JERRY GROWS
It is not my intention to dwell too long upon the first stages of my
tutorship, which presented few difficulties not easily surmounted, but
it is necessary in order to understand Jerry's character that I set
down a few facts which show certain phases of his development. Of his
physical courage, at thirteen, I need only relate an incident of one
of our winter expeditions. We were hunting coons one night with the
dogs, a collie and the bull pup, which now rejoiced in the name of
Skookums, already mentioned. The dogs treed their game three miles
from the Manor house, and when we came up were running around the
tree, whimpering and barking in a high state of excitement. The night
was dark and the branches of the tree were thick, so we could see
nothing, but Jerry clambered up, armed with a stout stick, and
disappeared into the gloom overhead.
"Do you see him?" I called.
"I see something, but it looks too big for a coon," he returned.
"What does it look like?"
"It looks more like a cat, with queer-looking ears."
"You'd better come down then, Jerry," I said quickly.
"It looks like a lynx," he called again, quite unperturbed.
It was quite possible that he was right, for in this part of the
Catskill country lynxes were still plentiful.
"Then come down at once," I shouted. "He may go for you."
"Oh, I'm not worried about that. I have my hunting knife," he said
coolly.
"Come down, do you hear?" I commanded.
"Not until he does," he replied with a laugh.
I called again. Jerry didn't reply, for just then there was a sudden
shaking of the dry leaves above me, the creaking of a bough and the
snarl of a wild animal, and the sound of a blow.
"Jerry!" I cried. No reply, but the sound of the struggle overhead
increased, dreadful sounds of snarling and of scratching, but no sound
of Jerry. Fearful of imminent tragedy, I climbed quickly, amid the
uproar of the dogs, and, knife in hand, had got my feet an the lower
branches, when a heavy weight shot by me and fell to the ground. Thank
God, not the boy!
"Jerry!" I cried again, clambering upward.
"A-all r-right, Mr. Canby," I heard. "You're safe, not hurt?"
"I'm all right, I think. Just--just scratched."
By this time I had reached him. He was braced in the crotch of a limb,
leaning against the tree trunk still holding his hunting knife. His
coat was wet and I guessed at rather than saw the pallor of his face
Below were the sounds of the dogs worrying at the animal.
"I--I guess they've finished him," said Jerry coolly sheathing his
knife.
"It's lucky he didn't finish _you_," I muttered. "You're sure you're
not hurt?"
"Oh, no."
"Can you get down alone?"
"Yes, of course."
But I helped him down, nevertheless, and he reached the ground in
safety, where I saw that his face at least had escaped damage. But the
sleeve of his coat was torn to ribbons, and the blood was dripping
from his finger ends.
"Come," I said, taking his arm, "we'll have to get you attended to."
And then severely: "You disobeyed me, Jerry. Why didn't you come
down?"
He hesitated a moment, smiling, and then: "I had no idea a lynx was so
large."
"It's a miracle," I said in wonder at his escape. "How did you hang
on?"
"I saw him spring and braced myself in time," he said simply, "and
putting my elbow over my head, struck with my knife when he was on
me--two, three, many times--until he let go. But I was glad, very glad
when he fell."
I drove the dogs away, lifted the dead beast over my shoulder and led
the way to the dog cart, which we had left in the road half a mile
off, reaching the Manor house very bloody but happy. But the happiest
of the lot of us, even including Skookums, the bull pup, was Jerry
himself at the sight under the lamplight of the formidable size of his
dead enemy. But I led Jerry at once upstairs, where I stripped him and
took account of his injuries.
His left arm was bitten twice and his neck and shoulder badly torn,
but he had not whimpered, nor did he now when I bathed and cauterized
his wounds. Whatever pain he felt, he made no sign, and I knew that by
inference my night-talks by the campfire had borne fruit. Old
Christopher, the butler, to whom the Great Experiment was a mystery,
hovered in the background with towels and lotions, timidly
reproachful, until Jerry laughed at him and sent him to bed, muttering
something about the queer goings on at Horsham Manor.
This incident is related to show that Jerry had more courage than most
boys of his years. Part of it was inherent, of course, but most of it
was born of the habit, learned early, to be sure of himself in any
emergency. There was little doubt in my mind that there was some of
the stuff in Jerry of which heroes are made. I thought so then, for I
was proud of my handiwork. I did not know, alas! to what tests my
philosophy and John Benham's were to be subjected. All of which goes
to show that in running counter to human nature the wisest plans, the
greatest sagacity, are as chaff before the winds of destiny. But to
continue:
The following summer Jerry gave further proofs of his presence of mind
in an accident of which I was the victim. For while trudging with
Jerry along a rocky hillside I stepped straight into the death trap of
a rattlesnake. He struck me below the knee, and we were a long way
from help. But the boy was equal to the emergency. Quite coolly he
killed the snake with a club. I fortunately kept my head and directed
him, though he knew just what to do. With his hunting knife he cut my
trouser leg away and double gashed my leg where the fangs had entered,
then sucked the wound and spat out the poison until the blood had
ceased to flow. Then he quickly made a tourniquet of his handkerchief
and fastened it just above the wound, and, making me comfortable, he
ran the whole distance to the house, bringing a motor car and help in
less than an hour. There isn't the slightest doubt that Jerry saved my
life on this occasion just as the following winter I saved him from
death at the horns of a mad buck deer.
You will not wonder therefore that the bond of affection and reliance
was strong between us. I gave Jerry of the best that was in me, and in
return I can truly say that not once did he disappoint me.
In addition to the woodlore that I taught him, I made him a good shot
with rifle and revolver. I had men from the city from time to time,
the best of their class, who taught him boxing and fencing. I had a
gymnasium built with Mr. Ballard's consent, and a swimming pool, which
kept him busy after the lesson hour. At the age of fifteen Jerry was
six feet tall and weighed one hundred and sixty-five pounds, all bone
and muscle. In the five years since I had been at Horsham Manor there
had not been a day when he was ill, and except for an occasional
accident such as the adventure with the lynx, not one when I had
called in the services of a doctor. Physically at least I had so far
succeeded, for in this respect Jerry was perfection.
As to his mind, perhaps my own ideals had made me too exacting.
According to my carefully thought out plans, scholarship was to be
Jerry's buckler and defense against the old Adam. God forbid that I
should have planned, as Jack Ballard would have had it, to build Jerry
in my own image, for if scholarship had been my own refuge it had also
done something to destroy my touch with human kind. It was the quality
of sympathy in Jerry which I had lacked, the love for and confidence
in every human being with whom he came into contact which endeared him
to every person on the place. From Radford to Christopher, throughout
the house, stables and garage, down to the humblest hedge-trimmer, all
loved Jerry and Jerry loved them all. He had that kind of nature. He
couldn't help loving those about him any more than he could help
breathing, and yet it must not be supposed that the boy was lacking in
discernment. Our failings, weaknesses and foibles were a constant
source of amusement to him, but his humor was without malice and his
jibes were friendly, and he ran the gamut of my own exposed nerve
pulps with such joyous consideration that I came to like the
operation. He loved me and I knew it.
But nothing could make him love his Latin grammar. He worried through
arithmetic and algebra and blarneyed his French and German tutors into
making them believe he knew more than he did, but the purely
scientific aspects of learning did not interest him. It was only when
he knew enough to read the great epics in the original that my
patience had its reward. The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid held him
in thrall, and by some magic eliminated at a bound the purely
mechanical difficulties which had fettered him. Hector, Achilles,
Agamemnon, Ulysses--Jerry was each of these in turn, lacking only the
opportunity to vanquish heroic foes or capture impregnable cities.
I had not censored the Homeric gods, as Jerry's father had commanded,
and my temerity led to difficulties. It began with Calypso and Ulysses
and did not even end when Dido was left alone upon the shores of
Carthage.
"I don't understand it at all," he said one day with a wrinkled brow,
"how a man of the caliber of Ulysses could stay so long the prisoner
of Calypso, a woman, when he wanted to go home. It's a pretty shabby
business for a hero and a demigod. A woman!" he sneered, "I'd like to
see any woman keep me sitting in a cave if I wanted to go anywhere!"
His braggadicio was the full-colored boyish reflection of the Canby
point of view. I had merely shrugged woman out of existence. Now Jerry
castigated her.
"What could she do?" he went on scornfully. "She couldn't shoot or run
or fight. All she did was to lie around or strut about with a veil
around her head and a golden girdle (sensible costume!) and serve the
hero with ambrosia and ruddy nectar. I've never eaten ambrosia, but
I'm pretty sure it was some sweet, sticky stuff, like _her_." There is
no measure for the contempt of his accents.
"She could swim," I ventured timidly.
"Swim! Even a fish can swim!"
I don't know why, but at this conversation, the first of Jerry's
maturer years in which the topic had been woman, I felt a slight
tremor go over me. Jerry was too good to look at. I fancied that there
were many women who would have liked to see the flash of his eye at
that moment and to meet his challenge with their wily arts. In the
pride of his masculine strength and capacity he scorned them as I had
taught him. I had done my work well. Had I done it too well?'
"What are women anyway?" he stormed at me again. "For what good are
they? To wash linen and have white arms like Nausicaa? Who cares
whether her arms were white or not? They're always weeping because
they're loved or raging because they're not. Love! Always love! I love
you and Christopher and Radford and Skookums, but I'm not always
whining about it. What's the use? Those things go without saying.
They're simply what are in a fellow's heart, but he doesn't talk about
them."
"Quite right. Jerry. Let's say no more about it."
"I'm glad there are no women around here, but now that I come to think
of it, I don't see why there shouldn't be."
"Your father liked men servants best. He believed them to be more
efficient."
"Oh, yes, of course," and then, suddenly: "When I go out beyond the
wall I'll have to see them and talk to them, won't I?"
"Not if you don't want to."
"Well, I don't want to."
He paused a second and then went on. "But I _am_ a little curious
about them. Of course, they're silly and useless and flabby, but it
seems queer that there are such a lot of 'em. If they're no good, why
don't they pass out of existence? That's the rule of life, you tell
me, the survival of the fittest. If they're not fit they ought to
have died out long ago."
"You can't keep them from being born, Jerry," I laughed.
"Well," he said scornfully, "it ought to be prevented."
I made a pretense of cutting the leaves of a book. He was going too
far. I temporized.
"Ah, they're all right, Jerry," I said with some magnificence, "if
they do their duty. Some are much better than others. Now, Miss
Redwood, for instance, your governess. She was kind, willing and
affectionate."
"Oh, yes," he said, "she was all right, but she wasn't like a man."
I had him safe again. Physical strength and courage at this time were
his fetish. But he was still thoughtful.
"Sometimes I think, Roger" (he called me Roger now, for after all I
was more like an elder brother than a father to him), "sometimes I
think that things are too easy for me; that I ought to be out doing my
share in the work of the world."
"Oh, that will come in time. If you think things are too easy, I might
manage to make them a little harder."
He laughed affectionately and clapped me on the shoulder.
"Oh, no, you don't, old Dry-as-dust. Not books. That isn't what I
meant. I mean life, struggles against odds. I've just been wondering
what chance I'd have to get, along by myself, without a lot of people
waiting on me."
"I've tried to show you, Jerry. You can go into the woods with a gun
and an ax and exist in comfort."
"Yes, but the world isn't all woods; and axes and guns aren't the
only weapons."
"But the principle is the same."
He flashed a bright glance at me.
"Flynn told me yesterday that I could make good in the prize ring if
I'd let him take me in hand."
(The deuce he had! Flynn would lose his engagement as a boxing teacher
if he didn't heed my warnings better.)
"The prize ring is not what you're being trained for, my young
friend," I said with some asperity.
"What then?" he asked.
"First of all I hope I'm training you to be a gentleman. And that
means--"
"Can't a boxer be a gentleman?" he broke in quickly.
"He might be, I suppose, but he usually isn't." He was forcing me into
an attitude of priggishness which I regretted.
"Then why," he persisted, "are you having me taught to box?"
"Chiefly to make your muscles hard, to inure you to pain, to teach you
self-reliance."
"But I oughtn't to learn to box then, if it's going to keep me from
being a gentleman. What is a gentleman, Roger?"
I tried to think of a succinct generalization and failed, falling back
instinctively upon safe ground.
"Christ was a gentleman, Jerry," I said quietly.
"Yes," he assented soberly, "Christ. I would like to be like Christ,
but I couldn't be meek, Roger, and I like to box and shoot--"
"He was a man, Jerry, the most courageous the world has ever known.
He was even not afraid to die for an ideal. He was meek, but He was
not afraid to drive the money changers from the temple."
"Yes, that was good. He was strong and gentle, too. He was wonderful."
I have merely suggested this part of the conversation to show the
feeling of reverence and awe with which the boy regarded the Savior.
The life of Christ had caught his imagination and its lessons had sunk
deeply into his spirit, touching chords of gentleness that I had never
otherwise been able to reach. His religion had begun with Miss Redwood
and he had clung to it instinctively as he had clung to the vague
memory of his mother. No word of mine and no teaching was to destroy
so precious a heritage. He was not goody-goody about it. No boy who
did and said and thought the things that Jerry did could be accused of
prudery or sentimentalism. But in his quieter moods I knew that he
thought deeply of sacred things.
But this conversation with Jerry had warned me that the time was
approaching when the boy would want to think for himself. Already in
our nature-talks some of his questions had embarrassed me. He had seen
birds hatched from their eggs and had marveled at it. The mammals and
their young had mystified him and he had not been able to understand
it. I had reverted to the process of development of the embryo of the
seed into a perfect plant. I had waxed scientific, he had grown
bewildered. We had reached our _impasse_. In the end we had
compromised. Unable to comprehend, Jerry had ascribed the propagation
of the species to a miracle of God. And since that was the precise
truth I had been content to let the matter rest there.
But there was another problem that our conversation had suggested: the
choice of a vocation. The proposition of the misguided Flynn had made
me aware of the fact that I was already letting my charge drift toward
the maws of the great unknown which began just beyond the Wall without
a plan of life save that he should be a "gentleman." It occurred to me
with alarming suddenness that the term "gentleman" was that frequently
applied to persons who had no occupation or visible means of support.
Nowhere in John Benham's instructions was there mention of any plan
for a vocation. Obviously if the old man had intended Jerry for a
business career he would have said so, and the omission of any exact
instructions convinced me that such an idea was furthest from John
Benham's thoughts. It remained for me to decide the matter in the best
way that I could, for determined I was that Jerry, merely because of
the possession of much worldly goods, should not be that bane of
humanity and of nations, an idler.
At about this period Mr. Ballard the elder came down to Horsham Manor
on one of his visits of inspection and inquiry. He brought up the
subject of his own accord.
"What do you think, Canby, what have you planned about Jerry's
future?"
I told him that my only ambition, so far, had been to make of Jerry a
gentleman and a scholar.
"Yes, of course," he nodded. "That's what you are here for. But beyond
that?"
"Nothing," I replied. "I am following my instructions from Mr.
Benham. They go no further than that."
He frowned into the fire.
"That's all very well as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough.
Jerry is now eighteen. Do you realize that in three years he comes
into possession of five million dollars, an income of over two hundred
thousand a year; and that in seven years, at twenty-five, the
executors must relinquish the entire estate?"
I had not thought of the imminence of this disaster.
"I was not aware, Mr. Ballard," I said. "At the present moment Jerry
doesn't know a dollar from a nickel."
He opened his eyes wide and examined me as though he feared he had not
heard correctly or as though it were blasphemy, heresy that I was
uttering.
"You mean that he doesn't know the value and uses of money?"
"So far as I am aware," I replied coolly, "he has never seen a piece
of money in his life."
"All wrong, all wrong, Canby. This won't do at all. He had his
arithmetic, percentage and so forth?"
"Yes. But money doesn't interest him. Can you see any reason why it
should?"
Again the frown and level gaze.
"And what had you planned for him?" he asked. He did not intend to be
satirical perhaps. He was merely worldly.
"I thought when the time came he might be permitted to choose a
vocation for himself. In the meanwhile--"
"A vocation!" he snapped. "Isn't the controlling interest in a
transcontinental line of railroad vocation enough? To say nothing of
coal, copper and iron mines, a steel mill or two and a fleet of
steamers?"
He overpowered me for the moment. I had not thought of Jerry as being
all these things. To me he was merely Jerry. But I struggled upward
through the miasma of oppressive millions and met the issue squarely.
"There is nothing in John Benham's advice which directs any vocational
instruction," I said staunchly. "I was to bring the boy to the age of
manhood without realization of sin."
"A dream, Canby. Utopian, impossible!"
"It has not proved so," I replied, nettled. "I am merely following
instructions, Mr. Benham's instructions through you to me. The dream
is very real to Jerry."
Mr. Ballard gazed into the fire and smiled.
"The executors are permitted some license in this matter. We are
entirely satisfied with your work. We have no desire to modify in the
slightest degree the purely moral character of your instruction or
indeed to change his mode of life. Indeed, I think we all agree that
you are carrying out with rare judgment the spirit if not the actual
letter of John Benham's wishes. Jerry is a wonderful boy. But in our
opinion the time has come when his mind should be slowly shaped to
grasp the essentials of the great career that awaits him."
"I can be of no assistance to you, Mr. Ballard," I said dryly.
"We think the time has arrived," he went on, passing over my remark as
though it hadn't been uttered, "for Jerry to have some instruction
from one versed in the theory, if not the practice, of business. It
is our purpose to engage a professor from a school of finance of one
of the universities to work with Jerry for a part of each summer."
I did not dare to speak for fear of saying something I might regret.
Thus far he was within his rights, I knew, but had he proposed to take
Jerry into the cafes of Broadway that night, he couldn't have done my
plans for the boy a greater hurt. He was proposing nothing less than
an assault upon my barriers of idealism. He was going to take the
sentient thing that was Jerry and make of him an adding machine. Would
he? Could he? I found courage in a smile.
"Of course, if that is your desire," I managed at last, "I have
nothing to say except that if you had asked my opinion I should have
advised against it."
"I'm sorry, Canby," he finished, "but the matter has already been
taken out of your hands."
Youth fortunately is the age of the most lasting impressions. Dr.
Carmichael, of the Hobart School of Finance of Manhattan University,
came and went, but he made no appreciable ripple in the placid surface
of Jerry's philosophy. He cast stone after stone into the lovely pool
of Jerry's thoughts, which broke the colorful reflections into smaller
images, but did not change them. And when he was gone the pool was as
before he came. Jerry listened politely as he did to all his masters
and learned like a parrot what was required of him, but made no secret
of his missing interest and enthusiasm. I watched furtively,
encouraging Jerry, as my duty was, to do his tasks as they were set
before him. But I knew then what I had suspected before, that they
would never make a bond-broker of Jerry. I had but to say a word, to
give but a sign and bring about an overt rebellion. But I was too wise
to do that. I merely watched the widening circles in the pool and saw
them lost in the border of dreamland.
Jerry learned, of course, the difference between a mortgage and an
insurance policy; he knew the meaning of economics, the theory of
supply and demand, and gained a general knowledge which I couldn't
have given him of the general laws of barter and trade. But he
followed Carmichael listlessly. What did he care for bonds and
receiverships when the happy woods were at his elbow, the wild-flowers
beckoning, his bird neighbors calling? Where I had appealed to Jerry
through his imagination, Carmichael used only the formulæ of matter
and fact. There was but one way in which he could have succeeded, and
that was through the picture of the stupendous agencies of which Jerry
was to be the master: the fast-flying steamers, the monster engines on
their miles of rails, the glowing furnaces, the sweating figures in
the heat and grime of smoke and steam, the energy, the inarticulate
power, the majesty of labor which bridged oceans, felled mountains and
made animate the sullen rock. All this I saw, as one day Jerry should
see it. But I did not speak. The time was not yet. Jerry's
understanding of these things would come, but not until I had prepared
him for them.