ENTER KERRY
When I was first seen prowling along the roads and about the fields
stalking butterflies and diurnal moths with the caution of a red
Indian on the warpath and the stealth of a tiger in the jungle; when
mystified folk met me at night, a lantern suspended from my neck, a
haversack across my shoulders, a bottle-belt about my waist, and armed
with a butterfly net, the consensus of opinion was that poor Father De
Rancé was stark staring mad. Appleboro hadn't heretofore witnessed the
proceedings of the Brethren of the Net, and I had to do much patient
explaining; even then I am sure I must have left many firmly convinced
that I was not, in their own phrase, "all there."
"Hey, you! Mister! Them worms is pizen! Them's _fever_-worms!" was
shrieked at me frenziedly by the country-folks, black and white, when
I was caught scooping up the hairy caterpillars of the tiger moths.
Even when it was understood that I wished caterpillars, cocoons, and
chrysalids, for the butterflies and moths they would later make, looks
of pitying contempt were cast upon me. That a grown man--particularly
a minister of the gospel, with not only his own but other people's
souls to save--should spend time hunting for worms, with which he
couldn't even bait a hook, awakened amazement.
"What any man in his right mind wants with a thing that ain't nothin'
but wriggles an' hair on the outside an' sqush on the inside, beats
me!" was said more than once.
"But all of them are interesting, some are valuable, and many grow
into very beautiful moths and butterflies," I ventured to defend
myself.
"S'posin' they do? You can't eat 'em or wear 'em or plant 'em, can
you?" And really, you understand, I couldn't!
"An' you mean to tell me to my face," said a scandalized farmer,
watching me assorting and naming the specimens taken from my field
box, "you mean to tell me you're givin' every one o' them bugs a
_name_, same's a baptized Christian? Adam named every livin' thing,
an' Adam called them things Caterpillars an' Butterflies. If it suited
him an' Eve and God A'mighty to have 'em called that an' nothin' else,
looks to me it had oughter suit anybody that's got a grain o'real
religion. If you go to call 'em anythin' else it's sinnin' agin the
Bible. I've heard all my life you Cath'lics don't take as much stock
in the Scripters as you'd oughter, but this thing o'callin' a wurrum
Adam named plain Caterpillar a--a--_what'd_ you say the dum beast's
name was? _My sufferin' Savior!_ is jest about the wust dern
foolishness yet! I lay it at the Pope's door, every mite o' it, an'
you'd better believe he'll have to answer for sech carryin's on, some
o' these days!"
So many other things having been laid at the Pope's door, I held my
peace and made no futile attempt to clear the Holy Father of the dark
suspicion of having perpetrated their names upon certain of the
American lepidoptera.
I had yet other darker madnesses; had I not been seen spreading upon
trees with a whitewash brush a mixture of brown sugar, stale beer, and
rum?
Asked to explain this lunatic proceeding I could only say that I was
sugaring for moths; these airy fairy gentlemen having a very human
liking for a "wee drappie o't."
"That amiable failin'," Major Appleby Cartwright decided, "is a credit
to them an' commends them to a respectful hearin'. On its face it
would seem to admit them to the ancient an' honorable brotherhood of
convivial man. But, suh, there's another side to this question, an'
it's this:--a creature that's got six perfectly good legs, not to
mention wings, an' still can't carry his liquor without bein' caught,
deserves his fate. It's not in my line to offer suggestions to an
allwise Providence, or I _might_ hint that a scoop-net an' a killing
jar in pickle for some two-legged topers out huntin' free drinks
wouldn't be such a bad idea at all."
But as I pursued my buggy way--and displayed, save in this one
particular, what might truthfully be called ordinary common
sense--people gradually grew accustomed to it, looking upon me as a
mild and harmless lunatic whose inoffensive mania might safely be
indulged--nay, even humored. In consequence I was from time to time
inundated with every common thing that creeps, crawls, and flies. I
accepted gifts of bugs and caterpillars that filled my mother with
disgust and Clélie with horror; both of them hesitated to come into my
study, and I have known Clélie to be afraid to go to bed of a night
because the great red-horned "Hickory devil" was downstairs in a box,
and she was firmly convinced that this innocent worm harbored a
cold-blooded desire to crawl upstairs and bite her. That silly woman
will depart this life in the firm faith that all crawling creatures
came into the world with the single-hearted hope of biting her, above
all other mortals; and that having achieved the end for which they
were created, both they and she will immediately curl up and die.
But alas, I had but scant time to devote to this enchanting and
engrossing study, which, properly pursued, will fill a man's days to
the brim. I gathered my specimens as I could and classified and
mounted them as it pleased God--until the advent of John Flint.
Now, I must, with great reluctance, here set down the plain truth that
he, too, looked upon me at first with amaze not unmixed with rage and
contempt. Most caterpillars, you understand, feed upon food of their
own arbitrary choosing; and when they are in captivity one must
procure this particular aliment if one hopes to rear them.
_Slippy McGee feeding bugs!_ It was about as hideous and devil-born a
contretemps as, say, putting a belted earl to peel potatoes or asking
an archbishop to clean cuspidors. The man boiled with offended dignity
and outraged pride. One could actually see him swell. He had expected
something quite different, and this apparently offensive triviality
disgusted and shocked him. I could see myself falling forty thousand
fathoms in his esteem, and I think he would have incontinently turned
his back upon me save for his promise to Mary Virginia.
It is true that many of the caterpillars are ugly and formidable, poor
things, to the uninitiated eye, which fails to recognize under this
uncomely disguise the crowned and glorious citizens of the air. I had
just then a great Cecropia, an able-bodied green gentleman armed with
twelve thorn-like, sizable horns, and wearing, along with other
agreeable adornments, three yellow and four red arrangements like
growths of dwarf cactus plants on the segments behind his hard round
green head.
Mr. Flint, with an ejaculation of horror, backed off on one crutch and
clubbed the other.
"My God!" said he, "Kill it! Kill it!" I saved my green friend in the
nick of time. The man, with staring eyes, looked from me to the
caterpillar; then he leaned over and watched it, in grim silence.
He knotted his forehead, made slits of his eyes, gulped, screwed his
mouth into the thin red line of deadly determination, and with every
nerve braced, even as a martyr braces himself for the stake or the
sword, put out his hand, up which the formidable-looking worm walked
leisurely. Death not immediately resulting from this daring act, he
controlled his shudders and breathed easier. The worm became less and
less terrifying; no longer appearing, say, the size of the boa
constrictor. A few moments of this harmless meandering about Mr.
Flint's hand and arm, and of a sudden he wore his true colors of an
inoffensive and law-abiding larva, anxious only to attend strictly to
his own legitimate business, the Gargantuan feeding of himself into
the pupa from which he would presently emerge one of the most
magnificent of native moths. Gingerly Mr. Flint picked him up between
thumb and fore-finger, and as gingerly dropped him back into the
breeding-cage. He squared his shoulders, wiped his brow, and drew a
long whistling breath.
"Phe-ew! It took all my nerve to do it!" said he, frankly. "I felt for
a minute as if a strong-arm cop'd chased me up an alley and pulled his
gun on me. The feeling of a bug's legs on your bare skin is something
fierce at first, ain't it? But after _him_ none of 'em can scare me
any more. I could play tag with pink monkeys with blue tails and green
whiskers without sending in the hurry-call."
The setting boards and blocks, the arrays of pins, needles, tubes,
forceps, jars and bottles, magnifying-glasses, microscope, slides,
drying-ovens, relaxing-box, cabinets, and above all, the mounted
specimens, raised his spirits somewhat. This, at least, looked
workman-like; this, at least, promised something better than stoking
worms!
If not hopefully, at least willingly enough, he allowed himself to be
set to work. And that work had come in what some like to call the
psychological moment. At least it came--or was sent--just when he
needed it most.
He soon discovered, as all beginners must, that there is very much
more to it than one might think; that here, too, one must pay for
exact knowledge with painstaking care and patient study and ceaseless
effort. He discovered how fatally easy it is to spoil a good specimen;
how fairy-fragile a wee wing is; how painted scales rub, and vanish
into thin air; how delicate antennæ break, and forelegs will
fiendishly depart hence; and that proper mounting, which results in a
perfect insect, is a task which requires practice, a sure eye, and an
expert, delicate, and dexterous touch. Also, that one must be
ceaselessly on guard lest the baleful little ant and other tiny curses
evade one's vigilance and render void one's best work. He learned
these and other salutary lessons, which tend to tone down an amateur's
conceit of his half-knowledge; and this chastened him. He felt his
pride at stake--he who could so expertly, with almost demoniac
ingenuity, force the costliest and most cunningly constructed
burglar-proof lock; he whose not idle boast was that he was handy with
his fingers! Slippy McGee baffled, at bay before a butterfly? And in
the presence of a mere priest and a girl-child? Never! He'd show us
what he could do when he really tried to try!
Presently he wanted to classify; and he wanted to do it alone and
unaided--it looked easy enough. It irked him, pricked his pride, to
have to be always asking somebody else "what is this?" And right then
and there those inevitable difficulties that confront every earnest
and conscientious seeker at the beginning of his quest, arose, as the
fascinating living puzzles presented themselves for his solving.
To classify correctly is not something one learns in a day, be he
never so willing and eager; as one may discover who cares to take half
a dozen plain, obscurely-colored small moths, and attempts to put them
in their proper places.
Mr. Flint tried it--and those wretched creatures _wouldn't_ stay put.
It seemed to him that every time he looked at them they ought to be
somewhere else; always there was something--a bar, a stripe, a small
distinctive spot, a wing of peculiar shape, antennæ, or palpi, or
spur, to differentiate them.
"Where the Sam Hill," he blazed, "do all these footy little devils
come from, anyhow? Where am I to put a beast of a bug when the next
one that's exactly like it is entirely different the next time you
look at it? There's too much beginning and no end at all to this
game!"
For all that, he followed them up. I saw with pure joy that he refused
to dismiss anything carelessly, while he scorned to split hairs. He
had a regular course of procedure when he was puzzled. First he turned
the new insect over and over and glared at it from every possible
angle; then he rumpled his hair, gritted his teeth, squared his
shoulders and hurled himself into work.
There was, for instance, the common Dione Vanillæ, that splendid Gulf
Fritillary which haunts all the highways of the South. She's a
long-wing, but she's not a Heliconian; she's a silver-spot, but she's
not an Argynnis. She bears a striking family likeness to her fine
relations, but she has certain structural peculiarities which
differentiate her. Whose word should he take for this, and why?
Wherein lay those differences? He began, patiently, with her
cylinder-shaped yellow-brown, orange-spotted caterpillar, on the
purple passion flowers in our garden; he watched it change into a
dark-brown chrysalis marked with a few pale spots; he saw emerge from
this the red-robed lady herself, with her long fulvous forewings, and
her shorter hind wings smocked with black velvet, and her under-frock
flushed with pinkish orange and spangled with silver. And yet, in
spite of her long marvelous tongue--he was beginning to find out that
no tool he had ever seen, and but few that God Himself makes, is so
wonderful as a butterfly's tongue--she hadn't been able to tell him
that about herself which he most wished to find out. _That_ called for
a deeper knowledge than he as yet possessed.
But he knew that other men knew. And he had to know. He meant to know.
For the work gripped him as it does those marked and foreordained for
its service. That marvelous world in which the Little People dwell--a
world so absolutely different from ours that it might well be upon
another planet--began to open, slowly, slowly, one of its many
mysterious doors, allowing him just glimpse enough of what magic lay
beyond to fire his heart and to whet his appetite. And he couldn't
break into that world with a jimmy. It was burglar-proof. That portal
was so impervious to even the facile fingers of Slippy McGee, that
John Flint must pay the inevitable and appropriate toll to enter!
Westmoreland had replaced his crutches with a wooden leg, and you
might see him stumping about our grounds, minutely examining the
underside of shrubs and bushes, the bark of trees, poking into corners
and crannies, or scraping in the mold under the fallen leaves by the
fences, for things which no longer filled him with aversion and
disgust, but with the student's interest and pleasure.
"Think of me being in the same world with 'em all these years and not
knowing a thing about 'em when there's so much to know, and under my
skin stark crazy to learn it, only I didn't know I even wanted to know
what I really want to know more than anything else, until I had to
get dumped down here to find it out! I get the funniest sort of a
feeling, parson, that all along there's been a Me tucked away inside
my hide that's been loving these things ever since I was born. Not
just to catch and handle 'em, and stretch out their little wings, and
remember the names some bughouse high-brow wished on 'em, though all
that's in the feeling, too; it's something else, if I could make you
understand what I mean."
I laughed. "I think I do understand," said I. "I have a Me like that
tucked away in mine, too, you know."
He looked at me gravely. "Parson," said he, earnestly, "there's times
I wish you had a dozen kids, and every one of 'em twins! It's a shame
to think of some poor orphans swindled out of such a daddy as you'd
have made!"
"Why," said I, smiling, "_You_ are one of my twins."
"Me?" He reflected. "Maybe half of me might be, parson," he agreed,
"but it's not safe for a skypilot to be caught owning a twin like the
other half."
"I'm pinning my faith to _my_ half," said I, serenely.
"Now, why?" he asked, with sudden fierceness. "I turn it over and over
and over: it looks white on the outside, but I can't to save me figure
out _why_ you're doing it. Parson, _what_ have you got up your
sleeve?"
"Nothing but my arm. What should you think?"
"I don't know what to think, and that's the straight of it. What's
your game, anyhow? What in the name of God are you after?"
"Why, I think," said I, "that in the name of God I'm after--that other
You that's been tucked away all these years, and couldn't get born
until a Me inside mine, just like himself, called him to come out and
be alive."
He pondered this in silence. Then:
"I'll take your word for it," said he. "Though if anybody'd ever told
me I'd be eating out of a parson's hand, I'd have pushed his face in
for him. Yep, I'm Fido! _Me!_"
"At least you growl enough," said I, tartly.
He eyed me askance.
"Have I got to lick hands?" he snarled.
I walked away, without a reply; through my shoulder-blades I could
feel him glaring after me. He followed, hobbling:
"Parson!"
"Well?"
"If I'm not the sort that licks hands I'm not the sort that bites 'em,
neither. I'll tell you--it's this way: I--sort of get to chewing on
that infernal log of wood that's where my good leg used to grow
and--and splinters get into my temper--and I've _got_ to snarl or
burst wide open! You'd growl like the devil yourself, if you had to
try holding down my job for awhile, skypilot or no skypilot!"
"Why--I dare say I should," said I, contritely. "But," I added, after
a pause, "I shouldn't be any the better for it, should you think?"
"Not so you could notice," shortly. And after a moment he added, in an
altered voice: "Rule 1: Can the Squeal!"
I think he most honestly tried to. It was no easy task, and I have
seen the sweat start upon his forehead and his face go pale, when in
his eagerness he forgot for a moment the cruel fact that he could no
longer move as lightly as of old--and the crippled body, betraying
him, reminded him all too swiftly of his mistake.
The work saved him. For it is the heaven-sent sort of work, to those
ordained for it, that fills one's hours and leaves one eager for
further tasks. It called for all his oldtime ingenuity. His tools, for
instance--at times their limitations irked him, and he made others
more satisfactory to himself; tools adjusted to an insect's frail
body, not to a time-lock. Before that summer ended he could handle
even the frailest and tiniest specimen with such nice care that it was
delightful to watch him at work. The time was to come when he could
mend a torn wing or fix a broken antennas with such exquisite fidelity
to detail that even the most expert eye might well be deceived.
I had only looked for a little temporary help, such as any intelligent
amateur might be able to furnish. But I was not long unaware that this
was more than a mere amateur. To quote himself, he had the goods, and
I realized with a mounting heart that I had made a find, if I could
only hold on to it. For the first time in years I could exchange
specimens. My cabinets began to fill out--with such perfect insects,
too! We added several rare ones, a circumstance to make any
entomologist look upon the world through rosy spectacles. Why, even
the scarce shy Cossus Centerensis came to our very doors, apparently
to fill a space awaiting him. Perhaps he was a Buddhist insect
undergoing reincarnation, and was anxious to acquire merit by
self-immolation. Anyhow, we acquired him, and I hope he acquired
merit.
We had scores of insects in the drying ovens. We had more and ever more
in the breeding cages,--in our case simple home-made affairs of a keg
or a box with a fine wire-netting over the food plant; or a lamp-chimney
slipped over a potted plant with a bit of mosquito-netting tied over the
top, for the smaller forms.
These cages were a never-failing source of delight and interest to the
children, and at their hands heaven rained caterpillars upon us that
season. Even my mother grew interested in the work, though Clélie
never ceased to look upon it as a horrid madness peculiar to white
people.
"All Buckrahs is funny in dey haids," Daddy January consoled her when
she complained to him about it. "Dey gets all kind o' fool notions
'bout all kind o' fool t'ings. You ain't got to feel so bad--de Jedge
is lots wuss'n yo' boss is. Yo' boss kin see de bugs he run atter, but
my boss talk 'bout some kind o' bug he call Germ. I ax um what kind o'
bug is dat; an' he 'low you can't see um wid yo' eye. I ain't say so
to de Jedge, but _I_ 'low when you see bug you can't see wid yo' eye,
you best not seem um 'tall--case he must be some kind o' spook, an'
Gawd knows I ain't want to see no spook. Ef de bug ain't no spook, den
he mus' be eenside yo' haid, 'stead o' outside um, an' to hab bug on
de eenside o' yo' haid is de wuss kind o' bad luck. Anyhow, nobody but
Buckrah talk an' ack like dat, niggers is got mo' sense."
We found, presently, a ready and a steady sale for our extra stock. We
could supply caterpillars, butterflies and moths, or chrysalids and
cocoons; we had some rather scarce ones; and then, our unmounted
specimens were so perfect, and our mounted ones so exquisitely done,
that we had but little trouble in disposing of them. Under the hand of
John Flint these last were really works of art. Not for nothing had
he boasted that he was handy with his fingers.
The pretty common forms, framed hovering lifelike over delicately
pressed ferns and flowers, found even a readier market, for they were
really beautiful. Money had begun to come in--not largely, it is true,
but still steadily and surely. You must know how to handle your stock,
and you must be in touch with your market--scientists, students,
collectors,--and this, of course, takes time. We could supply the
larger dealers, too, although they pay less, and we had a modest
advertisement in one or two papers published for the profession, which
brought us orders. But let no one imagine that it is an easy task to
handle these frail bodies, these gossamer wings, so that naturalists
and collectors are glad to get them. Once or twice we lost valuable
shipments.
Long since--in the late spring, to be exact, John Flint had moved out
of the Guest Room, needed for other occupants, into a two-roomed
outbuilding across the garden. Some former pastor had had it built for
an oratory and retreat, but now, covered with vines, it had stood for
many years unused, save as a sort of lumber room.
When the troublesome question of where we might properly house him had
arisen, my mother hit upon these unused rooms as by direct
inspiration. She had them cleaned, repainted, scoured, and turned into
a pleasant well-lighted, airy workroom and living-room combined, and a
smaller and rather austere bedroom, with an inexpensive but very good
head of Christ over the mantel, and an old, old carved crucifix on the
wall beside the white iron bed. Laurence took from his own room a
Morris chair, whose somewhat frayed cushions my mother neatly
re-covered. Mary Virginia contributed a rug, as well as dressing-gown
and slippers. Miss Sally Ruth gave him outright a brand-new Bible, and
loaned him an old cedar-wood wardrobe which had been her
great-grandmother's, and which still smelt delicately of generations
of rose-leaved and lavendered linen.
"All I ask," said Miss Sally Ruth sharply, "is that you'll read Paul
with your eyes open and your mouth shut, and that you'll keep your
clothes in that wardrobe and your moths out of it. If it was intended
for anybody to teach you anything, then Paul will teach you; but it
_wasn't_ intended for a cedar-wood wardrobe to hold moths, and I hope
you won't forget it!"
Major Cartwright sent over a fishing-rod, a large jar of tobacco, and
a framed picture of General Lee.
"Because no man, suh, could live under the same roof with even his
pictured semblance, and not be the bettah fo' it," said the major
earnestly. "I know. I've got to live with him myself. When I'm fair to
middlin' he's in the dinin' room. When I've skidded off the straight
an' narrow path I lock him up in the parlor, an' at such times I sleep
out on the po'ch. But when I'm at peace with man an' God I take him
into my bedroom an' look at him befo' retirin'. He's about as easy to
live with as the Angel Gabriel, but he's mighty bracin', Marse Robert
is: mighty bracin'!"
Thus equipped, John Flint settled himself in his own house. It had
been a wise move, for he had the sense of proprietorship, privacy, and
freedom. He could come and go as he pleased, with no one to question.
He could work undisturbed, save for the children who brought him such
things as they could find. He put his breeding cages out on the
vine-covered piazzas surrounding two-sides of his house, arranged the
cabinets and boxes which had been removed from my study to his own,
nailed up a few shelves to suit himself, and set up housekeeping.
My mother had been frankly delighted to have my creeping friends moved
out of the Parish House, and Clélie abated in her dislike of the
one-legged man because he had, in a way, removed from her a heretofore
never-absent fear of waking up some night and finding a caterpillar
under her bed. More yet, he entailed no extra work, for he flatly
refused to have her set foot in his rooms for the purpose of cleaning
them. He attended to that himself. The man was a marvel of neatness
and order. Mesdames, permit me to here remark that when a man is neat
and orderly no woman of Eve's daughters can compare with him. John
Flint's rooms would arouse the rabid envy of the cleanest and most
scourful she in Holland itself.
Now as the months wore away there had sprung up between him, and Mary
Virginia and Laurence, one of those odd comradely friendships which
sometime unite the totally unlike with bonds hard to break. His
spotless workroom had a fascination for the youngsters. They were
always in and out, now with a cocoon, now an imago, now a larva, and
then again to see how those they had already brought were getting
along.
The lame man was an unrivaled listener--a circumstance which endeared
him to youthful Laurence, in whom thoughts and the urge to express
these thoughts in words rose like sap. This fresh and untainted
confidence, poured out so naïvely, taught John Flint more than any
words or prayers of mine could have done. It opened to him a world
into which, his eyes had not heretofore been permitted to look; and
the result was all the more sure and certain, in that the children had
no faintest idea of the effect they were producing. They had no end to
gain, no ax to grind; they merely spoke the truth as they knew it, and
this unselfish and hopeful truthfulness aroused his interest and
curiosity; it even compelled his admiration. He couldn't dismiss
_this_ as "hot air"!
I was more than glad to have him thus taught. It was a salutary
lesson, tending to temper his overweening confidence and to humble his
contemptuous pride. In his own world he had been supreme, a figure of
sinister importance. Brash had been crook or cop who had taught or
caught Slippy McGee! But in this new atmosphere, in which he breathed
with difficulty, the young had been given him for guides. They led
him, where a grownup had failed.
Mary Virginia was particularly fond of him. He had as little to say to
her as to Laurence, but he looked at her with interested eyes that
never lost a movement; she knew he never missed a word, either; his
silence was friendly, and the little girl had a pleasant fashion of
taking folk for granted. Hers was one of those large natures which
give lavishly, shares itself freely, but does not demand much in
return. She gave with an open hand to her quiet listener--her books,
her music, her amusing and innocent views, her frank comments, her
truthfulness, her sweet brave gaiety; and he absorbed it like a
sponge. It delighted her to find and bring the proper food-plants for
his cages. And she being one of those who sing while they work, you
might hear her caroling like a lark, flitting about the old garden
with her red setter Kerry at her heels.
Laurence no longer read aloud to him, but instead gave Flint such
books as he could find covering his particular study, and these were
devoured and pored over, and more begged for. Flint would go without
new clothes, neat as he was, and without tobacco, much as he liked to
smoke,--to buy books upon lepidoptera.
He helped my mother with her flowers and her vegetables, but refused
to have anything to do with her chickens, remarking shortly that hens
were such fools he couldn't help hating them. Madame said she liked to
have him around, for he was more like some unobtrusive jinnee than a
mere mortal. She declared that John Flint had what the negroes call a
"growing hand"--he had only to stick a bit of green in the ground and
it grew like Jonah's gourd.
Since he had begun to hobble about, he had gradually come to be
accepted by the town in general. They looked upon him as one who
shared Father De Rancé's madness, a tramp who was a hunter of bugs. It
explained his presence in the Parish House; I fancy it also explained
to some why he had been a tramp!
Folks got used to him, as one does to anything one sees daily. The
pleasant conservative soft-voiced ladies who liked to call on Madame
of an afternoon and gossip Christianly, and drink tea and eat Clélie's
little cakes on our broad shady verandah, only glanced casually at the
bent head and shoulders visible through the screened window across the
garden. They said he was very interesting, of course, but painfully
shy and bashful. As for him, he was as horribly afraid of them as they
would have been of him, had they known. I could not always save
myself from the sin of smiling at an ironic situation.
Judge Mayne had at first eyed the man askance, watching him as his own
cats might an interloping stray dog.
"The fellow's not very prepossessing," he told me, of an evening when
he had dined with us, "but I've been on the bench long enough to be
skeptical of any fixed good or bad type--I've found that the criminal
type is any type that goes wrong; so I shouldn't go so far as to call
this chap a bad egg. But--I hope you are reasonably sure of him,
father?"
"Reasonably," said I, composedly.
"Laurence tells me Madame and Mary Virginia _like_ the fellow. H'm!
Well, I've acquired a little faith in the intuition of women--some
women, understand, and some times. And mark you, I didn't say
_judgment_. Let us hope that this is one of the times when faith in
intuition will be justified."
Later, when he had had time to examine the work progressing under the
flexible fingers of the silent workman, he withdrew with more respect.
"I suppose he's all right, if you think so, father. But I'd watch out
for him, anyway," he advised.
"That is exactly what I intend to do."
"Rather he fell into your hands than mine. Better for him," said the
judge, briefly. Then he launched into an intimate talk of Laurence,
and in thus talking of the boy's future, forgot my helper.
That was it, exactly. The man was so unobtrusive without in the least
being furtive. Had so little to say; attended so strictly to his own
business, and showed himself so utterly and almost inhumanly
uninterested in anybody else's, that he kept in the background. He
was there, and people knew it; they were, in a sense, interested in
him, but not curious about him.
One morning in early autumn--he had been with us then some eight or
nine months--I went over to his rooms with a New York newspaper in my
hand. It had news that set my heart to pounding sickeningly--news that
at once simplified and yet complicated matters. I hesitated as to
whether or not I should tell him, but decided that whatever effect
that news might produce, I would deal with him openly, above board,
and always with truth. He must act and judge for himself and with his
eyes open. On my part there should be no concealment.
The paper stated that the body of a man found floating in the East
River had been positively identified by the police as that of Slippy
McGee. That the noted crook had gotten back into New York through the
cunning dragnet so carefully spread for him was another proof of his
daring and dexterity. How he met the dark fate which set him adrift,
battered and dreadful, in the East River, was another of those
underworld crimes that remain unsolved. Cunning and dangerous,
mysterious in his life, baffling all efforts to get at him, he was as
evilly mysterious in his death. There was only one thing sure--that
this dead wretch with the marks of violence upon him was Slippy McGee;
and since his breath had ceased, the authorities could breathe easier.
He read it deliberately; then re-read it, and sat and stared at the
paper. A slow grim smile came to his lips, and he took his chin in his
hand, musingly. The eyes narrowed, the face darkened, the jaw thrust
itself forward.
"Dead, huh?" he grunted, and stared about him, with a slow, twisting
movement of the head. "Well--I might just as well be, as buried alive
in a jay-dump at the tail-end of all creation!" Once again the Powers
of Darkness swooped down and wrestled with and for him; and knowing
what I knew, sick at heart, I trembled for him.
"What am _I_ doing here, anyhow?" he snarled with his lips drawn back
from his teeth. "Piddling with bugs--_Me!_ Patching up their dinky
little wings and stretching out their dam' little legs and feelers--me
being what I am, and they being what they are! Say, I've got to quit
this, once for all I've got to quit it. I'm not a _man_ any more. I'm
a dead one, a he-granny cutting silo for lady-worms and drynursing
their interesting little babies. My God! _Me!_" And he threw his hands
above his head with a gesture of rage and despair.
"Hanging on here like a boob--no wonder they think I'm dead! If I
could just make a getaway and pull off one more good job and land
enough--"
"You couldn't keep it, if you did land it--your sort can't. You know
how it went before--the women and the sharks got it. There'd be always
that same incentive to pull off just one more to keep you going--until
you'd pulled yourself behind bars, and stayed there. And there's the
drug-danger, too. If you escaped so far, it was because so far you had
the strength to let drugs alone. But the drugs get you, sooner or
later, do they not? Have you not told me over and over again that
'nearly all dips are dopes'? That first the dope gets you--and then
the law? No. You can't pull off anything that won't pull you into
hell. We have gone over this thing often enough, haven't we?"
"No, we haven't. And I haven't had a chance to pull off
anything--except leaves for bugs. _Me!_ I want to get my hand in once
more, I tell you! I want to pull off a stunt that'll make the whole
bunch of bulls sit up and bellow for fair--and I can do it, easy as
easy. Think I've croaked, do they? And they can all snooze on their
peg-posts, now I'm a stiff? Well, by cripes, I just want half of a
half of a chance, and I'll show 'em Slippy McGee's good and plenty
alive!"
"Come out into the garden, my son, and feel that you are good and
plenty alive. Come out into the free air. Hold on tight, a little
while longer!"
I laid my hand upon his shoulder compellingly, and although he glared
at me, and ground his teeth, and lifted his lip, he came; unwillingly,
swearing under his breath, he came. We tramped up and down the garden
paths, up and down, and back again, his wooden peg making a round
hole, like a hoofmark, in the earth. He stared down at it, spat
savagely upon it, and swore horribly, but not too loudly.
"I want to feel like a live man!" he gritted. "A live man, not a
one-legged mucker with a beard like a Dutch bomb-thrower's, puttering
about a skypilot's backyard on the wrong side of everything!"
"Stick it out a little longer, John Flint; hold fast!"
"Hold fast to what?" he demanded savagely. "To a bug stuck on a
needle?"
"Yes. And to me who trusts you. To Madame who likes you. To the dear
child who put bug and needle into your hand because she knew it was
good work and trusted your hand to do it. And more than all, to that
other Me you're finding--your own true self, John Flint! Hold fast,
hold fast!"
He stopped and stared at me.
"I'm believing him again!" said he, grievously. "I've been sat on
while I was hot, and my number's marked on me, 23. I'm hoodooed,
that's what!"
Tramp, tramp, stump, stump, up and down, the two of us.
"All right, devil-dodger," said he wearily, after a long sullen
silence. "I'll stick it out a bit longer, to please you. You've been
white--the lot of you. But look here--if I beat it some night ... with
what I can find, why, I'm warning you: don't blame _me_--you're
running your risks, and it'll be up to _you_ to explain!"
"When you want to go, John Flint--when you really and truly want to
go, why, take anything I have that you may fancy, my son. I give it
you beforehand."
"I don't want anything given to me beforehand!" he growled. "I want to
take what I want to take without anybody's leave!"
"Very well, then; take what you want to take, without anybody's leave!
I shall be able to do without it, I dare say."
He turned upon me furiously:
"Oh, yes, I guess you can! You'd do without eating and breathing too,
I suppose, if you could manage it! You do without too blamed much
right now, trying to beat yourself to being a saint! Of course I'd
help myself and leave you to go without--you're enough to make a man
ache to shoot some sense into you with a cannon! And for God's sake,
_who_ are you pinching and scraping and going without _for_? A bunch
of hickey factory-shuckers that haven't got sense enough to talk
American, and a lot of mill-hands with beans on 'em like bone buttons!
They ain't worth it. While I'm in the humor, take it from me there
ain't anybody worth anything anyhow!"
"Oh, Mr. Flint! What a shame and a sin!" called another voice. "Oh,
Mr. Flint, I'm ashamed of you!" There in the freedom of the Saturday
morning sunlight stood Mary Virginia, her red Irish setter Kerry
beside her.
"I came over," said she, "to see how the baby-moths are getting on
this morning, and to know if the last hairy gentleman I brought spins
into a cocoon or buries himself in the ground. And then I heard Mr.
Flint--and what he said is unkind, and untrue, and not a bit like him.
Why, everybody's worth everything you can do for them--only some are
worth more."
The wild wrath died out of his face. As usual, he softened at sight of
her.
"Oh, well, miss, I wasn't thinking of the like of you--and him," he
jerked his head at me, half apologetically, "nor young Mayne, nor the
little Madame. You're different."
"Why, no, we aren't, really," said Mary Virginia, puckering her brows
adorably. "We only _seem_ to be different--but we are just exactly
like everybody else, only _we_ know it, and some people never can seem
to find it out--and there's the difference! You see?" That was the
befuddled manner in which Mary Virginia very often explained things.
If God was good to you, you got a little glimmer of what she meant and
was trying to tell you. Mary Virginia often talked as the alchemists
used to write--cryptically, abstrusely, as if to hide the golden truth
from all but the initiate.
"Come and shake hands with Mr. Flint, Kerry," said she to the setter.
"I want you to help make him understand things it's high time he
should know. Nobody can do that better than a good dog can."
Kerry looked a trifle doubtful, but having been told to do a certain
thing, he obeyed, as a good dog does. Gravely he sat up and held out
an obedient paw, which the man took mechanically. But meeting the
clear hazel eyes, he dropped his hand upon the shining head with the
gesture of one who desires to become friends. Accepting this, Kerry
reached up a nose and nuzzled. Then he wagged his plumy tail.
"There!" said Mary Virginia, delightedly. "Now, don't you see how
horrid it was to talk the way you talked? Why, Kerry _likes_ you, and
Kerry is a sensible dog."
"Yes, miss," and he looked at Mary Virginia very much as the dog did,
trustingly, but a little bewildered.
"Aren't you sorry you said that?"
"Y-e-s, seeing you seem to think it was wrong."
"Well, you'll know better from now on," said Mary Virginia,
comfortingly. She looked at him searchingly for a minute, and he met
her look without flinching. That had been the one hopeful sign, from
the first--that he never refused to meet your glance, but gave you
back one just as steady, if more suspicious.
"Mr. Flint," said Mary Virginia, "you've about made up your mind to
stay on here with the Padre, haven't you? For a good long while, at
any rate? You wouldn't like to leave the Padre, would you?"
He stiffened. One could see the struggle within him.
"Well, miss, I can't see but that I've just got to stay on--for
awhile. Until he's tired of me and my ways, anyhow," he said gloomily.
Mary Virginia dismissed my tiredness with an airy wave of her hand.
She smiled.
"Do you know," said she earnestly, "I've had the funniest idea about
you, from the very first time I saw you? Well, I have. I've somehow
got the notion that you and the Padre _belong_. I think that's why you
came. I think you belong right here, in that darling little house,
studying butterflies and mounting them so beautifully they look alive.
I think you're never going to go away anywhere any more, but that
you're going to stay right here as long as you live!"
His face turned an ugly white, and his mouth fell open. He looked at
Mary Virginia almost with horror--Saul might have looked thus at the
Witch of Endor when she summoned the shade of Samuel to tell him that
the kingdom had been rent from his hand and his fate was upon him.
Mary Virginia nodded, thoughtfully.
"I feel so sure of it," said she, confidently, "that I'm going to ask
you to do me a favor. I want you to take care of Kerry for me. You
know I'm going away to school next week, and--he can't stay at home
when I'm not there. My father's away frequently, and he couldn't take
Kerry about with him, of course. And he couldn't be left with the
servants--somehow he doesn't like the colored people. He always growls
at them, and they're afraid of him. And my mother dislikes dogs
intensely--she's afraid of them, except those horrible little
toy-things that aren't _dogs_ any more." The scorn of the real
dog-lover was in her voice. "Kerry's used to the Parish House. He
loves the Padre, he'll soon love you, and he likes to play with
Pitache, so Madame wouldn't mind his being here. And--I'd be more
satisfied in my mind if he were with somebody that--that needed
him--and would like him a whole lot--somebody like you," she finished.
Now, Mary Virginia regarded Kerry even as the apple of her eye. The
dog was a noble and beautiful specimen of his race, thoroughbred to
the bone, a fine field dog, and the pride of the child's heart. He was
what only that most delightful of dogs, a thoroughbred Irish setter,
can be. John Flint gasped. Something perplexed, incredulous, painful,
dazzled, crept into his face and looked out of his eyes.
"_Me_?" he gasped. "You mean you're willing to let me keep your dog
for you? Yours?"
"I want to _give_ him to you," said Mary Virginia bravely enough,
though her voice trembled. "I am perfectly sure you'll love
him--better than any one else in the world would, except me myself. I
don't know why I know that, but I do know it. If you wanted to go
away, later on, why, you could turn him over to the Padre, because of
course you wouldn't want to have a dog following you about everywhere.
They're a lot of bother. But--somehow, I think you'll keep him. I
think you'll love him. He--he's a darling dog." She was too proud to
turn her head aside, but two large tears rolled down her cheeks, like
dew upon a rose.
John Flint stood stock-still, looking from her to the dog, and back
again. Kerry, sensing that something was wrong with his little
mistress, pawed her skirts and whined.
"Now I come to think of it," said John Flint slowly, "I never had
anything--anything alive, I mean--belong to me before."
Mary Virginia glanced up at him shrewdly, and smiled through her
tears. Her smile makes a funny delicious red V of her lower lip, and
is altogether adorable and seductive.
"That's just exactly why you thought nobody was worth anything," she
said. Then she bent over her dog and kissed him between his beautiful
hazel eyes.
"Kerry, dear," said she, "Kerry, dear Kerry, you don't belong to me
any more. I--I've got to go away to school--and you know you wouldn't
be happy at home without me. You belong to Mr. Flint now, and I'm sure
he needs you, and I know he'll love you almost as much as I do, and
he'll be very, very good to you. So you're to stay with him,
and--stand by him and be his dog, like you were mine. You'll remember,
Kerry? Good-by, my dear, dear, darling dog!" She kissed him again,
patted him, and thrust his collar into his new owner's hand.
"Go--good-by, everybody!" said she, in a muffled voice, and ran. I
think she would have cried childishly in another moment; and she was
trying hard to remember that she was growing up!
John Flint stood staring after her, his hand on the dog's collar,
holding him in. His face was still without a vestige of color, and his
eyes glittered. Then his other hand crept out to touch the dog's
head.
"It's wet--where she dropped tears on it! Parson ... she's given me
her dog ... that she loves enough to cry over!"
"He's a very fine dog, and she has had him and loved him from his
puppyhood," I reminded him. And I added, with a wily tongue: "You can
always turn him over to me, you know--if you decide to take to the
road and wish to get rid of a troublesome companion. A dog is bad
company for a man who wishes to dodge the police."
But he only shook his head. His eyes were troubled, and his forehead
wrinkled.
"Parson," said he, hesitatingly, "did you ever feel like you'd been
caught by--by Something reaching down out of the dark? Something big
that you couldn't see and couldn't ever hope to get away from, because
it's always on the job? Ain't it a hell of a feeling?"
"Yes," I agreed. "I've felt--caught by that Something, too. And it is
at first a terrifying sensation. Until--you learn to be glad."
"You're caught--and you know under your hat you're never going to be
able to get away any more. It'll hold you till you die!" said he, a
little wildly. "My God! I'm caught! First It bit off a leg on me, so I
couldn't run. Then It wished you and your bugs on me. And now--Yes,
sir; I'm done for. That kid got my goat this morning. My God, who'd
believe it? But it's true: I'm done for. She gave me her dog and she
got my goat!"