The Steadfast Heart/Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
At the far end of the printing office, Jake Schwartz, printer of the old school—which, even in the early eighties was already on the decline—was engaged in the unpleasantly odorous occupation of moulding rollers for the antiquated press on which the Weekly Observer was printed. Jake was inky, gluey, savage of temper, and a perpetual atomizer giving off the fumes of strong drink…. But he knew his trade, and his loyalty to Dave Wilkins was of the sort which hits first and never stops to inquire at all.
Nearer to the front, where the light was stronger, a boy who looked to be some fifteen years old faced a case, distributing type. He, too, was inky and grubby and unkempt to a degree which bespoke genius for that art. It was a matter of pride with him—and he was painstaking in his efforts. This person was none other than the office devil, who was known by the name of Bishwhang. This title had been bestowed by Dave Wilkins as euphonious and descriptive. It was a word which gave pleasure to the speaker, and Dave liked that sort of word. What other name or names Bishwhang might once have possessed have been lost in the mists of history.
This pair constituted Wilkins’s staff—with the almost negligible exception of Nellie Ramsay, who did little, and that incompetently, in the office. That is to say, they had constituted the entire force until that very morning when another hand had been put on—when, at precisely eight o’clock Dave Wilkins led Angus Burke to Jake Schwartz and told that disreputable individual “to teach him as much as his basket would hold.”
Jake blinked at Angus, rolled the delectable quid in his mouth, scratched his head, and asked huskily, “Kid that shot Bates?”
Wilkins nodded.
“Goin’ to learn the trade?”
“If he can.”
“He kin,” declared Jake, narrowing his eyes. “Anybody kin learn anythin’, pervidin’ the teacher hain’t got too much patience—and I hain’t.”
“He needs a heap of teaching,” Dave said, more to himself than to Jake. “He’s five years behindhand, and he’s got to catch up…. He’s got to be stirred, Jake.”
“I’ll stir him.”
“Don’t go knocking him around. He’s lost his appetite for it. Once Angus gets to going and he’ll whiz. He hasn’t all that head bulging behind his ears for nothing.”
Jake turned morosely to Angus. “What kin you do?” he demanded sharply.
The boy looked first at Jake, and then to Wilkins for support. “I kin split wood,” he said.
“There hain’t what you might call a openin’ for a woodchopper in this print shop…. Kin you make a broom do its duty?”
Angus shook his head. A broom was an implement of cleanliness and with such he had known small experience.
“Broom and sprinklin’ can is back in the corner, and some sawdust in a bag. Git ’em.”
When Angus returned, Jake directed the spreading of the sawdust and the wetting of it with the sprinkling can.
“Now,” said Dave, “see how clean you can sweep it, Angus. I’ll come down after a little to see what sort of a job you make of it.”
Dave returned in half an hour to fulfill his promise of inspection, but stopped to speak with Jake about some handbills which should be ready for delivery. Several minutes were consumed in discussing this detail. While the conversation progressed, Angus, who had lingered in the rear of the room, commenced to edge forward. There was a slight alteration in his usual carriage, a faint lightening of his phlegmatic expression—a change which denoted anxiety. As he made his slow progress down the room he scrutinized the floor, stopping every few steps to look searchingly in some corner or cranny. Neither Wilkins nor Jake noticed the boy when he stopped close behind them, his fingers plucking nervously at the seams of his trousers…. He moved from one foot to the other and edged nearer and nearer in his impatience. At last, unable to endure further delay, he reached out and touched Wilkins timidly on the arm. Dave turned to look down inquiringly.
“I swep’ it,” Angus exclaimed breathlessly. “I swep’ it all.”
Wilkins understood. The boy had felt the stirring of responsibility and he had worked for a reward—a reward which was nothing more costly than a word of praise from Dave Wilkins. Angus had swept the floor to please him, and for him had done his best. It was loyalty…. Dave pretended to inspect the floor minutely, and when he had finished he faced the boy seriously. He did not make the mistake of smiling, or of dismissing the job as negligible, for he saw how important, how essential to the boy’s development it was that this faint dawn of ambition, this desire to accomplish, this first real effort of Angus’s life should be recognized, and its results nurtured and trained and encouraged. To the suppressed mind of the boy the cleaning of the floor had been a project of great weightiness; he had given to it his best…. Now he waited with anxiety for the verdict.
“Angus,” said Dave, “I don’t call to mind a cleaner, better swept floor. I declare, I’m proud of you.”
Angus drew a deep breath and his eyes gleamed. For an instant he stood vivified, a fleeting picture of what he might become. Then the curtain dropped and nothing remained but such a look of dumb gratitude and affection as made Wilkins turn away abruptly…. Angus drew another audible breath, gulped, and stammered, “Ain’t there nothin’ else I kin do?”
Wilkins was distinctly pleased. Angus had known his first taste of praise and was hungry for more…. How does the most careful definition of ambition differ from this? From that moment Dave had no doubts—Angus Burke could be reclaimed.
“There are lots of things you can do,” he said, “and if you do them all as well as you did this—I shall be satisfied with you.”
In this way began Angus Burke’s apprenticeship—auspiciously. During the days which followed he was kept busy a reasonable number of hours with tasks which had little to do with the trade itself, sweeping the shop, washing pans and forms, folding papers…. It is usual for an apprentice in a printing shop to run errands and to distribute papers on printing day, but this did not fall to Angus—for Angus never went unaccompanied on the streets after the first day when Jake sent him to the drug store for turpentine. He arrived safely at Ramsay’s, made his purchase, and started back…. It was then he was discovered by a group of boys of his own age, some of whom, unluckily, were members of Mary Trueman’s Sunday school class. Sammy Hammond was there and Harold Cuyler. At sight of Angus they raised the war cry of boyhood and came charging toward him with ferocious demonstrations.
Your boy of nine or ten is essentially a hunting animal; from daylight until dark he searches for his prey, which may be anything from the alley cat to a stranger with a peg leg. Especially does the strange, the unaccustomed, the bizarre attract his gifted attentions. Whatever is marked by peculiarity draws his attention and his enthusiasm. Let a red-haired traveling man alight from the train and walk up Main Street—and if he be a stranger and the hour is propitious, he will be followed by half a dozen urchins bawling “Brick-top!” Let a mendicant with a peg leg make his appearance in town, and he will be harried by shouts of “Limpt,” and more than likely by showers of vegetables…. What is not indigenous to their soil must be enemy. It is a throwback, perhaps, to the day when any stranger was a foe.
But in this descent upon Angus Burke there was more than this—there was imitation, and even encouragement. Last Sunday had taught them the stand they should take; the conversation in their homes had instructed them in how they should behave toward Angus, and last, but by no means negligibly, was Malcolm Crane, the public prosecutor of the county. Crane was a man who could hold a grudge against a child. The acquittal of Angus, he felt, had dimmed his reputation, and he hated Angus. His bitterness, loosed in words, found ready lodgment in his son’s ears, and young Malcolm, planning as boys will plan with his compeers, had laid out a campaign, “to git the murderer.” “I’ll git you,” is a part of boyhood’s ritual. “I’ll git you after school…. I’ll git you when your pa ain’t around….” So Malcolm, Junior, in conference with his fellows, had instructed them in their duty, which was to “git” Angus Burke….
It might be suspected that, boy-like, they would erect Angus into a hero. Not so. If he had been one of themselves, if he had been Harold Cuyler or Pazzy Brooks or any lad with whom they had been brought up, played with at recess, and known daily, a hero he might have become, endowed with a dread and terrible greatness. But Angus was an uitlander, an enemy in the nature of things, and therefore to be dealt with as an enemy…. It was a game, a make-believe—but to Angus it was no game….
“We got you,” they shouted, bearing down upon him. “We said we’d git you, and we got you.” So runs the time-honored formula.
Angus was terrified. His knowledge of boyhood was trifling. How could he be aware that these beings of his own age were harmless—were engaged in a game which came naturally to them, the game of harrying a living creature? He backed away from their onslaught until he found himself checked by a store front and could retreat no farther…. On all sides he saw young faces alight with the lust of the hunt….
“We got you…. We got you….” they shouted, and Angus faced them as he would have faced a pack of wolves, not aware that they would have taken to their heels at the first hostile movement on the part of so illustrious a criminal as himself. To him they were as ominous as a masked mob bearing a noosed rope—but he faced them, in terror, it is true, but he faced them.
Sammy Hammond added a cry to the clamor which achieved immediate popularity. “Murderer! Murderer!” he shouted.
That name sent a chill inward to Angus’s heart, a chill which was the forerunner of panic.
“Jailbird! Jailbird!” young Cuyler contributed. “Chase him out of town.” That was it, chase him. Your boy loves to see any creature scamper before his pursuit in terror.
Angus’s face went wild, his eyes distended, his mouth opened so that his teeth gleamed through, and, head down, he charged the line of his tormentors. His was the unreasoning fury of deadly fear. He kicked, he screamed, he struck out with fists and butted with his head. In an instant there was a seething, scrambling, rolling mêlée, a bedlam of shouts and cries of sudden pain…. Then Angus, crying with fear, worked himself free of the mass and took to his heels in a wild scurry for the refuge of Dave Wilkins’s office.
This was Angus’s last appearance on the streets of Rainbow unprotected. The attack put Dave Wilkins in a savage humor and impelled Craig Browning to bring with him to Wilkins’s rooms a set of worn boxing gloves and other apparatus for the betterment of Angus’s physical self and for the development of skill in self-defense….
The story of the attack was told and retold throughout Rainbow. It was magnified to sinister proportions, lifted to an epic in which Angus, gone berserk, had viciously attacked a dozen boys going peaceably about their business…. He was dangerous, the possessor of a homicidal mania. Something must be done, Rainbow declared. Were their children to be endangered every time they walked the streets?… It is of such stuff that reputation is made; from such fabric that public opinion is formulated….
It was a week later that Angus, with Bishwhang for bodyguard, was trudging along through the more aristocratic portion of Rainbow. Their destination was a spot far up the river where wintergreen was reputed to grow in abundance. On the brow of the hill above them, maple-shaded, with green expanse of well-kept lawn, stood the Canfield residence. It was neither new nor ostentatious, but substantial, dignified, a typical Michigan small-town dwelling of the best class. Here lived Jethro Canfield, nearing the age of retirement, more than comfortably well-off, with sufficient lands and goods and stocks to insure an opulent old age with bounty left over for expectant heirs. With him lived his wife, tall, spare, with lovely white hair crowning distinguished features—a woman of whom, at first glance, one said, “She comes of good family.” Indeed she did come of good family, for, if Jethro could boast of his father, General Canfield, she could point to her Uncle Wilworth, sometime ambassador to Spain!
In Rainbow, to be intimate with the Canfields was a mark of social position, for, though Jethro was approachable, even to sitting with the loafers in front of the post office, his wife was not. She was always the same, kindly, dignified, turning a cold shoulder upon anything or anybody tainted with the vulgar or whose antecedents would not bear scrutiny. She hardly concealed a fierce pride in her blood and lineage. With her family was a passion and a religion—and this religion she inculcated daily in her granddaughter Lydia.
Angus and Bishwhang climbed the hill and were passing the Canfield house—adding to their pleasure by dragging a stick along the pickets of the fence…. Inside the fence, close by the house, they saw a boy and girl—the same children Angus had met at the drug store on the day when Wilkins bought his new clothes.
“There’s Mal Crane,” whispered Bishwhang. “His pa’s prosecutin’ attorney.”
Angus increased his pace, for young Crane had been conspicuous among his tormentors, always ready with shouts of “Murderer!” and “Jailbird!”—words which always threw the boy into panic. Now he was all for flight, but he was too late. Young Crane spied him and leaped to his feet, grasping Lydia Canfield by the arm and pointing gleefully. “There he is,” he cried. “Murderer!… Jailbird!…”
Lydia shook his hand from her arm with petulant gesture and then peered curiously at Angus, whose white, quivering face she could see above the fence…. Mal Crane picked up a stick and shied it at Angus, who stopped, dodged, and held a protecting arm over his eyes.
No sooner had the stick clattered harmlessly against the fence than young Crane staggered under a stinging slap on his cheek. In sudden rage, most unladylike and unaristocratic rage, Lydia flew at him like a wild creature, slapping and kicking and gouging with all her dainty might, crying out as she struck, “You sha’n’t do it. You sha’n’t call him names…. Not in my yard. You sha’n’t, you sha’n’t, you sha’n’t!”
Crane let go a cry of surprised pain and turned tail in quick retreat, but the little fury followed, spatting him with eager palms until she chased him quite out of her yard. Then, flushed and lovely with a fairy-like beauty, she hurried back, calling as soon as her labored breathing would permit. “Boy…. Boy…. Stop. I want to talk to you.”
Angus stopped. He wanted to run, but somehow he was fascinated. It seemed incredible to him that this mite of daintiness could have conducted herself as he had seen her do. He was more afraid of her than ever he had been of a mob of boys, but something in him would not allow him to run. He stood, head hanging, cheeks blazing, and waited in his tracks.
“I—I won’t let him pick on you, not when he’s in my yard,” Lydia panted as she came to the fence. “I won’t let anybody pick on anybody. It’s my yard and folks got to do in it what I want, ’cause it’s my grandfather’s prop’ty, so there…. My grandma, she says folks hadn’t ought to put up with bein’ put on by other folks, that’s what she says, and my grandma knows! When Mal Crane went pickin’ on you, why didn’t you fight him yourself?”
Angus let his head fall farther forward, thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and kicked the walk with his toe. Lydia did not wait for an answer, but, peering sharply between the pickets, said, “I s’pose you’re that boy that’s so wicked, like everybody says, and shot Mr. Bates and lived in a shanty out there—and you’re a tramp and your papa was a bad man and stole things, and your fam’ly was shif’less and didn’t amount to anythin’. Are you him?” She recited the whole ritual carefully, leaving out none of the allegations which she had heard in her grandmother’s discussions of the tragedy. She was rather showing off and parading her intimate knowledge of his life and character.
Angus, in travail of spirit, uttered no sound, but Bishwhang, feeling that information should be forthcoming, bobbed his scrubby head and said solemnly, “This is him, Miss.”
“Well, I don’t care a bit who you are, nor how shif’less a lot all your ancestors was,” she spoke the word “ancestors” proudly because of the size of it, “nobody’s goin’ to pick on you in my yard.” Her eyes flashed and she looked at Angus scornfully, but curiously. “Now you better tell me why you didn’t just up and go for Mal Crane yourself.”
“He hain’t very smart,” explained Bishwhang with another bob of his head, “but he knows more’n he uster…. I’m teaching him,” he finished proudly.
There was a constrained silence for a moment and then Lydia turned toward the house. “My grandma says little girls like me mustn’t ever speak to and not play with or anything little boys like you, she says….” Then, with acumen which would have been startling to her elders could they have overheard it, “’Tain’t ’cause you shot Mr. Bates, I guess, but mostly on account of you not amountin’ to anythin’ and not havin’ any fam’ly or blood or ancestors, like my grandpa and grandma’s got—and my ancestors was a general and my great uncle was a ambassador….” She paused and considered the matter. “Mos’ likely if your pa had been a governor or somebody like that, why, your bein’ put in jail wouldn’t have been so bad…. But like things are and all, why, little girls like me can’t have nothin’ to do with you and mustn’t play with you.” She walked daintily away, but before she passed out of sight she turned and fired her parting shot. “Anyhow, and it don’t matter how shif’less you are, you don’t need to let nobody pick on you…. You can stand up for yourself like my grandma says everybody’s got a right to….” She shook her finger at him emphatically. “You just got to stand up for yourself.”
Angus did not move from his position after she was gone, but stood staring fixedly at his feet, forgetful of Bishwhang, remembering only Lydia Canfield’s words—words which had set to expanding some unused spring in his mental mechanism. They affected him deeply, compellingly, though he grasped them at first only dimly. He conned the words over and over, and each time some intuition informed him that she had uttered a thing of grave importance to him, something he must comprehend fully, and, having comprehended, must act upon.
“Come on,” said Bishwhang, “we got nigh two mile to go.”
“I hain’t goin’ to-day,” Angus said abstractedly, and with no other word, he turned and trudged slowly down the hill and up the stairs to his little room above Dave Wilkins’s printing shop.
It is a portentous moment in the life of any individual when first he knows the necessity to be alone and to think. It was doubly portentous in the life of Angus Burke…. To stand up for himself!… Also he was compelled to think about that other matter—that Lydia was forbidden to speak to him. That had to be studied out as well…. Vaguely, not with clear vision, he began to perceive the existence of social strata; class consciousness had its dawn within him….
For a long time, laboriously, he mulled over these matters, and arrived at two conclusions, both of far-reaching importance. First, that he must stand up for himself, and second, that there should come a time when none would forbid their children to play with him….