Pollyanna Grows Up, Eleanor H. Porter [best short novels of all time txt] 📗

Like Pollyanna, however, she had what she thought was a very satisfactory way out of the dilemma.

“But why don’t you take him, dear?” she proposed to her sister. “Why don’t you take him and adopt him? It would be lovely for him⁠—poor little fellow⁠—and⁠—” But Mrs. Carew shuddered and would not even let her finish.

“No, no, I can’t, I can’t!” she moaned. “I want my Jamie, my own Jamie⁠—or no one.” And with a sigh Della gave it up and went back to her nursing.

If Mrs. Carew thought that this closed the matter, however, she was again mistaken; for her days were still restless, and her nights were still either sleepless or filled with dreams of a “may be” or a “might be” masquerading as an “it is so.” She was, moreover, having a difficult time with Pollyanna.

Pollyanna was puzzled. She was filled with questionings and unrest. For the first time in her life Pollyanna had come face to face with real poverty. She knew people who did not have enough to eat, who wore ragged clothing, and who lived in dark, dirty, and very tiny rooms. Her first impulse, of course, had been “to help.” With Mrs. Carew she made two visits to Jamie, and greatly did she rejoice at the changed conditions she found there after “that man Dodge” had “tended to things.” But this, to Pollyanna, was a mere drop in the bucket. There were yet all those other sick-looking men, unhappy-looking women, and ragged children out in the street⁠—Jamie’s neighbors. Confidently she looked to Mrs. Carew for help for them, also.

“Indeed!” exclaimed Mrs. Carew, when she learned what was expected of her, “so you want the whole street to be supplied with fresh paper, paint, and new stairways, do you? Pray, is there anything else you’d like?”

“Oh, yes, lots of things,” sighed Pollyanna, happily. “You see, there are so many things they need⁠—all of them! And what fun it will be to get them! How I wish I was rich so I could help, too; but I’m ’most as glad to be with you when you get them.”

Mrs. Carew quite gasped aloud in her amazement. She lost no time⁠—though she did lose not a little patience⁠—in explaining that she had no intention of doing anything further in “Murphy’s Alley,” and that there was no reason why she should. No one would expect her to. She had canceled all possible obligations, and had even been really very generous, anyone would say, in what she had done for the tenement where lived Jamie and the Murphys. (That she owned the tenement building she did not think it necessary to state.) At some length she explained to Pollyanna that there were charitable institutions, both numerous and efficient, whose business it was to aid all the worthy poor, and that to these institutions she gave frequently and liberally.

Even then, however, Pollyanna was not convinced.

“But I don’t see,” she argued, “why it’s any better, or even so nice, for a whole lot of folks to club together and do what everybody would like to do for themselves. I’m sure I’d much rather give Jamie a⁠—a nice book, now, than to have some old Society do it; and I know he’d like better to have me do it, too.”

“Very likely,” returned Mrs. Carew, with some weariness and a little exasperation. “But it is just possible that it would not be so well for Jamie as⁠—as if that book were given by a body of people who knew what sort of one to select.”

This led her to say much, also (none of which Pollyanna in the least understood), about “pauperizing the poor,” the “evils of indiscriminate giving,” and the “pernicious effect of unorganized charity.”

“Besides,” she added, in answer to the still perplexed expression on Pollyanna’s worried little face, “very likely if I offered help to these people they would not take it. You remember Mrs. Murphy declined, at the first, to let me send food and clothing⁠—though they accepted it readily enough from their neighbors on the first floor, it seems.”

“Yes, I know,” sighed Pollyanna, turning away. “There’s something there somehow that I don’t understand. But it doesn’t seem right that we should have such a lot of nice things, and that they shouldn’t have anything, hardly.”

As the days passed, this feeling on the part of Pollyanna increased rather than diminished; and the questions she asked and the comments she made were anything but a relief to the state of mind in which Mrs. Carew herself was. Even the test of the glad game, in this case, Pollyanna was finding to be very near a failure; for, as she expressed it:

“I don’t see how you can find anything about this poor-people business to be glad for. Of course we can be glad for ourselves that we aren’t poor like them; but whenever I’m thinking how glad I am for that, I get so sorry for them that I can’t be glad any longer. Of course we could be glad there were poor folks, because we could help them. But if we don’t help them, where’s the glad part of that coming in?” And to this Pollyanna could find no one who could give her a satisfactory answer.

Especially she asked this question of Mrs. Carew; and Mrs. Carew, still haunted by the visions of the Jamie that was, and the Jamie that might be, grew only more restless, more wretched, and more utterly despairing. Nor was she helped any by the approach of Christmas. Nowhere was there glow of holly or flash of tinsel that did not carry its pang to her; for always to Mrs. Carew it but symbolized a child’s empty stocking⁠—a stocking that might be⁠—Jamie’s.

Finally, a week before Christmas, she fought what she thought was the last battle with herself. Resolutely, but with no real joy in her face, she gave terse orders to Mary, and summoned Pollyanna.

“Pollyanna,” she began, almost harshly, “I have decided to⁠—to take Jamie. The car will be here at once. I’m going after him now, and bring him