The Loom of Destiny/The Heart's Desire
THE HEART'S DESIRE
But I watch th' 'igh-toned nobs go out
W'ere th' English liner lays;
An' s' elp me Gawd, but 'er Union Jack
Fills m' bally eyes with 'aze!
THE HEART'S DESIRE
THERE were many things to show that Teddie's arrival in this world was an unwelcome event. The first symptom of such feeling was the fact that three days after his birth his mother drank half a bottle of carbolic acid, and was found dying on the very bed where Teddie lay wailing for his breakfast.
This took place in the big brown-stone hotel that overlooked the Plaza, and to show that there were others who regarded Teddie's advent in the light of an intrusion, the diamond-studded manager of that particular hotel walked up and down saying it was a pretty kettle of fish, and that his house would be ruined, and that if a newspaper reporter even so much as showed his face in that hotel to kick him out.
The worst of it all was that not a scrap of letter or paper or personal property could be found to show just who "Mrs. James Brown" really was. Even the name and initials had been cut out of the dead woman's underclothing—and it was noticed at the time that they were of the very finest silk!—and the wearer of the diamond studs was in a terrible way, not so much because the infant would have to be handed over to the tender mercies of the police and the city Foundling Hospital, but because of the fact that if such a thing were done the whole story would, of course, get into the papers.
So when the Irish elevator man, not altogether from selfish interests, said that he would take the baby, for a consideration, Teddie was joyfully handed over to him, accompanied by two nice crisp ten-dollar bills. This same Irish elevator man straightway carried Teddie to his little home on Thompson Street, where for seven months his childless wife lovingly over-fed him. Then it so fell out that she had to make room for a little boy of her own. Teddie was passed on to an equally humble home on Sullivan Street, and was accordingly thereafter known as Teddie Sullivan.
But in his new home the sturdy Teddie's appetite developed the most unexpected proportions, and he was quickly shuffled out into the wide world, where he fell upon evil days and would surely have died, had not a kindly-eyed Scotch widow in Perkins Place taken him in. His new foster-mother, who was laundress and shirt-maker and housekeeper by turns, had seen better days. But as her pursuits were now often those of mendicity she found the hungry-eyed Teddie to be a potent accession, and the gratuities he called forth were numerous. As Mar'gut Macdougall's love for Glenlevit rye, however, was even stronger than her love for the child, there were many days, indeed, when Master Teddie went without his dinner.
But here it was that Teddie emerged from babyhood and learned to say his first words with a strange little touch of the Highland burr to them. In time, too, he grew big enough to explore the boundless vistas of Perkins Place, which had no less than twelve tumble-down tenement houses facing on it. But nothing is so proudly exclusive as a slum like Perkins Place, and as it was an open secret that Teddie's forebears were unknown, he found no one to play with, and from the first day of his appearance on the Place repeatedly had flung at him an epithet which he, happily, did not understand. In more generous moments they merely made fun of his yellow curls, and called him "Girlie!"
His loneliness, however, did not weigh heavily upon him. He held animated discourse with bits of broken flower-pots, and fell into the habit of telling wonderful stories to the third step in the landing, which had a crack in it, and therefore always listened best. Later on he invented a series of games, in which the pieces of sticks were all men and the stones all tigers. If the tigers knocked over the men first throw, that meant they were all eaten up. But if the men fell down across one another, that meant the tigers could n't touch them, and the tigers had to begin all over again and keep eating up until the men were all gone. Tigers, in fact, from the first day Teddie overheard Bud Persons expatiating on their ferocity, had a peculiar fascination for him; only sometimes they invaded his dreams by night and made him wake with feelings of unutterable terror.
The child, as he grew older, also took a strange delight in watching people pass up and down the Place. He would suppose with himself that some Great Power had ordained that if a man did not pass before he had taken twenty breaths he would have to drop down dead. By the hour he would patiently sit and test this supposition, glorying over each victory and depressed by each defeat.
Then he took passionately to papers, books, and pictures. He came across a number of old "Illustrated News," with pictures of the siege of Paris, and over these pictures of war and adventure he would pore by the hour. He had refused to go to the Night School, and could not read, but he made up stories for each illustration, and it was not until the pages were worn to shreds and tatters that he found it possible to forego this pleasure.
Then he grew more adventurous in spirit and stole beyond the borders of the Place into unknown country, and even ventured so far away as Washington Square. It was here that life really opened up for him, for it was while following after an Italian organ-grinder that he came upon the Avenue with its smooth pavement, its hurrying carriages, and its long vista of white-globed lamp-posts leading afar off into the mysteriously alluring Unknown.
From the first, that Unknown Country enchanted the child. Just why it was he did not know, and never could tell, but day by day he stole away from the gloom and smells of Perkins Place and trudged off to the Avenue, where he could go wandering inquisitively up and down, watching the horses, the hurdygurdies, the big houses, and the children who were so different from his neighbours on Perkins Place. In time, when he had explored all the lower end of his street of enchantment, he found it possible, by climbing on the backs of up-bound carriages, to reach the remoter parts of the asphalted street, going sometimes even so far as the Park, where it seemed that miles and miles of green and growing things stretched away into the distance.
But he liked best of all to stand on the crowded sidewalk and listen to the women with silk skirts rustling by, to smell the perfume, and to hear the clank of the chains on the carriage horses as they came champing up to the stone steps. He liked to stand and get whiffs of music from the houses and to see the beautiful beings all clad in glittering things going in and out. He had a weakness, too, for bright colours and flowers, and the glimmer of the gilt furniture through some of the bio; hotel windows filled him with a nameless hunger. They certainly did not have that sort of thing down at Perkins Place, and as the time went on he even grew to think of his home with a certain disdain. His love for the odorous livery stable which, with its stamping horses and tall hansoms and men who were always washing down big carriages, had once seemed a sort of paradise to him, waned and finally flickered out in his affections. He forgot, too, the undertaker's window with the little satin-draped coffin in it, before which he used to stand by the hour with wondering eyes. And when he had once climbed up the wide stone steps and peeked timidly into the Cathedral, dark, vast, silent and mysterious, he no longer sat opposite the little Sullivan Street Church and wondered why people walked up through its door, always in their best clothes, and with cold, set faces.
So Teddie Sullivan became a sort of Buccaneer on the city's high seas of beauty, and went cruising up and down the Avenue in search of all those sounds and sights in which he took such an incongruous delight. There seemed to be a taint of aristocracy in his slum blood. At many an afternoon reception he was an uninvited guest, and quite often sat on the railing outside and dined, in fancy, at the different restaurants where he saw the "swell guys" go. In time he even grew to be fastidious, for where he could not see carriages and horses and hear music he would not deign to attend.
But as summer came on he found these grew less and less frequent, so one warm afternoon when he found forty broughams blocking the Avenue and a strip of red carpet covering the pavement, he knew that the season was not yet altogether over.
A couple of policemen guarded the gateway and two footmen stood on the wide stone steps beside the open doors. The low buzz of talk and an occasional strain of music came from the big cool-looking house. It was a wonderful scene to Teddie, who wormed his way up toward the policemen and stood by the great stone gate-pillars, with his freckled nose thrust through the iron rods of the fence, watching the shifting panorama with wistful and unwearying eyes.
As the afternoon slipped away the crowd began to come out from the house. Three times did one of the fat policemen, who kept guard at the gateway, pull the child away by the scruff of the neck of his ragged little coat, but each time the intruder had edged persistently back. Now that the guests were coming from the house the fat policeman did not care to keep up the undignified combat, so Teddie remained.
Many of the figures that stepped past were familiar to him. Among the last persons to come away was the short man with the white whiskers, who always wore the gold cross on his coat, and then the tall, white-faced woman who always rustled louder than all the others, and of whom the child was more or less afraid. Teddie remembered them all. Then a man with a long black coat and boots that shone very funnily came down the steps walking with a girl in white, with lilac-blossoms and lorgnettes. Teddie had not seen the tall girl in white go in. She was a new one! She must have come before he did.
The freckled nose squeezed further in between the iron bars. It was like finding a new friend, or discovering a new world, and his eyes drank in every detail.
She was the best one yet. Her dress was the whitest dress he had ever seen. Her hair was brown, and her eyes were grey—grey and soft and kind. It was no wonder he felt a new and strange feeling run through his puny little body. Then and there he tumbled head over heels in love, although he did not know it. She made his heart thump as only the band and the war pictures of the Siege of Paris and dreams of Santa Claus had hitherto done. He guessed she was the fairy that Bud Persons' Sunday-school teacher used to talk about. On further thoughts he decided she must be the Angel in the old "Harper's Magazine" that Mar'gut MacDougall would let him look through only on Sundays. Yes, that was it. She was the Angel.
The young man with the black coat pointed out the little freckled face with his walking stick. They both laughed.
"What an excruciatingly dirty little devil!" said the man.
The girl looked at the child for a moment, and then came over to him.
"What is your name, my little man?" she asked.
Teddie was silent. He could not have spoken for every house on the Avenue. His tongue clove to the roof of his mouth and he flushed crimson. Then the Angel (he was sure she was the Angel now) stooped down—actually leaned down over him until he could smell her flowers. He fixed his eyes blankly on them. He wriggled his bare toes in the anguish of his embarrassment.
"I—er—really—er—would n't touch him, you know!" advised the man in the black coat. How the child loathed the man in the black coat and shiny boots!
The Angel only smiled. "Did I frighten you, dear?" she asked gently.
The bare toes wriggled in mute embarrassment. So the Angel sighed, took out one of her flowers and gave it to him, and said to the man, as she turned to the carriage, that there was something fine in that child's face. Teddie heard it, and would have gone through fire and water for her.
Before following her the young man in the black coat diplomatically dropped a quarter into the youngster's hand. Teddie was thinking of other things, and never knew it. The last words of the Angel went singing through his veins. He did not see the fatal quarter until the carriage rolled out of sight far down the Avenue. When he beheld the coin, and realised what had been done, his flush was even deeper than before. He inwardly cursed the man in the black coat. She would think he was a beggar. He was disgraced in the Angel's eyes.
When he got back to Perkins Place he secretly dug a hole, three feet deep, and in the bottom of that hole he put the accursed quarter. On it he piled seven brickbats and flung four old boots and three empty tomato cans. Then he shovelled in stones and earth, stamping it all down savagely and vindictively.
The flower he placed in an empty castor-oil bottle, and watered it for days with infinite care.
For the rest of that week his mind was troubled with strange things. When Sniffins came and kicked him, he did not even try to kick him back; which conduct made Sniffins ask if he was sick.
A perceptible change crept over Teddie. His life had flowered into its first love. Night after night he dreamed of Angels with grey eyes and lorgnettes, and sometimes of a man in a long black coat. The tails of this coat in the dream would always grow longer and longer and thinner and thinner, until the man turned into the Evil One and crawled hungrily up and down Perkins Place on all fours, looking for something he could never seem to find.
By day Teddie trudged up and down the Avenue like one in a dream, watching out always for one particular carriage. Whenever this one carriage bowled past him, an intoxicating tingling fear seized on his limbs, and left him staring blankly after it from the curb.
But no sign could he ever get from the Angel as she swept by. Once he even grew so bold as to climb up behind her victoria, intending to show his face over the back and speak to her. But a sudden terrible embarrassment seized him before he could do this, and in his new sense of shame and dread he slipped down and dodged away among the stream of hurrying carriages.
He grew content merely to watch her from the sidewalk, probably much the same as Ferdinand once watched his window in the Florentine Riccardi.
So when Mar'gut MacDougall, without previous warning, confronted him with a new pair of pants and declared he was growing up an idle young ignoramus, and that on the next morning he should start to school, his heart sank like lead and he knew that he and the Angel should see each other no more. He said nothing, but slipped quietly out of the house and made his way up the Avenue, with a new fire in his childish eyes and a mad despair gnawing at his heart.
The hours slipped away, but he waited and waited, resolved that this last time he must and should speak to her.
It was late in the afternoon before the waiting child caught sight of her as she passed up the crowded thoroughfare without so much as seeing him. He watched the carriage fade away up the Avenue, swallowed up by the stream that surged about it. A sickening sense of loneliness and desertion overcame him, and a sudden gush of tears welled to his eyes.
There was still a chance that she would come back again, but he knew the Angel had forgotten him. For the first time in his childish life, waiting there at the curb for the Woman He Loved, he felt the wordless soul-hunger of loneliness.
She did at last come back. It was almost dusk when the child again caught sight of her carriage sweeping back down the Avenue. She sat back in the deep seat, seeing nothing and looking far into the distance.
Teddie, in a mad sort of despair, waved at her and then called out to her. But she neither saw nor heard.
Then a sudden thought, intoxicating as wine, ran through the child's mind. The thought that he should lose her for all time made life itself a trivial thing.
He watched his chance, dodged out among the hurrying carriages and hansoms, and deliberately flung himself in front of one bay team. He shut his eyes and waited.
Davis, the coachman, had been brought over from London, and Davis knew his business. He cursed with a good British oath, and brought the two bays around in a sharp semicircle that swung the right-hand wheels completely off the ground. They missed the boy by three inches. Davis was on the point of cutting at him with the long coach whip, when he caught the girl's eye. The Angel remembered him.
"Davis, help that little boy into the carriage, please," she said quietly.
The scandalised Davis got down and did so.
"Now we'll drive this little boy to his home, Davis, if you please."
The child was mute, limp, and miserable. He almost wished he was dead, for a moment, until the delicious consciousness that he was near her fully dawned on him.
The Angel took him on her knee and looked for several minutes into his blue eyes. Then she asked him, point-blank, why he had done such a thing. The child, who was known throughout Perkins Place to be an ingenious, inveterate, and incorrigible liar, broke down, and weeping repentantly, wished he really was dead, and in the performance completely ruined the Angel's white shirt-waist. But the Angel was all patience, and between sobs and whimpers he told her the whole story of his love for her. He talked as he had never talked before, and when he had nothing left to say he sighed and looked at her and sighed again. He was happy.
He touched her with his brown little fingers.
"My, I like bein' near youse!" he said. "It's like th' hurdygurdy! I allus want 'er git right close up to it an' see where th' soun' kind 'er first comes frum. Youse is jus' like that! An' I can't help it, youse is so—so much like music! I guess I'd ravver listen to youse then th' music, tho'."
His arms slipped timidly up to her neck, where he let them rest with intuitive tenderness.
It was the strangest love confession ever made to her. But it was a love confession. And she was a woman.
She slipped her own arms around the child and drew him close to her. There had been some one else, once, who had made the same confession. And now there came a dozen every season, yet that one, the real one, seemed very long ago, and it had been very hard work to keep from getting lonely.
But the sniffing Davis had pulled up with a jerk at Perkins Alley. The woman sighed, and the child's face lost its light.
"Won't you kiss me good-bye before you go, dear?" said the Angel.
Some old portal of memory swung back and Teddy kissed the girl on her eyes, as some one long ago—he could not remember who—used to kiss him.
"Yer eyes is orfully salty tastin'," said the child.
The girl did not answer. She was thinking how He had said to her once, long ago: "See, dearest, I shall kiss away every salt tear, and we shall be happy!"
"Home, m'm?" said Davis for the fourth time.
"Yes," said the girl absent-mindedly.
••••••
Teddie stood in the gathering dusk, listening to the sound of the wheels dying away in the distance. He drew a deep breath. With that breath he took into his childish nostrils all the blended, heavy odours of Perkins Place. Never before did the awful hideouness of it all so seem to hem him in, and crush him down to some darker under-world.