PETER

Miss Wald of the Nurses’ Settlement told me the story of Peter, and I set it down here as I remember it. She will forgive the slips. Peter has nothing to forgive; rather, he would not have were he alive. He was all to the good for the friendship he gave and took. Looking at it across the years, it seems as if in it were the real Peter. The other, who walked around, was a poor knave of a pretender.

This was Miss Wald’s story:—

He came to me with the card of one of our nurses, a lanky, slipshod sort of fellow of nineteen or thereabouts. The nurse had run across him begging in a tenement. When she asked him why he did that, he put a question himself: “Where would a fellow beg if not among the poor?” And now there he stood, indifferent, bored if anything, shiftless, yet with some indefinite appeal, waiting to see what I would do. She had told him that he had better go and see me, and he had come. He had done his part; it was up to me now.

He was a waiter, he said, used to working South in the winter, but it was then too late. He had been ill. He suppressed a little hacking cough that told its own story; he was a “lunger.” Did he tramp? Yes, he said, and I noticed that his breath smelled of whisky. He made no attempt to hide the fact.

I explained to him that I might send him to some place in the country where he could get better during the winter, but that it would be so much effort wasted if he drank. He considered a while, and nodded in his curious detached way; he guessed he could manage without it, if he had plenty of hot coffee. The upshot of it was that he accepted my condition and went.

[Larger Image]