CHAPTER FIVE
Dave Wilkins, followed by Angus Burke, clambered up the narrow stairs to the living rooms above the printing office. Wilkins threw himself loosely on the carpet-covered sofa, doubled up his legs and grasped an ankle in each hand. For a moment he hunched his shoulders backward and forward until comfort was established; then he turned his attention to Angus, who stood just within the door—a picture of stolidity.
“Come in. Come over here and sit in this chair,” said Wilkins. “We’ll kind of explore each other.”
Angus obeyed, seating himself and fixing dull eyes on his benefactor’s face. He exhibited no surprise, no emotion of any sort. Probably he would have made no manifestation had Wilkins directed him to stand on his head. Somehow, in these intimate surroundings, he seemed less intelligent, more helpless, duller than when Dave had first seen him in jail. Obviously Angus presented difficulties.
“Turn your head,” Dave said suddenly. “There… I wanted to get a look at that bulge of skull behind your ears. Just to kind of chirk me up. If the back of your head was flat, I calc’late I’d turn the job over to the state…. Now, about that head behind your ears—do you guess there’s brains in it?”
Angus comprehended as little of this as if it had been spoken in Scandinavian. His eyes dwelt steadily on Dave, neither staring nor scrutinizing—they simply remained there vacuously, as if one place to look was as good as another. “I dunno,” he said.
“Naturally…. Now let’s twit on facts. You’re fresh out of relatives, and plumb, jam alone in the world. And you’ve killed a sheriff. You’re an undesirable character, especially in Rainbow. If we were to auction you off this afternoon, you’d go cheap—with few bidders at the price…. Now, what’s to do?”
Angus attempted no reply.
“You're ten years old.”
“Goin’ on ’leven,” said Angus, showing his first spark of interest.
“Going on eleven,” conceded Dave. “That’s a bit early in life to go it alone. Can you read and write?”
“I kin read some, but I can’t write nor figger.”
“Better than I hoped for…. Like to learn? Like to go to school?”
“I dunno.”
“Come to think,” mused Dave, “I don’t calc’late school would be eager to have you come to it…. Now you listen and see how much of this you can get through your head. As you stand, nobody’s got a claim on you. Nobody can stop your doing what you want to—if you do it quick enough. You can clear out and be an immature tramp if you hanker for it, or you can stay with me, and Browning and I will see you have a bed and three square meals. But you don’t have to stay…. Understand?”
Angus nodded.
“As a parent,” said Dave, “I’m a little shy of experience. But I guess I can do darn near as well as the last ones you had. If you want to learn, I’ll teach you. You can work down in the shop as much as is good for you, and we’ll see if that and shufflin’ around with humans won’t make your wheels go ’round some faster.”
Angus continued to hold his eyes steadily on Wilkins’s face. The expression seemed to Dave a trifle less vacant, and he tried to make himself believe that Angus was endeavoring to consider the situation. After a sufficient wait Wilkins stretched out a long, bony hand, and laid it gently on the boy’s arm. “Well,” he asked, “will you stay with me?” Somehow Dave seemed to be asking a favor, rather than bestowing a notable charity.
Angus nodded affirmatively…. That was all.
“In that case,” said Dave, “we’ll have to doll you up. You’ve got to be a credit to a dressy man like me…. And another thing: you might smile once in a while. Know what a smile is? Understand, I’m not asking you to laugh out loud nor to see a joke. Just kind of grin now and then to get your face used to it. We’ll work up to the laugh by slow stages.”
Wilkins never had outfitted a boy, but he began the enterprise with enthusiasm and determination. From straw hat to stubby shoes he proceeded in leisurely manner and with appropriate comment, and ended by setting Angus in the barber’s chair. He surveyed the result with satisfaction…. Rainbow had surveyed the pair of them with astonishment…. It gratified and somehow encouraged Wilkins to note how Angus strove to see his reflection in the windows of stores as they passed; that he found difficulty in keeping his eyes off his new shoes; that he crooked his arm stiffly before him to peer at the fabric of his coat. In short, Wilkins was delighted that Angus showed signs of interest and boyish vanity. It was not much, but it was something.
“Well,” said Dave, “you’re fixed up considerable now. Got anything to say?”
Angus raised his eyes with a trace of question in them. Clearly he failed to understand. Probably Angus Burke never had uttered or thought the words thank you.
“Be they mine?” he asked presently.
“They’re yours.”
“To keep?”
“To keep.”
“Dad won’t take ’em and sell ’em?”
“No.”
“Kin I wear ’em every day?”
“You’ve got to wear them every day.”
Angus breathed heavily—a sigh of mingled relief and satisfaction. As Wilkins said to Browning that night, “If he’d had a tail he’d have wagged it.”… This moment marked an epoch in Angus Burke’s life; it marked the dawning of a first affection for a fellow creature—an affection purchased as the affection of a savage might be purchased by a string of beads—but none the less a species of attachment…. For the first time in his life Angus felt stirring in his sluggish heart a quickened thing, unborn, which might develop into that emotion which men call love.
Fully equipped, and to the eye a new being, Angus started home with Wilkins. Both were silent, Wilkins studying the problem of the boy, Angus in dumb admiration of his finery. As they passed Ramsay’s drug store a boy and girl came out boisterously, almost colliding with them. The little girl spoke to Wilkins; the boy stared curiously and with hostility at Angus—who stared openly and unconsciously at the girl. She threw back her head and wrinkled her nose. As Dave and Angus went on they heard her say to her companion: “That boy hasn’t any manners. He don’t know anything. He don’t know enough to tip his hat to a lady.”
Dave looked down at Angus quizzically. The boy was red with embarrassment.
“You mustn’t mind her,” said Dave. “She’s spoiled, Lydia Canfield is. Lives with her grandparents…. The kid’s the son of your friend Crane. I don’t cotton to him more’n I do to his dad.”
At the next corner they met Mary Trueman, the pastor’s daughter, and paused, for Mary and Dave were friends of standing.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Wilkins,” she said, and glanced down at Angus with a smile and a nod.
“I’m so glad the trial turned out as it did, aren’t you? I was so sorry for that poor little fellow. Where is he? What’s to become of him?”
“Allow me,” said Dave, “to present Mr. Angus Burke.”
Mary looked again at Angus, this time with eyes wide with astonishment. “Oh,” she cried, “this nice-looking boy! Impossible. He never hurt a flea. I won’t believe it.”
“He killed a sheriff,” said Dave, and watched her face intently.
“Poor little fellow. Poor little fellow…. I want so to help—to help be good to him. What can I do, Mr. Wilkins?” Then to Angus, before Dave could reply, “I like your eyes and I like your cheeks, and you have a nice mouth. I want you to be friends with me. Will you?”
Angus shook his head in the slow, uncertain fashion which was habitual to him. “I dunno,” he said.
“I wonder—you know I have a class of boys in Sunday school, Mr. Wilkins. Would he like to come?”
Dave smiled dryly. “I don't calc’late he’s had much experience in Sunday schools…. But how about the daddies and mothers of the ones you’ve got, eh? Think they’d be tickled to death to see a small goat herded with their lambs? Better inquire around a bit and settle that point first.”
“I shall do nothing of the sort. If other boys don’t want to sit in class with this little fellow they can stay away; and if fathers and mothers are afraid he’ll hurt their darlings, why let them keep them at home…. I want you to promise to send him Sunday.”
“Be an interesting experiment in Christian charity,” said Wilkins. “I’ll send him.”
So it was that Angus Burke, bathed, scrubbed, and arrayed in his best, went to Alvin Trueman’s church on the following Sabbath—conducted to the door by Dave Wilkins. As they entered, Malcolm Crane, superintendent of the Sunday school, had the song book open and was turning his face slowly from right to left, so that its benevolent smile—the vacuous, condescending smile which some adults believe has charms for children—could be plainly seen by all. Crane’s version of the benevolent smile verged a trifle on the oily; certainly it was smug. His eyes were opened to their widest capacity, as though he were surprised at his own genial bearing, and his mouth was bent in a curve which made one think of the cat that ate the canary. It was his custom to rise to his toes squeakily, then to subside again with a billowy motion which was very attractive indeed to the small boys who, under Mary Trueman’s supervision, flourished in the pews directly under the superintendent’s eyes.
Dave Wilkins paused in the door long enough to locate Mary Trueman, and then, with perfect calm, walked down the aisle, followed by Angus, and stopped at the end of the pew where she sat.
“Here he is, Miss Trueman,” he said. “Better give me a receipt for him.” With that he turned and walked with elaborate nonchalance out of the church.
Mary made room for Angus beside her. Crane, whose genial smile had slipped from his face at Angus’s entrance, recovered himself, and went on with the announcement he was making, but his smile was gone for that day. The school arose to sing, but few eyes were on the books. Whispers flew from child to child, from teacher to teacher, from class to class. The place of worship rustled; a tenseness of waiting fell upon it. Angus had been recognized at once.
Mary saw how her boys had drawn away from Angus, crowding themselves as far as possible to the other end of the pew, whence they gazed at her and at Angus with that vacancy of expression which, in the active boy, conceals thought and portends action. Angus noticed the commotion and the drawing away, for he pressed closer to Mary and looked up into her face uneasily. She smiled and circled his shoulders with her arm.
“I’m glad you came, Angus,” she said. “You didn’t forget.”
“No,” he said, glancing at the boys quickly, apprehensively, and then back to her face.
“You feel a little strange at first,” she said. “But you must remember that everybody is glad to have you here. You’re going to enjoy Sunday school.”
He shook his head slowly.
“What? You won’t enjoy coming?”
“It ain’t that…. I dunno.” He looked again at the boys and cast a glance at a little girl who was standing on tiptoe to peer over the back of a seat at him. “They,” he said, pointing, “don’t want me here.”
“Of course they want you. I’ll introduce you and then it will be all right.” She motioned to the boys. “Come closer. This is Angus Burke, and he’s going to be in our class. Shake hands with him, and we’ll get acquainted before the lesson begins.”
They hung back with faces which became stubborn.
She singled out a fresh-faced boy. “Harold Cuyler, won’t you come and shake hands with Angus?”
Harold drew down his lip sullenly and put his hand behind him. “No,” he said stubbornly. “I don’t want nothin’ to do with him. He’s a murderer.”
“Shame!” Mary's voice was sharp. “He’s not a murderer. He’s just a little boy like yourselves, only he hasn’t had the good things and the good times you’ve had. He’s been very unfortunate and unhappy, but that’s all over now. He’s going to have a fresh start and grow up to be a good man…. I’m ashamed of all of you.”
“Is he going to be in our class?” Harold demanded.
“Yes.”
“Then I ain’t. I ain’t goin’ to be in any Sunday school with a murderer. My grandfather said I wasn’t to play with him or have anythin’ to do with him.”
“Then your grandfather ought to be ashamed of himself,” said Mary, with more heat than diplomacy. She turned, conscious that someone was behind her and saw Malcolm Crane standing in the aisle. He pointed to Angus and his face was forbidding.
“Do you—er—think this exactly—wise?” he asked coldly.
“Why not?”
“Why—ah—it seems hardly proper to have this boy—fresh from jail—mingling with these others.”
“Nonsense,” said Mary with acerbity.
“He’s ignorant and dirty. Think of his squalid family. It’s not right to bring him here where he can taint these other little fellows who come from Christian homes.”
“You can see for yourself that he’s clean,” said Mary, “and as for the rest—isn’t he just the sort our Sunday school ought to reach?”
“There is a proper way of doing it—not by bringing him here. I object to having my son sit in class with him, and so will other parents.”
“You are perfectly at liberty, Mr. Crane, to take your son away.”
He lacked the courage to stand by his prejudice to that point. Mary waited, but he did not reply.
“I have asked Angus Burke to come into my class,” she said. “It is right that he should come, and I shall do all I can to see that he stays…. I don’t think much of the Christianity of folks who would deny the Church to the unfortunate.”
Crane turned on his heel and strode to his place in front of the pulpit. Encouraged by his example, Mary’s boys arose in revolt.
“I ain’t goin’ to stay,” said Harold Cuyler. “Not with him.”
“Nor me—nor me,” cried others, and they began to scramble out of the seat.
“If you go,” said Mary, “you can’t come back. I sha’n’t be your teacher again. Remember that.”
They scuffled off silently, leaving Mary alone with Angus and her own brother Jimmy. She arose and took Angus by the hand. “Come on,” she said chokingly, “I guess they don’t want us here. Come on, Jimmy.”
“I won’t,” Jimmy muttered. “I won't go walkin’ out beside him.”
Mary passed down the aisle holding Angus’s frightened hand, and out of the church. As she stepped through the door a hubbub broke out behind her which could not be curbed…. It is doubtful if that day’s lesson was of profit either to pupils or to teachers…. It was a lesson which burned deep into Angus Burke’s soul, and perhaps was not without its benefit to him. Malcolm Crane alone felt that there had been something of success in it.