SO many things that at first seem amazingly complex turn out amazingly
simple. The purely elemental has a trick of ambushing itself behind a
screen of mystery; but when by deduction and elimination--in short, by
the simple processes of subtraction and division--we have stripped away
the mask, the fact stands so plainly revealed we marvel that we did
not behold it from the beginning. Elemental, you will remember, was a
favourite word with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and one much employed by him in
the elucidation of problems in criminology for the better enlightenment
of his sincere but somewhat obvious-minded friend, the worthy Doctor
Watson.
On the other hand, traits and tricks that appear to betray the
characters, the inclinations and, most of all, the vocations of their
owners may prove misleading clues, and very often do. You see a black
man with a rolling gait, who spraddles his legs when he stands and sways
his body on his hips when he walks; and, following the formula of the
deductionist cult of amateur detectives, you say to yourself that here,
beyond peradventure, is a deep-water sailor, used to decks that heave
and scuppers that flood. Inquiry but serves to prove to you how wrong
you are. The person in question is a veteran dining-car waiter.
Then along comes another--one with a hearty red face, who rears well
back and steps out with martial precision. Evidently a retired officer
of the regular army, you say to yourself. Not at all; merely the former
bass drummer of a military brass band. The bass drummer, as will readily
be recalled, leans away from his instrument instead of toward it.
For a typical example of this sort of thing, let us take the man I have
in mind for the central figure of this tale. He was a square-built man,
round-faced, with a rather small, deep-set grey eye, and a pair of big
hands, clumsy-looking but deft. He wore his hair short and his upper
lip long. Appraising him upon the occasion of a chance meeting in the
street, you would say offhand that this, very probably, was a man who
had been reasonably successful in some trade calling for initiative
and expertness rather than for technic. He wouldn't be a theatrical
manager--his attire was too formal; or a stockbroker--his attire was not
formal enough.
I imagine you in the act of telling yourself that he might be a clever
life-insurance solicitor, or a purchasing agent for a trunk line, or a
canny judge of real-estate values--a man whose taste in dress would run
rather to golf stockings than to spats, rather to soft hats than to
hard ones, and whose pet hobby would likely be trout flies and not first
editions. In a part of your hypothesis you would have been absolutely
correct. This man could do things with a casting rod and with a mid-iron
too.
Seeing him now, as we do see him, wearing a loose tweed suit and sitting
bareheaded behind a desk in the innermost room of a smart suite of
offices on a fashionable side street, surrounded by shelves full of
medical books and by wall cases containing medical appliances, you,
knowing nothing of him except what your eye told you, would probably
hazard a guess that this individual was a friend of the doctor, who,
having dropped in for social purposes and having found the doctor out,
had removed his hat and taken a seat in the doctor's chair to await the
doctor's return.
Therein you would have been altogether in error. This man was not the
doctor's friend, but the doctor himself--a practitioner of high repute
in his own particular line. He was known as a specialist in neurotic
disorders; privately he called himself a specialist in human nature. He
was of an orthodox school of medicine, but he had cast overboard most
of the ethics of the school and he gave as little as possible of the
medicine. Drugs he used sparingly, preferring to prescribe other things
for most of his patients--such things, for instance, as fresh air,
fresh, vegetables and fresh thoughts. His cures were numerous and his
fees were large.
On the other side of a cross wall a woman sat waiting to see him. She
was alone, being the first of his callers to arrive this day. A heavy,
deep-cushioned town car, with a crest on its doors and a man in fine
livery to drive it, had brought her to the doctor's address five minutes
earlier; car and driver were at the curb outside.
The woman was exquisitely groomed and exquisitely overdressed. She
radiated luxury, wealth and the possession of an assured and enviable
position. She radiated something else, too--unhappiness.
Here assuredly the lay mind might make no mistake in its summarising.
There are too many like her for any one of us to err in our diagnosis
when a typical example is presented. The city is especially prolific of
such women. It breeds them. It coddles them and it pampers them, but
in payment therefore it besets them with many devils. It gives them
everything in reason and out of reason, and then it makes them long for
something else--anything else, so long as it be unattainable. Possessed
of the nagging demons of unrest and discontent and satiation, they feed
on their nerves until their nerves in retaliation begin to feed on them.
The result generally is smash. Sanitariums get them, and divorce courts
and asylums--and frequently cemeteries.
The woman who waited in the reception room did not have to wait very
long, yet she was hard put to it to control herself while she sat there.
She bit her under lip until the red marks of her teeth showed in the
flesh, and she gripped the arms of her chair so tightly and with
such useless expenditure of nervous force that through her gloves the
knuckles of her hands exposed themselves in sharp high ridges.
Presently a manservant entered and, bowing, indicated mutely that
his master would see her now. She fairly ran past him through the
communicating door which he held open for her passage. As she entered
the inner room it was as though her coming into it set all its
orderliness awry. Only the ruddy-faced specialist, intrenched behind the
big table in the middle of the floor, seemed unchanged. She halted on
the other side of the table and bent across it toward him, her finger
tips drumming a little tattoo upon its smooth surface. He did not speak
even the briefest of greetings; perhaps he was minded not to speak. He
waited for her to begin.
“Doctor,” she burst out, “you must do something for me; you must give
me medicine--drugs--narcotics--anything that will soothe me. I did not
sleep at all last night and hardly any the night before that. All
night I sat up in bed or walked the floor trying to keep from screaming
out--trying to keep from going mad. I have been dressed for hours--I
made my maid stay up with me--waiting for your office to open so that I
might come to you. Here I am--see me! See the state I am in! Doctor, you
must do something for me--and do it now, quickly, before I do something
desperate!”
She panted out the last words. She put her clenched hands to her bosom.
Her haggard eyes glared into his; their glare made the carefully applied
cosmetics upon her face seem a ghastly mask.
“I have already prescribed for you, madam,” the doctor said. “I told you
that what you mainly needed was rest--complete and absolute rest.”
“Rest? Rest! How can I rest? What chance is there for me to rest? I
can't rest! If I try to rest I begin to think--and then it is worse than
ever. I must keep on the go. Something drives me on--something inside
me, here--to go and go, and to keep on going until I drop. Oh, doctor,
you don't know what I suffer--what I have to endure. No one knows what I
have to endure. No one understands. My husband doesn't understand me--my
children do not, nor my friends.
“Friends? I have no friends. I can't get on with any one--I quarrel
with every one. I know I am sick, that I am irritable and out-of-sorts
sometimes. And I know that I am self-willed and want my own way. But
I've always been self-willed; it's a part of my nature. And I've always
had my own way. They should appreciate that. But they don't. They
cross me. At every turn somebody crosses me. The whole world seems in a
conspiracy to deny me what I want.
“It can't be my fault always that I am forever quarrelling with
people--with my own family; with my husband's family; with every one who
crosses my path. I tell you they don't understand me, doctor. They don't
make allowances for my condition. If they would only make allowances!
And they don't give me any consideration. I can't stand it, doctor! I
can't go on like this any longer. Please--please, doctor, do something
for me!”
Mounting hysteria edged her voice with a sharpened, almost a vulgar
shrillness. The austere and studied reserve of her class--a reserve that
is part of it poise and the rest of it pose--dropped away from her
like a discarded garment, and before her physician she revealed herself
nakedly for what she was--a creature with the passions, the forwardness
and the selfishness of a spoiled and sickly child; and, on top of
these, superimposed and piled up, adult impulses, adult appetites, adult
petulance, adult capacity for misery.
“I told you,” he said, “to go away. I thought, until my man brought me
your name a bit ago, that you had gone. Weeks ago I told you that travel
might help you--not the sort of travel to which you have been used, but
a different sort--travel in the quiet places, out of the beaten path,
and rest. I told you the same thing again less than a week ago.”
“But where?” she demanded. “Where am I to go? Tell me that! I have been
everywhere--I have seen everything. What is there left for me to see in
the world? What is there in the world that is worth seeing? You told
me before there was nothing organically wrong with me, nothing
fundamentally wrong with my body. Then it must be my mind, and travel
couldn't cure a mind in the state that mine is in. How can I rest when I
am so distracted, when small things upset me so, when----”
In the midst of this new outburst she broke off. Her eyes, wandering
from his as she pumped herself up toward a frenzy, were focused now upon
some object behind him. She pointed toward it.
“I never saw that before,” she said. “It wasn't there when I was here
last.”
He swung about in his chair, its spiral creaking under his weight.
“No,” he said; “you never saw that before. It came into my possession
only a day or two ago. It is a----”
She broke in on him.
“What a wonderful face!” she said. “What beauty there is in it--what
peace! I think that is what made me notice it--the peace that is in it.
Oh, if I could only be like that! Doctor, the being to whom that face
belonged must have had everything worth having. And to think there can
be such beings in this world--beings so blessed, so happy--while
I--I----”
Tears of self-pity came into her eyes. She was slipping back again into
her former mood. With his gaze he caught and held hers, exerting all his
will to hold it. A brother psychologist seeing him in that moment
would have said that to this man a possible way out of a dilemma had
come--would have said that an inspiration suddenly had visited him.
“Perhaps you would like to see it at closer range,” he said, still
steadfastly regarding her. “There is a story regarding it--a story that
might interest you, madam.”
He rose from his place, crossed the room and, reaching up, took down
a plaster cast of a face that rested upright against the broad low
moulding that ran along his walls on two sides.
As he brought it to her he saw that she had taken a chair. Her figure
was relaxed from its recent rigidness. Her elbows were upon the
tabletop. He put the cast into her gloved hands and reseated himself.
She held it before her at arm's length, and one gloved hand went over
its surface almost caressingly.
“It is wonderful!” she said. “I never saw such an expression on any
human face--why, it is soothing to me just to look at it. Doctor, where
did you get it? Who was the original of it--or don't you know? What
living creature sat for the artist who made it?”
“No living creature sat for it,” he said slowly.
“Oh!” she said disappointedly. “Well, then, what artist had the
imagination to conjure up such a conception?”
“No artist conjured it up,” he told her.
“Then how-”
“That, madam,” he said, “is a death mask.”
“A death mask!” Her tone was incredulous. “A death mask, doctor?”
“Yes, madam--a death mask. See, the eyes are closed--are half closed,
anyway.”
“Do you mean to tell me that death can leave such an expression on any
face? How could--”
She broke off, staring incredulously at the thing.
“That is what makes the story I mean to tell you,” he said--“if you care
to hear it?”
“Of course I want to hear it.” Her manner was insistent, impatient,
demanding almost. “Please go on.”
He kept her in suspense a moment or two; and so they both sat, he
squinting up at the ceiling as though marshalling a narrative in its
proper sequence in his mind, she holding fast to the disked shape of
white plaster. At length he began, speaking slowly.
“Here is the story,” he said: “A few weeks ago an acquaintance of
mine--a fellow physician--told me of a case he thought might interest
me. Primarily it was a surgical case, and I, as perhaps you know, do not
practise surgery; but there was another aspect of it that did have a
direct and personal appeal for me.
“It seems that some weeks before there had been put into his hands for
treatment a man--a young man--who was stone-deaf and stone-blind, and
whose senses of taste and of smell were greatly affected--perhaps I
should say impaired. He could speak, more or less imperfectly, and his
sense of touch was good; in fact, better than with ordinary mortals.
These two faculties alone remained to him. He had been afflicted so from
childhood; the attack, or the disease, which left him in this state
had come upon him very early, before his mind had registered very many
sensible impressions.
“Speech and feeling--these really were what remained intact. Yet his
intelligence, considering these handicaps, was above the average, and
his body was healthy, and his temperament, in the main, sanguine.
Practically all his life he had been in an asylum--a charity
institution. Until chance brought him to the attention of this
acquaintance of mine it had seemed highly probable that he would spend
the rest of his life in this institution.
“The physicians there regarded his case as hopeless. They were
conscientious men--these physicians--and they were not lacking in
sympathy, I think; but their hands and their thoughts were concerned
with their duties, and perhaps--mind you, I say perhaps--perhaps an
individual case more or less did not mean to them what it means to the
physician in private practice. You understand? So this young man, who
was well formed physically, who was normal in his mental aspects, seemed
to be doomed to serve a life sentence inside walls of utter darkness and
utter silence.
“Well, this man came under the attention of the surgeon I have
mentioned. Possibly because it seemed so hopeless, the case interested
the surgeon. He made up his mind that the affliction--afflictions
rather--were not congenital, not incurable. He made up his mind that a
tumorous growth on the brain was responsible for the present state of
the victim. And he made up his mind that an operation--a delicate and
a risky and a difficult operation--might bring about a cure. If the
operation failed the subject would pass from the silence and the
blackness he now endured into a silence and a blackness which many of
us, similarly placed, would find preferable. He would die--quickly and
painlessly. If the operation succeeded he probably would have back all
his faculties--he would begin really to live. The surgeon was willing to
take the chance, to assume the responsibility.
“The other man was willing to take his chance too. Both of them took it.
The operation was performed--and it was a success. The man lived through
it, and when he was lifted off the table my friend had every reason to
believe--in fact, to know as surely as a man whose business is tampering
with the human organism can know anything--that before very long this
man, who had walked all his days in darkness, lacking taste and smell,
and hearing no sound, would have back all that his afflictions had
denied him.
“To my friend, the surgeon, it seemed likely that I, as a person
concerned to a degree in psychologic manifestations and psychologic
phenomena, would be glad of the opportunity to be present at the hour
when this man, through his eyes, his ears, his tongue and his palate,
first registered intelligible and actual impressions. And I was glad
of the opportunity. Almost it would be like witnessing the rebirth of
a human being; certainly it would be witnessing the mental awakening,
through physical mediums, of a human soul.
“At first hand I would see what this world, to which you and I are
accustomed and of which some of us have grown weary, meant to one who
had been so completely, so utterly shut out from that world through all
the more impressionable years of his life. Naturally I was enormously
interested to hear what he might say, to see what he might do in the
hour of his reawakening and re-creation.
“So I went with the surgeon on the day appointed by him for testing the
success of his operation. Only five of us were present--the man himself,
the surgeon who had cured him, two others and myself. Until that hour
and for every hour since he had come out from under the ether, the
patient's eyes had been bandaged to shut out light, and his ears had
been muffled to shut out sounds, and he had been fed on liquid mixtures
administered artificially.”
“Why?” asked the woman, interrupting for the first time.
For a moment the doctor hesitated. Then he went on smoothly to explain:
“You see, they feared the sudden shock to senses and to organs made
sensitive by long disuse until he had completely rallied from the
operation. So they had hooded his eyes and his ears.”
“But food--why couldn't he have eaten solid food before this?” she
insisted. “That is what I mean.”
“Oh, that?” he said, and again he halted for an instant. “That was
done largely on my account. I think the surgeon wanted the test to be
complete at one time and not developed in parts. You understand, don't
you?”
She nodded. And he continued, watching her face intently as he
proceeded:
“So, first of all, we led him into a partly darkened room and sat him
down at a table; and we gave him food--very simple food--a glass of cold
water; a piece of bread, buttered; a baked Irish potato, with butter and
salt upon it--that was all. We stood about him watching him as he tasted
of the things we put before him--for it was really the first time he had
ever properly tasted anything.
“Madam, if I live to be a hundred years old, I shall never forget the
look that came into his face then. Even though he lacked the words
to express himself, as you and I with our greater vocabularies might
conceivably have expressed ourselves had such an experience come to us,
I knew that to him the bread was ambrosia and the water was nectar.
“He didn't wolf the food down as I had rather expected he might. He ate
it slowly, extracting the flavour from every crumb of it. And the water
he took in sips, allowing it to trickle down his throat, drop by drop
almost. And then he spoke to us, touching the bread and the potato and
the water glass. Mind you, I am reproducing the sense of what he said
rather than his exact words. He said:
“'What is this--and this--and this? What are these delicious things
you have given me to eat? And what is this exquisite drink I have
swallowed?'
“We told him and he seemed not to believe it at first. He said:
“'Why, I have handled such things as these often. I have taken them up
in my hands a thousand times and I have swallowed them. I should have
known what they were by the touch of my fingers--but the taste of
them deceived me. Can it be possible that these things are common
things--that even poor people can feast upon such meals as this which I
am eating? Can it even be possible that there is food within the reach
of ordinary mortals which has a finer zest than this?'
“And when his friend, the surgeon, told him 'Yes'--told him 'Yes' many
times and in many ways--still he seemed loath to believe it. When he had
finished, to the last scrap of the potato skin and the last morsel of
the bread crust and the last drop in the glass, he bowed his head and
outspread his hands before him as though returning thanks for a glorious
benefaction.
“Perhaps I should have told you that this took place late in the
afternoon. We waited a little while after that, and then just before
sunset we took him outdoors into a little shabby garden on the asylum
grounds; and we freed his eyes and we unmuffled his ears. And then we
drew back from him a distance and watched him to see what he would do.
“For a little while he did nothing except stand in his tracks,
transfixed and transfigured. He saw the sky and the sunlight and the
earth and the grass and the shadows upon the earth and the trees and the
flowers that were about him--saw them literally in a celestial vision;
and he smelled the good wholesome smells of the earth, and the scents of
the struggling, straggling flowers in the ill-kept flower beds, and the
scents of the green things growing there too.
“And just then, as though it had known and had been inspired to choose
this instant for bringing to him yet another sensation, a thrush--a
common brown thrush--began singing in an elm tree almost directly above
him. Of course it was merely a coincidence that a thrush should begin
singing then and there. Thrushes are plentiful enough about the country
in this climate at this season of the year. Central Park is full of
them, sometimes. Most of us scarcely notice them, or their singing
either. But, you see, with this man it was different. He literally was
undergoing re-creation, re-incarnation, resurrection. Call it what you
please. It was one of those three things. In a way of speaking it was
all three of them.
“At the first note of music from the bird he gave a quick start, and
then he threw back his head and uplifted his face; and quite near at
hand he saw the little rusty-coloured chap, singing away there, with
its speckled throat feathers rising and falling, and he heard the sounds
that poured from the thrush's open beak. And as he looked and listened
he put his hands to his breast as though something were hurting him
there. He didn't move until the bird had fluttered away. Nor did we move
either.
“Then he turned and came stumbling and reeling toward us, literally
drunk with joy. His intoxication of ecstasy thickened his tongue and
choked him until he, at first, could not speak to us. After a bit,
though, the words came outpouring from his lips.
“'Did you hear that?' he cried out. 'Did you hear it? Do you smell the
earth and the flowers? And the sky--I have seen it! I can see it now.
Oh, hasn't God been good to us to give us all this? Oh, hasn't He been
good to me?'
“In an outburst of gratitude he seized the hand of my friend and kissed
it again and again. I had meant to take notes of his behaviour as we
went along, but I took none. I knew that afterward I could reproduce
from memory all that transpired.
“Presently he was calmer, and the surgeon said to him:
“'My son, there is something yet to be seen--something that you, having
so many other things to see, have overlooked. Look yonder!' And he
pointed to the West, where the sun was just going down.
“And, at that, the other man faced about and looked full into his
first sunset. Instantly his whole mood changed. It became rapt,
reverential--you might say worshipful. His lips moved, but no words came
from them at first, and he made as though to shut out the sight with
his hands, as though the beauty of the vision was too great for him to
endure. I went to him and put my hand on his shoulder. He was quivering
from head to foot in an ague of sheer happiness. He seemed hardly to
know I was there. He did not look toward me. He kept his eyes fixed upon
the West as if he were greedy to miss nothing of the spectacle.
“Until now the sunset had seemed to me less beautiful by far than many
another summer sunset I had seen, for the sky was rather overcast and
the colours not particularly vivid; but, standing there beside him, in
physical contact with him, I caught from him something of what he felt,
and I saw that glow in the west as some-thing of indescribable grandeur
and unutterable splendour, a miracle too glorious for words to describe
or painters to reproduce upon squares of canvas.
“Presently he spoke to me, still without turning his head in my
direction.
“'How often does this--this--come to pass?' he asked, panting the words
out.
“'Many times a year,' I told him. 'At this season nearly every evening.'
“'And is it ever so beautiful as this?' he said.
“'Often more beautiful,' I said. 'Often the colours are richer and
deeper.'
“'Why are there not more of us here to look upon it?' he asked. 'Surely
at this hour all mankind must cease from its tasks--from whatever it is
doing--to see this miracle--this free gift of the Creator!'
“I tried to tell him that mankind had grown accustomed to the daily
repetition of the sunset, but he seemed unable to comprehend. As the
last flattened ray of sunshine faded upon the grass, and the afterglow
began to spread across the heavens, I thought he was about to faint; and
I put both my arms round him to steady him. But he did not faint, though
he trembled all over and took his breath into his lungs in great sobbing
gulps. I showed him the evening star where it shone in the sky, and he
watched it brighten, saying nothing at all.
“Suddenly he turned to me and said:
“'At last I have lived, and I have found that life is sweet. Life is
sweeter than I ever dared to hope it might be.'
“Then he said:
“'I have a home. Will you show me where it is? While I was blind I could
feel my way to it; but, now that I can see, I feel lost--all things are
so changed to me. Please lead me there--I want to see with my own eyes
what a home is like.'
“So I took his hand in mine and we went toward it, and the three others
who were there followed after us.
“Madam, his home--the only home he had, for so far as we knew, he had no
living kinspeople--was a room in that big barn of an asylum. I led
him to the door of it. It was a barren enough room--you know how these
institutions are apt to be furnished, and this room was no exception to
the rule. Bare walls, a bare floor, bare uncurtained windows, a bed, a
chair or two, a bare table--a sort of hygienic and sanitary brutality
governed all its appointments.
“I imagine the lowest servant in your employ has a more attractively
furnished room than this was. Now, though, it was flooded with the
afterglow, which poured in at the windows; that soft light alone
redeemed its hideousness of outline and its poverty of furnishings.
“He halted at the threshold. We know what home means to most of us. How
much must it have meant, then, to him! He could see the walls closing
round to encompass him in their friendly companionship; he could see the
roof coming down to protect him.
“'Home!' he said to himself in a half whisper, under his breath. 'What a
beautiful word home is! And what a beautiful place my home is!'
“Nobody gave the signal, none of us made the suggestion by word or
gesture; but with one accord we four, governed by the same impulse, left
him and went away. We felt in an inarticulate way that he was entitled
to be alone; that no curious eye had any right to study his emotions in
this supreme moment.
“In an hour we went back. He was lying where he had fallen--across
the threshold of his room. On his face was a beatific peace, a content
unutterable--and he was dead. Joy I think had burst his heart. That bit
of plaster you hold in your hand is his death mask.”
The doctor finished his tale. He bent forward in his chair to see
the look upon his caller's face. She stood up; and she was a creature
transformed and radiant!
“Doctor,” she said--and even her voice was altered--“I am going
home--home to my husband and my children and my friends. I believe I
have found a cure for my--my trouble. Rather, you have found it for me
here to-day. You have taught me a lesson. You have made me see things
I could not see before--hear things I could not hear before. For I have
been blind and deaf, as blind and as deaf as this man was--yes, blinder
than he ever was. But now”--she cried out the words in a burst
of revelation--“but now--why, doctor, I have everything to live
for--haven't I?”
“Yes, madam,” he said gravely; “you have everything to live for. If only
we knew it, if only we could realise it, all of us in this world have
everything to live for.”
She nodded, smiling across the table at him. “Doctor,” she said, “I
do not believe I shall ever come back here to see you--as a patient of
yours.”
“No,” he affirmed; “I do not believe you will ever come back--as a
patient of mine.”
“But, if I may, I should like to come sometimes, just to look at that
face--that dead face with its living message for me.”
“Madam,” he told her, “you may have it on two conditions--namely, that
you keep it in your own room, and that you do not tell its story--the
story I have just told you--to any other person. I have reasons of my
own for making those conditions.”
“In my own room is exactly where I would keep it,” she said. “I promise
to do as you ask. I shall never part with it. But how can you part with
it?”
“Oh, I think I know where I can get another copy,” he said, “The
original mould has not been destroyed. I am sure my--my friend--has it.
This one will be delivered at your home before night. My servant shall
take it to you.”
“No,” she said. “If you do not mind, I shall take it with me now--in my
own hands.”
She clasped the gift to her breast, holding it there as though it were
a priceless thing--too priceless to be intrusted to the keeping of any
other than its possessor.
For perhaps five minutes after the departure of his recent patient the
great specialist sat at his desk smiling gently to himself. Then he
touched with his forefinger a button under the desk. His manservant
entered.
“You have heard of troubles being started by a lie, haven't you?” asked
the doctor abruptly.
“Yes, sir--I think so, sir.”
The man was not an Englishman, but he had been trained in the school of
English servants. His voice betrayed no surprise.
“Well, did you ever hear of troubles being ended by a lie?”
“Really, sir, I can't say, sir--offhand.”
“Well, it can be done,” said the doctor; “in fact, it has been done.”
The man stood a moment.
“Was that all, sir?”
“No; not quite,” said the master. “Do you remember an Italian pedlar who
was here the other day?”
“An Italian pedlar, sir?”
“Yes; don't you remember? A street vender who passed the door. I called
him in and bought a plaster cast from him--for seventy-five cents, as I
recall.”
“Oh, yes, sir; I do remember now.”
The man's eyes flitted to an empty space on the wall moulding above the
bookcase behind his employer's chair, and back again to his employer's
face.
“Well,” said the doctor, “you keep a lookout for him, in case he passes
again. I want to buy another of those casts from him. I think it may be
worth the money--the last one was, anyhow.”
CHAPTER III. CHAPTER III. MR. FELSBURG GETS EVEN
OF all the human legs ever seen in our town I am constrained to admit
that Mr. Herman Felsburg's pair were the most humorous legs. When it
came to legs--funny legs--the palm was his without a struggle. Casting
up in my mind a wide assortment and a great range of legs, I recall no
set in the whole of Red Gravel County that, for pure comedy of contour
or rare eccentricity of gait, could compare with the two he owned. In
his case his legs achieved the impossible by being at one and the same
time bent outward and warped inward, so that he was knock-kneed at a
stated point and elsewhere bow-legged. And yet, as legs go, they were
short ones. For a finishing touch he was, to a noticeably extent,
pigeon-toed.
I remember mighty well the first time Mr. Felsburg's legs first acquired
for me an interest unrelated to their picturesqueness of aspect. As
I think backward along the grooves of my memory to that occasion, it
defies all the rules of perspective by looming on a larger scale and in
brighter and more vivid colours than many a more important thing which
occurred in a much more recent period. I reckon, though, that is because
our Creator has been good enough to us sometimes to let us view our
childhood with the big, round, magnifying eyes of a child.
I feel it to be so in my case. By virtue of a certain magic I see a
small, inquisitive boy sitting on the top step of the wide front porch
of an old white house; and as he sits he hugs his bare knees within the
circle of his arms and listens with two wide-open ears to the talk that
shuttles back and forth among three or four old men who are taking their
comfort in easy-chairs behind a thick screen of dishrag and morning
glory and balsam-apple vines.
I am that small boy who listens; and, as the picture forms and frames
itself in my mind, one of the men is apt to be my uncle. He was not my
uncle by blood ties or marriage, but through adoption only, as was the
custom down our way in those days and, to a certain degree, is still the
custom; and, besides, I was his namesake.
I know now, when by comparison I subject the scene to analysis, that
they were not such very old men--then. They are old enough now--such of
them as survive to this day. None of that group who yet lives will ever
see seventy-five again. In those times grown people would have called
them middle-aged men, or, at the most, elderly men; but when I re-create
the vision out of the back of my head I invest them with an incredible
antiquity and a vasty wisdom, because, as I said just now, I am looking
at them with the eyes of a small boy again. Also, it seems to me, the
season always is summer--late afternoon or early evening of a hot, lazy
summer day.
It was right there, perched upon the top step of Judge Priest's front
porch, that I heard, piece by piece, the unwritten history of our
town--its tragedies and its farces, its homely romances and its homely
epics. There I heard the story of Singin' Sandy Riggs, who, like
Coligny, finally won by being repeatedly whipped; and his fist feud with
Harve Allen, the bully; and the story of old Marm Perry, the Witch. I
don't suppose she was a witch really; but she owned a black cat and
she had a droopy lid, which hung down over one red eye, and she lived a
friendless life.
And so when the babies in the settlement began to sicken and die of the
spotted fever somebody advanced the very plausible suggestion that Marm
Perry had laid a spell upon the children, and nearly everybody else
believed it. A man whose child fell ill of the plague in the very hour
when Marm Perry had spoken to the little thing took a silver dollar
and melted it down and made a silver bullet of it--because, of course,
witches were immune to slugs of lead--and on the night after the day
when they buried his baby he slipped up to Marm Perry's cabin and fired
through the window at her as she sat, with her black cat in her lap,
mouthing her empty gums over her supper. The bullet missed her--and he
was a good shot, too, that man was. Practically all the men who lived in
those days on the spot where our town was to stand were good shots. They
had to be--or else go hungry frequently.
When the news of this spread they knew for certain that only by fire
could the evil charm be broken and the conjure-woman be destroyed. So
one night soon after that a party of men broke into Marm Perry's cabin
and made prisoners of her and her cat. They muffled her head in a
bedquilt and they thrust the cat into a bag, both of them yowling and
kicking; and they carried them to a place on the bluff above Island
Creek, a mile or so from the young settlement, and there they kindled a
great fire of brush; and when the flames had taken good hold of the wood
they threw Marm Perry and her cat into the blaze and stood back to see
them burn. Mind you, this didn't happen at Salem, Massachusetts, in or
about the year 1692. It happened less than a century ago near a small
river landing on what was then the southwestern frontier of these United
States.
There were certain men, though--leaders of opinion and action in the
rough young community--who did not altogether hold with the theory that
the evil eye was killing off the babies. Somehow they learned what
was afoot and they followed, hotspeed, on the trail of the volunteer
executioners. As the tale has stood through nearly a hundred years of
telling, they arrived barely in time. When they broke through the ring
of witch burners and snatched Marm Perry off the pyre, her apron strings
had burned in two. As for the cat, it burst through the bag and ran off
through the woods, with its fur all ablaze, and was never seen again. I
remember how I used to dream that story over and over again. Always in
my dreams it reached its climax when that living firebrand went tearing
off into the thickets. Somehow, to me, the unsalvaged cat took on more
importance than its rescued owner.
There were times, too, when I chanced to be the only caller upon Judge
Priest's front porch, and these are the times which in retrospect seem
to me to have been the finest of all. I used to slip away from home
alone, along toward suppertime, and pay the Judge a visit. Many and many
a day, sitting there on that porch step, I watched the birds going to
bed. His big front yard was a great place for the birds. In the deep
grass, all summer long and all day long, the cock partridge would be
directing the attention of a mythical Bob White to the fact that his
peaches were ripe and overripe. If spared by boys and house cats until
the hunting season began he would captain a covey. Now he was chiefly
concerned with a family. Years later I found that his dictionary name
was American quail; but to us then he was a partridge, and in our town
we still know him by no other title.
Forgetting all about the dogs and the guns of the autumn before he would
even invade Judge Priest's chicken lot to pick up titbits overlooked by
the dull-eyed resident flock; and toward twilight, growing bolder still,
he would whistle and whistle from the tall white gate post of the front
fence, while his trim brown helpmate clucked lullabies to her speckled
brood in the rank tangle back of the quince bushes.
When the redbirds called it a day and knocked off, the mocking birds
took up the job and on clear moonlight nights sang all night in the
honey locusts. Just before sunset yellow-hammers would be flickering
about, tremendously occupied with things forgotten until then; and the
chimney swifts that nested in Judge Priest's chimney would go whooshing
up and down the sooty flue, making haunted-house noises in the old
sitting room below.
Sprawled in his favourite porch chair, the Judge would talk and I would
listen. Sometimes, the situation being reversed, I would talk and he
listen. Under the spell of his sympathetic understanding I would be
moved to do what that most sensitive and secretive of creatures--a small
boy--rarely does do: I would bestow my confidences upon him. And if he
felt like laughing--at least, he never laughed. And if he felt that the
disclosures called for a lecture he rarely did that, either; but if he
did the admonition was so cleverly sugar-coated by his way of framing it
that I took it down without tasting it.
As I see the vision now, it was at the close of a mighty warm day, when
the sun went down as a red-hot ball and all the west was copper-plated
with promise of more heat to-morrow, when Mr. Herman Felsburg passed.
I don't know what errand was taking him up Clay Street that evening--he
lived clear over on the other side of town. But, anyway, he passed; and
as he headed into the sunset glow I was inspired by a boy's instinctive
appreciation of the ludicrous to speak of the peculiar conformation of
Mr. Felsburg's legs. I don't recall now just what it was I said, but
I do recall, as clearly as though it happened yesterday, the look that
came into Judge Priest's chubby round face.
“Aha!” he said; and from the way he said it I knew he was displeased
with me. He didn't scold me, though--only he peered at me over his
glasses until I felt my repentant soul shrivelling smaller and smaller
inside of me; and then after a bit he said: “Aha! Well, son, I reckin
mebbe you're right. Old Man Herman has got a funny-lookin' pair of
laigs, ain't he? They do look kinder like a set of hames that ain't been
treated kindly, don't they? Whut was it you said they favoured--horse
collars, wasn't it?” I tucked a regretful head down between my hunched
shoulders, making no reply. After another little pause he went on:
“Well, sonny, ef you should be spared to grow up to be a man, and there
should be a war comin' along, and you should git drawed into it someway,
jest you remember this: Ef your laigs take you into ez many tight places
and into ez many hard-fit fights as I've saw them little crookedy
laigs takin' that little man, you won't have no call to feel ashamed of
'em--not even ef yours should be so twisted you'd have to walk backward
in order to go furward.”
At hearing this my astonishment was so great I forgot my remorse of a
minute before. I took it for granted that off yonder, in those far-away
days, most of the older men in our town had seen service on one side or
the other in the Big War--mainly on the Southern side. But somehow it
never occurred to me that Mr. Herman Felsburg might also have been a
soldier. As far back as I recalled he had been in the clothing business.
Boylike, I assumed he had always been in the clothing business. So----
“Was Mr. Felsburg in the war?” I asked.
“He most suttinly was,” answered Judge Priest.
“As a regular sure-nuff soldier!” I asked, still in doubt.
“Ez a reg'lar sure-nuff soldier.”
I considered for a moment.
“Why, he's Jewish, ain't he, Judge?” I asked next.
“So fur as my best information and belief go, he's practically
exclusively all Jewish,” said Judge Priest with a little chuckle.
“But I didn't think Jewish gentlemen ever did any fighting, Judge?”
I imagine that bewilderment was in my tone, for my juvenile education
was undergoing enlargement by leaps and bounds.
“Didn't you?” he said. “Well, boy, you go to Sunday school, don't you?”
“Oh, yes, sir--every Sunday--nearly.”
“Well, didn't you ever hear tell at Sunday school of a little feller
named David that taken a rock-sling and killed a big giant named
Goliath?”
“Yes, sir; but----”
“Well, that there little feller David was a Jew.”
“I know, sir; but--but that was so long ago!”
“It was quite a spell back, and that's a fact,” agreed Judge Priest.
“Even so, I reckin human nature continues to keep right on bein' human
nature. You'll be findin' that out, son, when you git a little further
along in years. They learnt you about Samson, too, didn't they--at that
there Sunday school?”
I am quite sure I must have shown enthusiasm along here. At that period
Samson was, with me, a favourite character in history. By reason of his
recorded performances he held rank in my estimation with Israel Putnam
and General N. B. Forrest.
“Aha!” continued the Judge. “Old Man Samson was right smart of a
fighter, takin' one thing with another, wasn't he? Remember hearin'
about that time when he taken the jawbone of an ass and killed up I
don't know how many of them old Philistines?”
“Oh, yes, sir. And then that other time when they cut off his hair short
and put him in jail, and after it grew out again he pulled the temple
right smack down and killed everybody!”
“It strikes me I did hear somebody speakin' of that circumstance too. I
expect it must have created a right smart talk round the neighbourhood.”
I can hear the old Judge saying this, and I can see--across the
years--the quizzical little wrinkles bunching at the corners of his
eyes.
He sat a minute looking down at me and smiling.
“Samson was much of a man--and he was a Jew.”
“Was he?” I was shocked in a new place.
“That's jest exactly what he was. And there was a man oncet named
Judas--not the Judas you've heared about, but a feller with the full
name of Judas Maccabæus; and he was such a pert hand at fightin' they
called him the Hammer of the Jews. Judgin' by whut I've been able to
glean about him, his enemies felt jest as well satisfied ef they could
hear, before the hostilities started, that Judas was laid up sick in
bed somewheres. It taken considerable of a load off their minds, ez you
might say.
“But--jest as you was sayin', son, about David--it's been a good while
since them parties flourished. When we look back on it, it stretches all
the way frum here to B. C.; and that's a good long stretch, and a lot
of things have been happenin' meantime. But I sometimes git to thinkin'
that mebbe little Herman Felsburg has got some of that old-time Jew
fightin' blood in his veins. Anyhow, he belongs to the same breed. No,
sirree, sonny; it don't always pay to judge a man by his laigs. You kin
do that with reguards to a frog or a grasshopper, or even sometimes
with a chicken; but not with a man. It ain't the shape of 'em that
counts--it's where they'll take you in time of trouble.”
He cocked his head down at me--I saying nothing at all. There didn't
seem to be anything for me to say; so I maintained silence and he spoke
on:
“You jest bear that in mind next time you feel moved to talk about
laigs. And ef it should happen to be Mister Felsburg's laigs that you're
takin' fur your text, remember this whut I'm tellin' you now: They may
be crooked; but, son, there ain't no gamer pair of laigs nowheres in
this world. I've seen 'em carry in' him into battle when, all the time,
my knees was knockin' together, the same ez one of these here end men in
a minstrel show knocks his bones together. His laigs may 'a' trembled
a little bit too--I ain't sayin' they didn't--but they kept right on
promenadin' him up to where the trouble was; and that's the main p'int
with a set of shanks. You jest remember that.”
Being sufficiently humbled I said I would remember it.
“There's still another thing about Herman Felsburg's laigs that most
people round here don't know, neither,” added Judge Priest when I had
made my pledge: “All up and down the back sides of his calves, and clear
down on his shins, there's a whole passel of little red marks. There's
so many of them little scars that they look jest like lacework on his
skin.”
“Did he get them in the war?” I inquired eagerly, scenting a story.
“No; he got them before the war came along,” said Judge Priest. “Some of
these times, sonny, when you're a little bit older, I'll tell you a tale
about them scars on Mr. Felsburg's laigs. There ain't many besides me
that knows it.”
“Couldn't I hear it now?” I asked.
“I reckin you ain't a suitable age to understand--y it,” said
Judge Priest. “I reckin we'd better wait a few years. But I won't
for-git--I'll tell you when the time's ripe. Anyhow, there's somethin'
else afoot now--somethin' that ought to interest a hongry boy.”
I became aware of his house servant--Jeff Poindexter--standing in the
hall doorway, waiting until his master concluded whatever he might be
saying in order to make an important announcement.
“All right, Jeff!” said Judge Priest. “I'll be there in a minute.” Then,
turning to me: “Son-boy, hadn't you better stay here fur supper with
me? I expect there's vittles enough fur two. Come on--I'll make Jeff run
over to your house and tell your mother I kept you to supper with me.”
After that memorable supper with Judge Priest--all the meals I ever took
as his guest were memorable events and still are--ensues a lapse, to be
measured by years, before I heard the second chapter of what might be
called the tale of Mr. Felsburg's legs. I heard it one evening in the
Judge's sitting room.
A squeak had come into my voice, and there was a suspicion of down--a
mere trace, as the chemists say--on my upper lip. I was in the second
week of proud incumbency of my first regular job. I had gone to work
on the _Daily Evening News_--the cubbiest of cub reporters, green as
a young gourd, but proud as Potiphar over my new job and my new
responsibilities. This time it was professional duty rather than the
social instinct that took me to the old Judge's house.
I had been charged by my editor to get from him divers litigatious facts
relating to a decision he had that day rendered in the circuit court
where he presided. The information having been vouchsafed, the talk took
a various trend. Somewhere in the course of it Mr. Felsburg's name came
up and my memory ran back like a spark along a tarred string to that
other day when he had promised to relate to me an episode connected
with certain small scars on those two bandy legs of our leading clothing
merchant.
The present occasion seemed fitting for hearing this long-delayed
narrative. I reminded my host of his olden promise; and between puffs
at his corncob pipe he told me the thing which I retell here and now,
except that, for purposes of convenience, I have translated the actual
wording of it out of Judge Priest's vernacular into my own.
So doing, it devolves upon me, first off, to introduce into the
main theme a character not heretofore mentioned--a man named Thomas
Albritton, a farmer in our country, and at one period a prosperous one.
He lived, while he lived--for he has been dead a good while now--six
miles from town, on the Massac Creek Road. He lived there all his days.
His father before him had cleared the timber off the land and built the
two-room log house of squared logs, with the open “gallery” between.
With additions, the house grew in time to be a rambling, roomy
structure, but from first to last it kept its identity; and even after
the last of the old tenants died off or moved off, and new tenants moved
in, it was still known as the Albritton place. For all I know to the
contrary, it yet goes by that name.
From pioneer days on until this Thomas Albritton became heir to the
farm and head of the family, the Albrittons had been a forehanded
breed--people with a name for thrift. In fact, I had it that night from
the old Judge that, for a good many years after he grew up, this Thomas
Albritton enjoyed his due share of affluence. He raised as good a grade
of tobacco and as many bushels of corn to the acre as anybody in the
Massac Bottoms raised; and, so far as ready money went, he was better
off than most of his neighbours.
Perhaps, though, he was not so provident as his sire had been; or
perhaps, in a financial way, he had in his latter years more than
his share of bad luck. Anyhow, after a while he began to go downhill
financially, which is another way of saying he got into debt. Piece
by piece he sold off strips of the fertile creek lands his father had
cleared. There came a day when he owned only the house, standing in its
grove of honey locusts, and the twenty acres surrounding it; and the
title to those remaining possessions was lapped and overlapped by
mortgages.
It is the rule of this merry little planet of ours that some must go up
while others go down. Otherwise there would be no room at the top for
those who climb. Mr. Herman Felsburg was one who steadily went up. When
first I knew him he was rated among the wealthy men of our town. By
local standards of those days he was rich--very rich. To me, then,
it seemed that always he must have been rich. But here Judge Priest
undeceived me.
When Mr. Felsburg, after four years of honourable service as a private
soldier in the army of the late Southern Confederacy, came back with the
straggling handful that was left of Company B to the place where he had
enlisted, he owned of this world's goods just the rags he stood in, plus
a canny brain, a provident and saving instinct, and a natural aptitude
for barter and trade.
Somewhere, somehow, he scraped together a meagre capital of a few
dollars, and with this he opened a tiny cheap-John shop down on
Market Square, where he sold gimcracks to darkies and poor whites.
He prospered--it was inevitable that he should prosper. He took unto
himself a wife of his own people; and between periods of bearing him
children she helped him to save. He brought his younger brother, Ike,
over from the old country and made Ike a full partner with him in his
growing business.
Long before those of my own generation were born the little store down
on Market Square was a reminiscence. Two blocks uptown, on the busiest
corner in town, stood Felsburg Brothers' Oak Hall Clothing Emporium,
then, as now, the largest and the most enterprising merchandising
establishment in our end of the state. If you could not find it at
Felsburg Brothers' you simply could not find it anywhere--that was all.
It was more than a store; it was an institution, like the courthouse and
the county-fair grounds.
The multitudinous affairs of the industry he had founded did not engage
the energies of the busy little man with the funny legs to the exclusion
of other things. As the saying goes, he branched out. He didn't
speculate--he was too conservative for that; but where there seemed a
chance to invest an honest dollar with a reasonable degree of certainty
of getting back, say, a dollar-ten in due time, he invested. Some people
called it luck, which is what some people always call it when it turns
out so; but, whether it was luck or just foresight, whatsoever he
touched seemed bound to flourish and beget dividends.
Eventually, as befitting one who had risen to be a commanding figure in
the commercial affairs of the community, Mr. Felsburg became an active
factor in its financial affairs. As a stockholder, the Commonwealth
Bank welcomed him to its hospitable midst. Soon it saw its way clear to
making him a director and vice president. There was promise of profit in
the use of his name. Printed on the letterheads, it gave added solidity
and added substantiality to the bank's roster. People liked him too.
Behind his short round back they might gibe at the shape of his legs,
and laugh at his ways of butchering up the English language and twisting
up the metaphors with which he besprinkled his everyday walk and
conversation; but, all the same, they liked him.
So, in his orbit Mr. Herman Felsburg went up and up to the very peaks
of prominence; and while he did this, that other man I have
mentioned--Thomas Albritton--went down and down until he descended to
the very bottom of things.
In the fullness of time the lines of these two crossed, for it was at
the Commonwealth Bank that Albritton negotiated the first and, later,
the second of his loans upon his homestead. Indeed, it was Mr. Felsburg
who both times insisted that Albritton be permitted to borrow, even
though, when the matter of making the second mortgage came up, another
director, who specialised in county property, pointed out that, to begin
with, Albritton wasn't doing very well; and that, in the second place,
the amount of his indebtedness already was as much and very possibly
more than as much as the farm would bring at forced sale.
Even though the bank bought it in to protect itself--and in his gloomy
mind's eye this director foresaw such a contingency--it might mean a
cash loss; but Mr. Felsburg stood pat; and, against the judgment of his
associates, he had his way about it. Subsequently, when Mr. Felsburg
himself offered to relieve the bank of all possibility of an ultimate
deficit by buying Albritton's paper, the rest of the board felt
relieved. Practically by acclamation he was permitted to do so.
Of this, however, the borrower knew nothing at all, Mr. Felsburg having
made it a condition that his purchase should be a private transaction.
So far as the borrower's knowledge went, he owed principal and interest
to the bank. There was no reason why Albritton should suspect that Mr.
Herman Felsburg took any interest, selfish or otherwise, in his affairs,
or that Mr. Felsburg entertained covetous designs upon his possessions.
Mr. Felsburg wasn't a money lender. He was a clothing merchant. And
Albritton wasn't a business man--his present condition, stripped as he
was of most of his inheritance, and with the remaining portion heavily
encumbered, gave ample proof of that.
Besides, the two men scarcely knew each other. Albritton was an
occasional customer at the Oak Hall. But, for the matter of that, so was
nearly everybody else in Red Gravel County; and when he came in to make
a purchase it was never the senior member of the firm but always one
of the clerks who served him. At such times Mr. Felsburg, from the
back part of the store, would watch Mr. Albritton steadily. He never
approached him, never offered to speak to him; but he watched him.
One day, not so very long after the date when Mr. Felsburg privately
took over the mortgages on the Albritton place, Albritton drove in with
a load of tobacco for the Buckner & Keys Warehouse; and, leaving
his team and loaded wagon outside, he went into the Oak Hall to buy
something. Adolph Dreifus, one of the salesmen, waited on him as he
often had before.
The owners of the establishment were at the moment engaged in conference
in the rear of the store. Mr. Ike Felsburg was urging, with all the
eloquence at his command, the advisability of adding a line of trunks
and suit cases to the stock--a venture which he personally strongly
favoured--when he became aware that his brother was not heeding what he
had to say. Instead of heeding, Mr. Herman was peering along a vista of
counters and garment racks to where Adolph Dreifus stood on one side
of a show case and Tom Albritton stood on the other. There was a queer
expression on Mr. Felsburg's face. His eyes were squinted and his tongue
licked at his lower lip.
“Hermy,” said the younger man, irritated that his brother's attention
should go wandering afar while a subject of such importance was under
discussion, “Hermy, would you please be so good as to listen to me what
I am saying to you?”
There was no answer. Mr. Herman continued to stare straight ahead. Mr.
Ike raised his voice impatiently:
“Hermy!”
The older man turned on him with such suddenness that Mr. Ike almost
slipped off the stool upon which he was perched.
“What's the idea--yelling in my ear like a graven image?” demanded Mr.
Herman angrily. “Do you think maybe I am deef or something?”
“But, Hermy,” complained Mr. Ike, “you ain't listening at all. Twice now
I have to call you; in fact, three times.”
“Is that so?” said Mr. Herman with elaborate sarcasm. “I suppose you
think I got nothing whatever at all to do except I should listen to you?
If I should spend all my time listening to you where would this here
Oak Hall Clothing Emporium be? I should like to ask you that. Gabble,
gabble, gabble all day long--that is you! Me, I don't talk so much; but
I do some thinking.”
“But this is important, what I am trying to tell you, Hermy. Why should
you be watching yonder, with a look on your face like as if you would
like to bite somebody? Adolph Dreifus ain't so dumb in the head but what
he could sell a pair of suspenders or something without your glaring at
him every move what he makes.”
“Did I say I was looking at Adolph Dreifus?” asked Mr. Herman
truculently.
“Well, then, if you ain't looking at Adolph, why should you look so hard
at that Albritton fellow? He don't owe us any money, so far as I know.
For what he gets he pays cash, else we positively wouldn't let him have
the goods. I've seen you acting like this before, Hermy. Every time that
Albritton comes in this place you drop whatever you are doing and hang
round and hang round, watching him. I noticed it before; and I should
like to ask----”
“Mister Ikey Felsburg,” said Mr. Herman slowly, “if you could mind your
own business I should possibly be able to mind mine. Remember this, if
you please--I look at who I please. You are too nosey and you talk too
damn much with your mouth! I am older than what you are; and I tell you
this--a talking jaw gathers no moss. Also, I would like to know, do
my eyes belong to me or do they maybe belong to you, and you have just
loaned 'em to me for a temporary accommodation?”
“But, Hermy----”
“Ike, shut up!”
And Mr. Ike, warned by the tone in his brother's voice, shut up.
One afternoon, perhaps six months after this passage between the
two partners, Mr. Herman crossed the street from the Oak Hall to the
Commonwealth Bank to make a deposit.
Through his wicket window Herb Kivil, the cashier, spoke to him,
lowering his voice: “Oh, Mr. Felsburg; you remember that Albritton
matter you were speaking to me about week before last?”
Mr. Felsburg nodded.
“Well, the last interest payment is more than a month overdue now; and,
on top of that, Albritton still owes the payment that was due three
months before that. There's not a chance in the world of his being able
to pay up. He practically admitted as much when he was in here last,
asking for more time. So I've followed your instructions in the matter.”
“That's a good boy, Herby--a very good boy,” said Mr. Felsburg,
seemingly much gratified. “You wrote him, then, like I told you?”
“Yes, sir; I wrote him. Yesterday I served notice on him by mail that
we would have to go ahead and foreclose right away. So this morning he
called me up by telephone from out in the country and asked us to hold
off, please, until he could come in here and talk the thing over again.”
“Does he think maybe he can pay his just debts with talk?” inquired Mr.
Felsburg.
“Well, if he does I'll mighty soon undeceive him,” said Kivil. “And yet
I can't help but feel sorry for the poor devil--he's had an awful run of
luck, by all accounts. But here's the thing I mainly wanted to speak to
you about: You see, he still thinks the bank holds these mortgages. He
doesn't know you bought 'em from the bank; and what I wanted to ask
you was this: Do you want me to tell him the truth when he comes in, or
would you rather I waited and let him find it out for himself when the
foreclosure goes through and the sheriff takes possession?”
“Don't do neither one,” ordered Mr. Felsburg. “You should call him up
right away and tell him to come in to see about it to-morrow at ten
o'clock. And then, Herby, when he does come in, you should tell him he
should step over to the Oak Hall and see me in my office. That's all
what you should tell him. I got reasons of my own why I should prefer to
break the news to him myself. Understand, Herby?”
“I understand, Mr. Felsburg,” said Mr. Kivil. “The minute he steps in
here--before he's had time to open up the subject--I'm to send him over
to see you. Is that right?”
“That's exactly right, Herby.” And, with pleased puckers at the corners
of his eyes, Mr. Felsburg turned away and went stumping out.
Physically Mr. Felsburg didn't in the least suggest a cat, and yet,
after he was gone, Cashier Kivil found himself likening Mr. Felsburg to
a cat with long claws--a cat that would play a long time with a captive
mouse before killing it. He turned to his assistant, Emanuel Moon.
“What's bred in the bone is bound to show sooner or later,” said Herb
Kivil sagely. “I never thought of it before--but I guess there must be
a mighty mean streak in Mr. Felsburg somewheres. I know this much: I'd
hate mightily to owe him any money. Did you see that look on his face?
He looked like a regular little old Shylock. I'll bet you he takes his
pound of flesh every pop--with an extra half pound or so thrown in
for good measure.” Long before ten o'clock the following morning Mr.
Felsburg sat waiting in his little cubicle of a private office on the
mezzanine floor at the back of the Oak Hall. He kept taking out his
watch and looking at it. About ten minutes past the hour one of the
clerks climbed the stairs to tell him that Mr. Thomas Albritton, from
out in the Massac Creek neighbourhood, was below, asking to see him.
“All right,” said Mr. Felsburg; “you should send him up here to me right
away. Tell him I said, please, he should step this way.”
Presently, the clunk of heavy feet sounding on the steps, Mr. Felsburg
reared himself back in his chair at his desk with an expectant, eager
look on his face. In the doorway at the top of the stairs appeared the
man for whom he waited--a middle-aged man with slumped shoulders, in
worn, soiled garments, and in every line of his harassed face expressing
the fact that here stood a failure, mutely craving the pardon of the
world for being a failure. The yellow dust of country roads was thick,
like powdered sulphur, in the wrinkles of his shoes and the creases of
his shabby old coat. He had his hat in his hand.
“Good mornin', Mr. Felsburg,” he said.
“Morning!”
Mr. Felsburg returned the greeting with a sharp and businesslike
brevity. He did not invite the caller to seat himself. In the small room
there was but one chair--the one that held Mr. Felsburg's short
form. So, during the early part of the scene that followed, Albritton
continued to stand, while Mr. Felsburg enjoyed the advantage of being
seated and at his ease where, without stirring, he might, from beneath
his lowered brows, look the other up and down.
“I've just come from over at the Commonwealth Bank,” said Albritton,
fumbling his hat. “I came in to see about getting an extension on my
loans, and Mr. Kivil, over there, said I was to come on over here and
talk to you first. He said you wanted to see me 'bout something--if I
understood him right.”
Mr. Felsburg nodded in affirmation of this, but made no other reply.
Albritton, having halted for a moment, went on again:
“I suppose you want to talk to me about my affairs, you being a director
of the bank?”
“And also, furthermore, vice president,” supplemented Mr. Felsburg.
“Yes, suh. Just so. And that's what made me suppose--”
Mr. Felsburg raised a fat, short hand upon which the biggest, whitest
diamond in Red Gravel County glittered.
“You should not talk with me as an officer of that bank--if you will
be so good, please,” he stated. “You should talk with me now as an
individual.”
“An individual? I'm afraid I don't understand you, suh.”
“Pretty soon you will, Mr. Albritton. This is an individual matter--just
between you and me; because I, and not the bank, am the party what holds
these here mortgages on your place.”
“You hold 'em?”
“Sure! I bought both those mortgages off the bank quite some time ago. I
own those mortgages--and not anybody else whatsoever.”
“But I thought--”
“You don't need to think. You need only that you should listen at what I
am telling you now. It is me--Herman Felsburg, Esquire, of the Oak Hall
Clothing Emporium--to which you owe this money, principal and likewise
interest. So we will talk together, man to man, if you please, Mr.
Albritton. Do I make myself plain? I do.”
The debtor dropped to his side the hand with which he had been rubbing
a perplexed forehead. A little gleam, as of hope reawakening, came into
his eyes.
“Well, suh,” he said, “you sort of take me by surprise--I didn't have
any idea that was the state of the case at all. Then, all along, the
bank has just been representing you in the matter?”
“As my agent--yes,” said the little merchant. “Well, to tell you the
truth, I'm not sorry to hear it,” said Albritton. “A bank has got its
rules, I reckin, and has to live up to 'em. But, dealing with you, suh,
as an individual, is another thing altogether. Anyhow, I'm hoping so,
Mr. Felsburg.”
“How you make that out?”
Mr. Felsburg's tone was so sharply staccato that Albritton's face fell a
little.
“Well, suh, I'm hoping that maybe you can see your way clear not to
foreclose on me just yet a while. I'd hate mightily to lose my home--I
would so! I was born there, Mr. Felsburg. And I've got a sickly wife and
a whole houseful of children. I don't know where I'd turn to get another
roof over their heads if I was driven off my place. I know I owe you the
money and by law you're entitled to it; but I certainly would appreciate
the favour if you'd give me a little more time.”
“So? And was there any other little favour you'd like to ask from me,
Mr. Albritton?” inquired Mr. Felsburg with impressive politeness.
Perhaps the other missed the note in the speaker's voice; or perhaps he
was merely desperate. A drowning man does not pick and choose the straws
at which he grasps.
“Yes, suh; since you bring up the subject yourself, there is something
else, Mr. Felsburg. If you can see your way clear to giving me a little
time, and, on top of that, if you could loan me, say, four hundred
dollars more to help carry me over until fall, I believe I can pay you
back everything and start clean and clear again.”
“So-o-o!”
Mr. Felsburg turned himself in his chair, showing his back to his
visitor, and, taking up a pen, bent over his desk and for a minute wrote
briskly, as though to record notes of the proposition. Then he swung
back again, facing Albritton.
“Let me see if I get you right, Mr. Albritton,” he said, speaking slowly
and prolonging the suspense. “Already you owe me money; and now, instead
of paying up what you owe, you should like to borrow yet some more
money, eh? What security should you expect to give, Mr. Albritton?”
“Only my word and my promise, Mr. Felsburg,” pleaded Albritton. “You
don't know me very well; but if you'll inquire round you'll find out
I've got the name for being an honest man, even if I have had a power
of hard luck these last few years. I ain't a drinking man, Mr. Felsburg,
and I'm a hard worker. If there was somebody I knew better than I know
you I'd go to him; but there ain't anybody. I'm right at the end of my
rope--I ain't got anywhere to turn.
“I'm confident, if you'll give me a little help, Mr. Felsburg, I can
make out to get a new start. But if I'm put off my place now I'll lose
the crop I've put in--lose all my time and my labour too. It looks like
tobacco is going to fetch a better price this fall than it's fetched for
three or four years back, and the young plants I've put in are coming up
mighty promising. But I need money to carry me over until I can get
my tobacco cured and marketed. Don't you see how it is with me, Mr.
Felsburg? Just a little temporary accommodation from you and I'm
certain--”
“Business is business, Mr. Albritton,” said Mr. Felsburg, cutting in on
him. “And all my life I have been a business man. Is it good business,
I should like to ask you, that I should loan you yet more money when
already you owe me money which you cannot pay? Huh, Mr. Albritton?”
“Maybe it ain't good business; but, just as one human being to
another--”
“Oh! So now you put it that way? Well, suit yourself. We talk, then,
as two human beings, eh? We make this a personal matter, eh? Good! That
also is how I should prefer it should be. Listen to me for one little
minute, Mr. Albritton. I am going to speak with you about a small
matter which happened quite a long while ago. Do you perhaps re-member
something which happened in the spring of the year eighteen hundred and
sixty--the year before the war broke out?”
“Why, yes,” said Albritton after a moment of puzzled thought. “That was
the year my father died and left me the place; the same year that I got
married too. I wasn't but just twenty-two years old then. But I don't
get your drift, Mr. Felsburg. What's the year eighteen-sixty got to do
with you and me?”
“I'm coming to that pretty soon,” said Mr. Felsburg. He sat up straight
now, his eyes ashine and his hands clenched on the arms of his chair.
“Do you perhaps remember something else which also happened in that
year, Mr. Albritton?”
“I can't say as I do,” confessed the puzzled countryman.
“Then, if you'll be so good as to listen, Mr. Albritton, I should be
pleased to tell you. Maybe I have got a better memory than what your
memory is. Also, maybe I have got something on me to remember it by. Now
you listen to me!
“There was a hot day in the springtime of that year, when you sat on the
porch of your house out there in the country, and a little young Jew-boy
pedlar came up your lane from the road, with a pack on his back; and he
opened the gate of your horse lot, in the front of your house, and he
came through that gate.
“And you was sitting there on your porch, just like I am telling you;
and you yelled to him that he should get out--that you did not want to
buy nothing from him. Well, maybe he was new in this country and could
not understand all what you meant. Or maybe it was that he was very
tired and hot, and that he only wanted to ask you to let him sit down
and take his heavy pack off his back, and drink some cool water out of
your well, and maybe rest a little while there. And maybe, too, he had
not sold anything at all that day and hoped that if he showed you
what he had you would perhaps change your mind and buy something from
him--just a little something, so that his whole day would not be wasted.
“So he came through that gate of your horse lot and he kept on coming.
And then you cursed at him, and you told him again he should get
out. But he kept coming. And then you called your dogs. And two dogs
came--big, mean dogs--out from under your house.
“And when he saw the dogs come from under the house, that young Jew boy
he turned round and he tried to run away and save himself. But the
pack on his back was heavy, and he was already so very tired, like I am
telling you, from walking in the sun all day. And so he could not run
fast. And the dogs they soon caught him, and they bit him many times in
the legs; and then he was more worse scared than before and the biting
hurt him very much, and he cried out.
“But you stood there on your porch; and you clapped your two hands
together and you laughed to hear that poor little pedlar boy cry out.
And your dogs chased him away down the lane, and they bit him still
more in his legs. Maybe perhaps you thought a poor Jew would not have
feelings the same as you? Maybe perhaps you thought he would not bleed
when those sharp teeth bit him in his legs? So you clapped your hands
and you laughed to see him run and to hear him yell out that way. Do you
remember all that, Mr. Albritton?”
He stood up now, shaking all over; and his eyes glittered to match
the diamond on his quivering hand. They glittered like two little hard
bright stones.
Under the tan the face of the man at whom he glared turned a dull
brick-dust red. Albritton put up a hand to one burning cheek; and as he
made answer the words came from him haltingly, self-accusingly:
“I don't remember it, Mr. Felsburg; but if you say it's true--why, I
reckin it must 'a' happened just the way you tell it. It was a low-down,
cruel, mean thing to do; and if it was me I'm sorry for it--even now,
after all these years. I wasn't much more than a boy, though; and--”
“You were a grown man, Mr. Albritton; anyhow, you were older than the
little pedlar boy that your dogs bit. You say you are sorry now; but you
forgot about it, didn't you?
“I didn't forget about it, Mr. Albritton! All these years I have not
forgotten it. All these years I have been waiting for this day to make
you sorry. All these years I have been waiting for this day to get even
with you. I was that little Jew boy, Mr. Albritton. In my legs I have
now the red marks from your dogs' teeth. And so now you come here and
you stand here before me”--he raised his chubby clenched fists and shook
them--“and you--you--you--ask me that I should do you favours!”
“Mr. Felsburg,” said Albritton--and his figure drooped as though he
would prostrate himself before the triumphant little man--“I ain't
saying this because I hope to get any help from you in a money way--I
know there's no chance of that now--I'm saying it because I mean it from
the bottom of my soul. I'm sorry. If I thought you'd believe me I'd be
willing to go down on my knees and take my Bible oath that I'm sorry.”
“You should save yourself the trouble, Mr. Albritton,” said Mr.
Felsburg, calmer now. “In the part of your Bible which I believe in it
says 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,' Mr. Albritton.”
“All right!” said Albritton. “You've had your say--you're even with me.”
He turned from the gloating figure of the other and started to go. From
the chair in which he had reseated himself, Felsburg, a pic-ture of
vengeance gratified and sated, watched him, saying nothing until the
bankrupt had descended the first step of the stairs and the second. Then
he spoke.
“You wait!” he ordered in the tone of a master. “I am not yet done.”
“What's the use?” said Albritton; but he faced about, humbled and
crushed. “There ain't anything you could say or do that would make me
feel any worse.”
“Come back!” bade Felsburg; and, like a man whipped, the other came back
to the doorway.
“You're even with me, I tell you,” he said from the threshold. “What's
the use of piling it on?”
Mr. Felsburg did not answer in words. He reached behind him to his desk,
wadded up something in his fingers, and, once more rising, he advanced,
with his figure distended, on Albritton. Albritton flinched, then
straightened himself.
“Hit me if you want to,” he said brokenly. “I won't hit back if you do.
I deserve it.”
“Yes, I will hit you,” said Felsburg. “With this I will hit you.”
Into Albritton's right hand he thrust a crumpled slip of paper. At the
wadded paper Albritton stared numbly.
“I don't know what you are driving at,” he said; “but, if this is a
notice of foreclosure, I don't need any notice.”
“Look at it--close,” bade Felsburg.
And Albritton, obeying, looked; and his face turned from red to white
and then to red again.
“Now you see what it is,” said Felsburg. “It is my check for four
hundred dollars. I loan it to you--without security; and to-day I fix up
those mortgages for you. Mr. Albritton, I am even with you. All the days
from now on that you live in your house I am getting even with you--more
and more every day what passes. And now, please, go away.”
He turned from the other, ignoring the fumbling hand that would have
taken his own in its grasp; and, resting his elbows on his desk, he put
his face in his cupped palms and spoke from between his fingers:
“I ask you again--please go away!”
When Judge Priest had finished telling me the story, in form much as I
have retold it here, he sat back, drawing hard on his pipe, which had
gone out. Bewildered, I pondered the climax of the tale.
“But if Mr. Felsburg really wanted to get even,” I said at length, “what
made him give that man the money?”
The Judge scratched a match on a linen-clad flank and applied the flame
to the pipe-bowl; and then, between puffs, made answer slowly.
“Son,” he said, “you jest think it over in your spare time. I reckin
mebbe when you're a little older the answer'll come to you.”
And sure enough, when I was a little older it did.