IN WHICH MR. HANLON MAKES A GREAT IMPRESSION
Freddie found no one in the Tobacco Shop, so he knocked on the door of
the back room, and it was instantly opened by Mr. Littleback himself;
but a Mr. Littleback so resplendent that Freddie hardly knew him.
The suit of clothes which Mr. Littleback wore was beyond any doubt a
brand new suit. The ground color of it was a rich mauve, if you know
what that is; not exactly purple, nor violet, but somewhere in between;
and up and down and across were stripes of brown, making good-sized
squares all over him; it was extremely beautiful. His collar was a high
white collar, very stiff, and it held up his chin in front like a
whitewashed fence. His necktie was of a pale-blue satin, with little
pink roses painted on it, yes sir, painted! mind you, by hand! It was
not one of those troublesome things that come in a single long piece and
take you hours before the glass to twist and turn over and under before
you can get them to look like a necktie; no indeed; it was far better
than that; it was tied already, by somebody who could do it better than
you ever could, and when you bought it, all you had to do was to put it
on; fasten those two rubber bands behind with a hook, and there you
were; perfect. As to hair, the hand of the barber was yet upon him; his
hair, parted on one side, was of a slickness which his own soap never
could have accomplished; on the wide side, it lay flat down over his
forehead, and there gave a sudden curl backward, like the curve of a
hairpin, but much more graceful; it is only the most studious barbers
who ever learn to do it just right. There were creases down the arms of
Mr. Toby's coat and down the front of his trouser-legs. A yellow silk
handkerchief showed itself, not boldly, but quietly, from his breast
pocket.
As he let Freddie in, and in doing so turned his back to Aunt Amanda,
she screamed and cried out:
"Toby! Look behind you! Merciful heavens!"
Freddie, in the midst of his admiration of the magnificent creature, saw
him whirl about and look behind himself in alarm. His aunt pointed at
his coat and said sternly, "Come here."
Freddie saw on the back of Mr. Toby's coat, near the bottom, as he
whirled about, a little square white tag.
Mr. Toby backed up to his aunt, and stood before her, trying to look at
his back over his shoulder, while she took her scissors and clipped the
threads by which the white tag was sewed to the back of his coat. She
held up the tag; it had numbers printed and written on it.
"Now ain't that just like you, Toby Littleback," she said, "going out
with your tag on your back, with your size on it and your height and
age, too, for all I know, for anybody to see that you've got on a
splittin' brand new suit right out o' the shop. If you'd 'a' gone out
with that on your back, I'd 'a' died with shame right here in this
chair. Ain't you even able to dress yourself?"
"By crickets, that _would_ 'a' been bad," said Toby, considerably upset.
"However, you caught it in time, so there ain't no use cryin' over it.
Good-bye, Aunt; come along, Freddie, or we'll be late."
"Ain't you goin' to wear a hat?" said Aunt Amanda. "I declare the man's
so excited he don't know what he's doing."
"Blamed if I didn't come near going without a hat," said Toby. "Here she
is."
He produced his hat from a cupboard in the room, and put it on. It would
have been a pity indeed for him to have gone without it. It was a white
derby; yes, a _white_ derby. It was the kind of a hat which was known in
that city as a "pinochle"; pronounced "pea-knuckle" by all well-informed
boys. With the mauve suit and the hand-painted necktie and the
whitewashed fence, the white derby set him off to perfection, especially
as he wore it a little towards the back of his head, so as to show the
loveliest part of the plastered curl of his hair on the forehead. Aunt
Amanda could not restrain her admiration.
"You'll do now," she said. "I don't know that I ever seen you look so
genteel before."
Toby, in the embarrassment of being considered genteel, put his hands in
his trousers pockets.
"Take them hands out of your pockets," said Aunt Amanda sharply, and he
took them out in a hurry.
"Now, Freddie," she said, "come here a minute, and I'll set you to
rights."
Freddie stood before her knee, not very willingly, and she buttoned his
jacket from top to bottom, and put his cap squarely on his head.
"Now you'd better be off," she said.
"Good-bye, Aunt, and I wish you were going too," said Toby, his hand on
the door-knob.
"Good-bye, Freddie," said she.
"Good-bye," said Freddie.
"Good-bye what?" said she.
"Aunt Amanda," said he.
When they were out in the street, and she heard Toby lock the shop door
behind him, she took out her handkerchief and blew her nose; her cold
was evidently worse, because she blew her nose several times; and then,
tucking her handkerchief away in her dress, she put her head down on
her arm on the table, and cried.
The first thing Freddie did, as they went up the street, was to put his
cap back again on the back of his head, and the next thing he did was to
unbutton every button of his jacket, from top to bottom.
The little hunchback was in a great hurry, and he dragged the Little Boy
along by the hand so fast that he could hardly keep up. As they hurried
along, several naughty boys, observing Mr. Toby's white derby hat,
called after him, very rudely, "Pea-knuckle! pea-knuckle!" But Mr. Toby
paid no attention, and dragged Freddie along faster than ever.
"We don't want to miss any of it," said Mr. Toby. "Hurry up, boy."
They did not have far to go; only four or five "squares." They stopped
before a great grimy brick building with a great wide entrance-way.
"Here we are," said Toby.
"What does that say up there?" said Freddie.
"Gaunt Street Theatre," said Toby. "Hurry up."
Freddie hung back before a signboard on which was a picture of a slender
man dressed up in white clothing, very tight, with red and black squares
on it; he was leaning against a table; his head and face were a dead
white, except for red eyebrows, and a red spot in each cheek, and he had
no hair, but a smooth dead-white skin from his forehead to the back of
his neck. The peculiar thing was, that his head was on the table beside
him, and not on his neck. Freddie pointed to the writing underneath the
picture, and said:
"What does that say?"
"Hanlon's Superba," said Toby, pulling him along. "Hurry up! We'll be
late."
Mr. Littleback went to a little window in the wall, inside the
entrance-way, and spoke to a man in there, and evidently asked
permission to go in, and evidently got it; and they did go in, up a
flight of stairs, and found themselves suddenly among thousands and
thousands of people, as it seemed, all sitting in chairs facing the same
way, in a vast house lit up by gas light so that it was almost as bright
as day; and Toby and Freddie sat down in the very front row of these
people, and looked down over a railing in front of them on the heads of
thousands and thousands, as it seemed, of other people, all sitting in
chairs facing the same way. Everybody was facing towards a straight wall
at the other side of the house, which had pictures painted on it. At the
foot of this wall, in a kind of trench, there was a man at a piano, and
there were other men with fiddles big and little, and still others with
brass things, and they were all playing a tremendous tune together, but
just after Toby and Freddie had sat down, they stopped playing and Toby
nudged Freddie with his elbow, and said:
"Now, then, young feller, what do you think of this, eh? Just you wait!
Keep your eye on that curtain!"
He had no sooner said this than somewhere in the house somebody gave a
piercing whistle between his fingers, and in a minute there was such a
racket that it was impossible to talk. There must have been people above
them, and they must certainly have all been boys; for from up there
Freddie heard a clapping of hands and a stamping of feet, all in a
regular time, which spread to the whole house, and in the midst of it
the boys up there began to shout and call and whistle, and in a few
minutes there was such a hubbub as only boys could make, with whistling
between the fingers leading the riot. Toby nudged Freddie again with his
elbow, and to Freddie's surprise began to clap his hands and stamp his
feet with the rest; and as Freddie thought he ought to be polite, he
clapped his hands, too, though he did not know very well what it was all
about.
Suddenly the men in the trench at the foot of the painted wall struck up
again, and that quieted the other noise for a moment; but only for a
moment; someone whistled through his fingers, and in an instant those
fiddlers might as well have been sawing away at their fiddles out at the
Park, for all you could hear them; and right in the midst of it all,
while Freddie was trying to shout the word "Peanuts" into Toby's ear,
suddenly the lights went out and you could have heard a pin drop.
"Now then! now then!" whispered Mr. Toby, in great excitement. "Now
you'll see! Watch the curtain! It's going up!"
From down there in that dark trench came the sound of a soft twittery
kind of music, and at the same time the painted wall that Freddie had
been looking at was rising! going up! And it went on up and up out of
sight into the ceiling, and there behind it, in a dim light, there
behind it, mysterious and fearsome and delicious,--Well, there behind it
was Fairyland. Just Fairyland.
I can't describe it to you. Freddie never forgot it. If you haven't seen
Hanlon's Superba, in some old Gaunt Street Theatre or other, on a
Saturday afternoon, with the galleries wild with boys, you have not
lived. When Freddie tried to tell his mother and his father about it
that night, it was such a whirling mass of wonders and glories that they
could not make head nor tail of it. It is useless to speak of the Fairy
Queen in her glittering white, coming to the rescue in the nick of time
with her diamond sceptre, or of the horrible demons, or the trouble and
excitement they made for everybody, or of the beautiful young lady
who--and such leapings and twistings and climbings and tumblings as no
mere human beings with bones in them could ever have performed--it is no
use; it is best not to try to describe it. But there was one part
which, although it may seem to you the most unlikely thing in the world,
really had a good deal to do with Freddie afterwards. There was the same
man whose picture he had seen outside on the signboard; and he could
climb straight walls and leap through high windows and tumble across
floors in a way which passed belief; but there was one thing he could
not do; he could not talk; he never spoke a word from beginning to end.
Once, after having escaped from a parcel of wicked red imps, he sat
down, tired out and starved to death, before a table loaded with food,
and he commenced to make a hearty meal; but just as he was about to
sample each plate it disappeared, vanished, completely out of sight,
right under his nose. His distress was pitiable, and Freddie thought it
cruel of everybody to laugh, as everybody did. On his plate were
sausages, and he nearly got them; but just as he thought he had them,
they actually jumped off the table and ran along the floor and up the
wall; and the poor man had to climb the wall after them, which he did
like a cat, and even then he never came up with them; he was terribly
disappointed; and to finish off his miseries, at last a wicked creature
with a sword came up behind him, as he was leaning his head down on the
table in despair, and cut off his head before your very eyes; really and
truly cut it off; there was no doubt about it; the head was on the table
and the poor man was in the chair; Freddie was terrified, and clutched
Mr. Toby's arm. But when the wicked murderer had gone away, back popped
the head onto the dead man's neck, his eyes opened, he grinned from ear
to ear, and there he was on his feet, skipping and tumbling, as lively
as ever; and at that Freddie and all the others in the house roared and
shouted and clapped their hands.
"Is that Mr. Hanlon?" whispered Freddie into Mr. Toby's ear.
"Reckon it is," said Toby, too excited himself to pay much attention to
Freddie.
But it could not last forever. Even the peanuts, which Toby bought for
Freddie between the first and second acts, were all gone, and the
curtain was down for the last time, and the crowd crushed through the
doors, and Mr. Toby put on his white derby hat.
They were in the street, and the speechless Mr. Hanlon was a thing of
the past. Freddie did not believe that he would ever see that dumb and
loose-headed man again; but in that he was mistaken, as you shall see.
Toby left him at the corner near his father's house.
"What I say is," said Toby, "three cheers for our growing-up party!"
"Yes," said Freddie, "and three cheers for Mr. Hanlon!"