- -
- 100%
- +
“Bonny,” said Berty, turning to her brother, “how is Grandma?”
“Asleep, and resting quietly.”
“I’ll go sit beside her,” said the girl; then, turning to her visitor, “Tom Everest, are you going to do that commission for me, or are you not? I’ve stood a good deal from you to-night. Just one word more, and I take it from you and give it to Bonny.”
“I’m ready and willing if it’s anything good,” said the light-haired boy.
“Sha’n’t have it, Bonny,” said Tom, staggering to his feet. “That jewel is mine. I’ll love and cherish him, Berty, until to-morrow afternoon, then I’ll report to you.”
“Good night, then,” said Berty, “and don’t make a noise, or you’ll wake Grandma.”
“Come on, Bonny, let’s interview Berty’s treasure,” exclaimed Tom, seizing his hat.
“What is it?” inquired Bonny, curiously, following him through the hall.
“A black pearl. Didn’t she tell you?”
“No, I haven’t been here long. We were busy at the works.”
Without speaking, Tom led the way down the back staircase, through the lower hall, and out to the wood-shed at the back of the house.
“Listen to it,” he said to Bonny, with his hand on the door-knob.
“Who is snoring in there?” said the boy, quickly.
“One of your sister’s bits of driftwood. I’ve got to haul this one into port.”
“I wish Berty would look out for number one, and let number two, and three, and four, and five, take care of themselves,” said the lad, irritably. Then he suddenly recollected himself. “I suppose I am a brute, but I do hate dirty people. Berty is an angel compared with me.”
“Hello,” said Tom, opening the door and scratching a match to light the candle in a lantern hanging near him.
There was no response. Tom held the lantern and pushed the sleeping man with his foot.
“Here, you—wake up.”
The man rolled over, blinking at them in the light. “Hello, comrade, what you want?”
“Get up,” said Tom, commandingly.
“What for?” asked the sleeper, yawningly.
“To get out of this. I’ll find you another sleeping-place.”
“Oh, come, comrade,” said the man, remonstratingly, “this is cruelty to animals. I was having the sleep of my life—like drugged sleep—takes me back to my boyhood. Move on, and let me begin again. Your diamonds are safe to-night. I’ve had a first-class supper, and I’m having a first-class sleep. I wouldn’t get up to finger the jewels of the Emperor of Russia.”
“Get up,” said Tom, inexorably.
“Let him stay,” said Bonny. “I’m going to be here all night. If he gets dangerous, I’ll take the poker.”
“Oh, you’re going to stay all night,” remarked Tom. “Very good, then. I’ll come early in the morning and get him out of this.”
“Talking about me, gentlemen?” asked the man, sleepily.
Tom and Bonny stared at him.
“I haven’t done anything bad yet,” said the tramp, meekly, “unless I may have corrupted a few of those guinea-pigs by using bad language. They’re the most inquisitive creatures I ever saw. Stuck their noses in my food, and most took it away from me.”
“Who are you?” asked Bonny, abruptly.
“A poor, broken-down sailor, sir,” whined the man. “Turned out of his vessel the first day in port, because he had a little weakness of the heart.”
“I heard you were a doctor,” interposed Tom.
“So I was this afternoon, sir. That nice young lady said I looked like a sailor, so I thought I’d be one to please her.”
“You’re a first-class liar, anyway,” said Tom.
The man rolled over on his back and sleepily blinked at him. “That I am, sir. If you’d hear the different stories I tell to charitable ladies, you’d fall down in a fit. They’re too funny for words.”
Bonny was staring at him with wide-open eyes. He had never spoken to a tramp before in his life. If he saw one on the right side of the street, he immediately crossed to the left.
“I say,” he began, with a fastidious curl of his lip, “it must be mighty queer not to know in the morning where you are going to lay your head at night. Queer, and mighty uncomfortable.”
“So it is, young man, till you get used to it,” responded the tramp, amiably.
Bonny’s countenance expressed the utmost disdain, and suddenly the tramp raised himself on an elbow. “Can you think of me, my fine lad, young and clean and as good-looking as you are?”
“No, I can’t,” said Bonny, frankly.
“Fussy about my tailor,” continued the man. “Good heavens, just think of it—I, bothering about the cut of my coat. But I was, and I did, and I’ve come down to be a trailer over the roads.”
“How can persons take a jump like that?” said the boy, musingly.
“It isn’t a jump,” pursued the tramp, lazily, “it’s a slide. You move a few inches each day. I’m something of a philosopher, and I often look back on my career. I’ve lots of time to think, as you may imagine. Now, gentlemen, you wouldn’t imagine where my slide into trampdom began.”
“You didn’t start from the gutter, anyway,” remarked Bonny, “for you talk like a gentleman.”
“You’re right, young man. I can talk the slang of the road. I’ve been broken to it, but I won’t waste it on you, for you wouldn’t understand it—well, my first push downward was given me by my mother.”
“Your mother?” echoed Bonny, in disgust.
“Yes, young sir—one of the best women that ever lived. She held me out to the devil, when she allowed me to kick the cat because it had made me fall.”
“Nonsense,” said Bonny, sharply.
“Not nonsense, but sound sense, sir. That was the beginning of the lack of self-restraint. Did I want her best cap to tear to ribbons? I got it.”
“Oh, get out,” interposed Tom, crossly. “You needn’t tell us that all spoiled children go to the bad.”
“Good London, no,” said the man, with a laugh. “Look at our millionaires. Could you find on the face of the earth a more absolute autocrat, a more heartless, up-to-date, determined-to-have-his-own-way, let-the-rest-of-you-go-to-the-dogs kind of a man, than the average American millionaire?”
The two young men eyed each other, and Bonny murmured, “You are an extremist.”
“It began away back,” continued the tramp, now thoroughly roused from his sleepy condition. “When our forefathers came from England, they brought that ugly, I’m-going-to-have-my-own-way spirit with them. Talk about the severity of England precipitating the Revolution. If they hadn’t made a revolution for us, we’d made one to order. Did you ever read about the levelling spirit of those days? I tell you this American nation is queer—it’s harder for a real, true blue son of the soil to keep straight, than it is for the son of any other nation under the heaven. We lack self-restraint. We’ll go to the bad if we want to, and none shall hinder us.”
The tramp paused for a minute in his semi-lazy, semi-animated discourse, and Tom, feeling that some remark was expected from him, said feebly, “You’re quite a moralizer.”
The tramp did not hear him. “I tell you,” he said, extending a dirty hand, “we’re the biggest, grandest, foolishest people on earth. We’re the nation of the future. We’ll govern the earth, and at the same time fail in governing ourselves. Look at the lynchings we have. The United States has the highest murder rate of any civilized country in the world. The average American will be a decent, moral, pay-his-bills sort of man, and yet he’ll have more tolerance for personal violence than a Turk has.”
“You’re a queer man,” said Bonny, musingly.
“We’ve got to have more law and order,” pursued the tramp. “The mothers have got to make their little ones eat their mush, or porridge, as they say over the line in Canada—not fling it out the window to the dogs. I tell you that’s where it begins, just where every good and bad thing begins—in the cradle. The average mother has too much respect for the squallings of her Young America. Let her spank him once in awhile, and keep him out of sight of the eagle.”
“Do you suppose,” said Bonny, solemnly, “that if you had been well spanked you would not be lying here?”
“Suppose,” repeated the tramp, leaning back, “I don’t suppose anything about it. I know it. If my mother and father had made me mind them, and kept me in nights, and trained me into decent, self-respecting manhood, I’d be standing beside you to-night, young sirs, beside you—beyond you—for I guess from your bearing you are only young men of average ability, and I tell you I was a power, when I’d study and let the drink alone.”
“You must have had a strange mother,” remarked Bonny.
The tramp suddenly raised himself again, and his sunburnt face grew redder. “For the love of Heaven,” he said, extending one ragged arm, “don’t say a word against her. The thought of her is the only thing that moves me. She loved me, and, unclean, characterless wretch that I am, she would love me yet if she were still alive.”
The man’s head sank on his arm, but not quickly enough. Tom and Bonny had both seen glistening in his eyes, not the one jewel they were jestingly in search of, but two priceless jewels that were not pearls, but diamonds.
“Come on, Bonny,” said Tom, roughly, as he drew him from the shed.
“Tom,” remarked Bonny, softly, as they went slowly up-stairs, “Berty wants you to do something for that fellow, doesn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think it is of any use?”
“No.”
“Are you going to try?”
“Yes.”
Bonny made no further remarks until some time later, when they were standing on the front door-step, then he asked, thoughtfully, “What does Berty want you to do, Tom?”
“Start a cat-farm.”
“A cat-farm! What kind of cats?”
“Gutter cats, back yard cats, disreputable cats, I should guess from the character of the superintendent she has chosen,” replied Tom, gruffly.
“The superintendent being the tramp,” said Bonny, slyly.
“There’s no one else in question,” responded Tom.
“I think you are wrong about the nature of the beasts,” continued Bonny. “I believe Berty means pet cats—Angoras, and so on.”
“What sort are they?”
“Do you mean to say you haven’t noticed them? It’s the latest cry among the women—‘Give me a long-haired cat!’ Mrs. Darley-James has a beauty—snow-white with blue eyes.”
“All nonsense—these society women don’t know what to do to kill time.”
“They’re not all society women that have them. Old Mrs. McCarthy has a pair of dandies—and I find that the women who take up cat-culture are more kind to back yard tabbies.”
“Maybe you’re right, Bonny. I don’t call round on these women as you do.”
“Well,” said Bonny, apologetically, “I don’t see any harm in putting on your best coat and hat, and doing a woman who has invited you to her house the compliment of calling on her day.”
“Oh, dressing up,” said Tom, “is such a nuisance.”
“You can’t call on many that you’d be bothered with calling on without it. Sydney Gray tried calling on Margaretta on her day in a bicycle suit. He had ridden fifty miles, and was hot and dusty and perspiring. He had the impudence to go into Margaretta’s spick and span rooms and ask for a cup of tea. She was so sweet to him that he came away hugging himself—but he never got asked there again, and every once in awhile he says to some one, ‘Queer, isn’t it, that Mrs. Stanisfield gives me the go-by. I don’t know what I’ve done to offend her.’”
“Suppose we come back to Berty,” observed Tom. “If all the women here have cats, what does she want to start a farm for?”
“The women aren’t all supplied. The demand is increasing, and many would buy here that wouldn’t send away for one. Berty is more shrewd than you think. These cats sell for five and six dollars apiece at the least, and some are as high as twenty. I shouldn’t a bit wonder if it would turn out to be a good business speculation.”
“Well, then, you just meet some of the fellows in my office to-morrow evening and arrange for a house and lot for this man who is to boss the cats,” said Tom, dryly.
“All right, I’ll come—maybe Roger will, too.”
“Good night,” said Tom, “I’m off.”
“Good night,” returned Bonny, laconically, and, standing with his hands thrust in his pockets, he was looking down the street, when Tom suddenly turned back.
“I say, Bonny, your grandmother must have a good history of the Revolution.”
“She has two or three.”
“Ask her to lend me one, will you? I half forget what I learned in school.”
“Yes, sir; I’ll bring it to-morrow.”
Tom really went this time, and as he quickly disappeared from sight, Bonny, from his station on the door-step, kept muttering to himself, “Slipping through life, slipping through life. How easy to get on that greased path!”
“What are you saying to yourself?” asked a brisk voice.
Bonny, turning sharply, found Berty beside him.
“Nothing much—only that I was hungry. Let’s see what’s in the pantry.”
“Bonny, if I show you where there is a pie, the most beautiful pumpkin pie you ever saw, will you help me with my tramp?”
“I’ll do it for half a pie,” said Bonny, generously. “Come on, you young monkey.”
CHAPTER XIX.
AT THE BOARD OF WATER-WORKS
“There she comes,” murmured one of the clerks, in the board of water-works offices.
“Who?” murmured the other clerk.
“The beggar-girl,” responded the first one.
The chairman of the board heard them, and looked fearfully over his shoulder.
Roger, Tom, and Bonny knew that Berty’s frequent visits to the city hall had gained for her a nickname, occasioned by the character of her visits. She was always urging the claims of the poor, hence she was classed with them. They carefully shielded from her the knowledge of this nickname, and supposed she knew nothing of it.
However, she did know. Some whisper of the “beggar-girl” had reached her ears, and was a matter of chagrin to her.
The chairman of the board of water-works knew all about her. He knew that if the clerks had seen her passing along the glass corridor outside his office she was probably coming to him; she probably wanted something.
One clerk was his nephew, the other his second cousin, so he was on terms of familiarity with them, and at the present moment was in the outer office discussing with them the chances that a certain bill had of passing the city council.
The door of his own inner office stood open, but of what use to take refuge there? If the beggar-girl really wished to see a man on business, she always waited for him.
He looked despairingly about him. A high, old-fashioned desk stood near. Under it was a foot-stool. As a knock came at the door, he ungracefully folded his long, lank limbs, quickly sat down on the foot-stool, and said, in a low voice, “I’ve gone to Portland for a week!” Then he fearfully awaited results.
Berty, followed by her friend, the mongrel pup, walked into the room and asked if Mr. Morehall were in.
“No,” said the second cousin, gravely, “he has been called to Portland on important business—will be gone a week.”
The girl’s face clouded; she stood leaning against the railing that separated the room into two parts, and, as she did so, her weight pushed open the gate that the second cousin had just hastily swung together.
The pup ran in, and being of quick wits and an inquiring disposition wondered what that man was doing curled up in a corner, instead of being on his feet like the other two.
He began to sniff round him. Perhaps there was something peculiar about him. No—he seemed to be like other men, a trifle anxious and red-faced, perhaps, but still normal. He gave a playful bark, as if to say, “I dare you to come out.”
Berty heard him, and turned swiftly. “Mugwump, if you worry another rat, I’ll never give you a walk again.”
The two young men were in a quandary. Whether to go to the assistance of their chief, or whether to affect indifference, was vexing their clerical souls. Berty, more quick-witted than the pup, was prompt to notice their peculiar expressions.
“Please don’t let him worry a rat,” she said, beseechingly, “it makes him so cruel. Rats have a dreadfully hard time! Oh, please call him off. He’s got it in his mouth. I hear him.”
The chairman, in his perplexity, had thrown him a glove from his pocket, and Mugwump was mouthing and chewing it deliciously.
“He’ll kill it,” exclaimed Berty. “Oh! let me in,” and before the confused clerks could prevent her, she had pushed open the gate and had followed the dog.
Her face was a study. Low down on the floor sat the deceiving chairman, with Mugwump prancing before him.
“Mr. Morehall!” she exclaimed; then she stopped.
The chairman, with a flaming face, unfolded his long limbs, crawled out of his retreat, stumbled over the dog, partly fell, recovered himself, and finally got to his feet. After throwing an indignant glance at the two clerks, who were in a pitiable state of restrained merriment, he concentrated his attention on Berty. She blushed, too, as she divined what had been the case.
“You were trying to hide from me,” she said, after a long pause.
He could not deny it, though he stammered something about it being a warm day, and the lower part of the desk being a cool retreat.
“Now you are telling me a story,” said Berty, sternly, “you, the chairman of the board of water-works—a city official, afraid of me!”
He said nothing, and she went on, wistfully, “Am I, then, so terrible? Do you men all hate the beggar-girl?”
Her three hearers immediately fell into a state of shamefacedness.
“What have I done?” she continued, sadly, “what have I done to be so disliked?”
No one answered her, and she went on. “When I lived on Grand Avenue and thought only of amusing myself, everybody liked me. Why is it that every one hates me since I went to River Street and am trying to make myself useful?”
To Mr. Morehall’s dismay, her lip was quivering, and big tears began to roll down her cheeks.
“Come in here,” he said, leading the way to his own room.
Berty sat down in an armchair and quietly continued to cry, while Mr. Morehall eyed her with distress and increasing anxiety.
“Have a glass of water, do,” said the tall man, seizing a pitcher near him, “and don’t feel bad. Upon my word, I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“It—it isn’t you only,” gasped Berty. “It is everybody. Please excuse me, but I am tired and worried this morning. I’ve had some sick friends on our street—that’s what I came to see you about. The autumn is starting in so dry that we are almost choked with dust. River Street hasn’t been watered for a week.”
“Hasn’t it?” said Mr. Morehall, slowly.
“Grand Avenue was always watered,” continued Berty, as she rested her head against the back of the chair, “even soaked. I never thought about dust in summer. Why is River Street neglected?”
“River Street citizens don’t pay such heavy taxes,” suggested Mr. Morehall.
“But they pay all they can, sir.”
“Poor people are shiftless,” said the official, with a shrug of his shoulders.
“That’s what everybody says,” exclaimed Berty, despairingly. “All well-to-do people that I talk to dismiss the poorer classes in that way. But poor people aren’t all shiftless.”
“Not all, perhaps,” said Mr. Morehall, amiably, and with inward rejoicing that Berty was wiping away her tears.
“And there must be poor people,” continued Berty. “We can’t all be rich. It’s impossible. Who would work for the prosperous, if all were independent?”
“What I meant,” replied Mr. Morehall, “was that poverty is very often the result of a lack of personal exertion on the part of the poor.”
“Yes, sir, but I am not just now advocating the cause of the helpless. It is rather the claims of the respectable poor. I know heaps of people on River Street who have only a pittance to live on. Their parents had only the same. They are not dissipated. They work hard and pay what they can to the city. My argument is that these poorer children of the city should be especially well looked after, just as in a family the delicate or afflicted child is the most petted.”
“Now you are aiming at the ideal,” said Mr. Morehall, with an uneasy smile.
“No, sir, not the ideal, but the practical. Some one was telling me what the city has to spend for prisons, hospitals, and our asylums. Why, it would pay us a thousandfold better to take care of these people before they get to be a burden on us.”
“They are so abominably ungrateful,” muttered Mr. Morehall.
“And so would I be,” exclaimed Berty, “if I were always having charity flung in my face. Let the city give the poor their rights. They ask no more. It’s no disgrace to be born poor. But if I am a working girl in River Street I must lodge in a worm-eaten, rat-haunted tenement-house. I must rise from an unwholesome bed, and put on badly made, uncomfortable clothing. I must eat a scanty breakfast, and go to toil in a stuffy, unventilated room. I must come home at night to my dusty, unwatered street, and then I must, before I go to sleep, kneel down and thank God that I live in a Christian country—why, it’s enough to make one a pagan just to think of it! I don’t see why the poor don’t organize. They are meeker than I would be. It makes me wild to see River Street neglected. If any street is left unwatered, it ought to be Grand Avenue rather than River Street, for the rich have gardens and can go to the country, while the poor must live on the street in summer.”
“Now you are oppressing the rich,” said Mr. Morehall, promptly.
“Heaven forbid,” said the girl, wearily. “Equal rights for all—”
“The poor have a good friend in you,” he said, with reluctant admiration.
“Will you have our street watered, sir?” asked Berty, rising.
“I’ll try to. I’ll have to ask for an appropriation. We’ll want another cart and horse, and an extra man.”
“That means delay,” said Berty, despairingly, “and in the meantime the dust blows about in clouds. It enters the windows and settles on the tables and chairs. It chokes the lungs of consumptives struggling for breath, and little babies gasping for air. Then the mothers put the windows down, and they breathe over and over again the polluted air. And this is stifling autumn weather—come spend a day in River Street, sir.”
“Miss Gravely,” said the man, with a certain frank bluntness and good-will, “excuse my plain speaking, but you enthuse too much. Those poor people aren’t made of the same stuff that you are. They don’t suffer to the extent that you do under the same conditions.”
Berty was about to leave the room, but she turned round on him with flashing eyes. “Do you mean to say that God has created two sets of creatures—one set with fine nerves and sensitive bodies, the other callous and unsensitive to comfort or discomfort?”
“That’s about the measure of it.”
“And where would you draw the line?” she asked, with assumed calmness.
Mr. Morehall did not know Berty well. His family, though one of the highest respectability, moved in another circle. If he had had the pleasure of an intimate acquaintance with the energetic young person before him, he would have known that her compressed lips, her half-closed eyes, and her tense forehead betokened an overwhelming and suppressed anger.
Therefore, unaware of the drawn sword suspended over his head, he went on, unsuspiciously. “To tell the truth, I think there’s a lot in heredity. Now there are some families you never find scrabbling round for something to eat. I never heard of a poor Gravely, or a Travers, or a Stanisfield, or a Morehall. It’s in the blood to get on. No one can down you.”
He paused consequentially, and Berty, biting her lip, waited for him to go on. However, happening to look at the clock, he stopped short. This talk was interesting, but he would like to get back to business.
“Mr. Morehall,” said Berty, in a still voice, “do you know that there are a legion of poor Traverses up in the northern part of the State, that Grandma used to send boxes to every month?”
“No,” he said, in surprise, “I never heard that.”
“And old Mr. Stanisfield took two of his own cousins out of the poorhouse three years ago, and supports them?”
“You astonish me,” murmured the confused man.
“And, moreover,” continued Berty, with a new gleam in her eye, “since you have been frank with me, I may be frank with you, and say that two of the people for whom I want River Street made sweet and wholesome are old Abner Morehall and his wife, from Cloverdale.”
“Abner Morehall!” exclaimed the man, incredulously.
“Yes, Abner Morehall, your own uncle.”