Читать книгу The Vagaries of Tod and Peter - L. Allen Harker - Страница 10

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Tony sat in the gutter, wondering what would be the coolest thing to do. The front doors of all the houses in the dull, quite respectable street, wherein he dwelt, were close shut, as were also the white-curtained windows, lest dust should blow in and sully these hall-marks of houses that possess a front “best room.” The neighboring children were all away; some at the recreation ground, some to paddle their feet in the nearest approach to a river the town boasted—a little muddy stream about a foot deep at the best of times; now a sort of pea soup.

But on this August afternoon Tony felt too slack and too sticky to seek any amusement that necessitated a walk; so, having been thrust out of the back door by his mother, who was washing and wanted no boys “clutterin’ round”—he strolled lanquidly to the front, quite sure that here, at any rate, he would be left in peace, as the dwellers in Eva Terrace never used their front doors except on Sundays.

Just then a man carrying a bag came running down the road, which was a short cut to the station.

“Here, youngster!” he shouted, throwing the bag to Tony. “Carry this for me, and I’ll just do it! Run after me for all you’re worth!”

Tony caught the bag dexterously and ran. He could run faster than the man, and was soon jogging on ahead of him. At the station Tony got sixpence for his pains, thrust it deep into his right trouser pocket, and walked soberly away.

Infinite possibilities were opened up by this unexpected windfall, and he had no intention of mentioning it at home. His people were poor, but not poorer than their neighbors; his brothers and sisters were all older than he, and in his case Benjamin’s lot was not accompanied by the advantages with which it is generally accredited.

A lonely child was Tony, gentle and biddable enough, quick at his books, and happiest in his school hours, when people let him alone, and he succeeded in pleasing the clever, testy schoolmaster, whose life was embittered by a constant struggle with an overwhelming desire to whack the young demons who tormented him. He had been “summonsed” twice by irate parents; so now he restrained himself at the expense of his teaching powers and his nerves generally.

Tony stopped in the middle of the road and smacked his pocket.

“I’ll go to the baths to-morrow morning,” he said aloud, “and see them young nobs swim; it’s only threepence before nine.”

A great excitement—unshared, unmentioned—had lately come into Tony’s life. Every morning for the last week, about eight o’clock he had watched for two boys who went by on bicycles with towels strapped on to their handle-bars. One was quite a little boy, far less than Tony himself; the other bigger, and in his eyes less interesting; and in a few minutes after them came one for whom Tony had conceived the extravagant, unreasoning admiration children will sometimes lavish on somebody with whom they have never exchanged, or hope to exchange, two words; someone unconscious of their existence as they are the richer for that other’s.

Everybody in Tony’s locality knew the recruiting sergeant by sight: “Sergeant” who taught drill and gymnastics to all the “young gen’lemen” in the neighborhood. But Tony adored him, not only because he was so tall and good looking—and Tony was strenuously certain that it is a goodly thing to be upstanding and to have broad shoulders, instead of the champagne-bottle variety carried by his brothers and their like—but because he knew that the sergeant wished him well; inasmuch as that he, even he also, was one of the hundred and fifty odd boys in the parish schools of St. James’s. For now that the war fever was somewhat abating, now that Sergeant himself had come back from the front that he might send more soldiers out there, he had offered to drill the boys in St. James’s schools twice a week for love. And it could not be arranged.

The authorities, while granting the utility of algebra and French to those in the seventh standard, who were presently to form the bulk and bulwark of the nation, saw no good reason why an attempt should be made to give them straight backs and broad chests. So Sergeant, who loved his country, and was, in his way, something of a philanthropist, sighed and swore, and “put the question by.”

But Tony, who had heard the subject canvassed, and listened to the lamentations of the boys, was filled with a passion of gratitude, which found no expression save in a constant hanging round corners to see his idol pass.

Tony sat on his bed naked, in a patch of moonlight, admiring his own legs.

“My body be whiter nor theirn,” he said to himself, and indeed, his limbs looked radiantly fair in the mellow light. “But my arms beant so ’ard as ’is’n for all ’e be such little chap,” he continued, pinching the soft flesh of the upper arm in a dissatisfied way.

Tony was too excited to sleep just yet—such a great deal had happened in the last two days. In all his ten years he had never felt as he felt now—and yet, from an outsider’s point of view, what a little thing it was!

The day before he had gone to the swimming bath, intending just to watch. It was empty, save for Sergeant and the two boys who went with him every morning. The water looked so clear, and there seemed so much room in the big bath, that Tony undressed and went in.

He paddled shyly about in the shallow end, admiring the two boys, who dived off the spring-board and the pulpit and swam under water, while Sergeant roared directions at them, and flung them head over heels in the deep end, in a fashion that filled Tony with surprise.

The big boy was practising side-stroke, when the little one, whom Sergeant, for some reason or other, called the “swashbuckler,” swam down the bath toward Tony, remarking cheerfully:

“You’ll get rheumatism if you paddle so. Shall I show you the first exercise?”

He was such a little boy, but he swam like a frog. His square, freckled face was so friendly that Tony forgot that he himself was an “oik,” and therefore his sworn foe, and said, “Please, sir!” in the meekest of tiny whispers.

“You must kneel on the edge further down, and let me chuck you in,” was the next command—and Sergeant stopped in the very middle of a shout to chuckle and whisper:

“Blest if the swashbuckler isn’t giving a swimming lesson on his own account!”

And now Tony sat on the edge of his bed and remembered two wonderful mornings, and pondered what it could be that made that friendly little boy so different from all the other boys he knew. And through all his thinking, like the refrain of a song, sounded a sentence he had once heard at Sunday school. He could not remember the whole of it; but five words seemed to batter at his brain as though demanding instant comprehension and attention—“The temple of your body.”

Tony nodded as though in answer to a spoken word. He pictured Sergeant cleaving the water with his long arms, the muscles standing out on his white shoulders.

“I s’pose,” said Tony softly, as if in answer to that unseen, persistent voice, “some folks ’as temples for bodies, and some folks ’as on’y tin churches, or, so to speak, a public.... I’d like a temple myself for ch’ice.”

He was not very sure what a temple was, but in a vague way he was assured that it was something large and beautiful; and his conception was helped out by hazy recollections of Sunday school and Solomon, and thoughts of a building spacious and white.

“There used to be a free night,” he continued, reverting again to the actual, “but the Corpeeration stopped it—I wonder w’y? It’s tuppence after six, that’s a shillin’ a week—’ow can pore boys get that?—an’ I promised ’im as I’d learn the others w’en I could get a chanst, when he’s learned me....”

Tony’s voice faltered, he was getting sleepy. He gave his smooth white arms another stroke, slipped into his nightshirt, and got into bed.

“E’ve give oi a shillin’ to pay for four more mornin’s, till ’e do go away,” he whispered ecstatically as he laid his head on the pillow, and Tony fell asleep.

That evening Tony’s elder brother “Earny,” who cleaned bicycles, and was ’prenticed to a dealer in the neighborhood, wanted his Sunday necktie, for he purposed to “walk out with his young lady.” He ran upstairs to the room he shared with Tony and another brother, to find the little boy fast asleep, worn out by unusual exercise and varied emotions.

Earny could not find his tie, and on lifting Tony’s trousers to see if by any chance it was hidden beneath them, a shilling rolled out of the pocket and finished spinning with a clang, just in the very centre of the patch of moonlight where a quarter of an hour earlier Tony had decided that he, at all events, “would ’ave a temple for ch’ice.”

“’Ullo!” thought Earny to himself, “where did that kid collar a bob? ’E bin a’ter no good, I’ll be boun’, so secret-like and sayin’ nothin’ to nobody. Serve ’im right if I buys some smokes with ’un;” and Earny departed quietly, without having fulfilled his original intention of waking Tony that he might look for the missing necktie.

At nine o’clock the following morning Tony still lay upon his bed, wide-eyed, white-cheeked, with blank despair writ large upon his face. Breakfast was over long ago, his family had all departed to their daily work; his mother was ironing in the kitchen, he could hear the bump of the iron as she slammed it on the table; the bedroom could wait till one of the girls came in at dinner-time, so no one interfered with Tony.

He knew that it was his brother who must have taken the shilling—the precious shilling that had meant so much to him. He knew that he had no redress, no one would believe him if he told them how he came by it, and in his utter misery he was too poor-spirited even to think of reprisals. His whole imagination centred round the dreadful certainty that Sergeant and the little gen’leman and the little gen’leman’s brother would think him a fraud. For a brief space the sun had shone out on his drab life, discovering hitherto undreamt-of colors in the landscape, but now....

“I can never watch for ’em no more,” he said, with a hard, tearless sob.

Presently he stood out on the floor and shook his nightshirt about his feet; he dressed quickly, and did not even wash his face as he was wont to do.

“’Tain’t no use for the likes of me to try,” he said bitterly.

Then he went to his brother’s drawer and stole the bundle of cigarettes he found there, and went out and smoked under the railway bridge till his body was as sick as his heart.