Among the many things which Neale never thought of questioning was the
fact that he did not go to a public school as all his play-mates did. If
he had asked, he would have found that his father and mother had an
answer all ready for him, the completeness and thoroughness of which
might have indicated that they had perhaps silenced some questionings of
their own with it. He would have heard that of course they approved of
public schools, and that if they had continued to live in Massachusetts,
even if they had gone to live in a nice part of New York City, they
would certainly have sent their son to a public school. But here at
Union Hill, with the public schools so thickly populated by foreign
children, the conditions were really different. What could a little
American boy learn in a class-room with forty foreign children, whose
constant study must needs be English?
There was no flaw in the reasoning they were prepared to present to
their son when he should ask the natural question about his schooling.
But Neale never asked it. By the time he was old enough to think of it,
habit had made him incapable of conceiving it. He no more wondered why
he went every morning to the Taylors' house on Bower Street, instead of
to Public School Number Two, than why he had two eyes instead of one.
That was the way things were. Neale was slow to question the way things
were.
Dr. Taylor was another transplanted New Englander like Neale's father,
with another college-graduate wife (rarer in those days than now), like
Neale's mother. His ideas on children and the public schools would have
been exactly like those of the Crittendens, even if they had not been
fortified by the lameness of his only son. Jimmy's crutches made Public
School definitely out of the question, and since Jimmy must have
instruction at home, why, his two sisters, Elsie and Myrtle, might as
well profit by it. Dr. Taylor was glad enough to have the expense of
paying Miss Vanderwater shared by Mr. Crittenden, and to let Neale share
in the benefits of Miss Vanderwater's instruction.
Hence it happened that every morning Neale rang at the Taylors' front
door, and when the maid let him in, went upstairs to the big front room
on the top floor and there did whatever Miss Vanderwater told him to do.
He was under her command from nine in the morning till noon, when he
went home and had lunch with Mother, who always asked how school had
gone, to which question Neale always made the same truthful answer that
he guessed it was all right. At one he returned for two more hours with
Miss Vanderwater. In this way he went through a series of Appleton's
Readers, filled copy-books with thin Spencerian script, copied maps in
colored ink with the coast-line shaded with scallops, did arithmetic on
a slate and made very fair progress in learning German. German was much
in the air in that locality.
Of course he did not spend all those years of his life, side by side
with three other children without becoming intimately acquainted with
them. But one of the instinctive watertight compartments in Neale's
Anglo-Saxon mind was the one in which he kept his school separate from
his life. He studied with the Taylor children, but he never dreamed of
staying after hours to play with them. And yet he knew them infinitely
better than any of the innumerable chance street-acquaintances with whom
he flew kites or played one-old-cat. He knew instinctively, knew without
thinking of it, knew to the marrow of his brutally normal bones that
Jimmy Taylor was lame not only in his legs but in his character. Jimmy's
delicacy, the great care taken of him, the fact that he always played in
the house or back-yard with his sisters, made a sissy of him. That was
the plain fact, and Neale was not one to refuse to admit plain facts. He
was always kind to Jimmy, at least not unkind, but he was always
secretly relieved when the front door shut behind him, hiding from him
Jimmy's too-white hands, thin neck and querulous invalid's voice.
Of the two girls, Elsie was only a little kid, so much younger than
Jimmy and Neale that they were barely aware of her existence. Myrtle, on
the contrary, was very much there, a little girl whose comments on
things never failed to arouse in Neale the profoundest astonishment. How
could anybody think of such dotty things to say? You never had the least
idea how anything was going to strike her, except that it was likely to
strike her so hard that she made an awful fuss about it.
Myrtle lived in mortal terror of any little dirt, it seemed to Neale.
One day in May, when they had had a picnic-lunch out in the back-yard of
the Taylors' house, Myrtle carried on perfectly wild about a little
flying white thing that had fallen into her glass of lemonade. Holy
smoke! thought Neale, if she was afraid to get it out, _he_ wasn't. So
he fished it out with a spoon, and handed her back the glass. And what
did she do? She made up an awful face and threw the lemonade on the
ground! Neale was horrified at the waste.
And the day when Miss Vanderwater in their "natural history lesson" told
them about angle-worms and how they keep the ground light and open,
didn't Myrtle go off in another fit, with her eyes goggling and her
fingers all stretched apart as though she felt angle-worms everywhere.
She insisted that Miss Vanderwater must be wrong, that such an awful
thing could not be true.
"Why, what do you mean?" asked Miss Vanderwater, for once, Neale noticed
with satisfaction, as much at a loss as he.
"Ugh! _Nasty!_" cried Myrtle. "So all we eat has grown out of what
angle-worms have vomited up! And so they're wriggling around,
_every_where, touching everything that grows! I never dreamed of such a
nasty thing! I'll never eat a radish again! It makes me sick to think of
it--to put my mouth where a horrible old angle-worm has been rubbing all
its slime off!"
"Now what do you think of that?" Neale asked himself.
Mostly, Myrtle was just the worst dead loss you ever saw; but once in a
while you got some good out of her foolishness, like the time when she
bit into a lovely-looking apple and laid it down, looking very white
and sick at her stomach. She had bitten into a rotten place, and
although Neale pointed out honestly to her that it was the only bad
spot, and that the rest of the apple was a corker, she refused to touch
it, or even to look at it. She said she never wanted to see another
apple again as long as she lived! So Neale ate it to save it, sinking
his strong teeth through the taut red skin, reveling in the craunchy,
juicy white flesh, chewing away on huge crisp delicious mouthfuls. It
was perhaps as well, too, that Myrtle hadn't tried to go on eating it,
for Neale found another rotten spot. But he spit out the
cottony-feeling, brown, bad-tasting stuff into the waste basket, and
having got rid of it, went on with the apple, his zest undiminished to
the last mouthful gnawed off the core. The idea of going back on apples
because you struck a rotten place! Nobody asked you to _eat_ the rotten
places! It was perfectly easy to spit them out, or, if you saw them
beforehand, to eat your way around them. He couldn't make anything out
of Myrtle, at all.
But he didn't allow himself to be bothered by her, any more than by
rotten spots in apples, and he escaped from her and from the whole
genteel atmosphere of the Taylor household, the moment three o'clock
came. The instant Miss Vanderwater said, "dismissed," he hurried home,
left his books and hurried out again to hang around Number Two School,
till four o'clock sent all its mingled conglomeration, ranging from
tattered ragamuffins to little boys in white sailor-suits, yelling and
whooping out to the vacant lots.
For, although the Crittendens' New England Americanism was not quite
resolute enough to make them send Neale to a public school full of
foreigners, it was more than enough to make them incapable of conceiving
so odious an act of tyranny as forbidding a little boy to play freely
with other little boys, whether any one knew their parents or not. They
would have detested the idea of keeping Neale alone in their safe,
sheltered back-yard, and would have been horrified to detect in him any
trace of feeling himself better than the public-school children--which
he certainly did not.
Sundays had a special color of their own, not at all the traditional
one. The Crittendens were Unitarians, not much given to church-going
anywhere, and the nearest Unitarian church was across the river in New
York. Mr. Crittenden had enough of New York on week-days. So they never
went. Few of the Union Hill families did. Union Hill was anything but a
stronghold of Sabbatarianism. It considered Sunday rather as a
heaven-sent opportunity for much comfortable beer-drinking, attendance
on a Turn-verein, and for enormous family gatherings around a big
dinner.
For Neale, with no other children in the family, the day was always
solitary; not unpleasantly so. It was a day for long imaginings,
stirring, warlike imaginings, realized through lead soldiers. Lead
soldiers were a passion of his little boyhood. He had two hundred and
ten, counting the ones with their legs broken, that he had mounted on
half corks. He did not move them around much. He did not knock them
down. When he got them set up in the order he wished, he fell into a
trance, imagining stories and incidents. It took a long time to get them
arranged to his satisfaction, with stiff marching columns, at
shoulder-arms in the middle, some Indian sharp-shooters prone or
kneeling behind painted lead shrubbery out in front, a squadron of
parade cavalry on one wing, a troop of galloping Arabs on the other.
Always he had a pile of blocks behind which a coal-black charger was
tethered, and on top, leaning against a spool of thread, stood the
general surveying his army. By uniform and whiskers the toymaker had
intended the figure for Kaiser Wilhelm I; but to the boy's eyes it was
no Prussian king, but Neale--Neale commanding his victorious troops. It
was all arranged with a careful hand and a loving heart, and it took a
long, long time.
Very often the dinner-bell rang before he had even finished setting them
up. At Sunday dinner there was generally "company," men friends of
Father's mostly, but sometimes husbands and wives. Neale knew all their
names, and shook hands without self-consciousness. He grinned silently
if they spoke to him, and retired to his shell, busying himself with his
own thoughts, all concentrated on the impending battle. He liked the
things you had to eat on Sunday and had found that on Sunday he could
eat the soft parts out of his bread and hide the crusts under the edge
of his plate. Mother always caught him if he tried that on week-days,
but on Sundays, with company there, she never said a word.
But no matter how slowly he ate, he was always through, wriggling
uncomfortably on his chair and horribly bored, while those tedious
grown-up people were still gabbling on. Mother always saw this, took
pity, and smiled a permission to him to be off. He slipped from his
chair and tip-toed silently into the kitchen where Katie was dressing
the salad. But she stopped long enough to open the pasteboard ice-cream
box from Schlauchter's candy-store and give him a saucer-full from the
soft part on top.
Then he hurried upstairs again to act out with his army the glorious
scenes he had been imagining during dinner. Sometimes it was a surprise
attack on the march, with cavalry sweeping down on limbered guns,
sometimes it was artillery formed in triangles, a muzzle at each apex,
blowing the advancing cavalry to flinders. Sometimes it was a
magnificent parade of triumph through a city gate with Kaiser Wilhelm
(Neale) at their head.
But at any moment, especially as he came on to be ten years old, quite
suddenly and inexplicably he grew tired of it. The illusion would
pass ... they would be just lifeless stupid dead soldiers, with broken
legs and rifles, and the paint flaking off ... impossible to imagine
anything with them. Also his arms and legs would feel numb with sitting
still on the floor so long. Then Neale would slide noiselessly down the
banisters, using his hands and legs as a brake to keep from crashing
into the newel-post, slip by the dining-room door with its clinking
coffee-cups and blue haze of cigar smoke, grab his cap and go quietly
outdoors.
Nobody would have stopped him, he knew that, but it was more fun to keep
it quiet. Free from the house he would act out his drama of escape by
running for a block or so, and then drop into the roaming boy's slow,
zig-zag ramble.
You can walk south or north on Union Hill for miles beyond a boy's
endurance, without finding a single feature to quicken the imagination;
but if you go east or west from anywhere on the Hill, you come at once
to a jumping-off place where below you stretches the flat, marshy river
or the flats. Neale preferred the western edge, even though it had no
steep rocks. He was far from having any conscious love for landscape,
but he found a certain satisfaction in looking over the yellow and brown
expanse of the marsh-grass and cat-tails, hazy in the afternoon sun, cut
with straight black lines of railroads (he named them over to himself,
identifying every one, the Jersey Central, Pennsylvania, Erie,
Lackawanna, and Jersey Northern), each with little toy-trains, each tiny
locomotive sending up little balls of cotton-wool to hang motionless in
the still afternoon air. To the southwest a hazy blur that was Newark,
and right in front, like a doomed mountain, bogged and sinking into the
marsh, the sinister bulk of Snake Hill. Neale used to stand and brood
over it, sometimes till the sun went down, all red and orange. He did
not stir till the cold roused him to think of home and supper.
But his feet did not always turn westward. Sometimes he walked to the
eastern edge. The rocks were steeper here, steep enough to be the
impregnable fortress he always imagined them. When he came here, after
reconnoitering the ground (for his tribal enemy did not observe the
Truce of God on Sundays), Neale would go out to the edge of the sheerest
promontory and dangle his legs down. Under his feet were railroad tracks
again, then a belt of vacant lots, some of them black with
cinder-filling, others green with the scum of stagnant water, then a
belt of frame houses where the enemy lived, then a zone of city brick
and flat tin roofs. Beyond it all was Castle Point, high and green
(healthy green this, not scum), jutting out into the Hudson.
Indistinctly he could make out the other side of the river, the line of
ships at the wharves and more city ... New York.
Occasionally Neale thought of New York, an almost mythical spot, though
he went there once in a while with Mother on tiresome quests for
clothes, as well as to matinees; sometimes he thought of the ships and
the wharves, and how much he wished he could see more of them. But
mostly he forgot the actual world. He was in command of the fort. All
around him his brave men were working the guns. Bang! Bang! The enemy
were marching along those straight paved streets. Their cannon balls
were bursting all around, but the garrison did not quail. Their
sharp-shooters were starting to climb the rocks. Ah, this was serious!
No time for delay. The commander seized the rifle from the hand of a
dying soldier ... how plainly Neale saw that dying soldier there at his
feet ... bang! bang! bang! ... with every shot one of the foremost
scalers dropped headlong.
The engagement was a decisive victory.