The Romance of a Plain Man. Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson
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"But I don't want to play with your grandmama," I returned, on the point of tears.
"Well, you might come sometimes – not very often," she said at last, with a sympathetic touch on my sleeve, "an' you must come to the side gate where grandmama won't see you. I'll let you in an' mamma will not mind. But you mustn't come often," she concluded in a sterner tone, "only once or twice, so that there won't be any danger of my growin' like you. It would hurt grandmama dreadfully if I were ever to grow like you."
She paused a moment, and then began dancing up and down in her red shoes over the coloured leaves. "I'd like to play – play – play all the time!" she sang, whirling, a vivid little figure, around, the crumbling vault.
The next minute she caught up the puppy in her arms and hugged him passionately before she turned away.
"His name is Samuel!" she called back over her shoulder as she ran out of the churchyard.
When she had gone down the short flight of steps and into the wide street, I tucked Samuel under my arm, and lugged him, not without inward misgivings, into the kitchen, where my mother stood at the ironing-board, with one foot on the rocker of Jessy's cradle.
"Ma," I began in a faltering and yet stubborn voice, "I've got a pup."
My mother's foot left the rocker, and she turned squarely on me, with a smoking iron half poised above the garment she had just sprinkled on the board.
"Whar did he come from?" she demanded, and moistened the iron with the thumb of her free hand.
"I got him in the churchyard. His name is Samuel."
For a moment she stared at the two of us in a stony silence. Then her face twitched as if with pain, the perplexed and anxious look appeared in her eyes, and her mouth relaxed.
"Wall, he's ugly enough to be named Satan," she said, "but I reckon if you want to you may put him in a box in the back yard. Give him that cold sheep's liver in the safe and then you come straight in and comb yo' head. It looks for all the world like a tousled straw stack."
All the afternoon I sat in our little sitting-room, and faithful to my promise, shammed sickness, while Samuel lay in his box in the back yard and howled.
"I'll have that dog taken up the first thing in the mornin'," declared my mother furiously, as she cleared the supper table.
"I reckon he's lonely out thar, Susan," urged my father, observing my trembling mouth, and eager, as usual, to put a pacific face on the moment.
"Lonely, indeed! I'm lonely in here, but I don't set up a howlin'. Thar're mighty few folks, be they dogs or humans, that get all the company they want in life."
Once I crept out into the darkness, and hugging Samuel around his dirty stomach besought him, with tears, to endure his lot in silence; but though he licked my face rapturously at the time, I had no sooner entered the house than his voice was lifted anew.
"To think of po' Mrs. Cudlip havin' to mourn in all that noise," commented my mother, as I undressed and got into my trundle-bed.
My pillow was quite moist before I went to sleep, while my mother's loud threats against Samuel sounded from the other side of the room with each separate garment that she laid on the chair at the foot of her bed. In sheer desperation at last I pulled the cover over my ears in an effort to shut out her thin, querulous tones. At the instant I felt that I was wicked enough to wish that I had been born without any mother, and I asked myself how she would like it if I raised as great a fuss about baby Jessy's crying as she did about Samuel's – who didn't make one-half the noise.
Here the light went out, and I fell asleep, to awaken an hour or two later because of the candle flash in my eyes. In the centre of the room my mother was standing in her grey dressing-gown, with a shawl over her head and the rapturously wriggling body of Samuel in her arms. Too amazed to utter an exclamation, I watched her silently while she made a bed with an old flannel petticoat before the waning fire. Then I saw her bend over and pat the head of the puppy with her knotted hand before she crept noiselessly back to bed.
At this day I see her figure as distinctly as I saw it that instant by the candle flame – her soiled grey wrapper clutched over her flat bosom; her sallow, sharp-featured face, with bluish hollows in the temples over which her sparse hair strayed in locks; her thin, stooping shoulders under the knitted shawl; her sad, flint-coloured eyes, holding always that anxious look as if she were trying to remember some important thing which she had half forgotten.
So she appeared to my startled gaze for a single minute. Then the light went out, she faded into the darkness, and I fell asleep.
CHAPTER IV
IN WHICH I PLAY IN THE ENCHANTED GARDEN
For the next two years, when my mother sent me on errands to McKenney's grocery store, or for a pitcher of milk to old Mrs. Triffit's, who kept a fascinating green parrot hanging under an arbour of musk cluster roses, it was my habit to run five or six blocks out of my way, and measure my growing height against the wall of the enchanted garden. On the worn bricks, unless they have crumbled away, there may still be seen the scratches from my penknife, by which I tried to persuade myself that each rapidly passing week marked a visible increase in my stature. Though I was a big boy for my age, the top of my straw-coloured hair reached barely halfway up the spiked wall; and standing on my tiptoes my hands still came far below the grim iron teeth at the top. Yet I continued to measure myself, week by week, against the barrier, until at last the zigzag scratches from my knife began to cover the bricks.
It was on a warm morning in spring during my ninth year, that, while I stood vigorously scraping the wall over my head, I heard a voice speaking in indignant tones at my back.
"You bad boy, what are you doing?" it said.
Wheeling about, I stood again face to face with the little girl of the red shoes and the dancing feet. Except for her shoes she was dressed all in white just as I had last seen her, and this time, I saw with disgust, she held a whining and sickly kitten clasped to her breast.
"I know you are doing something you ought not to," she repeated, "what is it?"
"Nothink," I responded, and stared at her red shoes like one possessed.
"Then why were you crawling so close along the wall to keep me from seeing you?"
"I wa'nt."
"You wa'nt what?"
"I wa'nt crawlin' along the wall; I was just tryin' to look in," I answered defiantly.
An old negro "mammy," in a snowy kerchief and apron, appeared suddenly around the corner near which we stood, and made a grab at the child's shoulder.
"You jes let 'im alont, honey, en he ain' gwine hu't you," she said.
"He won't hurt me anyway," replied the little girl, as if I were a suspicious strange dog, "I'm not afraid of him."
Then she made a step forward and held the whining grey kitten toward me.
"Don't you want a cat, boy?" she asked, in a coaxing tone.
My hands flew to my back, and the only reason I did not retreat before her determined advance was that I could hardly retreat into a brick wall.
"I've just found it in the alley a minute ago," she explained. "It's very little. I'd like to keep it, only I've got six already."
"I don't like cats," I replied stubbornly, shaking my head. "I saw Peter Finn's dog kill one. He shook it by the neck till it was dead. I'm goin' to train my dog to kill 'em, too."
Raising herself on the toes of her red shoes, she bent upon me a look so scorching that it might have burned a passage straight through me into the bricks.
"I knew you were a horrid bad boy. You looked it!" she cried.
At this I saw in my imagination the closed gate of the enchanted garden, and my budding sportsman's proclivities withered in the white blaze of her wrath.
"I don't reckon I'll train him to catch 'em by the back of thar necks," I hastened to add.
At this she turned toward me again, her whole vivid