battled manfully but despairingly with his sick soul. Wherever he
looked there was blackness, lightened once or twice, and for an instant
only, by a sudden passing memory of a little child. It would be too
much to say that the memory comforted him. Nothing could do that, yet.
All he dared hope for was for the strength to go through his ordeal
with something approaching manliness and dignity. The visits of his
friends were a strain to him, as well as to them, and it was sadly easy
to see how the sense of his hopeless case depressed them. He could
imagine the long breath they drew as they left his tent and found
themselves again in the rich, warm, healthy world. He did not blame
them. In their places, he would no doubt have felt just the same. But
he was inevitably driven more and more into himself, and in his dogged
efforts to get away from self-centred thought he turned with a sturdy
determination to fancies about remote things, and especially to
imaginings of the boy--the little fellow who loved him, and who, thank
God, was not as yet "sorry for him!" Oddly enough, the mother seemed to
have taken her place in the background of Hamilton's thoughts. It was
her son who appealed to him--the innocent man-child, half American,
half Russian, entering so happily and unconsciously on the enhanced
uncertainties of life in the tragic land of his birth.
During the trying, stormy voyage north on the great hospital ship,
Hamilton had strange, half-waking visions of a curly headed lad with
brown eyes, tumbling over a bear-skin rug in front of a great
fireplace, or standing at his mother's knee looking into her face as
she talked of America and of an American soldier. He began to fancy
that the vision held at bay the other crowding horrors which lay in
wait. If he could keep his mind on that he was safe. He was glad the
mother and son could not, in their turn, picture him--as he was.
When the photographs arrived, soon after he reached New York, the
helpless officer opened the bulky package with eager ringers. There
were two "cabinets," both of the child. One showed him at the tender
age of two, a plump, dimpled, beautiful baby, airily clad in an
embroidered towel. The second was apparently quite recent. A
five-year-old boy, in black velvet and a bewildering expanse of lace
collar, looked straight out of the picture with tragic dark eyes, whose
direct glance was so like his mother's that ten years seemed suddenly
obliterated as Hamilton returned their gaze. With these was a little
letter on a child's note-paper, in printed characters which reeled
drunkenly down the page from left to right. Hamilton read it with a
chuckle.
"DEAR CAPTAIN HAMILTON,--I love you very much. I love you becos you
fought in the war. I have your picture. I have put a candle befront of
your picture. The candle is burning. I love you very much. Your boy,
"CHARLIE."
Accompanying this epistolary masterpiece was a brief note from the
writer's mother, explaining that the "picture" of Captain Hamilton, of
whose possession her infant boasted, had been cut from an illustrated
newspaper and pasted on stiff card-board in gratification of the
child's whim.
"He insists on burning a candle before it," she wrote, "evidently from
some dim association with tapers and altars and the rest. As it is all
a new manifestation of his character, we are indulging him freely.
Certainly it can do him no harm to love and admire a brave man.
Besides, to have a candle burned for you! Is not that a new flutter of
glory?"
Hamilton, still in the grasp of a dumb depression he would voice to no
one, was a little amused and more touched. In his hideous loneliness
and terror the pretty incident, one he would have smiled at and
forgotten a year ago, took on an interest out of all proportion to its
importance. He felt a sudden, unaccountable sense of pleasant
companionship. The child became a loved personality--the one human,
close, vital thing in a world over which there seemed to hang a thick
black fog through which Hamilton vaguely, wretchedly groped. He himself
did not know why the child interested him so keenly, nor did he try to
analyze the fact. He was merely grateful for it, and for the other fact
that he cherished no sentimental feeling for the boy's mother. That had
passed out of his life as everything else had seemingly passed which
belonged to the old order of things. He had always been a calm,
reserved, self-absorbed, unemotional type of man, glorying a little,
perhaps, in his lack of dependence on human kind. In his need he had
turned to his fellows and turned in vain. Now that a precious thing had
come to him unsought, he did not intend to lose it.
Through his physicians he pulled various journalistic wires, resulting
in the suppression, in the newspapers, of the hopeless facts of his
case. He did not intend, he decided, to have his boy think of him as
tied to an invalid's couch. Then, knowing something of human nature,
and of the evanescent character of childish fancies, he ordered shipped
to Russia a variety of American mechanical toys, calculated to swell
the proud bosom of the small boy who received them. This shameless bid
for continued favor met with immediate success. An ecstatic, incoherent
little shriek of delight came from the land of the czar in the form of
another letter; and the candle, which quite possibly would have burned
low or even gone out, blazed up cheerily again.
That was the beginning of an intercourse which interested and diverted
Hamilton for months. He spared no pains to adapt his letters to the
interest and comprehension of his small correspondent, and he derived a
quite incredible amount of satisfaction from the childish scrawls which
came to him in reply. They were wholly babyish documents, about the
donkey, the nurse, the toys, and games of the small boy's daily life.
Usually they were written in his own printed letters. Sometimes they
were dictated to his mother, who faithfully reported every weighty word
that fell from the infant's lips. But always they were full of the
hero-worship of the little child for the big, strong, American
fighting-man; and in every letter, sometimes in the beginning,
sometimes at the end, occasionally in both places, as the enthusiasm of
the writer waxed, was the satisfying assurance, "_I am your boy._"
Hamilton's eyes raced over the little pages till he found that line,
and there rested contentedly.
As the months passed, the healing influence of time wrought its
effects. Hamilton, shut in though he was, adapted himself to the narrow
world of an invalid's room and its few interests. With the wealth he
had fortunately inherited he brought to his side leading specialists
who might possibly help him, and went through alternate ecstatic hopes
and abysmal fears as the great men came and departed. Very quietly,
too, he helped others less fortunate, financially, than himself. The
nurses and physicians in the hospital where he lay learned to like and
admire him, and other patients, convalescents or newcomers who were
able to move about, sought his cheerful rooms and brought into them a
whiff of the outside world. Through it all, winding in and out of the
neutral-colored weeks like a scarlet thread of life and hope, came the
childish letters from Russia, and each week a thick letter went back,
artfully designed to keep alive the love and interest of an imaginative
little boy.
At the end of six months young Charles fell from his donkey and broke
his left arm, but this trivial incident was not allowed to interfere
with the gratifying regularity with which his letters arrived. It was,
however, interesting, as throwing a high light on the place his
American hero held in the child's fancy. His mother touched on this in
her letter describing the accident.
"The arm had to be set at once," she wrote, "and of course it was very
painful. But I told Charlie you would be greatly disappointed if your
boy were not brave and did not obey the doctor. He saw the force of
this immediately, and did not shed a tear, though his dear little face
was white and drawn with pain."
Master Charlie himself discussed the same pleasant incident in the
first letter he dictated after the episode.
"I did not cry," he mentioned, with natural satisfaction. "Mamma cried,
and Sonya cried. Men do not cry. Do they? You did not cry when you were
hurt, did you? I am going to be just like you."
Hamilton laughed over the letter, his pale cheek flushing a little at
the same time. He _had_ cried, once or twice; he recalled it now with
shame. He must try to do better, remembering that he loomed large as a
heroic model for the young.
He was still reading the little letter when Dr. Van Buren, his
classmate at the Point, his one intimate since then, and his physician
now, entered the room, greeted him curtly, and stood at the window for
a moment, drumming his fingers fiercely against the pane. Hamilton knew
the symptoms; Van Buren was nervous and worried about something. He
dropped the small envelope into his lap and looked up.
"Well?" he said, tersely.
Van Buren did not answer for a moment. Then he turned, crossed the room
abruptly, and sat down near the reclining-chair in which the officer
spent his days. The physician's face was strained and pale. His glance,
usually direct, shifted and fell under his friend's inquiring gaze.
"Well?" repeated the latter, compellingly. "I suppose you fellows have
been talking me over again. What's the outcome?"
Van Buren cleared his throat.
"Yes, we--we have, old man," he began, rather huskily--"in there, you
know." He indicated the direction of the consulting-room as he spoke.
"We don't like the recent symptoms."
Unconsciously, Hamilton straightened his shoulders.
"Out with it. Don't mince matters, Frank. Do you think life is so
precious a thing to me that I can't part with it if I've got to?"
Van Buren writhed in his chair.
"It isn't that," he said, "life or death. It's wor--I mean, it's
different. It's--it's these." He laid his hand on the officer's
helpless legs, stretched out stiffly under a gay red afghan. "God!" he
broke out, suddenly, "I don't know how you'll take it, old chap; and
there's no sense in trying to break a thing like this gently. We're
afraid--we think--they'll--have to come off!"
Under the shock of it Hamilton set his teeth.
"Why?" he asked, quietly.
"Because--well, because they're no good. They're dead. They're a
constant menace to you. A scratch or injury of any kind--they've got to
go--that's all, Arthur. But we've been talking it over and we can fix
you up so you can get about and be much better off than you are now."
He leaned forward as he spoke, and his words came quickly and eagerly.
The worst was over; he was ready to picture the other side. Hamilton
stopped him with a gesture.
"Suppose I decline to let them go?" he asked, grimly.
Van Buren stared at him.
"You can't!" he stammered.
"Why not?"
"Because--why, because your life depends on their coming off!"
Hamilton's lips set.
"My _life!_" he repeated. "My precious, glad, young life! So full of
happiness! So useful!" He dropped the savagely bitter tone suddenly.
"No, Frank," he said, quietly, "I won't go through life as the half of
a man. I'll let the thing take its course; or if that will be too slow
and too--horrible, I'll help the hobbling beast on its way. I think I'd
be justified. It's too much to ask--you know it--to be hoisted through
life as a remnant."
Van Buren rose, moved his chair nearer to Hamilton's, and sat down
close to his friend's side. All nervousness had left him. He was again
cool, scientific, professional; but with it all there was the deep
sympathy and understanding of a friend.
"No, you won't," he said, firmly; "you won't do anything of the kind,
and I'll tell you why you won't. Because it isn't in your make-up to
play the coward. That's why. You've got to go through with it and take
what comes, and do it all like the strong chap you are. If you think
there won't be anything left in life, you are mistaken. You can be of a
lot of use; you can do a lot of good. You will have time and
inclination and money. You will be able to get around, not as quickly,
but as surely. With a good man-servant you'll be entirely independent
of drafts on charity or pity. Money has some beautiful uses. If you
were a poor devil who hadn't a cent in the world and would be dependent
on the grudging service of others, I should wish you to accept and
bear, perhaps, but I could not urge you to. Now, your life is helpful
to others. You can give and aid and bless. You can be a greater hero
than the man who went up San Juan Hill, and there are those who will
feel it."
"That is, my money is needed, and because I've got it I should drag out
years of misery while I spread little financial poultices on other
people's ills," returned Hamilton. "No, thanks; it's not enough good.
They can have the money just the same. That can be amputated with
profit to all concerned. I'll leave it to hospitals and homes for the
helpless, especially for fractional humanity--needy remnants. But I
decline absolutely, once and for all, to accept the noble future you
have outlined. I grant you it would be heroic. But have you ever heard
of great heroism with no stimulus to arouse it?"
He raised his hand as he spoke, and brought it down with a gesture of
finality. As it fell, it dropped on the little letter. Mechanically,
his fingers closed on it.
His boy! His brave little boy who had not flinched or cried, because he
meant to be just like Captain Hamilton. What would _he_ think when the
truth came to him years hence, as it must do. What would she think now,
the mother who was glad that her son should "love and admire a brave
man"? The small missive was a stimulus.
Hamilton turned to Van Buren again, checking with a little shake of the
head the impetuous speech that rushed to that gentleman's lips.
"Just wait one moment," he said, thoughtfully. He leaned back and shut
his eyes, and as he did so the familiar scene of months past came
suddenly before them--the quaint old foreign room, the great fireplace
with its blazing logs, the mother, the curly haired boy. His life had
been a lonely one, always, Hamilton reflected. Few, pathetically few,
so far as he knew, would be affected by its continuance or its end. But
the _manner_ of its end--that was a different matter. That might touch
individuals far and wide by its tragic example to other desperate
souls. Still, he was not their keeper. As for Charlie--
Ah, _Charlie!_ Charlie, with his childish but utter hero-worship;
Charlie, with his lighted candle; Charlie, with his small-boy love and
trust--Charlie would be told some little story and Charlie would soon
forget. But--what would Charlie think of him some day when the truth
was out--Charlie who at five could set his teeth and bear pain
stoically because his hero did! Because he was "His Boy!" Hamilton's
mind returned to that problem again and again and lingered there. No,
he could not disappoint Charlie. Besides, Van Buren was right. There
was work, creditable work to do. And to be plucky, even if only to keep
a brave little chap's ideal intact, to maintain its helpful activity,
was something worthy of a stanch man. Would he wish his boy to go under
when the strain against the right thing was crushing?
He laid the letter down gently, deliberately, turned to his friend, and
smiled as Van Buren had not seen him smile since their ingenuous
boyhood days. There was that sweetness in the smile which homage to
woman makes us dub "feminine," and something of it, too, in the way he
laid his hand on his chum's shoulder.
"All right, old sawbones," he said, slowly. "You may do whatever has to
be done. I'll face the music. Unbuilding one man may build up another."
VI
THE COMMUNITY'S SUNBEAM
Miss Clarkson looked at the small boy, and the small boy looked back at
Miss Clarkson with round, unwinking eyes. In the woman's glance were
sympathy and a puzzled wonder; the child's gaze expressed only a calm
and complete detachment. Subtly, but unmistakably, he succeeded in
conveying the impression that he regarded this human object before him
because it was in his line of vision, but that he found no interest in
it, nor good reason for assuming an interest he did not feel: that if,
indeed, he was conscious of any emotion at all, it was in the nature of
a vaguely dawning desire that the object should remove itself, should
cease to shut off the view from the one window of the tenement room
that was his home. But it really did not matter much. Already, in his
seven years of life, the small boy had decided that nothing really
mattered much, and his dark, grim little face, with its deep-cut,
unchildish lines, bore witness to the unwavering strength of this
conviction. If the object preferred to stay--He settled himself more
firmly on the rickety chair he occupied, crossed his feet with infinite
care, and continued to regard the object with eyes that held the
invariable expression with which they met the incidents of life,
whether these incidents were the receiving of a banana from Miss
Clarkson's hands, or, as had happened half an hour before, the
spectacle of his dead mother being carried down-stairs.
It was not a stupid look; it was at once intent, unsympathetic,
impersonal. Under it, now, its object experienced a moment of actual
embarrassment. Miss Clarkson was not accustomed to the indifferent gaze
of human eyes, and in her philanthropic work among the tenements she
had been somewhat conspicuously successful with children. They seemed
always to like her, to accept her; and if her undoubted charm of face,
of dress, and of smile failed to win them, Miss Clarkson was not above
resorting to the aid of little gifts, of toys, even to the pernicious
power of pennies. She did good, but she did it in her own way. She was
young, she was rich, she was independent. She helped the poor because
she pitied them, and wished to aid them, but her methods were unique,
and were followed none the less serenely when, as frequently happened,
they conflicted with all the accepted notions of organized philanthropy.
She had come to this room almost daily, Miss Clarkson remembered, since
she had discovered the destitute Russian woman and her child there a
month ago. The mother was dying of consumption; the child was neglected
and hungry--yet both had an unmistakable air of birth, of breeding; and
the mother's French was as perfect as the exquisitely finished manner
that drew from Anne Clarkson, in the wretched tenement room, her utmost
deference and courtesy. The child, too, had glints of polish.
Punctiliously he opened doors, placed chairs, bowed; punctiliously he
stood when the lady stood, sat when the lady sat, met her requests for
small services with composure and appreciation. And (here was the rub)
each time she came, bringing in her generous wake the comforts that
lightened his mother's dreary journey into another world, he received
her with the air of one courteously greeting a stranger, or, at best,
of one seeking an elusive memory as one surveys a half-familiar face.
Doggedly Anne Clarkson had persisted in her attentions to them both.
The mother was grateful--there was no doubt of that. Under the
ministrations of the nurse Miss Clarkson supplied, under the influence
of food, of medicines, and of care, she brightened out of the apathy in
which her new friend had found her. But to the last she retained
something of her son's unresponsiveness, and an uncommunicativeness
which tagged his as hereditary. She never spoke of herself, of her
friends, or of her home. She made no last requests, left no last
messages. Once, as she looked at her boy, her eyeballs exuded a film of
moisture. Miss Clarkson interpreted this phenomenon rightly, and
quietly said:
"I will see that he is well cared for." The sick woman gave her a long
look, and then nodded.
"You will," she answered. "You are not of those who promise and do not
perform. You are very good--you have been very good to us. Your reward
should come. It does not always come to those who are good, but it
should come to you. You should marry and have children, and leave this
terrible country, and be happy."
The words impressed Miss Clarkson, because, as she reminded herself
now, they were almost the last her protegee uttered. She considered
them excessively unmodern, and strongly out of place on the lips of one
whose romance had ended in disillusionment.
Well, it was over. The mother was gone. But the child remained, and his
future--his immediate future, at least--must be decided here and now.
With a restless movement Anne Clarkson leaned toward him. In her
abstraction she had shifted her glance from him for a few moments, and
he had taken advantage of the interval to survey dispassionately the
toes of the new shoes she had given to him. He glanced up now, and met
her look with the singular unresponsiveness which seemed his note.
"We're going away, Ivan," she said, speaking with that artificial
cheerfulness practised so universally upon the helpless and the young.
"Mother has gone, you know, and we can't stay here any more. We're
going to the country, to a beautiful place where there are flowers, and
birds, and dogs, and other little boys and girls. So get your cap,
dear."
Ivan looked unimpressed, but he rose with instant obedience and crossed
the room to its solitary closet. His little figure looked very trim in
the new suit she had bought for him; she noticed how well he carried
himself. His preparations for departure were humorously simple. He took
his cap from its peg, put it on his head, and opened the door for her
to precede him in the utter abandonment of his "home." Earlier in the
day Miss Clarkson had presented to pleased neighbors the furniture and
clothing of the dead woman, taking the precaution to have it fumigated
in an empty room in the building. On the same impulse she had given to
an old bedridden Irishwoman a few little articles that had soothed the
Russian's last days: a small night-lamp, a bed-tray, and the like.
Ivan's outfit, consisting solely of the things she herself had given
him, had been packed in his mother's one small foreign trunk, whose
contents until then, Miss Clarkson, observed, was an ikon, quaintly
framed. Of letters, of souvenirs, of any clue of any kind to the
identity of mother and son, there was none. She felt sure that the
names they had given her were assumed.
Stiffly erect, Ivan waited beside the open door. Miss Clarkson gave a
methodical last look around the dismantled room, and walked out of it,
the child following. At the top of the stairs she turned her head
sharply, a sudden curiosity uppermost in her mind. Was he glancing
back? she wondered. Was he showing any emotion? Did he feel any? He
seemed so horribly mature--he _must_ understand something of what this
departure meant. Did he, by chance, need comforting? But Ivan was close
by her side, his sombre black eyes looking straight before him, his new
shoes creaking freshly as he descended the rickety steps. Miss Clarkson
sighed. If only he were pretty, she reflected. There were always
sentimental women ready and willing to adopt a handsome child. But even
Ivan's mother would have declared him not pretty. He was merely small,
and dark, and foreign, and reserved, and horribly self-contained. His
black hair was perfectly straight, his lips made a straight line in his
face. He had no dimples, no curls, none of the appealing graces and
charms of childhood. He was seven--seven decades, she almost thought,
with a sudden throb of pity for him. But he had one quality of
childhood--helplessness. To that, at least, the Community to which she
had finally decided to intrust him would surely respond. She took his
small hand in hers as they reached the street, and after an instinctive
movement of withdrawal, like the startled fluttering of a bird, he
suffered it to remain there. Together they walked to the nearest
corner, and stood awaiting the coming of a trolley-car, the heat of an
August sun blazing upon them, the stifling odors of the tenement
quarter filling their nostrils. Rude, half-naked little boys jeered at
them, and made invidious remarks about Ivan's new clothes; a small girl
smiled shyly at him; a wretched yellow dog snapped at his heels. To
these varying attentions the child gave the same quietly observant
glance, a glance without rancor as without interest. Miss Clarkson
experienced a sense of utter helplessness as she watched him.
"Did you know the little girl, Ivan?" she asked, in English.