The Seven-Branched Candlestick Part 10

We got him home in Mr. Richards' little run-about, and put the boy to bed. The doctor set his arm and put it into splints. I met Frank's mother here, and, later on, his father who, having heard of the accident, came rushing upstairs from his bakery shop. They were a nervous, frightened pair; and it needed all the talk my lungs were capable of to a.s.sure them that their son would soon recover the use of his arm and be out of his bandage.

As I left their stuffy little flat, they were reciting some Hebrew prayers of grat.i.tude. Tears were on the cheeks of both of them, and their eyes were uplifted to a G.o.d I could not know. I went downstairs bitterly conscious of that.

And this was why, when Frank Cohen, pale, his arm in a sling, but the hero of his comrades, came again to the settlement, I sought him out and made an especial friend of him. Of what that friendship should become I had then no plan.

XIII

CHILD AND PARENT

One hot evening, when the fire-escapes were crowded with hundreds of sleeping children, and the streets were shrieking canyons of heated stone and iron, and men and women lay in the gra.s.s of little parks, breathing heavily as if in prayer for coolness, I learned the secret in the heart of young Frank Cohen.

He was sitting beside me in the amateur roof-garden which Mr. Richards had contrived atop the settlement. We had wicker chairs there, a few potted palms and a solitary, tiny goldfish in a small gla.s.s bowl. That was the extent of its furnishings; but in the later afternoons the old Jewish mothers would come and sit here and doze in the sun, grateful for the breeze, city-fed and redolent, which might carry relief towards them.

This afternoon Frank's mother had been among them. I had seen her there, a pale, little woman who sat with her sewing in her lap, staring dully out over the roofs below her. I had been detailed to go around among these women and to make them as comfortable as I could. Hardly a one, however, could understand English; and Frank's mother, when I came to her, took no notice of anything that I said or mentioned. She looked at me from under lowered eyebrows. Later on Mr. Richards, who had had her under his attention for some months, told me how frightened she had been by her son's misdemeanor--it had been no more than that, according to the police report--and it was easy to imagine that she looked with suspicion upon every comrade whom Frank followed, now. The fact that I was so much older and was a member of the staff of the settlement workers was not enough to overcome the whole of her distrust.

And when the evening came, and Frank and I had emerged from one of the club meetings--for he was president of his particular club of boys of his own age--hot and tired from wrangling over Robert's Rules of Order and the wording of a baseball challenge to be sent to a rival organization, he told me the entire story of that misdemeanor. He would not speak of it readily. He too felt the shame of it, differently of course, but no less heavily. He had been in bad company. He had been going for months with some sons of one of the East Side's notorious gamblers--boys who were wise beyond their years and brutal beyond their strength. Cowardly, sneaky, they had prompted him to steal things at the counters of all the shops on their street. He had never realized, under their whispered urgings, how wrong it was--and he had never had a chance to profit by his thefts himself. The petty business had gone on for a couple of weeks, the other boys praising him, bullying him by turn, and dividing the loot between them. And when the inevitable happened and Frank found himself locked for the night in a police court, frantic at the disgrace which the loathsome night exaggerated, these boys informed against him.

When he told me of this, and how they had come snivelling before the police lieutenant, and had lied to make that fat, gruff, old master believe that Frank had stolen even more than he actually had, and all for the sake of becoming the chief of their "gang"--then his narrow face darkened and writhed with a hate that was too great for him to bear--and presently tears came into his black eyes.

"Were they Jewish boys?" I asked him. "No," he answered pa.s.sionately. "I think I should have gone crazy if they had been."

I glanced at him quickly. He did not smile as he said it, nor was there anything too melodramatic about his manner.

"Why do you say that? That you would have gone crazy?"

"Don't you see? You're a Jew, ain't you?"

I said, "Yes."

"Well, I couldn't talk about it to you at all if you wasn't. And if they had been Jews--my own people--and had gone back on me like that, it would've been just a little too much. They were just tough kids--and so they didn't know any better. If they had been Jews they wouldn't have taught me to steal, they wouldn't have done what they--G.o.d, my father and mother were right about it, for sure!"

"Your father and mother? Why, what had they to do with it?"

"Oh, you know how parents are. They used to warn me against going with those tough kids. They seemed to know from the beginning that something'd happen out of it. They said--you know, it's like old folks--that Christian boys would never want to go with me unless to gain their own ends--and then to desert me, see? They wanted me to go with the Jewish boys I'd been going with all my life, before then. But I laughed and didn't listen. And--and when I had to pay back for all the things I stole, it was--well, it was the Jewish boys I knew who clubbed together and earned money by odd jobs after school--and if it wasn't for them, I'd be in the workhouse."

"But all Christian boys aren't like the ones you went with," I argued.

"No, I suppose not. But I like to think that all Jewish boys are like the ones on this street. They made a good Jew of me!"

I turned on him quickly. "Did they? How?"

"They made me proud of being one of them. They made me feel the close something-or-other--well, I ain't much when it comes to speeches but you know what I mean."

Perhaps I did, but I would not admit it to myself. Perhaps I did see the faith reborn in him through the faith that other boys had given him.

Perhaps, too, I could picture something of the welling joy that had come to his parents when he returned to the only right path that their simple, unquestioning eyes could see. And how jealously they must be guarding him now, to keep him in that code which was their life's law and had become his daily lesson!

"Don't you see?" he begged. "Can't you? Why, a fellow's just _got_ to have a side to fight on--and to fight for. And he's got to believe that his side is the only one, the right one. Life wouldn't be worth living without it. You don't know what it means to be _fighting for the right_!"

From below came the droning of the unquiet streets. A little higher up a hot wind went almost noiselessly among the chimneys, so that we heard but faint sighs. The roof garden was in darkness, naught gleaming but the little gla.s.s bowl of gold fish. There was a sense of utter darkness and loneliness--and yet into it had come, like the glad, brave blast of New Year's trumpet, a battle cry of the One G.o.d. A battle cry which made throb the heart of a young, rough boy; a battle cry which would be his whole life's secret well of grat.i.tude and bravery.

"_You don't know what it means to be fighting for the right!_"

He was so slight, so meagre in appearance, that I could not help finding something gently humorous about his utterance. But when I looked at him and saw how his eyes glowed through the dark, and how he stood straight and at full height, his narrow shoulders thrown back, in spite of his bandaged arm, and his face upraised to the summer stars, my smile pa.s.sed quickly.

There came over me that same queer panging sense of being only on the outside of things--only on Life's outermost border. I was looking straight into the heart of a boy and seeing the gladness which blazed there--and yet I could not have it, as he had it. Here was this sudden, all-forgetting boldness of belief which he had won--and I could only watch it covetously through the bars of my exiled doubts.

No, no, he was right--a thousand times more right than I. If faith in the One G.o.d did all of this for him, then that faith was surely justified.

And if I could only bring myself to believe as deeply, as powerfully as he did--then my whole life would be remade as his had been--and I, too, would fight for what I must believe: would fight--_for the right_!

I did not let him talk any further, but sent him home. I did not want his parents to be worrying as to where he was, this time of night. I stayed on a little while, looking over the roofs and the white-faced huddlings of the fire-escapes, and then I went to bed, to toss with heat and battle with my thoughts throughout the night.

When the morning came, I went early to Frank's house. The pavements were fresh and damp with the water of a sprinkling cart, and the shops, just beginning to open, had a Sabbath air of cleanliness. It was cooler than yesterday, too, and the street corners were still cleared and quiet.

I had been granted permission to take Frank and two other boys on a picnic to Westchester. He was ready for me when I knocked at his door, and let me into the darkened kitchen.

His mother was there, too, cutting bread for sandwiches which we would take along. Her old morning wrapper and her hastily-shawled head gave her an even more forbidding appearance than ever. But when her sandwiches were packed into a box and wrapped and tied, she wiped her hands on a towel and looked at me steadfastly, not unkindly, for fully a minute.

I could not understand what she said. It was in Yiddish, and I have never learned that tongue. But here and there I caught a word which gave me enough of her meaning.

She was telling me that Frank had spoken to her of me last night when he returned from the blessed settlement. He always came to her bedside, nowadays, knowing that she would be awake and waiting to hear where he had been. And so he had whispered, while his father slept, of the strange young man who was so kind--a Jew, like them--and yet who had no faith in G.o.d.

Then suddenly she began to beg something. "Mutter, mutter," was all I could make of it--and I guessed that she was asking me of my mother, and wondering why I did not listen at her knee as Frank had done at his own mother's. And when I told her that my mother was dead, tears came into her eyes, and this was the finest sympathy I had ever known.

For she put her big, b.u.t.tery hand on mine and shook her head. "You must learn to know G.o.d," I think she said. "He alone can take your mother's place. He made my son what I longed he should be. He will make you what you most desire. In G.o.d alone is there happiness."

And so Frank and I went out and down the dirty, narrow stairs, and came into a street of Heaven itself--a street of early sunlight, and a clear sky above--and morning smiles upon the faces of all pa.s.sersby. Or so it seemed to me, at any rate.

Because, for once in my life, I had seen the happiness of mother and child swept up into glory that is G.o.d's.

And I laughed to think of Mr. Richard's remark that religion works harm among these East Side people.

XIV

AN UNGRATEFUL NEPHEW

The summer came to an end only too quickly. I had enjoyed every moment of it, every opportunity. I had built up three clubs of which I was personal leader; I had given service in the gymnasium and playground; I had helped in the development of a roof-garden cordiality between the settlement workers and the mothers of children on the street. Mr.

Richards, the last night I was there, presented me with a loving-cup on behalf of the other workers.

It was at supper that he did this, in front of them all. He called upon me, then, to describe to them the most interesting experience I had had in the course of the summer. So I told them the incident of Frank Cohen and his mother--but I do not think they saw much that was interesting about it. Mr. Richards may have, perhaps, because he must have remembered that dictum of his which the incident disproved; but even he could guess little of the impression it had made upon my thought and character.