Saturdays and Sundays, and the feller owns two or three galleries now.
He goes around tending to all of them and I have charge of one; there's
my card. I'm thinking about quitting, though, and going out West again;
business is too good, that's the trouble. No excitement; I'm getting
discouraged. Too much responsibility. Lord, Bill, I'm a _tramp_; I am;
yes, sir, that's what I am. I was raised that way. I like the life. The
man across the street from me owns a restaurant, where I eat; offered to
loan me a couple of hundred dollars to buy the gallery where I am. Ha!
Ha! That's a good one, isn't it?
"Girls, Bill! you ought to see the girls that come to my place, Bill,
yes, sir, to get their pictures taken. They all call me 'Jack.' Yes,
everybody around here calls me 'Jack.' I used to be 'John,' you know, at
home, where we were boys together; great days those, yes, sir; I never
will forget those days.
"Why, you know, I could have been married, Bill; yes, sir, ha! ha! Me, a
tramp. A fine girl, too, a regular lady, the real article, yes, sir,
rich too, yes, sir. Why I went over there one day, and their dog--a
blame little black dog--was sick; you ought to have seen the case of
medicine they had for that dog. A whole blame box full of bottles of
medicine; good medicine, too, yes, sir; why, I would have liked to have
had some of that medicine myself.
"I'll take you over and introduce you to some of those girls; here's a
picture I took of one; she's a daisy. I took her to the theater last
Saturday night. You know, it does a feller good to see good shows at the
theater. This theater--it's a little place right near my gallery--I go
there every once in awhile; they have better shows there than they do at
the Opera House; I like 'em better. This was a fine show, 'His Mother's
Son.' Yes, sir, it does a feller good to go to the theater.
"What's the matter with your coming over and staying with me to-night?
But no, I haven't a room now; you'd have to bunk in the gallery. That's
where I sleep now. I did have a room, you know, blame fine room, running
water, hot and cold, and all that sort of thing, three dollars a week.
But I got tired of it. Yes, too comfortable, bed all made up for me
every day, and everything else. It made me sick. I like to make my own
bed. I like to rough it like I'm used to doing, yes, so I gave it up
and sleep in the gallery now where I belong. I feel at home there, and
there's plenty of room.
"Say, Bill, how are you fixed? Need any money? I've got more'n I want.
Don't know what to do with it all, you know. Not used to it, just blow
it in. Well, all right, we'll take and spend it then. Drink up, Bill,
and let's go some other place."
XIII
A NICE TASTE IN MURDERS
[Illustration]
WE are much interested in the picturesque character of Caroline.
Caroline is twelve. She is like a buxom, rosy apple. Her dress is a
"Peter Thompson." Her physical sports are running like the wind, and, in
summer, fishing. Our concern, however, is more with her mind. Caroline
is a voracious reader. We are somewhat bookish ourselves, and the
conversations between us are often frankly literary. Caroline's taste in
this matter, for one of her sex, is rather startling.
"Oh, you ought to read the 'Pit and the Pendulum,'" says Caroline. "Is
it good?" we ask. "Fine!" Caroline replies. "It's at the time of the
Inquisition, you know," she explains. "They take a man and torture him.
It's fine," declares Caroline. "The demon's eyes grow brighter and
brighter" (phrases we recall from her synopsis of the tale), "the
pendulum comes nearer and nearer--but I think he deserved to escape,"
says Caroline, "because he tried so hard." Now that is really a deep
moral observation, "because he tried so hard," and a sound questioning
of the philosophical verity of a work of art.
"There's a good murder in here," says Caroline.
"I like Sherlock Holmes," Caroline says.
She reads the "Mark of the Beast" and the "Black Cat" with great
satisfaction. For comedy or for psychological moments she does not care,
but there is nobody, we believe, with greater capacity for enjoyment of
terrible murder in horrible dark places in the land of fiction.
Night after night we heard her voice reading aloud to her visitor Emily
after the two had retired, until we fell asleep; and in the morning we
saw that the relish of horror was still upon her.
Emily had gone. Caroline had retired alone. We read by the lamp in the
living-room. We were startled and mystified to hear suddenly mingle with
the sound of the night rain all around, a long, uncertain wailing, a
melancholy, haunting, sinking, rising, halting, gruesome sound,
uncannily redolent of weird Gothic tales; the "Castle of Otranto" came
into our mind. This apparently proceeded from an "upper chamber," as
would be said in the type of story mentioned.
"That," said brother Henry, in replying doubtless to a blank face, "is
Caroline playing the flute."
No one alive, of course, has not in his head a picture of another that
in the still hours sought solace in and loved a flute, Mr. Richard
Swiveler propped up in bed, his nightcap raked, fluting out the sad
thoughts in his bosom. So in the night and the storm, does another
bizarre soul, Caroline, speak with the elements.
XIV
IDA'S AMAZING SURPRISE
[Illustration]
IN "Bleak House," I think it is, that Poor Joe keeps "movin' along." One
of the atoms of London, he passes his whole life in the midst of
thousands upon thousands of signs. Printed letters, painted letters,
carved letters, words, words, words, blaze upon him all about. Yet not a
syllable of them all speaks to him; seen but all unheard by him they
clothe his path. Poor Joe cannot read. How must he regard these strange,
unmeaning signs? What is it goes on in this head which so little can
enter? What has filtered in where the great main avenue of approach
remains, as far from the first, black and unopened? What does this mind,
sitting there far off in the dark, looking out, comprehend of the
pageant? And how does it strike him? Some such a mysterious mind looks
out from Ida's eyes.
Ida is "colored." It is my belief that though she is grown and well
formed a little child dwells in her head. I know that when I ask her to
bring me another cup of coffee and she pauses, slightly bends forward,
her lips a trifle parted, and fastens her clear, utterly innocent,
curious eyes upon me, waiting to hear repeated what she has already
heard, she sees me as a sort of toy balloon on a string, whose
incomprehensible movements excite a pleasurable wonder. As regularly as
the dinner hour comes around Ida asks, with that same amazingly
unsophisticated, interested look, if each of us will have soup. If it
were our custom occasionally not to take soup, if we had declined soup a
couple of times even, a good while ago, if even we had declined soup
once--but, as Mr. MacKeene says, what could have put it into her head
that we might not take soup? It is the same with dessert, with cereal
at breakfast. I hardly know why it is not the same with having our beds
made.
It is easy to give Ida pleasure. She has not been satiated, perhaps,
with pleasure. A very little quite overjoys her. I turn about in my
chair to reach a book, and discover Ida silently dusting the furniture.
"Why! I didn't know you were in here," I say to Ida. Ida breaks into
great light at this highly entertaining situation. "Didin you know I was
in here! Didin you!" Her eyebrows go up with delight. Her pose might be
the original of Miss Rogson's "Merely Mary Ann."
XV
NOT GULLIBLE, NOT HE
[Illustration]
"Sir," said Doctor Johnson, "a fallible being will fail somewhere," So
far as penetration, at least, is concerned, this is not true of Dean. He
is never caught without his grains of salt.
Dean believes nothing that he reads in newspapers. He is not caught, for
one thing, believing anecdotes of celebrated persons. These anecdotes
are pretty stories yearned for by a sentimental public. The public is
amusing, composed as it is of simple, guileless people who know nothing
of the world. Newspapers are concoctions of press agents, for the most
part--bait for the gullible. A citizen of the word is Dean, and he has,
alas! lost his innocence. This pleases him. You can't impose on Dean's
credulity. He hasn't got any credulity. In this respect he has much the
same effect upon his company as the Mark Twain dog that didn't have any
hind legs had upon the mind of his antagonist. That dog was hardly a
pleasure to his opponent. He was baffling.
It is perhaps a man's misfortune that he should be so without delusions.
Dean has found out there is no Santa Claus, in a manner of speaking,
while the rest of us are yet humbugged. So while we may be pleased with
our callings or our hobby-horses, our coins, or our cockle-shells, our
drums, our fiddles, our pictures, our talents, our maggots and our
butterflies, he can only shrug his shoulders and depreciate them to the
best of his ability, saying that they are very poor cockle-shells, to be
sure, though no man more than he deplores it that this is so. Though no
doubt it must be a melancholy thing to feel so severely the failings of
all, Dean's cavilings are cheerfully made always, and they come to us
filtered through a humorous nature. And to do him justice, he is
whimsically aware of his own idiosyncrasies, and readily acknowledges
them as he sees them, which is in a mellow, kindly light. "Now I could
never make money," he says humorously, as it were. But that is not the
sum of life, he knows perhaps too well.
He sees the vanity of it all, does Dean. He sees the vanity of all
useful endeavor. He sees the vanity most of all perhaps, of success.
What is this success we see around us, after all? What is the fame of
this man, this Mr. So-and-So, but sensationalism? Of what the success of
that other, but cheap notoriety, and a rich wife? They are both of them,
very probably, at heart as miserable as Dean. Ah me! 'tis a profitless
world, and there's no satisfaction in it anywhere. "Though probably you
are hardly of an age to see it yet," says Dean, and he smiles at the
juvenility of ambition. You will see it, however, when you too have
failed.
"In this age when every man you meet is a genius," says Dean--it amuses
him that he is not of the many--"I have really seen only one really
great man, and I have been compelled to know a good many of the geniuses
too." This remarkable, unique gentleman, it appears, was an old
sou'easter sawbuck of a codger up in the backwoods of Maine, where he
lived hermit-wise in a shanty, being a squatter. When Dean met him
there he felt instinctively that here he was before a _man_. Uncle Eli
was old: he was a trifle filthy; he was addicted to drink; and not what
you would call much good in any way. He was uncouth; a man with the bark
on; one of nature's noblemen. He lacked culture, and education, and
intelligence; but he had eye-teeth. Lord! He wasn't polite; he wasn't
learned; but when it came to downright bull-headed horse-sense he
knocked the socks of all of them. He was a philosopher, this old B'gosh
half-idiot wreck. By George, he was, and a great one. He reminded Dean
of Lincoln. Some of his philosophical splinters from the old rail, rough
they were but ready, rather laid over the wisdom of Hercules himself.
"Ef 'n ol' hoss wus a Billygoat mighty few Christians there be 'ud git
to Heaven." That hits the nail on the head, Dean reckons.
XVI
CRAMIS, PATRON OF ART
"Have you got any tobacco?" I inquired of Cramis.
"Sure," he replied, "I'm never without it."
He is a slave to the weed, a hopeless smoker. He hands me his pouch; the
tobacco is a little old and mildewed. When Cramis comes to visit me he
always brings a most disreputable looking pipe along in his mouth,
charred and cold. This he calls attention to, musingly, as it were, by
remarking that "that looks natural."
"I shouldn't have known you without it," I answer. Then we are the best
of friends. An old Swede, an engineer of some rare sort, a whimsical
fellow, quite a character--Cramis is greatly interested in
characters--was much addicted to his pipe (so runs Cramis's story). It
was a limb of his body. He was one of those inveterate smokers that you
find here and there about the world. One day placards announcing that
smoking was prohibited among employees in the building were posted at
conspicuous places in the mill where Olie was employed. Olie went on
smoking. The manager came through; he paused at Olie.
"Look-a-here," he said, "don't you see that sign? No smoking among
employees in this building." Olie slowly took the pipe from his mouth,
regarding it thoughtfully in his out-stretched hand as he blew a great
cloud of blue smoke.
"Where my pipe goes," he said, replacing it between his teeth, "I goes."
You may notice it: there is something of the same idiosyncrasy between
that picturesque character and Cramis.
For all the idler and the dilettante that he is, no man ever more
conscientiously attended to business than Cramis. He is at it early and
late. He is very successful. Yet he knows himself to be an impractical
cuss, a dreamer, an aesthetic visionary. No man so thoroughly reliable
was ever before so irresponsible.
On his visits at my place, Cramis writes a great quantity of letters.
All globe trotters do this, I suppose, whether it is necessary or not.
It is only natural. If Cramis did not, many of his friends would not,
no doubt, be aware that he was in Connecticut, or, indeed, that he ever
got off the island of Manhattan.
Though Cramis is by nature shrewd, saving, and methodically economical,
he is very careless about money. He has no more idea of the value of it
than Oliver Goldsmith. It is pitiful--yet lovable.
[Illustration]
Among Cramis's curious circle of acquaintances--his collection of
acquaintances is a regular menagerie, as he so often says--was a
painter, a fellow twenty-four years old and with nobody to support him.
Cramis believed, after carefully inquiring, that the fellow had talent
and might amount to something. He loaned him money. The scoundrel
squandered it, probably; at any rate, he bought no fame with it. That
was a year ago, and Cramis is eight dollars out of pocket. Still, his
heart is a brother to genius. He consulted me on the question of the
very least amount upon which a man could live, the length of time at the
smallest estimate wherein he could reasonably be expected to attain
greatness, and was for setting the fellow up in a studio elsewhere. I
pointed out to Cramis that it might possibly be years before the hungry
man became famous, and he abandoned the idea. It was too great a risk.
XVII
BARBER SHOPS AWESOME
[Illustration]
To patronize barbers' shops is a trying affair. Nothing but a crying
need of services obtained there can drive one who knows them well into
one of them. When you enter a barber shop, a long row of barber's
chairs, like a line of guns down the deck of a man-o'-war, stretching
away in perspective, confronts you. Three barbers, say, are engaged with
patrons; and they go calmly on. They are unaware of your existence. The
rest have been enjoying newspapers and leisure. You interrupt them; and
they spring, as one man, each to the head of his chair, and stand at
attention. To find such a company of well-fed, well-groomed, better-men
than-you-are suddenly at your service is disturbing; to have to insult
all the others in your selection of one is an uncomfortable thought.
They are all equally friendly toward you; but it is impossible for them
all to shave you; you must turn against some of them. There is no
retreat for you; you cannot turn around and go out. You choose the
nearest man, as the only solution: and the others show their displeasure
by returning to their seats. A fiend is in this man whom you have
chosen; his suavity was a diabolical mask. He gloats in publicly
humiliating you. He forces you to confess there before his "gang" that
you do not want anything but a shave. You have brought this man from his
newspaper simply to shave you! Now the number of things the barber
manages to do to you against your desire is a measure of the resistant
force of your character. You deny that you need a shampoo. There is no
denying that your hair is falling out. There is no denying that you
sometimes shave yourself. You need try to conceal nothing from this man.
He sees quite through you. (You recall a certain Roundabout Paper.) He
has Found You Out! All you ask is to be allowed to go. He washes your
face for you and turns you out of the chair. You pass into the hands of
a boy, the same boy you denied to polish your shoes, a boy that has his
opinions, who plays the tune of "Yankee Doodle" on you with a
whisk-broom very much as if he snapped his fingers in your face; and you
may go.
XVIII
MUCH MARRIED STRATFORD
What an excellent thing it is that Stratford is comfortably married. He
is built for marriage. That is the life for him; a nice, quiet,
wholesome, unexciting life of home comforts. Mr. and Mrs. Stratford
dwell happily in a little nest called a cottage. Here they are
surrounded by all the sundry and divers chattels and effects incident to
the life they follow.
[Illustration]
In order that he may be properly protected against the elements,
Stratford is plentifully supplied with overshoes, earbobs, Storm King
chest protectors, mufflers, and umbrellas. He arms himself with these
instruments according to the precise demand of each different occasion.
Going out into the weather is an undertaking, and an adventure,
accompanied by hazardous risks. With Stratford, preparation for it is a
system and a science. Sometimes, however, Stratford's judgment errs in
the matter of precaution. One day last week Stratford went downtown.
Yielding to his vanity on that day, he recklessly wore kid gloves
instead of his mittens, which were so much more suited to the then
prevailing inclement weather. Now he suffers from it. He has a cough,
and is compelled to keep his breast goose-greased.
Few people realize the importance of health, and the relation of diet to
health. Pork is not wholesome. New potatoes are very hard to digest.
Cream should never be eaten with peaches. This pernicious combination
curdles. Stratford knows much more about these things than does the
writer, which is fortunate for Stratford; the writer has only attempted
to point out and warn you against a few of the most important, which he
learned from Stratford. Stratford learned all this from experience. Last
evening at dinner Stratford drank two cups of coffee. He did not sleep a
wink all the night in consequence. Coffee is very bad for the nerves,
very bad.
It may be that there are many persons like the writer in not knowing how
to serve coffee. The cream should always be put in the cup first, then
the coffee poured on. Though you may not be aware of the fact, it
absolutely ruins coffee to serve it any other way. It is better to put
sugar on oatmeal after the cream is on. The writer does not know why;
but it is better.
[Illustration]
Though one would hardly suspect it, in his youth Stratford was
considerable of a rake. He often tells the story. It appears that in a
spirit of reckless dare-deviltry on an occasion Stratford partook of
some spirituous liquor. Now Stratford has a tolerably strong head. But
this wine--or was it cocktail?--proved almost too much for him. Ah,
well! those wild and lawless days are past and gone. Stratford has
reformed, and will not fill a drunkard's grave. No one, we hope,
respects Stratford the less for having been a little wild. We all hate a
milksop, you will agree.
XIX
A HUMAN CASH REGISTER
Across the table from a lodger sits Mr. Fife. Mr. Fife is a clerk. This
statement comprises, not inadequately, his memoirs.
[Illustration]
When a man speaks to you of the useful piece of mechanism called a cash
register, you comprehend him perfectly. You know what a cash register
is, for what purpose it was designed, how it looks, how much
approximately it is worth, what it will perform, and what it will
remain--a cash register. A cash register could not have been born a toy
balloon, spent its youth as a bicycle, been educated as a pulpit, have
imprudently married a footlight, been forced to obtain employment as a
cash register, but cherishes a secret ambition to be a typewriter and
solace itself in turn as a violin, a mug of ale, and a tobacco pipe. A
lodger does not say that Mr. Fife is no better in any way than a cash
register. A mother nursed him at her breast, watched him as he slept; he
was somebody's baby. A grown man was strangely moved, probably, when he
was born. He played somewhere as a child. Dirty little brothers and
sisters, perhaps, were his. He was spanked and had diseases and suffered
and was frightened and rejoiced. Hearts have been glad when he was near.
One or two little girls, no doubt, have admired him very much. Some
woman, probably somewhere, admires him still. A lodger does not say that
Mr. Fife has no inner life. He does not say that the forces of existence
constantly, ceaselessly beating in on this man (or rather clerk) are not
here slowly, inevitably shaping a moral character, this way or that. But
as this human life sits here at Mrs. Wigger's board a clerk is here,
with his past and his future.
Mr. Fife has a "furnished room" somewhere around on the next street, and
only takes his meals at Mrs. Wigger's.
XX
IT STANDS TO REASON
On the hotel porch a large, earnest man was delivering the argument. He
poised his pipe in his hand; and, moving forward from period to period
with judicial deliberation, choosing his words with care, building his
sentences with a nice regard for precision, he constructed his
exposition in logical sequence. He had time at his command; and, so he
gripped his audience, was in no fear of interruption. "For instance, we
will take, for instance, just for instance, do you understand? the
little town of New York to represent the whole country. Well, here we
have the little town of New York. Now, it stands to reason----" One who
chanced to overhear passed beyond range.
But what of the disquisition had been caught gave rise to an important
reflection. When you examine the subject you find there are three
fundamental phrases in arguing, in the dexterous use of which is
largely constituted the talent of the born arguer. These home-driving
phrases, which are his stock in trade, are: "It stands to reason,"
"between man and man," and "that's human nature." With these, strongly
used, one can do almost anything. "Does capital meet labor?" says the
born arguer. "No; what is the consequence? It stands to reason. Labor
goes to the wall." Or, again: "You take the generations we have now, the
young people." He smokes a while in silence. "It's human nature," comes
the philosophical conclusion. And when the arguer addresses his audience
"as between man and man," when in this direct, blunt way all the
frangipani of class and convention is cleared aside, and only their
manhood stands between them, he has got at the bed-rock of argument.
XXI
A THREE-RINGED CIRCUS
[Illustration]
Our friend MacKeene is a very interesting person. One of his most
pronounced characteristics is an assiduous striving on his part to
increase his vocabulary. We are always made aware of any of his new
acquisitions in this direction by its frequent repetition during a
conversation, the loving way in which he appears to dwell upon it, to
hug it to his heart, allow it gradually to mount to his throat, roll it
in his mouth to suck its flavor, to send it forth at length, to watch it
tenderly and admiringly (like a fine ring of tobacco smoke) until it
loses itself in the flow of speech that comes after it. We relish this
new word ourselves. It is like a play; it thrills our soul, and we sigh
when it is gone--but we know it will come again many times before the
night is passed.