# The Loom of Destiny/The Crucible of Character

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THE CRUCIBLE OF CHARACTER
They 'orled us up from our sewer 'ome,
An' wept at our dirty wyes.
"They're 'uman, as us, O Gawd, be'old,
An' open their darkened eyes!"
THE CRUCIBLE OF CHARACTER
OF all his friends Russell Wentworth Russell liked Snapsie Doogan the best.
The reasons for this were many. Snapsie belonged to a world far distant from his own, and told him of weird and wonderful things that took place in Foreign Parts, vaguely but alluringly known as the Ward.
Then, again, there was no one to order Snapsie's going out or his coming in, and this alone almost deified Snapsie in his eyes. To Russell Wentworth Russell, who had a governess and a French maid, to say nothing of a mamma who was always telling him not to do things, such undreamed of liberty as Snapsie's seemed incredible and god-like.
As for Snapsie, he had neither maid, governess, nor mother, but gloated unnecessarily ​over his good luck. On several occasions, however, he had plainly and openly hinted that he should very much like Russell to take him and show him these three mysterious personages of his household, especially the French maid at meal-time, for he had somewhere heard that French people always ate live and wriggling frogs.
But this privilege was obviously impossible, as Russell's mamma had forbidden him to play with street boys, and once even had ordered the butler to chase Snapsie off the front steps.
Snapsie, thus outraged, wreaked a satisfactory but at the same time underhand revenge, by making a slide on the snowy asphalt, directly in front of Russell's house. Up and down this beautiful slide he careened for two boisterous hours, with much studied gusto and many a sign of delirious joy, knowing full well that Russell was watching him from the nursery window with tearful and covetous eyes.
But what seemed the most enviable and beautiful thing about Snapsie and his life was ​the fact that he could eat whatever and whenever he liked. No matter what time of day it was, all he had to do was to sit down and eat! With Russell it was very different, for it was part of Russell's mamma's daily occupation to examine him for symptoms of inherited gastritis.
Ever since Russell had had bilious fever—and the much-abused Russell knew in his heart of hearts that it had been brought on merely by an inordinate stuffing of cold suet pudding, given to him secretly by Nora, the chambermaid, in the cook's absence—candy and taffy, tarts and doughnuts, and all such things, indeed, that go to make life bearable for the Youthful, had been denied him. Even peanuts were tabooed, and after each meal he was made to swallow a pepsin tablet.
And many a time, accordingly, did his mouth water during his clandestine meetings with Snapsie, and he would eagerly watch the boy from the Ward struggling with a deliciously sticky all-day-sucker or a pink-tinted bull's-eye. Snapsie, by the way, made it a ​point always to save his little delicacies until such meetings, since he had discovered that the hungry eyes of another boy could give to his sugary prize an extraneous and quite intangible sweetness.
It was one afternoon when Russell had stolen out through the coach-house to a vacant lot they had appointed as a rendezvous, and was helping Snapsie make a bonfire of a piece of cheese-box and an apple barrel, that he, watching the Ward boy rapturously making away with his third cocoanut caramel, asked him if he ever got the stomach-ache?
"Naw!" said Snapsie, wiping his mouth with his coat sleeve, "on'y onct—las' Chris'mus!"
"At Christmas!" said Russell. "It must have been fun."
"Well, I guess! There was a blokie wid a jag on took me into a swell hash-house and says, 'Now, little lean guts, order anyt'ing yer wants.' Did n't I order up de grub, though!"
Snapsie's eyes saddened with the memory of it all.
​"What—what did you take?" asked Russell, hungrily.
"W'y," I says to de chief grub-slinger, "look 'ere, waiter, gimme one cow-juice wid an overcoat, an' den youse can trow on a pair of de white wings wid de sunny side up, an' den a slice or two for a gazabo, an' some mixed Irish arter dat, an' den a Santiago cake-walk, w'ich, of course, is a Spanish Ommerlet. Did I eat? Oh, no, I did n't do a t'ing to dat meal, I did n't! Den I finished 'er up wid some Chinese white weddin' an' a French roll wid black dirt on it!"
"Black dirt, Snapsie?" said Russell, dubiously.
"Yep, o' course it was black dirt! Dat means choc'lut."
"Oh, chocolate," said Russell, brightening, for he had understood none of Snapsie's graphically enumerated dishes, though he had vaguely felt their deliciousness, by the way in which the other boy worked his mouth and rolled his eyes. "Why, we often have chocolate at home."
​"Youse? Well, w'y don't youse bring us some out, now and den?"
"Why, I—I never thought of that! Besides, my mamma does n't let me eat things, you know."
"Oh, dat's nuthin'; w'y don't youse pinch some?" Snapsie queried, in the most matter-of-fact manner.
Why did n't he pinch some? Why did n't he, indeed? It seemed strange that he had never thought of that before. Other boys ate chocolate. Even Snapsie had it as often as he liked. Why should n't he pinch some? Snapsie, upon inquiry, stated that it was great fun to pinch stuff.
Russell Wentworth Russell found that the thought of his unjust treatment was a wonderful salve to his rebellious conscience. To his unelastic little code of fitting things, the idea of stealing was nauseatingly new. But he was never let have anything he wanted. Why should n't he eat stuff between meals, the same as other boys? Why was he made such a baby of, and treated like a girl? He succeeded in making himself quite miserable, ​and had worked himself up into a satisfying passion of revolt by the time he stole home by way of the coach-house.
He went in through the back door. He dared to do this in the face of tradition in order that he might pass through the kitchen, off which opened the pantry. It was in the pantry, he knew, that the chocolate was kept.
To the boy this same pantry had always seemed a place of mysterious twilight, enchanted and fragrant as it was with the odour of strange spices and the haunting perfumes of many kinds of fruit. In it, he knew, were kept raisins and currants, and bottles of vanilla, and orange peel, and wine biscuits, and angel food, and sponge cake, and everything, in fact, that would go to make it a place of paradisal mystery to the heart of the average small boy. At the end of the pantry, too, was a high, small window with a wide ledge, on which custards were always put to cool and jellies were left to form in the moulds. There was also a row of spice-boxes, all duly labelled and ranged beside canisters of tea and sugar and coffee. What was on the ​higher shelves was a secret that only the cook and the gods themselves could tell.
From his earliest day, before the régime of the reigning cook, Russell Wentworth Russell could remember the one particular red canister in which the chocolate was always kept. Often he had seen the old cook take out the beautiful, dark-brown squares done up in glittering tin-foil that all his life had seemed so delicious to him, especially on cake.
The old cook, Russell remembered, had been much nicer than Nora, the new one. Before the advent of Nora he had been allowed to stand in the kitchen and gaze wonderingly at the lurid heat of the range, and watch the sizzling roasts being lifted smoking hot from the pan to the big platter, which had queer little runnels in it for the gravy. And he once used to watch, with delight, the sponge cake being pierced with a thin whisp from the broom, to see if it was done in the centre, and get the burnt part when it was cut off. The splutter and bubble of the hot grease when water was ​poured on it from the kettle, to make gravy, had always been a sound he took special pleasure in, and sometimes he even had the good luck to see the live crabs meet their sickening yet fascinating death by scalding. Sometimes, too, he used to get the dish with the sugar frosting to scrape out. Sugar frosting, he remembered, was delicious!
But Nora, the new cook, was so different! She was very cross, and said the kitchen was no place "fur childer." Her Irish arms were red and big and strong, and her shoulders were broad, and she had a way of slamming to the oven door that always made Russell very much afraid of her. Her mere firm stride and the quick, war-like way in which she would approach and retreat from the hot range with one red arm guarding her face, soon made Russell afraid of her, even before she had felt enough at home in her new place to tell him in so many words that he had no business to an occasional handful of raisins out of her colander.
His mother herself now entered that throne-room of domesticity with a certain ​timidity, so strong-willed and outspoken was its monarch on the question of foreign intrusion.
So when Russell heard the step of the cook coming up from the laundry, he flushed guiltily and fled upstairs, by way of the back hall, tingling with fear. At the top of the stairs he listened for several moments, then tiptoed up to the nursery, where for an hour he brooded alone with some indefinite sense of shame. The baby curl went out of his lips and his eyes hardened, for it was his first passion of illicit possession. He tried to remember just how chocolate tasted, and brought to mind the last time he had eaten it as frosting on cake. It was about the sweetest thing, he thought, that he had ever tasted. But then they put such a little bit of frosting on cakes, and never, never was he allowed a second piece. The injustice of it all filled him with a weak, indeterminate rage.
When Weston, the maid, came to take him out for his walk he hotly protested that he had a headache, and would not go. He wanted to be alone. This unexpected revolt ​brought his flurried mamma on the scene, who set down his flushed face and his restless movements as incipient scarlatina, and made him hold a clinic thermometer in his mouth to see if he had a temperature. How he loathed and abhorred that thermometer! Then his mother took him on her knee and was about to give him one of his much-beloved "petting-ups," when he broke stubbornly away and fled to the furnace-room.
The result of such extraordinary conduct was that he was straightway put to bed, and kept there through one long, tearful day. It was only after a passionate outburst and a refusal to eat his breakfast that he was allowed to get up on the second morning.
All that day, making a plea of his so-called illness, he hung about the back of the house, listening always for the footsteps of the cook. They seemed never to leave the kitchen. Then he fell to wondering how much chocolate there might possibly be in the red canister.
He could not decide whether to eat it all himself, or share it with Snapsie. He ​thought he ought to share it with Snapsie. The consciousness of having a comrade in the deed was strangely consoling.
But never had the house seemed so full of sounds. At each little noise he started, and his breath came quicker.
Then he heard the voices of Weston and the cook talking together, and later he heard the sound of their feet on the laundry stairs.
He crept half-way down his own stairs, step by step, and then stopped to listen once more. A sudden, terrible silence seemed to hang over the back of the house.
Then, on his toes, he slunk cautiously down to the kitchen. It was quite empty. Then he stole across the bare floor and quietly turned the handle of the pantry door. It creaked startlingly. He waited a minute to listen. Hearing no sound, he swung the door open and stepped into the chamber of mysteries. There, before him, stood the red canister, emblazoned with letters of shining gold. He felt the lid, fearfully. A sudden trembling seized his knees, and his small, talon-like fingers shook visibly as he ​reached down to the bottom of the cannister and clutched one of the large squares of silver-papered chocolate. There were other pieces in the cannister, but he did not stop to take them all, as had been his first intention. The sound of feet on the laundry stairs reached his ears and he turned and fled.
At the top of the stairs he slackened his pace, and leaned panting over the banister. No one was following him. Then with slow and cautious steps and eyes watchful, like an animal's, he crept on, from door to door, to the nursery.
There he sat down, wiping the cold perspiration from his face with his coat sleeve. Then he got up and walked to the window. The room seemed suffocatingly hot to him. He noticed he had left the door open. After peering a silent moment or two down the hall he quickly closed the door, and would have locked it, but there was no key.
With trembling fingers he drew the cake of chocolate from under his blouse. He had broken it, in his flight, and to his horror, three or four loose bits fell on the floor. ​These he quickly gathered up, carefully brushing away the tell-tale marks with his sleeve.
He looked at his prize several moments without moving. It seemed, of a sudden, to have lost its value, and he doubted if, after all, chocolate was so nice as he had thought. One of the pieces he nibbled at timidly. The taste was crushingly disappointing, for it was unsweetened. It had all been a mistake. Almost nauseated, he spat the sickly taste of the stuff from his mouth.
Then slowly, terribly, it crept over him that he could never eat this thing he had stolen. Neither could he give it back. Nor could he carry it about with him. Someone might come in at any time,—at that very moment, and catch him with it. He wished he had never done it!
He guiltily stole downstairs, and across the little back yard out to the stables. Watching his chance, he climbed into the hay-loft unobserved, and buried the odious pieces of stolen things deep, deep down in the hay in one corner of the loft.
​He was gazing drearily, but with tacit watchfulness, from the nursery window when he heard the voice of the cook, talking to his mother. His heart stopped beating. The cook was saying that someone had stolen the chocolate, this time a whole cake! The boy sidled close to the nursery door that he might hear the better. The cook said she believed it was that drunken James. Then his mother said such a thing was ridiculous, and that it was n't really worth worrying over, and that she had better use cocoanut this time.
There were great and unknown guests that night for dinner, and that meant that Russell Wentworth Russell had his meal alone in the nursery. For the first time in his life he was glad of it. But so silent and dejected and miserable was he throughout his meal that the mystified Weston went downstairs, and came mysteriously back with a delicacy she knew would be a delightful surprise.
Holding her hands laughingly behind her, she came close to him and thrust it suddenly upon his plate.
​It was a huge piece of chocolate cake.
The boy shrank back as though Weston had struck him with her hand. He flushed hot and cold, and cowered, vaguely feeling that Weston knew everything and was playing a cruel joke on him.
But there was nothing but kindly surprise in Weston's eyes.
"Why, Russell, dear, it's chocolate!"
Russell neither spoke nor raised his eyes. There was a choking lump in his throat, and to hide a sudden gush of tears he slipped away from the table and went sullenly up to his bedroom.
That night there was no sleep for Russell Wentworth Russell. For three long hours he turned and twisted in his brass cot, with the awful secret eating his heart out. He was a thief, a thief, a thief! The darkness seemed to scream it at him, and the laughing night seemed to know. In a rage of grief he smote his pillow with his arms and groaned under his breath, until he could stand it no longer. Somebody, somebody must be told.
​He sat up in bed. He would go straight to his mother and tell her everything.
No, that would not do. He was not really afraid of his mother,—it was the unknown and awful cook. But, then, that would make it even. He would go right to the cook and tell her. He wondered what she would do. The thought of facing her filled him with a sick fear, and he lay back weakly on his bed. No, he dare not tell her.
But the Thief! Thief! Thief! started to ring again in his ears, and his soul writhed at the sound. He must do it. He closed his eyes and counted ten. Then, with one tearful gulp, he slipped out of bed. He went to the door and listened. It was terribly still and dark. Holding up his nightgown, he stole down the long hall, desperately facing the darkness. Shadows and little night sounds, that at other times would have shaken his childish frame with thrills of terror, he slipped past without even seeing or hearing.
At last he came to the cook's door. Once, twice, three times he knocked timidly on it. There was no answer. Then he pushed ​it open and walked courageously in. The cook was sleeping soundly. He shook her arm. She did not move. He shook it again, this time desperately. With a startled cry the cook opened her eyes, and sat up in bed.
"Why, Masther Russell, what is it?" she cried, peering through the dim light that came in at the window. She could see that the boy's face was as white as his nightgown. As he did not answer she asked him again. There was a note of kindliness in her voice at the second query, for she also saw that he was shivering, and his face was drawn and tear-stained.
Twice he tried to speak and could not. The choking lump in his throat seemed to keep back the words. When the sound did break out, it came in a sort of sobbing scream. And the sound of that voice was not like the sound of the voice of Russell Wentworth Russell, though it came from his own throat.
"Cook, I—I—stole the chocolate!"