O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 Part 10

Up to the age of ten her life was sketchy. A pa.s.sionate scramble for food, beatings, tears, slumber, a swift transition from one childish ailment to another that kept her forever out of reach of the truant officer.

She lay upon the floor in a little dark room, and through the window in the airless air-shaft, high up in one corner, she could see a three-cornered spot of light. At first she wondered what it was, since she lived in a tenement, not under the sky. Then it resolved itself into a ball, white and luminous, that floated remote in that high place and seemed to draw her, and was somehow akin to the queer, gnawing pain that developed about that time beneath her breastbone. It was all inarticulate, queer and confused. She did not think, she did not know how. She only felt that queer gnawing beneath her breastbone, distinct from all her other pains, and which she ascribed to hunger, and saw the lovely, trembling globe of light. At first she felt it only when she was ill and lay on the tumbled floor bed and looked up through the dark window; afterward always in her dreams.

After she pa.s.sed her tenth birthday the confusion within her seemed to settle as the queer pain increased, and she began to think, to wonder what it could be.

A year or two later her father died, and as she was the only child over whom her mother could exercise any control, the report of her death was successfully impressed upon the truant officer, so that she might be put to work unhindered to help the family in its desperate scramble for food, a scramble in which she took part with vivid earnestness. She was hired to Maverick's to wash dishes.

Maverick was a Greek and kept an open-all-night chop-house, a mean hole in the wall two doors from the corner, where Cake's surpa.s.sing thinness made her invaluable at the sink. Also the sc.r.a.ps she carried home in her red, water-puckered hands helped out materially. Then her mother took a boarder and rested in her endeavours, feeling she had performed all things well.

This boarder was a man with a past. And he had left it pretty far behind, else he had never rented a room and meals from the mother of Cake. In this boarder drink and debauchery had completely beaten out of shape what had once been a very n.o.ble figure of a man. His body was shrunken and trembling; the old, ragged clothes he wore flapped about him like the vestments of a scarecrow. His cheeks had the bruised congested look of the habitual drinker, his nose seemed a toadstool on his face, and his red eyes were almost vanished behind puffy, purple, pillow-like lids. His voice was husky and whispering, except when he raised it. Then it was surprisingly resonant and mellow, with something haunting in it like the echo of an echo of a very moving sweetness.

One night Cake, returning all weary and played-out from dish-washing at Maverick's, heard him speaking in this loud voice of his, pushed the door open a crack, and peeked in. He was standing in the middle of the floor evidently speaking what the child called to herself "a piece." Her big mouth crooked derisively in the beginning of what is now her famous smile. The lodger went on speaking, being fairly well stimulated at the time, and presently Cake pushed the door wider and crept in to the dry-goods box, where her mother always kept a candle, and sat down.

The lodger talked on and on while Cake sat rapt, the flickering candle in her hands throwing strange lights and shadows upon her gaunt face.

How was she to know she was the last audience of one of the greatest Shakespearian actors the world had ever seen?

It was a grave and wondering Cake that crept to her place to sleep that night between her two older sisters. And while they ramped against her and chewed and snorted in her ears, she listened all over again to that wonderful voice and was awed by the colour and beauty of the words that it had spoken. She slept, and saw before her the globe of light, trembling and luminous, the one bright thing of beauty her life had ever known, that seemed to draw her up from darkness slowly and with great suffering. Trembling and weeping she awoke in the dawn, and the strange pain that had tortured her so much and that she had called hunger and sought to a.s.suage with sc.r.a.ps from the plates that came to the sink at Maverick's became articulate at last. With her hands clasped hard against her breast she found relief in words.

"I gotta be somebody," sobbed the child. "I mus' be famous, I mus'!"

She arose to find life no longer a confused struggle for food, but a battle and a march; a battle to get through one day to march on to the next, and so on and on until, in that long line of days that stretched out ahead of her like chambers waiting to be visited, she reached the one where rested Fame, that trembling, luminous globe of beauty it was so vitally necessary for her to achieve. "How come he c'n talk like that?" she demanded of herself, musing on the lodger's wonderful exhibition over the greasy dish-water at Maverick's.

And that night she asked him, prefacing her question with the offering of an almost perfect lamb-chop. Only one piece had been cut from it since the purchaser, at that moment apprised by Maverick himself that the arrival of the police was imminent, had taken a hasty departure.

"Who learned you to talk that-a-way?" demanded Cake, licking a faint, far-away flavour of the chop from her long, thin fingers.

The lodger, for a moment, had changed places with the candle. That is to say, he sat upon the dry-goods box, the candle burned upon the floor. And, having been most unfortunate that day, the lodger was tragically sober. He bit into the chop voraciously, like a dog, with his broken, discoloured teeth.

"A book 'learned' me," he said, "and practice and experience--and something else." He broke off short. "They called it genius then," he said bitterly.

Cake took a short step forward. That thing beneath her prominent breastbone pained her violently, forced her on to speak.

"You learn me," she said.

The lodger ceased to chew and stared, the chop bone uplifted in his dirty hand. A pupil for him!

"You want to do this perhaps," he began. "Pray do not mock me; I am a very foolish, fond old man----"

The disreputable, swollen-faced lodger with a nose like a poisoned toadstool vanished. Cake saw an old white-haired man, crazy and pitiful, yet bearing himself grandly. She gasped, the tears flew to her eyes, blinding her. The lodger laughed disagreeably, he was gnawing on the chop bone again.

"I suppose you think because you've found me here it is likely I'll teach you--you! You starved alley cat!" he snarled.

Cake did not even blink. It is repet.i.tion that dulls, and she was utterly familiar with abuse.

"And suppose I did--'learn' you," he sneered, "what would _you_ do with it?"

"I would be famous," cried Cake.

Then the lodger did laugh, looking at her with his head hanging down, his swollen face all creased and purple, his hair sticking up rough and unkempt. He laughed, sitting there a degraded, debauched ruin, looking down from the height of his memories upon the gaunt, unlovely child of the slums who was rendered even more unlovely by the very courage that kept her waiting beside the broken door.

"So you think I could learn you to be famous, hey?" Even the words of this gutter filth he sought to construe into something nattering to himself.

Cake nodded. Really she had not thought of it that way at all. There was no thinking connected with her decision. The dumb hours she had spent staring up the air-shaft had resolved themselves with the pa.s.sing years into a strange, numb will to do. There was the light and she must reach it. Indeed the Thing there behind the narrow walls of her chest gave her no alternative. She did not think she wanted to be an actress. It was a long time after that before she knew even what an actress was. She did not know what the lodger had been. No.

Instinctively, groping and inarticulate, she recognized in him the rags and shreds of greatness, knew him to be a one-time dweller in that temple whither, willing or not, she was bound, to reach it or to die.

The lodger looked down at the naked chop bone in his hand. The juicy, broiled meat was comforting to his outraged stomach. Meat. The word stood out in his mind to be instantly followed by that other word that, for him, had spelled ruin, made him a ragged panhandler, reduced him to living among the poorest and most hopeless. Drink! He raised his head and eyed Cake with crafty calculation.

"What will you pay me for such teaching?" he demanded, and looked down again at the bone.

What he did in the end, Cake herself was satisfied came to him afterward. At first he was actuated only by the desire to procure food and drink--more especially the drink--at the cost of the least possible effort to himself.

Cake saw the look, and she knew. She even smiled a little in the greatness of her relief. She saw she had been right to bring the chop, and appreciated that her progress along road to fame would be as slow or fast as she could procure food for him in lesser or larger quant.i.ties.

"I'll bring you eats," she said cunningly. "From Maverick's," she added. By which she meant the eats would be "has-is"--distinctly second cla.s.s, quite possibly third.

The lodger nodded. "And booze," he put in, watching her face.

"And booze," Cake a.s.sented.

So the bargain was struck in a way that worked the most cruel hardship on the girl. Food she could steal and did, blithely enough, since she had no monitor but the lure of brightness and that Thing within her breast that hotly justified the theft and only urged her on. But booze was a very different proposition. It was impossible to steal booze--even a little. To secure booze she was forced to offer money.

Now what money Cake earned at Maverick's her mother s.n.a.t.c.hed from her hand before she was well within the door. If she held out even a dime, she got a beating. And Cake's mother, in the later years of her life, besides being a clever evader of the police and the truant officer, developed into a beater of parts. Broken food the child offered in abundance and piteous hope. But the lodger was brutally indifferent.

"Food," he scoffed. "Why, it says in the Bible--you never heard of the Bible, hey?" Cake shook her tangled head.

"No? Well, it's quite a Book," commented the lodger. He had been fortunate that day and was, for him, fairly intoxicated. "And it says right in there--and some consider that Book an authority--man cannot live by food alone. Drink--I drink when I have occasion, and sometimes when I have no occasion--Don't you know what drink is, alley-cat? Very well, then, wine is wont to show the mind of man, and you won't see mine until you bring me booze. Get out!"

And Cake got out. Also, being well versed in a very horrid wisdom, she took the food with her. This was hardly what the lodger had expected, and I think what respect he was capable of sprouted for her then.

Behind a screen of barrels in the corner of the alley Cake ate the broken meats herself, taking what comfort she could, and pondering the while the awful problem of securing the booze, since she must be taught, and since the lodger moved in her sphere as the only available teacher.

There was a rush up the alley past her hiding-place, a shout, and the savage thud of blows. Very cautiously, as became one wise in the ways of life in that place, Cake peered around a barrel. She saw Red Dan, who sold papers in front of Jeer Dooley's place, thoroughly punishing another and much larger boy. The bigger boy was crying.

"Anybody c'n sell pipers," shouted Red Dan, pounding the information home bloodily. "You hear me?--anybody!"

Cake crept out of her hiding-place on the opposite side.

She did not care what happened to the bigger boy, though she respected Red Dan the more. She knew where the money was going to come from to buy the lodger's booze. It meant longer hours for her; it meant care to work only out of school hours; it meant harder knocks than even she had experienced; it meant a fatigue there were no words to describe even among the beautiful, wonderful, colourful ones the lodger taught her. But she sold the papers and she purchased the booze.

Her mother did not know where she spent this extra time. She did not care since the money came in from Maverick's steadily each week.

Neither did the lodger care how the booze was procured; the big thing to him was that it came.

At first these lessons were fun for him; the big, gawky, half-starved, overworked child seeing so vividly in pictures all that he told her in words. Full-fed on the sc.r.a.ps from Maverick's--he was no longer fastidious--well stimulated by the drink she brought, he took an ugly sort of degraded pleasure in posturing before her, acting as he alone could act those most wonderful of all plays, watching with hateful, sardonic amus.e.m.e.nt the light and shadow of emotion upon her dirty face. Oh, he was a magician, no doubt at all of that! Past master in the rare art of a true genius, that of producing illusion.

Then he would make Cake try, rave at her, curse her, strike her, kill himself laughing, drink some more and put her at it again.

Night after night, almost comatose from the fatigue of a day that began while it was still dark, she carried a heaped-up plate and a full bottle to the lodger's room and sat down upon the dry-goods box with the candle beside her on the floor. And, having thus secured her welcome, night after night she walked with him among that greatest of all throngs of soldiers and lovers, kings and cardinals, queens, prost.i.tutes and thieves.

If the liquor was short in the bottle a dime's worth, the lesson was curtailed. At first Cake tried to coax him. "Aw, c'mon, yuh Romeo on th' street in Mantua."