“I see.”
Her thoughts were falling into order after the disturbance of her feelings by the cruelty she had come to halt.
My perceptions of what followed were at the time necessarily shallow, but they were, I am sure, essentially correct.
“Those wretches!” exclaimed Gail Burley, leading John by the hand while I trotted alongside. “What would we ever have done without Richard? You are a true friend, Richard! — Oh!” she said, at the memory of what she had seen. And then, as John stumbled because she was walking so fast and his blanket folds were so awkward to hold about himself, she jerked his hand and said, “Stop dragging your feet, John! Why can’t you walk like anybody else! Here! Pull up and keep up with me!”
At her suddenly cold voice, he went limp and would have fallen softly, like a dropped teddy bear, to the sidewalk. But she dragged him up and said with her teeth almost closed,
“John Burley, do you hear me? Get up and come with me. If you do not, your father will give you the whaling of your life when he comes home tonight!”
“No, Muzza, no, Muzza,” muttered John at the memories that this threat called alive. He got to his feet and began half-running along beside her, dragging his borrowed blanket, which looked like the robe of a pygmy king in flight.
I was chilled by the change in Mrs. Burley. Her loving rage was gone and in its place was a fury of exasperation. She blinked away angry tears. With no thought of how fast John could run along with her, she pulled and jerked at him all the way home, while her face told us after all that she was bitterly ashamed of him.
For at last she took the world’s view of her son. Represented by his own kind, other children, the world had repudiated him. Much as she hated the cruelty of the Grandvilles and their friends, sore as her heart was at what her son had suffered through them, she knew they were society, even if it was shown at its most savage. It was the determining attitude of the others that mattered. She had seen it clearly. Her heart broke in half. One half was charged with love and pity as it defied the mocking world which allowed no published lapse from its notion of a finally unrealizable norm. The other half was pierced by fragments of her pride. How could it happen to her that her child could be made sport of as a little animal monster? Gail Burley was to be treated better than that.
“John?” she sang out in warning as John stumbled again. “You heard what I said?”
Her cheeks, usually pale, were now flushed darkly. I was afraid of her. She seemed ready to treat John just as the boys had treated him. Was she on the side of his tormentors? Their judgments persuaded her even as she rescued her child. She longed for him both to live — and to die. Cold desire rose up in her. If only she knew some way to save this poor child in the future from the abuse and the uselessness which were all that life seemed to offer him. How could she spare John and herself long lifetimes of baffled sorrow? She made him dance along faster than he could, for being such a creature that others mocked and tortured him, at the expense of her pride.
When we reached her house, she said,
“Richard, you are an angel. Please drop John’s wet things in the butler’s pantry. I am going to take him upstairs to bed. He is having a chill. I’ll never be able to thank you enough. Your afterschool surprise is on the hall table, an almond chocolate bar. Come over and see John later.”
But that evening just before my nursery supper when I went to show John the developed prints of the Mauretania and Buckingham Palace, his father met me in the living room and said that John was ill — his chill had gone worse. His mother was upstairs with him, and I must not go up.
“Well, Richard,” said Howard Burley, “God only knows what they would have done to John if you hadn’t come to get his mother. They will catch it, never fear. I have talked to their fathers.”
I had been feeling all afternoon a mixture of guilt and fright for having snitched on the boys. Now I was sure they would avenge themselves on me. Something of this must have shown in my face.
“Never fear,” said Mr. Burley. “Their fathers will see to it that nothing happens to you. Come over and see John tomorrow.”
But the next day they said that John was really ill with grippe.
“Did they send for Dr. Grauer?” asked my mother.
“I don’t know,” I said.
He was our doctor, too, and we would have known his car if he had come to attend to John. But all day nobody came, and the next day, John was worse, and my mother said to my father, with glances that recalled my presence to him, which must require elliptical conversation,
“Grippe sometimes goes into pneumonia, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” replied my father. “But they know how to treat these things.”
“Yes, I know, but sometimes something is needed beyond just home remedies.”
“Then Grauer has not yet—?”
“No, not today, either.”
“That is odd. Perhaps he isn’t so sick as we think.”
“Oh, I think so. I talked to Gail today. She is frantic.”
“Well.”
“But she says she knows what to do. They are doing everything, she says. Everything possible.”
“I am sure they are. — Sometimes I can’t help thinking that it might be better all around if—”
“Yes, I have too,” said my mother hastily, indicating me again. “But of course it must only be God’s will.”
My father sighed.
I knew exactly what they were talking about, though they thought I didn’t.
On the third day, John Burley died. My mother told me the news when I reached home after school. She winked both eyes at me as she always did in extremes of feeling. She knelt down and enfolded me. Her lovely heart-shaped face was an image of pity. She knew I knew nothing of death, but some feeling of death came through to me from the intensity of color in her blue eyes. The power of her feeling upset me, and I swallowed as if I were sick when she said,
“Richard, my darling, our dear, poor, little John died this morning. His chill grew worse and worse and finally turned into pneumonia. They have already taken him away. His mother wanted me to tell you. She loves you for what you tried to do for him.”
“Then he’s gone?”
“Yes, my dearie, you will never be able to see him again. That is what death means.”
I was sobered by these remarks, but I did not weep. I was consumed with wonder, though I was not sure what I wondered about.
There was no funeral. Burial, as they said, was private. I missed John, but I was busy at school, where I was cautious with the Grandvilles and the others until enough days passed after the punishments they had received to assure me that I was safe from their reprisals. Perhaps they wanted to forget that they had given away death in heedless play. Howard Burley went to the office quite as usual. His wife stayed home and saw no one for a while.
“I cannot help wondering,” said my mother, “why she never called Dr. Grauer.”
“Hush,” said my father. “Don’t dwell on such things.”
But I dwelled on them now and then. They were part of my knowledge on the day when Gail Burley asked my mother to send me to see her after school.
“Mrs. Burley has some things of John’s that she wants to give you. You were his best friend.”
I knew all his toys. Some of them were glorious. I saw them all in my mind again. I went gladly to see his mother.
The housemaid let me in and sent me upstairs to Mrs. Burley’s sitting room. She was reclining against many lacy pillows on a chaise longue in the bay window. She was paler than ever, and perhaps thinner, and there was a new note in her voice which made her seem like a stranger — a huskiness which reflected lowered vitality. She embraced me and said,