Part 4

That his mother was no longer in jail was a fact he learned later in the day. It was a day of extremes, of quick rushes of rapture out of which he would fall suddenly, to go away somewhere and moan. When he begged, as he begged every hour or two, to be taken to the jail, he could be distracted by rompings with the other children, most of them in some such case as his own, or by some novelty in the life. To eat turkey and plum pudding at the head of one of three long tables, each seating twelve or fourteen, was to be raised to a point of social eminence beyond which it seemed there could be nothing more to reach. But in the midst of this pride the hard facts would recur to him, and turkey and plum pudding choke him.

That something had happened he began to infer when his beloved policeman appeared at the home in the afternoon. Having seen him enter, the boy ran up to him.

"Oh, mister, are you going to take me to the jail?"

Mister patted him on the head, though he answered, absently, "Not just now, sonny. You know you're goin' to have a Christmas Tree. I've come to see Miss Honiton."

Miss Honiton, one of the day matrons, having appeared at the end of the hall, the policeman turned him about by the shoulders.

"Now be off with you and play. This has got to be private."

He took himself off but only to the end of the hall, where they didn't notice that he lingered. He lingered because he knew that, whatever the mystery, it had something to do with him.

He caught, however, no more than words which he couldn't understand. Cyanide of potassium! Only his quick ear and retentive memory enabled him to lay hold of syllables so difficult. His mother had taken something or hadn't taken something, he couldn't make out which. All he saw was that both of his friends looked grave, Miss Honiton summing up their consultation,

"I'll let him enjoy the Christmas Tree before saying anything about it."

The policeman answered, regretfully: "Do you think you must?"

"I know I must. He ought to be told. He has a right to know. He might resent it later if we didn't tell him now."

"Very well, sister. I leave it to you."

The door having closed on this friend, Tom Whitelaw, so to call him henceforth, made his way into the room where the Christmas Tree was presently to be lighted up. But he had no heart for the spectacle. There was something new. In the grip of the forces which controlled his life he felt helpless, small. Even his companions in misfortune, as all these children were, could be relatively light-hearted. They could clap their hands when the Tree began to burn with magic fires, and take pleasure in the presents handed out to them. He could not. He was waiting for something to be told to him--something he had a right to know.

One by one, the presents were cut from the Tree; one by one the children went up to receive this addition to what Santa Claus had brought them in the morning. His own name was among the last. When it was called he went forward perfunctorily at first, and then with a sudden inspiration.

His package was handed him, not by one of the matrons but by a beaming young lady from outside. As she bent to deliver it he had his question ready.

"Please, miss, what's cyanide of potassium?"

He had repeated the words to himself so often during the half hour since first hearing them that he pronounced them distinctly. The young lady laughed.

"Why, I think it's a deadly poison." She turned to the matron nearest her. "What is cyanide of potassium? This dear little boy wants to know."

But the dear little boy had already walked soberly back to his seat. While the other children made merry with their presents he sat with his on his lap, and reflected. Poison was something that killed people. He knew that. In one of the houses where they had lived a woman had taken poison, and two days later he had seen her carried out in a long black box. The impression had remained with him poignantly.

He had no inclination to cry. Tears could bring little relief in this kind of cosmic catastrophe. If his mother had taken poison and was to be carried out in a long black box, everything that had made up his world would have collapsed. He could only wait submissively till the thing he ought to know was told to him.

It was told when the giving of the presents was over, and the children flocked out of the room to get ready for their Christmas supper. Miss Honiton was waiting near the door.

"Come into my office, dear. I want to ask you a few questions."

Miss Honiton's office was a mixture of office and sitting room, in that it had business furniture offset by photographs and knicknacks. Sitting at her desk, she turned to the lad, who stood as if to attention, a long thin sympathetic face, stamped with practical acumen.

"I wanted to ask you if besides your mother you have any relations."

His dark blue eyes, deep set beneath his bushy brows, she thought the most serious and earnest she had ever seen in any of the hundreds of homeless little boys she had had to deal with.

"No, miss."

"No brothers or sisters, no uncles or aunts?"

"No, miss."

"Didn't your mother ever take you to see anyone?"

"No, miss."

"Well, then, didn't anyone ever come to see her?"

"No, miss."

To the point she was trying to reach she went round by another way. Where did they live? How long had they lived there? Where had they lived before that? How long had they lived in that place? He answered to the best of his recollection, but when it came to their flittings from tenement to tenement, and from town to town, his recollection didn't take him very far. Miss Honiton soon understood that she might as well question a bird as to its migrations.

For a minute she said nothing, turning over in her mind the various ways of breaking her painful news, when he himself asked, suddenly:

"Is my mudda dead?"

The question was so direct that she felt it deserved a direct answer.

"Yes, dear."

"Did she"--he pulled himself together for the big words--"did she take cyanide of potassium?"

"Yes, dear; so I understand."

"Will they take her away in a long black box?"

"She'll be buried, dear, of course. There'll have to be a funeral somewhere."

"Can I go to it?"

"Yes, dear, certainly. I'll go with you myself."

He said nothing more, and Miss Honiton felt the futility of trying to comfort him. There was no opening for comfort in that stony little face. All she could suggest to break the tension was to ask if he wouldn't like his supper.

He went to his supper and ate it. He ate it ruminantly, speechlessly. What had happened to him he could not measure; what was before him he could not probe. All he knew of himself was that he had become a clod of misery, with almost nothing to temper his desolation.

Two big tears rolled down his cheeks without his being aware of it. They did not, however, escape the eyes of a little girl who sat near him.

"Who's a cry-baby?" she shrieked, to the entertainment of the lookers-on. She pointed at him with her spoon. "A grea' big boy like that cryin' for his momma!"

He accepted the scorn as a tonic. "A grea' big boy like that cryin' for his momma," were the words with which he kept many a pang during the next few days from being more than a tearless anguish.

Miss Honiton was as good as her word as to going with him to the rooms which housed the long black box. This he understood to be all that now represented his mudda. She had tried to explain the place as an "undertaker's parlor," but the words were outside his vocabulary. In the same way the why and the wherefore of the ceremony were outside his intelligence. He and Miss Honiton went into the dim room, and stood near the thing he heard mentioned as "the body." After some mumbled reading they went out again, and back to the Swindon Street Home.

Back in the Swindon Street Home he was still without a wherefore or a why. He got up, he washed, he dressed, he ate, he went to bed again. He was in a dormitory now with three other little boys, all of them too deep in the problems of parents in jail or in parts unknown to offer him much fellowship. They cried when they were left alone in bed, or they cried in their sleep; but they cried. It was his own pride, and in no small measure his strength, that he didn't cry, unless he cried in dreams.

Everyone was good to him, Mrs. Crewdson and Miss Honiton especially, but no one could give him the clue to life which instinctively he clutched for. That one didn't stay forever in the Swindon Street Home he could see from observation. The children he had found there went away; other children came. Some of these stayed but a night or two. None of them stayed much longer. By those sixth and seventh senses which children develop when they are in trouble he divined that conferences were taking place on his behalf. Now and then he detected glances shot toward him by the matrons in discussion which told him that he was being talked about. It was easy to deduce that he was in the Swindon Street Home longer than was the custom because they didn't know what to do with him. He inferred that they didn't know what to do with him from the many questions which many people asked. Sometimes it was a man, more times it was a woman, but the questions were always along the lines of those of Miss Honiton as he came out from the children's Christmas Tree. Had he any relatives? Had he any friends? If he had they ought to look after him. It was hard for these kindly people to believe that he had no claim whatever on any member of the human race.

He began to hear the words, a State ward. Though they meant nothing to him at first, he strove, as he always did, with new words and expressions, to find their application. Then one evening, as Mrs. Crewdson was putting him to bed, she told him that that was what he had become.

"You see, darling, now that your father and mother are both dead, the whole country is going to adopt you. Isn't that nice? And it isn't everything. You're going to have a home--not a home like this--what we call an institution--but a real home--with a real father and mother in it, and real brothers and sisters."

He took this stolidly. He was not to be moved now by anything that could happen. A waif on the world, the world had the right to pitch him in any direction that it chose. All he could do with his own desires was to beat them into submission. He mustn't cry! His fears and his griefs alike focussed themselves into that resolve. It was the only way in which he could translate his stout-hearted will to endure.

VIII

To conduct him to his new home, Mrs. Crewdson gave up the whole of the morning she was supposed to spend in sleep after her all-night vigil. The home was in a little town a short distance up the Hudson. Though the railway journey was not long, it was the longest he had ever taken, and, once the river came within view, it was not without its excitements. His spirits began to rise with a sense of new adventure. There were things to look at, bridges, steamers, a man-o'-war at anchor, lumber yards, coal sheds, an open-air exhibit of mortuary monuments, and high overhead the clear cold blue of a January sky. On the other side of the river the wooded heights made a bold brown bastion, flecked here and there with snow.

As he had not asked where they were going, or the composition of the family with whom the Guardian of State Wards was placing him, his protectress permitted him to make his own discoveries. New faces, new contacts, new necessities, would help him to forget the old.

They got out at the station of Harfrey. Mrs. Crewdson carried the suitcase containing the wardrobe rescued when they had searched the rooms which he and his mother had occupied last. In front of the station they got on a ramshackle street car, which zigzagged up the face of the bank, rising steeply from the river, so reaching the little town. They turned sharply at the top of the ridge to run through the one long street. It was a mean-looking street of drab wooden dwellings and drab wooden shops, occupied mostly by people dependent on the grand seigneurs of the neighboring big "places." An ugly schoolhouse, an ugly engine house, two or three ugly churches, further defied that beauty of which God had been so generous.

Having got out at a corner at which the car stopped, they walked to a small wooden house with a mansard roof, standing back from the street. It was a putty-colored house, with window and door frames in flecked, anæmic yellow. Perched on the edge of the ridge, it had three stories at the back and but two in front. What had once been an orchard had dwindled now to three or four apple trees, the rest of the ground being utilized as a chicken run. As the day was sunny, a few Plymouth Rocks were scratching and pecking in the yard.

Having turned in here, they found themselves expected, the front door opening before they reached the cement slab in front of it. The greetings were all for Mrs. Crewdson, who was plainly an old friend. The boy went in only because Mrs. Crewdson went in, and in the same way proceeded to a cheery, shabby sitting room. Here there were books and magazines about, while a canary in a cage began to sing as soon as he heard voices. To a homeless little boy the haven was so sweet that he forgot to take off his cap.

The first few minutes were consumed in questions as to this one and that one, relatives apparently, together with data given and received as to certain recognized maladies. Mrs. Crewdson was getting better of her headaches, but Mrs. Tollivant still suffered from her varicose veins. Only when these preliminaries were out of the way and Mrs. Crewdson had thrown off her outer wraps, was the introduction accomplished.

"So I've brought you the boy! Tom, dear, this is Mrs. Tollivant who's going to take care of you. Your cap, Tom! I imagine," she continued, with an apologetic smile, "you'll find manners very rudimentary."

Obliged to take an early train back to New York, Mrs. Crewdson talked with veiled, confidential frankness. A boy of seven could not be supposed to seize the drift of her cautious phraseology, even if he heard some of it.

"So you know the main features of the case.... I told them it wouldn't be fair to you to let you assume so much responsibility without your knowing the whole.... With children of your own to think of, you couldn't expose them to a harmful influence unless you were put in a position to take every precaution against.... Not that we've seen anything ourselves.... But, of course, after such a bringing up there can't but be traces.... And such good material there.... I'm sure you'll find it so.... Personally, I haven't seen a human being in a long time to whom my heart has gone.... Only there it is.... An inheritance which can't but be...."

He didn't feel betrayed. He had nothing to resent. Mrs. Crewdson had proved herself his friend, and he trusted her. Without knowing all the words she used, he caught easily enough the nature of the sentiments they stood for. These he accepted meekly. He was a bad boy. His mother and he had been engaged in wicked practices. Dimly, in unallayed mental discomfort, he had been convinced of this himself; and now it was clear to everyone. If they hadn't known what to do with him it was because a bad boy couldn't fit rightly into a world where everyone else was good. A young evildoer, he had no rôle left but that of humility.

He was the more keenly aware of this after Mrs. Crewdson had bidden him farewell, and he was face to face with his new foster mother. A wiry little woman, quick in action and sharp in tongue, she would be kind to him, with a nervous, nagging kindness. He got this impression, as he got an odor or a taste, without having to define or analyze. Later in life, when he had come to observe something of the stamp which professions leave on personalities, he was not surprised that she should have worn herself out in school-teaching before marrying Andrew Tollivant, a book-keeper. As he sat now, just as Mrs. Crewdson had left him, his overcoat still on his back, his cap in his hand, his feet dangling because the chair was too high for him, she treated him as if he were a class.

"Now, little boy, before we go any farther, you and I had better understand each other."

With this brisk call to his attention, she sat down in front of him, frightening him to begin with.

"You know that this is now to be your home, and I intend to do my duty by you to the best of my ability. Mr. Tollivant will do the same. If you take the children in the right way I'm sure you'll find them friendly. They were very nice to the last little boy the Board of Guardians sent to us."

Staring in fascinated awe at the starry brightness of her eyes, and the wrinkles of worry around them, he waited in silence for more.

"But one or two things I hope you'll remember on your side. Perhaps you haven't heard that the Board has found it hard to get anyone to take you. You're old enough to know that where there are children in a family people are shy of a boy who's had just your history. But I've run the risk. It's a great risk, I admit, and may be dangerous to my own. Do you understand what I mean?"

"No, ma'am," he said, blankly.

"Then I'll tell you. There are two things children must learn as soon as they're able to learn anything. One is to be honest; the other is to tell the truth. You know what telling the truth is, don't you?"

He did know, but paralyzed by her earnestness, he denied the fact. "No, ma'am."

"So there you are! And I don't suppose you've been taught anything about honesty."

"No, ma'am."

"Then you must begin to learn."

He began to learn that minute. Still treating him as a class, she delivered a little lecture, such as a child of tender years could understand, on the two basic virtues of which he had pleaded ignorance. He listened as in a trance, his eyes fixed on her vacantly. Though seizing a disconnected word or two, fear kept him from getting the gist of it all, as he generally did.

"It's your influence on the children that I want you to beware of. Arthur is older than you, but he's only ten; and a boy with your experience could easily teach him a good deal of harm. Cilly is eight, and Bertie only five. You'll be careful with them, won't you? Do you know that if we lead others astray God will call us to account for it?"

"No, ma'am."

"Well, He will; and I want you to remember it, and be afraid. Unless you're afraid of God you'll never grow into the good boy I hope we're going to make of you."

The homily finished, he was instructed in the ways of the upper floor, where, in the sloping space under the eaves, he was to have his room. After this he came back to the sitting room, not knowing what else to do. He was in a daze. It was as if he had dropped on another planet where nothing was familiar. Whether to stand up or sit down he didn't know. He didn't know what to think, or what to think about. Cut loose from his bearings, he floated in mental space.

As standing seemed to commit him to least that was wrong, he stood. Standing implied looking out of the window, and looking out of the window showed him, about half past twelve, a well-built boy, rosy with the cold, noisy from exuberance of spirit, swinging in at the gate and brandishing a hockey stick. From her preparation of the dinner his mother ran to meet him at the door. She spoke in a loud whisper that easily reached the sitting room.

"Now be careful, Arthur. He's come. He's in there."

Arthur responded with noisy indifference. "Who? The crook?"

"Sh-h-h, dear! You mustn't call him that. We must help him to forget it, and to grow into being like ourselves."

Arthur grunted noncommittally. Presently he strolled into the sitting room, whistling a tune. With hands in his pockets, his bearing was that of an overlord. He made a circuit of the room, eying the new guest, as the new guest eyed him back.

"Hello?" the overlord said at last, with a faint note of interrogation.

Still whistling and still with his hands in his pockets, he strolled out again.

Tom Whitelaw's nerves had become so many runlets for shame. He was the crook! He knew the word as one which crooks themselves use contemptuously. If he should hear it again.... But happily Mrs. Tollivant had put her veto on its use.

The gate clicked again. Coming up the pathway, he saw a girl of about his own age, with a boy much younger who swung himself on crutches. All his movements were twisted and grotesque. His head was sunk into his shoulders as if he had no neck. His feet and legs wore metal braces. His face had the uncannily aged look produced by suffering. Without actually helping him, the little girl kept by his side maternally. She was a dainty little girl, very fair, with shiny yellow hair hanging down her back, like a fairy princess in a picture book. The boy looking out of the window fell in love with her at sight. He was sure that in her he would find a friend.

On entering she called out in a whiny voice, very musical to Tom Whitelaw's ear:

"Ma! Bertie's been a naughty boy. He wouldn't sing 'Pretty Birdling' for Miss Smallbones. I told him you'd punish him, and you will, won't you, ma?"

As there was no response to this, the young ones came to the door of the sitting room and looked in. They stared at the stranger, and the stranger stared at them, with the unabashed frankness of young animals. Having stared their fill, the son and daughter of the house went off to ask about dinner.

To Tom that dinner was another new experience. For the first time in his life he sat down to what is known as a family meal. Attempts had sometimes been made by well-meaning women in the tenements to rope him to their tables, but his mother had never permitted him to yield to them. Now he sat down with those of his own age, to be served like them, and on some sort of footing of equality. The honor was so great that he could hardly swallow. Second helpings were beyond him.

The afternoon was blank again. "You'll begin to go to school on Monday," Mrs. Tollivant had explained; but in the meantime he had the hours to himself. They were long. He was lonely. Having been given permission to go into the yard, he stood studying the Plymouth Rocks. Presently he was conscious of a light step behind him. Before he had time to turn around he also heard a voice. It was a whiny voice, yet sharp and peremptory.

"You stop looking at our hens."

The fairy princess had not come up to him; she had paused some two or three yards away. Her expression was so haughty that it hurt him. It hurt him more from her than from anybody else because of his admiration. He looked at her beseechingly, not for permission to go on studying the Plymouth Rocks, but for some shade of relenting. He got none. The sharp little face was as glittering and cold as one of the icicles hanging from the roof behind her. Heavy at heart, he turned to go into the house by the back door.

He had climbed most of the hill when the clear, whiny voice arrested him.

"Who's a crook?"

At this stab in the back he leaped round, fury in his dark blue eyes. But the fairy princess was used to fury in dark blue eyes, and knew how best to defy it. The tip of the tongue she thrust out at him added insolence to insult. He turned again, and, wounded in all his being, went on into the house.

Near the back door there was a sun parlor, and in it he saw Bertie, squatting in a small-wheeled chair built for his convenience. Bertie called to him invitingly.

"I've got a book."

"I've got a book, too," he returned, in Bertie's own spirit.

"You show me your book, and I'll show you mine."