IN WHICH I START IN LIFE
With my mother's death all that was homelike and comfortable passed from
our little house. For three days after the funeral the neglected clothes
still hung on the line in the back yard, but on the fourth morning a
slatternly girl, with red hair and arms, came from the grocery store at
the corner, and gathered them in. My little sister was put to nurse with
Mrs. Cudlip next door, and when, at the end of the week, President went
off to work somewhere in a mining town in West Virginia, my father and I
were left alone, except for the spasmodic appearances of the red-haired
slattern. Gradually the dust began to settle and thicken on the dried
cat-tails in the china vases upon the mantel; the "prize" red geranium
dropped its blossoms and withered upon the sill; the soaking dish-cloths
lay in a sloppy pile on the kitchen floor; and the vegetable rinds were
left carelessly to rot in the bucket beside the sink. The old neatness
and order had departed before the garments my mother had washed were
returned again to the tub, and day after day I saw my father shake his
head dismally over the soggy bread and the underdone beef. Whether or
not he ever realised that it was my mother's hand that had kept him
above the surface of life, I shall never know; but when that strong
grasp was relaxed, he went hopelessly, irretrievably, and unresistingly
under. In the beginning there was merely a general wildness and disorder
in his appearance,--first one button, then two, then three dropped from
his coat. After that his linen was changed less often, his hair allowed
to spread more stiffly above his forehead, and the old ashes from his
pipe dislodged less frequently from the creases in his striped shirt. At
the end of three months I noticed a new fact about him--a penetrating
odour of alcohol which belonged to the very air he breathed. His mind
grew slower and seemed at last almost to stop; his blue eyes became
heavier and glazed at times; and presently he fell into the habit of
going out in the evenings, and not returning until I had cried myself to
sleep, under my tattered quilt, with Samuel hugged close in my arms.
Sometimes the red-haired girl would stop after her work for a few
friendly words, proving that a slovenly exterior is by no means
incompatible with a kindly heart; but as a usual thing I was left alone,
after the boys had gone home from their play in the street, to amuse
myself and Samuel as I could through the long evening hours. Sometimes I
brought in an apple or a handful of chestnuts given me by one of the
neighbours and roasted them before the remnants of fire in the stove.
Once or twice I opened my mother's closet and took down her clothes--her
best bombazine dress, her black cashmere mantle trimmed with bugles, her
long rustling crape veil, folded neatly beneath her bonnet in the tall
bandbox--and half in grief, half in curiosity, I invaded those sacred
precincts where my hands had never dared penetrate while she was alive.
My great loss, from which probably in more cheerful surroundings I
should have recovered in a few weeks, was renewed in me every evening by
my loneliness and by the dumb sympathy of Samuel, who would stand
wagging his tail for an hour at the sight of the cloak or the bonnet
that she had worn. Like my father I grew more unkempt and ragged every
day I lived. I ceased to wash myself, because there was nobody to make
me. My buttons dropped off one by one and nobody scolded. I dared no
longer go near the gate of the enchanted garden, fearing that if the
little girl were to catch sight of me, she would call me "dirty," and
run away in disgust. Occasionally my father would clap me upon the
shoulder at breakfast, enquire how I was getting along, and give me a
rusty copper to spend. But for the greater part of the time, I believe,
he was hardly aware of my existence; the vacant, flushed look was almost
always in his face when we met, and he stayed out so late in the evening
that it was not often his stumbling footsteps aroused me when he came
upstairs to bed.
So accustomed had I become to my lonely hours by the kitchen stove, with
Samuel curled up at my feet, that when one night, about six months after
my mother's death, I heard the unexpected sound of my father's tread on
the pavement outside, I turned almost with a feeling of terror, and
waited breathlessly for his unsteady hand on the door. It came after a
minute, followed immediately by his entrance into the kitchen, and to my
amazement I saw presently that he was accompanied by a strange woman,
whom I recognised at a glance as one of those examples of her sex that
my mother had been used to classify sweepingly as "females." She was
plump and jaunty, with yellow hair that hung in tight ringlets down to
her neck, and pink cheeks that looked as if they might "come off" if
they were thoroughly scrubbed. There was about her a spring, a bounce,
an animation that impressed me, in spite of my inherited moral sense, as
decidedly elegant.
My father's eyes looked more vacant and his face fuller than ever.
"Benjy," he began at once in a husky voice, while his companion released
his arm in order to put her ringlets to rights, "I've brought you a new
mother."
At this the female's hands fell from her hair, and she looked round in
horror. "What boy is that, Thomas?" she demanded, poised there in all
her flashing brightness like a figure of polished brass.
"That boy," replied my father, as if at a loss exactly how to account
for me, "that boy is Ben Starr--otherwise Benjy--otherwise--"
He would have gone on forever, I think, in his eagerness to explain me
away, if the woman had not jerked him up with a peremptory question:
"How did he come here?" she enquired.
Since nothing but the naked truth would avail him now, he uttered it at
last in an eloquent monosyllable--"Born."
"But you told me there was not a chick or a child," she exclaimed in a
rage.
For a moment he hesitated; then opening his mouth slowly, he gave voice
to the single witticism of his life.
"That was befo' I married you, dearie," he said.
"Well, how am I to know," demanded the female, "that you haven't got a
parcel of others hidden away?"
"Thar's one, the littlest, put out to nurse next do', an' another, the
biggest, gone to work in the West," he returned in his amiable, childish
manner.
After my unfortunate introduction, however, the addition of a greater
and a lesser appeared to impress her but little. She looked scornfully
about the disorderly room, took off her big, florid bonnet, and began
arranging her hair before the three-cornered mottled mirror on the wall.
Then wheeling round in a temper, her eyes fell on Samuel, sitting
dejectedly on his tail by my mother's old blue and white gingham apron.
"What is that?" she fired straight into my father's face.
"That," he responded, offering his unnecessary information as if it were
a piece of flattery, "air the dawg, Sukey."
"Whose dawg?"
Goaded into defiance by this attack on my only friend, I spoke in a
shrill voice from the corner into which I had retreated. "Mine," I said.
"Wall, I'll tell you what!" exclaimed the female, charging suddenly upon
me, "if I've got to put up with a chance o' kids, I don't reckon I've
got to be plagued with critters, too. Shoo, suh! get out!"
Seizing my mother's broom, she advanced resolutely to the attack, and an
instant later, to my loud distress and to Samuel's unspeakable horror,
she had whisked him across the kitchen and through the back door out
into the yard.
"Steady, Sukey, steady," remarked my father caressingly, much as he
might have spoken to a favourite but unruly heifer. For an instant he
looked a little crestfallen, I saw with pleasure, but as soon as Samuel
was outside and the door had closed, he resumed immediately his usual
expression of foolish good humour. It was impossible, I think, for him
to retain an idea in his mind after the object of it had been removed
from his sight. While I was still drying my eyes on my frayed coat
sleeve, I watched him with resentment begin a series of playful lunges
at the neck of the female, which she received with a sulky and
forbidding air. Stealing away the next minute, I softly opened the back
door and joined the outcast Samuel, where he sat whining upon the step.
The night was very dark, but beyond the looming chimneys a lonely star
winked at me through the thick covering of clouds. I was a sturdy boy
for my age, sound in body, and inwardly not given to sentiment or
softness of any kind; but as I sat there on the doorstep, I felt a lump
rise in my throat at the thought that Samuel and I were two small
outcast animals in the midst of a shivering world. I remembered that
when my mother was alive I had never let her kiss me except when she
paid me by a copper or a slice of bread laid thickly with blackberry
jam; and I told myself desperately that if she could only come back now,
I would let her do it for nothing! She might even whip me because I'd
torn my trousers on the back fence, and I thought I should hardly feel
it. I recalled her last birthday, when I had gone down to the market
with five cents of my own to buy her some green gage plums, of which she
was very fond, and how on the way up the hill, being tempted, I had
eaten them all myself. At the time I had stifled my remorse with the
assurance that she would far rather I should have the plums than eat
them herself, but this was cold comfort to me to-night while I regretted
my selfishness. If I had only saved her half, as I had meant to do if
the hill had not been quite so long and so steep.
Samuel snuggled closer to me and we both shivered, for the night was
fresh. The house had grown quiet inside; my father and his new wife had
evidently left the kitchen and gone upstairs. As I sat there I realised
suddenly, with a pang, that I could never go inside the door again; and
rising to my feet, I struck a match and fumbled for a piece of chalk in
my pocket. Then standing before the door I wrote in large letters across
the panel:--
"DEAR PA.
I have gone to work.
Your Aff. son,
BEN STARR."
The blue flame of the match flickered an instant along the words; then
it went out, and with Samuel at my heels, I crept through the back gate
and down the alley to the next street, which led to the ragged brow of
the hill. Ahead of me, as I turned off into Main Street, the scattered
lights of the city showed like blurred patches upon the darkness.
Gradually, while I went rapidly downhill, I saw the patches change into
a nebulous cloud, and the cloud resolve itself presently into straight
rows of lamps. Few people were in the streets at that hour, and when I
reached the dim building of the Old Market, I found it cold and
deserted, except for a stray cur or two that snarled at Samuel from a
heap of trodden straw under a covered wagon. Despite the fact that I was
for all immediate purposes as homeless as the snarling curs, I was not
without the quickened pulses which attend any situation that a boy may
turn to an adventure. A high heart for desperate circumstances has never
failed me, and it bore me company that night when I came back again with
aching feet to the Old Market, and lay down, holding Samuel tight, on a
pile of straw.
In a little while I awoke because Samuel was barking, and sitting up in
the straw I saw a dim shape huddled beside me, which I made out, after a
few startled blinks, to be the bent figure of a woman wrapped in a black
shawl with fringed ends, which were pulled over her head and knotted
under her chin. From the penetrating odour I had learned to associate
with my father, I judged that she had been lately drinking, and the
tumbled state of my coat convinced me that she had been frustrated by
Samuel in a base design to rifle my pockets. Yet she appeared so
miserable as she sat there rocking from side to side and crying to
herself, that I began all at once to feel very sorry. It seemed to hurt
her to cry and yet I saw that the more it hurt her the more she cried.
"If I were you," I suggested politely, "I'd go home right away."
"Home?" repeated the woman, with a hiccough, "what's home?"
"The place you live in."
"Lor, honey, I don't live in no place. I jest walks."
"But what do you do when you get tired?"
"I walks some mo'."
"An' don't you ever leave off?"
"Only when it's dark like this an' thar's no folks about."
"But what do folks say to you when they see you walkin'?"
"Say to me," she threw back her head and broke into a drunken laugh,
"why, they say to me: 'Step lively!'"
She crawled closer, peering at me greedily under the pale glimmer of the
street lamp.
"Why, you're a darlin' of a boy," she said, "an' such pretty blue eyes!"
Then she rose to her feet and stood swaying unsteadily above me, while
Samuel broke out into angry barks. "Shall I tell you a secret because of
yo' blue eyes?" she asked. "It's this--whatever you do in this world,
you step lively about it. I've done a heap of lookin' an' I've seen the
ones who get on are the ones who step the liveliest. It ain't no matter
where you're goin', it ain't no matter who's befo' you, if you want to
get there first, step lively!"
She went out, taking her awful secret with her, and turning over I fell
asleep again on my pile of straw. "If ever I have a dollar I'll give it
to her so she may stop walkin'," was my last conscious thought.
My next awakening was a very different one, for the light was streaming
into the market, and a cheerful red face was shining down, like a rising
sun, over a wheelbarrow of vegetables.
"Don't you think it's about time all honest folk were out of bed,
sonny?" enquired a voice.
"I ain't been here mo'n an hour," I retorted, resenting the imputation
of slothfulness with a spirit that was not unworthy of my mother.
The open length of the market, I saw now, was beginning to present a
busy, almost a festive, air. Stalls were already laden with fruit and
vegetables, and farmers' wagons covered with canvas, and driven by
sunburnt countrymen, had drawn up to the sidewalk. Rising hurriedly to
my feet, I began rubbing my eyes, for I had been dreaming of the
fragrance of bacon in our little kitchen.
"Now I'd be up an' off to home, if I were you, sonny," observed the
marketman, planting his wheelbarrow of vegetables on the brick floor,
and beginning to wipe off the stall. "The sooner you take yo' whippin',
the sooner you'll set easy again."
"There ain't anybody to whip me," I replied dolefully, staring at the
sign over his head, on which was painted in large letters--"John
Chitling. Fish, Oysters (in season). Vegetables. Fruits."
Stopping midway in his preparations, he turned on me his great beaming
face, so like the rising sun that looked over his shoulder, while I
watched his big jean apron swell with the panting breaths that drew from
his stomach.
"Here's a boy that says he ain't got nobody to whip him!" he exclaimed
to his neighbours in the surrounding stalls,--a poultryman, covered with
feathers, a fish vender, bearing a string of mackerel in either hand,
and a butcher, with his sleeves rolled up and a blood-stained apron
about his waist.
"I al'ays knew you were thick-headed, John Chitling," remarked the fish
dealer, with contempt, "but I never believed you were such a plum fool
as not to know a tramp when you seed him."
"You ain't got but eleven of yo' own," observed the butcher, with a
snicker; "I reckon you'd better take him along to round out the full
dozen."
"If I've got eleven there ain't one of 'em that wa'nt welcome,"
responded John, his slow temper rising, "an' I reckon what the Lord
sends he's willing to provide for."
"Oh, I reckon he is," sneered the fish dealer, who appeared to be of an
unpleasant disposition, "so long as you ain't over-particular about the
quality of the provision."
"Well, he don't provide us with yo' fish, anyway," retorted John; and I
was watching excitedly for the coming blows when the butcher, who had
been looking over me as reflectively as if I had been a spring lamb
brought to slaughter, intervened with a peaceable suggestion that he
should take me into his service.
"I'm on the lookout for a bright boy in my business," he observed.
But the sight of blood on his rolled-up shirt sleeves produced in me
that strange sickness I had inherited from my mother, who used to pay an
old coloured market man to come up and wring the necks of her chickens;
and when the question was put to me if I'd like to be trained up for a
butcher, I drew back and stood ready for instant flight in case they
should attempt' to decide my future by present force.
"I'd rather work for you," I said, looking straight at John Chitling,
for it occurred to me that if I were made to murder anything I'd rather
it would be oysters.
"Ha! ha! he knows by the look of you, you're needin' one to make up the
dozen," exclaimed the butcher.
"Well, I declar he does seem to have taken a regular fancy,"
acknowledged John, flattered by my decision. "I don't want any real
hands now, sonny, but if you'd like to tote the marketing around with
Solomon, I reckon I can let you have a square meal or so along with the
others."
"What'll yo' old woman say to it, John?" enquired the poultryman, with a
loud guffaw, "when you send her a new one of yo' own providin'?"
John Chitling was busily arranging a pile of turnips with what he
doubtless thought was an artistic eye for colour, and the facetiousness
of the poultryman reacted harmlessly from his thick head.
"You needn't worry about my wife, for she ain't worryin'," he rejoined,
and the shine seemed to gather like moisture on his round red face under
his shock of curling red hair. "She takes what comes an' leaves the Lord
to do the tendin'."
At this a shout went up which I did not understand, until I came to know
later that an impression existed in the neighbourhood that the Chitlings
had left entirely too much of the bringing up of their eleven children
in the hands of Providence, who in turn had left them quite as
complacently to the care of the gutter.
"I don't know but what too much trust in the Lord don't work as badly as
too little," observed the fish dealer, while John went on placidly
arranging his turnips and carrots. "What appears to me to be best
religion for a working-man is to hold a kind of middle strip between
faith and downright disbelievin'. Let yo' soul trust to the Lord's
lookin' arter you, but never let yo' hands get so much as an inklin'
that you're a-trustin'. Yes, the safest way is to believe in the Lord on
Sunday, an' on Monday to go to work as if you wa'nt quite so
sartain-sure."
A long finger of sunshine stretched from beyond the chimneys across the
street, and pointed straight to the vegetables on John Chitling's
counter, until the onions glistened like silver balls, and the turnips
and carrots sent out flashes of dull red and bright orange.
"I'll let you overhaul a barrel of apples, sonny," said the big man to
me; "have you got a sharp eye for specks?"
When I replied that I thought I had, he pointed to a barrel from which
the top had been recently knocked. "They're to be sorted in piles,
according to size," he explained, and added, "For such is the
contrariness of human nature that there are some folks as can't see the
apple for the speck, an' others that would a long ways rather have the
speck than the apple. I've one old gentleman for a customer who can't
enjoy eatin' a pippin unless he can find one with a spot that won't keep
till to-morrow."
Kneeling down on the bricks, as he directed, I sorted the yellow apples
until, growing presently faint from hunger, I began to gaze longingly, I
suppose, at the string of fish hanging above my head.
"Maybe you'd like to run across an' get a bite of somethin' befo' you go
on," suggested John, reading my glances.
But I only shook my head, in spite of my gnawing stomach, and went on
doggedly with my sorting, impelled by an inherent determination to do
with the best of me whatever I undertook to do at all. To the possession
of this trait, I can see now in looking back, I have owed any success or
achievement that has been mine--neither to brains nor to chance, but
simply to that instinct to hold fast which was bred in my bone and
structure. For the lack of this quality I have seen men with greater
intellects, with far quicker wits than mine, go down in the struggle.
Brilliancy I have not, nor any particular outward advantage, except that
of size and muscle; but when I was once in the race, I could never see
to right or to left of me, only straight ahead to the goal.
Overhead the sun had risen slowly higher, until the open spaces and the
brick arches were flooded with light. If I had turned I should have seen
the gay vegetable stalls blooming like garden beds down the dim length
of the building. The voices of the market men floated toward me, now
quarrelling, now laughing, now raised to shout at a careless negro or a
prowling dog. I heard the sounds, and I smelt the strong smell of fish
from the gleaming strings of perch and mackerel hanging across the way.
But through it all I did not look up and I did not turn. My first piece
of work was done with the high determination to do it well, and it has
been my conviction from that morning that if I had slighted that barrel
of apples, I should have failed inevitably in my career.