Bob Blake, in those days, lived in a somewhat dilapidated four-room
house, off toward the wrong end of Birch Street. His family arrangements
were peculiar. He had never married again; but not very long after his
wife's death a dull-eyed, rather mussy young woman, with a fondness for
rouge pots, had taken up her abode with him--to the scandal and
fascination of the neighborhood. It was an outrage, of course! With a
child in the house, too! Something ought to be done about it!
Yet, oddly enough, nothing that much worried Bob ever was done about
it, reckoning the various shocked-and-grieved forms of conversation as
nothing. As he never tired of asserting, Bob didn't give a damn for the
cackle of a lot of hens. He guessed he knew his way about; and so did
Pearl. Let the damned hens cackle their heads off; he was satisfied!
And so, eventually, I am forced to believe, were the hens. In the
earlier days of the scandal there was much clitter-clatter of having the
law on him, serving papers, and the like; but, as hen cackle sometimes
will, it came to precisely naught. Nor am I certain that, as the years
passed, the neighborhood did not grow a little proud of its one crimson
patch of wickedness; I am reasonably certain, indeed, that more than one
drab life took on a little borrowed flush of excitement from its
proximity.
Of course no decent, God-fearing woman would ever greet either Bob or
Pearl; but every time one passed either of them without a nod or a
"How's things to-day?" it gave one something to talk about, at home, or
over any amicable fence.
As for the men, they too were forbidden to speak; but men, most of them,
are unruly creatures if at large. You can't trust them safely five
minutes beyond the sound of your voice.
There was even one man, old Heinze, proprietor of the Birch Street
grocery store, who now and then cautiously put forth a revolutionary
sentiment.
"Dey lifs alvays togedder--like man unt vife--nod? Vere iss der
diffurunz, Mrs. Shay?"
"Shame on you for _them_ words, Mr. Heinze!"
"_Aber_"--with a slow, wide smile--"vere iss der diffurunz, Mrs. Shay? I
leaf id to you?"
That Pearl and Bob lived always together cannot be denied, and perhaps
they also lived as some men and their lawful wives are accustomed to
live--off toward the wrong end of city streets; and occasionally, no
doubt, toward the right end of them as well. Midweek, things wore along
dully enough, but over Sunday came drink and ructions. Susan says she
has never been able to understand why Sunday happens to be called a day
of rest. The day of arrest, she was once guilty of naming it.
Bob's neighbors, I fear, were not half so scandalized by his week-end
drunkenness as by what Mrs. Perkins--three doors nearer the right end of
Birch Street--invariably called his "brazen immorality." Intoxication
was not a rare vice in that miscellaneous block or two of factory
operatives. Nor can it be said that immorality, in the sense of Mrs.
Perkins, was so much rare as it was nervously concealed. The unique
quality of Bob's sin lay in its brazen element; that was what stamped
him peculiarly as a social outlaw.
Bob accepted this position, if sober, with a grim disregard. He had a
bitter, lowering nature at best, and when not profane was taciturn. As
for Pearl, social outlawry may be said to have been her native element.
She had a hazy mind in a lazy body, and liked better than most things
just to sit in a rocking-chair and polish her finger nails, as
distinguished from cleaning them. Only the guiltless member of this
family group really suffered from its low social estate, but she
suffered acutely. Little Susan could not abide being a social outlaw.
True, she was not always included in the general condemnation of her
family by the grown-ups; but the children were ruthless. They pointed
fingers, and there was much conscious giggling behind her back; while
some of the daintier little girls--the very little girls whom Susan
particularly longed to chum with--had been forbidden to play with "that
child," and were not at all averse to telling her so, flatly, with tiny
chins in air and a devastating expression of rectitude on their smug
little faces. At such times Susan would fight back impending cataracts,
stick her own freckled nose toward the firmament, and even, I regret to
say, if persistently harassed, thrust forth a rigid pink tongue. This,
Susan has since informed me, is the embryonic state of "swearing like
anything."
The little boys, on the whole, were better. They often said cruel
things, but Susan felt that they said them in a quite different spirit
from their instinctively snobbish and Grundyish sisters--said them
merely by way of bravado, or just for the fun of seeing whether or not
she would cry. And then they often let her join in their games, and on
those happy occasions treated her quite as an equal, with an impartial
and, to Susan, entirely blissful roughness. Susan early decided that she
liked boys much better than girls.
There was, for example, Jimmy Kane, whose widowed mother took in
washing, and so never had any time to clean up her huddled flat, over
Heinze's grocery store, or her family of four--two boys and two girls.
No one ever saw skin, as in itself it really is, on the faces of Mrs.
Kane's children, and Jimmy was always, if comparison be possible, the
grimiest of the brood. For some reason Jimmy always had a perpetual
slight cold, and his funny flat button of a nose wept, winter and summer
alike, though never into an unnecessary handkerchief. His coat-sleeve
served, even if its ministrations did not add to the tidiness of his
countenance.
Susan often wished she might scrub him, just to see what he really
looked like; for she idolized Jimmy. Not that Jimmy ever had paid any
special attention to her, except on one occasion. It was merely that he
accepted her as part of the human scheme of things, which in itself
would almost have been enough to win Susan's affectionate admiration.
But one day, as I have hinted, he became the god of her idolatry.
The incident is not precisely idyllic. A certain Joe--Giuseppe
Gonfarone; _aetat._ 14--whose father peddled fruit and vegetables, had
recently come into the neighborhood; a black-curled, brown-eyed little
devil, already far too wise in the manifold unseemliness of this sad old
planet. Joe was strong, stocky, aggressive, and soon posed as something
of a bully among the younger boys along Birch Street. Within less than a
month he had infected the minds of many with a new and rich vocabulary
of oaths and smutty words. Joe was not of the unconsciously
foul-mouthed; he relished his depravity. In fact, youngster as he was,
Joe had in him the makings of that slimiest product of our cities--the
street pimp, or cadet.
It was one fine spring day, three years or so before I met Susan in the
Eureka Garage, that Joe, with a group of Birch Street boys, was playing
marbles for keeps, just at the bottom of the long incline which carries
Birch Street down to the swamp land and general dump at the base of East
Rock. Susan was returning home from Orange Street, after bearing her
father his full dinner pail, and as she came up to the boys she halted
on one foot, using the toe of her free foot meanwhile to scratch
mosquito bites upward along her supporting shin.
"H'lo, Susan!" called Jimmy Kane, with his perfunctory good nature.
"What's bitin' you?"
Then it was his turn to knuckle-down. Susan, still balanced cranelike,
watched him eager-eyed, and was so delighted when he knocked a fine fat
reeler of Joe's out of the ring, jumping up with a yell of triumph to
pocket it, that she too gave a shrill cheer: "Oh, goody! I knew you'd
win!"
The note of ecstasy in her tone infuriated Joe. "Say!" he shrieked. "You
getta hell outta here!"
Susan's smile vanished; her white, even teeth--she had all her front
ones, she tells me; she was ten--clicked audibly together.
"It's no business of yours!" she retorted.
"You're right; it ain't!" This from Jimmy, still in high good humor.
"You stay here if you want. You're as good as him!"
"Who's as good as me?"
"She is!"
"_Her?_" Joe's lips curled back. He turned to the other boys, who had
all scrambled to their feet by this time and, instinctively scenting
mischief, were standing in a sort of ring. "He says she's good as me!"
Two of the smallest boys tittered, from pure excitement. Susan's nose
went up.
"I'm better. I'm not a dago!"
Joe leaped toward Susan and thrust his dense, bull-like head forward,
till his eyes were glaring into hers.
"Mebbe I live lika you--eh? Mebbe I live," cried Joe, "with a dirty
_whore_!"
There was a gasp from the encircling boys as Susan fell back from this
word, which she did not wholly comprehend, but whose vileness she felt,
somehow, in her very flesh. Joe, baring gorilla teeth, burst into coarse
jubilation.
It was just at this point that Jimmy Kane, younger than Joe by a year or
more, and far slighter, jumped on the little ruffian--alas, from
behind!--and dealt him as powerful a blow on the head as he could
compass; a blow whose effectiveness, I reluctantly admit, was enhanced
by the half brick with which Jimmy had first of all prudently provided
himself. Joe Gonfarone went to earth, inert, but bleeding profusely.
There was a scuttling of frightened feet in every direction. Susan
herself did not stop running until she reached the very top of the Birch
Street incline. Then she looked back, her eyes lambent, her heart
throbbing, not alone from the rapid ascent. Yes, there was Jimmy--_her_
Jimmy!--kneeling in the dust by the still prostrate Joe. Susan could not
hear him, but she knew somehow from his attitude that he was scared to
death, and that he was asking Joe if he was hurt much. She agonized with
her champion, feeling none the less proud of him, and she waited for him
at the top of the rise, hoping to thank him, longing to kiss his hands.
But Jimmy, when he did pass her, went by without a glance, at top speed.
He was bound for a doctor. So Susan never really managed to thank Jimmy
at all. She merely idolized him in secret, a process which proved,
however, fairly heart-warming and, in the main, satisfactory.
It took three stitches to mend Joe's head--a fact famous in the junior
annals of Birch Street for some years--and soon after he appeared,
somewhat broken in spirit, in the street again, his parents moved him,
Margharita and the sloe-eyed twins to Bridgeport--very much, be it
admitted, to the relief of Jimmy Kane, who had lived for three weeks
nursing a lonely fear of dark reprisals.