A Cathedral Singer | Page 7

his correction:
"And I only say mister when I am selling papers and am not at home."
"What do you say when not selling papers and when you are at home?" asked the man, forced to a smile.
"I say 'sir,' if I say anything," retorted the lad, flaring up, but still polite.
The man looked at him with increasing interest. Another word in the lad's speech had caught his attention--Southerner.
That word had been with him a good deal in recent years; he had not quite seemed able to get away from it. Nearly all classes of people in New York who were not Southerners had been increasingly reminded that the Southerners were upon them. He had satirically worked it out in his own mind that if he were ever pushed out of his own position, it would be some Southerner who pushed him. He sometimes thought of the whole New York professional situation as a public wonderful awful dinner at which almost nothing was served that did not have a Southern flavor as from a kind of pepper. The guests were bound to have administered to them their shares of this pepper; there was no getting away from the table and no getting the pepper out of the dinner. There was the intrusion of the South into every delicacy.
"We are Southerners," the lad had announced decisively; and there the flavor was again, though this time as from a mere pepper-box in a school basket. Thus his next remark was addressed to his own thoughts as well as to the lad:
"And so you are a Southerner!" he reflected audibly, looking down at the Southern plague in small form.
"Why, yes, Mister, we are Southerners," replied the lad, with a gay and careless patriotism; and as giving the handy pepper-box a shake, he began to dust the air with its contents: "I was born on an old Southern battle-field. When Granny was born there, it had hardly stopped smoking; it was still piled with wounded and dead Northerners. Why, one of the worst batteries was planted in our front porch."
This enthusiasm as to the front porch was assumed to be acceptable to the listener. The battery might have been a Cherokee rose.
The man had listened with a quizzical light in his eyes.
"In what direction did you say that battery was pointed?"
"I didn't say; but it was pointed up this way, of course."
The man laughed outright.
"And so you followed in the direction of the deadly Southern shell and came north--as a small grape-shot!"
"But, Mister, that was long ago. They had their quarrel out long ago. That's the way we boys do: fight it out and make friends again. Don't you do that way?"
"It's a very good way to do," said the man. "And so you sell papers?"
"I sell papers to people in the park, Mister, and back up on the avenue. Granny is particular. I'm not a regular newsboy."
"I heard you singing. Does anybody teach you?"
"Granny."
"And so your grandmother is your music teacher?"
It was the lad's turn to laugh.
"Granny isn't my grandmother; Granny is my mother."
Toppling over in the dust of imagination went a gaunt granny image; in its place a much more vital being appeared just behind the form of the lad, guarding him even now while he spoke.
"And so your mother takes pupils?"
"Only me."
"Has any one heard you sing?"
"Only she."
It had become more and more the part of the man during this colloquy to smile; he felt repeatedly in the flank of his mind a jab of the comic spur. Now he laughed at the lad's deadly preparedness; business competition in New York had taught him that he who hesitates a moment is lost. The boy seemed ready with his answers before he heard the man's questions.
"Do you mind telling me your name?"
"My name is Ashby. Ashby Truesdale. We come from an old English family. What is your name, and what kind of family do you come from, Mister?"
"And where do you live?"
The lad wheeled, and strode to the edge of the rock,--the path along there is blasted out of solid rock,--and looking downward, he pointed to the first row of buildings in the distant flats.
"We live down there. You see that house in the middle of the block, the little old one between the two big ones?"
The man did not feel sure.
"Well, Mister, you see the statue of Washington and Lafayette?"
The man was certain he saw Washington and Lafayette.
"Well, from there you follow my finger along the row of houses till you come to the littlest, oldest, dingiest one. You see it now, don't you? We live up under the roof."
"What is the number?"
"It isn't any number. It's half a number. We live in the half that isn't numbered; the other half gets the number."
"And you take your music lessons in one half?"
"Why, yes,