Part 6

Through the open door the buzz of the katydids was beginning tentatively. In the intervals of William’s gulps a faint bass note warned them from the swamp:

“_Better go rrround! Better go round!_”

Mrs. Slater filled their plates in silence. Henry slapped a mosquito and chuckled interiorly at some reminiscence. A cow-bell jangled sadly out of the gathering dusk.

Ardelia’s nerves strained and snapped. Her eyes grew wild.

“Fer Gawd’s sake, _talk_!” she cried sharply. “Are youse dumbies?”

❦

The morning dawned fresh and fair; the trees and the brown turf smelled sweet, the homely barnyard noises brought a smile to Miss Forsythe’s sympathetic face, as she waited for Ardelia to join her in a drive to the station. But Ardelia did not smile. Her eyes ached with the great green glare, the strange scattered objects, the long unaccustomed vistas. Her cramped feet wearied for the smooth pavements, her ears hungered for the dear familiar din. She scowled at the winding, empty road; she shrieked at the passing oxen.

At the station Miss Forsythe shook her limp little hand.

“Good-by, dear,” she said. “I’ll bring the other little children back with me. You’ll enjoy that. Good-by.”

“I’m comin’, too,” said Ardelia.

“Why—no, dear—you wait for us. You’d only turn around and come right back, you know,” urged Miss Forsythe, secretly touched by this devotion to herself.

“Come back nothin’,” said Ardelia doggedly. “I’m goin’ home.”

“Why—why, Ardelia! Don’t you really like it?”

“Naw, it’s too hot.”

Miss Forsythe stared.

“But Ardelia, you don’t want to go back to that horrible smelly street? Not truly?”

“Betcher life I do!” said Ardelia.

The train steamed in; Miss Forsythe mounted the steps uneasily, Ardelia clinging to her hand.

“It’s so lovely and quiet,” the young lady pleaded.

Ardelia shuddered. Again she seemed to hear that fiendish, mournful wailing:

“_Knee deep! Knee deep! Knee deep!_”

“It smells so good, Ardelia! All the green things!”

Good! that hot, rustling breeze of noonday, that damp and empty evening wind!

They rode in silence. But the jar and jolt of the engine made music in Ardelia’s ears; the crying of the hot babies, the familiar jargon of the newsboy:

“N’Yawk moyning paypers! Woyld! Joynal!” were a breath from home to her little cockney heart.

They pushed through the great station, they climbed the steps of the elevated track, they jingled on a cross-town car. And at a familiar corner Ardelia slipped loose her hand, uttered a grunt of joy, and Miss Forsythe looked for her in vain. She was gone.

But late in the evening, when the great city turned out to breathe, and sat with opened shirt and loosened bodice on the dirty steps; when the hurdy-gurdy executed brassy scales and the lights flared in endless sparkling rows; when the trolley gongs at the corner pierced the air, and feet tapped cheerfully down the cool stone steps of the beer-shop, Ardelia, bare-footed and abandoned, nibbling at a section of bologna sausage, secure in the hope of an olive to come, cakewalked insolently with a band of little girls behind a severe policeman, mocking his stolid gait, to the delight of Old Dutchy, who beamed approvingly at her prancings.

“Ja, ja, you trow out your feet goot. Some day we pay to see you, no? You like to get back already?”

Ardelia performed an audacious _pas seul_ and reached for her olive.

“Ja, danky shun, Dutchy,” she said airily, and as the hurdy-gurdy moved away, and the oboe of the Italian band began to run up and down the scale, she sank upon her cool step, stretched her toes and sighed.

“Gee!” she murmured, “N’Yawk’s the place!”

EDGAR, THE CHOIR BOY UNCELESTIAL

You all know how they look in the pictures—enlarged photogravures, mostly: they have appealing violet eyes and drooping mouths and oval faces. They tip their heads back and to the side, and there is usually a broad beam of light falling across their little official nighties. People frame them in Flemish oak and hang them over the piano, and little girls long to resemble them.

But Edgar was not that kind. So greatly did he differ, in fact, that even the choirmaster, who ought to have known better, was deceived, and discovered him with difficulty. When that gentleman confronted them in the parish house, a mob of suspicious little boys, shoving, growling, snickering, and otherwise fulfilling their natures, he promptly selected Tim Mullaly, who possessed to an amazing degree the violet eyes and the drooping mouth and the oval face, as his first soprano. The choirmaster was young in years and his profession.

But Tim refused to sing the scale alone, and as the others scorned to accompany him in this exercise, Mr. Fellowes, determinedly patient, suggested in the hilarious “come-on-boys!” fashion consecrated to childhood by adults, that they should all join in some popular melody, to limber them up and dispel their uneasiness.

“What shall we sing?” he called out breezily, from the piano-stool, faintly indicating a “ragtime” rhythm with his left hand, still facing them as he searched the forbidding countenances before him for a gleam of friendship.

After all, they were human boys, and they could all sing after a fashion, or they would not have been induced by relatives who had read the qualifications for choir membership to attend this trying function.

“’Hot time!’” burst from one of the youngsters.

“All right!” and the inviting melody drew them in; soon they were shouting lustily. Raucous altos, nasal sopranos, fatal attempts to compass a bass—at any rate, they were started. The verse was over, the chorus had begun, when a sudden sound sent the choirmaster’s heart to his throat, his hands left the keys. Into the medley of coarse, boyish shouting dropped a silvery thread of purest song, a very bird-note. For a moment it flowed on the level of the chorus, then suddenly, with an indescribable leap, a slurring rush, it rose to an octave above and led them all. The choirmaster twirled around on the stool.

“Who’s that? Which boy is singing up there?” he demanded excitedly. There was no reply. They grinned consciously at each other; one could imagine them all guilty.

“Come, come, boys! Don’t be silly—who was it?”

Silence, of the most sepulchral sort. Mr. Fellowes shrugged his shoulders, swung round again, and started the second verse. They dashed through it noisily; he picked out here and there a sweet little treble, one real alto. But his ears were pricked for something better, and presently it came. The rhythm was too enticing.

“_Please, oh, please, oh, don’t you let me fall——_”

“By George, he’s a human blackbird!”

“_You’re all mine, an’ I love you best of all——_”

“That’s high C!”

“_An you mus’ be my man, ’r I’ll have no man at all——_”

The choirmaster burst into a joyous if somewhat reedy tenor.

“_There’ll be a hot time in the old town to-night!_”

He whirled about, still singing, and caught the ecstatic, dreamy gaze of Tim Mullaly.

“It’s you!” he cried, pouncing on him. Tim giggled feebly.

“Yessir,” he said.

“Now sing this scale, and I’ll give you five cents.”

An envious sigh quavered through the parish hall.

Tim threw back his head and opened his drooping mouth.

“_Do, re——_”

There was a flash of blue gingham, a snarl of rage, a sound as of fifty pounds of small boy suddenly seated on the floor.

“Where’s yer fi’ cents?” a new voice inquired easily.

The choirmaster perceived with amazement that the owner of the voice, a freckled boy with an excessively _retroussé_ nose, was sitting on the prostrate Tim.

“What is the meaning of this? Get up!” he said sternly. “What’s your name? I can’t have any of this sort of thing in my choir!”

The freckled boy did not rise. In fact, he seated himself more comfortably on Master Mullaly, and demanded again:

“Where’s yer fi’ cents?”

The choirmaster stepped forward and seized the offender’s collar. As his fingers tightened, the captive burst into the chorus of the moment before—it was the blackbird voice! So obstinate was the choirmaster’s first impression that he looked instinctively at the fallen Tim to catch the notes, but Tim was struggling meekly but firmly for breath, and this free trilling came from above him. The choirmaster relaxed his hold.

“It was you all the time!” he said in a stupor of surprise.

“Yep,” replied the singer, “it was me. Did yer think it was him?” with a slight jounce to indicate his victim.

“Get up, won’t you, and sing me something else,” the choirmaster urged. The boy rose promptly.

“What’ll I sing?” he returned amicably. There had been a different tone in the choirmaster’s voice.

“Happy Home! Happy Home!” the crowd demanded. They had stood to one side in the most neutral manner during the brief struggle that had laid Tim low, and listened respectfully to the brief colloquy that followed. It was evident that past experience had suggested this attitude on their part.

The choirmaster looked relieved. He had no narrow prejudices, but he realized that a hymn like “My Happy Home” comes with good effect from the parish-hall windows.

“Where’s your mouth organ?” demanded the freckled one of a larger boy in the crowd. The latter promptly produced the instrument in question, cuddled it in both hands a moment after the fashion of the virtuoso, and drew forth the jerky and complex series of strains peculiar to it. It was evidently a prelude—a tune vaguely familiar to the choirmaster. Suddenly the boy’s voice burst into this sombre background:

“_I’d leave my yappy yome fer you, Oo-oo-oo-oo!_”

The choirmaster sighed ecstatically. A voice so tender, so soft, so rich in appealing inflections he had never heard. The repeated vowels cooed, they caressed, they allured.

“_You’re the nices’ man n’ I ever knoo, Oo-oo-oo-oo!_”

If you remember how Madame Melba cooes, “Edgardo! Edgardo-o-o!” when she sings the mad scene from “Lucia,” you will have an idea of the liquid, slipping notes of that snub-nosed, freckled boy.

“What’s your name?” asked the choirmaster respectfully.

It appeared at first to be Egg-nog, but resolved into Edgar Ogden under careful cross-examination, and its owner agreed to attend three weekly rehearsals and two Sunday services for the princely salary of twenty-five cents a week, the same to be increased in proportion to his progress.

Subsequent efforts proved that it was utterly hopeless to attempt to teach him to read music. When Tim Mullaly and the stupidest alto in the United States—as the choirmaster assured him—could stumble through what was considerately known as a duet at sight, and that was the work of many months, Edgar was still learning his solos by ear. It was wasted effort to insist, and the choirmaster spent long hours and nearly wore his forefinger to the bone, fixing in his pupil’s mind the succession of notes in anthems and _Te Deums_. Once learned, however, he never forgot them, and Mr. Fellowes thrilled with pride as the silver stream of his voice flowed higher, higher, above the organ, beyond the choir at his side, till the people in the church sighed and craned their necks to look at the wonderful boy.

As a matter of fact, they looked, most of them, at Tim Mullaly, who, fresh from his Saturday bath, in his little cassock and cotta, realized the dreams of the most exigent lithographer. He stood next to Edgar, and owing to a certain weakness of mind invariably followed with his lips the entire libretto, so to speak, of the work in hand. As his appealing expression and violet eyes were undetachable, he had all the effect of the soloist, and received most of the credit from that vast majority who fail to distinguish one little boy, like one Chinaman, from another, unless he possesses some such salient feature as Tim’s pleading gaze.

This little apprehension was mercifully unsuspected by Edgar, otherwise it is to be feared that the services of a physician would have been required in the Mullaly household. Not that Edgar had any professional pride in his voice. He possessed, according to his own ideas, many more valuable and decorative qualities. His power of song was entirely hereditary, and came to him from his father, who was of English descent. The elder Mr. Ogden, whom rumor reported to run frequent risks of being bitten like a serpent and stung like an adder at the last, had mounted to a dizzy height in the Knights of Pythias entirely through his voice, a sweet and powerful tenor, and was accustomed to spend the greater part of his time in committing to memory and practising dramatic songs of a highly moral variety with choruses on this order:

“_‘You lie! I saw you steal that ace!’ A crashing blow right in the face— A pistol shot and death’s disgrace Was in that pack of cards!_”

At the proper point, a friend in another room would shoot off a blank cartridge to a stormy accompaniment on the Pythian piano, and the Knights would become so appreciative that the soloist, to borrow a classical phrase, rarely got home until morning. What time Mr. Ogden found himself able to spare from getting up his repertoire was judiciously employed in borrowing money for the purchase of new articles of regalia, for with the Pythians to rise was to shine.

His elder son Samuel, familiarly known as Squealer, inherited both his father’s tendencies, and was in great demand among the saloons and pool-rooms, where he sang ballads of a tender and moral nature, dealing mostly with the Home, and the sanctity of the family relation in general. One of these in especial, in which Squealer assumed a hortatory attitude and besought an imaginary parent to “take her back, Dad,” adding in a melting baritone,

“_She’s my mother and your wife!_”

so affected a certain bar-room _habitué_, whose habit of chasing his family through the tenement with a carving-knife had led them to move out of town, that he had been known to lay his head on the bar and weep audibly.

It was a moot point among his friends as to which was Squealer’s real _chef d’œuvre_, the song just mentioned or another which ran,

“_You’ll only have one mother, boy, You can’t treat her too well!_”

Very often after singing this Squealer would become too affected to endure the thought of what the song described as “the old home, empty now,” and would repair to some scene which drew less heavily on the emotions, thus assuring a sleepless if wrathful night to Mrs. Ogden, and fluent altercation on his return to the old home.

Mrs. Ogden was not musical herself, and devoted most of her energies to fine laundry work, a less emotional but more lucrative occupation. Edgar’s professional duties interested her chiefly by reason of the weekly salary, now grown to fifty cents, of which one-tenth was allowed him for his private purse, the remainder being applied to the very obvious necessities of the household. His consequent position as wage-earner was firmly established, and his mother, though she cherished a natural contempt for the mental calibre of any young man who considered Edgar’s voice worth fifty cents a week, saw to it that so remunerative an organ received all the consideration it deserved.

To Mr. Ogden’s undisguised horror, two new suits of under flannels were purchased at the beginning of the winter, and shiny storm rubbers were urged upon the artist’s reluctant feet on every slushy day. The most unconvincing cough was rewarded with black licorice, purchased from the general household fund, and when Edgar had the measles, the Prince of Wales, to use Mr. Ogden’s irritated phrase, might have been glad to taste the mutton broth and cocoa that fattened that impudent kid.

Nor was her system limited to this soft indulgence, as the occasion of one of the choirmaster’s visits proved. Fearful lest the purpose of his call should become evident too abruptly, he began by one of his customary eulogies of his first soprano’s voice. She received his enthusiasm coldly, indicated forcibly her own lack of musical ability, and boasted, with a pride inexplicable to one who has not been accustomed to consider this gift synonymous with penitentiary qualifications, that she could not carry a tune. On his mentioning somewhat diffidently that Edgar’s fines for tardiness, absence, etc., must in the nature of things make appreciable inroads upon his salary, the interview assumed a different aspect.

Wiping her hands on her apron, Mrs. Ogden assured the choirmaster that if Edgar wasn’t earning his wages she’d attend to that part of it, all right. So intent was her expression that he felt obliged to put in a plea for gentleness, on the ground that such a delicate mechanism as the human throat could not be too carefully treated. Mrs. Ogden assured him that she was not in the habit of applying her disciplinary measures to the throat, and the audience was at an end. The day happened to be Saturday, and at the evening rehearsal it seemed to the choirmaster that things had never gone so smoothly. After all, he thought, it needed a mother to reason with the boys—he had made several calls of the same nature that week—a mother knew best how to influence them. And he was abundantly justified in his conclusions.

On Sunday afternoon Edgar marched into the church, impassive and uninteresting to the outward vision, with Tim beside him, rapt and effective. Edgar stared vacantly into space, his feet marked the time at the proper distance from the crucifer, a mild and stolid youth, who could never understand why it was that just as he turned the corner and began to climb the steps to the choir-stalls his cassock should suddenly tighten below the knees and almost throw him. Edgar’s partner in the column could have informed him, but prudence rendered him uncommunicative.

“_The brightest hopes we cherish here, How fast they tire and faint!_”

Edgar’s brows met, he took a longer stride in reaching for his B flat, and the crucifer grasped his pole nervously and broke step a moment—his cassock had caught again.

“_How many a spot defiles the robe That wraps an earthly saint!_”

“He sings like an angel,” the rector mused. “How clumsy that Waters boy is!”

Once through with the Psalter, which he loathed because he was not always certain of his pointing, and could not endure Tim’s look of horror at his occasional slips, Edgar, having hunched his shoulders at just the angle to prevent the tenor behind him from looking across into the transept, and ostentatiously opened his service at the _Nunc dimittis_, so that Tim might by his innocent nudging and indications of his own _Magnificat_ page call a frown and a fine from the choirmaster, devoted himself to a study of the rose-window over the transept.

The decoration of this window was a standing subject of quarrel between him and the first alto, Howard Potter. Edgar had advanced the somewhat untenable proposition that the various figures in the stained-glass windows represented the successive rectors and choirmasters of St. Mark’s. Howard had objected that the dedications under the windows referred (as he had discovered by adroit questions that gave his informants no idea whatever of what he was driving at) to persons who had never held office of any kind in the church.

Edgar had then fallen back on the theory that the figures were portraits of the persons whom the windows commemorated. Howard triumphantly queried why, then, should the legend, “Sacred to the memory of Walter, beloved husband of Mary Bird Ferris,” appear under a tall woman in dark green glass with a most feminine amount of hair and a long red sash? Edgar was staggered, but suddenly recalled his father’s glowing account of a costume ball given by the Knights of Pythias, in which many of the Knights appeared in women’s clothes, one in particular, the proprietor of a fish market, having rented a long and flowing wig the better to deceive his fellow-Knights and their delighted guests. This had impressed Edgar as intensely humorous; he greatly enjoyed picturing the scene to his imagination, and he strengthened his wavering infallibility by declaring that the beloved husband of Mary Bird Ferris was beyond doubt a Pythian in costume.

This had silenced Howard for a week, but one afternoon at evensong, just before the electric bell sounded in the robing-room to summon them to the hall, he had rapidly inquired in a hissing whisper, “Who that white puppy carryin’ the flag in the round window on the side, where the bird was, was a picture of?”

The bird was the lectern-eagle, and neither of the antagonists had ever seen a lamb. Edgar had recognized the fact that it was a poorly drawn puppy, and he did not believe that it could possibly have balanced in one crooked-up knee and at that perilous angle any such banner as the artist had given it. It was also crushingly apparent to him that no Knight of Pythias, with all the assistance in the world, could transform himself into such a woolly, curly, four-legged object as that.

Then why should the brass plate beneath it declare that this rose-window was placed in “loving memory of Alice Helen Worden, who departed this life June nineteenth, eighteen hundred and ninety”? That was no name for a puppy, to begin with. The whole affair irritated Edgar exceedingly. He saw no explanation whatever. He perceived that he should have to fight the first alto. This was not only a great responsibility in itself, but the necessity of evading the parental eye added to the nervous strain, and the consciousness that on this particular Sunday afternoon Mr. Ogden occupied one of the rear pews, with the idea of seeing how he behaved during service, and subsequently accompanying him home, so weighed upon the spirits of the first soprano that William Waters accomplished the choir steps, in the recessional, without a stumble.

Throughout the service Edgar was as one in a dream. His vision was turned inward, and he even forgot his effective trick of frightening the choirmaster into cold chills by looking vacantly uncertain of the proper moment to take up the choir’s share of the responses. The fact that he invariably came in at the precise beat had never fortified Mr. Fellowes against that nervous shudder as he saw his first soprano’s mouth open hesitatingly two seconds before the time. To-day he was spared all anxiety. Edgar’s voice and Tim’s eyes were the perfection of tuneful devotion.

“_And blèss thine in-hèr-i-tànce!_”

they implored softly. Neither of them had the remotest idea what inheritance meant—they would have besought as willingly a blessing for irrelevance or inelegance; but to the assistant clergyman, whose nervous scratching of his nose, while waiting for the alms-basin to reach him, was to Edgar and Tim as definite and eagerly awaited a part of the service as any other detail, the slow-syllabled Gregorian cadence brought the word in a sudden new light and he made it the text for a sermon so successful as to get him, a little later, a parish of his own. This leads us to many interesting conclusions, musical and other.