Michael had been three months with the new law firm and was beginning
to get accustomed to the violent contrast between the day spent in the
atmosphere of low-voiced, quiet-stepping, earnest men who moved about
in their environment of polished floors, oriental rugs, leather chairs
and walls lined with leather-covered law books; and the evening down in
the alley where his bare, little, white and gold room made the only
tolerable spot in the neighborhood.
He was still occupying the fourth floor back at his original boarding
house, and had seen Mr. Endicott briefly three or four times, but
nothing had been said about his lodgings.
One morning he came to the desk set apart for him in the law office,
and found a letter lying there for him.
“Son:” it said, “your board is paid at the address given below, up to
the day you are twenty-one. If you don’t get the benefit it will go to
waste. Mrs. Semple will make you quite comfortable and I desire you to
move to her house at once. If you feel any obligation toward me this is
the way to discharge it. Hope you are well, Yours, Delevan Endicott.’”
Michael’s heart beat faster with varied emotions. It was pleasant to
have some one care, and of course if Mr. Endicott wished it so much he
would manage it somehow—perhaps he could get some night work or copying
to do—but he would never let him bear his expenses. That could not be.
He hurried off at the noon hour to find his benefactor and make this
plain with due gratitude. He found, however, that it was not so easy to
change this man’s mind, once made up. Endicott would not hear to any
change in arrangements. He had paid the board for the remaining months
of Michael’s minority and maintained his right to do so if he chose.
Neither would he let Michael refund him any of the amount.
So Michael moved, bag and baggage, and found the change good. The
regular, well-cooked meals gave zest to his appetite which had been
going back on him for sometime under his own economical regime, and the
larger room with better outlook and more air, to say nothing of a
comfortable bed with adjoining bath-room, and plenty of heat and light,
made life seem more worth while. Besides there were other boarders with
whom he now came in pleasant contact, and there was a large pleasant
parlor with easy chairs and an old-fashioned square piano which still
retained much of its original sweetness of tone.
Mrs. Semple had a daughter Hester, an earnest, gray-eyed girl with soft
brown hair and a firm little chin, who had taken an art course in
Cooper Institute and painted very good pictures which, however, did not
sell. Hester played the piano—not very well, it is true, but well
enough to make it pleasant to a lonely boy who had known no music in
his life except the birds or his own whistle. She played hymns on
Sunday after church while they waited for the dinner to be ready; and
evenings after supper she played other things: old ballads and tender,
touching melodies from old masters simplified, for such as she. Michael
sometimes lingered a half hour before hurrying away to the alley, and
joined his rich natural tenor with her light pretty soprano. Sometimes
Will French, a young fellow who was in the same law office and also
boarded at Mrs. Semple’s, stayed awhile and sang bass. It was very
pleasant and made it seem more as if he were living in a home.
All this time Michael was carrying on his quiet work in the alley,
saying nothing about it to anybody. In the first place he felt shy
about it because of his personal connection with the place. Not that he
wished to hide his origin from his employers, but he felt he owed it to
Mr. Endicott who had recommended him, to be as respectable in their
sight as possible; and so long as they neither knew nor cared it did
not matter. Then, it never occurred to Michael that he was doing
anything remarkable with his little white room in the blackness of the
stronghold of sin. Night after night he gathered his newsboys and
taught them whittling, basketry, reading, arithmetic and geography,
with a little philosophy and botany thrown in unawares. Night after
night the older fellows dropped in, one or two at a time, and listened
to the stories Michael told; sometimes of college life and games in
which they were of course interested; sometimes of Nature and his
experiences in finding an alligator, or a serpent, or watching some
bird. It was wonderful how interesting he managed to make those talks.
He never realized that he was preparing in the school of experience to
be a magnificent public speaker. With an audience as difficult as any
he could have found in the whole wide city, he managed to hold them
every time.
And the favorite theme often was agriculture. He would begin by
bringing a new little plant to the room, setting it up and showing it
to them; talking about conditions of soil and how plants were being
improved. It was usually the _résumé_ of some article on agriculture
that he had taken time to read at noon and was reviewing for their
benefit.
They heard all about Burbank and his wonderful experiments in making
plants grow and develop, and as they listened they went and stood
around the blossom that Michael had just brought to them and looked
with new wonder at it. A flower was a strange enough sight in that
court, but when they heard these stories it became filled with new
interest. For a little while they forgot their evil plotting and were
lifted above themselves.
Another night the talk would be on fertilizers, and how one crop would
sometimes give out something that another crop planted later, needed.
Little by little, because he talked about the things in which he
himself was interested, he was giving these sons of ignorance a dim
knowledge of and interest in the culture of life, and the tilling of
the ground; getting them ready for what he had hardly as yet dared to
put into words even to himself.
And one day he took Sam down to Old Orchard. It was the week before
Christmas. They had made their second visit to Jim the week before and
he had spoken of the spring and when he should get out into the world
again. He seemed to be planning to get even with those who had confined
him for his wrongdoing. Michael’s heart was filled with anxiety for
him.
There was something about Jim that appealed to Michael from the first.
He had seen him first standing behind the grating of his cell, a great
unkempt hulk of a fellow with fiery red hair and brown eyes that roved
restlessly, hungrily through the corridor. He would have been handsome
but for his weak, girlish chin. Jim had melted almost to tears at sight
of the scarlet geranium they had carried him on that first visit, and
seemed to care more for the appearance of his old comrade “Mikky” than
ever Sam had cared.
Jim was to get out in April. If only there were some place for him to
go!
They talked of it on the way down, Sam seemed to think that Jim would
find it pretty hard to leave New York. Sam himself wasn’t much
interested in the continued, hints of Michael about going to the
country.
“Nothin’ doin’” was his constant refrain when Michael tried to tell him
how much better it would be if some of the congested part of the city
could be spread out into the wide country: especially for the poor
people, how much greater opportunity for success in life there would be
for them.
But Sam had been duly impressed with the wideness of the landscape, on
this his first long trip out of the city, and as Michael unfolded to
him the story of the gift of the farm, and his own hopes for it, Sam
left off his scorn and began to give replies that showed he really was
thinking about the matter.
“Say!” said he suddenly, “ef Buck was to come back would you let him
live down to your place an’ help do all them things you’re plannin’?”
“I surely would,” said Michael happily. “Say, Sam, do you, or do you
_not_ know where Buck is?”
Sam sat thoughtfully looking out of the window. At this point he turned
his gaze down to his feet and slowly, cautiously nodded his head.
“I thought so!” said Michael eagerly. “Sam, is he in hiding for
something he has done?”
Still more slowly, cautiously, Sam nodded his head once more.
“Sam, will you send him a message from me?”
Another nod.
“Tell him that I love him,” Michael breathed the words eagerly. His
heart remembered kindness from Buck more than any other lighting of his
sad childhood. “Tell him that I want him—that I need him! Tell him that
I want him to make an appointment to meet me somewhere and let us talk
this plan of mine over. I want him to go in with me and help me make
that farm into a fit place to take people who haven’t the right kind of
homes, where they can have honest work and good air and be happy! Will
you tell him?”
And Sam nodded his head emphatically.
“An’ Jim’ll help too ef Buck goes. That’s dead sure!” Sam volunteered.
“And Sam, I’m counting on you!”
“Sure thing!” said Sam.
Michael tramped all over the place with Sam, showing him everything and
telling all his plans. He was very familiar with his land now. He had
planned the bog for a cranberry patch, and had already negotiated for
the bushes. He had trimmed up the berry bushes in the garden himself
during his various holiday trips, and had arranged with a fisherman to
dump a few haulings of shellfish on one field where he thought that
kind of fertilizer would be effective. He had determined to use his
hundred-dollar graduation present in fertilizer and seed. It would not
go far but it would be a beginning. The work he would have to get some
other way. He would have but little time to put to it himself until
late in the summer probably, and there was a great deal that ought to
be done in the early spring. He would have to be contented to go slow
of course, and must remember that unskilled labor is always expensive
and wasteful; still it would likely be all he could get. Just how he
would feed and house even unskilled labor was a problem yet to be
solved.
It was a day of many revelations to Sam. For one thing even the bare
snowy stretch, of wide country had taken on a new interest to him since
Michael had been telling all these wonderful things about the earth.
Sam’s dull brain which up to this time had never busied itself about
anything except how to get other men’s goods away from them, had
suddenly awakened to the wonders of the world.
It was he that recognized a little colony of cocoons on the underside
of leaves and twigs and called attention to them.
“Say, ain’t dem some o’ de critters you was showin’ de fellers t’other
night?”
And Michael fell upon them eagerly. They happened to be rare specimens,
and he knew from college experience that such could be sold to
advantage to the museums. He showed Sam how to remove them without
injuring them. A little further on they came to a wild growth of holly,
crazy with berries and burnished thorny foliage, and near at hand a
mistletoe bough loaded with tiny white transparent berries.
“Ain’t dem wot dey sell fer Chris’sum greens?” Sam’s city eyes picked
them out at once.
“Of course,” said Michael delighted. “How stupid of me not to have
found them before. We’ll take a lot back with us and see if we can get
any price for it. Whatever we get we’ll devote to making the house
liveable. Holly and mistletoe ought to have a good market about now.
That’s another idea! Why not cultivate a lot of this stuff right in
this tract of land. It seems to grow without any trouble. See! There
are lots of little bushes. We’ll encourage them, Sam. And say, Sam, if
you hadn’t come along I might never have thought of that. You see I
needed you.”
Sam grunted in a pleased way.
When they came to the house it looked to Michael still more desolate in
the snowy stretch of setting than it had when the grass was about it.
His heart sank.
“I don’t know as we can ever do anything with the old shack,” he said,
shaking his head wistfully. “It looks worse than I thought.”
“’Tain’t so bad,” said Sam cheerfully. “Guess it’s watertight.” He
placed a speculative eye at the dusty window pane he had wiped off with
his coat sleeve. “Looks dry inside. ’Twould be a heap better’n sleepin’
on de pavement fer some. Dat dere fire hole would take in a big lot o’
wood an’ I guess dere’s a plenty round de place without robbin’ de
woods none.”
Michael led him to the seashore and bade him look. He wanted to see
what effect it would have upon him. The coast swept wild and bleak in
the cold December day, and Sam shivered in his thin garments. A look of
awe and fear came into his face. He turned his back upon it.
“Too big!” he said sullenly, and Michael understood that the sea in its
vastness oppressed him.
“Yes, there’s a good deal of it,” he admitted, “but after all it’s sort
of like the geranium flower.”
Sam turned back and looked.
“H’m! I don’t see nothin’ like!” he grunted despairingly.
“Why, it’s wonderful! Its beyond us! We couldn’t make it. Look at that
motion! See the white tossing rim of the waves! See that soft green
gray! Isn’t it just the color of the little down on the geranium leaf?
See the silver light playing back and forth, and look how it reaches as
far as you can see. Now, doesn’t it make you feel a little as it did
when you first looked at the geranium?”
Michael looked down at Sam from his greater height almost wistfully. He
wanted him to understand, but Sam looked in vain.
“Not fer mine!” he shrugged. “Gimme the posy every time.”
They walked in silence along the beach toward the flowing of the river,
and Sam eyed the ocean furtively as if he feared it might run up and
engulf them suddenly when they were not looking. He had seen the ocean
from wharfs of course; and once stole a ride in a pilot boat out into
the deep a little way; but he had never been alone thus with the whole
sea at once as this seemed. It was too vast for him to comprehend.
Still, in a misty way he knew what Michael was trying to make him
understand, and it stirred him uncomfortably.
They hired a little boat for a trifle and Michael with strong strokes
rowed them back to the farm, straight into the sunset. The sky was
purple and gold that night, and empurpled the golden river, whose
ripples blended into pink and lavender and green. Sam sat huddled in
the prow of the boat facing it all. Michael had planned it so. The oars
dipped very quietly, and Sam’s small eyes changed and widened and took
it all in. The sun slipped lower in a crimson ball, and a flood of
crimson light broke through the purple and gold for a moment and left a
thin, clear line of flame behind.
“Dere!” exclaimed Sam pointing excitedly. “Dat’s like de posy. I kin
see _thet_ all right!”
And Michael rested on his oars and looked back at the sunset, well
pleased with this day’s work.
They left the boat at a little landing where its owner had promised to
get it, and went back through the wood, gathering a quantity of holly
branches and mistletoe; and when they reached the city Michael found a
good market for it, and received enough for what he had brought to more
than cover the price of the trip. The best of it was that Sam was as
pleased with the bargain as if it were for his personal benefit.
When they parted Sam wore a sprig of mistletoe in his ragged
buttonhole, and Michael carried several handsome branches of holly back
to his boarding place.
Most of this he gave to Hester Semple to decorate the parlor with, but
one fine branch he kept and carried to his room and fastened it over
his mirror. Then after looking at it wistfully for a long time he
selected a glossy spray containing several fine large berries, cut it
off and packed it carefully in a tiny box. This without name or clue to
sender, he addressed in printing letters to Starr. Mr. Endicott had
asked him to mail a letter to her as he passed by the box the last time
he had been in the office, and without his intention the address had
been burned into his memory. He had not expected to use it ever, but
there could be no harm surely in sending the girl this bit of Christmas
greeting out of the nowhere of a world of possible people. She would
never know he had sent it, and perhaps it would please her to get a
piece of Christmas holly from home. She might think her father had sent
it. It mattered not, he knew, and it helped him to think he might send
this much of his thoughts over the water to her. He pleased himself
with thinking how she would look when she opened the box. But whether
she would be pleased or not he must only surmise, for she would never
know to thank him. Ah, well, it was as near as he dared hope for
touching life’s happiness. He must be glad for what he might have, and
try to work and forget the rest.