A plumber, living in the flat below, came up in the noon hour and soldered the holes in the tub, which O’More declared to be too black even for a pig’s trough, so he sped out around one of those many “corners,” of which at first Bird thought the city must be made, for a quart of boat paint and a brush.
“Yer aunt must be havin’ a hard time with her tradin’,” he remarked on his return, seeing that his wife had not come back to prepare dinner. But just as Bird had spread the table with various articles of cold food, whose abiding-places she very well knew, and was making Billy some little sandwiches to coax him to eat meat for which he had a distaste, Mrs. O’More came in, talkative and almost pleasant as the result of her morning’s bargaining.
Before night two narrow beds were carefully fitted into opposite sides of the little room, with the chest of drawers set between, in front of the now-closed door that led to the boys’ room, with the looking-glass hung above it. It was only a bit of a place and still very close and stuffy, but Billy and Bird had at least beds of their very own, if only in a niche apart, and Bird’s heart took fresh courage.
The next step was to coax her uncle to fill some long boxes with earth and set them inside the outer railing of the fire-escape. There is a law against filling up these little balconies with boxes or furniture of any kind, but Bird knew nothing about it, and her uncle regarded it as a sort of tyranny that he, a free-born citizen, should disregard. All Bird thought of was that she might plant morning-glory seeds in the earth so they would climb up the strings she fastened to the next story, and later on there was, in truth, a little bower blooming above that arid waste of bricks and ashes.
Bird and Billy on the Fire-escape.
After the new room was arranged, and permission given to Bird to see that Billy had what the doctor ordered that he should eat, and to take him out whenever he wanted to go, everything began to move more regularly and in some respects more comfortably, then Bird, to her dismay, saw the city summer, like a long roadway without a tree or bit of shade, stretching out before her.
There was not a book in the house and no one to tell her of the free library where she might get them, and school, where she hoped to find a sympathetic teacher for a friend, belonged to September three months away. No one who has always lived in the city can possibly understand what this change, with its confinement and lack of refined surroundings, meant to this young soul. To be poor, in the sense of having little to spend and plain food, she was accustomed,—in fact, she had much more to eat now, and through her uncle’s careless kindness she was seldom without dimes for the trolley rides to Battery Park “where the fishes lived,” or Central Park with the swan-boats that were to “make a man” of Billy. But to be shut away from the woods, the sky, the beauty of the sunsets, to have no flowers to gather and love, and to be brought face to face daily with all the ugliness of the life that is merely of the body, was almost too much for her courage.