I had passed him coming up the dingy corridor that led to Bob's law
office, and knew at once that he was one of Bob's tramps.
When he had squeezed himself through the partly open door and had
closed it gently,--closed it with a hand held behind his back, like
one who had some favor to ask or some confidence game to play,--he
proved to be a man about fifty years of age, fat and short, with a
round head partly bald, and hair quite gray. His face had not known a
razor for days. He was dressed in dark clothes, once good, showing a
white shirt, and he wore a collar without a cravat. Down his cheeks
were uneven furrows, beginning at his spilling, watery eyes, and
losing themselves in the stubble-covered cheeks,--like old
rain-courses dried up,--while on his flat nose were perched a pair of
silver-rimmed spectacles, over which he looked at us in a dazed,
half-bewildered, half-frightened way. In one hand he held his
shapeless slouch hat; the other grasped an old violin wrapped in a
grimy red silk handkerchief.
For an instant he stood before the door, bent low with unspoken
apologies; then placing his hat on the floor, he fumbled nervously in
the breast pocket of his coat, from which he drew a letter, penned in
an unknown hand and signed with an unknown name. Bob read it, and
passed it to me.
"Please buy this violin," the note ran. "It is a good instrument, and
the man needs the money. The price is sixty dollars."
"Who gave you this note?" Bob asked. He never turns a beggar from his
door if he can help it. This reputation makes him the target for half
the tramps in town.
"Te leader of te orchestra at te theatre. He say he not know you, but
dat you loafe good violin. I come von time before, but vas nobody
here." Then, after a pause, his wavering eye seeking Bob's, "Blease
you buy him?"
"Is it yours?" I asked, anxious to get rid of him. The note trick had
been played that winter by half the tramps in town.
"Yes. Mine vor veefteen year," he answered slowly, in an unemotional
way.
"Why do you want to sell it?" said Bob, his interest increasing, as he
caught the pleading look in the man's eyes.
"I don't vant to sell it--I vant to keep it; but I haf notting," his
hands opening wide. "Ve vas in Phildelphy, ant ten Scranton, ant ten
we get here to Peetsburgh, and all te scenery is by te shereef, and te
manager haf notting. Vor vourteen tays I valk te streets, virst it is
te ofercoat ant vatch, ant yestertay te ledder case vor veefty cents.
If you ton't buy him I must keep valking till I come by New York."
"I've got a good violin," said Bob, softening.
"Ten you don't buy him?" and a look as of a returning pain crossed his
hopeless, impassive face. "Vell, I go vay, ten," he said, with a sigh
that seemed to empty his heart.
We both looked on in silence as he slowly wrapped the silk rag around
it, winding the ends automatically about the bridge and strings, as he
had no doubt done a dozen times before that day in his hunt for a
customer. Suddenly as he reached the neck he stopped, turned the
violin in his hand, and unwound the handkerchief again.
"Tid you oxamine te neck? See how it lays in te hand! Tid you ever see
neck like dat? No, you don't see it, never," in a positive tone,
looking at us again over the silver rims of his spectacles.
Bob took the violin in his hand. It was evidently an old one and of
peculiar shape. The swells and curves of the sides and back were
delicately rounded and highly finished. The neck, too, to which the
man pointed, was smooth and remarkably graceful, like the stem of an
old meerschaum pipe, and as richly colored.
Bob handled it critically, scrutinizing every inch of its surface--he
adores a Cremona as some souls do a Madonna--then he walked with it to
the window.
"Why, this has been mended!" he exclaimed in surprise and with a trace
of anger in his voice. "This is a new neck put on!"