Calvary Alley Part 11

"Yes, ma'am," said Nance, almost in the same breath.

"I vote 'Yes,' too; so the ayes have it," said Mrs. Purely gaily, leading them through a neat hall into a neat kitchen, where they solemnly took their seats.

"My visitors always help me with the lemonade," said the purring little lady, giving Nance the lemons to roll, and Dan the ice to crack. Then as she fluttered about, she began to ask them vague and seemingly futile questions about home and school and play. Gradually their answers grew from monosyllables into sentences, until, by the time the lemonade was ready to serve, Nance was completely thawed out and Dan was getting soft around the edges. Things were on the way to positive conviviality when Mrs. Purdy suddenly turned to Nance and asked her where she went to Sunday school.

Now Sunday school had no charms for Nance. On the one occasion when curiosity had induced her to follow the stream of well-dressed children into the side door of the cathedral, she had met with disillusion. It was a place where little girls lifted white petticoats when they sat down and straightened pink sashes when they got up, and put nickels in a basket.

Nance had had no lace petticoat or pink sash or nickel. She showed her discomfort by misbehaving.

"Didn't you ever go back?" asked Mrs. Purdy.

"Nome. They didn't want me. I was bad, an' the teacher said Sunday school was a place for good little girls."

"My! my!" said Mrs. Purdy, "this will never do. And how about you, Dan?

Do you go?"

"Sometimes I've went," said Dan. "I like it."

While this conversation was going on Nance could not keep her eyes from the open door. There was more sky and gra.s.s out there than she had ever seen at one time before. The one green spot with which she was familiar was the neat plot of lawn on each side of the concrete walk leading into the cathedral, and that had to be viewed through a c.h.i.n.k in the fence and was a.s.sociated with the words, "Keep Out."

When all the lemonade was gone, and only one cookie left for politeness, Mrs. Purdy took them into the sitting-room where a delicate-looking man sat in a wheel-chair, carving something from a piece of wood. Nance's quick eyes took in every detail of the bright, commonplace room; its gay, flowered carpet and chintz curtains, its "fruit pieces" in wide, gold frames, and its crocheted tidies presented a new ideal of elegance.

There was a music-box on the wall in which small figures moved about to a tinkling melody; there were charm strings of bright colored b.u.t.tons, and a spinning-wheel, and a pair of bellows, all of which Mrs. Purdy explained at length.

"Sister," said the man in the chair, feebly, "perhaps the children would like to see my menagerie."

"Why, dearie, of course they would," said Mrs. Purdy, "Shall I wheel you over to the cabinet?"

"I'll shove him," said Dan, making his first voluntary remark.

"There now!" said Mrs. Purdy, "see how much stronger he is than I am! And he didn't jolt you a bit, did he, dearie?"

If the room itself was interesting, the cabinet was nothing short of entrancing. It was full of carved animals in all manner of grotesque positions. And the sick gentleman knew the name of each and kept saying such funny things about them that Nance laughed hilariously, and Dan forgot the prints of his muddy feet on the bright carpet, and even gave up the effort to keep his hand over the ragged knee of his pants.

"He knows all about live animals, too," chirped Mrs. Purdy. "You'll have to come some day and go over to the park with us and see his squirrels.

There's one he found with a broken leg, and he mended it as good as new."

The sun was slipping behind the trees before the children even thought of going home.

"Next Friday at three!" said Mrs. Purdy, cheerily waving them good-by.

"And we are going to see who has the cleanest face and the best report."

"We sure had a good time," said Nance, as they hurried away through the dusk. "But I'll git a lickin' all right when I git home."

"I liked that there animal man," said Dan slowly, "an' them cookies."

"Well, whatever made you lie to the lady 'bout bein' hungry?"

"I never lied. She ast me if I wanted her to give me somethin' to eat. I thought she meant like a beggar. I wasn't goin' to take it that way, but I never minded takin' it like--like--company."

Nance pondered the matter for a while silently; then she asked suddenly:

"Say, Dan, if folks are borned poor white trash, they don't have to go on bein' it, do they?"

CHAPTER VII

AN EVICTION

The three chief diversions in Calvary Alley, aside from fights, were funerals, arrests, and evictions. Funerals had the advantage of novelty, for life departed less frequently than it arrived: arrests were in high favor on account of their dramatic appeal, but the excitement, while intense, was usually too brief to be satisfying; for sustained interest the alley on the whole preferred evictions.

The week after Nance and Dan had reported to Mrs. Purdy, rumor traveled from house to house and from room to room that the rent man was putting the Lewises out. The piquant element in the situation lay in the absence of the chief actor. "Mis' Lewis" herself had disappeared, and n.o.body knew where she was or when she would return.

For many years the little cottage, sandwiched between Mr. Snawdor's "Bung and Fawcett" shop and Slap Jack's saloon had been the scandal and, it must be confessed the romance of the alley. It stood behind closed shutters, enveloped in mystery, and no visitor ventured beyond its threshold. The slender, veiled lady who flitted in and out at queer hours, and whom rumor actually accused of sometimes arriving at the corner in "a hack," was, despite ten years' residence, a complete stranger to her neighbors. She was quiet and well-behaved; she wore good clothes and shamefully neglected her child. These were the meager facts upon which gossip built a tower of conjecture.

As for Dan, he was as familiar an object in the alley as the sparrows in the gutter or the stray cats about the garbage cans. Ever since he could persuade his small legs to go the way he wanted them to, he had pursued his own course, asking nothing of anybody, fighting for his meager rights, and becoming an adept in evading the questions that seemed to const.i.tute the entire conversation of the adult world. All that he asked of life was the chance to make a living, and this the authorities sternly forbade until he should reach that advanced age of fourteen which seemed to recede as he approached. Like most of the boys in the gang, he had been in business since he was six; but it was business that changed its nature frequently and had to be transacted under great difficulty. He had acquired proficiency as a c.r.a.p-shooter only to find that the profession was not regarded as an honorable one; he had invested heavily in pins and pencils and tried to peddle them out on the avenue, only to find himself sternly taken in hand by a determined lady who talked to him about minors and street trades. Shoe-shining had been tried; so had selling papers, but each of these required capital, and Dan's appet.i.te was of such a demanding character that the acquisition of capital was well nigh impossible.

From that first day when the truant officer had driven him into the educational fold, his problems had increased. It was not that he disliked school. On the contrary he was ambitious and made heroic efforts to keep up with the cla.s.s; but it was up-hill work getting an education without text-books. The city, to be sure, furnished these to boys whose mothers applied for them in person, but Dan's mother never had time to come. The cause of most of his trouble, however, was clothes; seatless trousers, elbowless coats, brimless hats, const.i.tuted a series of daily mortifications which were little short of torture.

Twice, through no fault of his own, he had stood alone before the bar of justice, with no voice lifted in his behalf save the shrill, small voice of Nance Molloy. Twice he had been acquitted and sent back to the old hopeless environment, and admonished to try again. How hard he had tried and against what odds, surely only the angel detailed to patrol Calvary Alley has kept any record.

If any doubts a.s.sailed him concerning the mother who took little heed of his existence, he never expressed them. Her name rarely pa.s.sed his lips, but he watched for her coming as a shipwrecked mariner watches for a sail. When a boy ponders and worries over something for which he dares not ask an explanation, he is apt to become sullen and preoccupied. On the day that the long-suffering landlord served notice, Dan told no one of his mother's absence. Behind closed doors he packed what things he could, clumsily tying the rest of the household goods in the bedclothes.

At noon the new tenant arrived and, in order to get his own things in, obligingly a.s.sisted in moving Dan's out. It was then and then only that the news had gone abroad.

For three hours now the worldly possessions of the dubious Mrs. Lewis had lain exposed on the pavement, and for three hours Dan had sat beside them keeping guard. From every tenement window inquisitive eyes watched each stage of the proceeding, and voluble tongues discussed every phase of the situation. Every one who pa.s.sed, from Mr. Lavinski, with a pile of pants on his head, to little Rosy Snawdor, stopped to take a look at him and to ask questions.

Dan had reached a point of sullen silence. Sitting on a pile of bedclothes, with a gilt-framed mirror under one arm and a flowered water pitcher under the other, he scowled defiance at each newcomer. Against the jeers of the boys he could register vows of future vengeance and console himself with the promise of b.l.o.o.d.y retribution; but against the endless queries and insinuations of his adult neighbors, he was utterly defenseless.

"Looks like she had ever'thing fer the parlor, an' nothin' fer the kitchen," observed Mrs. Snawdor from her third-story window to Mrs.

Smelts at her window two floors below.

"I counted five pairs of curlin' irons with my own eyes," said Mrs. Smelts, "an' as fer bottles! If they took out one, they took out a hunderd."

"You don't reckon that there little alcohol stove was all she had to cook on, do you?" called up Mrs. Gorman from the pavement below.

"Maybe that's what she het her curlin' irons on!" was Mrs. Snawdor's suggestion, a remark which provoked more mirth than it deserved.

Dan gazed straight ahead with no sign that he heard. However strong the temptation was to dart away into some friendly hiding place, he was evidently not going to yield to it. The family possessions were in jeopardy, and he was not one to shirk responsibilities.

Advice was as current as criticism. Mrs. Gorman, being a chronic recipient of civic favors, advocated an appeal to the charity organization; Mrs. Snawdor, ever at war with foreign interference, strongly opposed the suggestion, while Mrs. Smelts with a covetous eye on the gilt mirror under Dan's arm, urged a sidewalk sale. As for the boy himself, not a woman in the alley but was ready to take him in and share whatever the family larder provided.

But to all suggestions Dan doggedly shook his head. He was "thinkin' it out," he said, and all he wanted was to be let alone.

"Well, you can't set there all night," said Mrs. Snawdor, "if yer maw don't turn up by five o'clock, us neighbors is goin' to take a hand."

All afternoon Dan sat watching the corner round which his mother might still appear. Not a figure had turned into the alley, that he had not seen it, not a clanging car had stopped in the street beyond, that his quick ear had not noted.