end of the bar and ordered a glass of beer, without looking at the
other drinkers. Some one nudged Tobit McStenger and pointed toward the
white-haired young pedagogue. The noise of talk broke off abruptly.
McStenger placed his back against the bar, resting his elbows upon it,
and turned a scornful gaze toward Pilling, who had taken one draught
from his glass of beer.
“Say, Tony,” began McStenger, in his big, growling voice, “who's your
ladylike customer? Oh, it's him, is it? Well, he needn't be skeered of
me. I don't mix up with folks o' his sort. You see, people could only
expect to be insulted through their children by fellows of his birth--”
“Hush, Mack!” whispered Tony Couch, whose sense of deportment advised
him that McStenger was treading forbidden ground. Pilling had not looked
up. He stood quietly at some distance from the others, intent upon his
glass of beer on the bar before him, perfectly still.
But McStenger went on, more loudly than before:
“By fellows, as I said, who came from orphans' homes, and never knew who
their parents was, and whose mothers may have been God knows what--”
Pilling, without turning, had lifted his glass. With an easy motion
he had tossed its remaining contents of beer into the face of Tobit
McStenger. The latter drew back from the splash of the liquid as if
stung. Then, with a loud cry of rage, he leaped toward Pilling. The
teacher turned and faced him.
McStenger clapped one huge hand against Pilling's neck, and in an
instant thereafter his long, bony fingers were pressing upon the
teacher's throat, in what had the looks of a fatal clutch. But Pilling,
with both his arms, violently forced McStenger from him. The teacher
took breath and McStenger reached for a whiskey decanter. The others in
the saloon looked on with eager interest, fearing to come between such
formidable combatants. Tony Couch ran out in search of the town's only
policeman. McStenger advanced toward the teacher.
Pilling was farm bred. He had chopped down trees with his right
arm alone in his time. Pilling thrust forth his arm with unexpected
suddenness. Upon the floor, six feet behind his antagonist, was a
cuspidor with jagged edges.
And Tobit McStenger slept with his fathers.
The jury acquitted the teacher on the plea of self-defense. The loungers
in Couch's saloon judiciously said that it was a very bad break for
Tobit McStenger to have made.
XVI. -- THE SCARS
My friend the tune-maker has often unintentionally amused his
acquaintances by the gravity with which he attributes significance to
the most trivial occurrences.
He turns the most thoughtless speeches, uttered in jest, into
prophecies.
“Very well,” he used to say to us at a café table, “you may laugh. But
it's astonishing how things turn out sometimes.”
“As for instance?” some one would inquire.
“Never mind. But I could give an instance if I wished to do so.”
One evening, over a third bottle, he grew unusually communicative.
“Just to illustrate how things happen,” he began, speaking so as to be
audible above the din of the café to the rest of us around the table,
“I'll tell you about a man I know. One February morning, about eight
years ago, he was hurrying to catch a train. There was ice on the
sidewalks and people had to walk cautiously or ride. As he was turning a
corner he saw by a clock that he had only five minutes in which to reach
the station, three blocks away. An instant later he saw a shapely figure
in soft furs suddenly describe a forward movement and drop in a heap to
the sidewalk, ten feet in front of him. A melodious light soprano scream
arose from the heap. A divinely turned ankle in a quite human black
stocking was momentarily visible. He was by the side of the mass of furs
and skirts in three steps.
“He caught the pretty girl under the arms and elevated her to a standing
posture. She recovered her breath and her self-possession promptly and
glowed upon him with the brightest of smiles. He had never before seen
her.
“'Oh, thank you,' she said; adding, with the unconscious exaggeration of
a schoolgirl, 'You've saved my life.'
“Realizing the absurdity of this speech, she blushed. Whereupon her
rescuer, feeling that the situation warranted him in turning the matter
to jest, replied:
“'That being the case, according to the rules of romance, I ought to
marry you, like all the men who rescue the heroines in stories.'
“'Oh,' she answered, quickly, 'this isn't in a novel; it's real life.'
“'Yes; besides which, I see by the clock over there I have only four
minutes in which to catch a train. Good morning.'
“And he ran off without taking a second glance at her. He arrived at the
station in due time.
“Three years after that he married the most charming woman in the world,
after an acquaintance of only six months.
“This woman is as beautiful as she is amiable. Nature has not been
guilty of a single defect in her construction. A tiny scar upon her knee
is all the more noticeable because of its solitude.
“It is a peculiarity of scars that each has a history. The history of
this one has thus far, for no adequate reason, remained a family secret.
“Another noteworthy fact about scars is that they may be, and in many
cases they are, useful for purposes of identification.
“Of course you anticipate the dramatic climax of my story, gentlemen.
Nevertheless, let me give it, for the sake of completeness, in the form
of a dialogue between the husband and the wife.
“'How came the wound there?'
“'Oh, I fell against the corner of a paving-stone one icy morning three
years ago.'
“'And to think that I was not there to help you up!'
“'True; but another young man served the purpose, and I'm afraid he
missed a train on my account.'
“'What! It wasn't on the corner of ---- and ---- Streets?'
“'It was just there. How did you know?'
“So you see, as they completely proved by comparing recollections, the
little speech uttered in merriment had been prophetic, a fact that they
probably would never have learned had it not been for the identifying
service of the scar.”
“But if this has been kept a family secret, how do you happen to know
it, and by what right do you divulge it?” one of us asked.
The ballad composer blushed and clouded his face with tobacco smoke; and
then it recurred to us all that “the most charming woman in the world”
is his wife.
XVII. -- “LA GITANA”
This is not an attempt to palliate the foolishness of Billy Folsom. It
is not an essay in the emotional or the pathetic. You may pity him or
reproach him, if you like, but my purpose is not to evoke any feeling
toward or opinion of him. I do not seek to play upon your sympathies or
to put you into a mood, or to delineate a character. I simply tell the
story of how certain critical points in a man's life were accompanied
by music; how a destiny was affected by a tune. Anything aside from
mere narrative in this account will be incidental and accidental. The
manifestations of love, of wounded vanity, of recklessness; of even
the death itself, are here subsidiary in interest to the train of
circumstance. He who underwent them is not the hero of the recital; she
who caused them is not the heroine. The heroine is a melody, the waltz
tune of “La Gitana.”
Everybody remembers when the tune was regnant. Its notes leaped gaily
from the strings of every theatre orchestra; soubrettes in fluffy
raiment and silk stockings yelled it singly and in chorus; hand-organs
blared it forth; dancers kicked up their toes to it; it monopolized the
atmosphere for its dwelling-place; it was everywhere.
Until one night, however, it did not touch the ear of Billy Folsom. He
had stayed late in the country, under the delusion that he was hunting.
It seems there are a few shootable things yet in certain parts of
Pennsylvania, and Folsom had the time and money to linger in search of
them. He came back to town in fine, exhilarating November weather, and
on one of these evenings when the joy of living is keenest, he and I
strolled with the crowd. Why I strolled with Folsom I do not know,
for he was not a man of ideas. He was even so bad as to be vain of his
personal appearance, especially upon having resumed the dress of the
city after months of outing.
We passed one of these theatres whose stages are near the street. A
musical farce was current there. From an open window came the tune,
waylaying us as we walked. The orchestra was playing it fortissimo. You
could hear it above the footfalls, the laughter, and the conversation of
the promenaders.
Folsom stopped. “Listen to that.”
“Yes, 'La Gitana.' It's all around. It's a catchy thing, and suits this
intoxicating weather.”
“It goes to the spot. Let's go inside. What's the play?”
He turned at once toward the main entrance of the theatre.
“A farce called 'Three Cheers and a Tiger,'--a Hoyt sort of a piece. The
little Tyrrell is doing her tambourine dance to the music.”
“Never heard of the lady,” he said to me. And then to the youth on the
other side of the box-office window, “Have you any seats left in the
front row?”
Folsom always asked for seats in the front row. This time it was fatal.
As we walked up the aisle, Folsom ahead, the little Tyrrell shot one
casual glance of her gray eyes at him, as almost any dancer would have
done at a front row newcomer entering while she was on the stage. In the
next instant her eyes were following her toe in its swift flight upward
to the centre of the tambourine that her hand brought downward to meet
it. But the one glance across the footlights had been productive. Folsom
sat staring over the heads of the musicians, his gaze fastened upon the
little Tyrrell, who was leaping about on the stage to the tune of “La
Gitana.” His lips opened slightly and remained so. His eyes feasted
upon the flying dancer in the rippling blond wig, his ears drank in the
buoyant notes.
It is well known that power lies in a saltatorial ensemble of white lace
skirts, pale blue hose, lustrous naked arms, undulating bodice, magnetic
eyes, flying hair, and an unchanging smile, to focus the perceptions of
a man, to absorb his consciousness, aided by a tune which seems to close
out from him all the rest of the world.
And there, while this plump little girl danced and the frivolous, stupid
crowd looked eagerly on, from all parts of the overheated theatre, began
the tragedy of Billy Folsom.
He gazed in rapture, and when she had finished and stood panting and
kissing her hands in response to applause, he heaved an eloquent sigh.
“I'd like to meet that girl,” he whispered to me, assuming a tone of
carelessness.
Thereafter he kept his eye fixed upon the wings until she reappeared.
And the rest of the performance interested him only when she was in
view.
I knew the symptoms, but I did not think the malady would become
chronic.
He managed to have himself introduced to her a week later in New York
by Ted Clarke, the artist, who made newspaper sketches of her in some
of her dances. Folsom saw her going up the steps to an elevated railway
station. He ran after her, in order to be near her. He followed her into
a car, where Ted Clarke, recognizing her, rose to give her his seat.
She rewarded the artist by opening a conversation with him, and Folsom
availed himself of his acquaintance with Clarke to salute the latter
with surprising cordiality. She looked a few years older and less
girlish without her blond wig but she was still quite pretty in brown
hair. She treated Folsom with her wonted offhand amiability. He left the
train when she left it, and he walked a block with her. With pardonable
shrewdness she inspected his visage, attire, and manner, for indications
of his pecuniary and social standing, while he was indulging in silly
commonplaces. When they parted at the quiet hotel where she lived she
said lightly:
“Come and see me sometime.”
To her surprise, perhaps, he came the next day, preceded by several
dozen roses and a few pounds of bonbons.
Every night thereafter he was at the theatre where she was appearing,
watching her dance from the front row or from the lobby, agitated with
mingled pleasure and jealousy when she received loud applause, angry
at the audience when the plaudits were not enthusiastic. When their
acquaintance was two weeks old, she allowed him to wait for her at the
stage door, and at last he was permitted to take her to supper.
There was a second supper, at which four composed the party. We had a
room to ourselves, with a piano in the corner. The event lasted long,
and near the end, while the other soubrette played the tune on the
piano, and Folsom kept time by clinking the champagne glass against the
bottle, the little Tyrrell, continually laughing, did her skirt dance,
“La Gitana.”
Thus with that waltz tune ever sounding in his ears, he fell in love
with her; strangely enough, really in love. She, having her own affairs
to mind, gave him no thought when he was not with her, and when they
were together she deemed him quite a good-natured, bearable fellow, as
long as he did not bore her.
He made several declarations of love to her. She smiled at them, and
said, “You're like the rest; you'll get over it. Meanwhile, don't look
like that; be cheerful.” At certain times, when circumstances were
auspicious, when there was night and electric light and a starry sky
with a moon in it, she was half-sentimental, but such moods were only
superficial and short-lived, and she invariably brought an end to them
with flippant laughter or some matter-of-fact speech that came with a
shock to Billy, although it did not cool his adoration.
Billy became quite gloomy. He was the veritable sighing lover. Although
for a month he was admittedly the chief of her admirers and saw her
every day, he seemed to make no progress toward securing a hospitable
reception for and a response to his love.
One day, as they were walking together on Broadway, she said:
“You're always in the dumps nowadays. Really you must not be that way.
Doleful people make me tired.”
And thereafter Billy, possessed by a horrible fear that his mournful
demeanour might cause his banishment from her, kept making desperate
efforts to be lively, which were a dismal failure. It was ludicrous. The
gayer he affected to be, the more emphatic was his manifest depression.
So she wearied of his company. One day he called at her hotel, and, as
was his custom, went immediately to her sitting-room without sending
in his card. Before he knocked at the door, he heard the notes of her
piano; some one was playing the air of “La Gitana” with one finger.
After two or three bars, the instrument was silent. Then a man's voice
was heard. Billy knocked angrily. Miss Tyrrell opened the door, looked
annoyed when she saw him, and introduced him to the tenor of a comic
opera company of which she recently had been engaged as leading
soubrette. Billy's call was a short one.
At eight o'clock that evening he sent this note to her from the café
where he was dining:
“Will be at stage door with carriage at eleven, as before.”
He was there at eleven. So was the tenor. The little Tyrrell came out
and looked from one to the other. Billy pointed to his waiting carriage.
The dancer took the tenor's arm and said:
“I'm sorry I can't accept your invitation, Mr. Folsom. Really I'm very
much obliged to you, but I have an engagement.”
She went off with the tenor, and Billy went off with the cab and made
himself drunker than he had ever been in his life. At dawn his feet
were seen protruding from the window of a coupé that was being driven up
Broadway, and he was bawling forth, as best he could, the tune which had
served indirectly to bring the little Tyrrell into his life.
After that night, it was the old story, a woman ridding herself of a man
for whom she had never cared, and who indeed was not worth caring for.
But the operation was just as hard upon Folsom as if he had been. You
know the stages of the process. She began by being not at home or just
about to go out. He wrote pleading notes to her, in boyish phraseology,
and she laughed over these with the tenor. He made the breaking off the
more painful by going nightly to see her dance that fatal melody. He
watched her from afar upon the street, and almost invariably saw the
tenor by her side. He drank continually, and he begged Ted Clarke to
tell her, in a casual way, that he was going to the dogs on account of
her treatment of him. Whereupon she laughed and then looked scornful,
saying: “If he's fool enough to drink himself to death because a woman
didn't happen to fall in love with him, the sooner he finishes the work
the better. I have no use for such a man.”
No one has, and I told Billy so. But he kept up his pace toward the goal
of confirmed drunkenness. He ceased his attendance at the theatre where
she danced, only after he learned that the tenor had married her. But
that dance of hers had become a part of his life. Its accompanying tune
was now as necessary to his aural sensibilities as food to his stomach.
He therefore spent his evenings going to theatres and concert-halls
where “La Gitana” was likely to be sung or played. He rarely sought in
vain. The melody was to be found serving some purpose or other at almost
every theatre that winter. It was the “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay” of its time.
Some men who drink themselves to death require years and wit to complete
the task. Others save time by catching pneumonia through exposure due to
drink. Billy Folsom was one of the pneumonia class. He “slept off” the
effects of a long lark in an area-way belonging to a total stranger. A
policeman took him to his lodgings by way of the station house, and a
day later his landlord sent for a doctor. Five days after that I went
over to see him. He was in bed, and one of his friends, a man of his own
kind, but of stronger fibre, was keeping him company. Billy told us how
it had come about:
“I wouldn't have gone on that racket if it hadn't been for one thing.
I'd made up my mind to turn over a new leaf, and I was walking along
full of plans for reformation. Suddenly I heard the sound of a banjo,
coming from an up-stairs window, playing a certain tune I've got
somewhat attached to. I saw the place was a kind of a dive and I went
in. I got the banjo-player to strum the piece over again, and I bought
drinks for the crowd. Then I made him play once more, and there were
other rounds of drinks, and the last I remember is that I was waltzing
around the place to that air. Two days after that the officer found
me trespassing on some one's property by sleeping on it. I dropped my
overcoat and hat somewhere, and it seemed there must have been a draft
around, for I caught this cold.”
I told Folsom to stop talking, as he was manifestly much weaker than he
or his friend supposed him to be. There ensued a few seconds of silence.
A loud noise broke upon the stillness with a shocking suddenness. It was
the clamour of a band-piano in the street beneath Folsom's window, and
of all the tunes in the world the tune that it shrieked out was “La
Gitana.” I looked at Folsom.
He rose in his bed and, clenching his teeth, he propelled through their
interstices the word:
“Damn!”
He remained sitting for a time, his hair tumbled about, his eyes wide
open but expressive of meditation as the notes continued to be thumped
upward by the turbulent instrument. Presently he said, in a husky voice:
“How that thing pursues me! It's like a fiend. It has no let-up. It
follows me even into the next world.”
He sat for a moment more, intently listening. Then, with a quick,
peevish sigh, he fell back from weakness. We by his side did not know it
at the instant, but we discovered in a short time what had taken place
when his head had touched the pillow, for he remained so still.
And that was the last of Billy Folsom, and up from the murmuring street
below came the notes of the band-piano playing “La Gitana.”
XVIII. -- TRANSITION
Three of us sat upon an upper deck, sailing to an island. The day was
sunlit, the wind was gentle, and the faintest ripple passed over the
sea.
“Do you see the tremulous old man sitting over there by the pilot-house
absorbing the sunshine? He reminds me of another old man, one whom I
watched for six years, while he faded and died. He never knew me, but
he walked by my house daily and I walked by his. It was an interesting
study. The conclusion of the process was so inevitable. The time came
when he did not pass my house. Then he took the sunlight in a bow-window
on the second floor of his residence. So closely had I watched his
decadence during the six years that I was able to say to myself one
morning, 'There will be crape on his door before the day is out.' And so
there was.”
The bon-vivant laughed rather mechanically, but the other, he who makes
verses so dainty that the world does not heed them, smiled softly and
sympathetically to me and said:
“You are right. Nothing is so fascinating as the study of a progress--a
development or a decline. The inevitability of the end makes it more
engrossing, for it relieves it of the undue eagerness of curiosity, the
feverishness of uncertainty.”
“Well, I am content rather to live than to contemplate life,” said the
bon-vivant. “It's true I have given myself up to observing anxiously
such an advancement as you describe--a vulgar one you will say. When I
was a very young man I was a very thin man. I determined to amplify my
dimensions. I followed with careful interest my daily increase toward my
present--let us not say obesity, but call it portliness.”
“You are inclined to be easy upon yourself,” I commented.
“Indeed I am--in all matters.”
After a pause the verse-maker, throwing away his cigarette, took up
again the theme that I had introduced.
“Yes, it is an engaging occupation to note any progression, even when
it is toward a fatal or a horrible culmination. But when it is to some
beautiful and happy outcome, this advancement is an ineffably charming
spectacle. Such it is when it is the unfolding of a flower or the
filling out of a poetic thought.
“But no growth nor transformation in the material world is more
entrancing to observe than that by which a young girl becomes a lovely
woman.
“This transition seems to be sudden. It is not so. It is rapid, perhaps,
as life goes, but each stage is distinctly marked. All men have not time
to watch the change, however, and so most men awaken to its occurrence
only when it is completed. Such was the case of the young and lowborn
lover of Consuelo in George Sand's romance. Do you remember that
incomparable scene in which he suddenly begins to notice that some
feature of Consuelo is handsome, and, with surprise, calls her attention
to its comeliness? She, equally astonished and delighted, joins him
in the visual examination of her charms, and the two pass from one
attraction to the other, finally completing the discovery that she is a
beautiful woman.
“The Italian gamin was not the sort of man to have anticipated this
transfiguration and to have watched its stages.
“You may argue that his delight at suddenly opening his eyes to
the finished work was greater than would have been his pleasure at
contemplating the alteration in process. Doubtless his was. As to
whether yours would be in such a case, depends upon your temperament.
“I have experienced both of these pleasures. Perhaps it may be due to
certain special circumstances that I cherish the memory of the more
lasting delight, even though it was tempered by occasional doubts as to
the end, more tenderly than I do the more sudden and keen awakening.
“There is a woman who first came under my observations when she was
thirteen years old. She was then agreeable enough to the eye, more
by reason of the gentleness of her expression than for any noteworthy
attractions of face and figure. Her face, indeed, was plain and
uninteresting; her figure unformed and too slim. Her hair, however, was
charming, being soft and extremely light in colour. She seemed awkward,
too, and timid, through fear of offending or making a bad impression.
“For a reason I was particularly interested in her. I knew, young as I
then was, that plain girls, in many cases, develop into handsome women.
“At fourteen her hair showed indications of changing its tint.
Its tendency was unmistakably toward brown. This was temporarily
unfavourable, but a brightening of the blue eyes and a newly acquired
poise of the head, with a step toward self-confidence in manner, were
compensating alterations.