attracted attention at any time on account of his size, his luxuriant
hair and whiskers, and the strange condition of the costly clothing he
wore--a frock-coat and trousers of the extremest fashion, a rolling
white waist-coat, gray-spatted patent-leathers, and a silk hat. But all
these fine articles of apparel were much soiled in places, his
coat-collar was half turned up, the hat had met with various mishaps,
his shoes were scratched and dusty, his cravat ill-tied, and altogether
his appearance suggested a puzzling combination of prosperity and hard
luck. His doings were stranger than his looks. He tacked cautiously
from side to side of the way, peered up a cross-street here; went slowly
and cautiously up another for a few yards, only to return and to efface
himself for a moment behind a tree or in a doorway.
Suddenly he gave signs of having caught sight of somebody far up a
narrow lane. Promptly bolting into the nearest front yard, he got behind
the syringa bush and waited patiently until another man, smaller, but
much more active, hurried sharply down the lane, glancing suspiciously
around. This second person missed seeing the big man, and after waiting
irresolutely a moment or two, he hailed a street-car going toward the
town. At the same time another car passed him going in the opposite
direction. With incredible agility, the large man darted from behind the
syringa bush and made the second car in the brief second the little
man’s back was turned. Swinging himself inside, the figures on the rear
platform promptly concealed him from view, and as he was whirled past us
we could distinctly hear him emit a tremendous sigh or puff of profound
relief.
“You don’t know him?” said the Doctor, smiling. “Yes, you do; at least,
you have seen him before; and I will show you him in his likeness as you
saw him two little years ago.
“Such as you see that man to-day,” continued the Doctor, as we strolled
toward the town, “he is entirely the creation of one small and
insignificant man; not the man you just saw watching for him, but
another so very insignificant that his name even is forgotten by the few
who have heard it. I alone remember his face. Nobody knows anything else
that throws light on his identity, except the fact that he was on one
occasion addressed as ‘Mr. Thingumajig,’ and that he is or was a writer
for the press, in no very great way of business. Now let us turn down
Main Street, and I will show you the man he reduced to the ignominious
object we have just been watching.”
We soon stopped at a photograph gallery, and the Doctor led me, in a way
that showed that his errand was not a rare one, to a little room in the
rear, where, on a purple velvet background, hung a nearly life-size
crayon portrait. It represented a large gentleman--the large gentleman
whom we had just seen--attired in much similar garments, only that in
the picture his neatness was spotless and perfect. Not a wrinkle, not a
stain marred him from top to toe. He stood in the graceful and dignified
attitude of one who has been set up by his fellow-citizens to be looked
at and admired, and who knows that his fellow-citizens are only doing
the right thing by him. His silk hat was jauntily poised upon his hip,
and the smile that illuminated his moustache and whiskers was at once
genial, encouraging, condescending, and full of deep religious and
political feeling. It was hardly necessary to look at the superb gilt
inscription below to know that that portrait was “Presented by the
Vestry of St. Dives Church, on the Occasion of his Retirement from their
Body to Assume the Burden of Civic Duties in the Assembly of the State
that Counts Him Among her Proudest Ornaments.”
[Illustration]
“Mr. Silo!” cried I.
“Mr. Silo,” said the Doctor; “but he did not go to the Assembly, and
that picture has never been presented. When you saw him to-day he was
running away from his brother-in-law, to get to New York to go on any
sort of a spree to drown his misery. Come along, and you shall hear the
tale of a fallen idol. And if, as you listen, an ant should cross your
path, do not step on it. Mr. Silo stepped upon an ant, and the ant made
of him the thing you saw.”
I do not tell this story exactly in the Doctor’s own words, though I
will let it look as if I did. The trouble of letting non-literary people
tell stories in their own language is that the “says I’s,” and the “says
he’s,” and the “well, this man” passages, and “then this other man I was
telling you about” interpolations take up so much of the narrative that
a story like this could not be read while a pound of candles burned.
But here is about the way the Doctor ought to have told it:
I do not wish to undervaluate the good influence of Mr. Silo in our
city. He has been a large and enterprising investor. He has built up the
town in many ways. He has been charitable and patriotic. He was a good
man; but he was not a saint. And a man has to be a saint to boom town
lots and keep straight. No; I’ll go further than that--it can’t be done!
George Washington couldn’t have boomed town lots and kept straight. And
Silo, as you can see by those whiskers, was no George Washington. Real
estate isn’t sold on the Golden Rule, you know. There were times when it
was mighty lucky for Silo that he was six feet high and weighed two
hundred pounds.
I don’t know the details of the transaction, but I am afraid that Silo
treated the little newspaper man pretty shabbily. He was a decent,
hard-working, unobtrusive little fellow, and he and his wife had been
scraping and saving for years and years to buy a house with a garden to
it, in just such a town as this. Well, no, that’s not the way to put it.
They had fixed on a particular house in this particular town, and they
had been waiting several years for the lease of it to fall in. They were
ready with the price, and I do not doubt that Silo or his agents had at
one time accepted their offer for the place. But when the time came,
Silo backed out, refused to sell, and disowned the whole transaction.
[Illustration]
That, in itself, was a mean act. It was a trifling matter to Silo, but
it was a biggest kind of matter to the other man and his wife. They had
set their hearts on that particular house; they had stinted themselves
for a long, long time to lay up the money to buy it; and probably no
other house in the whole world could ever be so desirable to those two
people. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The man might have put up with
his disappointment, and perhaps even have forgiven Silo for the shabby
trick. But Silo, I suppose, felt ashamed of himself and went further
than he had meant to, in trying to lash himself into a real good, honest
indignation. At least, that is my guess at it; for Silo was neither
brutal nor stupid by nature; but on this occasion he had the incredible
cussedness to twit the little man on his helplessness. It was purely a
question of veracity between the two, and Silo pointed out that, as
against him, nobody would take the stranger’s word. That was true; but,
good Lord! Silo himself told me subsequently that it was the meanest
thing, under the circumstances, that he ever heard one man say to
another. He always maintained that he was right about the sale; but he
admitted that his roughing of the poor fellow was inexcusable; and the
thing that graveled him most and frightened him most in the end was that
he had called the poor man “Mr. Thingumajig.” He had not caught the real
name; he only remembered that it had some sort of a foreign sound that
suggested “Thingumajig” to his mind.
Now, all that Silo had had before him previous to that outburst was only
a plain case of angry man; but from that time on he had ahead of him
through his pathway in life an incarnation of human hatred, out for
vengeance, and bound to have it.
“Well, now the fun of the thing comes in,” said the Doctor.
“I should think it was high time,” said I.
* * * * *
There was nothing very unusual in that little episode; but somehow it
got public, and was a good deal talked about; although, as I said,
hardly anybody knew the stranger, even by name. But, of course, it was
well nigh forgotten six months later, when the newspaper man came to the
front again.
His reappearance took the form of such a singular exhibition of meekness
that it ought to have made Silo suspicious, to say the least. But he was
a bit of a bully; and, like all bullies, it was hard for him to believe
that a man who did not bluster could really mean fight. Perhaps he had
no chance of mercy at that time; but if he did he threw it away.
The stranger wrote to the local paper a polite, even modest letter,
stating, very moderately, his grievance against Mr. Silo. He further
proposed a scheme, the adoption of which would obviate all possibilities
of such misunderstanding. I have forgotten what the scheme was. It was
not a good one, and I know now that it was not meant to be. The local
paper was the _Echo_. It was run by a shiftless young man named Meecham;
and, of course, Silo had him deep in his debt; and, of course, again,
Silo more or less ran the paper. So, when that letter arrived, Meecham
showed it to Silo, and Silo gave new cause of offense by violating the
honorable laws of newspaper controversy, and answering back in the very
same number of the paper. The matter of his reply was also injudicious.
He lost his temper at once when he saw that the letter was signed “Mr.
Thingumajig,” and he characterized both the plan and its proposer as
“preposterous.” I am inclined to think that that word “preposterous”
was just the word that the other man was setting a trap for. At any
rate, he got it, and he wanted nothing better. Here is his reply:
[Illustration]
AN OPEN LETTER TO P. Q. SILO, ESQ.
MY DEAR MR. SILO:
I greatly regret that my little scheme for the simplification of
the relations between intending purchasers and non-intending
sellers (so-called) of real estate should have fallen under your
disapprobation. Of course, I do not attempt to question your
judgement; but you must allow me to take exception to the language
in which that judgement is expressed; which is at once
inappropriate and insulting. You call me and my scheme
“preposterous;” and this shows that you do not know the meaning of
that frequently misused word. “Preposterous” is a word that may be
properly applied to a scheme that puts the cart before the
horse--“having that first which ought to be last,” as Mr. Webster’s
International Dictionary puts it--or to a thing or creature
“contrary to nature or reason; not adapted to the end; utterly and
glaringly foolish; unreasonably absurd; perverted.” If you want an
instance of its proper application, the word “preposterous” might
fitly be used in all its senses to describe your own brief but
startling appearance on Thursday evening last, between the hours of
nine and ten, in a certain quiet street of New York, in a pair of
pink pants.
I remain, dear sir,
Yours very truly,
MR. THINGUMAJIG.
That was all. Nothing more. But, as the lineman said of the two-thousand
volt shock, “it isn’t necessary to see some things to know that they’re
there.”
Now I want you to note the devilish ingenuity of that phraseology. To
speak of “pink trousers” would serve only to call up an unattractive
mental picture. “Pink breeches” would only suggest the satin
knee-breeches of a page in a comic opera; but “pink pants” is a
combination you can’t get out of your head. It is not English; the word
“pants” is a vulgar contraction of the word pantaloons, and we don’t
wear pantaloons in these days. But “pants” is the funniest word of its
size that ever was invented, and it is just about the right word for
the hideous garment it belongs to. And whether there’s any reason or
logic in it or not, when I put those two little cheap words together and
say “pink pants,” I am certain of two things. First, you have got to
smile; second, you can’t forget it to save your neck. And that’s what
Mr. Thingumajig knew. I think he had everything laid out in his mind
just as it was going to happen.
Meecham got that letter, and laid it aside to show to Silo; but as he
sat at his desk and worked, the salient phrase kept bobbing around in
his mind; and, finally, he said aloud:
“Pink pants! What in thunder are pink pants, anyway?”
His foreman heard him, and looked at him in amazement.
“Pink pants,” he repeated; “that’s a new one on me.”
Meecham picked up the letter again, and knit his brows as he studied it.
“That’s right,” he said; “that’s what it is.”
The foreman came and looked over his shoulder.
“‘Pink pants,’” he repeated; “that’s right.”
A man who had just come into the office looked at the two speakers with
astonishment. Meecham knew that he had come to put an advertisement in
the paper, and so he showed him the letter.
“Well, I’m damned!” he said. “That’s right, though. It’s ‘pink pants,’
on your life. But where in blazes would a man get pink pants, anyway?”
When Mr. Silo saw the letter he told Meecham to “burke” it; and Meecham
put it in the waste-basket. The next day Silo made him take it out of
the waste-basket and print it. He explained that so many people had
asked him about the letter--and he said something to Meecham as to his
methods of running the office--that he thought it better to print it and
let the people see for themselves how absurd it was, or else they might
magnify it and think he was afraid to print it. Meecham did not say
anything at the moment. He did not like being blown up any more than the
rest of us do, however; and, when he had got the letter safely printed
and out before the public, he said to Silo:
“You did just right about that letter. It wouldn’t have done for a man
of your position to have folks going around asking where you were on any
particular Thursday evening.”
[Illustration]
“Why, no!” said Silo; “of course it wouldn’t. Lemme see; was that the
day the infernal crank picked out?”
“Thursday night, the eleventh,” said Meecham, his finger on the
calendar; “between nine and ten o’clock at night. Now, of course, Mr.
Silo, you know just where you were then.”
“Why, of course!” said Silo. “Lemme see, now. Thursday the eleventh,
nine, ten at night. Why, I was--no--why, _Thursday, the eleventh_!--Oh,
thunder!--no--it can’t be! Oh, certainly! yes; that’s all right, of
course! Is that Mr. Smith over there, the other side of the street? I’ve
got to speak to him a minute. I’ll see you to-morrow. Good-night, my
boy!”
* * * * *
How much of an expert in human nature are you? If I tell you that Mr.
Silo insisted on having every first impression of an edition of the
_Echo_ sent to his house by special messenger the instant it was
printed, whether he was at home or not, and that he did this just to
make Meecham feel the bitterness of the servitude of debt, what do you
deduce or infer from that? That somebody else was tyrannizing over Silo?
Quite right! Mrs. Silo was a woman who opened all of her husband’s
letters--that came to the house. And she looked at Silo’s paper before
he saw it himself.
And when Silo got home that day, Mrs. Silo was waiting for him. Mrs.
Silo and the copy of the _Echo_, with the letter concerning Mr. Silo and
the pink pants. Mrs. Silo wanted to know about it. If Mr. Silo was in
any doubt about Thursday night, the eleventh, Mrs. Silo was not. On
that night Mr. Silo had been expected out on the train leaving New York
at eight o’clock. He had arrived on the train leaving New York at ten
o’clock. There was no trouble at all in identifying the night. Mrs. Silo
reminded him that it was the night of the day when he took in a certain
hank of red Berlin wool to be delivered to Mrs. Silo’s mother, who lived
in 14th Street; which, as Mrs. Silo remarked, is not a quiet street. She
also reminded Mr. Silo that on his appearance that evening she had asked
him if he had delivered that hank of red Berlin wool at the house of his
mother-in-law, and he had answered that he had; that his lateness was
due to that cause; and, furthermore, that his dear mother-in law was
very well.
[Illustration]
To this Mr. Silo responded that his statements on Thursday evening were
perfectly correct.
Then Mrs. Silo told him that since the arrival of the paper she had made
a trip to New York to inform herself as to the true condition of
affairs. And, furthermore, on Thursday the eleventh, Mrs. Silo’s mother
had been confined to her bed all day with a severe neuralgic headache,
all the other members of the family being absent at the bedside of a
sick relative; the cook had had a day off, and the aged waitress, who
had been in the family twenty-five years, was certain that no one had
entered the house up to the return of the absent members at eight,
sharp, when, the sick relative being by that time a dead relative, the
house was closed. So much for furthermore. Now, moreover, the hank of
red Berlin wool had arrived at the house in Fourteenth Street four days
after the date in question. It came through the United States mail,
wrapped up in a sheet of tinted notepaper, scented with musk, and
addressed in a sprawling but unmistakably feminine hand.
[Illustration]
Mr. Silo made an explanation. It was unsatisfactory.
* * * * *
It had long been known in the town that suspicion was rife in the Silo
household. It was now known that suspicion had ripened into certainty.
Events of that kind belong to what may be classed as the masculine or
strictly necessary and self-protective scandal. News of the event goes
in hushed whispers through the masculine community--the brotherhood of
man, as you might say. One man says to his neighbor, “Let’s get Johnston
and go down to Coney Island this afternoon.” “Johnston isn’t going down
to Coney Island this week,” says the neighbor. “Johnston miscalculated
his wine last night, and Mrs. Johnston is good people to leave alone
this morning.”
In a case so much more serious than a mere case of intoxication as
Silo’s was supposed to be, you can readily understand that the scandal
of the pink pants spread through the town like wildfire. Silo had
already resigned from the vestry, so all the vestry could do was to
pitch in and see that he did not get the ghost of a show as a candidate
for assembly. It was not much of a job, under the circumstances, and the
vestry did it very easily.
* * * * *
“Well, but what _had_ Silo done?” I asked the Doctor. “And what were the
pink pants, anyway?”
“Silo hadn’t done a thing,” replied the Doctor. “Not a blessed
thing--except to tell a tiny little bit of a two-for-one-cent fib about
that hank of worsted. I met Mr. Thingumajig in Chicago last year, and
he told me how he worked the whole scheme. The gist of the invention lay
in the ‘pink pants.’ Any fool can put up a job to make a man’s wife
jealous; but it takes the genius of deathless malevolence to invent a
phrase sure to catch every ear that hears it; sure to interest and
puzzle and excite every mind that gives it lodgment, and to tie that
phrase up to an individuality in such a way that it conveys an
accusation almost without form and void, and yet hideously suggestive of
iniquity.
“That is just what the little newspaper cuss did with Silo. He was bent
on revenge, and he gave up a certain portion of his time to shadowing
him. You must remember that, while he had reason to remember Silo, Silo
had hardly any to remember him. Well, he told me that he dogged Silo for
days--months, even--trying to catch him in some wrong-doing. But Silo,
big and blustering as he looked, with his whiskers and his knowing air,
was an innocent, respectable, henpecked ass. Outside of business, all
that he ever did in New York was to go to his mother-in-law’s house at
his wife’s bidding to execute shopping commissions and the like. For
instance, this hank of Berlin wool the old lady had bought for her
daughter; the shade was wrong, and the daughter sent it back. Mr.
Thingumajig--never mind his name now--had been tracking Silo on his
trips to Fourteenth Street for weeks, and had just learned their
innocent nature. His soul was full of rage. He got into a green car with
Silo, going to the ferry. The evening was hot. Silo dozed in the corner
of the car. The hank of red Berlin wool lay on the seat beside him. Mr.
Thingumajig saw it, and saw the letter pinned to it, addressed by Mrs.
Silo to her mother. In that instant he conceived the crude basis of his
plot--to appropriate the hank, suppress the letter, souse the wool with
cheap perfume, get his wife to readdress the parcel in her worst
hand--and to rely in pretty good confidence on Silo’s telling a lie at
one end or both ends of the line about the missing wool. Silo was not
much of a sinner, but a man who loses his wife’s hank of Berlin wool and
goes home and owns up about it is a good deal of a saint. The chances
were all in Mr. Thingumajig’s favor.”
* * * * *
“But,” said I, “when you had met Mr. Thingumajig and became possessed of
the plot, why didn’t you come back here and tell all about it, and clear
up poor Silo?”
[Illustration]
The Doctor looked at me pityingly, almost contemptuously.
“My dear fellow,” he said, as if he were talking to a child, “what was
my word to those pink pants? I tried it on, until I found that people
simply began to suspect me, and to think that I might be Silo’s
accomplice in iniquity. There wasn’t the least use in it. If I talked
to a man, he would hear me through; and then he would wag his head and
say, ‘That’s all very well; but how about those pink pants? If there
weren’t any pink pants how did they come to be mentioned?’ And that was
the way everywhere. I could explain all about poor Silo’s foolish little
lie, and they would say, ‘Oh, yes, that’s possible; a man might lie
about a hank of wool if he had the kind of wife Silo’s got; but how
about those pink pants?’ And when it wasn’t _those_ pink pants, it was
_them_ pink pants. And after a while I gave it up. Silo had got to
drinking pretty hard by that time, in order to drown his miseries; and
of course that only confirmed the earlier scandal. Now, Silo never was a
man that could drink; it never did agree with him, and he has got so
wild recently that Mrs. Silo has her two brothers take turns to come out
here and try to control him. Of course that makes him all the wilder.”
At the end of Main Street I parted from my friend, the Doctor, and
shortly I crossed the pathway of another citizen who had seen the two of
us bidding good-by.
“He’s a nice man, the Doctor is,” said the citizen; “but the trouble
with him is, he’s altogether too credulous and sympathetic. Now, I
wouldn’t be surprised if he’d been making some defense to you of the
goings on of that man Silo. He’s a sort of addled on that subject. May
be it’s just pure charity, of course; and may be, equally, he was in
with Silo when Silo wasn’t so openly disgraceful; but if you want to
know what that man Silo is, I’ll tell you. The people around here,
sir--the people who ought to know--do you know what they call him, sir?
Well, sir, they call him, ‘The Man with the Pink Pants.’ And do you
suppose for one minute, sir, that a man gets a name fixed on him like
that without he’s deserved it? No, sir; your friend there is a good man,
and a charitable man, but as for judgement of character, he ain’t got
it. And if you’re a friend of his, you’ll tell him that the less he has
to say about ‘The Man with the Pink Pants’--the better for _him_.”
[Illustration]
THE THIRD FIGURE IN THE COTILLION.
Around the little island of Ausserland the fishing-smacks hover all
through the season. They rarely go out of sight; or, indeed, stand far
off shore, for life is easy in Ausserland, and the famous Ausserland
herrings, which give the island its prosperity, are oftenest to be
caught in the broad reaches of shallow water that surround the island.
Beyond these reaches there are fish, too; but out there the waters are
more turbulent. And why should a fisherman risk his life and his
beautiful brown duck sails in treacherous seas, when he has his
herring-pond at his own door-step, so to speak. And they have a saying
in Ausserland that if you are drowned you may go to heaven; but
certainly not to Ausserland.