"I wonder!"
Taking two nickels from her small rusty bag, she rose, leaving the plate of cold soup almost untouched. She said good-by with her peculiarly friendly little smile, deposited the blue check and the two nickels at the cash counter, and went back to her afternoon's work.
WILLIAM, A MODERN DRAMA[3]
[3] Drawn from the records of the Juvenile Protective Association, Chicago.
The curtain is about to fall upon a human drama as full of complicating agencies and dramatic ironies as the most exacting either of Greeks or of moderns could require.
The dramatis personae are: a colored youth of twenty-two years; his aged mother (the father disappeared while the youth was still a child in Kansas); a friend who failed him and then too late repented; a partner; a dishonest clerk; a lawyer of similar type; and a judge according to the letter of the law. The acts are only three and brief.
Act I shows William at work for a large firm in Missouri at $9 a week. He manages to live on $3, sending $6 to his mother. He could not write; she could not read. But the weekly money order became the tryst of mother and son, and by it she knew that all was well with him. Among his fellow workmen was one, also a William, who seemed friendly and like William I, anxious to live economically. The two Williams shared a room, and all went well for about three months.
One pay day, William II borrowed from William I the $6 that should go to the mother, but only for a day or so, to be returned surely before the end of the week. But the man disappeared, and with him vanished the money. Then William I went to the little clothes press, and not having a suit of his own, took one of William II's, and pawned it for $6, and sent the money to his mother according to his word. That night, repentant but penniless, William II returned. He expressed himself as well pleased with what had been done with his suit, satisfied to have the money raised by any means possible. So the two, reconciled, slept. But William II rising early in the morning, went for an officer, and charging his room-mate with theft, had him arrested.
"He slep' with me all night there, and in the mawnin he don' have me arrested!"—thus William I mourned his false friend.
So Act I closes with our hero in the penitentiary, locked in for two years. But William II's repentance bore a late fruit. During the two years, he sent out of his own money each week the $6 to the mother of his friend, that she might never know the truth.