“Then you _don't_ know,” says she; and the next thing I knew I'd been
eased out the back door and she was grinning at me through the crack of
it with superiousness all over her face.
So I was walking slow around towards the front thinking to myself how
the Irish was a great people; and shall I go to Chicago and maybe get a
job sailing on the lakes till navigation closes, or shall I go back to
Omaha and work in the railroad yards again, which I don't like much, or
shall I go on down to Saint Looey just to see what's doing. And then I
thinks: “Billy, you was a fool to let that circus walk off and leave
you asleep with nothing over you but a barb wire fence this morning, and
what are you going to do now? First thing you know you'll be a regular
hobo, which some folks can't distinguish you ain't now.” And then I
thinks I'll go down to the river and take a swim and lazy around in the
grass a while and think things over and maybe something will happen.
Anyways, you can always join the army. And just when I was thinking that
I got by one of them naked stone heathens that was squirting water out
of a sea shell and a guy comes down the front steps on the jump and nabs
me by the coat collar. I seen he was a doctor or else a piano tuner by
the satchel he dropped when he grabbed me.
“Did you come out of this house?” he says.
“I did,” I says, wondering what next.
“Back in you goes,” he says, marching me towards the front steps.
“They've got smallpox in there.”
I liked to a-jumped loose when he said that, but he twisted my coat
collar and dug his thumbs into my neck and I seen they wasn't no use
pulling back. If a guy that's knocking around mixes up with one of the
solid citizens the magistrate's going to give him the worst of it on
principle. I ain't no hobo and never was, and never traveled much with
none of them professional bums, but there has been times I had hard work
making some people believe it. I seen I couldn't jerk away and I seen I
couldn't fight and so I went along. He rung the door bell, and I says:
“Smallpox ain't no inducement to me, doc.”
“No?” says he. And the door opened, and in we went. The girl that opened
it, she drew back when she seen me.
“Tell Professor Booth that Dr. Wilkins wants to see him,” says the doc,
not letting loose of me.
And we stood there saying nothing till the per-fessor come in, which he
did slow and absent-minded. When he seen me he stopped and took off a
pair of thick glasses that was split in two like a mended show case, so
he could see me better, and he says:
“What is that you have there, Dr. Wilkins?”
“A guest for you,” says Dr. Wilkins, grinning all over himself. “I
caught him leaving the house, and you being under quarantine and me
being secretary to the board of health, I'll have to ask you to keep him
here until we can get Miss Margery on her feet again,” he says. Or they
was words to that effect, as the lawyers asks you.
“Dear me,” says Perfessor Booth, kind o' helplesslike.
And he put his glasses on and took them off again, and come up close and
looked at me like I was one of them amphimissourian specimens in a free
museum. “Dear me,” he says, looking worrieder and worrieder all the
time. And then he went to the foot of the stairs and pipes out in a
voice that was so flat-chested and bleached-out it would a-looked just
like him if you could a-saw it--“Estelle,” he says, “O Estelle!”
I thinks the perfessor is one of them folks that can maybe do a lot
of high-class thinking, but has got to have some one tell 'em what the
answer is. But I doped him out wrong as I seen later on.
Estelle, she come down stairs looking like she was the perfessor's big
brother. I found out later she was his old maid sister. She wasn't no
spring chicken, Estelle wasn't, and they was a continuous grin on her
face. I figgered it must of froze there years and years ago. They was
a kid about ten or eleven years old come along down with her, that had
hair down to its shoulders and didn't look like it knowed whether it was
a girl or a boy. Miss Estelle, she looks me over in a way that makes me
shiver, while the doctor and the per-fessor jaws about whose fault it is
the smallpox sign ain't been hung out. And when she was done listening
she says to the perfessor: “You had better go back to your laboratory.”
And the perfessor he went along out, and the doctor with him.
“What are you going to do with him, Aunt Estelle?” the kid asks her.
“What would _you_ suggest, William Dear?” asks his aunt. I ain't feeling
very comfortable, and I was getting all ready just to natcherally bolt
out the front door now the doctor was gone. Then I thinks it mightn't be
no bad place to stay in fur a couple o' days, even risking the smallpox.
Fur I had ricolected I couldn't ketch it nohow, having been vaccinated
a few months before in Terry Hutt by compulsory medical advice, me being
temporary engaged in repair work on the city pavements through a mistake
in the police court.
William Dear looks at me when his aunt put it up to him just as solemn
as if it was the day of judgment and his job was separating the fatted
calves from the goats and the prodigals, and he says:
“Don't you think, Aunt Estelle, we better cut his hair and bathe him and
get him some clothes the first thing?”
“William is my friend,” thinks I, and I seen right off he was one of
them serious kids that you can't tell what is going on inside their
heads.
So she calls James, which was the butler, and James he buttled me into a
bathroom the like of which I never see before; and he buttled me into a
suit of somebody's clothes and into a room at the top of the house next
to his'n, and then he come back and buttled a razor and a comb and brush
at me; him being the most mournful-looking fat man I ever seen, and he
informs me that me not being respectable I will eat alone in the kitchen
after the servants is done. People has made them errors about me before.
And I looks around the room and I thinks to myself that this is all
right so far as it has went. But is these four walls, disregarding
the rest of the house, to be my home, and them only? Not, thinks I, if
little Billy knows it. It was not me that invited myself to become the
guest of this family; and if I got to be a guest I be damned if I don't
be one according to Hoyle's rules of etiquette or I'll quit the job.
Will I stay in this one room? Not me. Suppose the perfessor takes it
next? And then William Dear? And suppose when William Dear gets through
with it he gives it to Aunt Estelle? Am I to waste the golden hours
when, maybe, my country needs me, just for accommodation? But I thinks
it's all right for a day or two and then I'll leave my regrets and go on
down to Saint Looey or somewheres. And then James he buttles back into
the room like a funeral procession and says the perfessor says he wants
to see me in the laboratory.
That was a big room and the darndest looking room I ever see, and it
smelt strong enough to chase a Hungarian pig sticker out of a Chicago
slaughter house. It smelt like a drug store had died of old age and got
buried in a glue factory. I never seen so much scientific effusions and
the things to hold 'em in mixed up in one place before. They must of
been several brands of science being mixed up there all to once. They
was dinky little stoves, they was glass jars of all shapes and sizes
labeled with Dago names standing around on shelves like in one of them
Dutch delicatessen stores; they was straight glass tubes and they was
glass tubes that had the spinal contortions; they was bones and they
was whole skeletons, and they was things that looked like whisky stills;
they was a bookcase full of bugs and butterflies against one wall; they
was chunks of things that might have been human for all I know floating
around in vats like pickled pork in a barrel; they was beer schooners
with twisted spouts to them; they was microscopes and telescopes and
twenty-seven shapes and sizes of knives; they was crates of stuff that
was unpacked and crates that wasn't; and they was tables with things
just piled and spilled over 'em, every which way, and the looks of
everything was dirty on account of the perfessor not allowing any one in
there but himself and Miss Estelle and William. And whether you knowed
anything about them different brands of science or not you could see the
perfessor was one of them nuts that's always starting to do things and
then leaving them go and starting something else. It looked as if the
operating room of an emergency hospital and a blacksmith shop and a
people's free museum and a side show full of freaks, snakes and oneeyed
calves had all gone out and got drunk together, all four of them, and
wandered into a cremation plant to sleep off that souse; and when they
woke up they couldn't tell which was which nor nothing else except
they had a bad taste in their mouth and was sentenced to stay there
unseparated and unhappy and unsociable in each other's company for
evermore. And every time you turned around you stepped on something new,
and if you saw a rat or a lizard or a spider you better let him alone
for how was you going to tell he was dead or alive till he crawled up
you?
The perfessor, he was setting over by a window, and he pushed out
another chair for me and he says sit down.
“You are a gentleman of leisure?” he says, with a grin; or words to that
effect.
“I work at that sometimes,” I told him, “although it ain't rightly my
trade.”
“Biddy Malone says you're an agnostic,” he says, looking at me close.
It won't do, I thinks, to spring none of them agnostic gags on him, so I
says nothing.
“I'm one myself,” he says.
“Regular,” I asks him, “or just occasional?” He kind o' grins again, and
I thinks: “Billy, you're making a hit somehow.”
Then he says, like he was apologizing to someone about something: “Being
interested in sociology and the lower classes in general, I sent for you
to get some first-hand observations on your train of mind,” he says. Or
it was words like them. “I'm a sociologist,” he says.
I seen I made a hit before and I thinks I'll push my luck, so I swells
up and says:
“I'm a kind of sociologist myself.”
“Hum,” he says, thoughtful-like. “Indeed? And your itinerant mode of
subsistence is persecuted in pursuit of your desire to study knowledge
of the human specimen and to observe wisdom as to the ways they live
in the underworld,” he says. Or it was words to that effect. I wish I'd
a-had him wrote them words down. Then I'd a-had 'em just right now. I
seen a bunch of good words help a man out of a hole before this. Words
has always been more or less my admiration; you can never tell what one
of them long gazaboos is going to do till you spring it on somebody. So
I says:
“That's me, perfessor. I likes to float around and see what's doing.”
Then he tells me that sociology was how the criminal classes and the
lower classes in general was regarded by the scientific classes, only
it's a difficult brand of science to get next to, he says, on account
of the lower classes like me being mostly broke out with environment he
says, unbeknownst even to theirselves. He's not what you would call a
practicing sociologist all the time, being afraid, I suppose, he would
catch it if he got too close to it; he's just one of the boys that
writes about it, so as both the lower classes and the scientific classes
won't make no bad breaks, he says.
But what he wants of me just now ain't got nothing to do with that, he
says. He's been making experiments with all kinds of canned victuals,
that is put up with acid that eats holes in your stomach, he says, and
so long as I'm going to be a guest he's going to mix some of them acids
in my chuck and weigh me after each meal. He says I'll start slow and
easy and there won't be nothing dangerous about it. He's been practicing
on William Dear and Miss Estelle, which I suppose it was the acids got
into her smile, but he's going to give them a rest, them being naturally
delicate. I ain't got no kick, I thinks, and I'm going to leave this
place in a day or two anyhow. Besides, I always was intrusted in
scientific things and games of chance of all kinds.
But I didn't leave in a few days, and the first thing I knew I'd been
there a week. I had pretty much the run of the house, and I eat my meals
with Biddy Malone, the only uncomfortable feature of being a guest being
that Miss Estelle, soon as she found out I was an agnostic (whatever
brand of science that is, which I never found out to this day, just
having come across the word accidental), she begun to take charge of my
religion and intellectuals and things like that. She used to try to cure
the perfessor, too, but she had to give it up for a bad job, Biddy says.
Biddy, she says Mrs. Booth's been over to her mother's while this
smallpox has been going on; which I hadn't knowed they was a Mrs. Booth
before. And Biddy, she says if she was Mrs. Booth she'd stay there, too.
They's been a lot of talk, anyhow, Biddy says, about Mrs. Booth and some
musician fellow around town. But Biddy she likes Mrs. Booth, and even if
it was so who could blame her?
Things ain't right around that house since Miss Estelle's been there,
which the perfessor's science, though worrying to the nerves, ain't cut
much ice till about four years ago when Miss Estelle come.
But Mrs. Booth she's getting where she can't stand it much longer, Biddy
says. I didn't blame her none for feeling sore about things.
You can't expect a woman that's pretty and knows it, and ain't more'n
thirty-two or three years old, and don't look it, to be interested in
mummies and pickled snakes and the preservation of the criminal classes
and chemical profusions, not _all_ the time. And maybe when she'd ask
the perfessor if he wasn't going to take her to the opera he'd ask her
did she know them Germans had invented a newfangled disease or that it
was a mistake about them Austrians hiding their heads in the sand when
they are scared, which any fool that's ever seen 'em working around a
coal mine ought to of knowed. It wouldn't a-been so bad if the perfessor
had just picked out one brand of science and stuck to it. She could
a-got used to any one kind and knowed what to expect. But maybe this
week the perfessor's bug would be ornithography, and he'd be chasing
sparrows all over the front lawn; and next week it would be geneology
and he'd be trying to grow bananas on a potato vine. Then, he'd get
worried about the nigger problem in the south, and settle it all
up scientific and explain how ethnology done the whole damn thing,
lynchings and all, and it never could be straightened out till it was
done scientific. Every new gag that come out the perfessor took up with
it, Biddy says; one time he'd be fussing around with gastronomy through
a telescope and the next he'd be putting astrology into William's
breakfast food.
They was a row on all the time about the kids, which they hadn't been
till Miss Estelle come. Mrs. Booth she said they could kill their own
selves if they wanted to, but she had more right than anybody to say
what went into William's digestive ornaments, and she didn't want him
brought up scientific nohow, but just human. He was always making notes
on William, which was how William come to take so little interest in
life after a while. But Miss Estelle, she egged him on. She seen he
didn't have no sense about his money, which had been left to him when
he was a sure enough perfessor in a college before he quit and went nuts
and everything begun to go wrong between him and Mrs. Booth, so Miss
Estelle she took to running his money herself; but she seen likewise
that when it come to writing articles about William's insides and
intellectuals the perfessor he was a genius. Well, maybe he was; but
Biddy wouldn't let him try none of them laboratory gags on her though
she just as soon be hypnotized and telepathed as not just to humor him.
Miss Estelle, she eat what the perfessor give her, and after a while
she says she'll take charge of the children's education herself, their
mother being a frivolous young thing, and it was too bad, she says, a
genius like him couldn't a-mar-ried a noble woman who would a-understood
his great work for humanity and sympathized with it. So while the
perfessor filled William and Miss Margery up on new discovered food and
weighed 'em and probed 'em and sterilized 'em and did everything else
but put 'em in glass bottles, Miss Estelle she laid out courses of
reading matter for them and tended to their religion and intellectuals
and things like that. I reckon they never was two kids more completely
educated, inside and out. It hadn't worked much on Miss Margery yet, her
being younger than William. But William took it hard and serious, being
more like his father's family, and it made bumps all over his head. I
reckon by the time William was ten years old he knew more than a whole
high school, and every time that boy cut his finger he just naturally
bled science. But somehow he wasn't very chipper, and whenever the
perfessor would notice that he and Miss Estelle would change treatment.
But Biddy liked William just the same, they hadn't spoiled his
disposition none; and she said he seen a lot of things his aunt never
would a-seen, William did. One day when I first was a guest I says to
his aunt, I says:
“Miss Booth, William looks kind o' pale to me like he was getting too
much bringin' up to the square inch.”
She acted like she didn't care for no outsiders butting in, but I
seen she'd noticed it, too, and she liked William, too, in a kind of
scientific sort of a way, and she says in a minute:
“What do you suggest?”
“Why,” says I, “what a kid like that needs is to roll around and play in
the dirt now and then, and yell and holler.”
She went away like she was kind o' mad about it; but about an hour later
the perfessor sent word for me to come down to the labaratory, and Miss
Estelle was there.
“We have decided that there is something in what you say,” says the
perfessor. “Even the crudest and most untrained intellectuals has now
and then a bright hunch from which us men of special knowledge may take
a suggestion,” he says, or words to that effect. And they was a whole
lot more, and they was more scientific than that. I didn't know I'd done
nothing important like that, but when he told me all about it in science
talk I seen I made a ten strike, though I should of thought anyone could
of saw all William needed was just to be allowed to be a little more
human.
But what do you think--I never was so jarred in my life as I was the
next day. I seen Miss Estelle spreading an oilcloth on the floor, and
then the butler come in and poured a lot of nice, clean, sterilized dirt
on to it. And then she sent for William.
“William Dear,” she says, “we have decided that what you need is more
recreation mixed in along with your intellectuals. You ought to romp and
play in the dirt, close to the soil and nature, as is right for a youth
of your age. For an hour each day right after you study your biology and
before you take up your Euclid you will romp and play in this dirt like
a child of nature, and frolic. You may now begin to frolic, William, and
James will gather up the dirt again for to-morrow's frolic.” Or it was
words to that effect.
But William didn't frolic none. He seen things they didn't. He just
looked at that dirt, and he come the nearest to smiling I ever seen
William come; and then he come the nearest to getting mad I ever seen
William come. And then he says very serious:
“Aunt Estelle,” he says, “I shall _not_ frolic. I have come to that
place in my discretions where my intellectuals got to work some for
theirselves. It is them intellectuals which you have trained that
refuses to be made ridiculous one hour each day between the biology
lesson and the Euclid lesson with sand.” Those was not William's exact
words, which he always had down as slick as his pa, but they was what he
meant. William was a serious kid, but he seen things his aunt never had
no idea of. And he never did frolic, neither, and all that nice clean
dirt had to be throwed out by the stable amongst the unscientific dirt
again.
That was before Biddy Malone told me about why it was that the perfessor
and his wife didn't get along well, and as I was saying I didn't
blame her none, Miss Estelle having finally beat her out about her own
children, too; and she feeling she didn't scarcely own 'em no more, and
they hardly daring to kiss their own mamma with Miss Estelle in the room
because of germs, so Biddy says. Biddy, she says the perfessor is all
right, he's just a fool and don't mean no harm by his scientific gags,
but Miss Estelle she's a she-devil and takes that way to make herself
the boss of that house. If she wasn't there Mrs. Booth would have been
boss and never let the perfessor know it and things wouldn't a-been so
bad. Which shows that so long as every house got to have a boss it ain't
so much difference if it's a him or her so long as it ain't a relation.
The perfessor always eats his dinner in one of them coats with the
open-face vest to it, and one night I thinks I will, too. When you is in
Rome you does like the Dagos does, I thinks.
So I sends for James along before dinner time and I says: “Where is my
dinky clothes to eat dinner in?” I says.
James he says I'm to continue to eat dinner by myself. Which is all
right, I tells him, but I'll do it in style or I'll quit the job. So he
goes and asks Miss Estelle, and she comes in with that lemon grin on,
but looking, too, like I done something to please her.
“Is it true,” she says, “that already the effects of a refined
environment has overcome defections in early training and a misfortune
in ancestral hereditary?” she says. Or they was words to that effect.
“It is true,” I says. And the perfessor's being too small she made James
give me his'n. But when I seen all that shirt front it made me feel
kind of uncomfortable, too. So I takes them off again and puts on my old
striped sweater and puts on the vest and coat over that, and the effect
of them red stripes running crossways is something gorgeous with one of
them open-face vests over it.
So after I eat I don't want to go to bed and I gets a box of the
perfessor's cigars and goes into the library and thinks I'll see if he's
got anything fit to read. I dig around for a while among them shelves,
and most everything is one brand of science or other, but finally I got
hold of a little book that was real interesting. That was the damndest
book! It was all in rhyme, with the explanations of the rhyme printed in
real talk down the sides so as you could tell where you was at and what
it was about. It's about an Ancient Mariner. The nut that wrote it he's
never been sailing none, I bet; but he can make you feel like you been
going against the hop in one of them Chink joints. Of course, there
ain't nothing real literary about it like one of them Marie Corelli
stories I read once and it ain't got the excitement of a good Bill Hart
movie or a Nick Carter story, but I got real interested in it. The I-man
of that story he was a Jonah to the whole ship. He seen an albatross
circling around, and he up with his air gun and give him his'n. It
wasn't for nothing to eat, but just to be a-shooting. And from that on
everybody gets as sick of living as a bunch of Chicago factory hands
when another savings bank busts, and they all falls down and curses him.
And the snakes wiggles all over the top of the water like I seen 'em one
time when they cleaned out a reservoir where one of them prairie towns
gets its drinking water from. And the Ancient Mariner he tries to die
and can't make it; and their ghosts is whizzing all around that ship and
they go by him in the moonlight like a puff of steam goes by you on a
frosty morning out of an engine-room manhole. And there's a moral to
that story, too. I bet the fellow that doped that out had been on an
awful bat. I like to of talked with that nut. They was a fellow named
Looney Hogan use to have them phoney hunches, and he use to tell me what
he saw after he had 'em. Looney was awful good company and I use to like
to hear him tell what he seen and what he thinks he seen, but he walked
off of a grain barge up to Duluth when he was asleep one night and he
never did wake up.