PAGE 2
Jack-a-Boy
by
The next day the Professor had another visitor, no less a person than the enfant terriblehimself. The good man was seated at his desk, scratching away furiously, his door slightly ajar. When he got up to go to the case for a book, he saw a little boy dressed in a gray cadet suit standing outside his door, cap in hand. He ground his teeth and sat down and began writing again. Presently he looked up and saw that little gray figure still at his door.
"Well, what is it?" he asked sharply.
"Oh, I was just waiting until you were through. I came to call for a minute. I’ve been calling on almost everyone in the Terrace, but I saw you were busy, so I thought I’d wait. "
"Well, as my occupation is likely to last for some years yet, you may as well come in," said the Professor, rather gruffly. It was impossible to answer that clear little treble voice very savagely.
Jack-a-Boy was accustomed to taking people at their word, so in he went.
"My, what a lot of books you have!" he gasped, looking about. "Are there any with pictures in?"
"Pictures? Um-m, let me see. " The Professor got up and turned the revolving bookcase and took out a big book that looked like a portfolio, and smiled grimly as he gave it to the boy.
"Now, you go on with your work, and I’ll just sit here and look at these, and I won’t bother you. I never bother Papa when he writes. "
Jack-a-Boy curled himself up on the soft, woolly hearth rug, his chin propped on his hands and the book open before him, and the Professor went back to his desk and forgot Jack-a-Boy’s existence.
I can think of no place where a child’s presence—that is, an ordinary child’s presence—could be more incongruous than in the Professor’s room. It is a very large room, or would be for an ordinary tenant who furnished it in an ordinary manner. But under the Professor’s occupancy it looked as though an effort had been made to crowd into it the entire contents of the British Museum. There were detail maps of every dead and forgotten city in which antiquarians had ever burrowed; dusty plaster casts of all the Grecian philosophers marshaled in rows above the bookshelves; bronzes of several of the later Roman emperors; terra-cotta models of the Acropolis and Parthenon and several other edifices whose very names I have forgotten, if I ever knew them; even an Egyptian mummy was wedged in between the lavatory and chiffonier. As for the books, they had overflowed all the cases long ago, and there was not a niche left for another shelf. The Professor’s shoe box had been removed to make room for the last bookcase, and he kept his shoes under his bed. So the tomes were packed in under his desk, piled in the corners and on the chairs, on his table and on his bed. They were particularly in evidence on his little iron bed, and almost crowded him out entirely. The housemaid often told me that when she went to make his bed in the morning she found dozens of books piled up on the side next the wall, and a narrow indentation at the outer edge was the only indication that the Professor had gone to bed at all. I believe at one time he had another room in which to sleep, but he caught so many colds trapesing into his study in his pajamas at all hours of the night when some grammatical perplexity awoke him, that he had decided to abolish the last slight barrier between his books and himself and lived with them in good earnest. His room was on the third floor, where the doings of his landlady could not disturb him and where his windows commanded a magnificent view of the harbor, lying far away across the housetops. Not that the Professor spent much time looking out of his windows; when he first moved into the Terrace he had thought he would, but on his way to the window he always caught sight of some book or other and would pick it up and go back to his desk with it. All his life his excursions from his desk had ended just so. Very often, as he was starting out for his dinner, he would stop, hat in hand, for a look into Autenrieth or the Griechische Formenlehre, and the dinner hour would steal by and he would light his pipe and console himself with the thought that he worked more when he ate little, and on the whole was very glad that he had gained an hour.