Page:McClure's Magazine v9 n3 to v10 no2.djvu/242



IS mother named him Harold, and named him better than she knew. He was just such a boy as one would expect to see bearing a heroic name. He had big, faded blue eyes, a nubbin of a chin, and wide, wondering ears, and freckles—such brown blotches of freckles on his face and neck and hands, such a milky way of them across the bridge of his snub nose, that the boys called him "Mealy." And Mealy Jones it was to the end. When his parents called him Harold in the hearing of his playmates, the boy felt ashamed, for he felt that a nickname could give him equal standing among his fellows. There were times in his life—when he was alone, recounting valorous deeds—that Mealy more than half persuaded himself that he was a real boy. But when he was with Winfield Pennington, surnamed "Piggy" in the court of Boyhood, and Abraham Lincoln Carpenter, similarly knighted "Old Abe," Mealy saw that he was only Harold, a weak and unsatisfactory imitation. He was handicapped in his struggle to be a natural boy by a mother who had been a "perfect little lady" in her girlhood and who was molding her son in the forms that fashioned her. If it were the purpose of this tale to deal in philosophy, it would be easy to digress and show that Mealy Jones was a study in heredity; that from his mother's side of the house he inherited wide, white, starched collars, and from his father's a burning desire to whistle through his teeth. But this is only a simple tale, with no great problem in it, save that of a boy working out his salvation between a fiendish lust for suspenders with trousers and a long-termed incarceration in shirt-waists with despised white china buttons around his waist-band.

No one ever knew how Mealy Jones learned to swim but Piggy, and Harold's mother doesn't consider Piggy Pennington any one, for the Penningtons are Methodists and the Joneses are Baptists, and very hard-shelled ones, too. However, Mealy Jones did learn to swim "dog-fashion" years and years after the other boys he knew had become postgraduates in aquatic lore and could "tread water," "swim sailor-fashion," and "lay" their hair. Mrs. Jones permitted her son to go swimming occasionally, but she always exacted from him a solemn promise not to go into the deep water, and Harold, who was a good little boy, made it a point not to "let down" when he was beyond the "step-off," so of course he could not know how deep it was, although the bad little boys who "brought up bottom" had told him that it was twelve feet deep.

One hot June afternoon Mealy stood looking at a druggist's display window, gazing idly at the pills, absently picking out the various kinds which he had taken. He had just come from his mother with the express injunction not to go near the river. His eyes roamed listlessly from the pills to the pain-killer, and, turning wearily away, he saw Piggy and Old Abe and Jimmy Sears. The three boys were scuffling for the possession of a piece of rope. Pausing a moment in front of the grocery store, they beckoned for Mealy. The lad joined the group. Some one said:

"Come on, Mealy, and go swimmin'."

"Aw, Mealy can't go," put in Jimmy; "his ma won't let him."

"Yes, I kin, too, if I want to," replied Mealy, stoutly—but, alas! guiltily.

"Then come on," said Piggy Pennington. "You don't dast. My ma don't care how often I go in—only in dog days."

After some desultory debate they started—the four boys—pushing one another off the sidewalk, "rooster-fighting," shouting, laughing, racing through the streets. Mealy Jones longed to have the other boys observe his savage behavior. He knew, however, that he was a sham, that he was not of them, that he was a sad make-believe. The guilt of the deed he was doing oppressed him. He wondered how he could go into crime so stolidly, and inwardly he quaked as he recalled the stories he had read of boys who had