me, Slim! It's Looney! I've got youse again, Slim! Gawd! I've found
yuh!”
The woman hastily snatched the child up into her arms, with a suppressed
scream, and recoiled.
The man made no sound, but he, too, drew back a step, not seeming to see
Looney's outstretched hand.
But he did see it--he saw more than that. He saw, as if they were
flashed before him at lightning speed upon a cinema screen, a dozen
scenes of a wild and reckless and indigent youth that he had thought was
dead forever; he saw these roughneck years suddenly leap alive and
stalk toward him again, toward him and his; he saw his later years of
industry, his hard-won success, his position so strenuously battled for,
his respectability that was become so dear to him, all his house of
life so laboriously builded, crumbling before the touch of this torn and
grotesque outcast that confronted and claimed him, this wavering,
dusty lunatic whom he dimly remembered. If his wife knew--if her people
knew--if the business men of this town were to know----
He shuddered and turned sick, and then with a sudden recovery he took
his child from its mother and guided her before him into the waiting
room.
Looney watched them enter, in silence. He stood dazed for a moment,
and then he slowly turned and walked down the railroad track beyond the
limits of the town. There, upon a spot of turf beside the right of
way, he threw himself upon his face and sobbed and moaned, as a
broken-hearted child sobs, as a dog moans upon its master's grave.
But after a while he looked up. Slim's star was looking down at him, red
and confident and heartening as ever. He gazed at it a long time, and
then an idea took form in his ruined brain and he said aloud:
“Now, dat wasn't _really_ Slim! I been lookin' fer Slim so long I t'ink
I see Slim where he ain't! Dat was jus' some guy wot looks like Slimmy.
Slimmy, he wouldn't never of gone back on an old pal like dat!”
The rumble of an approaching train caught his ears. He got to his feet
and prepared to board it.
“Slim, he's waitin' fer me somewheres,” he told the star. “I may be
kinda looney about some t'ings, but I knows Slim, an' dey ain't no
yellow streak nowheres in Slim!”
And with unshaken loyalty Looney the Mutt boarded the train and set off
upon his endless quest anew.
VI--Kale
|See that old fellow there?” asked Ed the waiter. “Well, his fad is
money.”
The old fellow indicated--he must have been nearly eighty--sat eating
corned beef and cabbage in a little booth in a certain delightful,
greasy old chophouse in downtown New York. It was nearly time to close
the chophouse for that day for it was almost eleven o'clock at night; it
was nearly time to close the chophouse forever, for it was the middle of
June, 1919. In a couple of weeks the wartime prohibition act would be in
force, and Ed and I had been discussing what effect it would have upon
our respective lives.
There was no one else in the place at the time except the cashier and
the old man whose fad was money, and so Ed had condescended toward me,
as a faithful customer, and was sitting down to have a drink with me.
“His fad is money?” I questioned, glancing at the old gentleman, who
seemed to be nothing extraordinary as regards face or manner or attire.
He had a long, bony New Englandish head and a short, white, well-trimmed
beard; he was finishing his nowise delicate food with gusto. “I should
say,” I added, “that his fad was corned beef and cabbage.”
“That's one of his fads,” admitted Ed the waiter, “and I don't know but
that it's as strong in him as his money fad. At any rate, I've never
seen him without one or the other was near him, and both in large
quantities.”
We had been conversing in a mumble, so that our voices should not carry
to the old gentleman. And now Ed dropped his voice still lower and
whispered:
“That's Old Man Singleton.”
I looked at him with a renewed interest. Every one knew who Old Man
Singleton was, and many persons liked to guess how much he was worth.
Ostensibly he had retired, leaving to his two sons the management of the
Singleton banking business, with its many ramifications; but actually
he kept his interest in the concern and was reputed to be coaching his
grandsons in the ways of the world, and especially that part of the
world known as “The Street.”
Starting out as a New England villager who hated poverty because his
family had always known it, he had come to New York as a lad of twenty,
with red knitted mittens on his osseous hands, and he had at once
removed the mittens and put the hands to work gathering money; it was
rumored that the hands had never turned loose any of the garnered coin;
it was even said by some persons that he still had the same pair of
mittens.
The details of his rise I cannot give; he had achieved his ambition
to be one of the very rich men of America because the ambition was so
strong within him.
“Of course his fad is money,” I muttered to Ed the waiter. “Everybody
knows that Old Man Singleton's fad is money.”
Ed was about to reply, when Mr. Singleton looked up and motioned for his
check. Ed brought it, and gave the old gentleman his hat and his stick
and his change.
“I hope everything was all right,” Mr. Singleton said Ed, palpably
bidding for recognition and a tip.
“Eh? said Singleton, looking blankly at Ed You know me, hey? I don't
recall you. Yes, everything was all right, thank you.” He gave the
waiter a dime and passed out, after another blank, fumbling look at Ed,
and a shake of his head. There was something feeble and wandering in the
old fellow's manner; his memory was going; it was obvious that before
long the rest of him would follow his memory. He shouldn't be allowed to
go around this way alone at night,” murmured Ed, watching the door
through which he had made his exit. “But I suppose he's as bull-headed
as ever about doing what he pleases, even if his legs are shaky.”
“He didn't know you,” I hinted, for I wished to learn all that Ed knew
about Old Man Singleton.
Ed is a person who has been in the world nearly fifty years; he has had
some very unusual acquaintances and experiences. It is never safe to
predict just what Ed will know and what he will not know. One afternoon,
after I had known Ed for about a year, I was attempting to argue some
scientific point with a friend who was lunching with me, and Ed, who was
waiting on us and listening, remarked: “I beg your pardon, sir, but it
wasn't in _The Descent of Man_ that Darwin said that; it was in _The
Origin of Species_.”
And yet, if you deduce from that remark that Ed knows a great deal about
modern science, you will be mistaken; as likely as not he could quote
pages of Marcus Aurelius to you, and at the same time he might pronounce
“Euripides” as if the last two syllables were one, riming with “hides”;
his reading, like his life, has been elective.
“He doesn't recall you,” I repeated.
“And that's ingratitude,” said Ed, “if he only knew it. I saved the old
man's life once.”
And Ed limped over to the table and resumed his seat opposite me. He
has a bullet under one kneecap, and at times it makes him very lame. He
would never tell me how it came there; to this day I do not know.
“From what did you save his life?” I asked. “From a man,” said Ed
moodily. “From a man who had a notion to bean him one night. And to this
day I ask myself: 'Did I do right, or did I do wrong?'”
“Tell me about it,” I insisted,
“Drink up,” said Ed, manipulating the Scotch bottle and the siphon of
seltzer. “This is one of the last highballs you'll ever have, unless
you sneak around and take it on the sly. I don't know that I should have
another one myself; it settles in this damned knee of mine if I get a
little too much.”
“Tell me when, where and how you knew Old Man Singleton,” I demanded
again.
“This knee of mine,” went on Ed, disregarding me, “is a hell of a
handicap. We were talking about prohibition--what's prohibition going to
do to me? Hey? It puts me out of a job in a barroom like this the first
thing. And what else can I do? With this game leg, you can see me going
on the stage as a Russian dancer, can't you? Or digging trenches to lay
gas pipes in, or carrying a Hod? Huh? And I can't even get a job in a
swell restaurant uptown; they don't want any gamelegged waiters sticking
around, falling over the chairs. This was about the only kind of a joint
and the only kind of a job I was fit for, this chop-house thing down
here, and it's going to close in two weeks. What then? Be somebody's
housemaid? I can't see it. I don't wish anybody any bad luck, but I
hope the guy that put over this prohibition thing gets stiff in all his
joints and lives forever.”
I sympathized and waited, and finally he began. “Old Man Singleton's
fad,” said Ed, “as I re marked before, is money. And as you remarked,
another of his fads is corned beef and cabbage--especially cabbage. He
will eat corned beef with his cabbage, and like it; or he will eat pork
with his cabbage, and like it; or he will eat cabbage without either; it
is the cabbage he likes--or kale. In fact, you could reduce his two fads
to one, and say what he likes is kale--kale in the slang sense of money,
and kale that is cabbage. And all his life he has been stuffing himself
with kale.
“His fad is kale that he can see and feel and handle and show and carry
about with him. Not merely money in the bank and stocks and bonds and
property and real estate, but actual cash. He likes to carry it with
him, and he does carry it with him. I guess he likes the feel of it in
his billfolder, and the thought that he has got it on him--on him, the
poor boy that came out of New England with the red knitted mittens on
that everybody has heard so much about. I can understand the way
he feels about it; with a folder full of thousand-dollar and
ten-thousand-dollar bills he feels safe, somehow; feels like he'll never
have to go back to that little New England town and saw cordwood and
shovel snow again.
“He's got it on him now, that folder, and I'll bet you on it. That's
what I meant when I said it wasn't safe for him to be trotting about
this way after night. For if I know it, it stands to reason others know
it, too.
“What you want to know is, how I know it. Well, I was not always what I
am now. Once I was quite a bird and wore dress suits and went to the
Metropolitan Opera and listened to Caruso as he jumped his voice from
peak to peak. Yes, sir, I know every darned acoustic in that place! They
weren't my dress suits that I wore, but they fit me. Once I moved in the
circles of the idle rich, though they didn't know it, and helped 'em
spend the unearned increment they wrung from the toil of the downtrodden
laboring man.
“Once, to come down to brass tacks, I was a butler's companion. It is
an office you won't find listed in the social directory, but it existed,
for me at least. The butler in the case was a good friend of mine by the
name of Larry Hodgkins, and being part Irish, he was an ideal English
butler. Larry and his mother were in the employ of the Hergsheimers, a
wealthy Jewish family--you know who they are if you read the financial
pages or the Sunday supplements. Mrs. Hodgkins was the housekeeper and
Larry was the butler, and when the Hergsheimers were traveling Larry and
his mother stayed in the New York house as caretakers and kept things
shipshape. And let me give you a tip, by the way: if you ever take a
notion to quit the writing game and go into domestic service, plant
yourself with a rich Hebrew family. They want things done right,
but they are the most liberal people on earth, especially to Gentile
servants.
“This Hergsheimer was Jacob Hergsheimer, and he was in right socially in
New York, as well as financially; he had put himself across into the
big time socially because, if you ask me, he belonged there; all the
Hergsheimers didn't get across, but this one did. His New York house is
uptown, between the sixties and the eighties, east of the Park, and
he wants it kept so he can drop into it with his family and a flock of
servants at any hour of the day or night, from any part of the earth,
without a minute's notice, and give a dinner party at once, if he feels
like it, and he frequently feels like it.
“It was Mrs. Hodgkins's and Larry's job to keep the fire from going
out in the boilers, so to speak, and a head of steam on, so that the
domestic ship could sail in any direction on receipt of orders by wire,
wireless or telephone. They were permanent there, but Jake Hergsheimer
and his family, as far as I could make out, never got more than an
average of about three months' use a year out of that mansion.
“This time I am speaking of was nearly ten years ago. I was a waiter in
an uptown restaurant, and both my legs were good then; Larry and I
were old pals. The Jake Hergsheimers were sailing around the world in a
yacht, and would be at it for about a year, as far as Larry knew, and
he asked me up to live with him. I accepted; and believe me, the eight
months I put in as Jake Hergsheimer's guest were _some_ eight months.
Not that Jake knew about it; but if he had known it, he wouldn't have
cared. This Jake was a real human being.
“And his clothes fit me; just as if I had been measured for them. He had
what you might call an automatic tailor, Jake did. Every six weeks, rain
or shine, that tailor delivered a new suit of clothes to the Hergsheimer
house, and he sent in his bill once a year, so Larry the butler told me.
Some people go away and forget to stop the milk; and when Jake sailed
for the other side of the world he forgot to tell anybody to stop the
tailor. Larry didn't feel as if it were any part of his duty to stop
him; for Larry liked that tailor. He made Larry's clothes, too.
“And I didn't see where it was up to me to protest. As I said, Jake's
garments might have been made for me. In fact, a great many of them
_were_ made for me. There were at least fifteen suits of clothes that
had never been worn in that house, made to my measure and Jake's, when
I became butler's companion in the establishment, and they kept right
on coming. Also, there was a standing order for orchestra seats at the
Metropolitan. Jake had a box every second Thursday, or something like
that, but when he really wanted to hear the music and see the show he
usually sat in the orchestra. Not only did his business suits fit me,
but his dress clothes fit me, too.
“I used to go often, with a lady's maid that had the same access to
clothing as I did. She was part of a caretaking staff also. Being a
writing person, you have, of course, only viewed New York's society and
near-society from the outside, and no doubt you have been intimidated by
the haughty manners of the servants. Well, when you get close to swells
and really know them personally, you will find they are human, too.
“A butler on duty is a swelled-up proposition, because he has to be that
way. But take him as you find him among his peers, and he quits acting
like the Duke of Westminster Abbey, and is real sociable. This Larry
person, for instance, could distend himself like a poisoned pup and
make a timid millionaire feel like the sleeves of his undershirt must be
showing below his cuffs; but in our little select circle Larry was the
life of the party.
“Being, as I said before, an outsider, you likely don't realize how
many of those big swell millionaires' cribs uptown are in the hands of
caretakers like Larry and his mother and me the best part of the year.
Well, they are; and there's a social life goes on in them that don't
ever get into the papers. The parties we had that year in Jake's house
would have done Jake himself good, if Jake could have got an invitation
to them. But Jake was absent, though his cellar and his grocers were
at our service; and he never questioned a bill, Larry said. There were
twelve or fifteen hand-picked servants in our little social circle that
year, and before I left there I could begin to understand how these
débutantes feel at the end of the season--sort of tired and bored and
willing to relax and go in for work and rest and athletics for a change.
“I had only been butler's companion for a few weeks when Old Man
Singleton dropped in one evening--yes, sir, Old Lemuel Singleton
himself. He came to see the butler's mother, Mrs. Hodgkins. He had known
her a good many years before, when he was wearing those red mittens and
sawing wood up in that New England town and she was somebody's Irish
cook. And he had run across her again, after he became a millionaire,
down here in New York City. He was tickled to see her, and he didn't
care a darn if she was Jake Hergsheimer's housekeeper. She could cook
cabbage and kale better than any one else in the world, and he used to
come and sit with her, and talk about that little old town up there, and
indulge in his favorite dissipation.
“Old Man Singleton has had what you call the social entrée in New York
for a good many years; for so long that some of his children, and
all his grandchildren, were born with it. But he never took it very
seriously himself. He has been an in-and-outer, you might say. If he saw
Mrs. Hodgkins around Jake's house, he would call her Mary and ask her
how folks were up home in front of Jake and his wife and a whole bunch
of guests, just as soon as not.
“And his sons and his daughters and his grandchildren never could get
him out of those ways; he always was bull-headed about doing what he
pleased, so Mrs. Hodgkins told me, and he always will be. And the old
lady liked to see him and chin with him and cook for him; and believe
me, she was some cook when she set herself to it. Not merely kale, but
everything. She didn't cook for the Hergsheimers--they had a chef for
that--but they missed it by not having her. Victuals was old Mary's
middle name, and she could rustle up some of the best grub you ever
threw your lip over.
“At first, Old Man Singleton and Mrs. Hodgkins didn't mix much with
us younger folks when we pulled a party. It wasn't that we were too
aristocratic for them, for off duty, as I said before, butlers and other
swells can be as easy and jolly as common people. But they seemed too
antiquated, if you get me; they were living too much in the past.
“And then, one night, I discovered what Old Man Singleton's fad
was--kale. Money. Big money. Big money on his person. It was this way:
Larry and I wanted to go downtown and have a little fun, but neither
of us had any cash in hand. Larry had a check for one hundred and fifty
dollars which Jake Hergsheimer had sent him, but all the tradesmen we
knew were closed at that hour, and there wasn't any way to cash it,
unless Old Man Singleton could.
“'Mr. Singleton,' says Larry to the old man, who was sitting down to a
mess of pork and kale with Mrs. Hodgkins, 'maybe you can cash this for
me.' And he handed him the check.
“The old man stopped eating and put his glasses on and pulled a
billfolder out of his pocket, with a kind of pleased smile on his face.
“'Let me see,' he says, taking out the bills, and running them over with
his fingers; 'let me see.'
“I nearly dropped dead. There wasn't a bill in there of lower
denomination than one thousand dollars; and most of them were
ten-thousand-dol-lar bills.
“'No, Larry,' says the old man, 'I'm afraid I can't, afraid I
can't--haven't got the change.'
“And while we stood there and looked, he smoothed and patted those
bills, and folded and refolded them, and then put them back into his
pocket, and patted the pocket.
“'Mary,' he says to the old woman with a grin, 'that's quite a lot of
money for little Lem Singleton to be carrying around in his pocket,
isn't it?' “'It is that, Lemuel,' said the old lady, 'and I should think
you'd be afraid of leaving it out of the bank.'
“'Well, Mary,' says the old man, 'I kind o' like to have it around me
all the time--uh--huh! a little bit where I can put my hands on it, all
the time. I used to carry gold; but I gave that up; it's too heavy, for
what it's worth. But I like it, Mary; I used to look at that gold and
say to myself, “Well, there's one thing you got, Lem Singleton, they
never thought you'd get when you left home! And they aren't going to
take it away from you, either!” It was a long time before I could make
paper seem as real to me as gold. But it does now.'
“And what does the old bird do but take it out of his pocket again and
crinkle it through his fingers and smooth it out again and pet it and do
everything but kiss it. Larry and I stood looking at him with our eyes
sticking out, and he looked at us and laughed. It came to me all of a
sudden that he liked to come where we servants were because he could
pull that kind of thing in front of us, but that he was sort of lost
among the swell-society bunch because he didn't dare pull it there and
didn't feel so rich among them.
“'My God, Larry,' I said, when we were outside the house, 'did you
notice how much kale the old man had there?'
“'Uh-huh,' said Larry. 'Mother always cooks a lot for him.'
“'Wake up, Stupid,' I said. 'I don't mean cabbage. I mean money. There
must have been nearly two hundred thousand dollars in that roll!'
“'He always has around one hundred thousand dollars on him, at least,'
says Larry. 'And I've seen him flash as high as a quarter of a million.'
“'Well,' I says, 'something ought to be done about it.'
“'What do you mean, Ed?' says he.
“'Oh, nothing,' I said.
“We walked over to get the L train downtown, saying nothing, and then
finally Larry remarked: “'Electricity is a great thing, Ed.'
“'I never said it wasn't,' says I.
“'It's a great thing,' says Larry, 'but when you sit on it, sit on
it right. For instance, I'd a darned sight rather sit in one of these
electric trains than in that electric chair up at Sing Sing.'
“'Who said anything about an electric chair?' I asked him.
“'Nobody said anything,' says Larry, 'but you're thinking so darned loud
I can get you.'
“'Piffle, peanuts and petrification,' I said. 'Take care of your own
thoughts, and I'll skim the fat off of mine myself.'
“Well, as I said, after that we got better acquainted, the old man and
I. I paid more attention to him. He interested me more. I've always
been interested in science of all kinds, and the year I spent in Jake
Hergsheimer's house I cut the leaves of a lot of books in his library
and gave them the once over. I was always interested in psychology, even
before the word got to be a headliner in the Sunday supplements, and I
took a good deal of pleasure that winter trying to get inside of Old
Man Singleton's mind. I must say, I never got very far in, at that. My
general conclusion at the end is what it was at the beginning--his fad
is kale.
“And he loved to show it, you could see that. Not that he pulled it
every time he happened to be at one of our parties. Often he would drop
in that winter from some swell social event at one of the big houses
uptown, where he had been a guest, and eat some of old Mary's chow, and
never intimate by word or look that he had all that kale on him. And
then again he'd come among us, diked out in the soup and fish, and flash
the roll, for no other reason that I know except he enjoyed seeing us
get the blind staggers, which we always did. And then he'd fuss with it
and pet it and go into a dream over it, and wake up again and grin and
talk about life with old Mary. And they agreed about life; you never
heard two more moral persons exchange views. It was sometimes as good as
a Sunday-school to listen to them for half an hour.
“One night, when they had been gassing for a while, they sort of got my
goat, and I said to him:
“'Mr. Singleton, does it ever strike you as a little peculiar that you
should have so much money and so many other people, such as myself, none
at all?'
“'No, Ed,' he says. 'No, it doesn't. That's the Lord's way, Ed! Money is
given as a sacred trust by the Lord to them that are best fitted to have
and to hold.'
“'Meaning,' I asked him, 'that if you were ever to let loose of any of
it, it might work harm in the world?'
“He chewed over that for quite a while, as if he saw something personal
in it, and he gave me a ten-dollar bill for a Christmas present. He
isn't as stingy as some people say he is; he just looks so stingy that
if he was the most liberal man on earth he would get the reputation of
being stingy.