Читать книгу Christmas Stories Rediscovered - Sarah Orne Jewett - Страница 5

WULFY: A WAIF, By Vida Dutton Scudder (1861-1954)

The Christmas season magnifies the inequalities between the rich and poor in America. During the Gilded Age, many middle-class Americans tried to help those in need directly, either by doing individual charitable work or by getting involved in social reform movements. In the late nineteenth century, one such reform movement began operating “settlement houses,” where workers lived among the urban poor and offered help. This story describes the experiences of a little waif and his effect on an idealistic young settlement worker.

My father’s a good father; he don’t hardly ever hit me,” wheezed Wulfy.

“No, but he scolds him awful,” interposed Jakey.

They were standing around Miss Margaret’s chair—three little waifs of the street. Jakey, the Italian, with Murillo curves to mouth and eyebrows; Fritz Hutter, somewhat taller, his soft hat worn on the back of his curly head, his face sickly and sweet-eyed; Wulfy, the shortest of the three, his large and rickety head with its wide mouth, giving him something the effect of a Japanese doll. All the boys were dirty and ragged, but Wulfy’s rags carried off the palm. There was more hole than cloth. His face, overspread by a peculiar yellow grease, had a curious smile; at times it was a positive leer of worldly wisdom; again there crept into it something shy, appealing, and—could one venture to use the word—childlike. His eyes, when one could find them, were blue.

“He scolds him awful,” said Jakey.

“Yes, but that’s all right!” said Wulfy. “Yer see, he gives me two cents ter buy my breakfast, an’ sometimes I’m hungry an’ I asks him for fi’ cents, and then he does scold; but that’s ’cause he wants the fi’ cents hisself, don’t yer see?”

All this with an eagerly apologetic tone.

“How old are you, Wulfy?”

“I think I’m ten, but I might as well be twenty-five. I’ll never be no bigger. I’m goin’ to be a little man, yer know, like the little man at the dime museum. I went to the dime museum once, an’ I saw a man swaller two swords!” This speech, somewhat mournful and meditative at the beginning, became gleeful toward the end.

“And you live alone with your father?”

“No. I ain’t got no mother, yer know. There’s a friend of my father’s lives with us. I calls her aunty.”

“And isn’t she your aunty?”

No. She ain’t no relation. She’s jist a friend of my father’s.”

“O-oh,” said Miss Margaret. Her knowledge of life was becoming enlarged. “And is this friend of your father’s good to you?”

“She don’t hurt me. An’ my father’s a good father now. When I was littler I couldn’t dress myself ’cause my leg used to be so bad; he had to help me, an’ course he didn’t like that. Then it used to be hard. But I can dress myself now. He don’t have to do nothin’ for me. He’s a good father.”

The other boys, attracted by picture-books, had wandered away. Wulfy still stood beside Miss Margaret. There was some lop-sided deformity about the tiny, stunted fellow. His weak hands pecked at her dress, and an indescribable guilelessness shone paradoxically through his world-weary little person. He talked in a guttural, gasping fashion, hard to follow; yet there was no accent, except that indefinable accent of the streets which becomes one’s mother-tongue as one descends into the region of the Bowery.

“I had a mother once. A mother’s a good thing to have. When I was little, an’ my leg was bad, an’ I couldn’t get dressed, I used to lie in bed and remember her; an’ do yer know, sometimes I’d feel so bad, I’d feel as if I’d like to die!”

All this with no touch of sentiment, but with the same matter-of-fact tone in which a few moments before he had been telling of his ambition to own a nanny-goat and peddle newspapers.

Miss Margaret, however, who had seen less of life’s hard realities than Wulfy, was still inclined to be sentimental.

“You wanted to die so that you could be with your dear mother again, didn’t you, Wulfy?”

Wulfy looked sideways, with a scared expression.

“No, no! She died in the horspital.”

Miss Margaret waited, puzzled.

“They said they put her in a box and buried her. ’Twas over on Long Island. I shouldn’t be buried on Long Island.”

“Oh, but Wulfy, don’t you know? Your mother wasn’t buried, the real part of her; she went to heaven, and you can go there too when you die.”

Wulfy was blank. Evidently no impression entered his mind.

Miss Margaret looked at the forlorn little figure in silence an instant. Then all those lofty and etherealized conceptions of a future state which had been formed in the most advanced school of liberal theology slipped away from her, and she found herself saying:

“Wulfy, Jesus Christ, who is very good and who loves you dearly, died and went to a beautiful place called heaven on purpose that he might get ready a lovely house all for your mother and you. And when your mother died I think she went there, and I think she is waiting for you. Do you understand?”

Not at all. No more than if she had been talking Greek. With abrupt and disdainful transition, he announced:

“I won’t die in the horspital.”

The child quivered a little in speaking, like a frightened animal:

“They said they buried her, but they didn’t, yer know.”

“Why, what makes you think they didn’t?”

The answer came reluctantly, in a hoarse whisper. Wulfy was evidently making a grand confidence.

“There was a sick man in a gutter. They took him to a horspital. They were glad to get him.”

“Well?”

“He died. They didn’t bury him.”

“Wulfy, what do you mean?”

“They take the poor, sick people, and when they die they—make—castor-oil—out of them.”

Miss Margaret gasped.

“Who told you that wicked story?” she demanded.

“The man on the corner.”

“Now I want to tell you something.” She took his two wee hands and spoke impressively. “That is a wicked lie. Do you understand?”

Wulfy gazed at her blankly, then repeated his statement with serene and sorrowful assurance.

“They make castor-oil of them. He said so, the man on the corner.”

Nor could any amount of persuasion, then or later, shake in Wulfy’s soul the mystic authority of “the man on the corner.”

“But I wish she hadn’t died,” he went on drearily. “A mother’s a good thing to have. Better nor a father. A mother can make yer clothes. A father, he can buy yer clothes, but shoh! what’s the good of that? Costs him fifty cents to buy yer a coat. What’s the good of spendin’ all that money? A mother, she’ll make yer coat; yes, and wash yer clothes too. I wish my mother hadn’t died. Do yer know, my mother, she—used—ter—kiss me.”

* * * *

It was Miss Margaret’s first experience of life in “the slums.” Already she had begun to resent the opprobrium of the title; already felt that the frank and sturdy humanity of her neighbors deserved a more respectful handling. She found character more interesting here than on Fifth Avenue, because less sedulously concealed; at the same time, she recognized as the chief evil of this existence its crushing monotony. There was less room than she expected for the exercise of that somewhat high-strung compassion with which she had left her home. She was at first inclined to lavish a double measure of such compassion on Wulfy, for the sickly little fellow limped the streets all the bitter winter, foraging for himself like the sparrows, with the aid of an occasional two cents from his father. When asked at any hour to describe his last meal the answer came cheerful and invariable, “Coffee and Ca-ake”; these, picked up at the street-booths, formed the staple of the child’s diet. His little shivering body showed here and there through his rags. He suffered much pain at times, and, though silent for the most part about his home-life, it transpired slowly that he did not dare seek the mean shelter of his father’s tenement till after nine at night. And yet, for all this, Miss Margaret soon found that in a sense her compassion was wasted. Wulfy was as happy as the day is long. He would suffer hardship with the unconscious patience of a kitten, and the prevailing mood of his sunny nature was delight at the queer pleasures of street-life. Wulfy had been to school once, and liked it; but having been absent, he was turned out, and his place given to another. No one was to blame. What would you have when thirty applicants are sometimes refused at these public schools in one day for lack of accommodation! Wulfy, under these conditions, could hardly expect to be educated by his country. He had also, at one time, peddled papers, but a member of the S.P.C.C., seeing his shaky little legs, put an end to this occupation from mistaken kindness. So Wulfy became an attendant imp in the street-life of lower New York. He knew by heart all the theater-posters on the Bowery; he haunted the Hebrew booths on Henry Street in the evening, his small, ancient face watching like a child-Mephistopheles the evil that went on by the flare of the kerosene-torches. He joined in the rapture of barrel-bonfires, fleeing with all his small companions when the cry “Cheese it!” warned them that the “cops” were in sight. He was in the thick of every street-scandal, watching not only the row but the “flatteys”—a term which Margaret, highly amused, soon learned to know as the nickname bestowed on detectives by the hoodlums whose sharp eyes would pick out instantly, in spite of civilian garb, the flat-topped boot of the policeman.

There was nothing in the outer aspects of city-life among the poor which Wulfy did not know. There was nothing apart from the limits of that life of which he had ever heard. Full of strange superstitions that had no grace of fancy or of perverted faith; a thorough little materialist, with no vocabulary and no consciousness outside of the life of the body; conversant with evil of which the woman who talked to him hardly knew the name,—Wulfy was yet innocent in heart as the Christ-child. Scraps of child-wonder and desire were interwoven with his wizened knowledge. Every impulse was generous, and his whole nature set to sweetness. He radiated affection; to hear him talk, no little fellow had ever been so favored with friends. Now it was the kind “butcher-lady” who had given him a dinner; now he had gotten an “o’er-coat”—poor, flimsy little o’ercoat, looking as if it had been chewed—“off” of his father, and beamed with filial devotion.

Like all ardent natures, he had one great passion. It was for his sister. Poor waif! His little husky voice poured forth one day the whole pitiful story, while one hand rested confidingly on Miss Margaret’s knee:

“Do you know my sister Milly? She don’t live at home. She’s a bad girl, my sister Milly. She’s twelve years old, an’ you can be a bad girl when you’re twelve. Milly she come home late nights. Why, it was one, two, twelve o’clock an’ she didn’t come home! I’d sit up an’ open the door; father he’d go to bed. But he found out as she come home late, an’ he took her, and sent her off. The place where she lives, it’s a place where bad girls live. My sister Milly’s awful good to me.”

“And do you ever see Milly now?” asked Miss Margaret, crying in her heart over the child’s sorrowful knowledge.

Wulfy’s whole face brightened with an inward radiance that at times changed him from a Japanese doll to a child-angel.

“I’m goin’ to see Milly after Christmas. They’ve promised me I may. I ain’t a-goin’ to let ’em forgit it.”

“Are you glad Christmas is coming?”

“Yes,” with the bright impulse that always came first. “Ye-es—” more dubiously, and with a clouded face. “Santa Claus don’t come to my house, of course.”

“Why not, Wulfy?”

“He only comes to houses where there are mothers. There ain’t no mother at my house. He comes to Jakey’s house. Last he brought Jakey a knife and a drum.”

“Do yer s’pose,” he went on eagerly, “as Santa Claus comes to the house where Milly is? There ain’t no mother there, yer know.”

A vision of the Reform School rose before Miss Margaret.

“I don’t know, Wulfy,” she said gently. “But tell me: if Santa Claus should come to you this year, what would you like to have him bring?”

Wulfy brightened. For once, he looked like a genuine, jolly little boy.

“I’d like a drum, and an orange, and a pony with real hair on wheels, and—and—and a nanny-goat. Only a nanny-goat couldn’t get into the stocking.”

“No,” assented Miss Margaret gravely. “Now, Wulfy, Santa Claus visits this house, I am quite sure, and, if you like, you can come here Christmas eve and hang up your stocking. Would you like that?”

Wulfy’s response was not made in words. Sticking out a spindly leg, he started with beaming face to strip off its grimy, wrinkled and antique casing.

“Not now! Not now!” interposed Miss Margaret hastily. “Christmas eve! and, Wulfy, mind you wash the stocking before you bring it.”

Now Wulfy had aspirations after cleanliness. The first signal of his arrival was always a demand to “wash me hands”; and in a pan of hot water and a cake of soap he did delight. One day, when Miss Margaret had by vigorous scrubbing caused five pink fingertips to emerge from thick grime, she had said, on didacticism intent, “I think clean fingers are prettier than dirty.”

“So do I,” assented Wulfy; “but if you had a bad leg, and had to climb six pairs of stairs every time you washed yer hands, I guess yer fingers would go dirty.” To which argumentum ad hominem Miss Margaret had instantly succumbed.

On Christmas eve arrived Wulfy, his face one wide smile. In his hand he bore a trophy:—“I washed it myself,” he announced with unspeakable pride.

“I should think so!” gasped Miss Margaret.

It was a stocking. Rather it had been a stocking. Thick and slabby with dirt and grease it had evidently been dipped in water, squeezed out weakly by tiny fingers, and allowed to stiffen, rough-dry. Miss Margaret took it, handkerchief at face.

Wulfy viewed the stocking in her hand, and a shade of anxiety began to gather in his eyes. Toe and heel looked as if large bites had been taken out of them.

“Can yer tell Santa Claus something?” croaked Wulfy.

“Yes.”

“Tell him, then,”—with a look of uncanny wisdom,—“to put the orange in the toe. It can’t fall through, yer know, and it’ll keep the other things in.”

“I will,” promised Miss Margaret. And with due solemnity the stocking was hung.

Christmas was not many hours old when Wulfy came to welcome it. His face was clean in spots, to do honor to the occasion. Miss Margaret took him to the fireplace, his small body tense with expectation.

Santa Claus had remembered! He had remembered everything. There was even the orange in the toe; only, as the stocking was after all a very wee one, it had to be a mandarin. But there were the drum and the pony with real hair, warm stockings too, and mittens, and a muffler; yes, and a knife, and candy and raisins, and a large gold watch which would tick vigorously for over an hour when wound up.

If Miss Margaret had expected a demonstration, she was disappointed. Wulfy received his stocking in silence. The unpacking was an affair of time, for the little hands trembled so that they could not lift the packages nor untie the string, yet no one else was allowed to lay finger on the sacred treasures. At last it was accomplished, and the objects were ranged in a semicircle, Wulfy, cross-legged, like a Hindu idol, in the midst.

Then he broke silence.

“I got a gold watch!” he said, with a shaky sigh.

Nor could another word be extorted from him. This he repeated over and over, gazing at the gilt object as if hypnotized. Not his coveted pony, nor his ball, nor his drum, could hold his attention long. His eyes strayed back to the glittering watch, which he dangled speechless before each new-comer.

It was time for Wulfy to go home; and the journey was a function of state. In vain did Miss Margaret offer to help to carry the packages; he shook his head with determination. “Yer may go with me, though,” he announced graciously. “I’d ruther the boys.” So Wulfy was laden like a small pack-horse, and started from the house, bundles under each arm and the full stocking slung over his shoulder. By Miss Margaret’s side he hobbled joyful but exhausted. His feeble fingers dropped something every few steps, and not a raisin must be lost; his half-paralyzed side bent double under his burdens. As he jogged along, one boy after another of the street-urchins hailed him with surprise and glee, for Wulfy was known to them all.

“Hello, Wulfy!” “My eye, what a Christmas!” “Whatcher got?” met him on all sides. Wulfy’s grotesque little figure staggered under its bulky bundles with the proud and serene air of an Eastern prince. Secure in the protection of Miss Margaret, he answered briefly but freely.

“I got a gold watch,” was his response to every salutation. As they advanced, the walk became a triumphal procession. Boys sprang up from the paving-stones, poured from the alleys, dropped from the sky. In front marched Wulfy’s special friends Jakey and Fritz, as a guard of honor; behind and around was a crowd of boys of all sizes, hooting, curious and envious, and in the midst trudged Wulfy, laconic in his triumph, his stocking bobbing on his shoulder. The bright gold of the orange showed through the jagged toe. He was growing pale and breathless when at last the cavalcade halted at the entrance to a dilapidated court. He surveyed his followers an instant in silence, then, croaking a little louder than usual, he announced:

“Yer can go back now.”

And the boys went.

Miss Margaret waited. She hoped for an invitation to Wulfy’s home. But she received none.

“Good-by,” said Wulfy with dignity.

Thus dismissed, Miss Margaret murmured meekly, “Good-by,” and turned away. But another thought had struck him.

“Wait!” he called. “Where are yer going?”

“To church.”

Church was one of the ideas and probably one of the words which lay outside of Wulfy’s sphere; but perhaps he associated it dimly with beneficent powers, for he sidled a little nearer and wheezed with a touching sweetness of manner:

“Yer might tell Santa Claus as I liked all this stuff.”

For some time after Christmas Wulfy, to use his own phrase, did not “come over.” There was nothing surprising in this. He was irresponsible as a squirrel, and often would vanish, no one knew whither, for a month at a time. But at last, on a bitterly cold day, he reappeared. His rags were a little more sparse than usual, his face looked pinched, but he wore his familiar smile.

“Wulfy,” said Miss Margaret, “where are your new mittens?”

“I gave ’em to Jakey. Poor Jakey didn’t have any,” he said, looking at his blue fingers.

“And why don’t you wear your nice stockings?” for the little legs were incased in the old rags.

“Them stockings weren’t no good.”

“Why not?”

“Sho! they fitted tight! Stockings ought ter wrinkle. Like these. Then they keep yer legs warm. See?”

Miss Margaret saw: Wulfy’s wisdom was, as usual, convincing.

“I’ve seen Milly,” he announced.

“I’m glad. Was Milly pleased to see you?”

“Yes. She kissed me,” he said with shy pleasure. “They’re good to her. She has puddens twice a week. I gave Milly my gold watch.”

“Why, Wulfy! I thought you liked your gold watch.”

“Like it! Guess I did. ’T ain’t every feller as has a gold watch. Milly liked it too.”

Every shred of his Christmas gifts had vanished. To trace them was impossible. The pony, it seemed, and the candy had also gone to Milly. The knife, the ball, and all the rest had doubtless been distributed among the members of the youthful procession which had followed Wulfy through the street in his hour of triumph. He had not kept a peanut for himself.

“Wulfy,” said Miss Margaret soberly one day, willing to try him, “oh, Wulfy, where are your Christmas things? Aren’t you sorry they are all gone?”

Wulfy looked sober too for a minute, and his worldly-wise little lip quivered childishly. Then a smile broke over his face, he gave a brief chuckle, as was his wont when pleased, and then croaked jubilantly: “I had ’em once.”

Happy Wulfy! In this short sentence he had found a philosophy of life.

And Milly? Did Milly, who was a “bad girl” who had known a wild and secret life, did Milly care for a tin gold watch, for candy, and for a pony on wheels? Did she take them to please the little brother whose clinging loyalty may have been the one tie that held her to good? Or did the child perhaps still live in Milly,—poor Milly, who, although she was bad, was only twelve years old, after all,—and did she like the pony and watch for their own sake, with a little girl’s affection? Who shall say!

Wulfy, at least, was happy. Santa Claus had given him the two greatest pleasures in life: the pleasure of possession and the pleasure of sacrifice.

* * * *

Miss Margaret went home soon after this: it was a year before she returned to lower New York. The day after her arrival Wulfy “came over.” He looked plumper, his face was clean, and his clothes were neatly patched. Altogether he was a far less uncanny object than of old.

“Good mornin’,” said Wulfy, “I’ve got a new mother. She ain’t a friend of my father’s. She’s a new mother—a real one. She cooks my meals. Look here,”—holding out a fine patch,—“she did that. Look at them pants. I got ’em off my father. She told him to ’em for me. Once I didn’t go home, she thought I was lost, and, do yer know, she cried till she was black and blue. She was sorry.”

With this wondrous climax he paused breathless and rapturous. So Wulfy was to know the joy of being missed, of being shielded! He was no longer to depend on the chance kindness of the butcher-lady or the grudged two cents of his father to feed his small body; no longer would he laboriously scrape together stray pennies to buy for himself the shirts that barely covered his thin little chest. The waif of the streets was to be a waif no more. He was to know, though in a rough and poor fashion, something of the kindness of a home. Already the child-face, that of old showed only in rare moments, had become habitual to him; and the wicked and antique wisdom which had overspread it as a mask came back only in flashes now and then. The stunted body and sunny soul might know a little comfort at last. Life was sweet to Wulfy now.

Yet not all sweet. Still there was sorrow; still, disappointment, and desire unfulfilled. For Milly was not at home.

“I goes to see her,” said Wulfy. “But I don’t tell her about the new mother. I tell her its jist another friend of my father; for if she knew it was a new mother, Milly’d want ter come home. An’ they say she can’t come home—yet.”