Part 5

The proposal being fair, he went in search of his History of Mankind. In a few minutes he was seated on the floor beside Bertie's chair, exchanging literary criticisms. He liked Bertie. He had a premonition that Bertie was going to like him. After the disdain of the fairy princess, and the superciliousness of the overlord, this was comforting. Moreover, he could return Bertie's friendliness by doing things for him which no one else had time to do. He could push his wheeled chair; he could run his errands; he could fetch and carry; he would like doing it.

"I've got infantile paralysis."

"I've got a rubber ball."

"I've got a train."

"I've got a funny little man what dances."

Coming into the house, Cilly found them the best of friends, in the best of spirits. Without entering the sun-parlor, she spoke through the doorway, coldly.

"Bertie, I don't think momma would like you to act like that. I'll go and ask her."

Mrs. Tollivant hurried from the kitchen, scouring a saucepan as she looked in on them. Seeing nothing amiss, she went away again. Then as if distrusting her own vision, she came back. She came back more than once, anxiously, suspiciously. Bertie was enjoying himself with this boy picked out of the gutter. That the boy had been picked out of the gutter was not what troubled her, but that Bertie should enjoy himself in the lad's society. Wise enough not to put notions into Bertie's head, she stopped her ward later in the day, when she had the chance to speak to him alone.

"I saw you playing with Bertie. Well, that's all right. Only you'll remember your promise, won't you? You won't teach him anything harmful?"

"No, ma'am," the boy answered, humbly, as one who has a large selection of harmful things to impart.

IX

He had looked forward to Monday and school. After four days in the Tollivant household he was eager for relief from it. Except for Cilly's occasional, and always private, taunts, they were not unkind to him; they only treated him as an outcast whom they had been obliged to succor because no one else would do so. He had the same food and drink as they; his room was good enough; of whatever was material he had no complaint to make. There was only the distrust which rendered his bread bitter and the bed hard to lie upon. They didn't take him in as one of them. They kept him outside, an alien, an intruder.

It was again a new experience in that for the first time in his life he was doing without love. When he was Tom Coburn he had had plenty of it at the worst of times. The Swindon Street Home was full of it. In the Tollivant house it was the only thing weighed and measured and stinted. He couldn't, of course, make this analysis. He only knew that something on which his life depended was not given him.

He hoped to find it in the school. In any case the school would admit him to the larger life. It would bind him to that human family which he had so long craved to enter. In addition to that, it was at school you learned things.

He was the more eager to learn things for the reason that Mrs. Tollivant had declared him backward. In the primary school Cilly was in the second grade; he must go into the first. He would be with children a year younger than himself. But the humiliation would be an incentive to ambition. He had already decided that only by "knowing things" should he be able to lift himself out of his despised estate.

The school session was all he had hoped for. Miss Pollard, the teacher, put in touch with his story by Mrs. Tollivant, kept him near to her, and watched over him. He learned to discriminate between _his_, _has_, and _had_, as matters of orthography, as well as between _cat_, _car_, and _can_. That twice two made four and twice four made eight added much to his understanding of numbers. He sang _Roving the Old Homeland_, while Miss Pollard pointed on the map to the places as they were named.

From Plymouth town to Plymouth town The Pilgrims made their way; The Puritans settled Salem, And Boston on the Bay.

The air had a rhythm and a lilt which allowed for the inclusion of any reasonable number of redundant syllables.

The Dutch lived in New Amsterdam, Where the blue waters fork; The English came and conquered it, And turned it into New York.

A little history, a little geography, being taught by the simple method of doggerel, much pleasure was evoked by the exercise of healthy lungs. Listening to her new pupil, Miss Pollard discovered a sweet treble that had never before been aware of itself, with a linnet's joy in piping. A linnet's joy was his joy throughout the whole morning, with no more than a slight flaw in his ecstasy in the thought of two hours in the Tollivant home before he came back for the afternoon.

As Cilly called for Bertie at the kindergarten, he walked homeward by himself. Happy with a happiness never experienced before, he had not noticed that his school-mates hung away from him, tittering as he passed. To well-dressed little boys and girls his worn old cap, his frayed knickerbockers, and above all his cheap gray overcoat with a stringy sheepskin collar, naturally marked him for derision. They would have marked him for derision even had his story not been known to everyone.

He went singing on his way, stepping manfully to the measure.

The Dutch lived in New Amsterdam, Where the blue waters fork; The English came and conquered it, And turned it into New York.

They massed themselves behind him, convulsed by his lack of self-consciousness. The little girls giggled; the boys attempted to make snowballs from snow too powdery to hold together. One lad found a frozen potato which he hurled in such a way as to skim close to the singing figure while just missing it. Tom Whitelaw, unsuspicious of ill-will, turned round in curiosity. He was greeted by a hoot from the crowd, but from whom he couldn't tell.

"Who's the boy what his mother was put in jail?"

The hoot became a chorus of jeers. By one after another the insult was taken up.

"Who's the boy what his mother was put in jaaa-il?"

As far as he was able to distinguish, the voices of the little girls were the louder. In their merriment they screamed piercingly.

"Gutter-snipe! Gutter-rat! Crook! Crook! Crook! Who's the boy what his mother was put in ja-aa-ail?"

Crimson, with clenched fists, with gnashing teeth, with tears of rage in his eyes, he stood his ground while they came on. They swept toward him in a semicircle of which he made the center. Very well! So much the better! He could spring on at least one of them, and dash his brains out on the ground. There was no ferocity he would not enjoy putting into execution.

He sprang, but amid the yells of the crowd his prey dodged and escaped him. The semicircle broke. Instead of advancing in massed formation, it danced round him now as forty or fifty imps. The imps bewildered him, as _banderilleros_ bewilder a bull in the ring. He didn't know which to attack. When he lunged at one, the charge was diverted by another, so that he struck at the air wildly. Shrieks of mockery at these failures maddened him, with the heartbreaking madness of a loving thing goaded out of all semblance to itself. He panted, he groaned, he dashed about foolishly, he stumbled, he fell. When pelted with pebbles or scraps of ice, he was hardly aware of the rain upon his head.

But the mob swept on, leaving him behind. At gates and corners the boy baiters disappeared, hungry for their dinners. Most of them forgot him as soon as they had turned their backs. It was easy for them to stop for awhile since they could begin again.

He was alone on the gritty, icy slope surrounding the schoolhouse. There was no comfort for him in the world. Faintly he remembered as a satisfaction that he hadn't cried, but even this consolation was cold. He wondered if he couldn't kill himself.

He did not kill himself, though he pondered ways and means of doing it. He came to the conclusion that it would be foolish to kill himself before killing some of his tormentors. He prayed about it that night, his first prayer, except for the one taught him on Christmas Eve by Mrs. Crewdson.

To the family devotions, for which all were assembled about eight o'clock, before the younger children went to bed, Mr. Tollivant had begun to add a new petition.

"And, O Heavenly Father, take pity on the little stranger within our gates, even as we have welcomed him into our home. Blot out his past from Thy book. Give him a new heart. Make him truthful and honest especially. Help him to be gentle, obedient...."

But savagely the boy intervened on his own behalf. "O Heavenly Father, don't! Don't give me a new heart, or make me gentle and obedient, till I kill some of them fellows that called me a crook, for Jesus Christ's sake, Amen."

X

He killed none of the fellows who called him a crook, though during the first two years of his schooling he was called a crook pretty often. Whatever grade he was in, he was always that boy who differs from other boys, and is therefore the black swan in a flock of white ones. Whatever his progress, he made it to the tune of his own history. He was a gutter-snipe. His mother had killed herself in jail! Before she had killed herself both he and she had been arrested for thieving in a shop! There was not a house in Harfrey where the tale was not told. There was never a boy or girl in the school who hadn't learned it before making his acquaintance.

Besides, they said of him, he would have been "different" anyhow. Being "different" was an offense less easily pardoned than being criminal. Dressed more poorly than they, and with no claims of a social kind, he carried himself with that bearing which they could only describe as putting on airs. It was Cilly Tollivant who first brought this charge home to him.

"But I don't, Cilly," he protested, earnestly. "I don't know how to be any other way."

Cilly was by this time growing sisterly. She couldn't live in the house with him and not feel her heart relenting, and though she disdained him in public, as her own interests compelled her to do, in private she tried to help him.

"Don't know how to be any other way!" she exclaimed, indignantly. "Tom Whitelaw, you make me sick. Don't you know even how to _talk_ right?"

"Yes, but...."

"There you go," she interrupted, bitterly. "Why can't you say _Yep_, like anybody else?"

He took the suggestion humbly. He would try. His only explanation of his eccentricity was that _Yep_ and _Nope_ didn't suit his tongue.

But adopting Yep and Nope, as he might have adopted words from a foreign language, adopting much else that was crude and crass and vulgar and noisy and swaggering and standardized, according to schoolboy notions of the standard, he still found himself "different." For one thing, he looked different. Debase his language as he might, or coarsen his manners, or stultify his impulses, he couldn't keep himself from shooting up tall and straight, with a carriage of the head which was in itself an offense to those who knew themselves inferior. It made nothing easier for him that his teachers liked and respected him. "Teacher's pet" was a term of reproach hardly less painful than crook or gutter-snipe. But he couldn't help learning easily; he couldn't help answering politely when politely spoken to; he couldn't help the rapture of his smile when a friendly word came his way. All this told against him. He was guyed, teased, worried, tortured. If there was a cap to be snatched it was his. If there was one of a pair of rubber shoes to be stolen or hidden it was his. If there was an exercise book to be grabbed and thrown up into a tree where the owner could be pelted while he clambered after it, it was his. Because he was poor, friendless, defenseless, and yet with damnable pride written all over him, it became a recognized law of the school that any meanness done to him would be legitimate.

But in his third year at the Tollivants the persecution waned, and in the fourth it stopped. His school-mates grew. Growing, they developed other instincts. Fair play was one of them; admiration for pluck was another.

"You've got to hand it to that kid," Arthur Tollivant, now fourteen, had been heard to say in a circle of his friends. "He's stood everything and never squealed a yelp. Some young tough, believe me!"

This good opinion was reflected among the lads of Tom Whitelaw's own age. They had never been cruel; they had only been primitive. Having passed beyond that stage, they forgot to no small degree what they had done while in it. The boy who at seven was the crook was at eleven Whitey the Sprinter. He walked to and from school with the best of them. With the best of them he played and fought and swore privately. If he put on airs it was the airs of being a much sadder dog than he was, daring to smoke a cigarette and go home with the smell of the wickedness on his breath.

So, outwardly, Tom Whitelaw came in for two full years of good-natured toleration. If it did not go further than toleration it was because he was a State ward. On the baseball or the football team he might be welcomed as an equal; in homes there was discrimination. He was not invited to parties, and among the young people of Harfrey parties were not few. Girls who met him at the Tollivants' didn't speak to him outside. When Cilly, now being known as Cecilia, had her friends to celebrate her birthday, he remained in his room with no protest from the family at not joining them. None the less, it was a relief to be free from jeering in the streets, as well as from being reminded every day at school of his mother's tragedy. It was a relief to him; but it was no more.

For more than that the wound had gone too deep. Outwardly, he accepted their approaches; in his heart he rejected them, biding his time. He was biding his time, not with longings for revenge--he was too sensible now for that--but in the hope of passing on and forgetting them. By the time he was twelve he was already aware of his impulse toward growth.

It was in his soul as a secret conviction, the seed's knowledge of its own capacity to germinate. Most of the boys and girls around him he could judge, not by a precocious worldly wisdom, but by his gift for intuitive sizing up. Their range was so far and no farther, and they themselves were aware of it. They would become clerks and plumbers and carpenters and school-teachers and shoe dealers and provision men, and whatever else could reach its fulfillment in a small country town. He himself felt no limit. Life was big. He knew he could expand in it. To nurse resentments would be small, and would keep him small. All he asked was to forget them, to forget, too, those who called them forth; but to that end he must be far away.

XI

The road to this Far-away began in the summer vacation of the year when he was supposed to be twelve. It was the year when he first went to work, though the work was meant to last for no more than a few weeks.

Mr. Quidmore, a market gardener at Bere, in Connecticut, some seven or eight miles eastward toward the Sound, had come over to ask Mr. Tollivant for a few hours' work in straightening out his accounts. Straightening out accounts for men who were but amateurs at bookkeeping was a means by which Mr. Tollivant eked out his none-too-generous salary.

It was a Sunday afternoon in June. They were in the yard, looking at the Plymouth Rocks behind their defenses of chicken-wire. That is, Mr. Quidmore was looking at the Plymouth Rocks, but Tom was looking at Mr. Quidmore. Mr. and Mrs. Tollivant were giving their guest information as to how they raised their hens and marketed their eggs.

It was a family affair. Mrs. Tollivant prepared the food; Cecilia fed the birds; Art hunted for the eggs; Bertie and Tom packed them. Mr. Quidmore was moved to say:

"I wish I had a fine boy like your Art to help me with the berrypicking. Good money in it. Three a week and his keep for as long as the strawberries hold out."

Tom saw Mrs. Tollivant shake her head at her husband behind Mr. Quidmore's back. This meant disapproval. Disapproval could not be disapproval of the work, but of Mr. Quidmore. Art already gave his holiday services to a dairy for a dollar less than Mr. Quidmore's offer, and no keep. It was the employer, then, and not the employment that Mrs. Tollivant distrusted.

And yet Mr. Quidmore fascinated Tom. He had never before seen anyone whose joints had the looseness of one of those toys which you worked with a string. He was so slim, too, that you got little or no impression of a body beneath his flapping clothes. Nervously restless, he walked with a shuffle of which the object seemed the keeping of his shoes from falling off. When he talked or laughed one side of his long thin face was screwed up as if by some early injury or paralysis. The right portion of his lips could smile, while the left trembled into a rictus. This made his speech slower and more drawling than Tom was accustomed to hear; but his voice was naturally soft, with a quality in it like cream. It was the voice that Tom liked especially.

In reply to the suggestion about Art, Mr. Tollivant replied, as one who sees only a well-meant business proposal,

"We'd like nothing better, Brother Quidmore; but the fact is Art has about as much as he can do for the rest of his vacation." He waved his hand toward Tom. "What do you say to this boy?"

At the glorious suggestion Tom's heart began to fail for fear. He was not a fine boy like Arthur Tollivant. The possibility of earning three dollars a week, to say nothing of his board, was too much like the opening up of an Aladdin's palace for the hope to be more than deceptive. It was part of his daily humiliation never to have had any money of his own. The paternity of the State paid for his food, shelter, and education; but it never supplied him with cash, or with any cash that he ever saw. To have three dollars a week jingling in his pocket would not only lift him out of his impotent dependence, but would make him a man. While Mr. Quidmore walked round him, inspecting him as if he were a dog or pig or other small animal for sale, he held himself with straightness, dignity, and strength. If he was for sale he would do his best to be worthy of his price.

Mr. Quidmore nodded toward Mr. Tollivant. "State ward, ain't he?"

Mr. Tollivant admitted that he was.

"Youngster whose moth--"

Mrs. Tollivant interrupted kindly. "You needn't be afraid of that. He's been with us for five years. I think I may say that all traces of the past have been outlived. We can really give him a good character."

Tom was grateful. Mr. Quidmore examined him again. At last he shuffled up to him, throwing his arm across his shoulder, and drawing him close to himself.

"What about it, young fellow? Want to come?"

Entirely won by this display of kindliness, the boy smiled up into the twisted face. "Yes, sir."

"Then that's settled. Put your duds together, and we'll go along. I guess," he added to Mr. Tollivant, "that you can stretch a point to let him come, and get your permit from the Guardians to-morrow."

Mr. Tollivant agreeing that after five years' care he could venture as much as this, they drove over to Bere in Mr. Quidmore's dilapidated motor car. Mrs. Quidmore met them at the door. Her husband called to her:

"Hello, there! Got a new hand to help you with the strawberries."

She answered, dejectedly. "If he's as good as some of the other new hands you've picked up lately--"

"Oh, rats! Give us a rest! If I brought the angel Gabriel to pick the berries you'd see something to find fault with."

That there was a rift within the lute of this couple's happiness was clear to Tom before he had climbed out of the machine.

"Where's he to sleep?" Mrs. Quidmore asked in her tone of discontent.

"I suppose he can sleep in the barn, can't he?"

"I wouldn't put a dog to sleep in that barn, nasty, smelly, rotten place."

"Well, put him to sleep where you like. He'll get three a week and his keep while he's here, and that's all I'm responsible for." Mrs. Quidmore turned and went into the house. Her husband winked at Tom as man to man. "Can you beat it? Always like that. God! I don't know how I stand it. Get in."

Tom got in, finding an interior as slack as Mrs. Quidmore herself. The Tollivant house, with four children in it, was often belittered, but with a little tidying it became spick and span. Here the housekeeping wore an air of hopelessness. Whoever did it did it without heart.

"God! I hate to come into this place," its master confided to Tom, as they stood in the hall, of which the rug lay askew, while a mirror hung crooked on the wall. "You and me could keep the shack looking dandier than this if she wasn't here at all. I wish to the Lord...."

But before the week was out the boy had won over Mrs. Quidmore, and begun to make her fond of him. Because he was eager to be useful, he helped her in the house, showing solicitude, too, on her personal account. A low-keyed, sad-eyed woman who did nothing to make herself attractive, she blamed her husband for perceiving the loss of her attractiveness.

"He's bound to me," she would complain, tearfully, to the boy, as he dried the dishes she had washed. "It's his duty to be fond of me. But he ain't. There's fifty women he likes better than he does me."

This note of married infelicity was new to Tom, especially as it reached him from both parties to the contract.

"God, how she gets my goat! Sometimes I think how much I'd enjoy seeing her stretched out with a bullet through her head. I tell you that the fellow who'd do that for me wouldn't be sorry in the end...."

To the boy these words were meaningless. The creamy drawl with which they were uttered robbed them of the vicious or ferocious, making them mere humorous explosions. He could laugh at them, and yet he laughed with a feeling of discomfort.

The discomfort was the greater because in kindness to him lay the one point as to which the couple were agreed. Making no attempt to reconcile elements so discordant, all he could do was to soften the conditions which each found distasteful. He kept the house tidier for the man; he did for the woman a few of the things her husband overlooked.

"It's him that ought to do that," she would point out, in dull rebellion. "He's doing it for some other woman I'll be bound. Who _is_ that woman that he meets?"

Conjugal betrayal was also new to Tom, and not easily comprehensible. That a man with a wife should also be "going with a girl" was a possibility that had never come within his experience while living with the Tollivants. He had heard a good many things from Art, as also from some other boys, but this event seemed to have escaped even their wide observation. It would have escaped his own had not Mrs. Quidmore harped on it.

"I do believe he'd like to see me in my grave. I'm in their way, and they'd like to get me out of it. Oh, you needn't tell me! Couldn't you keep an eye on him, and tell me what she's like?"

For Mrs. Quidmore's sake he watched Mr. Quidmore, but as he didn't know what he was watching him for the results were not helpful. And he liked them both. He might have said that he loved them both, since loving came to him so easily. Mrs. Quidmore washed and mended his clothes, and whenever she went to Harfrey or some other town she added to his wardrobe. Mr. Quidmore was forever dropping into his ear some gentle, honeyed confidence of which Mrs. Quidmore was the butt. Neither of them ever scolded him, or overworked him. He was in the house almost as a son. And then one day he learned that he was to be there altogether as a son.

XII