IX.

“Come, turn out!” said a voice in his ear, and he started up, to see the

great dormitory where he had fallen asleep empty of all but himself and

his friend.

“Make out a night's rest?” asked the latter. “Didn't I tell you we'd

be the last up? Come along!” He preceded Lemuel, still drowsy, down the

stairs into the room where they had undressed, and where the tramps were

taking each his clothes from their hook, and hustling them on.

“What time is it, Johnny?” asked Lemuel's mate of the attendant. “I left

my watch under my pillow.”

“Five o'clock,” said the man, helping the poor old fellow who had not

known how to get into bed to put on his clothes.

“Well, that's a pretty good start,” said the other. He finished his

toilet by belting himself around the waist, and “Come along, mate,” he

said to Lemuel. “I'll show you the way to the tool-room.”

He led him through the corridor into a chamber of the basement where

there were bright rows of wood-saws, and ranks of saw-horses, with

heaps of the latter in different stages of construction. “House

self-supporting, as far as it can. We don't want to be beholden to

anybody if we can help it. We make our own horses here; but we can't

make our saws, or we would. Ever had much practice with the woodsaw?”

“No,” said Lemuel, with a throb of home-sickness, that brought back the

hacked log behind the house, and the axe resting against it; “we always

chopped our stove-wood.”

“Yes, that's the way in the country. Well, now,” said the other, “I'll

show you how to choose a saw. Don't you be took in by no new saw because

it's bright, and looks pretty. You want to take a saw that's been filed,

and filed away till it ain't more 'n an inch and a half deep; and then

you want to tune it up, just so,--like a banjo--not too tight, and not

too slack,--and then it'll slip through a stick o' wood like--lyin'.” He

selected a saw, and put it in order for Lemuel. “There!” He picked out

another. “Here's _my_ old stand-by!” He took up a saw-horse, at random,

to indicate that one need not be critical in that, and led through the

open door into the wood-yard, where a score or two of saws were already

shrilling and wheezing through the wood.

It was a wide and lofty shed, with piles of cord-wood and slabs at

either end, and walled on the farther side with kindling, sawed, split,

and piled up with admirable neatness. The place gave out the sweet smell

of the woods from the bark of the logs and from the fresh section of

their grain. A double rank of saw-horses occupied the middle space, and

beside each horse lay a quarter of a cord of wood, at which the men were

toiling in sullen silence for the most part, only exchanging a grunt or

snarl of dissatisfaction with one another.

“Morning, mates,” said Lemuel's friend cheerfully, as he entered the

shed, and put his horse down beside one of the piles. “Thought we'd look

in and see how you was gettin' along. Just stepped round from the Parker

House while our breakfast was a-cookin'. Hope you all rested well?”

The men paused, with their saws at different slopes in the wood, and

looked round. The night before, in the nakedness in which Lemuel had

first seen them, the worst of them had the inalienable comeliness of

nature, and their faces, softened by their relation to their bodies,

were not so bad; they were not so bad, looking from their white

nightgowns; but now, clad in their filthy rags, and caricatured out of

all native dignity by their motley and misshapen attire, they were a

hideous gang, and all the more hideous for the grin that overspread

their stubbly muzzles at the boy's persiflage.

“Don't let me interrupt you, fellows,” he said, flinging a log upon his

horse, and dashing his saw gaily into it. “Don't mind _me!_ I know you

hate to lose a minute of this fun; I understand just how you feel about

it, and I don't want you to stand upon ceremony with _me._ Treat me just

like one of yourselves, gents. This beechwood is the regular Nova

Scotia thing, ain't it? Tough and knotty! I can't bear any of your cheap

wood-lot stuff from around here. What I want is Nova Scotia wood, every

time. Then I feel that I'm gettin' the worth of my money.” His log

dropped apart on each side of his horse, and he put on another. “Well,

mates,” he rattled on, “this is lovely, ain't it? I wouldn't give up

my little quarter of a cord of green Nova Scotia before breakfast for

anything; I've got into the way of it, and I can't live without it.”

The tramps chuckled at these ironies, and the attendant who looked into

the yard now and then did not interfere with them.

The mate went through his stint as rapidly as he talked, and he had

nearly finished before Lemuel had half done. He did not offer to help

him, but he delayed the remnant of his work, and waited for him to catch

up, talking all the while with gay volubility, joking this one and

that, and keeping the whole company as cheerful as it was in their dull,

sodden nature to be. He had a floating eye that harmonised with his

queer, mobile face, and played round on the different figures, but

mostly upon Lemuel's dogged, rustic industry as if it really amused him.

“What's your lay, after breakfast?” he asked, as they came to the last

log together.

“Lay?” repeated Lemuel.

“What you goin' to do?”

“I don't know; I can't tell yet.”

“You know,” said the other, “you can come back here, and get your

dinner, if you want to saw wood for it from ten till twelve, and you get

your supper if you'll saw from five to six.”

“Are you going to do that?” asked Lemuel cautiously.

“No, sir,” said the other; “I can't spare the time. I'm goin' to fill

up for all day, at breakfast, and then I'm goin' up to lay round on the

Common till it's time to go to the Police Court; and when that's over

I'm goin' back to the Common ag'in, and lay round the rest of the day. I

hain't got any leisure for no such nonsense as wood-sawin'. I don't mind

the work, but I hate to waste the time. It's the way with most o' the

pardners, unless it's the green hands. That so, pards?”

Some of them had already gone in to breakfast; the smell of the stew

came out to the wood-yard through the open door. Lemuel and his friend

finished their last stick at the same time, and went in together,

and found places side by side at the table in the waiting-room. The

attendant within its oblong was serving the men with heavy quart bowls

of the steaming broth. He brought half a loaf of light, elastic bread

with each, and there were platters of hard-tack set along the board,

which every one helped himself from freely, and broke into his broth.

“Morning, Jimmy,” said the mate, as the man brought him and Lemuel their

portions. “I hate to have the dining-room chairs off a paintin' when

there's so much style about everything else, and I've got a visitor with

me. But I tell him he'll have to take us as he finds us, and stand it

this mornin'.” He wasted no more words on his joke, but plunging his

large tin spoon into his bowl, kept his breath to cool his broth,

blowing upon it with easy grace, and swallowing it at a tremendous rate,

though Lemuel, after following his example, still found it so hot

that it brought the tears into his eyes. It was delicious, and he

was ravenous from his twenty-four hours' fast, but his companion was

scraping the bottom of his bowl before Lemuel had got half-way down, and

he finished his second as Lemuel finished his first.

“Just oncet more for both of us, Jimmy,” he said, pushing his bowl

across the board; and when the man brought them back he said, “Now, I'm

goin' to take it easy and enjoy myself. I can't never seem to get the

good of it, till about the third or fourth bowl. Too much of a hurry.”

“Do they give you four bowls?” gasped Lemuel in astonishment.

“They give you four barrels, if you can hold it,” replied the other

proudly; “and some the mates _can_, pretty near. They got an awful tank,

as a general rule, the pards has. There ain't anything mean about this

house. They don't scamp the broth, and they don't shab the measure. I

do wish you could see that refrigerator, oncet. Never been much at sea,

have you, mate?”

Lemuel said he had never been at sea at all.

The other leaned forward with his elbows on each side of his bowl, and

lazily broke his hard-tack into it. “Well, I have. I was shipped when

I was about eleven years old by a shark that got me drunk. I wanted to

ship, but I wanted to ship on an American vessel for New Orleans. First

thing I knowed I turned up on a Swedish brig bound for Venice. Ever been

to It'ly?”

“No,” said Lemuel.

“Well, I hain't but oncet. Oncet is enough for _me_. I run away, while

I was in Venice, and went ashore--if you can call it ashore; it's

all water, and you got to go round in boats: gondolas they call 'em

there--and went to see the American counsul, and told him I was an

American boy, and tried to get him to get me off. But he couldn't do

anything. If you ship under the Swedish flag you're a Swede, and the

whole United States couldn't get you off. If I'd 'a' shipped under the

American flag I'd 'a' been an American, I don't care if I was born in

Hottentot. That's what the counsul said. I never want to see that town

ag'in. I used to hear songs about Venice--'Beautiful Venice, Bride of

the Sea;' but I think it's a kind of a hole of a place. Well, what

I started to say was that when I turn up in Boston, now,--and I most

generally do,--I don't go to no sailor boardin'-house; I break for the

Wayfarer's Lodge, every time. It's a temperance house, and they give you

the worth o' your money.”

“Come! Hurry up!” said the attendant. He wiped the table impatiently

with his towel, and stood waiting for Lemuel and the other to finish.

All the rest had gone.

“Don't you be too fresh, pard,” said the mate, with the effect of

standing upon his rights. “Guess if you was on your third bowl, you

wouldn't hurry.”

The attendant smiled. “Don't you want to lend us a hand with the

dishes?” he asked.

“Who's sick?” asked the other in his turn.

“Johnny's got a day off.”

The boy shook his head. “No; I couldn't. If it was a case of sickness,

of course I'd do it. But I couldn't spare the time; I couldn't really.

Why, I ought to be up on the Common now.”

Lemuel had listened with a face of interest.

“Don't you want to make half a dollar, young feller?” asked the

attendant.

“Yes, I do,” said Lemuel eagerly.

“Know how to wash dishes?”

“Yes,” answered the boy, not ashamed of his knowledge, as the boy of

another civilisation might have been. Nothing more distinctly marks

the rustic New England civilisation than the taming of its men to the

performance of certain domestic offices elsewhere held dishonourably

womanish. The boy learns not only to milk and to keep the milk cans

clean, but to churn, to wash dishes, and to cook.

“Come around here, then,” said the attendant, and Lemuel promptly

obeyed.

“Well, now,” said his mate, “that's right. I'd do it myself, if I had

the time.” He pulled his soft wool hat out of his hip pocket. “Well,

good morning, pards. I don't know as I shall see you again much before

night.” Lemuel was lifting a large tray, heavy with empty broth-bowls.

“What _time_ did you say it was, Jimmy?”

“Seven o'clock.”

“Well, I just got time to get there,” said the other, putting on his

hat, and pushing out of the door.

At the moment Lemuel was lifting his tray of empty broth-bowls, Mr.

Sewell was waking for the early quarter-to-eight breakfast, which he

thought it right to make--not perhaps as an example to his parishioners,

most of whom had the leisure to lie later, but as a sacrifice, not too

definite, to the lingering ideal of suffering. He could not work before

breakfast--his delicate digestion forbade that--or he would have risen

still earlier, and he employed the twenty minutes he had between his

bath and his breakfast in skimming the morning paper.

Just at present Mr. Sewell was taking two morning papers: the

_Advertiser_ which he had always taken, and a cheap little one-cent

paper, which had just been started, and which he had subscribed for

experimentally, with the vague impression that he ought to encourage the

young men who had established it. He did not like it very well. It was

made up somewhat upon the Western ideal, and dealt with local matters

in a manner that was at once a little more lively and a little more

intimate than he had been used to. But before he had quite made up his

mind to stop it, his wife had come to like it on that very account. She

said it was interesting. On this point she used her conscience a little

less actively than usual, and he had to make her observe that to be

interesting was not the whole duty of journalism. It had become a matter

of personal pride with them respectively to attack and defend _The

Sunrise_, as I shall call the little sheet, though that was not the

name; and Mr. Sewell had lately made some gain through the character

of the police reports, which _The Sunrise_ had been developing into a

feature. It was not that offensive matters were introduced; the worst

cases were in fact rather blinked, but Sewell insisted that the tone of

flippant gaiety with which many facts, so serious, so tragic for their

perpetrators and victims, were treated was odious. He objected to the

court being called a Mill, and prisoners Grists, and the procedure

Grinding; he objected to the familiar name of Uncle for the worthy

gentleman to whose care certain offenders were confided on probation. He

now read that department of _The Sunrise_ the first thing every

morning, in the hope of finding something with which to put Mrs. Sewell

hopelessly in the wrong, but this morning a heading in the foreign news

of the _Advertiser_ caught his eye, and he laid _The Sunrise_ aside to

read at the breakfast-table. His wife came down in a cotton dress, as

a tribute to the continued warmth of the weather, and said that she had

not called the children, because it was Saturday, and they might as well

have their sleep out. He liked to see her in that dress; it had a

leafy rustling that was pleasant to his ear, and as she looked into the

library he gaily put out his hand, which she took, and suffered

herself to be drawn toward him. Then she gave him a kiss, somewhat less

business-like and preoccupied than usual.

“Well, you've got Lemuel Barker off your mind at last,” she divined, in

recognition of her husband's cheerfulness.

“Yes, he's off,” admitted Sewell.

“I hope he'll stay in Willoughby Pastures after this. Of course it

puts an end to our going there next summer.” “Oh, I don't know,” Sewell

feebly demurred.

“_I_ do,” said his wife, but not despising his insincerity enough to

insist that he did also. The mellow note of an apostle's bell--the

gift of an aesthetic parishioner--came from below, and she said, “Well,

there's breakfast, David,” and went before him down the stairs.

He brought his papers with him. It would have been her idea of

heightened cosiness, at this breakfast, which they had once a week

alone together, not to have the newspapers, but she saw that he felt

differently, and after a number of years of married life a woman learns

to let her husband have his own way in some unimportant matters. It was

so much his nature to have some sort of reading always in hand, that

he was certainly more himself, and perhaps more companionable with his

papers than without them.

She merely said, “Let me take the _Sunrise_,” when she had poured out

his coffee, and he had helped her to cantaloupe and steak, and spread

his _Advertiser_ beside his plate. He had the _Sunrise_ in his lap.

“No, you may have the _Advertiser_” he said, handing it over the table

to her. “I was down first, and I got both the papers. I'm not really

obliged to make any division, but I've seen the _Advertiser_, and I'm

willing to behave unselfishly. If you're very impatient for the police

report in the _Sunrise_ I'll read it aloud for you. I think that will be

a very good test of its quality, don't you?”

He opened the little sheet, and smiled teasingly at his wife, who said,

“Yes, read it aloud; I'm not at all ashamed of it.”

She put the _Advertiser_ in her lap, and leaned defiantly forward,

while she stirred her coffee, and Sewell unfolded the little sheet, and

glanced up and down its columns. “Go on! If you can't find it, I can.”

“Never mind! Here it is,” said Sewell, and he began to read--

“'The mill opened yesterday morning with a smaller number of grists than

usual, but they made up in quality what they lacked in quantity.'

“Our friend's metaphor seems to have weakened under him a little,”

commented Sewell, and then he pursued--

“'A reasonable supply of drunks were despatched--'

“Come, now, Lucy! You'll admit that this is horrible?” he broke off.

“No,” said his wife, “I will admit nothing of the kind. It's flippant,

I'll allow. Go on!”

“I can't,” said Sewell; but he obeyed.

“'A reasonable supply of drunks were despatched, and an habitual drunk,

in the person of a burly dame from Tipperary, who pleaded not guilty and

then urged the “poor childer” in extenuation, was sent down the harbour

for three months; Uncle Cook had been put in charge of a couple of young

frailties whose hind name was woman--'

“How do you like that, my dear?” asked Sewell exultantly.

Mrs. Sewell looked grave, and then burst into a shocked laugh. “You must

stop that paper, David! I can't have it about for the children to get

hold of. But it _is_ funny, isn't it? That will do--”

“No, I think you'd better have it all, now. There can't be anything

worse. It's funny, yes, with that truly infernal drollery which the

newspaper wits seem to have the art of.” He read on--“--'when a case was

called that brought the breath of clover blossoms and hay-seed into the

sultry court-room, and warmed the cockles of the habitués' toughened

pericardiums with a touch of real poetry. This was a case of assault,

with intent to rob, in which a lithe young blonde, answering to the

good old Puritanic name of Statira Dudley, was the complainant, and the

defendant an innocent-looking, bucolic youth, yclept--'”

Sewell stopped and put his hand to his forehead.

“What is it, David?” demanded his wife. “Why don't you go on? Is it too

scandalous?”

“No, no,” murmured the minister.

“Well?”

“I can't go on. But you must read it, Lucy,” he said, in quite a passion

of humility. “And you must try to be merciful. That poor boy--that--”

He handed the paper to his wife, and made no attempt to escape from

judgment, but sat submissive while she read the report of Lemuel's

trial. The story was told throughout in the poetico-jocular spirit of

the opening sentences; the reporter had felt the simple charm of the

affair, only to be ashamed of it and the more offensive about it.

When she had finished Mrs. Sewell did not say anything. She merely

looked at her husband, who looked really sick.

At last he said, making an effort to rise from his chair, “I must go and

see him, I suppose.”

“Yes, if you can find him,” responded his wife, with a sigh.

“Find him?” echoed Sewell.

“Yes. Goodness knows what more trouble the wretched creature's got into

by this time. You saw that he was acquitted, didn't you?” she demanded,

in answer to her husband's stare.

“No, I didn't. I supposed he was convicted, of course.”

“Well, you see it isn't so bad as it might be,” she said, using a pity

which she did not perhaps altogether feel. “Eat your breakfast now,

David, and then go and try to look him up.”

“Oh, I don't want any breakfast,” pleaded the minister.

He offered to rise again, but she motioned him down in his chair.

“David, you shall! I'm not going to have you going about all day with a

headache. Eat! And then when you've finished your breakfast, go and find

out which station that officer Baker belongs to, and he can tell you

something about the boy, if any one can.”

Sewell made what shift he could to grasp these practical ideas, and

he obediently ate of whatever his wife bade him. She would not let him

hurry his breakfast in the least, and when he had at last finished, she

said, “Now you can go, David. And when you've found the boy, don't you

let him out of your sight again till you've put him aboard the train for

Willoughby Pastures, and seen the train start out of the depot with him.

Never mind your sermon. I will be setting down the heads of a sermon,

while you're gone, that will do _you_ good, if you write it out, whether

it helps any one else or not.”

Sewell was not so sure of that. He had no doubt that his wife would

set down the heads of a powerful sermon, but he questioned whether any

discourse, however potent, would have force to benefit such an abandoned

criminal as he felt himself, in walking down his brown-stone steps,

and up the long brick sidewalk of Bolingbroke Street toward the Public

Garden. The beds of geraniums and the clumps of scarlet-blossomed salvia

in the little grass-plots before the houses, which commonly flattered

his eye with their colour, had a suggestion of penal fires in them now,

that needed no lingering superstition in his nerves to realise something

very like perdition for his troubled soul. It was not wickedness he had

been guilty of, but he had allowed a good man to be made the agency

of suffering, and he was sorely to blame, for he had sinned against

himself. This was what his conscience said, and though his reason

protested against his state of mind as a phase of the religious insanity

which we have all inherited in some measure from Puritan times, it

could not help him. He went along involuntarily framing a vow that if

Providence would mercifully permit him to repair the wrong he had done,

he would not stop at any sacrifice to get that unhappy boy back to his

home, but would gladly take any open shame or obloquy upon himself in

order to accomplish this.

He met a policeman on the bridge of the Public Garden, and made bold to

ask him at once if he knew an officer named Baker, and which station he

could be found at. The policeman was over-rich in the acquaintance

of two officers of the name of Baker, and he put his hand on Sewell's

shoulder, in the paternal manner of policemen when they will be

friendly, and advised him to go first to the Neponset Street station,

to which one of these Bakers was attached, and inquire there first.

“Anyway, that's what I should do in your place.”

Sewell was fulsomely grateful, as we all are in the like case, and at

the station he used an urbanity with the captain which was perhaps not

thrown away upon him, but which was certainly disproportioned to the

trouble he was asking him to take in saying whether he knew where he

could find officer Baker.

“Yes, I do,” said the captain. “You can find him in bed, upstairs,

but I'd rather you wouldn't wake a man off duty, if you don't have to,

especially if you don't know he's the one. What's wanted?”

Sewell stopped to say that the captain was quite right, and then he

explained why he wished to see officer Baker.

The captain listened with nods of his head at the names and facts given.

“Guess you won't have to get Baker up for that. I can tell you what

there is to tell. I don't know where your young man is now, but I gave

him an order for a bed at the Wayfarer's Lodge last night, and I guess

he slept there. You a friend of his?”

“Yes,” said Sewell, much questioning inwardly whether he could be truly

described as such. “I wish to befriend him,” he added savingly. “I knew

him at home, and I am sure of his innocence.”

“Oh, I guess he's _innocent_ enough,” said the captain. “Well, now,

I tell you what you do, if you want to befriend him; you get him home

quick as you can.”

“Yes,” said Sewell, helpless to resent the officer's authoritative and

patronising tone. “That's what I wish to do. Do you suppose he's at the

Wayfarer's Lodge now?” asked Sewell.

“Can't say,” said the captain, tilting himself back in his chair, and

putting his quill toothpick between his lips like a cigarette. “The only

way is to go and see.”

“Thank you very much,” said the minister, accepting his dismissal

meekly, as a man vowed to ignominy should, but feeling keenly that he

was dismissed, and dismissed in disgrace.

At the Lodge he was received less curtly. The manager was there with

a long morning's leisure before him, and disposed to friendliness that

Sewell found absurdly soothing. He turned over the orders for beds

delivered by the vagrants the night before, and “Yes,” he said, coming

to Lemuel's name, “he slept here; but nobody knows where he is by this

time. Wait a bit, sir!” he added to Sewell's fallen countenance. “There

was one of the young fellows stayed to help us through with the dishes,

this morning. I'll have him up; or may be you'd like to go down and take

a look at our kitchen? You'll find him there if it's the one. Here's our

card, We can supply you with all sorts of firewood at less cost than the

dealers, and you'll be helping the poor fellows to earn an honest bed

and breakfast. This way, sir!”

Sewell promised to buy his wood there, put the card respectfully

into his pocket, and followed the manager downstairs, and through the

basement to the kitchen. He arrived just as Lemuel was about to lift a

trayful of clean soup-bowls, to carry it upstairs. After a glance at the

minister, he stood still with dropped eyes.

Sewell did not know in what form to greet the boy on whom he had

unwillingly brought so much evil, and he found the greater difficulty in

deciding as he saw Lemuel's face hardening against him.

“Barker!” he said at last. “I'm very glad to find you--I have been very

anxious to find you.”

Lemuel made no sign of sympathy, but stood still in his long check

apron, with his sleeves rolled up to his elbow, and the minister

was obliged to humble himself still further to this figure of lowly

obstinacy.

“I should like to speak with you. Can I speak with you a few moments?”

The manager politely stepped into the storeroom, and affected to employ

himself there, leaving Lemuel and the minister alone together.