Pollyanna Grows Up - Eleanor H. Porter (read an ebook week .TXT) 📗

swarmed shrieking and chattering out of the dismal tenements, and surrounded the car in a second.

Jerry waved his arms angrily.

“Here, you, beat it!” he yelled to the motley throng. “This ain’t no free movies! Can that racket and get a move on ye. Lively, now! We gotta get by. Jamie’s got comp’ny.”

Mrs. Carew shuddered again, and laid a trembling hand on Jerry’s shoulder.

“Not⁠—here!” she recoiled.

But the boy did not hear. With shoves and pushes from sturdy fists and elbows, he was making a path for his charges; and before Mrs. Carew knew quite how it was done, she found herself with the boy and Pollyanna at the foot of a rickety flight of stairs in a dim, evil-smelling hallway.

Once more she put out a shaking hand.

“Wait,” she commanded huskily. “Remember! Don’t either of you say a word about⁠—about his being possibly the boy I’m looking for. I must see for myself first, and⁠—question him.”

“Of course!” agreed Pollyanna.

“Sure! I’m on,” nodded the boy. “I gotta go right off anyhow, so I won’t bother ye none. Now toddle easy up these ’ere stairs. There’s always holes, and most generally there’s a kid or two asleep somewheres. An’ the elevator ain’t runnin’ ter-day,” he gibed cheerfully. “We gotta go ter the top, too!”

Mrs. Carew found the “holes”⁠—broken boards that creaked and bent fearsomely under her shrinking feet; and she found one “kid”⁠—a two-year-old baby playing with an empty tin can on a string which he was banging up and down the second flight of stairs. On all sides doors were opened, now boldly, now stealthily, but always disclosing women with tousled heads or peering children with dirty faces. Somewhere a baby was wailing piteously. Somewhere else a man was cursing. Everywhere was the smell of bad whiskey, stale cabbage, and unwashed humanity.

At the top of the third and last stairway the boy came to a pause before a closed door.

“I’m just a-thinkin’ what Sir James’ll say when he’s wise ter the prize package I’m bringin’ him,” he whispered in a throaty voice. “I know what mumsey’ll do⁠—she’ll turn on the weeps in no time ter see Jamie so tickled.” The next moment he threw wide the door with a gay: “Here we be⁠—an’ we come in a buzz-wagon! Ain’t that goin’ some, Sir James?”

It was a tiny room, cold and cheerless and pitifully bare, but scrupulously neat. There were here no tousled heads, no peering children, no odors of whiskey, cabbage, and unclean humanity. There were two beds, three broken chairs, a dry-goods-box table, and a stove with a faint glow of light that told of a fire not nearly brisk enough to heat even that tiny room. On one of the beds lay a lad with flushed cheeks and fever-bright eyes. Near him sat a thin, white-faced woman, bent and twisted with rheumatism.

Mrs. Carew stepped into the room and, as if to steady herself, paused a minute with her back to the wall. Pollyanna hurried forward with a low cry just as Jerry, with an apologetic “I gotta go now; goodbye!” dashed through the door.

“Oh, Jamie, I’m so glad I’ve found you,” cried Pollyanna. “You don’t know how I’ve looked and looked for you every day. But I’m so sorry you’re sick!”

Jamie smiled radiantly and held out a thin white hand.

“I ain’t sorry⁠—I’m glad,” he emphasized meaningly; “ ’cause it’s brought you to see me. Besides, I’m better now, anyway. Mumsey, this is the little girl, you know, that told me the glad game⁠—and mumsey’s playing it, too,” he triumphed, turning back to Pollyanna. “First she cried ’cause her back hurts too bad to let her work; then when I was took worse she was glad she couldn’t work, ’cause she could be here to take care of me, you know.”

At that moment Mrs. Carew hurried forward, her eyes half-fearfully, half-longingly on the face of the lame boy in the bed.

“It’s Mrs. Carew. I’ve brought her to see you, Jamie,” introduced Pollyanna, in a tremulous voice.

The little twisted woman by the bed had struggled to her feet by this time, and was nervously offering her chair. Mrs. Carew accepted it without so much as a glance. Her eyes were still on the boy in the bed.

“Your name is⁠—Jamie?” she asked, with visible difficulty.

“Yes, ma’am.” The boy’s bright eyes looked straight into hers.

“What is your other name?”

“I don’t know.”

“He is not your son?” For the first time Mrs. Carew turned to the twisted little woman who was still standing by the bed.

“No, madam.”

“And you don’t know his name?”

“No, madam. I never knew it.”

With a despairing gesture Mrs. Carew turned back to the boy.

“But think, think⁠—don’t you remember anything of your name but⁠—Jamie?”

The boy shook his head. Into his eyes was coming a puzzled wonder.

“No, nothing.”

“Haven’t you anything that belonged to your father, with possibly his name in it?”

“There wasn’t anythin’ worth savin’ but them books,” interposed Mrs. Murphy. “Them’s his. Maybe you’d like to look at ’em,” she suggested, pointing to a row of worn volumes on a shelf across the room. Then, in plainly uncontrollable curiosity, she asked: “Was you thinkin’ you knew him, ma’am?”

“I don’t know,” murmured Mrs. Carew, in a half-stifled voice, as she rose to her feet and crossed the room to the shelf of books.

There were not many⁠—perhaps ten or a dozen. There was a volume of Shakespeare’s plays, an “Ivanhoe,” a much-thumbed “Lady of the Lake,” a book of miscellaneous poems, a coverless “Tennyson,” a dilapidated “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” and two or three books of ancient and medieval history. But, though Mrs. Carew looked carefully through every one, she found nowhere any written word. With a despairing sigh she turned back to the boy and to the woman, both of whom now were watching her with startled, questioning eyes.

“I wish you’d tell me⁠—both of you⁠—all you know about yourselves,” she said brokenly, dropping herself once more into the chair by the bed.

And they told her. It was much the same story that Jamie had told Pollyanna in the Public Garden. There was little that was new, nothing that was significant,