The boys looked surprised at his not stopping at the house, but they
said nothing.
At the next corner the tramp spoke up:
“I think I'll go back now. Good night, youngsters.”
The boys trudged on, and the tramp retraced his steps. When he reached
the Hacketts' house, he paused at the gate. The children, a boy of eight
and a girl of six, looked at him curiously from the piazza.
“Are you Mr. Hackett's little boy and girl?” he asked.
The girl stepped back to the hall door and stood there. The boy looked
up at the tramp and answered, “Yes, sir.”
“Is your mother in?”
“No, she's across the street at Mrs. Johnson's.”
“Grandmother's in, though,” continued the boy. “Would you like to see
her?”
“No, no! Don't call her. I just wanted to see your mother.”
“Do you know mamma?” inquired the girl.
“Well--no. I knew her brother, your uncle.”
“We haven't any uncle--except Uncle George, and he's papa's brother,”
said the boy.
“What! Not an uncle Will--Uncle Will Kershaw?”
“O--h, yes,” assented the boy. “Did you know him before he died? That
was a long time ago.”
The tramp made no other outward manifestation of his surprise than to
be silent and motionless for a time. Presently he said, in a trembling
voice:
“Yes, before he died. Do you remember when he died?”
“Oh, no. That was when mamma was a girl. She and grandmother often talk
about it, though. Uncle Will started West, you know, when he was fifteen
years old. He was standing on a bridge out near Pittsburg one day, and
he saw a little girl fall into the river. He jumped in to save her, but
he was drowned, 'cause his head hit a stone and that stunned him. They
didn't know it was Uncle Will or who it was, at first, but mamma read
about it in the papers and Grandpa Coates went out to see if it wasn't
Uncle Will. Grandpa 'dentified him and they brought him back here, but,
what do you think, the doctor wouldn't allow them to open his coffin,
and so grandma and mamma couldn't see him. He's buried up in the
graveyard next Grandpa Kershaw, and there's a little monument there that
tells all about how he died trying to save a little girl from drownin'.
I can read it, but Mamie can't. She's my little sister there.”
The tramp had seated himself on the piazza step. He was looking vacantly
before him. He remained so until the boy, frightened at his silence,
moved further from him, toward the door. Then the tramp arose suddenly.
“Well,” he said, huskily, “I won't wait to see your mamma. You needn't
tell her about me bein' here. But, say--could I just get a look at--at
your grandma, without her knowing anythin about it?”
The boy took his sister's hand and withdrew into the doorway. Then he
said, “Why, of course. You can see her through the window.”
The tramp stood against the edge of the piazza upon his toes, and craned
his neck to see through one of the lighted windows. So he remained
for several seconds. Once during that time he closed his eyes, and the
muscles of his face contracted. Then he opened his eyes again. They were
moist.
He could see a gentle old lady, with smooth gray hair, and an expression
of calm and not unhappy melancholy. She was sitting in a rocking-chair,
her hands resting on the arms, her look fixed unconsciously on the paper
on the wall. She was thinking, and evidently her thoughts, though sad,
perhaps, were not keenly painful.
The tramp read that much upon her face. Presently, without a word, he
turned quickly about and hurried away, closing the gate after him.
When the two children told about their visitor later, their mother said:
“You mustn't talk to strange men, Tommy. You and Mamie should have come
right in to grandma.”
Their father said: “He was probably looking for a chance to steal
something. I'll let the dog out in the yard to-night.”
And their grandmother: “I suppose he was only a man who likes to hear
children talk, and perhaps, poor fellow, he has no little ones of his
own.”
The tramp knew the way to the cemetery. But first he found the
house where he had lived as a boy. It looked painfully rickety and
surprisingly small. So he hastened from before it and went up by a
back street across the town creek and up a hill, where at last he stood
before the cemetery gate. It was locked; so he climbed over the wall. He
went still further up the hill, past tombstones that looked very white,
and trees that looked very green in the moonlight. At the top of the
hill he found his father's grave. Beside it was another mound, and at
the head of this, a plain little pillar. The moon was high now and the
tramp was used to seeing in the night. Word by word he could slowly read
upon the marble this inscription:
“William Albert, beloved son of the late Thomas Kershaw and his wife
Rachel; born in Brickville, August 2, 1862; drowned in the Allegheny
River near Pittsburg, July 27, 1877, while heroically endeavouring to
save the life of a child.”
The tramp laughed, and then uttered a sigh.
“I wonder,” he said, aloud, “what poor bloke it is that's doin' duty for
me under the ground here.”
And at the thought that he owed an excellent posthumous reputation to
the unknown who had happened to resemble him fifteen years before, he
laughed louder. Having no one near to share his mirth, he looked up at
the amiable moon, and nodded knowingly thereat, as if to say:
“This is a fine joke we're enjoying between ourselves, isn't it?”
And by and by he remembered that he was being waited for, and he strode
from the grave and from the cemetery.
By the railroad the short tramp, having smoked all the refuse tobacco in
his possession, was growing impatient. Already the expected coal-train
had heralded its advent by whistle and puff and roar when his associate
had joined him.
“Found out all you wanted to know?” queried the stout little vagabond,
starting down the embankment to mount the train.
“Yep,” answered the tall vagrant, contentedly.
The small man grasped the iron rod attached to the side of one of the
moving coal-cars and swung his foot into the iron stirrup beneath. His
companion mounted the next car in the same way.
“Are you all right, Kersh?” shouted back the small tramp, standing safe
above the “bumpers.”
“All right,” replied the tall tramp, climbing upon the end of a car.
“But don't ever call me Kersh any more. After this I'm always Bill
the Bum. Bill Kershaw's dead--” and he added to himself, “and decently
buried on the hill over there under the moon.”
XI. -- UNDER AN AWNING
For ten minutes we had been standing under the awning, driven there at
two o'clock at night by a shower that had arisen suddenly.
“A pocket umbrella is one of the unsupplied necessities of the age,”
said my companion.
“Yes, and the peculiarity of the age is that while such luxuries as
the phonograph and the kinetograph multiply day by day, important
necessities remain unsupplied.”
My friend mused for a time, while he watched the reflection of the
electric light in the little street pools that were agitated by the
falling fine drops of rain.
He looked from the reflection to the light itself, and thus his eyes
turned upward.
An expression of surprise changed to mirth, and then dropping his glance
until it met mine, he said:
“Have you noticed anything peculiar about this awning?”
“No, what is it?”
“Simply that there is no awning. Look up and see. Here are the posts
and there is the framework, but only the sky is above, and we've been
getting rained upon for the past ten minutes in blissful ignorance.”
It was as he said, so we ran to the next awning, which was a fact, not a
figment of fancy.
“That reminds me,” resumed my friend, “of Simpkins. He was a young man
who used to catch cold at the slightest dampness. His being out in the
rain without an umbrella never failed to result in his remaining in the
house for two or three subsequent days.
“One night, Simpkins, surprised by an unexpected shower, took refuge
beneath the framework of an awning, which framework lacked the awning
itself. He waited for an hour, until the shower had passed, and then
joyously took up again his homeward way, without having observed his
mistake. He told me on the next day of his narrow escape from the rain.
I happened to know that the awning to which he alluded had been removed
a few weeks before. But I did not tell him so until there no longer
seemed to exist any likelihood of his catching cold from that wetting.
You see, his imagination had saved him.”
“That tale is singularly reminiscent of those dear old stories about the
man who took cold through sitting at a window that was composed of one
solid sheet of glass, so clean that he thought it was no glass at all;
and the men who, awaking in the night, stifling for want of fresh air,
broke open the door of a bookcase which they took to be a window, and
immediately noticed a pleasant draught of pure outside air.”
“There is a likeness, which simply goes toward proving the truth of all
three accounts. But the remarkable thing about Simpkins' case is that
when he once learned that there had been nothing over his head during
that rain, he immediately caught cold, although two weeks had passed
since the night of the shower. Wonderful, wasn't it?”
“Astonishing, indeed.”
Silence ensued and we meditated for awhile. Evidently the same thought
came simultaneously into the minds of both of us, for while I was
mentally commenting upon the deserted and lonely condition of the city
streets at two o'clock on a rainy night, my friend spoke:
“A man is alone with his conscience, the electric lights, the shadows
of the houses, and the sound of the rain at a time and place like this,
isn't he? Standing as we stand now, under an awning, during a persistent
rainfall, at this hour, with no other human being in sight, a man is for
the time upon a desert island. Which reminds me:
“One night, at a later hour than this, when the rain was heavier than
this, I was alone under an awning that was smaller than this. Being
without umbrella and overcoat, I saw at least a quarter of an hour
waiting for me. The thought was dismal.
“Happy idea! I would smoke. I had a cigar in my mouth in an instant.
“Horrors! I had no matches.
“The desire to smoke instantly increased tenfold. I puffed despairingly
at my unlit cigar. No miracle occurred to ignite it. I looked longingly
at the electric lights and the gas-lamps in the distance.
“Like a sailor cast upon an island and straining his eyes on the lookout
for a ship, I stood there scanning the prospect in search of a man with
a light. I was Enoch Arden; the awning was my palm-tree.
“Ten minutes passed. No craft hove in sight.
“Suddenly uncertain footsteps were heard. I looked. Some one came
that way. It was a squalid-looking personage--a professional beggar,
half-drunk. He landed upon my island, beneath my awning.
“'For charity's sake, give me a match!' I cried.
“He looked at me--'sized me up,' in the technical terminology of his
trade. Intelligence began to illumine his countenance. He saw that the
opportunity of his life had come. He held out a match.
“'I'll sell it to you for fifty cents,' he said, with a grin.
“I had erred in revealing the depth of my want, the extent of my
distress.
“I compromised by promising to give him a half-dollar if I should
succeed in lighting my cigar with his solitary match. We did succeed. He
took the fifty and started back for the saloon from whence he had come.
“Oh, my boy, the irony of fate--that same old oft-quoted irony!
“I hadn't blown three mouthfuls of smoke from that cigar when a friend
came along with a lighted cigar, an umbrella, and a box full of matches.
“The whole effect of this story lies in the value that fifty cents
possessed for me at that time. It was my last fifty cents, and two days
stood between that night and salary day.
“I had another experience--”
But a night car came in view from around a corner, my friend ran for it,
and his third tale remains untold.
XII. -- SHANDY'S REVENGE
He was old enough to know better, and a superficial observer might have
thought that he did. But a severe and haughty manner in repose is not
any indication of knowledge, nor is a well-kept beard, even when it is
turning gray. Melrose Welty, the possessor of these and other ways and
features symbolical of wisdom, had no higher occupation in life than
to sit in club-houses and cafés, telling of conquests won by him over
women, chiefly over soubrettes and chorus girls.
Of his means of livelihood, no one had certain knowledge. He always
dressed well, but he abode in a lodging-house, to which he never invited
any of his associates. He affected the society of newspaper men, some of
whom pronounced him a good fellow until they discovered that he was an
ass; and he never refused an invitation to have a drink.
When he had you at a table in a quiet corner of a café, or in front of
a bar, or in the lobby of a theatre between the acts, no matter how the
conversation began, he would invariably turn it into that realm to which
his thoughts were confined.
“I've got a supper on hand to-night after the performance,” he would
probably say, “with a blonde in the ---- Company. A lovely girl, too!
It's curious, old man, how I happened to meet her. I've talked to her
only twice, but I made a hit with her in the first five minutes. I'll
tell you how it was--”
Whereupon, if you were polite, and did not know Welty sufficiently to
flee on a pretext, he would tell you how it was, inflicting upon you the
wearisome minute details of the most commonplace thing in the world, the
birth and growth of an acquaintance between a man about town and a silly
young woman, not fastidious as to who pays for her food and drink as
long as the food and drink are adequate.
If you were a newspaper man, Welty was apt to supplement his story with
something like this:
“By the way, old fellow, if you have any pull with your dramatic editor,
can't you give her a line or two? She hasn't much to do in the piece,
but she does it well, and she's clever. She may get a good part one of
these days. Have something nice said about her, won't you?”
And if you ever gave another thought to this plea, you determined to use
whatever influence you had with the dramatic editor to this effect, that
the young woman would have to exhibit very decided cleverness indeed ere
she should have “something nice” said about her in the paper.
Welty was not wont to retain one divinity on the altar of his
conversation longer than a week. But he did so once. He talked about the
same girl every day for a month. And thereby came his undoing.
She was a slender little girl who was singing badly a small rôle in a
certain comic opera at the time of these occurrences. She had a babyish
manner across the footlights, and she was thought to be a blonde, for
she was wearing a yellow wig over her own short black hair that season.
Her first name was Emily.
Welty managed to be introduced to her by thrusting himself upon a little
party of which she was a member, and in which was one acquaintance of
his, at a restaurant one night. He called upon her at her boarding house
the next day, where she received him with some surprise, and left most
of the conversation to him. When he visited there again, she caused him
to be told that she was out, and this took place a half dozen times.
Their real acquaintance never went any further, but an imaginary
acquaintance between them, growing from Welty's wish, made great
progress in his fancy and in the stories told by him at his club to
groups of men, some of whom doubted and looked bored, while others
believed and grinned and envied.
It was at the point where Emily had quite forgotten Welty, and Welty's
stories portrayed her as recklessly adoring him and seeking him in cabs
at all hours, that Barry McGettigan, a despised young reporter, “doing
police,” heard one of Welty's accounts of an alleged interview with
Emily; and Barry, who had a way of knowing human nature and observing
people, suspected.
Now Barry cherished a deep-rooted grudge against Welty, all the more
dangerous because Welty was unaware of it. Its exact cause has never
been torn from Barry's breast. Some have ascribed it to Welty's having
mimicked Barry's brogue before a crowd in a saloon one night. Others
have laid it to the following passage of words, which is now a part of
the ancient history of the Nocturnal Club.
“Spakin' of ancestors,” Barry began, “I'd loike to bet--”
“I'd like to bet,” broke in Welty, “that your own ancestry leads
directly to the Shandy family.”
There was a general laugh, which Barry, whose nose was as flat as
any Shandy's could have been but who had never read Sterne, did not
understand.
“What did he mane?” Barry asked a friend. The friend told him to read
“Tristram Shandy.” He spent two hours in a public library next day and
learned how his facial peculiarity had been used by Welty to create a
laugh and incidentally to insult him.
This he never forgave. And he bided his time.
Now, having heard Welty boast of being the object of this Emily's
infatuation, Barry McGettigan deflected his mind from the contemplation
of murders, infanticides, fires, and other matters of general interest,
and gave his best thoughts and skill to investigating this talked-of
love affair of Welty's.
He discovered the true situation within three days. He found that Emily
was engaged to be married to a college football player who came to the
city once a week to see her.
He borrowed money, made himself very agreeable to Welty, and also got
himself introduced to the football player. The latter was a tall, lithe,
heavy-shouldered, brown-faced, thick-knuckled youth, who practiced all
kinds of athletic diversions.
Barry McGettigan sounded the football man in one brief interview one
night, between the acts of the comic opera, at the saloon next door. He
found a means of fastening himself upon the football player's esteem.
The collegian expressed a mild desire to see something of police-station
life. Barry invited him to spend an evening with him on duty at Central
Station. The collegian accepted. Barry appointed a time and named a
certain café as a meeting place.
Then Barry invited Welty to dine with him at the same café on the
same evening at the same hour. By means of his borrowed money, he had
lavished costly drinks upon Welty of late, and Welty had reason to
anticipate a dinner worth the accepting. Barry told Welty nothing of the
collegian and he told the collegian nothing more of Welty.
When the evening came, Barry found Welty awaiting him at the café. The
two sat down at a table. The preliminary cocktail had only arrived when
in walked the collegian. Barry saluted him as if the meeting had only
occurred by chance. He made the collegian and Welty known to each other
by name only. And then he ordered dinner.
When a bottle had been drunk, Barry innocently turned the current of the
conversation to women. He spoke modestly of a mythical conquest he
had recently made. The football player listened without showing much
interest. Presently Barry paused.
Welty took a drink and began:
“No, my boy,” said he to Barry, “you're wrong there. It's like you
youngsters to think you know all about the sex, but the older you grow
the less you think you know about them, until you get to my age.”
Barry made no answer, but looked at Welty with becoming deference.
The football man's eyes were wandering about the café, showing him to be
indifferent to the theme of discussion.
“I know,” continued Welty, “that many more or less writers have said,
as you say, that women must be sought and pursued to be won. They deduce
that theory from the habits of lower animals and of barbarous nations,
in which the man obtains the woman by chase and force. But it's all
a theory, and simply shows that the learned writers study their books
instead of their fellow men and women.”
The collegian looked restless, as if the conversation had gotten beyond
his depth.
Barry remained silent, and with a flattering aspect of great interest in
Welty's observations.
“Now,” went on Welty, striking the table with the bottom of his glass,
“I've had a little experience of this sort of thing in my time, and
I can say that in nine cases out of ten, once you've attracted the
attention of your game, let it alone and it will chase you. That's how
to win women.”
The collegian looked bored.
“Just to illustrate,” said Welty, “I'll tell of a little conquest of my
own. I use it because it is the first that comes to my mind, not that
I'm given to bragging about my success in these matters. I suppose
you've seen the opera at the ---- Theatre?”
The collegian ceased looking bored. Barry McGettigan sat perfectly,
unnaturally still.
“And,” pursued Welty, “you've doubtless noticed the three girls who
appear as the queen's maids of honour?”
The collegian looked somewhat concerned. Barry stopped breathing.
“Well,” continued Welty, “you mayn't believe it, for we've kept it
really quiet, one of them girls is really dead gone on me.”
The collegian opened his mouth wide, and Barry began to nervously tap
his hand upon the table.
“It's the one,” said Welty, “who wears the big blond wig. Her name's
Emi--”
There was the noise of upsetting plates, bottles, and glasses, of
a man's feet rapping up against the bottom of a table and his head
thumping down against the floor. There was the sight of an agile youth
leaping across an overturned table and alighting with one foot at each
side of the prostrate form of an astonished man, whose gray whiskers
were spattered with blood. There was the quick gathering of a crowd, an
excited explanation on the part of the collegian, a slow recovery on
the part of the man on the floor, and Barry McGettigan's vengeance was
complete.
For, by one of those incredible coincidences that have the semblance of
fatality, the football player's fist had reduced Melrose Welty's nose to
a flatness which the nose of no imaginable Shandy ever has surpassed.
XIII. -- THE WHISTLE
She was the wife of a railway locomotive engineer, and the two lived
in the newly built house to which he had taken her as a bride a year
before.
Many other people in the country railroad town used to laugh at a thing
which she had once said to a gossiping neighbour:
“I can tell the sound of the whistle on Tom's engine from all other
whistles. Every afternoon when his train gets to the crossing at the
planing-mill, I hear that whistle, and then I know it's time to get
Tom's supper.”
The gossips found something humourous in the fact that the engineer's
wife recognized the whistle of her husband's engine and knew by it when
to begin to prepare his supper. So are the small manifestations of love
and devotion regarded by coarse minds. You frequently observe this in
the conduct of certain people at the theatre when tender sentiments are
uttered upon the stage.
Perhaps the men were envious of the engineer. He had a prettier wife,
they said, when he was not present, than was deserved by a mere freight
engineer, very recently elevated from the post of fireman. Perhaps,
also, the petty malevolence of the women was due to the wife's superior
comeliness. Be that as it may, each afternoon at half-past four or
thereabouts, when Tom's whistle was blown at the crossing by the
planing-mill, loungers in the grocery store and wives in their kitchens
smiled knowingly and said:
“Time to begin to get Tom's supper, now.”
But the engineer was careless and his wife was disdainful of their
neighbours. She loved the sound of that whistle. In the earliest days of
their married life it even sent the crimson to her cheeks. The engineer
could make it as expressive as music. It began like a sudden glad cry;
it died away lingeringly, tenderly. Virtually it said to one pair of
ears:
“My darling, I have come back to you.”
Whenever the engineer pulled the rope for that particular signal, he
pictured his wife arising from her work-basket in their little parlour
with a thrill of pleasure and affection, and passing out to the kitchen.
She, likewise, at the signal, made a mental image of Tom, seated in the
engine cab, his one hand fixed upon the shining lever, his eyes fixed
upon the glistening tracks ahead.