Part 3

That reminds us. We one time went with Kirk into an express office to send a package. We ignorantly considered this to be a thing of little moment. That was because we do not know how to handle men. A pale young man, with a high, bald forehead, who had the appearance of an excellent assistant to some one in an office, was standing at the counter. He witnessed the entrance of the two without remarking it as an impressive ceremony. Indeed, the clerk was quite apathetic. In an instant all this was changed.

"Let me have your pencil," Kirk demanded. It was the voice of the man born to command, the man that moves an army of subordinates this way or that, as he wills, like chessmen. He took the pencil, hoisted his package onto the counter with a flourish, tilted his cigar upward in one corner of his mouth by a movement of his jaws, and fell into so fine an attitude that the pale young man became interested and leaned over to see what important name would appear in the address. In his strongest hand Kirk addressed it. It was a package worth two dollars Kirk was sending to his brother, who needed it. "Send collect," cried Kirk. And the entire company, Kirk included, and ourself, who also knew the contents of the package, felt, it was evident, that a transaction very important to the interests of business had been accomplished.

Kirk was one time playing checkers when we entered. "Well, how are you coming out?" we inquired. "Are you being beaten, Chester?" He flared up like a flash. "I can beat you!" he cried. We had never seen the man so beautiful. (He had never in his life seen us play checkers.) He looked to be invincible; though he wasn't; for he had lost every game.

XII

HIS BUSINESS IS GOOD

[Illustration]

"HULLO there, Bill! I'm glad to see you. How're you getting along? Do you know, I didn't know you when you first came in. Let me see, it's been a couple--no, four years since I saw you before. I was pretty much down and out then, ha! ha! Just bummed my way to New York, you know. Well, how are things with you? You know, I sat there looking an' a looking at you--couldn't make up my mind whether it was you or not. I says to myself, 'I'll risk it,' I says. 'If it's Bill, we'll have a time,' I says. Ha! Ha! I came over to take a bath--there's a fine bath place across the street, where I always go. I'm in the photograph business, you know, over in Brooklyn. Yes, doing well now; I'm manager of the place; I'll take you over to see it. Been in the business three years, same place; first two years work, work all the time, no pay at all, so to speak. But I knew I was learning the business, and I liked the job and liked the boss; we were busted together, you know. I was head musher in a mushhouse at Coney, you know, when I first met him; then I lost the job; we bummed around together awhile. Then I went back to Indiana--by freight--to see my folks.

"Yes, the old man's well; Dora's married, you know; married a Sunday school superintendent, church where she taught Sunday school. Nothing doing in Indiana. Laid around awhile, then I got a letter from this feller. He had come into money, set up a photograph shop, told me to come back and take a job with him. I went to my sister, Dora, you know, and got railroad fare here. I says to her, 'If you can get me the money, I'll pay you as soon as I can, which won't be long,' I says. 'I've got a good job there,' I says. I says, 'Of course, I can bum my way back, but it will take me four or five days, maybe a week,' I says. 'If I have railroad fare I can get on a train here one day and get off there the next,' I says. She got me the money from her husband--sixteen dollars; she's been awful good to me; and I came in a passenger train. First time, you know, ha! ha! Second-class, though; just as good as first, though. I got on at Indianapolis one day, you know, and got off in New York the next day. Twenty-four hours, you know.

"First thing, I went to the feller's place, but he had moved. Didn't leave any address, where he had gone, you know; nobody around there knew anything about him. I was in a deuce of a fix. Didn't have a cent of money--wasn't the first time, though. We used to write to each other sometimes through the General Delivery, so I went there, and sure enough there was a letter for me; but there was some postage due on it somehow. I says to the man, I says, 'I haven't got any money; I can't pay it'; there was a feller standing behind me in the line; he ups and says, 'Here, I'll pay it,' he says; 'it's only two cents' he says. So I got the letter and set right out for the address; the feller had moved to a better place.

"Well, Bill, business has been good; we do a corking business on Saturdays and Sundays, and the feller owns two or three galleries now. He goes around tending to all of them and I have charge of one; there's my card. I'm thinking about quitting, though, and going out West again; business is too good, that's the trouble. No excitement; I'm getting discouraged. Too much responsibility. Lord, Bill, I'm a _tramp_; I am; yes, sir, that's what I am. I was raised that way. I like the life. The man across the street from me owns a restaurant, where I eat; offered to loan me a couple of hundred dollars to buy the gallery where I am. Ha! Ha! That's a good one, isn't it?

"Girls, Bill! you ought to see the girls that come to my place, Bill, yes, sir, to get their pictures taken. They all call me 'Jack.' Yes, everybody around here calls me 'Jack.' I used to be 'John,' you know, at home, where we were boys together; great days those, yes, sir; I never will forget those days.

"Why, you know, I could have been married, Bill; yes, sir, ha! ha! Me, a tramp. A fine girl, too, a regular lady, the real article, yes, sir, rich too, yes, sir. Why I went over there one day, and their dog--a blame little black dog--was sick; you ought to have seen the case of medicine they had for that dog. A whole blame box full of bottles of medicine; good medicine, too, yes, sir; why, I would have liked to have had some of that medicine myself.

"I'll take you over and introduce you to some of those girls; here's a picture I took of one; she's a daisy. I took her to the theater last Saturday night. You know, it does a feller good to see good shows at the theater. This theater--it's a little place right near my gallery--I go there every once in awhile; they have better shows there than they do at the Opera House; I like 'em better. This was a fine show, 'His Mother's Son.' Yes, sir, it does a feller good to go to the theater.

"What's the matter with your coming over and staying with me to-night? But no, I haven't a room now; you'd have to bunk in the gallery. That's where I sleep now. I did have a room, you know, blame fine room, running water, hot and cold, and all that sort of thing, three dollars a week. But I got tired of it. Yes, too comfortable, bed all made up for me every day, and everything else. It made me sick. I like to make my own bed. I like to rough it like I'm used to doing, yes, so I gave it up and sleep in the gallery now where I belong. I feel at home there, and there's plenty of room.

"Say, Bill, how are you fixed? Need any money? I've got more'n I want. Don't know what to do with it all, you know. Not used to it, just blow it in. Well, all right, we'll take and spend it then. Drink up, Bill, and let's go some other place."

XIII

A NICE TASTE IN MURDERS

[Illustration]

WE are much interested in the picturesque character of Caroline. Caroline is twelve. She is like a buxom, rosy apple. Her dress is a "Peter Thompson." Her physical sports are running like the wind, and, in summer, fishing. Our concern, however, is more with her mind. Caroline is a voracious reader. We are somewhat bookish ourselves, and the conversations between us are often frankly literary. Caroline's taste in this matter, for one of her sex, is rather startling.

"Oh, you ought to read the 'Pit and the Pendulum,'" says Caroline. "Is it good?" we ask. "Fine!" Caroline replies. "It's at the time of the Inquisition, you know," she explains. "They take a man and torture him. It's fine," declares Caroline. "The demon's eyes grow brighter and brighter" (phrases we recall from her synopsis of the tale), "the pendulum comes nearer and nearer--but I think he deserved to escape," says Caroline, "because he tried so hard." Now that is really a deep moral observation, "because he tried so hard," and a sound questioning of the philosophical verity of a work of art.

"There's a good murder in here," says Caroline.

"I like Sherlock Holmes," Caroline says.

She reads the "Mark of the Beast" and the "Black Cat" with great satisfaction. For comedy or for psychological moments she does not care, but there is nobody, we believe, with greater capacity for enjoyment of terrible murder in horrible dark places in the land of fiction.

Night after night we heard her voice reading aloud to her visitor Emily after the two had retired, until we fell asleep; and in the morning we saw that the relish of horror was still upon her.

Emily had gone. Caroline had retired alone. We read by the lamp in the living-room. We were startled and mystified to hear suddenly mingle with the sound of the night rain all around, a long, uncertain wailing, a melancholy, haunting, sinking, rising, halting, gruesome sound, uncannily redolent of weird Gothic tales; the "Castle of Otranto" came into our mind. This apparently proceeded from an "upper chamber," as would be said in the type of story mentioned.

"That," said brother Henry, in replying doubtless to a blank face, "is Caroline playing the flute."

No one alive, of course, has not in his head a picture of another that in the still hours sought solace in and loved a flute, Mr. Richard Swiveler propped up in bed, his nightcap raked, fluting out the sad thoughts in his bosom. So in the night and the storm, does another bizarre soul, Caroline, speak with the elements.

XIV

IDA'S AMAZING SURPRISE

[Illustration]

IN "Bleak House," I think it is, that Poor Joe keeps "movin' along." One of the atoms of London, he passes his whole life in the midst of thousands upon thousands of signs. Printed letters, painted letters, carved letters, words, words, words, blaze upon him all about. Yet not a syllable of them all speaks to him; seen but all unheard by him they clothe his path. Poor Joe cannot read. How must he regard these strange, unmeaning signs? What is it goes on in this head which so little can enter? What has filtered in where the great main avenue of approach remains, as far from the first, black and unopened? What does this mind, sitting there far off in the dark, looking out, comprehend of the pageant? And how does it strike him? Some such a mysterious mind looks out from Ida's eyes.

Ida is "colored." It is my belief that though she is grown and well formed a little child dwells in her head. I know that when I ask her to bring me another cup of coffee and she pauses, slightly bends forward, her lips a trifle parted, and fastens her clear, utterly innocent, curious eyes upon me, waiting to hear repeated what she has already heard, she sees me as a sort of toy balloon on a string, whose incomprehensible movements excite a pleasurable wonder. As regularly as the dinner hour comes around Ida asks, with that same amazingly unsophisticated, interested look, if each of us will have soup. If it were our custom occasionally not to take soup, if we had declined soup a couple of times even, a good while ago, if even we had declined soup once--but, as Mr. MacKeene says, what could have put it into her head that we might not take soup? It is the same with dessert, with cereal at breakfast. I hardly know why it is not the same with having our beds made.

It is easy to give Ida pleasure. She has not been satiated, perhaps, with pleasure. A very little quite overjoys her. I turn about in my chair to reach a book, and discover Ida silently dusting the furniture. "Why! I didn't know you were in here," I say to Ida. Ida breaks into great light at this highly entertaining situation. "Didin you know I was in here! Didin you!" Her eyebrows go up with delight. Her pose might be the original of Miss Rogson's "Merely Mary Ann."

XV

NOT GULLIBLE, NOT HE

[Illustration]

"Sir," said Doctor Johnson, "a fallible being will fail somewhere," So far as penetration, at least, is concerned, this is not true of Dean. He is never caught without his grains of salt.

Dean believes nothing that he reads in newspapers. He is not caught, for one thing, believing anecdotes of celebrated persons. These anecdotes are pretty stories yearned for by a sentimental public. The public is amusing, composed as it is of simple, guileless people who know nothing of the world. Newspapers are concoctions of press agents, for the most part--bait for the gullible. A citizen of the word is Dean, and he has, alas! lost his innocence. This pleases him. You can't impose on Dean's credulity. He hasn't got any credulity. In this respect he has much the same effect upon his company as the Mark Twain dog that didn't have any hind legs had upon the mind of his antagonist. That dog was hardly a pleasure to his opponent. He was baffling.

It is perhaps a man's misfortune that he should be so without delusions. Dean has found out there is no Santa Claus, in a manner of speaking, while the rest of us are yet humbugged. So while we may be pleased with our callings or our hobby-horses, our coins, or our cockle-shells, our drums, our fiddles, our pictures, our talents, our maggots and our butterflies, he can only shrug his shoulders and depreciate them to the best of his ability, saying that they are very poor cockle-shells, to be sure, though no man more than he deplores it that this is so. Though no doubt it must be a melancholy thing to feel so severely the failings of all, Dean's cavilings are cheerfully made always, and they come to us filtered through a humorous nature. And to do him justice, he is whimsically aware of his own idiosyncrasies, and readily acknowledges them as he sees them, which is in a mellow, kindly light. "Now I could never make money," he says humorously, as it were. But that is not the sum of life, he knows perhaps too well.

He sees the vanity of it all, does Dean. He sees the vanity of all useful endeavor. He sees the vanity most of all perhaps, of success. What is this success we see around us, after all? What is the fame of this man, this Mr. So-and-So, but sensationalism? Of what the success of that other, but cheap notoriety, and a rich wife? They are both of them, very probably, at heart as miserable as Dean. Ah me! 'tis a profitless world, and there's no satisfaction in it anywhere. "Though probably you are hardly of an age to see it yet," says Dean, and he smiles at the juvenility of ambition. You will see it, however, when you too have failed.

"In this age when every man you meet is a genius," says Dean--it amuses him that he is not of the many--"I have really seen only one really great man, and I have been compelled to know a good many of the geniuses too." This remarkable, unique gentleman, it appears, was an old sou'easter sawbuck of a codger up in the backwoods of Maine, where he lived hermit-wise in a shanty, being a squatter. When Dean met him there he felt instinctively that here he was before a _man_. Uncle Eli was old: he was a trifle filthy; he was addicted to drink; and not what you would call much good in any way. He was uncouth; a man with the bark on; one of nature's noblemen. He lacked culture, and education, and intelligence; but he had eye-teeth. Lord! He wasn't polite; he wasn't learned; but when it came to downright bull-headed horse-sense he knocked the socks of all of them. He was a philosopher, this old B'gosh half-idiot wreck. By George, he was, and a great one. He reminded Dean of Lincoln. Some of his philosophical splinters from the old rail, rough they were but ready, rather laid over the wisdom of Hercules himself. "Ef 'n ol' hoss wus a Billygoat mighty few Christians there be 'ud git to Heaven." That hits the nail on the head, Dean reckons.

XVI

CRAMIS, PATRON OF ART

"Have you got any tobacco?" I inquired of Cramis.

"Sure," he replied, "I'm never without it."

He is a slave to the weed, a hopeless smoker. He hands me his pouch; the tobacco is a little old and mildewed. When Cramis comes to visit me he always brings a most disreputable looking pipe along in his mouth, charred and cold. This he calls attention to, musingly, as it were, by remarking that "that looks natural."

"I shouldn't have known you without it," I answer. Then we are the best of friends. An old Swede, an engineer of some rare sort, a whimsical fellow, quite a character--Cramis is greatly interested in characters--was much addicted to his pipe (so runs Cramis's story). It was a limb of his body. He was one of those inveterate smokers that you find here and there about the world. One day placards announcing that smoking was prohibited among employees in the building were posted at conspicuous places in the mill where Olie was employed. Olie went on smoking. The manager came through; he paused at Olie.

"Look-a-here," he said, "don't you see that sign? No smoking among employees in this building." Olie slowly took the pipe from his mouth, regarding it thoughtfully in his out-stretched hand as he blew a great cloud of blue smoke.

"Where my pipe goes," he said, replacing it between his teeth, "I goes." You may notice it: there is something of the same idiosyncrasy between that picturesque character and Cramis.

For all the idler and the dilettante that he is, no man ever more conscientiously attended to business than Cramis. He is at it early and late. He is very successful. Yet he knows himself to be an impractical cuss, a dreamer, an aesthetic visionary. No man so thoroughly reliable was ever before so irresponsible.

On his visits at my place, Cramis writes a great quantity of letters. All globe trotters do this, I suppose, whether it is necessary or not. It is only natural. If Cramis did not, many of his friends would not, no doubt, be aware that he was in Connecticut, or, indeed, that he ever got off the island of Manhattan.

Though Cramis is by nature shrewd, saving, and methodically economical, he is very careless about money. He has no more idea of the value of it than Oliver Goldsmith. It is pitiful--yet lovable.

[Illustration]

Among Cramis's curious circle of acquaintances--his collection of acquaintances is a regular menagerie, as he so often says--was a painter, a fellow twenty-four years old and with nobody to support him. Cramis believed, after carefully inquiring, that the fellow had talent and might amount to something. He loaned him money. The scoundrel squandered it, probably; at any rate, he bought no fame with it. That was a year ago, and Cramis is eight dollars out of pocket. Still, his heart is a brother to genius. He consulted me on the question of the very least amount upon which a man could live, the length of time at the smallest estimate wherein he could reasonably be expected to attain greatness, and was for setting the fellow up in a studio elsewhere. I pointed out to Cramis that it might possibly be years before the hungry man became famous, and he abandoned the idea. It was too great a risk.

XVII

BARBER SHOPS AWESOME

[Illustration]

To patronize barbers' shops is a trying affair. Nothing but a crying need of services obtained there can drive one who knows them well into one of them. When you enter a barber shop, a long row of barber's chairs, like a line of guns down the deck of a man-o'-war, stretching away in perspective, confronts you. Three barbers, say, are engaged with patrons; and they go calmly on. They are unaware of your existence. The rest have been enjoying newspapers and leisure. You interrupt them; and they spring, as one man, each to the head of his chair, and stand at attention. To find such a company of well-fed, well-groomed, better-men than-you-are suddenly at your service is disturbing; to have to insult all the others in your selection of one is an uncomfortable thought. They are all equally friendly toward you; but it is impossible for them all to shave you; you must turn against some of them. There is no retreat for you; you cannot turn around and go out. You choose the nearest man, as the only solution: and the others show their displeasure by returning to their seats. A fiend is in this man whom you have chosen; his suavity was a diabolical mask. He gloats in publicly humiliating you. He forces you to confess there before his "gang" that you do not want anything but a shave. You have brought this man from his newspaper simply to shave you! Now the number of things the barber manages to do to you against your desire is a measure of the resistant force of your character. You deny that you need a shampoo. There is no denying that your hair is falling out. There is no denying that you sometimes shave yourself. You need try to conceal nothing from this man. He sees quite through you. (You recall a certain Roundabout Paper.) He has Found You Out! All you ask is to be allowed to go. He washes your face for you and turns you out of the chair. You pass into the hands of a boy, the same boy you denied to polish your shoes, a boy that has his opinions, who plays the tune of "Yankee Doodle" on you with a whisk-broom very much as if he snapped his fingers in your face; and you may go.

XVIII

MUCH MARRIED STRATFORD