START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPY ISLES*** E-text prepared by Tim Lindell, Graeme Mackreth, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 61344-h.htm or 61344-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/61344/61344-h/61344-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/61344/61344-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/happyisles00king_0 THE HAPPY ISLES [Illustration] * * * * * * _BOOKS BY BASIL KING_ _The Happy Isles_ _The Dust Flower_ _The Thread of Flame_ _The City of Comrades_ _Abraham's Bosom_ _The Empty Sack_ _Going West_ _The Side of the Angels_ _Harper & Brothers Publishers_ * * * * * * [Illustration: "THEY'LL SAY I STOLE HIM. IT'LL BE TWENTY YEARS FOR ME"] THE HAPPY ISLES by BASIL KING Author of "The Empty Sack," "The Inner Shrine," "The Dust Flower," etc. With Illustrations by John Alonzo Williams [Illustration] Publishers Harper & Brothers New York and London MCMXXIII THE HAPPY ISLES Copyright, 1923 By Harper & Brothers Printed in the U.S.A. First Edition K-X ILLUSTRATIONS "They'll Say I Stole Him. It'll Be Twenty Years for Me" _Frontispiece_ "That's a Terr'ble Big Wad for a Boy Like You to Wear" _Facing p._ 158 "Get Up, I Tell You" " 298 Mrs. Ansley Took Him as an Affliction " 362 THE HAPPY ISLES The Happy Isles Many a green isle needs must be In the deep wide sea of misery, Or the mariner, worn and wan, Never thus could voyage on, Day and night, and night and day.... --Shelley. I At eight months of age his only experience of life had been one of well-being. He was fed when hungry; he slept when sleepy; he woke when he had slept enough. When bored or annoyed or uneasy he could cry. If crying brought him attentions it was that much to the good; if the effort was thrown away it did no one any harm. Even when least fertile of results it was a change from the crowing and gurgling which were all he had to distract him when left to his own company. Though his mind worked in co-operation with the subconscious more than with the conscious, it worked actively. In waking minutes there was everything to observe and register. His intimate needs being met, there were the phenomena of light and darkness. He knew not only the difference between them, but in a general way when to expect the turn of each. He knew that light brought certain formalities, chiefly connected with his person, and that darkness brought certain others. The reasons remained obscure, but the variety was pleasing. Then there was the room, or rather the spectacular surroundings of his universe. The nursery was his earth, his atmosphere, his firmament, the ether in which his heavenly bodies went rolling away into the infinite. And, just as with grown-up people, the nearness and distance of Mars or Sirius or Betelgueuse have gone through experimental stages of guesswork first and calculation afterwards, so the exact location of the wardrobe, the table, or the mantelpiece, was a subject for endless wonderment. At times they were apparently so close that he would put out his hand to touch them from his crib; but at once they receded, fixing themselves against the light-blue walls, home of a menagerie of birds and animals, with something between him and them which he was learning to recognize as space. There was also motion. Certain things remained in place; other things could move. He himself could move, but that was so near the fundamental necessities as hardly to call for notice. True, there were discoveries even here. The day when he learned that once his legs were freed he could lie on his back and kick was one of emancipation. In finding that he could catch his foot with his hands and put it in his mouth he made his first advance in skill. But there was motion superior to this. There were beings who walked about the room, who entered it and left it. Merely to watch their goings and comings sent spasms through his feet. Little by little he had come to discern in these creatures a difference in function and personality. Enormous in size, irresistible in strength, they were nevertheless his satellites. One of them supplied his wants; another worshipped him; the third lifted him up, carried him about, tickled him deliciously with his mustache or his bushy outstanding eyebrows, and otherwise entertained him. For the first his tongue essayed the syllables, Na-Na; for the second his lips rose and fell with an explosive Ma-Ma; the last sent his tongue clicking toward the roof of his mouth in the harsher sound of Da-Da; and yet between these efforts and the accomplishment there was still some lack of correspondence. Of his many enthralling interests speech was the most magical. In his analysis of life it came to him early that these coughings and barkings and gruntings were meant to express thought. He himself had thoughts. What he lacked was the connection of the sounds with the ideas, and of this he was not unaware. They supposed him a little animal who could only eat and sleep, when all the while he was listening, recording, distinguishing, defining, correlating the syllable with the thing that was evidently meant, so that later he should astonish his circle by uttering a word. It was a stimulating game and in it his daily progress was not far short of marvelous. If the nursery was his universe, his crib was his private domain, cushioned and soft, and as spotless as an ermine's nest. It was a joy to wake up in it, and equally a joy to go to sleep. Joy, Tenderness, and Comfort, were the only elements in life with which he was acquainted. Thriving on them as he throve on the carefully prepared formulas of his food, he grew in the spirit without obstacles to struggle with, as his body grew in the sunlight and the air. By the time he had reached the May morning on which his story begins he had come to take Comfort, Tenderness, and Joy, as life's essentials. Never having known anything else, he had no suspicion that anything else would lurk within the possible. The ritual that attended his going out was as much a matter of course to him as a red carpet to tread on is to a queen. He took it for granted that, when he had been renewed by bottle and bath, she for whom he tried to say Na-Na would be in a flutter of preparation, while she whose sweet smile forced the Ma-Ma to his lips would put a little coat on his back, a little cap on his head, little mittens on his hands, and smother him with adoration all the time she was doing it. On this particular morning these things had been done. Nestled into a canopied crib on wheels, he was ready for the two gigantic ministrants whom he could not yet distinguish as the first and second footmen. These colossi lifted his vehicle down the steps, to set it on the pavement of Fifth Avenue, where for the time being dramatic episodes were at an end. The town didn't interest him. Moreover, a filmy curtain, to protect him against flies as well as against too much sun, having shut him in from the vastness of the scene, he had nothing to do but let himself be lulled to his customary slumber. II Miss Nash, the baby carriage in front of her, furrowed a way through the traffic of the avenue, relatively scant in those days, and reaching the safety of the other side passed within the Park. She was a trained child's-nurse, and wore a uniform. England being at that time the only source of this specialty, examples in New York were limited to the heirs-apparent of the noble families. Between a nursemaid and a trained child's-nurse you will notice the same distinction as between a lady's maid and a princess's lady-in-waiting. Having entered the Park, Miss Nash stopped the carriage to lift the veil protecting her charge. He was already beyond the noises and distractions of the planet in his rosy, heavenly sleep. Miss Nash smiled wistfully, because it was the only way in which she could smile at all. A superior woman by nature, she clung to that refinement which best expresses itself in something melancholic. Daughter of a solicitor's clerk and niece to a curate, she felt her status as a lady most fittingly preserved in an atmosphere delicate, subdued, and rather sad. And yet when she looked on her little boy asleep she was no longer superior, and scarcely so much as a lady. She was only a woman enraptured before one of those babies so compact of sweetness, affection, and intelligence that they tug at the heartstrings. She was on her guard as to loving her children overmuch, since it made it so hard to give them up when the minute for doing so arrived; but with this little fellow no guard had been effective. Whether he crowed, or cried, or kicked, or snuggled in her arms to croon with her in baby tunelessness, she found him adorable. But when he was asleep, chubby, seraphic, so awesomely undefiled, she was sure that his spirit had withdrawn from her for a little while to commune with the angels. "No," she confessed one day to her friend, Miss Etta Messenger, the only other uniformed child's nurse among her acquaintance in New York, "it won't do. I must break myself. I shall have to leave him some day. But I do envy the mother who will have him always." "It don't pay you," Miss Messenger declared, as one who has had experience. "Anyone, I always say, can hire my services; but my affections remain my own. Now this little girl I'm with while I'm in New York, I could leave her to-morrow without a pang if--but then I've got something to leave her _for_." "And what does he say to things now?" Miss Nash inquired, with selfless interest in her friend's drama. Miss Messenger answered, judicially, "I've put it to him straight. I've told him he must simply fix a date to marry me, or give me up. As I know he simply won't give me up--you never knew a fellow so wild about a girl as he is about me...." The fortnight which had intervened between that conversation and the morning when our little boy's story opens had given time for Miss Messenger's affairs to take another turn. In the hope of learning the details of this turn Miss Nash sought a corner of the Park, not much frequented by nursemaids, where she and Miss Messenger often met, but Etta was not there. Drawing the carriage within the shade of a miniature grove of lilacs in perfumed flower, Miss Nash once more lifted the veil, wiped the precious mouth, and adjusted the coverlet outside which lay the mittened baby hands. Since there was no more to be done, she sat down on a convenient bench to her reading of _Juliet Allingham's Sin_. In the scene where the lover drowns she became so absorbed as not to notice that on a bench on the other side of a lilac bush Miss Messenger came and installed herself and her baby carriage in the shade of a near-by fan-shaped elm, bronze-green in its young leafage. Miss Nash looked up only when, her emotions having grown so poignant, she could read no more. She was drying her eyes when, through the branches of the lilac, the flutter of a nurse's cape told her that her friend must have arrived. "Why, Etta!" On going round the barrier she found herself greeted by what she had come to call Etta's fighting eyes. They were fine flashing black eyes, set in a face which Miss Nash was further accustomed to describe as "high-complexioned." Miss Messenger spoke listlessly, and yet as one who knew her mind. "I saw you. I thought I wouldn't interrupt. I haven't very good news." Miss Nash glided to a seat beside her friend, seizing both her hands. "Oh, my dear, he hasn't----?" "That's just what he has." Etta nodded, drily. "Bring your baby round here and I'll tell you." But Miss Nash couldn't wait. "He's all right there. He's sound asleep. I'll hear him if he stirs. Do tell me what's happened." "Well, he simply says that if that's the way I feel perhaps we'd better call it off." "And are you going to?" Etta's eyes blazed with their black flames. "Call it off? Me? Not much, I won't." "Still if he won't fix a date...." "He'll jolly well fix a date--or meet me in the court." "Oh, but, Etta, you wouldn't...." "I don't say I would for choice. There are two or three other things I could do, and I think I'll try them first." "What sort of things?" In the answer to that question Miss Nash was even more absorbed than in Juliet Allingham's sin. Juliet Allingham was after all but a creature of the brain; whereas Etta Messenger's adventures might conceivably be her own. It was not merely some one else's love story that held her imagination in thrall; it was the possibility that one of these days she, Milly Nash, might have a man playing fast and loose with her heart's purest offering.... III Anyone closely watching the strange woman would have said that her first care was not to seem distraught; but then, no one was closely watching her. On a rapturous May morning, with the lilac scenting the air, and the tulip beds in only the passing of their glory, there were so many things better worth doing than observing a respectably dressed young woman, probably the wife of an artisan, that she went unobserved. As there were at that very minute some two or three hundred more or less like her also pushing babies in the Park, the eye that singled her out for attention would have had more than the gift of sight. What she did that was noticeable--again had there been anyone to notice her--was to approach first one little group and then another, quickly sheering away. One would have said that she sheered away from some queer motive of strategy. Her movements might have been called erratic, not because they were aimless, but because she didn't know or didn't find the object of her search. Even if that were so, she neither advanced nor receded, nor drifted hither or yon, more like a lost thing than many another nursemaid giving her charge the air or killing time. There was nothing sinister about her, unless it was sinister to have moments of seeming dazed or of muttering to herself. She muttered to herself only when sure that there was no one to overhear, and with similar self-command she indulged in looking dazed only when she knew that no eye could light on her. As if aware of abnormality, she schooled herself to a semblance of sanity. Otherwise she was some thirty years of age, neatly if cheaply clad, and too commonplace and unimportant for the most observant to remember her a second after she had passed. At sight of a little hooded vehicle, standing unguarded where the lilac bushes made a shrine for it, she paused. Again, the pause was natural. She might have been tired. Pushing a baby carriage in a park is always futile work, with futile starts and stops and turnings in this direction or in that. If she stood to reconnoiter or to make her plans there was no power in the land to interfere with her. Her further methods were simple. Behind the bench on which Miss Nash and Miss Messenger were by this time entering on an orgy of romantic confidence there rose a gentle eminence. To the top of this hill the strange woman made her way. She made it with precautions, sauntering, dawdling, simulating all the movements of the perfect nurse. When two women, wheeling young laddies strapped into go-carts, crossed her path she walked slowly till they were out of sight. When a park attendant with a lawnmower clicked his machine along to cut a distant portion of the greensward, she waited till he too had disappeared. A few pedestrians were scattered here and there, but so distant as not to count. A few riders galloped up or down the bridle-path near Fifth Avenue, but these too she could disregard. Except for Miss Nash and Miss Messenger, turned towards each other, and with their backs to her, she had the world to herself. Softly she crept down the hill; softly she stole in among the lilacs. "My little Gracie! my little Gracie!" she kept muttering, but only between closed lips. "My little Gracie!" * * * * * "Oh, don't think, Milly," Miss Messenger was saying, "that I shan't give him the chance to come across honorable. I shall. You say that an action for breach doesn't seem to you delicate, and I don't say but what I shrink from it. But when you've a trunkful of letters simply burning with passion, simply _burning_ with it, what good are they to you if you don't?... And he's worth fifty thousand dollars if he's worth a penny. Don't talk to me! A fishmonger, right in the heart of East Eighty-eighth Street, the very best district.... If I sue for twenty-five thousand dollars I'd be pretty sure of getting five ... and with a sympathetic jury, possibly six or eight ... and with all that money I could set up a little nursing home in London ... say in the Portland Place neighborhood ... with a specialty in children's diseases ... and put you in charge of it as matron. You and me together...." "Oh, but, Etta, I couldn't leave my little boy, not till he's able to do without me. By that time there may be other children for me to take care of, so that I could keep near him. I've thought of that. He being the first, and his father and mother such a fine healthy young couple, with everything to support a big family...." During the minutes which marked his transfer from one destiny to another, Miss Nash's little boy remained in the sweet, blest country to which little babies go in dreams. When a swift hand raised the veil, lifting him with deft gentleness, he knew nothing of what was happening. While the cap was peeled from his head and pulled over that of a big, featureless rag doll shaped to the outlines of a baby's limbs, he was still on the lap of Miss Nash's angels. On the lap of these angels he stayed during the rest of the exchange. The strange woman's hand was tender. Lightly it drew over the little boy's head the soiled, cheap bonnet worn by the big rag doll; lightly it laid the little warm body into its new bed. Where he had nestled the big rag doll with his cap on its head gave a fair imitation of his form, unless inspected closely. By the time the veils were lowered on the two little carriages there was nothing for the most suspicious eye to wonder at. A respectable woman of the humbler classes was trundling her baby back to its home. The infant rested quietly. The rag doll, too, rested quietly when Miss Nash returned to her charge, as Miss Messenger to hers. Miss Nash had heard so much within an hour that she was not quite mistress of herself. Nothing was so rare with her as to neglect the due examination of her child, but this time she neglected it. Etta had given her so much to think of that for the minute her mind was over-taxed. Because the love theme had become involved with the compelling dictates of self-interest, which even a sweet creature like Miss Nash couldn't overlook, she laid her hands absently on the push-bar, beginning to make her way homeward. There was no question as to Etta's worldly wisdom. The choice lay between worldly wisdom and the warm, glowing, human thing we call affection. In Milly Nash's experience it was the first time such a choice had been put up to her. "Don't talk to me!" Miss Etta pursued, as they sauntered along side by side. "I simply love my children up to every penny I'm paid for it, not a farthing more; and if you'll take my advice, Milly Nash, you'll follow my example." Miss Nash felt humble, rebuked. Through fear of disturbing her little boy, she pushed as gently as a zephyr blows. "I'm not sure that I could measure it out, not with this little fellow." "This little fellow, fiddlesticks! He's just like any other little fellow." "Oh, no, he isn't. There's character in babies just as there is in grown-up people. This child's got it strong, all sweetness and loveliness, and so much sense--you'd never believe it! Why, he knows--there's nothing that he doesn't know, in his own dear little way. I tell you, Etta, that if you had him you'd feel just like me." "Just like you and be out of your heart's job--your heart's job, mind you--as soon as he's four years old, and they want to put him with a French girl to learn French. Oh, I know them, these aristocrats! When I get my alimony, or whatever it is, I'm simply going to provide for the future, and you'll be a goose, Milly Nash, if you simply don't come with me, and do the same." While Miss Nash was shaking her head with her gentle perplexed smile, the strange woman was crossing Fifth Avenue. Having accomplished this feat, she entered one of the streets running from that great thoroughfare toward the East River. Squalor being so much the rule in New York, the wealthier classes find it hard to pre-empt to themselves more than a long thin streak, relatively trim, bearing to the general disorder the proportion of a brook to the meadow through which it runs. The strange woman had left Fifth Avenue but a few hundred yards away before she and her baby were swallowed up in that kind of human swarm in which individuals lose their identity. Afraid of betraying some frenzy she knew to be within her by mumbling to herself, she kept her lips shut with a fierce, determined tightness. She was a little woman, and when you looked at her closely you saw that she had once possessed a wild dark prettiness. Even now, as she pushed her way between uncouth men and women, or screaming children at play, her wild dark eyes blazed with sudden anger or swam with unshed tears by fits and turns. The house at which she stopped was hardly to be distinguished from thousands of others in which a brief brownstone dignity had fallen, first to the boarding-house stage, and then to that of tenements. From the top of a flight of brownstone steps a frowzy, buxom, motherly woman came lumbering down to lend a hand with the baby carriage. "So you've brought your baby, Mrs. Coburn. Now you'll be able to get settled." The reply came as if it had been learned by rote. "Yes, now I'll be able to get settled. I've got her crib ready, though all my other things is strewed about just as when I moved in. Still, the crib's ready, which is the main thing. She's a fretful baby by nature, so you mustn't think it funny if you hear her cry. Some people thought I'd never raise her, so that if you ever hear say that my little girl died...." "I'll know it's not true," the buxom woman laughed. "She couldn't die, and you have her here, now could she? Do let me have a peep." By this time they had lifted the carriage over the steps and into the little passageway. Seeing that there was no help for this inspection, the strange woman trembled but resigned herself. The neighbor lifted the veil, and peered under it. "My, what a love! And she don't look sick, not a little mite." "Not her face, she don't. Her poor little body's some wasted, but then so long as I've got her...." "I believe as it'd be too much lime-water in her milk. She's bottle-fed, ain't she? Well, them bottle-fed babies--I've had two of 'em out of my five--you got to try and try, and ten to one you'll find as it's that nasty lime-water that upsets 'em." Having unlocked her door, which was on the left of the passageway, the strange woman pulled her treasure into a room stuffy with closed windows, and dim with drawn blinds. Turning the key behind her, she was alone at last. She fell on her knees, throwing the veil back with a fierceness that almost tore it off. She strained forward. Her breath came in racking, panting sobs. "My Gracie! my Gracie! God didn't take you! God wouldn't be so mean! I just dreamed it, and now I've waked up." Suddenly she changed. Drawing backward, she put her hands to her brow and pressed them down the whole length of her face. Her eyes filled with horror. Her face turned sallow. Her lips fell apart. "I'll get twenty years for this. Perhaps it'll be more. I don't think they hang for it, but it'll be twenty years anyhow, if they find it out." She sprang up, still muttering in broken, only partly articulated phrases. "But they'll never find it out. What's there to find? It's my baby! My precious only baby!" She was on her knees again, dragging herself forward by the sides of the little carriage, her eyes strained toward the infant face. "My little Gracie! I've missed you all the time you've been away. My heart was near broke. Now you've come back to me. You're mine--mine--mine!" He opened his eyes. It was his usual hour for waking up. For the first time in his history amazement gave an expression to his face which it was often to wear afterward. Instead of being in his own nest, downy, clean, and scentless, he was in a humpy little hole unpleasant to his senses. Instead of the Na-Na with her tender smile, or the Ma-Ma with her love, he saw this terrifying woman's stormy eyes, rousing the sensation he was later to know as fear. Instead of his nursery, spotless and gay, he was dumped amid the forlorn disarray of furniture that has just been moved into an empty tenement. Without getting these impressions in detail, he got them at once. He got them not as separate facts, but as facts in a single quintessence, distilled and distilled again, till no one element can be told from any other element, and held to his lips in a poisoned draught. All he could do was to wail, but he wailed with a note of anguish which was new to him. It was anguish the more bitter because of the lack of explanation. His only awareness hitherto had been that of power. He had been a baby sovereign, obeyed without having to command. Now he had been born again as a baby serf, into conditions against which his will, imperious in its baby way, would beat in vain. Once more, he knew this, not by reasoned argument, of course, but by heartbroken instinct. It was not merely the distress of the present that was in his cry, but dread of the future. There was something else in the world besides Comfort, Tenderness, and Joy, and he had touched it. Without knowing what it was he shrank back from the contact and sobbed. And yet such is the need for love in any young thing's heart, that when the strange woman had lifted him up, and cradled him on her bosom, he was partly soothed. He was not soothed easily. Though she held him closely, and sang to him softly, seated in the low rocking-chair in which she had rocked her baby-girl, he went on sobbing. He sobbed, not as he had sobbed in his old nursery, for the sport or the mischief of the thing, but because his inner being had been bruised. But his capacity for sobbing wore itself out. Little by little the convulsions grew calmer, the agony less desperate. Love held him. It was not the love of the Ma-Ma or the Na-Na, but it was love. It had love's embrace, love's lullaby. Arms were about him, he was on a breast. The shipwrecked sailor may be only on a raft, but he is not sinking. Little by little he turned his face into this only available refuge. A dangling embroidery adorned it, and in his struggle not to go down his little hands clutched at that. IV His first conscious recollection was of sitting on a high chair drawn up to a table at which he was having a meal. He could never recall whether this was in Harlem, Hoboken, Brooklyn, Jersey City, or the Bronx. Because they moved so often he had little more memory of places than he had of clouds. Tenements, streets, and suburbs of New York melted into one big sense of squalor. It was not squalor to him because he was used to it. It only obscured the difference between one dwelling and another, as monotony always obscures remembrance. Wherever their wanderings carried them, the background was the same, crowded, dirty, seething, a breeding place rather than a home. What marked this occasion was a question he asked and the answer he got back. "Mudda, id my name Gracie, or id it Tom?" The mother spoke sharply, as she whisked about the kitchen. "What do you want to know for?" The question was difficult. He knew what he wanted to know for, and yet it wasn't easy to explain. The nearest he could get to it in language was to say: "I'm a little boy, ain't I?" "Yes, you're a little boy, but you should have been a little girl. It was a little girl I wanted." "But you want me, don't you, mudda?" She dropped whatever she was doing to press his head fiercely against her side. "Yes, I want _you_! I want _you_! I want _you_!" He remembered this paroxysm of affection not because it was special but because it was connected with his gropings after his identity. Paroxysms were what he lived on. They were of love or of anger or of something which frightened him and yet was nameless. He thrummed to himself, beating time on the table with his spoon, while he worked on to another point. "Wadn't there never no Gracie, mudda?" She wheeled round from the gas-stove. "For goodness' sake, what's putting this into your head? Of course there was a Gracie. You're her. You don't suppose I stole you, do you?" He ceased his thrumming; he ceased to beat on the table with his spoon. The mystery of being grew still more baffling. "Mudda!" "What's it now?" "If I wad Gracie I'd be a little girl, wouldn't I?" She stamped her foot. "Stop it! If you ask me another thing I'll slap you." He stopped it, not because he was afraid of being slapped. Accustomed to that he had learned to discount its ferocity. A sharp stinging smart, it passed if you grinned and bore it, and grinning and bearing had already entered his life as part of its philosophy. If for the minute he asked no more questions it was in order not to vex his mudda. She was easily vexed; she easily lost her self-control; she was easily repentant. It was her repentance that he feared. It was so violent, so overwhelming. He loved love; he loved caressing; he loved to sit in her lap and sing with her; but her tempests of self-reproach alarmed him. As she washed the dishes or switched about the kitchen, he watched her with that trepidation which makes the children of the poor sharp-witted. Though under five years of age, he was already developing a sense of responsibility. You could see it in the gravity of a wholly straightforward little face, which had the even tan of a healthy fairness, in keeping with his crisp ashen hair. He knew when the moment had come to clamber down from his perch, and snuggle himself against her petticoats. "Mudda, sing!" "I can't sing now. Don't you see I'm busy! Look out, or this hot dish-water'll scald you." Nevertheless, a few minutes later they were settled in the rocking chair, he on her knee, with his cheek against her shoulder. She was not as ungracious as her words would have made her seem, a fact of which he was aware. "What'll I sing, Troublesome?" "Sing 'Three Cups of Cold Poison.'" So she sang in a sweet, true voice, the sort of childish voice which children love, her little boy joining in with her whenever he knew the words, but with only a hit-or-miss venture at the tune. "Where have you been dining, Lord Ronald, my son? Where have you been dining, my handsome young man?" "I've been dining with my true love, mither, make my bed soon, There's a pain in my heart, and I fain would lie doon." "And what did she give you, Lord Ronald, my son? And what did she give you, my handsome young man?" "Three cups of cold poison, mither, make my bed soon, There's a pain in my heart, and I fain would lie doon." "What'll you will to your mither, Lord Ronald, my son? What'll you will to your mither, my handsome young man?" "My gowd and my silver, mither, make my bed soon, There's a pain in my heart, and I fain would lie doon." "What'll you will to your brither, Lord Ronald, my son? What'll you will to your brither, my handsome young man?" "My coach and six horses, mither, make my bed soon, There's a pain in my heart, and I fain would lie doon." "What'll you will to your truelove, Lord Ronald, my son? What'll you will to your truelove, my handsome young man?" "A rope for to hang her, mither, make my bed soon, There's a pain in my heart, and I fain would lie doon." His next conscious memory was more dramatic. He had been playing in the street, in what town he could never remember. They had recently moved, but they had always recently moved. A month in one set of rooms, and his mother was eager to be off. Rarely did they ever stay anywhere for more than the time of moving in, giving the necessary notice, and moving out again. When they stayed long enough for him to know a few children he sometimes played with them. In this way the thing happened. The boy's name was Frankie Bell, a detail which remained long after the larger facts had escaped him. Frankie Bell and he had been engaged in scraping the dust and offal of the street into neat little piles, with the object of building what they called a "dirt-house." The task was engrossing, and to it little Tom Coburn gave himself with good will. Suddenly, as each bent over his pile, Frankie Bell threw off the observation, casually uttered: "My mother says your mother's crazy." Tom Coburn raised himself from his stooping posture, standing straight, and looking straight. The expression in his dark blue eyes, over which the eyebrows even now stood out bushily, was of pain, and yet of pain that left him the more dauntless. Though knowing but vaguely what the word crazy meant, he knew it was insulting. "She ain't." Frankie Bell, a stout young man, lifted himself slowly. "Yes, she is. My mother says so." "Well, your mudda id a liar." One rush and Frankie Bell lay sprawling with his head in the cushioned softness of his own dirt-heap. The attack had taken him so much by surprise that he went down before he could bellow. Before he could bellow his enemy was upon him, filling his mouth with the materials collected for architectural purposes. Victor in the fray, Tom Coburn ran homeward blinded with his tears. He found his mother at the stove, stirring something with a tablespoon. "Mudda, you're _not_ crazy, _are_ you?" His reply was a blow on the head with the spoon. The woman was beside herself. "Who said that?" Rubbing his head, he told her. "Don't you ever let them say no such thing again. If you do I'll kill you." She threw back her head, her arms outstretched, the spoon in her right hand. "God! God! What'll they say next? They'll say I stole him. It'll be twenty years for me; it'll be forty; it may be life. I won't live to begin it. I know what'll end it before they can...." He was terrified now, terrified as he had never been in all his terrifying moments. Throwing himself upon her, he clutched at her skirts. "Don't, mudda, don't! I'm your little boy! You didn't steal me. Don't cry, mudda! Oh, don't cry! don't cry!" When, in one of her sudden reactions, she sank sobbing to the floor, he sank with her, petting her, coaxing her, wiping away her tears, forcing himself to laugh so that she should laugh with him; but a few days afterward they moved. V "Mudda, can I have a book and learn to read?" The ambition had been inspired in the street, where he had seen a little boy who actually had a book, and was spelling out the words. Tom Coburn was now nominally six years old, though it was in the nature of things that of his age no exact record could be kept. His mother had changed his birthday so many times that he observed it whenever she said it had come round. Bursting into the room with his eager question, he found her sitting by a window looking out at a blank wall. Given her feverish restlessness, the attitude called attention to itself. The apartment was poorer and dingier than any they had lived in hitherto, while it had not escaped his observation that she was living on the ragged edge of her nerves. This made him the more sorry for her, and the more loving. He put his hand on her shoulder, tenderly. "What's the matter, mudda?" It was one of the minutes when a touch made her frantic. "Get away!" He got away, not through fear, but because she pushed him. He didn't mind that, though the rejection hurt him inside. He stood in the middle of the floor, pity in his young countenance, wondering what he could do for her, when she spoke again. "I've got hardly any money left. I don't know what to do." It was the first time his attention had been called to finance. He knew there was such a thing as money; he knew it had purchasing value; but he had not known its relation to himself. "Why don't you get money where you got it before?" "Because I ain't got a husband to die and leave me another five thousand dollars of insurance." "And did you have, mudda?" "Of course I had. What did you think?" The question voiced his inner difficulty. He had not known what to think. Having observed that a fundamental social unit was formed of husbands and wives, he had also understood that husbands and wives could, in the terms which were the last to hang over from the lingo of his babyhood, be translated into faddas and muddas. They in turn implied children. The methods were mysterious, but the unit was so composed. The exception to this rule seemed to be himself. Though he had a mudda, he could not remember ever to have heard of a fadda. He had pondered on this deficiency more times than anyone suspected. The effort to link himself up with the human family was far more important to him now than the ways and means of getting cash. Standing pensive, he peered into the blinding light, or the unfathomable darkness, whichever it may be, out of which comes human life. "Mudda, did Gracie have a fadda?" She snapped peevishly, her gaze again turned outward to the stone wall. "Of course she did." He came nearer to his point. "Did I?" "I--I suppose so." He approached still nearer. "Did I have the same fadda what Gracie had?" "No, you hadn't." She caught herself up hurriedly, rounding on him in one of her fits of wrath. "Yes, you had." The inconsistency was evident. "Well, which was it, mudda?" She jumped to her feet, threateningly. "Now you quit! The next thing you'll be saying is that your name is Whitelaw, and that I stole you. Take that, you nasty little brat!" A smack on the cheek brought the color to his face, and the tears to his eyes. "No, I won't, mudda. I won't say you stole me, or that my name is--" oddly enough he had caught it--"or that my name is Whitelaw. My name is Tom Coburn, and I'm your little boy." Rushing at her in the big outpouring of his love, he threw his arms about her and cried against her waist. He cried so seldom that his grief drove her to one of her paroxysms of repentance. Her self-reproaches abating, all she could do to comfort him was to promise him a book, and begin to teach him to read. The book was procured two days later, and by a method new to him. Doubtless some other means could have been adopted, but the necessity for sparing pennies had become imperative. Moreover, she had never willingly looked at print since the day when she opened a paper to find that, without knowing who she was, all the forces of the country had been organized against her. They went out together. After traversing a series of streets he had never been in before they stopped in front of a little shop, in the window of which stationery, ink, wallpaper, rubber bands, and books were arranged in artistic confusion. The impression on the fancy of a little boy already groping toward the treasures of the mind was like that made on the tourist in Dresden by the heaped up riches of the Grüne Gewölbe. The geography of the shop was explained to him before entering. The stationery counter was on the right as soon as you passed the door. The children's books were opposite, on the left. Books forming a cheap circulating library were back of that, and opposite these, where the shop was dark, were the wallpapers, in small, tight rolls on shelves. She was going to inspect wallpapers. The woman in the shop would exhibit them. He would remain alone in the front part of the shop, and close to the counter with the children's books. He was to keep alert and attentive, waiting for a sign which she would give him. When she turned round in the dark part of the shop, and called out, "Are you all right, darling?" he was to understand it as permissible to slip from the counter any small work on which he could lay his hands, and button it up inside his overcoat. He was to do it quickly, keeping his booty out of sight, and above all saying nothing about it. The plan was exciting, with a savor of adventure and manly incentive to skill. If in the Grüne Gewölbe you were told you could take anything you pleased you would have some of Tom Coburn's sense of enchantment as he stood by the book counter, waiting for the sign. He could see his mother dimly. More dimly still he could follow the movements of the shop-woman eager for a sale. Sample after sample, the wallpapers were unrolled, and hung on an easel where their flowers lighted the obscurity. Even at a distance he could do justice to their beauty, but more captivating than their glories were the wonders at his hand. Pages in which children and animals disported in colors far beyond those of nature were piled in neat little rows, and so tempting that he ached for the signal. He couldn't choose; there was too much to choose from. He would put out his hand without looking, guided by fate. "Are you all right, darling?" Curiously to the little boy, the question came just when he himself could perceive that the shop-woman had dived beneath the counter for another example of her wares. All the conditions were propitious. No one was entering the shop; no one was looking through the window. Without knowing the moralities of his act, he understood the need for secrecy. He stretched forth his arm. His fingers touched paper. In the fraction of a fraction of a second the object was within his overcoat, and pressed to his pounding heart. A few minutes later his mother came smiling and chatting down toward the exit, giving her address, which the shop-woman jotted in a notebook. "I think it will have to be the pale-green background with the roses. The room is darkish, and it would light it up. But I'll decide by to-morrow, and let you know. Yes, that's right. Mrs. F.H. Grover, 321 Blaisdel Avenue. So much obliged to you. Good morning." Having bowed themselves out they went some yards up the street before the little boy dared to express his new wonderment. "Mudda, what did you say you was Mrs. F.H. Grover for? And we don't live on Blaisdel Avenue. We live on Orange Street." "You mind your own business. Did you get your book? Well, that's what we went for, isn't it?" The expedition having proved successful, it was tried on other planes. Now it was in the line of groceries; now in that of hardware; now in that of drygoods; now in that of fruit. Needed things could be used; useless things could be sold, especially after they had moved to distant neighborhoods. While the procedure didn't supply an income, it eked out very helpfully such income as remained. It furnished, moreover, a motive in life, which was what they had lacked hitherto. There was something to which to give themselves. It was like devotion to an art, or even a religion. They could pursue it for its own sake. For her especially this outside interest appeased the wild something which wasted her within. She grew calmer, more reasonable. She slept and ate better. She had fewer fits of frenzy. With but faint pangs of misgiving the little boy enjoyed himself. He enjoyed his finesse; he enjoyed the pride his mother took in him. In proportion as they grew more expert they enlarged their field, often reversing their rôles. There were times when he created the distraction, while she secreted any object within reach. They did this the more frequently after she became recognized as his superior in selection. For a superior in selection the great department stores naturally offered the widest field for operation. They approached them, however, cautiously, going in and out and out and in for a good many days before they ventured on anything. When they did this at last it was amid the crowding and pushing of a bargain day. The system evolved had the masterly note of simplicity. The little boy carried a satchel, of the kind in which school-boys sometimes carry books. He stood near his mudda, or farther away, according to the dictates of the moment's strategy. On the first occasion he kept close to her, sincerely admiring a display of colored silk scarves conspicuously marked down to the price at which it was intended, even before their importation, that they should be sold. Women thronged about the counter, the little boy and his mudda having much ado to edge themselves into the front to where these products of the loom could be handled. The picking and choosing done, the mother still showed some indecision. "I'll just ask my sister to step over here," she confided to the saleswoman. "Her judgment is so much better than mine. Run over, dear, to your Aunt Mary," she begged of the boy, "and ask her to come and speak to me." Holding the scarf noticeably in her hands, she smiled at the saleswoman affably. "I'll just make room for this lady, who seems to be in a hurry." She did not step back; she merely allowed herself to be crowded out. From the front row she receded to the second, from the second to the third. Keeping in sight of the saleswoman, she looked this way and that, plainly for Aunt Mary to appear. At times she
{'title': 'The Happy Isles by Basil King', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}