So the child skulked about, alternately ignored or whined over, cursed or caressed, petted or beaten, sometimes into insensibility.
Otherwise she followed them about instinctively, like a crippled kitten.
Then there came one stifling night in that earthly hell called a New York tenement, when little Stephanie Quest, tortured by prickly heat, gasping for the relief which the western lightning promised, crept out to the fire escape and lay there gasping like a minnow.
Fate, lurking in the reeking room behind her, where her drugged parents lay in merciful stupor, unloosed a sudden breeze from the thunderous west, which blew the door shut with a crash. It did not awaken the man. But, among other things, it did jar loose a worn-out gas jet… That was the verdict, anyway.
Pluris est oculatus testis unus quam auriti decem.
But, as always, the Most High remained silent, offering no testimony to the contrary.
This episode in the career of Stephanie Quest happened in the days of the Great Administration, an administration not great in the sense of material national prosperity, great only in spirit and in things of the mind and soul.
Even the carpenter, Albrecht Schmidt, across the hallway in the tenement, rose to the level of some unexplored spiritual stratum, for he had a wife and five children and only his wages, and he did not work every week.
"Nein," he said, when approached for contributions toward the funeral, "I haff no money for dead people. I don't giff, I don't lend. Vat it iss dot Shakespeare says? Don't neffer borrow und don't neffer lend noddings… But I tell you what I do! I take dot leedle child!"
The slim, emaciated child, frightened white, had flattened herself against the dirty wall of the hallway to let the policemen and ambulance surgeon pass.
The trampling, staring inmates of the tenement crowded the stairs, a stench of cabbage and of gas possessed the place.
The carpenter's wife, a string around her shapeless middle, and looking as though she might add to her progeny at any minute, came to the door of her two-room kennel.
"Poor little Stephanie," she said, "you come right in and make you'self at home along of us!"
And, as the child did not stir, seemingly frozen there against the stained and battered wall, the carpenter said:
"Du! Stephanie! Hey you, Steve! Come home und get you some breakfast right away quick!"
"Is that their kid?" inquired a policeman coming out of the place of death and wiping the sweat from his face.
"Sure. I take her in."
"Well, you'll have to fix that matter later – "
"I fix it now. I take dot little Steve for mine – "
The policeman yawned over the note book in which he was writing.
"It ain't done that way, I'm tellin' you! Well, all right! You can keep her until the thing is fixed up – " He went on writing.
The carpenter strode over to the child; his blond hair bristled, his beard was fearsome and like an ogre's. But his voice trembled with Teuton sentiment.
"You got a new mamma, Steve!" he rumbled. "Now, you run in und cry mit her so much as you like." He pulled the little girl gently toward his rooms; the morbid crowd murmured on the stairs at the sight of the child of suicides.
"Mamma, here iss our little Steve alretty!" growled Schmidt. "Now, py Gott! I got to go to my job! A hellofa business iss it! Schade – immer – schade! Another mouth to feed, py Gott!"
FOREWORD
On the Christmas-tide train which carried homeward those Saint James schoolboys who resided in or near New York, Cleland Junior sat chattering with his comrades in a drawing-room car entirely devoted to the Saint James boys, and resounding with the racket of their interminable gossip and laughter.
The last number of their school paper had come out on the morning of their departure for Christmas holidays at home; every boy had a copy and was trying to read it aloud to his neighbour; shrieks of mirth resounded, high, shrill arguments, hot disputes, shouts of approval or of protest.
"Read this! Say, did you get this!" cried a tall boy named Grismer. "Jim Cleland wrote it! What do you know about our own pet novelist – "
"Shut up!" retorted Cleland Junior, blushing and abashed by accusation of authorship.
"He wrote it all right!" repeated Grismer exultantly. "Oh, girls! Just listen to this mush about the birds and the bees and the bright blue sky – "
"Jim, you're all right! That's the stuff!" shouted another. "The girl in the story's a peach, and the battle scene is great!"
"Say, Jim, where do you get your battle stuff?" inquired another lad respectfully.
"Out of the papers, of course," replied Cleland Junior. "All you have to do is to read 'em, and you can think out the way it really looks."
The only master in the car, a young Harvard graduate, got up from his revolving chair and came over to Cleland Junior.
The boy rose immediately, standing slender and handsome in the dark suit of mourning which he still wore after two years.
"Sit down, Jim," said Grayson, the master, seating himself on the arm of the boy's chair. And, as the boy diffidently resumed his seat: "Nice little story of yours, this. Just finished it. Co you still think of making writing your profession?"
"I'd like to, sir."
"Many are called, you know," remarked the master with a smile.
"I know, sir. I shall have to take my chance."
Phil Grayson, baseball idol of the Saint James boys, and himself guilty of several delicate verses in the Century and Scribner's, sat on the padded arm of the revolving chair and touched his slight moustache thoughtfully.
"One's profession, Jim, ought to be one's ruling passion. To choose a profession, choose what you most care to do in your leisure moments. That should be your business in life."
The boy said:
"I like about everything, Mr. Grayson, but I think I had rather write than anything else."
John Belter, a rotund youth, listening and drawing caricatures on the back of the school paper, suggested that perhaps Cleland Junior was destined to write the Great American Novel.
Grayson said pleasantly:
"It was the great American ass who first made inquiries concerning the Great American Novel."
"Oh, what a knock!" shouted Oswald Grismer, delighted.
But young Belter joined in the roars of laughter, undisturbed, saying very coolly:
"Do you mean, sir, that the Great American Novel will never be written, or that it has already been written several times, or that there isn't any such thing?"
"I mean all three, Jack," explained Grayson, smiling. "Let me see that caricature you have been so busy over."
"It's – it's you, sir."
"What of it?" retorted the young master. "Do you think I can't laugh at myself?"
He took the paper so reluctantly tendered:
"Jack, you are a terror! You young rascal, you've made me look like a wax-faced clothing dummy!"
"Tribute to your faultless apparel, sir, and equally faultless features – "
A shriek of laughter from the boys who had crowded around to see; Grayson himself laughing unfeignedly and long; then the babel of eager, boyish voices again, loud, emphatic, merciless in discussion of the theme of the moment.
Into the swaying car and down the aisle came a negro in spotless white, repeating invitingly:
"First