JODIE was going downtown, running a stick along the fence palings, singing a wordless, tuneless song. Now and then a little wave of happiness broke over him, and he had to give a sudden skip, scattering the downy bright-eyed balls of feathers that were printing the snow with arrowy tracks. He paused to flatten his nose against the window of the Vienna Bakery, a pink tip of tongue coming out of the corner of his mouth as he looked at the glazed stickiness and plump raisins of the cinnamon bun. In the fish-shop window the goldfish drifted and turned in their tank, and a lobster languidly waved a claw from its couch of ice. He turned in at the grocer's for a few friendly words with Mr. Turben, and an olive from a tub of brine, and then went out and on, careful not to step on the cracks of the pavement, followed by old Shep.
The ladies of the Congregational church were hav ing a fair in an unrented store, and Jodie and Shep entered, and wandered through a forest of skirts, paying no attention to voices high in air inquiring who in the world let that dog in. Layer cakes, dressed dolls, sachets—a great many things to look at.
A lilac glove case, perfumed and padded, took Jodie's fancy. He wanted to buy it for his mother. He loved to bring her surprises—wormy chestnuts, or stones that really did look as if they had gold in them. He indicated the glove case with a small dirty hand, and hoarsely asked how much it was.
"A dollar and a half, darling," Miss Pearl Miller answered, dripping honey, breaking off from her talk with Mr. Royal Clawson of the Men's Bible Class to bend with sweet womanliness to the round uplifted face, and two other ladies behind the counter smiled at Mr. Clawson with their heads on one side, and groaned tenderly.
That was bad news. Jodie's pockets held a good deal, but not that much. A canceled postage stamp, a licorice nigger baby meltingly attached to a grimy handkerchief, some walnut shells, two five-cent pieces, and three pennies. He wandered about for a few minutes, and then went back to inquire again, and, not completely discouraged, again. Mr. Clawson had moved on to the Fish Pond, and the Fancy-table ladies, whose feet were beginning to ache, somewhat lost their womanly tenderness.
"Goodness, Leora, here's that little boy back again, and I've told him forty million times how much the glove case is. Oh, dear! Now, little boy, you must not touch the things. And you must take your dog out of here!"
Well, if it was to be, it was to be. Farewell, lilac glove case, beautiful and unattainable. Jodie and Shep trotted home, through the clicking gate, around the house to the kitchen door.
"Now wipe your feet off, Jodie Green. Don't you dass come tracking snow all over my clean floor!"
Jodie paused for a drink from the sink faucet. The water in the glass changed from cloudy to clear, and he drank it in great gulps punctuated by loud panting sighs, as if he had been in the desert a long time, far from an oasis.
"Where's mother, Lizzie?"
"Run away with a soldier."
The big round box with its little round boxes nested inside—cloves, cinnamon, ginger, allspice, nutmegs, mace—was open on the table, the kitchen smelled warmly spicy. He felt sleepy, coming in from the cold; he put his head on the kitchen table and yawned widely.
"What are we going to have for dessert for supper?"
"Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies."
His mother really was out. He didn't like the house without her, so still, as if it were watching him, as if things were happening behind his back. He climbed into a chair in the parlor window to look for her.
The dusk was deepening, the arc light on the corner lit, but he could see snow beginning to fall again. No one passed by, footprints and wheel tracks were lightly filled and hidden. Behind him familiar things disappeared in a darkness that pressed him against the glass until the tip of his nose was white. Suppose she never came? His heart lurched. The world was empty except for a watching child.
Then under the arc light he saw her, her long crêpe veil blowing in the snowy wind, hurrying home to him, and the reassurance of her presence poured through all his body.
Kate had been out delivering some score cards she had painted for Mrs. Wells' valentine heart party. She was working hard to make money. The most difficult thing was to tell people she would like to take orders for portraits, dinner cards, anything "hand painted." She would plan an easy, graceful speech, she could hear herself saying it, just the opportunity would come—and time after time she let it slip past.
She would lie awake at night in a panic that made her heart beat fast, drenched her with terror. What if she couldn't get anything more to do? What if she couldn't get along on the little bit of money left from the Thunder Bird? Jodie, who slept in the small room opening out of hers, woke up sometimes to hear his mother crying in the dark, and lay still, not daring to move. Why should grown-up people ever cry? And what can a boy do about it, even a boy who is going to be six his next birthday?
But Kate's terror was always gone in the morning. Mornings when snowy branches were blazing white traceries on the blue; bright blowing mornings tossing red maple buds against the sky; even mornings of mistlike drifting rain—brought courage and reassurance.
Mrs. Driggs was wonderful, giving such large orders. Just now she was working on a miniature of Mrs. Driggs' mother, old Mrs. Barnes.
"It must be so much easier this way, from a photograph," Carrie Pyne said, looking at the three chins and the flat scalloped curls. "What I mean is—well, you never could make a live person keep so still, could you? Kind of hard to make a dainty miniature from this, though."
And Mrs. Martine had given big orders, too, and gotten lots of other people to order dinner cards and candle shades and painted satin candy boxes. It made Kate feel hot and grateful and reluctant. She hated painting things for Mrs. Martine, she put her very best work into them; scattered violets on satin sachets, sprays of forget-me-nots tied by bowknots dancing Highland flings. She worked herself into a fever, forcing herself to say, "Mrs. Martine is being very kind."
For hours she painted Dutch girls, Japanese maidens, Colonial ladies, until her shoulder ached and black spots swarmed before her eyes, while the children hung over her, breathed down her neck, ate apples in her ear, admiring every touch of her brush.
They planned secretly to help, to make money, too.
"We'll have a store," Charlotte decided. "Ona table in the front yard, under Miss Smith's lilac bush. And I'll paint dinner cards for it."
Charlotte and Jodie each had a Prang non-poisonous water-color box, with blue daisies and a little girl's blue head on the cover. It said non-poisonous, so they sucked their stubby quill-handled brushes as much as they liked, but Charlotte told Hoagland he would die if he sucked his paintbrush. He had a grand paint box, wooden, with drawers and drawers of paints, each cake with a rampant lion on it. But only little specks of color came off; no matter how much water he used, he couldn't make a nice pink or yellow mud.
"So will I paint dinner cards," said Jodie. But Charlotte discouraged him.
"No, Jodie, you always go over the edge. Real artists never go over the edge."
Charlotte never went over the edge. She painted so neatly that she could even do the veins in fairy wings in the Green and Yellow Fairy Books.
"Say, kids, do you know what? We could have lemonade for sale," Hoagland suggested. "I betcha million dollars we could make an awful lot of money selling that. I'll tease Myrtle for some lemons and sugar."
"And, oh, listen! We can get some trailing arbutus to sell!"
"Gee! C'mon! Let's go get it now! I'll get my bike!"
The trailing arbutus grew at the edge of the pine woods behind the haunted house. They went along Poor Farm Road on their bicycles, Jodie apprehensively riding on Hoagland's handlebars.
"Gee! Here's a lot, under these old dead leaves!"
The stems clung close to the cold ground under the rotting leaves and pine needles. Clusters of small stars, white and frosty pink, with rusty-spotted leaves. So sweet, so sweet!
"Joseph Montgomery Green! Don't pull them up that way! Miss Hazel says you mustn't ever pull a wild flower up by its roots!"
"Gee! I hope the old woman in that house don't see us!"
"Why, what would she do?"
"She'd do plenty," said Hoagland, darkly.
"Well, but tell us what, why don't you?"
"Noble says she caught a bad little boy one night and she cooked him!"
"She wouldn't cook a good, quite big boy, would she?" Jodie asked, anxiously.
"Hoagland, you ought to be ashamed, scaring Jodie. Now listen, I tell you what we got to do, kids—we got to wet our handkerchiefs in the brook to keep these fresh."
Which was the pouring of the brook, which the wind in the pine trees? The two sounds flowed together. The water slid smooth as glass over the stones, tiny voices spoke through the waterfall. They soaked their handkerchiefs in the icy stream, scattering a shimmering school of minnows.
No more school! No matter if the arithmetic book was lost, the pencil box, the pencil sharpener that wouldn't sharpen anything. No more school forever.
Then autumn bonfires crackled, familiar things looked strange seen through smoke like flawed glass, and the children tried to eat potatoes baked in the blaze. "Hey, kids, gee! this spud's good!" But even Hoagland couldn't get far with the ash-grimed blistering hot skin and the cold raw inside. Yellow apples, frosty with dew, lay in the dew-drenched grass; bits of grass stuck to them; they made the children's teeth ache with cold. An organ grinder came through Chestnut Street. His monkey's fingers were quick and cold in the children's hands as it took their pennies. And the dark threat could no longer be ignored. School would begin soon—next week—to-morrow morning.
Jodie began lessons in the autumn. Kate taught drawing at the school, to pay for him and Charlotte. She was happy at the breakfast table, scooping tea out of the tea caddy with the red china frog on the lid, making bacon sandwiches for the eleven-o'clock recess. A jug of water and sunlight quivered on the table; holy water, its halo quivered above it on the ceiling. Jodie made mountains and rivers with his oatmeal and milk, and Kate, between bites, heard Charlotte's spelling. Charlotte always knew her spelling, and won a prize for it every year—a—passe-partouted "Baby Stuart," a passe-partouted "Shakespeare's Birthplace."
The children were having dancing lessons, too. Kate painted a miniature of Ethel Anderson, to pay for them, and strained her eyes over a Battenberg lace collar for Charlotte to wear with a made-over black velvet of Lulu's. Jodie bobbed about dreamily, not at all bothered by the music, and Charlotte competently guided her partners through waltz and two-step and polka—one two three and a one two three! Hoagland went, too, and was having private lessons in the sailor's hornpipe beside. The children would find him, hot, red, despairing, puffing and pounding, when they arrived with their slipper bags, Miss Ethel skipping lightly before him, winding up air rope, touching herself fore and aft as a butterfly touches a rose, but despairing, too, clapping her hands for Miss Edna to stop playing and begin all over again.
There were other gayeties beside the dance. Children had birthdays, and blotted invitations on small sheets of note paper decorated with little boys and girls in color and "Come to my Party" arrived for Charlotte and Jodie, and Mrs. Driggs entertained for Master Driggs with box parties at the Palace—refined vaudeville—followed by ice cream at Goff's, far too often, the other mothers thought. But the children loved everything—the curtain with the lady in pink and the gentleman in pale blue, feeding swans from a boat that trailed a yellow silk parlor curtain in the water, the performing dogs barking on their semi-circle of stools, the lady in white tights and spangles who ran forward, holding out her hands for the applause they so earnestly gave her, the sad gentleman with the big mustache who stood beside the colored pictures on the screen, singing:
For I'm all alone to-night"
The Irish comedian, the Hebrew comedian, the tramp comedian with his scarlet nose, getting off their jokes, while the white magic of the children's laughter made cheap and vulgar things funny and lovely.
Winter, with snowdrifts and crystal trees, and Christmas coming. Jodie waited outside of shops in the cold, hoping that people would engage him to carry bundles so that he could earn enough to buy his mother the toilet set on a turbulent sea of blue satin in Small's window. Snuffling, joggling from one cold cast-iron foot to the other, he would look up at the shoppers hopefully, but he was too shy to ask anyone in a voice loud enough to be heard, so he had to give her a calendar painted with a sprig of mud-colored holly, just as he had last Christmas.
Then spring again. Easter. Kate sat up late at night painting faces on Easter eggs for the children, dressing an egg in a crocus cap, or a clown's ruff, or a baby's frilled bonnet. Hoagland brought them large chocolate eggs with doves and Easter greetings and encircling squiggles done in white icing.
"They cost one fifty apiece at Goff's; they got cocoanut inside, and they're the biggest that comes! Lessee your eggs. Y'oughta c'mon over and see mine; I got forty-three. I bet I got the biggest egg in the whole world, full of jelly beans!"
Jodie hunted for the Easter rabbit's nests, his cheeks, even his large transparent ears, flaming with excitement. Blown eggs, light as bubbles, dyed blue and red and yellow, behind the playroom sofa; under the dining-room table an egg of sparkling sugar that held in its heart a small bright scene of children and forget-me-nots—in the doll-house chimney a tiny nest with one white chocolate-spotted egg. Kind Easter rabbit, hopping about through the dark on paws softer than velvet, laying your eggs for Jodie!
Hoagland ate as many chocolate eggs as he could, pensively, as the day went on, and later was sick. Charlotte saved hers. She always had bits of Christmas candy cane to suck in April, bits of fondant Easter egg to nibble in July.
On Easter afternoon all the children went to St. Stephen's. Charlotte's short hair was topped with a frilled pink organdy hat, just made by Kate. It sat high and airy, held on by an elastic under her chin. All the other girls had Easter hats, too, organdy, or leghorn wreathed with muslin buttercups. Even Jodie had an Easter hat, straw, with blue ribbons like a sailor. Opal Mendoza, all forget-me-nots and pale blue ruffles, was behaving like a little saint, kneeling, with big blue eyes meltingly cast toward heaven, remembering to smooth out her skirt when she sat down, singing sweetly, shrilly, with the other children:
Can no longer, death, appall us:"
As sweetly and shrilly as she had sung all the way to church: "I have lace on my pan-ties! I have lace on my pan-ties!"
Thou, O grave, canst not enthrall us.
Alleluia!"
The children sang, balancing on hassocks, thinking of the plants in the chancel that they would be allowed to choose from and take home. Charlotte always chose her plants so wisely, safe dependable geraniums that grew bigger and bigger, and that she could take back year after year at Easter to help trim the chancel. But Jodie, in spite of all the good advice Kate and Charlotte gave him, would choose heliotrope that died in a week or so under his passionate sniffing.