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T. Tembarom

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T. TEMBAROM

by Frances Hodgson Burnett




CHAPTER I:


The boys at the Brooklyn public school which he attended did not know
what the "T." stood for. He would never tell them. All he said in
reply to questions was: "It don't stand for nothin'. You've gotter
have a' 'nitial, ain't you?" His name was, in fact, an almost
inevitable school-boy modification of one felt to be absurd and
pretentious. His Christian name was Temple, which became "Temp." His
surname was Barom, so he was at once "Temp Barom." In the natural
tendency to avoid waste of time it was pronounced as one word, and
the letter p being superfluous and cumbersome, it easily settled
itself into "Tembarom," and there remained. By much less inevitable
processes have surnames evolved themselves as centuries rolled by.
Tembarom liked it, and soon almost forgot he had ever been called
anything else.

His education really began when he was ten years old. At that time
his mother died of pneumonia, contracted by going out to sew, at
seventy-five cents a day, in shoes almost entirely without soles,
when the remains of a blizzard were melting in the streets. As, after
her funeral, there remained only twenty-five cents in the shabby
bureau which was one of the few articles furnishing the room in the
tenement in which they lived together, Tembarom sleeping on a cot,
the world spread itself before him as a place to explore in search of
at least one meal a day. There was nothing to do but to explore it to
the best of his ten-year-old ability.

His father had died two years before his mother, and Tembarom had
vaguely felt it a relief. He had been a resentful, domestically
tyrannical immigrant Englishman, who held in contempt every American
trait and institution. He had come over to better himself, detesting
England and the English because there was "no chance for a man there,"
and, transferring his dislikes and resentments from one country to
another, had met with no better luck than he had left behind him.
This he felt to be the fault of America, and his family, which was
represented solely by Tembarom and his mother, heard a good deal
about it, and also, rather contradictorily, a good deal about the
advantages and superiority of England, to which in the course of six
months he became gloomily loyal. It was necessary, in fact, for him
to have something with which to compare the United States unfavorably.
The effect he produced on Tembarom was that of causing him, when he
entered the public school round the corner, to conceal with
determination verging on duplicity the humiliating fact that if he
had not been born in Brooklyn he might have been born in England.
England was not popular among the boys in the school. History had
represented the country to them in all its tyrannical rapacity and
bloodthirsty oppression of the humble free-born. The manly and
admirable attitude was to say, "Give me liberty or give me death"--
and there was the Fourth of July.

Though Tembarom and his mother had been poor enough while his father
lived, when he died the returns from his irregular odd jobs no longer
came in to supplement his wife's sewing, and add an occasional day or
two of fuller meals, in consequence of which they were oftener than
ever hungry and cold, and in desperate trouble about the rent of
their room. Tembarom, who was a wiry, enterprising little fellow,
sometimes found an odd job himself. He carried notes and parcels when
any one would trust him with them, he split old boxes into kindling-
wood, more than once he "minded" a baby when its mother left its
perambulator outside a store. But at eight or nine years of age one's
pay is in proportion to one's size. Tembarom, however, had neither
his father's bitter eye nor his mother's discouraged one. Something
different from either had been reincarnated in him from some more
cheerful past. He had an alluring grin instead--a grin which curled
up his mouth and showed his sound, healthy, young teeth,--a lot of
them,--and people liked to see them.

At the beginning of the world it is only recently reasonable to
suppose human beings were made with healthy bodies and healthy minds.
That of course was the original scheme of the race. It would not have
been worth while to create a lot of things aimlessly ill made. A
journeyman carpenter would not waste his time in doing it, if he knew
any better. Given the power to make a man, even an amateur would make
him as straight as he could, inside and out. Decent vanity would
compel him to do it. He would be ashamed to show the thing and admit
he had done it, much less people a world with millions of like proofs
of incompetence. Logically considered, the race was built straight
and clean and healthy and happy. How, since then, it has developed in
multitudinous less sane directions, and lost its normal straightness
and proportions, I am, singularly enough, not entirely competent to
explain with any degree of satisfactory detail. But it cannot be
truthfully denied that this has rather generally happened. There are
human beings who are not beautiful, there are those who are not
healthy, there are those who hate people and things with much waste
of physical and mental energy, there are people who are not unwilling
to do others an ill turn by word or deed, and there are those who do
not believe that the original scheme of the race was ever a decent
one.

This is all abnormal and unintelligent, even the not being beautiful,
and sometimes one finds oneself called upon passionately to resist a
temptation to listen to an internal hint that the whole thing is
aimless. Upon this tendency one may as well put one's foot firmly, as
it leads nowhere. At such times it is supporting to call to mind a
certain undeniable fact which ought to loom up much larger in our
philosophical calculations. No one has ever made a collection of
statistics regarding the enormous number of perfectly sane, kind,
friendly, decent creatures who form a large proportion of any mass of
human beings anywhere and everywhere--people who are not vicious or
cruel or depraved, not as a result of continual self-control, but
simply because they do not want to be, because it is more natural and
agreeable to be exactly the opposite things; people who do not tell
lies because they could not do it with any pleasure, and would, on
the contrary, find the exertion an annoyance and a bore; people whose
manners and morals are good because their natural preference lies in
that direction. There are millions of them who in most essays on life
and living are virtually ignored because they do none of the things
which call forth eloquent condemnation or brilliant cynicism. It has
not yet become the fashion to record them. When one reads a daily
newspaper filled with dramatic elaborations of crimes and
unpleasantness, one sometimes wishes attention might be called to
them --to their numbers, to their decencies, to their normal lack of
any desire to do violence and their equally normal disposition to
lend a hand. One is inclined to feel that the majority of persons do
not believe in their existence. But if an accident occurs in the
street, there are always several of them who appear to spring out of
the earth to give human sympathy and assistance; if a national
calamity, physical or social, takes place, the world suddenly seems
full of them. They are the thousands of Browns, Joneses, and
Robinsons who, massed together, send food to famine-stricken
countries, sustenance to earthquake-devastated regions, aid to
wounded soldiers or miners or flood-swept homelessness. They are the
ones who have happened naturally to continue to grow straight and
carry out the First Intention. They really form the majority; if they
did not, the people of the earth would have eaten one another alive
centuries ago. But though this is surely true, a happy cynicism
totally disbelieves in their existence. When a combination of
circumstances sufficiently dramatic brings one of them into
prominence, he is either called an angel or a fool. He is neither. He
is only a human creature who is normal.

After this manner Tembarom was wholly normal. He liked work and
rejoiced in good cheer, when he found it, however attenuated its form.
He was a good companion, and even at ten years old a practical
person. He took his loose coppers from the old bureau drawer, and
remembering that he had several times helped Jake Hutchins to sell
his newspapers, he went forth into the world to find and consult him
as to the investment of his capital.

"Where are you goin', Tem?" a woman who lived in the next room said
when she met him on the stairs. "What you goin' to do?"

"I'm goin' to sell newspapers if I can get some with this," he
replied, opening his hand to show her the extent of his resources.

She was almost as poor as he was, but not quite. She looked him over
curiously for a moment, and then fumbled in her pocket. She drew out
two ten-cent pieces and considered them, hesitating. Then she looked
again at him. That normal expression in his nice ten-year-old eyes
had its suggestive effect.

"You take this," she said, handing him the two pieces. "It'll help
you to start."

"I'll bring it back, ma'am," said Tem. "Thank you, Mis' Hullingworth."

In about two weeks' time he did bring it back. That was the beginning.
He lived through all the experiences a small boy waif and stray
would be likely to come in contact with. The abnormal class treated
him ill, and the normal class treated him well. He managed to get
enough food to eat to keep him from starvation. Sometimes he slept
under a roof and much oftener out-of-doors. He preferred to sleep out-
of-doors more than half of the year, and the rest of the time he did
what he could. He saw and learned many strange things, but was not
undermined by vice because he unconsciously preferred decency. He
sold newspapers and annexed any old job which appeared on the horizon.
The education the New York streets gave him was a liberal one. He
became accustomed to heat and cold and wet weather, but having sound
lungs and a tough little body combined with the normal tendencies
already mentioned, he suffered no more physical deterioration than a
young Indian would suffer. After selling newspapers for two years he
got a place as "boy" in a small store. The advance signified by
steady employment was inspiring to his energies. He forged ahead, and
got a better job and better pay as he grew older. By the time he was
fifteen he shared a small bedroom with another boy. In whatsoever
quarter he lived, friends seemed sporadic. Other boy's congregated
about him. He did not know he had any effect at all, but his effect,
in fact, was rather like that of a fire in winter or a cool breeze in
summer. It was natural to gather where it prevailed.

There came a time when he went to a night class to learn stenography.
Great excitement had been aroused among the boys he knew best by a
rumor that there were "fellows" who could earn a hundred dollars a
week "writing short." Boyhood could not resist the florid splendor of
the idea. Four of them entered the class confidently looking forward
to becoming the recipients of four hundred a month in the course of
six weeks. One by one they dropped off, until only Tembarom remained,
slowly forging ahead. He had never meant anything else but to get on
in the world--to get as far as he could. He kept at his "short," and
by the time he was nineteen it helped him to a place in a newspaper
office. He took dictation from a nervous and harried editor, who,
when he was driven to frenzy by overwork and incompetencies, found
that the long-legged, clean youth with the grin never added fuel to
the flame of his wrath. He was a common young man, who was not marked
by special brilliancy of intelligence, but he had a clear head and a
good temper, and a queer aptitude for being able to see himself in
the other man's shoes--his difficulties and moods. This ended in his
being tried with bits of new work now and then. In an emergency he
was once sent out to report the details of a fire. What he brought
back was usable, and his elation when he found he had actually "made
good" was ingenuous enough to spur Galton, the editor, into trying
him again.

To Tembarom this was a magnificent experience. The literary
suggestion implied by being "on a newspaper" was more than he had
hoped for. If you have sold newspapers, and slept in a barrel or
behind a pile of lumber in a wood-yard, to report a fire in a street-
car shed seems a flight of literature. He applied himself to the
careful study of newspapers--their points of view, their style of
phrasing. He believed them to be perfect. To attain ease in
expressing himself in their elevated language he felt to be the
summit of lofty ambition. He had no doubts of the exaltation of his
ideal. His respect and confidence almost made Galton cry at times,
because they recalled to him days when he had been nineteen and had
regarded New York journalists with reverence. He liked Tembarom more
and more. It actually soothed him to have him about, and he fell into
giving him one absurd little chance after another. When he brought in
"stuff" which bore too evident marks of utter ignorance, he actually
touched it up and used it, giving him an enlightening, ironical hint
or so. Tembarom always took the hints with gratitude. He had no
mistaken ideas of his own powers. Galton loomed up before him a sort
of god, and though the editor was a man with a keen, though wearied,
brain and a sense of humor, the situation was one naturally
productive of harmonious relations. He was of the many who
unknowingly came in out of the cold and stood in the glow of
Tembarom's warm fire, or took refuge from the heat in his cool breeze.
He did not know of the private, arduous study of journalistic style,
and it was not unpleasing to see that the nice young cub was
gradually improving. Through pure modest fear or ridicule, Tembarom
kept to himself his vaulting ambition. He practised reports of fires,
weddings, and accidents in his hall bedroom.

A hall bedroom in a third-rate boarding-house is not a cheerful place,
but when Tembarom vaguely felt this, he recalled the nights spent in
empty trucks and behind lumber-piles, and thought he was getting
spoiled by luxury. He told himself that he was a fellow who always
had luck. He did not know, neither did any one else, that his luck
would have followed him if he had lived in a coal-hole. It was the
concomitant of his normal build and outlook on life. Mrs. Bowse, his
hard-worked landlady, began by being calmed down by his mere bearing
when he came to apply for his room and board. She had a touch of
grippe, and had just emerged from a heated affray with a dirty cook,
and was inclined to battle when he presented himself. In a few
minutes she was inclined to battle no longer. She let him have the
room. Cantankerous restrictions did not ruffle him.

"Of course what you say GOES," he said, giving her his friendly grin.
"Any one that takes boarders has GOT to be careful. You're in for a
bad cold, ain't you?"

"I've got grippe again, that's what I've got," she almost snapped.

"Did you ever try Payson's 'G. Destroyer'? G stands for grippe, you
know. Catchy name, ain't it? They say the man that invented it got
ten thousand dollars for it. 'G. Destroyer.' You feel like you have
to find out what it means when you see it up on a boarding. I'm just
over grippe myself, and I've got half a bottle in my pocket. You
carry it about with you, and swallow one every half-hour. You just
try it. It set me right in no time."

He took the bottle out of his waistcoat pocket and handed it to her.
She took it and turned it over.

"You're awful good-natured,"--She hesitated,--"but I ain't going to
take your medicine. I ought to go and get some for myself. How much
does it cost?"

"It's on the bottle; but it's having to get it for yourself that's
the matter. You won't have time, and you'll forget it."

"That's true enough," said Mrs. Bowse, looking at him sharply. "I
guess you know something about boarding-houses."

"I guess I know something about trying to earn three meals a day--or
two of them. It's no merry jest, whichever way you do it."




CHAPTER II


When he took possession of his hall bedroom the next day and came
down to his first meal, all the boarders looked at him interestedly.
They had heard of the G. Destroyer from Mrs. Bowse, whose grippe had
disappeared. Jim Bowles and Julius Steinberger looked at him because
they were about his own age, and shared a hall bedroom on his floor;
the young woman from the notion counter in a down-town department
store looked at him because she was a young woman; the rest of the
company looked at him because a young man in a hall bedroom might or
might not be noisy or objectionable, and the incident of the G.
Destroyer sounded good-natured. Mr. Joseph Hutchinson, the stout and
discontented Englishman from Manchester, looked him over because the
mere fact that he was a new-comer had placed him by his own rash act
in the position of a target for criticism. Mr. Hutchinson had come to
New York because he had been told that he could find backers among
profuse and innumerable multi- millionaires for the invention which
had been the haunting vision of his uninspiring life. He had not been
met with the careless rapture which had been described to him, and he
was becoming violently antagonistic to American capital and
pessimistic in his views of American institutions. Like Tembarom's
father, he was the resentful Englishman.

"I don't think much o' that chap," he said in what he considered an
undertone to his daughter, who sat beside him and tried to manage
that he should not be infuriated by waiting for butter and bread and
second helpings. A fine, healthy old feudal feeling that servants
should be roared at if they did not "look sharp" when he wanted
anything was one of his salient characteristics.

"Wait a bit, Father; we don't know anything about him yet," Ann
Hutchinson murmured quietly, hoping that his words had been lost in
the clatter of knives and forks and dishes.

As Tembarom had taken his seat, he had found that, when he looked
across the table, he looked directly at Miss Hutchinson; and before
the meal ended he felt that he was in great good luck to be placed
opposite an object of such singular interest. He knew nothing about
"types," but if he had been of those who do, he would probably have
said to himself that she was of a type apart. As it was, he merely
felt that she was of a kind one kept looking at whether one ought to
or not. She was a little thing of that exceedingly light slimness of
build which makes a girl a childish feather-weight. Few girls retain
it after fourteen or fifteen. A wind might supposably have blown her
away, but one knew it would not, because she was firm and steady on
her small feet. Ordinary strength could have lifted her with one hand,
and would have been tempted to do it. She had a slim, round throat,
and the English daisy face it upheld caused it to suggest to the mind
the stem of a flower. The roundness of her cheek, in and out of which
totally unexpected dimples flickered, and the forget-me-not blueness
of her eyes, which were large and rather round also, made her look
like a nice baby of singularly serious and observing mind. She looked
at one as certain awe-inspiring things in perambulators look at one--
with a far and clear silence of gaze which passes beyond earthly
obstacles and reserves a benign patience with follies. Tembarom felt
interestedly that one really might quail before it, if one had
anything of an inferior quality to hide. And yet it was not a
critical gaze at all. She wore a black dress with a bit of white
collar, and she had so much soft, red hair that he could not help
recalling one or two women who owned the same quantity and seemed
able to carry it only as a sort of untidy bundle. Hers looked
entirely under control, and yet was such a wonder of burnished
fullness that it tempted the hand to reach out and touch it. It
became Tembarom's task during the meal to keep his eyes from turning
too often toward it and its owner.

If she had been a girl who took things hard, she might have taken her
father very hard indeed. But opinions and feelings being solely a
matter of points of view, she was very fond of him, and, regarding
him as a sacred charge and duty, took care of him as though she had
been a reverentially inclined mother taking care of a boisterous son.
When his roar was heard, her calm little voice always fell quietly on
indignant ears the moment it ceased. It was her part in life to act
as a palliative: her mother, whose well-trained attitude toward the
ruling domestic male was of the early Victorian order, had lived and
died one. A nicer, warmer little woman had never existed. Joseph
Hutchinson had adored and depended on her as much as he had harried
her. When he had charged about like a mad bull because he could not
button his collar, or find the pipe he had mislaid in his own pocket,
she had never said more than "Now, Mr. Hutchinson," or done more than
leave her sewing to button the collar with soothing fingers, and
suggest quietly that sometimes he DID chance to carry his pipe about
with him. She was of the class which used to call its husband by a
respectful surname. When she died she left him as a sort of legacy to
her daughter, spending the last weeks of her life in explaining
affectionately all that "Father" needed to keep him quiet and make
him comfortable.

Little Ann had never forgotten a detail, and had even improved upon
some of them, as she happened to be cleverer than her mother, and had,
indeed, a far-seeing and clear young mind of her own. She had been
called "Little Ann" all her life. This had held in the first place
because her mother's name had been Ann also, and after her mother's
death the diminutive had not fallen away from her. People felt it
belonged to her not because she was especially little, though she was
a small, light person, but because there was an affectionate humor in
the sound of it.

Despite her hard needs, Mrs. Bowse would have faced the chance of
losing two boarders rather than have kept Mr. Joseph Hutchinson but
for Little Ann. As it was, she kept them both, and in the course of
three months the girl was Little Ann to almost every one in the house.
Her normalness took the form of an instinct which amounted to genius
for seeing what people ought to have, and in some occult way filling
in bare or trying places.

"She's just a wonder, that girl," Mrs. Bowse said to one boarder
after another.

"She's just a wonder," Jim Bowles and Julius Steinberger murmured to
each other in rueful confidence, as they tilted their chairs against
the wall of their hall bedroom and smoked. Each of the shabby and
poverty-stricken young men had of course fallen hopelessly in love
with her at once. This was merely human and inevitable, but realizing
in the course of a few weeks that she was too busy taking care of her
irritable, boisterous old Manchester father, and everybody else, to
have time to be made love to even by young men who could buy new
boots when the old ones had ceased to be water-tight, they were
obliged to resign themselves to the, after all, comforting fact that
she became a mother to them, not a sister. She mended their socks and
sewed buttons on for them with a firm frankness which could not be
persuaded into meaning anything more sentimental than a fixed habit
of repairing anything which needed it, and which, while at first
bewildering in its serenity, ended by reducing the two youths to a
dust of devotion.

"She's a wonder, she is," they sighed when at every weekend they
found their forlorn and scanty washing resting tidily on their bed.

In the course of a week, more or less, Tembarom's feeling for her
would have been exactly that of his two hall-bedroom neighbors, but
that his nature, though a practical one, was not inclined to any
supine degree of resignation. He was a sensible youth, however, and
gave no trouble. Even Joseph Hutchinson, who of course resented
furiously any "nonsense" of which his daughter and possession was the
object, became sufficiently mollified by his good spirits and ready
good nature to refrain from open conversational assault.

"I don't mind that chap as much as I did at first," he admitted
reluctantly to Little Ann one evening after a good dinner and a
comfortable pipe. "He's not such a fool as he looks."

Tembarom was given, as Little Ann was, to seeing what people wanted.
He knew when to pass the mustard and other straying condiments. He
picked up things which. dropped inconveniently, he did not interrupt
the remarks of his elders and betters, and several times when he
chanced to be in the hall, and saw Mr. Hutchinson, in irritable,
stout Englishman fashion, struggling into his overcoat, he sprang
forward with a light, friendly air and helped him. 'He did not do it
with ostentatious politeness or with the manner of active youth
giving generous aid to elderly avoirdupois. He did it as though it
occurred to him as a natural result of being on the spot.

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