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Title: The Other Fellow
Author: F. Hopkinson Smith
Release Date: August 21, 2011 [EBook #37148]
Language: English
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_FICTION AND TRAVEL_
By F. Hopkinson Smith.
CALEB WEST, MASTER DIVER. Illustrated. 12mo, $1.50.
TOM GROGAN. Illustrated. 12mo, gilt top, $1.50.
THE OTHER FELLOW. Illustrated. 12mo, $1.50.
A GENTLEMAN VAGABOND, AND SOME OTHERS. 16mo, $1.25.
COLONEL CARTER OF CARTERSVILLE. With 20 illustrations by
the author and E. W. Kemble. 16mo, $1.25.
A DAY AT LAGUERRE'S AND OTHER DAYS. 16mo, $1.25.
A WHITE UMBRELLA IN MEXICO. Illustrated by the author.
16mo, gilt top, $1.50.
GONDOLA DAYS. Illustrated. 12mo, $1.50.
WELL-WORN ROADS OF SPAIN, HOLLAND, AND ITALY, traveled by
a Painter in search of the Picturesque. With 16 full-page
phototype reproductions of water-color drawings, and text
by F. HOPKINSON SMITH, profusely illustrated
with pen-and ink sketches. A Holiday volume. Folio, gilt
top, $15.00.
THE SAME. _Popular Edition._ Including some of the
illustrations of the above. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK.
THE OTHER FELLOW
[Illustration: "MISS NANNIE GIB MARSE TOM BOLING HER HAN'"
(_Page 63_)]
_The Other Fellow_
_By F. HOPKINSON SMITH_
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1900
COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY F. HOPKINSON SMITH
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
PAGE
Dick Sands, Convict 1
A Kentucky Cinderella 35
A Waterlogged Town 65
The Boy in the Cloth Cap 71
Between Showers in Dort 82
One of Bob's Tramps 113
According to the Law 124
"Never had no Sleep" 162
The Man with the Empty Sleeve 169
"Tincter ov Iron" 200
"Five Meals for a Dollar" 206
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
"Miss Nannie gib Marse Tom Boling
her han'" (page 63) _Frontispiece_
Aunt Chloe 36
"Her head crammed full of hifalutin' notions" 66
Through streets embowered in trees 82
The gossips lean in the doorways 88
Drenched leaves quivering 94
An ancient Groote Kerk 108
"Forty-two cents" 216
DICK SANDS, CONVICT.
I
The stage stopped at a disheartened-looking tavern with a sagging
porch and sprawling wooden steps. A fat man with a good-natured face,
tagged with a gray chin whisker, bareheaded, and without a coat--there
was snow on the ground, too--and who said he was the landlord, lifted
my yellow bag from one of the long chintz-covered stage cushions, and
preceded me through a sanded hall into a low-ceiled room warmed by a
red-hot stove, and lighted by windows filled with geraniums in full
bloom. The effect of this color was so surprising, and the contrast to
the desolate surroundings outside so grateful, that, without stopping
to register my name, I drew up a chair and joined the circle of baking
loungers. My oversight was promptly noted by the clerk--a sallow-faced
young man with an uncomfortably high collar, red necktie, and stooping
shoulders--and as promptly corrected by his dipping a pen in a wooden
inkstand and holding the book on his knee until I could add my own
superscription to those on its bespattered page. He had been
considerate enough not to ask me to rise.
The landlord studied the signature, his spectacles on his nose, and
remarked in a kindly tone:--
"Oh, you're the man what's going to lecture to the college."
"Yes; how far is it from here?"
"'Bout two miles out, Bingville way. You'll want a team, won't you? If
I'd knowed it was you when yer got out I'd told the driver to come
back for you. But it's all right--he's got to stop here again in half
an hour--soon 's he leaves the mail."
I thanked him and asked him to see that the stage called for me at
half-past seven, as I was to speak at eight o'clock. He nodded in
assent, dropped into a rocking chair, and guided a spittoon into range
with his foot. Then he backed away a little and began to scrutinize my
face. Something about me evidently puzzled him. A leaning mirror that
hung over a washstand reflected his head and shoulders, and gave me
every expression that flitted across his good-natured countenance.
His summing up was evidently favorable, for his scrutinizing look gave
place to a benign smile which widened into curves around his mouth and
lost itself in faint ripples under his eyes. Hitching his chair
closer, he spread his fat knees, and settled his broad shoulders,
lazily stroking his chin whisker all the while with his puffy fingers.
"Guess you ain't been at the business long," he said kindly. "Last one
we had a year ago looked kinder peaked." The secret of his peculiar
interest was now out. "Must be awful tough on yer throat, havin' to
holler so. I wasn't up to the show, but the fellers said they heard
him 'fore they got to the crossin'. 'Twas spring weather and the
winders was up. He didn't have no baggage--only a paper box and a
strap. I got supper for him when he come back, and he did eat
hearty--did me good to watch him." Then, looking at the clock and
recalling his duties as a host, he leaned over, and shielding his
mouth with his hand, so as not to be overheard by the loungers, said
in a confidential tone, "Supper'll be on in half an hour, if you want
to clean up. I'll see you get what you want. Your room's first on the
right--you can't miss it."
I expressed my appreciation of his timely suggestion, and picking up
the yellow bag myself--hall-boys are scarce in these localities--mounted
the steps to my bedroom.
Within the hour--fully equipped in the regulation costume, swallow-tail,
white tie, and white waistcoat--I was again hugging the stove, for
my bedroom had been as cold as a barn.
My appearance created something of a sensation. A tall man in a
butternut suit, with a sinister face, craned his head as I passed, and
the sallow-faced clerk leaned over the desk in an absorbed way, his
eyes glued to my shirt front. The others looked stolidly at the red
bulb of the stove. No remarks were made--none aloud, the splendor of
my appearance and the immaculate nature of my appointments seeming to
have paralyzed general conversation for the moment. This silence
continued. I confess I did not know how to break it. Tavern stoves are
often trying ordeals to the wayfarer; the silent listeners with the
impassive leather faces and foxlike eyes disconcert him; he knows just
what they will say about him when they go out. The awkward stillness
was finally broken by a girl in blue gingham opening a door and
announcing supper.
It was one of those frying-pan feasts of eggs, bacon, and doughnuts,
with canned corn in birds' bathtubs, plenty of green pickles, and dabs
of home-made preserves in pressed glass saucers. It occupied a few
moments only. When it was over, I resumed my chair by the stove.
The night had evidently grown colder. The landlord had felt it, for he
had put on his coat; so had a man with a dyed mustache and heavy red
face, whom I had left tipped back against the wall, and who was now
raking out the ashes with a poker. So had the butternut man, who had
moved two diameters nearer the centre of comfort. All doubts, however,
were dispelled by the arrival of a thickset man with ruddy cheeks, who
slammed the door behind him and moved quickly toward the stove,
shedding the snow from his high boots as he walked. He nodded to the
landlord and spread his stiff fingers to the red glow. A faint wreath
of white steam arose from his coonskin overcoat, filling the room with
the odor of wet horse blankets and burned leather. The landlord left
the desk, where he had been figuring with the clerk, approached my
chair, and pointing to the new arrival, said:--
"This is the driver I been expectin' over from Hell's Diggings. He'll
take you. This man"--he now pointed to me--"wants to go to the college
at 7.30."
The new arrival shifted his whip to the other hand, looked me all
over, his keen and penetrating eye resting for an instant on my white
shirt and waistcoat, and answered slowly, still looking at me, but
addressing the landlord:--
"He'll have to get somebody else. I got to take Dick Sands over to
Millwood Station; his mother's took bad again."
"What, Dick Sands?" came a voice from the other side of the stove. It
was the man in the butternut suit.
"Why, Dick Sands," replied the driver in a positive tone.
"Not _Dick Sands_?" The voice expressed not only surprise but
incredulity.
"Yes, DICK SANDS," shouted the driver in a tone that carried with it
his instant intention of breaking anybody's head who doubted the
statement.
"Gosh! that so? When did he git out?" cried the butternut man.
"Oh, a month back. He's been up in Hell's Diggin's ever since." Then
finding that no one impugned his veracity, he added in a milder tone:
"His old mother's awful sick up to her sister's back of Millwood. He
got word a while ago."
"Well, this gentleman's got to speak at the college, and our team
won't be back in time." The landlord pronounced the word "gentleman"
with emphasis. The white waistcoat had evidently gotten in its fine
work.
"Let Dick walk," broke in the clerk. "He's used to it, and used to
runnin', too"--this last with a dry laugh in spite of an angry glance
from his employer.
"Well, Dick won't walk," snapped the driver, his voice rising. "He'll
ride like a white man, he will, and that's all there is to it. His
leg's bad ag'in."
These remarks were not aimed at me nor at the room. They were fired
pointblank at the clerk. I kept silent; so did the clerk.
"What time was you goin' to take Dick?" inquired the landlord in a
conciliatory tone.
"'Bout 7.20--time to catch the 8.10."
"Well, now, why can't you take this man along? You can go to the
Diggings for Dick, and then"--pointing again at me--"you can drop him
at the college and keep on to the station. 'Tain't much out of the
way."
The driver scanned me closely and answered coldly:--
"Guess his kind don't want to mix in with Dick"--and started for the
door.
"I have no objection," I answered meekly, "provided I can reach the
lecture hall in time."
The driver halted, hit the spittoon squarely in the middle, and said
with deep earnestness and with a slight trace of deference:--
"Guess you don't know it all, stranger. Dick's served time. Been up
twice."
"Convict?"--my voice evidently betrayed my surprise.
"You've struck it fust time--last trip was for five years."
He stood whip in hand, his fur cap pulled over his ears, his eyes
fixed on mine, noting the effect of the shot. Every other eye in the
room was similarly occupied.
I had no desire to walk to Bingville in the cold. I felt, too, the
necessity of proving myself up to the customary village standard in
courage and complacency.
"That don't worry me a bit, my friend. There are a good many of us out
of jail that ought to be in, and a good many in that ought to be out."
I said this calmly, like a man of wide experience and knowledge of the
world, one who had traveled extensively, and whose knowledge of
convicts and other shady characters was consequently large and varied.
The prehistoric age of this epigram was apparently unnoticed by the
driver, for he started forward, grasped my hand, and blurted out in a
whole-souled, hearty way, strangely in contrast with his former
manner:--
"You ain't so gol-darned stuck up, be ye? Yes, I'll take ye, and glad
to." Then he stooped over and laid his hand on my shoulder and said in
a softened voice: "When ye git 'longside o' Dick you tell him that;
it'll please him," and he stalked out and shut the door behind him.
Another dead silence fell upon the group. Then a citizen on the other
side of the stove, by the aid of his elbows, lifted himself
perpendicularly, unhooked a coat from a peg, and remarked to himself
in a tone that expressed supreme disgust:--
"Please him! In a pig's eye it will," and disappeared into the night.
Only two loungers were now left--the butternut man with the sinister
expression, and the red-faced man with the dyed mustache.
The landlord for the second time dropped into a chair beside me.
"I knowed Dick was out, but I didn't say nothing, so many of these
fellers 'round here is down on him. The night his time was up Dick
come in here on his way home and asked after his mother. He hadn't
heard from her for a month, and was nigh worried to death about her. I
told him she was all right, and had him in to dinner. He'd fleshed up
a bit and nobody didn't catch on who he was,--bein' away nigh five
years,--and so I passed him off for a drummer."
At this the red-faced man who had been tilted back, his feet on the
iron rod encircling the stove, brought them down with a bang,
stretched his arms above his head, and said with a yawn, addressing
the pots of geraniums on the window sill, "Them as likes jail-birds
can have jail-birds," and lounged out of the room, followed by the
citizen in butternut. It was apparent that the supper hour of the
group had arrived. It was equally evident that the hospitality of the
fireside did not extend to the table.
"You heard that fellow, didn't you?" said the landlord, turning to me
after a moment's pause. "You'd think to hear him talk there warn't
nobody honest 'round here but him. That's Chris Rankin--he keeps a rum
mill up to the Forks and sells tanglefoot and groceries to the miners.
By Sunday mornin' he's got 'bout every cent they've earned. There
ain't a woman in the settlement wouldn't be glad if somebody would
break his head. I'd rather be Dick Sands than him. Dick never drank a
drop in his life, and won't let nobody else if he can help it. That's
what that slouch hates him for, and that's what he hates me for."
The landlord spoke with some feeling--so much so that I squared my
chair and faced him to listen the better. His last remark, too,
explained a sign tacked over the desk reading, "No liquors sold here,"
and which had struck me as unusual when I entered.
"What was this man's crime?" I asked. "There seems to be some
difference of opinion about him."
"His crime, neighbor, was because there was a lot of fellers that
didn't have no common sense--that's what his crime was. I've known
Dick since he was knee-high to a barrel o' taters, and there warn't no
better"----
"But he was sent up the second time," I interrupted, glancing at my
watch. "So the driver said." I had not the slightest interest in Mr.
Richard Sands, his crimes or misfortunes.
"Yes, and they'd sent him up the third time if Judge Polk had lived.
The first time it was a pocket-book and three dollars, and the second
time it was a ham. Polk did that. Polk's dead now. God help him if
he'd been alive when Dick got out the last time. First question he
asked me after I told him his mother was all right was whether 'twas
true Polk was dead. When I told him he was he didn't say nothin' at
first--just looked down on the floor and then he said slow-like:--
"'If Polk had had any common sense, Uncle Jimmy,'--he always calls me
'Uncle Jimmy,'--'he'd saved himself a heap o' worry and me a good deal
o' sufferin'. I'm glad he's dead.'"
II
The driver arrived on the minute, backed up to the sprawling wooden
steps, and kicked open the door of the waiting-room with his foot.
"All right, boss, I got two passengers 'stead o' one, but you won't
kick, I know. You git in; I'll go for the mail." The promotion and the
confidential tone were intended as a compliment.
I slipped into my fur overcoat; slid my manuscript into the outside
pocket, and followed the driver out into the cold night. The only
light visible came from a smoky kerosene lamp boxed in at the far end
of the stage and protected by a pane of glass labeled in red paint,
"Fare, ten cents."
Close to its rays sat a man, and close to the man--so close that I
mistook her for an overcoat thrown over his arm--cuddled a little
girl, the light of the lamp falling directly on her face. She was
about ten years of age, and wore a cheap woolen hood tied close to her
face, and a red shawl crossed over her chest and knotted behind her
back. Her hair was yellow and weather-burned, as if she had played out
of doors all her life; her eyes were pale blue, and her face freckled.
Neither she nor the man made any answer to my salutation.
The child looked up into the man's face and shrugged her shoulders
with a slight shiver. The man drew her closer to him, as if to warm
her the better, and felt her chapped red hands. In the movement his
face came into view. He was, perhaps, thirty years of age--wiry and
well built, with an oval face ending in a pointed Vandyke beard;
piercing brown eyes, finely chiseled nose, and a well-modeled mouth
over which drooped a blond mustache. He was dressed in a dark blue
flannel shirt, with loose sailor collar tied with a red 'kerchief, and
a black, stiff-brimmed army-shaped hat a little drawn down over his
eyes. Buttoned over his chest was a heavy waistcoat made of a white
and gray deerskin, with the hair on the outside. His trousers, which
fitted snugly his slender, shapely legs, were tucked into his boots.
He wore no coat, despite the cold.
A typical young westerner, I said to myself--one of the bone and sinew
of the land--accustomed to live anywhere in these mountains--cold
proof, of course, or he'd wear a coat on a night like this. Taking his
little sister home, I suppose. The country will never go to the dogs
as long as we have these young fellows to fall back upon. Then my eyes
rested with pleasure on the pointed beard, the peculiar curve of the
hat-brim, the slender waist corrugating the soft fur of the deerskin
waistcoat, and the peculiar set of his trousers and boots--like those
of an Austrian on parade. And how picturesque, I thought. What an
admirable costume for the ideal cowboy or the romantic mountain ranger
who comes in at the nick of time to save the young maiden; and what a
hit the favorite of the footlights would make if he could train his
physique down to such wire-drawn, alert, panther-like outlines and--
A heavy object struck the boot of the stage and interrupted my
meditations. It was the mail-bag. The next instant the driver's head
was thrust in the door.
"Dick, this is the man I told you was goin' 'long far as Bingville.
He's got a show up to the college."
I started, hardly believing my ears. Shades of D'Artagnan, Davy
Crockett, and Daniel Boone! Could this lithe, well-knit, brown-eyed
young Robin Hood be a convict?
"Are you Dick Sands?" I faltered out.
"Yes, that's what they call me when I'm out of jail. When I'm in I'm
known as One Hundred and Two."
He spoke calmly, quite as if I had asked him his age--the voice clear
and low, with a certain cadence that surprised me all the more. His
answer, too, convinced me that the driver had told him of my
time-honored views on solitary confinement, and that it had disposed
him to be more or less frank toward me. If he expected, however, any
further outburst of sympathy from me he was disappointed. The surprise
had been so great, and the impression he had made upon me so
favorable, that it would have been impossible for me to remind him
even in the remotest way of his former misfortunes.
The child looked at me with her pale eyes, and crept still closer,
holding on to the man's arm, steadying herself as the stage bumped
over the crossings.
For some minutes I kept still, my topics of conversation especially
adapted to convicts being limited. Despite my implied boasting to the
driver, I had never, to my knowledge, met one before. Then, again, I
had not yet adjusted my mind to the fact that the man before me had
ever worn stripes. So I said, aimlessly:--
"Is that your little sister?"
"No, I haven't got any little sister," still in the same calm voice.
"This is Ben Mulford's girl; she lives next to me, and I am taking her
down for the ride. She's coming back."
The child's hand stole along the man's knee, found his fingers and
held on. I kept silence for a while, wondering what I would say next.
I felt that to a certain extent I was this man's guest, and therefore
under obligation to preserve the amenities. I began again:--
"The driver tells me your mother's sick?"
"Yes, she is. She went over to her sister's last week and got cold.
She isn't what she was--I being away from her so much lately. I got
two terms; last time for five years. Every little thing now knocks her
out."
He raised his head and looked at me calmly--all over--examining each
detail,--my derby hat, white tie, fur overcoat, along my arms to my
gloves, and slowly down to my shoes.
"I s'pose you never done no time?" He had no suspicion that I had; he
only meant to be amiable.
"No," I said, with equal simplicity, meeting him on his own
ground--quite as if an attack of measles at some earlier age was under
discussion, to which he had fallen a victim while I had escaped. As he
spoke his fingers tightened over the child's hand. Then he turned and
straightened her hood, tucking the loose strands of hair under its
edge with his fingers.
"You seem rather fond of that little girl; is she any relation?" I
asked, forgetting that I had asked almost that same question before.
"No, she isn't any relation--just Ben Mulford's girl." He raised his
other hand and pressed the child's head down upon the deerskin
waistcoat, close into the fur, with infinite tenderness. The child
reached up her small, chapped hand and laid it on his cheek, cuddling
closer, a shy, satisfied smile overspreading her face.
My topics were exhausted, and we rode on in silence, he sitting in
front of me, his eyes now so completely hidden in the shadow of his
broad-brimmed hat that I only knew they were fixed on me when some
sudden tilt of the stage threw the light full on his face. I tried
offering him a cigar, but he would not smoke--"had gotten out of the
habit of it," he said, "being shut up so long. It didn't taste good to
him, so he had given it up."
When the stage reached the crossing near the college gate and stopped,
he asked quietly:--
"You get out here?" and lifted the child as he spoke so that her
soiled shoes would not scrape my coat. In the action I saw that his
leg pained him, for he bent it suddenly and put his hand on the
kneecap.
"I hope your mother will be better," I said. "Good-night; good-night,
little girl."
"Thank you; good-night," he answered quickly, with a strain of sadness
that I had not caught before. The child raised her eyes to mine, but
did not speak.
I mounted the hill to the big college building, and stopped under a
light to look back; following with my eyes the stage on its way to the
station. The child was on her knees, looking at me out of the window
and waving her hand, but the man sat by the lamp, his head on his
chest.
* * * * *
All through my discourse the picture of that keen-eyed, handsome young
fellow, with his pointed beard and picturesque deerskin waistcoat, the
little child cuddled down upon his breast, kept coming before me.
When I had finished, and was putting on my coat in the president's
room,--the landlord had sent his team to bring me back,--I asked one
of the professors, a dry, crackling, sandy-haired professor, with
bulging eyes and watch-crystal spectacles, if he knew of a man by the
name of Sands who had lived in Hell's Diggings with his mother, and
who had served two terms in state's prison, and I related my
experience in the stage, telling him of the impression his face and
bearing had made upon me, and of his tenderness to the child beside
him.
"No, my dear sir, I never heard of him. Hell's Diggings is a most
unsafe and unsavory locality. I would advise you to be very careful in
returning. The rogue will probably be lying in wait to rob you of your
fee;" and he laughed a little harsh laugh that sounded as if some one
had suddenly torn a coarse rag.
"But the child with him," I said; "he seemed to love her."
"That's no argument, my dear sir. If he has been twice in state's
prison he probably belongs to that class of degenerates in whom all
moral sense is lacking. I have begun making some exhaustive
investigations of the data obtainable on this subject, which I have
embodied in a report, and which I propose sending to the State
Committee on the treatment of criminals, and which"----
"Do you know any criminals personally?" I asked blandly, cutting
short, as I could see, an extract from the report. His manner, too,
strange to say, rather nettled me.
"Thank God, no, sir; not one! Do you?"
"I am not quite sure," I answered. "I thought I had, but I may have
been mistaken."
III
When I again mounted the sprawling steps of the disheartened-looking
tavern, the landlord was sitting by the stove half asleep and alone.
He had prepared a little supper, he said, as he led the way, with a
benign smile, into the dining-room, where a lonely bracket lamp,
backed by a tin reflector, revealed a table holding a pitcher of milk,
a saucer of preserves, and some pieces of leather beef about the size
used in repairing shoes.
"Come, and sit down by me," I said. "I want to talk to you about this
young fellow Sands. Tell me everything you know."
"Well, you saw him; clean and pert-lookin', ain't he? Don't look much
like a habitual criminal, as Polk called him, does he?"
"No, he certainly does not; but give me the whole story." I was in a
mood either to reserve decision or listen to a recommendation of
mercy.
"Want me to tell you about the pocketbook or that ham scrape?"
"Everything from the beginning," and I reached for the scraps of beef
and poured out a glass of milk.
"Well, you saw Chris Rankin, didn't you,--that fellow that talked
about jail-birds? Well, one night about six or seven years ago,"--the
landlord had now drawn out a chair from the other side of the table
and was sitting opposite me, leaning forward, his arms on the
cloth,--"maybe six years ago, a jay of a farmer stopped at Rankin's
and got himself plumb full o' tanglefoot. When he come to pay he
hauled out a wallet and chucked it over to Chris and told him to take
it out. The wallet struck the edge of the counter and fell on the
floor, and out come a wad o' bills. The only other man besides him and
Chris in the bar-room was Dick. It was Saturday night, and Dick had
come in to git his paper, which was always left to Rankin's. Dick seen
he was drunk, and he picked the wallet up and handed it back to the
farmer. About an hour after that the farmer come a-runnin' in to
Rankin's sober as a deacon, a-hollerin' that he'd been robbed, and
wanted to know where Dick was. He said that he had had two rolls o'
bills; one was in an envelope with three dollars in it that he'd got
from the bank, and the other was the roll he paid Chris with. Dick, he
claimed, was the last man who had handled the wallet, and he vowed
he'd stole the envelope with the three dollars when he handed it back
to him.
"When the trial come off everything went dead ag'in Dick. The cashier
of the bank swore he had given the farmer the money and envelope, and
in three new one-dollar bills of the bank, mind you, for the farmer
had sold some ducks for his wife and wanted clean money for her. Chris
swore he seen Dick pick it up and fix the money all straight again for
the farmer; the farmer's wife swore she had took the money out of her
husband's pocket, and that when she opened the wallet the envelope was
gone, and the farmer, who was so dumb he couldn't write his name,
swore that he hadn't stopped no place between Chris Rankin's and home,
'cept just a minute to fix his traces t'other side of Big Pond Woods.
"Dick's mother, of course, was nigh crazy, and she come to me and I
went and got Lawyer White. It come up 'fore Judge Polk. After we had
all swore to Dick's good character and, mind you, there warn't one of
'em could say a word ag'in him 'cept that he lived in Hell's Diggin's,
Lawyer White began his speech, clamin' that Dick had always been
square as a brick, and that the money must be found on Dick or
somewheres nigh him 'fore they could prove he took it.
"Well, the jury was the kind we always git 'round here, and they done
what Polk told 'em to in his charge,--just as they always do,--and
Dick was found guilty before them fellers left their seats. The mother
give a shriek and fell in a heap on the floor, but Dick never changed
a muscle nor said a word. When Polk asked him if he had anything to
say, he stood up and turned his back on Polk, and faced the
court-room, which was jam full, for everybody knowed him and everybody
liked him--you couldn't help it.
"'You people have knowed me here,' Dick says, 'since I was a boy, and
you've knowed my mother. I ain't never in times back done nothin' I
was ashamed of, and I ain't now, and you know it. I tell you, men, I
didn't take that money.' Then he faced the jury. 'I don't know,' he
said, 'as I blame you. Most of you don't know no better and those o'
you who do are afraid to say it; but you, Judge Polk,' and he squared
himself and pointed his finger straight at him, 'you claim to be a man
of eddication, and so there ain't no excuse for you. You've seen me
grow up here, and if you had any common sense you'd know that a man
like me couldn't steal that man's money, and you'd know, too, that he
was too drunk to know what had become of it.' Then he stopped and said
in a low voice, and with his teeth set, looking right into Polk's
eyes: 'Now I'm ready to take whatever you choose to give me, but
remember one thing, I'll settle with you if I ever come back for
puttin' this misery on to my mother, and don't you forget it.'
"Polk got a little white about the gills, but he give Dick a year, and
they took him away to Stoneburg.
"After that the mother ran down and got poorer and poorer, and folks
avoided her, and she got behind and had to sell her stuff, and a month
before his time was out she got sick and pretty near died. Dick went
straight home and never left her day nor night, and just stuck to her
and nursed her like any girl would a-done, and got her well again. Of
course folks was divided, and it got red-hot 'round here. Some
believed him innercent, and some believed him guilty. Lawyer White and
fellers like him stuck to him, but Rankin's gang was down on him; and
when he come into Chris's place for his paper same as before, all the
bums that hang 'round there got up and left, and Chris told Dick he
didn't want him there no more. That kinder broke the boy's heart,
though he didn't say nothing, and after that he would go off up in the
woods by himself, or he'd go huntin' ches'nuts or picking flowers, all
the children after him. Every child in the settlement loved him, and
couldn't stay away from him. Queer, ain't it, how folks would trust
their chil'ren. All the folks in Hell's Diggin's did, anyhow."
"Yes," I interrupted, "there was one with him to-night in the stage."
"That's right. He always has one or two boys and girls 'long with him;
says nothin' ain't honest, no more, 'cept chil'ren and dogs.
"Well, when his mother got 'round ag'in all right, Dick started in to
get something to do. He couldn't get nothin' here, so he went acrost
the mountains to Castleton and got work in a wagon fact'ry. When it
come pay day and they asked him his name he said out loud, Dick Sands,
of Hell's Diggin's. This give him away, and the men wouldn't work with
him, and he had to go. I see him the mornin' he got back. He come in
and asked for me, and I went out, and he said, 'Uncle Jimmy, they mean
I sha'n't work 'round here. They won't give me no work, and when I git
it they won't let me stay. Now, by God!'--and he slammed his fist down
on the desk--'they'll support me and my mother without workin',' and
he went out.
"Next thing I heard Dick had come into Rankin's and picked up a ham
and walked off with it. Chris, he allus 'lowed, hurt him worse than
any one else around here, and so maybe he determined to begin on him.
Chris was standin' at the bar when he picked up the ham, and he
grabbed a gun and started for him. Dick waited a-standin' in the road,
and just as Chris was a-pullin' the trigger, he jumped at him,
plantin' his fist in 'tween Chris's eyes. Then he took his gun and
went off with the ham. Chris didn't come to for an hour. Then Dick
barricaded himself in his house, put his mother in the cellar, strung
a row of cartridges 'round his waist, and told 'em to come on. Well,
his mother plead with him not to do murder, and after a day he give
himself up and come out.
"At the trial the worst scared man was Polk. Dick had dropped in on
him once or twice after he got out, tellin' him how he couldn't git no
work and askin' him to speak up and set him straight with the folks.
They do say that Polk never went out o' night when Dick was home,
'fraid he'd waylay him--though I knew Polk was givin' himself a good
deal of worry for nothin', for Dick warn't the kind to hit a man on
the sly. When Polk see who it was a-comin' into court he called the
constable and asked if Dick had been searched, and when he found he
had he told Ike Martin, the constable, to stand near the bench in case
the prisoner got ugly.
"But Dick never said a word, 'cept to say he took the ham and he never
intended to pay for it, and he'd take it again whenever his mother was
hungry.
"So Polk give him five years, sayin' it was his second offense, and
that he was a 'habitual criminal.' It was all over in half an hour,
and Ike Martin and the sheriff had Dick in a buggy and on the way to
Stoneburg. They reached the jail about nine o'clock at night, and
drove up to the gate. Well, sir, Ike got out on one side and the
sheriff he got out on t'other, so they could get close to him when he
got down, and, by gosh! 'fore they knowed where they was at, Dick give
a spring clear over the dashboard and that's the last they see of him
for two months. One day, after they'd hunted him high and low and lay
'round his mother's cabin, and jumped in on her half a dozen times in
the middle of the night, hopin' to get him,--for Polk had offered a
reward of five hundred dollars, dead or alive,--Ike come in to my
place all het up and his eyes a-hangin' out, and he say, 'Gimme your
long gun, quick, we got Dick Sands.' I says, 'How do you know?' and he
says, 'Some boys seen smoke comin' out of a mineral hole half a mile
up the mountain above Hell's Diggin's, and Dick's in there with a bed
and blanket, and we're goin' to lay for him to-night and plug him when
he comes out if he don't surrender.' And I says, 'You can't have no
gun o' mine to shoot Dick, and if I knowed where he was I'd go tell
him.' The room was full when he asked for my gun, and some o' the boys
from Hell's Diggin's heard him and slid off through the woods, and
when the sheriff and his men got there they see the smoke still comin'
up, and lay in the bushes all night watchin'. 'Bout an hour after
daylight they crep' up. The fire was out and so was Dick, and all they
found was a chicken half cooked and a quilt off his mother's bed.
"'Bout a week after that, one Saturday night, a feller come runnin' up
the street from the market, sayin' Dick had walked into his place just
as he was closin' up,--he had a stall in the public market under the
city hall, where the court is,--and asked him polite as you please for
a cup of coffee and a piece of bread, and before he could holler Dick
was off again with the bread under his arm. Well, of course, nobody
didn't believe him, for they knowed Dick warn't darn fool enough to be
loafin' 'round a place within twenty foot of the room where Polk
sentenced him. Some said the feller was crazy, and some said it was a
put-up job to throw Ike and the others off the scent. But the next
night Dick, with his gun handy in the hollow of his arm, and his hat
cocked over his eye, stepped up to the cook shop in the corner of the
market and helped himself to a pie and a chunk o' cheese right under
their very eyes, and 'fore they could say 'scat,' he was off ag'in and
didn't leave no more tracks than a cat.
"By this time the place was wild. Fellers was gettin' their guns, and
Ike Martin was runnin' here and there organizing posses, and most
every other man you'd meet had a gun and was swore in as a deputy to
git Dick and some of the five hundred dollars' reward. They hung
'round the market, and they patrolled the streets, and they had signs
and countersigns, and more tomfoolery than would run a circus. Dick
lay low and never let on, and nobody didn't see him for another week,
when a farmer comin' in with milk 'bout daylight had the life pretty
nigh scared out o' him by Dick stopping him, sayin' he was thirsty,
and then liftin' the lid off the tin without so much as 'by your
leave,' and takin' his fill of the can. 'Bout a week after that the
rope got tangled up in the belfry over the court-house so they
couldn't ring for fires, and the janitor went up to fix it, and when
he came down his legs was shakin' so he couldn't stand. What do you
think he'd found?" And the landlord leaned over and broke out in a
laugh, striking the table with the flat of his hand until every plate
and tumbler rattled.
I made no answer.
"By gosh, there was Dick sound asleep! He had a bed and blankets and
lots o' provisions, and was just as comfortable as a bug in a rug.
He'd been there ever since he got out of the mineral hole! Tell you I
got to laugh whenever I think of it. Dick laughed 'bout it himself
t'other day when he told me what fun he had listenin' to Ike and the
deputies plannin' to catch him. There ain't another man around here
who'd been smart enough to pick out the belfry. He was right over the
room in the court-house where they was, ye see, and he could look down
'tween the cracks and hear every word they said. Rainy nights he'd
sneak out, and his mother would come down to the market, and he'd see
her outside. They never tracked her, of course, when she come there.
He told me she wanted him to go clean away somewheres, but he wouldn't
leave her.
"When the janitor got his breath he busted in on Ike and the others
sittin' 'round swappin' lies how they'd catch Dick, and Ike reached
for his gun and crep' up the ladder with two deputies behind him, and
Ike was so scared and so 'fraid he'd lose the money that he fired
'fore Dick got on his feet. The ball broke his leg, and they all
jumped in and clubbed him over the head and carried him downstairs for
dead in his blankets, and laid him on a butcher's table in the market,
and all the folks in the market crowded 'round to look at him, lyin'
there with his head hangin' down over the table like a stuck calf's,
and his clothes all bloody. Then Ike handcuffed him and started for
Stoneburg in a wagon 'fore Dick come to."
"That's why he couldn't walk to-night," I asked, "and why the driver
took him over in the stage?"
"Yes, that was it. He'll never get over it. Sometimes he's all right,
and then ag'in it hurts him terrible, 'specially when the weather's
bad.
"All the time he was up to Stoneburg them last four years--he got a
year off for good behavior--he kept makin' little things and sellin'
'em to the visitors. Everybody went to his cell--it was the first
place the warders took 'em, and they all bought things from Dick. He
had a nice word for everybody, kind and comforting-like. He was the
handiest feller you ever see. When he got out he had twenty-nine
dollars. He give every cent to his mother. Warden told him when he
left he hadn't had no better man in the prison since he had been
'p'inted. And there ain't no better feller now. It's a darned mean
shame how Chris Rankin and them fellers is down on him, knowin', too,
how it all turned out."
I leaned back in my chair and looked at the landlord. I was conscious
of a slight choking in my throat which could hardly be traced to the
dryness of the beef. I was conscious, too, of a peculiar affection of
the eyes. Two or three lamps seemed to be swimming around the room,
and one or more blurred landlords were talking to me with elbows on
tables.
"What do you think yourself about that money of the farmer's?" I asked
automatically, though I do not think even now that I had the slightest
suspicion of his guilt. "Do you believe he stole the three dollars
when he handed the wallet back?"
"Stole 'em? Not by a d---- sight! Didn't I tell you? Thought I had.
That galoot of a farmer dropped it in the woods 'longside the road
when he got out to fix his traces, and he was too full of Chris
Rankin's rum to remember it, and after Dick had been sent up for the
second time, the second time now, mind ye, and had been in two years
for walking off with Rankin's ham, a lot of school children huntin'
for ches'nuts come upon that same envelope in the ditch with them
three new dollars in it, covered up under the leaves and the weeds
a-growin' over it. Ben Mulford's girl found it."
"What, the child he had with him tonight?"
"Yes, little freckle-faced girl with white eyes. Oh, I tell you Dick's
awful fond of that kid."
A KENTUCKY CINDERELLA
I was bending over my easel, hard at work upon a full-length portrait
of a young girl in a costume of fifty years ago, when the door of my
studio opened softly and Aunt Chloe came in.
"Good-mawnin', suh! I did n' think you'd come to-day, bein' a Sunday,"
she said, with a slight bend of her knees. "I'll jes' sweep up a lil
mite; doan' ye move, I won't 'sturb ye."
Aunt Chloe had first opened my door a year before with a note from
Marny, a brother brush, which began with "Here is an old Southern
mammy who has seen better days; paint her if you can," and ended with,
"Any way, give her a job."
The bearer of the note was indeed the ideal mammy, even to the
bandanna handkerchief bound about her head, and the capacious waist
and ample bosom--the lullaby resting-place for many a child, white and
black. I had never seen a real one in the flesh before. I had heard
about them in my earlier days. Daddy Billy, my father's body servant
and my father's slave, who lived to be ninety-four, had told me of his
own Aunt Mirey, who had died in the old days, but too far back for me
to remember. And I had listened, when a boy, to the traditions
connected with the plantations of my ancestors,--of the Keziahs and
Mammy Crouches and Mammy Janes,--but I had never looked into the eyes
of one of the old school until I saw Aunt Chloe, nor had I ever fully
realized how quaintly courteous and gentle one of them could be until,
with an old-time manner, born of a training seldom found outside of
the old Southern homes, she bent forward, spread her apron with both
hands, and with a little backward dip had said as she left me that
first day: "Thank ye, suh! I'll come eve'y Sunday mawnin'. I'll do my
best to please ye, an' I specs I kin."
I do not often work on Sunday, but my picture had been too long
delayed waiting for a faded wedding dress worn once by the original
when she was a bride, and which had only been found when two of her
descendants had ransacked their respective garrets.
"Mus' be mighty driv, suh," she said, "a-workin' on de Sabbath day.
Golly, but dat's a purty lady!" and she put down her pail. "I see it
las' Sunday when I come in, but she didn't had dem ruffles 'round her
neck den dat you done gib her. 'Clar' to goodness, dat chile look like
she was jes' a-gwine to speak."
[Illustration: AUNT CHLOE]
Aunt Chloe was leaning on her broom, her eyes scrutinizing the
portrait.
"Well, if dat doan' beat de lan'. I ain't never seen none o' dem
frocks since de ole times. An' dem lil low shoes wid de ribbons
crossed on de ankles! She's de livin' pussonecation--she is so, for a
fac'. Uhm! Uhm!" (It is difficult to convey this peculiar sound of
complete approval in so many letters.)
"Did you ever know anybody like her?" I asked.
The old woman straightened her back, and for a moment her eyes looked
into mine. I had often tried to draw from her something of her earlier
life, but she had always evaded my questions. Marny had told me that
his attempts had at first been equally disappointing.
"Body as ole's me, suh, seen a plenty o' people." Then her eyes sought
the canvas again.
After a moment's pause she said, as if to herself: "You's de real
quality, chile, dat you is; eve'y spec an' spinch o' ye."
I tried again.
"Does it look like anybody you ever saw, Aunt Chloe?"
"It do an' it don't," she answered critically. "De feet is like hern,
but de eyes ain't."
"Who?"
"Oh, Miss Nannie." And she leaned again on her broom and looked down
on the floor.
I heaped up a little pile of pigments on one corner of my palette and
flattened them for a high light on a fold in the satin gown.
"Who was Miss Nannie?" I asked carelessly. I was afraid the thread
would break if I pulled too hard.
"One o' my chillen, honey." A peculiar softness came into her voice.
"Tell me about her. It will help me get her eyes right, so you can
remember her better. They don't look human enough to me anyhow" (this
last to myself). "Where did she live?"
"Where dey all live--down in de big house. She warn't Marse Henry's
real chile, but she come o' de blood. She didn't hab dem kind o' shoes
on her footses when I fust see her, but she wore 'em when she lef' me.
Dat she did." Her voice rose suddenly and her eyes brightened. "An'
dem ain't nothin' to de way dey shined. I ain't never seen no satin
slippers shine like dem slippers; dey was jes' ablaze!"
I worked on in silence. Marny had cautioned me not to be too curious.
Some day she might open her heart and tell me wonderful stories of her
earlier life, but I must not appear too anxious. She had become rather
suspicious of strangers since she had moved North and lost track of
her own people, Marny had said.
Aunt Chloe picked up her pail and began moving some easels into a far
corner of my studio and piling the chairs in a heap. This done, she
stopped again and stood behind me, looking intently at the canvas over
my shoulder.
"My! My! ain't dat de ve'y image of dat frock? I kin see it now jes'
as Miss Nannie come down de stairs. But you got to put dat gold chain
on it 'fore it gits to be de ve'y 'spress image. I had it roun' my own
neck once; I know jes' how it looked."
I laid down my palette, and picking up a piece of chalk asked her to
describe it so that I could make an outline.
"It was long an' heavy, an' it woun' roun' de neck twice an' hung down
to de wais'. An' dat watch on de end of it! Well, I ain't seen none
like dat one sence. I 'clar' to ye it was jes' 's teeny as one o' dem
lil biscuits I used to make for 'er when she come in de kitchen--an'
she was dere most of de time. Dey didn't care nuffin for her much. Let
'er go roun' barefoot half de time, an' her hair a-fiyin'. Only one
good frock to her name, an' dat warn't nuffin but calico. I used to
wash dat many a time for her long 'fore she was outen her bed. Allus
makes my blood bile to dis day whenever I think of de way dey treated
dat chile. But it didn't make no diff'ence what she had on--shoes or
no shoes--her footses was dat lil. An' purty! Wid her big eyes an' her
cheeks jes' 's fresh as dem rosewater roses dat I used to snip off for
ole Sam to put on de table. Oh! I tell ye, if ye could picter her like
dat dey wouldn't be nobody clear from here to glory could come nigh
her."
Aunt Chloe's eyes were kindling with every word. I remembered Marny's
warning and kept still. I had abandoned the sketch of the chain as an
unnecessary incentive, and had begun again with my palette knife,
pottering away, nodding appreciatingly, and now and then putting a
question to clear up some tangled situation as to dates and localities
which her rambling talk had left unsettled.
"Yes, suh, down in the blue grass country, near Lexin'ton, Kentucky,
whar my ole master, Marse Henry Gordon, lived," she answered to my
inquiry as to where this all happened. "I used to go eve'y year to see
him after de war was over, an' kep' it up till he died. Dere warn't
nobody like him den, an' dere ain't none now. He warn't never spiteful
to chillen, white or black. Eve'ybody knowed dat. I was a pickaninny
myse'f, an' I b'longed to him. An' he ain't never laid a lick on me,
an' he wouldn't let nobody else do't nuther, 'cept my mammy. I
'members one time when Aunt Dinah made cake dat ole Sam--he war a heap
younger den--couldn't put it on de table 'ca'se dere was a piece broke
out'n it. Sam he riz, an' Dinah she riz, an' after dey'd called each
other all de names dey could lay dere tongues to, Miss Ann, my own
fust mist'ess, come in an' she say dem chillen tuk dat cake, an'
'tain't nary one o' ye dat's 'sponsible.' 'What's dis,' says Marse
Henry--'chillen stealin' cake? Send 'em here to me!' When we all come
in--dere was six or eight of us--he says, 'Eve'y one o' ye look me in
de eye; now which one tuk it?' I kep' lookin' away,--fust on de flo'
an' den out de windy. 'Look at me,' he says agin. 'You ain't lookin',
Clorindy.' Den I cotched him watchin' me. 'Now you all go out,' he
says, 'and de one dat's guilty kin come back agin.' Den we all went
out in de yard. 'You tell him,' says one. 'No, you tell him;' an'
dat's de way it went on. I knowed I was de wustest, for I opened de
door o' de sideboard an' gin it to de others. Den I thought, if I
don't tell him mebbe he'll lick de whole passel on us, an' dat ain't
right; but if I go tell him an' beg his 'umble pardon he might lemme
go. So I crep' 'round where he was a-settin' wid his book on his
knee,"--Aunt Chloe was now moving stealthily behind me, her eyes fixed
on her imaginary master, head down, one finger in her mouth,--"an' I
say, 'Marse Henry!' An' he look up an' say, 'Who's dat?' An' I say,
'Dat's Clorindy.' An' he say, 'What you want?' 'Marse Henry, I come to
tell ye I was hungry, an' I see de door open an' I shove it back an'
tuk de piece o' cake, an' maybe I thought if I done tole ye you'd
forgib me.'
"'Den you is de ringleader,' he says, 'an' you tempted de other
chillen?' 'Yes,' I says, 'I spec so.' 'Well,' he says, lookin' down on
de carpet, 'now dat you has perfessed an' beg pardon, you is good an'
ready to pay 'tention to what I'm gwine to say.' De other chillen had
sneaked up an' was listenin'; dey 'spected to see me git it, though
dere ain't nary one of 'em ever knowed him to strike 'em a lick. Den
he says: 'Dis here is a lil thing,--dis stealin a cake; an' it's a big
thing at de same time. Miss Ann has been right smart put out 'bout it,
an' I'm gwine to see dat it don't happen agin. If you see a pin on de
fl'or you wouldn't steal it,--you'd pick it up if you wanted it, an'
it wouldn't be nuffin, 'cause somebody th'owed it away an' it was free
to eve'body; but if you see a piece o' money on de fl'or, you knowed
nobody didn't th'ow dat away, an' if you pick it up an' don't tell,
dat's somethin' else--dat's stealin', 'cause you tuk somethin' dat
somebody else has paid somethin' for an' dat belongs to him. Now dis
cake ain't o' much 'count, but it warn't yourn, an' you oughtn't to
ha' tuk it. If you'd asked yo'r mist'ess for it she'd gin you a piece.
There ain't nuffin here you chillen doan' git when ye ask for it.' I
didn't say nuffin more. I jes' waited for him to do anythin' he wanted
to me. Den he looks at de carpet for a long time an' he says:--
"'I reckon you won't take no mo' cake 'thout askin' for it, Clorindy,
an' you chillen kin go out an' play agin.'"
The tears were now standing in her eyes.
"Dat's what my ole master was, suh; I ain't never forgot it. If he had
beat me to death he couldn't 'a' done no mo' for me. He jes' splained
to me an' I ain't never forgot since."
"Did your own mother find it out?" I asked.
The tears were gone now; her face was radiant again at my question.
"Dat she did, suh. One o' de chillen done tole on me. Mammy jes' made
one grab as I run pas' de kitchen door, an' reached for a barrel
stave, an' she fairly sot--me--afire!"
Aunt Chloe was now holding her sides with laughter, fresh tears
streaming down her cheeks.
"But Marse Henry never knowed it. Lawd, suh, dere ain't nobody round
here like him, nor never was. I kin 'member him now same as it was
yisterday, wid his white hair, an' he a-settin' in his big chair. It
was de las' time I ever see him. De big house was gone, an' de colored
people was gone, an' he was dat po' he didn't know where de nex'
mouf'ful was a-comin' from. I come out behind him so,"--Aunt Chloe
made me her old master and my stool his rocking-chair,--"an' I pat him
on the shoulder dis way, an' he say, 'Chloe, is dat you? How is it yo'
looks so comf'ble like?' An' I say, 'It's you, Marse Henry; you done
it all; yo' teachin' made me what I is, an' if you study about it
you'll know it's so. An' de others ain't no wus'. Of all de colored
people you owned, dere ain't nary one been hung, or been in de
penitentiary, nor ain't knowed as liars. Dat's de way you fotch us
up.'
"An' I love him yet, an' if he was a-livin' to-day I'd work for him
an' take care of him if I went hungry myse'f. De only fool thing
Marster Henry ever done was a-marryin' dat widow woman for his second
wife. Miss Nannie, dat looks a lil bit like dat chile you got dere
before ye"--and she pointed to the canvas--"wouldn't a been sot on an'
'bused like she was but for her. Dat woman warn't nuffin but a
harf-strainer noway, if I do say it. Eve'body knowed dat. How Marse
Henry Gordon come to marry her nobody don't know till dis day. She
warn't none o' our people. Dey do say dat he met her up to Frankfort
when he was in de Legislater, but I don't know if dat's so. But she
warn't nuffin, nohow."
"Was Miss Nannie her child?" I asked, stepping back from my easel to
get the better effect of my canvas.
"No suh, dat she warn't!" with emphasis. "She was Marse Henry's own
sister's chile, she was. Her people--Miss Nannie's--lived up in
Indiany, an' dey was jes's po' as watermelon rinds, and when her
mother died Marse Henry sent for her to come live wid him, 'cause he
said Miss Rachel--dat was dat woman's own chile by her fust
husband--was lonesome. Dey was bofe about de one age,--fo'teen or
fifteen years old,--but Lawd-a-massy! Miss Rachel warn't lonesome
'cept for what she couldn't git, an' she most broke her heart 'bout
dat, much's she could break it 'bout anything.
"I remember de ve'y day Miss Nannie come. I see her comin' down de
road totin' a big ban'box, an' a carpet bag mos's big's herse'f. Den
she turned in de gate. ''Fo' God,' I says to ole Sam, who was settin'
de table for dinner, 'who's dis yere comin' in?' Den I see her stop
an' set de bundles down an' catch her bref, and den she come on agin.
"'Dat's Marse Henry's niece,' he says. 'I heared de mist'ess say she
was a-comin' one day dis week by de coach.'
"I see right away dat dat woman was up to one of her tricks; she
didn't 'tend to let dat chile come no other way 'cept like a servant;
she was dat dirt mean.
"Oh, you needn't look, suh! I ain't meanin' no onrespect, but I knowed
dat woman when Marse Henry fust married her, an' she ain't never
fooled me once. Fust time she come into de house she walked plumb in
de kitchen, where me an' old Sam an' ole Dinah was a-eaten our dinner,
we setten at de table like we useter did, and she flung her head up in
de air and she says: 'After dis when I come in I want you niggers to
git up on yo' feet.' Think o' dat, will ye? Marse Henry never called
nary one of us nigger since we was pickaninnies. I knowed den she
warn't 'customed to nuthin'. But I tell ye she never put on dem kind
o' airs when Marse Henry was about. No, suh. She was always mighty
sugar-like to him when he was home, but dere ain't no conniption she
warn't up to when he couldn't hear of it. She had purty nigh riz de
roof when he done tell her dat Miss Nannie was a-comin' to live wid
'em, but she couldn't stand agin him, for warn't her only daughter,
Miss Rachel, livin' on him, an' not only Miss Rachel, but lots mo' of
her people where she come from?
"Well, suh, as soon as ole Sam said what chile it was dat was a-comin'
down de road I dropped my dishcloth an' I run out to meet 'er.
"'Is you Miss Nannie?' I says. 'Gimme dat bag,' I says, 'an' dat box.'
"'Yes,' she says, 'dat's me, an' ain't you Aunt Chloe what I heared so
much about?'
"Honey, you ain't never gwine to git de kind o' look on dat picter
you's workin' on dere, suh, as sweet as dat chile's face when she said
dat to me. I loved her from dat fust minute I see her, an' I loved her
ever since, jes' as I loved her mother befo' her.
"When she got to de house, me a-totin' de things on behind, de
mist'ess come out on de po'ch.
"'Oh, dat's you, is it, Nannie?' she says. 'Well, Chloe'll tell ye
where to go,' an' she went straight in de house agin. Never kissed
her, nor touched her, nor nuffin!
"Ole Sam was bilin'. He heard her say it, an' if he was alive he'd
tell ye same as me.
"'Where's she gwine to sleep?' I says, callin' after her; 'upstairs
long wid Miss Rachel?' I was gittin' hot myse'f, though I didn't say
nuffin.
"'No,' she says, flingin' up her head like a goat; 'my daughter needs
all de room she's got. You kin take her downstairs an' fix up a place
for her 'longside o' you an' Dinah.' She was de old cook.
"'Come 'long,' I says, 'Miss Nannie,' an' I dropped a curtsey same's
if she was a princess. An' so she was, an' Marse Henry's own eyes in
her head, an' 'nough like him to be his own chile. 'I'll hab ev'ything
ready for ye,' I says. 'You wait here an' take de air,' an' I got a
chair an' sot her down on de po'ch, an' ole Sam brung her some cake,
an' I went to git de room ready--de room offn de kitchen pantry, where
dey puts de overseer's chillen when dey come to see him.
"Purty soon Miss Rachel come down an' went up an' kissed her--dat is,
Sam said so, though I ain't never seen her kiss her dat time nor no
other time. Miss Rachel an' de mist'ess was bofe split out o' de same
piece o' kindlin', an' what one was agin t'other was agin--a blind man
could see dat. Miss Rachel never liked Miss Nannie from de fust, she
was dat cross-grained and pernicketty. No matter what Miss Nannie done
to please her it warn't good 'nough for her. Why, do you know, when de
other chillen come over from de nex' plantation Miss Rachel wouldn't
send for Miss Nannie to come in de parlor. No, suh, dat she wouldn't!
An' dey'd run off an' leave her, too, when dey was gwine picknickin',
an' treat dat chile owdacious, sayin' she was po' white trash, an'
charity chile, an' things like dat, till I would go an' tell Marse
Henry 'bout it. Den dere would be a 'ruction, an' Marse Henry'd blaze
out, an' jes 's soon 's he was off agin to Frankfort--an' he was dere
mos' of de time, for he was one o' dese yere ole-timers dat dey
couldn't git 'long widout at de Legislater--dey'd treat her wus'n
ever. Soon 's Dinah an' me see dat, we kep' Miss Nannie 'long wid us
much as we could. She'd eat wid 'em when dere warn't no company
'round, but dat was 'bout all."
"Did they send her to school?" I asked, fearing she would again lose
the thread. My picture had a new meaning for me now that it looked
like her heroine.
"No, suh, dat dey didn't, 'cept to de schoolhouse at de cross-roads
whar eve'ybody's chillen went. But dey sent Miss Rachel to a real
highty-tighty school, dat dey did, down to Louisville. Two winters she
was dere, an' eve'y time when she come home for holiday times she had
mo' airs dan when she went away. Marse Henry wanted bofe chillen to
go, but dat woman outdid him, an' she faced him up an' down dat dere
warn't money 'nough for two, an' dat her daughter was de fittenest,
an' all dat, an' he give in. I didn't hear it, but ole Sam did, an'
his han' shook so he mos' spilt de soup. But law, honey, dat didn't
make no diff'ence to Miss Nannie. She'd go off by herse'f wid her
books an' sit all day under de trees, an' sing to herse'f jes' like a
bird, an' dey'd sing to her, an' all dat time her face was a-beamin'
an' her hair shinin' like gold, an' she a-growin' taller, an' her eyes
gittin' bigger an' bigger, an' brighter, an' her little footses white
an' cunnin' as a rabbit's.
"De only place whar she did go outside de big house was over to Mis'
Morgan's, who lived on de nex' plantation. Miss Morgan didn't hab no
chillen of her own, an' she'd send for Miss Nannie to come an' keep
her company, she was dat dead lonesome, an' dey was glad 'nough to let
dat chile go so dey could git her out o' de house. Ole Sam allers said
dat, for he heared 'em talk at table an' knowed what was gwine on.
"Purty soon long come de time when Miss Rachel done finish her
eddication, an' she come back to de big house an' sot herse'f up to
'ceive company. She warn't bad lookin' in dem days, I mus' say, an' if
dat woman's sperit hadn't 'a' been in her she might 'a' pulled
through. But dere warn't no fotching up could stand agin dat blood.
Miss Rachel'd git dat ornery dat you couldn't do nuffin wid her, jes'
like her maw. De fust real out-an'-out beau she had was Dr. Tom
Boling. He lived 'bout fo'teen miles out o' Lexin'ton on de big
plantation, an' was de richest young man in our parts. His paw had
died 'bout two years befo' an' lef him mo' money dan he could th'ow
away, an' he'd jes' come back from Philadelphy, whar he'd been
a-learnin' to be a doctor. He met Miss Rachel at a party in
Louisville, an' de fust Sunday she come home he driv over to see her.
If ye could 'a' seen de mist'ess when she see him comin' in de gate!
All in his ridin' boots an' his yaller breeches an' bottle-green coat,
an' his servant a-ridin' behind to hold de horses.
"Ole Sam an' me was a-watchin' de mist'ess peekin' th'ough de blind at
him, her eyes a-blazin', an' Sam laughed so he had to stuff a napkin
in his mouf to keep 'er from hearin' him. Well, suh, dat went on all
de summer. Eve'y time he come de mist'ess'd be dat sweet mos' make a
body sick to see her, an' when he'd stay away she was dat pesky dere
warn't no livin' wid her. Of co'se dere was plenty mo' gemmen co'rting
Miss Rachel, too, but none o' dem didn't count wid de mist'ess 'cept
de doctor, 'cause he was rich, dat's all dere was to 't, 'cause he was
rich. I tell ye ole Sam had to tell many a lie to the other gemmen,
sayin' Miss Rachel was sick or somethin' else when she was a-waitin'
for de doctor to come, and was feared he might meet some of 'em an'
git skeered away.
"Miss Nannie, she'd watch him, too, from behind de kitchen door, or
scrunched down lookin' over de pantry winder sill, an' den she'd tell
Dinah an' me what he did, an' how he got off his horse an' han' de
reins to de boy, an' slap his boots wid his ridin' whip, like he was
a-dustin' off a fly. An' she'd act it all out for me an' Dinah, an'
slap her own frock, an' den she'd laugh fit to kill herse'f an' dance
all 'round de kitchen. Would yo' believe it? No! dere ain't nobody'd
believe it. Dey never asked her to come in once while he was in de
parlor, an' dey never once tole him dat Miss Nannie was a-livin' on de
top side o' de yearth!
"'Co'se people 'gin to talk, an' ev'ybody said dat Dr. Boling was
gittin' nighest de coon, an' dat fust thing dey'd know dere would be a
weddin' in de Gordon fambly. An' den agin dere was plenty mo' people
said he was only passin' de time wid Miss Rachel, an' dat he come to
see Marse Henry to talk pol'tics.
"Well, one day, suh, I was a-standin' in de door an' I see him come in
a-foot, widout his horse an' servant, an' step up on de po'ch quick
an' rap at de do', like he say to himse'f, 'Lemme in; I'm in a hurry;
I got somethin' on my mind.' Ole Sam was jes' a-gwine to open de do'
for him when Miss Nannie come a-runnin' in de kitchen from de yard,
her cheeks like de roses, her hair a-flyin', an' her big hat hangin'
to a string down her back. I gin Sam one look an' he stopped, an' I
says to Miss Nannie, 'Run, honey,' I says, 'an' open de do' for ole
Sam; I spec',' I says, 'it's one o' dem peddlers.'
"If you could 'a' seen dat chile's face when she come back!"
Aunt Chloe's hands were now waving above her head, her mouth wide open
in her merriment, every tooth shining.
"She was white one minute an' red as a beet de nex'. 'Oh, Aunt Chloe,
what did you let me go for?' she says. 'Oh! I wouldn't 'a' let him see
me like dis for anythin' in de wo'ld. Oh, I'm dat put out.'
"'What did he say to ye, honey?' I says.
"'He didn't say nuffin; he jes' look at me an' say he beg my pardon,
an' was Miss Rachel in, an' den I said I'd run an' tell her, an' when
I come downstairs agin he was a-standin' in de hall wid his eyes up de
staircase, an' he never stopped lookin' at me till I come down.'
"'Well, dat won't do you no harm, chile,' I says; 'a cat kin look at a
king.'
"Ole Sam was a-watchin' her, too, an' when she'd gone in her leetle
room an' shet de do' Sam says, 'I'll lay if Marse Tom Boling had
anythin' on his mind when he come here to-day it's mighty unsettled by
dis time.'
"Nex' time Dr. Tom Boling come he say to de mist'ess, 'Who's dat young
lady,' he says, 'dat opened de door for me las' time I was here? I
hoped to see her agin. Is she in?'
"Den dey bofe cooked up some lie 'bout her bein' over to Mis' Morgan's
or somethin', an' as soon's he was gone dey come down an' riz Sam for
not 'tendin' de door an' lettin' dat ragged fly-away gal open it. Den
dey went for Miss Nannie till dey made her cry, an' she come to me,
an' I took her in my lap an' comfo'ted her like I allers did.
"De nex' time he come he says, 'I hear dat yo'r niece, Miss Nannie
Barnes, is livin' wid you, an' dat she is ve'y 'sclusive. I hope dat
you'll 'suade her to come in de parlor,' he says. Dem was his ve'y
words. Sam was a-standin' close to him as I am to you an' he heared
him.
"'She ain't yet in s'ciety,' de mist'ess says, 'an' she's dat wild dat
we can't p'esent her.'
"'Oh! is dat so?' he says. 'Is she in now?'
"'No,' she says, 'she's over to Mis' Morgan's.'
"Dat was a fac' dis time; she'd gone dat very mawnin'. Den Miss Rachel
come down, an' co'se Sam didn't hear no mo' 'cause he had to go out.
Purty soon out de Doctor come. Dese visits, min' ye, was gittin'
shorter an' shorter, though he do come as often, an' over he goes to
Mis' Morgan's hisse'f.
"Now I doan' know what he said to Miss Nannie, or what passed 'twixt
'em, 'cause she didn't tell me. Only dat she said he had come to see
Mis' Morgan 'bout some land matters, an' dat Mis' Morgan interjuced
'em, but nuffin mo'. Lord bless dat chile! An', suh, dat was de fust
time she ever kep' anythin' from her ole mammy. Dat made me mo' glad
'n ever. I knowed den dey was bofe hit.
"But my lan', de fur begin to fly when de mist'ess an' Miss Rachel
heared 'bout dat visit!
"'What you mean by makin' eyes at Dr. Boling? Don't you know he's good
as 'gaged to my daughter?' de mist'ess said. Dat was a lie, for he
never said a word to Miss Rachel; ole Sam could tole you dat. 'Git out
o' my house, you good-for-nothin' pauper, an' take yo' rags wid ye.'
"I see right away de fat was in de fire. Marse Henry warn't spected
home till de nex' Sunday, an' so I tuk her over to Mis' Morgan, an'
den I ups an' tells her eve'ything dat woman had done to dat chile
since de day she come. An' when I'd done she tuk Miss Nannie by de
han' an' she says:--
"'You won't never want a home, chile, so long as I live. Go back,
Chloe, an' git her clo'es.' But I didn't git 'em. I knowed Marse
Henry'd raise de roof when he come, an' he did, bless yo' heart. Went
over hisse'f an' got her, an' brought her home, an' dat night when Dr.
Boling come he made her sit down in de parlor, an' 'fo' he went home
dat night de Doctor he say to Marse Henry, 'I want yo' permission,
Mister Gordon, to pay my addresses to Miss Nannie, yo' niece.' Sam was
a-standing close as he could git to de door, an' he heard ev'y word.
Now he ain't never said dat, mind ye, to Marse Henry 'bout Miss
Rachel! An' dat's why I know dat he warn't hit unto death wid her.
"Well, do you know, suh, dat dat woman was dat owdacious she wouldn't
let 'em see each other after dat 'cept on de front po'ch. Wouldn't let
'em come in de house; make 'em do all dere co'rtin' on de steps an'
out at de paster gate. De doctor would rare an' pitch an' git white in
de face at de scand'lous way dat Miss Barnes was bein' treated, until
Miss Nannie put bofe her leetle han's on his'n, soothin' like, an' den
he'd grab 'em an' kiss 'em like he'd eat 'em up. Sam cotched him at
it, an' done tole me; an' den dey'd sa'nter off down de po'ch, sayin'
it was too hot or too cool, or dat dey was lookin' for birds' nests in
de po'ch vines, till dey'd git to de far end, where de mist'ess nor
Sam nor nobody else couldn't hear what dey was a-sayin' an'
a-whisperin', an' dere dey'd sit fer hours.
"But I tell ye de doctor had a hard time a-gittin' her even when Marse
Henry gin his consent. An' he never would 'a' got her if Miss Rachel,
jes' for spite, I spec', hadn't 'a' took up wid Colonel Todhunter's
son dat was a-co'rtin' on her too, an' run off an' married him. Den
Miss Nannie knowed she was free to follow her own heart.
"I tell you it'd 'a' made ye cry yo' eyes out, suh, to see dat chile
try an' fix herse'f up to meet him de days an' nights she knowed he
was comin', an' she wid jes' one white frock to her name. An' we all
felt jes' as bad as her. Dinah would wash it an' I'd smooth her hair,
an' ole Sam'd git her a fresh rose to put in her neck.
"Purty soon de weddin' day was 'pinted, an' me an' Dinah an' ole Sam
gin to wonder how dat chile was a-gwine to git clo'es to be married
in. Sam heared ole marster ask dat same question at de table, an' he
see him gib de mist'ess de money to buy 'em for her, an' de mist'ess
said dat she reckoned 'Miss Nannie's people would want de priv'lege o'
dressin' her now dat she was a-gwine to marry dat wo'thless young
doctor, Tom Boling, dat nobody wouldn't hab in de house, but dat if
dey didn't she'd gin her some of Miss Rachel's clo'es, an' if dem
warn't 'nough den she'd spen' de money to de best advantage.' Dem was
her ve'y words. Sam heared her say 'em. I knowed dat meant dat de
chile would go naked, for she wouldn't a-worn none o' Miss Rachel's
rubbish, an' not a cent would she git o' de money. So I got dat ole
white frock out, an' Dinah found a white ribbon in a ole trunk in de
garret, an' washed an' ironed it to tie 'round her waist, an' Miss
Nannie come an' look at it, an' when she see it de tears riz up in her
eyes.
"'Doan' you cry, chile,' I says. 'He ain't lovin' ye for yo' clo'es,
an' never did. Fust time he see ye yo' was purty nigh barefoot. It's
you he wants, not yo' frocks, honey;' an' den de sun come out in her
face an' her eyes dried up, an' she gin to smile an' sing like a robin
after de rain.
"Purty soon 'long come Chris'mas time, an' me an' ole Sam an' Dinah
was a-watchin' out to see what Marse Tom Boling was gwine to gin his
bride, fur she was purty nigh dat, as dey was to be married de week
after Chris'mas. Well, suh, de mawnin' 'fore Chris'mas come, an' den
de arternoon come, an' den de night come, an' mos' ev'y hour somebody
sent somethin' for Miss Rachel, an' yet not one scrap of nuffin big as
a chink-a-pin come for Miss Nannie. Dinah an' me was dat onres'less
dat we couldn't sleep. Miss Nannie didn't say nuffin when she went to
bed, but I see a little shadder creep over her face an' I knowed right
away what hurted her.
"Well, de nex' mawnin'--Chris'mas mawnin' dat was--ole Sam come
a-bustin' in de kitchen do', a-hollerin' loud as he could
holler"--Aunt Chloe was now rocking herself back and forth, clapping
her hands as she talked--"dat dere was a trunk on de front po'ch for
Miss Nannie dat was dat heavy it tuk fo' niggers to lif it. I run, an'
Dinah run, an' when we got to de trunk mos' all de niggers was thick
'round it as flies, an' Miss Nannie was standin' over it readin' a
card wid her name on it an' a 'scription sayin' dat it was 'a
Chris'mas gif', wid de compliments of a friend.' But who dat friend
was, whether it was Marse Henry, who sent it dat way so dat woman
wouldn't tear his hair out; or whether Mis' Morgan sent it, dat hadn't
mo'n 'nough money to live on; or whether some of her own kin in
Indiany, dat was dirt po', stole de money an' sent it; or whether de
young Dr. Tom Boling, who had mo' money dan all de banks in Lexin'ton,
done did it, don't nobody know till dis day, 'cept me an' ole Sam, an'
we ain't tellin'.
"But, my soul alive, de insides of dat trunk took de bref clean out o'
de mist'ess an' Miss Rachel. Sam opened it, an' I tuk out de things.
Honey! dere was a weddin' dress all white satin dat would stand
alone,--jes' de ve'y mate of de one you got in dat picter 'fore
ye,--an' a change'ble silk, dat heavy! an' a plaid one, an' eve'ything
a young lady could git on her back from her skin out, an' a
thousand-dollar watch an' chain. I wore dat watch myse'f; Miss Nannie
was standin' by me, a-clappin' her han's an' laughin', an' when dat
watch an' chain came out she jes' th'owed de chain over my neck an'
stuck de leetle watch in my bosom, an' says, 'Dere, you dear ole
mammy, go look at you'se'f in de glass an' see how fine you is.'
"De nex' week come de weddin'. I'll never forgit dat weddin' to my
dyin' day. Marse Tom Boling driv in wid a coach an' four an' two
outriders, an' de horses wore white ribbons on dere ears; an' de
coachman had flowers in his coat mos' big as his head, an' dey whirled
up in front of de po'ch, an' out he stepped in his blue coat an' brass
buttons an' a yaller wais'coat,--yaller as a gourd,--an' his
bell-crown hat in his han'. She was a-waitin' for him wid dat white
satin dress on, an' de chain 'round her neck, an' her lil footses tied
up wid silk ribbons de ve'y match o' dem you got pictered, an' her
face shinin' like a angel. An' all de niggers was a-standin' 'roun' de
po'ch, dere eyes out'n dere heads, an' Marse Henry was dere in his new
clo'es lookin' so grand, an' Sam in his white gloves, an' me in a new
head han'chief.
"Eve'ybody was happy 'cept one. Dat one was de mist'ess, standin' in
de door. She wouldn't come out to de coach where de horses was
a-champin' de bits an' de froth a-droppin' on de groun', an' she
wouldn't speak to Marse Tom. She kep' back in de do'way.
"Miss Rachel was dat mean she wouldn't come downstairs.
"Miss Nannie gib Marse Tom Boling her han' an' look up in his face
like a queen, an' den she kissed Marse Henry, an' whispered somethin'
in his ear dat nobody didn't hear, only de tears gin to jump out an'
roll down his cheeks, an' den she looked de mist'ess full in de face,
an' 'thout a word dropped her a low curtsey.
"I come de las'. She looked at me for a minute wid her eyes
a-swimmin', an' den she th'owed her arms roun' my neck an' hugged an'
kissed me, an' den I see an arm slip 'roun' her wais' an' lif' her in
de coach. Den de horses gin a plunge an' dey was off.
"An 'arter dat dey had five years--de happiest years dem two ever
seen. I know, 'cause Marse Henry gin me to her, an' I lived wid 'em
day in an' day out till dat baby come, an' den"----
Aunt Chloe stopped and reached out her hand as if to steady herself.
The tears were streaming down her cheeks.
Then she advanced a step, fixed her eyes on the portrait, and in a
voice broken with emotion, said:--
"Honey, chile,--honey, chile,--is you tired a-waitin' for yo' ole
mammy? Keep a-watchin', honey--keep a-watchin'--It won't be long now
'fore I come. Keep a-watchin'."
A WATERLOGGED TOWN
He was backed up against the Column of the Lion, holding at bay a
horde of gondoliers who were shrieking, "Gondola! Gondola!" as only
Venetian gondoliers can. He had a half-defiant look, like a cornered
stag, as he stood there protecting a small wizen-faced woman of an
uncertain age, dressed in a long gray silk duster and pigeon-winged
hat--one of those hats that looked as if the pigeon had alighted on it
and exploded.
"No, durn ye, I don't want no gon-_do_-la; I got one somewhere round
here if I can find it."
If his tall gaunt frame, black chin whisker, and clearly defined
features had not located him instantly in my mind, his dialect would
have done so.
"You'll probably find your gondola at the next landing," I said,
pointing to the steps.
He looked at me kindly, took the woman by the arm, as if she had been
under arrest, and marched her to the spot indicated.
In another moment I felt a touch on my shoulder. "Neighbor, ain't you
from the U.S.A.?"
I nodded my head.
"Shake! It's God's own land!" and he disappeared in the throng.
The next morning I was taking my coffee in the café at the Britannia,
when I caught a pair of black eyes peering over a cup, at a table
opposite. Then six feet and an inch or two of raw untilled American
rose in the air, picked up his plates, cup, and saucer, and, crossing
the room, hooked out a chair with his left foot from my table, and sat
down.
"You're the painter feller that helped me out of a hole yesterday?
Yes, I knowed it; I see you come in to dinner last night. Eliza-beth
said it was you, but you was so almighty rigged up in that
swallow-tailed coat of yourn I didn't catch on for a minute, but
Eliza-beth said she was dead sure."
"The lady with you--your wife?"
[Illustration: "HER HEAD CRAMMED FULL OF HIFALUTIN' NOTIONS"]
"Not to any alarming extent, young man. Never had one--she's my
sister--only one I got; and this summer she took it into her head--you
don't mind my setting here, do you? I'm so durned lonesome among these
jabbering Greeks I'm nearly froze stiff. Thank ye!--took it into her
head she'd come over here, and of course I had to bring her. You ain't
never traveled around, perhaps, with a young girl of fifty-five, with
her head crammed full of hifalutin' notions,--convents and early
masters and Mont Blancs and Bon Marchés,--with just enough French to
make a muddle of everything she wants to get. Well, that's Eliza-beth.
First it was a circulating library, at Unionville, back of Troy, where
I live; then come a course of lectures twice a week on old Edinburgh
and the Alps and German cities; and then, to cap all, there come a
cuss with magic-lantern slides of 'most every old ruin in Europe, and
half our women were crazy to get away from home, and Eliza-beth worse
than any of 'em; and so I got a couple of Cook's tickets out and back,
and here we are; and I don't mind saying," and a wicked, vindictive
look filled his eyes, "that of all the cussed holes I ever got into in
my life, this here Venice takes--the--cake. Here, John Henry, bring me
another cup of coffee; this's stone-cold. P.D.Q., now! Don't let me
have to build a fire under you." This to a waiter speaking every
language but English.
"Do not the palaces interest you?" I asked inquiringly, in my effort
to broaden his views.
"Palaces be durned! Excuse my French. Palaces! A lot of caved-in old
rookeries; with everybody living on the second floor because the first
one's so damp ye'd get your die-and-never-get-over-it if you lived in
the basement, and the top floors so leaky that you go to bed under an
umbrella; and they all braced up with iron clamps to keep 'em from
falling into the canal, and not a square inch on any one of 'em clean
enough to dry a shirt on! What kind of holes are they for decent----
Now see here," laying his hand confidingly on my shoulder, "just
answer me one question--you seem like a level-headed young man, and
ought to give it to me straight. Been here all summer, ain't you?"
"Yes."
"Been coming years, ain't you?"
I nodded my head.
"Well, now, I want it straight,"--and he lowered his voice,--"what
does a sensible man find in an old waterlogged town like this?"
I gave him the customary answer: the glories of her past; the
picturesque life of the lagoons; the beauty of her palaces, churches,
and gardens; the luxurious gondolas, etc., etc.
"Don't see it," he broke out before I had half finished. "As for the
gon-do-las, you're dead right, and no mistake. First time I settled on
one of them cushions I felt just as if I'd settled in a basket of
kittens; but as for palaces! Why, the State House at Al-ba-ny knocks
'em cold; and as for gardens! Lord! when I think of mine at home all
chock-full of hollyhocks and sunflowers and morning-glories, and then
think what a first-class cast-iron idiot I am wandering around
here"---- He gazed abstractedly at the ceiling for a moment as if the
thought overpowered him, and then went on, "I've got a stock-farm six
miles from Unionville, where I've got some three-year-olds can trot in
2.23--Gardens!"--suddenly remembering his first train of thought,--"they
simply ain't in it. And as for ler-goons! We've got a river sailing
along in front of Troy that mayn't be so wide, but it's a durned sight
safer and longer, and there ain't a gallon of water in it that ain't
as sweet as a daisy; and that's what you can't say of these streaks of
mud around here, that smell like a dumping-ground." Here he rose from
his chair, his voice filling the room, the words dropping slowly:
"I--ain't--got--no--use--for--a--place--where--there--ain't--a--horse
--in--the--town,--and every--cellar--is--half--full--of--water."
A few mornings after, I was stepping into my gondola when I caught
sight of the man from Troy sitting in a gondola surrounded by his
trunks. His face expressed supreme content, illumined by a sort of
grim humor, as if some master effort of his life had been rewarded
with more than usual success. Eliza-beth was tucked away on "the
basket of kittens," half hidden by the linen curtains.
"Off?" I said inquiringly.
"You bet!"
"Which way?"
"Paris, and then a bee-line for New York."
"But you are an hour too early for your train."
He held his finger to his lips and knitted his eyebrows.
"What's that?" came a shrill plaintive voice from the curtains. "An
hour more? George, please ask the gentleman to tell the gondolier to
take us to Salviate's; we've got time for that glass mirror, and I
can't bear to leave Venice without"----
"Eliza-beth, you sit where you air, if it takes a week. No Salviate's
in mine, and no glass mirror. We are stuffed now so jammed full of
wooden goats, glass bottles, copper buckets, and old church rags that
I had to jump on my trunk to lock it." Then waving his hand to me, he
called out as I floated off, "This craft is pointed for home, and
don't you forget it."
THE BOY IN THE CLOTH CAP
I had seen the little fellow but a moment before, standing on the car
platform and peering wistfully into the night, as if seeking some face
in the hurrying crowd at the station. I remembered distinctly the
cloth cap pulled down over his ears, his chubby, rosy cheeks, and the
small baby hand clutching the iron rail of the car, as I pushed by and
sprang into a hack.
"Lively, now, cabby; I haven't a minute," and I handed my driver a
trunk check.
Outside the snow whirled and eddied, the drifts glistening white in
the glare of the electric light.
I drew my fur coat closer around my throat, and beat an impatient
tattoo with my feet. The storm had delayed the train, and I had less
than an hour in which to dine, dress, and reach my audience.
Two minutes later something struck the cab with a force that rattled
every spoke in the wheels. It was my trunk, and cabby's head, white
with snow, was thrust through the window.
"Morgan House, did you say, boss?"
"Yes, and on the double-quick."
Another voice now sifted in--a small, thin, pleading voice, too low
and indistinct for me to catch the words from where I sat.
"Want to go where?" cried cabby. The conversation was like one over
the telephone, in which only one side is heard. "To the orphan asylum?
Why, that's three miles from here.... Walk?... See, here, sonny, you
wouldn't get halfway.... No, I can't take yer--got a load."
My own head had filled the window now.
"Here, cabby, don't stand there all night! What's the matter, anyway?"
"It's a boy, boss, about a foot high, wants to walk to the orphan
'sylum."
"Pass him in."
He did, literally, through the window, without opening the door, his
little wet shoes first, then his sturdy legs in wool stockings, round
body encased in a pea-jacket, and last, his head, covered by the same
cloth cap I had seen on the platform. I caught him, feet first, and
helped land him on the front seat, where he sat looking at me with
staring eyes that shone all the brighter in the glare of the arc
light. Next a collar-box and a small paper bundle were handed in.
These the little fellow clutched eagerly, one in each hand, his eyes
still looking into mine.
"Are you an orphan?" I asked--a wholly thoughtless question, of
course.
"Yes, sir."
"Got no father nor mother?"
Another, equally idiotic; but my interest in the boy had been inspired
by the idea of the saving of valuable minutes. As long as he stood
outside in the snow, he was an obstruction. Once aboard, I could take
my time in solving his difficulties.
"Got a father, sir, but my mother's dead."
We were now whirling up the street, the cab lighting up and growing
pitch dark by turns, depending on the location of the street lamps.
"Where's your father?"
"Went away, sir." He spoke the words without the slightest change in
his voice, neither abashed nor too bold, but with a simple
straightforwardness which convinced me of their truth.
"Do you want to go to the asylum?"
"Yes, sir."
"Why?"
"Because I can learn everything there is to learn, and there isn't any
other place for me to go."
This was said with equal simplicity. No whining; no "me mother's dead,
sir, an' I ain't had nothin' to eat all day," etc. Not that air about
him at all. It was merely the statement of a fact which he felt sure I
knew all about.
"What's your name?"
"Ned."
"Ned what?"
"Ned Rankin, sir."
"How old are you?"
"I'm eight"--then, thoughtfully--"no, I'm nine years old."
"Where do you live?"
I was firing these questions one after the other without the slightest
interest in either the boy or his welfare. My mind was on my lecture,
and the impatient look on the faces of the audience, and the consulted
watch of the chairman of the committee, followed by the inevitable:
"You are not very prompt, sir," etc. "Our people have been in their
seats," etc. If the boy had previously replied to my question as to
where he lived, I had forgotten the name of the town.
"I live"---- Then he stopped. "I live in---- Do you mean now?" he
added simply.
"Yes."
There was another pause. "I don't know, sir; maybe they won't let me
stay."
Another foolish question. Of course, if he had left home for good, and
was now on his way to the asylum for the first time, his present home
was this hack.
But he had won my interest now. His words had come in tones of such
directness, and were so calm, and gave so full a statement of the
exact facts, that I leaned over quickly, and began studying him a
little closer.
I saw that this scrap of a boy wore a gray woolen suit, and I noticed
that the cap was made of the same cloth as the jacket, and that both
were the work of some inexperienced hand, with uneven, unpressed
seams--the seams of a flat-iron, not a tailor's goose. Instinctively
my mind went back to what his earlier life had been.
"Have you got any brothers and sisters, my boy?"
"Yes, sir."
"Where are they?"
"I don't know, sir; I was too little to remember."
The pathos of this answer stirred me all the more.
"Who's been taking care of you ever since your father left you?" I had
lowered my voice now to a more confidential tone.
"A German man."
"What did you leave him for?"
"He had no work, and he took me to the priest."
"When?"
"Last week, sir."
"What did the priest do?"
"He gave me these clothes. Don't you think they're nice? The priest's
sister made them for me--all but the stockings; she bought those."
As he said this he lifted his arms so I could look under them, and
thrust out toward me his two plump legs. I said the clothes were very
nice, and that I thought they fitted him very well, and I felt his
chubby knees and calves as I spoke, and ended by getting hold of his
soft wee hand, which I held on to. His fingers closed tightly over
mine, and a slight smile lighted up his face. It seemed good to him to
have something to hold on to. I began again:--
"Did the priest send you here?"
"Yes, sir. Do you want to see the letter?" The little hand--the free
one--fumbled under the jacket, loosened the two lower buttons, and
disclosed a white envelope pinned to his shirt.
"I'm to give it to 'em at the asylum. But I can't unpin it. He told me
not to."
"That's right, my boy. Leave it where it is."
"You poor little rat," I said to myself. "This is pretty rough on you.
You ought to be tucked up in some warm bed, not out here alone in this
storm."
The boy felt for the pin in the letter, reassured himself that it was
safe, and carefully rebuttoned his jacket. I looked out of the window,
and caught glimpses of houses flying by, with lights in their windows,
and now and then the cheery blaze of a fire. Then I looked into his
eyes again. I still had hold of his hand.
"Surely," I said to myself, "this boy must have some one soul who
cares for him." I determined to go a little deeper.
"How did you get here, my boy?" I had leaned nearer to him.
"The priest put me on the train, and a lady told me where to get off."
"Oh, a lady!" Now I was getting at it! Then he was not so desolate; a
lady had looked after him. "What's her name?" This with increased
eagerness.
"She didn't tell me, sir."
I sank back on my seat. No! I was all wrong. It was a positive,
undeniable, piteous fact. Seventy millions of people about him, and
not one living soul to look to. Not a tie that connected him with
anything. A leaf blown across a field; a bottle adrift in the sea,
sailing from no port and bound for no haven. I got hold of his other
hand, and looked down into his eyes, and an almost irresistible desire
seized me to pick him up in my arms and hug him; he was too big to
kiss, and too little to shake hands with; hugging was all there was
left. But I didn't. There was something in his face that repelled any
such familiarity,--a quiet dignity, pluck, and patience that inspired
more respect than tenderness, that would make one want rather to touch
his hat to him.
Here the cab stopped with so sudden a jerk that I had to catch him by
the arms to steady him. Cabby opened the door.
"Morgan House, boss. Goin's awful, or I'd got ye here sooner."
The boy looked up into my face; not with any show of uneasiness, only
a calm patience. If he was to walk now, he was ready.
"Cabby, how far is it to the asylum?" I asked.
"'Bout a mile and a half."
"Throw that trunk off and drive on. This boy can't walk."
"I'll take him, boss."
"No; I'll take him myself. Lively, now."
I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes of the hour had gone. I would
still have time to jump into a dress suit, but the dinner must be
brief. There came a seesaw rocking, then a rebound, and a heavy thud
told where the trunk had fallen. The cab sped on round a sharp corner,
through a narrow street, and across a wide square.
Suddenly a thought rushed over me that culminated in a creeping chill.
Where was his trunk? In my anxiety over my own, I had forgotten the
boy's.
I turned quickly to the window, and shouted:--
"Cabby! _Cabby_, you didn't leave the boy's trunk, too, did you?"
The little fellow slid down from the seat, and began fumbling around
in the dark.
"No, sir; I've got 'em here;" and he held up the collar box and brown
paper bundle!
"Is that all?" I gasped.
"Oh, no, sir! I got ten cents the lady give me. Do you want to see
it?" and he began cramming his chubby hand into his side pocket.
"No, my son, I don't want to see it."
I didn't want to see anything in particular. His word was good enough.
I couldn't, really. My eyelashes somehow had got tangled up in each
other, and my pupils wouldn't work. It's queer how a man's eyes act
sometimes.
We were now reaching the open country. The houses were few and farther
apart. The street lamps gave out; so did the telegraph wires festooned
with snow loops. Soon a big building, square, gray, sombre-looking,
like a jail, loomed up on a hill. Then we entered a gate between
flickering lamps, and tugged up a steep road, and stopped. Cabby
sprang down and rang a bell, which sounded in the white stillness like
a fire-gong. A door opened, and a flood of light streamed out, showing
the kindly face and figure of an old priest in silhouette, the yellow
glow forming a golden background.
"Come, sonny," said cabby, throwing open the cab door.
The little fellow slid down again from the seat, caught up the box and
bundle, and, looking me full in the face, said:--
"It _was_ too far to walk."
There were no thanks, no outburst. He was merely a chip in the
current. If he had just escaped some sunken rock, it was the way with
chips like himself. All boys went to asylums, and had no visible
fathers nor invisible mothers nor friends. This talk about boys going
swimming, and catching bull-frogs, and robbing birds' nests, and
playing ball, and "hooky," and marbles, was all moonshine. Boys never
did such things, except in story-books. He was a boy himself, and
knew. There couldn't anything better happen to a boy than being sent
to an orphan asylum. Everybody knew that. There was nothing strange
about it. That's what boys were made for.
All this was in his eyes.
* * * * *
When I reached the platform and faced my audience, I was dinnerless,
half an hour late, and still in my traveling dress.
I began as follows:--
"Ladies and gentlemen, I ask your forgiveness. I am very sorry to have
kept you waiting, but I could not help it. I was occupied in escorting
to his suburban home one of your most distinguished citizens."
And I described the boy in the cloth cap, with his box and bundle, and
his patient, steady eyes, and plump little legs in the yarn stockings.
I was forgiven.
BETWEEN SHOWERS IN DORT
There be inns in Holland--not hotels, not pensions, nor
stopping-places--just inns. The Bellevue at Dort is one, and the
Holland Arms is another, and the--no, there are no others. Dort only
boasts these two, and Dort to me is Holland.
The rivalry between these two inns has been going on for years, and it
still continues. The Bellevue, fighting for place, elbowed its way
years ago to the water-line, and took its stand on the river-front,
where the windows and porticos could overlook the Maas dotted with
boats. The Arms, discouraged, shrank back into its corner, and made up
in low windows, smoking-rooms, and private bathroom--one for the whole
house--what was lacking in porticos and sea view. Then followed a
slight skirmish in paint,--red for the Arms and yellow-white for the
Bellevue; and a flank movement of shades and curtains,--linen for the
Arms and lace for the Bellevue. Scouting parties were next ordered out
of porters in caps, banded with silk ribbons, bearing the names of
their respective hostelries. Yacob of the Arms was to attack weary
travelers on alighting from the train, and acquaint them with the
delights of the downstairs bath, and the dark-room for the kodakers,
all free of charge. And Johan of the Bellevue was to give minute
descriptions of the boats landing in front of the dining-room windows
and of the superb view of the river.
* * * * *
It is always summer when I arrive in Dordrecht. I don't know what
happens in winter, and I don't care. The groundhog knows enough to go
into his hole when the snow begins to fly, and to stay there until the
sun thaws him out again. Some tourists could profit by following his
example.
[Illustration: THROUGH STREETS EMBOWERED IN TREES]
It is summer then, and the train has rolled into the station at
Dordrecht, or beside it, and the traps have been thrown out, and
Peter, my boatman--he of the "Red Tub," a craft with an outline like a
Dutch vrou, quite as much beam as length (we go a-sketching in this
boat)--Peter, I say, who has come to the train to meet me, has swung
my belongings over his shoulder, and Johan, the porter of the
Bellevue, with a triumphant glance at Yacob of the Arms, has stowed
the trunk on the rear platform of the street tram,--no cabs or trucks,
if you please, in this town,--and the one-horse car has jerked its way
around short curves and up through streets embowered in trees and
paved with cobblestones scrubbed as clean as china plates, and over
quaint bridges with glimpses of sluggish canals and queer houses, and
so on to my lodgings.
And mine host, Heer Boudier, waiting on the steps, takes me by the
hand and says the same room is ready and has been for a week.
Inside these two inns, the only inns in Dort, the same rivalry exists.
But my parallels must cease. Mine own inn is the Bellevue, and my old
friend of fifteen years, Heer Boudier, is host, and so loyalty compels
me to omit mention of any luxuries but those to which I am accustomed
in his hostelry.
Its interior has peculiar charms for me. Scrupulously clean, simple in
its appointments and equipment, it is comfort itself. Tyne is
responsible for its cleanliness--or rather, that particular portion of
Tyne which she bares above her elbows. Nobody ever saw such a pair of
sledge-hammer arms as Tyne's on any girl outside of Holland. She is
eighteen; short, square-built, solid as a Dutch cheese, fresh and rosy
as an English milkmaid; moon-faced, mild-eyed as an Alderney heifer,
and as strong as a three-year-old. Her back and sides are as straight
as a plank; the front side is straight too. The main joint in her body
is at the hips. This is so flexible that, wash-cloth in hand, she can
lean over the floor without bending her knees and scrub every board in
it till it shines like a Sunday dresser. She wears a snow-white cap as
dainty as the finest lady's in the land; an apron that never seems to
lose the crease of the iron, and a blue print dress bunched up behind
to keep it from the slop. Her sturdy little legs are covered by gray
yarn stockings which she knits herself, the feet thrust into wooden
sabots. These clatter over the cobbles as she scurries about with a
crab-like movement, sousing, dousing, and scrubbing as she goes; for
Tyne attacks the sidewalk outside with as much gusto as she does the
hall and floors.
Johan the porter moves the chairs out of Tyne's way when she begins
work, and, lately, I have caught him lifting her bucket up the front
steps--a wholly unnecessary proceeding when Tyne's muscular
developments are considered. Johan and I had a confidential talk one
night, when he brought the mail to my room,--the room on the second
floor overlooking the Maas,--in which certain personal statements were
made. When I spoke to Tyne about them the next day, she looked at me
with her big blue eyes, and then broke into a laugh, opening her mouth
so wide that every tooth in her head flashed white (they always
reminded me somehow of peeled almonds). With a little bridling twist
of her head she answered that--but, of course, this was a strictly
confidential communication, and of so entirely private a nature that
no gentleman under the circumstances would permit a single word of it
to--
Johan is taller than Tyne, but not so thick through. When he meets you
at the station, with his cap and band in his hand, his red hair
trimmed behind as square as the end of a whisk-broom, his thin,
parenthesis legs and Vienna guardsman waist,--each detail the very
opposite, you will note, from Tyne's,--you recall immediately one of
George Boughton's typical Dutchmen. The only thing lacking is his
pipe; he is too busy for that.
When he dons his dress suit for dinner, and bending over your shoulder
asks, in his best English: "Mynheer, don't it now de feesh you haf?"
you lose sight of Boughton's Dutchman and see only the cosmopolitan.
The transformation is due entirely to continental influences--Dort
being one of the main highways between London and Paris--influences so
strong that even in this water-logged town on the Maas, bonnets are
beginning to replace caps, and French shoes sabots.
The guests that Johan serves at this inn of my good friend Boudier are
as odd looking as its interior. They line both sides and the two ends
of the long table. Stout Germans in horrible clothes, with stouter
wives in worse; Dutchmen from up-country in brown coats and green
waistcoats; clerks off on a vacation with kodaks and Cook's tickets;
bicyclists in knickerbockers; painters, with large kits and small
handbags, who talk all the time and to everybody; gray-whiskered,
red-faced Englishmen, with absolutely no conversation at all, who
prove to be distinguished persons attended by their own valets, and on
their way to Aix or the Engadine, now that the salmon-fishing in
Norway is over; school teachers from America, just arrived from
Antwerp or Rotterdam, or from across the channel by way of Harwich,
their first stopping-place really since they left home--one
traveling-dress and a black silk in the bag; all the kinds and
conditions and sorts of people who seek out precious little places
like Dort, either because they are cheap or comfortable, or because
they are known to be picturesque.
I sought out Dort years ago because it was untouched by the hurry that
makes life miserable, and the shams that make it vulgar, and I go back
to it now every year of my life, in spite of other foreign influences.
[Illustration: THE GOSSIPS LEAN IN THE DOORWAYS]
And there is no real change in fifteen years. Its old trees still nod
over the sleepy canals in the same sleepy way they have done, no
doubt, for a century. The rooks--the same rooks, they never die--still
swoop in and out of the weather-stained arches high up in the great
tower of the Groote Kerk, the old twelfth-century church, the tallest
in all Holland; the big-waisted Dutch luggers with rudders painted
arsenic green--what would painters do without this green?--doze under
the trees, their mooring lines tied to the trunks; the girls and boys,
with arms locked, a dozen together, clatter over the cobbles, singing
as they walk; the steamboats land and hurry on--"Fop Smit's boats" the
signs read--it is pretty close, but I am not part owner in the line;
the gossips lean in the doorways or under the windows banked with
geraniums and nasturtiums; the cumbersome state carriages with the big
ungainly horses with untrimmed manes and tails--there are only five of
these carriages in all Dordrecht--wait in front of the great houses
eighty feet wide and four stories high, some dating as far back as
1512, and still occupied by descendants of the same families; the old
women in ivory black, with dabs of Chinese white for sabots and caps,
push the same carts loaded with Hooker's green vegetables from door to
door; the town crier rings his bell; the watchman calls the hour.
Over all bends the ever-changing sky, one hour close-drawn, gray-lined
with slanting slashes of blinding rain, the next piled high with great
domes of silver-white clouds inlaid with turquoise blue or hemmed in
by low-lying ranges of purple peaks capped with gold.
* * * * *
I confess that an acute sense of disappointment came over me when I
first saw these gray canals, rain-varnished streets, and rows of green
trees. I recognized at a glance that it was not my Holland; not the
Holland of my dreams; not the Holland of Mesdag nor Poggenbeck nor
Kever. It was a fresher, sweeter, more wholesome land, and with a more
breathable air. These Dutch painters had taught me to look for dull,
dirty skies, soggy wharves, and dismal perspectives of endless dikes.
They had shown me countless windmills, scattered along stretches of
wind-swept moors backed by lowering skies, cold gray streets, quaint,
leanover houses, and smudgy, grimy interiors. They had enveloped all
this in the stifling, murky atmosphere of a western city slowly
strangling in clouds of coal smoke.
These Dutch artists were, perhaps, not alone in this falsification. It
is one of the peculiarities of modern art that many of its masters
cater to the taste of a public who want something that _is not_ in
preference to something that _is_. Ziem, for instance, had, up to the
time of my enlightenment, taught me to love an equally untrue and
impossible Venice--a Venice all red and yellow and deep ultra-marine
blue--a Venice of unbuildable palaces and blazing red walls.
I do not care to say so aloud, where I can be heard over the way, but
if you will please come inside my quarters, and shut the door and
putty up the keyhole, and draw down the blinds, I will whisper in your
ear that my own private opinion is that even Turner himself would have
been an infinitely greater artist had he built his pictures on Venice
instead of building them on Turner. I will also be courageous enough
to assert that the beauty and dignity of Venetian architecture--an
architecture which has delighted many appreciative souls for
centuries--finds no place in his canvases, either in detail or in
mass. The details may be unimportant, for the soft vapor of the
lagoons ofttimes conceals them, but the correct outline of the
mass--that is, for instance, the true proportion of the dome of the
Salute, that incomparable, incandescent pearl, or the vertical line of
the Campanile compared to the roofs of the connecting palaces--should
never be ignored, for they are as much a part of Venice, the part that
makes for beauty, as the shimmering light of the morning or the glory
of its sunsets. So it is that when most of us for the first time reach
the water-gates of Venice, the most beautiful of all cities by the
sea, we feel a certain shock and must begin to fall in love with a new
sweetheart.
So with many painters of the Holland school--not the old Dutch school
of landscape painters, but the more modern group of men who paint
their native skies with zinc-white toned with London fog, or mummy
dust and bitumen. It is all very artistic and full of "tone," but it
is not Holland.
There is Clays, for instance. Of all modern painters Clays has charmed
and wooed us best with certain phases of Holland life, particularly
the burly brown boats lying at anchor, their red and white sails
reflected in the water. I love these boats of Clays. They are superbly
drawn, strong in color, and admirably painted; the water treatment,
too, is beyond criticism. But where are they in Holland? I know
Holland from the Zuyder Zee to Rotterdam, but I have never yet seen
one of Clays's boats in the original wood.
Thus by reason of such smeary, up and down fairy tales in paint have
we gradually become convinced that vague trees, and black houses with
staring patches of whitewash, and Vandyke brown roofs are thoroughly
characteristic of Holland, and that the blessed sun never shines in
this land of sabots.
[Illustration: DRENCHED LEAVES QUIVERING]
But doesn't it rain? Yes, about half the time, perhaps three quarters
of the time. Well, now that I think of it, about all the time. But not
continuously; only in intermittent downpours, floods, gushes of
water--not once a day but every half hour. Then comes the quick
drawing of a gray curtain from a wide expanse of blue, framing ranges
of snow-capped cumuli; streets swimming in great pools; drenched
leaves quivering in dazzling sunlight, and millions of raindrops
flashing like diamonds.
II
But Peter, my boatman, cap in hand, is waiting on the cobbles outside
the inn door. He has served me these many years. He is a wiry, thin,
pinch-faced Dutchman, of perhaps sixty, who spent his early life at
sea as man-o'-war's-man, common sailor, and then mate, and his later
years at home in Dort, picking up odd jobs of ferriage or stevedoring,
or making early gardens. While on duty he wears an old white
traveling-cap pulled over his eyes, and a flannel shirt without collar
or tie, and sail-maker's trousers. These trousers are caught at his
hips by a leather strap supporting a sheath which holds his knife. He
cuts everything with this knife, from apples and navy plug to ship's
cables and telegraph wire. His clothes are waterproof; they must be,
for no matter how hard it rains, Peter is always dry. The water may
pour in rivulets from off his cap, and run down his forehead and from
the end of his gargoyle of a nose, but no drop ever seems to wet his
skin. When it rains the fiercest, I, of course, retreat under the
poke-bonnet awning made of cotton duck stretched over barrel hoops
that protects the stern of my boat, but Peter never moves. This Dutch
rain does not in any way affect him. It is like the Jersey
mosquito--it always spares the natives.
Peter speaks two languages, both Dutch. He says that one is English,
but he cannot prove it--nobody can. When he opens his mouth you know
all about his ridiculous pretensions. He says--"Mynheer, dot manus ist
er blowdy rock." He has learned this expression from the English
sailors unloading coal at the big docks opposite Pappendrecht, and he
has incorporated this much of their slang into his own nut-cracking
dialect. He means of course "that man is a bloody rogue." He has a
dozen other phrases equally obscure.
Peter's mission this first morning after my arrival is to report that
the good ship Red Tub is now lying in the harbor fully equipped for
active service. That her aft awning has been hauled taut over its
hoops; that her lockers of empty cigar boxes (receptacles for brushes)
have been clewed up; the cocoa-matting rolled out the whole length of
her keel, and finally that the water bucket and wooden chair (I use a
chair instead of an easel) have been properly stowed.
Before the next raincloud spills over its edges, we must loosen the
painter from the iron ring rusted tight in the square stone in the
wharf, man the oars, and creep under the little bridge that binds
Boudier's landing to the sidewalk over the way, and so set our course
for the open Maas. For I am in search of Dutch boats to-day, as near
like Clays's as I can find. I round the point above the old India
warehouses, I catch sight of the topmasts of two old luggers anchored
in midstream, their long red pennants flattened against the gray sky.
The wind is fresh from the east, filling the sails of the big
windmills blown tight against their whirling arms. The fishing-smacks
lean over like dipping gulls; the yellow water of the Maas is flecked
with wavy lines of beer foam.
The good ship Red Tub is not adapted to outdoor sketching under these
conditions. The poke-bonnet awning acts as a wind-drag that no amount
of hard pulling can overcome. So I at once convene the Board of
Strategy, Lieutenant-Commander Peter Jansen, Red Tub Navy, in the
chair. That distinguished naval expert rises from his water-soaked
seat on the cocoa-matting outside the poke bonnet, sweeps his eye
around the horizon, and remarks sententiously:--
"It no tam goot day. Blow all dime; we go ba'd-hoose," and he turns
the boat toward a low-lying building anchored out from the main shore
by huge chains secured to floating buoys.
In some harbors sea-faring men are warned not to "anchor over the
water-pipes." In others particular directions are given to avoid
"submarine cables planted here." In Dort, where none of these modern
conveniences exist, you are notified as follows: "No boats must land
at this Bath."
If Peter knew of this rule he said not one word to me as I sat back
out of the wet, hived under the poke bonnet, squeezing color-tubes and
assorting my brushes. He rowed our craft toward the bath-house with
the skill of a man-o'-war's-man, twisted the painter around a short
post, and unloaded my paraphernalia on a narrow ledge or plank walk
some three feet wide, and which ran around the edge of the floating
bath-house.
It never takes me long to get to work, once my subject is selected. I
sprang from the boat while Peter handed me the chair, stool, and
portfolio containing my stock of gray papers of different tones;
opened my sketch frame, caught a sheet of paper tight between its
cleats; spread palettes and brushes on the floor at my side; placed
the water bucket within reach of my hand, and in five minutes I was
absorbed in my sketch.
Immediately the customary thing happened. The big bank of gray cloud
that hung over the river split into feathery masses of white framed in
blue, and out blazed the glorious sun.
Meantime, Peter had squatted close beside me, sheltered under the lee
of the side wall of the bath-house, protected equally from the slant
of the driving rain and the glare of the blinding sun. Safe too from
the watchful eye of the High Pan-Jam who managed the bath, and who at
the moment was entirely oblivious of the fact that only two inches of
pine board separated him from an enthusiastic painter working like
mad, and an equally alert marine assistant who supplied him with fresh
water and charcoal points, both at the moment defying the law of the
land, one in ignorance and the other in a spirit of sheer bravado. For
Peter must have known the code and the penalty.
The world is an easy place for a painter to live and breathe in when
he is sitting far from the madding crowd--of boys--protected from the
wind and sun, watching a sky piled up in mountains of snow, and
inhaling ozone that is a tonic to his lungs. When the outline of his
sketch is complete and the colors flow and blend, and the heart is on
fire; when the bare paper begins to lose itself in purple distances
and long stretches of tumbling water, and the pictured boats take
definite shape, and the lines of the rigging begin to tell; when
little by little, with a pat here and a dab there, there comes from
out this flat space a something that thrilled him when he first
determined to paint the thing that caught his eye,--not the thing
itself, but the spirit, the soul, the feeling, and meaning of the
color-poem unrolled before him,--when a painter feels a thrill like
this, all the fleets of Spain might bombard him, and his eye would
never waver nor his touch hesitate.
I felt it to-day.
Peter didn't. If he had he would have kept still and passed me fresh
water and rags and new tubes and whatever I wanted--and I wanted
something every minute--instead of disporting himself in an entirely
idiotic and disastrous way. Disastrous, because you might have seen
the sketch which I began reproduced in these pages had the
Lieutenant-Commander, R.T.N., only carried out the orders of the
Lord High Admiral commanding the fleet.
A sunbeam began it. It peeped over the edge of the side wall--the wall
really was but little higher than Peter's head when he stood
erect--and started in to creep down my half-finished sketch. Peter
rose in his wrath, reached for my white umbrella, and at once opened
it and screwed together the jointed handle. Then he began searching
for some convenient supporting hook on which to hang his shield of
defence. Next a brilliant, intellectual dynamite-bomb of a thought
split his cranium. He would hoist the umbrella _above_ the top of
the thin wall of the bath-house, resting one half upon its upper edge,
drive the iron spike into the plank under our feet, and secure the
handle by placing his back against it. No sunbeam should pass him!
The effect can be imagined on the High-Pan-Jam inside the
bath-house--an amphibious guardian, oblivious naturally to sun and
rain--when his eye fell upon this flag of defiance thrust up above his
ramparts. You can imagine, too, the consternation of the peaceful
inmates of the open pools, whose laughter had now and then risen above
the sough of the wind and splash of the water. Almost immediately I
heard the sound of hurrying footsteps from a point where no sound had
come before, and there followed the scraping of a pair of toes on the
planking behind me, as if some one was drawing himself up.
I looked around and up and saw eight fingers clutching the top of the
planking, and a moment later the round face of an astonished Dutchman.
I haven't the faintest idea what he said. I didn't know then and I
don't know now. I only remember that his dialect sounded like the
traditional crackling of thorns under a pot, including the
spluttering, and suggesting the equally heated temperature. When his
fingers gave out he would drop out of sight, only to rise again and
continue the attack.
Here Peter, I must say, did credit to his Dutch ancestors. He did not
temporize. He did not argue. He ignored diplomacy at the start, and
blazed out that we were out of everybody's way and on the lee side of
the structure; that there was no sign up on that side; that I was a
most distinguished personage of blameless life and character, and
that, rules or no rules, he was going to stay where he was and so was
I.
"You tam blowdy rock. It's s'welve o'clook now--no rule aft' s'welve
o'clook,--nopody ba'd now;"--This in Dutch, but it meant that, then
turning to me, "You stay--you no go--I brek tam head him."--
None of this interested me. I had heard Peter explode before. I was
trying to match the tone of an opalescent cloud inlaid with
mother-of-pearl, the shadow side all purplish gray. Its warm
high-lights came all right, but I was half out of my head trying to
get its shadow-tones true with Payne's gray and cobalt. The cloud
itself had already cast its moorings and was fast drifting over the
English Channel. It would be out of sight in five minutes.
"Peter--_Peter!_" I cried. "Don't talk so much. Here, give him half a
gulden and tell him to dry up. Hand me that sky brush--quick now!"
The High Pan-Jam dropped with a thud to his feet. His swinging
footsteps could be heard growing fainter, but no stiver of my silver
had lined his pocket.
I worked on. The tea-rose cloud had disappeared entirely; only its
poor counterfeit remained. The boats were nearly finished; another
wash over their sails would bring them all right. Then the tramp as of
armed men came from the in-shore side of the bath-house. Peter stood
up and craned his neck around the edge of the planking, and said in an
undertone:--
"Tam b'lice, he come now; nev' mind, you stay 'ere--no go. Tam blowdy
rock no mak' you go."
Behind me stood the High Pan-Jam who had scraped his toes on the
fence. With him was an officer of police!
Peter was now stamping his feet, swearing in Dutch, English, and
polyglot, and threatening to sponge the Dutch government from the face
of the universe.
My experience has told me that it is never safe to monkey with a
gendarme. He is generally a perfectly cool, self-poised,
unimpressionable individual, with no animosity whatever toward you or
anybody else, but who intends to be obeyed, not because it pleases
him, but because the power behind him compels it. I instantly rose
from my stool, touched my hat in respectful military salute, and
opened my cigarette-case. The gendarme selected a cigarette with
perfect coolness and good humor, and began politely to unfold to me
his duties in connection with the municipal laws of Dordrecht. The
manager of the bath, he said, had invoked his services. I might not be
aware that it was against the law to land on this side of the
bath-house, etc.
But the blood of the Jansens was up. Some old Koop or De Witt or Von
Somebody was stirring Peter.
"No ba'd aft' s'welve o'clook"--this to me, both fists in the air, one
perilously near the officer's face. The original invective was in his
native tongue, hurled at Pan-Jam and the officer alike.
"What difference does it make, your Excellency," I asked, "whether I
sit in my boat and paint or sit here where there is less motion?"
"None, honored sir," and he took a fresh cigarette (Peter was now
interpreting),--"except for the fact that you have taken up your
position on the _women's_ side of the bath-house. They bathe from
twelve o'clock till four. When the ladies saw the umbrella they were
greatly disturbed. They are now waiting for you to go away!"
III
My room at Heer Boudier's commands a full view of the Maas, with all
its varied shipping. Its interior fittings are so scrupulously clean
that one feels almost uncomfortable lest some of the dainty
appointments might be soiled in the using. The bed is the most
remarkable of all its comforts. It is more of a box than a bed, and so
high at head and foot, and so solid at its sides, that it only needs a
lid to make the comparison complete. There is always at its foot an
inflated eider-down quilt puffed up like a French soufflé potato; and
there are always at its head two little oval pillows solid as bags of
ballast, surmounting a bolster that slopes off to an edge. I have
never yet found out what this bolster is stuffed with. The bed itself
would be bottomless but for the slats. When you first fall overboard
into this slough you begin to sink through its layers of feathers, and
instinctively throw out your hands, catching at the side boards as a
drowning man would clutch at the gunwales of a suddenly capsized boat.
The second night after my arrival, I, in accordance with my annual
custom, deposited the contents of this bed in a huge pile outside my
door, making a bottom layer of the feathers, then the bolster, and
last the soufflé with the hard-boiled eggs on top.
Then I rang for Tyne.
She had forgotten all about the way I liked my sleeping arrangements
until she saw the pile of bedding. Then she held her sides with
laughter, while the tears streamed down her red cheeks. Of course, the
Heer should have a mattress and big English pillows, and no
bouncy-bounce, speaking the words not with her lips, but with a
gesture of her hand. Then she called Johan to help. I never can see
why Tyne always calls Johan to help when there is anything to be done
about my room out of the usual order of things,--the sweeping,
dusting, etc.,--but she does. I know full well that if she so pleased
she could tuck the whole pile of bedding under her chin, pick up the
bureau in one hand and the bed in the other, and walk downstairs
without even mussing her cap-strings.
When Johan returned with a hair mattress and English pillows,--you can
get anything you want at Boudier's,--he asked me if I had heard the
news about Peter. Johan, by the way, speaks very good English--for
Johan. The Burgomaster, he said, had that day served Peter with a
writ. If I had looked out of the window an hour ago, I could have seen
the Lieutenant-Commander of the Red Tub, under charge of an officer of
the law, on his way to the Town Hall. Peter, he added, had just
returned and was at the present moment engaged in scrubbing out the R.
T. for active service in the morning.
I at once sent for Peter.
He came up, hat in hand. But there was no sign of weakening. The blood
of the Jansens was still in his eye.
"What did they arrest you for, Peter?"
"For make jaw wid de tam bolice. He say I mos' pay two gulden or one
tay in jail. Oh, it is notting; I no pay. Dot bolice lie ven he say
vimmen ba'd. Nopoty ba'd in de hoose aft' s'welve 'clook."
Later, Heer Boudier tells me that because of Peter's action in
resisting the officer in the discharge of his duty, he is under
arrest, and that he has but _five days in which to make up his mind_
as to whether he will live on bread and water for a day and night in
the town jail, or whether he will deplete his slender savings in favor
of the state to the extent of two gulden.
"But don't they lock him up, meanwhile?" I asked.
Boudier laughed. "Where would he run to, and for what? To save two
gulden?"
My heart was touched. I could not possibly allow Peter to spend five
minutes in jail on my account. I should not have slept one wink that
night even in my luxurious bed-box with English pillows, knowing that
the Lieutenant-Commander was stretched out on a cold floor with a
cobblestone under his cheek. I knew, too, how slender was his store,
and what a godsend my annual visit had been to his butcher and baker.
The Commander of the Red Tub might be impetuous, even aggressive, but
by no possible stretch of the imagination could he be considered
criminal.
That night I added these two gulden (about eighty cents) to Peter's
wages. He thanked me with a pleased twinkle in his eye, and a
wrinkling of the leathery skin around his nose and mouth. Then he put
on his cap and disappeared up the street.
* * * * *
But the inns, quaint canals, and rain-washed streets are not Dort's
only distinctions. There is an ancient Groote Kerk, overlaid with
colors that are rarely found outside of Holland. It is built of brick,
with a huge square tower that rises above the great elms pressing
close about it, and which is visible for miles. The moist climate not
only encrusts its twelfth-century porch with brown-and-green patches
of lichen over the red tones, but dims the great stained-glass windows
with films of mould, and covers with streaks of Hooker's green the
shadow sides of the long sloping roofs. Even the brick pavements about
it are carpeted with strips of green, as fresh in color as if no
passing foot had touched them. And few feet ever do touch them, for it
is but a small group of worshipers that gather weekly within the old
kirk's whitewashed walls.
[Illustration: AN ANCIENT GROOTE KERK]
These faithful few do not find the rich interior of the olden time,
for many changes have come over it since its cathedral days, the days
of its pomp and circumstance. All its old-time color is gone when you
enter its portals, and only staring white walls and rigid, naked
columns remain; only dull gray stone floors and hard, stiff-backed
benches. I have often sat upon these same benches in the gloom of a
fast-fading twilight and looked about me, bemoaning the bareness, and
wondering what its _ensemble_ must have been in the days of its
magnificence. There is nothing left of its glories now but its
architectural lines. The walls have been stripped of their costly
velvets, tapestries, and banners of silk and gold, the uplifted cross
is gone; the haze of swinging censers no longer blurs the vistas, nor
the soft light of many tapers illumines their gloom.
I have always believed that duty and beauty should ever go hand in
hand in our churches. To me there is nothing too rich in tone, too
luxurious in color, too exquisite in line for the House of God.
Nothing that the brush of the painter can make glorious, the chisel of
the sculptor beautify, or the T-square of the architect ennoble, can
ever be out of place in the one building of all others that we
dedicate to the Creator of all beauty. I have always thanked Him for
his goodness in giving as much thought to the flowers that cover the
hillsides as He did to the dull earth that lies beneath; as much care
to the matchings of purples and gold in the sunsets as to the
blue-black crags that are outlined against them. With these feelings
in my heart I have never understood that form of worship which
contents itself with a bare barn filled with seats of pine, a square
box of a pulpit, a lone pitcher of ice water, and a popular edition of
the hymns. But then, I am not a Dutchman.
Besides this town of Dort, filled with queer warehouses, odd
buildings, and cobbled streets, and dominated by this majestic
cathedral, there is across the river--just a little way (Peter rows me
over in ten minutes)--the Noah's Ark town of Pappendrecht, surrounded
by great stretches of green meadow, dotted with black and white cows,
and acres and acres of cabbages and garden truck, and tiny farmhouses,
and absurdly big barns; and back of these, and in order to keep all
these dry, is a big dike that goes on forever and is lost in the
perspective. On both sides of this dike (its top is a road) are built
the toy houses facing each other, each one cleaner and better scrubbed
than its neighbor, their big windows gay with geraniums.
Farther down is another 'recht--I cannot for the life of me remember
the first part of its name--where there is a shipyard and big
windlasses and a horse hitched to a sweep, which winds up water-soaked
luggers on to rude ways, and great pots of boiling tar, the yellow
smoke drifting away toward the sea.
And between these towns of Dort, Pappendrecht, and the other 'recht
moves a constant procession of water craft; a never-ceasing string of
low, rakish barges that bear the commerce of Germany out to the sea,
each in charge of a powerful tug puffing eagerly in its hurry to reach
tide water, besides all the other boats and luggers that sail and
steam up and down the forked Maas in front of Boudier's Inn--for Dort
is really on an island, the water of the Rhine being divided here. You
would never think, were you to watch these ungainly boats, that they
could ever arrive anywhere. They look as if they were built to go
sideways, endways, or both ways; and yet they mind their helms and
dodge in and out and swoop past the long points of land ending in the
waving marsh grass, and all with the ease of a steam yacht.
* * * * *
These and a hundred other things make me love this quaint old town on
the Maas. There is everything within its borders for the painter who
loves form and color--boats, queer houses, streets, canals, odd,
picturesque interiors, figures, brass milk cans, white-capped girls,
and stretches of marsh. If there were not other places on the earth I
love equally as well--Venice, for instance--I would be content never
to leave its shower-drenched streets. But I know that my gondola, gay
in its new _tenta_ and polished brasses, is waiting for me in the
little canal next the bridge, and I must be off.
Tyne has already packed my trunk, and Johan is ready to take it down
the stairs. Tyne sent for him. I did not.
When Johan, like an overloaded burro stumbling down the narrow defile
of the staircase, my trunk on his back, disappears through the lower
door, Tyne reënters my room, closes the door softly, and tells me that
Johan's wages have been raised, and that before I return next summer
she and--
But I forgot. This is another strictly confidential communication.
Under no possible circumstances could a man of honor--certainly not.
Peter, to my surprise, is not in his customary place when I reach the
outer street door. Johan, at my inquiring gesture, grins the width of
his face, but has no information to impart regarding Peter's unusual
absence.
Heer Boudier is more explicit.
"Where's Peter?" I cry with some impatience.
My host shrugs his shoulders with a helpless movement, and opens wide
the fingers of both hands.
"Mynheer, the five days are up. Peter has gone to jail."
"What for?" I ask in astonishment.
"To save two gulden."
ONE OF BOB'S TRAMPS
I had passed him coming up the dingy corridor that led to Bob's law
office, and knew at once that he was one of Bob's tramps.
When he had squeezed himself through the partly open door and had
closed it gently,--closed it with a hand held behind his back, like
one who had some favor to ask or some confidence game to play,--he
proved to be a man about fifty years of age, fat and short, with a
round head partly bald, and hair quite gray. His face had not known a
razor for days. He was dressed in dark clothes, once good, showing a
white shirt, and he wore a collar without a cravat. Down his cheeks
were uneven furrows, beginning at his spilling, watery eyes, and
losing themselves in the stubble-covered cheeks,--like old
rain-courses dried up,--while on his flat nose were perched a pair of
silver-rimmed spectacles, over which he looked at us in a dazed,
half-bewildered, half-frightened way. In one hand he held his
shapeless slouch hat; the other grasped an old violin wrapped in a
grimy red silk handkerchief.
For an instant he stood before the door, bent low with unspoken
apologies; then placing his hat on the floor, he fumbled nervously in
the breast pocket of his coat, from which he drew a letter, penned in
an unknown hand and signed with an unknown name. Bob read it, and
passed it to me.
"Please buy this violin," the note ran. "It is a good instrument, and
the man needs the money. The price is sixty dollars."
"Who gave you this note?" Bob asked. He never turns a beggar from his
door if he can help it. This reputation makes him the target for half
the tramps in town.
"Te leader of te orchestra at te theatre. He say he not know you, but
dat you loafe good violin. I come von time before, but vas nobody
here." Then, after a pause, his wavering eye seeking Bob's, "Blease
you buy him?"
"Is it yours?" I asked, anxious to get rid of him. The note trick had
been played that winter by half the tramps in town.
"Yes. Mine vor veefteen year," he answered slowly, in an unemotional
way.
"Why do you want to sell it?" said Bob, his interest increasing, as he
caught the pleading look in the man's eyes.
"I don't vant to sell it--I vant to keep it; but I haf notting," his
hands opening wide. "Ve vas in Phildelphy, ant ten Scranton, ant ten
we get here to Peetsburgh, and all te scenery is by te shereef, and te
manager haf notting. Vor vourteen tays I valk te streets, virst it is
te ofercoat ant vatch, ant yestertay te ledder case vor veefty cents.
If you ton't buy him I must keep valking till I come by New York."
"I've got a good violin," said Bob, softening.
"Ten you don't buy him?" and a look as of a returning pain crossed his
hopeless, impassive face. "Vell, I go vay, ten," he said, with a sigh
that seemed to empty his heart.
We both looked on in silence as he slowly wrapped the silk rag around
it, winding the ends automatically about the bridge and strings, as he
had no doubt done a dozen times before that day in his hunt for a
customer. Suddenly as he reached the neck he stopped, turned the
violin in his hand, and unwound the handkerchief again.
"Tid you oxamine te neck? See how it lays in te hand! Tid you ever see
neck like dat? No, you don't see it, never," in a positive tone,
looking at us again over the silver rims of his spectacles.
Bob took the violin in his hand. It was evidently an old one and of
peculiar shape. The swells and curves of the sides and back were
delicately rounded and highly finished. The neck, too, to which the
man pointed, was smooth and remarkably graceful, like the stem of an
old meerschaum pipe, and as richly colored.
Bob handled it critically, scrutinizing every inch of its surface--he
adores a Cremona as some souls do a Madonna--then he walked with it to
the window.
"Why, this has been mended!" he exclaimed in surprise and with a trace
of anger in his voice. "This is a new neck put on!"
I knew by the tone that Bob was beginning now to see through the game.
"Ah, you vind day oud, do you? Tat _is_ a new neck, sure, ant a goot
von, put on py Simon Corunden--not Auguste!--Simon! It is better as
efer."
I looked for the guileless, innocent expression with the regulation
smile that distinguishes most vagabonds on an errand like this, but
his lifeless face was unlit by any visible emotion.
Drawing the old red handkerchief from his pocket in a tired, hopeless
way, he began twisting it about the violin again.
"Play something on it," said Bob. He evidently believed every word of
the impromptu explanation, and was weakening again. Harrowing
sighs--chronic for years--or trickling tears shed at the right moment
by some grief-stricken woman never failed to deceive him.
"No, I don't blay. I got no heart inside of me to blay," with a weary
movement of his hand. He was now tucking the frayed ends of the
handkerchief under the strings.
"_Can_ you play?" asked Bob, grown suddenly suspicious, now that the
man dare not prove his story.
"Can I _blay_?" he answered, with a quick lifting of his eyes, and the
semblance of a smile lighting up his furrowed face. "I blay mit
Strakosch te Mendelssohn Concerto in te olt Academy in Vourteenth
Street; ant ven Alboni sing, no von in te virst violins haf te solo
but me, ant dere is not a pin drop in te house, ant Madame Alboni send
me all te flowers tey gif her. Can I BLAY!"
The tone of voice was masterly. He was a new experience to me,
evidently an expert in this sort of thing. Bob looked down into his
stagnant, inert face, noting the slightly scornful, hurt expression
that lingered about the mouth. Then his tender heart got the better of
him.
"I cannot afford to pay sixty dollars for another violin," he said,
his voice expressing the sincerity of his regret.
"I cannot sell him vor less," replied the man, in a quick, decided
way. It would have been an unfledged amateur impostor who could not
have gained courage at this last change in Bob's tone. "Ven I get to
New York," he continued, with almost a sob, "I must haf some money
more as my railroad ticket to get anudder sheap violin. Te peoples
will say it is Grossman come home vidout hees violin--he is broke. No,
I no can sell him vor less. Tis cost one hundret ant sefenty-vive
dollar ven I buy him."
I was about to offer him five dollars, buy the patched swindle, and
end the affair--I had pressing business with Bob that morning--when he
stopped me.
"Would you take thirty dollars and my old violin?"
The man looked at him eagerly.
"Vere is your violin?"
"At my house."
"Is it a goot von? Stop a minute"---- For the third time he removed
the old red silk handkerchief. "Draw te bow across vonce. I know aboud
your violin ven I hears you blay."
Bob tucked the instrument under his chin and drew a full, clear,
resonant tone.
The watery eyes glistened.
"Yes, I take your violin ant te money," in a decided tone. "You know
'em, ant I tink you loafe 'em too."
The subtle flattery of this last touch was exquisitely done. The man
was an artist.
Bob reached for a pad, and, with the remark that he was wanted in
court or he would go to his house with him, wrote an order, sealed it,
and laid three ten-dollar bills on the table.
I felt that nothing now could check Bob. Whatever I might say or do
would fail to convince him. "I know how hard a road can be and how
sore one's feet can get," he would perhaps say to me, as he had often
done before when we blamed him for his generosities.
The man balanced the letter on his hand, reading the inscription in a
listless sort of way, picked up the instrument, looked it all over
carefully, flecked off some specks of dust from the finger-board, laid
the violin on the office table, thrust the soiled rag into his pocket,
caught up the money, and without a word of thanks closed the door
behind him.
"Bob," I said, the man's absolute ingratitude and my friend's colossal
simplicity irritating me beyond control, "why in the name of common
sense did you throw your money away on a sharp like that? Didn't you
see through the whole game? That note was written by himself. Corunden
never saw that fiddle in his life. You can buy a dozen of them for
five dollars apiece in any pawn-shop in town."
Bob looked at me with that peculiar softening of the eyelids which we
know so well. Then he said thoughtfully: "Do you know what it is to be
stranded in a strange city with not a cent in your pocket, afraid to
look a policeman in the face lest he run you in? hungry, unwashed, not
a clean shirt for weeks? I don't care if he is a fraud. He sha'n't go
hungry if I can help it."
There are some episodes in Bob's life to which he seldom refers.
"Then why didn't he play for you?" I asked, still indignant, yet
somewhat touched by an intense earnestness unusual in Bob.
"Yes, I wondered at that," he replied in a musing tone, but without a
shadow of suspicion in his voice.
"You don't think," I continued, "he's such a fool as to go to your
house for your violin? I'll bet you he's made a bee line for a rum
mill; then he'll doctor up another old scraper and try the same game
somewhere else. Let me go after him and bring him back."
Bob did not answer. He was tying up a bundle of papers. The violin lay
on the green-baize table where the man had put it, the law books
pushed aside to give it room. Then he put on his coat and went over to
court.
In an hour he was back again--he and I, sitting in the small inner
office overlooking the dingy courtyard.
We had talked but a few moments when a familiar shuffling step was
heard in the corridor. I looked through the crack in the door, touched
Bob's arm, and put my finger to my lips. Bob leaned forward and
watched with me through the crack.
The outer office door was being slowly opened in the same noiseless
way, and the same man was creeping in. He gave an anxious glance about
the room. He had Bob's own violin in his hand; I knew it by the case.
"Tey all oud," he muttered in an undertone.
For an instant he wavered, looked hungrily towards his old violin,
laid Bob's on a chair near the door, stepped on tiptoe to the
green-baize table, picked up the Cremona, looked it all over,
smoothing the back with his hands, then, nestling it under his chin,
drew the bow gently across the strings, shut his eyes, and began the
Concerto,--the one he had played with Alboni,--not with its full
volume of sound or emphasis, but with echoes, pulsations, tremulous
murmurings, faint breathings of its marvelous beauty. The instrument
seemed part of himself, the neck welded to his fingers, the bow but a
piece of his arm, with a heart-throb down its whole length.
When it was ended he rubbed his cheek softly against his old comrade,
smoothed it once or twice with his hand, laid it tenderly back in its
place on the table among the books, picked up Bob's violin from the
chair, and gently closed the door behind him.
I looked at Bob. He was leaning against his desk, his eyes on the
floor, his whole soul filled with the pathos of the melody. Suddenly
he roused himself, sprang past me into the other room, and, calling to
the man, ran out into the corridor.
"I couldn't catch him," he said in a dejected tone, coming back all
out of breath, and dropping into a chair.
"What did you want to catch him for?" I asked; "he never robbed you?"
"Robbed me!" cried Bob, the tears starting to his eyes. "Robbed _me_!
Good God, man! Couldn't you hear? I robbed _him_!"
We searched for him all that day--Bob with the violin under his arm, I
with an apology.
But he was gone.
ACCORDING TO THE LAW
I
The luncheon was at one o'clock. Not one of your club luncheons,
served in a silent, sedate mausoleum on the principal street, where
your host in the hall below enters your name in a ledger, and a
brass-be-buttoned Yellowplush precedes you upstairs into a desolate
room furnished with chairs and a round table decorated with pink
_boutonnières_ set for six, and where you are plied with Manhattans
until the other guests arrive.
Nor yet was it one of your smart petticoat luncheons in a Fifth Avenue
mansion, where a Delmonico veteran pressed into service for the
occasion waves you upstairs to another recruit, who deposits your coat
and hat on a bed, and who later on ushers you into a room ablaze with
gaslights--midday, remember--where you and the other unfortunates are
served with English pheasants cooked in their own feathers, or
Kennebec salmon embroidered with beets and appliqued with green
mayonnaise. Not that kind of a mid-day meal at all.
On the contrary, it was served,--no, it was eaten,--reveled in, made
merry over, in an ancient house fronting on a sleepy old park filled
with live oaks and magnolias, their trunks streaked with green moss
and their branches draped with gray crape: an ancient house with a big
white door that stood wide open to welcome you,--it was December,
too,--and two verandas on either side, stretched out like welcoming
arms, their railings half hidden in clinging roses, the blossoms in
your face.
There was an old grandmother, too,--quaint as a miniature,--with
fluffy white cap and a white worsted shawl and tea-rose cheeks, and a
smile like an opening window, so sunny did it make her face. And how
delightfully she welcomed us.
I can hear even now the very tones of her voice, and feel the soft,
cool, restful touch of her hand.
And there was an old darky, black as a gum shoe, with tufts of
grizzled gray wool glued to his temples--one of those loyal old house
servants of the South who belong to a régime that is past. I watched
him from the parlor scuffling with his feet as he limped along the
wide hall to announce each new arrival (his master's old Madeira had
foundered him, they said, years before), and always reaching the
drawing-room door long after the newcomer had been welcomed by shouts
of laughter and the open arms of every one in the room: the newcomer
another girl, of course.
And this drawing-room, now I think of it, was not like any other
drawing-room that I knew. Very few things in it matched. The carpet
was a faded red, and of different shades of repair. The hangings were
of yellow silk. There were haircloth sofas, and a big fireplace, and
plenty of rocking chairs, and lounges covered with chintz of every
pattern, and softened with cushions of every hue.
At one end hung a large mirror made of squares of glass laid like
tiles in a dull gilt frame that had held it together for nearly a
century, and on the same wall, too, and all so splotched and mouldy
with age that the girls had to stoop down to pick out a pane clear
enough to straighten their bonnets by.
And on the side wall there were family portraits, and over the mantel
queer Chinese porcelains and a dingy coat-of-arms in a dingier frame,
and on every table, in all kinds of dishes, flat and square and round,
there were heaps and heaps of roses--De Vonienses, Hermosas, and
Agripinas--whose distinguished ancestors, hardy sons of the soil, came
direct from the Mayflower (This shall not happen again), and who
consequently never knew the enervating influences of a hothouse. And
there were marble busts on pedestals, and a wonderful clock on high
legs, and medallions with weeping willows of somebody's hair, besides
a miscellaneous collection of large and small bric-à-brac, the
heirlooms of five generations.
And yet, with all this mismatching of color, form, and style,--this
chronological array of fittings and furnishings, beginning with the
mouldy mirror and ending with the modern straw chair,--there was a
harmony that satisfied one's every sense.
And so restful, and helpful, and comforting, and companionable was it
all, and so accustomed was everything to be walked over, and sat on,
and kicked about; so glad to be punched out of shape if it were a
cushion which you needed for some special curve in your back or twist
of your head; so delighted to be scratched, or slopped over, or
scarred full of holes if it were a table that could hold your books or
paste-pot or lighted pipe; so hilariously joyful to be stretched out
of shape or sagged into irredeemable bulges if it were a straw chair
that could sooth your aching bones or rest a tired muscle!
When all the girls and young fellows had arrived,--such pretty girls,
with such soft, liquid voices and captivating dialects, the one their
black mammies had taught them,--and such unconventional, happy young
fellows in all sorts of costumes from blue flannel to broadcloth,--one
in a Prince Albert coat and a straw hat in his hand, and it near
Christmas,--the old darky grew more and more restless, limping in and
out of the open door, dodging anxiously into the drawing-room and out
again, his head up like a terrapin's.
Finally he veered across to a seat by the window, and, shielding his
mouth with his wrinkled, leathery paw, bent over the old grandmother
and poured into her ear a communication of such vital import that the
dear old lady arose at once and, taking my hand, said in her low,
sweet voice that we would wait no longer for the Judge, who was
detained in court.
After this the aged Terrapin scuffled out again, reappearing almost
immediately before the door in white gloves inches too long at the
fingers. Then bowing himself backwards he preceded us into the
dining-room.
And the table was so inviting when we took our seats around it, I
sitting on the right of the grandmother--being the only stranger--and
the prettiest of all the girls next to me. And the merriment was so
contagious, and the sallies of wit so sparkling, and the table itself!
Solid mahogany, this old heirloom! rich and dark as a meerschaum, the
kind of mahogany that looked as if all the fine old Madeira and choice
port that had been drunk above it had soaked into its pores. And every
fibre of it in evidence, too, except where the silver coasters, and
the huge silver centrepiece filled with roses, and the plates and the
necessary appointments hid its shining countenance.
And the aged Terrapin evidently appreciated in full the sanctity of
this family altar, and duly realized the importance of his position as
its High Priest. Indeed, there was a gravity, a dignity, and repose
about him as he limped through his ministrations which I had noticed
in him before. If he showed any nervousness at all it was as he
glanced now and then toward the drawing-room door through which the
Judge must enter.
And yet he appeared outwardly calm, even under this strain. For had he
not provided for every emergency? Were not His Honor's viands already
at that moment on the kitchen hearth, with special plates over them to
keep them hot against his arrival?
And what a luncheon it was! The relays of fried chicken, baked sweet
potatoes, corn-bread, and mango pickles--a most extraordinary
production, I maintain, is a mango pickle!--and things baked on top
and brown, and other things baked on the bottom and creamy white.
And the fun, too, as each course appeared and disappeared only to be
followed by something more extraordinary and seductive. The men
continued to talk, and the girls never ceased laughing, and the
grandmother's eyes constantly followed the Terrapin, giving him
mysterious orders with the slightest raising of an eyelash, and we had
already reached the salad--or was it the baked ham?--when the fairy in
the pink waist next me clapped her hands and cried out:--
"Oh, you dear Judge! We waited an hour for you"--it doubtless seemed
long to her. "What in the world kept you?"
"Couldn't help it, little one," came a voice in reply; and a man with
silver-white hair, dignified bearing, and a sunny smile on his face
edged his way around the table to the grandmother, every hand held out
to him as he passed, and, bending low over the dear lady, expressed
his regrets at having been detained.
Then with an extended hand to me and, "It gives me very great pleasure
to see you in this part of the South, sir," he sat down in the vacant
chair, nodding to everybody graciously as he spread his napkin. A
moment later he leaned forward and said in explanation to the
grandmother,--
"I waited for the jury to come in. You received my message, of
course?"
"Oh, yes, dear Judge; and although we missed you we sat down at once."
"Have you been in court all day?" I asked as an introductory remark.
Of course he had if he had waited for the jury. What an extraordinary
collection of idiocies one could make if he jotted down all the stupid
things said and heard when conversations were being opened.
"Yes, I am sorry to say, trying one of those cases which are becoming
daily more common."
I looked up inquiringly.
"Oh, a negro, of course," and the Judge picked up his fork and moved
back the wine glass.
"And such dreadful things happen, and such dreadful creatures are
going about," said the grandmother, raising her hand deprecatingly.
"How do you account for it, madam?" I asked. "It was quite different
before the war. I have often heard my father tell of the old days, and
how much the masters did for their slaves, and how loyal their
servants were. I remember one old servant whom we boys called Daddy
Billy, who was really one of the family--quite like your"--and I
nodded toward the Terrapin, who at the moment was pouring a thin
stream of brown sherry into an equally attenuated glass for the
special comfort and sustenance of the last arrival.
"Oh, you mean Mordecai," she interrupted, looking at the Terrapin. "He
has always been one of our family. How long do you think he has lived
with us?"--and she lowered her voice. "Forty-eight years--long before
the war--and we love him dearly. My father gave him to us. No, it is
not the old house servants,--it is these new negroes, born since the
war, that make all the trouble."
"You are right, madam. They are not like Mordecai," and the Judge held
up the thin glass between his eye and the light. "God bless the day
when Mordecai was born! I think this is the Amazon sherry, is it not,
my dear madam?"
"Yes, Mordecai's sherry, as we sometimes call it. It may interest you,
sir, to hear about it," and she turned to me again. "This wine that
the Judge praises so highly was once the pride of my husband's heart,
and when Sherman came through and burned our homes, among the few
things that were saved were sixty-two bottles of this old Amazon
sherry, named after the ship that brought it over. Mordecai buried
them in the woods and never told a single soul for two years
after--not even my husband. There are a few bottles left, and I always
bring one out when we have distinguished guests," and she bowed her
head to the Judge and to me. "Oh, yes, Mordecai has always been one of
our family, and so has his wife, who is almost as old as he is. She is
in the kitchen now, and cooked this luncheon. If these new negroes
would only behave like the old ones we would have no trouble," and a
faint sigh escaped her.
The Terrapin, who during the conversation had disappeared in search of
another hot course for the Judge, had now reappeared, and so the
conversation was carried on in tones too low for his ears.
"And has any effort been made to bring these modern negroes, as you
call them, into closer relation with you all, and"----
"It would be useless," interrupted the Judge. "The old negroes were
held in check by their cabin life and the influence of the 'great
house,' as the planter's home was called. All this has passed away.
This new product has no home and wants none. They live like animals,
and are ready for any crime. Sometimes I think they care neither for
wife, child, nor any family tie. The situation is deplorable, and is
getting worse every day. It is only the strong hand of the law that
now controls these people." His Honor spoke with some positiveness, I
thought, and with some warmth.
"But," I broke in, "if when things became more settled you had begun
by treating them as your friends"--I was getting into shoal water, but
I blundered on, peering into the fog--"and if you had not looked upon
them as an alien race who"----
Just here the siren with the pink waist who sat next me--bless her
sweet face!--blew her conch-shell--she had seen the rocks ahead--and
cried out:--
"Now, grandma, please stop talking about the war!" (The dear lady had
been silent for five minutes.) "We're tired and sick of it, aren't we,
girls? And don't you say another word, Judge. You've got to tell us
some stories."
A rattle of glasses from all the young people was the response, and
the Judge rose, with his hand on his heart and his eyes upraised like
those of a dying saint. He protested gallantly that he hadn't said a
word, and the grandmother insisted with a laugh that she had merely
told me about Mordecai hiding the sherry, while I vowed with much
solemnity that I had not once opened my lips since I sat down, and
called upon the siren in pink to confirm it. To my great surprise she
promptly did, with an arch look of mock reproof in her eye; whereupon,
with an atoning bow to her, I grasped the lever, rang "full speed,"
and thus steamed out into deep water again.
While all this was going on at our end of the table, a running fire of
fun had been kept at the other end, near the young man in the Prince
Albert coat, which soon developed into heavy practice, the Judge with
infinite zest joining in the merriment, exploding one story after
another, each followed by peals of laughter and each better than the
other, his Honor eating his luncheon all the while with great gusto as
he handled the battery.
During all this the Terrapin neglected no detail of his duty, but
served the fifth course to the ladies and the kept-hot courses to the
Judge with equal dexterity, and both at the same time, and all without
spilling a drop or clinking a plate.
When the ladies had withdrawn and we were seated on the veranda
fronting the sleepy old park, each man with a rose in his buttonhole,
the gift of the girl who had sat next him (the grandmother had pinned
the rose she wore at her throat on the lapel of the Judge's coat), and
when the Terrapin had produced a silver tray and was about to fill
some little egg-shell cups from a George-the-Third coffee-pot, the
Judge, who was lying back in a straw chair, a picture of perfect
repose and of peaceful digestion, turned his head slightly toward me
and said,--
"I am sorry, sir, but I shall be obliged to leave you in a few
minutes. I have to sentence a negro by the name of Sam Crouch. When
these ladies can spare you it will give me very great pleasure to have
you come into court and see how we administer justice to this
much-abused and much-misunderstood race," and he smiled significantly
at me.
"What was his crime, Judge?" asked the young man in the Prince Albert
coat, as he held out his cup for Mordecai to fill. "Stealing
chickens?" The gayety of the table was evidently still with him and
upon him.
"No," replied the Judge gravely, and he looked at me, the faintest
gleam of triumph in his eyes. "Murder."
II
There are contrasts in life, sudden transitions from light to dark,
startling as those one experiences in dropping from out the light of a
spring morning redolent with perfume into the gloom of a coal mine
choked with noxious vapors--out of a morning, if you will, all joy and
gladness and the music of many birds; a morning when the wide, white
sky is filled with cloud ships drifting lazily; when the trees wave in
the freshening wind, and the lark hanging in mid-air pours out its
soul for very joy of living!
And the horror of that other! The never-ending night and silence; the
foul air reeking with close, stifling odors; the narrow walls where
men move as ghosts with heads alight, their bodies lost in the
shadows; the ominous sounds of falling rock thundering through the
blackness; and again, when all is still, the slow drop, drop of the
ooze, like the tick of a deathwatch. It is a prison and a tomb, and to
those who breathe the sweet air of heaven, and who love the sunshine,
the very house of despair.
I myself experienced one of these contrasts when I exchanged all the
love and gladness, all the wit and laughter and charm of the
breakfast, for the court-room.
It was on the ground floor, level with the grass of the courtyard,
which a sudden storm had just drenched. The approach was through a
cold, crypt-like passage running under heavy brick arches. At its end
hung a door blocked up with slouching ragged figures, craning their
woolly heads for a glimpse inside whenever some official or visitor
passed in or out.
I elbowed my way past the constables holding long staffs, and,
standing on my toes, looked over a sea of heads--a compact mass wedged
together as far down as the rail outside the bench. The air was
sickening, loathsome, almost unbreathable. The only light, except the
dull gray light of the day, came from a single gas jet flaring over
the Judge's head. Every other part of the court-room was lost in the
shadow of the passing storm.
Inside the space where the lawyers sat, the floor was littered with
torn papers, and the tables were heaped with bundles of briefs and law
books in disorder, many of them opened face down.
Behind me rose the gallery reserved for negroes, a loft having no
window nor light, hanging like a huge black shadow without form or
outline. All over this huge black shadow were spattered specks of
white. As I looked again, I could see that these were the strained
eyeballs and set teeth of motionless negroes.
The Judge, his hands loosely clasped together, sat leaning forward in
his seat, his eyes fastened on the prisoner. The flare of the gas jet
fell on his stern, immobile face, and cast clear-lined shadows that
cut his profile sharp as a cameo.
The negro stood below him, his head on his chest, his arms hanging
straight. On either side, close within reach of the doomed man, were
the sheriffs--rough-looking men, with silver shields on their breasts.
They looked straight at the Judge, nodding mechanically as each word
fell from his lips. They knew the litany.
The condemned man was evidently under thirty years of age, of almost
pure African blood, well built, and strong. The forehead was low, the
lips heavy, the jaw firm. The brown-black face showed no cruelty; the
eyes were not cunning. It was only a dull, inert face, like those of a
dozen others about him.
As he turned again, I saw that his hair was cut short, revealing
lighter-colored scars on the scalp--records of a not too peaceful
life, perhaps. His dress was ragged and dingy, patched trousers, and
shabby shoes, and a worn flannel shirt open at the throat, the skin
darker than the flannel. On a chair beside him lay a crumpled slouch
hat, grimed with dirt, the crown frayed and torn.
As I pressed my way farther into the throng toward the bench, the
voice of the Judge rose, filling every part of the room, the words
falling slowly, as earth drops upon a coffin:--
--"until you be dead, and may God have mercy on your soul!"
I looked searchingly into the speaker's face. There was not an
expression that I could recall, nor a tone in his voice that I
remembered. Surely this could not be the same man I had met at the
table but an hour before, with that musical laugh and winning smile. I
scrutinized him more closely--the rose was still in his buttonhole.
As the voice ceased, the condemned man lifted his face, and turned his
head slowly. For a moment his eyes rested on the Judge; then they
moved to the clerks, sitting silent and motionless; then behind, at
the constables, and then up into the black vault packed with his own
people.
A deathlike silence met him everywhere.
One of the officers stepped closer. The condemned man riveted his gaze
upon him, and held out his hands helplessly; the officer leaned
forward, and adjusted the handcuffs. Then came the sharp click of
their teeth, like the snap of a hungry wolf.
The two men,--the criminal judged according to the law, and the
sheriff, its executor,--chained by their wrists, wheeled about and
faced the crowd. The constables raised their staffs, formed a guard,
and forced a way through the crowd, the silent gallery following with
their eyes until the door closed upon them.
Then through the gloom there ran the audible shiver of pent-up sighs,
low whispers, and the stretching of tired muscles.
When I reached the Judge, he was just entering the door of the
anteroom opening into his private quarters. His sunny smile had
returned, although the voice had not altogether regained its former
ring. He said,--
"I trust you were not too late. I waited a few minutes, hoping you had
come, and then when it became so dark, I ordered a light lit, but I
couldn't find you in the crowd. Come in. Let me present you to the
district attorney and to the young lawyer whom I appointed to defend
the prisoner. While I was passing sentence, they were discussing the
verdict. Were you in time for the sentence?" he continued.
"No," I answered, after shaking hands with both gentlemen and taking
the chair which one of them offered me, "only the last part. But I saw
the man before they led him away, and I must say he didn't look much
like a criminal. Tell me something about the murder," and I turned to
the young lawyer, a smooth-faced young man with long black hair tucked
behind his ears and a frank, open countenance.
"You'd better ask the district attorney," he answered, with a slight
shrug of his shoulders. "He is the only one about here who seems to
know anything about the _murder_; my client, Crouch, didn't, anyhow. I
was counsel for the defense."
He spoke with some feeling, and I thought with some irritation, but
whether because of his chagrin at losing the case or because of real
sympathy for the negro I could not tell.
"You seem to forget the jury," answered the district attorney in a
self-satisfied way; "they evidently knew something about it." There
was a certain elation in his manner, as he spoke, that surprised
me--quite as if he had won a bet. That a life had been played for and
lost seemed only to heighten his interest in the game.
"No, I don't forget the jury," retorted the young man, "and I don't
forget some of the witnesses; nor do I forget what you made them say
and how you got some of them tangled up. That negro is as innocent of
that crime as I am. Don't you think so, Judge?" and he turned to the
table and began gathering up his papers.
His Honor had settled himself in his chair, the back tipped against
the wall. His old manner had returned, so had the charm of his voice.
He had picked up a reed pipe when he entered the room, and had filled
it with tobacco, which he had broken in finer grains in the palm of
his hand. He was now puffing away steadily to keep it alight.
"I have no opinion to offer, gentlemen, one way or the other. The
matter, of course, is closed as far as I am concerned. I think you
will both agree, however, whatever may be your personal feelings, that
my rulings were fair. As far as I could see, the witnesses told a
straight story, and upon their evidence the jury brought in the
verdict. I think, too, my charge was just. There was"--here the Judge
puffed away vigorously--"there was, therefore, nothing left for me to
do but"--puff--puff--"to sentence him. Hang that pipe! It won't draw,"
and the Judge, with one of his musical laughs, rose from his chair and
pulled a straw from the broom in the corner.
The district attorney looked at the discomfited opposing counsel and
laughed. Then he added, as an expression of ill-concealed contempt for
his inexperience crept over his face:--
"Don't worry over it, my boy. This is one of your first cases, and I
know it comes hard, but you'll get over it before you've tried as many
of them as I have. The nigger hadn't a dollar, and somebody had to
defend him. The Judge appointed you, and you've done your duty well,
and lost--that's all there is to it. But I'll tell you one thing for
your information,"--and his voice assumed a serious tone,--"and one
which you did not notice in this trial, and which you would have done
had you known the ways of these niggers as I do, and it went a long
way with me in establishing his guilt. From the time Crouch was
arrested, down to this very afternoon when the Judge sentenced him,
not one of his people has ever turned up,--no father, mother, wife,
nor child,--not one."
"That's not news to me," interrupted the young man. "I tried to get
something from Crouch myself, but he wouldn't talk."
"Of course he wouldn't talk, and you know why; simply because he
didn't want to be spotted for some other crime. This nigger
Crouch"--and the district attorney looked my way--"is a product of the
war, and one of the worst it has given us--a shiftless tramp that
preys on society." His remarks were evidently intended for me, for the
Judge was not listening, nor was the young lawyer. "Most of this class
of criminals have no homes, and if they had they lie about them, so
afraid are they, if they're fortunate enough to be discharged, that
they'll be rearrested for a crime committed somewhere else."
"Which discharge doesn't very often happen around here," remarked the
young man with a sneer. "Not if you can help it."
"No, which doesn't very often happen around here _if I can help it_.
You're right. That's what I'm here for," the district attorney
retorted with some irritation. "And now I'll tell you another thing. I
had a second talk with Crouch only this afternoon after the
verdict"--and he turned to me--"while the Judge was lunching with you,
sir, and I begged him, now that it was all over, to send for his
people, but he was stubborn as a mule, and swore he had no one who
would want to see him. I don't suppose he had; he's been an outcast
since he was born."
"And that's why you worked so hard to hang him, was it?" The young man
was thoroughly angry. I could see the color mount to his cheeks. I
could see, too, that Crouch had no friends, except this young sprig of
the law, who seemed as much chagrined over the loss of his case as
anything else. And yet, I confess, I did not let my sympathies for the
under dog get the better of me. I knew enough of the record of this
new race not to recognize that there could be two sides to questions
like this.
The district attorney bit his lip at the young man's thrust. Then he
answered him slowly, but without any show of anger:--
"You have one thing left, you know. You can ask for a new trial. What
do you say, Judge?"
The Judge made no answer. He evidently had lost all interest in the
case, for during the discussion he had been engaged in twisting the
end of the straw into the stem of the pipe and peering into the
clogged bowl with one eye shut.
"And if the Judge granted it, what good would it do?" burst out the
young man as he rose to his feet. "If Sam Crouch had a soul as white
as snow, it wouldn't help him with these juries around here as long as
his skin is the color it is!" and he put on his hat and left the room.
The Judge looked after him a moment and then said to me,--
"Our young men, sir, are impetuous and outspoken, but their hearts are
all right. I haven't a doubt but that Crouch was guilty. He's probably
been a vagrant all his life."
III
Some weeks after these occurrences I was on my way South, and again
found myself within reach of the sleepy old park and the gruesome
court-room.
I was the only passenger in the Pullman. I had traveled all night in
this royal fashion--a whole car to myself--with the porter, a quiet,
attentive young colored man of perhaps thirty years of age, duly
installed as First Gentleman of the Bedchamber, and I had settled
myself for a morning of seclusion when my privacy was broken in upon
at a way station by the entrance of a young man in a shooting jacket
and cap, and high boots splashed with mud.
He carried a folding gun in a leather case, an overcoat, and a
game-bag, and was followed by two dogs. The porter relieved him of his
belongings, stowed his gun in the rack, hung his overcoat on the hook,
and distributed the rest of his equipment within reach of his hand.
Then he led the dogs back to the baggage car.
The next moment the young sportsman glanced over the car, rose from
his seat, and held out his hand.
"Haven't forgotten me, have you? Met you at the luncheon, you
know--time the Judge was late waiting for the jury to come in."
To my delight and astonishment it was the young man in the Prince
Albert coat.
He proved, as the morning wore on, to be a most entertaining young
fellow, telling me of his sport and the birds he had shot, and of how
good one dog was and how stupid the other, and how next week he was
going after ducks down the river, and he described a small club-house
which a dozen of his friends had built, and where, with true Southern
hospitality, he insisted I should join him.
And then we fell to talking about the luncheon, and what a charming
morning we had spent, and of the pretty girls and the dear
grandmother; and we laughed again over the Judge's stories, and he
told me another, the Judge's last, which he had heard his Honor tell
at another luncheon; and then the porter put up a table, and spread a
cloth, and began opening things with a corkscrew, and filling empty
glasses with crushed ice and other things, and altogether we had a
most comfortable and fraternal and much-to-be-desired half hour.
Just before he left the train--he had to get out at the junction--some
further reference to the Judge brought to my recollection that ghostly
afternoon in the courtroom. Suddenly the picture of the negro with
that look of stolid resignation on his face came before me. I asked
him if any appeal had been taken in the case as suggested by the
district attorney.
"Appeal? In the Crouch case? Not much. Hung him high as Haman."
"When?"
"'Bout a week ago. And by the way, a very curious thing happened at
the hanging. The first time they strung Crouch up the rope broke and
let him down, and they had to send eight miles for another. While they
were waiting the mail arrived. The post-office was right opposite. In
the bag was a letter for Crouch, care of the warden, but not directed
to the jail. The postmaster brought it over and the warden opened it
and read it to the prisoner, asking him who it was from, and the
nigger said it was from his mother--that the man she worked for had
written it. Of course the warden knew it was from Crouch's girl, for
Crouch had always sworn he had no family, so the Judge told me. Then
Crouch asked the warden if he'd answer it for him before he died. The
warden said he would, and got a sheet of paper, a pen and ink, and
sitting down by Crouch under the gallows asked him what he wanted to
say. And now, here comes the funny part. All that negro wanted to say
was just this:--
"'I'm enjoying good health and I hope to see you before long.'
'SAM CROUCH.'
"Then Crouch reached over and took the pen out of the warden's hands,
and marked a cross underneath what the warden had written, and when
the warden asked him what he did that for, he said he wanted his
mother to have something he had touched himself. By that time the new
rope came and they swung him up. Curious, wasn't it? The warden said
it was the funniest message he ever knew a dying nigger to send, and
he'd hung a good many of 'em. It struck me as being some secret kind
of a password. You never can tell about these coons."
"Did the warden mail it?"
"Oh, yes, of course he mailed it--warden's square as a brick. Sent it,
of course, care of the man the girl works for. He lives somewhere
around here, or Crouch said he did. Awfully glad to see you again--I
get out here."
The porter brought in the dogs, I picked up the gun, and we conducted
the young sportsman out of the car and into a buggy waiting for him at
the end of the platform.
As I entered the car again and waved my hand to him from the open
window, I saw a negro woman dart from out the crowd of loungers, as if
in eager search of some one. She was a tall, bony, ill-formed woman,
wearing the rude garb of a farm hand--blue cotton gown, brown
sunbonnet, and the rough muddy shoes of a man.
The dress was faded almost white in parts, and patched with different
colors, but looked fresh and clean. It was held together over her flat
bust by big bone buttons. There was neither collar nor belt. The
sleeves were rolled up above the elbows, showing her strong, muscular
arms, tough as rawhide. The hands were large and bony, with big
knuckles, the mark of the hoe in the palms.
In her eagerness to speak to the porter the sunbonnet had slipped off.
Black as the face was, it brought to my mind, strange to say, those
weather-tanned fishwives of the Normandy coast--those sturdy, patient,
earnest women, accustomed to toil and exposure and to the buffetings
of wind and tempest.
When the porter appeared on his way back to the car, she sprang
forward, and caught him by the arm.
"Oh, I'm dat sorry! An' he ain't come wid ye?" she cried. "But ye see
him, didn't ye?" The voice was singularly sweet and musical. "Ye did?
Oh, dat's good."
As she spoke, a little black bare-legged pickaninny, with one garment,
ran out from behind the corner of the station, and clung to the
woman's skirts, hiding her face in their folds. The woman put her
hard, black hand on the child's cheek, and drew the little woolly head
closer to her side.
"Well, when's he comin'? I come dis mawnin' jes 's ye tol' me. An' ye
see him, did ye?" she asked with a strange quivering pathos in her
voice.
"Oh, yes, I see him yisterday."
The porter's answer was barely audible. I noticed, too, that he looked
away from her as he spoke.
"An' yer sho' now he ain't come wid ye," and she looked toward the
train as if expecting to find some one.
"No, he can't come till nex' Saturday," answered the porter.
"Well, I'm mighty dis'pinted. I been a-waitin' an' a-waitin' till I
_mos_' gin out. Ain't nobody helped me like him. You tol' me las' time
dat he'd be here to-day," and her voice shook. "You tell him I got his
letter an' dat I think 'bout him night an' day, an' dat I'd rudder see
him dan anybody in de worl'. And you tell him--an' doan' ye forgit
dis--dat you see his sister Maria's chile--dis is her--hol' up yer
haid, honey, an' let him see ye. I thought if he come to-day he'd like
to see 'er, 'cause he useter tote her roun' on his back when she
warn't big'r'n a shote. An' ye _see_ him, did ye? Well, I'm mighty
glad o' dat."
She was bending forward, her great black hand on his wrist, her eyes
fixed on his. Then a startled, anxious look crossed her face.
"But he ain't sick dat he didn't come? Yo' _sho'_ now, he ain't sick?"
"Oh, no; never see him lookin' so good."
The porter was evidently anxious about the train, for he kept backing
away toward his car.
"Well, den, good-by; but doan' ye forgit. Tell him ye see me an' dat I
'm a-hungerin' for him. You hear, _a-hungerin_' for him, an' dat I
can't git 'long no mo' widout him. Don' ye forgit, now, 'cause I mos'
daid a-waitin' for him. Good-by."
The train rolled on. She was still on the platform, her gaunt figure
outlined against the morning sky, her eager eyes strained toward us,
the child clutching her skirts.
* * * * *
I confess that I have never yet outgrown my affection for the colored
race: an affection at best, perhaps, born of the dim, undefined
memories of my childhood and of an old black mammy--my father's
slave--who crooned over me all day long, and sang me lullabies at
night.
I am aware, too, that I do not always carry this affectionate sympathy
locked up in a safe, but generally pinned on the outside of my sleeve;
and so it is not surprising, as the hours wore on, and the porter
gradually developed his several capacities for making me comfortable,
that a certain confidence was established between us.
Then, again, I have always looked upon a Pullman porter as a superior
kind of person--certainly among serving people. He does not often
think so himself, nor does he ever present to the average mind any
marked signs of genius. He is in appearance and deportment very much
like all other uniformed attendants belonging to most of the great
corporations; clean, neatly dressed, polite, watchful, and patient. He
is also indiscriminate in his ministrations; for he will gladly open
the window for No. 10, and as cheerfully close it one minute later for
No. 6. After traveling with him for half a day, you doubtless conclude
that nothing more serious weighs on his mind than the duty of
regulating the temperature of his car, or looking after its linen. But
you are wrong.
All this time he is classifying you. He really located you when you
entered the car, summing you up as you sought out your berth number.
At his first glance he had divined your station in life by your
clothes, your personal refinement, by your carpet-bag, and your
familiarity with travel by the way you took your seat. The shoes he
will black for you in the still small hours of the morning, when he
has time to think, will give him any other points he requires.
If they are patched or half-soled, no amount of diamond shirt studs or
watch chain worn with them will save your respectability. If you
should reverse your cuffs before him, or imbibe your stimulants from a
black bottle which you carry in your inside pocket instead of a silver
flask concealed in your bag, no amount of fees will gain for you his
unqualified respect. If none of these delinquencies can be laid to
your account, and he is still in doubt, he waits until you open your
bag.
Should the first rapid glance betray your cigars packed next to your
shoes, or the handle of a toothbrush thrust into the sponge-bag, or
some other such violation of his standard, your status is fixed; he
knows you. And he does all this while he is bowing and smiling,
bringing you a pillow for your head, opening a transom, or putting up
wire screens to save you from draughts and dust, and all without any
apparent distinction between you and your fellow passengers.
If you swear at him, he will not answer back, and if you smite him, he
will nine times out of ten turn to you the other cheek. He does all
this because his skin is black, and yours is white, and because he is
the servant and representative of a corporation who will see him
righted, and who are accustomed to hear complaints. Above all, he will
do so because of the wife and children or mother at home in need of
the money he earns, and destined to suffer if he lose his place.
He has had, too, if you did but know it, a life as interesting,
perhaps, as any of your acquaintances. It is quite within the
possibilities that he has been once or twice to Spain, Italy, or
Egypt, depending on the movements of the master he served; that he can
speak a dozen words or more of Spanish or Italian or pigeon English,
and oftener than not the best English of our public schools; can make
an omelette, sew on a button, or clean a gun, and that in an emergency
or accident (I know of two who lost their lives to save their
passengers) he can be the most helpful, the most loyal, the most human
serving man and friend you can find the world over.
If you are selfishly intent on your own affairs, and look upon his
civility and his desire to please you as included in the price of your
berth or seat, and decide that any extra service he may render you is
canceled by the miserable twenty-five cents which you give him, you
will know none of these accomplishments nor the spirit that rules
them.
If, however, you are the kind of man who goes about the world with
your heart unbuttoned and your earflaps open, eager to catch and hold
any little touch of pathos or flash of humor or note of tragedy, you
cannot do better than gain his confidence.
* * * * *
I cannot say by what process I accomplished this result with this
particular porter and on this particular train. It may have been the
newness of my shoes, combined with the proper stowing of my toothbrush
and the faultless cut of my pajamas; or it might have been the fact
that he had already divined that I liked his race; but certain it is
that no sooner was the woman out of sight than he came direct to my
seat, and, with a quiver in his voice, said,--
"Did you see dat woman I spoke to, suh?"
"Yes; you didn't seem to want to talk to her."
"Oh, it warn't dat, suh, but dat woman 'bout breaks my heart. Hadn't
been for de gemman gettin' off here an' me havin' to get his dogs, I
wouldn't 'a' got out de car at all. I hoped she wouldn't come to-day.
I thought she heared 'bout it. Everybody knows it up an' down de road,
an' de papers been full, tho' co'se she can't read. She lives 'bout
ten miles from here, an' she walked in dis mawnin'. Comes every
Saturday. I only makes dis run on Saturday, and she knows de day I'm
comin'."
"Some trouble?" I asked.
"Oh, yes, suh, a heap o' trouble; mo' trouble dan she kin stan' when
she knows it. Beats all why nobody ain't done tol' her. I been talkin'
to her every Saturday now for a month, tellin' her I see him an' dat
he's a-comin' down, an' dat he sent her his love, an' once or twice
lately I'd bring her li'l' things he sent her. Co'se _he_ didn't send
'em, 'cause he was whar he couldn't get to 'em, but she didn't know no
better. He's de only son now she'd got, an' he's been mighty good to
her an' dat li'l' chile she had wid her. I knowed him ever since he
worked on de railroad. Mos' all de money he gits he gives to her. If
he done the thing they said he done I ain't got nothin' mo' to say,
but I don't believe he done it, an' never will. I thought maybe dey'd
let him go, an' den he'd come home, an' she wouldn't have to suffer no
mo'; dat made me keep on a-lyin' to her."
"What's been the matter? Has he been arrested?"
"'Rested! '_Rested!_ Fo' God, suh, dey done hung him las' week."
A light began to break in upon me.
"What was his name?"
"Same name as his mother's, suh--Sam Crouch."
"NEVER HAD NO SLEEP"
It was on the upper deck of a Chesapeake Bay boat, _en route_ for Old
Point Comfort and Norfolk. I was bound for Norfolk.
"Kinder ca'm, ain't it?"
The voice proceeded from a pinched-up old fellow with a colorless
face, straggling white beard, and sharp eyes. He wore a flat-topped
slouch hat resting on his ears, and a red silk handkerchief tied in a
sporting knot around his neck. His teeth were missing, the lips
puckered up like the mouth of a sponge-bag. In his hand he carried a
cane with a round ivory handle. This served as a prop to his mouth,
the puckered lips fumbling about the knob. He was shadowed by an old
woman wearing a shiny brown silk, that glistened like a wet
waterproof, black mitts, poke-bonnet, flat lace collar, and a long
gold watch chain. I had noticed them at supper. She was cutting up his
food.
"Kinder ca'm, ain't it?" he exclaimed again, looking my way. "Fust
real nat'ral vittles I've eat fur a year. Spect it's ther sea air.
This water's brackish, ain't it?"
I confirmed his diagnosis of the saline qualities of the Chesapeake,
and asked if he had been an invalid.
"Waal, I should say so! Bin livin' on hospital mush fur nigh on ter a
year; but, by gum! ter-night I jist said ter Mommie: 'Mommie, shuv
them soft-shells this way. Ain't seen none sence I kep' tavern.'"
Mommie nodded her head in confirmation, but with an air of "if you're
dead in the morning, don't blame me."
"What's been the trouble?" I inquired, drawing up a camp stool.
"Waal, I dunno rightly. Got my stummic out o' gear, throat kinder
weak, and what with the seventies"----
"Seventies?" I asked.
"Yes; had 'em four year. I'm seventy-five nex' buthday. But come ter
sum it all up, what's ther matter with me is I ain't never had no
sleep. Let me sit on t'other side. One ear's stopped workin' this ten
year."
He moved across and pulled an old cloak around him.
"Been long without sleep?" I asked sympathetically.
"'Bout sixty year--mebbe sixty-five."
I looked at him inquiringly, fearing to break the thread if I jarred
too heavily.
"Yes, spect it must be more. Well, you keep tally. Five year bootblack
and porter in a tavern in Dover, 'leven year tendin' bar down in
Wilmington, fourteen year bootcherin', nineteen year an' six months
keepin' a roadhouse ten miles from Philadelphy fur ther hucksters
comin' to market--quit las' summer. How much yer got?"
I nodded, assenting to his estimate of sixty-five years of service, if
he had started when fifteen.
He ruminated for a time, caressing the ivory ball of his cane with his
uncertain mouth.
I jogged him again. "Boots and tending bar I should think would be
wakeful, but I didn't suppose butchering and keeping hotel
necessitated late hours."
"Well, that's 'cause yer don't know. Bootcherin's ther wakefulest
business as is. Now yer a country bootcher, mind--no city beef man,
nor porter-house steak and lamb chops fur clubs an' hotels, but jest
an all-round bootcher--lamb, veal, beef, mebbe once a week, ha'f er
whole, as yer trade goes. Now ye kill when ther sun goes down, so ther
flies can't mummuck 'em. Next yer head and leg 'em, gittin' in in
rough, as we call it--takin' out ther insides an' leavin' ther hide on
ther back. Ye let 'em hang fur four hours, and 'bout midnight ye go at
'em agin, trim an' quarter, an' 'bout four in winter and three in
summer ye open up ther stable with a lantern, git yer stuff in, an'
begin yer rounds."
"Yes, I see; but keeping hotel isn't"----
"Now thar ye're dead out agin. Ye're a-keepin' a roadhouse, mind--one
of them huckster taverns where ha'f yer folks come in 'arly 'bout
sundown and sit up ha'f ther night, and t'other ha'f drive inter yer
yard 'bout midnight an' lie round till daybreak. It's eat er drink all
ther time, and by ther time ye've stood behind ther bar and jerked
down ev'ry bottle on ther shelf, gone out ha'f a dozen times with er
light ter keep some mule from kickin' out yer partitions, got er dozen
winks on er settee in a back room, and then begin bawlin' upstairs,
routin' out two or three hired gals to get 'arly breakfust, ye're nigh
tuckered out. By ther time this gang is fed, here comes another
drivin' in. Oh, thet's a nice quiet life, thet is! I quit las' year,
and me and Mommie is on our way to Old P'int Cumfut. I ain't never bin
thar, but ther name sounded peaceful like, and so I tho't ter try it.
I'm in sarch er sleep, I am. Wust thing 'bout me is, no matter whar
I'm lyin', when it comes three 'clock I'm out of bed. Bin at it all my
life; can't never break it."
"But you've enjoyed life?" I interpolated.
"Enj'yed life! Well, p'rhaps, and agin p'rhaps not," looking furtively
at his wife. Then, lowering his voice: "There ain't bin er horse race
within er hundred miles of Philadelphy I ain't tuk in. Enj'y! Well,
don't yer worry." And his sharp eyes snapped.
I believed him. That accounted for the way the red handkerchief was
tied loosely round his throat--an old road-wagon trick to keep the
dust out.
For some minutes he nursed his knees with his hands, rocking himself
to and fro, smiling gleefully, thinking, no doubt, of the days he had
speeded down the turnpike, and the seats, too, on the grand stand.
I jogged him again, venturing the remark that I should think that now
he might try and corral a nap in the daytime.
The gleeful expression faded instantly. "See here," he said seriously,
laying his hand with a warning gesture on my arm, the ivory knob
popping out of the sponge-bag. "Don't yer never take no sleep in ther
daytime; that's suicide. An' if yer sleep after eatin', that's murder.
Look at me. Kinder peaked, ain't I? Stummic gone, throat busted, mouth
caved in; but I'm seventy-five, ain't I? An' I ain't a wreck yet, am
I? An' a-goin' to Old P'int Cumfut, ain't we, me an' Mommie, who's
sixty---- Never mind, Mommie. I won't give it away"--with a sly wink
at me. The old woman looked relieved. "Now jist s'pose I'd sat all my
life on my back stoop, ha'f awake, an' ev'ry time I eat, lie down an'
go ter sleep. Waal, yer'd never bin talkin' to-night to old Jeb
Walters. They'd 'a' bin fertilizin' gardin truck with him. I've seen
more'n a dozen of my friends die thet way--busted on this back porch
snoozin' business. Fust they git loggy 'bout ther gills; then their
knees begin ter swell; purty soon they're hobblin' round on er cane;
an' fust thing they know they're tucked away in er number thirteen
coffin, an' ther daisies a-bloomin' over 'em. None er that fur me.
Come, Mommie, we'll turn in."
When the boat, next morning, touched the pier at Old Point, I met the
old fellow and his wife waiting for the plank to be hauled aboard.
"Did you sleep?" I asked.
"Sleep? Waal, I could, p'rhaps, if I knowed ther ways aboard this
steamboat. Ther come er nigger to my room 'bout midnight, and wanted
ter know if I was ther gentleman that had lost his carpet-bag--he had
it with him. Waal, of course I warn't; and then 'bout three, jist as I
tho't I was dozin' off agin, ther come ther dangdest poundin' the nex'
room ter mine ye ever heard. Mommie, she said 'twas fire, but I didn't
smell no smoke. Wrong room agin. Feller nex' door was to go ashore in
a scow with some dogs and guns. They'd a-slowed down and was waitin',
an' they couldn't wake him up. Mebbe I'll git some sleep down ter Old
P'int Cumfut, but I ain't spectin' nuthin'. By, by."
And he disappeared down the gang plank.
THE MAN WITH THE EMPTY SLEEVE
I
The Doctor closed the book with an angry gesture and handed it to me
as I lay in my steamer chair, my eyes on the tumbling sea. He had read
every line in it. So had P. Wooverman Shaw Todd, Esquire, whose
property it was, and who had announced himself only a moment before as
heartily in sympathy with the pessimistic views of the author,
especially in those chapters which described domestic life in America.
The Doctor, who has a wrist of steel and a set of fingers steady
enough to adjust a chronometer, and who, though calm and silent as a
stone god when over an operating table, is often as restless and
outspoken as a boy when something away from it touches his
heartstrings, turned to me and said:--
"There ought to be a law passed to keep these men out of the United
States. Here's a Frenchman, now, who speaks no language but his own,
and after spending a week at Newport, another at New York, two days at
Niagara, and then rushing through the West on a 'Limited,' goes home
to give his Impressions of America. Read that chapter on Manners," and
he stretched a hand over my shoulder, turning the leaves quickly with
his fingers. "You would think, to listen to these fellows, that all
there is to a man is the cut of his coat or the way he takes his soup.
Not a line about his being clean and square and alive and all a
man,--just manners! Why, it is enough to make a cast-iron dog bite a
blind man."
It would be a waste of time to criticise the Doctor for these
irrelevant verbal explosives. Indefensible as they are, they are as
much parts of his individuality as the deftness of his touch and the
fearlessness of his methods are parts of his surgical training.
P. Wooverman Shaw Todd, Esquire, looked at the Doctor with a slight
lifting of his upper lip and a commiserating droop of the eyelid,--an
expression indicating, of course, a consciousness of that superior
birth and breeding which prevented the possibility of such outbreaks.
It was a manner he sometimes assumed toward the Doctor, although they
were good friends. P. Wooverman and the Doctor are fellow townsmen and
members of the same set, and members, too, of the same club,--a most
exclusive club of one hundred. The Doctor had gained admission, not
because of his ancestors, etc. (see Log of the Mayflower), but because
he had been the first and only American surgeon who had removed some
very desirable portions of a gentleman's interior, had washed and
ironed them and scalloped their edges, for all I know, and had then
replaced them, without being obliged to sign the patient's death
certificate the next day.
P. Wooverman Shaw Todd, Esquire, on the other hand, had gained
admission because of--well, Todd's birth and his position (he came of
an old Salem family who did something in whale oil,--not fish or
groceries, be it understood); his faultless attire, correct speech,
and knowledge of manners and men; his ability to spend his summers in
England and his winters in Nice; his extensive acquaintance among
distinguished people,--the very most distinguished, I know, for Todd
has told me so himself,--and--well, all these must certainly be
considered sufficient qualifications to entitle any man to membership
in almost any club in the world.
P. Wooverman Shaw Todd, Esquire, I say, elevated his upper lip and
drooped his eyelid, remarking with a slight Beacon Street accent:--
"I cawn't agree with you, my dear Doctor,"--there were often traces of
the manners and the bearing of a member of the Upper House in Todd,
especially when he talked to a man like the Doctor, who wore
turned-down collars and detached cuffs, and who, to quote the
distinguished Bostonian, "threw words about like a coal heaver,"--"I
cawn't agree with you, I say. It isn't the obzervar that we should
criticise; it is what he finds." P. Wooverman was speaking with his
best accent. Somehow, the Doctor's bluntness made him over-accentuate
it,--particularly when there were listeners about. "This French critic
is a man of distinction and a member of the most excloosive circles in
Europe. I have met him myself repeatedly, although I cawn't say I know
him. We Americans are too sensitive, my dear Doctor. His book, to me,
is the work of a keen obzervar who knows the world, and who sees how
woefully lacking we are in some of the common civilities of life," and
he smiled faintly at me, as if confident that I shared his opinion of
the Doctor's own short-comings. "This Frenchman does not lay it on a
bit too thick. Nothing is so mortifying to me as being obliged to
travel with a party of Americans who are making their first tour
abroad. And it is quite impossible to avoid them, for they all have
money and can go where they please. I remember once coming from Basle
to Paris, in a first-class carriage,--it was only larst summer,--with
a fellow from Indiana or Michigan, or somewhere out there. He had a
wife with him who looked like a cook, and a daughter about ten years
old, who was a most objectionable young person. You could hear them
talk all over the train. I shouldn't have minded it so much, but Lord
Norton's harf-brother was with me,"--and P. Wooverman Shaw Todd
glanced, as he spoke, at a thin lady with a smelling bottle and an air
of reserve, who always sat with a maid beside her, to see if she were
looking at him,--"and one of the best bred men in England, too, and a
man who"----
"Now hold on, Todd," broke in the Doctor, upon whom neither the thin
lady nor any other listener had made the slightest impression. "No
glittering generalities with me. Just tell me in so many plain words
what this man's vulgarity consisted of."
"Why, his manners, his dress, Doctor,--everything about him," retorted
Todd.
"Just as I thought! All you think about is manners, only manners!"
exploded the Doctor. "Your Westerner, no doubt, was a hard-fisted,
weather-tanned farmer, who had worked all his life to get money enough
to take his wife and child abroad. The wife had tended the dairy and
no doubt milked ten cows, and in their old age they both wanted to see
something of the world they had heard about. So off they go. If you
had any common sense or anything that brought you in touch with your
kind, Todd, and had met that man on his own level, instead of
overawing him with your high-daddy airs, he would have told you that
both the wife and he were determined that the little girl should have
a better start in life than their own, and that this trip was part of
her education. Do you know any other working people,"--and the Doctor
faced him squarely,--"any Dutch, or French, or English, Esquimaux or
Hottentots, who take their wives and children ten thousand miles to
educate them? If I had my way with the shaping of the higher education
of the country, the first thing I would teach a boy would be to learn
to work, and with his hands, too. We have raised our heroes from the
soil,--not from the easy-chairs of our clubs,"--and he looked at Todd
with his eyebrows knotted tight. "Let the boy get down and smell the
earth, and let him get down to the level of his kind, helping the
weaker man all the time and never forgetting the other fellow. When he
learns to do this he will begin to know what it is to be a man, and
not a manikin."
When the Doctor is mounted on any one of his hobbies,--whether it is a
new microbe, Wagner, or the rights of the working-man,--he is apt to
take the bit in his teeth and clear fences. As he finished speaking,
two or three of the occupants of contiguous chairs laid down their
books to listen. The thin lady with the smelling bottle and the maid
remarked in an undertone to another exclusive passenger on the other
side of her, in diamonds and white ermine cape,--it was raining at the
time,--that "one need not travel in a first-class carriage to find
vulgar Americans," and she glanced from the Doctor to a group of young
girls and young men who were laughing as heartily and as merrily, and
perhaps as noisily, as if they were sitting on their own front porches
at their Southern homes.
Another passenger--who turned out later to be a college
professor--said casually, this time to me, that he thought good and
bad manners were to be determined, not by externals, but by what lay
underneath; that neither dress, language, nor habits fixed or marred
the standard. "A high-class Turk, now," and he lowered his voice,
"would be considered ill bred by some people, because in the seclusion
of his own family he helps himself with his fingers from the common
dish; and yet so punctiliously polite and courteous is he that he
never sits down in his father's presence nor lights a cigarette
without craving his permission."
After this the talk became general, the group taking sides; some
supporting the outspoken Doctor in his blunt defense of his
countrymen, others siding with the immaculately dressed Todd, so
correct in his every appointment that he was never known, during the
whole voyage, to wear a pair of socks that did not in color and design
match his cravat.
* * * * *
The chief steward had given us seats at the end of one of the small
tables. The Doctor sat under the porthole, and Todd and I had the
chairs on either side of him. The two end seats--those on the
aisle--were occupied by a girl of twenty-five, simply clad in a plain
black dress with plainer linen collar and cuffs, and a young German.
The girl would always arrive late, and would sink into her revolving
chair with a languid movement, as if the voyage had told upon her.
Often her face was pale and her eyes were heavy and red, as if from
want of sleep. The young German--a Baron von Hoffbein, the passenger
list said--was one of those self-possessed, good-natured, pink-cheeked
young Teutons, with blue eyes, blond hair, and a tiny waxed mustache,
a mere circumflex accent of a mustache, over his "o" of a mouth. His
sponsors in baptism had doubtless sent him across the sea to chase the
wild boar or the rude buffalo, with the ultimate design, perhaps, of
founding a brewery in some Western city.
The manners of this young aristocrat toward the girl were an especial
source of delight to Todd, who watched his every movement with the
keenest interest. Whenever the baron approached the table he would
hesitate a moment, as if in doubt as to which particular chair he
should occupy, and, with an apologetic hand on his heart and a slight
bow, drop into a seat immediately opposite hers. Then he would raise a
long, thin arm aloft and snap his fingers to call a passing waiter. I
noticed that he always ordered the same breakfast, beginning with cold
sausage and ending with pancakes. During the repast the young girl
opposite him would talk to him in a simple, straightforward way, quite
as a sister would have done, and without the slightest trace of either
coquetry or undue reserve.
When we were five days out, a third person occupied a seat at one side
of the young woman. He was a man of perhaps sixty years of age, with
big shoulders and big body, and a great round head covered with a mass
of dull white hair which fell about his neck and forehead. The
newcomer was dressed in a suit of gray cloth, much worn and badly cut,
the coat collar, by reason of the misfit, being hunched up under his
hair. This gave him the appearance of a man without a shirt collar,
until a turn of his head revealed his clean starched linen and narrow
black cravat. He looked like a plain, well-to-do manufacturer or
contractor, one whose earlier years had been spent in the out of
doors; for the weather had left its mark on his neck, where one can
always look for signs of a man's manner of life. His was that of a man
who had worn low-collared flannel shirts most of his days. He had,
too, a look of determination, as if he had been accustomed to be
obeyed. He was evidently an invalid, for his cheeks were sunken and
pale, with the pallor that comes of long confinement.
Apart from these characteristics there was nothing specially
remarkable about him except the two cavernous eye sockets, sunk in his
head, the shaggy eyebrows arched above them, and the two eyes which
blazed and flashed with the inward fire of black opals. As these
rested first on one object and then on another, brightening or paling
as he moved his head, I could not but think of the action of some
alert searchlight gleaming out of a misty night.
As soon as he took his seat, the young woman, whose face for the first
time since she had been on board had lost its look of anxiety and
fatigue, leaned over him smilingly and began adjusting a napkin about
his throat and pinning it to his coat. He smiled in response as she
finished--a smile of singular sweetness--and held her hand until she
regained her seat. They seemed as happy as children or as two lovers,
laughing with each other, he now and then stopping to stroke her hand
at some word which I could not hear. When, a moment after, the von
Hoffbein took his accustomed seat, in full dress, too,--a red silk
lining to his waistcoat, and a red silk handkerchief tucked in above
it and worn liver-pad fashion,--the girl said simply, looking toward
the man in gray, "My father, sir;" whereupon the young fellow shot up
out of his chair, clicked his heels together, crooked his back, placed
two fingers on his right eyebrow, and sat down again. The man in gray
looked at him curiously and held out his hand, remarking that he was
pleased to meet him.
Todd was also watching the group, for I heard him say to the Doctor:
"These high-class Germans seldom forget themselves. The young baron
saluted the old duffer with the bib as though he were his superior
officer."
"Shouldn't wonder if he were," replied the Doctor, who had been
looking intently over his soup spoon at the man in gray, and who was
now summing up the circumflex accent, the red edges of the waistcoat,
the liver-pad handkerchief, and the rest of von Hoffbein.
"You don't like him, evidently, my dear Doctor."
"You saw him first, Todd--you can have him. I prefer the old duffer,
as you call him," answered the Doctor dryly, and put an end to the
talk in that direction.
Soon the hum of voices filled the saloon, rising above the clatter of
the dishes and the occasional popping of corks. The baron and the man
in gray had entered into conversation almost at once, and could be
distinctly heard from where we sat, particularly the older man, who
was doubtless unconscious of the carrying power of his voice. Such
words as "working classes," "the people," "democracy," "when I was in
Germany," etc., intermingling with the high-keyed tones of the baron's
broken English, were noticeable above the din; the young girl
listening smilingly, her eyes on those of her father. Then I saw the
gray man bend forward, and heard him say with great earnestness, and
in a voice that could be heard by the occupants of all the tables near
our own:--
"It is a great thing to be an American, sir. I never realized it until
I saw how things were managed on the other side. It must take all the
ambition out of a man not to be able to do what he wants to do and
what he knows he can do better than anybody else, simply because
somebody higher than he says he shan't. We have our periods of unrest,
and our workers sometimes lose their heads, but we always come out
right in the end. There is no place in the world where a man has such
opportunities as in my country. All he wants is brains and some little
horse sense,--the country will do the rest."
Our end of the table had stopped to listen; so had the occupants of
the tables on either side; so had Todd, who was patting the Doctor's
arm, his face beaming.
"Listen to him, Doctor! Hear that voice! How like a traveling
American! There's one of your ex_traw_d'nary clay-soiled sons of toil
out on an educating tour: aren't you proud of him? Oh, it's too
delicious!"
For once I agreed with Todd. The peculiar strident tones of the man in
gray had jarred upon my nerves. I saw too, that one lady, with
slightly elevated shoulder, had turned her back and was addressing her
neighbor.
The Doctor had not taken his eyes from the gray man, and had not lost
a word of his talk. As Todd finished speaking, the daughter, with all
tenderness and with a pleased glance into her father's eyes, arose,
and putting her hand in his helped him to his feet, the baron standing
at "attention." As the American started to leave the table, and his
big shaggy head and broad shoulders reached their full height, the
Doctor leaned forward, craning his head eagerly. Then he turned to
Todd, and in his crisp, incisive way said: "Todd, the matter with you
is that you never see any further than your nose. You ought to be
ashamed of yourself. Look at his empty sleeve; off at the shoulder,
too!"
II
In the smoking-room that night a new and peculiar variety of passenger
made his appearance, and his first one--to me--although we were then
within two days of Sandy Hook. This individual wore a check suit of
the latest London cut, big broad-soled Piccadilly shoes, and smoked a
brierwood pipe which he constantly filled from a rubber pouch carried
in his waistcoat pocket. When I first noticed him, he was sitting at a
table with two Englishmen drinking brandy-and-sodas,--plural, not
singular.
The Doctor, Todd, and I were at an adjoining table: the Doctor
immersed in a scientific pamphlet, Todd sipping his crème de menthe,
and I my coffee. Over in one corner were a group of drummers playing
poker. They had not left the spot since we started, except at
meal-time and at midnight, when Fritz, the smoking-room steward, had
turned them out to air the room. Scattered about were other
passengers--some reading, some playing checkers or backgammon, others
asleep, among them the pink-cheeked von Hoffbein, who lay sprawled out
on one of the leather-covered sofas, his thin legs spread apart like
the letter A, as he emitted long-drawn organ tones, with only the nose
stop pulled out.
The party of Englishmen, by reason of the unlimited number of
brandy-and-sodas which their comrade in the check suit had ordered for
them, were more or less noisy, laughing a good deal. They had
attracted the attention of the whole room, many of the old-timers
wondering how long it would be before the third officer would tap the
check suit on the shoulder, and send it and him to bed under charge of
a steward. The constant admonitions of his companions seemed to have
had no effect upon the gentleman in question, for he suddenly launched
out upon such topics as Colonial Policies and Governments and Taxation
and Modern Fleets; addressing his remarks, not to his two friends, but
to the room at large.
According to my own experience, the traveling Englishman is a quiet,
well-bred, reticent man, brandy-and-soda proof (I have seen him drink
a dozen of an evening without a droop of an eyelid); and if he has any
positive convictions of the superiority of that section of the
Anglo-Saxon race to which he belongs,--and he invariably has,--he
keeps them to himself, certainly in the public smoking-room of a
steamer filled with men of a dozen different nations. The outbreak, as
well as the effect of the incentive, was therefore as unexpected as it
was unusual.
The check-suit man, however, was not constructed along these lines.
The spirit of old Hennessy was in his veins, the stored energy of many
sodas pressed against his tongue, and an explosion was inevitable. No
portion of these excitants, strange to say, had leaked into his legs,
for outwardly he was as steady as an undertaker. He began again, his
voice pitched in a high key:--
"Talk of coercing England! Why, we've got a hundred and forty-one
ships of the line, within ten days' sail of New York, that could blow
the bloody stuffin' out of every man Jack of 'em. And we don't care a
brass farthing what Uncle Sam says about it, either."
His two friends tried to keep him quiet, but he broke out again on
Colonization and American Treachery and Conquest of Cuba; and so,
being desirous to read in peace, I nodded to the Doctor and Todd,
picked up my book, and drew up a steamer chair on the deck outside,
under one of the electric lights.
I had hardly settled myself in my seat when a great shout went up from
the smoking-room that sent every one running down the deck, and jammed
the portholes and doors of the room with curious faces. Then I heard a
voice rise clear above the noise inside: "Not another word, sir; you
don't know what you are talking about. We Americans don't rob people
we give our lives to free."
I forced my way past the door, and stepped inside. The Englishman was
being held down in his chair by his two friends. In his effort to
break loose he had wormed himself out of his coat. Beside their table,
close enough to put his hand on any one of them, stood the Doctor, a
curious set expression on his face. Todd was outside the circle,
standing on a sofa to get a better view.
Towering above the Englishman, his eyes burning, his shaggy hair about
his face, his whole figure tense with indignation, was the man with
the empty sleeve! Close behind him, cool, polite, straight as a
gendarme, and with the look in his eye of a cat about to spring, stood
the young baron. As I reached the centre of the mêlée, wondering what
had been the provocation and who had struck the first blow, I saw the
baron lean forward, and heard him say in a low voice to one of the
Englishmen, "He is so old as to be his fadder; take me," and he tapped
his chest meaningly with his fingers. Evidently he had not fenced at
Heidelberg for nothing, if he did have pink cheeks and pipestem legs.
The old man turned and laid his hand on the baron's shoulder. "I thank
you, sir, but I'll attend to this young man." His voice had lost all
its rasping quality now. It was low and concentrated, like that of one
accustomed to command. "Take your hands off him, gentlemen, if you
please. I don't think he has so far lost his senses as to strike a man
twice his age and with one arm. Now, sir, you will apologize to me,
and to the room, and to your own friends, who must be heartily ashamed
of your conduct."
At the bottom of almost every Anglo-Saxon is a bed rock of common
sense that you reach through the shifting sands of prejudice with the
probe of fair play. The young man in the check suit, who was now on
his feet, looked the speaker straight in the eye, and, half drunk as
he was, held out his hand. "I'm sorry, sir, I offended you. I was
speaking to my friends here, and I did not know any Americans were
present."
"Bravo!" yelled the Doctor. "What did I tell you Todd? That's the kind
of stuff! Now, gentlemen, all together--three cheers for the man with
the empty sleeve!"
Everybody broke out with another shout--all but Todd, who had not made
the slightest response to the Doctor's invitation to loosen his legs
and his lungs. He did not show the slightest emotion over the fracas,
and, moreover, seemed to have become suddenly disgusted with the
baron.
Then the Doctor grasped the young German by the hand, and said how
glad he was to know him, and how delighted he would be if he would
join them and "take something,"--all of which the young man accepted
with a frank, pleased look on his face.
When the room had resumed its normal conditions, all three Englishmen
having disappeared, the Doctor, whose enthusiasm over the incident had
somehow paved the way for closer acquaintance, introduced me in the
same informal way both to the baron and to the hero of the occasion,
as "a brother American," and we all sat down beside the old man, his
face lighting up with a smile as he made room for us. Then laying his
hand on my knee, with the manner of an older man, he said: "I ought
not to have given way, perhaps; but the truth is, I'm not accustomed
to hear such things at home. I did not know until I got close to him
that he had been drinking, or I might have let it pass. I suppose this
kind of talk may always go on in the smoking-room of these steamers. I
don't know, for it's my first trip abroad, and on the way out I was
too ill to leave my berth. To-night is the first time I've been in
here. It was bad for me, I suppose. I've been ill all"----
He stopped suddenly, caught his breath quickly, and his hand fell from
my knee. For a moment he sat leaning forward, breathing heavily.
I sprang up, thinking he was about to faint. The baron started for a
glass of water. The old man raised his hand.
"No, don't be alarmed, gentlemen; it is nothing. I am subject to these
attacks; it will pass off in a moment," and he glanced around the room
as if to assure himself that no one but ourselves had noticed it.
"The excitement was too much for you," the Doctor said gravely, in an
undertone. His trained eye had caught the peculiar pallor of the face.
"You must not excite yourself so."
"Yes, I know,--the heart," he said after a pause, speaking with short,
indrawn breaths, and straightening himself slowly and painfully until
he had regained his old erect position. After a little while he put
his hand again on my knee, with an added graciousness in his manner,
as if in apology for the shock he had given me. "It's passing
off,--yes, I'm better now." Then, in a more cheerful tone, as if to
change the subject, he added: "My steward tells me that we made four
hundred and fifty-two miles yesterday. This makes my little girl
happy. She's had an anxious summer, and I'm glad this part of it is
over. Yes, she's _very_ happy to-day."
"You mean on account of your health?" I asked sympathetically;
although I remembered afterward that I had not caught his meaning.
"Well, not so much that, for that can never be any better, but on
account of our being so near home,--only two days more. I couldn't
bear to leave her alone on ship-board, but it's all right now. You
see, there are only two of us since her mother died." His voice fell,
and for the first time I saw a shade of sadness cross his face. The
Doctor saw it too, for there was a slight quaver in his voice when he
said, as he rose, that his stateroom was No. 13, and he would be happy
to be called upon at any time, day or night, whenever he could be of
service; then he resumed his former seat under the light, and
apparently his pamphlet, although I could see his eyes were constantly
fixed on the pallid face.
The baron and I kept our seats, and I ordered three of something from
Fritz, as further excuse for tarrying beside the invalid. I wanted to
know something more of a man who was willing to fight the universe
with one arm in defense of his country's good name, though I was still
in the dark as to what had been the provocation. All I could gather
from the young baron, in his broken English, was that the Englishman
had maligned the motives of our government in helping the Cubans, and
that the old man had flamed out, astounding the room with the power of
his invective and thorough mastery of the subject, and compelling
their admiration by the genuineness of his outburst.
"I see you have lost your arm," I began, hoping to get some further
facts regarding himself.
"Yes, some years ago," he answered simply, but with a tone that
implied he did not care to discuss either the cause or the incidents
connected with its loss.
"An accident?" I asked. The empty sleeve seemed suddenly to have a
peculiar fascination for me.
"Yes, partly," and, smiling gravely, he rose from his seat, saying
that he must rejoin his daughter, who might be worrying. He bade the
occupants of the room good-night, many of whom, including the baron
and the Doctor, rose to their feet,--the baron saluting, and following
the old man out, as if he had been his superior officer.
With the closing of the smoking-room door, P. Wooverman Shaw Todd,
Esquire, roused himself from his chair, walked toward the Doctor, and
sat down beside him.
"Well! I must say that I'm glad that man's gone!" he burst out. "I
have never seen anything more outrageous than this whole performance.
This fire eater ought to travel about with a guardian. Suppose, now,
my dear Doctor, that everybody went about with these absurd
ideas,--what a place the world would be to live in! This is the worst
American I have met yet. And see what an example; even the young baron
lost his head, I am sorry to say. I heard the young Englishman's
remark. It was, I admit, indiscreet, but no part of it was addressed
to this very peculiar person; and it is just like that kind of an
American, full of bombast and bluster, to feel offended. Besides,
every word the young man said was true. There is a great deal of
politics in this Cuban business,--you know it, and I know it. We have
no men trained for colonial life, and we never shall have, so long as
our better class keep aloof from politics. The island will be made a
camping-ground for vulgar politicians--no question about it. Think,
now, of sending that firebrand among those people. You can see by his
very appearance that he has never done anything better than astonish
the loungers about a country stove. As for all this fuss about his
empty sleeve, no doubt some other fire eater put a bullet through it
in defense of what such kind of people call their honor. It is too
farcical for words, my dear Doctor,--too farcical for words," and P.
Wooverman Shaw Todd, Esquire, pulled his steamer cap over his eyes,
jumped to his feet, and stalked out of the room.
The Doctor looked after Todd until he had disappeared. Then he turned
to his pamphlet again. There was evidently no composite, explosive
epithet deadly enough within reach at the moment, or there is not the
slightest doubt in my mind that he would have demolished Todd with it.
Todd's departure made another vacancy at our table, and a tall man,
who had applauded the loudest at the apology of the Englishman,
dropped into Todd's empty chair, addressing the Doctor as representing
our party.
"I suppose you know who the old man is, don't you?"
"No."
"That's John Stedman, manager of the Union Iron Works of Parkinton, a
manufacturing town in my State. He's one of the best iron men in the
country. Fine old fellow, isn't he? He's been ill ever since his wife
died, and I don't think he'll ever get over it. She had been sick for
years, and he nursed her day and night. He wouldn't go to Congress,
preferring to stay by her, and it almost broke his heart when she
died. Poor old man,--don't look as if he was long for this world. I
expected him to mop up the floor with that Englishman, sick as he is;
and he would, if he hadn't apologized. I heard, too, what your friend
who has just gone out said about Stedman not being the kind of a man
to send to Cuba. I tell you, they might look the country over, and
they couldn't find a better. That's been his strong hold,
straightening out troubles of one kind or another. Everybody believes
in him, and anybody takes his word. He's done a power of good in our
State."
"In what way?" asked the Doctor.
"Oh, in settling strikes, for one thing. You see, he started from the
scrap pile, and he knows the laboring man down to a dot, for he
carried a dinner pail himself for ten years of his life. When the men
are imposed upon he stands by 'em, and compels the manufacturers to
deal square; and if they don't, he joins the men and fights it out
with the bosses. If the men are wrong, and want what the furnaces
can't give 'em,--and there's been a good deal of that lately,--he
sails into the gangs, and, if nothing else will do, he gets a gun and
joins the sheriffs. He was all through that last strike we had, three
years ago, and it would be going on now but for John Stedman."
"But he seems to be a man of fine education," interrupted the Doctor,
who was listening attentively.
"Yes, so he is,--learned it all at night schools. When he was a boy he
used to fire the kilns, and they say you could always find him with a
spelling-book in one hand and a chunk of wood in the other, reading
nights by the light of the kiln fires."
"You say he went to Congress?" The Doctor's eyes were now fixed on the
speaker.
"No, I said he _would_n't go. His wife was taken sick about that
time, and when he found she wasn't going to get well,--she had lung
trouble,--he told the committee that he wouldn't accept the
nomination; and of course nomination meant election for him. He told
'em his wife had stuck by him all her life, had washed his flannel
shirts for him and cooked his dinner, and that he was going to stick
by her now she was down. But I tell you what he did do: he stumped
the district for his opponent, because he said he was a better man
than his own party put up,--and elected him, too. That was just like
John Stedman. The heelers were pretty savage, but that made no
difference to him.
"He's never recovered from his wife's death. That daughter with him is
the only child he's got. She's been so afraid he'd die on board and
have to be buried at sea that he's kept his berth just to please her.
The doctor at home told him Carlsbad was his only chance, and the
daughter begged so he made the trip. He was so sick when he went out
that he took a coffin with him,--it's in the hold now. I heard him
tell his daughter this morning that it was all right now, and he
thought he'd get up. You see, there are only two days more, and the
captain promised the daughter not to bury her father at sea when we
were that close to land. Stedman smiled when he told me, but that's
just like him; he's always been cool as a cucumber."
"How did he lose his arm?" I inquired. I had been strangely absorbed
in what he had told me. "In the war?"
"No. He served two years, but that's not how he lost his arm. He lost
it saving the lives of some of his men. I happened to be up at
Parkinton at the time, buying some coke, and I saw him carried out. It
was about ten years ago. He had invented a new furnace; 'most all the
new wrinkles they've got at the Union Company Stedman made for 'em.
When they got ready to draw the charge,--that's when the red-hot iron
is about to flow out of the furnace, you know, the outlet got clogged.
That's a bad thing to happen to a furnace; for if a chill should set
in, the whole plant would be ruined. Then, again, it might explode and
tear everything to pieces. Some of the men jumped into the pit with
their crowbars, and began to jab away at the opening in the wrong
place, and the metal started with a rush. Stedman hollered to 'em to
stop; but they either didn't hear him or wouldn't mind. Then he jumped
in among them, threw them out of the way, grabbed a crowbar, and
fought the flow until they all got out safe. But the hot metal had
about cooked his arm clear to the elbow before he let go."
The Doctor, with hands deep in his pockets, began pacing the floor.
Then he stopped, and, looking down at me, said slowly, pointing off
his fingers one after the other to keep count as he talked:--
"Tender and loyal to his wife--thoughtful of his child--facing death
like a hero--a soldier and patriot. What is there in the make-up of a
gentleman that this man hasn't got?
"Come! Let's go out and find that high-collared, silk-stockinged,
sweet-scented Anglomaniac from Salem! By the Eternal, Todd's got to
apologize!"
"TINCTER OV IRON"
It was in an old town in Connecticut. Marbles kept the shop. "Joseph
Marbles, Shipwright and Blacksmith," the sign read.
I knew Joe. He had repaired one of the lighters used in carrying
materials for the foundation of the lighthouse I was building. The
town lay in the barren end of the State, where they raised rocks
enough to make four stone fences to the acre. Joe always looked to me
as if he had lived off the crop. The diet never affected his temper
nor hardened his heart, so far as I could see. It was his body, his
long, lean, lank body, that suggested the stone diet.
In his early days Joe had married a helpmate. She had lasted until the
beginning of the third year, and then she had been carried to the
cemetery on the hill, and another stone, and a new one, added to the
general assortment. This matrimonial episode was his last.
This wife was a constant topic with Marbles. He would never speak of
her as a part of his life, one who had shared his bed and board, and
therefore entitled to his love and reverent remembrance. It was rather
as an appendage to his household, a curiosity, a natural freak, as one
would discuss the habits of a chimpanzee, and with a certain pity,
too, for the poor creature whom he had housed, fed, poked at, humored,
and then buried.
And yet with it all I could always see that nothing else in his life
had made so profound an impression upon him as the companionship of
this "poor creeter," and that underneath his sparsely covered ribs
there still glowed a spot for the woman who had given him her youth.
He would say, "It wuz one ov them days when she wouldn't eat, or it
was kind o' cur'us to watch her go on when she had one ov them
tantrums." Sometimes he would recount some joke he had played upon
her, rubbing his ribs in glee--holding his sides would have been a
superfluous act and the statement here erroneous.
"That wuz when she fust come, yer know," he said to me one day,
leaning against an old boat, his adze in his hand. "Her folks belonged
over to Westerly. I never had seen much ov wimmen, and didn't know
their ways. But I tell yer she wuz a queer 'un, allers imaginin' she
wuz ailin', er had heart disease when she got out er breath runnin'
upstairs, er as'mer, er lumbago, er somethin' else dreadful. She wuz
the cur'usest critter too to take medicin' ye ever see. She never
ailed none really 'cept when she broke her coller bone a-fallin'
downstairs, and in the last sickness, the one that killed her, but she
believed all the time she wuz, which was wuss. Every time the druggist
would git out a new red card and stick it in his winder, with a cure
fer cold, or chilblains, er croup, er e'sipelas, she'd go and buy it,
an' out 'd cum ther cork, and she a-tastin' ov it 'fore she got hum.
She used ter rub herself with St. Jiminy's intment, and soak her feet
in sea-salt, and cover herself with plasters till yer couldn't rest.
Why, ther cum a feller once who painted a yaller sign on ther whole
side ov Buckley's barn--cure fer spiral meningeetius,--and she wuz
nigh crazy till she had found out where ther pain ought ter be, and
had clapped er plaster on her back and front, persuadin' herself she
had it. That's how she bruk her coller bone, a-runnin' fer hot water
to soak 'em off, they burnt so, and stumblin' over a kit ov tools I
had brung hum to do a job around the house. After this she begun ter
run down so, and git so thin and peaked, I begun to think she really
wuz goin' ter be sick, after all, jest fer a change.
"When ther doctor come he sed it warn't nothin' but druggist's truck
that ailed her, and he throwed what there wuz out er ther winder, and
give her a tonic--Tincter ov Iron he called it. Well, yer never see a
woman hug a thing as she did that bottle. It was a spoonful three
times a day, and then she'd reach out fer it in ther night, vowin' it
was doin' her a heap er good, and I a-gettin' ther bottle filled at
Sarcy's ther druggist's, and payin' fifty cents every time he put er
new cork in it. I tried ter reason with her, but it warn't no use; she
would have it, and if she could have got outer bed and looked round at
the spring crop of advertisements on ther fences, she would hev struck
somethin' worse. So I let her run on until she tuk about seven
dollars' wuth of Tincter, and then I dropped in ter Sarcy's. 'Sarcy,'
sez I, 'can't ye wholesale this, er sell it by the quart? If the ole
woman's coller bone don't get ter runnin' easy purty soon I'll be
broke.'
"'Well,' he said, 'if I bought a dozen it might come cheaper, but it
wuz a mighty pertic'ler medicine, and had ter be fixed jest so.'
"''Taint pizen, is it?' I sez, 'thet's got ter be fixed so all-fired
kerful?' He 'lowed it warn't, and thet ye might take er barrel of it
and it wouldn't kill yer, but all ther same it has ter be made mighty
pertic'ler.
"'Well, iron's cheap enough,' I sez, 'and strengthenin' too. If it's
ther Tincter thet costs so, don't put so much in.' Well, he laffed,
and said ther warn't no real iron in it, only Tincter, kinder iron
soakage like, same es er drawin' ov tea.
"Goin' home thet night I got ter thinkin'. I'd been round iron all my
life and knowed its ways, but I hadn't struck no Tincter as I knowed
ov. When she fell asleep I poured out a leetle in another bottle and
slid it in my trousers pocket, an' next day, down ter ther shop, I
tasted ov it and held it up ter ther light. It was kind er persimmony
and dark-lookin', ez if it had rusty nails in it; and so thet night
when I goes hum I sez ter her, 'Down ter ther other druggist's I kin
git twice as much Tincter fer fifty cents as I kin at Sarcy's, and if
yer don't mind I'll git it filled there.' Well, she never kicked a
stroke, 'cept to say I'd better hurry, fer she hadn't had a spoonful
sence daylight, and she wuz beginnin' ter feel faint. When the whistle
blew I cum hum ter dinner, and sot the new bottle, about twice as big
as the other one, beside her bed.
"'How's that?' I sez. 'It's a leetle grain darker and more muddy like,
but the new druggist sez thet's the Tincter, and thet's what's doin'
ov yer good.' Well, she never suspicioned; jest kept on, night and
day, wrappin' herself round it every two er three hours, I gettin' it
filled regerlar and she a-empt'in' ov it.
"'Bout four weeks arter that she begun to git around, and then she'd
walk out ez fur ez ther shipyard fence, and then, begosh, she begun to
flesh up so as you wouldn't know her. Now an' then she'd meet the
doctor, and she'd say how she'd never a-lived but fer ther Tincter,
and he'd laff and drive on. When she got real peart I brought her down
to the shop one day, and I shows her an old paint keg thet I kep'
rusty bolts in, and half full ov water.
"'Smell that,' I sez, and she smells it and cocks her eye.
"'Taste it,' I sez, and she tasted it, and give me a look. Then I dips
a spoonful out in a glass, and I sez: 'It's most time to take yer
medicine. I kin beat Gus Sarcy all holler makin' Tincter; every drop
yer drunk fer a month come out er thet keg.'"
"FIVE MEALS FOR A DOLLAR"
The Literary Society of West Norrington, Vt., had invited me to
lecture on a certain Tuesday night in February.
The Tuesday night had arrived. So had the train. So had the
knock-kneed, bandy-legged hack--two front wheels bowed in, two hind
wheels bowed out--and so had the lecturer.
West Norrington is built on a hill. At the foot are the station, a
saw-mill, and a glue factory. On the top is a flat plateau holding the
principal residences, printing-office, opera-house, confectionery
store, druggist's, and hotel. Up the incline is a scattering of
cigar-stores, butcher shops, real-estate agencies, and one lone
restaurant. You know it is a restaurant by the pile of extra-dry
oyster-shells in the window--oysterless for months--and the four
oranges bunched together in a wire basket like a nest of pool balls.
You know it also from the sign--
"Five meals for a dollar."
I saw this sign on my way up the hill, but it made no impression on my
mind. I was bound for the hotel--the West Norrington Arms, the
conductor called it; and as I had eaten nothing since seven o'clock,
and it was then four, I was absorbed mentally in arranging a bill of
fare. Broiled chicken, of course, I said to myself--always get
delicious broiled chicken in the country--and a salad, and
perhaps--you can't always tell, of course, what the cellars of these
old New England taverns may contain--yes, perhaps a pint of any really
good Burgundy, Pommard, or Beaune.
"West Norrington Arms" sounded well. There was a distinct flavor of
exclusiveness and comfort about it, suggesting old side-boards,
hand-polished tables, small bar with cut-glass decanters, Franklin
stoves in the bedrooms, and the like. I could already see the luncheon
served in my room, the bright wood fire lighting up the dimity
curtains draping the high-post bedstead. Yes, I would order Pommard.
Here the front knees came together with a jerk. Then the driver pulled
his legs out of a buffalo-robe, opened the door with a twist, and
called out,--
"Nor'n't'n Arms."
I got out.
The first glance was not reassuring. It was perhaps more Greek than
Colonial or Early English or Late Dutch. Four high wooden boxes,
painted brown, were set up on end--Doric columns these--supporting a
pediment of like material and color. Half-way up these supports hung a
balcony, where the Fourth of July orator always stands when he
addresses his fellow citizens. Old, of course, I said to myself--early
part of this century. Not exactly moss-covered and inn-like, as I
expected to find, but inside it's all right.
"Please take in that bag and fur overcoat." This to the driver, in a
cheery tone.
The clerk was leaning over the counter, chewing a toothpick. Evidently
he took me for a drummer, for he stowed the bag behind the desk, and
hung the overcoat up on a nail in a side room opening out of the
office, and within reach of his eye.
When I registered my name it made no perceptible change in his manner.
He said, "Want supper?" with a tone in his voice that convinced me he
had not heard a word of the Event which brought me to West
Norrington--I being the Event.
"No, not now. I would like you to send to my room in half an hour a
broiled chicken, some celery, and any vegetable which you can get
ready--and be good enough to put a pint of Burgundy"----
I didn't get any further. Something in his manner attracted me. I had
not looked at him with any degree of interest before. He had been
merely a medium for trunk check, room key, and ice water--nothing
more.
Now I did. I saw a young man--a mean-looking young man--with a narrow,
squeezed face, two flat glass eyes sewed in with red cotton, and a
disastrous complexion. His hair was brushed like a barber's, with a
scooping curl over the forehead; his neck was long and thin--so long
that his apple looked over his collar's edge. This collar ran down to
a white shirt decorated with a gold pin, the whole terminating in a
low-cut velvet vest.
"Supper at seven," he said.
This, too, came with a jerk.
"Yes, I know, but I haven't eaten anything since breakfast, and don't
want to wait until"----
"Ain't nuthin' cooked 'tween meals. Supper at seven."
"Can't I get"----
"Yer can't get nuthin' until supper-time, and yer won't get no
Burgundy then. Yer couldn't get a bottle in Norrington with a club.
This town's prohibition. Want a room?" This last word was almost
shouted in my ear.
"Yes--one with a wood fire." I kept my temper.
"Front!"--this to a boy half asleep on a bench. "Take this bag to No.
37, and turn on the steam. Your turn next"--and he handed the pen to a
fresh arrival, who had walked up from the train.
No. 37 contained a full set of Michigan furniture, including a patent
wash-stand that folded up to look like a bookcase, smelt slightly of
varnish, and was as hot as a Pullman sleeper.
I threw up all the windows; came down and tackled the clerk again.
"Is there a restaurant near by?"
"Next block above. Nichols."
He never looked up--just kept on chewing the toothpick.
"Is there another hotel here?"
Even a worm will turn.
"No."
That settled it. I didn't know any inhabitant--not even a
committeeman. It was the West Norrington Arms or the street.
So I started for Nichols. By that time I could have eaten the shingles
off the church.
Nichols proved to be a one-and-a-half-story house with a glass door, a
calico curtain, and a jingle bell. Inside was a cake shop, presided
over by a thin woman in a gingham dress and black lace cap and wig. In
the rear stood a marble-top table with iron legs. This made it a
restaurant.
"Can you get me something to eat? Steak, ham and eggs--anything?" I
had fallen in my desires.
She looked me all over. "Well, I'm 'mazin' sorry, but I guess you'll
have to excuse us; we're just bakin', and this is our busy day.
S'mother time we should like to, but to-day"----
I closed the door and was in the street again. I had no time for
lengthy discussions that didn't lead to something tangible and
eatable.
"Alone in London," I said to myself. "Lost in New York. Adrift in West
Norrington. Plenty of money to buy, and nobody to sell. Everybody
going about their business with full stomachs, happy, contented,--all
with homes, and firesides, and ice chests, and things hanging to
cellar rafters, hams and such like, and I a wanderer and hungry, an
outcast, a tramp."
Then I thought some citizen might take me in. She was a rather
amiable-looking old lady, with a kind, motherly face.
"Madam!" This time I took off my hat. Ah, the common law of hunger
brings you down and humbles your pride. "Do you live here, madam?"
"Why, yes, sir," edging to the sidewalk.
"Madam, I am a stranger here, and very hungry. It's baking-day at
Nichols. Do you know where I can get anything to eat?"
"Well, no, I can't rightly say," still eyeing me suspiciously.
"Hungry, be ye? Well, that's too bad, and Nichols baking."
I corroborated all these statements, standing bare-headed, a wild idea
running through my head that her heart would soften and she would take
me home and set me down in a big chintz-covered rocking chair, near
the geraniums in the windows, and have her daughter--a nice, fresh,
rosy-cheeked girl in an apron--go out into the buttery and bring in
white cheese, and big slices of bread, and some milk, and preserves,
and a---- But the picture was never completed.
"Well," she said slowly, "if Nichols is baking, I guess ye'll hev to
wait till suppertime."
Then like a sail to a drowning man there rose before me the sign down
the hill near the station, "Five meals for a dollar."
I had the money. I had the appetite. I would eat them all at once, and
_now_.
In five minutes I was abreast of the extra-dry oyster-shells and the
pool balls. Then I pushed open the door.
Inside there was a long room, bare of everything but a wooden counter,
upon which stood a glass case filled with cigars; behind this was a
row of shelves with jars of candy, and level with the lower shelf my
eye caught a slouch hat. The hat covered the head of the proprietor.
He was sitting on a stool, sorting out chewing-gum.
"Can I get something to eat?"
The hat rose until it stood six feet in the air, surmounting a round,
good-natured face, ending in a chin whisker.
"Cert. What'll yer hev?"
Here at last was peace and comfort and food and things! I could hardly
restrain myself.
"Anything. Steak, fried potatoes--what have you got?"
"Waal, I dunno. 'Tain't time yit for supper, but we kin fix ye
somehow. Lemme see."
Then he pushed back a curtain that screened one half of the room,
disclosing three square tables with white cloths and casters, and
disappeared through a rear door.
"We got a steak," he said, dividing the curtains again, "but the
potatoes is out."
"Any celery?"
"No. Guess can git ye some 'cross to ther grocery. Won't take a
minit."
"All right. Could you"--and I lowered my voice--"could you get me a
bottle of beer?"
"Yes--if you got a doctor's prescription."
"Could _you_ write one?" I asked nervously.
"I'll try." And he laughed.
In two minutes he was back, carrying four bunches of celery and a
paper box marked "Paraffine candles."
"What preserves have you?"
"Waal, any kind."
"Raspberry jam, or apricots?" I inquired, my spirits rising.
"We ain't got no rusberry, but we got peaches."
"Anything else?"
"Waal, no; come ter look 'em over, just peaches."
So he added a can to the celery and candles, and carried the whole to
the rear.
While he was gone I leaned over the cigar-case and examined the stock.
One box labeled "Bouquet" attracted my eye; each cigar had a little
paper band around its middle. I remembered the name, and determined to
smoke one after dinner if it took my last cent.
Then a third person took a hand in the feast. This was the hired girl,
who came in with a tray. She wore an alpaca dress and a disgusted
expression. It was evident that she resented my hunger as a personal
affront--stopping everything to get supper two hours ahead of time!
She didn't say this aloud, but I knew it all the same.
Then more tray, with a covered dish the size of a soap-cup, a few
sprigs of celery out of the four bunches, and a preserve-dish, about
the size of a butter pat, containing four pieces of peach swimming in
their own juice.
In the soap-dish lay the steak. It was four inches in diameter and a
quarter of an inch thick. I opened the paraffine candles, poured out
half a glass, and demolished the celery and peaches. I didn't want to
muss up the steak. I was afraid I might bend it, and spoil it for some
one else.
Then an idea struck me: "Could she poach me some eggs?"
She supposed she could, if she could find the eggs; most everything
was locked up this time of day.
I waited, and spread the mustard on the dry bread, and had more
peaches and paraffine. When the eggs came they excited my sympathies.
They were such innocent-looking things--pinched and shriveled up, as
if they had fainted at sight of the hot water and died in great agony.
The toast, too, on which they were coffined, had a cremated look. Even
the hired girl saw this. She said it was a "leetle mite too much
browned; she'd forgot it watchin' the eggs."
Here the street door opened, and a young woman entered and asked for
two papers of chewing-gum.
She got them, but not until the proprietor had shot together the
curtains screening off the candy store from the restaurant. The
dignity and exclusiveness of the establishment required this.
When she was gone I poured out the rest of the paraffine, and called
out through the closed curtains for a cigar.
"One of them bo-kets?" came the proprietor's voice in response.
"Yes, one of them."
He brought it himself, in his hand, just as it was, holding the mouth
end between the thumb and forefinger.
"And now how much?"
He made a rapid accounting, overlooking the table, his eyes lighting
on the several fragments: "Beer, ten cents; steak, ten; peaches, five;
celery, three; eggs on toast, ten; one bo-ket, four." Then he paused a
moment, as if he wanted to be entirely fair and square, and said,
"Forty-two cents."
[Illustration: "FORTY-TWO CENTS"]
When I reached the hotel, a man who said he was the proprietor came to
my room. He was a sad man with tears in his voice.
"You're comin' to supper, ain't ye? It'll be the last time. It's a
kind o' mournful occasion, but I like to have ye."
It was now my turn.
"No, I'm not coming to supper. You drove me out of here half starving
into the street two hours ago. I couldn't get anything to eat at
Nichols, and so I had to go down the hill to a place near the
saw-mill, where I got the most infernal"----
He stopped me with a look of real anxiety.
"Not the five-meals-for-a-dollar place?"
"Yes."
"And you swallowed it?"
"Certainly--poached eggs, peaches, and a lot of things."
"No," he said reflectively, looking at me curiously. "_You_ don't
want no supper--prob'bility is you won't want no breakfast, either.
You'd better eaten the saw-mill--it would 'er set lighter. If I'd
known who you were I'd tried"----
"But I told the clerk," I broke in.
"What clerk?" he interrupted in an astonished tone.
"Why, the clerk at the desk, where I registered--that long-necked
crane with red eyes."
"He ain't no clerk; we ain't had one for a week. Don't you know what's
goin' on? Ain't you read the bills? Step out into the hall--there's
one posted up right in front of you. 'Sheriff's sale; all the stock
and fixtures of the Norrington Arms to be sold on Wednesday
morning'--that's to-morrow--'by order of the Court.' You can read the
rest yourself; print's too fine for me. That fellow you call a crane
is a deputy sheriff. He's takin' charge, while we eat up what's in the
house."
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