“I wish to speak to you, my young friend, about a matter reflecting upon your good name, and so of deep concern to me and my family.”
Horace’s brows narrowed. “Professional or personal?” he asked. He thought he knew what was coming.
“You may claim in your defense that it is professional.”
“I’m not aware of being on my defense,” said the prospective son-in-law calmly. “Who’s accusing me?”
“Well—er—ah …”
“It’s about the Settlement, I suppose.”
“It is, sir. A most unpleasant rumor has reached my ears.”
“Yes, I heard that some of the town clappermaws were freighting gossip around the streets concerning me.”
“Gossip? Then it is not true?”
“It is certainly true that I attend the sick in the Settlement as I would anywhere else.”
“Sick with what?” asked Mr. Levering with tremendous accentuation.
“It doesn’t matter what. If a patient is sick and needs medical care, that is all that concerns me. The case I am now attending is a consumption.”
“Suppose it were an affliction of another nature,” suggested Mr. Levering with delicacy.
“My duty would be the same in one case as the other.”
“Have you no duty to my daughter, sir?”
“Suppose you call her,” said Horace.
Mr. Levering clawed at his luxuriant whiskers. “Would you submit her to the humiliation of such a discussion?”
“Mr. Levering, Agatha is going to be my wife—the wife of a physician. She will understand that she must not interfere in any way with my professional actions. Nor,” he added gently, “must any other person.”
“You confound me, sir,” cried the father. “You would come from the bedside of shame and pollution into the presence of a pure, young maiden?”
“What would you have me do? Let a patient die, untended?”
“Why not? The wages of sin is death.”
“That’s no business of mine,” returned the young man doggedly. “A sick woman is a sick woman just as much in a brothel as in a church.”
A long sigh and a gentle thump sounded from beyond the closed door. Both men rushed to the spot. There in a pathetic heap huddled Agatha. She had quietly fainted at the appropriate moment. Horace propped her in a chair and restored her. Her lids fluttered. She opened moist and grievous eyes upon her lover.
“I will pray for you,” she breathed.
Her father tenderly helped her from the room. Mrs. Levering, who had also listened in, took a less sentimental and more practical view as she put her daughter to bed.
“You’ll lose that young man of yours if you’re not careful, Miss,” said she with asperity.
That acutely receptive pair of ears which lurked beneath Dinty Jerrold’s curls, caught echoes of the gossip, one of them a giggling reference at a sewing bee to “Dr. Amlie’s fair and frail unfortunates down at the Settlement.” Her notions as to the establishment were of the vaguest. She had read the newspaper paragraph about the “French Hell” and speculated on it. The French for “hell” was l’enfer. That she had from her lessons at the Polite Academy. But when she asked Mrs. Larrabee wherein a French hell differed from any other, she got in return a repressive scowl and no satisfaction.
“Fair and frail unfortunates.” That sounded as if someone were in need of help. It was an opportunity for Good Works. The self-appointed investigating committee, Happalonia Vallance, Wealthia Latham and herself had not been very active of late. Dinty rounded up her fellow Sunbeams and they set out to succor the supposed needy with a well-filled basket. The prime mover had not thought it necessary to mention their plan to Dr. Amlie. In fact, she guessed that it would be wiser not to. Since the episode of the smallpox his attitude toward the efforts of the Cluster had been tainted with suspicion. Just as likely as not he would tell them they couldn’t go. Dinty’s curiosity, once roused, drove her inevitably forward. There was nothing prurient in it; it was simply the expression of a consuming interest in her fellow creatures and the riddle of the painful world.
At noon of Saturday when the helpful trio arrived, the log cabin which housed the denizens of the local underworld was just stirring into life. The day was unseasonably warm. The sun shone; great gobbets of snow slid and plopped from the slanted roof. A young slattern appeared in the door, yawned and stretched. One of the cold avalanches came down on her neck. She said a word which Dinty had heard only once before when a freighter was rebuking his horse for stepping on his foot.
“Let’s go home,” said Happalonia who was inclined to be timorous.
“Yes. I don’t like it here,” Wealthia supported her. “I don’t believe they’re nice people.” She had the self-protective instinct of budding maturity.
Dinty, the intrepid, was not to be diverted. “You go down by the creek and throw snowballs at the teegle-ducks,” she suggested. She assumed that expression of piety which masked, not always successfully, her spirit of adventure. “I shall not be wearied in well-doing,” she proclaimed, and took over the basket of charities.
The blowen in the doorway kicked a carpet slipper from her left foot, examined the big toe with solicitude and thrust it into the snow. She uttered another word less familiar than the first. Dinty advanced.
“Good day,” she said.
The other looked up. “Hullo!” she said hoarsely. “Whatcha got in the basket?”
“Some sick-room dainties,” said the Little Sunbeam.
A gleam of interest shot across the sleep-sodden features. “Got any good, ole red-eye whipbelly rotgut?” she inquired hopefully.
“No-o-o. Elderberry wine, though,” she proffered hopefully.
“Slops!” commented the girl. She wiggled her toe. “Hell!” she said.
“What’s the matter with your foot?” Dinty was alert at once.
“It’s sore.”
“Let me look at it.”
The girl stared and laughed. “Ain’t she the young vixen!” she remarked. But she thrust forward the member for examination.
“There’s a splinter,” Dinty diagnosed after careful scrutiny. “It’s all hot and angry.” She delved into the basket, brought forth a housewife which was part of standard Sunbeam equipment in case charity mending was needed, and selected a penny needle.
“Hey!” said the girl. “Whatcha think yer doin’ with that?”
“Taking out the splinter.”
“Like hell!”
“Don’t you want it out?”
“It’ll hurt,” said she distrustfully.
“It wouldn’t hurt much if I had some ether-paint to put on, but I haven’t.” Noting the other’s hesitancy, she summoned up her medical lore. “If you leave it in, it’ll fester and matterate and spread and bite into the bone, and first thing you know your toe’ll drop off and …”
“Hey!” said the girl, pop-eyed. “Wait till I get me a slug of comfort. Then you can go ahead.
She vanished within, and reappeared, her breath reeking. Dinty passed her the needle. “Lick it,” she directed.
This was formula, folklore prophylaxis. The patient understood. “That’s for luck,” she observed, moistening the steel liberally.
Dinty set vigorously to work. Before she finished she had heard more language than in her whole previous life. But the sliver was out and the foot washed.
“Now,” said the operator proudly, “take me to the fire and I’ll make you a nice, hot bread-and-milk cataplasm to take out the fever.”
The door was pulled open. Gwenny Jump appeared.
“Bob save us!” she ejaculated. “What’s all this? Who are you, littling?”
“How do you do?” returned the always courteous Dinty. “I’m Araminta Jerrold.”
“You hadn’t ought to be here,” the manageress told her.
“Why not?”
“It isn’t a fitten place for little girls. Go away, little girl.”
“What about my toe?”
demanded the sufferer. “It’s all tore open. She’s goin’ to fix it.”
Dinty explained the virtues of the cataplasmic dressing. She must have heat in it. Gwenny, puzzled but obliging, offered to fetch out some coals in a firebox. Dinty wondered why it wouldn’t be simpler to let her go to the fireplace. As the door closed behind the woman, a deep, male voice from the interior boomed out the start of a popular ditty:
“My Daddy is a Roarer, O!” A sound of coughing followed. Then, “Fetch me a drink, Donie.”
The girl half-turned her head. “Shut your pan, you little punk!” she yelped.
Dinty asked in surprise, “Do gentlemen live here, too?”
“They come here. When they got four shillin’s.”
“Do they have to pay? Like a theatre?”
Donie giggled. Like so many of the sisterhood, she was hardly more than a halfwit. “Theatre, huh? That’s a good one!”
“Then what’s the four shillings for?” queried the information-seeker.
Donie leered at her. “Ask your ma. Where do you think you came from?”
“Shut up, wench!” Gwenny had returned, bearing firebox and linen swatch. “What you don’t know won’t hurt you,” said she to Dinty, shortly but not unkindly. “Do your job.”
Dinty did it very much to her own satisfaction. The bandage was one that she would have liked her Doctor to see.
“Fresh and hot every hour,” she directed importantly. “And stay in bed as much as you can.”
Donie sniggered and said, “That’s my business,” whereupon Mistress Jump bade her shut up and get inside.
“I hope for the pleasure of meeting you again,” said Dinty in urbane farewell.
Gwenny addressed her with a furrowed brow. “Do you know what kind of a house this is?”
“No, ma’am,” said Dinty. “But I think it’s very nice.”
“You go straight home,” said the woman earnestly, “and don’t you ever, ever come back. You’re a sweet little girl and you mean well, but you ain’t got the sense God gave a straddlebug. Good-bye and my thanks to you for what you did for Donie.”
Somewhat downcast, the missionary rejoined her companions. To them she imparted that there was something queer about the place, but she didn’t know quite what it was. She would ask Dr. Amlie about these ladies and why folks thought they were unfortunate.
The effect upon Dr. Amlie was as bewildering as the rest of the affair.
“First it made him laugh, and then it made him mad,” she reported back to her comrades. “He told me unless I wanted my ears boxed off my head, not to say anything about it at home. So I guess we all better keep mum-mouth.”
The adventure into the half-world might well have been without sequel had not that young, fair and sprightly Englishwoman of letters, Miss Frances Wright, visited Palmyra in her quest for American impressions. That she should have taken a fancy to the bright-eyed, nimble-witted Jerrold child was nothing extraordinary; most people did. After a formal round, committee-escorted, of mills, tanneries, breweries, asheries, mint-stills and ropewalk, the traveler may have caught a gleam of sympathy in the clever young face, turned admiringly upon her, for she addressed Dinty, over restorative tea and caraway cakes, as a fellow spirit.
“I am weary to the bone of being bear-led and supervised like visiting royalty. Is there anything really interesting in the locality?”
Dinty meditated. “There’s Poverty’s Pinch.”
“What a delightful name!” The lady smacked her lips over it with literary gusto. “Who lives there?”
“Poor people. Gypsies and tenkers and wagonfolk. There’s the Settlement, too. That’s interesting.”
“It doesn’t sound so. What is it?”
“It’s a house where a lot of ladies live, and gentlemen pay half a dollar to come and call on them.”
Miss Wright had made a career of broadmindedness; she allowed nothing to shock her or balk her curiosity.
“Let’s run away and go there,” she whispered.
Upon her departure from Palmyra, the lovely chronicler of Americana assured the committee that she had found their village of unusual interest, though she did not go into explanatory detail. That was furnished by the loose-tongued halfwit, Donie, who was soundly thumped for her indiscretions by Gwenny Jump, but not before she had, in the phrase of the day, spilled the nosebag. A horrified Palmyra buzzed with the news that that Awful Child had actually taken the distinguished visitor to see Those Women, “… and, my dear, she’s sure to write it in her book and disgrace us forever.” Dinty was easily Prime Enemy of the Republic.
The day after the storm burst, Horace Amlie, stamping the wet spring snow and mud from his feet, opened his door upon Dinty, sitting in a dejected attitude, her cheeks mottled with woe and her network schoolbag crumpled on the floor. At sight of him, her housewifely instincts momentarily eclipsed her grief. Darting upon him, she pushed him back into the hallway, dabbing at him with the hearthbroom.
“Aren’t you awful!” she cried. “Take off those dirty boots!” She fetched his carpet-slippers. “Put these on.” Sorrow rolled in upon her again like a wave. “Alas!” she said.
“Hullo!” said Horace. “What’s the matter now?”
“I am desprit,” said his caller. “Alas!”
“Stop saying ‘Alas!’ and tell me about it.”
“It’s all because I tried to be nice to Miss Wright,” she said, weeping.
“I heard something of that. What did they say at home?”
“My mind is all anarchy and confusion,” said Dinty. “My soul is harrowed. To what lengths my despair may carry me, I know not. Ma spanked me. Alas!”
Casting about for the key to this singular conglomerate, Horace perceived the lumpy form of a book which the caller had failed to conceal in her bag. He extracted it and read the title: Coquette, a Novel Founded on Fact, by a Lady of Massachusetts.
“So this is where you get your alases,” he observed. “What kind of reading is this for a child like you?”
“It’s Wealthy’s,” answered Dinty. “She got it from the new two-penny-loan library. It is very sorrowful. Alack!”
“If you don’t stop that nonsense, I’ll bleed you,” threatened the doctor. “What if your mother did spank you? A spanking never killed anybody.”
“That isn’t the worst of it,” said Dinty, weeping afresh. “Ma told Pa he ought to send me away to schoo-oo-ool before I did something to bring his gray hairs in sorrow to the grave.”
“It might not be a bad idea,” said Horace, with what seemed to her an inhuman callousness.
“You don’t care,” she mourned. “You wouldn’t care if you never saw me any more. Prob’ly you won’t. I’ll go away and never come back to see you or Wealthy or Tip or M-m-m-marcus.”
“What’s this? Who is Marcus?”
Dinty smoothed her lap. “Marcus Dillard,” she said complacently “He’s in love with me. He squeezed my hand in dancing class and sent me a poem about the tender passion.”
“Ho!” commented Horace. “We’re growing up.”
“He’s awfly grown-up,” continued Dinty. “Not old like you, Uncle Horace. But he’s going on fifteen and he’s almost got a whisker and if the mint crop is good next season his father is going to build him a boat to go on the Grand Canal and he’s going to take me out in it.”
“So this is love.”
“I guess so. But I’d rather go birdsnesting with Tip.” Her face fell. “There’ll be nobody to take me to the woods in their nasty old school. I’ll hate it.”
“When do you leave?”
She brightened. “Not till next term. Lots of things can happen before then. Maybe I’ll die,” she said hopefully.
No symptoms of an early demise manifesting themselves, Dinty instituted a campaign of being unnaturally good, on the theory that thus she might escape the penalty of her misdeeds. She was assiduous at her lessons. She let pass no opportunity of helping her mother at the housekeeping. She kept her father’
s boots greased, his clothes spot-free, his shirts supplied with buttons; she even made spills to light his pipe. Her appearances at the Bible Class were edifying. Agatha Levering, to whom she had been an object of distrust if not dislike, confided to Horace that the child seemed really to be undergoing a change of heart. Horace, who knew her better, reserved judgment.
Dinty had one arrow left in her quiver. Through the days she had been building up her structure of impeccable behavior, as an appeal to her parents’ better nature. On Easter Sunday she came to breakfast with a look of seraphic meekness that would have done credit to Miss Agatha, herself. She bowed a reverent head to her father’s grace, then rose, folded her hands before her, and recited in touching accents a poem which she had carefully selected and conned as suitable to the occasion.
My father and mother, I know
I cannot your kindness repay,
But I hope that, as older I grow,
I shall learn your commands to obey.
I am sorry that ever I should
Be naughty and give you a pain;
I hope I shall learn to be good,
And so never grieve you again.
But for fear that I ever should dare
From all your commands to depart,
Whenever I’m saying my prayer,
I’ll ask for a dutiful heart.
Squire Jerrold choked over his coffee. His wife glared.
“Please don’t send me away from my loved home, dear parents,” said Dinty in imploring, if somewhat specious accents. “Please!”
The voice of doom spoke through Mrs. Jerrold’s delicate lips. “Your passage is booked on the Tuesday morning coach. Let that be an end of it.”
Dinty said “Damn!” with all the fervor of a lost soul, and fled the room.
Canal Town Page 16
