usual, the brown-eyed young man shook himself erect, as though to cast
behind him these evil thoughts. It was a beautiful day, and flowers
blazed in the broad windows of the florists--roses and carnations and
lilacs. There were lilacs also in the arbitrary hats the women were
wearing, and the same tint was often echoed in their costumes. He had
always been attentive to the changes of fashion--always subject to the
charm of woman. As he was borne down the Avenue by the side of the man
in whose custody he was, it struck him that this year the girls were
prettier than usual--younger, more graceful, more fascinating, more
desirable. He followed with his eyes first one and then another, noting
the sweep of the skirt, the curve of the bodice, the grace of gesture,
the straggling tendril of hair that had escaped upon the neck. For a
brief moment the pleasure of his eye took his thoughts away from his
future; and then swiftly his mind leaped forward to the next spring,
when no woman's face would chance within the range of his vision, and
when the unseen blossoming of nature would bring only impotent desire.
What zest could there be in life when life was bounded in a whitewashed
cell?
At Thirty-fourth Street the hansom was halted to let a funeral cross the
current of the Avenue. An open carriage came first, its seats covered
with flowers, tortured into stiff set pieces; the white hearse followed,
with a satin-covered coffin visible through its plate-glass sides; and
then half a dozen carriages trailed after. The prisoner in the hansom
noticed that the shades were drawn in the one that followed the hearse;
it bore a grief too sacred for observation--a mother's, no doubt. He was
suddenly glad that his parents had both died when he was yet a boy. To
be alone in the world, with no family to keep him warm with tolerant
affection--this had often saddened him; now at last he rejoiced at it.
When a man is on his way to prison to serve a term of years, the fewer
those who cherish him, the luckier for them. That he loved a
woman--that, indeed, he was going to jail because of his love for
her--this might add poignancy to his pain; but he felt himself manly for
once in trying to believe it was better now that she did not love him,
that she did not even know of his love for her.
In time the hansom turned from Fifth Avenue into Broadway; it went on
down-town past Union Square, with its broad trees, and past Grace
Church, with its grateful greenery; but the younger of the two men was
no longer taking note of what sped before his gaze. He was wondering
what the woman he loved would think when she would hear of his going to
prison--whether she would care very much--whether she would suspect that
his crime was due to his passion for her. That, of course, she could not
guess--that he had yielded to the temptation to lay hands on what was
not his, solely because he wanted more money to place at her feet. For
himself, he had been making enough; but for her he must have more. He
could not have ventured to invite her to give up anything for his sake.
He wanted to be able to offer her all she had been accustomed to
have--and more too, were that possible. He was conceited enough
ordinarily, he feared; and yet when he thought of her he felt so humble
that he had never dared to dream of going to her empty-handed--of asking
her to make any sacrifice in loving him. He had never told her of his
love, and perhaps she did not even guess it; and yet women are swift to
discover a thing like that. It might be that she had seen it; and that
when others should speak of him as he knew he deserved to be spoken of,
she might come to his defence and find some word of extenuation for his
misdeed. This possibility, remote as it was, gave him pleasure; and he
smiled at the suggestion as it came to him.
From this day-dream he was aroused as the driver of the hansom jerked
the horse back on his haunches to avoid running down a little old woman
who was trying to cross Broadway with a bundle of sticks balanced on her
head. As the animal almost touched her she looked up, and her glance
crossed that of the prisoner. He perceived instantly that she was an
Italian, that she was not so old as she looked, and that she had been
beautiful not so long ago. Then he wondered whether any man had done
wrong for her sake--whether or not two of her lovers had fought in the
soft Sicilian moonlight and one had done the other to death. Well, why
not? There were worse things than death, after all.
As they went on farther and farther down-town, Broadway began to seem
emptier. It was the first Saturday in June, and most of the stores were
closed. When they drew near to the City Hall, the great street, although
not so desolate as it is on a Sunday, lacked not a little of its
week-day activity. It was as though a truce had been proclaimed in the
battle of business; but the forts were guarded, and the fight would
begin again on the Monday morning.
After the hansom passed the Post Office the buildings on the right and
the left raised themselves higher and higher, until the cab was at last
rolling along what might be the bottom of a canyon. And it seemed to
him that the cliff-dwellers who inhabited the terraces of this man-made
gorge, and who spent the best part of their lives a hundred feet above
the level of the sidewalk, were no peaceable folk withdrawn from the
strife of the plains; they were relentless savages ever on the war-path,
and always eager to torture every chance captive. Wars may be less
frequent than they were and less cruel, but the struggle for existence
is bitterer than ever, and as meanly waged as any Apache raid.
The young man in the hansom felt his hatred hot within him for those
with whom he had meant to match himself. He had been beaten in the first
skirmish, and yet--but for the one thing--he could hold himself as good
as the best of them. How many of the men under the shadow of Trinity
were more honest than he? Some of them, no doubt--but how many? How many
names now honorable would be disgraced if the truth were suddenly made
known? How many of those who thought themselves honest, and who were
honest now, had in the past yielded to a temptation once, as he had
done, and having been luckier than he in escaping detection then, had
never again risked it? That was what he had intended to do; he knew
himself not to be dishonest, although the alluring opportunity had been
too much for him. If only he could have held on for another day, all
would have been well--no one would have had cause ever to suspect him;
and never again would he have stepped aside from the narrow path of
rectitude.
There was no use in repining. Luck had been against him, that was all.
Some men had been guilty of what he had done, and they had been able to
bluff it out. His bluff had been called, and he was now going to jail to
pay his debt of honor. Perhaps the copy-book was right when it declared
honesty to be the best policy. And yet he could not help feeling that
fate had played him a mean trick. To put in his possession at the same
moment a large sum of money and the information that the most powerful
group of capitalists in America had determined to take hold of a certain
railroad and re-establish it, and to have thus the possibility put
before him at the very hour when he had discovered that perhaps he had a
chance to win the woman he loved, if only he could approach her on an
equality of fortune--this temptation just then was too great to
withstand. He had yielded, and for a little while it had seemed as
though he was about to succeed. Twenty-four hours more and he could have
put back the money he had borrowed--for so he liked to look on his act.
That money once restored, he would have waited patiently for the rest of
his profit. Thereafter he could have afforded to be honest; he was
resolved never to overstep the law again; he would have kept the letter
of it vigorously--if only he had escaped detection that once.
But blind chance smote him down from behind. Suddenly, without an hour's
warning, the leader of the group of sustaining capitalists dropped dead;
his heart had failed, worn out by the friction and the strain. The
market broke; and all who had bought stocks on a margin were sold out
instantly and inexorably. Then the supporting orders came in and prices
were pushed up again; but it was too late. Two days before, or a day
after, that capitalist might have died without having by his death
unwittingly caused an arrest. And as the hansom rolled on toward the
Battery the prisoner had again a resentment against the capitalist for
choosing so unfortunate a day to die.
Now the end had come; of course, he had been unable to replace the money
he had taken, and there was nothing for him to do but to fly. But
instead of going to Canada, and hiding his trail, and then slipping
across to Europe, he had been foolish enough to come here to New York to
have another glimpse of the woman for the love of whom he had become a
thief. Once more luck had been against him; as it happened, she had gone
out of town for Decoration Day; and instead of taking ship to Europe, he
had waited. Only that Saturday morning he had met her brother and had
been told of her return to town. But when he was about to call on her
that afternoon, the gray-eyed man had called on him; and here he was on
his way to his trial, and he had not seen her, after all.
Then he went back to the last time he had had speech with her. It was
during one of his frequent visits to New York, and he had dined at the
club with her brother, who had told him that she was going to the play
that night with her mother. So he had betaken himself to the theater
also, and he had gazed at her across the house; and then he had put her
and her mother into their carriage, and the old lady had asked him to
dinner the next evening. He had supposed it was an eleventh-hour
invitation and that he was to fill the seat of some man who had
unexpectedly backed out; but none the less he had accepted with obvious
pleasure. And it was from a few casual words of her father's, after
dinner, that he got the first inkling of the railroad deal; and then,
before the time came for him to go, he had been fortunate enough to have
her to himself for a quarter of an hour. She had been graciousness
itself, and for the first time he had begun to have hope. He could not
recall what he had said, but his memory was clear as to how she had
looked. He could not remember whether he had allowed her even a glimpse
of his deep passion. It might be that she had guessed it, although she
had made no sign; he knew that women were as keen as they were
inscrutable.
The hansom was at last under the ugly framework of the Elevated almost
at the South Ferry gate. The tide was coming in strongly, and there was
a salt savor in the breeze that blew up from the lower bay. The
prisoner relished it as he filled his lungs with the fresh air; and then
he asked himself how long it would be before that saline taste would
touch his nostrils again.
As the cab drew up, the elder of the two men in it laid his hand on the
arm of the younger.
"I can trust you without the wristlets, can't I?" he asked.
The other flushed. "Put them on if you want," he answered, "but you
needn't. I'm not going to make a fool of myself again. I've told you I'm
going to plead guilty and do everything else I can to get the thing over
as soon as possible."
The gray-eyed man looked at him firmly.
"You're talking sense," he declared. "I'll trust you."
As they were about to step out, their horse was somewhat startled by an
electric automobile that rolled past clumsily and drew up immediately in
front of them.
The prisoner stood stock-still, with his foot vainly reaching out for
the sidewalk, as he saw the brother of the woman he loved help her out
of the vehicle. Then the brother asked a newsboy to point the way to the
boat for Governors Island; and she went with him as the urchin eagerly
guided them. She did not look around; she never saw the man who loved
her; and in a minute she turned the corner and was out of sight.
The officer of the law tapped his prisoner on the arm again.
"Come on," he said. "What's the matter with you? Have you seen a
ghost?"
(1899)
[Illustration: The Frog that Played the Trombone]
On a corner of my desk there stands a china shell; its flat and oval
basin is about as broad as the palm of my hand; it is a spotted
brownish-yellow on the outside, and a purply-pinkish white on the
inside; and on the crinkled edge of one end there sits a green frog with
his china mouth wide open, thus revealing the ruddy hollow of his
interior. At the opposite end of the shell there is a page of china
music, purporting to be the first four bars of a song by Schubert. Time
was when the frog held in his long greenish-yellow arms a still longer
trombone made of bright brass wire, bent into shape, and tipped with a
flaring disk of gilded porcelain. In the days when the china frog was
young he pretended to be playing on the brass trombone. Despite its
musical assertiveness, the function of the frog that played the trombone
was humble enough: the shell was designed to serve as a receiver for the
ashes of cigars and cigarettes. But it is a score of years at least
since the china frog has held the brass trombone to its open lips. Only
a few months after he gave his first mute concert on the corner of my
table the carelessness of a chance visitor toppled him over on the
floor, and broke off both his arms and so bent the trombone that even
the barren pretense of his solo became an impossibility. A week or two
later the battered musical instrument disappeared; and ever since then
the gaping mouth of the frog has seemed to suggest that he was trying to
sing Schubert's song. His open countenance, I am sorry to say, has often
tempted my friends to make sport of him. They have filled the red
emptiness of his body with the gray ashes of their cigars; they have
even gone so far as to put the stump of a half-smoked cigarette between
his lips, as though he were solacing himself thus for the loss of his
voice.
Although the frog is no longer playing an inaudible tune on an immovable
instrument, I keep it on a corner of my desk, where it has been for
nearly twenty years. Sometimes of a winter's night, when I take my seat
at the desk before the crackling and cheerful hickory fire, the frog
that played the trombone catches my eye, and I go back in memory to the
evening when it performed its first solo in my presence, and I see again
the beautiful liquid eyes of the friend who brought it to me. We were
very young then, both of us, that night before Christmas, and our hearts
kept time with the lilt of the tune that the frog played silently on his
trombone. Now I am young no longer, I am even getting old, and my friend
has been dead this many a year. Sometimes, as I look at the gaping frog,
I know that if I could hear the song he is trying to sing I should hate
it for the memories it would recall.
He who gave it to me was not a school fellow, a companion of my boyhood,
but he was the friend of my youth and a classmate in college. It was in
our Junior year that he joined us, bringing a good report from the
fresh-water college where he had been for two years. I can recall his
shy attitude the first morning in chapel when we were wondering what
sort of a fellow the tall, dark, handsome new-comer might be. The
accidents of the alphabet put us side by side in certain class-rooms,
and I soon learned to know him, and to like him more and more with
increasing knowledge. He was courteous, gentle, kindly, ever ready to do
a favor, ever grateful for help given him, and if he had a fault it was
this, that he was jealous of his friends. Although his nature was
healthy and manly, he had a feminine craving for affection, and an
almost womanly unreason in the exactions he made on his friends. Yet he
was ever ready to spend himself for others, and to do to all as he would
be done by.
Although fond of out-door sports, his health was not robust. He lacked
stamina. There was more than a hint of consumption in the brightness of
his eye, in the spot of color on his cheek, in the hollowness of his
chest, and in the cough which sometimes seized him in the middle of a
recitation. Toward the end of our senior year he broke down once, and
was kept from college a week; but the spring came early, and with the
returning warmth of the sunshine he made an effort and took his place
with us again. He was a good scholar, but not one of the best in the
class. He did his work faithfully in the main, having no relish for
science, but enjoying the flavor of the classics. He studied German that
year, and he used to come to me reciting Heine's poems with enthusiasm,
carried away by their sentiment, but shocked by the witty cynicism which
served as its corrective. He wrote a little verse now and then, as young
men do, immature, of course, and individual only in so far as it was
morbid. I think that he would have liked to devote himself to literature
as a career, but it had been decided that he was to study law.
After Class Day and Commencement the class scattered forever. In
September, when I returned to New York and settled down to my
profession, I found my friend at the Columbia Law School. His father had
died during the summer, leaving nothing but a life-insurance policy, on
the income of which the mother and son could live modestly until he
could get into a law office and begin to make his way in the world. They
had taken a floor in a little boarding-house in a side street, and they
were very comfortable; their money had been invested for them by one of
his father's business associates, who had so arranged matters that their
income was much larger than they had expected. In this modest home he
and his mother lived happily. I guessed that the father had been hard
and unbending, and that my friend and his mother had been drawn closer
together. Of a certainty I never saw a man more devoted than he was to
her, or more tender, and she was worthy of the affection he lavished on
her.
In those days the Law School course extended over two years only, and it
did not call for very hard work on the part of the student, so he was
free to pass frequent evenings in my library. I used to go and see him
often, for I liked his mother, and I liked to see them sitting side by
side, he holding her hand often as he debated vehemently with me the
insoluble questions which interested us then. During the second winter I
sometimes saw there a brown-eyed girl of perhaps twenty, pretty enough,
but with a sharp, nervous manner I did not care for. This was the
daughter of the lady who kept the boarding-house; and my friend was
polite to her, as he was to all women; he was attentive even, as a young
man is wont to be toward a quick-witted girl. But nothing in the manner
led me to suppose that he was interested in her more than in any other
woman. I did not like her myself, for she struck me as sharp-tongued.
It is true that I saw less of my friend that second winter, being hard
at work myself. It was in the spring, two years after our graduation,
that I received a letter from him announcing his engagement to the
young lady I had seen him with, his landlady's daughter. My first
thought, I remember, was to wonder how his mother would feel at the
prospect of another woman's coming between them. His letter was a long
dithyramb, and it declared that never had there been a man so happy, and
that great as was his present joy, it was as nothing compared with the
delight in store for him. He wrote me that each had loved the other from
the first, and each had thought the other did not care, until at last he
could bear it no longer; so he had asked her, and got his answer. "You
cannot know," he wrote, "what this is to me. It is my life--it is the
making of my life; and if I should die to-night, I should not have lived
in vain, for I have tasted joy, and death cannot rob me of that."
Of course the engagement must needs be long, because he was as yet in no
position to support a wife; but he had been admitted to the bar, and he
could soon make his way, with the stimulus he had now.
I was called out of town suddenly about that time, and I saw him for a
few minutes only before I left New York. He was overflowing with
happiness, and he could talk about nothing but the woman he loved--how
beautiful she was! how clever! how accomplished! how devoted to his
mother! In the midst of his rhapsody he was seized by a fit of violent
coughing, and I saw the same danger signal in his cheeks which had
preceded the break-down in his senior year. I begged him to take care
of himself. With a light laugh he answered that he intended to do so--it
was his duty to do so, now that he did not belong to himself.
In the fall, when I came back to the city, I found him in the office of
a law firm, the head of which had been an intimate of his father's. The
girl he was to marry went one night a week to dine with her grandmother,
and he came to me that evening and talked about her. As the cold weather
stiffened, his cough became more frequent, and long before Christmas I
was greatly alarmed by it. He consulted a distinguished doctor, who told
him that he ought to spend the winter in a drier climate--in Colorado,
for example.
It was on Christmas eve that year that he brought me the frog that
played the trombone. Ever since the first Christmas of our friendship we
had made each other little presents.
"This is hardly worth giving," he said, as he placed the china shell on
the corner of my desk, where it stands to this day. "But it is quaint
and it caught my fancy. Besides, I've a notion that it is the tune of
one of Heine's lyrics set by Schubert that the fellow is trying to play.
And then I've a certain satisfaction in thinking that I shall be
represented here by a performer of marvelous force of lung, since you
seem to think my lungs are weak."
A severe cough seized him then, but, when he had recovered his breath,
he laughed lightly, and said: "That's the worst one I've had this week.
However, when the spring warms me up again I shall be all right once
more. It wasn't on me that the spring poet wrote the epitaph:
'It was a cough
That carried him off;
It was a coffin
They carried him off in.'"
"You ought to go away for a month at least," I urged. "Take a run down
South and fill your lungs with the balsam of the pines."
"That's what my mother wants me to do," he admitted; "and I've half
promised to do it. If I go to Florida for January, can you go with me?"
I knew how needful it was for him to escape from the bleakness of our
New York winter, so I made a hasty mental review of my engagements.
"Yes," I said, "I will go with you."
He held out his hand and clasped mine firmly. "We'll have a good time,"
he responded, "just we two. But you must promise not to object if I
insist on talking about her all the time."
[Illustration: "I WENT TO SEE THE WOMAN MY FRIEND LOVED"]
As it turned out, I was able to keep all my engagements, for we never
went away together. Before the new year came there was a change in my
friend's fortunes. The man who had pretended to invest for them the
proceeds of his father's life-insurance policy absconded, leaving
nothing behind but debts. For the support of his mother and himself
my friend had only his own small salary. A vacation, however necessary,
became impossible, and the marriage, which had been fixed for the
spring, was postponed indefinitely. He offered to release the girl, but
she refused.
Through a classmate of ours I was able to get my friend a place in the
law department of the Denver office of a great insurance company. In the
elevated air of Colorado he might regain his strength, and in a new city
like Denver he might find a way to mend his fortunes. His mother went
with him, of course, and it was beautiful to see her devotion to him. I
saw them off.
"She bore the parting very bravely," he said to me. "She is braver than
I am, and better in every way. I wish I were more worthy of her. You
will go and see her, won't you? There's a good fellow and a good friend.
Go and see her now and then, and write and tell me all about her--how
she looks and what she says."
I promised, of course, and about once a month I went to see the woman my
friend loved. He wrote me every fortnight, but it was often from her
that I got the latest news. His health was improving; his cough had
gone; Denver agreed with him, and he liked it. He was working hard, and
he saw the prospect of advancement close before him. Within two years he
hoped to take a month off, and return to New York and marry her, and
bear his bride back to Colorado with him.