The Secret of Toni

by Molly Elliot Seawell

“And now, Toni,” Paul urged, “pray try and learn to play the violin or do something to make a living.”

Toni shook his head dolefully.

“I don’t like making a living, and besides, if I marry Denise, what’s the use? Denise will take care of me—I know she will. She and my mother will make a living for me.”

Paul felt perfectly hopeless at this speech of Toni’s—there was no doing anything with him. Paul returned to school and Toni went back to his music lessons, but with no better success than before. He was now quite twelve years old, and he had become a public scandal in the town of Bienville. Even old Marie, who sat by the monument, scolded him for his idleness. At last, Madame Marcel, actuated by the press of public opinion, was forced to put Toni to work. As a great favor, Clery, the tailor, took Toni on trial, with a view to making him a professor of the sartorial art. Clery’s two sons, aged twelve and fourteen, could already make, each, a respectable pair of trousers, and Madame Marcel, tearfully laying aside her ambitions, implored Clery to make Toni a replica of the Clery boys.

Toni was frightened half to death at the prospect of going into a tailor’s shop, and his mother had literally to drag him there on the morning when he was to be inducted into his new profession. The shop was a small room, where two or three sewing-machines were perpetually going. There sat Clery and his two boys at work.

For the first week or two, Toni was employed in carrying parcels, which he found onerous enough. He had a way, however, of taking an hour to do an errand which ought only to have taken him ten minutes, and when during that first week in the tailor’s shop he was intrusted with a pair of Captain Ravenel’s well-worn trousers which had been pressed and cleaned, and it took him fifty-seven minutes to carry them from Clery’s shop to the Ravenels’ door, which was exactly four minutes away, Clery said that would never do.

As for Toni, these long absences from the shop meant getting back to his old haunts, and to the things he was not afraid of—the bridge by the river, and the sight of a cavalry troop going out for exercise, or a conversation with Jacques by way of encouragement. He had a feeling of terror when he sat in the shop with the tailor’s eye fixed on him, and the two boys, industriously sewing away on the sewing-machine, and eying him with contempt. He sat there, this wild and reckless Toni, who was thought to fear neither God, nor man, nor beast, the most frightened little boy imaginable. He could not have told, to save his life, what he was afraid of, but he knew that he was afraid—so much so that he stayed with Clery a whole year. In that time he learned absolutely nothing except to carry parcels, which he knew before.

If it had not been for the regard that Clery had for Madame Marcel, he would not have kept Toni a fortnight. As it was, he found it impossible to teach Toni the smallest thing about the tailoring trade. He could not operate a sewing-machine to save his life, nor learn to sew a stitch or to handle a smoothing-iron. Clery, who knew what a problem it was, thought long and anxiously over this problem of Madame Marcel’s. All through the winter days, he kept his eye on Toni, hoping that the boy might learn something; but when the leaves came in the spring, Toni knew no more about tailoring than he did when the autumn winds swept the trees bare.

It was then May, and Toni was finding the confinement of the shop almost more than his soul could bear. It seemed to him impossible that such a life should continue, away from the fresh air, away from the damp, sweet-smelling earth, away from horses and troopers. He could not even see Denise, for Clery had taught him one thing, and that was not to loiter by the wayside, and sometimes a whole week would pass without his having a word with the lady of his love.

And Denise, with the clairvoyance of childhood, saw, in the troubled depths of Toni’s black eyes, that he was soul-sick, and in her tender heart she felt sorry for him. Sometimes she would lie in wait for Toni under the branches of the acacia tree, and hand him out a tart or a piece of ginger bread, but even this had no taste in Toni’s mouth—life was so dark and drear to him. How he longed for those happy days when he scraped and talked in Hermann’s garret, or those still better days, when there was no thought of work, and he could spend the whole day, if he liked, lying on his stomach on the parapet of the bridge and watch the silvery backs of the fishes as they tumbled about in the rippling water! It seemed to him as if Denise was the only soul in the world who understood and pitied him. Even his mother, who he had hoped would let him live in idleness all his days, had done this strange and cruel thing of trying to make him work. Paul Verney wished him to work, Clery made him work, the Clery boys openly despised him for not working. Only Denise, of everybody in the wide world, knew what Toni himself knew—that he was never meant to work.