My friend Muffles has had a varied career. Muffles is not his baptismal
name--if he were ever baptized, which I doubt. The butcher, the baker,
the candlestick maker, and the brewer--especially the brewer--knew him
as Mr. Richard Mulford, proprietor of the Shady Side on the Bronx--and
his associates as Dick. Only his intimates knew him as Muffles. I am one
of his intimates. This last sobriquet he earned as a boy among his
fellow wharf-rats, by reason of an extreme lightness of foot attended by
an equally noiseless step, particularly noticeable when escaping from
some guardian of the peace who had suddenly detected him raiding an
apple-stand not his own, or in depleting a heap of peanuts the property
of some gentleman of foreign birth, or in making off with a just-emptied
ash-barrel--Muffles did the emptying--on the eve of an election.
If any member of his unknown and widely scattered family reached the
dignity of being considered the flower of the clan, no stretch of
imagination or the truth on the part of his acquaintances--and they
were numerous--ever awarded that distinction to Muffles. He might have
been a weed, but he was never a flower. A weed that grew up between the
cobbles, crouching under the hoofs of horses and the tramp of men, and
who was pulled up and thrown aside and still lived on and flourished in
various ways, and all with that tenacity of purpose and buoyancy of
spirit which distinguishes all weeds and which never by any possibility
marks a better quality of plant, vegetable or animal.
The rise of this gamin from the dust-heap to his present lofty position
was as interesting as it was instructive. Interesting because his career
was a drama--instructive because it showed a grit, pluck, and
self-denial which many of his contemporaries might have envied and
imitated: wharf-rat, newsboy, dish-washer in a sailor's dive,
bar-helper, bar-tender, bar-keeper, bar-owner, ward heeler, ward
politician, clerk of a district committee--go-between, in shady deals,
between those paid to uphold the law and those paid to break it--and
now, at this time of writing, or was a year or so ago, the husband of
"the Missus," as he always calls her, the father of two children, one
three and the other five, and the proprietor of the Shady Side Inn,
above the Harlem River and within a stone's throw of the historic Bronx.
The reaching of this final goal, the sum of all his hopes and
ambitions, was due to the same tenacity of purpose which had
characterized his earlier life, aided and abetted by a geniality of
disposition which made him countless friends, a conscience which
overlooked their faults, together with a total lack of perception as to
the legal ownership of whatever happened to be within his reach. As to
the keeping of the other commandments, including the one of doing unto
others as you would have them do unto you----
Well, Muffles had grown up between the cobbles of the Bowery, and his
early education had consequently been neglected.
The Shady Side Inn, over which Muffles presided, and in which he was
one-third owner--the Captain of the Precinct and a "Big Pipe" contractor
owned the other two-thirds--was what was left of an old colonial
mansion. There are dozens of them scattered up and down the Bronx, lying
back from the river; with porches falling into decay, their gardens
overrun with weeds, their spacious rooms echoing only the hum of the
sewing-machine or the buzz of the loom.
This one belonged to some one of the old Knickerbockers whose winter
residence was below Bleecker Street and who came up here to spend the
summer and so escape the heat of the dog-days. You can see it any day
you drive up the Speedway. It has stood there for over a hundred years
and is likely to continue. You know its history, too--or can, if you
will take the trouble to look up its record. Aaron Burr stopped here, of
course--he stopped about everywhere along here and slept in almost every
house; and Hamilton put his horse up in the stables--only the site
remains; and George Washington dined on the back porch, his sorrel mare
tied to one of the big trees. There is no question about these facts.
They are all down in the books, and I would prove it to you if I could
lay my hand on the particular record. Everybody believes it--Muffles
most of all.
Many of the old-time fittings and appurtenances are still to be seen. A
knocker clings to the front door--a wobbly old knocker, it is true, with
one screw gone and part of the plate broken--but still boasting its
colonial descent. And there is a half-moon window over the door above
it, with little panes of glass held in place by a spidery parasol frame,
and supported on spindling columns once painted white. And there is an
old lantern in the hall and funny little banisters wreathed about a
flight of stairs that twists itself up to the second floor.
The relics--now that I come to think of it--stop here. There was a fine
old mantel framing a great open fireplace in the front parlor, before
which the Father of His Country toasted his toes or sipped his grog, but
it is gone now. Muffles's bar occupied the whole side of this front
room, and the cavity once filled with big, generous logs, blazing away
to please the host's distinguished guests, held a collection of bottles
from Muffles's cellar--a moving cellar, it is true, for the beer-wagon
and the grocer's cart replenished it daily.
The great garden in the rear of the old mansion has also changed. The
lines of box and sweet syringa are known only by their roots. The
rose-beds are no more, the paths that were woven into long stripes
across its grass-plats are overgrown and hardly traceable. Only one
lichen-covered, weather-stained seat circling about an old locust-tree
remains, and this is on its last legs and needs propping up--or did the
last time I saw it. The trees are still there. These old stand-bys reach
up their arms so high, and their trunks are so big and straight and
smooth, that nothing can despoil them. They will stay there until the
end--that is, until some merciless Commissioner runs the line of a city
street through their roots. Then their fine old bodies will be drawn and
quartered, and their sturdy arms and lesser branches go to feed the
fires of some near-by factory.
No ladies of high degree now sip their tea beneath their shade, with
liveried servants about the slender-legged tables, as they did in the
old days. There are tables, of course--a dozen in all, perhaps, some in
white cloths and some in bare tops, bare of everything except the glass
of beer--it depends very largely on what one orders, and who orders
it--but the servants are missing unless you count Muffles and his
stable-boy. Two of these old aristocrats--I am speaking of the old trees
now, not Muffles, and certainly not the stable-boy--two giant elms (the
same that Washington tied his mare to when they were little)--stand
guard on either side of the back porch, a wide veranda of a porch with a
honeysuckle, its stem, as thick as your arm, and its scraggy, half-dead
tendrils plaited in and out of the palings and newly painted
lattice-work.
On Sunday mornings--and this tale begins with a Sunday morning--Muffles
always shaved himself on this back porch. On these occasions he was
attired in a pair of trousers, a pair of slippers, and a red flannel
undershirt.
I am aware that this is not an extraordinary thing for a man living in
the country to do on a Sunday morning, and it is not an extraordinary
costume in which to do it. It was neither the costume nor the occupation
that made the operation notable, but the distinguished company who sat
around the operator while it went on.
There was the ex-sheriff--a large, bulbous man with a jet-black mustache
hung under his nose, a shirt-collar cut low enough to permit of his
breathing, and a skin-tight waistcoat buttoned over a rotundity that
rested on his knees. He had restless, quick eyes, and, before his "ex"
life began and his avoirdupois gained upon him, restless, quick fingers
with steel springs inside of them--good fingers for handling the
particular people he "wanted."
Then there was the "Big Pipe" contractor--a lean man with half-moon
whiskers, a red, weather-beaten, knotted face, bushy gray eyebrows, and
a clean-shaven mouth that looked when shut like a healed scar. On Sunday
this magnate wore a yellow diamond pin and sat in his shirt-sleeves.
There could be found, too, now and then, tilted back on their chairs,
two or three of the light-fingered gentry from the race-course near
by--pale, consumptive-looking men, with field-glasses hung over their
shoulders and looking like bank-clerks, they were so plainly and neatly
dressed; as well as some of the less respectable neighbors, besides a
few intimate personal friends like myself.
While Muffles shaved and the group about him discussed the several
ways--some of them rather shady, I'm afraid--in which they and their
constituents earned their daily bread, the stable-boy--he was a street
waif, picked up to keep him from starving--served the beverages. Muffles
had no Sunday license, of course, but a little thing like that never
disturbed Muffles or his friends--not with the Captain of the Precinct
as part owner.
My intimacy with Muffles dated from a visit I had made him a year
before, when I stopped in one of my sketching-tramps to get something
cooling. A young friend of mine--a musician--was with me. Muffles's
garden was filled with visitors: some celebration or holiday had called
the people out. Muffles, in expectation, had had the piano tuned and had
sent to town for an orchestra of three. The cornet and bass-viol had put
in an appearance, but the pianist had been lost in the shuffle.
"De bloke ain't showed up and we can't git nothin' out o' de fish-horn
and de scrape--see?" was the way Muffles put it.
My friend was a graduate of the Conservatoire, an ex-stroke, crew of
'91, owned a pair of shears which he used twice a year in the vaults of
a downtown bank, and breakfasted every day at twelve--but none of these
things had spoiled him.
"Don't worry," he said; "put a prop under your piano-lid and bring me a
chair. I'll work the ivories for you."
He played till midnight, drank his free beers between each selection,
his face as grave as a judge except when he would wink at me out of the
corner of his eye to show his intense enjoyment of the whole situation.
You can judge of its effect on the audience when I tell you that one
young girl in a pink shirt-waist was so overcome with emotion and so
sorry for the sad young man who had to earn his living in any such way,
that she laid a ten-cent piece on the piano within reach of my friend's
fingers. The smile of intense gratitude which permeated his face--a
"thank-God-you-have-saved-me-from-starvation" smile, was part of the
evening's enjoyment. He wears the dime now on his watch-chain; he says
it is the only money he ever earned by his music; to which one of his
club-friends added, "Or in your life."
Since that time I have been _persona grata_ to Muffles. Since that time,
too, I have studied him at close range: on snowy days--for I like my
tramps in winter, with the Bronx a ribbon of white, even though it may
be too cold to paint--as well as my outings on Sunday summer mornings
when I sit down with his other friends to watch Muffles shave.
On one of these days I found a thin, cadaverous, long-legged, long-armed
young man behind the bar. He had yellow-white hair that rested on his
head like a window-mop, whitey blue eyes, and a pasty complexion. When
he craned his neck in his anxiety to get my order right, I felt that his
giraffe throat reached down to his waist-line and that all of it would
come out of his collar if I didn't make up my mind at once "what it
should be."
"Who's he, Muffles?" I asked.
"Dat's me new bar-keep. I've chucked me job."
"What's his name?"
"Bowser."
"Where did you get him?"
"Blew in here one night las' month, purty nigh froze--out of a job and
hungry. De Missus got soft on him--she's dat kind, ye know. Yer oughter
seen him eat! Well, I guess! Been in a littingrapher's shop--ye kin tell
by his fingers. Say, Bowser, show de gentleman yer fingers."
Bowser held them up as quickly as if the order had come down the barrel
of a Winchester.
"And ye oughter see him draw. Gee! if I could draw like him I wouldn't
do nothin' else. But I ain't never had nothin' in my head like that. A
feller's got to have sumpin' besides school-larnin' to draw like him.
Now you're a sketch-artist, and know. Why, he drawed de Sheriff last
Sunday sittin' in de porch huggin' his bitters, to de life. Say, Bowse,
show de gentleman de picter ye drawed of de Sheriff."
Bowser slipped his hand under the bar and brought out a charcoal sketch
of a black mustache surrounded by a pair of cheeks, a treble chin, and
two dots of eyes.
"Kin hear him speak, can't ye? And dat ain't nothin' to de way he kin
print. Say, Bowse"--the intimacy grew as the young man's talents loomed
up in Muffles's mind--"tell de gentleman what de boss said 'bout yer
printin'."
"Said I could print all right, only there warn't no more work." There
was a modesty in Bowser's tone that gave me a better opinion of him.
"Said ye could print all right, did he? Course he did--and no guff in
it, neither. Say, Missus"--and he turned to his wife, who had just
come in, the youngest child in her arms. She weighed twice as much as
Muffles--one of those shapeless women with a kindly, Alderney face, and
hair never in place, who lets everything go from collar to waist-line.
"Say, Missus, didn't de Sheriff say dat was a perfec' likeness?" And he
handed it to her.
The wife laughed, passed it back to Muffles and, with a friendly nod to
me, kept on to the kitchen.
"Bar-room ain't no place for women," Muffles remarked in an undertone
when his wife had disappeared. "Dat's why de Missus ain't never 'round.
And when de kids grow up we're goin' to quit, see? Dat's what de Missus
says, and what she says goes!"
All that summer the Shady Side prospered. More tables were set out under
the trees; Bowser got an assistant; Muffles wore better clothes; the
Missus combed out her hair and managed to wear a tight-fitting dress,
and it was easy to see that fame and fortune awaited Muffles--or what he
considered its equivalent. Muffles entertained his friends as usual on
the back porch on Sunday mornings, but he shaved himself upstairs and
wore an alpaca coat and boiled shirt over his red flannel underwear. The
quality of the company improved, too--or retrograded, according to the
point of view. Now and then a pair of deer, with long tails and manes,
hitched to a spider-web of a wagon, would drive up to the front
entrance and a gentleman wearing a watch-chain, a solitaire diamond
ring, a polished silk hat, and a white overcoat with big pearl buttons,
would order "a pint of fiz" and talk in an undertone to Muffles while he
drank it. Often a number of these combinations would meet in Muffles's
back room and a quiet little game would last until daylight. The orders
then were for quarts, not pints. On one of these nights the Captain of
the Precinct was present in plain clothes. I learned this from
Bowser--from behind his hand.
One night Muffles was awakened by a stone thrown at his bedroom window.
He went downstairs and found two men in slouch hats; one had a black
carpet-bag. They talked some time together, and the three went down into
the cellar. When they came up the bag was empty.
The next morning one of those spider-wheeled buggies, driven by one of
the silk hat and pearl-buttoned gentlemen, accompanied by a friend,
stopped at the main gate. When they drove away they carried the contents
of the black carpet-bag stowed away under the seat.
The following day, about ten o'clock in the morning, a man in a derby
hat and with a pair of handcuffs in his outside pocket showed Muffles a
paper he took from his coat, and the two went off to the city. When
Muffles returned that same night--I had heard he was in trouble and
waited for his return--he nodded to me with a smile, and said:
"It's all right. Pipes went bail."
He didn't stop, but walked through to the back room. There he put his
arms around his wife. She had sat all day at the window watching for his
return, so Bowser told me.