The glimpse which Felix had caught of these two poor, unappreciated old men, living contentedly from hand to mouth, gayly propping each other up when one or the other weakened, had strangely affected him. If, as he reasoned, such battered hulks, stranded these many years on the dry sands of incompetency, with no outlook for themselves across the wide sea over which their contemporaries were scudding with all sails set before the wind of success—if these castaways, their past always with them and their hoped-for future forever out of their reach, could laugh and be merry, why should not he carry some of their spirit into his relations with the people among whom his lot was now thrown?
That these people had all been more than good to him, and that he owed them in return something more than common politeness now took possession of his mind. Few such helping hands had ever been held out to him. When they had been, the proffered palm had generally concealed a hidden motive. Hereafter he would try to add what he could of his own to the general fund of good-fellowship and good deeds.
He would continue his nightly search—and he had not missed a single evening—but he would return earlier, so as to be able to spend an hour reading to Masie before she went to bed, or with his other friends and acquaintances of “The Avenue”—especially with Kitty and John. He had been too unmindful of them, getting back to his lodgings at any hour of the night, either to let himself in by his pass-key—all the lights out and everybody asleep—or to find only Kitty or John, or both, at work over their accounts or waiting up for Mike or Bobby or for one of their wagons detained on some dock. And since Kling had raised his salary, enabling him not only to recover his dressing-case, which then rested on his mantel, but to take his meals wherever he happened to be at the moment—he had seldom dined at home—a great relief in many ways to a man of his tastes.
Kitty, though he did not know it, had demurred and had talked the matter over with John, wondering whether she had neglected his comfort. When she had questioned him, he had settled it with a pat on her shoulders. “Just let me have my way this time, my dear Mrs. Cleary,” he had said gently but firmly. “I am a bad boarder and cause you no end of trouble, for I am never on time. And please keep the price as it is, for I don't pay you half enough for all your goodness to me.”
Now under the impulse of his new resolution, and rather ashamed of his former attitude in view of all her unremitting attentions, he resumed his place at her table. Nor did he stop here. He taught her to broil a chop over her coal fire by removing the stove lid—until then they had been fried—and a new way with a rasher of bacon, using the carving-fork instead of a pan. The clearing of the famous coffee-pot with an egg—making the steaming mixture anew whenever wanted instead of letting the dented old pot simmer away all day on the back of the stove—was another innovation, making the evening meal just that much more enjoyable, greatly to the delight of the hostess, who was prouder of her boarder than of any other human being who had come into her life, except John and Bobby.
These renewed intimacies opened his eyes to another phase of the life about him, and he soon found himself growing daily more interested in the sweet family relations of the small household.
“What do I care for what we haven't got,” Kitty said to him one night when some economies in the small household were being discussed. “I'm better off than half the women who stop at my door in their carriages. I got two arms, and I can sleep eight hours when I get the chance, and John loves me and so does Bobby and so does my big white horse Jim. There ain't one of them women as knows what it is to work for her man and him to work for her.” All the other married couples he had seen had pulled apart, or lived apart—mentally, at least. These two seemed bound together heart and soul.
More than once he contrived to stop at the Studio Building, where both of the old fellows were almost always to be found sitting side by side, and, picking them up bodily, he had set them down on hard chairs in a rathskeller on Sixth Avenue, where they had all dined together, the old fellows warmed up with two beers apiece. This done, he had escorted them back, seen them safely up-stairs, and returned to his lodgings.
It was after one of these mild diversions that, before going to his room, he pushed open the door of the Clearys' sitting-room with a cheery “May I come in, Mistress Kitty?”
“Oh, but I'm glad to see ye!” was the joyous answer. “I was sayin' to myself: 'Maybe ye'd come in before he went.' Here's Father Cruse I been tellin' ye about—and, Father, here's Mr. O'Day that's livin' wid us.”
A full-chested man of forty, in a long black cassock, standing six feet in his stockings, his face alight with the glow of a freshly kindled pleasure, rose from his chair and held out his hand. “The introduction should be quite unnecessary, Mr. O'Day,” he exclaimed in the full, sonorous voice of a man accustomed to public speaking. “You seem to have greatly attached these dear people to you, which in itself is enough, for there are none better in my parish.”
Felix, who had been looking the speaker over, taking in his thoughtful face, deep black eyes, and more especially the heavy black eyebrows that lay straight above them, felt himself warmed by the hearty greeting and touched by its sincerity. “I agree with you, Father, in your praise of them,” he said as he grasped the priest's hand. “They have been everything to me since my sojourn among them. And, if I am not mistaken, you and I have something else in common. My people are from Limerick.”
“And mine from Cork,” laughed the priest as he waved his hand toward his empty chair, adding: “Let me move it nearer the table.”
“No, I will take my old seat, if you do not mind. Please do not move, Mr. Cleary; I am near enough.”
“And are you an importation, Father, like myself?” continued Felix, shifting the rocker for a better view of the priest.
“No. I am only an Irishman by inheritance. I was brought up on the soil, born down in Greenwich village—and a very queer old part of the town it is. Strange to say, there are very few changes along its streets since my boyhood. I found the other day the very slanting cellar door I used to slide on when I was so high! Do you know Greenwich?”
He was sitting upright as he spoke, his hands hidden in the folds of his black cassock, wondering meanwhile what was causing the deep lines on the brow of this high-bred, courteous man, and the anxious look in the deep-set eyes. As priest he had looked into many others, framed in the side window of the confessional—the most wonderful of all schools for studying human nature—but few like those of the man before him; eyes so clear and sincere, yet shadowed by what the priest vaguely felt was some overwhelming sorrow.
“Oh, yes, I know it as I know most of New York,” Felix was saying; “it is close to Jefferson Market and full of small houses, where I should think people could live very cheaply”; adding, with a sigh, “I have walked a great deal about your city,” and as suddenly checked himself, as if the mere statement might lead to discussion.
Kitty, who had been darning one of John's gray yarn stockings—the needle was still between her thumb and forefinger—leaned forward. “That's the matter with him, Father, and he'll never be happy until he stops it,” she cried. “He don't do nothin' but tramp the streets until I think he'd get that tired he'd go to sleep standin' up.”
Felix turned toward her. “And why not, Mrs. Cleary?” he asked with a smile. “How can I learn anything about this great metropolis unless I see it for myself?”
“But it's all Sunday and every night! I get that worried about ye sometimes, I'm ready to cry. And ye won't listen to a thing I say! I been waitin' for Father Cruse to get hold of ye, and I'm goin' to say what's in my mind.” Here she looked appealingly to the priest. “Now, ye just talk to him, Father, won't ye, please?”
The priest, laughing heartily, raised his protesting hands toward her. “If he fails to heed you, Mrs. Cleary, he certainly won't listen to me. What do you say for yourself, Mr. O'Day?”
Felix twisted his head until he could address his words more directly to his hostess. “Please keep on scolding me, my dear Mrs. Cleary. I love to hear you. But there is Father Cruse, why not sympathize with him? He tramps to some purpose. I am only the Wandering Jew, who does it for exercise.”
Kitty held the point of the darning-needle straight out toward Felix. “But why must you do it Sundays, Mr. O'Day? That's what I want to know.”
“But Sunday is my holiday.”
“Yes, and there's early mass. Ye'd think he'd come, wouldn't ye, Father?”
One of O'Day's low, murmuring laughs, that always sounded as if he had grown unaccustomed to letting the whole of it pass his lips, filtered through the room.
“You see what a heathen I am, Father,” he exclaimed. “But I am going to turn over a new leaf. I shall honor myself by visiting St. Barnabas's some day very soon, and shall sit in the front pew—or, perhaps, in yours, Mrs. Cleary, if you will let me—now that I know who officiates,” and he inclined his head graciously toward the priest. “I hope the service is not always in the morning!”
“Oh, no, we have a service very often at night, sometimes at eight o'clock.”
“And how long does that last?”
“Perhaps an hour.”
“And so if I should come at eight and wait until you are free, you could give me, perhaps, another hour of yourself?”
“Yes, and with the greatest pleasure. But why at those hours?” asked the priest with some curiosity.
“Because I am very busy at other times. But I want to be quite frank. If I come, it will not be because I need your service, but because I shall want to see YOU. Your church is not my church, and never has been, but your people—especially your priests—have always had my admiration and respect. I have known many of your brethren in my time. One in particular, who is now very old—a dear abbe, living in Paris. Heaven is made up of just such saints.”
The priest clasped his hands together. “We have many such, sir,” he replied solemnly. The acknowledgment came reverently, with a gleam that shone from under the heavy brows.
Felix caught its brilliance, and the sense of a certain bigness in the man passed through him. He had been prepared for his quiet, well-bred dignity. All the priests he had known were thoroughbreds in their manner and bearing; their self-imposed restraint, self-effacement, absence of all unnecessary gesture, and modulated voices had made them so; but the warmth of this one's underlying nature was as unexpected as it was pleasurable.
“Yes, you have many such,” O'Day repeated simply after a slight pause during which his thoughts seemed to have wandered afar. “And now tell me,” he asked, rousing himself to renewed interest, “where your work lies—your real work, I mean. The mass is your rest.”
The priest turned quickly. He wondered if there were a purpose behind the question. “Oh, among my people,” he answered, the slow, even, non-committal tones belying the eagerness of his gesture.
“Yes, I know; but go on. This is a great city—greater than I had ever supposed—greater, in many ways, than London. The luxury and waste are appalling; the misery is more appalling still. What sort of men and women do you put your hands on?”
“Here are some of them,” answered the priest, his forefinger pointing to Kitty and John.
“We could all of us do without churches and priests,” ventured Felix, his eyes kindling, “if your parishioners were as good as these dear people.”
“Well, there's Bobby,” laughed the priest, his face turned toward the boy, who was sound asleep in his chair, Toodles, the door-mat of a dog, sprawled at his feet.
“And are there no others, Father Cruse?”
The priest, now convinced of a hidden meaning in the insistent tones, grew suddenly grave, and laid his hand on O'Day's knee. “Come and see me some time, and I will tell you. My district runs from Fifth Avenue to the East River, from the homes of the rich to the haunts of the poor, and there is no form of vice and no depth of suffering the world over that does not knock daily at my study door. Do not let us talk about it here. Perhaps some day we may work together, if you are willing.”
Kitty, who had been listening, her heart throbbing with pride over Felix, who had held his own with her beloved priest, and still fearing that the talk would lead away from what was uppermost in her mind—O'Day's welfare—now sprang from her chair before Felix could reply. “Of course he'll come, Father, once he's seen ye.”
“Yes, I will,” answered Felix cordially. “And it will not be very long either, Father. And now I must say good night. It has been a real pleasure to meet you. You have been a most kindly grindstone to a very dull and useless knife, and I am greatly sharpened up. After all, I think we both agree that it is rather difficult to keep anything bright very long unless you rub it against something still brighter and keener. Thank you again, Father,” and with a pat of his fingers on Kitty's shoulder as he passed, and a good night to John, he left the room on his way to his chamber above.
Kitty waited until the sound of O'Day's footsteps told her that he had reached the top of the stairs and then turned to the priest. “Well, what do ye think of him? Have I told ye too much? Did ye ever know the beat of a man like that, livin' in a place like this and eatin' at my table, and never a word of complaint out o' him, and everybody lovin' him the moment they clap their two eyes on him?”
The priest made no immediate answer. For some seconds he gazed into the fire, then looked at John as if about to seek some further enlightenment, but changing his mind faced Kitty. “Is his mail sent here?”
“What? His letters?”
“Yes.”
“He don't have any—not one since he's been wid us.”
“Anybody come to see him?”
“Niver a soul.”
The priest ruminated for a moment more, and then said slowly, as if his mind were made up: “It does not matter; somebody or something has hurt him, and he has gone off to die by himself. In the old days such men sought the monasteries; to-day they try to lose themselves in the crowd.”
Again he ruminated, the delicate antennae of his hands meeting each other at the tips.
“A most extraordinary case,” he said at last. “No malice, no bitterness—yet eating his heart out. Pitiful, really; and the worst thing about it is that you can't help him, for his secret will die with him. Bring him to me sometime, and let me know before you come so I may be at home.”
“You don't think there's anything crooked about him, Father, do you?” said John, who had sat tilted back against the wall and now brought the front legs of his chair to the floor with a bang.
“What do you mean by crooked. John?” asked the priest.
“Well, he blew in here from nowheres, bringin' a couple of trunks and a hat-box, and not much in 'em, from what Kitty says. And he might blow out again some fine night, leavin' his own full of bricks, carting off instead some I keep on storage for my customers, full of God knows what!—but somethin' that's worth money, or they wouldn't have me take care of 'em. There ain't nothin' to prevent him, for he's got the run of the place day and night. And Kitty's that dead stuck on him she'll believe anything he says.”
Kitty wheeled around in her seat, her big strong fist tightly clinched. “Hold your tongue, John Cleary!” she cried indignantly. “I'd knock any man down—I don't care how big he was—that would be a-sayin' that of ye without somethin' to back it up, and that's what'll happen to ye if ye don't mend your manners. Can't ye see, Father, that Mr. Felix O'Day is the real thing, and no sham about him? I do, and Kling does, and so does that darlin' Masie, and every man, woman, and child around here that can get their hands on him or a word wid him. Shame on ye, John! Tell him so, Father Cruse!”
The priest kept silent, waiting until the slight family squall—never very long nor serious between John and Kitty—had spent itself.
“Well, I'm not sayin' anything against Mr. O'Day, Kitty,” broke in John. “I'm only askin' for information. What do you think of him, Father? What's he up to, anyhow? There ain't any of 'em can fool ye. I don't want to watch him—I ain't got no time—and I won't if he's all right.”
The priest rose from his chair and stood looking down at Kitty, his hands clasped behind his back. “You believe in him, do you not?”
“I do—up to the handle-and I don't care who knows it!”
“Then I would not worry, John Cleary, if I were you.”
“Well, what does she know about it, Father?”
“What every good woman always knows about every good man. And now I must go.”
As was to be expected, Kitty's first words to O'Day on the following morning related to his meeting with Father Cruse. “Ye'll not find a better man anywhere,” she had said to him, “and there ain't a trouble he can't cure.”
Felix had smiled at her enthusiasm for her idol and comforted her by saying that it had given him distinct pleasure to meet him, adding: “A big man with a big soul, that priest of yours, Mistress Kitty. I begin to see now why you and your husband lead such human lives. Yes—a fine man.”
But no closer intimacy ensued, nor did he pursue the acquaintance—not even on the following Sunday, when Kitty urged him, almost to importunity, to go and hear the Father say mass. He was not ready as yet, he said to himself, for friendships among men of his own intellectual caliber. In the future he might decide otherwise. For the present, at least, he meant to find whatever peace and comfort he could among the simple people immediately around him—meagrely educated, often strangely narrow-minded, but possessing qualities which every day aroused in him a profounder admiration.
With the quick discernment of the man of the world—one to whom many climes and many people were familiar—he had begun to discover for himself that this great middle class was really the backbone of the whole civil structure about him, its self-restraint, sanity, and cleanliness marking the normal in the tide-gauge of the city's activities; the hysteria of the rich and the despair of the poor being the two extremes.
Here, as he repeatedly observed, were men absorbed in their several humble occupations, proud of their successes, helpful of those who fell by the wayside, good citizens and good friends, honest in their business relations, each one going about his appointed task and leaving the other fellow unmolested in his. Here, too, were women, good mothers to their children and good wives to their husbands, untiring helpmates, regarding their responsibilities as mutual, and untroubled as yet by thoughts of their own individual identities or what their respective husbands owed to them.
This was why, instead of renewing his acquaintance with Father Cruse, he preferred to halt for a few minutes' talk with some one of Kitty's neighbors—it might be the liveryman next door who had been forty years on the Avenue, or one of the shopkeepers near by, most of whom were welcome to Kitty's sitting-room and kitchen, and all of whom had shared her coffee. Or it might be that he would call at Digwell's, whose undertaker's shop was across the way and whose door was always open, the gas burning as befitted one liable to be called upon at any hour of the day or night; or perhaps he would pass the time of day with Pestler, the druggist; or give ten minutes to Porterfield, listening to his talk about the growing prices of meat.
Had you asked his former associates why a man of O'Day's intelligence should have cultivated the acquaintance of an undertaker like Digwell, for instance, whose face was a tombstone, his movements when on duty those of a crow stepping across wet places in a cornfield, they would have shaken their heads in disparaging wonder. Had you asked Felix he would have answered with a smile: “Why to hear Digwell laugh!” And then, warming to his subject, he would have told you what a very jolly person Digwell really was, if you were fortunate enough to find him unoccupied in his private den, way back in the rear of his shop. How he had entertained him by the hour with anecdotes of his early life when he was captain of a baseball team, and what fun he had gotten out of it, and did still, when he could sneak away to help pack the benches.
Had you inquired about Pestler, the druggist, there would have followed some such reply as: “Pestler? Did you say? Because Pestler is one of the most surprising men I know. He has kept that same shop, he tells me, for twenty-two years. Of course, he knows only a very little about drugs—just enough to keep him out of the hands of the police—but then none of you are aware, perhaps, that Pestler is also a student? You might think, when you saw only the top of his fuzzy, half-bald head sticking up above the wooden partition, that he was putting up a prescription, but you would be wrong. What he is really doing, with the aid of his microscope, is dissecting bugs, and pasting them on glass slides for use in the public schools. And he plays the violin—and very well, too! He often entertains me with his music.”
Sanderson, the florist, was another denizen who interested him. To look at Sanderson tying ribbons on funeral wreaths, no one would ever have supposed that there was rarely a first night at the opera at which he was not present, paying for his ticket, too, and rather despising Pestler, who got his theatre tickets free because he allowed the managers the use of his windows for advertisements. Felix forgave even his frozen roses whenever the Scotchman, having found a sympathetic listener, launched out upon his earlier experiences among opera stars, especially his acquaintance with Patti, whom he had known before she became great and whom he always spoke of as devotees do of the Madonna—with bated breath and a sigh of despair that he would never hear her again.
Then, too, there was Codman. O'Day was always enthusiastic over Codman. “I have taken a great fancy to that fishmonger, and a fine fellow he is,” he said one night to Kitty and John. “His shop was shut when I first called on him, but he was good enough to open it at my knock, and I have just spent half an hour, and a very delightful half-hour, watching him handle the sea food, as he calls it, in his big refrigerator. I got a look, too, at his chest and his arms, and at his pretty wife and children. She is really the best type of the two. American, you say, both of them, and a fine pair they are, and he tells me he pulled a surf-boat in your coast-guard when he was a lad of twenty, then took up fishing, and then went into Fulton Market, helping at a stall, and now he is up here with two delivery wagons and four assistants and is a member of a fish union, whatever that is. It's astonishing! And yet I have met him many a time pushing his baby-carriage around the block.”
“Yes,” Kitty answered, putting on a shovel of coal, “and I'll lay ye a wager, Mr. O'Day, that Polly Codman will be drivin' through Central Park in her carriage before five years is out; and she deserves it, for there ain't a finer woman from here to the Battery.”
“I am quite sure of it, Mistress Kitty. That is where the American comes in—or, perhaps it is the New Yorker. I have not been here long enough to find out.”
Of all these neighbors, however, it was Timothy Kelsey, the hunchback, largely because of his misfortunes and especially because of his vivid contrast to all the others, who appealed to him most. Tim, as has been said, kept the second-hand book-shop, half-way down the block on the opposite side of the street. He was but a year or two older than O'Day, but you would never have supposed it had Tim not told you—and not then unless you had looked close and followed the lines of care deep cut in his face and the wrinkles that crowded close to his deep, hollowed-out eyes. When he was a boy of two, his sister, a girl of six, had let him drop to the sidewalk, and he had never since straightened his back. The customary outlets by which fully equipped men earn their living having been denied Tim, he had passed his boyhood days in one of the small, down-town libraries cataloguing the books. With this came the opportunity to attend the auction sales when some rare volume was to be bid for, he representing the library. A small shop of his own followed in the lower part of the town, and then the one a little below Kling's, where he lived alone with only a caretaker to look after his wants.
Kelsey had arrived one morning shortly after Felix had entered Kling's service, carrying a heavily bound book which he laid on a glass case under Otto's nose. “Take a look at it, Otto,” he said, after pausing a moment to get his breath, the volume being heavy. “There is more brass than leather on the outside, and more paint than text on the inside. I have two others from the same collection. It is in your line rather than in mine, I take it. What do you think of it? Could you sell it?”
Kling dropped his glasses from his forehead to the bridge of his flat nose. “Vell! Dot is a funny-looking book, Tim. Dot is awful old, you know.”
“Yes, seventeenth century, I think,” replied Tim.
“Vot you tink, Mr. O'Day? Ain't dot a k'veer book? Oh, you don't have met my new clerk, have you, Tim? Vell dot's funny, for he lives over at Kitty's. Vell, dis is him—Mr. Felix O'Day. Tim Kelsey is an olt friend of mine, Mr. O'Day. You must have seen dot k'veer shop vich falls down into de cellar from de sidevalk—vell, dat's Tim's.”
Felix smiled good-naturedly, bowed to Kelsey, and taking the huge, brass-bound volume in his hands, passed his fingers gently across the leather and then over the heavy clamps, turning the book to the light of the window so as to examine the chasing the closer. Tim, who had been watching him, remarked the ease with which he handled the volume and the care with which he ran his eye along the edges of the inside of the back before paying the slightest attention to the quality of the vellum or to the title-page.
“Did you say you thought it was seventeenth century, Mr. Kelsey?” Felix asked thoughtfully.
“Yes, I should say so.”
“I would put it somewhat earlier. The binding is wholly tool-work, much older than the brasses, which, I think, have been renewed—at least the clamps—certainly one of them is of a later period. The vellum and the illuminated text”—again he scrutinized the title-page, this time turning a few of the inside leaves—“is before Gutenberg's time. Handwork, of course, by some old monk. Very curious and very interesting. And you say there are two others like this one?”
The hunchback, whose big, shaggy head reached but a very little above the case over which the colloquy was taking place, stretched himself upon his toes as if to see Felix the better. “You seem to know something of books, sir,” he remarked in a surprised tone. “May I ask where you picked it up?”
Again Felix smiled, a curious expression lurking around his thin lips—a way with him when he intended to be non-committal. He was now more interested in the speaker than in the object before him, especially in the big dome head and sunken eyes, shaded by bushy eyebrows, the only feature of the man which seemed to have had a chance to grow to its normal size. He had caught, too, a certain high-pitched note, one of suffering running through the hunchback's speech—often discernible in those who have been robbed of their full physical strength and completeness.
“Oh, I don't know, Mr. Kelsey. There are, as you know, but few old clamp books like this in existence. There are some in the Bibliotheque in Paris, and a good many in Spain. I remember handling one some years ago in Cordova. When you have seen a fine example you are not apt to forget it. Why do you sell it?”
Kelsey settled down upon his heels—the upper half of his misshapen body telescoping the lower—and shoved both hands into his pockets. “I did not come here to sell it”—there was a touch of irony in his voice—“I came to find out whether Kling could sell it. Do you think YOU could?”
“I might, or I might not. Only a few people about here, so I understand, can appreciate this sort of thing.”
“What is it worth?” He was still eying him closely. People who praised his things were those who never wanted to buy.
“Not very much,” replied Felix.
“Oh, but I thought you said it was very rare?”
“So it is—almost too rare—and almost too old. If it had been done fifty or more years later, on one of Gutenberg's presses, Quaritch might give you two thousand pounds for it. Hand-work—which ought really to be more valuable than machine-work—is worth pence, where the other sells for pounds. One of Gutenberg's Bibles sold here a year ago for three thousand guineas, so I am told. What are the other two like?”
“No difference—a clasp is gone from one. The other is—” He stopped, his mien suddenly changing to one of marked respect, even to one of awe. “Will you do me a favor, sir?”
“With pleasure”—again the same quiet smile. He had read the financial workings of the bookseller's mind with infinite amusement and decided to see more of him. “What can I do for you?”
“I want you to come over with me to my shop. You won't object, will you, Otto? I won't keep him a minute.”
“Let me come a little later, sir, say about nine o'clock. I have work here until six and an engagement, which is important, until nine. You are open as late as that?”
“Oh, I am always open, or can be,” Kelsey answered. “What would I shut up shop for except to keep out the rats—human and otherwise? I live in my place, and, as I live alone, nobody ever disturbs me—nobody I want to see—and I do want you, and want you very much. Well, then, come at nine, and if the blinds are up, ring the bell.” And so the acquaintance began.
And yet, interesting as he found these diversions with his neighbors, there were moments when, despite his determination to be cheerful and to add his quota to the general fund of good-fellowship, he had to summon all his courage to prevent his spirit sinking to its lowest ebb. It was then he would turn to the thing that lay nearest to hand, his work—work often so irksome to him that, but for his sense both of obligation and of justice to his employer and his love for Masie, he would have abandoned it altogether.
A possible relief came when through the protests of a customer he had begun to realize the clearer Kling's deficiencies and had, in consequence, cast about for some plan of helping him to do a larger and more remunerative business.
Several ways by which this could be accomplished were outlined in his mind. The disorder everywhere apparent in the shop should first come to an end. The present chaos of tables, chairs, bureaus, and sideboards, heaped higgledy-piggledy one upon the other—the customers edging their way between lanes of dusty furniture—must next be abolished. So must the jumble of glass, china, curios, and lamps. This completed, color and form would be considered, each taking its proper place in the general scheme.
To accomplish these results, all the unsalable, useless, and ugly furniture taking up valuable space must be carted away to some auction room and sold for what it would bring. Light, air, and much-needed room would then follow, and prices advanced to make up for the loss on the “rattletrap” and the “rickety.” Stuffs which had been poked away in worthless bureau drawers for years, as being too ragged even to show, were next to be hauled out, patched, and darned, and then hung on the bare white walls, concealing the dirt and the cracks.
And these improvements, strange to say—Kling being as obstinate as the usual Dutch cabinetmaker, and as set in his ways—were finally carried out; slowly at first, and with a rush later when every customer who entered the door began by complimenting Otto on the improvement. Soon the sales increased to such an extent and the stock became so depleted that Kling was obliged to look around for articles of a better and higher grade to take its place.
At this juncture a happy and unforeseen accident came to his aid. A bric-a-brac dealer with a shop in Jersey City filled with some very good English and Italian patterns and a fine assortment of European gatherings—most of them rare, and all of them good—fell ill and was ordered to Colorado for his health. His wife had insisted on going with him, and thus the whole concern, including its good-will—worthless to Kling—was offered to him at half its value.
O'Day spent the entire morning crawling in and out of the interstices of the choked-up Jersey City shop; Masie, as his valuable assistant, propped up with Fudge on a big table until he had finished. The next day the bargain was made. Mike, Bobby, the two Dutchies, and both Kitty's teams were then called in and the transfer began.
It was when this collection of things really worth having were being moved into their new home under Felix's personal direction that Masie announced to him an important event. They were on the second floor at the time, overlooking Hans and Mike, who had just brought up-stairs the first of the purchase, a huge, high-backed gilt chair, stately in its proportions—Spanish, Felix thought—with a few renovations about the arms and back, but a good specimen withal. The chair had evidently excited her imagination, reminding her, perhaps, of some of the pictures in Tim Kelsey's fairy books, for after looking at it for a moment she began clapping her hands and whirling about the room.
“I've thought of such a lovely thing, Uncle Felix! Let's play kings and queens! I will sit in this chair and will dress Fudge up like a page and everybody will come up and courtesy, or I will be the fairy princess and you will be my beauty prince, and—”
Felix, who was holding up the heavy end of a piece of tapestry while the two men were clearing a place for it behind the chair, called out, “When's all this to happen, Tootcoms?”—one of his pet names; he had a dozen of them.
“Next Saturday.”
“Why next Saturday?”
“Because then I'm eleven years old, and you know that a great many fairy princesses are never any older.”
Down went the tapestry. “Your birthday! You blessed little angel! Eleven years old! My goodness, how time flies! Pretty soon you will be in long dresses, with your hair in a knot on the top of your head. You never told me a word about it!”
“No, but I do now. And I am just going to have a party—a real party. And I am going to invite everybody, all the girls I know and all the boys and all the old people.”
Felix had her beside him now, her fresh young cheek against his. “You don't tell me! Well! I never heard anything like it! And what will your father say?”
Her face fell. “Don't let's tell him! Let's have a surprise.”
Felix shook his head. “I am afraid we could never do that, unless we locked him up in the cellar and did not give him a thing to eat until everything was ready. Oh, just think how he would beg for mercy!”
Masie rubbed her cheek up and down that of Felix in disapproval. “No, you wouldn't be so mean to poor Popsy.”
“Well, then, suppose—suppose—” and he held her teasingly from him to note the effect of his words—“suppose we make him go away—way off somewhere, to buy something—so far away that he could not come back until the next day. How would that do?”
“No, that won't do—not a little bit! I've got a better plan. You go right down-stairs this minute and tell him it's all fixed, and that I'm going out this very afternoon to invite everybody myself.”
Felix made a wry fate. “Suppose he sends me about my business?”
“He won't. He thinks you are the most WONDERFUL man in the world—he told Mr. Kelsey so; I heard him—and he won't refuse you anything—oh, Uncle Felix”—both arms were around his neck now, always her last argument—“I do so want a birthday party and I want it right here in this room.”
Felix smoothed back the hair from her pleading eyes and kissed her tenderly on the forehead. For a moment there was silence between them, he continuing to smooth back her hair, she cuddling the tighter, her usual way. She always let him think a while and it always came out right. But he had made up his mind. It had been years since a birthday of his own had been celebrated; nor had he ever helped, so far as he could recollect, to celebrate the birthday of any child. Yes, Masie should have her birthday, if he could bring it about, and it should be the happiest of all her life.
Suddenly he rose, releasing his neck from her grasp, and ran his eyes around the almost bare interior—the big chair being the only article, so far, in place. “It will make a grand banquet hall, Masie,” he said, as if speaking more to himself than to her. “Let me see!” He walked half the length of the floor and began studying the walls and the bare rafters of the ceiling. These last had once been yellow-washed, age and dust having turned the kalsomine to an old-gold tint, reminding him of a ceiling belonging to a Venetian palace.
“Yes,” he continued, with the same abstracted air, his head upturned, “there's a good place for hanging a big lamp, if there is one in the new lot, and there are spots where I can hang twenty or more smaller ones. I will cover the side walls with stuffs and embroideries and put those long Italian settees against—yes, Tweety-kins, it will come out all right. It will make a splendid banquet hall! And after the party we will leave it just so. Fine, my child! And I have an idea, too—a brilliant idea. Hans, ask Mr. Kling to be good enough to come up here!”
With the surrender of her Uncle Felix, Masie resumed her spinning around the room and kept it up until the father's bald head showed clear above the top of the stairs.
“Masie has had one brilliant idea, Mr. Kling, and I have another. I will tell you mine first.” It was wonderful how thoroughly he understood the Dutchman.
“Vell, vot is it?” Otto had sniffed something unusual in the atmosphere and was on the defensive. When there was only one to deal with he sometimes had his way; never when they were leagued together.
“I propose,” continued O'Day, “to turn this whole floor into the sort of a room one could live in—like many of the great halls I have seen abroad—and I think we have enough material to make a success of it, plenty of space in which to put everything where it belongs. Leave that big chair where I have placed it, throw some rugs on the floor, nail the stuffs and tapestries to the walls, fasten the brackets and sconces and appliques on top of them, filled with candles, and hang the lanterns and church lamps to the rafters. When I finish with it, you will have a room to which your customers will flock.”
Kling, bewildered, followed the play of O'Day's fingers in the air as if he were already placing the ornaments and hangings with which his mind was filled.
“Vell, vot ve do vid de stuff dot's comin'—all dem sideboards and chairs and de pig tables? Ve ain't got de space.”
“Half of them will go here, and the balance we will pile away on the top floor. When these are sold then we'll bring down the others—always keeping up the character of the room. That is my idea. What do you think of it?”
The shopkeeper hesitated, his fat features twisted in calculation. Every move of his new salesman had brought him in double his money. The placing of his goods so that a customer would be compelled to crawl over a table in order to see whether a chair had three whole legs or two, dust and darkness helping, had always seemed to him one of the tricks of the trade and not to be abandoned lightly.
“You mean dot ve valk 'round loose in de middle, and everyting is shoved back de Vall behind, so you can see it all over?”
Felix smothered a smile. “Certainly, why not?”
“Vell, Mr. O'Day, I don't know.” Then, noticing the quickly drawn brows of his clerk's face and the shadow of disappointment: “Of course, ve can try it, and if it don't vork ve do it over, don't ve?”
Masie slipped her arm through O'Day's and began a joyous tattoo with her foot. She knew now that Felix had carried the day.
“And now for Masie's idea, Mr. Kling.”
“Oh, dere is someting else, eh? I tought dere vould be ven you puts your two noddles togedder—Vell, vot is dot all about, eh?”
“She is to have a birthday. She will be eleven years old next Saturday.”
“By Jeminy, yes, dot's so! I forgot dot, Masie. Yes, it comes on de tventy-fust. Vy you don't tell me before, little Beesvings?”
“Yes, next Saturday; only four days off,” continued Felix, forging ahead to avoid any side-tracking of his main theme. “And what are you going to do for her? Not many more of them before she will be out of the window like a bird, and off with somebody else.”
Otto ruminated. He loved his daughter, even if he did sometimes forget her very existence. “Oh, I don't know. I guess ve buy her sometings putty—vot you like to have, Beesvings? Or maybe you like to go to de teater vid Auntie Gossburger. I get de tickets.”
The child disengaged her hand from O'Day's arm, pushed back her hair and tiptoed to her father. “I want a party, Popsy—a real party,” she whispered, tipping his chin back with her fingers, so he could look at her through his spectacles—not over them, like an ogre.
“Vere you have it?” This came in a bewildered way, as if the pair had the big ballroom at Delmonico's in the back of their heads.
“Here, in this very place,” broke in Felix, “after I get it in order.”
Kling, gently freeing himself from Masie's hold, stared at his clerk. “Dot vill cost a lot of money, don't it?”
“No, I do not think so.”
“Vell, who is coming? De childer all around?”
“Everybody is coming—big, little, and middle-sized,” answered Felix. The cat was all out of the bag now.
“Vell, dot's vot I said. You don't can get someting for nodding. You must have blenty to eat and drink.”
“No. Some simple refreshment will do—sandwiches, cake, and some ice-cream. I'll take care of that myself, if you'll permit me.”
“Vell, now stop a minute vunce—here is anudder idea. Suppose ve make it a Dutch treat—everybody bring sometings. Ve had vun last vinter at Budvick's, de upholsterer, ven he vas married tventy-five years. I give de apples—more as half a peck.”
Felix broke into a hearty, ringing laugh—one of the few either Masie or his employer had ever heard escape his lips.
“We will let you off without even the apples this time,” he said, when he recovered himself. “They are not coming to get something to eat this time. I will give them something better.”
“And you say everybody is comin'. Who is dot everybody?”
“Just leave it all to me, Mr. Kling. And give yourself no concern. I am going to use everything we have: all our cups and saucers, no matter whether they are Spode, Lowestoft, or Worcester; all the platters, German beer mugs, candlesticks—even that rare old tablecloth trimmed with church lace. This is an entertainment to be given by a distinguished antiquary in honor of his lovely daughter”—and he bowed to each in turn—“the whole conducted under the management of his junior clerk, Mr. F. O'Day, who is very much at your service, sir.”