Beggars of Life by Jim Tully

Author:Jim Tully
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kent State University Press

CHAPTER XIII

A LONG REST

CHAPTER XIII

A LONG REST

BOYS of all sizes romped in the cement yard that fronted the Newsboys’ Home. Bill was among the number.

He ran hurriedly toward me. The flannel-shirted truckman carried me in his hairy arms.

Bill ran up the stairs to the Matron of the Home, and quickly pleaded for my entrance.

“Jist long enough so’s we kin git him in St. Luke’s,” Bill told her. The kind woman entered my name on the Home Register, and Bill hurried back to me. Other boys had gathered about me.

They carried me up to the dormitory, while the matron telephoned the house doctor.

This man was one of the best-known physicians in Chicago. He came within an hour.

Bill and other boys scrubbed my face and hands, and tried to work a comb through my tangled hair.

Josephine G. Post, the beautiful silver-haired matron, superintended the work. Ever impulsive, and unused to the touch of gentleness, I cried in her arms.

Finally the great doctor came to the whitewashed dormitory. He was followed by two internes. He made an examination, and I can still hear him say, “Typhoid—malaria—advanced. Call the ambulance.”

An interne hurried to the telephone. The doctor and the internes left, and presently two heavy policemen entered the dormitory with a stretcher. I was placed upon it, and carried to the ambulance below.

One of the policemen grumbled steadily until I was placed in the waiting vehicle. The inmates of the Home stood in a group about the matron as the wagon of the poor clattered over the cobble-stones on Wabash Avenue, and turned toward Michigan Boulevard and the Lake.

In a short time, I was bathed, and clad in a clean night-gown, and placed in a white bed near a window which overlooked the blue water of Lake Michigan.

Sick, and at the point of death many times during the next forty-eight days, still, as I look back, even now, they remain the very happiest in my life.

Always, on the road, and in my earlier environment, I had seen too much of the wretched aspects of existence. Women of the finer sort were far off to me, and their gentleness was unknown. A reader of books all my life, and a lover of things beautiful, the doors of my environment had shut out all people who would talk about them to me.

A fluid had gathered on my lungs which seemed to make the abating of the fever impossible for a long time. Three attempts were made to remove it, and the third time was successful.

A German doctor came through the ward, and tapped above my lungs with his finger, and made a mark with a blue pencil on the flesh. That afternoon a hollow needle, to which a tiny hose was attached, drilled its way to the fluid. It ran into a small bottle at the end of the hose. A drop of it turned green on my night-gown.

There were no more relapses after that, and day after dreaming day followed. There were books and magazines in plenty.

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