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Lo, Michael!

<h3>Chapter XIV</h3> Michael had been three months with the new law firm and was beginning to get accustomed to the violent contrast between the day spent in the atmosphere of low-voiced, quiet-stepping, earnest men who moved about in their environment of polished floors, oriental rugs, leather chairs and walls lined with leather-covered law books; and the evening down in the alley where his bare, little, white and gold room made the only tolerable spot in the neighborhood. He was still occupying the fourth floor back at his original boarding house, and had seen Mr. Endicott briefly three or four times, but nothing had been said about his lodgings. One morning he came to the desk set apart for him in the law office, and found a letter lying there for him. “Son:” it said, “your board is paid at the address given below, up to the day you are twenty-one. If you don’t get the benefit it will go to waste. Mrs. Semple will make you quite comfortable and I desire you to move to her house at once. If you feel any obligation toward me this is the way to discharge it. Hope you are well, Yours, Delevan Endicott.’” Michael’s heart beat faster with varied emotions. It was pleasant to have some one care, and of course if Mr. Endicott wished it so much he would manage it somehow—perhaps he could get some night work or copying to do—but he would never let him bear his expenses. That could not be. He hurried off at the noon hour to find his benefactor and make this plain with due gratitude. He found, however, that it was not so easy to change this man’s mind, once made up. Endicott would not hear to any change in arrangements. He had paid the board for the remaining months of Michael’s minority and maintained his right to do so if he chose. Neither would he let Michael refund him any of the amount. So Michael moved, bag and baggage, and found the change good. The regular, well-cooked meals gave zest to his appetite which had been going back on him for sometime under his own economical regime, and the larger room with better outlook and more air, to say nothing of a comfortable bed with adjoining bath-room, and plenty of heat and light, made life seem more worth while. Besides there were other boarders with whom he now came in pleasant contact, and there was a large pleasant parlor with easy chairs and an old-fashioned square piano which still retained much of its original sweetness of tone. Mrs. Semple had a daughter Hester, an earnest, gray-eyed girl with soft brown hair and a firm little chin, who had taken an art course in Cooper Institute and painted very good pictures which, however, did not sell. Hester played the piano—not very well, it is true, but well enough to make it pleasant to a lonely boy who had known no music in his life except the birds or his own whistle. She played hymns on Sunday after church while they waited for the dinner to be ready; and evenings after supper she played other things: old ballads and tender, touching melodies from old masters simplified, for such as she. Michael sometimes lingered a half hour before hurrying away to the alley, and joined his rich natural tenor with her light pretty soprano. Sometimes Will French, a young fellow who was in the same law office and also boarded at Mrs. Semple’s, stayed awhile and sang bass. It was very pleasant and made it seem more as if he were living in a home. All this time Michael was carrying on his quiet work in the alley, saying nothing about it to anybody. In the first place he felt shy about it because of his personal connection with the place. Not that he wished to hide his origin from his employers, but he felt he owed it to Mr. Endicott who had recommended him, to be as respectable in their sight as possible; and so long as they neither knew nor cared it did not matter. Then, it never occurred to Michael that he was doing anything remarkable with his little white room in the blackness of the stronghold of sin. Night after night he gathered his newsboys and taught them whittling, basketry, reading, arithmetic and geography, with a little philosophy and botany thrown in unawares. Night after night the older fellows dropped in, one or two at a time, and listened to the stories Michael told; sometimes of college life and games in which they were of course interested; sometimes of Nature and his experiences in finding an alligator, or a serpent, or watching some bird. It was wonderful how interesting he managed to make those talks. He never realized that he was preparing in the school of experience to be a magnificent public speaker. With an audience as difficult as any he could have found in the whole wide city, he managed to hold them every time. And the favorite theme often was agriculture. He would begin by bringing a new little plant to the room, setting it up and showing it to them; talking about conditions of soil and how plants were being improved. It was usually the résumé of some article on agriculture that he had taken time to read at noon and was reviewing for their benefit. They heard all about Burbank and his wonderful experiments in making plants grow and develop, and as they listened they went and stood around the blossom that Michael had just brought to them and looked with new wonder at it. A flower was a strange enough sight in that court, but when they heard these stories it became filled with new interest. For a little while they forgot their evil plotting and were lifted above themselves. Another night the talk would be on fertilizers, and how one crop would sometimes give out something that another crop planted later, needed. Little by little, because he talked about the things in which he himself was interested, he was giving these sons of ignorance a dim knowledge of and interest in the culture of life, and the tilling of the ground; getting them ready for what he had hardly as yet dared to put into words even to himself. And one day he took Sam down to Old Orchard. It was the week before Christmas. They had made their second visit to Jim the week before and he had spoken of the spring and when he should get out into the world again. He seemed to be planning to get even with those who had confined him for his wrongdoing. Michael’s heart was filled with anxiety for him. There was something about Jim that appealed to Michael from the first. He had seen him first standing behind the grating of his cell, a great unkempt hulk of a fellow with fiery red hair and brown eyes that roved restlessly, hungrily through the corridor. He would have been handsome but for his weak, girlish chin. Jim had melted almost to tears at sight of the scarlet geranium they had carried him on that first visit, and seemed to care more for the appearance of his old comrade “Mikky” than ever Sam had cared. Jim was to get out in April. If only there were some place for him to go! They talked of it on the way down, Sam seemed to think that Jim would find it pretty hard to leave New York. Sam himself wasn’t much interested in the continued, hints of Michael about going to the country. “Nothin’ doin’” was his constant refrain when Michael tried to tell him how much better it would be if some of the congested part of the city could be spread out into the wide country: especially for the poor people, how much greater opportunity for success in life there would be for them. But Sam had been duly impressed with the wideness of the landscape, on this his first long trip out of the city, and as Michael unfolded to him the story of the gift of the farm, and his own hopes for it, Sam left off his scorn and began to give replies that showed he really was thinking about the matter. “Say!” said he suddenly, “ef Buck was to come back would you let him live down to your place an’ help do all them things you’re plannin’?” “I surely would,” said Michael happily. “Say, Sam, do you, or do you not know where Buck is?” Sam sat thoughtfully looking out of the window. At this point he turned his gaze down to his feet and slowly, cautiously nodded his head. “I thought so!” said Michael eagerly. “Sam, is he in hiding for something he has done?” Still more slowly, cautiously, Sam nodded his head once more. “Sam, will you send him a message from me?” Another nod. “Tell him that I love him,” Michael breathed the words eagerly. His heart remembered kindness from Buck more than any other lighting of his sad childhood. “Tell him that I want him—that I need him! Tell him that I want him to make an appointment to meet me somewhere and let us talk this plan of mine over. I want him to go in with me and help me make that farm into a fit place to take people who haven’t the right kind of homes, where they can have honest work and good air and be happy! Will you tell him?” And Sam nodded his head emphatically. “An’ Jim’ll help too ef Buck goes. That’s dead sure!” Sam volunteered. “And Sam, I’m counting on you!” “Sure thing!” said Sam. Michael tramped all over the place with Sam, showing him everything and telling all his plans. He was very familiar with his land now. He had planned the bog for a cranberry patch, and had already negotiated for the bushes. He had trimmed up the berry bushes in the garden himself during his various holiday trips, and had arranged with a fisherman to dump a few haulings of shellfish on one field where he thought that kind of fertilizer would be effective. He had determined to use his hundred-dollar graduation present in fertilizer and seed. It would not go far but it would be a beginning. The work he would have to get some other way. He would have but little time to put to it himself until late in the summer probably, and there was a great deal that ought to be done in the early spring. He would have to be contented to go slow of course, and must remember that unskilled labor is always expensive and wasteful; still it would likely be all he could get. Just how he would feed and house even unskilled labor was a problem yet to be solved. It was a day of many revelations to Sam. For one thing even the bare snowy stretch, of wide country had taken on a new interest to him since Michael had been telling all these wonderful things about the earth. Sam’s dull brain which up to this time had never busied itself about anything except how to get other men’s goods away from them, had suddenly awakened to the wonders of the world. It was he that recognized a little colony of cocoons on the underside of leaves and twigs and called attention to them. “Say, ain’t dem some o’ de critters you was showin’ de fellers t’other night?” And Michael fell upon them eagerly. They happened to be rare specimens, and he knew from college experience that such could be sold to advantage to the museums. He showed Sam how to remove them without injuring them. A little further on they came to a wild growth of holly, crazy with berries and burnished thorny foliage, and near at hand a mistletoe bough loaded with tiny white transparent berries. “Ain’t dem wot dey sell fer Chris’sum greens?” Sam’s city eyes picked them out at once. “Of course,” said Michael delighted. “How stupid of me not to have found them before. We’ll take a lot back with us and see if we can get any price for it. Whatever we get we’ll devote to making the house liveable. Holly and mistletoe ought to have a good market about now. That’s another idea! Why not cultivate a lot of this stuff right in this tract of land. It seems to grow without any trouble. See! There are lots of little bushes. We’ll encourage them, Sam. And say, Sam, if you hadn’t come along I might never have thought of that. You see I needed you.” Sam grunted in a pleased way. When they came to the house it looked to Michael still more desolate in the snowy stretch of setting than it had when the grass was about it. His heart sank. “I don’t know as we can ever do anything with the old shack,” he said, shaking his head wistfully. “It looks worse than I thought.” “’Tain’t so bad,” said Sam cheerfully. “Guess it’s watertight.” He placed a speculative eye at the dusty window pane he had wiped off with his coat sleeve. “Looks dry inside. ’Twould be a heap better’n sleepin’ on de pavement fer some. Dat dere fire hole would take in a big lot o’ wood an’ I guess dere’s a plenty round de place without robbin’ de woods none.” Michael led him to the seashore and bade him look. He wanted to see what effect it would have upon him. The coast swept wild and bleak in the cold December day, and Sam shivered in his thin garments. A look of awe and fear came into his face. He turned his back upon it. “Too big!” he said sullenly, and Michael understood that the sea in its vastness oppressed him. “Yes, there’s a good deal of it,” he admitted, “but after all it’s sort of like the geranium flower.” Sam turned back and looked. “H’m! I don’t see nothin’ like!” he grunted despairingly. “Why, it’s wonderful! Its beyond us! We couldn’t make it. Look at that motion! See the white tossing rim of the waves! See that soft green gray! Isn’t it just the color of the little down on the geranium leaf? See the silver light playing back and forth, and look how it reaches as far as you can see. Now, doesn’t it make you feel a little as it did when you first looked at the geranium?” Michael looked down at Sam from his greater height almost wistfully. He wanted him to understand, but Sam looked in vain. “Not fer mine!” he shrugged. “Gimme the posy every time.” They walked in silence along the beach toward the flowing of the river, and Sam eyed the ocean furtively as if he feared it might run up and engulf them suddenly when they were not looking. He had seen the ocean from wharfs of course; and once stole a ride in a pilot boat out into the deep a little way; but he had never been alone thus with the whole sea at once as this seemed. It was too vast for him to comprehend. Still, in a misty way he knew what Michael was trying to make him understand, and it stirred him uncomfortably. They hired a little boat for a trifle and Michael with strong strokes rowed them back to the farm, straight into the sunset. The sky was purple and gold that night, and empurpled the golden river, whose ripples blended into pink and lavender and green. Sam sat huddled in the prow of the boat facing it all. Michael had planned it so. The oars dipped very quietly, and Sam’s small eyes changed and widened and took it all in. The sun slipped lower in a crimson ball, and a flood of crimson light broke through the purple and gold for a moment and left a thin, clear line of flame behind. “Dere!” exclaimed Sam pointing excitedly. “Dat’s like de posy. I kin see thet all right!” And Michael rested on his oars and looked back at the sunset, well pleased with this day’s work. They left the boat at a little landing where its owner had promised to get it, and went back through the wood, gathering a quantity of holly branches and mistletoe; and when they reached the city Michael found a good market for it, and received enough for what he had brought to more than cover the price of the trip. The best of it was that Sam was as pleased with the bargain as if it were for his personal benefit. When they parted Sam wore a sprig of mistletoe in his ragged buttonhole, and Michael carried several handsome branches of holly back to his boarding place. Most of this he gave to Hester Semple to decorate the parlor with, but one fine branch he kept and carried to his room and fastened it over his mirror. Then after looking at it wistfully for a long time he selected a glossy spray containing several fine large berries, cut it off and packed it carefully in a tiny box. This without name or clue to sender, he addressed in printing letters to Starr. Mr. Endicott had asked him to mail a letter to her as he passed by the box the last time he had been in the office, and without his intention the address had been burned into his memory. He had not expected to use it ever, but there could be no harm surely in sending the girl this bit of Christmas greeting out of the nowhere of a world of possible people. She would never know he had sent it, and perhaps it would please her to get a piece of Christmas holly from home. She might think her father had sent it. It mattered not, he knew, and it helped him to think he might send this much of his thoughts over the water to her. He pleased himself with thinking how she would look when she opened the box. But whether she would be pleased or not he must only surmise, for she would never know to thank him. Ah, well, it was as near as he dared hope for touching life’s happiness. He must be glad for what he might have, and try to work and forget the rest. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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