The room had an empty corner. Straight into it he walked, and turned his back, his face within the angle. The head with an old cap on it was bowed. The sturdy shoulders, muffled in a cheap top-coat, heaved up and down. But the legs in their knickerbockers were both straight and strong, and the feet firmly planted on the floor. Except for an occasional strangled sound which he couldn't control, he betrayed himself by nothing audible.
The three policemen, all of them fathers, glanced at him, but forbore to glance at one another. One of them tried to say, "Poor kid!" but the words stuck in his throat. It was the kindly fellow who had brought the lad and the woman there who recovered himself first.
"All right, then, boys. The Swindon Street Home. One of you can 'phone that we're on the way." He went over and laid his hand on the child's shoulder. "Say, sonny, I'm goin' to take you out to see the Christmas Tree."
The thought was a happy one. Tom Coburn hadnever seen any Christmas Trees, though he had often heard of them. He had specially heard of the community Christmas Tree which was new that year in that particular city. It was to be a splendid sight, and against the fascination of splendor even grief was not wholly proof. He looked shyly round, an incredible wonder in his tear-stained, upturned face.
In the street they walked hand in hand, pausing now and then to admire some brightly lighted window. The boy was in fairyland, but in spite of fairyland long deep sighs welled up from the springs of his loneliness and sorrow. To distract him the policeman took him into a druggist's and bought him a cone of ice-cream. The boy licked it gratefully, as they made their way to the open space consecrated to the Tree.
The night was brisk and frosty; the sky clear. In the streets there was movement, light, gayety. At a spot on a bit of pavement a vendor was showing a dancing toy, round which some scores of idlers were gathered. The dancing was so droll that the little boy laughed. The policeman bought him one.
When they came to the Christmas Tree the lad was in ecstasy. Nothing he had ever dreamed of equalled these fruits of many-colored fires. A band was playing, and suddenly the multitude broke into song.
O come, all ye faithful,Joyful and triumphant,O come ye, O come ye, to Bethlehem!
Even the policeman joined in, humming the refrain in Latin.
Venite, adoremus;Venite, adoremus;Venite, adoremus,Dominum.
Passing thus through marvels they came to the Swindon Street Home. The night-nurse, warned by telephone, was expecting them. She was a motherly woman who had once had a child, and knew well this precise situation.
"Oh, come in, you poor little boy! Have you had your supper?"
He hadn't had his supper, though the cone of ice-cream had stilled the worst pangs of hunger.
"Then you shall have some; and after that I'll put you in a nice comfy bed."
"He's a fine kid," the policeman commended, before going away, "and won't give you no trouble, will you, sonny?"
The boy caught him by the hand, looking up pleadingly into his face, as if he would have kept him. But the policeman had children of his own, and this was Christmas Eve.
"See you again, sonny," he said, cheerily, as he went out, "and a merry Christmas!"
The night matron knew by experience all the sufferings of little boys homesick for mothers who have got into trouble. She had dealt with them by the hundred.
"Now, dear, while Mrs. Lamson is getting your supper we'll go to the washroom and you'll wash your face and hands. Then you'll feel more like eating, won't you?"
Deprived of his policeman, despair would have settled on him again, had it not been for the night matron's hearty voice. The deeper his woe, and it was very deep, the less he could resist friendliness. Just as in that first agony, when he was only eight months old, he had turned to the only love available, so now he yielded again. He was not reconciled; he was not even comforted; he was only responsive and grateful, thus getting the strength to go on.
Going on was only in letting the night matron scrub his face and hands, and submitting patiently. As they went from the washroom to the dining room he held her by the hand. He did this first because he couldn't let her go, and then because the halls were big and bare and dark. Never had he been in any place so vast, or so impersonal. He was used to strangeness, as they moved so often, but not to strangeness on so immense a scale. It was a relief to him, because it brought in a note of hominess, to hear from an upper floor a forlorn little baby cry.
His supper toned him up. He could speak of his great sorrow. While the night matron sat with him and helped him to porridge he asked, suddenly:
"Will they let me go to jail and stay with my mudda to-morrow?"
"You see, dear, your mother may not be in jail to-morrow. Perhaps she'll be let out, and then you can go home with her."
"They didn't ought to put her in. I'm big. I could work for her, and then she wouldn't have to take things no more."
"But bless you, darling, you'll be able to work forher as it is. They won't keep her very long—not so very long—and I'll look after you till she comes out. After that...."
"What's your name?" he asked, solemnly, as if he wished to nail her to the bargain.
"Mrs. Crewdson's my name. I'm a widow. I like little boys. I like you especially. I think we're going to be friends."
As a proof of this she took him to her own room, instead of to a dormitory, where she gave him a bath, found a clean night-shirt which, being too big, descended to his feet, and put him to sleep in a cot she kept on purpose for homeless little children in danger of being too lonely.
"You see, dear," she explained to him, "I don't go to bed all night. I stay up to look after all the little children—there are a lot of them in this house—who may want something. So you needn't be afraid. I'll leave a light burning, and I'll be in and out all the time. If you wake up and hear a noise, you'll know that that'll be me going about in the rooms, but mostly I'll be in this room. Now, don't you want to say your prayers?"
He didn't want to say his prayers because he had never said any. She suggested, therefore, that he should kneel on the bed, put his hands together, and repeat the words she told him to say, as she sat on the edge of the cot.
"Dear God"—"Dear God"—"take care of me to-night"—"take care of me to-night"—"and take care of my dear mother"—"and take care of my dearmudda"—"and make us happy again"—"and make us happy again"—"for Jesus Christ's sake"—"for Jesus Christ's sake"—"Amen"—"Amen."
"God's up in the sky, isn't He?" he asked, as he hugged his dancing toy to him and let her cover him up.
"God's everywhere where there's love, it seems to me, dear. I bring a little bit of God to you, and you bring a little bit of God to me; and so we have Him right here. That's a good thought to go to sleep on, isn't it? So good-night, dear."
She kissed him as she supposed his mother would have done. He threw his arms about her neck, drawing her face close to his. "Good night, dear," he whispered back, and almost before she rose from the bedside she knew he was asleep.
Somewhere toward morning she came into the room and found him sitting up in his cot.
"Will it soon be daytime, Mrs. Crewdson?"
"Yes, dear; not so very long now."
"And when daytime comes could I go to the jail?"
"Not too early, dear. They wouldn't let you in."
"Oh, but I don't want to go in. I only want to stand outside. Then if my mudda looks out of the window, she'll see her little boy."
Throwing herself on her knees, she clasped him in her arms. "Oh, you darling! How I wish God had given me a little son like you! I did have one—he would have been just your age—only I—I lost him."
Touched by this tribute to himself, as well as by his friend's bereavement, he brought out a fine manlyphrase he had long been saving for an adequate occasion.
"The hell you did, Mrs. Crewdson!"
Having thus expressed his sympathy, he nestled down to sleep again, hugging his dancing toy.
VII
Hewoke to his first Christmas. That is, he woke to find a chair drawn up beside his cot and stocked with little presents. He had never had presents before. It had not been his mother's custom to make them. Since she gave him what she could afford, and they shared everything in common, presents would have seemed to her superfluous.
But here were half a dozen parcels done up in white paper and tied with red ribbon, and on them he could read his name. At least, he could read Tom, while he guessed from the length of the word and initialWthat the other name was Whitelaw. So he was to be Tom Whitelaw now! The fact seemed to make a change in his identity. He stowed it away in the back of his mind for later meditation, in order to feast his soul on the mystic bounty of Santa Claus.
He knew who Santa Claus was. He had often seen him in the windows of the big stores, surrounded by tempting packages, and driving reindeer harnessed to a sleigh. He knew that he drove over the roofs of houses, down chimneys, and out through grates. Somewhere, too, he harbored the suspicion that this was only childish talk, and that the real Santa Claus must be a father or a mother, or in this case Mrs. Crewdson; only both childish talk and fact simmered without conflict in his brain. It was easier to thinkthat a supernatural goodwill had brought him this profusion than that commonplace hands, which had never done much for him hitherto, should all of a sudden be busy on his behalf.
Raising himself on his elbow, his first thought came with the bubbling of a sob. "My mudda is in jail!" His second was in the nature of a corollary, "But she'll like it when I tell her that Santa Claus took care of her little boy." The deduction gave him permission to enjoy himself.
At first he only gazed in a rapture that hardly guessed at what was beneath these snowy coverings. What he was to get was secondary to the fact that he was getting something. For the first time in his life he was taken into that vast family of boys and girls for whom Christmas has significance. Up to this morning he had stood outside of it wistfully—yearning, hoping, and yet condemned to stand aloof. Now, if his mudda hadn't been in jail....
The parcels were larger and smaller. Beginning with the smallest, he arranged them according to size. Merely to touch them sent a thrill through his frame. The smallest was round like an orange and yet yielded to pressure. He was almost sure it was a rubber ball. He could have been quite sure, only that he preferred the condition of suspense.
It was long before he could bring himself to untie the first red ribbon bow, his surprise on finding a rubber ball being no less keen than if he hadn't known it was a rubber ball on first taking it between his fingers. A handkerchief laid out flat, making the second parcel seem bigger than it was, sent him up inthe scale of social promotion. By way of candies, nuts, a toothbrush with tooth paste, he came to the largest of all, a History of Mankind, written in words of one syllable, and garnished with highly-colored pictures of various racial types. If only his mother hadn't been in jail....
That his mother was no longer in jail was a fact he learned later in the day. It was a day of extremes, of quick rushes of rapture out of which he would fall suddenly, to go away somewhere and moan. When he begged, as he begged every hour or two, to be taken to the jail, he could be distracted by rompings with the other children, most of them in some such case as his own, or by some novelty in the life. To eat turkey and plum pudding at the head of one of three long tables, each seating twelve or fourteen, was to be raised to a point of social eminence beyond which it seemed there could be nothing more to reach. But in the midst of this pride the hard facts would recur to him, and turkey and plum pudding choke him.
That something had happened he began to infer when his beloved policeman appeared at the home in the afternoon. Having seen him enter, the boy ran up to him.
"Oh, mister, are you going to take me to the jail?"
Mister patted him on the head, though he answered, absently, "Not just now, sonny. You know you're goin' to have a Christmas Tree. I've come to see Miss Honiton."
Miss Honiton, one of the day matrons, having appeared at the end of the hall, the policeman turned him about by the shoulders.
"Now be off with you and play. This has got to be private."
He took himself off but only to the end of the hall, where they didn't notice that he lingered. He lingered because he knew that, whatever the mystery, it had something to do with him.
He caught, however, no more than words which he couldn't understand. Cyanide of potassium! Only his quick ear and retentive memory enabled him to lay hold of syllables so difficult. His mother had taken something or hadn't taken something, he couldn't make out which. All he saw was that both of his friends looked grave, Miss Honiton summing up their consultation,
"I'll let him enjoy the Christmas Tree before saying anything about it."
The policeman answered, regretfully: "Do you think you must?"
"I know I must. He ought to be told. He has a right to know. He might resent it later if we didn't tell him now."
"Very well, sister. I leave it to you."
The door having closed on this friend, Tom Whitelaw, so to call him henceforth, made his way into the room where the Christmas Tree was presently to be lighted up. But he had no heart for the spectacle. There was something new. In the grip of the forces which controlled his life he felt helpless, small. Even his companions in misfortune, as all these children were, could be relatively light-hearted. They could clap their hands when the Tree began to burn with magic fires, and take pleasure in the presents handedout to them. He could not. He was waiting for something to be told to him—something he had a right to know.
One by one, the presents were cut from the Tree; one by one the children went up to receive this addition to what Santa Claus had brought them in the morning. His own name was among the last. When it was called he went forward perfunctorily at first, and then with a sudden inspiration.
His package was handed him, not by one of the matrons but by a beaming young lady from outside. As she bent to deliver it he had his question ready.
"Please, miss, what's cyanide of potassium?"
He had repeated the words to himself so often during the half hour since first hearing them that he pronounced them distinctly. The young lady laughed.
"Why, I think it's a deadly poison." She turned to the matron nearest her. "What is cyanide of potassium? This dear little boy wants to know."
But the dear little boy had already walked soberly back to his seat. While the other children made merry with their presents he sat with his on his lap, and reflected. Poison was something that killed people. He knew that. In one of the houses where they had lived a woman had taken poison, and two days later he had seen her carried out in a long black box. The impression had remained with him poignantly.
He had no inclination to cry. Tears could bring little relief in this kind of cosmic catastrophe. If his mother had taken poison and was to be carried out in a long black box, everything that had made up his world would have collapsed. He could only wait submissively till the thing he ought to know was told to him.
It was told when the giving of the presents was over, and the children flocked out of the room to get ready for their Christmas supper. Miss Honiton was waiting near the door.
"Come into my office, dear. I want to ask you a few questions."
Miss Honiton's office was a mixture of office and sitting room, in that it had business furniture offset by photographs and knicknacks. Sitting at her desk, she turned to the lad, who stood as if to attention, a long thin sympathetic face, stamped with practical acumen.
"I wanted to ask you if besides your mother you have any relations."
His dark blue eyes, deep set beneath his bushy brows, she thought the most serious and earnest she had ever seen in any of the hundreds of homeless little boys she had had to deal with.
"No, miss."
"No brothers or sisters, no uncles or aunts?"
"No, miss."
"Didn't your mother ever take you to see anyone?"
"No, miss."
"Well, then, didn't anyone ever come to see her?"
"No, miss."
To the point she was trying to reach she went round by another way. Where did they live? How long had they lived there? Where had they lived before that? How long had they lived in that place? He answered to the best of his recollection, but whenit came to their flittings from tenement to tenement, and from town to town, his recollection didn't take him very far. Miss Honiton soon understood that she might as well question a bird as to its migrations.
For a minute she said nothing, turning over in her mind the various ways of breaking her painful news, when he himself asked, suddenly:
"Is my mudda dead?"
The question was so direct that she felt it deserved a direct answer.
"Yes, dear."
"Did she"—he pulled himself together for the big words—"did she take cyanide of potassium?"
"Yes, dear; so I understand."
"Will they take her away in a long black box?"
"She'll be buried, dear, of course. There'll have to be a funeral somewhere."
"Can I go to it?"
"Yes, dear, certainly. I'll go with you myself."
He said nothing more, and Miss Honiton felt the futility of trying to comfort him. There was no opening for comfort in that stony little face. All she could suggest to break the tension was to ask if he wouldn't like his supper.
He went to his supper and ate it. He ate it ruminantly, speechlessly. What had happened to him he could not measure; what was before him he could not probe. All he knew of himself was that he had become a clod of misery, with almost nothing to temper his desolation.
Two big tears rolled down his cheeks without hisbeing aware of it. They did not, however, escape the eyes of a little girl who sat near him.
"Who's a cry-baby?" she shrieked, to the entertainment of the lookers-on. She pointed at him with her spoon. "A grea' big boy like that cryin' for his momma!"
He accepted the scorn as a tonic. "A grea' big boy like that cryin' for his momma," were the words with which he kept many a pang during the next few days from being more than a tearless anguish.
Miss Honiton was as good as her word as to going with him to the rooms which housed the long black box. This he understood to be all that now represented his mudda. She had tried to explain the place as an "undertaker's parlor," but the words were outside his vocabulary. In the same way the why and the wherefore of the ceremony were outside his intelligence. He and Miss Honiton went into the dim room, and stood near the thing he heard mentioned as "the body." After some mumbled reading they went out again, and back to the Swindon Street Home.
Back in the Swindon Street Home he was still without a wherefore or a why. He got up, he washed, he dressed, he ate, he went to bed again. He was in a dormitory now with three other little boys, all of them too deep in the problems of parents in jail or in parts unknown to offer him much fellowship. They cried when they were left alone in bed, or they cried in their sleep; but they cried. It was his own pride, and in no small measure his strength, that he didn't cry, unless he cried in dreams.
Everyone was good to him, Mrs. Crewdson andMiss Honiton especially, but no one could give him the clue to life which instinctively he clutched for. That one didn't stay forever in the Swindon Street Home he could see from observation. The children he had found there went away; other children came. Some of these stayed but a night or two. None of them stayed much longer. By those sixth and seventh senses which children develop when they are in trouble he divined that conferences were taking place on his behalf. Now and then he detected glances shot toward him by the matrons in discussion which told him that he was being talked about. It was easy to deduce that he was in the Swindon Street Home longer than was the custom because they didn't know what to do with him. He inferred that they didn't know what to do with him from the many questions which many people asked. Sometimes it was a man, more times it was a woman, but the questions were always along the lines of those of Miss Honiton as he came out from the children's Christmas Tree. Had he any relatives? Had he any friends? If he had they ought to look after him. It was hard for these kindly people to believe that he had no claim whatever on any member of the human race.
He began to hear the words, a State ward. Though they meant nothing to him at first, he strove, as he always did, with new words and expressions, to find their application. Then one evening, as Mrs. Crewdson was putting him to bed, she told him that that was what he had become.
"You see, darling, now that your father and mother are both dead, the whole country is going to adoptyou. Isn't that nice? And it isn't everything. You're going to have a home—not a home like this—what we call an institution—but a real home—with a real father and mother in it, and real brothers and sisters."
He took this stolidly. He was not to be moved now by anything that could happen. A waif on the world, the world had the right to pitch him in any direction that it chose. All he could do with his own desires was to beat them into submission. He mustn't cry! His fears and his griefs alike focussed themselves into that resolve. It was the only way in which he could translate his stout-hearted will to endure.
VIII
Toconduct him to his new home, Mrs. Crewdson gave up the whole of the morning she was supposed to spend in sleep after her all-night vigil. The home was in a little town a short distance up the Hudson. Though the railway journey was not long, it was the longest he had ever taken, and, once the river came within view, it was not without its excitements. His spirits began to rise with a sense of new adventure. There were things to look at, bridges, steamers, a man-o'-war at anchor, lumber yards, coal sheds, an open-air exhibit of mortuary monuments, and high overhead the clear cold blue of a January sky. On the other side of the river the wooded heights made a bold brown bastion, flecked here and there with snow.
As he had not asked where they were going, or the composition of the family with whom the Guardian of State Wards was placing him, his protectress permitted him to make his own discoveries. New faces, new contacts, new necessities, would help him to forget the old.
They got out at the station of Harfrey. Mrs. Crewdson carried the suitcase containing the wardrobe rescued when they had searched the rooms which he and his mother had occupied last. In front of the station they got on a ramshackle street car, which zigzagged up the face of the bank, rising steeplyfrom the river, so reaching the little town. They turned sharply at the top of the ridge to run through the one long street. It was a mean-looking street of drab wooden dwellings and drab wooden shops, occupied mostly by people dependent on the grand seigneurs of the neighboring big "places." An ugly schoolhouse, an ugly engine house, two or three ugly churches, further defied that beauty of which God had been so generous.
Having got out at a corner at which the car stopped, they walked to a small wooden house with a mansard roof, standing back from the street. It was a putty-colored house, with window and door frames in flecked, anæmic yellow. Perched on the edge of the ridge, it had three stories at the back and but two in front. What had once been an orchard had dwindled now to three or four apple trees, the rest of the ground being utilized as a chicken run. As the day was sunny, a few Plymouth Rocks were scratching and pecking in the yard.
Having turned in here, they found themselves expected, the front door opening before they reached the cement slab in front of it. The greetings were all for Mrs. Crewdson, who was plainly an old friend. The boy went in only because Mrs. Crewdson went in, and in the same way proceeded to a cheery, shabby sitting room. Here there were books and magazines about, while a canary in a cage began to sing as soon as he heard voices. To a homeless little boy the haven was so sweet that he forgot to take off his cap.
The first few minutes were consumed in questions as to this one and that one, relatives apparently, together with data given and received as to certain recognized maladies. Mrs. Crewdson was getting better of her headaches, but Mrs. Tollivant still suffered from her varicose veins. Only when these preliminaries were out of the way and Mrs. Crewdson had thrown off her outer wraps, was the introduction accomplished.
"So I've brought you the boy! Tom, dear, this is Mrs. Tollivant who's going to take care of you. Your cap, Tom! I imagine," she continued, with an apologetic smile, "you'll find manners very rudimentary."
Obliged to take an early train back to New York, Mrs. Crewdson talked with veiled, confidential frankness. A boy of seven could not be supposed to seize the drift of her cautious phraseology, even if he heard some of it.
"So you know the main features of the case.... I told them it wouldn't be fair to you to let you assume so much responsibility without your knowing the whole.... With children of your own to think of, you couldn't expose them to a harmful influence unless you were put in a position to take every precaution against.... Not that we've seen anything ourselves.... But, of course, after such a bringing up there can't but be traces.... And such good material there.... I'm sure you'll find it so.... Personally, I haven't seen a human being in a long time to whom my heart has gone.... Only there it is.... An inheritance which can't but be...."
He didn't feel betrayed. He had nothing to resent. Mrs. Crewdson had proved herself his friend, and he trusted her. Without knowing all the words she used,he caught easily enough the nature of the sentiments they stood for. These he accepted meekly. He was a bad boy. His mother and he had been engaged in wicked practices. Dimly, in unallayed mental discomfort, he had been convinced of this himself; and now it was clear to everyone. If they hadn't known what to do with him it was because a bad boy couldn't fit rightly into a world where everyone else was good. A young evildoer, he had no rôle left but that of humility.
He was the more keenly aware of this after Mrs. Crewdson had bidden him farewell, and he was face to face with his new foster mother. A wiry little woman, quick in action and sharp in tongue, she would be kind to him, with a nervous, nagging kindness. He got this impression, as he got an odor or a taste, without having to define or analyze. Later in life, when he had come to observe something of the stamp which professions leave on personalities, he was not surprised that she should have worn herself out in school-teaching before marrying Andrew Tollivant, a book-keeper. As he sat now, just as Mrs. Crewdson had left him, his overcoat still on his back, his cap in his hand, his feet dangling because the chair was too high for him, she treated him as if he were a class.
"Now, little boy, before we go any farther, you and I had better understand each other."
With this brisk call to his attention, she sat down in front of him, frightening him to begin with.
"You know that this is now to be your home, and I intend to do my duty by you to the best of my ability. Mr. Tollivant will do the same. If you take the children in the right way I'm sure you'll find them friendly. They were very nice to the last little boy the Board of Guardians sent to us."
Staring in fascinated awe at the starry brightness of her eyes, and the wrinkles of worry around them, he waited in silence for more.
"But one or two things I hope you'll remember on your side. Perhaps you haven't heard that the Board has found it hard to get anyone to take you. You're old enough to know that where there are children in a family people are shy of a boy who's had just your history. But I've run the risk. It's a great risk, I admit, and may be dangerous to my own. Do you understand what I mean?"
"No, ma'am," he said, blankly.
"Then I'll tell you. There are two things children must learn as soon as they're able to learn anything. One is to be honest; the other is to tell the truth. You know what telling the truth is, don't you?"
He did know, but paralyzed by her earnestness, he denied the fact. "No, ma'am."
"So there you are! And I don't suppose you've been taught anything about honesty."
"No, ma'am."
"Then you must begin to learn."
He began to learn that minute. Still treating him as a class, she delivered a little lecture, such as a child of tender years could understand, on the two basic virtues of which he had pleaded ignorance. He listened as in a trance, his eyes fixed on her vacantly. Though seizing a disconnected word or two, fear kepthim from getting the gist of it all, as he generally did.
"It's your influence on the children that I want you to beware of. Arthur is older than you, but he's only ten; and a boy with your experience could easily teach him a good deal of harm. Cilly is eight, and Bertie only five. You'll be careful with them, won't you? Do you know that if we lead others astray God will call us to account for it?"
"No, ma'am."
"Well, He will; and I want you to remember it, and be afraid. Unless you're afraid of God you'll never grow into the good boy I hope we're going to make of you."
The homily finished, he was instructed in the ways of the upper floor, where, in the sloping space under the eaves, he was to have his room. After this he came back to the sitting room, not knowing what else to do. He was in a daze. It was as if he had dropped on another planet where nothing was familiar. Whether to stand up or sit down he didn't know. He didn't know what to think, or what to think about. Cut loose from his bearings, he floated in mental space.
As standing seemed to commit him to least that was wrong, he stood. Standing implied looking out of the window, and looking out of the window showed him, about half past twelve, a well-built boy, rosy with the cold, noisy from exuberance of spirit, swinging in at the gate and brandishing a hockey stick. From her preparation of the dinner his mother ran to meethim at the door. She spoke in a loud whisper that easily reached the sitting room.
"Now be careful, Arthur. He's come. He's in there."
Arthur responded with noisy indifference. "Who? The crook?"
"Sh-h-h, dear! You mustn't call him that. We must help him to forget it, and to grow into being like ourselves."
Arthur grunted noncommittally. Presently he strolled into the sitting room, whistling a tune. With hands in his pockets, his bearing was that of an overlord. He made a circuit of the room, eying the new guest, as the new guest eyed him back.
"Hello?" the overlord said at last, with a faint note of interrogation.
Still whistling and still with his hands in his pockets, he strolled out again.
Tom Whitelaw's nerves had become so many runlets for shame. He was the crook! He knew the word as one which crooks themselves use contemptuously. If he should hear it again.... But happily Mrs. Tollivant had put her veto on its use.
The gate clicked again. Coming up the pathway, he saw a girl of about his own age, with a boy much younger who swung himself on crutches. All his movements were twisted and grotesque. His head was sunk into his shoulders as if he had no neck. His feet and legs wore metal braces. His face had the uncannily aged look produced by suffering. Without actually helping him, the little girl kept by his side maternally. She was a dainty little girl, veryfair, with shiny yellow hair hanging down her back, like a fairy princess in a picture book. The boy looking out of the window fell in love with her at sight. He was sure that in her he would find a friend.
On entering she called out in a whiny voice, very musical to Tom Whitelaw's ear:
"Ma! Bertie's been a naughty boy. He wouldn't sing 'Pretty Birdling' for Miss Smallbones. I told him you'd punish him, and you will, won't you, ma?"
As there was no response to this, the young ones came to the door of the sitting room and looked in. They stared at the stranger, and the stranger stared at them, with the unabashed frankness of young animals. Having stared their fill, the son and daughter of the house went off to ask about dinner.
To Tom that dinner was another new experience. For the first time in his life he sat down to what is known as a family meal. Attempts had sometimes been made by well-meaning women in the tenements to rope him to their tables, but his mother had never permitted him to yield to them. Now he sat down with those of his own age, to be served like them, and on some sort of footing of equality. The honor was so great that he could hardly swallow. Second helpings were beyond him.
The afternoon was blank again. "You'll begin to go to school on Monday," Mrs. Tollivant had explained; but in the meantime he had the hours to himself. They were long. He was lonely. Having been given permission to go into the yard, he stood studying the Plymouth Rocks. Presently he wasconscious of a light step behind him. Before he had time to turn around he also heard a voice. It was a whiny voice, yet sharp and peremptory.
"You stop looking at our hens."
The fairy princess had not come up to him; she had paused some two or three yards away. Her expression was so haughty that it hurt him. It hurt him more from her than from anybody else because of his admiration. He looked at her beseechingly, not for permission to go on studying the Plymouth Rocks, but for some shade of relenting. He got none. The sharp little face was as glittering and cold as one of the icicles hanging from the roof behind her. Heavy at heart, he turned to go into the house by the back door.
He had climbed most of the hill when the clear, whiny voice arrested him.
"Who's a crook?"
At this stab in the back he leaped round, fury in his dark blue eyes. But the fairy princess was used to fury in dark blue eyes, and knew how best to defy it. The tip of the tongue she thrust out at him added insolence to insult. He turned again, and, wounded in all his being, went on into the house.
Near the back door there was a sun parlor, and in it he saw Bertie, squatting in a small-wheeled chair built for his convenience. Bertie called to him invitingly.
"I've got a book."
"I've got a book, too," he returned, in Bertie's own spirit.
"You show me your book, and I'll show you mine."
The proposal being fair, he went in search of his History of Mankind. In a few minutes he was seated on the floor beside Bertie's chair, exchanging literary criticisms. He liked Bertie. He had a premonition that Bertie was going to like him. After the disdain of the fairy princess, and the superciliousness of the overlord, this was comforting. Moreover, he could return Bertie's friendliness by doing things for him which no one else had time to do. He could push his wheeled chair; he could run his errands; he could fetch and carry; he would like doing it.
"I've got infantile paralysis."
"I've got a rubber ball."
"I've got a train."
"I've got a funny little man what dances."
Coming into the house, Cilly found them the best of friends, in the best of spirits. Without entering the sun-parlor, she spoke through the doorway, coldly.
"Bertie, I don't think momma would like you to act like that. I'll go and ask her."
Mrs. Tollivant hurried from the kitchen, scouring a saucepan as she looked in on them. Seeing nothing amiss, she went away again. Then as if distrusting her own vision, she came back. She came back more than once, anxiously, suspiciously. Bertie was enjoying himself with this boy picked out of the gutter. That the boy had been picked out of the gutter was not what troubled her, but that Bertie should enjoy himself in the lad's society. Wise enough not to putnotions into Bertie's head, she stopped her ward later in the day, when she had the chance to speak to him alone.
"I saw you playing with Bertie. Well, that's all right. Only you'll remember your promise, won't you? You won't teach him anything harmful?"
"No, ma'am," the boy answered, humbly, as one who has a large selection of harmful things to impart.
IX
Hehad looked forward to Monday and school. After four days in the Tollivant household he was eager for relief from it. Except for Cilly's occasional, and always private, taunts, they were not unkind to him; they only treated him as an outcast whom they had been obliged to succor because no one else would do so. He had the same food and drink as they; his room was good enough; of whatever was material he had no complaint to make. There was only the distrust which rendered his bread bitter and the bed hard to lie upon. They didn't take him in as one of them. They kept him outside, an alien, an intruder.
It was again a new experience in that for the first time in his life he was doing without love. When he was Tom Coburn he had had plenty of it at the worst of times. The Swindon Street Home was full of it. In the Tollivant house it was the only thing weighed and measured and stinted. He couldn't, of course, make this analysis. He only knew that something on which his life depended was not given him.
He hoped to find it in the school. In any case the school would admit him to the larger life. It would bind him to that human family which he had so long craved to enter. In addition to that, it was at school you learned things.
He was the more eager to learn things for the reason that Mrs. Tollivant had declared him backward. In the primary school Cilly was in the second grade; he must go into the first. He would be with children a year younger than himself. But the humiliation would be an incentive to ambition. He had already decided that only by "knowing things" should he be able to lift himself out of his despised estate.
The school session was all he had hoped for. Miss Pollard, the teacher, put in touch with his story by Mrs. Tollivant, kept him near to her, and watched over him. He learned to discriminate betweenhis,has, andhad, as matters of orthography, as well as betweencat,car, andcan. That twice two made four and twice four made eight added much to his understanding of numbers. He sangRoving the Old Homeland, while Miss Pollard pointed on the map to the places as they were named.
From Plymouth town to Plymouth townThe Pilgrims made their way;The Puritans settled Salem,And Boston on the Bay.
The air had a rhythm and a lilt which allowed for the inclusion of any reasonable number of redundant syllables.
The Dutch lived in New Amsterdam,Where the blue waters fork;The English came and conquered it,And turned it into New York.
A little history, a little geography, being taught by the simple method of doggerel, much pleasure wasevoked by the exercise of healthy lungs. Listening to her new pupil, Miss Pollard discovered a sweet treble that had never before been aware of itself, with a linnet's joy in piping. A linnet's joy was his joy throughout the whole morning, with no more than a slight flaw in his ecstasy in the thought of two hours in the Tollivant home before he came back for the afternoon.
As Cilly called for Bertie at the kindergarten, he walked homeward by himself. Happy with a happiness never experienced before, he had not noticed that his school-mates hung away from him, tittering as he passed. To well-dressed little boys and girls his worn old cap, his frayed knickerbockers, and above all his cheap gray overcoat with a stringy sheepskin collar, naturally marked him for derision. They would have marked him for derision even had his story not been known to everyone.
He went singing on his way, stepping manfully to the measure.
The Dutch lived in New Amsterdam,Where the blue waters fork;The English came and conquered it,And turned it into New York.
They massed themselves behind him, convulsed by his lack of self-consciousness. The little girls giggled; the boys attempted to make snowballs from snow too powdery to hold together. One lad found a frozen potato which he hurled in such a way as to skim close to the singing figure while just missing it. Tom Whitelaw, unsuspicious of ill-will, turned round incuriosity. He was greeted by a hoot from the crowd, but from whom he couldn't tell.
"Who's the boy what his mother was put in jail?"
The hoot became a chorus of jeers. By one after another the insult was taken up.
"Who's the boy what his mother was put in jaaa-il?"
As far as he was able to distinguish, the voices of the little girls were the louder. In their merriment they screamed piercingly.
"Gutter-snipe! Gutter-rat! Crook! Crook! Crook! Who's the boy what his mother was put in ja-aa-ail?"
Crimson, with clenched fists, with gnashing teeth, with tears of rage in his eyes, he stood his ground while they came on. They swept toward him in a semicircle of which he made the center. Very well! So much the better! He could spring on at least one of them, and dash his brains out on the ground. There was no ferocity he would not enjoy putting into execution.
He sprang, but amid the yells of the crowd his prey dodged and escaped him. The semicircle broke. Instead of advancing in massed formation, it danced round him now as forty or fifty imps. The imps bewildered him, asbanderillerosbewilder a bull in the ring. He didn't know which to attack. When he lunged at one, the charge was diverted by another, so that he struck at the air wildly. Shrieks of mockery at these failures maddened him, with the heartbreaking madness of a loving thing goaded out of all semblance to itself. He panted, he groaned, he dashed about foolishly, he stumbled, he fell. When peltedwith pebbles or scraps of ice, he was hardly aware of the rain upon his head.
But the mob swept on, leaving him behind. At gates and corners the boy baiters disappeared, hungry for their dinners. Most of them forgot him as soon as they had turned their backs. It was easy for them to stop for awhile since they could begin again.
He was alone on the gritty, icy slope surrounding the schoolhouse. There was no comfort for him in the world. Faintly he remembered as a satisfaction that he hadn't cried, but even this consolation was cold. He wondered if he couldn't kill himself.
He did not kill himself, though he pondered ways and means of doing it. He came to the conclusion that it would be foolish to kill himself before killing some of his tormentors. He prayed about it that night, his first prayer, except for the one taught him on Christmas Eve by Mrs. Crewdson.
To the family devotions, for which all were assembled about eight o'clock, before the younger children went to bed, Mr. Tollivant had begun to add a new petition.
"And, O Heavenly Father, take pity on the little stranger within our gates, even as we have welcomed him into our home. Blot out his past from Thy book. Give him a new heart. Make him truthful and honest especially. Help him to be gentle, obedient...."
But savagely the boy intervened on his own behalf. "O Heavenly Father, don't! Don't give me a new heart, or make me gentle and obedient, till I kill some of them fellows that called me a crook, for Jesus Christ's sake, Amen."
X
Hekilled none of the fellows who called him a crook, though during the first two years of his schooling he was called a crook pretty often. Whatever grade he was in, he was always that boy who differs from other boys, and is therefore the black swan in a flock of white ones. Whatever his progress, he made it to the tune of his own history. He was a gutter-snipe. His mother had killed herself in jail! Before she had killed herself both he and she had been arrested for thieving in a shop! There was not a house in Harfrey where the tale was not told. There was never a boy or girl in the school who hadn't learned it before making his acquaintance.
Besides, they said of him, he would have been "different" anyhow. Being "different" was an offense less easily pardoned than being criminal. Dressed more poorly than they, and with no claims of a social kind, he carried himself with that bearing which they could only describe as putting on airs. It was Cilly Tollivant who first brought this charge home to him.
"But I don't, Cilly," he protested, earnestly. "I don't know how to be any other way."
Cilly was by this time growing sisterly. She couldn't live in the house with him and not feel her heart relenting, and though she disdained him in public, as her own interests compelled her to do, in private she tried to help him.
"Don't know how to be any other way!" she exclaimed, indignantly. "Tom Whitelaw, you make me sick. Don't you know even how totalkright?"
"Yes, but...."
"There you go," she interrupted, bitterly. "Why can't you sayYep, like anybody else?"
He took the suggestion humbly. He would try. His only explanation of his eccentricity was thatYepandNopedidn't suit his tongue.
But adopting Yep and Nope, as he might have adopted words from a foreign language, adopting much else that was crude and crass and vulgar and noisy and swaggering and standardized, according to schoolboy notions of the standard, he still found himself "different." For one thing, he looked different. Debase his language as he might, or coarsen his manners, or stultify his impulses, he couldn't keep himself from shooting up tall and straight, with a carriage of the head which was in itself an offense to those who knew themselves inferior. It made nothing easier for him that his teachers liked and respected him. "Teacher's pet" was a term of reproach hardly less painful than crook or gutter-snipe. But he couldn't help learning easily; he couldn't help answering politely when politely spoken to; he couldn't help the rapture of his smile when a friendly word came his way. All this told against him. He was guyed, teased, worried, tortured. If there was a cap to be snatched it was his. If there was one of a pair of rubber shoes to be stolen or hidden it was his. If there was an exercise book to be grabbed and thrown up into a tree where the owner could be pelted whilehe clambered after it, it was his. Because he was poor, friendless, defenseless, and yet with damnable pride written all over him, it became a recognized law of the school that any meanness done to him would be legitimate.
But in his third year at the Tollivants the persecution waned, and in the fourth it stopped. His school-mates grew. Growing, they developed other instincts. Fair play was one of them; admiration for pluck was another.
"You've got to hand it to that kid," Arthur Tollivant, now fourteen, had been heard to say in a circle of his friends. "He's stood everything and never squealed a yelp. Some young tough, believe me!"
This good opinion was reflected among the lads of Tom Whitelaw's own age. They had never been cruel; they had only been primitive. Having passed beyond that stage, they forgot to no small degree what they had done while in it. The boy who at seven was the crook was at eleven Whitey the Sprinter. He walked to and from school with the best of them. With the best of them he played and fought and swore privately. If he put on airs it was the airs of being a much sadder dog than he was, daring to smoke a cigarette and go home with the smell of the wickedness on his breath.
So, outwardly, Tom Whitelaw came in for two full years of good-natured toleration. If it did not go further than toleration it was because he was a State ward. On the baseball or the football team he might be welcomed as an equal; in homes there was discrimination. He was not invited to parties, andamong the young people of Harfrey parties were not few. Girls who met him at the Tollivants' didn't speak to him outside. When Cilly, now being known as Cecilia, had her friends to celebrate her birthday, he remained in his room with no protest from the family at not joining them. None the less, it was a relief to be free from jeering in the streets, as well as from being reminded every day at school of his mother's tragedy. It was a relief to him; but it was no more.
For more than that the wound had gone too deep. Outwardly, he accepted their approaches; in his heart he rejected them, biding his time. He was biding his time, not with longings for revenge—he was too sensible now for that—but in the hope of passing on and forgetting them. By the time he was twelve he was already aware of his impulse toward growth.
It was in his soul as a secret conviction, the seed's knowledge of its own capacity to germinate. Most of the boys and girls around him he could judge, not by a precocious worldly wisdom, but by his gift for intuitive sizing up. Their range was so far and no farther, and they themselves were aware of it. They would become clerks and plumbers and carpenters and school-teachers and shoe dealers and provision men, and whatever else could reach its fulfillment in a small country town. He himself felt no limit. Life was big. He knew he could expand in it. To nurse resentments would be small, and would keep him small. All he asked was to forget them, to forget, too, those who called them forth; but to that end he must be far away.
XI
Theroad to this Far-away began in the summer vacation of the year when he was supposed to be twelve. It was the year when he first went to work, though the work was meant to last for no more than a few weeks.
Mr. Quidmore, a market gardener at Bere, in Connecticut, some seven or eight miles eastward toward the Sound, had come over to ask Mr. Tollivant for a few hours' work in straightening out his accounts. Straightening out accounts for men who were but amateurs at bookkeeping was a means by which Mr. Tollivant eked out his none-too-generous salary.
It was a Sunday afternoon in June. They were in the yard, looking at the Plymouth Rocks behind their defenses of chicken-wire. That is, Mr. Quidmore was looking at the Plymouth Rocks, but Tom was looking at Mr. Quidmore. Mr. and Mrs. Tollivant were giving their guest information as to how they raised their hens and marketed their eggs.
It was a family affair. Mrs. Tollivant prepared the food; Cecilia fed the birds; Art hunted for the eggs; Bertie and Tom packed them. Mr. Quidmore was moved to say:
"I wish I had a fine boy like your Art to help me with the berrypicking. Good money in it. Three a week and his keep for as long as the strawberries hold out."
Tom saw Mrs. Tollivant shake her head at her husband behind Mr. Quidmore's back. This meant disapproval. Disapproval could not be disapproval of the work, but of Mr. Quidmore. Art already gave his holiday services to a dairy for a dollar less than Mr. Quidmore's offer, and no keep. It was the employer, then, and not the employment that Mrs. Tollivant distrusted.
And yet Mr. Quidmore fascinated Tom. He had never before seen anyone whose joints had the looseness of one of those toys which you worked with a string. He was so slim, too, that you got little or no impression of a body beneath his flapping clothes. Nervously restless, he walked with a shuffle of which the object seemed the keeping of his shoes from falling off. When he talked or laughed one side of his long thin face was screwed up as if by some early injury or paralysis. The right portion of his lips could smile, while the left trembled into a rictus. This made his speech slower and more drawling than Tom was accustomed to hear; but his voice was naturally soft, with a quality in it like cream. It was the voice that Tom liked especially.
In reply to the suggestion about Art, Mr. Tollivant replied, as one who sees only a well-meant business proposal,
"We'd like nothing better, Brother Quidmore; but the fact is Art has about as much as he can do for the rest of his vacation." He waved his hand toward Tom. "What do you say to this boy?"
At the glorious suggestion Tom's heart began to fail for fear. He was not a fine boy like ArthurTollivant. The possibility of earning three dollars a week, to say nothing of his board, was too much like the opening up of an Aladdin's palace for the hope to be more than deceptive. It was part of his daily humiliation never to have had any money of his own. The paternity of the State paid for his food, shelter, and education; but it never supplied him with cash, or with any cash that he ever saw. To have three dollars a week jingling in his pocket would not only lift him out of his impotent dependence, but would make him a man. While Mr. Quidmore walked round him, inspecting him as if he were a dog or pig or other small animal for sale, he held himself with straightness, dignity, and strength. If he was for sale he would do his best to be worthy of his price.
Mr. Quidmore nodded toward Mr. Tollivant. "State ward, ain't he?"
Mr. Tollivant admitted that he was.
"Youngster whose moth—"
Mrs. Tollivant interrupted kindly. "You needn't be afraid of that. He's been with us for five years. I think I may say that all traces of the past have been outlived. We can really give him a good character."
Tom was grateful. Mr. Quidmore examined him again. At last he shuffled up to him, throwing his arm across his shoulder, and drawing him close to himself.
"What about it, young fellow? Want to come?"
Entirely won by this display of kindliness, the boy smiled up into the twisted face. "Yes, sir."
"Then that's settled. Put your duds together, andwe'll go along. I guess," he added to Mr. Tollivant, "that you can stretch a point to let him come, and get your permit from the Guardians to-morrow."
Mr. Tollivant agreeing that after five years' care he could venture as much as this, they drove over to Bere in Mr. Quidmore's dilapidated motor car. Mrs. Quidmore met them at the door. Her husband called to her:
"Hello, there! Got a new hand to help you with the strawberries."
She answered, dejectedly. "If he's as good as some of the other new hands you've picked up lately—"
"Oh, rats! Give us a rest! If I brought the angel Gabriel to pick the berries you'd see something to find fault with."
That there was a rift within the lute of this couple's happiness was clear to Tom before he had climbed out of the machine.
"Where's he to sleep?" Mrs. Quidmore asked in her tone of discontent.
"I suppose he can sleep in the barn, can't he?"
"I wouldn't put a dog to sleep in that barn, nasty, smelly, rotten place."
"Well, put him to sleep where you like. He'll get three a week and his keep while he's here, and that's all I'm responsible for." Mrs. Quidmore turned and went into the house. Her husband winked at Tom as man to man. "Can you beat it? Always like that. God! I don't know how I stand it. Get in."
Tom got in, finding an interior as slack as Mrs. Quidmore herself. The Tollivant house, with fourchildren in it, was often belittered, but with a little tidying it became spick and span. Here the housekeeping wore an air of hopelessness. Whoever did it did it without heart.
"God! I hate to come into this place," its master confided to Tom, as they stood in the hall, of which the rug lay askew, while a mirror hung crooked on the wall. "You and me could keep the shack looking dandier than this if she wasn't here at all. I wish to the Lord...."
But before the week was out the boy had won over Mrs. Quidmore, and begun to make her fond of him. Because he was eager to be useful, he helped her in the house, showing solicitude, too, on her personal account. A low-keyed, sad-eyed woman who did nothing to make herself attractive, she blamed her husband for perceiving the loss of her attractiveness.
"He's bound to me," she would complain, tearfully, to the boy, as he dried the dishes she had washed. "It's his duty to be fond of me. But he ain't. There's fifty women he likes better than he does me."
This note of married infelicity was new to Tom, especially as it reached him from both parties to the contract.
"God, how she gets my goat! Sometimes I think how much I'd enjoy seeing her stretched out with a bullet through her head. I tell you that the fellow who'd do that for me wouldn't be sorry in the end...."
To the boy these words were meaningless. The creamy drawl with which they were uttered robbed them of the vicious or ferocious, making them merehumorous explosions. He could laugh at them, and yet he laughed with a feeling of discomfort.
The discomfort was the greater because in kindness to him lay the one point as to which the couple were agreed. Making no attempt to reconcile elements so discordant, all he could do was to soften the conditions which each found distasteful. He kept the house tidier for the man; he did for the woman a few of the things her husband overlooked.
"It's him that ought to do that," she would point out, in dull rebellion. "He's doing it for some other woman I'll be bound. Whoisthat woman that he meets?"
Conjugal betrayal was also new to Tom, and not easily comprehensible. That a man with a wife should also be "going with a girl" was a possibility that had never come within his experience while living with the Tollivants. He had heard a good many things from Art, as also from some other boys, but this event seemed to have escaped even their wide observation. It would have escaped his own had not Mrs. Quidmore harped on it.
"I do believe he'd like to see me in my grave. I'm in their way, and they'd like to get me out of it. Oh, you needn't tell me! Couldn't you keep an eye on him, and tell me what she's like?"
For Mrs. Quidmore's sake he watched Mr. Quidmore, but as he didn't know what he was watching him for the results were not helpful. And he liked them both. He might have said that he loved them both, since loving came to him so easily. Mrs. Quidmore washed and mended his clothes, and whenevershe went to Harfrey or some other town she added to his wardrobe. Mr. Quidmore was forever dropping into his ear some gentle, honeyed confidence of which Mrs. Quidmore was the butt. Neither of them ever scolded him, or overworked him. He was in the house almost as a son. And then one day he learned that he was to be there altogether as a son.
XII
Henever knew how and when the question as to his adoption had been raised, or whether the husband or the wife had raised it first. Here, too, the steps were taken with that kind of mystification which shrouded so much of his destiny. He himself was not consulted till, apparently, all the principal parties but himself had decided on the matter. One of the Guardians, or a representative, asked him the formal question as to whether or not he should like it, and being answered with a Yes, had gone away. The next thing he knew he had legally become the son of Martin and Anna Quidmore, and was to be henceforth called by their name.
The outward changes were not many. He had won so much freedom in the house that when he became its son and heir there was, for the minute, little more to give him. His new mother grew more openly affectionate; his new father drove him round in the dilapidated car and showed him to the neighbors as his boy. As far as Tom could judge, there was general approval. Martin Quidmore had taken a poor outcast lad and given him a home and a status in the world. All good people must rejoice in this sort of generosity. The new father rejoiced in it himself, smiling with a twisted smile that was like a leer, the only thing about him which the new son was afraid of.
It was August now. The picking of the strawberries having long been over, the boy had been kept on for other jobs. He still worked at them. He dug potatoes; he picked peas and beans; he pulled carrots, parsnips, and beets; he culled cucumbers. The hired hands did the heaviest work, but he shared in it to the limit of his strength. Sometimes he went off early in the morning on the great lorry, loaded with garden-truck, which his father drove to the big markets.
On these journeys the new father grew most confidential and lovable. His mellifluous voice, which was sad and at the same time not quite serious, was lovable in itself.
"God, how I'd like to give you a better home than you've got! But it's no use, not as long as she's there. She'll never be anything different. She'd not make things brighter or cleaner or jollier, not even if she was to try."
"Well, sheistrying," the boy declared, in her defense; but the only answer was a melancholy laugh.
And yet now that he had the duties, of a son, he set to work to improve the family relationships. He petted the mother, he cajoled the father. He found small ruses of affection in which, as it seemed to him, he gained both the one and the other, insensibly to either. His proof of this came one morning as once more they were driving to one of the big markets.
"Say, boy, I'm beginning to be worried about her. I don't think she can be well. She's never been sick much; but gosh! now I'll be hanged if I don't think I'll go and see a doctor and ask him to give her some medicine."
As this thoughtfulness, in spite of all indications to the contrary, implied a fundamental tenderness, the boy was glad of it. He was the more glad of it when, on a morning some days later, and in the same situation, the father drawled, in his casual way:
"Say, I've seen that doctor, and he's given me something he wants her to take. Thinks it will put her all right in no time."
"And did you give it to her?" he asked, eagerly.
The honeyed voice grew sweeter. "Well, no; that's the trouble. You can't get her to take doctor's stuff, if she knows she's taking it. Got to get her on the sly. Once when she needed a tonic I used to watch round and put it in her tea. Bucked her up fine."
"And is that what you're going to do now?"
"Well, I would, only she'd be afraid of me. Watches me like a cat, don't you see she does? What I was thinking of was this. You know she makes a cup of tea for herself every day in the middle of the afternoon while we're out at work. Well, now, if you could make an excuse to slip into the kitchen, and put one of these powders in her teapot—" he tapped the packet in his waistcoat pocket—"she'd never suspect nothing. She'd take it—and be cured."
The boy was silent.
"You don't want to do it, hey?"
"Oh, I don't say that. I was—I was—just wondering."