The happy isles

Front matter

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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 But when he was asleep, chubby, seraphic, so awesomely undefiled, she was sure that his spirit had withdrawn from her for a little while to commune with the angels.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!9

"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 dpne, 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. . . .

Ill

A NYONE 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 Grade!" 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

ii

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 limewater 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.

'Til 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 Grade, 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 o£ 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'U 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/ 99

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 Til 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 . . ."