Munsey's Magazine/A Conflict of Authorities

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

 

A Conflict of Authorities

THROUGH a congenital defect Jimmy Claney walked on the sides of his feet; but having never known the advantages of straight legs, just as he had never known eider-down comforters or a bath-tub—both of which are things of habit—he got along very cheerfully. For physical agility he substituted mental rapidity and a crooked, shrewd little smile.

“Extry!” he would cry. “Forty-one dagos blown to pieces eatin' dynamite in their spaghetti!” or “Terrible traction accident—motorman swallowed his quid of tobacco!”

But for a couple of months Jimmy's invention had failed. He still sat on the fire-plug at the entrance to the roller-skating hall over the market, but he rarely smiled. He was scarcely curious when one day the whir and roar of the skates over his head, and the monotonous throb of the band, gave way to quiet and decorum. It was only when Hop Jenkins, a one-legged bootblack, was attracted by the “admission free” card and paid the exhibit up-stairs a call, that Jimmy was roused to interest.

“Y' oughter go up,” Hop reported. “There's a nurse up there, and she showed me around. It's how to cure sick folks—all about sleepin' with yer head out the winder, and not spittin' around.”

“Aw, gwan!” Jimmy had responded. “What you goin' to do if you don't spit?”

After which retort he shuffled home; but he was turning over in his mind, skeptically, what he had just heard. As he reached the landing of the tenement he could hear a persistent cough from down the dirty hall, and he drew a long breath. Near at hand Mrs. Simmons's voice rose above the hissing of her fried potatoes and stabbed his soul.

“I don't know who'll take the boy,” she said, “and him crippled. He's a good boy, too, Jimmy is. If I didn't have so many—”

“Old fool!” the boy muttered savagely; and to fill an interval when his voice got in his throat and strangled him, he dug a piece of plaster from the broken wall and fired it at the Simmons's cat. Then he went on.

Jimmy ate his supper from a plate on his lap. The whir of the heavy, old-fashioned sewing-machine seemed to fill the little room, and in the lamplight the boy surreptitiously watched his mother's face.

“How's the cough to-day?” he asked finally. It was always “the cough” between them, and then only incidentally, as one might mention the weather, or the crying of the Levinsky baby.

His mother did not answer. She was busy counting a double stack of trousers piled on the bed. Jimmy didn't wait. He launched into a description of Hop's visit to the City Hall, and ended with a suggestion that they “take in the show.”

“It's a free blow,” he ended, “and you could get Mrs. Simmons's straw hat.” The etiquette of Cherry Row forbade felt head-gear after the middle of May.

It required finesse to borrow the hat without telling its owner where it was to be worn. It necessitated diplomacy to get his mother to wear it, and there was a further scramble for Jimmy to find a pair of stockings to draw over his old ones, thus hiding deficiencies in both pairs. And there was the final and greatest struggle of all—to get Mrs. Claney up the steps and into the lighted hall, when they finally arrived.

“Maybe they won't let us in,” she said timidly.

“Sure they will,” Jimmy asserted. “There's a guy there now shootin' off his face.”

The nurse of Hop's description was just inside the door. Jimmy was not shy, and he shuffled over to her.

“Me mother an' me'd like to look around,” he said. “No objection, is there?”

“None at all.” The nurse smiled a little. “That's what the things are here for. If you have anybody who is—not well, I could show you—”

Jimmy shrank back.

“We haven't nobody,” he said, glancing uneasily at his mother's timid figure near the door. “That is, me mother has a cough, but that's all.” He walked away a few steps, then he came back. “You needn't speak about the cough to her,” he said confidentially. “She's always had it.”

Through a maze of model open-air shacks, of outdoor sleeping-bags and porch tents, Jimmy led his mother. When the nurse came up she found him alone, stooping before a photograph of a woman in a bed on a fire-escape. Below, all around, were chimneys and blackened roofs.

“Did she get better?” he asked, jerking his thumb toward the picture.

“Yes, she got better,” said the nurse. “It's all a matter of plenty of air, you see—air day and night.”

The picture was something Jimmy could comprehend. He took a deep breath and straightened up.

“We've got a fire-escape,” he said.

When Mrs. Claney was somewhat rested, they started home. As they went, Jimmy paved the way for his new plan.

“Say,” he began diplomatically, “do you remember when the police let us sleep on the park benches last summer? Didn't the air feel good? That there woman back there said when folks got used to sleepin' out they never wanted to sleep inside again.”

Mrs. Claney waited to cough a little. “I always thought night air was as good as poison,” she objected.

“I guess it's all air,” Jimmy said largely, “only one you see and one you don't.” Which seemed to settle the argument. “I was thinkin',” he went on, “that we don't have enough air in the room nights. How'd it be if we made a bed on the fire-escape and took turns at it? Wouldn't the Levinskys open their eyes?”

It took all Jimmy's art to persuade his mother to the innovation. It was Jimmy who spread the old mattress on the iron slats, who draped the railing with an old-fashioned patchwork quilt; and it was Jimmy who crept up-stairs after his mother had been tucked into her airy couch and requésted the Levinskys not to upset the milk-pitcher on the fire-escape over her head.

There was little sleep for mother or son that night. Jimmy sat on the window-sill until very late, until his twisted feet went to sleep and his eyelids grew heavy. His mother coughed very little. She lay peacefully, watching the stars overhead, and now and then wistfully looking at the boy's old-young face. Once she held out her hand, and Jimmy sheepishly slipped his own little rough paw into it.

It was a night of dreams. When the moon came out, the little jets of steam from the big warehouse next door looked like vanishing angels, and the stair of the fire-escape going up and up was a Jacob's ladder leading to heaven. The heat of the street was far below; indeed, the earth seemed to have dropped away, and the sky was very close.

At ten o'clock next morning big Pat Donlon, seeing Jimmy at his old post by the market-house, sauntered over to him.

“Look here, young un,” he said, not unkindly, “you got to cut out that sleepin' on the fire-escape.”

“It's our fire-escape,” Jimmy replied doggedly. “It don't hurt nobody, me mother sleepin' there.”

The policeman moved on a few steps pompously; then he turned around.

“Cut it out,” he said impressively. “It's again' the law, and if there was a fire there'd be trouble.”

Jimmy's passions were elemental, his revolt against authority cyclonic. Hop's heavy wooden box went flying through the air; it struck a little low and caught Mr. Donlon at the back of the knees. He doubled up with amazing swiftness, and in that instant of collapse Jimmy disappeared. In the constant warfare of the street boys against authority, for once the law was laid low. Nobody had seen Jimmy; no one knew even the direction his flight had taken. Decidedly, the sentiment of the quarter was in his favor. Was not a man's fire-escape his castle, his veranda, or his refrigerator, as he chose?

At the end of fifteen minutes Jimmy crawled from under a delicatessen-stand and put a new resolve into action. His rights as an American citizen being impugned, he would appeal to the law. He went down to Alderman O'Toole's and stumped in. Donlon was there, talking across the desk with Mr. O'Toole and straightening his dented helmet.

“There's the little divil now,” he said, as much surprised as Jimmy.

“Don't ye touch me!” Jimmy yelled, but he did not retreat. Instead, he came directly to the. desk.

“Well?” said O'Toole severely, with a twinkle in his eye.

“It's like this,” Jimmy began, bold in his confidence that justice would be done. “Me mother—she ain't been very well; she's had a cough, and she didn't eat. Yesterday I heard of a cure—how sleepin' out on a fire-escape'd make her better. Las' night she slep' out, and to-day this here guy says it's agin the law. 'That's why I slammed him.”

“'Obstructing fire-escapes,'” quoted the alderman. “Better have her sleep inside, Jimmy. There's entirely too much use made of those fire-escapes, anyhow. If a fire ever gets any headway there, there'll be something doing. Next case!”

Jimmy stepped forward desperately. “It was the air,” he tried to explain. “She's got to have air. What kind of a place is it where you can't even have air?”

A titter went around the room, and the alderman, who was popular in the ward, and with reason, reached over and patted the boy's shoulder.

“You keep your mother in out of the night air, my lad, if you want her to get better,” he said, “and here's a dollar for some cough-medicine.”

Officer Donlon was apoplectic with rage as Jimmy went out. As for the boy, his soul was chaos. With his instinct for getting to the bottom of things, he went directly to the market-house, and up the stairs. The hall was almost empty. He looked at the picture of the woman in bed on the fire-escape. Yes, there she was, cozy and smiling, with an umbrella over her head and a flower-pot on the window-sill.

The nurse recognized him and came up.

“Well,” she queried, “did you try the fire-escape?”

Jimmy searched the woman's face with suspicious eyes.

“Say”—he waved a hand vaguely around the hall—“put me on, won't you? Is it a bluff?”

For a moment the nurse was staggered. Then she took the boy by the arm and led him to a small private office, where sat a young man with a cigarette, which the nurse pretended not to see.

“Now, you tell him the whole thing,” she said; and being a wise woman, she left them to talk, man to man.

II

When the early spring vegetables in the market had given way to heaps of fragrant green corn, and that in its turn to baskets of cool, dusky grapes, Jimmy came back to his old stand at the corner. He came slowly, but his old shuffling gait was gone forever. The market people stared, for Jimmy's legs were straight. Straight! And the familiar crooked smile spread over a face rotund and sunburnt as the ward had never seen it.

“Me mother?” he said, in response to Mrs. Simmons's hesitating inquiry. “Say, you oughter see her. Bustin' out of her clothes she is, and they're that stuck on her at the home they want her to stay and help run it. Me? I came down to the city to go to night-school. I'm goin' back every week. Extry, terrible explosion! Alderman O'Toole blown up—by the boss!”

Mary Roberts Rinehart