poor. They think I ain't got any money. But old Ab's too smart for them.
I've got lots of money--all I want--all anyone could want--wealth beyond
the dreams of avar--of av--avar--avar'ce, as John Ingalls used to say.
Just look at this!" And with that Handy pulled from his inside coat
pocket a roll of one and two-dollar bills, that seemed to Hedrick to
represent fifty dollars less the price of about ten drinks. "Look
a-here," continued Handy, "ol' Ab's got 'em all fooled. Don't you say
anything about it; but ol' Ab's goin' to make his mark." And he shook
Hedrick's hand and took him down to the street, and shook it again and
again before prancing grandly down the sidewalk.
For three years Mrs. Handy's boarding-house has been one of the most
exclusive in our town. They say that she pays Mr. Handy for mowing the
lawn and helping about the rough work in the kitchen, and that he sleeps
in the barn and pays her for such meals as he eats. Sometimes a new
boarder makes the mistake of paying the board money to Handy, and he
appears on Main Street ostentatiously jingling his silver and toward
evening has ideas about the railroad situation. On election days and
when there is a primary Handy drives a carriage and gathers up his
cronies in the fifth ward, who, like him, are not so much in evidence as
they were ten years ago.
It was only last week that Hedrick was in our office telling us of
Handy's "wealth beyond the dreams of avarice." He paused when he had
finished the story, cocked his head on one side, and squinted at the
ceiling as he said:
"For three long, weary, fruitless years I've searched the drug-stores of
this town for the brand of liquor Ab had that day. I believe if I had
two drinks of that I could write better poetry than old Browning
himself."
Whereupon Hedrick shook himself out of the office in a gentle wheesy
laugh.
XVII
The Tremolo Stop
Our business has changed greatly since Horace Greeley's day. And,
although machines have come into little offices like ours, the greatest
changes have come in the men who do the work in these offices. In the
old days--the days before the great war and after it--printers and
editors were rarely leading citizens in the community. The editor and
the printer were just coming out of the wandering minstrel stage of
social development, and the journeyman who went from town to town
seeking work, and increasing his skill, was an important factor in the
craft. One might always depend upon a tramp printer's coming in when
there was a rush of work in the office, and also figure on one of the
tourists in the office leaving when he was needed most.
From the ranks of this wayward class came the old editors and reporters;
they were postgraduates from the back room of newspaper offices and
they brought to the front room their easy view of life. Some of these
itinerant writing craftsmen had professional fame. There was Peter B.
Lee, who had tramped the country over, who knew Greeley and Dana and
Prentice and Bob Burdett and Henry Watterson, and to whom the cub in
country offices looked with worshipful eyes. There was "Old Slugs"--the
printer who carried his moulds for making lead slugs, and who, under the
influence of improper stimulants, could recite stirring scenes from the
tragedies of Shakespeare. There was Buzby--old Buzby, who went about
from office to office leaving his obituary set up by his own hand,
conveying the impression that at last the end had come to a misspent
life. Then there was J. N. Free--the "Immortal J. N.," as he called
himself, a gaunt, cadaverous figure in broad hat and linen duster, with
hair flowing over his shoulders, who stalked into the offices at
unseemly hours to "raise the veil" of ignorance and error, and "relieve
the pressure" of psychic congestion in a town by turning upon it the
batteries of his mind.
They were a dear lot of old souls out of accord with the world about
them, ever seeking the place where they would harmonise. They might have
stepped out of Dickens's books or Cruikshank's pictures, and, when one
recalls them now, their lineaments seem out of drawing and impossible in
the modern world. And yet they did live and move in the world that was,
and the other day when we were looking over the files we came across the
work of Simon Mehronay,--the name which he said was spelled Dutch and
sounded Irish,--and it does not seem fair to set down the stories of the
others who have made our office traditions without giving some account
of him.
For to us he was the most precious of all the old tribe of journalistic
aborigines. He came to the office one bright April day with red mud on
his shoes that was not the mud of our river bottoms, and we knew that he
had ridden to town "blind baggage"--as they say of men who steal their
way--from the South. The season was ripe for the birds to come North and
it was the mud of Texas that clung to him. His greeting as he strode
through the front room not waiting for a reply was "How's work?" And
when the foreman told him to hang up his coat, he found a stick, got a
"chunk of copy," and was clicking away at his case three minutes from
the time he darkened the threshold of the office.
There he sat for two weeks--the first man down in the morning and the
last to quit at night--before anyone knew whence he came or whither he
was bound. He had a little "false motion," the foreman said, and
clattered his types too audibly in the steel stick, but as he got up a
good string of type at the end of the day and furnished his own chewing
tobacco, he created no unfavourable comment in the office. He was a bald
little man, with a fringe of hair above the greasy velvet collar of his
coat, with beady, dancing black eyes, and black chin whiskers and a
moustache that often needed dyeing. It was the opinion of the foreman
and the printers that Mehronay's weakness was liquor, though that
opinion did not arise from anything that he said. For during the first
two weeks we did not hear him say much, but in the years that followed,
his mild little voice that ever seemed to be teetering on the edge of
the laugh into which he fell a score of times during an hour, became a
familiar sound about the office, and the soft, flabby little hand which
the other printers laughed about, during the first week of his
employment with us, has rested on most of the shoulders in the shop
guiding us through many sad ways.
In those days there were only three of us in the front room. All the
bookkeeping and collecting and reporting and editorial writing were done
by the three, and it happened that one morning near the first of the
month, when the books needed attention, no one had heard the performance
of "Hamlet" given by Thomas Keene at the opera house the night before,
and no one about the paper could write it up. Wherefore there was
perturbation; but in an hour this came from the back room set up in type
and proved in the galley:
"There were more clean shaves in town last night than have been seen
here for a long time. Everyone who wears cuffs and a necktie got a
'twice-over' and was 'out amongst 'em.' In the gallery of the opera
house roosted the college faculty and the Potter boy who holds the
Cottonwood Valley belt as the champion lay-down collar swell, and near
him was Everett Fowler, who was making his first public appearance in
his new parted spring whiskers, and was the observed of all observers.
Colonel Alphabetical Morrison, with his famous U-shaped hair-cut, lent
the grace of his presence to the dress circle. The first Methodist
Church was represented by Brother-in-law John Markley, who is wearing a
new flowered necktie, sent by his daughter in California (if you must
know), and General Durham of the _Statesman_ says that when the
orchestra played 'Turkey in the Straw,' and Bill Master began to shake
the sand-box--which is a new wrinkle in musical circles in our
town--John Markley's feet began to wiggle until people thought this was
his 'chill day.' After 'Turkey in the Straw,' the orchestra struck up
something quick and devilish, which Charley Hedrick, who played the
snare drum at Gettysburg, and is therefore entitled to speak on musical
subjects, says was 'The Irish Washerwoman.' After this appropriate
overture the curtain rose and the real show began.
"Mr. Keene's Hamlet is not so familiar to our people as his Richard
III., but it gave great satisfaction; for it is certainly a Methodist
Hamlet from the clang of the gong to the home-stretch. The town never
has stood for Mr. Lawrence Barrett's Unitarian Hamlet, and the high
church Episcopal Hamlet put on the boards last winter by Mr. Frederick
Paulding was distinctly disappointing. One of the most searching scenes
in the play was enacted when Ophelia got the power and had to be carried
out to the pump. The Chicago brother who plays the ghost has a great
voice for his work. He brought many souls to a realizing sense that they
are sin-stricken and hair-hung over the fiery pit. The groans and amens
from the sanctified in the audience were a delicate compliment to his
histrionic ability. The queen seems to have been a Presbyterian, and the
king a Second Day Adventist of an argumentative type. And they were not
popular with the audience, but the boy preacher who did Laertes was
exceedingly blessed with the gift of tongues. Brother Polonius seems to
have been a sort of presiding elder, and, when his exhortation rose, the
chickens in Mike Wessner's coop, in the meat-market downstairs, gave up
hope of life and lay down to be cut up and fried for breakfast. The
performance was a great treat and, barring the fact that some switchmen,
thinking Ophelia was full, giggled during the mad scene, and the further
fact that someone yelled, 'Go for his wind, Ham!' during the fencing
scene, the evening with Shakespeare's weirdest hero was a distinct
credit to Mr. Keene, his company and our people."
We wrote a conventional report of the performance, and printed
Mehronay's account below it, under the caption FROM ANOTHER REPORTER,
and it made the paper talked about for a week. Now in our town Keene was
a histrionic god of the first order, and so many church people came to
the office to "stop the paper" that circulation had a real impetus. We
have never had a boom in subscription that did not begin with a lot of
angry citizens coming in to stop the paper. It became known about town
who wrote the Keene article, and Mehronay became in a small way a public
character. We encouraged him to write more, so every morning the first
proof slips that came in began to have on them ten or a dozen short
items of Mehronay's writing. There was a smile in every one of them, and
if he wrote more than ten lines there was a laugh. It was Mehronay who
referred to Huddleson's livery-stable joint--where the old soaks got
their beer in a stall and salted it from the feed-box--as "a gilded
palace of sin." It was Mehronay who wrote the advertisement of the
Chinese laundryman and signed his name "Fat Sam Child of the Sun,
Brother of the Moon and Second Cousin by marriage to all the Stars." It
was Mehronay who took a galley of pi which the office devil had set up
from a wrecked form, and interspersed up and down the column of
meaningless letters "Great applause"--"Tremendous cheering"--Cries of
"Good, good!--that's the way to hit 'em!"--"Hurrah for Hancock"--and ran
it in the paper as a report of Carl Schurz's speech to the
German-American League at the court-house. It was Mehronay who put the
advertisement in the paper proclaiming the fact that General Durham of
the _Statesman_ office desired to purchase a good second-hand fiddle,
and explaining that the owner must play five tunes on it in front of the
_Statesman_ office door before bringing it in. Mehronay originated the
fiction that there was an association in town formed to insure its
members against wedding invitations which, in case of loss, paid the
afflicted member a pickle dish or a napkin ring, to present as his
offering to the bride.
Mehronay started a mythical Widowers' Protective Foot-racing Society,
and the town had great sport with the old boys whose names he used so
wittily that it transcended impudence. Mehronay got up a long list of
husbands who wiped dishes when the family was "out of a girl," as our
people say, and organised them into a union to strike for their altars
and their kitchen fires. When we sent him out to write up a fire,
however, he generally forgot the amount of insurance and the extent of
the loss, but he told all about the way the crowd tried to boss the fire
department; and if we sent him out to gather the local markets, he made
such a mess of it that we were a week straightening matters up. Figures
didn't mean anything to Mehronay. When the bank failed, he tried to
write something about it, but mixed the assets and the liabilities so
hopelessly that we had to keep him busy with other things, so that he
would have no time to touch the bank story. They used to say around town
that when he laid down a piece of money, however large, on a store
counter he never waited for his change, but be it said to the credit of
most of the merchants that they would save it for Mehronay and give it
to him on his next visit to the store, when he would be as joyful as a
child.
Gradually he left the back room and became a fixture in the front
office. He wrote locals and editorials and helped with the advertising,
drawing for this the munificent salary of fifteen dollars a week, which
should have kept him like a prince; but it did not--though what he did
with his money no one knew. He bought no new clothes, and never buttoned
those he had. Before sending him out on the street in the morning,
someone in the office had to button him up, and if it was a gala
day--say circus day, or the day of a big political pow-wow--we had to
put a clean paper collar on Mehronay above his brown wool shirt and
shove out the dents in his derby hat--a procedure which he called
"making a butterfly of fashion out of an honest workin' man." He slept
in the press-room, on a bed which he rolled up and stowed behind the
press by day, and in the evening he consorted with the goddess of
nicotine--as he called his plug tobacco--and put in his time at his desk
with a lead pencil and a pad of white paper writing copy for the next
day's issue. Nothing delighted him so much as a fictitious personage or
situation which held real relations with local events or home people.
One of the best of his many inventions was a new reporter who, according
to Mehronay's legend, had just quit work for a circus where he had been
employed writing the posters. Mehronay's joy was to write up a local
occurrence and pretend that the circus poster-writer had written it and
that we had been greatly bothered to restrain his adjectives. A few days
after the Sinclair-Handy wedding--a particularly gorgeous affair in one
of the stone churches, which had been written up by the bride's mother,
as the whole town knew, in a most disgusting manner--Mehronay sat
chuckling in his corner, writing something which he put on the copy-hook
before going out on his beat. It was headed A DAZZLING AFFAIR and it ran
thus:
"For some time we have realised that we have not been doing full justice
to the weddings that occur in this town; we have been using a repressed
and obsolete style which is painful to those who enter into the joyous
spirit of such occasions, and last night's wedding in the family of the
patrician Skinners we assigned to our gentlemanly and urbane Mr. J.
Mortimer Montague, late of the publicity department of the world-famed
Robinson Circus and Menagerie. The following graceful account from Mr.
Montague's facile pen is the most accurate and satisfactory report of a
nuptial event we have ever recorded in these columns."
And thereafter followed this:
"Last evening, just as the clock in the steeple struck nine, a vast
concourse of the beauty and the chivalry of our splendid city, composing
wealth beyond the dreams of the kings of India and forming a galaxy only
excelled in splendour by the knightly company at the Field of the Cloth
of Gold, assembled to witness the marriage of Miss May Skinner and Mr.
John Fortesque. The great auditorium was a bower of smilax and
chrysanthemums, bewildering, amazing, superb in its verdant labyrinth.
As the clock was striking the hour, the ten-thousand-dollar pipe-organ
filled the edifice with strains of most seductive, entrancing music,
played by Miss Jane Brown, the only real left-handed organist in the
civilised world. Then came the wedding party, magnificent, radiant,
resplendent with the glittering jewels of the Orient, dazzling with
gorgeousness, stupefying and miraculous in its revelation of beauty.
There were six handsome ushers--count them--six, ten bridesmaids--ten--a
bevy of real, live, flower-bearing fairies, captured at an immense
outlay of time and money in far Caucasia. The bride's resplendent
costume and surpassing beauty put the blush upon the Queen of Sheba,
made Hebe's effulgence fade as the moon before the sun; and as the long
courtly train of knights errant and ladies-in-waiting passed the
populace, they presented a regal spectacle, never equalled since the
proud Cleopatra sailed down the perfumed lotus-bearing Nile in her
gilded pageant to meet Marc Antony, while all the world stood agape at
the unheard-of triumph.
"To describe the bride's costume beggars the English language; and human
imagination falls faint and feeble before the Herculean task. From the
everlasting stars she stole the glittering diamonds that decked her
alabaster brow and hid them in the Stygian umbrage of her hair. From the
fleecy, graceful cloud she snared the marvellous drapery that floated
like a dream about her queenly figure, and from the Peri at Heaven's
gate she captured the matchless grace that bore her like an enchanted
wraith through the hymeneal scene.
"The array of presents spread in the throne-room of the Skinner palace
has been unexcelled in lavish expenditure of fabulous and reckless
prodigal wealth anywhere in the world. Golden tokens literally strewed
the apartment, merely as effulgent settings for the mammoth, appalling,
maddening array of jewels and precious stones, sunbursts and pearls
without price, that gleamed like a transcendent electrical display in
the hypnotising picture."
There was more of the same kind, but it need not be set down here.
However, it should be said that nothing we ever printed in the paper
before or since set the town to laughing as did that piece. We have
calls to-day for papers containing the circus-poster wedding, and it was
printed over two decades ago.
It was Mehronay's first great triumph in town; then the expected
happened. For three days he did not appear at the office and we
suspected the truth--that by day he slept the sleep of the unjust in the
loft of Huddleson's stable and by night he vibrated between the Elite
oyster parlour, where he absorbed fabulous quantities of soup, and Red
Martin's gambling-room, where he disported himself most festively before
the gang assembled there. The morning of the fourth day Mehronay
appeared--but not at his desk. We found him sitting glumly on his stool
at the case in the back room, clicking the types, with his hat over his
eyes and the smile rubbed off his face.
We were a month coaxing Mehronay back in to the front room. His
self-respect grew slowly, but finally it returned, and he sat at his
desk turning off reams of copy so good that the people read the paper up
one side and down the other hunting for his items. He is the only man we
have ever had around the paper who could write. Everyone else we have
employed has been a news-gatherer. But Mehronay cared little for what we
call news. He went about the town asking for news, and getting more or
less of it, but the way he put it was much more important than the thing
itself. He had imagination. He created his own world in the town, and
put it in the paper so vividly that before we realised it the whole town
was living in Mehronay's world, seeing the people and events about them
through his merry countenance. No one ever referred to him as Mr.
Mehronay, and before he had been on the street six months he was calling
people by their first names, or by nicknames, which he tagged onto them.
He was so fatherly to the young people that the girls in the Bee Hive,
or the White Front, or the Racket Store used to brush his clothes when
they needed it, if we in the office neglected him, and smooth his back
hair with their pocket combs, and he--never remembering the name of the
particular ministering angel who fixed him up--called one and all of
them "darter," smiled a grateful smile like an old dog that is petted,
and then went his way. The girls in the White Front Drygoods Store gave
him a cravat, and though it was made up, he brought it every morning in
his pocket for them to pin on. He was as simple as a child, and, like a
child, lived in a world of unrealities. He swore like a mule driver, and
yet he told the men in the back room that he could never go to sleep
without getting down and saying his prayers, and the only men with whom
he ever quarrelled were a teacher of zoology at the College, who is an
evolutionist, and Dan Gregg, the town infidel.
One morning when we were sitting in the office before going out to the
street for the morning's grist, Mehronay dog-eared a fat piece of copy
and jabbed it on the hook as he started for the door.
"My boy was drunk last night," he said. "Me and his mother felt so bad
over it that I gave him a pretty straight talk this morning. There it
is."
The office dropped its jaw and bugged its eyes.
"Oh, yes," he continued. "Didn't you know I had a boy? He's been the
best kind of a boy till here lately. I can see his mother don't like it
and his sister's worried too." His face for a second wore an expression
of infinite sadness, and he sighed even while the smile came back on the
face he turned to us from the door as he said: "Sometimes I think he is
studying law with old Charley Hedrick and sometimes I think he is in the
bank with John Markley; but he is always with me, and was such a decent
boy when I had him out to the College. But I saw him with Joe Nevison
last night, and I knew he'd been drinking."
With that he closed the door behind him and was gone. This was the
article that Mehronay left on the hook:
"Your pa was downtown this morning, complaining about his 'old trouble,'
that crick in his back that he got loading hay one hot day in Huron
County, Ohio, 'before the army.' The 'old trouble,' as you will
remember, bothers your pa a good deal, and your ma thinks that his
father must have been a pretty hard-hearted man to let him work so hard
when he was a boy. Your pa likes to have you and your ma think that when
he was a boy he did nothing but work and go to prayer-meeting and go
around doing noble deeds out of the third reader, but a number of the
old boys of the Eleventh Kansas, who knew your pa in the sixties, are
prepared to do a lot of forgetting for him whenever he asks it. The
truth about your pa's 'old trouble' is that he was down at Fort
Leavenworth just after the close of the war, and after filling up on
laughing-water at a saloon, he got into a fight with the bartender, was
kicked out of the saloon, and slept in the alley all night. That was his
last whizz. He took an invoice of his stock and found that he had some
of the most valuable experiences that a man can acquire, and he
straightened up and came out here and grew up with the country. Your ma
met him at a basket-meeting, and she thought he was an extremely pious
young man, and they made a go of it.