His Family by Ernest Poole (popular ebook readers txt) 📕

are to go on like this I can’t let him board here any more. If he had let me know before I’d have taken him from you sooner. You’ll miss the four dollars a week he pays.”

The woman swallowed fiercely. The flush on her face had deepened. She scowled to keep back the tears.

“We can all die for all I care! I’ve about got to the end of my rope!”

“I see you have.” Deborah’s voice was low. “You’ve made a hard plucky fight, Mrs. Berry. Are there any empty rooms left in this building?”

“Yes, two upstairs. What do you want to know for?”

“I’m going to rent them for you. I’ll arrange it tonight with the janitor, on condition that you promise to move your children tomorrow upstairs and keep them there until this is over. Will you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s sensible. And I’ll have one of the visiting nurses here within an hour.”

“Thanks.”

“And later on we’ll have a talk.”

“All right⁠—”

“Good night, Mrs. Berry.”

“Good night, Miss Gale, I’m much obliged.⁠ ⁠… Say, wait a minute! Will you?” The wife had followed them out on the landing and she was clutching Deborah’s arm. “Why can’t the nurse give him something,” she whispered, “to put him to sleep for good and all? It ain’t right to let a man suffer like that! I can’t stand it! I’m⁠—I’m⁠—” she broke off with a sob. Deborah put one arm around her and held her steadily for a moment.

“The nurse will see that he sleeps,” she said. “Now, John,” she added, presently, when the woman had gone into the room, “I want you to get your things together. I’ll have the janitor move them upstairs. You sleep there tonight, and tomorrow morning come to see me at the school.”

“All right, Miss Deborah, much obliged. I’ll be all right. Good night, sir⁠—”

“Good night, my boy,” said Roger, and suddenly he cleared his throat. He followed his daughter down the stairs. A few minutes she talked with the janitor, then joined her father in the court.

“I’m sorry I took you up there,” she said. “I didn’t know the man was sick.”

“Who are they?” he asked.

“Poor people,” she said. And Roger flinched.

“Who is this boy?”

“A neighbor of theirs. His mother, who was a widow, died about two years ago. He was left alone and scared to death lest he should be ‘put away’ in some big institution. He got Mrs. Berry to take him in, and to earn his board he began selling papers instead of coming to our school. So our school visitor looked him up. Since then I have been paying his board from a fund I have from friends uptown, and so he has finished his schooling. He’s to graduate next week. He means to be a stenographer.”

“How old is he?”

“Seventeen,” she replied.

“How was he crippled? Born that way?”

“No. When he was a baby his mother dropped him one Saturday night when she was drunk. He has never been able to sit down. He can lie down or he can stand. He’s always in pain, it never stops. I learned that from the doctor I took him to see. But whenever you ask him how he feels you get the same answer always: ‘Fine, thank you.’ He’s a fighter, is John.”

“He looks it. I’d like to help that boy⁠—”

“All right⁠—you can help him,” Deborah said. “You’ll find him quite a tonic.”

“A what?”

“A tonic,” she repeated. And with a sudden tightening of her wide and sensitive mouth, Deborah added slowly, “Because, though I’ve known many hungry boys, Johnny Geer is the hungriest of them all⁠—hungry to get on in life, to grow and learn and get good things, get friends, love, happiness, everything!” As she spoke of this child in her family, over her strong quiet face there swept a fierce, intent expression which struck Roger rather cold. What a fight she was making, this daughter of his, against what overwhelming odds. But all he said to her was this:

“Now let’s look at something more cheerful, my dear.”

“Very well,” she answered with a smile. “We’ll go and see Isadore Freedom.”

“Who’s he?”

“Isadore Freedom,” said Deborah, “is the beginning of something tremendous. He came from Russian Poland⁠—and the first American word he learned over there was ‘freedom.’ So in New York he changed his name to that⁠—very solemnly, by due process of law. It cost him seven dollars. He had nine dollars at the time. Isadore is a flame, a kind of a torch in the wilderness.”

“How does the flame earn his living?”

“At first in a sweatshop,” she replied. “But he came to my school five nights a week, and at ten o’clock when school was out he went to a little basement café, where he sat at a corner table, drank one glass of Russian tea and studied till they closed at one. Then he went to his room, he told me, and used to read himself to sleep. He slept as a rule four hours. He said he felt he needed it. Now he’s a librarian earning fifteen dollars a week, and having all the money he needs he has put the thought of it out of his life and is living for education⁠—education in freedom. For Isadore has studied his name until he thinks he knows what it means.”

They found him in a small public library on an ill-smelling ghetto street. The place had been packed with people, but the clock had just struck ten and the readers were leaving reluctantly, many with books under their arms. At sight of Deborah and her father, Isadore leaped up from his desk and came quickly to meet them with outstretched hands.

“Oh, this is splendid! Good evening!” he cried. Hardly more than a boy, perhaps twenty-one, he was short of frame but large of limb. He had wide stooping shoulders and reddish hollows in his dark cheeks. Yet there was a springiness in his step, vigor and warmth in the grip of his hand, in the very curl of his thick black hair, in his voice,