Moderation, therefore, I concluded, was the keynote of success in courtship. When the current became balanced in negative and positive qualities, the desirable equilibrium recognized by each pole as the real thrill of mutual romance, jealousy and despair would spark, blow out the fuse and short-circuit into a proposal and an acceptance. Jim was negative in desire and positive in appearance, thus securing neutrality, and my passive state was the resultant of a positive inclination and a negative exterior. Thus Jim was admired and I was tolerated, but he had progressed no further than I.
One Sunday he and I were strolling through an art gallery.
"What do you call this, Ben?" he whispered behind his hand, pointing to the portrait of a red-haired Diana sitting on a low, mossy stump in a lonely spot. Her back was turned toward us, and she seemed to be taking a sun bath. He looked stealthily around to make sure his curiosity was not noted by the spectators near us.
"It says on the label that Titty Ann painted it. It is the bluest-looking woman I ever saw; how did they come to let it in?"
"Yes," said I, not attempting to disturb his view of the painting or the name of the artist,"Titty Ann was a great painter of the blue-blooded women of the aristocracy, so blue-blooded they seemed to be bruised all over, and Titty Ann wanted you to see there was no place they had not been hurt."
The incident shows how keen was Jim's appreciation of this great subject of universal interest to bachelors. It seemed to me in those days that the fairest creature that ever fluttered could not charm him with the siren whistle of her swishing silk, nor throw a damaging spark from her bright eyes. But here he was, plunged into the most dreadful complications, which seemed in the mind of Tescheron, at least, to be fastening him in the electric chair.
It must have been about 11:30 o'clock when Jim got out of bed and began to mope around the flat, tramp nervously up and down the private hall and scuffle through the closets, the cupboard and among the pots and pans, which fretfully clashed in a heap upon the floor when he sought to unhook his favorite, the upper story of the double boiler. I wondered what ailed him now. From the way the alleged murderer was rattling the crockery and the tinware, back in the kitchen, I knew he had it bad. What prompted him to invade the kitchen and unhook our outfit I don'tknow, but I think he was trying to heat some water, poor chap!—to accompany a certain pill, on a theory that it was dyspepsia which disturbed his dreams.
Presently he wandered into the front room, looking badly rumpled. He had on his yellow and brown dressing gown and a pair of pink-bowed knitted slippers of a piebald variety, that I had seen displayed by a neighboring gents' furnishing goods store.
"Ben, what are you doing up this time of night? Pretty late, ain't it?" he asked.
"Oh, I'm just cogitating," I answered. "You look sick; anything the matter with you?—and, say, when you go into that kitchen, I wish you wouldn't chuck everything in the place on the floor for me to pick up."
"I picked 'em all up, Ben," was his meek reply.
I never could scold him, so I forgave him and invited him to sit down and have a smoke. He fairly jumped at the idea, and it pleased me to see him bite. I thought then how little Tescheron could know of this innocent blockhead, Jim Hosley, whose heart and brain traps were built on the open, sanitary order, with nothing concealed.
Jim continued fidgety and wide-awake as he took his seat near the table and the county papers.He squirmed on the cushions, smoked hard and complained of the tobacco, the weather, the police magistrates, his tight shoes, the careless washerwoman and a string of matters incidental to the world's work and its burdens that he had never mentioned before so long as I had lived with him, and that was pretty close to ten years. It was easy to see that this was no ordinary case. Several times I had suffered the same sort of misery; had looked for a soft seat and reposeful thoughts in vain. Jim had not noticed it.
A man who has been forty miles over a mountain road on an empty lumber wagon knows what thrills are. I could see that Jim was aboard and that the team had cut loose down hill, for his bones were fairly rattling with the vibrations from the bog hollows, "thank yer, mums," old stumps and disagreeable boulders. He needed help. He couldn't hang on much longer.
"Say, Ben, there was a little matter I wanted to speak to you about," said Jim, with the same uneasy manner in which he had rubbed all our household arrangements the wrong way and aroused the resentment of the frying-pan and its "pards" of the domestic range.
I at once began to talk about something I was reading, to let him down easy and to open him upwider, for I was anxious to burrow into the mystery and dig exploration shafts in all directions. As he seemed to close again, I allowed my comment to drool off into a hum, and then looked up short in a way to send his ideas from mark-time to a continuance of the procession.
"You know that young lady, Miss Tescheron—Miss Gabrielle Tescheron?" asked Jim, tossing his hair into windrows and looking straight away from me.
"Why, I know that lovely girl I've seen you with; is her name—"
"Yes, that's her name, and we're to be married."
"Jim, old boy, let me congratulate you." And we shook hands over this creature who was to wreck our happy home—still, I felt there wouldn't be enough crockery to continue on unless the thing was settled in church or at Sing Sing pretty soon.
"When is it to come off?" I continued, that question usually being No. 2 to the hand-shake and congratulations.
"Ben, I mention this matter because I feel that I need your friendship now more than ever," said he, disregarding my inquiry in a way which clearly showed that Cupid had stubbed a toe. "I am up against it. Tell me, what should be done?You must know a lot about such matters, and I don't seem to understand. It's the old man, her pa; a little whipper-snapper of a dude. I could swat him with my little finger and settle him in a minute. George! I've a mind to, at that."
"That, of course, is out of the question," I advised, tackling the matter as if time and again the fat of my theories had been tried out into the dripping of wedded affinities. "Soft dealing with parents is essential." This wisdom came also as if I were quoting from a book by a Mormon, who had handled every variety of father-in-law. "On what does pa base his opposition?"
"Well, I'll tell you," said Jim, preparing to confess all and let me do the penance. "But it's such blamed nonsense, I'm almost afraid to. It shows what an infernal old fool he is."
"How old is pa?" I inquired.
"Oh, he's an old 'un."
"Says you're old enough to be her father, doesn't he?"
"That's it, but he's off; and how would you get around it, anyway—by postponing it?"
Jim's notion of ages, and Tescheron's, I feared were both wide of the mark, but I let that pass. One was vain and mad, and the other did not observe closely.
"Is that all he said?" I asked.
"Well, no. I'll tell you just what he said as near as I can remember, and see if you can figure out the answer. I came away to-day from his office, squeezed out and dried up, but I gave him no back talk. I simply said, 'Mr. Tescheron, I love your daughter, Gabrielle, and I am here, sir, to ask you to set the day for the wedding,' just like that, as pleasant as if I was chatting to him after church. Say, I thought he would hurrah, or take me around to lunch (it was then after noon) and introduce me to his friends. But he proceeded to breathe an early frost on my green and tender leaves. As I was about to say, Ben, as near as I can remember after rehearsing all this afternoon is this—and I tell you, because if I don't the chances are I'll go right on rehearsing it forever in some asylum, and then everybody will hear it till they are sick and tired of it, and the curtain won't rise on the real show. Said he: 'Well, so you say, so you say, so you say!' This beat me. I had never heard a man talk that way."
"I've heard that kind," said I, knowingly. "He took stitches in his conversation."
"'So you say, so you say. What say I? So? No.' That has been running through my headin a way to set me crazy," continued Jim. "'Do I want a son-in-law nearly as old as I am?' the little jackanapes asked me. 'Not I. So you see, you are too old for Gabrielle.' Now, what do you think of that? Doesn't that beat you? Why, the old chap is over fifty, and he says I am older than he is. I actually believe he's crazy. Hair dye and cologne and young men's clothes seem to give him the notion that he is about thirty and became Gabrielle's father when he was about five years old. He's got an idea from somewhere that I'm twice as old as I am because I'm twice as big as he is—that's the most reasonable way I can look at it. Well, I got so dry in the roof of my mouth I couldn't stub my tongue on it to turn a word; my eyes burned and a cold sweat started. No man his size had ever floored me before. I tried hard to remember he was Gabrielle's father, and out of respect for her I should not injure him. He then piled in on me again. 'That is not all,' he said. 'Gabrielle is ambitious. You are lazy. You have wasted your youth. Look at you! A man of your age who has done nothing yet!'"
From this I gathered that Tescheron's objections were at first personal. He did not find Jim to his liking and was probably urging his daughter to regard the suitor in the same light. Laterin the day the better excuse learned from the great detective bureau came to his support.
"What do you think of that, Ben?" continued Jim. "What has he done to brag about? Should I bring a birth certificate?"
"Yes, but he is not marrying Gabrielle himself," said I. "He is trying to help her to find a good husband. You must be generous, Jim, and give a father his due."
"Shucks! He spends all his pay on his clothes. Such a dresser you never saw, and what is he? A rubber-neck, that's all."
"A what?"
"I asked one of the fellows who worked where he does, some time ago, what old man Tescheron did, and he told me he was a rubber-neck. Now, I know very well that a rubber-neck is a fellow who goes around to corner groceries to see what other kinds of crackers are sold there besides the brands furnished by his house. He starts in talking about the price of green-groceries, drifts along for five or ten minutes, and keeps squinting over the cracker boxes. To stave off suspicion he buys an apple, peels it carefully and eats it slowly, while he incidentally craves a cracker and proceeds to pump the innocent grocer on his cracker business. He writes out his notes in full afterward and that grocer is then described on a card index at the main office as handling such and such goods. I ought to know what rubber-necks are, having been around groceries enough."
"A sort of cracker detective," said I.
"That's all. A common, ordinary rubber-neck—gets about fifteen a week. By the way he dresses you'd think he had a king's job. Think of him looking down upon me. Small as I am, I lead him."
"I wonder would he turn up his nose at me, an Inspector of Offensive Trades?" I queried, sadly. "But go ahead, Jim, and stick to your story, for I can see that there is plenty of trouble ahead for you."
This startled Jim into a more direct presentation of his problem.
"Well, I up and told him, said I: 'Mr. Tescheron, Miss Gabrielle and I would like to be married at her home some time soon,' said I; 'and if you don't wish it that way,' said I, 'I guess we can find a place that will be big enough and will answer just as well,' said I; and then I began to start up warmer and get bolder, when he shut me off with a string of cuss words that ran all over me. I didn't suppose he could talk that way, but no one in the office seemed to mind, althoughI'll bet you could have heard him a mile down South Street."
"South Street?" I asked, in a surprised tone not observed by the single-minded Jim. "Where's his office?"
"Fulton Market."
"The place they deal in fish at wholesale. And yet you say he is a rubber-neck for a cracker house?" I connected the faint suggestion of fish at the Fifth Avenue Hotel with the case at this point, and knew at once Tescheron's business, and from my knowledge gained by many inspections at the market inferred that the father of the girl was a millionaire.
"A queer place for the cracker business," said I.
"Well, a fellow told me; that's all I know," said Jim. "I haven't been sitting on the same sofa with the old gentleman asking him questions."
"Jim, do you know that you have this prospective father-in-law all twisted? He's something besides a cheap dude," said I. "He's no rubber-neck. I'll bet the old chap is well off, and do you want to know why he dresses so fine and keeps cologne on his handkerchief?"
"That's right, he does," said Jim with a wondering gaze. "And it's sickening to find a little, weazened, sawed-off cuss doing it—just to getpeople to look around to locate him, I warrant. There'd be no questions about old Tescheron if it warn't for his gasoline."
"No, no. You are away off, Jim. You don't know so much about perfumes and their antidotes as I do, and besides, you're not expected to, because it is not your profession. My nose is my bread and butter. I am an expert in the analysis of the nether atmosphere. Any composite bunch of air striking my acute analytic apparatus is at once split into its elements. Put me blindfolded in a woman's kitchen and I can tell you if there is pumpkin pie and rhubarb under cover there, and where they keep the butter and cheese. I can tell you what kind of microbes live in the cellar and all about their relatives, and even if there are moths or other evidences of winged occupancy among the fauna of the mattresses on the floors above. Wonderful, of course; but it's in my line, that's all. Given a peculiar kind of brains and any man can do it just as easily. My great deficiencies in other respects have all tended to the enlargement of this faculty. By some accident of nature my ancestors appear to have inclined toward obtaining a higher development of this sense so important to the protection of life in these days of crowded living. Of course, theydid it unconsciously; but Fate wisely predisposes, I believe—"
"Well, what has this all got to do with Gabrielle?" interrupted Jim, crossing first one leg and then the other, and tossing his hair into cocks ready to be thrown on the rigging.
"Patience, Jim, old boy. You can't solve these great mysteries of life which confront us at every crisis of our existence, by jumping off the handle. I am ready to tell you, however, that I have hastily turned over in my mind such data as you have given me, and I find that you have blundered into a favorable position. It will not do for you to make any moves without consulting me, however. If you can patiently bear up while I handle the case for you for a few days—"
"You may handle the father all you please," interrupted Jim, "but not Gabrielle. Everything is quiet at that end of the line."
"Of course," said I. "I would be no good there. Let me adjust the old gentleman. You may be thankful that the trail leads to a wholesale fish-market. I will be right at home there. I think I can surprise you."
Jim shuffled off to bed after receiving my assurances of support. I had been extremely careful to keep from him the knowledge that I was in the game at both ends. In five minutes he was asleep.
Now for a good think on love, murder, political economy and fish. No sleep for me—just a good, long think, with breakfast at 6a. m., with the correct solution as snugly stored in my mind as ten cents in a dime.
First, I knew nothing about the Brownings and cared less. They didn't figure in my plans at all. My purpose was to startle Pa Tescheron into a full knowledge of his lunacy, and command his appreciation of his future son-in-law.
As I was about to plunge deeper into my cogitations, I picked up a card from the table and read it. It chilled me some, but only for a minute. It ran like this:
PATRICK K. COLLINS,Undertaker and Embalmer,9 West Tenth Street, New York.Cremations a Specialty.
I had heard of that fellow Collins, a notorious man in his line. His specialty, cremations, removed all possibility of pathological or toxicological investigation weeks afterward, when public suspicion became aroused. The political coroners were supposed to be partners of his in crime, and the police had tracked many a case through his establishment to the retorts at the Fresh Pond crematory, where nothing but a few handfuls of ashes remained. Was there to be a cremation in the Browning case? Of course, I asked myself that question, and I also wondered why the sleuths of Smith's had not reported the fact, if it were a fact, to the hotel headquarters. If they knew it, then my telegram to Mr. Tescheron about Coroner Flanagan telephoning to all the cemeteries and his further purposes need not cause alarm. Perhaps he would laugh when he received it. The card had been placed there during my absence. Jim would tell me about it in themorning, so I gave the matter no further consideration.
By that time, 12 o'clock, the detectives must have had Tescheron talked tired, I guessed, and he was probably at home trying to figure how he might escape the coroner's ordeal of publicity on the morrow, unless, of course, they knew this man cremated his victims right after the service.
It so happened that the detectives had him fairly crazy. When he read my message he was completely daft. Instead of working out my plans carefully, so as to achieve a complete fourth-act reconciliation by 6 o'clock, I spent the night answering and sending messages like a general looking through a telescope on a hill-top.
The first lad in blue uniform came just about midnight and scared me a little, but as Jim was not disturbed, all was well. It seems that instead of going to bed, Pa Tescheron took a new start as soon as he read my message about notifying the coroner. Smith was called again to meet him at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, about fifteen minutes by messenger boy from my headquarters. Here is the first message from General Tescheron:
"You have done your worst. If you attempt to expose my family, I will have you prosecutedfor blackmail and punished to the full extent of the law. Please call here at once."Tescheron."
"You have done your worst. If you attempt to expose my family, I will have you prosecutedfor blackmail and punished to the full extent of the law. Please call here at once.
"Tescheron."
General Hopkins sent this back by return boy:
"Only evidence of attempted blackmail in this case so far is your message just received. I will keep it. Is Smith also your lawyer? He's a bird. Thanks, but I never go calling after midnight. Please accept my regrets."Hopkins."
"Only evidence of attempted blackmail in this case so far is your message just received. I will keep it. Is Smith also your lawyer? He's a bird. Thanks, but I never go calling after midnight. Please accept my regrets.
"Hopkins."
I kept copies of the answers also, for I didn't know how far Smith and his bureau might carry this fanatic, for they seemed to have touched him where he was as tender as a wet spot on a paper napkin.
This came back in half an hour:
"Your course is incomprehensible to me. You seem to take this matter as a joke. It may be necessary for me to let the law take its course to achieve my purpose. I do not fear your threats. Please call and talk it over.Tescheron."
"Your course is incomprehensible to me. You seem to take this matter as a joke. It may be necessary for me to let the law take its course to achieve my purpose. I do not fear your threats. Please call and talk it over.
Tescheron."
Of course, he didn't fear the exposure, for heknew what a smart lot of detectives he had. But he knew, according to my analysis of the workings of his superheated brain, that the few times he had been real mad in his life and had trusted to his impulses, he had gone deep into the mire of expense or ridicule. Some of the skeletons of these experiences were beginning to rattle in opposition to the oft-repeated easy solution of Smith, who had been stoking that inflamed head since 2P. M.with the kind of gore which kept it ablaze. Tescheron was certainly getting a fine run for his money, and he had seemed to lose sight of the fact that Smith was filling the part of bookmaker and taking his pile.
I replied:
"This is no joke. Wait until you get Smith's bill. Hope you have a good picture of yourself for the papers?—it saves the disgrace of a sketch from life. They are bound to make your wife and daughter look well. I have just laid aside a half dozen of our portraits for publication. Seems as if we would have pleasant weather for the coroner's party to-morrow. Don't miss it—or they'll drag you there in the hurry-up wagon."Hopkins."
"This is no joke. Wait until you get Smith's bill. Hope you have a good picture of yourself for the papers?—it saves the disgrace of a sketch from life. They are bound to make your wife and daughter look well. I have just laid aside a half dozen of our portraits for publication. Seems as if we would have pleasant weather for the coroner's party to-morrow. Don't miss it—or they'll drag you there in the hurry-up wagon.
"Hopkins."
I guessed he could see I wasn't rattled and was sticking close to my method of play. He could see that a thirty-year-old was no ordinary lad of the fish-market, to get excited when the boss turned red from boiling. This renewed activity on his part, however, threw me clear off the track that was to fetch me up at 6a. m.with the whole business settled.
The murderer, who had comfortably thrown his burdens on me, in the meantime, snored again with a regularity and smoothness which proved he had banished all thought of his first wife and was preparing his trousseau for a comfortable wedding, with Pa Tescheron controlled and delivered by me at the altar, ready to speak his little piece.
It was a shame for Tescheron to keep those boys running all night, but he did. This came next:
"I'll have my men at the autopsy, but I shall not be there, so you see our pictures will not be printed, as you seem to fear. I do not understand you. Don't you realize what your position is if this crime is revealed? Do not delay further, but come at once.Tescheron."
"I'll have my men at the autopsy, but I shall not be there, so you see our pictures will not be printed, as you seem to fear. I do not understand you. Don't you realize what your position is if this crime is revealed? Do not delay further, but come at once.
Tescheron."
In my next I assured him that all our pictures would be printed, for he would be served by subpœna from the coroner, unless he and his family left the State before 8 o'clock.
And so it went, till finally I sent him a line saying that I would guard the murderer all night and meet him at the Fifth Avenue Hotel at 9 a. m. on my way to the coroner's.
Then I turned in and forgot all Jim's troubles. It must have been about 4a. m.
Now, if early that evening I had learned my lesson, I might have minded my own business, gone to bed early, and, like a wise man, awakened early and left the house before it all happened.
It was just as I had predicted a hundred times, so I was not surprised afterward when I learned how it was. A short time after I went to sleep, Jim was overcome by the fidgets again and took one of those Turkish baths invented by his home folks. This style of bath was pure turkey. It was a regular turkey gobbler system of bathing and I had never heard the like of it before I began to live with Jim. The way to know a man is to live with him when he's in love. It was different in a number of ways from any country custom I had ever heard of up North, but all Jim's folks did it regularly, so he had told me, becausethey thought it was the greatest thing in the world for a person who felt out of sorts. I had been over to his house many and many a time, but it so happened that I never saw his dad or his ma, or in fact any of them, sitting on their kitchen stove.
Jim rigged up the bath in our flat kitchen with a lot of care. First he would take our set of three sad-irons—the kind that are run with the same handle, especially designed to press trousers under a wet rag—and he would put them on top of the range, one under each leg of a chair as far as they would go, and an old tin cup bottom-side-up under the fourth leg. He was always particular to have a cane seat in the chair and a piping hot fire in the range.
Then he would simplify his toilet till he got it about as we used to have it before diving into the old swimming-hole. When he had reached that point, he brought out a dark-colored quilt with a white ruffle all around the edge. (We liked dark quilts and had quite a number that never seemed to need washing.) In the middle of this quilt he had cut a hole, just large enough to poke his head through and be snug about the neck. When he got that on he pulled on a pair of old slippers that he had tacked tin soles onto.The next and last piece to the harness was his red and blue worsted toboggan cap with a long peak minus the tassel—it was very necessary for the head to get the full benefit or you'd catch cold. This cap he pulled down well over his head and ears, and then he stood on a box and mounted the fiery throne, sitting down mighty easy while spreading the quilt over the back of the chair, and holding it out well so that the pointed ends were as close to the lids as possible to keep the cold air of the room off his shin bones.
It sort of reminded me of an old turkey gobbler; I don't know why, for it was such a serious business with Jim, and he looked so glum. But with the pointed ends dragging, he seemed to be strutting, and when he got heated up nicely and began to drip on the hot lids, the "hist" noise it made was just the same as an old gobbler's.
I've known him to swelter there in his turkey bath till he fairly sizzled, "hissing" like the proudest gobbler on the farm, and then step off easy onto the box, jump into bed, pull a heap of blankets over him and enjoy a good wilt.
It is the most natural thing in the world that the quilt caught fire without Jim noticing it. And thus ended our housekeeping.
I woke up six weeks later in a hospital.
The circus side-shows used to exhibit specimens of the human family who were nothing but head. They had been sliced off clean at the neck and rested comfortably with the stump on a parlor table. The underside had evidently healed over nicely without corns, for they were the most amiable and smiling people you would find in the whole show. Spectators were not allowed within six feet of these people in reduced circumstances, for it was plainly desirable that no one should kick the table over or playfully tap them to see if they were really alive. Sceptics in the crowd said that mirrors did it. A razor might have done it, for all I cared. It gave me joy as a boy to think how it would feel to be only head and decorate a table. Brains certainly counted with them—they were always on top. And if they trained their tongues to run out and wash their faces and comb their hair, a valet would not be necessary. I've seen a man withno legs find a way to jump on a Broadway car and a man without arms can't be kept from playing the piano with his toes. This is because human nature has such a persistent way of trying to do the difficult thing, usually with wonderful success. Man can't fly nor be a fish naturally, but he wants to know how it would feel, and so he makes some startling flights and dives at doing both.
Well, I never tried falling out of a five-story window before just to see how it felt, but I got the sensation by doing it without trying. My first knowledge after the act was the sensation of carbolic acid making an appeal to my best-educated sense. That is all I knew for a long, long time—probably a year or two; then I began to have larger ideas, but not very broad or deep. I began to feel that I was just a head, and from this I figured it was all over with me on earth, and I was starting in to be a young angel. At first, I was to be only a small angel, just a cherub, with nothing but a fat head and two little wings about as big as your hand spreading out from under each ear. I tried to bend an ear down or cast an eye to feel or see if the wings had started, for as I thought of my condition I imagined a couple of inflamed lumps were swelling where the wingroots ought to be. But the ears were stiff and the eyes would not reach around so far.
The wing-boils made me feel a little colicky; I don't know why, for there was no substantial excuse for a case of colic, as I was all gone below the collar. Winging, I concluded, was like teething. Infant angels naturally felt colicky for some time before they cut their ear-wings. By-and-by, the little wings would, no doubt, drop out, and the second wings would come in at the shoulder-blades, when I sprouted out below and took on shoulders with blades.
I slept, and slept, and the wings began to unfold and feather up nicely, but they were too sore to flap yet and the feathers were mostly pin size and very fluffy. Only at the top there were just a few that you might say had real quills on as yet. The carbolic acid kept getting stronger. I fancied it must be what young angels cry for. Why they should sprinkle so much of it around me, I didn't understand at first, but as I got to thinking about it I concluded that an Inspector of Offensive Trades would need it good and plenty, like Tescheron needed his cologne.
It must have been six months, so I then thought, after I had cut my first set of wings, that I began to think about getting weaned, for I wasa bottle angel and I was getting almighty tired of watery victuals, and besides, I was losing my appetite for the rubber tap. The reason I didn't get a cookie or a chicken bone, I figured, was because I was now handling everything in my crop, and it wouldn't do to crowd it too hard or I might choke—the overload point being very close to the choker.
Well, I had never in all my worldly career wanted a cracker so badly. If they had thrown in some sweitzerkase or a Yankee sardine I would have been pleased; of course, I understood that it would be all out of order to call for a glass of beer. Still, if there were any soft drinks I would like a "horse's neck," promising to sip it so as not to get drowned in it.
By and by, I began to feel an awful thirst for something sour. Would it be in order for a small angel to have a pickle to cut his wings on? If so, I prayed, please let me have a jar of the mustard variety, full of red peppers and other emphatic food.
My eyesight began to improve, and after many years of craving for a pickle I began to see them in all sorts and sizes, dripping with delicious vinegar and aromatic of tasty cloves and cinnamon. There was no way for me to reach them. WhenI tired of trying I would drop into nothingness again. By-and-by these lapses seemed to give me strength. The floating pickles grew smaller and faded away and I began to discern the dim outline of pillows, bed-clothes and bed-posts, and the four walls of a narrow room. I burst the chains of bondage one morning by saying:
"Pickle, please; pickle, pickle!"
A consultation of the house staff and the leading members of the advisory corps was called immediately, and grouped around my bed they formally voted that this was excellent for so young an angel. The vote was not unanimous, as one of the doctors present gallantly led a strong opposition. He tried hard to have his motion carried. His motion was to lay the subject on the table (in the operating room) and take time to go into it deeper before deciding.
When the learned men had gone away, my mother angel (angel is the only word good enough for her), in a starchy blue and white uniform, leaned over close to my lips and I saw her smile in such a lovely way, shake her head and press a finger to her lips as she gently lifted me and drew a smooth, cool pillow under my tired head. But she did not speak. She placed a screen before the window and I fell asleep.
The next time I saw my mother angel she was laughing at me softly while looking over the foot of the bed. I was able to respond by raising my eyebrows and turning my creaking neck on its rusty hinge toward the sunshine that brought the glory of life into the room through a broad window.
"Good morning, ma'am," I said, not venturing to be too familiar with the lady, for I was at once struck with my inferiority to this saintly vision.
"Good morning, sir. Do you feel well to-day?"
"Yes, ma'am," said I; "I have never been ill."
A low, pleasant laugh, like the soft trill of a muffled music box, greeted my statement.
"I believe you," she said. "You will soon be out again."
"Am I in? Where am I in?"
"This is Bellevue Hospital," said she. "But you'll soon be gone from here. You're as tough and strong as rawhide and wrought iron."
Here was a woman who could size me up. I took her word for it and tried to turn over and get up, but nothing happened.
"Tush, tush! Don't get lively now! Think what you've been through. Take it easy. Dr.Hanley says you are a wonderful fellow; that he will always be proud of you."
"Is the pickle coming?" I asked expectantly, as if I had heard it knock on the door.
"Yes, it's coming," she laughed. "But it won't get here this week. Here's something that is a good deal better."
She squeezed out a thimbleful of orange juice and placed it in a low cup with a long snout like a locomotive oil can, designed to poke in out-of-the-way places. With this device she was able to get through my beard and find my mouth. As she gently tipped it, the goodly nectar trickled upon my desert tongue, to be quickly evaporated in that arid area before it reached far along the parched wastes. I wanted to swim in it, but these hospitals provide poor entertainment for their patrons.
"Pretty flowers there," said I, pointing to a great mass of roses and orchids, showing the freshness of recent arrival.
"Oh, she hasn't forgotten you"; and her large blue eyes danced playfully as she said it. I could see that those blue eyes would aggravate me yet, but I wanted to linger forever under the spell of their teasing.
"Who sent them?" I asked in surprise.
"Miss Tescheron."
I was about to say that I didn't know the lady, but I decided that the plot was too thick for a brain foddered on orange juice by the drop through a dripper, so I just threw the complications all over, willing to bide my time. Some accident had tossed me upon this bed of bruises, but I was pulling out and I gritted my bridge-work, determined to get out as quickly as possible and pick up my tasks again.
The following morning I felt like a new man. I could actually reach out for my food. Eighteen hours of sound sleep had put abundant life, hope and courage into me.
"What a fine color you have!" said the cheery nurse.
"That braces me," said I. "But what I want to get at is this: How did I come to get here? How long have I been here? How long must I stay here?"
And she laughed joyously, jacking me up several notches in spirits and at the back with the pillows.
"The doctor says I may tell you," she began. "He left just before you awoke. The three upper stories of your house were burned out early that morning, six weeks ago, and the house next doorwas also damaged. You must be strong while I tell you this, will you? You were thrown out of the fifth-story window while you were unconscious. You fell on the outspread net held by the firemen, but you were badly injured by striking against the ironwork of the fire-escapes that were rendered useless because the flames were so great; it was a quick fire. I got the story from the ambulance doctors. You have been wavering between life and death ever since, almost, although about the third week you seemed to begin to mend slowly. Are you comfortable now?"
"Where is Hosley? Is he in jail? Hasn't he been here to see me? Was he hurt? Was he killed? Hasn't he written to me?"
"My heavens! Why do you ask me is he in jail, and all those questions? Who is Hosley, pray? Is he a jail-bird? And are you only a jail-bird? Why do you begin to talk about jail so soon?"
She was born to nurse the ill and tease well folks, and she saw I was better and could stand it.
"How about those flowers?" I asked. "How is it she brings flowers to me?"
"Oh, my! Oh, my! Well, I never heard a man complain of the devotion of a beautiful woman. Dear me, you are a fortunate man; andshe must have lots of money, too. Orchids like those are three dollars. You can get them for seventy-five cents each, but not that kind. Did you ever price roses like that? Just look at them! Um, how sweet—how I love them! A two-dollar bill blooms on every one of them. Isn't that devotion for you! And how does she come to send them to you? Well, now! What a hard shell there must be on your heart! What a pity the fall didn't crack it!"
As she talked she busied herself about the room; it was a bare, antiseptic spot, fragrant of carbolic and formaldehyde. I could see that she was chaffing me; but I let her have her way in this, just as she ruled the diet, the naps and the airings.
Why should I lie for six weeks in a hospital without Jim Hosley coming to see me? thought I. Why hadn't he insisted on sleeping on the mat just outside the door if they would not let him in? Why had he not sent notes hourly to learn of my condition? Why had I been left to strangers? There could be no excuse for this, even though he were in jail, for he could at least write me. If he were dead, killed in the fire, Miss Tescheron would have told the nurse, for had she not brought me flowers? Had he been injured she would certainly have told the nurse about us. He had not been near me. He must, therefore, have skipped. In that case he must be all that Tescheron had pictured him to me. But why had Tescheron placed such confidence in Smith, whom he had known for such a short time? That was certainly not like a shrewd business man. Of course, I understood how anxious Tescheron was to get damaging evidence against Hosley; but what had Smith shown him? Why had he taken no further interest in me? Hosley must have skipped and Tescheron must have settled down, believing that no more would be heard of him. Miss Tescheron was still devoted to Jim, because she was sending me flowers. She still hoped to reach him through me and prove him innocent. But I would discourage her. I would not let her throw herself away on that fellow. If he were not a wretch he would have been there to see me; and if he were helpless as I was, then Miss Tescheron would be devoted to him and would have told the nurse about us, as she was enough interested in me to send me these beautiful flowers—me, whom she had never spoken to. And so it wound around in my weak head.
It was hard to believe this of Jim Hosley, that great lumbering hulk of humanity. How had hebeen able to assume that childish air and play the part with me, a shrewd, calculating observer of men, whose advice he always sought? Such villainy seemed to me to be beyond the art of any actor, and it certainly seemed to be a superlative degree of crime and deception impossible in real life. I remembered that he had shown some uneasiness that night when I started for the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and there was the card of the notorious undertaker, the ally of some of our worst criminals. Still, this was not connected with him and could not be regarded as damaging. When two bachelors are so wedded, is it possible for one to deceive the other? Married men had before this deceived clever wives. Could this companion to whom I would have trusted my life have deserted me at the moment of danger when I lay there overcome by smoke? Who tossed me from the window? Quickly I put that question to the nurse.
"There now," she said with a cautioning shake of her pretty head; "if you are going to keep thinking about that and get all upset, we won't let you out of here for a year—it was a fireman, perhaps; but what matters it?"
The bravery of a plain fireman mattered not, I thought. They must save lives as a business;chums, friends, they may slink away and leave you to a horrible death.
Jim Hosley was all that Tescheron had painted him, and yet there were doubts in my mind. But these doubts were soon removed.
For nearly five weeks after regaining complete consciousness I lived and gathered strength in that bare and polished room at the hospital. Dust found no place to stick there, it was all so slippery, and the flies were discouraged when they came in and found it so miserably antiseptic. The food was sterilized and peptonized until there was nothing a fly could find in my pre-digested tid-bits to snuggle up to—it was just like licking the plaster off the wall or biting the glazed, enameled paint on the bed. The enameled iron furniture seemed to be made to order without cracks, and there were no tidies or fancy work about. Any insect that came in, slipped around until he figured it was a toboggan slide and a mighty poor place to spend the day.
"Please send out for all the newspapers containing accounts of the fire and let me read them," I requested one day soon after my wits improved.
"No, indeed; I shall not. Reading is the worstthing you could do," said Hygeia. "You are gaining and must take no risks."
So it went. There was no one to obey me. I brooded over my hard luck. But life would have been wholly dismal in such a room without the companionship of one of those inspiring daughters of Hygeia. Now that I am beyond the confines of that room I must confess there seems to be little in life anywhere without one. Bachelors are quickly restored by their antitoxin cheer, but there is a more dangerous bacillus hidden in this powerful living therapeutic agency which in afteryears works its damaging, enervating effect in the heart of a man. They save but to slay! Can there be no healing balm benign in a woman's tender sympathy? Cannot the microbe of remorse be isolated from this serum beautifully administered by melting eyes and graces so fair that we wonder to find them so near our bitterest experiences? But there are wounds that will not heal; some mysterious infection lingers in them to sustain a slow fire, and the ashes of its discontent clog the channels till life seems cast in the vale of death.
But no more of this anguish! I have not told her name—in this at least, I shall be wise. I have not told of her family; why she became adaughter of Æsculapius; and beyond those dancing blue eyes, she shall not enter here. Neither shall anything be written of the things that passed between us during those five weeks of my convalescence. What matters it? Was I not in the world simply to be tempered and hardened by all the adversities to which a heart may be subjected? And was I not an inhuman wretch, who touched with the sting of sarcasm, ridicule and scorn the vital things that interest normal beings? To me she became only Hygeia—a goddess!
What a man of thirty years needs is mirth more abundantly than at twenty, but the clouds were too thick around me then to take sane views. Contentment comes when a man can shake the clouds inside out and bask in the reflection of the silver lining that makes the other half of the comedy agreeable. I seemed to be plunged into despair, to be confined in a dungeon, with the devils of hate and all the monsters of abandoned hopes shooting their tongues at me from the crannies of the damp, green walls that hedged me in. Were they to be my torturers to the death? Then why send a sick man to the hospital?
Even though my mind had been at peace otherwise, it would have been impossible for me to regain my habit of unconcern and reliance uponmy own resources, deserted by the man in whom I had anchored my faith since boyhood. Thought of his guilt oppressed me.
"Which would you rather go to—a wedding or a hanging?" I abruptly questioned the nurse, waking from a troubled nap.
"Calm yourself all you can. You are not so well to-day."
"I am beginning to think better of a hanging," said I. "It seems like a sure thing, so it's well to get used to it."
"Tut, tut!" said Hygeia softly, adjusting a cold cloth to my brow. She reported to the doctor that I was wandering again. But I wasn't crazy. I was looking for consolation.
The detectives had reported Jim with the undertakers in the same carriage that night, while I was at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and the card of the notorious Collins, whose specialty, cremations, removed all traces of such crime, lay on the table. I waited to inquire about the card until the next morning. The morning came and here I was, alive, but hardly thankful for my escape. Why was it, I asked myself, that the only two circumstances, the carriage and the card, that pointed with any directness to Jim Hosley's guilt, should have come under my notice the same night?Why, if he had deceived me for years, should he leave a damaging card where it could be seen by me at a time when he was deep in one of his most awful crimes? But, on the other hand, had he not fooled me for ten years? So why should he be careful about the mere card of an undertaker? How did he know where I had gone that night to be enlightened? Still, why did he squirm and appear so uneasy when I went out? Was it only because he had so much to tell me about his disappointment over the interview with Mr. Tescheron? Certainly, that must be it. Then came the last "but" of all—Why didn't he come to see me, or why had I not heard from him? If Jim Hosley had been devoted to me like a loyal friend there was no possible way for me not to have heard from him before this. Any man in his right mind could take the same state of facts and reach no other conclusion. Suspicion had worked its way through narrow openings, and my doubts were giving way to convictions, so that soon I believed I would be as much against Hosley as the fiery Tescheron, when goaded by the mercenary Smith.
I cannot tell how hard it was for me to believe this of Jim Hosley, that great, lumbering fellow, handsome and manly, the personification of comfortable, attractive indolence and agreeable indifference.
"Pity you never saw Hosley," said I to Hygeia. She was now prepared to hear me speak of him at any time.
"What did he look like? Dark and swarthy; rather short, I imagine, with curly, black hair."
"Turn that upside down, inside out and stretch it and you'll have it," said I.
She laughed and left the room.
What a charming fellow Jim was to get on with! Perhaps those virtues had been his resources in a wild career of crime and his strongest allies in effecting a concealment of his true self. Thus my analytical mind threshed out the ramifications of possibilities. My intimate relations with him for so many years further convinced me that if he had followed that long career of crime outlined by Tescheron he must have begun when he was playing "Injuns" up in Oswegatchie County.
Then I would cheer myself with the thought that something in Jim's favor would turn up soon and all would be well again, and we would get a new outfit of stuff for about eighty-five dollars—that's what we paid before—and start in housekeeping again; perhaps on the second floor, so asto get in line with the inexorable law of falling bodies.
Mr. Tescheron, I supposed, would somehow blame Jim for the fire and count it part of the grand plot to seize his daughter. Well, it was all too much for me, with my weak body and easily fatigued brain. It was hard work to keep my nerves calm under the circumstances.
My brother Silas had come down to see me, but when I began to mend he returned to Oswegatchie County, completely worn out with three weeks' tramping on city sidewalks. He made a number of inquiries for me concerning Hosley at the City Hall and among our old neighbors. He could learn nothing, however, so it was clear that Jim had departed for parts unknown. Silas carried back the news of my returning health to the folks, and was also able to inform them that the cars ran all night down here in New York—a matter they had never seen reported in the papers and I had never referred to in my letters. When he left, I was as lonesome as a retired pork packer dabbling in the fine arts. It seemed that