In addition to all the other work there was the yard to cut. This Lem knew to be sheer thought-up, intentional cruelty to youth, for the yard had never been cut before. In places the matted, dried grass was the accumulation of years, tough and stringy. It was a huge yard; to Lem it seemed like square miles.
To cut the grass he had a sickle that had seen better days, but not recently. It was like cutting grass with a spoon. When he came to the places where the old grass was matted under the new, he had to comb it out with his fingers and hold it up, like a Bluebeard holding the hair of an inquisitive wife’s head, and hack at it. His knuckles wore raw, stained with earth and grass, from rubbing as he slashed at the grass.
The result of his sickle work gave Miss Susan little satisfaction. The yard looked worse where Lem had cut it than it had looked originally. It had a jagged, uncouth appearance, like some yellow furred animal that had shed in rough, irregular patches. Miss Susan told him he would have to go over it again as soon as he had finished.
To his misery was added the knowledge that it was a shocking-looking job. His acquaintance with sickles was so slight that he did not know the instrument of his torture was outrageously dull. He foresaw a life of unending grass chopping, with a complaining Aunt Susan always at hand to give him another job as soon as she had scolded him for doing the last in a sloppy manner.
Lem, handed into pawn like a chattel by his father, was miserable and he did not think of letting his countenance hide his misery. He was so thoroughly boy that when he felt miserable he showed it, and Miss Susan believed that Lem disliked her, and Lem had no reason to doubt that she disliked him or that she was intentionally “being as mean as an old cat” to him.
In addition to the worry caused Henrietta by the dangerous and annoying attentions of Johnnie Alberson, who believed in making hay while the sun shone, both Carter Bruce and Freeman were giving Lem’s only able friend so much trouble that she had little time to help Lem with sympathy or otherwise.
Johnnie seemed inclined to take advantage of his knowledge of Henrietta’s supposed maternal relation to Freeman, as well as of his power over her because of Freeman’s peculations. Henrietta was thoroughly frightened. That Miss Susan objected was enough in itself to worry her, but she was actually afraid of Johnnie’s love-making because she was to some extent really in his power. She did not know how far he might choose to press his attentions and she did not have a free cent with which to lessen the amount for which he was holding her responsible.
Johnnie himself was probably having one of the gladdest times of his life. Being a Riverbank Alberson he had his full share of conceit, and thought well of himself at all times except when his withered, dictatorial, and aged mother was treating him as if he were a five-year-old boy. She treated him thus whenever she saw him, no matter where, and she was such a thorough tyrant and so hearty in her tyranny that Johnnie was meek and lowly before her. It was said she swore at him like a pirate when he asserted himself in any way whatever.
When he was away from his mother, the plump, immaculately dressed pharmacist rebounded to the extremes of self-adoration. He thought he was the finest flower of Riverbank’s gallantry and that the only reason all females did not fall in worshipful attitudes at his feet was because an Alberson was so awesome that their very worship would not permit them to take even that liberty.
During the days when he was thus annoying Henrietta, he believed himself to be the admiration of every one at Miss Susan’s, instead of which he came near being, in nearly all eyes, a most ridiculous figure. To Miss Susan, who knew the truth about Henrietta and her husband, he was a matter of sorrow; it was painful for her to see an Alberson preening his feathers and strutting peacock-like around Henrietta while Freeman Todder, her husband, observed it all, and laughed up his sleeve at an Alberson.
Gay and Lorna alone were pleased. As they had no reason to know that Henrietta was married, and as they believed – and rightly – that her Billy Vane was a myth, they hoped Johnnie was in love with their friend and might marry her.
To Henrietta he was nothing but a danger and a menace, doubly annoying because of her other annoyance. Carter Bruce was pressing her for more information regarding the wife of Freeman Todder.
“I ‘ve got to have it,” he told her.
“You shouldn’t have said anything to him about it,” she told him. “It was a secret. I told you in confidence.”
Carter did not see it in that light. He was inclined to argue.
“I kept your secret,” he said. “How could he know how I learned? I don’t mean to let him know, either, but you must give me some hint how I can get the information in some other way. Give me the name of the town where his wife is.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t.”
“You mean you won’t?”
“Very well, Carter, I won’t. It is absolutely impossible. I told you to look out for Gay – to make strong love to her – not to go blundering like a bull in a china shop.”
Henrietta had this every day. Freeman was even worse. He accused her of having told Bruce some lie, of course, but the worst was his insistent demand for money. He must have money. There must be some way in which she could get it, he said.
“There’s not,” she told him. “How can I get it?”
Freeman did not know, but he knew he had to have money. He was as ugly about it as possible, worse than he had ever been.
“You get me some money,” he said brutally. “That’s all I want from you – some money.”
“Freeman, I can’t get any. If I could get it I would not give it to you. Presently we will have to leave this house, and wherever we go next we have to pay in advance. And I must give something to Johnnie Alberson. I’m afraid of him. I must pay him something. I don’t like the way he acts.”
“Let him act,” said Freeman scornfully.
All in all Henrietta was in no state of mind to think of any troubles except her own, and poor Lem was left to his own resources. Or to his one resource. That one resource was his father, and his father, unfortunately, was having his own troubles. He was having difficulty in preserving that calmness of mind and subjugation of appetite necessary to carry on the business of a successful saint.
CHAPTER XVII
Again and again Lem stole from his room at night by the window route and made his way to his father’s hermitage, to beg to be taken out of pawn. These visits caused Saint Harvey of Riverbank the utmost irritation.
The good Saint Harvey, Little Brother to Stray Dogs, was doing his best to live up to the task he had set himself. He was trying faithfully to mortify the flesh and to live abstemiously (on bread and water), to do without his pipe, to think high thoughts, and to be gentle and kind to all living creatures, particularly to stray dogs.
He had a double reason for trying. The news that he was in business as a saint had gone around town – for he could not keep from bragging about it – and old friends and perfect strangers dropped into the junkyard to inquire how he was progressing and to learn from his own lips how a man went about being a saint and how he liked the job.
The worst, of course, was living on bread and water alone. Every atom of his huge body seemed to cry for ham and eggs every minute, and his stomach simply yelled for ham and eggs. And that made him irritable, of course, and made it more difficult to keep from dod-basting everybody, and everything. And it made him long for his pipe, which would have been the solace that every man knows tobacco is. And then the questioners would come:
“An’ say, Harvey, they say you don’t eat nothin’ but bread an’ water. Is that so?”
“That’s all. Nothin’ but. It’s got to be that way. Mortify the flesh, that’s the idee. High thinkin’ an’ plain livin’. Why, there would n’t be no merit in bein’’ a saint if I was to go on eatin’ an’ drinkin’ an’ smokin’ an’ cussin’ around same as everybody does an’ like I used to. Bread an’ water; that’s the idee of it.”
“Gosh! it must be hard on a man!”
“Well, yes! Yes, right at first it is. I don’t say it ain’t, right at first. It irked me some right at first, but I’m gettin’ used to it.”
“An’ don’t it no more?”
“Not a mite. Mind conquers the flesh, as you may say. Want to come back an’ see the stray dogs I’m takin’ care of? That’s my speciality – stray dogs. It’s just that I love ‘em an’ they love me, like I was a brother to ‘em. That does the business.”
He would lead the way to where three canines were chained in the junkyard.
But at night, when he was supposed to be sound asleep, and his blinds were closed, he would begin to think of food – rich, solid ham and eggs cooked in bacon fat – and he would fight with himself, and groan and roll to and fro in his bed.
“Dod-bas – no, not dod-baste; I’ll take that back, it ain’t saintly,” he would mutter; “but I’m hungry. I did n’t know a man could git so hungry.”
Then he would get up and walk the floor.
It was wonderful that he stood it. A new spirit of resolution seemed to have entered into him. The interest that was shown in his new life by his friends and by strangers certainly was one cause of his tenacity, but even so he might have given up – as he had given up all his previous labors – had the Riverbank Eagle not written him up. The article was intended to be satirical, but satire is a serious matter for unpracticed hands to meddle with, and the article that appeared in the Eagle– headed “Riverbank Has a Hermit” – was so very delicately satirical that it did not appear to be satirical at all. Riverbank accepted it as sincere, and so did Saint Harvey, and so did papers all over the land. In a day Saint Harvey found himself not only a recognized hermit, but a famous one. The “Brother of Stray Dogs” was a national character, but he wished he was n’t. He was a national celebrity, but a hungry one. Nobody knew how hungry he was. He was the hungriest man in the United States. He was just plumb, downright, miserably hungry for ham and eggs.
It was late at night, when this hunger was greatest, that Lem would come, pushing open the door, standing on the sill, and saying: “Pop, I want you to lemme come home.”
“Say! Are you here again? Did n’t I tell you to keep away? You git out o’ here an’ go right back to your aunt.”
“Aw, pop! Lemme stay here, won’t you, please?”
“No, I won’t. I can’t have you around here, Lem. The place where a man is tryin’ to be a saint ain’t no place for a hearty, growin’ boy. I got to practically do without food. I got to fast, an’ live on bread an’ water – ”
“Aw, lemme come. I don’t want much to eat. Just maybe some ham an’ eggs – ”
“Now, hush up! You shut your noise! Don’t you come talkin’ about – about nothin’ to eat. You come around here talkin’ about ham an’ – about things to eat, an’ botherin’ me, an’ I won’t have it. How can I get my mind quieted down to bread an’ water when you’re comin’ here all the time? It’s just food, food, food, an’ tempt, tempt, tempt, all the time. I’m havin’ a hard enough time as it is, dod – I mean – ”
“Why don’t you quit it, then? I don’t see what you want to be a plaguey old saint for, anyway. I don’t see where you ‘re goin’ to make any money at it.”
“There now! Money! That just shows you oughtn’t to be around here, Lem. You don’t understand the first principles of a saint. A saint ain’t in the saint business for the money it gets him.”
“What is he one for, then, I’d like to know? What’s it good for, anyway?”
“Why, dod-baste – no, I take that back, Lem. I mean anybody ought to know what a saint is for. He’s – well, he’s just a saint. There don’t have to be no reason for a saint. He just stays around where he is, an’ is. Folks come an’ look at him an’ wonder how he does it. He’s a credit to the town, dod – I mean, he’s a credit to the town. He gets wrote up in the papers. They make monuments of him when he’s dead, an’ put his picture in a book.”
“Well, I don’t think it’s sense, I’d rather not be dead an’ have monuments, if I had to go an’ have nothin’ but bread an’ water. I’d rather be alive an’ have ham an’ eggs – ”
“Now, you stop that! You’re talkin’ about ham an’ eggs just to pester me, an’ I won’t have it! You get away from here!”
Always it ended in Lem coaxing again to be taken out of pawn. He would sit in the shanty snivelling, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand after he had run out of words, but always his father sent him away again, back to Miss Susan. He ordered him out of the shanty sternly enough, but after Lem had closed the door, going out into the night reluctantly, Saint Harvey could not forget him. He worked off his irritation by whanging his pillow around the room, kicking it when it fell to the floor, until he was nearly exhausted, and then he would settle himself in his bed and, grumbling at first, read – his dime novels!
The truth was that, much as he scolded about them, he welcomed the nocturnal visits of the boy, even if they did irritate him (or because they did), and during the long, saintly days when he sat in his hickory rocker reading his “Lives of the Saints,” he became hungrily homesick for Lem. He missed him.
Now and then, too, Saint Harvey had a qualm. Now and then the thought came to him that he was being a saint because there was no heavy work connected with the job, and he had occasionally a guilty feeling that he had put Lem in pawn to be rid of him. He was not very happy. When he thought such thoughts he had second thoughts – that he was thinking such anti-saint thoughts because he was finding the saint business harder than the junk business.
He did not relish a form of martyrdom that came with his saintship, either. It took the form of small boys, who love to annoy saints, hermits, and other odd characters. They began throwing clods at him from a safe distance, chanting in chorus:
“Holy saint! Holy saint!
Wishes he was, but knows he ain’t!”
Saint Harvey was learning that saints are not canonized for nothing. They thoroughly earn their places in the estimation of their admiration.
Lem, after an unusually hard day with Miss Susan, came one night to the hermitage of Saint Harvey with his usual plea to be taken back.
“No, Lem,” his father said patiently, “I ain’t going to take you. I can’t, Lem. I got to stick at this saint job now. And I can’t, anyhow. I ain’t got the money to pay your aunt, and you’ve got to stay until – ”
From his pocket Lem drew something thick and square, wrapped in paper. He was sitting where he always sat, and he cast a glance out of the comers of his eyes at his father as he slowly unwrapped the paper.
“Aw! please let me come back!” he begged, and dropped the paper on the floor.
Saint Harvey of Riverbank licked his lips and drew a deep, covetous breath. In his hand Lem held a thick, moist ham sandwich. He lifted one lid and straightened the ham with his finger – thick, moist ham with a strip of luscious white fat that hung tremulously over the edge of the bread.
“Aw! please, pa! Let me come back,” Lem begged, and set his teeth into the sandwich.
Saint Harvey licked his puffy lips again and heaved a second deep sigh.
The great ham sandwich barrage against the encroaching sainthood of Saint Harvey of River-bank had begun.
CHAPTER XVIII
Saint Harvey of Riverbank was not having a care-free sainthood those days. Lem came every night, sitting in the same place, pleading with his father to stop being a saint, and eating a luscious ham sandwich before his eyes. The young rascal knew what he was doing. He found a way of turning the ham slowly on the bread – so his father saw it in all its beauty – that made Saint Harvey turn red in the face and swallow hard and lick his lips greedily. There was a way in which Lem licked a forefinger after getting it moist with ham grease that was agony to Saint Harvey. And all the while Lem talked.
“Don’t your aunt treat you nice?” his father would ask.
“No, she don’t,” Lem would say. “She’s mean to me. She makes me wash the dishes, she does. An’ she’s got millions of dishes. She don’t care how many dishes she has. She goes an’ cooks an’ cooks, an’ has pie an’ puddin’ an’ roast beef an’ asparagus an’ – ”
“How does she have the asparagus, Lem?”
“Well, she has it in stalks – big, white stalks – with a kind of sauce on it. It’s good. It’s mighty good. An’ she has ham an’ eggs an’ beefsteak an’ sausage an’ pancakes for breakfast. With maple syrup.”
“Ham an’ eggs an’’ beefsteak an’ sausage?”
“Yes.”
Saint Harvey would emit a long, tremulous sigh and close his eyes. Sometimes when Lem told of a Sunday dinner Saint Harvey would turn quite pale, and groan. Then he would get up and walk back and forth, gasping and swallowing and working his jaws and licking his lips.
“I don’t want all this sandwich. You can have it,” Lem would say sometimes. “You ought to be hungry; nothin’ but bread an’ – ”
“You get out o’ here! You scoot out o’ here!” his father would cry, reaching for something to use as a club, and then Lem would go.
Nor was Lem the only trial the good saint had. The Russian Jew, Moses Shuder, would not leave him alone, and no one could anger good Saint Harvey as Shuder could. His very meekness angered Saint Harvey.
Moses Shuder would come to the junkyard, meek and apologetic, dry-washing his hands against his chest, with his crushed hat on his head – the hat itself a reminder of Saint Harvey’s anger – and plead with Harvey to sell him or lease him the junkyard.
“Please, Misder Redink, I vant only to talk to you. Please, you should not get a mad at me —
“Why, dod – why, blame take – ” Saint Harvey would begin furiously, only to remember himself in time, and force himself to calmness. “You go ‘way from here! I don’t want to talk to you! I don’t want to sell! I don’t want to lease – ”
“But, please, Misder Redink – ”
The meekly appealing eyes of his late rival made Harvey furious, inwardly. He longed to be able to cast aside all restraint and to dod-baste Moses Shuder with all his heart and all his soul. Moses Shuder was worse than a hair shirt or peas in his shoes.
It was the meekness of Shuder, coming back so cringingly, day after day, that drove Saint Harvey to the edge of terrible outbursts of unsaintly temper. And Moses Shuder’s eyes, which were like the meekly appealing eyes of Saint Harvey’s stray dogs, reminded him of them.
For the stray dogs were another thorn in the good saint’s flesh. He was having a sad time being a Little Brother to Stray Dogs. Stray dogs did not like him. They hated him. Whenever they saw him, they looked up at him with meekly appealing eyes like Moses Shuder’s and then bit him on the leg.
Perhaps this was because before Saint Harvey became a saint he had hated stray dogs and thrown things at them, and the dogs recognized him as an ancient dog-hater. However that may be, they now greeted him, when he approached them, with a look that pleaded not to be given a beating, and then, as he approached, showed their fangs, growled and raised the hair along their spines, and jumped at his legs. He wished he had been advertised as a Little Brother to Stray Rabbits instead of to dogs.
Saint Harvey missed his smoking tobacco, too. He missed it tremendously, and temptation was always being forced upon him. You know how Americans are. We are not well used to saints and hermits, and when we have one we are proud of him and grateful to him, and we try to show that we are. We go to him and offer him a good cigar. People who would never have thought of offering Harvey Redding even a two-for-five cigar went out of their way to buy ten-cent cigars to offer to Saint Harvey of Riverbank. Sometimes they offered him two two-for-twenty-five cigars at one offering! And when he refused they seated themselves beside him and lighted one of the cigars and let the delicious aroma of the burning leaf float across his nostrils. Great Scott! Have you ever stopped smoking and had one of these fellows come around and let the delicious aroma of a really good cigar float across your nostrils?
I have seen pictures of Saint Anthony being tempted, and I will admit he was subjected to some considerable temptations, and withstood them, but he had never been a tobacco smoker. If he had been, and had given it up, and had then been tempted as Saint Harvey was tempted, he would have stood firm, I have no doubt, but he would have been quite considerably irritated. Giving up tobacco after long using it has that effect on the nerves. It had that effect on Saint Harvey’s nerves.
Along about that time Saint Harvey of Riverbank was the most easily irritated saint that ever lived, bar none.
CHAPTER XIX
The term of school drew to an end and July began, hot and with no sign of a refreshing rain for weeks to come. In his junkyard Saint Harvey sat and panted and fanned himself with a palm-leaf fan and felt miserable. He felt especially miserable in the region of his belt and just above and below it, for he had a huge pitcher of water always at his elbow and drank copiously, and he had a sensation of being merely a large globe full of water that swished to and fro as he moved.
He was seriously alarmed by this imagined condition. His continued existence seemed exceedingly precarious. It was not as if he had been eating good, solid food – ham and eggs, for example. When he drank another glass of water, it did not seem to go anywhere in particular; it seemed to flow down into an already vast ocean of water. When he thumped himself he was sure he heard waves splashing around inside of him, and he thought he knew what would happen if he was wounded deeply in any way: there would be a sort of Niagara for a minute or two, and then there would be left only a deflated, extinct Saint Harvey.
It was to this worried Saint Harvey that Moses Shuder came on the third of July, appealingly offering him fifty dollars for his remaining junk and one hundred dollars for a year’s lease of the junkyard and shanty.
For several nights Lem’s sandwich barrage had been especially trying to Saint Harvey.
“Cash money?” he asked Moses Shuder.
“Sure, cash money! I got it in my pocket the cash money. I could show it to you.”
He did. Saint Harvey looked at the crisp, new bills and at the pitcher of water at his elbow and at the lump of bread beside the pitcher. It was the hour for his frugal midday meal. From somewhere came the odor of ham frying.
“Please, Misder Redink!” urged Moses Shuder meekly, and from his pocket he took – with exquisite care – a large, costly-looking cigar.
Saint Harvey reached for the cigar.
“I ‘ll go you, dod-baste the dod-basted luck!” he exclaimed, and with the other hand he reached for the money.
From the shed at the rear of the yard came the sharp, angry yelps of two of Saint Harvey’s stray dogs beginning hostilities. Saint Harvey eased himself carefully out of his chair.
“You wait,” he said to Shuder.
Three minutes later three stray dogs, their tails trailing their legs, their eyes looking backward, dashed through the gate of the junkyard and down the street. Three pieces of old iron hurtled through the air after them.
“There!” puffed the Little Brother to Stray Dogs; “that’s what I think of you, you worthless curs!” – and then he added, “Dod-baste you!”
The next morning, which was the morning of the anniversary of the day of our glorious independence, Lem, finishing the task of the breakfast dishes, had the final and crowning indignity thrust upon him. He was sore, anyway, because Miss Sue had forbidden firecrackers and other noise-makers, and now she told him to go upstairs and make his own bed.
“You’re old enough, and you know enough, to make it,” she said, “and if you ain’t it’s time you was.”
“I won’t! I won’t do that! Boys don’t make beds. That’s girls’ work.”
“Lem!”
“Well – well, I don’t see why – well, I’m goin’ to, ain’t I? You don’t have to be in such a hurry about it, do you?”
“Lem!”
“All right, I’m goin’. But all right for you!” On his way up the stairs he passed Henrietta coming down, and she touched him lightly on the shoulder in sign of her good-will. She was going down to meet Carter Bruce, who had insisted that she see him that morning. She found him awaiting her on the porch, in a mood not exactly pleasant.
