Read Ebook: The Happy Isles by King Basil Williams John Alonzo Illustrator

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Ebook has 2639 lines and 118993 words, and 53 pages

If in the Gr?ne Gew?lbe you were told you could take anything you pleased you would have some of Tom Coburn's sense of enchantment as he stood by the book counter, waiting for the sign. He could see his mother dimly. More dimly still he could follow the movements of the shop-woman eager for a sale. Sample after sample, the wallpapers were unrolled, and hung on an easel where their flowers lighted the obscurity. Even at a distance he could do justice to their beauty, but more captivating than their glories were the wonders at his hand. Pages in which children and animals disported in colors far beyond those of nature were piled in neat little rows, and so tempting that he ached for the signal. He couldn't choose; there was too much to choose from. He would put out his hand without looking, guided by fate.

"Are you all right, darling?"

Curiously to the little boy, the question came just when he himself could perceive that the shop-woman had dived beneath the counter for another example of her wares. All the conditions were propitious. No one was entering the shop; no one was looking through the window. Without knowing the moralities of his act, he understood the need for secrecy. He stretched forth his arm. His fingers touched paper. In the fraction of a fraction of a second the object was within his overcoat, and pressed to his pounding heart.

A few minutes later his mother came smiling and chatting down toward the exit, giving her address, which the shop-woman jotted in a notebook. "I think it will have to be the pale-green background with the roses. The room is darkish, and it would light it up. But I'll decide by to-morrow, and let you know. Yes, that's right. Mrs. F.H. Grover, 321 Blaisdel Avenue. So much obliged to you. Good morning."

Having bowed themselves out they went some yards up the street before the little boy dared to express his new wonderment.

"Mudda, what did you say you was Mrs. F.H. Grover for? And we don't live on Blaisdel Avenue. We live on Orange Street."

"You mind your own business. Did you get your book? Well, that's what we went for, isn't it?"

The expedition having proved successful, it was tried on other planes. Now it was in the line of groceries; now in that of hardware; now in that of drygoods; now in that of fruit. Needed things could be used; useless things could be sold, especially after they had moved to distant neighborhoods. While the procedure didn't supply an income, it eked out very helpfully such income as remained.

It furnished, moreover, a motive in life, which was what they had lacked hitherto. There was something to which to give themselves. It was like devotion to an art, or even a religion. They could pursue it for its own sake. For her especially this outside interest appeased the wild something which wasted her within. She grew calmer, more reasonable. She slept and ate better. She had fewer fits of frenzy.

With but faint pangs of misgiving the little boy enjoyed himself. He enjoyed his finesse; he enjoyed the pride his mother took in him. In proportion as they grew more expert they enlarged their field, often reversing their r?les. There were times when he created the distraction, while she secreted any object within reach. They did this the more frequently after she became recognized as his superior in selection.

For a superior in selection the great department stores naturally offered the widest field for operation. They approached them, however, cautiously, going in and out and out and in for a good many days before they ventured on anything. When they did this at last it was amid the crowding and pushing of a bargain day.

The system evolved had the masterly note of simplicity. The little boy carried a satchel, of the kind in which school-boys sometimes carry books. He stood near his mudda, or farther away, according to the dictates of the moment's strategy. On the first occasion he kept close to her, sincerely admiring a display of colored silk scarves conspicuously marked down to the price at which it was intended, even before their importation, that they should be sold. Women thronged about the counter, the little boy and his mudda having much ado to edge themselves into the front to where these products of the loom could be handled.

The picking and choosing done, the mother still showed some indecision.

"I'll just ask my sister to step over here," she confided to the saleswoman. "Her judgment is so much better than mine. Run over, dear, to your Aunt Mary," she begged of the boy, "and ask her to come and speak to me." Holding the scarf noticeably in her hands, she smiled at the saleswoman affably. "I'll just make room for this lady, who seems to be in a hurry."

She did not step back; she merely allowed herself to be crowded out. From the front row she receded to the second, from the second to the third. Keeping in sight of the saleswoman, she looked this way and that, plainly for Aunt Mary to appear. At times she made little dashes, as Aunt Mary seemed to come within sight. From these she did not fail to return, but on each occasion to a point more distant from that of her departure. With sufficient time the poor saleswoman, who had fifty other customers to attend to, would be likely to forget her, for a few minutes if no more.

The moment seemed to have come. With the scarf thrown jauntily over her arm where anyone could see it, the mother forced her way amid the crowds in search of her little boy. If intercepted she had her explanation. He had gone on an errand, and had not come back. When she had found him she would return and pay for the scarf, or decide not to take it. Her story couldn't help being plausible.

"Aunt Mary" was a spot agreed upon near one of the side doors, and far from the center of interest in silk scarves. Agreed upon was also a little bit of comedy, for the benefit of possible lookers-on.

"Oh, my dear, I've kept you waiting so long. I'm so sorry. Tell your mother this is the best I could do for her. I knew you were waiting, so I didn't let the lady wrap it up. Open your bag, and I'll put it in."

The bag closed, the little boy went out through one door, and his mother through another. The point where she was to rejoin him was not so far away but that he could walk to it alone.

"It's all right, mudda, isn't it?"

He asked this after their campaign had been carried on for a good part of a year, and when they were nearing Christmas. He was now supposed to be seven. For reasons he could not explain the great game lost its zest. In as far as he understood himself he hated the sneaking and the secrecy. He hated the lying too, but lying was so much a part of their everyday life that he might as well have hated bread.

"Of course it's all right," his mother snapped. "Haven't I said so time and again? We get away with it, don't we? And if it wasn't all right we shouldn't be able to do that."

Silenced by this reasoning, even if something in his heart was not convinced by it, he prepared for the harvest of the festival. Christmas was an exciting time, even to Tom Coburn. Perhaps it was more exciting to him than to other boys, since he had so much to do with shops. As long ago as the middle of November he had noted the first stirrings of new energy. After that he had watched the degrees through which they had ripened to a splendor in which toys, books, skis, skates, sleds, and all the paraphernalia of young joyousness, made a bright thing of the world. Where there was so much, the profusion went beyond desire. One of these objects at a time, or two, or three, might have found him envious; but he couldn't cope with such abundance. He could concentrate, therefore, all the more on the pair of fur-lined mittens which his mother promised him, if, as she expressed it, they could haul it off.

The little boy's heart began to ache with a great fear. Perhaps he shouldn't get them. Unless he got them by Christmas Day the spell of the occasion would be gone. To get them a week later wouldn't be the same thing. It would not be Christmas. He couldn't remember having kept a Christmas hitherto. He couldn't remember ever having longed for what might be called an article of luxury. The yearning was new to him, and because new, it consumed him. Whenever he thought that the happiness might after all elude him he had to grind his teeth to keep back a sob, but he could not prevent the filling of his eyes with tears.

It was not only Christmas Eve but late in the day before the mother found her opportunity. At half-past five the counter where fur-lined mittens were displayed was crowded with poor women who hadn't had the money or the time to make their purchases earlier. In among them pressed Tom Coburn's mother, making her selection, and asking the price.

"Now where's that boy? His hands grow so quick that I can't be sure of anything without trying them on."

With a despairing smile at the saleswoman, she followed her usual tactics of being elbowed from the counter, while she looked about vainly for the boy. At the right moment she slipped into the pushing, struggling mass of tired women, where she could count on being no more remarked than a single crow in a flock. The mittens were in the muff which was the prize of an earlier expedition. At a side door the boy was waiting where she had left him. Without pausing for words she whispered commandingly.

"Come along quick."

He went along quick, but also happily, projecting himself into the "surprise" to which he would wake on Christmas morning.

They had reached the sidewalk when a hand was laid on the mother's shoulder.

"Will you come back a minute, please?"

The words were so polite that for the first few seconds the boy was not alarmed. A lady was speaking, a lady like any other lady, unless it was that her manner was quieter, more forceful, more sure of itself, than he was accustomed to among women. But what he never forgot during all the rest of his life was the look on his mother's face. As he came to analyze it later it was one of inner surrender. She had come to the point which she had long foreseen as her objective. She had reached the end. But in spite of surrender, and though she grew bloodlessly pale, she was still determined to show fight.

"What do you want me for?"

"If you'll step this way I'll tell you."

"I don't know that I care to do that. I'm going home."

"You'd better come quietly. You won't gain anything by making a fuss."

A second lady, also forceful and sure of herself, having joined them they pushed their way back through the throng. At the glove counter a place was made for them. The saleswoman was beckoned to. The woman who had stopped them at the door continued to take the lead.

"Now, will you show us what you've got in your muff?"

She produced the mittens. "Yes, I have got these. I bought and paid for them."

The saleswoman gave her account of the incident. Women shoppers gathered round. Floorwalkers came up.

"It's a lie; it's a lie!" the boy heard his mother cry out, as the girl behind the counter told her tale. "If I didn't pay for them it was because I forgot. Here's the money. I'll pay for them now. What do you take me for?"

"No; you won't pay for them now. That's not the way we do business. Just come along this way."

"I'm not going nowheres else. If you won't take the money you can go without it. Leave me alone, and let me take my little boy home."

Her voice had the screaming helplessness of women in the grasp of forces without pity. A floorwalker laid his hand on her shoulder, compelling her to turn round.

"Don't you touch me," she shouted. "If I've got to go anywheres I can go without your tearing the clothes off my back, can't I?"

For the little boy it was the last touch of humiliation. Rushing at the floorwalker, he kicked him in the shins.

"Don't you hit my mudda. I won't let you."

A second floorwalker held the youngster back. Some of the crowd laughed. Others declared it a monstrous thing that women of the sort should have such fine-looking children.

Presently they were surging through the crowd again, toward a back region of the premises. The boy, not crying but panting as if spent by a long race, held his mother by the skirt; on the other side one of the forceful women had her by the arm. He saw that his mother's hat had been knocked to one side, and that a mesh of her dark hair had broken loose. He remembered this picture, and how the shoppers, wherever they passed, made a lane for them, shocked by the sight of their disgrace.

They came to an office, where their party, his mother, himself, the two forceful women, and two floorwalkers, were shut in with an elderly man who sat behind a desk. It was still the first of the forceful women who took the lead.

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