The Loom of Destiny/The Fly in the Ointment
THE FLY IN THE OINTMENT
They seen as we was gutter scum,
An' they said as we was bad;
An' they knowed th' soul of a gutter snipe
Was th' on'y soul we 'ad!
THE FLY IN THE OINTMENT
HE was by no means the worst boy in the ward, though the charge was often flung at him. Really bad boys lived all about him, but their ways were not his ways.
Such being so, there was great rejoicing and glee when he fell. It all came about by the merest accident. He had learned his Golden Text by heart, had his penny for collection in his pocket, and his Sunday-school lesson, about Joseph, at his finger tips. And it might never have happened but that at the corner of the street his quick ears caught a whiff of band music.
He stopped and listened. Yes, it was most unmistakably a band—no, two, three, four of them, all playing at once. The sullen, heavy Sunday-school look went out of the boy's face. He forgot the discomfort of his Sunday clothes. It must be the soldiers on church parade! Then the sound grew like the voice of a thousand sirens singing in his ears.
Still he faltered. He remembered the Sunday-school collection, and his story of Joseph, and the cold, green eyes, haunting and relentless, that watched him each morning to see that he did not take more than his share of porridge. He was dreadfully afraid of those cold, green eyes. But the fates were against Duncan Stewart McDougall.
At that moment a new sound fell on his childish ears. It was the unfamiliar note of bagpipes, the mingled chant and drone of the band of Highland pipers. At that moment it was not the smell of the crowded slums that stole into his little Scottish nostrils. It was heather—the scent of heather, remembered as a dream of years ago.
The sound awoke something dormant, ancestral, unconquerable, in his McDougall veins. Then it was he remembered watching Sandy McPherson, the Holland's coachman, pipe-clay his leggings while he talked of the "Chur-r-rch Par-r-ade a' Sabbath week."
But still he faltered. He could not get the thought of those green eyes out of his mind. Then, all of a sudden, far up the street, he caught a glimpse of bonnets and kilts. Bonnets and kilts! And Scotland half a world away! It was a sight for sore eves, if those same eyes had once seen the hills and valleys of the Highlands. After one furtive glance down his own little street, the carefully folded lesson leaf was flung into the gutter, and he was piking up the avenue as fast as his thin legs could carry him. He headed them off in six blocks, and fell in, panting and perspiring, with the Victoria Rifles Band. One or two of the soldiers kicked him surreptitiously, but he did not even know it. He was following the band! The blood that throbbed through his thin legs had never run so fast. He was drunk, dead drunk, with the music. Thrills went coursing up and down his backbone, and he seemed to be walking on air. How or why it was he could not understand; but on and on he went. For seven enchanted miles he stuck to his band. His one sorrow was that his short legs could not keep in time with the music. But he could nearly almost do it, and by a sort of dot and carry one, he made a rhythm of his own in the marches. He pulled his peaked, puny little stooped shoulders back, and thrust out his narrow chest. He all but burst the one button from his threadbare coat with its neat patches at the elbows.
And all the while he marched, hobbled, stumbled on, drinking in the martial sound. An occasional policeman would try to kick him away, but he dodged in between the lines, where the soldiers came to look upon him as a joke. They poked him in the ribs with their white-gloved fists, in brutal good nature, but he did not feel it. He followed on ecstatically, with his stern little freckled Scottish face and his puckered-out chest, causing many a smile along the line of march.
That day he was not afraid to face the biggest policeman on the force. By this time there were big water blisters on his heels, and one stocking was hanging down. But that military band was all he saw or heard. When he got big like Sandy McPherson he was going to be a soldier. He was going to bayonet Indians and cannonade cities, and shoot people dead, right through their stomach and insides, and save the general's life at the end of the battle, and get sixteen gold medals, and then—
But the boy, of a sudden, started, paled, and wilted. The music withered out, the soldiers faded. The gleam left his eye, and the martial poise ebbed from his fallen shoulders. Peering at him from the curb, he saw a pair of cold, green, relentless eyes! The glory and the dream were gone!
At the next street he fell away from the lines, cut across five side streets, hobbled home, and waited for the green eyes to come back. After that, he knew what would happen. The green eyes came. When the flogging was over he went up to bed without supper. He did n't care very much if it really was true that he was going to be a bad man and a drunkard as his father had been. He supposed the green eyes ought to know. But before he fell asleep he showed the Baby, with the broom handle, how to bayonet Indians; whereat the Baby bawled, and she of the green eyes called up the little stairway. Trembling, the boy crept into bed. He felt sore all over.
Very late that night he heard the green eyes come in and take the penny from his pocket. She held the lamp to his face, but his eyes remained shut. Yet he felt those green eyes burning into him and withering his soul.