For a moment the two in the kitchen stared at each other, speechless;
but the moment was short. Whatever might have caused the sick boy’s
departure, Mrs. Schmitz was not one to have her hospitality scorned.
“Never mind what you think,” she sharply reproved Sydney, who had
ventured to voice his distrust of the midnight prowler. “I looked once
in his face. He iss now a good boy. If he goes once again to cold ant
hunger, he----” She broke her speech and called into the night, “Blitzen!
Blitzen!”
No dog came bounding to her, but a faint whine was heard somewhere
outside. She caught up the rope that had held the stranger, and, heedless
of thin slippers, ran into the wet dark, calling Sydney to follow.
They found the dog tied to the fence, his jaws strapped together.
With many endearments of hand and speech, the latter in German, she
unbound him, led him to the kitchen door, and made him smell of rope and
chair. “Seek! seek! Find him! Hold! him!” she commanded.
The dog sniffed doubtfully a minute, growled, and with a short bark, set
off through the gate and down the street.
“You also, Seedney! Run! Catch up mit Blitzen. He’ll find that boy, ant
you bring him back. No matter what he says, bring him.”
The run was short and led scarcely a block away to a vacant lot, where
Sydney found the other boy prone on his face in a thicket of young
sallows and wild blackberry.
Evidently stunned from a fall, he was mumbling incoherently and Blitzen
was nosing him doubtfully. Even the dog had his scruples about attacking
a fallen enemy. Sydney turned the lad over, trying to learn what had
happened, and was debating the next thing to do when Mrs. Schmitz puffed
into the zone of excitement.
“Ach! Here he iss! Hooray, Blitzen! Good Blitzen!” She gave the dog a
caress that took the drooping doubt from his tail and set it high over
his back, a waving plume of satisfaction.
They soon had the stranger on his feet and back in the kitchen. He seemed
willing to go, and quite calm but reticent, evidently perplexed as to
Mrs. Schmitz’s motive in compelling his return.
She did not hurry him, but busied herself about the room; gave the dog
some food, and piled the dishes together, Sydney helping. Presently she
turned to the boy, decision in her face. “You come now mit me up stairs
ant have one bath ant go to bed. To-morrow you shall talk mit me.”
He stood suddenly erect. “No, tonight--now I shall tell you what--what
you must know before you keep me in your home another hour. Before this
I have robbed a few ice boxes--taken things to eat. But this time I came
to get money, jewels, anything I could find that could be turned into
money. I had the dope, too.”
“Dope?” she questioned as he hesitated.
“Yes. I was going to put you to sleep, so that I could have time to--to
go over the house. You see I’m green at the work, and Jim--my pal--said
that was the only way I could pull off the stunt.”
“Ach! So? Two of you?”
“Yes. He is an old hand.”
“Why did he send you? Why comes he not himself?”
“He said the police were on to him. If I was caught I could get off easy
because it was my first offense and I am young. Besides it isn’t safe for
the one that--that steals the goods to try to raise money on them.”
“So?” It is impossible to describe in words the changes the German woman
could ring on that one little word. It could mean doubt, incredulity,
surprise, joy, sorrow, pity, trust, love, and more.
This time it meant scorn. “So? You take all the risk. You give him the
goods, ant he gets the money! It iss one fine scheme! When did you fall
in his trap?”
“Today--yesterday, I mean,” he glanced at the clock that marked the hour
of three, “when I was hunting work, hungrier all the time, I got angry.
I said if a man wants work and can’t get it, at least he ought not to
starve. Going to jail would save him from that.”
“I’ll give you better to eat than any chails,” Mrs. Schmitz broke in with
a laugh.
Sydney saw the ghost of an answering smile on the lad’s face, and knew
that was what she wished.
“When I went back to--to the place down by the water front where he hides
in the daytime, he made this proposition that--that I tried to carry
out--and failed.”
“But why you choose my place? I’m not rich.”
“A man paid you fifty dollars last evening, there in the greenhouse,
didn’t he?” She nodded. “I was there, saw it, and hurried off to tell
him. We came back in time to look through your dining-room windows and
see you at dinner. Gee! It looked good.” He hesitated a breath, and
indicating Sydney, went on. “He was feeding the dog things I could have
fought for.”
“Seedney, no more shall you feed Blitzen at the table.”
“Something like frenzy came to me then, and I said, ‘I’ll do it! I will
have some of that dinner!’”
For a time the kitchen was absolutely still. Then Mrs. Schmitz said
abruptly, “Still you tell me not why you run out mit mine bread.”
The boy started up. “Don’t you see? He was hungry too. There I was
eating a splendid meal in your kitchen and he was out in the cold. I had
forgotten him, a pal that had helped me as long as he had a cent. The
noise--our signal--recalled me, made me ashamed, and I--I did--what you
saw.”
“But how came you down, hurt, lying mit the scratching vines?”
“He--he was mad. He said I had queered the whole game, and he was through
with me. But he would put me to sleep first so I couldn’t tell which way
he went.”
Mrs. Schmitz rose. “It iss enough. You come mit me. One good hot bath
mit plenty of soap shall wash away the thief, outsides and insides. You
sleep one night in my house; to-morrow we talk.” She walked across to the
boiler and touched it. “It iss hot. Come!”
Blitzen started up and licked her hand, at which she cast a quick look of
distrust at the boy. “Did you tie up mine dog?”
“No. Jim did.”
“Ach! So? He iss a goot dog. Come.” Her face beamed with good feeling as
she led the boy off to minister to him as his own mother might have done.
Sydney returned to his room to sleep out the remainder of the night; but
sleep did not come quickly. The last thing he heard was Mrs. Schmitz’s
cheery “Sleep goot” at the door of the best chamber. And with that up
leaped again in Sydney’s heart the demon, jealousy.
The best chamber! There were two others untenanted. In all the months
since his coming he had not once questioned the generosity of his hostess
because he had the most meanly furnished chamber in the house. Indeed
he knew very little of the great rambling structure that had grown like
the chambered nautilus, by larger and ever larger additions. It was just
as Mrs. Schmitz had bought it. Glimpses through open doors revealed
nothing to Sydney’s untrained eyes beyond a succession of beds, rugs or
carpets, and chairs. But he did know that the large room over the living
room opened upon a spacious, wisteria-hung porch and was called the best
chamber; and he resented its possession by the thief.
It was after nine when he opened his eyes on a brilliant morning, the
winter sun streaming into the room with the warmth of May. He hopped out
and dressed hastily, whistling gayly, his yellow humor quite forgotten
till Mrs. Schmitz appeared asking for clean underwear and other articles
for the new comer.
“We will give him the best we have, Seedney, till he iss well. Seek
people don’t like rags nor dirt.”
Silently and not very readily he selected from his own ample if not
elegant wardrobe the pieces she asked. Perhaps it was not strange that he
was ungracious. He had fought for his crust and disputed the wall side
of a warm grating with others in as desperate case as himself; and that
does not breed readiness to welcome newcomers of doubtful character.
Yet Sydney himself was puzzled by this emotion. He had never grudged
things before. He had usually been ready to share the crust he fought
for. Why could he not feel kinder to this boy, Max? Thoroughly ashamed,
he determined to discipline himself.
At the late breakfast the boy told more of himself, yet nothing that
revealed his past; and his hostess did not ask it, but pressed the good
food on him, as pleased to see him eat as if he had been her own son.
“Already are you better!” she exclaimed, delighted, as they rose from the
table. “Not once have you coughed.”
“I’d be ill-bred to disturb such a breakfast with coughing.” He made a
little bow and stepped back for her to pass.
Sydney could see that the speech, the bow, everything Max did with such
an air of elegance, was quite natural, quite unconsciously done. And in
the parlor where every Sunday morning after breakfast Mrs. Schmitz and
Sydney sang together, the new boy proved by every word and movement that
he had been born to a refinement that Sydney believed beyond his own
greatest effort to acquire.
Here as all over the house the furniture was incongruous, though,
differing from that in Sydney’s room, it was expensive and modern. But
three things stood for culture; the grand piano, a violin in its case,
and a mahogany music cabinet filled with music.
“You can sing?” she questioned; “or play the violin?” she added, seeing
his glance fixed upon it.
“I haven’t much of a voice, but I used to play a little.”
She crossed the room to take the instrument from its case, but stood
motionless for a moment, her back to the boys, her hands hanging limp.
When at last she did bring it to view, her hands were trembling. Each
touch was a caress; and when she adjusted the bow and placed the violin
in position to tune, Sydney heard her sigh.
But when she handed it to Max her face was serene and her voice steady.
“Try it. Mine father’s it was; I have many years ago played the piano for
him. When he died they sent it to me mit much music ant mine fine dresses
I wore in Germany.”
Max took the violin with a reverence that pleased her, and tried the
strings with delicate, accustomed fingers. “It is a fine one, a Cremona!”
he added with an excitement Sydney saw no reason for; he didn’t know one
fiddle from another.
But Mrs. Schmitz did. She knew much about music, instruments, and
composers. And here was some one else who could speak the same language,
and with his instrument too, as Sydney could see by the way he tuned it
and played little snatches of this or that, while she nodded and beamed.
“Ach, goot! Your hant ant head ant heart sind all one mit music!”
From under the shelf of the cabinet she drew a pile of violin music and
began to run it over rapidly, pronouncing the foreign names with no
more ease than Max, who caught a passage from one, or hummed a snatch
from another; and presently they were speaking in German, both excited,
gesticulating, happy.
Sydney was as much out of it as if the language were Hindoo. In school he
had done well. Through the interest of Mr. Streeter, a young man recently
come into a fortune, who devoted it and his time to assisting boys who
were otherwise on the way to being “down and out,” and through the
kindness of Mrs. Schmitz, Sydney had been able to press on in his grades.
Now at the beginning of the winter semester he stood with Billy Bennett,
“Sis” Jones, Queen Bess, and all the others who made his world, seniors
in the “Fifth Avenue High,” side by side, respected and liked.
But suddenly Sydney realized in the presence of this stranger, so
sinisterly introduced into that quiet life, that there was a great area
of culture for which no public school can issue diplomas. As a child
speaks its native tongue nor knows when he learns it, so Max spoke the
language of refined society, of an early home environment that comes only
from generations of good breeding and comfortable income.
Sydney’s eyes were opened in another quarter. He had always found
kindness and understanding in Mrs. Schmitz, and that exquisite neatness
that is the mark of a gentlewoman; but he had not seen behind her
eccentricities. It had never occurred to him that the industrious woman
who spent her days with pots and flowers had once lived differently.
Though her fingers had brought marvelous music from the ivory keys, he
had not seen far beyond the split nails--marks of her toil.
Now he saw! And he suddenly knew she had met a kindred spirit.
“Come, Seedney,” she called half an hour later; “we’ll sing now our
songs.”
If she had not gone and taken his hand he would not have stirred, so
foreign to them did he feel. But she must have divined that, for she
pulled him forward, and not without pride in her tone, said, “This iss
mine only pupil. Some day he will make me very proud.”
They sang a number of simple songs, ending with some hymns, Max adding
a rather thin voice while he played the air, or again, some delicate
obligato.
“You have a splendid voice,” he said heartily to Sydney when Mrs. Schmitz
finally left them together. “Four or five years’ work would put you on
the stage--if you care for that.”
“I never thought of it. Something else would fit me better, I guess.”
“Gee! She’s great, isn’t she?” Max said under his breath, nodding toward
the door where Mrs. Schmitz had disappeared. “How is it she is just
drudging--cooking, washing dishes? She should never use her hands but to
play.”
Sydney looked again at the stranger. Some vague notion he, too, had
had in regard to Mrs. Schmitz’s past, when she must have been taught
by masters and spent long hours at the piano; but it never occurred to
him that she was out of place in a new city, “running” a greenhouse and
working twice as many hours as her men did. But this boy who had crept in
at her pantry window to steal from her, through one half hour’s music,
understood her better than Sydney in half a year’s sojourn in her house.
The discovery gave him a feeling of inadequacy, as if he had been unkind
to her, had failed in fealty to her.
Max toyed with the violin a little longer; looked over the music, now
and then drawing a breath of sweetness from the strings, and speaking a
running accompaniment all the while, so easy in word and movement, so
fluent, that each moment he became more and more an enigma to the other.
Sydney found himself telling freely the little he knew of Mrs. Schmitz,
her kindness to him, her generosity, her many eccentricities, one of
which was her aversion to girls. “She can’t bear even to hear about them.”
“Did she ever have a daughter? And where’s her husband?”
“She’s lost both.”
Before Max could reply he was shaken with a paroxysm of coughing, the
severest of the morning, yet light compared with those of the night
before, so much had warmth and food done toward banishing the spectre,
tuberculosis.
“Come upstairs with me while I do up my room. I’ll do yours too this
morning. After that we’ll get out in the sun; that’s the best medicine
you can have.”
“Do--do up your room? Do you make beds?”
“Why not? Do you think I’d let her?”
“No--no, of course not. But why doesn’t she have a maid?”
“She has a woman to wash and clean two or three times a week.”
“She--she does all the rest? And takes boys to board?”
“Yes.” Sydney was having his eyes still more opened. “The work in this
house is nothing; she spends most of her time in the nursery.”
Max followed his leader upstairs, asking no more questions, but watching
Sydney, astonished, as he went deftly through the morning work. Once
or twice Max moved a chair, or tried to help with a blanket, but his
awkwardness was so apparent that he laughed at himself.
“How did you learn?”
“She taught me.”
“But this isn’t boys’ work any more than washing dishes.”
“Why not? Doesn’t a boy sleep in a bed and eat his food from dishes? Why
shouldn’t he do such work if it’s to save some one better than he is?
Mrs. Schmitz for instance?”
“That’s right. But doesn’t it make you feel a little--sissylike?”
“The manliest chap I know, Billy To-morrow--Billy Bennett--isn’t ashamed
to do any sort of work to save his mother and sisters. They used to be
poorer than they are now.”
Max said nothing for a time. Then he broke out with, “How did you come to
this snug berth anyhow?”
Sydney told him that Mr. Streeter had seen Mrs. Schmitz’s advertisement
of a good home for a boy who would be steady, do a little light work, and
be company for her at night. “She wasn’t afraid, never was; but she told
Mr. Streeter she wanted some one to look at across the table when she
ate.”
Max went to the window and looked out a moment, then he whirled and
strode back to Sydney. “Here! Show me how you do everything! I will
learn--beat you to it pretty soon--if I can.” He laughed almost joyously
and Sydney felt only sincerity in it. “I’m going to accept her offer of
a home till I get over this cough; but it shall not be for nothing. If I
can’t render service for value received, I’ll--” His face darkened to a
thought Sydney saw he had entertained before. “I’ll put this mug where it
won’t need feeding.”
“Shut up! You’re no quitter. Put a few of her good dinners into you, and
you’ll be ready to buck any game coming.”
“I believe you. But it won’t be her dinners alone; it’s herself. She
radiates something good besides food.”
Sydney clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m glad you like her. I am not
able to speak of her as you do, but I--I think she’s the best ever.” He
turned away, ashamed that he could not find words to say what he wished.
He seemed the more dumb because of Max’s fluency.
“Is this the way you do the trick, Mr. Blanket-slinger?” Max asked,
catching up a sheet and flapping it wide but crookedly over the mattress.
“No. It’s wrong side up and end to.”
“How do you tell that?”
Sydney showed him the right side of the hem that came uppermost, and the
wide hem designating the upper end of the sheet.
Max thanked him and carefully flung the other sheet to place.
“That goes wrong side up. Turn it over.”
“For the love of Inverarity, why?”
“Right sides go together.”
“Why? Does one side of a sheet feel any different from another?”
“It does to her. Anyway there’s a reason, it’s the right way. I never
asked her why.”
“I will then. I want to know all about it.”
They finished up the two rooms and Max proposed to “do” Mrs. Schmitz’s as
well.
“No. Here’s where we stop. I don’t go into her room any more than if it
was in another house.”
Max stared at him a second and nodded comprehendingly, when they went
down and out into the sunshine.
“How strange to see the grass green and the trees budding in January.”
“Strange? Then you come from the East. It seems queer to me not to see
flowers everywhere; and it’s awfully cold up here.”
“Is it so warm in California?”
“In spots. You can find all the climates there. I never stepped on snow
till I came here, to the City of Green Hills; and there’s very little
here.”
They walked up and down the narrow paths in the nursery, examining the
sprouting cuttings growing in close rows, and the long heaped rows of
earth where the bulbs would soon send forth their green shoots, Sydney
freely giving of his small fund of information.
Suddenly from the farther end where the nursery abutted against a vacant
block well hidden under a thick young forest growth, a voice hailed them,
and a sinister face peered from behind a fir tree.
“Come with me, or I’ll make it hot for all that outfit you’re with,
you--” He ended with unprintable oaths.
“That’s he! I must go! If I don’t he’ll hurt her--rob--or burn!” Max gave
Sydney a look of utter disappointment and started off.