AMBITION STIRS
After Nance Molloy's first visit to Butternut Lane, life became a series
of thrilling discoveries. Hitherto she had been treated collectively. At
home she was "one of the Snawdor kids"; to the juvenile world beyond the
corner she was "a Calvary Alley mick"; at school she was "a pupil of the
sixth grade." It remained for little Mrs. Purdy to reveal the fact to her
that she was an individual person.
Mrs. Purdy had the most beautiful illusions about everything. She seemed
to see her fellow-men not as they were, but as God intended them to be.
She discovered so many latent virtues and attractions in her new
probationers that they scarcely knew themselves.
When, for instance, she made the startling observation that Nance had
wonderful hair, and that, if she washed it with an egg and brushed it
every day, it would shine like gold, Nance was interested, but
incredulous. Until now hair had meant a useless mass of tangles that at
long intervals was subjected to an agonizing process of rebraiding. The
main thing about hair was that it must never on any account be left
hanging down one's back. Feuds had been started and battles lost by
swinging braids. The idea of washing it was an entirely new one to her;
but the vision of golden locks spurred her on to try the experiment. She
carefully followed directions, but the egg had been borrowed from Mrs.
Smelts who had borrowed it some days before from Mrs. Lavinski, and the
result was not what Mrs. Purdy predicted.
"If ever I ketch you up to sech fool tricks again," scolded Mrs. Snawdor,
who had been called to the rescue, "I'll skin yer hide off! You've no
need to take yer hair down except when I tell you. You kin smooth it up
jus' like you always done."
Having thus failed in her efforts at personal adornment, Nance turned her
attention to beautifying her surroundings. The many new features observed
in the homely, commonplace house in Butternut Lane stirred her ambition.
Her own room, to be sure, possessed architectural defects that would have
discouraged most interior decorators. It was small and dark, with only
one narrow opening into an air-shaft. Where the plaster had fallen off,
bare laths were exposed, and in rainy weather a tin tub occupied the
center of the floor to catch the drippings from a hole in the roof. For
the rest, a slat bed, an iron wash-stand, and a three-legged chair
comprised the furniture.
But Nance was not in the least daunted by the prospect. With
considerable ingenuity she evolved a dresser from a soap box and the
colored supplements of the Sunday papers, which she gathered into a
valance, in imitation of Mrs. Purdy's bright chintz. In the air-shaft
window she started three potato vines in bottles, but not satisfied with
the feeble results, she pinned red paper roses to the sickly white stems.
The nearest substitutes she could find for pictures were labels off
tomato cans, and these she tacked up with satisfaction, remembering Mrs.
Purdy's admired fruit pictures.
"'Tain't half so dark in here as 'tis down in Smeltses," she bragged to
Fidy, who viewed her efforts with pessimism. "Once last summer the sun
come in here fer purty near a week. It shined down the shaft. You ast
Lobelia if it didn't."
Nance was nailing a pin into the wall with the heel of her slipper, and
the loose plaster was dropping behind the bed.
"Mis' Purdy says if I don't say no cuss words, an' wash meself all
over on Wednesdays and Sat'days, she's goin' to help me make myself a
new dress!"
"Why don't she give you one done made?" asked Fidy.
"She ain't no charity lady!" said Nance indignantly. "Me an' her's
friends. She said we was."
"What's she goin' to give Dan?" asked Fidy, to whom personages from the
upper world were interesting only when they bore gifts in their hands.
"She ain't givin' him nothin', Silly! She's lettin' him help her. He gits
a quarter a hour, an' his dinner fer wheelin' Mr. Walter in the park."
"They say Mr. Jack's give him a room over the saloon 'til his maw
comes back."
"I reckon I know it. I made him! You jus' wait 'til December when
Dan'll be fourteen. Once he gits to work he won't have to take nothin'
offen nobody!"
School as well as home took on a new interest under Mrs. Purdy's
influence. Shoes and textbooks appeared almost miraculously, and reports
assumed a new and exciting significance. Under this new arrangement Dan
blossomed into a model of righteousness, but Nance's lapses from grace
were still frequent. The occasional glimpses she was getting of a code of
manners and morals so different from those employed by her stepmother,
were not of themselves sufficient to reclaim her. On the whole she found
being good rather stupid and only consented to conform to rules when she
saw for herself the benefit to be gained.
For instance, when she achieved a burning desire to be on the honor roll
and failed on account of being kept at home, she took the matter into her
own small hands and reported herself to the once despised truant
officer. The result was a stormy interview between him and her stepmother
which removed all further cause of jealousy on the part of Mr. Snawdor,
and gave Nance a record for perfect attendance.
Having attained this distinction, she was fired to further effort. She
could soon glibly say the multiplication tables backward, repeat all the
verses in her school reader, and give the names and length of the most
important rivers in the world. On two occasions she even stepped into
prominence. The first was when she electrified a visiting trustee by her
intimate knowledge of the archipelagos of the eastern hemisphere. The
fact that she had not the remotest idea of the nature of an archipelago
was mercifully not divulged. The second had been less successful. It was
during a visit of Bishop Bland's to the school. He was making a personal
investigation concerning a report, then current, that public school
children were underfed. Bishop Bland was not fond of children, but he was
sensitive to any slight put upon the stomach, and he wished very much to
be able to refute the disturbing rumor.
"Now I cannot believe," he said to the sixth grade, clasping his plump
hands over the visible result of many good dinners, "that any one of you
nice boys and girls came here this morning hungry. I want any boy in the
room who is not properly nourished at home to stand up."
Nobody rose, and the bishop cast an affirmative smile on the principal.
"As I thought," he continued complacently. "Now I'm going to ask any
little girl in this room to stand up and tell us just exactly what she
had for breakfast. I shall not be in the least surprised if it was just
about what I had myself."
There was a silence, and it began to look as if nobody was going to call
the bishop's bluff, when Nance jumped up from a rear seat and said at the
top of her voice:
"A pretzel and a dill pickle!"
The new-found enthusiasm for school might have been of longer duration
had it not been for a counter-attraction at home. From that first night
when old "Mr. Demry," as he had come to be called, had played for her to
dance, Nance had camped on his door-step. Whenever the scrape of his
fiddle was heard from below, she dropped whatever she held, whether it
was a hot iron or the baby, and never stopped until she reached the
ground floor. And by and by other children found their way to him, not
only the children of the tenement, but of the whole neighborhood as well.
It was soon noised abroad that he knew how to coax the fairies out of the
woods and actually into the shadows of Calvary Alley where they had never
been heard of before. With one or two children on his knees and a circle
on the floor around him, he would weave a world of dream and rainbows,
and people it with all the dear invisible deities of childhood. And while
he talked, his thin cheeks would flush, and his dim eyes shine with the
same round wonder as his listeners.
But some nights when the children came, they found him too sleepy to tell
stories or play on the fiddle. At such times he always emptied his
pockets of small coins and sent the youngsters scampering away to find
the pop-corn man. Then he would stand unsteadily at the door and watch
them go, with a wistful, disappointed look on his tired old face.
Nance overheard her elders whispering that "he took something," and she
greatly feared that he would meet a fate similar to that of Joe Smelts.
In Joe's case it was an overcoat, and he had been forced to accept the
hospitality of the State for thirty days. Nance's mind was greatly
relieved to find that it was only powders that Mr. Demry took--powders
that made him walk queer and talk queer and forget sometimes where he
lived. Then it was that the children accepted him as their special
charge. They would go to his rescue wherever they found him and guide his
wandering footsteps into the haven of Calvary Alley.
"He's a has-benn," Mrs. Snawdor declared to Uncle Jed. "You an' me are
never-wases, but that old gent has seen better days. They tell me that
settin' down in the orchestry, he looks fine. That's the reason his
coat's always so much better'n his shoes an' pants; he dresses up the
part of him that shows. You can tell by the way he acts an' talks that
he's different from us."
Perhaps that was the reason, that while Nance loved Uncle Jed quite as
much, she found Mr. Demry far more interesting. Everything about him was
different, from his ideas concerning the proper behavior of boys and
girls, to his few neatly distributed belongings. His two possessions that
most excited her curiosity and admiration, were the violin and its
handsome old rosewood case, which you were not allowed to touch, and a
miniature in a frame of gold, of a beautiful pink and white girl in a
pink and white dress, with a fair curl falling over her bare shoulder.
Nance would stand before the latter in adoring silence; then she would
invariably say:
"Go on an' tell me about her, Mr. Demry!"
And standing behind her, with his fine sensitive hands on her shoulders,
Mr. Demry would tell wonderful stories of the little girl who had once
been his. And as he talked, the delicate profile in the picture became an
enchanting reality to Nance, stirring her imagination and furnishing an
object for her secret dreams.
Hitherto Birdie Smelts had been her chief admiration. Birdie was fourteen
and wore French heels and a pompadour and had beaux. She had worked in
the ten-cent store until her misplaced generosity with the glass beads
on her counter resulted in her being sent to a reformatory. But Birdie's
bold attractions suffered in comparison with the elusive charm of the
pink and white goddess with the golden curl.
This change marked the dawn of romance in Nance's soul. Up to this time
she had demanded of Mr. Demry the most "scareful" stories he knew, but
from now on Blue Beard and Jack, the Giant-Killer had to make way for
Cinderella and the Sleeping Beauty. She went about with her head full of
dreams, and eyes that looked into an invisible world. It was not that the
juvenile politics of the alley were less interesting, or the street
fights or adventures of the gang less thrilling. It was simply that life
had become absorbingly full of other things.
As the months passed Mrs. Snawdor spent less and less time at home. She
seemed to think that when she gave her nights on her knees for her
family, she was entitled to use the remaining waking hours for
recreation. This took the form of untiring attention to other people's
business. She canvassed the alley for delinquent husbands to admonish,
for weddings to arrange, for funerals to supervise--the last being a
specialty, owing to experience under the late Mr. Yager.
Upon one of the occasions when she was superintending the entrance of a
neighboring baby into the world, her own made a hurried exit. A banana
and a stick of licorice proved too stimulating a diet for him, and he
closed his eyes permanently on a world that had offered few attractions.
It was Nance who, having mothered him from his birth, worked with him
through the long night of agony; and who, when the end came, cut the
faded cotton flowers from her hat to put in the tiny claw-like hand that
had never touched a real blossom; and it was Nance's heart that broke
when they took him away.
It is doubtful whether any abstract moral appeal could have awakened her
as did the going out of that little futile life. It stirred her deepest
sympathies and affections, and connected her for the first time with the
forces that make for moral and social progress.
"He wouldn't a-went if we'd treated him right!" she complained
bitterly to Mr. Snawdor a week later. "He never had no sunshine, nor
fresh air, nor nothin'. You can't expect a baby to live where a
sweet-potato vine can't!"
"He's better off than me," said Mr. Snawdor, "what with the funeral, an'
the coal out, an' the rent due, I'm at the end of my rope. I told her it
was comin'. But she would have a white coffin an' six hacks. They'll have
to set us out in the street fer all I can see!"
Nance looked at him apprehensively.
"Well, we better be doin' something'," she said. "Can't Uncle Jed help
us?"
"I ain't goin' to let him. He's paid my rent fer the last time."
This unexpected flare of independence in Mr. Snawdor was disturbing. The
Snawdor family without Uncle Jed was like a row of stitches from which
the knitting needle has been withdrawn.
"If I was two years older, I could go to work," said Nance, thinking of
Dan, who was now on the pay-roll of Clarke's Bottle Factory.
"It ain't right to make you stop school," said Mr. Snawdor. "It ain't
bein' fair to you."
"I'd do it all right," said Nance, fired by his magnanimity, "only
they're on to me now I've reported myself. Ain't you makin' any money at
the shop?"
Mr. Snawdor shook his head.
"I might if I was willin' to buy junk. But you know where them boys gets
their stuff."
Nance nodded wisely.
"The gang bust into a empty house last night an' cut out all the lead
pipes. I seen 'em comin' home with it."
Mr. Snawdor rose and went to the window.
"There ain't no chance fer a honest man," he said miserably. "I'm sick o'
livin', that's whut I am. I am ready to quit."
When Mrs. Snawdor arrived, she swept all domestic problems
impatiently aside.
"Fer goodness' sake don't come tellin' me no more hard-luck tales. Ain't
I got troubles enough of my own? Nance, soon 's you git through, go git
me a bucket of beer, an' if you see any of the Gormans, say I'll stop in
this evenin' on my way to work."
"I ain't goin' fer the beer no more," announced Nance.
"An' will ye tell me why?" asked Mrs. Snawdor.
"'Cause I ain't," said Nance, knowing the futility of argument.
Mrs. Snawdor lifted her hand to strike, but changed her mind. She was
beginning to have a certain puzzled respect for her stepdaughter's
decision of character.
After the children had been put to bed and Nance had cried over the
smallest nightgown, no longer needed, she slipped down to the second
floor and, pausing before the door behind which the sewing-machines were
always whirring, gave a peculiar whistle. It was a whistle possible only
to a person who boasted the absence of a front tooth, and it brought Ike
Lavinski promptly to the door.
Ikey was a friend whom she regarded with mingled contempt and
admiration--contempt because he was weak and undersized, admiration
because he was the only person of her acquaintance who had ever had his
name in the newspaper. On two occasions he had been among the honor
students at the high school, and his family and neighbors regarded him as
an intellectual prodigy.
"Say, Ikey," said Nance, "if you was me, an' had to make some money, an'
didn't want to chuck school, what would you do?"
Ikey considered the matter. Money and education were the most important
things in the world to him, and were not to be discussed lightly.
"If you were bigger," he said, sweeping her with a critical eye, "you
might try sewing pants."
"Could I do it at night? How much would it pay me? Would yer pa take me
on?" Nance demanded all in a breath.
"He would if he thought they wouldn't get on to it."
"I'd keep it dark," Nance urged. "I could slip down every night after I
git done my work, an' put in a couple of hours, easy. I'm a awful big
child fer my age--feel my muscle! Go on an' make him take me on, Ikey,
will you?"
And Ikey condescendingly agreed to use his influence.