What Happened to Tad

What Happened to Tad by Mary E. Ropes

"What Happened to Tad" follows Teddie Poole, a fourteen-year-old English grocer's errand boy whose miserable home life under a cruel, favoritist stepmother drives him to a series of increasingly consequential decisions rooted in spite, self-will, and poor judgment. Tad's stepmother treats his younger half-siblings, Bert and Nell, harshly while doting on her own infant. After his father refuses to intervene, Tad conceives a petty revenge: on a Sunday morning, while his stepmother sleeps off one of her habitual headaches, he takes the baby out of the house with his packed belongings, intending to give her a fright before returning the child and running away for good. His plan unravels when he leaves the infant in the care of a sympathetic gypsy woman and returns to find the entire encampment gone — the baby taken with them. Faced with confessing or fleeing, Tad chooses flight, writing his father a letter from the road and heading toward the coast. He reaches the seaside town of Upland Bay to find police notices posted with his description and the accusation that he may have harmed the child. Disguising himself, he attempts to stow away on a harbor vessel, is refused, and flees on foot through a rainy night. He falls asleep on a beach, steals food from a guarded bundle, commandeers a small boat without oars, and drifts out to sea — where he is rescued by the schooner "Stormy Petrel," captained by a kind, plain-spoken man named Jeremiah Jackson. Tad confesses everything. Jackson counsels him to return home and face the consequences honestly, telling him it is hard to kick against the pricks. Tad refuses. At Granville in France, Tad falls under the influence of a predatory itinerant charlatan called Renard — "Foxy" — who effectively enslaves Tad and a gentle English orphan named Phil Bates, working them as organ-grinders and beating them when their earnings fall short. Phil proves to be morally stronger than Tad in every crisis: when Renard attempts to use the boys as accomplices in a burglary, Phil refuses outright and steadies the vacillating Tad into refusal as well. Renard beats them both savagely. The boys escape during one of Renard's drunken stupors. After a period of wandering, begging, and narrowly evading Renard, the boys take refuge with a caravan of itinerant French tradespeople led by the elderly, warm-hearted Jacques and Sophie. Living and working honestly among them, Tad gradually matures under Phil's persistent moral influence. He learns that Sophie's daughter Marie — an English gypsy's wife — unknowingly has the very baby he lost, having kept the child to fill the void left by the death of her own infant. Tad's self-will reasserts itself. Against Phil's repeated, earnest pleading, he secretly abducts the baby again and sets off on foot overnight toward Granville, hoping to find Jackson's schooner and sail home. The baby, already feverish, becomes dangerously ill from exposure and is admitted to Granville Hospital with lung inflammation. Tad is stranded, penniless, remorseful, and cut off from everyone who had helped him. Renard reappears and seizes him on the quay — until Jackson, by chance in port, confronts Renard and frees the boy. Phil, having guessed where Tad would go, arrives at the "Stormy Petrel" with Sophie and Marie. The truth is fully told. Marie, persuaded by her parents, agrees to relinquish the child if he recovers. The baby's condition worsens to a crisis; Phil prays urgently and simply at Tad's side; the child turns and begins to recover. When the "Stormy Petrel" next puts into Granville, the party — Tad, Phil, Marie, and the restored baby — sail for Southampton. James Poole meets them. Mrs. Poole, long bedridden from illness and shaken by losing her baby, has undergone her own change of heart. She acknowledges that grief taught her what Tad, Nell, and Bert had suffered in losing their own mother, and she asks Tad to call her mother and start again. Tad returns to his position at the grocer's. Phil takes a berth on the "Stormy Petrel." The novel closes with the explicit moral that getting one's own way does not mean happiness, a lesson Tad has paid dearly to learn.

By Mary E. Ropes · First published 1914 · Genre: Bildungsroman, Adventure fiction, Moral fiction · 20 chapters · 44,081 words

First lines

"NOW look here, boy! I ain't a-goin' to have no more words about it. / Your mother must-"

"She ain't my mother, nor I'll never call her so, never! Not if I live / a hundred year; so don't try to make me, dad."

What this Textopian page supports

What Happened to Tad is listed on Textopian as a novella by Mary E. Ropes, dated 1914 CE.

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Genres

Tags

children's literature · juvenile fiction · adventure · family life · boyhood · coming of age · moral lessons · friendship · school life · domestic fiction · early twentieth century · American fiction

Contents

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