TRAMP PHILOSOPHY
“What are you two giggling about?” asked a sudden voice, and Berty,
looking up from the hall, and Tom, from the staircase, saw Bonny
standing on the steps above them.
“Meow, meow,” murmured Tom, in a scarcely audible voice.
“What’s up with him, Berty?” asked Bonny, good-naturedly.
“I think his head must be growing weak,” said the girl. “Everything
lately seems to amuse him. If you hold up a finger, he goes into fits
of laughter.”
“Poor Tom,” said Bonny, “and once he was a joy to his friends--I say,
old man, uncurl yourself and tell us the joke.”
“Go ’way, Berty,” ejaculated Tom, partly straightening himself, “go
’way. You hate to see me laugh. Just like all girls. They haven’t any
more sense of humour than sticks.”
“Bonny,” said Berty, turning to her brother, “how is Grandma?”
“Asleep, and resting quietly.”
“I’ll go sit beside her,” said the girl; then, turning to her visitor,
“Tom Everest, are you going to do that commission for me, or are you
not? I’ve stood a good deal from you to-night. Just one word more, and
I take it from you and give it to Bonny.”
“I’m ready and willing if it’s anything good,” said the light-haired
boy.
“Sha’n’t have it, Bonny,” said Tom, staggering to his feet. “That jewel
is mine. I’ll love and cherish him, Berty, until to-morrow afternoon,
then I’ll report to you.”
“Good night, then,” said Berty, “and don’t make a noise, or you’ll wake
Grandma.”
“Come on, Bonny, let’s interview Berty’s treasure,” exclaimed Tom,
seizing his hat.
“What is it?” inquired Bonny, curiously, following him through the hall.
“A black pearl. Didn’t she tell you?”
“No, I haven’t been here long. We were busy at the works.”
Without speaking, Tom led the way down the back staircase, through the
lower hall, and out to the wood-shed at the back of the house.
“Listen to it,” he said to Bonny, with his hand on the door-knob.
“Who is snoring in there?” said the boy, quickly.
“One of your sister’s bits of driftwood. I’ve got to haul this one into
port.”
“I wish Berty would look out for number one, and let number two, and
three, and four, and five, take care of themselves,” said the lad,
irritably. Then he suddenly recollected himself. “I suppose I am a
brute, but I do hate dirty people. Berty is an angel compared with me.”
“Hello,” said Tom, opening the door and scratching a match to light the
candle in a lantern hanging near him.
There was no response. Tom held the lantern and pushed the sleeping man
with his foot.
“Here, you--wake up.”
The man rolled over, blinking at them in the light. “Hello, comrade,
what you want?”
“Get up,” said Tom, commandingly.
“What for?” asked the sleeper, yawningly.
“To get out of this. I’ll find you another sleeping-place.”
“Oh, come, comrade,” said the man, remonstratingly, “this is cruelty to
animals. I was having the sleep of my life--like drugged sleep--takes
me back to my boyhood. Move on, and let me begin again. Your diamonds
are safe to-night. I’ve had a first-class supper, and I’m having a
first-class sleep. I wouldn’t get up to finger the jewels of the
Emperor of Russia.”
“Get up,” said Tom, inexorably.
“Let him stay,” said Bonny. “I’m going to be here all night. If he gets
dangerous, I’ll take the poker.”
“Oh, you’re going to stay all night,” remarked Tom. “Very good, then.
I’ll come early in the morning and get him out of this.”
“Talking about me, gentlemen?” asked the man, sleepily.
Tom and Bonny stared at him.
“I haven’t done anything bad yet,” said the tramp, meekly, “unless I
may have corrupted a few of those guinea-pigs by using bad language.
They’re the most inquisitive creatures I ever saw. Stuck their noses in
my food, and most took it away from me.”
“Who are you?” asked Bonny, abruptly.
“A poor, broken-down sailor, sir,” whined the man. “Turned out of his
vessel the first day in port, because he had a little weakness of the
heart.”
“I heard you were a doctor,” interposed Tom.
“So I was this afternoon, sir. That nice young lady said I looked like
a sailor, so I thought I’d be one to please her.”
“You’re a first-class liar, anyway,” said Tom.
The man rolled over on his back and sleepily blinked at him. “That
I am, sir. If you’d hear the different stories I tell to charitable
ladies, you’d fall down in a fit. They’re too funny for words.”
Bonny was staring at him with wide-open eyes. He had never spoken to
a tramp before in his life. If he saw one on the right side of the
street, he immediately crossed to the left.
“I say,” he began, with a fastidious curl of his lip, “it must be
mighty queer not to know in the morning where you are going to lay your
head at night. Queer, and mighty uncomfortable.”
“So it is, young man, till you get used to it,” responded the tramp,
amiably.
Bonny’s countenance expressed the utmost disdain, and suddenly the
tramp raised himself on an elbow. “Can you think of me, my fine lad,
young and clean and as good-looking as you are?”
“No, I can’t,” said Bonny, frankly.
“Fussy about my tailor,” continued the man. “Good heavens, just think
of it--I, bothering about the cut of my coat. But I was, and I did, and
I’ve come down to be a trailer over the roads.”
“How can persons take a jump like that?” said the boy, musingly.
“It isn’t a jump,” pursued the tramp, lazily, “it’s a slide. You move a
few inches each day. I’m something of a philosopher, and I often look
back on my career. I’ve lots of time to think, as you may imagine. Now,
gentlemen, you wouldn’t imagine where my slide into trampdom began.”
“You didn’t start from the gutter, anyway,” remarked Bonny, “for you
talk like a gentleman.”
“You’re right, young man. I can talk the slang of the road. I’ve been
broken to it, but I won’t waste it on you, for you wouldn’t understand
it--well, my first push downward was given me by my mother.”
“Your mother?” echoed Bonny, in disgust.
“Yes, young sir--one of the best women that ever lived. She held me out
to the devil, when she allowed me to kick the cat because it had made
me fall.”
“Nonsense,” said Bonny, sharply.
“Not nonsense, but sound sense, sir. That was the beginning of the
lack of self-restraint. Did I want her best cap to tear to ribbons? I
got it.”
“Oh, get out,” interposed Tom, crossly. “You needn’t tell us that all
spoiled children go to the bad.”
“Good London, no,” said the man, with a laugh. “Look at our
millionaires. Could you find on the face of the earth a more absolute
autocrat, a more heartless, up-to-date, determined-to-have-his-own-way,
let-the-rest-of-you-go-to-the-dogs kind of a man, than the average
American millionaire?”
The two young men eyed each other, and Bonny murmured, “You are an
extremist.”
“It began away back,” continued the tramp, now thoroughly roused from
his sleepy condition. “When our forefathers came from England, they
brought that ugly, I’m-going-to-have-my-own-way spirit with them. Talk
about the severity of England precipitating the Revolution. If they
hadn’t made a revolution for us, we’d made one to order. Did you ever
read about the levelling spirit of those days? I tell you this American
nation is queer--it’s harder for a real, true blue son of the soil to
keep straight, than it is for the son of any other nation under the
heaven. We lack self-restraint. We’ll go to the bad if we want to, and
none shall hinder us.”
The tramp paused for a minute in his semi-lazy, semi-animated
discourse, and Tom, feeling that some remark was expected from him,
said feebly, “You’re quite a moralizer.”
The tramp did not hear him. “I tell you,” he said, extending a dirty
hand, “we’re the biggest, grandest, foolishest people on earth. We’re
the nation of the future. We’ll govern the earth, and at the same time
fail in governing ourselves. Look at the lynchings we have. The United
States has the highest murder rate of any civilized country in the
world. The average American will be a decent, moral, pay-his-bills sort
of man, and yet he’ll have more tolerance for personal violence than a
Turk has.”
“You’re a queer man,” said Bonny, musingly.
“We’ve got to have more law and order,” pursued the tramp. “The mothers
have got to make their little ones eat their mush, or porridge, as they
say over the line in Canada--not fling it out the window to the dogs.
I tell you that’s where it begins, just where every good and bad thing
begins--in the cradle. The average mother has too much respect for the
squallings of her Young America. Let her spank him once in awhile, and
keep him out of sight of the eagle.”
“Do you suppose,” said Bonny, solemnly, “that if you had been well
spanked you would not be lying here?”
“Suppose,” repeated the tramp, leaning back, “I don’t suppose anything
about it. I know it. If my mother and father had made me mind them, and
kept me in nights, and trained me into decent, self-respecting manhood,
I’d be standing beside you to-night, young sirs, beside you--beyond
you--for I guess from your bearing you are only young men of average
ability, and I tell you I was a power, when I’d study and let the drink
alone.”
“You must have had a strange mother,” remarked Bonny.
The tramp suddenly raised himself again, and his sunburnt face grew
redder. “For the love of Heaven,” he said, extending one ragged arm,
“don’t say a word against her. The thought of her is the only thing
that moves me. She loved me, and, unclean, characterless wretch that I
am, she would love me yet if she were still alive.”
The man’s head sank on his arm, but not quickly enough. Tom and Bonny
had both seen glistening in his eyes, not the one jewel they were
jestingly in search of, but two priceless jewels that were not pearls,
but diamonds.
“Come on, Bonny,” said Tom, roughly, as he drew him from the shed.
“Tom,” remarked Bonny, softly, as they went slowly up-stairs, “Berty
wants you to do something for that fellow, doesn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think it is of any use?”
“No.”
“Are you going to try?”
“Yes.”
Bonny made no further remarks until some time later, when they were
standing on the front door-step, then he asked, thoughtfully, “What
does Berty want you to do, Tom?”
“Start a cat-farm.”
“A cat-farm! What kind of cats?”
“Gutter cats, back yard cats, disreputable cats, I should guess from
the character of the superintendent she has chosen,” replied Tom,
gruffly.
“The superintendent being the tramp,” said Bonny, slyly.
“There’s no one else in question,” responded Tom.
“I think you are wrong about the nature of the beasts,” continued
Bonny. “I believe Berty means pet cats--Angoras, and so on.”
“What sort are they?”
“Do you mean to say you haven’t noticed them? It’s the latest cry
among the women--‘Give me a long-haired cat!’ Mrs. Darley-James has a
beauty--snow-white with blue eyes.”
“All nonsense--these society women don’t know what to do to kill time.”
“They’re not all society women that have them. Old Mrs. McCarthy has a
pair of dandies--and I find that the women who take up cat-culture are
more kind to back yard tabbies.”
“Maybe you’re right, Bonny. I don’t call round on these women as you
do.”
“Well,” said Bonny, apologetically, “I don’t see any harm in putting on
your best coat and hat, and doing a woman who has invited you to her
house the compliment of calling on her day.”
“Oh, dressing up,” said Tom, “is such a nuisance.”
“You can’t call on many that you’d be bothered with calling on without
it. Sydney Gray tried calling on Margaretta on her day in a bicycle
suit. He had ridden fifty miles, and was hot and dusty and perspiring.
He had the impudence to go into Margaretta’s spick and span rooms and
ask for a cup of tea. She was so sweet to him that he came away hugging
himself--but he never got asked there again, and every once in awhile
he says to some one, ‘Queer, isn’t it, that Mrs. Stanisfield gives me
the go-by. I don’t know what I’ve done to offend her.’”
“Suppose we come back to Berty,” observed Tom. “If all the women here
have cats, what does she want to start a farm for?”
“The women aren’t all supplied. The demand is increasing, and many
would buy here that wouldn’t send away for one. Berty is more shrewd
than you think. These cats sell for five and six dollars apiece at the
least, and some are as high as twenty. I shouldn’t a bit wonder if it
would turn out to be a good business speculation.”
“Well, then, you just meet some of the fellows in my office to-morrow
evening and arrange for a house and lot for this man who is to boss the
cats,” said Tom, dryly.
“All right, I’ll come--maybe Roger will, too.”
“Good night,” said Tom, “I’m off.”
“Good night,” returned Bonny, laconically, and, standing with his
hands thrust in his pockets, he was looking down the street, when Tom
suddenly turned back.
“I say, Bonny, your grandmother must have a good history of the
Revolution.”
“She has two or three.”
“Ask her to lend me one, will you? I half forget what I learned in
school.”
“Yes, sir; I’ll bring it to-morrow.”
Tom really went this time, and as he quickly disappeared from sight,
Bonny, from his station on the door-step, kept muttering to himself,
“Slipping through life, slipping through life. How easy to get on that
greased path!”
“What are you saying to yourself?” asked a brisk voice.
Bonny, turning sharply, found Berty beside him.
“Nothing much--only that I was hungry. Let’s see what’s in the pantry.”
“Bonny, if I show you where there is a pie, the most beautiful pumpkin
pie you ever saw, will you help me with my tramp?”
“I’ll do it for half a pie,” said Bonny, generously. “Come on, you
young monkey.”