V
Next morning came a letter written in a large and careful hand: "My dear Alfred,—I hope these few lines find you well, as they don't leave me at present. I fell down the office stairs last night and got a twist to my inside, so can't come to-day. Kiss Liz from me, and tell her to be good. From your loving mother, Mrs. Reeve."
Day followed day, and the mother did not come. The children lived on, almost without thought of change in the daily round, the common task.
It was early in Christmas week, and the female officers were doing their best to excite merriment over the decorations. Snow was falling, but the flakes, after hesitating for a moment, thawed into sludge on the surface of the asphalte yard. Seeing Alfred shivering about under the shed, the superintendent sent him to the office for a plan of the school drainage, which had lately been reconstructed on the most sanitary principles. The boy found the plan on the table, under a little brass dog which someone had given the superintendent as a paper-weight.
"A dog!" he said to himself, taking it up carefully. It was a setter with a front paw raised as though it sighted game. Alfred stroked its back and felt its muzzle. Then he pushed it along the polished table, and thought of all the things he could make it do, if only he had it for a bit. He put it down, patted its head again with his cold hand, and took up the plan. But somehow the dog suddenly looked at him with a friendly smile, and seemed to move its tail and silky ears. He caught it up, glanced round, slipped it up his waistcoat, and ran as hard as he could go.
"Thank you my boy," said the superintendent, taking the plan. "You've not been here long, have you?"
"Oh yes, sir, a tremenjus long time!" said Alfred, shaking all over, whilst the dog's paw kept scratching through his shirt.
"My memory isn't what it was," sighed the superintendent to himself, and he thought of the days when he had struggled to learn the name at least of every boy in his charge.
That afternoon Alfred went into school filled with mixed shame, apprehension, and importance, such as Eve might have felt if she could have gone back to a girls' school with the apple. Lessons began with a "combined recitation" from Shakespeare.
"Now," said the teacher, "go on at 'Mercy on me.'"
"'Methinks nobody should be sad but I,'" shouted seventy mouths, opening like one in a unison of sing-song.
"Now, you there!" cried the teacher. "You with your hand up your waistcoat! You're not attending. Go on at 'Only for wantonness.'"
"'By my Christendom,'" Alfred blurted out, almost bringing dog and all to light in his terror:
"'So I were out of prison and kept sheep,
I should be merry as the day is long.
And so I should be here, but that I doubt—'"
"That'll do," said the teacher, "Now attend."
The seventy joined in with "My uncle practises," and Alfred turned from red to white.
At tea the table jammed the hidden dog against his chest. When he sought relief by sitting back over the form, Clem corrected the irregular posture with a pin. At bedtime he undressed in terror lest the creature should jump out and patter on the boards as live things will. But at last the gas was turned off at the main, and he cautiously groped for his pet among his little heap of clothes under the bed. That night Clem's most outrageous story could not attract him. He roamed Elysian fields with his dog. Like all toys, it was something better than alive. And certainly no mortal setter ever played so many parts. It hunted rats up the nightgown sleeves, and caught burglars by the throat as they stole into bed. It tracked murderers over the sheet's pathless waste. It coursed deer up and down the hills and valleys of his knees. It drove sheep along the lanes of the striped blanket. It rescued drowning sailors from the vasty deep around the bed. It dug out frozen travellers from the snowdrifts of the pillow. And at last it slept soundly, kennelled between two warm hands, and continued its adventures in dreams.
At the first note of the bugle Alfred sprang up in bed, sure that the drill-sergeant would come to pull him out first. As he marched listlessly up and down the yard at drill, the wind blew pitilessly, and the dog gnawed at him till he was red and sore. At meals and in school he was sure that secret eyes were watching him. He searched everywhere for some hole where he might hide the thing. But the building was too irreproachable to shelter a mouse.
Next day was Christmas Eve. He had heard from the "permanents" that at Christmas each child received an apple, an orange, and twelve nuts in a paper bag. He hungered for them. Even the ordinary meals had become the chief points of interest in life, and the days were named from the dinners. He was forgetting the scanty and uncertain food of his home, now that dinner came as regularly as in a rich man's house or the Zoo. And Christmas promised something far beyond the ordinary. There was to be pork. At Christmas, at all events, he would lay himself out for perfect enjoyment, undisturbed by terrors. He would take the dog back, and be at peace again.
Just before tea-time he saw the superintendent pass over to the infants' side. He stole along the sounding corridors to the office, and noiselessly opened the door. There was somebody there. But it was only Looney, who, being able to count like a calculating machine because no other thoughts disturbed him, had been set to tie up in bundles of a hundred each certain pink and blue envelopes which lay in heaps on the floor. Each envelope contained a Christmas card with a text, and every child on Christmas morning found one laid ready on its plate at breakfast. A wholesale stationer supplied them, and a benevolent lady paid the bill.
"Leave me alone," cried Looney from habit, "I ain't doin' nuffin."
"All right," said Alfred airily; "I've only come to fetch somethink."
But just at that moment he heard the superintendent's footstep coming along the passage. There was no escape and no time for thought. With the instinct of terror he put the dog down noiselessly beside Looney on the carpet, drew quickly back, and stood rigid beside the door as it opened.
"Hullo!" said the superintendent, "what are you doing here?"
"Nothink, sir, only somethink," Alfred stammered.
"What's the meaning of that?" said the superintendent.
"I wanted to speak to that boy very pertikler, sir," said Alfred.
The superintendent looked at Looney. But Looney in turning round had caught sight of the dog at his side, and was gazing at it open-mouthed, as a countryman gazes at a pigeon produced from a conjuror's hat. Suddenly he pounced upon it as though he was afraid it would fly away, and kept it close hidden under his hands.
"Oh, that's what you wanted to speak about so particular, is it?" said the superintendent. "That paperweight's been lost these two or three days, and it was you who stole it, was it?"
"Please sir," said Alfred, beginning to cry, "'e never done it, and I didn't mean no 'arm."
"Oh, enough of that," said the superintendent. "I've got other things to do besides standing here arguing with you all night. I'll send for you both at bed-time, and then I'll teach you to come stealing about here, you young thieves. Now drop that, and clear out!" he added more angrily to Looney, who was still chuckling with astonishment over his prize.
So they were both well beaten that night, and Looney never knew why, but took it as an incident in his chain of dim sensations. Next day they alone did not receive either the Christmas card or the paper bag. But after dinner Clem had them up before him, and gave them each a nutshell and a piece of orange-peel, adding the paternal advice: "Look 'ere, my sons, if you two can't pinch better than that, you'd best turn up pinchin' altogether till you see yer father do it."
On Boxing Day Mrs. Reeve at last contrived to come again. She was informed that she could not see her son because he was kept indoors for stealing.
After this the machinery of the institution had its own way with him. It was as though he were passed through each of its scientific appliances in turn—the steam washing machine, the centrifugal steam wringer, the hot-air drying horse, the patent mangle, the gas ovens, the heating pipes, the spray baths, the model bakery, and the central engine. After drifting through the fourth standard he was sent every other day to a workshop to fit him for after life. Looney joined a squad of little gardeners which shuffled about the walks, two deep, with spades shouldered like rifles. Alfred was sent to the shoemaker's, as there was a vacancy there. He did such work as he was afraid not to do, and all went well as long as nothing happened.
Only two events marked the lapse of time. Mrs. Reeve did not recover from the "twist in her inside." In answer to her appeal, a brother-in-law in the north took charge of her two remaining children, and then she died. It was about three years after Alfred had entered the school. He was sorry; but the next day came, and the next, and there was no visible change. The bell rang: breakfast, dinner, and tea succeeded each other. It was difficult to imagine that he had suffered any loss.
The other event was more startling, and it helped to obliterate the last thought of his mother's death. After a brief interval of parental guidance, Clem had returned to the school for about the tenth time. As usual he devoted his vivacious intellect chiefly to Looney, in whose progress he expressed an almost grandmotherly interest. Looney sputtered and made sport as usual, till one night an unbaptized idea was somehow wafted into the limbo of his brain. He was counting over the faggots in the great store-room under his dormitory when the thought came. Soon afterwards he went upstairs, and quietly got into bed. It was a model dormitory. So many cubic feet of air were allowed for each child. The temperature was regulated according to thermometers hung on the wall. Windows and ventilators opened on each side of the room to give a thorough draught across the top. The beds had spring mattresses of steel, and three striped blankets each, and spotted red and white counterpanes such as give pauper dormitories such a cheerful look. Looney and Clem slept side by side. Before midnight the dormitory was full of suffocating smoke. The alarm was raised. For a time it was thought that all the boys had escaped down an iron staircase lately erected outside the building. But when the flames had been put out in the store-room below, the bodies of Looney and Clem were found clasped together on Clem's bed. Looney's arms were twisted very tightly around Clem's neck, and people said he had perished in trying to save his friend. Next Sunday the chaplain preached on the text, "And in death they were not divided." Their names were inscribed side by side on a little monument set up to commemorate the event, and underneath was carved a passage from the Psalms: "Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain."