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The Romance of a Plain Man

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow · English · Gutenberg #30299 · 708,261 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Romance of a Plain Man

Author: Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow


        
Release date: October 20, 2009 [eBook #30299]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMANCE OF A PLAIN MAN ***

                       THE ROMANCE OF A PLAIN MAN

                            BY ELLEN GLASGOW

       AUTHOR OF "THE DELIVERANCE," "THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE," ETC.


New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1909

_All rights reserved_

Copyright, 1909,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1909. Reprinted
May, July, August, September, twice, October, 1909.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.




CONTENTS


       I. IN WHICH I APPEAR WITH FEW PRETENSIONS

      II. THE ENCHANTED GARDEN

     III. A PAIR OF RED SHOES

      IV. IN WHICH I PLAY IN THE ENCHANTED GARDEN

       V. IN WHICH I START IN LIFE

      VI. CONCERNING CARROTS

     VII. IN WHICH I MOUNT THE FIRST RUNG OF THE LADDER

    VIII. IN WHICH MY EDUCATION BEGINS

      IX. I LEARN A LITTLE LATIN AND A GREAT DEAL OF LIFE

       X. IN WHICH I GROW UP

      XI. IN WHICH I ENTER SOCIETY AND GET A FALL

     XII. I WALK INTO THE COUNTRY AND MEET WITH AN ADVENTURE

    XIII. IN WHICH I RUN AGAINST TRADITIONS

     XIV. IN WHICH I TEST MY STRENGTH

      XV. A MEETING IN THE ENCHANTED GARDEN

     XVI. IN WHICH SALLY SPEAKS HER MIND

    XVII. IN WHICH MY FORTUNES RISE

   XVIII. THE PRINCIPLES OF MISS MATOACA

     XIX. SHOWS THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE

      XX. IN WHICH SOCIETY RECEIVES US

     XXI. I AM THE WONDER OF THE HOUR

    XXII. THE MAN AND THE CLASS

   XXIII. IN WHICH I WALK ON THIN ICE

    XXIV. IN WHICH I GO DOWN

     XXV. WE FACE THE FACTS AND EACH OTHER

    XXVI. THE RED FLAG AT THE GATE

   XXVII. WE CLOSE THE DOOR BEHIND US

  XXVIII. IN WHICH SALLY STOOPS

    XXIX. IN WHICH WE RECEIVE VISITORS

     XXX. IN WHICH SALLY PLANS

    XXXI. THE DEEPEST SHADOW

   XXXII. I COME TO THE SURFACE

  XXXIII. THE GROWING DISTANCE

   XXXIV. THE BLOW THAT CLEARS

    XXXV. THE ULTIMATE CHOICE




THE ROMANCE OF A PLAIN MAN




CHAPTER I

IN WHICH I APPEAR WITH FEW PRETENSIONS


As the storm broke and a shower of hail rattled like a handful of
pebbles against our little window, I choked back a sob and edged my
small green-painted stool a trifle nearer the hearth. On the opposite
side of the wire fender, my father kicked off his wet boots, stretched
his feet, in grey yarn stockings, out on the rag carpet in front of the
fire, and reached for his pipe which he had laid, still smoking, on the
floor under his chair.

"It's as true as the Bible, Benjy," he said, "that on the day you were
born yo' brother President traded off my huntin' breeches for a yaller
pup."

My knuckles went to my eyes, while the smart of my mother's slap faded
from the cheek I had turned to the fire.

"What's become o' th' p-p-up-p?" I demanded, as I stared up at him with
my mouth held half open in readiness to break out again.

"Dead," responded my father solemnly, and I wept aloud.

It was an October evening in my childhood, and so vivid has my later
memory of it become that I can still see the sheets of water that rolled
from the lead pipe on our roof, and can still hear the splash! splash!
with which they fell into the gutter below. For three days the clouds
had hung in a grey curtain over the city, and at dawn a high wind,
blowing up from the river, had driven the dead leaves from the
churchyard like flocks of startled swallows into our little street.
Since morning I had watched them across my mother's "prize" red geranium
upon our window-sill--now whipped into deep swirls and eddies over the
sunken brick pavement, now rising in sighing swarms against the closed
doors of the houses, now soaring aloft until they flew almost as high as
the living swallows in the belfry of old Saint John's. Then as the dusk
fell, and the street lamps glimmered like blurred stars through the
rain, I drew back into our little sitting-room, which glowed bright as
an ember against the fierce weather outside.

Half an hour earlier my father had come up from the marble yard, where
he spent his days cutting lambs and doves and elaborate ivy wreaths in
stone, and the smell from his great rubber coat, which hung drying
before the kitchen stove, floated with the aroma of coffee through the
half-open door. When I closed an eye and peeped through the crack, I
could see my mother's tall shadow, shifting, not flitting, on the
whitewashed wall of the kitchen, as she passed back and forth from the
stove to the wooden cradle in which my little sister Jessy lay asleep,
with the head of her rag doll in her mouth.

Outside the splash! splash! of the rain still sounded on the brick
pavement, and as I glanced through the window, I saw an old blind negro
beggar groping under the street lamp at the corner. The muffled beat of
his stick in the drenched leaves passed our doorstep, and I heard it
grow gradually fainter as he turned in the direction of the negro hovels
that bordered our end of the town. Across the street, and on either side
of us, there were rows of small boxlike frame houses built with narrow
doorways, which opened from the sidewalk into funny little kitchens,
where women, in soiled calico dresses, appeared to iron all day long. It
was the poorer quarter of what is known in Richmond as "Church Hill," a
portion of the city which had been left behind in the earlier
fashionable progress westward. Between us and modern Richmond there were
several high hills, up which the poor dripping horses panted on summer
days, a railroad station, and a broad slum-like bottom vaguely described
as the "Old Market." Our prosperity, with our traditions, had crumbled
around us, yet there were still left the ancient church, with its shady
graveyard, and an imposing mansion or two inherited from the forgotten
splendour of former days. The other Richmond--that "up-town" I heard
sometimes mentioned--I had never seen, for my early horizon was bounded
by the green hill, by the crawling salmon-coloured James River at its
foot, and by the quaint white belfry of the parish of old St. John's.
Beneath that belfry I had made miniature graves on summer afternoons,
and as I sat now opposite to my father, with the bright fire between us,
the memory of those crumbling vaults made me hug myself in the warmth,
while I edged nearer the great black kettle singing before the flames.

"Pa," I asked presently, with an effort to resume the conversation along
cheerful lines, "was it a he or a she pup?"

My father turned his bright blue eyes from the fire, while his hand
wandered, with an habitual gesture, to his coarse straw-coloured hair
which stood, like mine, straight up from the forehead.

"Wall, I'll be blessed if I can recollect, Benjy," he replied, and added
after a moment, in which I knew that his slow wits were working over a
fresh attempt at distraction, "but speaking of dawgs, it wouldn't
surprise me if yo' ma was to let you have a b'iled egg for yo' supper."

Again the storm was averted. He was so handsome, so soft, so eager to
make everybody happy, that although he did not deceive even my infant
mind for a minute, I felt obliged by sheer force of sympathy to step
into the amiable snare he laid.

"Hard or soft?" I demanded.

"Now that's a matter of ch'ice, ain't it?" he rejoined, wrinkling his
forehead as if awed by the gravity of the decision; "but bein' a plain
man with a taste for solids, I'd say 'hard' every time."

"Hard, ma," I repeated gravely through the crack of the door to the
shifting shape on the kitchen wall. Then, while he stooped over in the
firelight to prod fresh tobacco into his pipe, I began again my
insatiable quest for knowledge which had brought me punishment at the
hand of my mother an hour before.

"Pa, who named me?"

"Yo' ma."

"Did ma name you, too?"

He shook his head, doubtfully, not negatively. Above his short growth of
beard his cheeks had warmed to a clear pink, and his foolish blue eyes
were as soft as the eyes of a baby.

"Wall, I can't say she did that--exactly."

"Then who did name you?"

"I don't recollect. My ma, I reckon."

"Did ma name me Ben Starr, or just Ben?"

"Just Ben. You were born Starr."

"Was she born Starr, too?"

"Good Lord, no, she was born Savage."

"Then why warn't I born Savage?"

"Because she married me an' I was born Starr."

I gave it up with a sigh. "Who had the most to do with my comin' here,
God or ma?" I asked after a minute.

My father hesitated as if afraid of committing himself to an heretical
utterance. "I ain't so sure," he replied at last, and added immediately
in a louder tone, "Yo' ma, I s'pose."

"Then why don't I say my prayers to ma instead of to God?"

"I wouldn't begin to worry over that at my age, if I were you," replied
my father, with angelic patience, "seein' as it's near supper time an'
the kettle's a-bilin'."

"But I want to know, pa, why it was that I came to be named just Ben?"

"To be named just Ben?" he repeated slowly, as if the fact had been
brought for the first time to his attention. "Wall, I reckon 'twas
because we'd had considerable trouble over the namin' of the first,
which was yo' brother President. That bein' the turn of the man of the
family, I calculated that as a plain American citizen, I couldn't do
better than show I hadn't any ill feelin' agin the Government. I don't
recollect just what the name of the gentleman at the head of the Nation
was, seein' 'twas goin' on sixteen years ago, but I'd made up my mind to
call the infant in the cradle arter him, if he'd ever answered my
letter--which he never did. It was then yo' ma an' I had words because
she didn't want a child of hers named arter such a bad-mannered,
stuck-up, ornary sort, President or no President. She raised a terrible
squall, but I held out against her," he went on, dropping his voice,
"an' I stood up for it that as long as 'twas the office an' not the man
I was complimentin', I'd name him arter the office, which I did on the
spot. When 'twas over an' done the notion got into my head an' kind of
tickled me, an' when you came at last, arter the four others in between,
that died befo' they took breath, I was a'ready to name you 'Governor'
if yo' ma had been agreeable. But 'twas her turn, so she called you
arter her Uncle Benjamin--"

"What's become o' Uncle Benjamin?" I interrupted.

"Dead," responded my father, and for the third time I wept.

"I declar' that child's been goin' on like that for the last hour,"
remarked my mother, appearing upon the threshold. "Thar, thar, Benjy
boy, stop cryin' an' I'll let you go to old Mr. Cudlip's burial
to-morrow."

"May I go, too, ma?" enquired President, who had come in with a lighted
lamp in his hand. He was a big, heavy, overgrown boy, and his head was
already on a level with his father's.

"Not if I know it," responded my mother tartly, for her temper was
rising and she looked tired and anxious. "I'll take Benjy along because
he can crowd in an' nobody'll mind."

She moved a step nearer while her shadow loomed to gigantic proportions
on the whitewashed wall. Her thin brown hair, partially streaked with
grey, was brushed closely over her scalp, and this gave her profile an
angularity that became positively grotesque in the shape behind her.
Across her forehead there were three deep frowning wrinkles, which did
not disappear even when she smiled, and her sad, flint-coloured eyes
held a perplexed and anxious look, as if she were trying always to
remember something which was very important and which she had half
forgotten. I had never seen her, except when she went to funerals,
dressed otherwise than in a faded grey calico with a faded grey shawl
crossed tightly over her bosom and drawn to the back of her waist, where
it was secured by a safety pin of an enormous size. Beside her my father
looked so young and so amiable that I had a confused impression that he
had shrunk to my own age and importance. Then my mother retreated into
the kitchen and he resumed immediately his natural proportions. After
thirty years, when I think now of that ugly little room, with its
painted pine furniture, with its coloured glass vases, filled with dried
cat-tails, upon the mantelpiece, with its crude red and yellow print of
a miniature David attacking a colossal Goliath, with its narrow
window-panes, where beyond the "prize" red geranium the wind drove the
fallen leaves over the brick pavement, with its staring whitewashed
walls, and its hideous rag carpet--when I think of these vulgar details
it is to find that they are softened in my memory by a sense of peace,
of shelter, and of warm firelight shadows.

My mother had just laid the supper table, over which I had watched her
smooth the clean red and white cloth with her twisted fingers; President
was proudly holding aloft a savoury dish of broiled herrings, and my
father had pinned on my bib and drawn back the green-painted chair in
which I sat for my meals--when a hurried knock at the door arrested each
one of us in his separate attitude as if he had been instantly petrified
by the sound.

There was a second's pause, and then before my father could reach it,
the door opened and shut violently, and a woman, in a dripping cloak,
holding a little girl by the hand, came from the storm outside, and ran
straight to the fire, where she stood shaking the child's wet clothes
before the flames. As the light fell over them, I saw that the woman was
young and delicate and richly dressed, with a quantity of pale brown
hair which the rain and wind had beaten flat against her small
frightened face. At the time she was doubtless an unusually pretty
creature to a grown-up pair of eyes, but my gaze, burning with
curiosity, passed quickly over her to rest upon the little girl, who
possessed for me the attraction of my own age and size. She wore red
shoes, I saw at my first glance, and a white cloak, which I took to be
of fur, though it was probably made of some soft, fuzzy cloth I had
never seen. There was a white cap on her head, held by an elastic band
under her square little chin, and about her shoulders her hair lay in a
profuse, drenched mass of brown, which reminded me in the firelight of
the colour of wet November leaves. She was soaked through, and yet as
she stood there, with her teeth chattering in the warmth, I was struck
by the courage, almost the defiance, with which she returned my gaze.
Baby that she was, I felt that she would scorn to cry while my glance
was upon her, though there were fresh tear marks on her flushed cheeks,
and around her solemn grey eyes that were made more luminous by her
broad, heavily arched black eyebrows, which gave her an intense and
questioning look. The memory of this look, which was strange in so young
a child, remained with me after the colour of her hair and every
charming feature in her face were forgotten. Years afterwards I think I
could have recognised her in a crowded street by the mingling of light
with darkness, of intense black with clear grey, in her sparkling
glance.

"I followed the wrong turn," said the pale little woman, breathing hard
with a pitiable, frightened sound, while my mother took her dripping
cloak from her shoulders, "and I could not keep on because of the rain
which came up so heavily. If I could only reach the foot of the hill I
might find a carriage to take me up-town."

My father had sprung forward as she entered, and was vigorously stirring
the fire, which blazed and crackled merrily in the open grate. She
accepted thankfully my mother's efforts to relieve her of her wet wraps,
but the little girl drew back haughtily when she was approached, and
refused obstinately to slip out of her cloak, from which the water ran
in streams to the floor.

"I don't like it here, mamma, it is a common place," she said, in a
clear childish voice, and though I hardly grasped the meaning of her
words, her tone brought to me for the first time a feeling of shame for
my humble surroundings.

"Hush, Sally," replied her mother, "you must dry yourself. These people
are very kind."

"But I thought we were going to grandmama's?"

"Grandmama lives up-town, and we are going as soon as the storm has
blown over. There, be a good girl and let the little boy take your wet
cap."

"I don't want him to take my cap. He is a common boy."

In spite of the fact that she seemed to me to be the most disagreeable
little girl I had ever met, the word she had used was lodged unalterably
in my memory. In that puzzled instant, I think, began my struggle to
rise out of the class in which I belonged by birth; and I remember that
I repeated the word "common" in a whisper to myself, while I resolved
that I would learn its meaning in order that I might cease to be the
unknown thing that it implied.

My mother, who had gone into the kitchen with the dripping cloak in her
arms, returned a moment later with a cup of steaming coffee in one hand
and a mug of hot milk in the other.

"It's a mercy if you haven't caught your death with an inner chill," she
observed in a brisk, kindly tone. "'Twas the way old Mr. Cudlip, whose
funeral I'm going to to-morrow, came to his end, and he was as hale,
red-faced a body as you ever laid eyes on."

The woman received the cup gratefully, and I could see her poor thin
hands tremble as she raised it to her lips.

"Drink the warm milk, dear," she said pleadingly to the disagreeable
little girl, who shook her head and drew back with a stiff childish
gesture.

"I'm not hungry, thank you," she replied to my mother in her sweet,
clear treble. To all further entreaties she returned the same answer,
standing there a haughty, though drenched and battered infant, in her
soiled white cloak and her red shoes, holding her mop of a muff tightly
in both hands.

"I'm not hungry, thank you," she repeated, adding presently in a manner
of chill politeness, "give it to the boy."

But the boy was not hungry either, and when my mother, finally taking
her at her word, turned, in exasperation, and offered the mug to me, I
declined it, also, and stood nervously shifting from one foot to the
other, while my hands caught and twisted the fringe of the table-cloth
at my back. The big grey eyes of the little girl looked straight into
mine, but there was no hint in them that she was aware of my existence.
Though her teeth were chattering, and she knew I heard them, she did not
relax for an instant from her scornful attitude.

"We were just about to take a mouthful of supper, mum, an' we'd be proud
if you an' the little gal would jine us," remarked my father, with an
eager hospitality.

"I thank you," replied the woman in her pretty, grateful manner, "but
the coffee has restored my strength, and if you will direct me to the
hill, I shall be quite able to go on again."

A step passed close to the door on the pavement outside, and I saw her
start and clutch the child to her bosom with trembling hands. As she
stood there in her shaking terror, I remembered a white kitten I had
once seen chased by boys into the area of a deserted house.

"If--if anyone should come to enquire after me, will you be so good as
to say nothing of my having been here?" she asked.

"To be sure I will, with all the pleasure in life," responded my father,
who, it was evident even to me, had become a victim to her distressed
loveliness.

Emboldened by the effusive politeness of my parent, I went up to the
little girl and shyly offered her a blossom from my mother's geranium
upon the window-sill. A scrap of a hand, as cold as ice when it touched
mine, closed over the stem of the flower, and without looking at me, she
stood, very erect, with the scarlet geranium grasped stiffly between her
fingers.

"I'll take you to the bottom of the hill myself," protested my father,
"but I wish you could persuade yourself to try a bite of food befo' you
set out in the rain."

"It is important that I should lose no time," answered the woman,
drawing her breath quickly through her small white teeth, "but I fear
that I am taking you away from your supper?"

"Not at all, you will not deprive me in the least," stammered my father,
blushing up to his ears, while his straight flaxen hair appeared
literally to rise with embarrassment. "I--I--the fact is I'm not an
eater, mum."

For an instant, remembering the story of Ananias I had heard in
Sunday-school, I looked round in terror, half expecting to hear the
dreadful feet of the young men on the pavement. But he passed scathless
for the hour at least, and our visitor had turned to receive her
half-dried cloak from my mother's hands, when her face changed suddenly
to a more deadly pallor, and seizing the little girl by the shoulder,
she fled, like a small frightened animal, across the threshold into the
kitchen.

My father's hand had barely reached the knob of the street door, when it
opened and a man in a rubber coat entered, and stopped short in the
centre of the room, where he stood blinking rapidly in the lamplight. I
heard the rain drip with a soft pattering sound from his coat to the
floor, and when he wheeled about, after an instant in which his glance
searched the room, I saw that his face was flushed and his eyes swimming
and bloodshot. There was in his look, as I remember it now, something of
the inflamed yet bridled cruelty of a bird of prey.

"Have you noticed a lady with a little girl go by?" he enquired.

At his question my father fell back a step or two until he stood
squarely planted before the door into the kitchen. Though he was a big
man, he was not so big as the other, who towered above the dried
cat-tails in a china vase on the mantelpiece.

"Are you sure they did not pass here?" asked the stranger, and as he
turned his head the dried pollen was loosened from the cat-tails and
drifted in an ashen dust to the hearth.

"No, I'll stake my word on that. They ain't passed here yet," replied my
father.

With an angry gesture the other shook his rubber coat over our bright
little carpet, and passed out again, slamming the door violently behind
him. Running to the window, I lifted the green shade, and watched his
big black figure splashing recklessly through the heavy puddles under
the faint yellowish glimmer of the street lamp at the comer. The light
flickered feebly on his rubber coat and appeared to go out in the
streams of water that fell from his shoulders.

When I looked round I saw that the woman had come back into the room,
still grasping the little girl by the hand.

"No, no, I must go at once. It is necessary that I should go at once,"
she repeated breathlessly, looking up in a dazed way into my mother's
face.

"If you must you must, an' what ain't my business ain't," replied my
mother a trifle sharply, while she wrapped a grey woollen comforter of
her own closely over the head and shoulders of the little girl, "but if
you'd take my advice, which you won't, you'd turn this minute an' walk
straight back home to yo' husband."

But the woman only shook her head with its drenched mass of soft brown
hair.

"We must go, Sally, mustn't we?" she said to the child.

"Yes, we must go, mamma," answered the little girl, still grasping the
stem of the red geranium between her fingers.

"That bein' the case, I'll get into my coat with all the pleasure in
life an' see you safe," remarked my father, with a manner that impressed
me as little short of the magnificent.

"But I hate to take you away from home on such a terrible night."

"Oh, don't mention the weather," responded my gallant parent, while he
struggled into his rubber shoes; and he added quite handsomely, after a
flourish which appeared to set the elements at defiance, "arter all,
weather is only weather, mum."

As nobody, not even my mother, was found to challenge the truth of this
statement, the child was warmly wrapped up in an old blanket shawl, and
my father lifted her in his arms, while the three set out under a big
cotton umbrella for the brow of the hill. President and I peered after
them from the window, screening our eyes with our hollowed palms, and
flattening our noses against the icy panes; but in spite of our efforts
we could only discern dimly the shape of the umbrella rising like a
miniature black mountain out of the white blur of the fog. The long
empty street with the wind-drifts of dead leaves, the pale glimmer of
the solitary light at the far corner, the steady splash! splash! of the
rain as it fell on the brick pavement, the bitter draught that blew in
over the shivering geranium upon the sill--all these brought a lump to
my throat, and I turned back quickly into our cheerful little room,
where my untasted supper awaited me.




CHAPTER II

THE ENCHANTED GARDEN


The funeral was not until nine o'clock, but at seven my mother served us
a cold breakfast in order, as she said, that she might get the dishes
washed and the house tidied before we started. Gathering about the bare
table, we ate our dismal meal in a depressed silence, while she bustled
back and forth from the kitchen in her holiday attire, which consisted
of a stiff black bombazine dress and the long rustling crape veil she
had first put on at the death of her uncle Benjamin, some twenty years
before. As her only outings were those occasioned by the deaths of her
neighbours, I suppose her costume was quite as appropriate as it seemed
to my childish eyes. Certainly, as she appeared before me in her hard,
shiny, very full bombazine skirt and attenuated bodice, I regarded her
with a reverence which her everyday calico had never inspired.

"I ain't et a mouthful an' I doubt if I'll have time to befo' we start,"
she was saying in an irritable voice, as I settled into my bib and my
chair. "Anybody might have thought I'd be allowed to attend a funeral in
peace, but I shan't be,--no, not even when it comes to my own."

"Thar's plenty of time yet, Susan," returned my father cheerfully, while
he sawed at the cold cornbread on the table. "You've got a good hour an'
mo' befo' you."

"An' the things to wash up an' the house to tidy in my veil and bonnet.
Thar ain't many women, I reckon, that would wash up china in a crape
veil, but I've done it befo' an' I'm used to it."

"Why don't you lay off yo' black things till you're through?"

His suggestion was made innocently enough, but it appeared, as he
uttered it, to be the one thing needed to sharpen the edge of my
mother's temper. The three frowning lines deepened across her forehead,
and she stared straight before her with her perplexed and anxious look
under her rustling crape.

"Yes, I'll take 'em off an' lay 'em away an' git back to work," she
rejoined. "It did seem as if I might have taken a holiday at a time like
this--my next do' neighbour, too, an' I'd al'ays promised him I'd see
him laid safe in the earth. But, no, I can't do it. I'll go take off my
veil an' bonnet an' stay at home."

Before this attack my father grew so depressed that I half expected to
see tears fall into his cup of coffee, as they had into mine. His
handsome gayety dropped from him, and he looked as downcast as was
possible for a face composed of so many flagrantly cheerful features.

"I declar, Susan, I wa'nt thinkin' of that," he returned apologetically,
"it just seemed to me that you'd be mo' comfortable without that sheet
of crape floatin' down yo' back."

"I've never been comfortable in my life," retorted my mother, "an' I
don't expect to begin when I dress myself to go to a funeral. It's got
to be, I reckon, an' it's what I'm used to; but if thar's a man alive
that would stand over a stove with a crape veil on his head, I'd be
obliged to him if he'd step up an' show his face."

At this point; the half-grown girl who had promised to look after the
baby arrived, and with her assistance, my mother set about putting the
house in order, while my father, as soon as his luncheon basket was
packed, wished us a pleasant drive, and started for old Timothy Ball's
marble yard, where he worked. At the sink in the kitchen my mother, with
her crape veil pinned back, and her bombazine sleeves rolled up, stood
with her arms deep in soapsuds.

"Ma," I asked, going up to her and turning my back while she unfastened
my bib with one soapy hand, "did you ever hear anybody call you common?"

"Call me what?"

"Common. What does it mean when anybody calls you common?"

"It means generally that anybody is a fool."

"Then am I, ma?"

"Air you what?"

"Am I common?"

"For the Lord's sake, Benjy, stop yo' pesterin'. What on earth has gone
an' set that idee workin' inside yo' head?"

"Is pa common?"

She meditated an instant. "Wall, he wa'nt born a Savage, but I'd never
have called him common--exactly," she answered.

"Then perhaps you are?"

"You talk like a fool! Haven't I told you that I wa'nt?" she snapped.

"Then if you ain't an' pa ain't exactly, how can I be?" I concluded with
triumph.

"Whoever said you were? Show me the person."

"It wa'nt a person. It was a little girl."

"A little girl? You mean the half-drowned brat I wrapped up in yo'
grandma's old blanket shawl I set the muffin dough under? To think of my
sendin' yo' po' tired pa splashin' out with 'em into the rain. So she
called you common?"

But the sound of a carriage turning the corner fell on my ears, and
running hastily into the sitting-room, I opened the door and looked out
eagerly for signs of the approaching funeral.

A bright morning had followed the storm, and the burnished leaves, so
restless the day before, lay now wet and still under the sunshine. I had
stepped joyously over the threshold, to the sunken brick pavement, when
my mother, moved by a sudden anxiety for my health, called me back, and
in spite of my protestations, wrapped me in a grey blanket shawl, which
she fastened at my throat with the enormous safety-pin she had taken
from her own waist. Much embarrassed by this garment, which dragged
after me as I walked, I followed her sullenly out of the house and as
far as our neighbour's doorstep, where I was ordered to sit down and
wait until the service was over. As the stir of her crape passed into
the little hall, I seated myself obediently on the single step which led
straight from the street, and made faces, during the long wait, at the
merry driver of the hearse--a decrepit negro of ancient days, who
grinned provokingly at the figure I cut in my blanket shawl.

"Hi! honey, is you got on swaddlin' close er a windin' sheet?" he
enquired. "I'se a-gittin' near bline en I cyarn mek out."

"You jest wait till I'm bigger an' I'll show you," was my peaceable
rejoinder.

"Wat's dat you gwine sho' me, boy? I reckon I'se done seed mo' curus
things den you in my lifetime."

I looked up defiantly. Between the aristocratic, if fallen, negro and
myself there was all the instinctive antagonism that existed in the
Virginia of that period between the "quality" and the "poor white
trash."

"If you don't lemme alone you'll see mo'n you wanter."

"Whew! I reckon you gwine tu'n out sump'im' moughty outlandish, boy.
I'se a-lookin' wid all my eyes an I cyarn see nuttin' at all."

"Wait till I'm bigger an' you'll see it," I answered.

"I'se sho'ly gwine ter wait, caze ef'n hits mo' curus den you is en dat
ar windin' sheet, hit's a sight dat I'se erbleeged ter lay eyes on.
Wat's yo' name, suh?" he enquired, with a mocking salute.

"I am Ben Starr," I replied promptly, "an' if you wait till I get
bigger, I'll bus' you open."

"Hi! hi! wat you wanter bus' me open fur, boy? Is you got a pa?"

"He's Thomas Starr, an' he cuts lambs and doves on tombstones. I've seen
'em, an' I'm goin' to learn to cut 'em, too, when I grow up. I like
lambs."

The door behind me opened suddenly without warning, and as I scrambled
from the doorstep, my enemy, the merry driver, backed his creaking
vehicle to the sidewalk across which the slow procession of mourners
filed. A minute later I was caught up by my mother's hand, and borne
into a carriage, where I sat tightly wedged between two sombre females.

"So you've brought yo' little boy along, Mrs. Starr," remarked a third
from the opposite seat, in an aggressive voice.

"Yes, he had a cold an' I thought the air might do him good," replied my
mother with her society manner.

"Wall, I've nine an' not one of 'em has ever been to a funeral,"
returned the questioner. "I've al'ays been set dead against 'em for
children, ain't you, Mrs. Boxley?"

Mrs. Boxley, a placid elderly woman, who had already begun to doze in
her corner, opened her eyes and smiled on me in a pleasant and friendly
way.

"To tell the truth I ain't never been able really to enjoy a child's
funeral," she replied.

"I'm sure we're all mighty glad to have him along, Mrs. Starr," observed
the fourth woman, who was soft and peaceable and very fat. "He's a fine,
strong boy now, ain't he, ma'am?"

"Middlin' strong. I hope he ain't crowdin' you. Edge closer to me,
Benjy."

I edged closer until her harsh bombazine sleeve seemed to scratch the
skin from my cheek. Mrs. Boxley had dozed again, and sinking lower on
the seat, I had just prepared myself to follow her example, when a
change in the conversation brought my wandering wits instantly together,
and I sat bolt upright while my eyes remained fixed on the small,
straggling houses we were passing.

"Yes, she would go, rain or no rain," my mother was saying, and I knew
that in that second's snatch of sleep she had related the story of our
last evening's adventure. "To be sure she may have been all she ought to
be, but I must say I can't help mistrustin' that little, palaverin' kind
of a woman with eyes like a scared rabbit."

"If it was Sarah Mickleborough, an' I think it was, she had reason
enough to look scared, po' thing," observed Mrs. Kidd, the soft fat
woman, who sat on my left side. "They've only lived over here in the old
Adams house for three months, but the neighbours say he's almost killed
her twice since they moved in. She came of mighty set up, high falutin'
folks, you know, an' when they wouldn't hear of the marriage, she ran
off with him one night about ten years ago just after he came home out
of the army. He looked fine, they say, in uniform, on his big black
horse, but after the war ended he took to drink and then from drink, as
is natchel, he took to beatin' her. It's strange--ain't it?--how easily
a man's hand turns against a woman once he's gone out of his head?"

"Ah, I could see that she was the sort that's obliged to be beaten
sooner or later if thar was anybody handy around to do it," remarked my
mother. "Some women are made so that they're never happy except when
they're hurt, an' she's one of 'em. Why, they can't so much as look at a
man without invitin' him to ill-treat 'em."

"Thar ain't many women that know how to deal with a husband as well as
you an' Mrs. Cudlip," remarked Mrs. Kidd, with delicate flattery.

"Po' Mrs. Cudlip. I hope she is bearin' up," sighed my mother. "'Twas
the leg he lost at Seven Pines--wasn't it?--that supported her?"

"That an' the cheers he bottomed. The last work he did, po' man, was for
Mrs. Mickleborough of whom we were speakin'. I used to hear of her befo'
the war when she was pretty Miss Sarah Bland, in a white poke bonnet
with pink roses."

"An' now never a day, passes, they say, that Harry Mickleborough doesn't
threaten to turn her an' the child out into the street."

"Are her folks still livin'? Why doesn't she go back to them?"

"Her father died six months after the marriage, an' the rest of 'em live
up-town somewhar. The only thing that's stuck to her is her coloured
mammy, Aunt Euphronasia, an' they tell me that that old woman has mo'
influence over Harry Mickleborough than anybody livin'. When he gets
drunk an' goes into one of his tantrums she walks right up to him an'
humours him like a child."

As we drove on their voices grew gradually muffled and thin in my ears,
and after a minute, in which I clung desperately to my eluding
consciousness, my head dropped with a soft thud upon Mrs. Kidd's
inviting bosom. The next instant I was jerked violently erect by my
mother and ordered sternly to "keep my place an' not to make myself a
nuisance by spreadin' about." With this admonition in my ears, I pinched
my leg and sat staring with heavy eyes out upon the quiet street, where
the rolling of the slow wheels over the fallen leaves was the only sound
that disturbed the silence. After ten bitter years the city was still
bound by the terrible lethargy which had immediately succeeded the war;
and on Church Hill it seemed almost as if we had been forgotten like the
breastworks and the battle-fields in the march of progress. The grip of
poverty, which was fiercer than the grip of armies, still held us, and
the few stately houses showed tenantless and abandoned in the midst of
their ruined gardens. Sometimes I saw an old negress in a coloured
turban come out upon one of the long porches and stare after us, her
pipe in her mouth and her hollowed palm screening her eyes; and once a
noisy group of young mulattoes emerged from an alley and followed us
curiously for a few blocks along the sidewalk.

Withdrawing my gaze from the window, I looked enviously at Mrs. Boxley,
who snored gently in her corner. Then for the second time sleep
overpowered me, and in spite of my struggles, I sank again on Mrs.
Kidd's bosom.

"Thar, now, don't think of disturbin' him, Mrs. Starr. He ain't the
least bit in my way. I can look right over his head," I heard murmured
over me as I slid blissfully into unconsciousness.

What happened after this I was never able to remember, for when I came
clearly awake again, we had reached our door, and my mother was shaking
me in the effort to make me stand on my feet.

"He's gone and slept through the whole thing," she remarked irritably to
President, while I stumbled after them across the pavement, with the
fringed ends of my blanket shawl rustling the leaves.

"He's too little. You might have let me go, ma," replied President, as
he dragged me, sleepy eyes, ruffled flaxen hair, and trailing shawl over
the doorstep.

"An' you're too big," retorted my mother, removing the long black pins
from her veil, and holding them in her mouth while she carefully
smoothed and folded the lengths of crape. "You could never have squeezed
in between us, an' as it was Mrs. Kidd almost overlaid Benjy. But you
didn't miss much," she hastened to assure him, "I declar' I thought at
one time we'd never get on it all went so slowly."

Having placed her bonnet and veil in the tall white bandbox upon the
table, she hurried off to prepare our dinner, while President urged me
in an undertone to "sham sick" that afternoon so that he wouldn't have
to take me out for an airing on the hill.

"But I want to go," I responded selfishly, wide awake at the prospect.
"I want to see the old Adams house where the little girl lives."

"If you go I can't play checkers, an' it's downright mean. What do you
care about little girls? They ain't any good."

"But this little girl has got a drunken father."

"Well, you won't see _him_ anyway, so what is the use?"

"She lives in a big house an' it's got a big garden--as big as that!" I
stretched out my arms in a vain attempt to impress his imagination, but
he merely looked scornful and swore a mighty vow that he'd "be jiggered
if he'd keep on playin' nurse-girl to a muff."

At the time he put my pleading sternly aside, but a couple of hours
later, when the afternoon was already waning, he relented sufficiently
to take me out on the ragged hill, which was covered thickly with
pokeberry, yarrow, and stunted sumach. Before our feet the ground sank
gradually to the sparkling river, and farther away I could see the
silhouette of an anchored vessel etched boldly against the rosy clouds
of the sunset.

As I stood there, holding fast to his hand, in the high wind that blew
up from the river, a stout gentleman, leaning heavily on a black
walking-stick, with a big gold knob at the top, came panting up the
slope and paused beside us, with his eyes on the western sky. He was
hale, handsome, and ruddy-faced, with a bunch of iron-grey whiskers on
either cheek, and a vivacious and merry eye which seemed to catch at a
twinkle whenever it met mine. His rounded stomach was spanned by a
massive gold watch-chain, from which dangled a bunch of seals that
delighted my childish gaze.

"It's a fine view," he observed pleasantly, patting my shoulder as if I
were in some way responsible for the river, the anchored vessel, and the
rosy sunset. "I moved up-town as soon as the war ended, but I still
manage to crawl back once in a while to watch the afterglow."

"Where does the sun go," I asked, "when it slips way down there on the
other side of the river?"

The gentleman smiled benignly, and I saw from his merry glance that he
did not share my mother's hostility to the enquiring mind.

"Well, I shouldn't be surprised if it went to the wrong side of the
world for little boys and girls over there to get up by," he replied.

"May I go there, too, when I'm big?"

"To the wrong side of the world? You may, who knows?"

"Have you ever been there? What is it like?"

"Not yet, not yet, but there's no telling. I've been across the ocean,
though, and that's pretty far. I went once in a ship that ran through
the blockade and brought in a cargo of Bibles."

"What did you want with so many Bibles? We've got one. It has gilt
clasps."

"Want with the Bibles! Why, every one of these Bibles, my boy, may have
saved a soul."

"Has our Bible saved a soul? An' whose soul was it? It stays on our
centre table, an' my name's in it. I've seen it."

"Indeed! and what may your name be?"

"Ben Starr. That's my name. What is yours? Is yo' name in the Bible?
Does everybody's name have to be in the Bible if they're to be saved?
Who put them in there? Was it God or the angels? If I blot my name out
can I still go to heaven? An' if yours isn't in there will you have to
be damned? Have you ever been damned an' what does it feel like?"

"Shut up, Benjy, or ma'll wallop you," growled President, squeezing my
hand so hard that I cried aloud.

"Ah, he's a fine boy, a promising boy, a remarkable boy," observed the
gentleman, with one finger in his waistcoat pocket. "Wouldn't you like
to grow up and be President, my enquiring young friend?"

"No, sir, I'd rather be God," I replied, shaking my head.

All the gentleman's merry grey eyes seemed to run to sparkles.

"Ah, there's nothing, after all, like the true American spirit," he
said, patting my shoulder. Then he laughed so heartily that his
gold-rimmed eye-glasses fell from his eyes and dangled in the air at the
end of a silk cord. "I'm afraid your aspiration is too lofty for my
help," he said, "but if you should happen to grow less ambitious as you
grow older, then remember, please, that my name is General Bolingbroke."

"Why, you're the president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic
Railroad, sir!" exclaimed President, admiring and embarrassed.

The General sighed, though even I could see that this simple tribute to
his fame had not left him unmoved. "Ten years ago I was the man who
tried to save Johnston's army, and to-day I am only a railroad
president," he answered, half to himself; "times change and fames change
almost as quickly. When all is said, however, there may be more lasting
honour in building a country's trade than in winning a battle. I'll have
a tombstone some day and I want written on it, 'He brought help to the
sick land and made the cotton flower to bloom anew.' My name is General
Bolingbroke," he added, with his genial and charming smile. "You will
not forget it?"

I assured him that I should not, and that if it could be done, I'd try
to have it written in our Bible with gilt clasps, at which he thanked me
gravely as he shook my hand.

"An' I think now I'd rather be president of the Great South Midland and
Atlantic Railroad, sir," I concluded.

"Young man, I fear you're with the wind," he said, laughing, and added,
"I've a nephew just about your age and at least a head shorter, what do
you think of that?"

"Has he a kite?" I enquired eagerly. "I have, an' a top an' ten checkers
an' a big balloon."

"Have you, indeed? Well, my poor boy is not so well off, I regret to
say. But don't you think your prosperity is excessive considering the
impoverished condition of the country?"

The big words left me gasping, and fearing that I had been too boastful
for politeness, I hastened to inform him that "although the balloon was
very big, it was also bu'sted, which made a difference."

"Ah, it is, is it? Well, that does make a difference."

"If your boy hasn't any checkers I'll give him half of mine," I added
with a gulp.

With an elaborate flourish the General drew out a stiffly starched
pocket handkerchief and blew his nose. "That's a handsome offer and I'll
repeat it without fail," he said.

Then he shook hands again and marched down the hill with his gold-headed
stick tapping the ground.

"Now you'll come and trot home, I reckon," said President, when he had
disappeared.

But the spirit of revolt had lifted its head within me, for through a
cleft in the future, I saw myself already as the president of the Great
South Midland and Atlantic Railroad, with a jingling bunch of seals and
a gold-headed stick.

"I ain't goin' that way," I said, "I'm goin' home by the old Adams house
where the little girl lives."

"No, you ain't either. I'll tell ma on you."

"I don't care. If you don't take me home by the old Adams house, you'll
have to carry me every step of the way, an' I'll make myself heavy."

For a long minute President wrinkled his brows and thought hard in
silence. Then an idea appeared to penetrate his slow mind, and he
grasped me by the shoulder and shook me until I begged him to stop.

"If I take you home that way will you promise to sham sick to-morrow, so
I shan't have to bring you out?"

The price was high, but swallowing my disappointment I met it squarely.

"I will if you'll lift me an' let me look over the wall."

"Hope you may die?"

"Hope I may die."

"Wall, it ain't anything to see but jest a house," remarked President,
as I held out my hand, "an' girls ain't worth the lookin' at."

"She called me common," I said, soberly.

"Oh, shucks!" retorted President, with fine scorn, and we said no more.

Clinging tightly to his hand I trudged the short blocks in silence. As I
was little, and he was very large for his years, it was with difficulty
that I kept pace with him; but by taking two quick steps to his single
slow one, I managed to cover the same distance in almost the same number
of minutes. He was a tall, overgrown boy, very fat for his age, with a
foolish, large-featured face which continued to look sheepishly amiable
even when he got into a temper.

"Is it far, President?" I enquired at last between panting breaths.

"There 'tis," he answered, pointing with his free hand to a fine old
mansion, with a broad and hospitable front, from which the curved iron
railing bent in a bright bow to the pavement. It was the one great house
on the hill, with its spreading wings, its stuccoed offices, its massive
white columns at the rear, which presided solemnly over the terraced
hill-side. A moment later he led me up to the high, spiked wall, and
swung me from the ground to a secure perch on his shoulder. With my
hands clinging to the iron nails that studded the wall, I looked over,
and then caught my breath sharply at the thought that I was gazing upon
an enchanted garden. Through the interlacing elm boughs the rosy light
of the afterglow fell on the magnolias and laburnums, on the rose
squares, and on the tall latticed arbours, where amid a glossy bower of
foliage, a few pale microphylla roses bloomed out of season. Overhead
the wind stirred, and one by one the small yellow leaves drifted, like
wounded butterflies, down on the box hedges and the terraced walks.

"You've got to come down now--you're too heavy," said President from
below, breathing hard as he held me up.

"Jest a minute--give me a minute longer an' I'll let you eat my
blackberry jam at supper."

"An' you've promised on yo' life to sham sick to-morrow?"

"I'll sham sick an' I'll let you eat my jam, too, if you'll hold me a
little longer."

He lifted me still higher, and clutching desperately to the iron spikes,
I hung there quivering, breathless, with a thumping heart. A glimmer of
white flitted between the box rows on a lower terrace, and I saw that
the princess of the enchanted garden was none other than my little girl
of the evening before. She was playing quietly by herself in a bower of
box, building small houses of moss and stones, which she erected with
infinite patience. So engrossed was she in her play that she seemed
perfectly oblivious of the fading light and of the birds and squirrels
that ran past her to their homes in the latticed arbours. Higher and
higher rose her houses of moss and stones, while she knelt there,
patient and silent, in the terrace walk with the small, yellow leaves
falling around her.

"That's a square deal now," said President, dropping me suddenly to
earth. "You'd better come along and trot home or you'll get a lamming."

My enchanted garden had vanished, the spiked wall rose over my head, and
before me, as I turned homeward, spread all the familiar commonplaceness
of Church Hill.

"How long will it be befo' I can climb up by myself?" I asked.

"When you grow up. You're nothin' but a kid."

"An' when'll I grow up if I keep on fast?"

"Oh, in ten or fifteen years, I reckon."

"Shan't I be big enough to climb up befo' then?"

"Look here, you shut up! I'm tired answerin' questions," shouted my
elder brother, and grasping his hand I trotted in a depressed silence
back to our little home.




CHAPTER III

A PAIR OF RED SHOES


I awoke the next morning a changed creature from the one who had fallen
asleep in my trundle-bed. In a single hour I had awakened to the sharp
sense of contrast, to the knowledge that all ways of life were not
confined to the sordid circle in which I lived. Outside the poverty, the
ugliness, the narrow streets, rose the spiked wall of the enchanted
garden; and when I shut my eyes tight, I could see still the half-bared
elms arching against the sunset, and the old house beyond, with its
stuccoed wings and its grave white columns, which looked down on the
magnolias and laburnums just emerging from the twilight on the lower
terrace. In the midst of this garden I saw always the little girl
patiently building her houses of moss and stones, and it seemed to me
that I could hardly live through the days until I grew strong enough to
leap the barriers and play beside her in the bower of box.

"Ma," I asked, measuring myself against the red and white cloth on the
table, "does it look to you as if I were growin' up?"

The air was strong with the odour of frying bacon, and when my mother
turned to answer me, she held a smoking skillet extended like a votive
offering in her right hand. She was busy preparing breakfast for Mrs.
Cudlip, whose husband's funeral we had attended the day before, and as
usual when any charitable mission was under way, her manner to my father
and myself had taken a biting edge.

"Don't talk foolishness, Benjy," she replied, stopping to push back a
loosened wiry lock of hair; "it's time to think about growin' up when
you ain't been but two years in breeches. Here, if you're through
breakfast, I want you to step with this plate of muffins to Mrs. Cudlip.
Tell her I sent 'em an' that I hope she is bearin' up."

"That you sent 'em an' that you hope she is bearin' up," I repeated.

"That's it now. Don't forget what I told you befo' you're there. Thomas,
have you buttered that batch of muffins?"

My father handed me the plate, which was neatly covered with a
red-bordered napkin.

"Did you tell me to lay a slice of middlin' along side of 'em, Susan?"
he humbly enquired.

Without replying to him in words, my mother seized the plate from me,
and lifting the napkin, removed the offending piece of bacon, which she
replaced in the dish.

"I thought even you, Thomas, would have had mo' feelin' than to send
middlin' to a widow the day arter she has buried her husband--even a
one-legged one! Middlin' indeed! One egg an' that soft boiled, will be
as near a solid as she'll touch for a week. Keep along, Benjy, an' be
sure to say just what I told you."

I did my errand quickly, and returning, asked eagerly if I might go out
all by myself an' play for an hour. "I'll stay close in the churchyard
if you'll lemme go," I entreated.

"Run along then for a little while, but if you go out of the churchyard,
you'll get a whippin'," replied my mother.

With this threat ringing like a bell in my ears, I left the house and
walked quickly along the narrow pavement to where, across the wide
street, I discerned the white tower and belfry which had been added by a
later century to the parish church of Saint John. Overhead there was a
bright blue sky, and the October sunshine, filtering through the bronzed
network of sycamore and poplar, steeped the flat tombstones and the
crumbling brick vaults in a clear golden light. The church stood upon a
moderate elevation above the street, and I entered it now by a short
flight of steps, which led to a grassy walk that did not end at the
closed door, but continued to the brow of the hill, where a few
scattered slabs stood erect as sentinels over the river banks. For a
moment I stood among them, watching the blue haze of the opposite shore;
then turning away I rolled over on my back and lay at full length in the
periwinkle that covered the ground. From beyond the church I could hear
Uncle Methusalah, the negro caretaker, raking the dead leaves from the
graves, and here and there among the dark boles of the trees there
appeared presently thin bluish spirals of smoke. The old negro's figure
was still hidden, but as his rake stirred the smouldering piles, I could
smell the sharp sweet odour of the burning leaves. Sometimes a wren or a
sparrow fluttered in and out of the periwinkle, and once a small green
lizard glided like the shadow of a moving leaf over a tombstone. One
sleeper among them I came to regard, as I grew somewhat older, almost
with affection--not only because he was young and a soldier, but because
the tall marble slab implored me to "tread lightly upon his ashes." Not
once during the many hours when I played in the churchyard, did I forget
myself and run over the sunken grave where he lay.

The sound of the moving rake passed the church door and drew nearer, and
the grey head of Uncle Methusalah appeared suddenly from behind an ivied
tree trunk. Sitting up in the periwinkle, I watched him heap the
coloured leaves around me into a brilliant pile, and then bending over
hold a small flame close to the curling ends. The leaves, still moist
from the rain, caught slowly, and smouldered in a scented cloud under
the trees.

"Dis yer trash ain' gwine ter bu'n twel hit's smoked out," he remarked
in a querulous voice.

"Uncle Methusalah," I asked, springing up, "how old are you?"

With a leisurely movement, he dragged his rake over the walk, and then
bringing it to rest at his feet, leaned his clasped hands on the end of
it, and looked at me over the burning leaves. He wore an old, tightly
fitting army coat of Union blue, bearing tarnished gold epaulets upon
the shoulders, and around his throat a red bandanna handkerchief was
wrapped closely to keep out the "chills."

"Gaud-a-moughty, honey!" he replied, "I'se so ole dat I'se done clean
furgit ter count."

"I reckon you knew almost everybody that's buried here, didn't you?"

"Mos' un um, chile, but I ain't knowed near ez many ez my ole Marster.
He done shuck hans w'en he wuz live wid um great en small. I'se done
hyern 'im tell in my time how he shuck de han' er ole Marse Henry right
over dar in dat ar church."

"Who was ole Marse Henry?" I enquired.

"I dunno, honey, caze he died afo' my day, but he mus' hev done a
powerful heap er talkin' while he wuz 'live."

"Whom did he talk to, Uncle Methusalah?"

"Ter hisself mostly, I reckon, caze you know folks ain' got time al'ays
ter be lisen'in'. But hit wuz en dish yer church dat he stood up en ax
'em please ter gin 'im liberty er ter gin 'im deaf."

"An' which did they give him, Uncle?"

"Wall, honey, ez fur ez I recollect de story dey gun 'im bofe."

Bending over in his old blue army coat with the tarnished epaulets, he
prodded the pile of leaves, where the scented smoke hung low in a cloud.
The wind stirred softly in the grass, and a small flame ran along a bent
twig of maple to a single scarlet leaf at the end.

"Did they give 'em to him because he talked too much?" I asked.

"I ain' never hyern ner better reason, chile. Folks cyarn' stan' too
much er de gab nohow, en' dey sez dat he 'ouldn't let up, but kep' up
sech a racket dat dey couldn't git ner sleep. Den at las' ole King
George over dar in England sent de hull army clear across de water jes'
ter shet his mouf."

"An' did he shut it?"

"Dat's all er hit dat I ever hyern tell, boy, but ef'n you don' quit
axin' folks questions day in en day out, he'll send all de way over yer
agin' jes' ter shet yourn."

He went off, gathering the leaves into another pile at a little
distance, and after a moment I followed him and stood with my back
against a high brick vault.

"Is there any way, Uncle Methusalah, that you can grow up befo' yo'
time?" I asked.

"Dar 'tis agin!" exclaimed the old negro, but he added kindly enough,
"Dey tell me you kin do hit by stretchin', chile, but I ain' never seed
hit wid my eyes, en w'at I ain' seed wid my eyes I ain' set much sto'
by."

His scepticism, however, honest as it was, did not prevent my seizing
upon the faint hope he offered, and I had just begun to stretch myself
violently against the vault, when a voice speaking at my back brought my
heels suddenly to the safe earth again.

"Boy," said the voice, "do you want a dog?"

Turning quickly I found myself face to face with the princess of the
enchanted garden. She wore a fresh white coat and a furry white cap and
a pair of red shoes that danced up and down. In her hand she carried a
dirty twine string, the other end of which was tied about the neck of a
miserable grey and white mongrel puppy.

"Do you want a dog, boy?" she repeated, as proudly as if she offered a
canine prize.

The puppy was ugly, ill-bred, and dirty, but not an instant did I
hesitate in the response I made.

"Yes, I want a dog," I answered as gravely as she had spoken.

She held out the string and my fist closed tightly over it. "I found him
in the gutter," she explained, "and I gave him a plate of bread and milk
because he is so young. Grandmama wouldn't let me keep him, as I have
three others. I think it was very cruel of grandmama."

"I may keep him," I responded, "I ain't got any grandmama. I'll let him
sleep in my bed."

"You must give him a bath first," she said, "and put him by the fire to
dry. They wouldn't let me bring him into our house, but yours is such a
little one that it will hardly matter."

At this my pride dropped low. "You live in the great big house with the
high wall around the garden," I returned wistfully.

She nodded, drawing back a step or two with a quaint little air of
dignity, and twisting a tassel on her coat in and out of her fingers,
which were encased in white crocheted mittens. The only touch of colour
about her was made by her small red shoes.

"I haven't lived there long, and I remember where we came
from--way--away from here, over yonder across the river." She lifted her
hand and pointed across the brick vault to the distant blue on the
opposite shore of the James. "I liked it over there because it was the
country and we lived by ourselves, mamma and I. She taught me to knit
and I knitted a whole shawl--as big as that--for grandmama. Then papa
came and took us away, but now he has gone and left us again, and I am
glad. I hope he will never come back because he is so very bad and I
don't like him. Mamma likes him, but I don't."

"May I play with you in your garden?" I asked when she had finished;
"I'd like to play with you an' I know ever so many nice ways to play
that I made up out of my head."

She looked at me gravely and, I thought, regretfully.

"You can't because you're common," she answered. "It's a great pity. I
don't really mind it myself," she added gently, seeing my downcast face,
"I'd just every bit as lief play with you as not--a little bit--but
grandmama wouldn't--"

"But I don't want to play with your grandmama," I returned, on the point
of tears.

"Well, you might come sometimes--not very often," she said at last, with
a sympathetic touch on my sleeve, "an' you must come to the side gate
where grandmama won't see you. I'll let you in an' mamma will not mind.
But you mustn't come often," she concluded in a sterner tone, "only once
or twice, so that there won't be any danger of my growin' like you. It
would hurt grandmama dreadfully if I were ever to grow like you."

She paused a moment, and then began dancing up and down in her red shoes
over the coloured leaves. "I'd like to play--play--play all the time!"
she sang, whirling, a vivid little figure, around, the crumbling vault.

The next minute she caught up the puppy in her arms and hugged him
passionately before she turned away.

"His name is Samuel!" she called back over her shoulder as she ran out
of the churchyard.

When she had gone down the short flight of steps and into the wide
street, I tucked Samuel under my arm, and lugged him, not without inward
misgivings, into the kitchen, where my mother stood at the
ironing-board, with one foot on the rocker of Jessy's cradle.

"Ma," I began in a faltering and yet stubborn voice, "I've got a pup."

My mother's foot left the rocker, and she turned squarely on me, with a
smoking iron half poised above the garment she had just sprinkled on the
board.

"Whar did he come from?" she demanded, and moistened the iron with the
thumb of her free hand.

"I got him in the churchyard. His name is Samuel."

For a moment she stared at the two of us in a stony silence. Then her
face twitched as if with pain, the perplexed and anxious look appeared
in her eyes, and her mouth relaxed.

"Wall, he's ugly enough to be named Satan," she said, "but I reckon if
you want to you may put him in a box in the back yard. Give him that
cold sheep's liver in the safe and then you come straight in and comb
yo' head. It looks for all the world like a tousled straw stack."

All the afternoon I sat in our little sitting-room, and faithful to my
promise, shammed sickness, while Samuel lay in his box in the back yard
and howled.

"I'll have that dog taken up the first thing in the mornin'," declared
my mother furiously, as she cleared the supper table.

"I reckon he's lonely out thar, Susan," urged my father, observing my
trembling mouth, and eager, as usual, to put a pacific face on the
moment.

"Lonely, indeed! I'm lonely in here, but I don't set up a howlin'.
Thar're mighty few folks, be they dogs or humans, that get all the
company they want in life."

Once I crept out into the darkness, and hugging Samuel around his dirty
stomach besought him, with tears, to endure his lot in silence; but
though he licked my face rapturously at the time, I had no sooner
entered the house than his voice was lifted anew.

"To think of po' Mrs. Cudlip havin' to mourn in all that noise,"
commented my mother, as I undressed and got into my trundle-bed.

My pillow was quite moist before I went to sleep, while my mother's loud
threats against Samuel sounded from the other side of the room with each
separate garment that she laid on the chair at the foot of her bed. In
sheer desperation at last I pulled the cover over my ears in an effort
to shut out her thin, querulous tones. At the instant I felt that I was
wicked enough to wish that I had been born without any mother, and I
asked myself how _she_ would like it if I raised as great a fuss about
baby Jessy's crying as she did about Samuel's--who didn't make one-half
the noise.

Here the light went out, and I fell asleep, to awaken an hour or two
later because of the candle flash in my eyes. In the centre of the room
my mother was standing in her grey dressing-gown, with a shawl over her
head and the rapturously wriggling body of Samuel in her arms. Too
amazed to utter an exclamation, I watched her silently while she made a
bed with an old flannel petticoat before the waning fire. Then I saw her
bend over and pat the head of the puppy with her knotted hand before she
crept noiselessly back to bed.

At this day I see her figure as distinctly as I saw it that instant by
the candle flame--her soiled grey wrapper clutched over her flat bosom;
her sallow, sharp-featured face, with bluish hollows in the temples over
which her sparse hair strayed in locks; her thin, stooping shoulders
under the knitted shawl; her sad, flint-coloured eyes, holding always
that anxious look as if she were trying to remember some important thing
which she had half forgotten.

So she appeared to my startled gaze for a single minute. Then the light
went out, she faded into the darkness, and I fell asleep.




CHAPTER IV

IN WHICH I PLAY IN THE ENCHANTED GARDEN


For the next two years, when my mother sent me on errands to McKenney's
grocery store, or for a pitcher of milk to old Mrs. Triffit's, who kept
a fascinating green parrot hanging under an arbour of musk cluster
roses, it was my habit to run five or six blocks out of my way, and
measure my growing height against the wall of the enchanted garden. On
the worn bricks, unless they have crumbled away, there may still be seen
the scratches from my penknife, by which I tried to persuade myself that
each rapidly passing week marked a visible increase in my stature.
Though I was a big boy for my age, the top of my straw-coloured hair
reached barely halfway up the spiked wall; and standing on my tiptoes my
hands still came far below the grim iron teeth at the top. Yet I
continued to measure myself, week by week, against the barrier, until at
last the zigzag scratches from my knife began to cover the bricks.

It was on a warm morning in spring during my ninth year, that, while I
stood vigorously scraping the wall over my head, I heard a voice
speaking in indignant tones at my back.

"You bad boy, what are you doing?" it said.

Wheeling about, I stood again face to face with the little girl of the
red shoes and the dancing feet. Except for her shoes she was dressed all
in white just as I had last seen her, and this time, I saw with disgust,
she held a whining and sickly kitten clasped to her breast.

"I know you are doing something you ought not to," she repeated, "what
is it?"

"Nothink," I responded, and stared at her red shoes like one possessed.

"Then why were you crawling so close along the wall to keep me from
seeing you?"

"I wa'nt."

"You wa'nt what?"

"I wa'nt crawlin' along the wall; I was just tryin' to look in," I
answered defiantly.

An old negro "mammy," in a snowy kerchief and apron, appeared suddenly
around the corner near which we stood, and made a grab at the child's
shoulder.

"You jes let 'im alont, honey, en he ain' gwine hu't you," she said.

"He won't hurt me anyway," replied the little girl, as if I were a
suspicious strange dog, "I'm not afraid of him."

Then she made a step forward and held the whining grey kitten toward me.

"Don't you want a cat, boy?" she asked, in a coaxing tone.

My hands flew to my back, and the only reason I did not retreat before
her determined advance was that I could hardly retreat into a brick
wall.

"I've just found it in the alley a minute ago," she explained. "It's
very little. I'd like to keep it, only I've got six already."

"I don't like cats," I replied stubbornly, shaking my head. "I saw Peter
Finn's dog kill one. He shook it by the neck till it was dead. I'm goin'
to train my dog to kill 'em, too."

Raising herself on the toes of her red shoes, she bent upon me a look so
scorching that it might have burned a passage straight through me into
the bricks.

"I knew you were a horrid bad boy. You looked it!" she cried.

At this I saw in my imagination the closed gate of the enchanted garden,
and my budding sportsman's proclivities withered in the white blaze of
her wrath.

"I don't reckon I'll train him to catch 'em by the back of thar necks,"
I hastened to add.

At this she turned toward me again, her whole vivid little face with its
red mouth and arched black eyebrows inspired by a solemn purpose.

"If you'll promise never, never to kill a cat, I'll let you come into
the garden--for a minute," she said.

I hesitated for an instant, dazzled by the prospect and yet bargaining
for better terms. "Will you let me walk under the arbours and down all
the box-bordered paths?"

She nodded. "Just once," she responded gravely.

"An' may I play under the trees on the terrace where you built yo'
houses of moss and stones?"

"For a little while. But I can't play with you because--because you
don't look clean."

My heart sank like lead to my waist line, and I looked down ashamed at
my dirty hands.

"I--I'd rather play with you," I faltered.

"Fur de Lawd's sake, honey, come in en let dat ar gutter limb alont,"
exclaimed the old negress, wagging her turbaned head.

"Well, I'll tell you what I'll do," said her charge, after a deep
moment; "I'll let you play with me for a little while if you'll take the
cat."

"But I ain't got any use for it," I stammered.

"Take it home for a pet. Grandmama won't let any more come on the place.
She's very cruel is grandmama, isn't she, mammy?"

"Go way, chile, dar ain' nobody dat 'ould want all dem ar critters,"
rejoined the old negress.

"_I_ do," said the little girl, and sighed softly.

"I'll take it home with me," I began desperately at last, "if you'll let
me play with you the whole evening."

"And take you into the house?"

"An' take me into the house," I repeated doggedly.

Her glance brushed me from head to foot, while I writhed under it, "I
wonder why you don't wash your face," she observed in her cool,
impersonal manner.

I fell back a step and stared defiantly at the ground.

"I ain't got any water," I answered, driven to bay.

"I think if you'd wash it ever so hard and brush your hair flat on your
head, you'd look very nice--for a boy," she remarked. "I like your eyes
because they're blue, and I have a dog with blue eyes exactly like
yours. Did you ever see a blue-eyed dog? He's a collie. But your hair
stands always on end and it's the colour of straw."

"It growed that way," I returned. "You can't get it to be flat. Ma has
tried."

"I bet I could," she rejoined, and caught at the old woman's hand. "This
is my mammy an' her name is Euphronasia, an' she's got blue eyes an'
golden hair," she cried, beginning to dance up and down in her red
shoes.

"Gawd erlive, lamb, I'se ez black ez a crow's foot," protested the old
woman, at which the dance of the red shoes changed into a stamp of
anger.

"You aren't!--You aren't! You've got blue eyes an' golden hair!"
screamed the child. "I won't let you say you haven't,--I won't let
anybody say you haven't!"

It took a few minutes to pacify her, during which the old negress
perjured herself to the extent of declaring on her word of honour that
she _had_ blue eyes and golden hair; and when the temper of her "lamb"
was appeased, we turned the corner, approached the front of the house,
and ascended the bright bow of steps. As we entered the wide hall, my
heart thumped so violently that I hurriedly buttoned my coat lest the
little girl should hear the sound and turn indignantly to accuse, me of
disturbing the peace. Then as the front door closed softly behind us, I
stood blinking nervously in the dim green light which entered through
the row of columns at the rear, beyond which I saw the curving stairway
and the two miniature yew trees at its foot. There was a strange musty
smell about the house--a smell that brings to me now, when I find it in
old and unlighted buildings, the memory of the high ceiling, the shining
floor over which I moved so cautiously, and the long melancholy rows of
moth-eaten stags' heads upon the wall.

A door at the far end was half open, and inside the room there were two
ladies--one of them very little and old and shrivelled, and the other a
pretty, brown-haired, pliant creature, whom I recognised instantly as
our visitor of that stormy October evening more than two years ago. She
was reading aloud when we entered, in a voice which sounded so soft and
pious that I wondered if I ought to fold my hands and bow my head as I
had been taught to do in the infant Sunday-school.

"Be careful not to mush your words, Sarah; the habit is growing upon
you," remarked the elder lady in a sharp, imperative tone.

"Shall I read it over, mother? I will try to speak more distinctly,"
returned the other submissively, and she began again a long paragraph
which, I gathered vaguely, related to that outward humility which is the
becoming and appropriate garment for a race of miserable sinners.

"That is better," commented the old lady, in an utterly ungrateful
manner, "though you have never succeeded in properly rolling your r's.
There, that will do for to-day, we will continue the sermon upon
Humility to-morrow."

She was so little and thin and wrinkled that it was a mystery to me, as
I looked at her, how she managed to express so much authority through so
small a medium. The chair in which she sat seemed almost to swallow her
in its high arms of faded green leather; and out of her wide, gathered
skirt of brocade, her body rose very erect, like one of my mother's
black-headed bonnet pins out of her draped pincushion. On her head there
was a cap of lace trimmed gayly with purple ribbons, and beneath this
festive adornment, a fringe of false curls, still brown and lustrous,
lent a ghastly coquetry to her mummied features. In the square of
sunshine, between the gauze curtains at the window, a green parrot, in a
wire cage, was scolding viciously while it pecked at a bit of
sponge-cake from its mistress's hand. At the time I was too badly
frightened to notice the wonderful space and richness of the room, with
its carved rosewood bookcases, and its dim portraits of beruffled
cavaliers and gravely smiling ladies.

"Sally," said the old lady, turning upon me a piercing glance which was
like the flash of steel in the sunlight, "is that a boy?"

Going over to the armchair, the little girl stood holding the kitten
behind her, while she kissed her grandmother's cheek.

"What is it, Sally, dear?" asked the younger woman, closing her book
with a sigh.

"It's a boy, mamma," answered the child.

At this the old lady stiffened on her velvet cushions. "I thought I had
told you, Sally," she remarked icily, "that there is nothing that I
object to so much as a boy. Dogs and cats I have tolerated in silence,
but since I have been in this house no boy has set foot inside the
doors."

"I am sure, dear mamma, that Sally did not mean to disobey you,"
murmured the younger woman, almost in tears.

"Yes, I did, mamma," answered the child, gravely, "I meant to disobey
her. But he has such nice blue eyes," she went on eagerly, her lips
glowing as she talked until they matched the bright red of her dancing
shoes; "an' he's goin' to take a kitten home for a pet, an' he says the
reason he doesn't wash his face is because he hasn't any water."

"Is it possible," enquired the old lady in the manner of her pecking
parrot, "that he does not wash his face?"

My pride could bear it no longer, and opening my mouth I spoke in a
loud, high voice.

"If you please, ma'am, I wash my face every day," I said, "and all over
every Saturday night."

She was still feeding the parrot with a bit of cake, and as I spoke, she
turned toward me and waved one of her wiry little hands, which reminded
me of a bird's claw, under its ruffle of yellowed lace.

"Bring him here, Sally, and let me see him," she directed, as if I had
been some newly entrapped savage beast.

Catching me by the arm, Sally obediently led me to the armchair, where I
stood awkward and trembling, with my hands clutching the flaps of my
breeches' pockets, and my eyes on the ground.

For a long pause the old lady surveyed me critically with her merciless
eyes. Then, "Give him a piece of cake, Sally," she remarked, when the
examination was over.

Sally's mother had come up softly behind me while I writhed under the
piercing gaze, and bending over she encircled my shoulders with her
protecting arms.

"He's a dear little fellow, with such pretty blue eyes," she said.

As she spoke I looked up for the first time, and my glance met my
reflection in a long, gold-framed mirror hanging between the windows.
The "pretty blue eyes" I saw, but I saw also the straw-coloured hair,
the broad nose sprinkled with freckles, and the sturdy legs disguised by
the shapeless breeches, which my mother had cut out of a discarded
dolman she had once worn to funerals. It was a figure which might have
raised a laugh in the ill-disposed, but the women before me carried kind
hearts in their bosoms, and even grandmama's chilling scrutiny ended in
nothing worse than a present of cake.

"May I play with him just a little while, grandmama?" begged Sally, and
when the old lady nodded permission, we joined hands and went through
the open window out upon the sunny porch.

On that spring morning the colours of the garden were all clear white
and purple, for at the foot of the curving stairway, and on the upper
terrace, bunches of lilacs bloomed high above the small spring flowers
that bordered the walk. Beneath the fluted columns a single great
snowball bush appeared to float like a cloud in the warm wind. As we
went together down the winding path to the box maze which was sprinkled
with tender green, a squirrel, darting out of one of the latticed
arbours, stopped motionless in the walk and sat looking up at us with a
pair of bright, suspicious eyes.

"I reckon I could make him skeet, if I wanted to," I remarked,
embarrassed rather than malevolent.

Her glance dwelt on me thoughtfully for a moment, while she stood there,
kicking a pebble with the toe of a red shoe.

"An' I reckon I could make _you_ skeet, if I wanted to," she replied
with composure.

Since the parade of mere masculinity had failed to impress her, I
resorted to subtler measures, and kneeling among the small spring
flowers which powdered the lower terrace, I began laboriously erecting a
palace of moss and stones.

"I make one every evening, but when the ghosts come out and walk up an'
down, they scatter them," observed Sally, hanging attentively upon the
work.

"Are there ghosts here really an' have you seen 'em?" I asked.

Stretching out her hand, she swept it in a circle over the growing
palace. "They are all around here--everywhere," she answered. "I saw
them one night when I was running away from my father. Mamma and I hid
in that big box bush down there, an' the ghosts came and walked all
about us. Do you have to run away from your father, too?"

For an instant I hesitated; then my pride triumphed magnificently over
my truthfulness. "I ran clear out to the hill an' all the way down it,"
I rejoined.

"Is his face red and awful?"

"As red as--as an apple."

"An apple ain't awful."

"But he is. I wish you could see him."

"Would he kill you if he caught you?"

"He--he'd eat me," I panted.

She sighed gravely. "I wonder if all fathers are like that?" she said.
"Anyway, I don't believe yours is as bad as mine."

"I'd like to know why he ain't?" I protested indignantly.

Her lips quivered and went upward at the corners with a trick of
expression which I found irresistible even then.

"It's a pity that it's time for you to go home," she observed politely.

"I reckon I can stay a little while longer," I returned.

She shook her head, but I had already gone back to the unfinished
palace, and as the work progressed, she forgot her hint of dismissal in
watching the fairy towers. We were still absorbed in the building when
her mother came down the curving stairway and into the maze of box.

"It's time for you to run home now, pretty blue eyes," she said in her
soft girlish way. Then catching our hands in hers, she turned with a
merry laugh, and ran with us up the terraced walk.

"Is your mamma as beautiful as mine?" asked Sally, when we came to a
breathless stop.

"She's as beautiful as--as a wax doll," I replied stoutly.

"That's right," laughed the lady, stooping to kiss me. "You're a dear
boy. Tell your mother I said so."

She went slowly up the steps as she spoke, and when I looked back a
moment later, I saw her smiling down on me between two great columns,
with the snowball bush floating in the warm wind beneath her and the
swallows flying low in the sunshine over her head.

I had opened the side gate, when I felt a soft, furry touch on my hand,
and Sally thrust the forgotten kitten into my arms.

"Be good to her," she said pleadingly. "Her name's Florabella."

Resisting a dastardly impulse to forswear my bargain, I tucked the
mewing kitten under my coat, where it clawed me unobserved by any
jeering boy in the street. Passing Mrs. Cudlip's house on my way home, I
noticed at once that the window stood invitingly open, and yielding with
a quaking heart to temptation, I leaned inside the vacant room, and
dropped Florabella in the centre of the old lady's easy chair. Then,
fearful of capture, I darted along the pavement and flung myself
breathlessly across our doorstep.

A group of neighbours was gathered in the centre of our little
sitting-room, and among them I recognised the flushed, perspiring face
of Mrs. Cudlip herself. As I entered, the women fell slightly apart, and
I saw that they regarded me with startled, compassionate glances. A
queer, strong smell of drugs was in the air, and near the kitchen door
my father was standing with a frightened and sheepish look on his face,
as if he had been thrust suddenly into a prominence from which he shrank
back abashed.

"Where's ma?" I asked, and my voice sounded loud and unnatural in my own
ears.

One of the women--a large, motherly person, whom I remembered without
recognising, crossed the room with a heavy step and took me into her
arms. At this day I can feel the deep yielding expanse of her bosom,
when pushing her from me, I looked round and repeated my question in a
louder tone.

"Where's ma?"

"She was took of a sudden, dear," replied the woman, still straining me
to her. "It came over her while she was standin' at the stove, an' befo'
anybody could reach her, she dropped right down an' was gone."

She released me as she finished, and walking straight through the
kitchen and the consoling neighbours, I opened the back door, and
closing it after me, sat down on the single step. I can't remember that
I shed a tear or that I suffered, but I can still see as plainly as if
it were yesterday, the clothes-line stretching across the little yard
and the fluttering, half-dried garments along it. There was a striped
shirt of my father's, a faded blue one of mine, a pink slip of baby
Jessy's, and a patched blue and white gingham apron I had seen only that
morning tied at my mother's waist. Between the high board fence, above
the sunken bricks of the yard, they danced as gayly as if she who had
hung them there was not lying dead in the house. Samuel, trotting from a
sunny corner, crept close to my side, with his warm tongue licking my
hand, and so I sat for an hour watching the flutter of the blue, the
pink, and the striped shirts on the clothes-line.

"There ain't nobody to iron 'em now," I said suddenly to Samuel, and
then I wept.




CHAPTER V

IN WHICH I START IN LIFE


With my mother's death all that was homelike and comfortable passed from
our little house. For three days after the funeral the neglected clothes
still hung on the line in the back yard, but on the fourth morning a
slatternly girl, with red hair and arms, came from the grocery store at
the corner, and gathered them in. My little sister was put to nurse with
Mrs. Cudlip next door, and when, at the end of the week, President went
off to work somewhere in a mining town in West Virginia, my father and I
were left alone, except for the spasmodic appearances of the red-haired
slattern. Gradually the dust began to settle and thicken on the dried
cat-tails in the china vases upon the mantel; the "prize" red geranium
dropped its blossoms and withered upon the sill; the soaking dish-cloths
lay in a sloppy pile on the kitchen floor; and the vegetable rinds were
left carelessly to rot in the bucket beside the sink. The old neatness
and order had departed before the garments my mother had washed were
returned again to the tub, and day after day I saw my father shake his
head dismally over the soggy bread and the underdone beef. Whether or
not he ever realised that it was my mother's hand that had kept him
above the surface of life, I shall never know; but when that strong
grasp was relaxed, he went hopelessly, irretrievably, and unresistingly
under. In the beginning there was merely a general wildness and disorder
in his appearance,--first one button, then two, then three dropped from
his coat. After that his linen was changed less often, his hair allowed
to spread more stiffly above his forehead, and the old ashes from his
pipe dislodged less frequently from the creases in his striped shirt. At
the end of three months I noticed a new fact about him--a penetrating
odour of alcohol which belonged to the very air he breathed. His mind
grew slower and seemed at last almost to stop; his blue eyes became
heavier and glazed at times; and presently he fell into the habit of
going out in the evenings, and not returning until I had cried myself to
sleep, under my tattered quilt, with Samuel hugged close in my arms.
Sometimes the red-haired girl would stop after her work for a few
friendly words, proving that a slovenly exterior is by no means
incompatible with a kindly heart; but as a usual thing I was left alone,
after the boys had gone home from their play in the street, to amuse
myself and Samuel as I could through the long evening hours. Sometimes I
brought in an apple or a handful of chestnuts given me by one of the
neighbours and roasted them before the remnants of fire in the stove.
Once or twice I opened my mother's closet and took down her clothes--her
best bombazine dress, her black cashmere mantle trimmed with bugles, her
long rustling crape veil, folded neatly beneath her bonnet in the tall
bandbox--and half in grief, half in curiosity, I invaded those sacred
precincts where my hands had never dared penetrate while she was alive.
My great loss, from which probably in more cheerful surroundings I
should have recovered in a few weeks, was renewed in me every evening by
my loneliness and by the dumb sympathy of Samuel, who would stand
wagging his tail for an hour at the sight of the cloak or the bonnet
that she had worn. Like my father I grew more unkempt and ragged every
day I lived. I ceased to wash myself, because there was nobody to make
me. My buttons dropped off one by one and nobody scolded. I dared no
longer go near the gate of the enchanted garden, fearing that if the
little girl were to catch sight of me, she would call me "dirty," and
run away in disgust. Occasionally my father would clap me upon the
shoulder at breakfast, enquire how I was getting along, and give me a
rusty copper to spend. But for the greater part of the time, I believe,
he was hardly aware of my existence; the vacant, flushed look was almost
always in his face when we met, and he stayed out so late in the evening
that it was not often his stumbling footsteps aroused me when he came
upstairs to bed.

So accustomed had I become to my lonely hours by the kitchen stove, with
Samuel curled up at my feet, that when one night, about six months after
my mother's death, I heard the unexpected sound of my father's tread on
the pavement outside, I turned almost with a feeling of terror, and
waited breathlessly for his unsteady hand on the door. It came after a
minute, followed immediately by his entrance into the kitchen, and to my
amazement I saw presently that he was accompanied by a strange woman,
whom I recognised at a glance as one of those examples of her sex that
my mother had been used to classify sweepingly as "females." She was
plump and jaunty, with yellow hair that hung in tight ringlets down to
her neck, and pink cheeks that looked as if they might "come off" if
they were thoroughly scrubbed. There was about her a spring, a bounce,
an animation that impressed me, in spite of my inherited moral sense, as
decidedly elegant.

My father's eyes looked more vacant and his face fuller than ever.
"Benjy," he began at once in a husky voice, while his companion released
his arm in order to put her ringlets to rights, "I've brought you a new
mother."

At this the female's hands fell from her hair, and she looked round in
horror. "What boy is that, Thomas?" she demanded, poised there in all
her flashing brightness like a figure of polished brass.

"That boy," replied my father, as if at a loss exactly how to account
for me, "that boy is Ben Starr--otherwise Benjy--otherwise--"

He would have gone on forever, I think, in his eagerness to explain me
away, if the woman had not jerked him up with a peremptory question:
"How did he come here?" she enquired.

Since nothing but the naked truth would avail him now, he uttered it at
last in an eloquent monosyllable--"Born."

"But you told me there was not a chick or a child," she exclaimed in a
rage.

For a moment he hesitated; then opening his mouth slowly, he gave voice
to the single witticism of his life.

"That was befo' I married you, dearie," he said.

"Well, how am I to know," demanded the female, "that you haven't got a
parcel of others hidden away?"

"Thar's one, the littlest, put out to nurse next do', an' another, the
biggest, gone to work in the West," he returned in his amiable, childish
manner.

After my unfortunate introduction, however, the addition of a greater
and a lesser appeared to impress her but little. She looked scornfully
about the disorderly room, took off her big, florid bonnet, and began
arranging her hair before the three-cornered mottled mirror on the wall.
Then wheeling round in a temper, her eyes fell on Samuel, sitting
dejectedly on his tail by my mother's old blue and white gingham apron.

"What is that?" she fired straight into my father's face.

"That," he responded, offering his unnecessary information as if it were
a piece of flattery, "air the dawg, Sukey."

"Whose dawg?"

Goaded into defiance by this attack on my only friend, I spoke in a
shrill voice from the corner into which I had retreated. "Mine," I said.

"Wall, I'll tell you what!" exclaimed the female, charging suddenly upon
me, "if I've got to put up with a chance o' kids, I don't reckon I've
got to be plagued with critters, too. Shoo, suh! get out!"

Seizing my mother's broom, she advanced resolutely to the attack, and an
instant later, to my loud distress and to Samuel's unspeakable horror,
she had whisked him across the kitchen and through the back door out
into the yard.

"Steady, Sukey, steady," remarked my father caressingly, much as he
might have spoken to a favourite but unruly heifer. For an instant he
looked a little crestfallen, I saw with pleasure, but as soon as Samuel
was outside and the door had closed, he resumed immediately his usual
expression of foolish good humour. It was impossible, I think, for him
to retain an idea in his mind after the object of it had been removed
from his sight. While I was still drying my eyes on my frayed coat
sleeve, I watched him with resentment begin a series of playful lunges
at the neck of the female, which she received with a sulky and
forbidding air. Stealing away the next minute, I softly opened the back
door and joined the outcast Samuel, where he sat whining upon the step.

The night was very dark, but beyond the looming chimneys a lonely star
winked at me through the thick covering of clouds. I was a sturdy boy
for my age, sound in body, and inwardly not given to sentiment or
softness of any kind; but as I sat there on the doorstep, I felt a lump
rise in my throat at the thought that Samuel and I were two small
outcast animals in the midst of a shivering world. I remembered that
when my mother was alive I had never let her kiss me except when she
paid me by a copper or a slice of bread laid thickly with blackberry
jam; and I told myself desperately that if she could only come back now,
I would let her do it for nothing! She might even whip me because I'd
torn my trousers on the back fence, and I thought I should hardly feel
it. I recalled her last birthday, when I had gone down to the market
with five cents of my own to buy her some green gage plums, of which she
was very fond, and how on the way up the hill, being tempted, I had
eaten them all myself. At the time I had stifled my remorse with the
assurance that she would far rather I should have the plums than eat
them herself, but this was cold comfort to me to-night while I regretted
my selfishness. If I had only saved her half, as I had meant to do if
the hill had not been quite so long and so steep.

Samuel snuggled closer to me and we both shivered, for the night was
fresh. The house had grown quiet inside; my father and his new wife had
evidently left the kitchen and gone upstairs. As I sat there I realised
suddenly, with a pang, that I could never go inside the door again; and
rising to my feet, I struck a match and fumbled for a piece of chalk in
my pocket. Then standing before the door I wrote in large letters across
the panel:--

    "DEAR PA.
      I have gone to work.
         Your Aff. son,
            BEN STARR."

The blue flame of the match flickered an instant along the words; then
it went out, and with Samuel at my heels, I crept through the back gate
and down the alley to the next street, which led to the ragged brow of
the hill. Ahead of me, as I turned off into Main Street, the scattered
lights of the city showed like blurred patches upon the darkness.
Gradually, while I went rapidly downhill, I saw the patches change into
a nebulous cloud, and the cloud resolve itself presently into straight
rows of lamps. Few people were in the streets at that hour, and when I
reached the dim building of the Old Market, I found it cold and
deserted, except for a stray cur or two that snarled at Samuel from a
heap of trodden straw under a covered wagon. Despite the fact that I was
for all immediate purposes as homeless as the snarling curs, I was not
without the quickened pulses which attend any situation that a boy may
turn to an adventure. A high heart for desperate circumstances has never
failed me, and it bore me company that night when I came back again with
aching feet to the Old Market, and lay down, holding Samuel tight, on a
pile of straw.

In a little while I awoke because Samuel was barking, and sitting up in
the straw I saw a dim shape huddled beside me, which I made out, after a
few startled blinks, to be the bent figure of a woman wrapped in a black
shawl with fringed ends, which were pulled over her head and knotted
under her chin. From the penetrating odour I had learned to associate
with my father, I judged that she had been lately drinking, and the
tumbled state of my coat convinced me that she had been frustrated by
Samuel in a base design to rifle my pockets. Yet she appeared so
miserable as she sat there rocking from side to side and crying to
herself, that I began all at once to feel very sorry. It seemed to hurt
her to cry and yet I saw that the more it hurt her the more she cried.

"If I were you," I suggested politely, "I'd go home right away."

"Home?" repeated the woman, with a hiccough, "what's home?"

"The place you live in."

"Lor, honey, I don't live in no place. I jest walks."

"But what do you do when you get tired?"

"I walks some mo'."

"An' don't you ever leave off?"

"Only when it's dark like this an' thar's no folks about."

"But what do folks say to you when they see you walkin'?"

"Say to me," she threw back her head and broke into a drunken laugh,
"why, they say to me: 'Step lively!'"

She crawled closer, peering at me greedily under the pale glimmer of the
street lamp.

"Why, you're a darlin' of a boy," she said, "an' such pretty blue eyes!"
Then she rose to her feet and stood swaying unsteadily above me, while
Samuel broke out into angry barks. "Shall I tell you a secret because of
yo' blue eyes?" she asked. "It's this--whatever you do in this world,
you step lively about it. I've done a heap of lookin' an' I've seen the
ones who get on are the ones who step the liveliest. It ain't no matter
where you're goin', it ain't no matter who's befo' you, if you want to
get there first, step lively!"

She went out, taking her awful secret with her, and turning over I fell
asleep again on my pile of straw. "If ever I have a dollar I'll give it
to her so she may stop walkin'," was my last conscious thought.

My next awakening was a very different one, for the light was streaming
into the market, and a cheerful red face was shining down, like a rising
sun, over a wheelbarrow of vegetables.

"Don't you think it's about time all honest folk were out of bed,
sonny?" enquired a voice.

"I ain't been here mo'n an hour," I retorted, resenting the imputation
of slothfulness with a spirit that was not unworthy of my mother.

The open length of the market, I saw now, was beginning to present a
busy, almost a festive, air. Stalls were already laden with fruit and
vegetables, and farmers' wagons covered with canvas, and driven by
sunburnt countrymen, had drawn up to the sidewalk. Rising hurriedly to
my feet, I began rubbing my eyes, for I had been dreaming of the
fragrance of bacon in our little kitchen.

"Now I'd be up an' off to home, if I were you, sonny," observed the
marketman, planting his wheelbarrow of vegetables on the brick floor,
and beginning to wipe off the stall. "The sooner you take yo' whippin',
the sooner you'll set easy again."

"There ain't anybody to whip me," I replied dolefully, staring at the
sign over his head, on which was painted in large letters--"John
Chitling. Fish, Oysters (in season). Vegetables. Fruits."

Stopping midway in his preparations, he turned on me his great beaming
face, so like the rising sun that looked over his shoulder, while I
watched his big jean apron swell with the panting breaths that drew from
his stomach.

"Here's a boy that says he ain't got nobody to whip him!" he exclaimed
to his neighbours in the surrounding stalls,--a poultryman, covered with
feathers, a fish vender, bearing a string of mackerel in either hand,
and a butcher, with his sleeves rolled up and a blood-stained apron
about his waist.

"I al'ays knew you were thick-headed, John Chitling," remarked the fish
dealer, with contempt, "but I never believed you were such a plum fool
as not to know a tramp when you seed him."

"You ain't got but eleven of yo' own," observed the butcher, with a
snicker; "I reckon you'd better take him along to round out the full
dozen."

"If I've got eleven there ain't one of 'em that wa'nt welcome,"
responded John, his slow temper rising, "an' I reckon what the Lord
sends he's willing to provide for."

"Oh, I reckon he is," sneered the fish dealer, who appeared to be of an
unpleasant disposition, "so long as you ain't over-particular about the
quality of the provision."

"Well, he don't provide us with yo' fish, anyway," retorted John; and I
was watching excitedly for the coming blows when the butcher, who had
been looking over me as reflectively as if I had been a spring lamb
brought to slaughter, intervened with a peaceable suggestion that he
should take me into his service.

"I'm on the lookout for a bright boy in my business," he observed.

But the sight of blood on his rolled-up shirt sleeves produced in me
that strange sickness I had inherited from my mother, who used to pay an
old coloured market man to come up and wring the necks of her chickens;
and when the question was put to me if I'd like to be trained up for a
butcher, I drew back and stood ready for instant flight in case they
should attempt' to decide my future by present force.

"I'd rather work for you," I said, looking straight at John Chitling,
for it occurred to me that if I were made to murder anything I'd rather
it would be oysters.

"Ha! ha! he knows by the look of you, you're needin' one to make up the
dozen," exclaimed the butcher.

"Well, I declar he does seem to have taken a regular fancy,"
acknowledged John, flattered by my decision. "I don't want any real
hands now, sonny, but if you'd like to tote the marketing around with
Solomon, I reckon I can let you have a square meal or so along with the
others."

"What'll yo' old woman say to it, John?" enquired the poultryman, with a
loud guffaw, "when you send her a new one of yo' own providin'?"

John Chitling was busily arranging a pile of turnips with what he
doubtless thought was an artistic eye for colour, and the facetiousness
of the poultryman reacted harmlessly from his thick head.

"You needn't worry about my wife, for she ain't worryin'," he rejoined,
and the shine seemed to gather like moisture on his round red face under
his shock of curling red hair. "She takes what comes an' leaves the Lord
to do the tendin'."

At this a shout went up which I did not understand, until I came to know
later that an impression existed in the neighbourhood that the Chitlings
had left entirely too much of the bringing up of their eleven children
in the hands of Providence, who in turn had left them quite as
complacently to the care of the gutter.

"I don't know but what too much trust in the Lord don't work as badly as
too little," observed the fish dealer, while John went on placidly
arranging his turnips and carrots. "What appears to me to be best
religion for a working-man is to hold a kind of middle strip between
faith and downright disbelievin'. Let yo' soul trust to the Lord's
lookin' arter you, but never let yo' hands get so much as an inklin'
that you're a-trustin'. Yes, the safest way is to believe in the Lord on
Sunday, an' on Monday to go to work as if you wa'nt quite so
sartain-sure."

A long finger of sunshine stretched from beyond the chimneys across the
street, and pointed straight to the vegetables on John Chitling's
counter, until the onions glistened like silver balls, and the turnips
and carrots sent out flashes of dull red and bright orange.

"I'll let you overhaul a barrel of apples, sonny," said the big man to
me; "have you got a sharp eye for specks?"

When I replied that I thought I had, he pointed to a barrel from which
the top had been recently knocked. "They're to be sorted in piles,
according to size," he explained, and added, "For such is the
contrariness of human nature that there are some folks as can't see the
apple for the speck, an' others that would a long ways rather have the
speck than the apple. I've one old gentleman for a customer who can't
enjoy eatin' a pippin unless he can find one with a spot that won't keep
till to-morrow."

Kneeling down on the bricks, as he directed, I sorted the yellow apples
until, growing presently faint from hunger, I began to gaze longingly, I
suppose, at the string of fish hanging above my head.

"Maybe you'd like to run across an' get a bite of somethin' befo' you go
on," suggested John, reading my glances.

But I only shook my head, in spite of my gnawing stomach, and went on
doggedly with my sorting, impelled by an inherent determination to do
with the best of me whatever I undertook to do at all. To the possession
of this trait, I can see now in looking back, I have owed any success or
achievement that has been mine--neither to brains nor to chance, but
simply to that instinct to hold fast which was bred in my bone and
structure. For the lack of this quality I have seen men with greater
intellects, with far quicker wits than mine, go down in the struggle.
Brilliancy I have not, nor any particular outward advantage, except that
of size and muscle; but when I was once in the race, I could never see
to right or to left of me, only straight ahead to the goal.

Overhead the sun had risen slowly higher, until the open spaces and the
brick arches were flooded with light. If I had turned I should have seen
the gay vegetable stalls blooming like garden beds down the dim length
of the building. The voices of the market men floated toward me, now
quarrelling, now laughing, now raised to shout at a careless negro or a
prowling dog. I heard the sounds, and I smelt the strong smell of fish
from the gleaming strings of perch and mackerel hanging across the way.
But through it all I did not look up and I did not turn. My first piece
of work was done with the high determination to do it well, and it has
been my conviction from that morning that if I had slighted that barrel
of apples, I should have failed inevitably in my career.




CHAPTER VI

CONCERNING CARROTS


When I had finished my work, I rose from my knees and stood waiting for
John Chitling's directions.

"Run along to the next street," he said kindly, "an' you can tell my
house, I reckon, by the number of children in the gutter. It's the house
with the most children befo' it. You'll find my wife cookin', likely
enough, in the kitchen, an' all you've got to say is that I told you to
tell her that you were hungry. She won't ax you many questions,--that
ain't her way,--but she'll jest set to work an' feed you."

Reassured by this description, I whistled to Samuel, and crossed the
narrow street, crowded with farmers' wagons and empty wheelbarrows, to a
row of dingy houses, with darkened basements, which began at the corner.
By the number of ragged and unwashed children playing among the old tin
cans in the gutter before the second doorway, I concluded that this was
the home of John Chitling; and I was about to enter the close, dimly
lighted passage, when a chorus of piercing screams from the small
Chitlings outside, brought before me a large, slovenly woman, with
slipshod shoes, and a row of curl papers above her forehead. When she
reached the doorway, a small crowd had already gathered upon the
pavement, and I beheld a half-naked urchin of a year or thereabouts,
dangled, head downwards, by the hand of a passing milkman.

"The baby's gone an' swallowed a cent, ma," shrieked a half-dozen treble
voices.

"Well, the Lord be praised that it wa'nt a quarter!" exclaimed Mrs.
Chitling, with a cheerful piety, which impressed me hardly less than did
the placid face with which she gazed upon the howling baby. "There,
there, it ain't near so bad as it might have been. Don't scream so,
Tommy, a cent won't choke him an' a quarter might have."

"But it was _my cent_, an' I ain't got a quarter!" roared Tommy, still
unconsoled.

"Well, I'll give you a quarter when my ship comes in," responded his
mother, at which the grief of the small financier began gradually to
subside.

"I had it right in my hand," he sniffled, with his knuckles at his eyes,
"an' I jest put it into the baby's mouth for keepin'."

By this time Mrs. Chitling had received the baby into her arms, and
turning with an unruffled manner, she bore him into the house, where she
stopped his mouth with a spoonful of blackberry jam. As she replaced the
jar on the shelf she looked down, and for the first time became aware of
my presence.

"He ain't swallowed anything of yours, has he?" she enquired. "If he has
you'll have to put the complaint in writing because the neighbours are
al'ays comin' to me for the things that are inside of him. I've never
been able to shake anything out of him," she added placidly, "except one
of Mrs. Haskin's bugle beads."

She delivered this with such perfect amiability that I was emboldened to
say in my politest manner, "If you please, ma'am, Mr. Chitling told me I
was to say that he said that I was hungry."

"So the baby really ain't took anything of yours?" she asked, relieved.
"Well, I al'ays said he didn't do half the damage they accused him of."

As I possessed nothing except the clothes in which I stood, and even
that elastic urchin could hardly have accommodated these, I hastened to
assure her that I was the bearer of no complaint. This appeared to win
her entirely, and her large motherly face beamed upon me beneath the
aureole of curl papers that radiated from her forehead. With a single
movement she cleared a space on the disorderly kitchen table and slapped
down a plate, with a piece missing, as if the baby had taken a bite out
of it.

"To think of yo' goin' hungry at yo' age an' without a mother," she
said, opening a safe, and whipping several slices of bacon and a couple
of eggs into a skillet. "Why, it would make me turn in my grave if I
thought of one of my eleven wantin' a bite of meat an' not havin' it."

As she switched about in her cheerful, slovenly way, I saw that her
skirt had sagged at the back into what appeared to be an habitual gap,
and from beneath it there showed a black calico petticoat of a dingy
shade. But when a little later she sat me at the table, with Samuel's
breakfast on the floor beside me, I forgot her slatternly dress, her
halo of curl papers, and her slipshod shoes, while I plied my fork and
my fingers under the motherly effulgence of her smile. Tied into a high
chair in one corner, the baby sat bolt upright, with his thumb in his
mouth, deriving apparently the greatest enjoyment from watching my
appetite; and before I had finished, the ten cheerful children trooped
in and gathered about me. "Give him another cake, ma!" "It's my turn to
help him next, ma!" "I'll pour out his coffee for him!" "Oh, ma, let me
feed the dog," rose in a jubilant chorus of shrieks.

"An' he ain't got any mother!" roared Tommy suddenly, and burst into
tears.

A sob lodged in my throat, but before the choking sound of it reached my
ears, I felt myself enfolded in Mrs. Chitling's embrace. As I looked up
at her from this haven of refuge, it seemed to me that her curl papers
were transfigured into a halo, and that her face shone with a heavenly
beauty.

I was given a bed in the attic, with the six younger Chitlings, and two
days later, when my father tracked me to my hiding-place, I hid under
the dark staircase in the hall, and heard my protector deliver an
eloquent invective on the subject of stepmothers. It was the one
occasion in my long acquaintance with her when I saw her fairly roused
out of her amiable inertia. Albemarle, the baby, had spilled bacon gravy
over her dress that very morning, and I had heard her console him
immediately with the assurance that there was "a plenty more in the
dish." But possessed though she was with that peculiar insight which
discerns in every misfortune a hidden blessing, in stepmothers, I found,
and in stepmothers alone, she could discern nothing except sermons.

"To think of yo' havin' the brazen impudence to come here arter the harm
you've done that po' defenceless darling boy," she said, with a noble
dignity which obscured somehow her slovenly figure and her dirty
kitchen. Peering out from under the staircase, I could see that my
father stood quite humbly before her, twirling his hatbrim nervously in
his hands.

"I ax you to believe, mum, what is the gospel truth," he replied, "that
I wa'nt meanin' any harm to Benjy."

"Not meanin' any harm an' you brought him a stepmother befo' six months
was up?" she cried. "Well, that ain't _my_ way of lookin' at it, for
I've a mother's heart and it takes a mother's heart to stand the tricks
of children," she added, glancing down at the gravy stains on her bosom,
"an' it ain't to be supposed--is it?--that a stepmother should have a
mother's heart? It ain't natur--is it?--I put it to you, that any man or
woman should be born with a natchel taste for screamin' an' kickin' an'
bein' splashed with gravy, an' the only thing that's goin' to cultivate
them tastes in anybody is bringin' ten or eleven of 'em into the world.
Lord, suh, I wa'nt born with the love of dirt an' fussin' any mo' than
you. It just comes along o' motherhood like so much else. Now it stands
to reason that you ain't goin' to enjoy the trouble a child makes unless
that child is your own. Why, what did my baby do this mornin' when he
was learnin' to walk, but catch holt of the dish an' bring all the gravy
down over me. Is thar any livin' soul, I ax you plainly, expected to see
the cuteness in a thing like that except a mother? An' what I say is
that unless you can see the cuteness in a child instead of the badness,
you ain't got no business to bring 'em up--no, not even if you are the
President himself!--"

Just here I distinctly heard my father murmur in his humble voice
something about having named an infant after the office and not the man.
But so brief was the pause in Mrs. Chitling's flow of remonstrance that
his interjection was overwhelmed almost before it was uttered. Her very
slovenliness, expressing as it did what she had given up rather than
what she was, served in a measure to increase the solemn majesty with
which she spoke; and I gathered easily that my father's small wits were
vanquished by the first charge of her impassioned rhetoric.

"I thank you kindly, mum, it is all jest as you say," he replied, with
the submissiveness of utter defeat, "but, you see, a man has got to give
a thought to his washin'. It stands to reason--don't it?"--he concluded
with a flash of direct inspiration, "that thar ain't any way to get a
woman to wash free for you except to marry her."

The logic of this appeared to impress even Mrs. Chitling, for she
hesitated an instant before replying, and when she finally spoke, I
thought her tone had lost something of its decision.

"An' to make it worse you took a yaller-headed one an' they're the kind
that gad," she retorted feebly.

My father shook his head, while a stubborn expression settled on his
sheepish features.

"Thar's the cookin' an' the washin' for her to think of," he said. "I
ain't got any use for a woman that ain't satisfied with the pleasures of
home."

"The moral kind are, Mr. Starr," rejoined Mrs. Chitling, who had
relapsed into a condition of placid indolence. "An' as far as I am
concerned since the first of my eleven came, I've never wanted to put on
my bonnet an' set foot outside that do'. My kitchen is my kingdom," she
added, with dignity, "an' for my part, I ain't got any use for those
women who are everlastingly standin' up for thar rights. What does a
woman want with rights, I say, when she can enjoy all the virtues? What
does she want to be standin' up for anyway as long as she can set?"

"Thar's no doubt that it is true, mum," rejoined my father; and when he
took his leave a few minutes afterwards, their relations appeared to
have become extremely friendly,--not to say confidential. For an instant
I trembled in my hiding-place, half expecting to be delivered into his
hands. But he departed at last without discovering me, and I emerged
from the darkness and stood before Mrs. Chitling, who had begun
absent-mindedly to take down her curl papers.

"Most likely it ain't his fault arter all," she observed, for her
judgment of him had already become a part of the general softness and
pliability of her criticism of life; "he seems to be a nice sensible
body with proper ideas about women. I like a man that knows a woman's
place, an' I like a woman that knows it, too. Yo' ma was a decent,
sober, hard-workin' person, wa'nt she, Benjy?"

I replied that she was always in her kitchen and generally in her
washtub, except when she went to funerals.

"Well, I ain't any moral objection to a funeral now an' then, or some
other sober kind of entertainment," returned Mrs. Chitling, removing her
curl papers in order to put on fresh ones, "but what I say is that the
woman who wants pleasure outside her do' ain't the woman that she ought
to be, that's all. What can she have, I ax, any mo' than she's got?
Ain't she got everything already that the men don't want? Ain't
sweetness an' virtue, an' patience an' long suffering an' childbearin'
enough for her without her impudently standin' up in the face of men an'
axin' for mo'? Had she rather have a vote than the respect of men, an'
ain't the respect of men enough to fill any honest female's life?"

In the beginning of her discourse, she had turned aside to slap a
portion of cornmeal into a cracked yellow bowl, and after pouring a
little water out of a broken dipper, she began whipping the dough with a
long, irregular stroke that scattered a shower of fine drops at every
revolution of her hand. Two of the children had got into a fight over a
basin of apple parings, and she left her yellow bowl and separated them
with a hand that bestowed a patch of wet meal on the hair of one and on
the face of another. Not once did she hasten her preparations or
relinquish the cheerful serenity which endowed her large, loose figure
with a kind of majesty.

The next day I started in as general assistant and market boy to John
Chitling, and when I was not sorting over ripe vegetables or barrels of
apples fresh from the orchard, I was toiling up the long hill, with a
split basket, containing somebody's marketing, on my arm. By degrees I
learned the names of John Chitling's patrons, the separate ways to their
houses, which always seemed divided by absurd distances, and the faces
of the negro cooks who met me at the kitchen steps and relieved me of my
burden. In the beginning I was accompanied on my rounds by a fat,
smudge-nosed youth some six or eight years my senior, who smoked vile
tobacco and enlivened the way by villainous abuses of John Chitling and
the universe. For the first months, I fear, my outlook upon the
customers I served was largely coloured by his narratives, but when at
last he dropped off and went on a new job at the butcher's, I arrived
gradually at a more correct, and certainly a more charitable, point of
view. By the end of the winter I had ceased to believe that John
Chitling was a skinflint and his customers all vipers.

In the bright soft weather of that spring the city opened into a bloom
of faint pink and white, which comes back to me like a delicate
fragrance. The old gardens are gone now, with their honeysuckle arbours,
their cleanly swept walks, bordered by rows of miniature box, their
deep, odorous bowers of microphylla and musk cluster roses. Yet I can
look back still through the gauzy shadows of elms and sycamores; I can
hear still the rich, singing call of the negro drivers, as the covered
wagons from country farms passed sleepily through the hot sunshine which
fell between the arching trees; and I can smell again the air steeped in
a fragrance that is less that of flowers than of the subtle atmosphere
of an unforgettable youth. To-day the city is the same city no longer,
nor is the man who writes this the market boy who toiled up the long
hill in the blossoming spring, with the seeds of the future quickening
in brain and heart.

The morning that I remember best is the one on which I carried the day's
marketing to an old grey house, with beds of wallflowers growing close
against the stuccoed bricks, and a shrub that flowered bright yellow
glancing through the tall gate at the rear. I had passed the wallflowers
as was my custom, and entering the gate at the back, had delivered my
basket at the kitchen door, when, as I turned to retrace my steps, I was
detained by the scolding voice of the pink-turbaned negro cook.

"Hi! if you ain' clean furgit de car'ots!" she cried.

Now the carrots had been placed in the basket, as I had seen with my own
eyes, by the hands of John Chitling himself, and I had been cautioned at
the time not to drop them out in my ascent of the steep hill. There was
a lady in the grey house, he had informed me, who was supposed to
subsist upon carrots alone, and who was in consequence extremely
particular as to their size and flavour.

"Are you sure they ain't among the vegetables?" I asked. "I saw them put
in myself."

"Huh! en you seed 'em fall out, too, I lay!" rejoined the negress,
protruding her thick red lips as she turned the basket upside down with
an indignant blow.

"If they're lost, I'll go back and bring others," I said, thinking
disconsolately of the hill.

"En you 'ould be back hyer agin in time fur supper," retorted the
outraged divinity. "Wat you reckon Miss Mitty wants wid car'ots fur 'er
supper? Dey is hern, dey ain' mine, but ef'n dey 'us mine I'd lamn you
twel you couldn't see ter set. Hit's bad enough ter hev ter live erlong
in de same worl' wid de slue-footed po' white trash widout hevin' dem
a-snatchin' de car'ots outer yo' ve'y mouf."

My temper, never of the mildest, was stung quickly to a retort, and I
was about to order her to hold her tongue and return me my basket, when
the door into the house opened and shut, and the little girl of the
enchanted garden appeared in the flesh before me.

"I want the plum cake you promised me, Aunt Mirabella," she cried; "and
oh! I hope you've stuffed it full of plums!" Then her glance fell upon
me and I saw her thick black eyebrows arch merrily over her sparkling
grey eyes. "It's my boy! My dear common boy!" she exclaimed, with a rush
toward me. For the first time I noticed then that she was dressed in
mourning, and that her black clothes intensified the dark brightness of
her look. "Oh, I _am_ glad to see you," she added, seizing my hand.

I gazed up at her, wounded rather than pleased. "I shan't be a common
boy always," I answered.

"Do you mind my calling you one? If you do, I won't," she said, and
without waiting a minute, "What are you doing here? I thought you lived
over on Church Hill."

"I don't now. Ma died and I ran away."

"My mother died, too," she returned softly, "and then grandmama."

For a moment there was a pause. Then I said with a kind of stubborn
pride, "I ran away."

The sadness passed from her and she turned on me in a glow of animation.
"Oh, I should just love dearly to run away!" she exclaimed.

"You couldn't. You're a girl."

"I could, too, if I chose."

"Then why don't you choose?"

"Because of Aunt Mitty and Aunt Matoaca. They haven't anybody but me."

"I left my father," I replied proudly, "and I didn't care one single
bit. That's the trouble with girls. They're always caring."

"Well, I'm not caring for you," she retorted with crushing effect,
shaking back the soft cloud of hair on her shoulders.

"Boys don't care," I rejoined with indifference, taking up my market
basket.

She detained me with a glance. "There's one thing they care
about--dreadfully," she said.

"No, there ain't."

Without replying in words she went over to the stove, and standing on
tiptoe, gingerly removed a hot plum cake, small and round and shaped
like a muffin, from the smoking oven.

"I reckon they care about plum cake," she remarked tauntingly, and as
she held it toward me it smelt divinely.

But my pride was in arms, for I remembered the cup of milk she had
refused disdainfully more than three years ago in our little kitchen.

"No, they don't," I replied with a stoicism that might have added lustre
to a nobler cause.

In my heart I was hoping that she would drop the cake into my basket in
spite of my protest, not only sparing my pride by an act of magnanimity,
but allowing me at the same time the felicity of munching the plums on
my way back to the Old Market. But the next moment, to my surprise and
indignation, she took a generous bite of the very dainty she had offered
me, making, while she ate it, provoking faces of a rapturous enjoyment.

I was lingering in the doorway with a scornful yet fascinated gaze on
the diminishing cake, when the pink-turbaned cook, who had gone out to
empty a basin of pea shells, entered and resumed her querulous abuse.

"De bes' thing you kin do is ter clear out," she said, "you en yo'
car'ots. He ain' fit'n fur you ter tu'n yo' eyes on, honey," she added
to the child, "en I don' reckon yo' ma would let yo' wipe yo' foot on
'im ef'n she 'uz alive. Yes'm, Miss Mitty, I'se a-comin'!"

Her voice rose high in response to a call from the house, but before she
could leave the kitchen, the door behind the little girl opened, and a
lady said reprovingly:--

"Sally, Sally, haven't I told you to keep away from the kitchen?"

"Oh, Aunt Mitty, I had to come for my plum cake," pleaded Sally, "and
Aunt Matoaca said that I might."

An elderly lady, all soft black and old yellow lace, stood in the
doorway. Then before she could answer a second one appeared at her side,
and I had a vision of two slender maidenly figures, who reminded me,
meek heads, drooping faces, and creamy lace caps, of the wallflowers in
the border outside blooming in a patch of sunshine close against the old
grey house. At first there seemed to me to be no visible difference
between them, but after a minute, I saw that the second one was gentler
and smaller, with a softer smile and a more shrinking manner.

"It was my fault, Sister Mitty," she said, "I told Sally that she might
come after her plum cake."

Her voice was so low and mild that I was amazed the next instant to hear
the taller lady respond.

"Of course, Sister Matoaca, you were at liberty to do as you thought
right, but I cannot conceal from you that I consider a person of your
dangerous views an unsafe guardian for a young girl."

She advanced a step into the kitchen, and as Miss Matoaca followed her
she replied in an abashed and faltering voice:--

"I am sorry, Sister Mitty, that we do not agree in our principles. There
is nothing else that I will not sacrifice to you, but when a question of
principle is concerned, however painful it is to me, I must be firm."

At this, while I was wondering what terrible thing a principle could
possibly turn out to be, I saw Miss Mitty draw herself up until she
fairly towered like a marble column about the shrinking figure in front
of her.

"But such principles, Sister Matoaca!" she exclaimed.

A flush rose to the clear brown surface of the little lady's cheek, and
more than ever, I thought, she resembled one of the wallflowers in the
border outside. Her head, with its shiny parting of soft chestnut hair,
was lifted with a mild, yet spirited gesture, and I saw the delicate
lace at her throat and wrists tremble as if a faint wind had passed.

"Remember, sister, that my ancestors as well as yours fought against
oppression in three wars," she said in her sweet low voice that had, to
my ears, the sound of a silver bell, "and it has become my painful duty,
after long deliberation with my conscience, to inform you--I consider
that taxation without representation is tyranny."

"Sally, go into the house," commanded Miss Mitty, "I cannot permit you
to hear such dangerous sentiments expressed."

"Let me go, Sister Mitty," said Miss Matoaca, for the flash of spirit
had left her as wan and drooping as a blighted flower; "I will go
myself," and turning meekly, she left the kitchen, while Sally took a
second cake from the oven and came over to where I stood.

"I'll just put this into your basket anyway," she remarked, "even if you
don't care about it."

"Come, child," urged Miss Mitty, waiting, "but give the boy his cake
first."

The cake was put into my hands, not into the basket, and I took a large,
delicious mouthful of it while I went by the meek wallflowers standing
in a row, like prim maiden ladies, against the old grey house.




CHAPTER VII

IN WHICH I MOUNT THE FIRST RUNG OF THE LADDER


As I passed through the gate and turned down Franklin Street under a
great sycamore that grew midway of the pavement, I vowed passionately in
my heart that I would remain "a common boy" no longer. With the plum
cake in my hand, and the delicious taste of it in my mouth, I placed my
basket on the ground and leaned against the silvery body of the tree,
with my eyes on Samuel, sitting very erect, with his paws held up, his
tail wagging, and his expectant gaze on my face.

"What can we do about it, Samuel? How can we begin? Are we common to the
bone, I wonder? and how are we going to change?"

But Samuel's thoughts were on the last bit of cake, and when I gave it
to him, he stopped begging like a wise dog that has what he wanted, and
lay down on the sidewalk with his eyes closed and his nose between his
outstretched paws.

A gentle wind stirred overhead, and I smelt the sharp sweet fragrance of
the sycamore, which cast a delicate lace-work of shadows on the crooked
brick pavement. Not only the great sycamore and myself and Samuel, but
the whole blossoming city appeared to me in a dream; and as I glanced
down the quiet street, over which the large, slow shadows moved to and
fro, I saw through a mist the blurred grey-green foliage in the Capitol
Square. In the ground the seeds of the new South, which was in truth but
the resurrected spirit of the old, still germinated in darkness. But the
air, though I did not know it, was already full of the promise of the
industrial awakening, the constructive impulse, the recovered energy,
that was yet to be, and in which I, leaning there a barefooted market
boy, was to have my part.

An aged negress, in a red bandanna turban, with a pipe in her mouth,
stopped to rest in the shadow of the sycamore, placing her basket, full
of onions and tomatoes, on the pavement beside my empty one.

"Do you know who lives in that grey house, Mammy?" I asked.

Twisting the stem of her pipe to the corner of her mouth, she sat
nodding at me, while the wind fluttered the wisps of grizzled hair
escaping from beneath her red and yellow head-dress.

"Go 'way, chile, whar you done come f'om?" she demanded suspiciously.
"Ain't you ever hyern er Marse Bland? He riz me."

I shook my head, sufficiently humbled by my plebeian ignorance.

"Are the two old ladies his daughters?"

"Wat you call Miss Mitty en Miss Matoaca ole fur? Dey ain' ole," she
responded indignantly. "I use'n ter b'long ter Marse Bland befo' de war,
en I kin recollect de day dat e'vy one er dem wuz born. Dey's all daid
now cep'n Miss Mitty en Miss Matoaca, en Marse Bland he's daid, too."

"Then who is the little girl? Where did she come from?"

There was a dandelion blooming in a tuft of grass between the loosened
bricks of the pavement, and I imprisoned it in my bare toes while I
waited impatiently for her answer.

"Dat's Miss Sary's chile. She ran away wid Marse Harry Mickleborough, in
Marse Bland's lifetime, en he 'ouldn't lay eyes on her f'om dat day ter
his deaf. Miss Mitty en Miss Matoaca dey ain' ole, but Miss Sary she
want nuttin' mo'n a chile w'en she went off."

"But why did her father never see her again?"

"Dat was 'long er Marse Mickleborough, boy, but I ain' gwine inter de
ens en de outs er dat. Hit mought er been becaze er Marse
Mickleborough's fiddle, but I ain' sayin' dat hit wuz er dat hit wuzn't.
Dar's some folks dat cyarn' stan' de squeak er a fiddle, en he sutney
did fiddle a mont'ous lot. He usen ter beat Miss Sary, too, I hyern
tell, jes es you mought hev prognosticate er a fiddlin' man; but she
ain' never come home twel atter her pa wuz daid en buried over yonder in
Hollywood. Den w'en de will wuz read Marse Bland had lef ev'y las' cent
clean away f'om her en de chile. Atter Miss Mitty en Miss Matoaca die de
hull pa'cel er hit's er gwine ter some no 'count hospital whar dey take
live folks ter pieces en den put 'em tergedder agin."

"You mean the little girl won't get a blessed cent?" I asked, and my
toes pinched the head of the dandelion until it dropped from its stem.

"Ain't I done tole you how 'tis?" demanded the negress in exasperation,
rising from her seat on the curbing, "en wat mek you keep on axin' over
wat I done tole you?"

She went off muttering to herself, while she clenched the stem of her
corncob pipe between her toothless gums; and picking up my basket and
whistling to Samuel, I walked slowly downhill, with the problem of the
future working excitedly in my brain.

"A market boy is obliged to be a common boy," I thought, and
immediately: "Then I will not be a market boy any longer."

So hopeless the next instant did my present condition of abject
ignorance appear to me, that I found myself regretting that I had not
asked advice of the aged negress who had rested beside me in the shadow
of the sycamore. I wondered if she would consider the selling of
newspapers a less degrading employment than the hawking of vegetables,
and with the thought, I saw stretching before me, in all its alluring
brightness, that royal road of success which leads from the castle of
dreams. One instant I resolved to start life as a fruit vender on the
train, and the next I was wildly imagining myself the president of the
Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad, with a jingling bunch of
seals and a gold-headed stick. When at last I reached the Old Market I
found that the gayety had departed from it, and it appeared slovenly and
disgusting to my awakened eyes. The fruit and vegetables, so fresh and
inviting in the early morning, were now stale and wilted; a swarm of
flies hung like a black cloud around the joint suspended before the
stall of Perkins, the butcher; and as I passed the stand of the fish
dealer, the odour of decaying fish entered my nostrils. Was it the same
place I had left only a few hours before, or what sudden change in
myself had revealed to me the grim ugliness of its aspect? "He's a
common boy," the little girl had said of me almost four years ago, and I
felt now, as I had felt then, the sting of a whip on my bare flesh at
her words. Come what might I would cease to be "a common boy" from that
hour.

In the afternoon I bought an armful of "The Evening Planet," and
wandered up Franklin Street on a venture, crying the papers aloud with
an agreeable assurance that I had deserted huckstering to enter
journalism. As I passed the garden of the old grey house my voice rang
out shrilly, yet with a quavering note in it, "Eve-ning Pla-net!" and
almost before the sound had passed under the sycamores, the gate in the
wall opened cautiously and one of the ladies called to me timidly with
her face pressed to the crack. The two sisters were so much alike that
it was a minute before I discovered the one who spoke to be Miss
Matoaca.

"Will you please let me have a paper," she said apologetically, "we do
not take it. There is no gentleman in the house. I--I am interested in
the marriages and deaths," she added, in a louder tone as if some one
were standing close to her beyond the garden gate.

As I gave her the paper she stretched out her hand, under its yellowed
lace ruffle, and dropped the money into my palm.

"I shall be obliged to you if you will call out every day when you pass
here," she remarked, after a minute; "I am almost always in the garden
at this hour."

I promised her that I should certainly remember, and she was about to
draw inside the garden with a gentle, flower-like motion of her head,
when a gentleman, with a gold-headed walking-stick in his hand, lunged
suddenly round the smaller sycamore at the corner, and entrapped her
between the wall and the gate before she had time to retreat.

"So I've caught you at it, eh, Miss Matoaca!" he exclaimed, shaking a
pudgy forefinger into her face, with an air of playful gallantry.
"Buying newspapers!"

Poor Miss Matoaca, fluttering like a leaf before this onslaught of
chivalry, could only drop her bright brown eyes to the ground and flush
a delicate pink, which the General must have admired.

"They--they are excellent to keep away moths!" she stammered.

The sly and merry look, which I discovered afterwards to be his
invincible weapon with the ladies, appeared instantly in his watery grey
eyes.

"And you don't even glance at the political headlines? Ah, confess, Miss
Matoaca."

He was very stout, very red in the face, very round in the stomach, very
roguish in the eyes, yet I realised even then that some twenty years
before--when the results of his sportive masculinity had not become
visible in his appearance--he must have been handsome enough to have
melted even Miss Matoaca's heart. Like a faint lingering beam of autumn
sunshine, this comeliness, this blithe and unforgettable charm of youth,
still hovered about his heavy and plethoric figure. Across his expansive
front there stretched a massive gold chain of a unique pattern, and from
this chain, I saw now, there hung a jingling and fascinating bunch of
seals. The gentleman I might have forgotten, but that bunch of seals had
occupied for three long years a particular corner of my memory; and in
the instant that my eyes fell upon it, I saw again the ragged hill
covered with pokeberry, yarrow, and stunted sumach, the anchored vessel
outlined against the rosy sunset, and the panting stranger, who had
stopped to rest with his hand on my shoulder. I remembered suddenly that
I wanted to become the president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic
Railroad.

He stood there now in all his redundant flesh before me, his large
mottled cheeks inflated with laughter, his full red lips pursed into a
gay and mocking expression. To me he personified success, happiness,
achievement--the other shining extreme from my own obscurity and
commonness; but the effect upon poor little Miss Matoaca was quite the
opposite, I judged the next minute, from the one that he had intended. I
watched her fragile shoulders straighten and a glow rather than a flash
of spirit pass into her uplifted face.

"With your record, General Bolingbroke," she said, in a quavering yet
courageous voice, "you may refuse your approval, but not your respect,
to a matter of principle."

The roguish twinkle, which was still so charming, appealed like the lost
spirit of youth in the General's eyes.

"Ah, Miss Matoaca," he rejoined, in his most gallant manner, "principles
do not apply to ladies!"

At this Miss Matoaca drew herself up almost haughtily, and I felt as I
looked at her that only her sex had kept her from becoming a general
herself.

"It is very painful to me to disagree with the gentlemen I know," she
said, "but when it is a matter of conviction I feel that even the
respect of gentlemen should be sacrificed. My sister Mitty considers me
quite indelicate, but I cannot conceal from you that--" her voice broke
and dropped, but rose again instantly with a clear, silvery sound, "I
consider that taxation without representation is tyranny."

A virgin martyr refusing to sacrifice a dove to Venus might have uttered
her costly heresy in such a voice and with such a look; but the General
met it suavely with a flourish of his wide-brimmed hat and a blandishing
smile. He was one of those gentlemen of the old school, I came to know
later, to whom it was an inherent impossibility to appear without
affectation in the presence of a member of the opposite sex. A high
liver, and a good fellow every inch of him, he could be natural, racy,
charming, and without vanity, when in the midst of men; but let so much
as the rustle of a petticoat sound on the pavement, and he would begin
to strut and plume himself as instinctively as the cock in the barnyard.

"But what would you do with a vote, my dear Miss Matoaca," he protested
airily. "Put it into a pie?"

His witticism, which he hardly seemed aware of until it was uttered,
afforded him the next instant an enjoyment so hilarious that I saw his
waist shake like a bowl of jelly between the flapping folds of his
alpaca coat. While he stood there with his large white cravat twisted
awry by the swelling of his crimson neck, and his legs, in a pair of
duck trousers, planted very far apart on the sidewalk, he presented the
aspect of a man who felt himself to be a graduate in the experimental
science of what he probably would have called "the sex." When I heard
him frequently alluded to afterwards as "a gay old bird," I wondered
that I had not fitted the phrase to him as he fixed his swimming,
parrot-like eyes on the flushed face of Miss Matoaca.

"If that's all the use you'd make of it, I think we might safely trust
it to you," he observed with a flattering glance. "A woman who can make
your mince pies, dear lady, need not worry about her rights."

"How is George, General?" asked Miss Matoaca, with an air of gentle,
offended dignity. "I heard he had come to live with you since his
mother's death."

"So he has, the rascal," responded the General, "and a nephew under
twelve years of age is a severe strain on the habits of an elderly
bachelor."

The corners of Miss Matoaca's mouth grew suddenly prim.

"I suppose you could hardly close the door on your sister's orphan son,"
she observed, in a severer tone than I had yet heard her use.

He sighed, and the sigh appeared to pass in the form of a tremor through
his white-trousered legs.

"Ah, that's it," he rejoined. "You ladies ought to be thankful that you
haven't our responsibilities. No, no, thank you, I won't come in. My
respects to Miss Mitty and to yourself."

The gate closed softly as if after a love tryst, Miss Matoaca
disappeared into the garden, and the General's expression changed from
its jocose and smiling flattery to a look of genuine annoyance.

"No, I don't want a paper, boy!" he exclaimed.

With a wave of his gold-headed cane in my direction, he would have
passed on his way, but at his first step, happily for me, his toe struck
against a loosened brick, and the pain of the shock caused him to bend
over and begin rubbing his gouty foot, with an exclamation that sounded
suspiciously like an oath. Where was the roguish humour now in the small
watery grey eyes? The gout, not "the sex," had him ignominiously by the
heel.

"If you please, General, do you remember me?" I enquired timidly.

Still clasping his foot, he turned a crimson glare upon me.
"Damnation!--I mean Good Lord, have mercy on my toe, why should I
remember you?"

"It was on Church Hill almost four years ago, you promised," I suggested
as a gentle spur to his memory.

"And you expect me to remember what I promised four years ago?" he
rejoined with a sly twinkle. "Why, bless my soul, you're worse than a
woman."

"You asked me, sir, if I wanted to grow up and be President," I
returned, not without resentment.

Releasing his ankle abruptly, he stood up and slapped his thigh.

"Great Jehosaphat! If you ain't the little chap who was content to be
nothing less than God Almighty!" he exclaimed. "I've told that story a
hundred times if I've told it once."

"Then perhaps you'll help me a little, sir," I suggested.

"Help you to become God Almighty?" he chuckled.

"No, sir, help me to be the president of the Great South Midland and
Atlantic Railroad."

"Then you'll be satisfied with the lesser office, eh?"

"I shall, sir, if--if there isn't anything better."

Again he slapped his thigh and again he chuckled. "But I've got one boy
already. I don't want another," he protested. "Good Lord, one is bad
enough when he's not your own."

Whether or not he really supposed that I was a serious applicant for
adoption, I cannot say, but his face put on immediately an harassed and
suffering look.

"Have you ever had a twinge of gout, boy?" he enquired.

"No, sir."

"Then you're lucky--damned lucky. When you go to bed to-night you get
down on your knees and thank the Lord that you've never had a twinge of
gout. You can even eat a strawberry without feeling it, I reckon?"

I replied humbly that I certainly could if I ever got the chance.

"And yet you ain't satisfied--you're asking to be president of a damned
railroad--a boy who can eat a strawberry without feeling it!"

He moved on, limping slightly, and like a small persistent devil of
temptation, I kept at his elbow.

"Isn't there anything that you can do for me, sir?" I asked, at the
point of tears.

"Do for you? Bless my soul, boy, if I had your joints I shouldn't want
anything that anybody could do for me. Can't you walk, hop, skip, jump,
all you want to?"

This was so manifestly unfair that I retorted stubbornly, "But I don't
want to."

He glanced down on me with a flicker of his still charming smile.

"Well, you would if you were president of the Great South Midland and
Atlantic and had looked into the evening paper," he said.

"Are you president of it still, sir?"

"Eh? eh? You'll be wanting to push me out of my job next, I suppose?"

"I'd like to have it when you are dead, sir," I replied.

But this instead of gratifying the General appeared plainly to annoy
him. "There now, you'd better run along and sell your papers," he
remarked irritably. "If I give you a dime, will you quit bothering me?"

"I'd rather you'd give me a start, sir, as you promised."

"Good Lord! There you are again! Do you know the meaning of
n-u-i-s-a-n-c-e, boy?"

"No, sir."

"Well, ask your teacher the next time you go to school."

"I don't go to school. I work."

"You work, eh? Well, look here, let's see. What do you want of me?"

"I thought you might tell me how to begin. I don't want to stay common."

For a moment his attention seemed fixed on a gold pencil which he had
taken from his waistcoat pocket. Then opening his card-case he scribbled
a line on a card and handed it to me. "If you choose you may take that
to Bob Brackett at the Old Dominion Tobacco Works, on Twenty-fifth
Street, near the river," he said, not unkindly. "If he happens to want a
boy, he may give you a job; but remember, I don't promise you that he
will want one,--and if he does, it isn't likely he'd make you president
on the spot," he concluded, with a chuckle.

Waving a gesture of dismissal he started off at a hobble; then catching
the eye of a lady in a passing carriage, he straightened himself, bowed
with a gallant flourish of his wide-brimmed hat, and went on with a look
of agony but a jaunty pace. As I turned, a minute later, to discover who
could have wrought this startling change in the behaviour of the
General, an open surrey, the bottom filled with a pink cloud of wild
azaleas, stopped at the curbing before the grey house, and the faces of
Miss Mitty and Sally shone upon me over the blossoms. The child was
coloured like a flower from the sun and wind, and there was a soft dewy
look about her flushed cheeks, and her very full red lips. At the corner
of her mouth, near her square little chin, a tiny white scar showed like
a dimple, giving to her lower lip when she laughed an expression of
charming archness. I remember these things now--at the moment there was
no room for them in my whirling thoughts.

"Oh!" cried the little girl in a burst of happiness, "there's my boy!"

The next minute she had leaped out of the carriage and was bounding
across the pavement. Her arms were filled with azalea, and loosened
petals fluttered like a swarm of pink and white moths around her.

"What are you doing, boy?" she asked. "Where is your basket?"

"It's at the market. I'm selling papers."

"Come, Sally," commanded Miss Mitty, stepping out of the surrey with the
rest of the flowers. "You must not stop in the street to talk to people
you don't know."

"But I do know him, Aunt Mitty, he brings our marketing."

"Well, come in anyway. You are breaking the flowers."

The strong, heady perfume filled my nostrils, though when I remember it
now it changes to the scent of wallflowers, which clings always about my
memory of the old grey house, with its delicate lace curtains draped
back from the small square window-panes as if a face looked out on the
crooked pavement.

"Please, Aunt Mitty, let me buy a paper," begged the child.

"A paper, Sally! What on earth would you do with a paper?"

"Couldn't I roll up my hair in it, Auntie?"

"You don't roll up your hair in newspapers. Here, come in. I can't wait
any longer."

Lingering an instant, Sally leaned toward me over the pink cloud of
azalea. "I'd just love to play with you and Samuel," she said with the
sparkling animation I remembered from our first meeting, "but dear Aunt
Mitty has so much pride, you know."

She bent still lower, gave Samuel an impassioned hug with her free arm,
and then turning quickly away ran up the short flight of steps and
disappeared into the house. The next instant the door closed sharply
after her, and only the small rosy petals fluttering in the wind were
left to prove to me that I was really awake and it was not a dream.




CHAPTER VIII

IN WHICH MY EDUCATION BEGINS


There was no lingering at kitchen doorways with scolding white-turbaned
cooks next morning, for as soon as I had delivered the marketing, I
returned the basket to John Chitling, and set out down Twenty-fifth
Street in the direction of the river. As I went on, a dry, pungent odour
seemed to escape from the pavement beneath and invade the air. The earth
was drenched with it, the crumbling bricks, the negro hovels, the few
sickly ailantus trees, exuded the sharp scent, and even the wind brought
stray wafts, as from a giant's pipe, when it blew in gusts up from the
river-bottom. Overhead the sky appeared to hang flat and low as if seen
through a thin brown veil, and the ancient warehouses, sloping toward
the river, rose like sombre prisons out of the murky air. It was still
before the introduction of modern machinery into the factories, and as I
approached the rotting wooden steps which led into the largest building,
loose leaves of tobacco, scattered in the unloading, rustled with a
sharp, crackling noise under my feet.

Inside, a clerk on a high stool, with a massive ledger before him,
looked up at my entrance, and stuck his pen behind his ear with a sigh
of relief.

"A gentleman told me you might want a boy, sir," I began.

He got down from his stool, and sauntering across the room, took a long
drink from a bucket of water that stood by the door.

"What gentleman?" he enquired, as he flirted a few drops on the steps
outside, and returned the tin dipper to the rusty nail over the bucket.

I drew out the card, which I had kept carefully wrapped in a piece of
brown paper in my trousers' pocket. When I handed it to him, he looked
at it with a low whistle and stood twirling it in his fingers.

"The gentleman owns about nine-tenths of the business," he remarked for
my information. Then turning his head he called over his shoulder to
some one hidden behind the massive ledgers on the desk. "I say, Bob,
here's a boy the General's sent along. What'll you do with him?"

Bob, a big, blowzy man, who appeared to be upon terms of intimacy with
every clerk in the office, came leisurely out into the room, and looked
me over with what I felt to be a shrewd and yet not unkindly glance.
"It's the second he's sent down in two weeks," he observed, "but this
one seems sprightly enough. What's your name, boy?"

"Ben Starr."

"Well, Ben, what're you good for?"

"'Most anything, sir."

"'Most anything, eh? Well, come along, and I'll put you at 'most
anything."

He spoke in a pleasant, jovial tone, which made me adore him on the
spot; and as he led me across a dark hall and up a sagging flight of
steps, he enquired good-humouredly how I had met General Bolingbroke and
why he had given me his card.

"He's a great man, is the General!" he exclaimed with enthusiasm. "When
you met him, my boy, you met the biggest man in the South to-day."

Immediately the crimson face, the white-trousered legs, the round
stomach, and even the gouty toe, were surrounded in my imagination with
a romantic halo. "What's he done to make him so big?" I asked.

"Done? Why, he's done everything. He's opened the South, he's restored
trade, he's made an honest fortune out of the carpet-baggers. It's
something to own nine-tenths of the Old Dominion Tobacco Works, and to
be vice-president of the Bonfield Trust Company, but it's a long sight
better to be president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad.
If you happen to know of a bigger job than that, I wish you'd point it
out."

I couldn't point it out, and so I told him, at which he gave a friendly
guffaw and led the way in silence up the sagging staircase. At that
moment all that had been mere formless ambition in my mind was
concentrated into a single burning desire; and I swore to myself, as I
followed Bob, the manager, up the dark staircase to the leaf department,
that I, too, would become before I died the biggest man in the South and
the president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad. The idea
which was to possess me utterly for thirty years dropped into my brain
and took root on that morning in the heavy atmosphere of the Old
Dominion Tobacco Works. From that hour I walked not aimlessly, but
toward a definite end. I might start in life, I told myself, with a
market basket, but I would start also with the resolution that out of
the market basket the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad should
arise. The vow was still on my lips when the large sliding door on the
landing swung open, and we entered an immense barnlike room, in which
three or four hundred negroes were at work stemming tobacco.

At first the stagnant fumes of the dry leaf mingling with the odours of
so many tightly packed bodies, caused me to turn suddenly dizzy, and the
rows of shining black faces swam before my eyes in a blur with the
brilliantly dyed turbans of the women. Then I gritted my teeth fiercely,
the mist cleared, and I listened undisturbed to the melancholy chant
which accompanied the rhythmic movements of the lithe brown fingers.

At either end of the room, which covered the entire length and breadth
of the building, the windows were shut fast, and on the outside, close
against the greenish panes, innumerable flies swarmed like a black
curtain. Before the long troughs stretching waist high from wall to
wall, hundreds of negroes stood ceaselessly stripping the dry leaves
from the stems; and above the soft golden brown piles of tobacco, the
blur of colour separated into distinct and vivid splashes of red, blue,
and orange. Back and forth in the obscurity these brilliantly coloured
turbans nodded like savage flowers amid a crowd of black faces, in which
the eyes alone, very large, wide open, and with gleaming white circles
around the pupils, appeared to me to be really alive and human. They
were singing as we entered, and the sound did not stop while the manager
crossed the floor and paused for an instant beside the nearest worker, a
brawny, coal-black negro, with a red shirt open at his throat, on which
I saw a strange, jagged scar, running from ear to chest, like the
enigmatical symbol of some savage rite I could not understand. Without
turning his head at the manager's approach, he picked up a great leaf
and stripped it from the stem at a single stroke, while his tremendous
bass voice rolled like the music of an organ over the deep piles of
tobacco before which he stood. Above this rich volume of sound fluted
the piercing thin sopranos of the women, piping higher, higher, until
the ancient hymn resolved itself into something that was neither human
nor animal, but so elemental, so primeval, that it was like a voice
imprisoned in the soil--a dumb and inarticulate music, rooted deep, and
without consciousness, in the passionate earth. Over the mass of dark
faces, as they rocked back and forth, I saw light shadows tremble, as
faint and swift as the shadows of passing clouds, while here and there a
bright red or yellow head-dress rose slightly higher than its
neighbours, and floated above the rippling mass like a flower on a
stream. And it seemed to me as I stood there, half terrified by the
close, hot smells and the savage colours, that something within me
stirred and awakened like a secret that I had carried shut up in myself
since birth. The music grew louder in my ears, as if I, too, were a part
of it, and for the first time I heard clearly the words:--

    "Christ totes de young lambs in his bosom, bosom,
    Christ totes de young lambs in his bosom, bosom,
    Christ totes de young lambs in his bosom, bosom,
    Fa-ther, de ye-ar-ur Ju-bi-le-e!"

Bob, the manager, picked up a leaf from the nearest trough, examined it
carefully, and tossed it aside. The great black negro turned his head
slowly toward him, the jagged scar standing out like a cord above the
open collar of his red shirt.

    "Christ leads de ole sheep by still watah, watah,
    Christ leads de ole sheep by still watah, watah,
    Christ leads de ole sheep by still watah, watah,
    Fa-ther, de ye-ar-ur Ju-bi-le-e!"

"If I were to leave you here an hour what would you do, Ben?" asked the
manager suddenly, speaking close to my ear.

I thought for a moment. "Learn to stem tobacco quick'en they do," I
replied at last.

"What have you found out since you came in?"

"That you must strip the leaf off clean and throw it into the big trough
that slides it downstairs somewhere."

A smile crossed his face. "If I give you a job it won't be much more
than running up and down stairs with messages," he said; "that's what a
nigger can't do." He hesitated an instant; "but that's the way I began,"
he added kindly, "under General Bolingbroke."

I looked up quickly, "And was it the way _he_ began?"

"Oh, well, hardly. He belongs to one of the old families, you know. His
father was a great planter and he started on top."

My crestfallen look must have moved his pity, I think, for he said as he
turned away and we walked down the long room, "It ain't the start that
makes the man, youngster, but the man that makes the start."

The doors swung together behind us, and we descended the dark staircase,
with the piercing soprano voices fluting in our ears.

    "Christ leads de ole sheep by still watah, watah,
    Christ leads de ole sheep by still watah, watah."

       *       *       *       *       *

That afternoon I went home, full of hope, to my attic in the Old Market
quarter. Then as the weeks went on, and I took my place gradually as a
small laborious worker in the buzzing hive of human industry, whatever
romance had attached itself to the tobacco factory, scattered and
vanished in the hard, dry atmosphere of the reality. My part was to run
errands up and down the dark staircase for the manager of the leaf
department, or to stand for hours on hot days in the stagnant air, amid
the reeking smells of the big room, where the army of "stemmers" rocked
ceaselessly back and forth to the sound of their savage music. In all
those weary weeks I had passed General Bolingbroke but once, and by the
blank look on his great perspiring face, I saw that my hero had
forgotten utterly the incident of my existence. Yet as I turned on the
curbing and looked after him, while he ploughed, wiping his forehead, up
the long hill, under the leaves of mulberry and catalpa trees, I felt
instinctively that my future triumphs would be in a measure the
overthrow of the things for which he and his generation had stood. The
manager's casual phrase "the old families," had bred in me a secret
resentment, for I knew in my heart that the genial aristocracy,
represented by the president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic
Railroad, was in reality the enemy, and not the friend, of such as I.

The long, hot summer unfolded slowly while I trudged to the factory in
the blinding mornings and back again to the Old Market at the
suffocating hour of sunset. Over the doors of the negro hovels luxuriant
gourd vines hung in festoons of large fan-shaped leaves, and above the
high plank fences at the back, gaudy sunflowers nodded their heads to me
as I went wearily by. The richer quarter of the city had blossomed into
a fragrant bower, but I saw only the squalid surroundings of the Old
Market, with its covered wagons, its overripe melons, its prowling dogs
hunting in refuse heaps, and beyond this the crooked street, which led
to the tobacco factory and then sagged slowly down to the river-bottom.
Sometimes I would lean from my little window at night into the stifling
atmosphere, where the humming of a mosquito, or the whirring of a moth,
made the only noise, and think of the enchanted garden lying desolate
and lovely under the soft shining of the stars. Were the ghosts moving
up and down the terraces in the mazes of scented box, I wondered? Then
the garden would fade far away from me into a cool, still distance,
while I knelt with my head in my hands, panting for breath in the
motionless air. Outside the shadow of the Old Market lay over all,
stretching sombre and black to where I crouched, a lonely, half-naked
child at my attic window. And so at last, bathed in sweat, I would fall
asleep, to awaken at dawn when the covered wagons passed through the
streets below, and the cry of "Wa-ter-mil-lion! Wa-ter-mil-lion!" rang
in the silence. Then the sun would rise slowly, the day begin, and Mrs.
Chitling's cheerful bustle would start anew. Tired, sleepless,
despairing, I would set off to work at last, while the Great South
Midland Railroad receded farther and farther into the dim province of
inaccessible things.

After a long August day, when the factory had shut down while it was yet
afternoon, I crept up to Church Hill, and looked again over the spiked
wall into the enchanted garden. It was deserted and seemed very sad, I
thought, for its only tenants appeared to be the swallows that flew,
with short cries, in and out of the white columns. On the front door a
large sign hung, reading "For Sale"; and turning away with a sinking
heart, I went on to Mrs. Cudlip's in the hope of catching a glimpse of
baby Jessy, whom I had not seen since I ran away. She was playing on the
sidewalk, a pretty, golden-haired little girl, with the melting blue
eyes of my father; and when she caught sight of me, she gave a gurgling
cry and ran straight to me out of the arms of President, who, I saw to
my surprise, was standing in the doorway of our old home. He was taller
than my father now, with the same kind, sheepish face, and the awkward
movements as of an overgrown boy.

"Wall, if it ain't Benjy!" he exclaimed, his slow wits paralysed by my
unexpected appearance. "If it ain't Benjy!"

Turning aside he spat a wad of tobacco into the gutter, and then coming
toward me, seized both my hands and wrung them in his big fists with a
grip that hurt.

"You're comin' along now, ain't you, Benjy?" he inquired proudly.

"Tith my Pethedent," lisped baby Jessy at his knees, and he stooped from
his great height and lifted her in his arms with the gentleness of a
woman.

"What about an eddication, Benjy boy?" he asked over the golden curls.

"I can't get an education and work, too," I answered, "and I've got to
work. How's pa?"

"He's taken an awful fondness to the bottle," replied President, with a
sly wink, "an' if thar's a thing on earth that can fill a man's thoughts
till it crowds out everything else in it, it's the bottle. But speakin'
of an eddication, you see I never had one either, an' I tell you, when
you don't have it, you miss it every blessed minute of yo' life.
Whenever I see a man step on ahead of me in the race, I say to myself,
'Thar goes an eddication. It's the eddication in him that's a-movin' an'
not the man.' You mark my words, Benjy, I've stood stock still an' seen
'em stridin' on that didn't have one bloomin' thing inside of 'em except
an eddication."

"But how am I to get it, President?" I asked dolefully. "I've got to
work."

"Get it out of books, Benjy. It's in 'em if you only have the patience
to stick at 'em till you get it out. I never had on o'count of my eyes
and my slowness, but you're young an' peart an' you don't get confused
by the printed letters."

Diving into his bulging pockets, he took out a big leather purse, from
which he extracted a dollar and handed it to me. "Let that go toward an
eddication," he said, adding: "If you can get it out of books I'll send
you a dollar toward it every week I live. That's a kind of starter,
anyway, ain't it?"

I replied that I thought it was, and carefully twisted the money into
the torn lining of my pocket.

"I'm goin' back to West Virginy to-night," he resumed. "Arter I've seen
you an' the little sister thar ain't any use my hangin' on out of work."

"Have you got a good place, President?"

"As good as can be expected for a plain man without an eddication," he
responded sadly, and a half hour later, when I said good-by to him, with
a sob, he came to the brow of the hill, with little Jessy clinging to
his hand, and called after me solemnly, "Remember, Benjy boy, what you
want is an eddication!"

So impressed was I by the earnestness of this advice, that as I went
back down the dreary hill, with its musty second-hand clothes' shops,
its noisy barrooms, and its general aspect of decay and poverty, I felt
that my surroundings smothered me because I lacked the peculiar virtue
which enabled a man to overcome the adverse circumstances in which he
was born. The hot August day was drawing to its end, and the stagnant
air in which I moved seemed burdened with sweat until it had become a
tangible thing. The gourd vines were hanging limp now over the negro
hovels, as if the weight of the yellow globes dragged them to the earth;
and in the small square yards at the back, the wilted sunflowers seemed
trying to hide their scorched faces from the last gaze of a too ardent
lover. Whole families had swarmed out into the streets, and from time to
time I stepped over a negro urchin, who lay flat on his stomach,
drinking the juice of an overripe watermelon out of the rind. Above the
dirt and squalor the street cries still rang out from covered wagons
which crawled ceaslessly back and forth from the country to the Old
Market. "Wa-ter-mil-lion. Wa-ter-mil-l-i-o-n! Hyer's yo' Wa-ter-mil-lion
fresh f'om de vi-ne!" And as I shut my eyes against the dirt, and my
nostrils against the odours, I saw always in my imagination the
enchanted garden, with its cool sweet magnolias and laburnums, and its
great white columns from which the swallows flew, with short cries,
toward the sunset.

A white shopkeeper and a mulatto woman had got into a quarrel on the
pavement, and turning away to avoid them, I stumbled by accident into
the open door of a second-hand shop, where the proprietor sat on an old
cooking-stove drinking a glass of beer. As I started back my frightened
glance lit on a heap of dusty volumes in one corner, and in reply to a
question, which I put the next instant in a trembling voice, I was
informed that I might have the whole pile for fifty cents, provided I'd
clear them out on the spot. The bargain was no sooner clinched than I
gathered the books in my arms and staggered under their weight in the
direction of Mrs. Chitling's. Even for a grown man they would have made
a big armful, and when at last I toiled up to my attic, and dropped on
my knees by the open window, I was shaking from head to foot with
exhaustion. The dust was thick on my hands and arms, and as I turned
them over eagerly by the red light of the sunset, the worm-eaten
bindings left queer greenish stains on my fingers. Among a number of
loose magazines called _The Farmer's Friend_, I found an illustrated,
rather handsome copy of "Pilgrim's Progress," presented, as an
inscription on the flyleaf testified, to one Jeremiah Wakefield as a
reward for deportment; the entire eight volumes of "Sir Charles
Grandison"; a complete Johnson's Dictionary, with the binding missing;
and Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy" in faded crimson morocco. When I
had dusted them carefully on an old shirt, and arranged them on the
three-cornered shelf at the head of my cot, I felt, with a glow of
satisfaction, that the foundations of that education to which President
had contributed were already laid in my brain. If the secret of the
future had been imprisoned in those mouldy books, I could hardly have
attacked them with greater earnestness; and there was probably no
accident in my life which directed so powerfully my fortunes as the one
that sent me stumbling into that second-hand shop on that afternoon in
mid-August. I can imagine what I should have been if I had never had the
help of a friend in my career, but when I try to think of myself as
unaided by Johnson's Dictionary, or by "Sir Charles Grandison," whose
prosiest speeches I committed joyfully to memory, my fancy stumbles in
vain in the attempt. For five drudging years those books were my
constant companions, my one resource, and to conceive of myself without
them is to conceive of another and an entirely different man. If there
was harm in any of them, which I doubt, it was clothed to appeal to an
older and a less ignorant imagination than mine; and from the elaborate
treatises on love melancholy in Burton's "Anatomy," I extracted merely
the fine aromatic flavour of his quotations.




CHAPTER IX

I LEARN A LITTLE LATIN AND A GREAT DEAL OF LIFE


My opportunity came at last when Bob Brackett, the manager of the leaf
department, discovered me one afternoon tucked away with the half of
Johnson's Dictionary in a corner of the stemming room, where the negroes
were singing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."

"I say, Ben, why ain't you out on the floor?" he asked.

I laid the book face downwards on the window-sill, and came out,
embarrassed and secretive, to where he stood. "I just dropped down there
a minute ago to rest," I replied.

"You weren't resting, you were reading. Show me the book."

Without a word I handed him the great dictionary, and he fingered the
dog-eared pages with a critical and reflective air.

"Holy Moses! it ain't a blessed thing except words!" he exclaimed, after
a minute. "Do you mean to tell me you can sit down and read a dictionary
for the pure pleasure of reading?"

"I wasn't reading, I was learning," I answered.

"Learning how?"

"Learning by heart. I've already got as far as the _d_'s."

"You mean you can say every last word of them _a_'s, _b_'s, and _c_'s
straight off?"

I nodded gravely, my hands behind my back, my eyes on the beams in the
ceiling. "As far as the _d_'s."

"And you're doing all this learning just to get an education, ain't
you?"

My eyes dropped from the beams and I shook my head, "I don't believe
it's there, sir."

"What? Where?"

"I don't believe an education is in them. I did once."

For a moment he stood turning over the discoloured leaves without
replying. "I reckon you can tell me the meaning of 'most any word, eh,
Ben?" he demanded.

"Not unless it begins with _a_, _b_, or _c_, sir."

"Well, any word beginning with an _a_, then, that's something. There're
a precious lot of 'em. How about allelujah, how's that for a mouthful?"

Instinctively my eyes closed, and I began my reply in a tone that seemed
to chime in with the negro's melody.

'Falsely written for Hallelujah, a word of spiritual exultation, used in
hymns; signifies, _Praise God. He will set his tongue, to those pious
divine strains; which may be a proper præludium to those allelujahs, he
hopes eternally to sing._

"'_Government of the Tongue._'"

"Hooray! That's a whopper!" he exclaimed, with enthusiasm. "What's a
præ-lu-di-um?"

"I told you I hadn't got to _p_'s yet," I returned, not without
resentment.

The hymn changed suddenly; the negro in the red shirt, with the scar on
his neck, turned his great oxlike eyes upon me, and the next instant his
superb voice rolled, rich and deep, as the sound of an organ, from his
bared black chest.

    "A-settin' in de kingdom,
    Y-e-s, m-y-L-a-w-d!"

"Well, you've got gumption," said Bob, the manager. "That's what I
always lacked--just plain gumption, and when you ain't got it, there's
nothing to take its place. I was talking to General Bolingbroke about
you yesterday, Ben, and that's what I said. 'There's but one word for
that boy, General, and it's gumption.'"

I accepted the tribute with a swelling heart. "What good will it do me
if I can't get an education?" I demanded.

"It's that will give it to you, Ben. Why, don't you know every blessed
word in the English language that begins with an _a_? That's more than I
know--that's more, I reckon," he burst out, "than the General himself
knows!"

In this there was comfort, if a feeble one. "But there're so many other
things besides the _a_'s that you've got to learn," I responded.

"Yes, but if you learn the _a_'s, you'll learn the other things,--now
ain't that logic? The trouble with me, you see, is that I learned the
other things without knowing a blamed sight of an _a_. I tell you what
I'll do, Ben, my boy, I'll speak to the General about it the Very next
time he comes to the factory."

He gave me back the dictionary, and I applied myself to its pages with a
terrible earnestness while I awaited the great man's attention.

It was a week before it came, for the General, having gone North on
affairs of the railroad, did not condescend to concern himself with my
destiny until the more important business was arranged and despatched.
Being in a bland mood, however, upon his return, it appeared that he had
listened and expressed himself to some purpose at last.

"Tell him to go to Theophilus Pry and let me have his report," was what
he had said.

"But who is Theophilus Pry?" I enquired, when this was repeated to me by
Bob Brackett.

"Dr. Theophilus Pry, an old friend of the General's, who takes his
nephew to coach in the evenings. The doctor's very poor, I believe,
because they say of him that he never refuses a patient and never sends
a bill. He swears there isn't enough knowledge in his profession to make
it worth anybody's money."

"And where does he live?"

"In that little old house with the office in the yard on Franklin
Street. The General says you're to go to him this evening at eight
o'clock."

The sound of my beating heart was so loud in my ears that I hurriedly
buttoned my jacket across it. Then as if I were to be examined on
Johnson's Dictionary, my lips began to move silently while I spelled
over the biggest words. If I could only confine my future conversations
to the use of the _a_'s and _b_'s, I felt that I might safely pass
through life without desperate disaster in the matter of speech.

It was a mild October evening, with a smoky blue haze, through which a
single star shone over the clipped box in Dr. Theophilus Pry's garden,
when I opened the iron gate and went softly along the pebbled walk to
the square little office standing detached from the house. A black
servant, carrying a plate of waffles from the outside kitchen, informed
me in a querulous voice that the doctor was still at supper, but I might
go in and wait; and accepting the suggestion with more amiability than
accompanied it, I entered the small, cheerful room, where a lamp, with a
lowered wick, burned under a green shade. Around the walls there were
many ancient volumes in bindings of stout English calf, and on the
mantelpiece, above which hung one of the original engravings of Latane's
"Burial," two enormous glass jars, marked "Calomel" and "Quinine,"
presided over the apartment with an air of medicinal solemnity. They
were the only visible and positive evidence of the doctor's calling in
life, and when I knew him better in after years, I discovered that they
were the only drugs he admitted to a place in the profession of healing.
To the day of his death, he administered these alternatives with a high
finality and an imposing presence. It was told of him that he considered
but one symptom, and this he discovered with his hand on the patient's
pulse and his eyes on a big loud-ticking watch in a hunting case. If the
pulse was quick, he prescribed quinine, if sluggish, he ordered calomel.
To dally with minor ailments was as much beneath him as to temporise
with modern medicine. In his last years he was still suspicious of
vaccination, and entertained a profound contempt for the knife. Beyond
his faith in calomel and quinine, there were but two articles in his
creed; he believed first in cleanliness, secondly in God. "Madam," he is
reported to have remarked irreverently to a mother whom he found praying
for her child's recovery in the midst of a dirty house, "when God
doesn't respond to prayer, He sometimes answers a broom and a bucket of
soapsuds." Honest, affable, adored, he presented the singular spectacle
of a physician who scorned medicine, and yet who, it was said, had fewer
deaths and more recoveries to his credit than any other practitioner of
his generation. This belief arose probably in the legendary glamour
which resulted from his boundless, though mysterious, charities; for
despite the fact that he had until his death a large and devoted
following, he lived all his life in a condition of genteel poverty. His
single weakness was, I believe, an utter inability to appreciate the
exchange value of dollars and cents; and this failing grew upon him so
rapidly in his declining years that Mrs. Clay, his widowed sister, who
kept his house, was at last obliged to "put up pickles" for the market
in order to keep a roof over her brother's distinguished head.

I was sitting in one of the worn leather chairs under the green lamp,
when the door opened and shut quickly, and Dr. Theophilus Pry came in
and held out his hand.

"So you're the lad George was telling me about," he began at once, with
a charming, straightforward courtesy. "I hope I haven't kept you
waiting many minutes, sir."

He was spare and tall, with stooping shoulders, a hooked nose, bearing a
few red veins, and a smile that lit up his face like the flash of a
lantern. Everything about his clothes that could be coloured was of a
bright, strong red; his cravat, his big silk handkerchief, and the polka
dots in his black stockings. "Yes, I like any colour as long as it's
red," he was fond of saying with his genial chuckle.

Bending over the green baize cloth on the table, he pushed away a pile
of examination papers, and raised the wick of the lamp.

"So you've started out to learn Dr. Johnson's Dictionary by heart," he
observed. "Now by a fair calculation how long do you suppose it will
take you?"

I replied with diffidence that it appeared to me now as if it would very
likely take me till the Day of Judgment.

"Well, 'tis as good an occupation as most, and a long ways better than
some," commented the doctor. "You've come to me, haven't you, because
you think you'd like to learn a little Latin?"

"I'd like to learn anything, sir, that will help me to get on."

"What's the business?"

"Tobacco."

"I don't know that Latin will help you much there, unless it aids you to
name a blend."

"It--it isn't only that, sir, I--I want an education--not just a common
one."

A smile broke suddenly like a beam of light on his face, and I
understood all at once why his calomel and his quinine so often cured.
At that moment I should have swallowed tar water on faith if he had
prescribed it.

"I don't know much about you, my lad," he remarked with a grave,
old-fashioned courtesy, which lifted me several feet above the spot of
carpet on which I stood, "but a gentleman who starts out to learn old
Samuel Johnson's Dictionary by heart, is a gentleman I'll give my hand
to."

With my pulses throbbing hard, I watched him take down a dog-eared Latin
Grammar, and begin turning the pages; and when, after a minute, he put a
few simple questions to me, I answered as well as I could for the lump
in my throat. "It's the fashion now to neglect the classics," he said
sadly, "and a man had the impertinence to tell me yesterday that the
only use for a dead language was to write prescriptions for sick people
in it. But I maintain, and I will repeat it, that you never find a
gentleman of cultured and elevated tastes who has not at least a bowing
acquaintance with the Latin language. The common man may deride--"

I looked up quickly. "If you please, sir, I'd like to learn it," I broke
in with determination.

He glanced at me kindly, secretly flattered, I suspect, by my
spontaneous tribute to his eloquence, and the leaves of the Latin
Grammar had fluttered open, when the door swung wide with a cheerful
bang, and a boy of about my own age, though considerably under my height
and size, entered the room.

"I didn't get in from the ball game till an hour ago, doctor," he
exclaimed. "Uncle George says please don't slam me if I am late."

Some surface resemblance to my hero of the railroad made me aware, even
before Dr. Pry introduced us, that the newcomer was the "young George"
of whom I had heard. He was a fresh, high-coloured boy, whose features
showed even now a slight forecast of General Bolingbroke's awful
redness. Before I looked: at him I got a vague impression that he was
handsome; after I looked at him I began to wonder curiously why he was
not? His hair was of a bright chestnut colour, very curly, and clipped
unusually close, in order to hide the natural wave of which, I
discovered later, he was ashamed. He had pleasant brown eyes, and a
merry smile, which lent a singular charm to his face when it hovered
about his mouth.

"I say, doctor, I wish you'd let me off to-night. I'll do double
to-morrow," he begged, and then turned to me with his pleasant, intimate
manner: "Don't you hate Latin? I do. Before Dr. Theophilus began
coaching me I went to a woman, and that was worse--she made it so silly.
I hate women, don't you?"

"Young George," observed Dr. Theophilus, with sternness, "for every
disrespectful allusion to the ladies, I shall give you an extra page of
grammar."

"I'm no worse than uncle, doctor. Uncle says--"

"I forbid you to repeat any flippant remarks of General Bolingbroke's,
George, and you may tell him so, with my compliments, at breakfast."

Opening his book, he glanced at me gravely over its pages, and the next
instant my education in the ancient languages and the finer graces of
society commenced.

On that first evening I won a place in the doctor's affections, which, I
like to think, I never really lost in the many changes the future
brought me. My obsequious respect for dead tongues redeemed, to a great
measure, the appalling ignorance I immediately displayed of the merest
rudiments of geography and history; and when the time came, I believe it
even reconciled him to my bodily stature, which always appeared to him
to be too large to conform to the smaller requirements of society. In my
fourteenth year I began to grow rapidly, and his chief complaint of me
after this was that I never learned to manage my hands and feet as if
they really belonged to me--a failing that I am perfectly aware I was
never able entirely to overcome. It would doubtless take the breeding of
all the Bolingbrokes, he once informed me, with a sigh, to enable a man
to carry a stature such as mine with the careless dignity which might
possibly have been attained by a moderate birth and a smaller body.

"Nature has intended you for a prize-fighter, but God has made of you a
gentleman," he added, with his fine, characteristic philosophy, which
escaped me at the moment; "it is a blessing, I suppose, to be endowed
with a healthy body, but if I were you, I should endeavour to keep my
members constantly in my mind. It is the next best thing to behaving as
if they did not exist."

This was said so regretfully that I hadn't the heart to inform him that
my mind, being of limited dimensions, found difficulty in accommodating
at one and the same time my bodily members and the Latin language. Even
my "Cæsar" caused me less misery at this period than did the problem of
the proper disposal of my hands and feet. Do what I would they were
hopelessly (by some singular freak of nature) in my way. The breeding of
all the Bolingbrokes would have been taxed to its utmost, I believe, to
behave for a single instant as if they did not exist.

Except for the embarrassment of my increasing stature, the years that
followed my introduction to Dr. Theophilus, as he was called, stand out
in my memory as ones of almost unruffled happiness. The two great jars
of calomel and quinine on the mantelpiece became like faces of familiar,
beneficent friends; and the dusty bookcases, with their shining rows of
old English bindings, formed an appropriate background for the flight of
my wildest dreams. To this day those adolescent fancies have never
detached themselves from the little office, the scattered bricks of
which are now lying in the ruined garden between the blighted yew tree
and the uprooted box. I can see them still circling like vague faces
around the green lamp, under which Dr. Theophilus sits, with his brown
and white pointer, Robin, asleep at his feet. Sometimes there was a
saucer of fresh raspberry jam brought in by Mrs. Clay, the widowed
sister; sometimes a basket of winesap apples; and once a year, on the
night before Christmas, a large slice of fruit cake and a very small
tumbler of egg-nog. Always there were the cheery smile, the pleasant
talk, racy with anecdotes, and the wagging tail of Robin, the pointer.

"A good dog, Ben, this little mongrel of yours," the doctor would say,
as he stooped to pat Samuel's head; "but then, all dogs are good dogs.
You remember your Plutarch? Now, here's this Robin of mine. I wouldn't
take five hundred dollars in my hand for him to-night." At this Robin,
the pointer, would lift his big brown eyes, and slip his soft nose into
his master's hand. "I wouldn't take five hundred dollars down for him,"
Dr. Theophilus would repeat with emphasis.

On the nights when our teacher was called out to a patient, as he often
was, George Bolingbroke and I would push back the chairs for a game of
checkers, or step outside into the garden for a wrestling match, in
which I was always the victor. The physical proportions which the doctor
lamented, were, I believe, the strongest hold I had upon the admiration
of young George. Latin he treated with the same half-playful,
half-contemptuous courtesy that I had observed in General Bolingbroke's
manner to "the ladies," and even the doctor he regarded as a mixture of
a scholar and a mollycoddle. It was perfectly characteristic that one
thing, and one thing only, should command his unqualified respect, and
this was the possession of the potential power to knock him down.




CHAPTER X

IN WHICH I GROW UP


In my eighteenth year, when I had achieved a position and a salary in
the tobacco factory, I left the Old Market forever, and moved into a
room, which Mrs. Clay had offered to rent to me, in the house of Dr.
Theophilus. During the next twelve months my intimacy with young George,
who was about to enter the University, led to an acquaintance, though a
slight one, with that great man, the General. As the years passed my
dream of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad, instead of
evaporating, had become fixed in my mind as the fruition of all my toil,
the end of all my ambition. I saw in it still, as I had seen in it that
afternoon against the rosy sunset and the anchored vessel, the one
glorious possibility, the great adventure. The General's plethoric
figure, with his big paunch and his gouty toe, had never lost in my eyes
the legendary light in which I had enveloped it; and when George
suggested to me carelessly one spring afternoon that I should stop by
his house and have a look at his uncle's classical library, I felt my
cheeks burn, while my heart beat an excited tattoo against my ribs. The
house I knew by sight, a grave, low-browed mansion, with a fringe of
purple wistaria draping the long porch; and it was under a pendulous
shower of blossoms that we found the General seated with the evening
newspaper in his hand and his bandaged foot on a wicker stool. As we
entered the gate he was making a face over a glass of water, while he
complained fretfully to Dr. Theophilus, who sat in a rocking-chair, with
Robin, the pointer, stretched on a rug at his feet.

"I'll never get used to the taste of water, if I live to be a hundred,"
the great man was saying peevishly. "To save my soul I can't understand
why the Lord made anything so darn flat!"

A single lock of hair, growing just above the bald spot on his head,
stirred in the soft wind like a tuft of bleached grass, while his lower,
slightly protruding lip pursed itself into an angry and childish
expression. He was paying the inevitable price, I gathered, for his
career as "a gay old bird"; but even in the rebuking glance which Dr.
Theophilus now bent upon him, I read the recognition that the president
of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad must be dosed more
sparingly than other men. Under his loose, puffy chin he wore a loose,
puffy tie of a magenta shade, in the midst of which a single black pearl
reposed; and when he turned his head, the creases in his neck looked
like white cords sunk deep in the scarlet flesh.

"There's no use, Theophilus, I can't stand it," he protested. "Delilah,
bring me a sip of whiskey to put a taste in my mouth."

"No whiskey, Delilah, not a drop," commanded the doctor sternly. "It's
the result of your own imprudence, George, and you've got to pay for it.
You've been eating strawberries, and I told you not to touch one with a
ten-foot pole."

"You didn't say a word about strawberry shortcake," rejoined the
General, like a guilty child, "and this attack is due to an entirely
different cause. I dined at the Blands' on Sunday, and Miss Mitty gave
me mint sauce on my lamb. I never could abide mint sauce."

Taking out his prescription book the doctor wrote down a prescription in
a single word, which looked ominously like "calomel" from a distance.

"How did Miss Matoaca seem?" he asked, while Robin, the old pointer,
came and sniffed at my ankles, and I thought of Samuel, sleeping under a
flower bed in the doctor's garden. "She has a touch of malaria, and I
ordered her three grains of quinine every morning."

A purple flush mounted to the General's face, which, if I could have
read it by the light of history, would have explained the scornful
flattery in his attitude toward "the sex." It was easy to catch the
personal note in his piquant allusions to "the ladies," though an
instinct, which he would probably have called a principle, kept them
always within the bounds of politeness. Later I was to learn that Miss
Matoaca had been the most ardent, if by no means the only, romance of
his youth; and that because of some headstrong and indelicate opinions
of hers on the subject of masculine morals, she had, when confronted
with tangible proofs of the General's airy wanderings, hopelessly
severed the engagement within a few weeks of the marriage. To a gay
young bird the prospect of a storm in a nest had been far from
attractive; and after a fierce quarrel, he had started dizzily down the
descent of his bachelorhood, while she had folded her trembling wings
and retired into the shadow. That Miss Matoaca possessed "headstrong
opinions," even the doctor, with all his gallantry, would have been the
last to deny. "She seems to think men are made just like women," he
remarked now, wonderingly, "but, oh, Lord, they ain't!"

"I tell you it's those outlandish heathen notions of hers that are
driving us all crazy!" exclaimed the General, making a face as he had
done over his glass of water. "Talks about taxes without representation
exactly as if she were a man and had rights! What rights does a woman
want, anyway, I'd like to know, except the right to a husband? They all
ought to have husbands--God knows I'm not denying them that!--the state
ought to see to it. But rights! Pshaw! They'll get so presently they
won't know how to bear their wrongs with dignity. And I tell you,
doctor, if there's a more edifying sight than a woman bearing her wrongs
beautifully, I've never seen it. Why, I remember my Cousin Jenny
Tyler--you know she married that scamp who used to drink and throw his
boots at her. 'What do you do, Jenny?' I asked, in a boiling rage, when
she told me, and I never saw a woman look more like an angel than she
did when she answered, 'I pick them up.' Why, she made me cry, sir;
that's the sort of woman that makes a man want to marry."

"I dare say you're right," sighed the doctor, "but Miss Matoaca is made,
of a different stuff. I can't imagine her picking up any man's boots,
George."

"No more can I," retorted the General, "it serves her right that she
never got a husband. No gentleman wants to throw his boots at his wife,
but, by Jove, he likes to feel that if he were ever to do such a thing,
she'd be the kind that would pick them up. He doesn't want to think
everlastingly that he's got to walk a chalk-line or catch a flea in his
ear. Now, what do you suppose Miss Matoaca said to me on Sunday? We were
talking of Tom Frost's running for governor, and she said she hoped he
wouldn't be elected because he led an impure life. An impure life! Will
you tell me what business it is of an unmarried lady's whether a man
leads an impure life or not? It isn't ladylike--I'll be damned if it is!
I could see that Miss Mitty blushed for her. What's the world coming to,
I ask, when a maiden lady isn't ashamed to know that a man leads an
impure life?"

He raged softly, and I could see that Dr. Theophilus was growing sterner
over his flippancy.

"Well, you're a gay old bird, George," he remarked, "and I dare say you
think me something of a prude."

Tearing off a leaf from his prescription book, he laid it on the table,
and held out his hand. Then he stood for a minute with his eyes on
Robin, who was marching stiffly round a bed of red geraniums near the
gate. "It's time to go," he added; "that old dog of mine is getting
ready to root up your geraniums."

"You'd better keep a cat," observed the General, "they do less damage."

Young George and I, who had stood in the shadow of the wistaria awaiting
the doctor's departure, came forward now, and I made my awkward bow to
the General's bandaged foot.

"Any relative of Jack Starr?" he enquired affably as he shook my hand.

I towered so conspicuously above him, while I stood there with my hat in
my hand, that I was for a moment embarrassed by my mere physical
advantages.

"No, sir, not that I ever heard of," I answered.

"Then you ought to be thankful," he returned peevishly, "for the first
time I ever met the fellow he deliberately trod on my toe--deliberately,
sir. And now they're wanting to nominate him for governor--but I say
they shan't do it. I've no idea of allowing it. It's utterly out of the
question."

"Uncle George, I've brought Ben to see your library," interrupted young
George at my elbow.

"Library, eh? Are you going to be a lawyer?" demanded the General.

I shook my head.

"A preacher?" in a more reverent voice.

"No, sir, I'm in the Old Dominion Tobacco Works. You got me my first
job."

"I got you your job--did I? Then you're the young chap that discovered
that blend for smoking. I told Bob you ought to have a royalty on that.
Did he give it to you?"

"I'm to have ten per cent of the sales, sir. They've just begun."

"Well, hold on to it--it's a good blend. I tried it. And when you get
your ten per cent, put it into the Old South Chemical Company, if you
want to grow rich. It isn't everybody I'd give that tip to, but I like
the looks of you. How tall are you?"

"Six feet one in my stockings."

"Well, I wouldn't grow any more. You're all right, if you can only
manage to keep your hands and feet down. You've got good eyes and a good
jaw, and it's the jaw that tells the man. Now, that's the trouble with
that Jack Starr they want to nominate for governor. He lacks jaw. 'You
can't make a governor out of a fellow who hasn't jaw,' that's what I
said. And besides, he deliberately trod on my toe the first time I ever
met him. Didn't know it was gouty, eh? What right has he got, I asked,
to suppose that any gentleman's toe isn't gouty?"

His lower lip protruded angrily, and he sat staring into his glass of
water with an enquiring and sulky look. It is no small tribute to my
capacity for hero-worship to say that it survived even this nearer
approach to the gouty presence of my divinity. But the glamour of
success--the only glamour that shines without borrowed light in the
hard, dry atmosphere of the workaday world--still hung around him; and
his very dissipations--yes, even his fleshly frailties--reflected, for
the moment at least, a romantic interest. I began to wonder if certain
moral weaknesses were, indeed, the inevitable attributes of the great
man, and there shot into my mind, with a youthful folly of regret, the
memory of a drink I had declined that morning, and of a pretty maiden at
the Old Market whom I might have kissed and did not. Was the doctor's
teaching wrong, after all, and had his virtues made him a failure in
life, while the General's vices had but helped him to his success? I was
very young, and I had not yet reached the age when I could perceive the
expediency of the path of virtue unless in the end it bordered on
pleasant places. "The General is a bigger man than the doctor," I
thought, half angrily, "and yet the General will be a gay old bird as
long as the gout permits him to hobble." And it seemed to me suddenly
that the moral order, on which the doctor loved to dilate, had gone
topsy-turvy while I stood on the General's porch. As if reading my
thoughts the great man looked up at me, with his roguish twinkle.

"Now there's Theophilus!" he observed. "Whatever you are, sir, don't be
a damned mollycoddle."

Young George, plucking persistently at my sleeve, drew me at last out of
the presence and into the house, where I smelt the fragrance of
strawberries, freshly gathered.

"Here're the books," said George, leading me to the door of a long room,
filled with rosewood bookcases and family portraits of departed
Bolingbrokes. Then as I was about to cross the threshold, the sound of a
bright voice speaking to the General on the porch caused me to stop
short, and stand holding my breath in the hall.

"Good afternoon, General! You look as if you needed exercise."

"Exercise, indeed! Do you take me for your age, you minx?"

"Oh, come, General! You aren't old--you're lazy."

By this time George and I had edged nearer the porch, and even before he
breathed her name in a whisper, I knew in the instant that her sparkling
glance ran over me, that she was my little girl of the red shoes just
budding into womanhood. She was standing in a square patch of sunlight,
midway between the steps and a bed of red geraniums near the gate, and
her dress of some thin white material was blown closely against the
curves of her bosom and her rounded hips. Over her broad white forehead,
with its heavily arched black eyebrows, the mass of her pale brown hair
spread in the strong breeze and stood out like the wings of a bird in
flight, and this gave her whole, finely poised figure a swift and
expectant look, as of one who is swept forward by some radiant impulse.
Her face, too, had this same ardent expression; I saw it in her eyes,
which fixed me the next moment with her starry and friendly gaze; in her
very full red lips that broke the pure outline of her features; and in
her strong, square chin held always a little upward with a proud and
impatient carriage. So vivid was my first glimpse of her, that for a
single instant I wondered if the radiance in her figure was not produced
by some fleeting accident of light and shadow. When I knew her better I
learned that this q

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