time, and take it over there--not mentioning it to anybody.”
Stubby felt weak. “Why, all right,” he managed to say.
“I'll give you fifty cents a week. That fair?”
“Yes, sir,” said Stubby, doing some quick calculation.
“Then here goes for the first week”--and he handed him the other forty
cents.
It was funny how fast the world could change! Stubby wanted to run--he
hadn't been doing much running of late. He wanted to go home and get
Hero to go with him to Pleasant street, but didn't. No, _sir_, when you
had a job you had to 'tend to things!
Well, a person could do things, if he had to, thought Stubby. No use
saying you couldn't, you _could_, if you had to. He was back in tune
with life. He whistled; he turned up his collar in the old rakish way;
he threw a stick at a cat. Back home he jumped over the fence instead
of going in the gate--lately he had actually been using the gate. And
he cried, “Get out of my sight, you cur!” in tones which, as Hero
understood things, meant anything but getting out of his sight.
He was a little boy again. He slept at night as little boys sleep. He
played with Hero along the route--taught him some new tricks. His jaw
relaxed from its grown-upishness.
It was funny about those Stuarts. Sometimes he saw Mr. Stuart, but never
anybody else; the place seemed shut up. But each day the little package
was there, and every day he took it to Pleasant street and left it at
the door there--that place seemed shut up, too.
When it was well into the second week Stubby ventured to say something
about the next fifty cents.
The man fumbled in his pockets. Something in his face was familiar to
experienced Stubby. It suggested a having to have two dollars and a half
by August first and only having a dollar and a quarter state of mind.
“I haven't got the change. Pay you at the end of next week for the whole
business. That all right?”
Stubby considered. “I've got to have it before the first of August,” he
said.
At that the man laughed--funny kind of laugh, it was, and muttered
something. But he told Stubby he would have it before the first.
It bothered Stubby. He wished the man had given it to him _then_. He
would rather get it each week and keep it himself. A little of the
grown-up look stole back.
After that he didn't see Mr. Stuart, and one day, a week or so later,
the package was not in the box and a man who wore the kind of clothes
Stubby's father wore came around the house and asked him what he was
doing.
Stubby was wary. “Oh, I've got a little job I do for Mr. Stuart.”
The man laughed. “I had a little job I did for Mr. Stuart, too. You paid
in advance?”
Stubby pricked up his ears.
“'Cause if you ain't, I'd advise you to look out for a little job
some'eres else.”
Then it came out. Mr. Stuart was broke; more than that, he was “off his
nut.” Lots of people were doing little jobs for him--there was no sense
in any of them, and now he had suddenly been called out of town!
There was a trembly feeling through Stubby's insides, but outwardly he
was bristling just like his hair bristled as he demanded: “Where am I to
get what's coming to me?”
“'Fraid you won't get it, sonny. We're all in the same boat.” He looked
Stubby up and down and then added: “Kind of little for that boat.”
“I _got_ to have it!” cried Stubby. “I tell you, I _got_ to!”
The man shook his head. “_That_ cuts no ice. Hard luck, sonny, but we've
got to take our medicine in this world. 'Taint no medicine for kids,
though,” he muttered.
Stubby's face just then was too much for him. He put his hand in his
pocket and drew out a dime, saying: “There now. You run along and get
you a soda and forget your troubles. It ain't always like this. You'll
have better luck next time.”
But Stubby did not get the soda. He put the dime in his pocket and
turned toward home. Something was the matter with his legs--they acted
funny about carrying him. He tried to whistle, but something was the
matter with his lips, too.
Counting this dime, he now had a dollar and eighty cents, and it was the
twenty-eighth day of July. “Thirty days has September--April, June and
November--” he was saying to himself. Then July was one of the long
ones. Well, _that_ was a good thing! Been a great deal worse if July was
a short one. Again he tried to whistle, and that time did manage to pipe
out a few shrill little notes.
When Hero came running up the hill to meet him he slapped him on the
back and cried, “Hello, Hero!” in tones fairly swaggering with bravado.
That night he engaged his father in conversation--the phrase is well
adapted to the way Stubby went about it. “How is it about--'bout things
like taxes”--Stubby crossed his knees and swung one foot to show his
indifference--“if you have _almost_ enough--do they sometimes let you
off?”--the detachment was a shade less perfect on that last.
His father laughed scoffingly. “Well, I guess _not!_”
“I thought maybe,” said Stubby, “if a person had _tried_ awful hard--and
had _most_ enough--”
Something inside him was all shaky, so he didn't go on. His father said
that _trying_ didn't have anything to do with it.
It was hard for Stubby not to sob out that he thought trying _ought_ to
have something to do with it, but he only made a hissing noise between
his teeth that took the place of the whistle that wouldn't come.
“Kind of seems,” he resumed, “if a person would have had enough if they
hadn't been beat out of it, maybe--if he done the best he could--”
His father snorted derisively and informed him that doing the best you
could made no difference to the government; hard luck stories didn't go
when it came to the laws of the land.
Thereupon Stubby took a little walk out to the alley and spent a
considerable time in contemplation of the neighbour's chicken-yard. When
he came back he walked right up to his father and standing there, feet
planted, shoulders squared, wanted to know, in a desperate little voice:
“If some one else was to give--say a dollar and eighty cents for Hero,
could I take the other seventy out of my paper money?”
The man turned upon him roughly. “Uh-_huh_! _That's_ it, is it? _That's_
why you're getting so smart all of a sudden about government! Look
a-here. Just l'me tell you something. You're lucky if you git enough
to _eat_ this winter. Do you know there's talk of the factory shuttin'
down? _Dog_ tax! Why you're lucky if you git _shoes_.”
Stubby had turned away and was standing with his back to his father,
hands in his pockets.
“And l'me tell you some'en else, young man. If you got any dollar and
eighty cents, you give it to your mother!”
As Stubby was turning the corner of the house he called after him:
“How'd you like to have me get you an automobile?”
He went doggedly from house to house the next afternoon, but nobody had
any jobs. When Hero came running out to him that night he patted him,
but didn't speak.
That evening as they were sitting in the back yard--Stubby and Hero
a little apart from the others--his father was discoursing with his
brother about anarchists. They were getting commoner, his father
thought. There were a good many of them at the shop. They didn't call
themselves that, but that was what they were.
“Well, what is an anarchist, anyhow?” Stubby's mother wanted to know.
“Why, an anarchist,” her lord informed her, “is one that's against
the government. He don't believe in the law and order. The real bad
anarchists shoot them that tries to enforce the laws of the land. Guess
if you'd read the papers these days you'd know.”
Stubby's brain had been going round and round and these words caught in
it as it whirled. The government--the laws of the land--why, it was the
government and the laws of the land that were going to shoot Hero! It
was the government--the laws of the land--that didn't care how hard you
had _tried_--didn't care whether you had been cheated--didn't care how
you _felt_--didn't care about anything except getting the money! His
brain got hotter. Well, _he_ didn't believe in the government, either.
He was one of those people--those anarchists--that were against the laws
of the land.
He'd done the very best he could and now the government was going
to take Hero away from him just because he couldn't get--_couldn't_
get--that other seventy cents.
Stubby's mother didn't hear her son crying that night. That was because
Stubby was successful in holding the pillow over his head.
The next morning he looked in one of the papers he was carrying to
see what it said about anarchists. Sure enough, some place way off
somewhere, the anarchists had shot somebody that was trying to enforce
the laws of the land. The laws of the land--that didn't _care_.
That afternoon as Stubby tramped around looking for jobs he saw a good
many boys playing with dogs. None of them seemed to be worrying about
whether their dogs had checks. To Stubby's hot little brain and sore
little heart came the thought that they didn't love their dogs any more
than he loved Hero, either. But the government didn't care whether he
loved Hero or not! Pooh!--what was that to the government? All it cared
about was getting the money. He stood for a long time watching a boy
giving his dog a bath. The dog was trying to get away and the boy and
another boy were having lots of fun about it. All of a sudden Stubby
turned and ran away--ran down an alley, ran through a number of alleys,
just kept on running, blinded by the tears.
And that night, in the middle of the night, that something in his head
going round and round, getting hotter and hotter, he decided that the
only thing for him to do was to shoot the policeman who came to take
Hero away on the morning of August first--that would be day after
to-morrow.
All night long policemen with revolvers stood around his bed. When his
mother called him at half-past four he was shaking so he could scarcely
get into his clothes.
On his way home from his route Stubby had to pass a police-station. He
went on the other side of the street and stood there looking across. One
of the policemen was playing with a dog!
Suddenly he wanted to rush over and throw himself down at that
policeman's feet--sob out the story--ask him to please, _please_ wait
till he could get that other seventy cents.
But just then the policeman got up and went in the station, and Stubby
was afraid to go in the police-station.
That policeman complicated things for Stubby. Before that it had been
quite simple. The policeman would come to enforce the law of the land;
but he did not believe in the law of the land, so he would just kill the
policeman. But it seemed a policeman wasn't just a person who enforced
the laws of the land. He was also a person who played with a dog.
After a whole day of walking around thinking about it--his eyes burning,
his heart pounding--he decided that the thing to do was to warn the
policeman by writing a letter. He did not know whether real anarchists
warned them or not, but Stubby couldn't get reconciled to the idea of
killing a person without telling him you were going to do it. It seemed
that even a policeman should be told--especially a policeman who played
with a dog.
The following letter was pencilled by a shaking hand, late that
afternoon. It was written upon a barrel in the Lynch wood-shed, on a
piece of wrapping paper, a bristly little head bending over it:
To the Policeman who comes to take my dog 'cause I ain't got the two
fifty--'cause I tried but could only get one eighty--'cause a man was
off his nut and didn't pay me what I earned--
This is to tell you I am an anarchist and do not believe in the
government or the law and the order and will shoot you when you come. I
wouldn't a been an anarchist if I could a got the money and I tried to
get it but I couldn't get it--not enough. I don't think the government
had ought to take things you like like I like Hero so I am against the
government.
Thought I would tell you first.
Yours truly,
F. LYNCH.
I don't see how I can shoot you 'cause where would I get the revolver.
So I will have to do it with the butcher knife. Folks are sometimes
killed that way 'cause my father read it in the paper.
If you wanted to take the one eighty and leave Hero till I can get the
seventy I will not do anything to you and would be very much obliged.
1113 Willow street.
The letter was properly addressed and sealed--not for nothing had
Stubby's teacher given those instructions in the art of letter writing.
The stamp he paid for out of the dime the man gave him to get a soda
with--and forget his troubles.
Now Bill O'Brien was on the desk at the police-station and Miss Murphy
of the Herald stood in with Bill. That was how it came about that the
next morning a fat policeman, an eager-looking girl and a young fellow
with a kodak descended into the hollow to 1113 Willow street.
A little boy peeped around the corner of the house--such a wild-looking
little boy--hair all standing up and eyes glittering. A yellow dog ran
out and barked. The boy darted out and grabbed the dog in his arms and
in that moment the girl called to the man with the black box: “Right
now! Quick! Get him!”
They were getting ready to shoot Hero! That box was the way the police
did it! He must--oh, he _must--must_ ... Boy and dog sank to the
ground--but just the same the boy was shielding the dog!
When Stubby had pulled himself together the policeman was holding Hero.
He said that Hero was certainly a fine dog--he had a dog a good
deal like him at home. And Miss Murphy--she was choking back sobs
herself--knew how he could earn the seventy cents that afternoon.
In such wise do a good anarchist and a good story go down under the same
blow. Some of those sobs Miss Murphy choked back got into what she wrote
about Stubby and his yellow dog and the next day citizens with no sense
of the dramatic sent money enough to check Hero through life.
At first Stubby's father said he had a good mind to lick him. But
something in the quality of Miss Murphy's journalism left a hazy feeling
of there being something remarkable about his son. He confided to his
good wife that it wouldn't surprise him much if Stubby was some day
President. Somebody had to be President, said he, and he had noticed
it was generally those who in their youthful days did things that made
lively reading in the newspapers.
XIII
AT TWILIGHT
A breeze from the May world without blew through the class-room, and as
it lifted his papers he had a curious sense of freshness and mustiness
meeting. He looked at the group of students before him, half smiling at
the way the breath of spring was teasing the hair of the girls sitting
by the window. Anna Lawrence was trying to pin hers back again, but May
would have none of such decorum, and only waited long enough for her
to finish her work before joyously undoing it. She caught the laughing,
admiring eyes of a boy sitting across from her and sought to conceal her
pleasure in her unmanageable wealth of hair by a wry little face, and
then the eyes of both strayed out to the trees that had scented
that breeze for them, looking with frank longing at the campus which
stretched before them in all its May glory that sunny afternoon. He
remembered having met this boy and girl strolling in the twilight the
evening before, and as a buoyant breeze that instant swept his own face
he had a sudden, irrelevant consciousness of being seventy-three years
old.
Other eyes were straying to the trees and birds and lilacs of that world
from which the class-room was for the hour shutting them out. He was
used to it--that straying of young eyes in the spring. For more than
forty years he had sat at that desk and talked to young men and women
about philosophy, and in those forty years there had always been
straying eyes in May. The children of some of those boys and girls had
in time come to him, and now there were other children who, before
many years went by, might be sitting upon those benches, listening to
lectures upon what men had thought about life, while their eyes strayed
out where life called. So it went on--May, perhaps, the philosopher
triumphant.
As, with a considerable effort--for the languor of spring, or some other
languor, was upon him too--he brought himself back to the papers they
had handed in, he found himself thinking of those first boys and girls,
now men and women, and parents of other boys and girls. He hoped that
philosophy had, after all, done something more than shut them out from
May. He had always tried, not so much to instruct them in what men had
thought, as to teach them to think, and perhaps now, when May had become
a time for them to watch the straying of other eyes, they were the less
desolate because of the habits he had helped them to form. He wanted to
think that he had done something more than hold them prisoners.
There was a sadness to-day in his sympathy. He was tired. It was hard
to go back to what he had been saying about the different things the
world's philosophers had believed about the immortality of the soul. So,
as often when his feeling for his thought dragged, he turned to Gretta
Loring. She seldom failed to bring a revival of interest--a freshening.
She was his favourite student. He did not believe that in all the years
there had been any student who had not only pleased, but helped him as
she did.
He had taught her father and mother. And now there was Gretta,
clear-eyed and steady of gaze, asking more of life than either of them
had asked; asking, not only May, but what May meant. For Gretta there
need be no duality. She was one of those rare ones for whom the meaning
of life opened new springs to the joy of life, for whom life intensified
with the understanding of it. He never said a thing that gratified him
as reaching toward the things not easy to say but that he would find
Gretta's face illumined--and always that eager little leaning ahead for
more.
She had that look of waiting now, but to-day it seemed less an expectant
than a troubled look. She wanted him to go on with what he had been
saying about the immortality of the soul. But it was not so much a
demand upon him--he had come to rely upon those demands, as it was--he
had an odd, altogether absurd sense of its being a fear for him. She
looked uncomfortable, fretted; and suddenly he was startled to see her
searching eyes blurred by something that must be tears.
She turned away, and for just a minute it seemed to leave him alone and
helpless. He rubbed his forehead with his hand. It felt hot. It got that
way sometimes lately when he was tired. And the close of that hour often
found him tired.
He believed he knew what she wanted. She would have him declare his own
belief. In the youthful flush of her modernism she was impatient with
that fumbling around with what other men had thought. Despising the
muddled thinking of some of her classmates, she would have him put it
right to them with “As for yourself--”
He tried to formulate what he would care to say. But, perhaps just
because he was too tired to say it right, the life the robin in the
nearest tree was that moment celebrating in song seemed more important
than anything he had to say about his own feeling toward the things men
had thought about the human soul.
It was ten minutes before closing time, but suddenly he turned to his
class with: “Go out-of-doors and think about it. This is no day to sit
within and talk of philosophy. What men have thought about life in the
past is less important than what you feel about it to-day.” He paused,
then added, he could not have said why, “And don't let the shadow of
either belief or unbelief fall across the days that are here for you
now.” Again he stopped, then surprised himself by ending, “Philosophy
should quicken life, not deaden it.”
They were not slow in going, their astonishment in his wanting them to
go quickly engulfed in their pleasure in doing so. It was only Gretta
who lingered a moment, seeming too held by his manner in sending her out
into the sunshine to care about going there. He thought she was going to
come to the desk and speak to him. He was sure she wanted to. But at the
last she went hastily, and he thought, just before she turned her face
away, that it was a tear he saw on her lashes.
Strange! Was she unhappy, she through whom life surged so richly? And
yet was it not true, that where it gave much it exacted much? Feeling
much, and understanding what she felt, and feeling for what she
understood--must she also suffer much? Must one always pay?
He sighed, and began gathering together his papers. Thoughts about life
tired him to-day.
On the steps he paused, unreasonably enough a little saddened as he
watched some of them beginning a tennis game. Certainly they were losing
no time--eager to let go thoughts about life for its pleasures, very few
of them awake to that rich life he had tried to make them ready for.
He drooped still more wearily at the thought that perhaps the most real
gift he had for them was that unexpected ten minutes.
Remembering a book he must have from the library, he turned back. He
went to the alcove where the works on philosophy were to be found, and
was reaching up for the volume he wanted, when a sentence from a lowly
murmured conversation in the next aisle came to him across the stack of
books.
“That's all very well; we know, of course, that he doesn't believe, but
what will he do when it comes to _himself?_”
It arrested him, coming as it did from one of the girls who had just
left his class-room. He stood there motionless, his hand still reaching
up for the book.
“Do? Why, face it, of course. Face it as squarely as he's faced every
other fact of life.”
That was Gretta, and though, mindful of the library mandate for silence,
her tone was low, it was vibrant with a fine scorn.
“Well,” said the first speaker, “I guess he'll have to face it before
very long.”
That was not answered; there was a movement on the other side of the
barricade of books--it might have been that Gretta had turned away. His
hand dropped down from the high shelf. He was leaning against the books.
“Haven't you noticed, Gretta, how he's losing his grip?”
At that his head went up sharply; he stood altogether tense as he waited
for Gretta to set the other girl right--Gretta, so sure-seeing, so much
wiser and truer than the rest of them. Gretta would _laugh!_
But she did not laugh. And what his strained ear caught at last was--not
her scornful denial, but a little gasp of breath suggesting a sob.
“_Noticed_ it? Why it breaks my heart!”
He stared at the books through which her low, passionate voice had
carried. Then he sank to the chair that fortunately was beside him.
Power for standing had gone from him.
“Father says--father's on the board, you know” (it was the first girl
who spoke)--“that they don't know what to do about it. It's not justice
to the school to let him begin another year. These things are arranged
with less embarrassment in the big schools, where a man begins emeritus
at a certain time. Though of course they'll pension him--he's done a lot
for the school.”
He thanked Gretta for her little laugh of disdain. The memory of it was
more comforting--more satisfying--than any attempt to put it into words
could have been.
He heard them move away, their skirts brushing the book-stacks in
passing. A little later he saw them out in the sunshine on the campus.
Gretta joined one of the boys for a game of tennis. Motionless, he sat
looking out at her. She looked so very young as she played.
For an hour he remained at the table in the alcove where he had
overheard what his students had to say of him. And when the hour had
gone by he took up the pen which was there upon the study table and
wrote his resignation to the secretary of the board of trustees. It was
very brief--simply that he felt the time had come when a younger man
could do more for the school than he, and that he should like his
resignation to take effect at the close of the present school year. He
had an envelope, and sealed and stamped the letter--ready to drop in the
box in front of the building as he left. He had always served the school
as best he could; he lost no time now, once convinced, in rendering
to it the last service he could offer it--that of making way for the
younger man.