The Little City Of Hope by F. Marion Crawford

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The

Little City of Hope

A CHRISTMAS STORY

BY

F. MARION CRAWFORD

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1907

_Copyright in the United States America, 1907_

CONTENTS

PAGE

1. HOW JOHN HENRY OVERHOLT SAT ON PANDORA'S BOX 1
2. HOW A MAN AND A BOY FOUNDED THE LITTLE CITY OF HOPE 19
3. HOW THEY MADE BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW 35
4. HOW THERE WAS A FAMINE IN THE CITY 49
5. HOW THE CITY WAS BESIEGED AND THE LID OF PANDORA'S BOX CAME OFF 63
6. HOW A SMALL BOY DID A BIG THING AND NAILED DOWN THE LID OF THE BOX 74
7. HOW A LITTLE WOMAN DID A GREAT DEED TO SAVE THE CITY 87
8. HOW THE WHEELS WENT ROUND AT LAST 105
9. HOW THE KING OF HEARTS MADE A FEAST IN THE CITY OF HOPE 116

I

HOW JOHN HENRY OVERHOLT SAT ON PANDORA'S BOX

"Hope is very cheap. There's always plenty of it about."

"Fortunately for poor men. Good morning."

With this mild retort and civil salutation John Henry Overholt rose and
went towards the door, quite forgetting to shake hands with Mr.
Burnside, though the latter made a motion to do so. Mr. Burnside always
gave his hand in a friendly way, even when he had flatly refused to do
what people had asked of him. It was cheap; so he gave it.

But he was not pleased when they did not take it, for whatever he chose
to give seemed of some value to him as soon as it was offered; even his
hand. Therefore, when his visitor forgot to take it, out of pure absence
of mind, he was offended, and spoke to him sharply before he had time to
leave the private office.

"You need not go away like that, Mr. Overholt, without shaking hands."

The visitor stopped and turned back at once. He was thin and rather
shabbily dressed. I know many poor men who are fat, and some who dress
very well; but this was not that kind of poor man.

"Excuse me," he said mildly. "I didn't mean to be rude. I quite forgot."

He came back, and Mr. Burnside shook hands with becoming coldness, as
having just given a lesson in manners. He was not a bad man, nor a
miser, nor a Scrooge, but he was a great stickler for manners,
especially with people who had nothing to give him. Besides, he had
already lent Overholt money; or, to put it nicely, he had invested a
little in his invention, and he did not see any reason why he should
invest any more until it succeeded. Overholt called it selling shares,
but Mr. Burnside called it borrowing money. Overholt was sure that if he
could raise more funds, not much more, he could make a success of the
"Air-Motor"; Mr. Burnside was equally sure that nothing would ever come
of it. They had been explaining their respective points of view to each
other, and in sheer absence of mind Overholt had forgotten to shake
hands.

Mr. Burnside had no head for mechanics, but Overholt had already made an
invention which was considered very successful, though he had got little
or nothing for it. The mechanic who had helped him in its construction
had stolen his principal idea before the device was patented, and had
taken out a patent for a cheap little article which every one at once
used, and which made a fortune for him. Overholt's instrument took its
place in every laboratory in the world; but the mechanic's labour-saving
utensil took its place in every house. It was on the strength of the
valuable tool of science that Mr. Burnside had invested two thousand
dollars in the Air-Motor without really having the smallest idea whether
it was to be a machine that would move the air, or was to be moved by
it. A number of business men had done the same thing.

Then, at a political dinner in a club, three of the investors had dined
at the same small table, and in an interval between the dull speeches,
one of the three told the others that he had looked into the invention
and that there was nothing in Overholt's motor after all. Overholt was
crazy.

"It's like this," he had said. "You know how a low-pressure engine acts;
the steam does a part of the work and the weight of the atmosphere does
the rest. Now this man Overholt thinks he can make the atmosphere do
both parts of the work with no steam at all, and as that's absurd, of
course, he won't get any more of my money. It's like getting into a
basket and trying to lift yourself up by the handles."

Each of the two hearers repeated this simple demonstration to at least a
dozen acquaintances, who repeated it to dozens of others; and after that
John Henry Overholt could not raise another dollar to complete the
Air-Motor.

Mr. Burnside's refusal had been definite and final, and he had been the
last to whom the investor had applied, merely because he was undoubtedly
the most close-fisted man of business of all who had invested in the
invention.

Overholt saw failure before him at the very moment of success, with the
not quite indifferent accompaniment of starvation. Many a man as good as
he has been in the same straits, even more than once in life, and has
succeeded after all, and Overholt knew this quite well, and therefore
did not break down, nor despair, nor even show distinct outward signs of
mental distress.

Metaphorically, he took Pandora's box to the Park, put it in a sunny
corner, and sat upon it, to keep the lid down, with Hope inside, while
he thought over the situation.

It was not at all a pleasant one. It is one thing to have no money to
spare, but it is quite another to have none at all, and he was not far
from that. He had some small possessions, but those with which he was
willing to part were worth nothing, and those which would bring a little
money were the expensive tools and valuable materials with which he was
working. For he worked alone, profiting by his experience with the
mechanic who had robbed him of one of his most profitable patents. When
the idea of the Air-Motor had occurred to him he had gone into a
machine-shop and had spent nearly two years in learning the use of fine
tools. Then he had bought what he needed out of the money invested in
his idea, and had gone to work himself, sending models of such castings
as he required to different parts of the United States, that the pieces
might be made independently.

He was not an accomplished workman, and he made slow progress with only
his little son to help him when the boy was not at school. Often,
through lack of skill, he wasted good material, and more than once he
spoiled an expensive casting, and was obliged to wait till it could be
made again and sent to him. Besides, he and the boy had to live, and
living is dear nowadays, even in a cottage in an out-of-the-way corner
of Connecticut; and he needed fire and light in abundance for his work,
besides something to eat and decent clothes to wear and somebody to cook
the dinner; and when he took out his diary note-book and examined the
figures on the page near the end, headed "Cash Account, November," he
made out that he had three hundred and eighteen dollars and twelve
cents to his credit, and nothing to come after that, and he knew that
the men who had believed in him had invested, amongst them, ten thousand
dollars in shares, and had paid him the money in cash in the course of
the past three years, but would invest no more; and it was all gone.

One thousand more, clear of living expenses, would do it. He was
positively sure that it would be enough, and he and the boy could live
on his little cash balance, by great economy, for four months, at the
end of which time the Air-Motor would be perfected. But without the
thousand the end of the four months would be the end of everything that
was worth while in life. After that he would have to go back to teaching
in order to live, and the invention would be lost, for the work needed
all his time and thought.

He was a mathematician, and a very good one, besides being otherwise a
man of cultivated mind and wide reading. Unfortunately for himself, or
the contrary, if the invention ever succeeded, he had given himself up
to higher mathematics when a young man, instead of turning his talent to
account in an architect's office, a shipbuilding yard, or a locomotive
shop. He could find the strain at any part of an iron frame building by
the differential and integral calculus to the millionth of an ounce, but
the everyday technical routine work with volumes of ready-made tables
was unfamiliar and uncongenial to him; he would rather have calculated
the tables themselves. The true science of mathematics is the most
imaginative and creative of all sciences, but the mere application of
mathematics to figures for the construction of engines, ships, or
buildings is the dullest sort of drudgery.

Rather than that, he had chosen to teach what he knew and to dream of
great problems at his leisure when teaching was over for the day or for
the term. He had taught in a small college, and had known the rare
delight of having one or two pupils who were really interested. It had
been a good position, and he had married a clever New England girl, the
daughter of his predecessor, who had died suddenly. They had been very
happy together for years, and one boy had been born to them, whom his
father insisted on christening Newton. Then Overholt had thrown up his
employment for the sake of getting freedom to perfect his invention,
though much against his wife's advice, for she was a prudent little
woman, besides being clever, and she thought of the future of the two
beings she loved, and of her own, while her husband dreamed of hastening
the progress of science.

Overholt came to New York because he could work better there than
elsewhere, and could get better tools made, and could obtain more easily
the materials he wanted. For a time everything went well enough, but
when the investors began to lose faith in him things went very badly.

Then Mrs. Overholt told her husband that two could live where three
could not, especially when one was a boy of twelve; and as she would not
break his heart by teasing him into giving up the invention as a matter
of duty, she told him that she would support herself until it was
perfected or until he abandoned it of his own accord. She was very well
fitted to be a governess; she was thirty years old and as strong as a
pony, she said, and she had friends in New England who could find her a
situation. He should see her whenever it was possible, she added, but
there was no other way.

Now it is not easy to find a thoroughly respectable married governess
of unexceptionably good manners, who comes of a good stock and is able
to teach young ladies. Such a person is a treasure to rich people who
need somebody to take charge of their girls while they fly round and
round the world in automobiles, seeking whom they may destroy. Therefore
Mrs. Overholt obtained a very good place before long, and when the
family in which she taught had its next attack of European fever and it
was decided that the girls must stay in Munich to improve their German
and their music, Mrs. Overholt was offered an increase of salary if she
would take them there and see to it, while their parents quartered
Germany, France, Spain, and Austria at the rate of forty miles an hour,
or even fifty and sixty where the roads were good. If the parents broke
their necks, Mrs. Overholt would take the children home; but this was
rather in the understanding than in the agreement.

Such was the position when John Henry sat down upon the lid of Pandora's
box in a sunny corner of the Central Park and reflected on Mr.
Burnside's remark that "there was plenty of hope about." The inventor
thought that there was not much, but such as it was, he did not mean to
part with it on the ground that the man of business had called it
"cheap."

He resolved his feelings into factors and simplified the form of each;
and this little mathematical operation showed that he was miserable for
three reasons.

The first was that there was no money for the tangent balance of the
Air-Motor, which was the final part, on which he had spent months of
hard work and a hundred more than half sleepless nights.

The second was that he had not seen his wife for nearly a year, and had
no idea how long it would be before he saw her again, and he was just as
much in love with her as he had been fourteen years ago, when he married
her.

The third, and not the least, was that Christmas was coming, and he did
not see how in the world he was to make a Christmas out of nothing for
Newton, seeing that a thirteen-year-old boy wants everything under the
sun to cheer him up when he has no brothers and sisters, and school is
closed for the holidays, and his mother is away from home, and there is
nobody but a dear old tiresome father who has his nose over a lathe all
day long unless he is blinding himself with calculating quaternions for
some reason that no lad, and very few men, can possibly understand. John
Henry was obliged to confess that hope was not much of a Christmas
present for a boy in Newton's surroundings.

For the surroundings would be dismal in the extreme. A rickety cottage
on an abandoned Connecticut farm that is waiting for a Bohemian emigrant
to make it pay is not a gay place, especially when two-thirds of the
house has been turned into a workshop that smells everlastingly of
smith's coal, brass filings, and a nauseous chemical which seemed to be
necessary to the life of the Air-Motor, and when the rest of the house
is furnished in a style that would make a condemned cell look attractive
by contrast.

Besides, it would rain or snow, and it rarely snowed in a decent
Christian manner by Christmas. It snowed slush, as Newton expressed it.
A certain kind of snow-slush makes nice hard snowballs, it is true, just
like stones, but when there is no other boy to fight, it is no good.
Overholt had once offered to have a game of snow-balling with his son on
a Saturday afternoon in winter; and the invitation was accepted with
alacrity. But it was never extended again. The boy was a perfect terror
at that form of diversion. Yet so distressed was Overholt at the
prospect of a sad Christmas for his son that he even thought of
voluntarily giving up his thin body to the torment again on the 25th of
December, if that would amuse Newton and make it seem less dull for him.
Good-will towards men, and even towards children, could go no further
than that, even at Christmas time. At least Overholt could think of no
greater sacrifice that might serve.

For what are toys to a boy of thirteen? He wants a gun and something to
kill, or he wants a boat in which he can really sail, or a live pony
with a real head, a real tail, and four real legs, one at each corner.
That had been Newton's definition of the desired animal when he was six
years old, and some one had given him a wooden one on rockers with the
legs painted on each side. Girls of thirteen can still play with dolls,
and John Henry had read that, far away in ancient times, girls
dedicated their dolls, with all the dolls' clothes, to Artemis on the
eve of their wedding-day. But no self-respecting boy of thirteen cares a
straw for anything that is not real, except an imaginary pain that will
keep him away from school without cutting down his rations; and in the
invention and presentation of such fictitious suffering he beats all the
doll-makers in Germany and all the playwrights and actors in the world.
You must have noticed that the pain is always as far from the stomach as
is compatible with probability. Toothache is a grand thing, for nobody
can blame a healthy boy for eating then, if he can only bear the pain.
And he can, and does, bear it nobly, though with awful faces. The little
beast knows that all toothaches do not make your cheek swell. Then there
is earache; that is a splendid invention; it goes through your head like
a red-hot corkscrew with a powerful brakeman at the other end, turning
it steadily--between meals. Only certain kinds of things really serve to
make him stop. Ice-cream is one, and it takes a great deal of it. It is
well known that ice will cool a red-hot corkscrew.

But this is a digression, for no boy ever has any pain at Christmas; it
is only afterwards that it comes on; usually about ten days.

After an hour Overholt came to the conclusion that he had better take
Pandora's box out to the cottage and sit on it there, since nothing
suggested itself to him, in spite of his immense good-will to accept any
suggestion which the spirit of coming Christmas might be kind enough to
offer; and if he could do nothing else, he could at least work at his
machine, and try to devise some means of constructing the
tangent-balance, with the materials he had left, and perhaps, by the
time he was thoroughly grimy and the workshop smelt like the Biblical
bottomless pit, something would occur to him for Newton.

He could also write a letter to his wife, a sort of anticipatory
Christmas letter, and send her the book he had bought as a little gift,
wrapping it in nice white paper first, tied with a bit of pale green
ribband which she had left behind her, and which he had cherished nearly
a year, and marking it "to be opened on Christmas morning"; and the
parcel should then be done up securely in good brown grocer's paper and
addressed to her, and even registered, so that it could not possibly be
lost. It was a pretty book, and also a very excellent book, which he
knew she wanted and would read often, so it was as well to take
precautions. He wished that Newton wanted a book, or even two or three,
or magazines with gaily coloured pictures, or anything that older or
younger boys would have liked a little. But Newton was at that age which
comes sooner or later to every healthy boy, and the sight of a book
which he was meant to read and ought to read was infinitely worse than
the ugliest old toad that ever flops out of a hollow tree at dusk,
spitting poison and blinking his devilish little eyes at you when you
come too near him.

Overholt had been brought up by people who lived in peace and good-will
towards men, in a city where the spirit of Christmas still dwells, and
sleeps most of the time, but wakens every year, like a giant of good
courage and good cheer, at the sound of the merry bells across the snow,
and to the sweet carol under the windows in the frosty night. The
Germans say that bad men have no songs; and we and all good fellows may
say that bad people have no Christmas, and though they copy the letter
they know not the spirit; and I say that a copied Christmas is no
Christmas at all, because Christmas is a feast of hearts and not of poor
bits of cut-down trees stuck up in sawdust and covered with lights and
tinsel, even if they are hung with the most expensive gewgaws and
gimcracks that ever are bought for gifts by people who are expected to
give, whether they like or not. But when the heart for Christmas is
there and is beating, then a very little tree will do, if there be none
better to the hand.

Overholt thought so, while the train rumbled, creaked, and clattered and
jerked itself along, as only local trains can, probably because they are
old and rheumatic and stiff and weak in the joints, like superannuated
crocodiles, though they may have once been young express trains, sleek
and shiny, and quick and noiseless as bright snakes.

Overholt thought so, too; but the trouble was that he saw not even the
least little mite of a tree in sight for his boy when the 25th of
December should come. And it was coming, and was only a month away; and
time is not a local train that stops at every station, and then kicks
itself on a bit to stop at the next; it is the "Fast Limited," and, what
is more, it is the only one we can go by; and we cannot get out, because
it never stops anywhere.

II

HOW A MAN AND A BOY FOUNDED THE LITTLE CITY OF HOPE

Overholt's boy came home from school at the usual hour with his books
buckled together in an old skate strap, which had never been very good
because the leather was too soft and tore from one hole to the next; but
it served very well for the books, as no great strain was caused by an
arithmetic thumbed to mushiness, a history in the same state, and a
geography of which the binding gave in and doubled up from sheer
weariness, while the edges were so worn that the eastern coast of China
and Siberia had quite disappeared.

He was a good-looking lad, not tall for his age, but as tough as a
street cat in hard training. He had short and thick brown hair, a clear
complexion, his father's energetically intellectual features, though
only half developed yet, a boldly-set mouth, and his mother's kindly,
practical blue eyes. For surely the eyes of practical people are always
quite different from those of all others; and not many people are
practical, though I never knew anybody who did not think he or she was,
except pinchbeck artists, writers, and players, who are sure that since
they must be geniuses, it is necessary to be Bohemians in order to show
it. The really big ones are always trying to be practical, like Sir
Isaac Newton when he ordered a good-sized hole to be cut in his barn
door for the cat, and a little one next it for the kitten.

But Newton Overholt did not at all resemble his great namesake. He was a
practical young soul, and had not yet developed the American disease
which consists in thinking of two things at the same time. John Henry
had it badly, for he had been thinking of the tangent-balance, his wife,
his boy, and the coming Christmas, all together, since he had got home,
and the three problems had got mixed and had made his head ache.

Nevertheless he looked up from his work-table and smiled when his son
came in.

"Everything all right?" he asked, with an attempt to be cheerful.

"Oh yes, fine," answered the boy, looking at the motionless model for
the five-hundredth time, and sticking his hands into his pockets. "I'm
only third in mathematics yet, but I'm head in everything else. I wish I
had your brains, father! I'd be at the head of the arithmetic class in
half a shake of a lamb's tail if I had your brains."

So far as mathematics were concerned this sounded probable to John
Henry, who would have considered the speed of the tail to be a variable
function of lamb, depending on the value of mother, plus or minus milk.

"Well," he said in an encouraging tone, "I never could remember
geography, so it makes us even."

"I'd like to know how!" cried the boy in a tone of protest. "You could
do sums, and you grew up to be a great mathematician and inventor. But
what is the good of a geographician, anyway? They can only make
school-books. They never invent anything, do they? You can't invent
geography, can you? At least you can, and some boys do, but they go to
the bottom of the class like lead. It's safer to invent history than
geography, isn't it, father?"

Overholt's clever mouth twitched.

"It's much safer, my boy. Almost all historians have found it so."

"There! I said so to-day, and now you say just the same thing. I don't
believe one word of ancient history. Not--one--word! They wrote it about
their own nations, didn't they? All right. Then you might just as well
expect them to tell what really happened, as think that I'd tell on
another boy in my own school. I must say it would be as mean as dog pie
of them if they did, but all the same that does not make history true,
does it?"

Newton had a practical mind. His father, who had not, meditated with
unnecessary gravity on the boy's point of view and said nothing.

"For instance," continued the lad, sitting down on the high stool before
the lathe Overholt was not using, "the charge of Balaclava's a true
story, because it's been told by both sides; but they all say that it
did no good, anyway, except to make poetry of. But Marathon! Nobody had
a chance to say a word about it except the Greeks themselves, and they
weren't going to allow that the Persians wiped up the floor with them,
were they? Why should they? And if Balaclava had happened then, those
Greek fellows would have told us that the Light Brigade carried the
Russian guns back with them across their saddles, wouldn't they? I say,
father!"

"What is it?" asked Overholt, looking up, for he had gone back to his
work and was absorbed in it.

"The boys are all beginning to talk about Christmas down at the school.
Now what are we going to do at Christmas? I've been wondering."

"So have I!" responded the man, laying down the screw-plate with which
he was about to cut a fine thread on the end of a small brass rod for
the tangent-balance. "I've been thinking about it a good deal to-day,
and I haven't decided on anything."

"Let's have turkey and cranberry sauce, anyway," said Newton
thoughtfully, for he had a practical mind. "And I suppose we can have
ice-cream if it freezes and we can get some ice. Snow does pretty well
if you pack it down tight enough with salt, and go on putting in more
when it melts. Barbara doesn't make ice-cream as well as they do in New
York. She puts in a lot of winter-green and too little cocoanut. But
it's not so bad. We can have it, can't we, father?"

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