Cain, the Key

A SMALL blind girl sat on the veranda steps of the Lomax School for deaf and blind children, and blew upon a tin horn. She was an appealing scrap of humanity, with her thin little body and dreamy face, and her big blank eyes which had a wistful trick of rolling up and down and from side to side, suggesting a little the restless pacing of a caged animal, as they continually quested the dark for some tiny loophole of light.

At present she was utterly happy. The spring sunshine warmed her all over, and she drank it in at every sensitive pore. She had blown at first soft little tentative notes upon her horn, just tasting, as it were, its delightful possibilities all over; but now she had settled to one thrilling blast emitted again and again. It is possible that in the note’s apparent monotony she divined shades of sound which the casual listener would have missed; but it was not merely sound to her, it was color, and emotion, and filled her with a passionate delight. She had not lost her sight until she was ten years old, so that now at eleven she still retained the faculty of making mental pictures, and to her mind, intoxicated by the sound, that single note appeared like a red streak of flame going up and up into the sky. It made moreover a sharp background for all the impressions which her senses gathered for her, and presently these impressions began to translate themselves into a little silent chant. She seemed to see the words like a flock of small hurrying people that ran out of her mouth, through her horn, and by that bright flame-ladder of sound went scurrying away to the warm sky. The words said, —

‘I am sitting in the sunshine, I can feel it pour all over me, and my beautiful horn gathers it up and blows it back into the air. I can hear the deaf children running and laughing and playing in their yard. I can hear Janey Simons practicing on the piano in the blind girls’ sitting-room — and my beautiful horn it blows and it blows for me! The wind blows the smell of the Easter flowers in the garden to me. I think maybe the wind loves the flowers, and turns their little faces up one after another for the sun to see — and my beautiful horn it blows for me! I love Miss Cynthia. She will come presently, her footsteps as light and swift as the wind, and take us all back to school, and my beautiful horn —’

At this moment another blind girl came out of the sitting-room which opened on the porch, and, groping for the little horn-blower, caught her arm and snatched the horn violently away.

‘ For mercy sakes, Phœbe West! Quit blowing on that old horn like that!’ she cried.

For a moment Phœbe was stunned by this sudden shattering of her entranced world; then, with a cry, she leaped to her feet and flung herself upon the other. They fought back and forth, struggling over the horn.

‘Girls! Girls! Why, Phœbe! Janey! Why, I’m ashamed of you!’

Miss Cynthia, one of the younger teachers, came quickly along the porch, and separated the two.

’To think of two of my girls fighting!’ she exclaimed.

‘Well, she was enough to drive a person just distracted!’ the assailant, a clumsy overgrown girl of fourteen, defended herself.

‘She snatched my horn just when I — when I was so happy!’ Phœbe cried passionately; and dropping down on the steps she burst into an agony of tears.

Miss Cynthia went on, —

‘Why, if you girls take to behaving like this, I shall have to ask Mr. Lincoln to shut you up in that empty room at the top of the school, where he puts the boys when they’ve been fighting.’

‘But I just bet Mr. Lincoln would n’t do that to the girls!’ Janey protested, the rudeness of her tone hardly masking its panic; and Phœbe stopped crying, and raised her head to listen.

‘Why certainly he would if the girls behave like bad boys,’ Miss Cynthia returned. ‘And now,’ she added as, recess being over, the bell rang, ‘come along to school and I ’ll tell you something interesting. Come along, little girl.’ Reaching down she took Phœbe’s small hand which always clung so affectionately to hers, and jumped her to her feet.

Over in the classroom, Miss Cynthia’s ‘something interesting’ proved to be that Mr. Lincoln, the Superintendent, to stimulate the imagination of the younger children, had offered the prize of a book for the best set of verses written within the next week by any blind child under fifteen. The whole Blind Department was to celebrate the occasion with ice-cream and cake; the cake to be a large fancy one decorated with white icing, and to have the winner’s name done in pink across the top, — a tribute from Mr. Hartwell, the baker, who, though himself a deaf mute, could always be counted upon to further any good cause in the school.

‘I should feel very proud if one of my scholars were to win such a prize,’ Miss Cynthia concluded impressively, ‘and I have a feeling that there is a child here who might win it, if he or she — I won’t say whether I am thinking of a boy or a girl — chose to try hard enough.’

‘I just know Miss Cynthia means me,’ Janey Simons whispered to her next neighbor with a satisfied little toss of her head, ‘ ’cause of that poem I wrote on Easter.’

But Miss Cynthia did not mean Janey. All her hopes were secretly centred upon Pœbe West, whose poetic fancy flashed out now and again like a sudden bright flame set vividly off against the unimaginative background of the other children’s good average little brains.

Phœbe had lost her sight only a year and a half ago, and had therefore not been playing the difficult game of how-to-be-blind for very long; and with all the bright pictures of what the world held for seeing people still stored in her eager mind, which had always taken such passionate delight in lovely things, she found the game harder to play than did the children who had been at it longer. Despairingly hard it was at times, and at these times after she came to Lomax, her adored Miss Cynthia had understood, and had helped and comforted, and in consequence there had grown up between the two a very close tie of affection.

Whatever Phœbe may have been before the loss of her sight, the school only knew her as a docile and timid little creature who through her parents’ misplaced solicitude had been so waited upon and led about by a large family of brothers and sisters that she was as yet very dependent upon some friendly hand to guide her in the dark of her little world. So usually fearful of finding her way alone was she, that Miss Cynthia was astounded, when returning that afternoon from a walk with one of the teachers, to catch sight some distance from the school grounds of a small blue-and-white ginghamclad figure huddled close in a corner of the rail-fence bordering the roadside.

‘Why, Pœebe! Why, little girl, what are you doing out here all alone!’ she exclaimed.

At the sound of her voice the child leaped up with a glad little tremulous cry.

‘O Miss Cynthia!’ she quavered, acute relief in her voice. ‘Oh! I hoped maybe those would be your darling footsteps coming down the road.’ She clung to the teacher’s hand trembling a little, ‘I — I was scared,' she whispered.

Here Miss Julia, Cynthia’s companion, a much older teacher, saw fit to make a protest in behalf of discipline.

‘ Don’t you know it’s against the rules to go out of the grounds like this? ’ she demanded.

Miss Julia was an estimable person, but one whose voice fell with no softness upon the sensitive ears of small blind people detected in disobedience. Miss Cynthia was conscious that Phœbe trembled faintly as she leaned against her.

‘I do believe you were running away!’ Miss Julia pursued severely.

‘Yes —yes’m,’ Phœbe faltered and hung her head.

‘You were! Why, I’m perfectly astonished ! What were you doing it for? ’

Looking down at the curve of the child’s painfully crimsoning cheek, it seemed to Cynthia that an intangible veil of reserve and almost defiance was drawn suddenly across the sensitive little face.

’ I don’t know,’ the child answered, her voice almost lost in fear.

‘Don’t know! Of course you know! Don’t, tell me stories, and don’t let me catch you out of bounds again, or I’ll report you to Mr. Lincoln and he’ll very likely lock you up all alone in that room where he puts the bad boys.’

At this second mention of that prison room Phœbe’s nervous fingers twitched in Miss Cynthia’s grasp, and the latter felt an acute indignation over the other teacher’s severity; but Miss Julia was the senior in command and she dared not interfere.

If Miss Cynthia had been astounded to find Phœbe out on the high road all alone, events followed swiftly which were more than astounding; in the light of the small girl’s heretofore affectionate and shrinking character, they were no less than appalling. At half-past ten the next morning, in Miss Cynthia’s classroom, Phœbe West put out a small feeling foot., and deliberately tripped up Janey Simons as she was innocently passing the former’s desk. Janey came sprawling to the floor, bumping her head and immediately bursting into wild tears.

Miss Cynthia rushed forward and picked her up. ‘Why, Phœe!’ she cried in consternation.

Phœbe had started to her feet and stood trembling slightly, her whole little person keyed to an intensity of listening. Her face was white and horrified, and in a moment she too dissolved in tears.

Miss Cynthia soothed the frightened Janey, and put some hamamelis on t he bumped head.

‘For such outrageous conduct I shall report Phœbe West to Mr. Lincoln,’ she announced, her usually sweet voice so alarmingly stern, that every small pupil applied frightened fingers diligently to the raised print of the lesson books, afraid to do more than wrinkle an inquisitive nose, and sniff very faintly at the smell of hamamelis, though at ordinary times it would have occasioned much pleasant conversation.

‘Mr. Lincoln he — he won’t put me up in t hat big room all — all alone, will he?’ Phœbe’s shaky little voice inquired, feeling its way unsteadily, as it were, through the dark.

‘I don’t, know what he will think necessary to do to a little girl who for no reason whatever deliberately trips another one up,’ Miss Cynthia returned coldly.

At this statement of the outrage committed upon her, Janey shed a few more tears.

Phœbe escaped the locking up, however, Mr. Lincoln ordering her to bed straight after supper, hours before the other children; a form of punishment over which Miss Cynthia drew a secret breath of relief. As a child she had suffered an acute fear of being locked into places, and she could not bear the thought of her timid little Pœbe’s having to pass through such an ordeal.

The next day, however, she underwent a change of heart in the matter. When she entered her schoolroom with her bright ‘morning face,’ she found the children awaiting her, but not seated as usual at their desks. Instead they were in an agitated group surrounding her treasured rose-geranium, a plant which usually graced the window-sill,— lending a refreshing fragrance to the room, most grateful to small inquiring noses, — but which now lay shattered upon the floor. It had been dear to the whole room, for the gift of one of its spicy leaves pinned on the front of an apron, or stuck in the buttonhole of a coat, had been Miss Cynthia’s highest mark of approbation; and the children bent over it in deep solicitude, feeling with delicate, excited fingers the bruised leaves, and all the wreckage of earth and broken pottery.

‘Oh my poor geranium! How did it happen?’ Miss Cynthia cried.

Instantly all the little listening faces turned in her direction and a very babel of accusation broke forth.

‘Phœbe—’

‘Phœbe West she did it —'

‘She pulled it right over on purpose —'

‘She said, “I’m going to smash that old geranium,” an’ she did!’

‘Yes, sir! Miss Cynthia, that’s just what she did do!’

Miss Cynthia looked at Phœbe in consternation.

‘Did you break my pretty plant on purpose? ’ she demanded incredulously.

Phœbe, conscious with her whole strained little body of her teacher’s eyes upon her, showed a small tragic face; nevertheless she affirmed the accusation.

‘Yes’m,’ she whispered with an effort.

‘But why? what do you mean by such behavior?’

Phœbe hung her head, but gave no answer.

Miss Cynthia regarded her a moment in a hurt and perplexed silence; then, ‘Take your reader, and come with me,’ she said. ‘As you cannot behave properly with other children, and with pretty things, I shall put you upstairs in that empty room, where you will have to study all alone.’

In the oppressive silence and loneliness of the top story, Miss Cynthia, after trying in vain to win some explanation of her extraordinary conduct from Phœbe, left the child, a small desolate figure seated on the floor in the very middle of the wide bare room. The teacher’s heart smote her as she turned the key in the lock, and she lingered a moment outside, dreading an outburst of panic-stricken tears. But all was silent. When she returned later to release her, however, there were signs that Phœbe had wept copiously.

The situation developed rapidly and appallingly. The next day Miss Cynthia’s usually well-ordered classroom was reduced to pandemonium. Immediately after school was assembled, Phœbe West, with a set fatalistic little face, went on what might be termed a whirlwind campaign. Within the space of three short, stormy minutes she slapped Johnny Coleman’s plump, surprised little face, snatched away Janey Simons’s book, and gave Maggie Ridgeway’s flaxen curls an agonizing jerk. After which opening she became a veritable little fury, attacking any and everybody with whom her fingers came in contact, until with a swift and terrible hand Miss Cynthia dragged her from a crowd of outraged children and marched her off upstairs. There, failing again to make the child explain herself, she locked her up once more, but this time she did not linger softheartedly outside. Closing the door firmly, she turned the key with a grating shriek, which she hoped might send a shiver of terror into the heart of the incomprehensible little culprit within.

That evening after supper the extraordinary behavior of Phœbe West was the subject of acute discussion in the teachers’ hall.

‘ I can’t make her out! ’ Miss Cynthia confessed in despair. ‘In the last few days she has changed absolutely from the gentlest, dearest little child into a perfect demon, and I never know what she may do next . She acts as though she were possessed, as though something were driving her to do these things against her will.’

‘ I would n’t be a bit surprised if she was losing her mind,’ Miss Julia prophesied gloomily. ‘ I thought there was something funny about her that day we found her out in the road all alone. That girl I had in my class from the Fells County Poorhouse went exactly that way. At first she was as sweet a child as you ever saw, and then she took to acting in a peculiar manner, and the next thing I knew she went right off her head and —’ Here Miss Julia unfolded a terrible story of child suffering. ‘And it would n’t surprise me one bit if Phœbe West was going just that same way,’ she wound up.

‘Oh, no! Oh, no, she won’t!’ Miss Cynthia protested in horror.

‘Perhaps she has adenoids, or her teeth need looking after,’ suggested another teacher, one who had a firm belief that the only thing necessary to make the world a sweet and beautiful place, was the elimination of all adenoids and the straightening of all teeth.

‘No, I don’t think that’s the trouble,’ Miss Cynthia said. ‘I have a feeling you know that there’s a perfectly simple and natural explanation of the whole business if I could only find the key to it — if I could only find the key,’ she repeated distractedly. ‘And I did so hope she was going to win Mr. Lincoln’s prize for the best verses!’ she burst out presently. ‘ But of course, she won’t now, she has n’t written a thing, and that conceited little Janey Simons has hers all finished. They begin,

She asked me this morning if I thought Mr. Hartwell would know how to spell Simons, and of course she’s perfectly sure her name is going to be on that cake.’

Miss Cynthia tossed on a restless pillow that night. Miss Julia’s terrible story returned to stare at her through the dark hours; and suppose, suppose Phœbe West were on the point of going off her poor little head! She entered her classroom the next morning in a high state of nervous apprehension. The day’s lessons always opened with a selection from the Bible, and it was Phœbe’s turn to read. Miss Cynthia would have given much if it had not been, though in times past she had liked to listen to the child’s soft, slightly hesitating voice which had such pretty inflections, and always thrilled so to the sonorous Bible words. But now? To what outrageous act might not the command to read provoke her perhaps unbalanced mind? With a beating heart she spread open the huge volume of Genesis upon Phœbe’s desk, and finding the day’s lesson, placed the child’s fingers on the raised dots of the opening verse. To her unbounded relief Phœbe began obediently to read, one slender forefinger following the other patiently across the page, as her butterfly touch translated the dots into words for her eager little mind.

’And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said I know not. Am I my brother’s keeper?’

She read steadily on until her fingers came to the sentence, ‘A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.’ Here she paused, spelling out the two long words for Miss Cynthia to pronounce.

‘ What does that mean ? ’ she demanded abruptly.

With a start the teacher brought her mind back from a relieved contemplation of the soft spring sky seen through the windows, to the anxiety of the present.

‘Why, it means that he was driven away from his own people because he was a murderer, and had to go out into the world all alone,’ she explained.

‘ Into the world all alone — did it mean that he would be all alone?’ Phœbe persisted.

‘Yes, that’s what it means.’

‘In the wide world all alone,’ the child repeated dreamily. Suddenly she brought her hands up tight against her breast. ‘Oh!’ she cried poignantly, ‘Oh, I wish I was Cain!’

And pushing the book from her, she buried her head in her arm and burst into passionate tears. A wave of startled emotion swept over the other children, and every little blind face swayed in the direction of those heartbroken sobs. They seemed to appreciate the teacher’s anxiety, and to surmise that these were no ordinary tears.

Cynthia was appalled. Nevertheless, she forced herself to rise. If Phœbe were on the point of insanity, she must at least be taken away from the other children. Going over, she laid a quiet hand on the small grief-shaken figure.

‘Come outside with me, dear,’ she said.

Out in the big deserted hall, away from the strained curiosity of the other children, Phœbe continued to sob, but she clung with all her old trusting affection to Miss Cynthia, and the latter’s heart melted within her.

‘ Poor little thing! Poor little honey! ’ she whispered tenderly, ‘Tell me what the trouble is.’

Seating herself upon the lowest step of the stairs leading to the classrooms above, where the deaf children could be heard drilling over their vowel sounds monotonously in unison, — ‘a-a-a-a, e_e_e-e-e-e-e,’ — she gathered the child close in her arms, stroking the bowed head softly, and waiting for the tears to subside a little.

‘Oh, I wish I was Cain! ’ Phœbe cried passionately again.

‘But, darling, Cain was a dreadful man!’ Miss Cynthia protested, distressed. ‘Why he killed his very own brother.’

‘But God let him be alone, and — and that’s what I want to be!’ the child cried; and catching her breath sharply she broke into a torrent of hurrying sobs — choked words. I’ m never — never alone! I — I have to eat with other children, and play with them, and sleep with them, and study with them, and—and go to church and to walk with them! And I can never, never be by myself one minute out of the whole day! There’re always other children just swarming everywhere ! And at home it’s the same way; my mother’s got lots of us, and they never let me be one minute! The only time I’m ever really alone is — is when I wake up in the night when all the other children are asleep. But —’ she sobbed, ‘but I don’t wake up very often! When I could — could see, I used to run away into the woods all by myself, and oh, I just loved it! And — and I tried to run away here, that day you and Miss Julia found me out on the road, but — but after I got out all by myself, it was — was all so sort of big and dark, that I — I was scared — it was n’t like when I could see!’

' Phœbe! ’ cried Miss Cynthia, a great light, dawning upon her, ‘ have you been behaving so badly for the sake of being put up in that big room all alone?’

The child hid her face close against the other’s shoulder, but she nodded with a muffled sob. ' Yes, that was why, she confessed. ' But I — I could n’t tell you, ’cause of course you would n’t have put me there then. But — but it did n’t do any good,’ she added forlornly, ‘’cause I could n’t think of anything after I got there but just how bad I’d been — it — it was awful to be sq. bad! ’

‘But why do you want to be alone, darling?’ Miss Cynthia questioned.

‘So I can think. There’re all sorts of lovely things that I think about when I’m alone. And I wanted specially now to make up a poem for t he prize cause

— ’cause you said you’d be so pleased if one of your children got it. But now I won’t be able to,’ she went on with a little wail, ‘’cause the children are just swarming and swarming, all the time, and they never let me be! I don’t want to be alone much, only just sometimes, when my — my — I guess it’s my soul — wants to sort of breathe. Oh, you don’t know what it is to have people around all day long — every minute — and at night, too! Folks that can see can get off to themselves whenever they want to — and I used to be able to — but — but now! I just never can! '

After a moment’s silence Miss Cynthia spoke: —

’If you will stop crying now, and be very good all the rest of the morning, I will let you come this afternoon and sit a little while in my room.’

’All alone?’ the child raised a tearwet, tremulously eager little face.

‘Yes, all alone.’

‘With my horn?’

Miss Cynthia hesitated; the remembrance of that one plaintive nervewracking note in her mind.

‘Why do you want your horn?’ she evaded.

‘ ’Cause when I blow it, it says lovely things to me — it was just beginning to say beautiful things that time Janey Simons came and snatched it away.’

‘Very well, then,’ Miss Cynthia capitulated.

The child’s face kindled with a transcendent happiness.

‘Oh, I will be so good!’ she cried. ‘It’ll be nice to be good again,’ she added with a little weary sigh, as of a soul that has been lost and is found again.

That afternoon the thrilling note of a horn, blown over and over again, might have been heard coming from Miss Cynthia’s room; and when that teacher returned from her afternoon walk, she found a happy child curled up in an easy hair by the open window, the air with its whiffs of spring perfume stirring her hair faintly; all the baffled strained expression smoothed from her face, and in its stead the tranquil, shining look of one whose spirit has been in sunny places.

‘Oh, I have been so happy!' she cried breathlessly, jumping up and stretching out eager arms along which all the warmth of her heart seemed running to meet her teacher. ‘And my horn made some poetry for me,’ she added. ‘It told me about spring at home.’

Dropping the other’s hands, she stood a little away from her, and raising her entranced face turned it slightly from side to side, feeling unconsciously the soft air, first with one check then with the other, as she recited in a voice a trifle shaky from excitement: —

‘Oh! ’ she finished, ‘ that ’s why I love my trumpet ’cause it makes my mind see what, my eyes can’t see any more.’

Miss Cynthia felt a sharp ache in her throat.

‘But any way,’ she told herself, ‘her verses are better than any of the other children’s.’

Phœbe slipped her hand back into hers.

‘I’d be glad if my poem took the prize,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t really make it for that. I wanted to make it for you, ’cause, — cause I love you,’ she whispered shyly.