letters from my friend awaiting me. I found only one, a brief note,
telling me that he had been too busy to write the month before, and that
he was now too tired with overwork to be able to do more than say how
glad he was that I was back again in America, adding that a friend at
hand might be farther away than one who was on the other side of the
Atlantic. The letter seemed to me not a little constrained in manner. I
did not understand it; and with the hope of getting some light by which
to interpret its strangeness, I went to call on her. She refused to see
me, pleading a headache.
It was a month before I had a reply to my answer to his note, and the
reply was as short as the note, and quite as constrained. He told me
that he was well enough himself, but that his mother's health worried
him, since Denver did not agree with her, and she was pining to be back
in New York. He added a postscript, in which he told me that he had
dined a few nights before with the local manager of the insurance
company, and that he had met the manager's sister, a wealthy widow from
California, a most attractive woman, indeed. With needless emphasis he
declared that he liked a woman of the world old enough to talk
sensibly.
Another month passed before I heard from him again, and Christmas had
gone and the new year had almost come. The contents of this letter,
written on Christmas eve, when the frog that played the trombone had
been sitting on the corner of my desk for just a year, was as startling
as its manner was strange. He told me that his engagement was broken off
irrevocably.
If my own affairs had permitted it, I should have taken the first train
to Denver to discover what had happened. As it was I went again to call
on the landlady's daughter. But she refused to see me again. Word was
brought me that she was engaged, and begged to be excused.
About a fortnight later I chanced to meet on a street corner the
classmate who had got my friend the Denver appointment. I asked if there
was any news.
"Isn't there!" was the response. "I should think there was, and lots of
it! You know our friend in Denver? Well, we have a telegram this
morning: his health is shaky, and so he has resigned his position."
"Resigned his position!" I echoed. "What does that mean?"
"That's what we wanted to know," replied my classmate, "so we
telegraphed to our local manager, and he gave us an explanation right
off the reel. The manager has a sister who is the widow of a California
millionaire, and she has been in Denver for the winter, and she has met
our friend; and for all she is a good ten years older than he is, she
has been fascinated by him--you know what a handsome fellow he is--and
she's going to marry him next week, and take him to Egypt for his
health."
"He's going to marry the California widow?" I asked, in astonishment.
"Why, he's enga--" Then I suddenly held my peace.
"He's going to marry the California widow," was the answer,--"or she's
going to marry him; it's all the same, I suppose."
Two days later I had a letter from Denver confirming this report. He
wrote that he was to be married in ten days to a most estimable lady,
and that they were to leave his mother in New York as they passed
through. Fortunately he had been able to make arrangements whereby his
mother would be able to live hereafter where she pleased, and in
comfort. He invited me to come out to Colorado for the wedding, but
hardly hoped to persuade me, he said, knowing how pressing my
engagements were. But as their steamer sailed on Saturday week they
would be at a New York hotel on the Friday night, and he counted on
seeing me then.
I went to see him then, and I was shocked by his appearance. He was
thin, and his chest was hollower than ever. There were dark lines below
his liquid eyes, brighter then than I had ever seen them before. There
were two blazing spots on his high cheek-bones. He coughed oftener than
I had ever known him, and the spasms were longer and more violent. His
hand was feverishly hot. His manner, too, was restless. To my surprise,
he seemed to try to avoid being alone with me. He introduced me to his
wife, a dignified, matronly woman with a full figure and a cheerful
smile. She had a most motherly manner of looking after him and of
anticipating his wants; twice she jumped up to close a door which had
been left open behind him. He accepted her devotion as a matter of
course, apparently. Once, when she was telling me of their projects--how
they were going direct to Egypt to remain till late in the spring, and
then to return to Paris for the summer, with a possible run over to
London before the season was over--he interrupted her to say that it
mattered little where he went or what he did--one place was as good as
another.
When I rose to go he came with me out into the hotel corridor, despite
his wife's suggestion that there was sure to be a draught there.
He thrust into my hand a note-book. "There," he said, "take that; it's a
journal I started to keep, and never did. Of course you can read it if
you like. In the pocket you will find a check. I want you to get some
things for me after I've gone; I've written down everything. You will do
that for me, I know."
I promised to carry out his instructions to the letter.
"Then that's all right," he answered.
At that moment his wife came to the door of their parlor. "I know it
must be chilly out in the hall there," she said.
"Oh, I'm coming," he responded.
Then he grasped my fingers firmly in his hot hand. "Good-by, old man,"
he whispered. "You remember how I used to think the frog that played the
trombone was trying to execute a Heine-Schubert song? Well, perhaps it
is--I don't know; but what I do know is that it has played a wedding
march, after all. And now good-by. God bless you! Go and see my mother
as often as you can."
He gave my hand a hearty shake, and went back into the parlor, and his
wife shut the door after him.
I had intended to go down to the boat and see him off the next morning,
but at breakfast I received a letter from his wife saying that he had
passed a very restless night, and that she thought it would excite him
still more if I saw him again, and begging me, therefore, not to come to
the steamer if such had been my intention. And so it was that he sailed
away and I never saw him again.
In the note-book I found a check for five hundred dollars, and a list of
the things he wished me to get and to pay for. They were for his mother
mostly, but one was a seal-ring for myself. And there was with the check
a jeweler's bill, "To articles sent as directed," which I was also
requested to pay.
The note-book itself I guarded with care. It was a pocket-journal, and
my friend had tried to make it a record of his life for the preceding
year. There were entries of letters received and sent, of money earned
and spent, of acquaintances made, of business appointments, of dinner
engagements, and of visits to the doctor. Evidently his health had been
failing fast, and he had been struggling hard to keep the knowledge not
only from his mother, but even from himself. While he had set down these
outward facts of his life, he had also used the note-book as the record
of his inward feelings. To an extent that he little understood, that
journal, with its fragmentary entries and its stray thoughts, told the
story of his spiritual experience.
Many of the entries were personal, but many were not; they were merely
condensations of the thought of the moment as it passed through his
mind. Here are two specimens:
"We judge others by the facts of life--by what we hear them say and see
them do. We judge ourselves rather by our own feelings--by what we
intend and desire and hope to do some day in the future. Thus a poor man
may glow with inward satisfaction at the thought of the hospital he is
going to build when he gets rich. And a wealthy man can at least pride
himself on the fortitude with which he would, if need be, bear the
deprivations of poverty."
"To pardon is the best and the bitterest vengeance."
Toward the end of the year the business entries became fewer and fewer,
as though he had tired of keeping the record of his doings. But the
later pages were far fuller than the earlier of his reflections--sometimes
a true thought happily expressed, sometimes, more often than not
perhaps, a mere verbal antithesis, such as have furnished forth many an
aphorism long before my friend was born. And these later sentiments had
a tinge of bitterness lacking in the earlier.
"There are few houses," he wrote, in October, apparently, "where
happiness is a permanent boarder; generally it is but a transient guest;
and sometimes, indeed, it is only a tramp that knocks at the side door
and is refused admittance."
"Many a man forgets his evil deeds so swiftly that he is honestly
surprised when any one else recalls them."
Except the directions to me for the expenditure of the five hundred
dollars, the last two entries in the book were written on Christmas
morning. One of these was the passage which smote me most when I first
read it, for it struck me as sadness itself when written by a young man
not yet twenty-five:
"If we had nothing else to wish, we should at least wish to die."
At the time I did not seize the full significance of the other passage,
longer than this, and far sadder when its meaning was finally grasped.
"The love our parents gave us we do not pay back, nor a tithe of it,
even. We may bestow it to our children, but we never render it again to
our father and our mother. And what can equal the love of a woman for
the son she has borne? No peak is as lofty, and no ocean is as wide; it
is fathomless, boundless, immeasurable; it is poured without stint,
unceasing and unfailing. And how do we men meet it? We do not even make
a pretense of repaying it, most of us. Now and again there may be a son
here and there who does what he can for his mother, little as it is, and
much as he may despise himself for doing it: and why not? Are there not
seven swords in the heart of the Mater Dolorosa? And what sort of a son
is he who would add another?"
Although I had already begun to guess at the secret of my friend's
conduct, a mystery to all others, it was the first of these two final
entries in his note-book which came flashing back into my memory one
evening toward the end of March, ten weeks or so after he had bidden me
good-by and had gone away to Egypt. I was seated in my library, smoking,
when there came a ring at the door, and a telegram was handed to me. I
laid my cigar down on the brownish-yellow shell, at the crinkled edge of
which the green frog was sitting, reaching out his broken arms for the
trombone whereon he had played in happier days. I saw that the despatch
had come by the cable under the ocean, and I wondered who on the other
side of the Atlantic had news for me that would not keep till a letter
could reach me.
I tore open the envelope. The message was dated Alexandria, Egypt, and
it was signed by my friend's widow. He had died that morning, and I was
asked to break the news to his mother.
(1893)
[Illustration: On an Errand of Mercy]
The ambulance clanged along, now under the elevated railroad, and now
wrenching itself outside to get ahead of a cable-car.
With his little bag in his hand, the young doctor sat wondering whether
he would know just what to do when the time came. This was his first day
of duty as ambulance surgeon, and now he was going to his first call. It
was three in the afternoon of an August day, when the hot spell had
lasted a week already, and yet the young physician was chill with
apprehension as he took stock of himself, and as he had a realizing
sense of his own inexperience.
The bullet-headed Irishman who was driving the ambulance as skilfully as
became the former owner of a night-hawk cab glanced back at the doctor
and sized up the situation.
"There's no knowin' what it is we'll find when we get there," he began.
"There's times when it's no aisy job the doctor has. Say you give the
man ether, now, or whatever it is you make him sniff, and maybe he's
dead when he comes out of it. Where are you then?"
The young man decided instantly that if anything of that sort should
happen to him that afternoon, he would go back to Georgia at once and
try for a place in the country store.
"But nothing ever fazed Dr. Chandler," the driver went on. "It's Dr.
Chandler's place you're takin' now, ye know that?"
It seemed to the surgeon that the Irishman was making ready to patronize
him, or at least to insinuate the new-comer's inferiority to his
predecessor, whereupon his sense of humor came to his rescue, and a
smile relieved the tension of his nerves as he declared that Dr.
Chandler was an honor to his profession.
"He is that!" the driver returned, emphatically, as with a dextrous jerk
he swung the ambulance just in front of a cable-car, to the sputtering
disgust of the gripman. "An' it's many a dangerous case we've had to
handle together, him and me."
"I don't doubt that you were of great assistance," the young Southerner
suggested.
"Many's the time he's tould me he never knew what he'd ha' done without
me," the Irishman responded. "There was that night, now--the night when
the big sailor come off the Roosian ship up in the North River there,
an' he got full, an' he fell down the steps of a barber shop, an' he
bruck his leg into three paces, so he did; an' that made him mad, the
pain of it, an' he was just wild when the ambulance come. Oh, it was a
lovely jag he had on him, that Roosian--a lovely jag! An' it was a
daisy scrap we had wid him!"
"What did he do?" asked the surgeon.
"What didn't he do?" the driver replied, laughing at the memory of the
scene. "He tried to do the doctor--Dr. Chandler it was, as I tould you.
He'd a big knife--it's mortial long knives, too, them Roosians
carry--an' he was so full he thought it was Dr. Chandler that was
hurtin' him, and he med offer to put his knife in him, when, begorra, I
kicked it out of his hand."
"I have often heard Dr. Chandler speak of you," said the doctor, with an
involuntary smile, as he recalled several of the good stories that his
predecessor had told him of the driver's peculiarities.
"An' why w'u'dn't he?" the Irishman replied. "It's more nor wanst I had
to help him out of trouble. An' never a worrd we had in all the months
he drove out wid me. But it 'll be some aisy little job we'll have now,
I'm thinkin'--a sun-stroke, maybe, or a kid that's got knocked down by a
scorcher, or a thrifle of that kind; you'll be able to attend to that
yourself aisy enough, no doubt."
To this the young Southerner made no response, for his mind was busy in
going over the antidotes for various poisons. Then he aroused himself
and shook his shoulders, and laughed at his own preoccupation.
The Irishman did not approve of this. "An' of coorse," he continued,
"it may be a scrap 'twixt a ginny and a Polander; or maybe, now, a coon
has gone for a chink wid a razzer, and sliced him most in two, I
dunno'."
Then he clanged the bell unexpectedly, and swerved off the track and
down a side street toward the river.
The doctor soon found a curious crowd flattening their noses against the
windows of a drug-store on a corner of the Boulevard. He sprang off as
the driver slowed down to turn and back up.
A policeman stood in the doorway of the pharmacist's, swinging his club
by its string as he kept the children outside. He drew back to let the
young surgeon pass, saying, as he did so: "It's no use now, I think,
Doctor. You are too late."
The body of the man lay flat on the tile pavement of the shop. He was
decently dressed, but his shoes were worn and patched. He was a very
large man, too, stout even for his length. His cravat had been untied
and his collar had been opened. His face was covered with a torn
handkerchief.
As the doctor dropped on his knees by the side of the body, the
druggist's clerk came from behind the prescription counter--a thin,
undersized, freckled youngster, with short red hair and a trembling
voice.
"He's dead, ain't he?" asked this apparition.
The doctor finished his examination of the man on the floor, and then he
answered, as he rose to his feet: "Yes, he's dead. How did it happen?"
The delivery of the young druggist was hesitating and broken. "Well, it
was this way, you see. The boss was out, and I was in charge here, and
there wasn't anything doing except at the fountain. Then this man came
in; he was in a hurry, and he told me he was feeling faint--kind of
suffocated, so he said--and couldn't I give him something. Well, I'm a
graduate in pharmacy, you know, and so I fixed him up a little aromatic
spirits of ammonia in a glass of soda-water. You know that won't hurt
anybody. But just as he took the glass out of my hand his knees gave way
and he squashed down on the floor there. The glass broke, and he hadn't
paid for the spirits of ammonia, either; and when I got round to him he
was dead--at least I thought so, but I rang you up to make sure."
"Yes," the doctor returned, "apparently he died at once--heart failure.
Probably he had fatty degeneration, and this heat has been too much for
him."
"I don't think any man has a right to come in here and die like that
without warning, heart failure or no heart failure, do you?" asked the
red-headed assistant. "I don't know what the boss will say. That's the
kind of thing that spoils trade, and it ain't any too good here, anyway,
with a drug-store 'most every block."
"Do you know who he is?" the doctor inquired.
"I went through his pockets, but he hadn't any watch nor any letters,"
the druggist answered; "but he's got about a dollar in change in his
pants."
The doctor looked around the shop. The policeman was still in the
doorway, and a group of boys and girls blocked the entrance.
"Does anybody here know this man?" asked the surgeon.
A small boy twisted himself under the policeman's arm and slipped into
the store. "I know him," he cried, eagerly. "I see him come in. I was
here all the time, and I see it all. He's Tim McEcchran."
"Where does he live?" the doctor asked, only to correct himself
swiftly--"where did he live?"
"I thought he was dead when I saw him go down like he was sandbagged,"
said the boy. "He lives just around the corner in Amsterdam Avenue--at
least his wife lives there."
The doctor took the address, and with the aid of the policeman he put
the body on the stretcher and lifted it into the ambulance. The driver
protested against this as unprecedented.
"Sure it's none of our business to take a stiff home!" he declared.
"That's no work at all, at all, for an ambulance. Dr. Chandler never
done the like in all the months him an' me was together. Begob, I never
contracted to drive hearses."
The young Southerner explained that this procedure might not be regular,
but it revolted him to leave the body of a fellow-mortal lying where it
had fallen on the floor of a shop. The least he could do, so it seemed
to him, was to take it to the dead man's widow, especially since this
was scarcely a block out of their way as they returned to the hospital.
The driver kept on grumbling as they drove off. "Sure he give ye no
chance at all, at all, Doctor, to go and croak afore iver ye got at him,
and you only beginnin' yer work! Dr. Chandler, now, he'd get 'em into
the wagon ennyway, an' take chances of there bein' breath in 'em. Three
times, divil a less, they died on us on the stretcher there, an' me
whippin' like the divil to get 'em into the hospital ennyhow, where it
was their own consarn whether they lived or died. That's the place for
'em to die in, an' not in the wagon; but the wagon's better than dyin'
before we can get to 'em, an' the divil thank the begrudgers! It's
unlucky, so it is; an' by the same token, to-day's Friday, so it is!"
The small boy who had identified the dead man ran alongside of them,
accompanied by his admiring mates; and when the ambulance backed up
again before a pretentious tenement-house with a brownstone front and
beveled plate-glass doors, the small boy rang Mrs. McEcchran's bell.
"It's the third floor she lives on," he declared.
The janitor came up from the basement and he and the driver carried the
stretcher up to Mrs. McEcchran's landing.
The doctor went up before them, and found an insignificant little old
woman waiting for him on the landing.
"Is this Mrs. McEcchran?" he asked.
"Yes," she answered; then, as she saw the burden the men were carrying,
she cried: "My God! What's that? What are they bringing it here for?"
The young Southerner managed to withdraw her into the front room of the
flat, and he noticed that it was very clean and very tidy.
"I am a doctor," he began, soothingly, "and I am sorry to say that there
has been an accident--"
"An accident?" she repeated. "Oh, my God! And is it Tim?"
"You must summon all your courage, Mrs. McEcchran," the doctor returned.
"This is a serious matter--a very serious matter."
"Is he hurt very bad?" she cried. "Is it dangerous?"
"I may as well tell you the truth, Mrs. McEcchran," said the physician.
"I cannot say that your husband will ever be able to be out again."
By that time the stretcher had been brought into the room, with the body
on it entirely covered by a blanket.
"You don't mean to tell me that he is going to die?" she shrieked,
wringing her hands. "Don't say that, Doctor! don't say that!"
The bearers set the stretcher down, and the woman threw herself on her
knees beside it.
"Tim!" she cried. "Speak to me, Tim!"
Getting no response, she got to her feet and turned to the surgeon. "You
don't mean he's dead?" And the last word died away in a wail.
"I'm afraid there is no hope for him," the doctor replied.
"He's dead! Tim's dead! Oh, my God!" she said, and then she dropped into
a chair and threw her apron over her head and rocked to and fro, sobbing
and mourning.
The young Southerner was not yet hardened to such sights, and his heart
was sore with sympathy. Yet it seemed to him that the woman's emotion
was so violent that it would not last long.
While he was getting ready to have the body removed from the stretcher
to a bed in one of the other rooms, Mrs. McEcchran unexpectedly pulled
the apron from her head.
"Can I look at him?" she asked, as she slipped to the side of the body
and stealthily lifted a corner of the covering to peek in. Suddenly she
pulled it back abruptly. "Why, this ain't Tim!" she cried.
"That is not your husband?" asked the doctor, in astonishment. "Are you
sure?"
"Of course I'm sure!" she answered, laughing hysterically. "Of course
I'm sure! As if I didn't know Tim, the father of my children! Why, this
ain't even like him!"
The doctor did not know what to say. "Allow me to congratulate you,
madam," he began. "No doubt Mr. McEcchran is still alive and well; no
doubt he will return to you. But if this is not your husband, whose
husband is he?"
The room had filled with the neighbors, and in the crowd the small boy
who had brought them there made his escape.
"Can any one tell me who this is?" the surgeon asked.
"I knew that weren't Mr. McEcchran as soon as I see him," said another
boy. "That's Mr. Carroll."
"And where does--did Mr. Carroll live?" the doctor pursued, repenting
already of his zeal as he foresaw a repetition of the same painful scene
in some other tenement-house.
"It's only two blocks off--on the Boulevard," explained the second boy.
"It's over a saloon on the corner. I'll show you if I can ride on the
wagon."
"Very well," agreed the doctor; and the body was carried down and placed
again in the ambulance.
As the ambulance started he overheard one little girl say to another:
"He was killed in a blast! My! ain't it awful? It blew his legs off!"
To which the other little girl answered, "But I saw both his boots as
they carried him out."
And the first little girl then explained: "Oh, I guess they put his legs
back in place so as not to hurt his wife's feelings. Turrible, ain't
it?"
[Illustration: "MY! AIN'T IT AWFUL? IT BLEW HIS LEGS OFF!"]
When the ambulance started, the driver began grumbling again: "It's
not Dr. Chandler that 'ud have a thing like this happen to him. Him an'
me never went traipsing round wid a corp that didn't belong to nobody.
We knew enough to take it where the wake was waitin'."
The boy on the box with the driver guided the ambulance to a two-story
wooden shanty with a rickety stairway outside leading up to the second
floor.
He sprang down as the ambulance backed up, and he pointed out to the
doctor the sign at the foot of these external steps--"Martin Carroll,
Photographer."
"That's where he belongs," the boy explained. "He sleeps in the gallery
up there. The saloon belongs to a Dutchman that married his sister. This
is the place all right, if it really is Mr. Carroll."