WHEN the angel child
returned with her parents to New York, the fond heart of Jimmie Trescott felt
its bruise greatly. For two days he simply moped, becoming a stranger to all
former joys. When his old comrades yelled invitation, as they swept off on some
interesting quest, he replied with mournful gestures of disillusion.
He thought often of
writing to her, but of course the shame of it made him pause. Write a letter to
a girl? The mere enormity of the idea caused him shudders. Persons of his
quality never wrote letters to girls. Such was the occupation of mollycoddles
and snivellers. He knew that if his acquaintances and friends found in him
evidences of such weakness and general milkiness, they would fling themselves
upon him like so many wolves, and bait him beyond the borders of sanity.
However, one day at
school, in that time of the morning session when children of his age were
allowed fifteen minutes of play in the school-grounds, he did not as usual rush
forth ferociously to his games. Commonly he was of the worst hoodlums, preying
upon his weaker brethren with all the cruel disregard of a grown man. On this
particular morning he staid in the school-room, and with his tongue stuck from
the corner of his mouth, and his head twisting in a painful way, he wrote to
little Cora, pouring out to her all the poetry of his hungry soul, as follows:
"My dear Cora I love thee with all my hart oh come bac again, bac, bac
gain for I love thee best of all oh come bac again When the spring come again
we'l fly and we'l fly like a brid."
As for the last word,
he knew under normal circumstances perfectly well how to spell
"bird," but in this case he had transposed two of the letters through
excitement, supreme agitation.
Nor had this letter
been composed without fear and furtive glancing. There was always a number of
children who, for the time, cared more for the quiet of the school-room than
for the tempest of the play-ground, and there was always that dismal company
who were being forcibly deprived of their recess--who were being "kept
in." More than one curious eye was turned upon the desperate and lawless
Jimmie Trescott suddenly taken to ways of peace, and as he felt these eyes he
flushed guiltily, with felonious glances from side to side.
It happened that a
certain vigilant little girl had a seat directly across the aisle from Jimmie's
seat, and she had remained in the room during the intermission, because of her
interest in some absurd domestic details concerning her desk. Parenthetically
it might be stated that she was in the habit of imagining this desk to be a
house, and at this time, with an important little frown, indicative of a proper
matron, she was engaged in dramatizing her ideas of a household.
But this small Rose
Goldege happened to be of a family which numbered few males. It was, in fact,
one of those curious middle- class families that hold much of their ground,
retain most of their position, after all their visible means of support have
been dropped in the grave. It contained now only a collection of women who
existed submissively, defiantly, securely, mysteriously, in a pretentious and
often exasperating virtue. It was often too triumphantly clear that they were
free of bad habits. However, bad habits is a term here used in a commoner
meaning, because it is certainly true that the principal and indeed solitary
joy which entered their lonely lives was the joy of talking wickedly and busily
about their neighbors. It was all done without dream of its being of the
vulgarity of the alleys. Indeed it was simply a constitutional but not incredible
chastity and honesty expressing itself in its ordinary superior way of the
whirling circles of life, and the vehemence of the criticism was not lessened
by a further infusion of an acid of worldly defeat, worldly suffering, and
worldly hopelessness.
Out of this family
circle had sprung the typical little girl who discovered Jimmie Trescott
agonizingly writing a letter to his sweetheart. Of course all the children were
the most abandoned gossips, but she was peculiarly adapted to the purpose of
making Jimmie miserable over this particular point. It was her life to sit of
evenings about the stove and hearken to her mother and a lot of spinsters talk
of many things. During these evenings she was never licensed to utter an
opinion either one way or the other way. She was then simply a very little girl
sitting open-eyed in the gloom, and listening to many things which she often
interpreted wrongly. They on their part kept up a kind of a smug-faced pretence
of concealing from her information in detail of the widespread crime, which
pretence may have been more elaborately dangerous than no pretence at all. Thus
all her home-teaching fitted her to recognize at once in Jimmie Trescott's
manner that he was concealing something that would properly interest the world.
She set up a scream. "Oh! Oh! Oh! Jimmie Trescott's writing to his girl!
Oh! Oh!"
Jimmie cast a miserable
glance upon her--a glance in which hatred mingled with despair. Through the
open window he could hear the boisterous cries of his friends--his hoodlum
friends--who would no more understand the utter poetry of his position than
they would understand an ancient tribal sign-language. His face was set in a
truer expression of horror than any of the romances describe upon the features
of a man flung into a moat, a man shot in the breast with an arrow, a man cleft
in the neck with a battle-axe. He was suppedaneous of the fullest power of
childish pain. His one course was to rush upon her and attempt, by an
impossible means of strangulation, to keep her important news from the public.
The teacher, a
thoughtful young woman at her desk upon the platform, saw a little scuffle
which informed her that two of her scholars were larking. She called out
sharply. The command penetrated to the middle of an early world struggle. In
Jimmie's age there was no particular scruple in the minds of the male sex
against laying warrior hands upon their weaker sisters. But, of course, this
voice from the throne hindered Jimmie in what might have been a berserk attack.
Even the little girl
was retarded by the voice, but, without being unlawful, she managed soon to shy
through the door and out upon the play-ground, yelling, "Oh, Jimmie
Trescott's been writing to his girl!"
The unhappy Jimmie was
following as closely as he was allowed by his knowledge of the decencies to be
preserved under the eye of the teacher.
Jimmie himself was
mainly responsible for the scene which ensued on the play-ground. It is
possible that the little girl might have run, shrieking his infamy, without
exciting more than a general but unmilitant interest. These barbarians were
excited only by the actual appearance of human woe; in that event they cheered
and danced. Jimmie made the strategic mistake of pursuing little Rose, and thus
exposed his thin skin to the whole school. He had in his cowering mind a vision
of a hundred children turning from their play under the maple-trees and
speeding toward him over the gravel with sudden wild taunts. Upon him drove a
yelping demoniac mob, to which his words were futile. He saw in this mob boys
that he dimly knew, and his deadly enemies, and his retainers, and his most
intimate friends. The virulence of his deadly enemy was no greater than the
virulence of his intimate friend. From the outskirts the little informer could
be heard still screaming the news, like a toy parrot with clock work inside of
it. It broke up all sorts of games, not so much because of the mere fact of the
letter-writing, as because the children knew that some sufferer was at the last
point, and, like little blood-fanged wolves, they thronged to the scene of his
destruction. They galloped about him shrilly chanting insults. He turned from
one to another, only to meet with howls. He was baited.
Then, in one instant,
he changed all this with a blow. Bang! The most pitiless of the boys near him
received a punch, fairly and skilfully, which made him bellow out like a
walrus, and then Jimmie laid desperately into the whole world, striking out
frenziedly in all directions. Boys who could handily whip him, and knew it,
backed away from this onslaught. Here was intention--serious intention. They
themselves were not in frenzy, and their cooler judgment respected Jimmie's
efforts when he ran amuck. They saw that it really was none of their affair. In
the mean time the wretched little girl who had caused the bloody riot was away,
by the fence, weeping because boys were fighting.
Jimmie several times
hit the wrong boy--that is to say, he several times hit a wrong boy hard enough
to arouse also in him a spirit of strife. Jimmie wore a little shirt-waist. It
was passing now rapidly into oblivion. He was sobbing, and there was one
blood-stain upon his cheek. The school-ground sounded like a pine-tree when a
hundred crows roost in it at night.
Then upon the situation
there pealed a brazen bell. It was a bell that these children obeyed, even as
older nations obey the formal law which is printed in calf-skin. It smote them
into some sort of inaction; even Jimmie was influenced by its potency,
although, as a finale, he kicked out lustily into the legs of an intimate
friend who had been one of the foremost in the torture.
When they came to form
into line for the march into the school- room it was curious that Jimmie had
many admirers. It was not his prowess; it was the soul he had infused into his
gymnastics; and he, still panting, looked about him with a stern and
challenging glare.
And yet when the long
tramping line had entered the school- room his status had again changed. The
other children then began to regard him as a boy in disrepair, and boys in
disrepair were always accosted ominously from the throne. Jimmie's march toward
his seat was a feat. It was composed partly of a most slinking attempt to dodge
the perception of the teacher and partly of pure braggadocio erected for the
benefit of his observant fellow-men.
The teacher looked
carefully down at him. "Jimmie Trescott," she said.
"Yes'm," he
answered, with business-like briskness, which really spelled out falsity in all
its letters.
"Come up to the
desk."
He rose amid the awe of
the entire school-room. When he arrived she said,
"Jimmie, you've
been fighting."
"Yes'm," he
answered. This was not so much an admission of the fact as it was a
concessional answer to anything she might say.
"Who have you been
fighting?" she asked.
"I dunno,
'm."
Whereupon the empress
blazed out in wrath. "You don't know who you've been fighting?"
Jimmie looked at her
gloomily. "No, 'm."
She seemed about to
disintegrate to mere flaming fagots of anger. "You don't know who you've
been fighting?" she demanded, blazing. "Well, you stay in after
school until you find out."
As he returned to his
place all the children knew by his vanquished air that sorrow had fallen upon
the house of Trescott. When he took his seat he saw gloating upon him the
satanic black eyes of the little Goldege girl.