I fear she will not live till morning. Will you please come to her at
once?”
“Next door?” cried the physician. “I didn't know the Nethertons were
home!”
“Please hasten,” begged the man. “I must go back to her. Follow as
quickly as you can.”
The doctor went back upstairs to complete his toilet.
“How absurd,” protested his wife when she heard the story. “There is no
one at the Nethertons'. I sit where I can see the front door, and no one
can enter without my knowing it, and I have been sewing by the window
all day. If there were any one in the house, the gardener would have the
porch lantern lighted. It is some plot. Some one has designs on you. You
must not go.”
But he went. As he left the room his wife placed a revolver in his
pocket.
The great porch of the mansion was dark, but the physician made out that
the door was open, and he entered. A feeble light came from the bronze
lamp at the turn of the stairs, and by it he found his way, his feet
sinking noiselessly in the rich carpets. At the head of the stairs the
man met him. The doctor thought himself a tall man, but the stranger
topped him by half a head. He motioned the physician to follow him, and
the two went down the hall to the front room. The place was flushed with
a rose-colored glow from several lamps. On a silken couch, in the midst
of pillows, lay a woman dying with consumption. She was like a lily,
white, shapely, graceful, with feeble yet charming movements. She looked
at the doctor appealingly, then, seeing in his eyes the involuntary
verdict that her hour was at hand, she turned toward her companion with
a glance of anguish. Dr. Block asked a few questions. The man answered
them, the woman remaining silent. The physician administered something
stimulating, and then wrote a prescription which he placed on the
mantel-shelf.
“The drug store is closed to-night,” he said, “and I fear the druggist
has gone home. You can have the prescription filled the first thing in
the morning, and I will be over before breakfast.”
After that, there was no reason why he should not have gone home. Yet,
oddly enough, he preferred to stay. Nor was it professional anxiety that
prompted this delay. He longed to watch those mysterious persons, who,
almost oblivious of his presence, were speaking their mortal farewells
in their glances, which were impassioned and of unutterable sadness.
He sat as if fascinated. He watched the glitter of rings on the woman's
long, white hands, he noted the waving of light hair about her temples,
he observed the details of her gown of soft white silk which fell about
her in voluminous folds. Now and then the man gave her of the stimulant
which the doctor had provided; sometimes he bathed her face with water.
Once he paced the floor for a moment till a motion of her hand quieted
him.
After a time, feeling that it would be more sensible and considerate
of him to leave, the doctor made his way home. His wife was awake,
impatient to hear of his experiences. She listened to his tale in
silence, and when he had finished she turned her face to the wall and
made no comment.
“You seem to be ill, my dear,” he said. “You have a chill. You are
shivering.”
“I have no chill,” she replied sharply. “But I--well, you may leave the
light burning.”
The next morning before breakfast the doctor crossed the dewy sward to
the Netherton house. The front door was locked, and no one answered to
his repeated ringings. The old gardener chanced to be cutting the grass
near at hand, and he came running up.
“What you ringin' that door-bell for, doctor?” said he. “The folks ain't
come home yet. There ain't nobody there.”
“Yes, there is, Jim. I was called here last night. A man came for me to
attend his wife. They must both have fallen asleep that the bell is not
answered. I wouldn't be surprised to find her dead, as a matter of fact.
She was a desperately sick woman. Perhaps she is dead and something has
happened to him. You have the key to the door, Jim. Let me in.”
But the old man was shaking in every limb, and refused to do as he was
bid.
“Don't you never go in there, doctor,” whispered he, with chattering
teeth. “Don't you go for to 'tend no one. You jus' come tell me when you
sent for that way. No, I ain't goin' in, doctor, nohow. It ain't part
of my duties to go in. That's been stipulated by Mr. Netherton. It's my
business to look after the garden.”
Argument was useless. Dr. Block took the bunch of keys from the old
man's pocket and himself unlocked the front door and entered. He mounted
the steps and made his way to the upper room. There was no evidence of
occupancy. The place was silent, and, so far as living creature went,
vacant. The dust lay over everything. It covered the delicate damask of
the sofa where he had seen the dying woman. It rested on the pillows.
The place smelled musty and evil, as if it had not been used for a long
time. The lamps of the room held not a drop of oil.
But on the mantel-shelf was the prescription which the doctor had
written the night before. He read it, folded it, and put it in his
pocket.
As he locked the outside door the old gardener came running to him.
“Don't you never go up there again, will you?” he pleaded, “not unless
you see all the Nethertons home and I come for you myself. You won't,
doctor?”
“No,” said the doctor.
When he told his wife she kissed him, and said:
“Next time when I tell you to stay at home, you must stay!”
THE PIANO NEXT DOOR
BABETTE had gone away for the summer; the furniture was in its summer
linens; the curtains were down, and Babette's husband, John Boyce, was
alone in the house. It was the first year of his marriage, and he missed
Babette. But then, as he often said to himself, he ought never to
have married her. He did it from pure selfishness, and because he was
determined to possess the most illusive, tantalizing, elegant, and
utterly unmoral little creature that the sun shone upon. He wanted her
because she reminded him of birds, and flowers, and summer winds,
and other exquisite things created for the delectation of mankind. He
neither expected nor desired her to think. He had half-frightened her
into marrying him, had taken her to a poor man's home, provided her with
no society such as she had been accustomed to, and he had no reasonable
cause of complaint when she answered the call of summer and flitted
away, like a butterfly in the morning sunshine, to the place where the
flowers grew.
He wrote to her every evening, sitting in the stifling, ugly house, and
poured out his soul as if it were a libation to a goddess. She sometimes
answered by telegraph, sometimes by a perfumed note. He schooled himself
not to feel hurt. Why should Babette write? Does a goldfinch indict
epistles; or a humming-bird study composition; or a glancing, red-scaled
fish in summer shallows consider the meaning of words?
He knew at the beginning what Babette was--guessed her
limitations--trembled when he buttoned her tiny glove--kissed her dainty
slipper when he found it in the closet after she was gone--thrilled at
the sound of her laugh, or the memory of it! That was all. A mere case
of love. He was in bonds. Babette was not. Therefore he was in the
city, working overhours to pay for Babette's pretty follies down at the
seaside. It was quite right and proper. He was a grub in the furrow;
she a lark in the blue. Those had always been and always must be their
relative positions.
Having attained a mood of philosophic calm, in which he was prepared to
spend his evenings alone--as became a grub--and to await with
dignified patience the return of his wife, it was in the nature of an
inconsistency that he should have walked the floor of the dull little
drawing-room like a lion in cage. It did not seem in keeping with
the position of superior serenity which he had assumed, that, reading
Babette's notes, he should have raged with jealousy, or that, in the
loneliness of his unkempt chamber, he should have stretched out arms of
longing. Even if Babette had been present, she would only have smiled
her gay little smile and coquetted with him. She could not understand.
He had known, of course, from the first moment, that she could not
understand! And so, why the ache, ache, ache of the heart! Or WAS it the
heart, or the brain, or the soul?
Sometimes, when the evenings were so hot that he could not endure the
close air of the house, he sat on the narrow, dusty front porch and
looked about him at his neighbors. The street had once been smart and
aspiring, but it had fallen into decay and dejection. Pale young men,
with flurried-looking wives, seemed to Boyce to occupy most of the
houses. Sometimes three or four couples would live in one house. Most of
these appeared to be childless. The women made a pretence at fashionable
dressing, and wore their hair elaborately in fashions which somehow
suggested boarding-houses to Boyce, though he could not have told why.
Every house in the block needed fresh paint. Lacking this renovation,
the householders tried to make up for it by a display of lace curtains
which, at every window, swayed in the smoke-weighted breeze. Strips
of carpeting were laid down the front steps of the houses where the
communities of young couples lived, and here, evenings, the inmates of
the houses gathered, committing mild extravagances such as the treating
of each other to ginger ale, or beer, or ice-cream.
Boyce watched these tawdry makeshifts at sociability with bitterness and
loathing. He wondered how he could have been such a fool as to bring
his exquisite Babette to this neighborhood. How could he expect that she
would return to him? It was not reasonable. He ought to go down on his
knees with gratitude that she even condescended to write him.
Sitting one night till late,--so late that the fashionable young wives
with their husbands had retired from the strips of stair carpeting,--and
raging at the loneliness which ate at his heart like a cancer, he heard,
softly creeping through the windows of the house adjoining his own, the
sound of comfortable melody.
It breathed upon his ear like a spirit of consolation, speaking
of peace, of love which needs no reward save its own sweetness, of
aspiration which looks forever beyond the thing of the hour to find
attainment in that which is eternal. So insidiously did it whisper these
things, so delicately did the simple and perfect melodies creep upon the
spirit--that Boyce felt no resentment, but from the first listened
as one who listens to learn, or as one who, fainting on the hot road,
hears, far in the ferny deeps below, the gurgle of a spring.
Then came harmonies more intricate: fair fabrics of woven sound, in
the midst of which gleamed golden threads of joy; a tapestry of sound,
multi-tinted, gallant with story and achievement, and beautiful things.
Boyce, sitting on his absurd piazza, with his knees jambed against
the balustrade, and his chair back against the dun-colored wall of his
house, seemed to be walking in the cathedral of the redwood forest,
with blue above him, a vast hymn in his ears, pungent perfume in his
nostrils, and mighty shafts of trees lifting themselves to heaven, proud
and erect as pure men before their Judge. He stood on a mountain at
sunrise, and saw the marvels of the amethystine clouds below his feet,
heard an eternal and white silence, such as broods among the everlasting
snows, and saw an eagle winging for the sun. He was in a city, and away
from him, diverging like the spokes of a wheel, ran thronging streets,
and to his sense came the beat, beat, beat of the city's heart. He saw
the golden alchemy of a chosen race; saw greed transmitted to progress;
saw that which had enslaved men, work at last to their liberation; heard
the roar of mighty mills, and on the streets all the peoples of earth
walking with common purpose, in fealty and understanding. And then, from
the swelling of this concourse of great sounds, came a diminuendo, calm
as philosophy, and from that, nothingness.
Boyce sat still for a long time, listening to the echoes which this
music had awakened in his soul. He retired, at length, content,
but determined that upon the morrow he would watch--the day being
Sunday--for the musician who had so moved and taught him.
He arose early, therefore, and having prepared his own simple breakfast
of fruit and coffee, took his station by the window to watch for the
man. For he felt convinced that the exposition he had heard was that of
a masculine mind. The long, hot hours of the morning went by, but the
front door of the house next to his did not open.
“These artists sleep late,” he complained. Still he watched. He was
too much afraid of losing him to go out for dinner. By three in the
afternoon he had grown impatient. He went to the house next door and
rang the bell. There was no response. He thundered another appeal. An
old woman with a cloth about her head answered the door. She was very
deaf, and Boyce had difficulty in making himself understood.
“The family is in the country,” was all she would say. “The family will
not be home till September.”
“But there is some one living here?” shouted Boyce.
“_I_ live here,” she said with dignity, putting back a wisp of dirty
gray hair behind her ear. “It is my house. I sublet to the family.”
“What family?”
But the old creature was not communicative.
“The family that lives here,” she said.
“Then who plays the piano in this house?” roared Boyce. “Do you?”
He thought a shade of pallor showed itself on her ash-colored cheeks.
Yet she smiled a little at the idea of her playing.
“There is no piano,” she said, and she put an enigmatical emphasis to
the words.
“Nonsense,” cried Boyce, indignantly. “I heard a piano being played in
this very house for hours last night!”
“You may enter,” said the old woman, with an accent more vicious than
hospitable.
Boyce almost burst into the drawing-room. It was a dusty and forbidding
place, with ugly furniture and gaudy walls. No piano nor any other
musical instrument stood in it. The intruder turned an angry and baffled
face to the old woman, who was smiling with ill-concealed exultation.
“I shall see the other rooms,” he announced. The old woman did not
appear to be surprised at his impertinence.
“As you please,” she said.
So, with the hobbling creature, with her bandaged head, for a guide, he
explored every room of the house, which being identical with his own, he
could do without fear of leaving any apartment unentered. But no piano
did he find!
“Explain,” roared Boyce at length, turning upon the leering old hag
beside him. “Explain! For surely I heard music more beautiful than I can
tell.”
“I know nothing,” she said. “But it is true I once had a lodger who
rented the front room, and that he played upon the piano. I am poor at
hearing, but he must have played well, for all the neighbors used to
come in front of the house to listen, and sometimes they applauded him,
and sometimes they were still. I could tell by watching their hands.
Sometimes little children came and danced. Other times young men and
women came and listened. But the young man died. The neighbors were
angry. They came to look at him and said he had starved to death. It was
no fault of mine. I sold his piano to pay his funeral expenses--and it
took every cent to pay for them too, I'd have you know. But since then,
sometimes--still, it must be nonsense, for I never heard it--folks say
that he plays the piano in my room. It has kept me out of the letting of
it more than once. But the family doesn't seem to mind--the family that
lives here, you know. They will be back in September. Yes.”
Boyce left her nodding her thanks at what he had placed in her hand, and
went home to write it all to Babette--Babette who would laugh so merrily
when she read it!
AN ASTRAL ONION
WHEN Tig Braddock came to Nora Finnegan he was red-headed and freckled,
and, truth to tell, he remained with these features to the end of his
life--a life prolonged by a lucky, if somewhat improbable, incident, as
you shall hear.
Tig had shuffled off his parents as saurians, of some sorts, do their
skins. During the temporary absence from home of his mother, who was at
the bridewell, and the more extended vacation of his father, who, like
Villon, loved the open road and the life of it, Tig, who was not a
well-domesticated animal, wandered away. The humane society never heard
of him, the neighbors did not miss him, and the law took no cognizance
of this detached citizen--this lost pleiad. Tig would have sunk into
that melancholy which is attendant upon hunger,--the only form of
despair which babyhood knows,--if he had not wandered across the path of
Nora Finnegan. Now Nora shone with steady brightness in her orbit,
and no sooner had Tig entered her atmosphere, than he was warmed and
comforted. Hunger could not live where Nora was. The basement room where
she kept house was redolent with savory smells; and in the stove in her
front room--which was also her bedroom--there was a bright fire glowing
when fire was needed.
Nora went out washing for a living. But she was not a poor washerwoman.
Not at all. She was a washerwoman triumphant. She had perfect health, an
enormous frame, an abounding enthusiasm for life, and a rich abundance
of professional pride. She believed herself to be the best washer of
white clothes she had ever had the pleasure of knowing, and the value
placed upon her services, and her long connection with certain families
with large weekly washings, bore out this estimate of herself--an
estimate which she never endeavored to conceal.
Nora had buried two husbands without being unduly depressed by the
fact. The first husband had been a disappointment, and Nora winked at
Providence when an accident in a tunnel carried him off--that is to
say, carried the husband off. The second husband was not so much of a
disappointment as a surprise. He developed ability of a literary order,
and wrote songs which sold and made him a small fortune. Then he ran
away with another woman. The woman spent his fortune, drove him to
dissipation, and when he was dying he came back to Nora, who received
him cordially, attended him to the end, and cheered his last hours by
singing his own songs to him. Then she raised a headstone recounting his
virtues, which were quite numerous, and refraining from any reference to
those peculiarities which had caused him to be such a surprise.
Only one actual chagrin had ever nibbled at the sound heart of Nora
Finnegan--a cruel chagrin, with long, white teeth, such as rodents have!
She had never held a child to her breast, nor laughed in its eyes; never
bathed the pink form of a little son or daughter; never felt a tugging
of tiny hands at her voluminous calico skirts! Nora had burnt many
candles before the statue of the blessed Virgin without remedying this
deplorable condition. She had sent up unavailing prayers--she had, at
times, wept hot tears of longing and loneliness. Sometimes in her sleep
she dreamed that a wee form, warm and exquisitely soft, was pressed
against her firm body, and that a hand with tiniest pink nails crept
within her bosom. But as she reached out to snatch this delicious little
creature closer, she woke to realize a barren woman's grief, and turned
herself in anguish on her lonely pillow.
So when Tig came along, accompanied by two curs, who had faithfully
followed him from his home, and when she learned the details of his
story, she took him in, curs and all, and, having bathed the three of
them, made them part and parcel of her home. This was after the demise
of the second husband, and at a time when Nora felt that she had done
all a woman could be expected to do for Hymen.
Tig was a preposterous baby. The curs were preposterous curs. Nora had
always been afflicted with a surplus amount of laughter--laughter which
had difficulty in attaching itself to anything, owing to the lack of the
really comic in the surroundings of the poor. But with a red-headed and
freckled baby boy and two trick dogs in the house, she found a good and
sufficient excuse for her hilarity, and would have torn the cave where
echo lies with her mirth, had that cave not been at such an immeasurable
distance from the crowded neighborhood where she lived.
At the age of four Tig went to free kindergarten; at the age of six he
was in school, and made three grades the first year and two the next. At
fifteen he was graduated from the high school and went to work as
errand boy in a newspaper office, with the fixed determination to make a
journalist of himself.
Nora was a trifle worried about his morals when she discovered his
intellect, but as time went on, and Tig showed no devotion for any woman
save herself, and no consciousness that there were such things as bad
boys or saloons in the world, she began to have confidence. All of his
earnings were brought to her. Every holiday was spent with her. He told
her his secrets and his aspirations. He admitted that he expected to
become a great man, and, though he had not quite decided upon the nature
of his career,--saving, of course, the makeshift of journalism,--it was
not unlikely that he would elect to be a novelist like--well, probably
like Thackeray.
Hope, always a charming creature, put on her most alluring smiles for
Tig, and he made her his mistress, and feasted on the light of her eyes.
Moreover, he was chaperoned, so to speak, by Nora Finnegan, who listened
to every line Tig wrote, and made a mighty applause, and filled him up
with good Irish stew, many colored as the coat of Joseph, and pungent
with the inimitable perfume of “the rose of the cellar.” Nora Finnegan
understood the onion, and used it lovingly. She perceived the difference
between the use and abuse of this pleasant and obvious friend of hungry
man, and employed it with enthusiasm, but discretion. Thus it came
about that whoever ate of her dinners, found the meals of other cooks
strangely lacking in savor, and remembered with regret the soups
and stews, the broiled steaks, and stuffed chickens of the woman who
appreciated the onion.
When Nora Finnegan came home with a cold one day, she took it in such a
jocular fashion that Tig felt not the least concern about her, and when,
two days later, she died of pneumonia, he almost thought, at first, that
it must be one of her jokes. She had departed with decision, such as had
characterized every act of her life, and had made as little trouble for
others as possible. When she was dead the community had the opportunity
of discovering the number of her friends. Miserable children with faces
which revealed two generations of hunger, homeless boys with vicious
countenances, miserable wrecks of humanity, women with bloated faces,
came to weep over Nora's bier, and to lay a flower there, and to scuttle
away, more abjectly lonely than even sin could make them. If the cats
and the dogs, the sparrows and horses to which she had shown kindness,
could also have attended her funeral, the procession would have been,
from a point of numbers, one of the most imposing the city had ever
known. Tig used up all their savings to bury her, and the next week, by
some peculiar fatality, he had a falling out with the night editor of
his paper, and was discharged. This sank deep into his sensitive
soul, and he swore he would be an underling no longer--which foolish
resolution was directly traceable to his hair, the color of which, it
will be recollected, was red.
Not being an underling, he was obliged to make himself into something
else, and he recurred passionately to his old idea of becoming a
novelist. He settled down in Nora's basement rooms, went to work on
a battered type-writer, did his own cooking, and occasionally pawned
something to keep him in food. The environment was calculated to further
impress him with the idea of his genius.
A certain magazine offered an alluring prize for a short story, and Tig
wrote one, and rewrote it, making alterations, revisions, annotations,
and interlineations which would have reflected credit upon Honoré;
Balzac himself. Then he wrought all together, with splendid brevity and
dramatic force,--Tig's own words,--and mailed the same. He was convinced
he would get the prize. He was just as much convinced of it as Nora
Finnegan would have been if she had been with him.