The Rich Little Poor Boy Part 26

Every morning now he enjoyed his splash in the tub; every night he glorified in his taste of the real outdoors. On the following Sunday, he combined the two pleasures. Big Tom was in and out all day, making it impossible for Johnnie to bathe even in the seclusion of Cis's tiny room, which she generously offered to loan him for the ceremony. He did not accept her offer. He was as sure as ever that Barber would not only put a stop to all baths if he discovered they were being taken (on the ground that they used up too much soap), but the longsh.o.r.eman might go further, and administer punishment which would be particularly trying--with Johnnie in a clothesless condition.

He waited for nightfall. The day was unseasonably warm. By sundown the patch of sky framed by the window was solidly overlaid with clouds, among which the thunder was rolling. A shower was brewing, and Johnnie had an idea. He took the soap and a wash rag to bed with him.

The others were asleep when the storm broke. But Johnnie was just inside the little house on the roof, shedding his clothes under cover. As the rain came lashing upon the warm, painted tin, he rushed forth into it, letting it whip his bare skin as he soaped and rubbed.

It was glorious! And though he dared not shout, he leaped hither and thither in an excess of joy, and did his calisthenics, the lightning flashing him into his own sight. And he took in from the rain, through tossing arms and legs, the electricity that he lacked--cut off as he had been so long from even the touch of a pavement.

Next, naked though he was, he played scout; and as he romped other scouts came to romp with him, dropping over the edge of the roof in all directions, or popping out from behind the chimney and the little house. And all were as naked as he, and as full of joy, and they danced in a circle with him, and marched, and went through the exercises.

When at last his yellow hair was streaming, and his breath was spent, he dried himself, standing on the stairs, and using the long tails of the big shirt; then, trousered once more, he crept down and in, to sleep an unbroken, dreamless sleep, wrapped from head to toe in just nothing but his quilt. Only his small unfreckled nose showed, drawing in the rain-washed breeze that came swirling upon his bed through the open window.

"It's my beach!" he told Cis proudly the next morning. "I waded--honest, I did! And I pretty near _swimmed_!"

He felt stronger, and consequently did not hate his housework so much.

As for his appearance, Mr. Perkins was more than ever struck with its improvement when he saw Johnnie again; also, the leader was a trifle puzzled. But other things than breathing and bathing and exercises were helping Johnnie. He had something to look forward to now--a goal.

Indeed, the greater part of his betterment was the result of that fresh interest Mr. Perkins had given him, his pride, and his hope.

"But I'd like t' learn more things 'bout scouts," he told the leader.

"Is all I have t' do jus' git strong and grow t' be twelve?"

"Steady, old man!" counseled Mr. Perkins.

He failed to see, he said, that Johnnie's teeth looked any whiter. He acted almost as if he doubted Johnnie's use of the brush. Luckily Johnnie remembered that meeting which Cis had proposed, and this served to change the subject. By advice from Cis, later on, he was insured against Mr. Perkins's being so disappointed again. Cis gave him some powder; and he got fair results from her old brush.

So far as he was concerned, the meeting between Cis and Mr. Perkins proved utterly profitless. To begin with, in his pride and excitement, he forgot to follow out her instructions regarding the introduction.

Instead of p.r.o.nouncing the two names politely, he ran to Cis, and "Here he is!" he cried. "This is him! Mister Perkins!"

She stood against the hall door, smiling shyly. Mr. Perkins rose, looking more red than brown, and gave her a soldierly bow, though that day he was not wearing a uniform, but a gray business suit.

"I'm so glad to meet you," he said. "Johnnie's told me so much about you."

"I--I've got to go right back," was what she said. "Two of the girls 're waiting for me downstairs."

"Aw, Cis!" pleaded Johnnie. "Wait! Ain't y' goin' t' exercise with us?"

She went. And though she darted a smile at their visitor, to Johnnie she seemed all indifference, and he was staggered by it; only to be more than gratified by her complete change of att.i.tude when she got home at suppertime. "Oh, he's handsome!" she declared. "My! The girls wouldn't believe how n.o.ble and splendid he is! He just can't be as young as you say, Johnnie, because he's been a soldier in the big war! I know it by that little b.u.t.ton-thing in his coat! Oh, Johnnie, he's nicer than you said! Thousands and thousands of times!"

Johnnie swaggered a bit over that. "_All_ my friends is nice," he observed. "Only I wish I could have One-Eye and Mr. Perkins here both at the same time!"

He had to give a minute account of Mr. Perkins's visit, and not once, but as often as he could manage to go over the subject before Big Tom came in. After supper, as they hung in the window together, looking up at the night sky, he had to review all previous visits, as well as that memorable, history-making meeting under the Elevated.

"He's like a young gentleman in a story!" she whispered. "And he's awful stylish! Did you notice?--his handkerchief to-day had a teeny brown edge to it!"

In the morning, she did an unprecedented thing: rose earlier than usual and helped Johnnie set the flat to rights. The dish cupboard came in for the most of her attention, a fact which brought loud protests from him, for she used up the whole of Mr. Maloney's precious newspapers, this in making fancifully cut covers for the shelves.

"Oh, let's look civilized!" she cried.

She came home at noon, her girl friends accompanying her, but waiting, as before, in the area. She was not so shy as she had been the first day; instead, she was dignified as she viewed the arm- and leg-work, praised Johnnie with sweet condescension, and thanked Mr. Perkins for all his trouble with quite a grown-up air.

The noon following, she arrived alone (Mr. Perkins had remarked the day previous that he would be coming regularly now). As he had appeared early, and the exercising was over and done, he and Cis went down the stairs together. Johnnie stood outside the door to watch them, and marveled as he watched. When had he ever seen Cis smile so much? chatter so freely? Now she did not seem afraid of Mr. Perkins at all!

In the hall overhead some one else was watching--Mrs. Kukor. As he looked up, she nodded at him. "Ah-ha-a-a-a!" she whispered, and laid one finger along her nose mysteriously. Johnnie understood that she was thinking of Big Tom. He nodded back, and put a finger to his lips.

All that afternoon he was so proud, just thinking of Cis threading the crowds with Mr. Perkins at her side. Yet she herself was evidently not impressed by the great compliment the leader had paid her. For the next day she did not invite a similar experience by coming home at noon; nor the next. In fact, she never again dropped in to see the drill. She had lost interest in it, she told Johnnie--which was natural enough, seeing that she was a girl.

But! She seemed also to have completely lost all interest in Mr.

Perkins!

CHAPTER XIX

A DIFFERENT CIS

BUT for some reason which Johnnie could not fathom, Cis suddenly began to show a great deal of interest in the flat. Indeed, she was by way of making his life miserable, what with her constant warnings and instructions about keeping the rooms neat and clean. And she proved that her concern was genuine by continuing to rise early each day in order to help him with the housework.

In her own tiny closet she brought about a really magnificent improvement. This took place mainly on Decoration Day, a day which, just because of its name, Johnnie regarded as particularly suitable for the happy task in hand. Cis's ceiling and walls had never been papered (she explained this by pointing out that paper would only have made the little cubby-hole just that much smaller, and there was not even a mite of room to spare). By dint of extra violet-making, she bought a can of paint and a brush. Then borrowing a ladder from the janitress, she first cleared her bedroom of its contents, and next wiped every inch of plaster--sides and top--by means of a rag tied over the end of the broom. After that, in her oldest dress, with her head wrapped up, she tinted her retreat, the mop-boards included, a delicate blue.

Now, however, she was far from done. The paint dry, she restored her two pieces of furniture to their rightful places. The dressing-table box she skirted with cheesecloth dipped in blued starch; and covered the top of it with a roll of crinkly, flower-sprinkled tissue paper. To the general effect, her cretonne-encased pillow gave the final touch. It was Johnnie's opinion that the pillow was one of the most beautiful things in New York. When it was stood up stiffly against the wall at the end of the narrow bed shelf; when the picture of Colonel Roosevelt was again in its place of honor beside the bit of mirror, with the handsome Edwarda leaned negligently just beneath; and when Cis had lavished upon her bed and box the delicious scent of a whole nickel's-worth of orris root, Johnnie, wildly enthused, signaled the flat above.

"I'll bet there ain't any room that's nicer'n this in the whole Waldorf 'Storia!" he vowed to the little Jewish lady when she came rocking down to marvel over the transformation, hands uplifted, head wagging. "Don't you think it's fine, Mrs. Kukor? and don't it smell 'zac'ly like Mrs.

Reisenberger?"

"Pos-i-tivvle!" agreed Mrs. Kukor.

Next, in her housewifely zeal, Cis started in to improve the kitchen.

Keeping the ladder an extra day by special permission she climbed it to wash the eight small panes of the window, after which she hung at either side of them a strip of the blue-tinted cheesecloth. But when Barber saw the curtains, he called them "tomfoolery," and tore them down. So nothing happened to the rest of the flat.

That rebuke of Barber's seemed to deflect Cis's interest from the rooms to herself. For now upon her own person she wrought improvements. These did not escape Johnnie, who accepted them as a part of the general upheaval--an upheaval which she informed him was "Spring cleaning." Each night before retiring she pressed her one dress, and freshened its washable collar; she also brushed her hair a full hundred times, conscientiously counting the strokes. As for her teeth, Johnnie warned her that she would wear out both them and the ivory-handled brush in no time, since, night and morning, she used the brush tirelessly. Also she wasted valuable hours (in his opinion) by manicuring her fingernails when she might better have been threading a kitchen jungle all beast-infested.

Next, another, and the most startling change in her. She came out of her blue room one morning looking very tall, and odd. At first Johnnie did not see what was wrong, and stared, puzzled and bewildered.

But Barber saw. "What's the idea?" he wanted to know, and none too pleasantly.

"I'm almost seventeen," Cis answered.

Almost seventeen! Johnnie looked at her closer, and discovered the thing that made her different. It was her hair. Usually she wore it braided, and tied at the nape of her neck. But now that shining braid was pinned in a coil on the back of her head!

"Y' look foolish!" went on Barber. "And y' can't waste any more money 'round here, buyin' pins and combs and such stuff. Y' can jus' wear it down your back for another year or so."

"All the other girls have their hair up," she argued. "And I've got to have mine out of the way."

She did not take that coil down. Yet she was by no means indifferent to the att.i.tude of Big Tom. Johnnie, who understood so well her every expression, noticed how, when the longsh.o.r.eman sometimes entered unexpectedly, Cis would go whiter than usual, as if frightened; she would start at the mere sound of his voice, and drop whatever happened to be in her hand.

When Big Tom was out she would walk about aimlessly and restlessly; would halt absentmindedly with her face to a wall and not seem to see it. She did not want to talk; she preferred to be let completely alone.

She was irritable, or she sighed a good deal. She took to watching the clock, and wishing it were to-morrow morning. And if, giving in to Johnnie's entreaties, she consented to take part in a think, all she cared to do was bury the unhappy Cora, or watch lovely, and love-smitten, Elaine breathe her last.