“TOMMY, I have missed you shockingly. You haven’t been in for days and
days. I suppose science has been benefiting at my expense. Magic must
have been working like yeast?” Mr. Meadowcroft observed pensively.
“Magic nothing!” Tommy grumbled, pausing in his wandering about the
big handsome parlor and dropping like a jack-in-the-box into a deep,
cushioned chair. “I was kep’ in after school for an hour every night
for a week, and instead of making up to me for missing all that magic
and all my visits here with you, what do you think dad did? He kep’
me at home all day Saturday and made me clean the woodshed, and no
magic all this week. It’s what you call adding insult to injury. And
all for--I was going to say nothing, but I guess you were right, Mr.
Meadowcroft. It was really for science, as you call magic.”
“How was that?”
“The girl that sits in front of me--or did, because I don’t sit there
since--has got long yellow hair with sort of a tossel on the end. She’s
always a-switching it over my desk, and I’m always wishing the tossel
would fall into my ink-well and wanting to give it a little poke but
never doing it. But in one of my tricks I pour a few drops of liquid
into a red solution and it takes the color all out and I says to myself
I’ll try it with ink. I took a bottle of the solution to school and
dipped Helen’s hair--the tip end, you know--into the ink-well and was
just going to neutralize it by putting it into the bottle when the
teacher caught me. I tried to explain and to get her to let me try the
antidote, but--nothing doing!”
“Did Helen’s hair come out all right?” Meadowcroft inquired.
“It washed out, I guess,” Tommy returned indifferently. “Anyhow, ’twas
only an inch or two and Betty says her Aunt Sarah trims her hair every
new moon and the queer part of it was there was a new moon just that
time. And what do you think? Betty offered to let me try it on her
hair!”
Meadowcroft started.
“I didn’t do it,” Tommy reassured him. “I think it would have been safe
enough, but if anything had happened and Betty had had to trim the end
of her braid, her Aunt Sarah would have been sure to have missed it and
made a fuss. And she hasn’t even got back to ordinary yet with Betty
since she made all the changes, you know. And even her ordinary ain’t
none too good.”
He rose, picked up his cap, and seating himself in another chair
twirled it about his knee.
“She ain’t a mite more aggravating than dad, Aunt Sarah ain’t. There’s
no one that can beat him at spoiling a home run every time. But she
talks a lot more. She goes over and over and over the same things, and
dad doesn’t waste any words.”
“That was a friendly offer on Betty’s part,” Meadowcroft observed
rather musingly. For that seemed a part of this new independence of the
girl that so puzzled him. It wasn’t, of course, possible that one could
be quite made over, transformed, overnight. And yet, that seemed to
have happened. He wondered if he should get the key to the puzzle when
he saw Betty. But he didn’t, as a matter of fact, have to wait.
“Sure, Betty’s all right,” Tommy declared, and added: “I suppose you
have seen me walking past with her several times, haven’t you?”
Meadowcroft had noticed the pair--or rather, the two; for Tommy was so
thin and carried himself so badly that Betty was truly a baby giant
beside him.
“It’s the only way I can get hold of her to talk about magic, she’s so
awfully busy,” Tommy explained. “But anyhow, it’s funny, for she ain’t
really any thinner or any shorter--the heels of her new shoes don’t let
her down hardly enough to count--but I don’t mind walking with Betty
now. I like to. I’ve made up my mind it wasn’t her size before, hardly
at all; but it was her looking so grown-up with long dresses and her
hair pugged like a lady’s. Walking beside her was like walking with a
teacher. And, gee! how a fellow feels to walk with a female teacher
after he gets out of the primary!”
“Betty certainly looks different and she doesn’t act like the same
person,” remarked Meadowcroft. “I hoped she would come in to see me
soon again, but she hurries by the house always. You might tell her I
want to see her to learn whether we have got to get acquainted all over
again.”
“You won’t have to do that. She’s the same old Betty,” declared the
boy. “And yet in a way she ain’t. Anyhow, the funny part of it all
is, she is so sort of--well, innocent-like. Honest and true, Mr.
Meadowcroft, you’d think she had always had her hair flapping down her
back with a bow tied to it and worn brown shoes with ribbon strings and
looked like other girls, she acts so natural. But I know why.”
“Why Tommy, what is it? What do you mean?” demanded the other.
“Bee in her bonnet,” remarked the boy, and the man marveled at his
insight and wondered that he hadn’t had the wit to solve the problem
thus.
“What’s the nature of the insect, Mr. Magician?” he inquired.
“It’s all about Rose Harrow, the girl that went blind, you know,” Tommy
returned with an important air. “Betty simply went wild over her and
the wilder she is the more she forgets about herself and being big or
little or--anything.”
Meadowcroft knit his brows.
“But I thought that the Harrow’s girl’s affliction dated back some
months?” he said.
“Yes, sir; well--listen. This is how it is now.” Tommy began, rounding
his inky fingers and joining the tips before him. “First Betty started
in doing like you advised her----”
“Yes?”
Tommy raised his eyes from the skeleton dome of his hands.
“Did you get a hunch from what I said about my cousin in Jersey, Mr.
Meadowcroft?” he asked ingenuously.
“Possibly, Sir Wizard.”
“Well, no matter, I haven’t mentioned it,” Tommy said magnanimously.
“But anyway, right in the midst of her thinking how she was to begin
straight off acting as if she wasn’t fat, something made her think
of Rose. It came to her all in a flash, she said--just like one of my
tricks, you know--why couldn’t Rose do the same? Why couldn’t she start
right in and act as if she wasn’t blind? Of course, Rose _was_ blind,
but then, so was Betty fat; and if she could act as if she was just
like anybody, Rose could act as if she could see. Well, Betty thought
and thought of it, but she had to wait till Saturday till she could
see Rose. And all the time she was thinking of it and forgetting other
things and stepping along spry and all that.”
Mr. Meadowcroft understood the whole situation.
“And how did the other girl take it?” he inquired.
“Well, Rose took to it like quicksilver takes to gold--especially if
it’s your mother’s ring and she don’t know you borrowed it,” rejoined
Tommy, grinning, and trying another chair. “Rose is crazy over it, too.
She was in our class in school, you know, awful bright, but gee! full
of mischief and pep, and what do you suppose? Betty thinks she can go
to the high school with the rest of us. Rose has set her heart on it
and so has Betty hers even more. But don’t say anything about it yet,
because they haven’t asked Rose’s mother yet. She’s awful careful of
Rose and awful timid about her, and they hardly dare to tell her about
this. And anyhow, as it is, she’s sort of stunned--having Rose flying
about the house and going out with Betty and eating her meals at the
table and begging to wash the dishes when she used to hate it.”
The clock struck six. Tommy seized his cap, and ran, calling back “So
long!” from the door. Meadowcroft understood that he feared to be late
for tea. During periods when his practise of magic was suspended,
Tommy always strove so to keep within bounds as to regain the privilege
at the appointed time. Meadowcroft watched the boy loping up the
avenue, then fell to musing.
He realized that he ought to feel gratified that Betty Pogany had
so speedily handed on the lighted torch to another. The girl had
good stuff in her, truly, and an active and supple mind to have
applied the principle given her so promptly and daringly to one far
worse handicapped than herself. Of course it was a fine thing to do,
and Meadowcroft knew he ought to be pleased; but he couldn’t help
regretting that Betty had been moved to act so precipitately. He had
wanted the girl to have a taste--a deep, long draught of happiness.
He wanted her to have her fling, to be a happy, careless, frolicking
school-girl. Instead of that, she had, almost in the act of striking
for her freedom, fettered herself with a burden that would add to her
years instead of reducing them. Instead of being a romping little girl,
she would be an anxious old woman.
Humphrey Meadowcroft shook his head and sighed deeply. And yet there
was a sort of rueful smile in his eyes.