A CHOICE OF VOCATIONS.—RECREATION HOUR.—THE BOW LEGGED BOY.—DRAWING BY
HEART.—GIOTTO.
JAN found favor with his new friends. The master’s sharp eyes noted that
the prescribed ablutions seemed both pleasant and familiar to the new
boy, and the superintendent of the wood-chopping department expressed his
opinion that Jan’s intelligence and dexterity were wasted among the
fagots, and that his vocation was to be a brushmaker at least, if not a
joiner.
Of such trades as were open to him in the Home Jan inclined to
cabinet-making. It must be amusing to dab little bunches of bristles so
deftly into little holes with hot pitch as to produce a hearth-brush, but
as a life-work it does not satisfy ambition. For boot-making he felt no
fancy, and the tailor’s shop had a dash of corduroy and closeness in the
atmosphere not grateful to nostrils so long refreshed by the breezes of
the plains. But, when an elder boy led him into the airy room of the
cabinet-maker, Jan found a subject of interest. The man was making a
piece of furniture to order; the boys had done the rough work, and he was
finishing it. It was a combination of shelves and cupboard, and was
something like an old oak cabinet which stood in Master Chuter’s parlor,
and which, in Jan’s opinion, was both handsomer and more convenient than
this. When the joiner, amused by the keen gaze of Jan’s black eyes,
asked him good-naturedly “how he liked it,” Jan expressed his opinion, to
illustrate which he involuntarily took up the fat pencil lying on the
bench, and made a sketch of Master Chuter’s cabinet upon a bit of wood.
News spreads with mysterious swiftness in all communities, large and
small. Before dinner-time, it was known throughout the Home that the
master joiner had applied for the new boy as a pupil, and that he could
draw with a black-lead pencil, and set his betters to rights.
The master had passed through several phases of feeling over Jan during
that morning. His first impression had been dispelled by Jan’s orderly
ways, and the absence of any vagrant restlessness about him. The
joiner’s report awoke a hope that he would become a star of the
institution, but as his acquirements came to the light, and he proved not
merely to have a good voice, but to have been in a choir, the master’s
generous hopes received a check, and as the day passed on he became more
and more convinced that it was a case to be “restored to his friends.”
When two o’clock came, and the boys were all out for “recreation,” Jan
had to endure some chaff on the subject of his accomplishments. But the
banter of London street boys was familiar to him, and he took it in good
part. When they found him good-tempered, he was soon popular, and they
asked his history with friendly curiosity.
“And vot sort of a mansion did you hang out in ven you wos at home?”
inquired a little lad, whose rosy cheeks and dancing eyes would have
qualified him to sit as a model for the hero of some little tale of
rustic life and simplicity, but who had graduated in the lowest lore of
the streets so much before he was properly able to walk that he was
bandy-legged in consequence. There must have been some blood in him that
was domestic and not vagrant in its currents, for he was as a rule one of
the steadiest and best-behaved boys in the establishment. Only from time
to time he burst out into street slang of the strongest description,
apparently as a relief to his feelings. Happily for the cause it had at
heart, the Boys’ Home was guided by large-minded counsels, and if the
eyes of the master were as the eyes of Argus, they could also wink on
occasion. “Hout with it!” said the bow-legged boy, straddling before
Jan. “If it wos Buckingham Palace as you resided in, make a clean breast
of it, and hease your mind.”
“Thee knows more of palaces than the likes of me. Thee manners be so
fine,” said Jan; and the repartee drew a roar of laughter, in which the
bandy-legged boy joined. “But I’ve lived in a windmill,” Jan added, “and
that be more than thee’ve done, I fancy.”
Some of the boys had seen windmills, and some had not; and there was a
strong tendency among the boys who had to give exaggerated, not to say
totally fictitious, descriptions of those buildings to the boys who had
not. There was a quick, prevailing impression, however, that Jan’s word
could be trusted, and he was appealed to. “Take it off in a picter,”
said the bandy-legged boy. “We heered as you took off a _sweet of
furnitur_ in the Master’s face. Take off the windmill, if you lived in
it.”
There was a bit of chalk in Jan’s pocket, and the courtyard was paved.
He knelt down, and the boys gathered round him. They were sharp enough
to be sympathetic, and when he begged them to be quiet they kept a
breathless silence, which was broken only by the distant roar of London
outside, and by the Master’s voice speaking in an adjoining passage.
“I can hardly say, sir, that I _fear_, but I think you’ll find most of
them look too hearty and comfortable for your purpose.”
About Jan the silence was breathless. The bow-legged boy literally laid
his hand upon his mouth, and he had better have laid it over his eyes,
for they seemed in danger of falling out of their sockets.
Jan covered his for a moment, and then looked upwards. Back upon his
sensitive memory rolled the past, like a returning tide which sweeps
every thing before it. Much clearer than those roofs and chimney-stacks
the windmill stood against the sky, with arms outstretched as if to
recall its truant son. If he had needed it to draw from, it was there,
plain enough. But how should he need to see it, on whose heart every
line of it was written? He could have laid his hand in the dark upon the
bricks that were weather-stained into fanciful landscapes upon its walls,
and planted his feet on the spot where the grass was most worn down about
its base.
He drew with such power and rapidity that only some awe of the look upon
his face could have kept silence in the little crowd whom he had
forgotten. And when the last scrap of chalk had crumbled, and he dragged
his blackened finger over the foreground till it bled, the voice which
broke the silence was the voice of a stranger, who stood with the master
on the threshold of the court-yard.
Never perhaps was more conveyed in one word than in that which he spoke,
though its meaning was known to himself alone,—
“GIOTTO!”