Spring Street | Page 2

house and take him.
Somewhere across the street a phonograph started blaring out a jazz
piece. Then it stopped as suddenly as the shouts of the children. A lot
they cared, he thought. All his father's death meant to them was the
irritation of stopping the phonograph.
The blind on a window of the house next door was pulled to one side,
emitting a shaft of light across the path he paced. A head--the head of
the little girl his father had so often petted as he strode up the walk
when he came home from work--shut off the light. He heard a scuffle
of feet and she was pulled from the window.
Mrs. Sprockett's husband, in his shirt sleeves, came over and stood on
the sidewalk.

"Is Maude in there with your mother?" he asked.
John looked at him, without a word.
"Beg your pardon," said Mrs. Sprockett's husband, backing away. "She
didn't say--didn't leave any word--and the baby--and--"
The crying of the Sprockett baby could be heard faintly.
"I didn't think--I--I----" and Mrs. Sprockett's husband turned
awkwardly and went back to the house.
Everything was quiet, so quiet that it startled him. A mocking bird
warbled in a tree by the porch. He remembered his father saying one
night that there was no music sweeter than its song.
Fragments of memory came to him vividly. His father pulling him from
under a bed the night he was punished for stealing apples at the corner
grocery store. His father reading David Copperfield to him and their
mutual rejoicing when Betsy Trotwood lectured David's firm stepfather.
His father closing his eyes and leaning back and a soft smile on his lips
as his mother played "Annie Laurie."
These thoughts carried him away so that he stopped quickly when they
left him. For a moment he could not realize that death was taking his
father. He felt he had been out of his head, walking out there, that it
was all a horrible nightmare. He almost began to laugh and dash up to
the door to find things as they always had been. He staggered back with
an impulse to shout in his agony as realization came back to him.
A wild hope seized him. He had been walking there for hours, for days
it seemed, and the door had not opened. Perhaps the doctor was wrong,
after all. Perhaps his father had rallied strength and would live. His
heart beat exultingly. Perhaps----
And then the door opened.
* * * * *

He knew that his father had left them nothing but what was in the house.
He had not spoken to his mother about it. He had been beside her bed
until after dawn when, with a gentle sigh, she had slipped off into a
merciful sleep.
Mrs. Sprockett, who left them only for a few minutes in the morning,
he thanked with a guilty feeling of having not appreciated what she had
done. The doctor had spoken to him kindly.
"My boy," he said, "this comes to all of us. Your father passed as
gently as he lived. Remember, there's no sorrow nor suffering where he
has gone and--be good to your mother."
It was not until after the funeral that John and his mother talked of the
life before them. He told her that they would not have to leave their
little home, that he would quit school and find work so they could go
on together.
"Dearest, dearest mother, you shall be with me always," he said to her.
But she replied:
"We owe a heavy debt, John, that must be paid at once."
He saw she was worrying over the expense of his father's funeral. He
knew how sensitive she was about debts.
"I can get money somewhere, dearest mother," he said. "Don't worry."
"But where?"
"Somewhere--I'll get it. Please, oh, please don't think about it any
more."
He could tell, however, that she could not put it out of her mind. There
was a look about her eyes that told him it weighed upon her. It
disappeared when he held her in his arms and comforted her; she tried
bravely to hide it from him, but it was there, in his mind, haunting him.
He came to his decision about the money for the funeral director

quickly. He told her he was going to look for work and went to George
Blake at his Spring street gymnasium. Blake, an instructor in boxing,
had seen him spar in amateur bouts and had taken him in tow. He
boxed because he liked it; never with a thought of ever fighting for
money. Only a month before he had refused an offer of a bout at Jack
Doyle's Vernon arena.
"George," he said, "can you get me a bout at