|I was a student then and lived on the second floor of a brick dormitory
with foot-worn stones and sagging casements. The windows looked across
one end of the campus on ivy-covered walls of other buildings, on
a bronze statue whose head was bent to indicate that the person
represented had taken life seriously in his day. Near at hand was a
street of unacademic noises, horse-cars, shops, German bands, newsboys,
people who bought and sold without higher mathematics and seldom
mentioned Horatius Flaccus.
But there were drifts and eddies of the street that would turn aside and
enter the dormitories commercially. Tobin was one of these. He came to
my door by preference, because of the large crack in the panel. For,
if one entered the dormitory commercially and knocked at the doors, one
never knew--it might be Horatius Flaccus, a volume of size and weight.
But with a crack in the panel one could stand outside at ease and
dignity, looking through it, and crying, “_M'las ca-andy!_ Peanuts!”
Then, if anything arrived, without doubt it arrived. A man might throw
what he chose at his own door.
He was thin in the legs and shoulders, but round of face and marked
there with strange designs that were partly a native complexion; but, if
one is a candy boy, in constant company with newsboys, shiners, persons
who carry no such merchandise but are apt to wish for it violently,
one's complexion of course varies from day to day.
“Say, but I hit _him!_ He bled on his clo's.” Tobin sometimes made this
comment, “him” meaning different persons. There was a vein of fresh
romance in him. Did not Sir Balin, or his like, smite Sir Lanceor, so
that the blood flowed over his hauberk, and afterward speak of it with
enthusiasm?
It was a cold December day in the year 188-, when the snow whirled
without rest from morning chapel till the end of the day was signified
by the first splutter of gas-jets. Among the hills where I was born that
office was left to the sunsets and twilights, who had a manner of doing
it, a certain broad nobility, a courtesy and grace. “One of God's days
is over. This is our sister, the night.” The gas-jets were fretful,
coquettish, affected. “It is an outrage! One is simply turned on and
turned off!” Horatius Flaccus was social and intimate with me that day.
“_Exegi monumentum_,” he remarked. “You will find it not easy to forget
me.”
Monuments! At the University we lived among commemorative buildings;
many a silent dusty room was dim with accumulation of thought; and there
men labored for what but to make a name?
The statue outside represented one who took life seriously in his day,
now with the whirling snow about it, the gas-jet in front snapping
petulantly. “One is simply turned on and turned off!”
“_Exegi monumentum_,” continued Horatius Flac-cus. “This is my work, and
it is good. I shall not all die, _non omnis moriar_.” It seemed natural
to feel so. But how honorably the sunsets and twilights used to go their
ways among the hills, contented and leaving not a wrack behind.
It was a better attitude and conduct, that serene security of clouds in
their absolute death. “_Non omnis moriar_” was not only a boast, but a
complaint and a protest.
Still, as to monuments, one would rather be memorialized by one's own
work than by the words of other men, or the indifferent labor of their
chisels.
“_M'las ca-andy!_”
“Come in, Tobin!”
He opened the door and said, tentatively, “Peanuts.”
He always spoke in a more confident tone of the candy than of the
peanuts. There was no good reason for his confidence in either.
“Tobin,” I said, “you don't want a monument?”
He kicked his feet together and murmured again, “Peanuts.”
His shoes were cracked at the sides. The cracks were full of snow.
The remark seemed to imply that he did not expect a monument, having no
confidence in his peanuts. As a rule they were soggy and half-baked.
Tobin's life, I thought, was too full of the flux of things; candy
melted, peanuts decayed, complexion changed from day to day, his private
wars were but momentary matters. I understood him to have no artificial
desires. Death would be too simple an affair for comment. He would
think of no comment to make. Sunsets and twilights went out in silence;
Tobin's half of humanity nearly as dumb. It was the other half that was
fussy on the subject.
“Your feet are wet, Tobin. Warm them. Your shoes are no good.”
Tobin picked the easiest chair with good judgment, and balanced his feet
over the coals of the open stove, making no comment.
“I won't buy your peanuts. They're sloppy. I might buy you another pair
of shoes. What do you think?”
He looked at me, at the shoes, at the wet basket on his knees, but
nothing elaborate seemed to occur to him. He said:
“A'right.” He had great mental directness. I had reached that point in
the progress of young philosophy where the avoidance of fussiness takes
the character of a broad doctrine: a certain Doric attitude was desired.
Tobin seemed to me to have that attitude.
“If I give you the money, will you buy shoes or cigarettes?”
“Shoes.”
“Here, then. Got anything to say?”
He put the bill into his pocket, and said:
“Yep, I'll buy 'em.”
His attitude was better than mine. The common wish to be thanked was
pure fussiness.
“Well, look here. You bring me back the old ones.”
Even that did not disturb him. The Doric attitude never questions other
men's indifferent whims.
“A'right.”
I heard him presently on the lower floor, crying, “_M'las ca-andy!_
Peanuts.”
“I shall be spoken of,” continued Horatius Flaccus, calmly, “by that
wild southern river, the Aufidus, and in many other places. I shall be
called a pioneer in my own line, _princeps Æolium carmen deduxisse_.”
The night was closing down. The gas-light flickered on the half-hidden
face of the statue, so that its grave dignity seemed changed to a
shifty, mocking smile.
I heard no more of Tobin for a month, and probably did not think of him.
There were Christmas holidays about, and that week which is called of
the Promenade, when one opens Horatius Flaccus only to wonder what might
have been the color of Lydia's hair, and to introduce comparisons that
are unfair to Lydia.
It was late in January. Some one came and thumped on the cracked panel.
It was not Tobin, but a stout woman carrying Tobin's basket, who said in
an expressionless voice:
“Oi! Them shoes.”
“What?”
“You give 'im some shoes.”
“Tobin. That's so.”
“I'm Missus Tobin.”
She was dull-looking, round-eyed, gray-haired. She fumbled in the
basket, dropped something in wet paper on a chair, and seemed placidly
preparing to say more. It seemed to me that she had much of Tobin's
mental directness, the Doric attitude, the neglect of comment. I asked:
“How's Tobin?”
“Oi! He's dead.”
“I am very sorry, Mrs. Tobin. May I--”
“Oi! Funeral's this afternoon. He could'n' be round. He was sick. Five
weeks three days.”
She went out and down the stair, bumping back and forth between the wall
and the banister.
On the misty afternoon of that day I stood on that corner where more than
elsewhere the city and the University meet; where hackmen and newsboys
congregate; where a gray brick hotel looks askance at the pillared
and vaulted entry of a recitation hall. The front of that hall is a
vainglorious thing. Those who understand, looking dimly with halfshut
eyes, may see it change to a mist, and in the mist appear a worn fence,
a grassless, trodden space, and four tall trees.
The steps of the hall were deserted, except for newsboys playing tag
among the pillars. I asked one if he knew where Tobin lived.
“He's havin' a funeral,” he said.
“Where?”
“10 Clark Street.”
“Did you know him?”
The others had gathered around. One of them said:
“Tobin licked him.”
The first seemed to think more than ordinary justice should be done a
person with a funeral, and admitted that Tobin had licked him.
No. 10 Clark Street was a door between a clothing shop and a livery
stable. The stairway led up into darkness. On the third landing a door
stood open, showing a low room. A painted coffin rested on two chairs.
Three or four women sat about with their hands on their knees. One of
them was Mrs. Tobin.
“Funeral's over,” she said, placidly.
The clergyman from the mission had come and gone. They were waiting for
the city undertaker. But they seemed glad of an interruption and looked
at me with silent interest.
“I want to ask you to tell me something about him, Mrs. Tobin.”
Mrs. Tobin reflected. “There ain't nothin'.”
“He never ate no candy,” said one of the women, after a pause.
Mrs. Tobin sat stolidly. Two large tears appeared at length and rolled
slowly down.
“It made him dreadful sick when he was little. That's why.”
The third woman nodded thoughtfully.
“He said folks was fools to eat candy. It was his stomach.”
“Oi!” said Mrs. Tobin.
I went no nearer the coffin than to see the common grayish pallor of the
face, and went home in the misty dusk.
The forgotten wet bundle had fallen to the floor and become undone.
By the cracks in the sides, the down-trodden heels, the marks of keen
experience, they were Tobin's old shoes, round-toed, leather-thonged,
stoical, severe.
Mrs. Tobin had not commented. She had brought them merely, Tobin having
stated that they were mine.
They remained with me six months, and were known to most men, who came
to idle or labor, as “Tobin's Monument.” They stood on a book-shelf,
with other monuments thought to be _aere perennius_, more enduring than
brass, and disappeared at the end of the year, when the janitor reigned
supreme. There seemed to be some far-off and final idea in the title,
some thesis which never got itself rightly stated. Horatius Flaccus was
kept on the shelf beside them in the notion that the statement should
somehow be worked out between them. And there was no definite result;
but I thought he grew more diffident with that companionship.
“_Exegi monumentum_. I suppose there is no doubt about that,” he would
remark. “_Ære perennius_. It seems a trifle pushing, so to trespass on
the attention of posterity. I would rather talk of my Sabine farm.”