THEclerk of the store (dry goods and gentlemen's furnishings) is what is known as a nice man. He is known as such among his neighbors. He is known as such by his customers. People, wives sometimes to their husbands, refer to him as a nice man. Motherly old ladies say, "He is such a nice man!" Younger ladies exclaim, "What a nice man!" You cannot look at him and fail to know that he is a nice man. You cannot look at him and fail to know that his life has been blameless. He is very clean, tidy, and very, fresh-faced.His cheeks are round and rosy; his eyes are bright; his mustache is silken. He is in perfect health; his expression is pleasant; his disposition agreeable; and his manners are perfect. His name is Will (certainly).
The nice man has a little wife, who is almost as nice as he. She is interested in Sunday schools. The nice man and his wife have a little baby that looks just like its father. On Sundays they walk in the park, pushing the baby-cab before them. On great days of celebration they go together into the country, on picnics; and return home at night tired out. On these trips to the country the little wife brings home chestnut burrs to hang from the chandelier in the parlor. She made some pussy-willow buds to look like little cats on a stick. These are on the mantel. When Will got the job he now has his wife turned to the store's advertisement the first thing in the newspaper every evening to read it. She had always known that Will had it in him to be something, and so she had always told him. When the nice men gets a raise in salary he and his wife will put away so much a week and soon have a home of their own somewhere inthe suburbs. Already, the baby has a savings-bank account of its own, and by the time it has developed into the grown image of the nice man, its father, it will have a sum of money.
LETus walk down the street with Muldoon.
Muldoon is always a bit shabby, and never well shaved. To be well groomed is the mark of a snob. Muldoon walks with a brisk step and somewhat defiantly. He carries his shoulders well back and a trifle raised. He wears a cap; and a fine rakish thing is the way he wears it. There is in his manner of wearing a cap a suggestion of the country fair gambling game of ring-a-cane. His appearance gives the impression that some one had tossed a cap at him and failed to ring him squarely, but had landed itinsecurely, and left it liable to fall off at any moment, decidedly on one side of his head, and that then Muldoon had walked off without giving the slightest thought to the matter.
Professionally, Muldoon's greatest virtue is that he is a champion "mixer" and "butter-in"; his greatest failing, that he is not reliable. Still he is spoken of among his confrérie as "a good man," and is never without employment. He has served upon a great multitude of newspapers in sundry and divers cities, towns, and hamlets, though never upon any one for a greater period than several months. His is a nature that requires constant change and variety. In distant places he has been editor—sporting editor, we believe he says—though in his own city—we should hardly say that he had a city but that he always comes back again—he serves in the capacity of police reporter. Thus we see that a rolling stone is not without honor, save in his own country.
Muldoon's classics in literature are "Down the Line with John Henry" and "Fables in Slang," with a good appreciation of "Chimmy Fadden." He one time wrote a book himself which was distinguished chiefly for spirit and the odd circumstance that most of the ladycharacters were named Flossie, and which was a failure financially.
We were one day in company of Muldoon when he visited Hudson Street, in the neighborhood of his childhood days, and where he met again some of the friends of his youth. These meetings were affecting to witness. "Hi, Pat Muldoon!" cried a fine stocky lad who immediately fell into the attitude of pugilistic encounter. Muldoon, too, put up his fists. "Hi, Owen Heely!" he cried; and they circled about, working their arms in and out and grinning an affectionate greeting upon each other.
We walk down the street with Muldoon; we pass an acquaintance (of Muldoon's). "How 'do, Pat!" says the acquaintance. "Hullo, Tom!" (or Dick, or Harry, as the case may be), cries Muldoon, then, as if in afterthought, "Hold on, just a minute, Tom." Muldoon leaves us for a moment—we had got quite pastthe acquaintance—goes back and engages him in earnest conversation, inaudible to us. The acquaintance's head is bent forward and while giving ear he gazes fixedly at the ground. Then he slowly shakes his head, and, straightening up, says (we hear), "I would if I had it, Pat. But I haven't got it with me." "All right," cries Muldoon, in perfect good humor. "So long," and he returns to us.
We continue down the street, and Muldoon beguiles the way with tales of his checkered experience. Muldoon's duties as a representative of the press require him to spend considerable of his time at the police station. One time there came a great hurry-up call for the ambulance when the ambulance surgeon was nowhere to be found. (This city hospital was next door to the police station.) The horses were hitched, and stomping and waiting. Again and again the call was repeated. A man, no doubt, lay dying. Still no ambulance surgeon. Muldoon fretted and waited. At length he could stand it no longer. He leaped into the seat, jerked the reins in his hand, clanged the gong, and dashed full tilt to the rescue. It was madness. What could he do when he got there? "Clang! Clang!" went the gong. Reeling, plunging,staggering, now on two wheels, now on one, now on none at all—on and on and on, around corners, across tracks, between vehicles, past poles, dashed the ambulance. "Clang! Clang!" Just missing a pedestrian here, who saves himself only by a hair's-breadth, grazing a wheel there, on, on! until he drew up by a knot of people along the curb. This drive was afterward reckoned the fastest run in the history of the service.
A laborer, swinging a mighty sledge, had dropped it on and mashed his great toe. He was in acute pain. The man refused to budge until his wound has been attended to. What was to be done? Muldoon had picked up a trifling knowledge of surgery about the hospital. He whipped out the surgical kit and took off the fellow's toe, neat as you please, by the grace of heaven. We are now come to a public-house. Muldoon marches in (we follow). He puts his foot on the rail, a dime, a ten-cent piece, on the bar, turns to us, and says, "What'll you have?" We look at the dime and say, "Beer." Now, Muldoon enters into conversation with the barman (who has addressed him as "Pat"), and recounts to him the details of his late illness, which are most astonishing.
When we resume our journey, which Muldoon does with some reluctance, he tells us the dream of his life. On the street where Muldoon spent his boyhood live a great number of gossiping old cats, who, in so far as they were able, made that boyhood miserable, who bore false witness to one another, to his family, and to others, against Muldoon, and who predicted that he (Muldoon) would come to a bad end. On the occasion of his coming into any great sum of money, he intends to wind up a tremendous bacchanalian orgy on that street. He will drive up it in a cab in broad daylight, howling and singing, and with his feet out the windows. On the roof of his equipage will be a great array of bottles, and the cabman will be drunk and screaming. We believe Muldoon sees in this mental picture a Brobdignagian placard on the back of the vehicle reading, "This is Muldoon!!!" That will give 'em something to talk about. It will be a fine revenge.
IFthere is a finer fellow in the world than Chester Kirk we have never seen him. As he himself so often says, the finest things are done up in small packages. (There was Napoleon, for instance, as we have heard him say, and General Grant, and, at the moment, we do not remember who all.)
When in eyeshot of ladies, especially when he is unknown to them, he is grand. He takes his gloves from his pocket and holds them in his left hand. He searches himself for a cigar,which, when found, he holds before him, unlighted, in his right hand, on a level with his chest, his elbow crooked. He stands very firmly, with one leg bending backward in a line of virile, graceful curve. His back is taut. His other knee is bent forward, relaxed. Or he strides up and down, with something of a fine strut, like a fighting cock. So, he reminds us of Alan Breck.
When, in this stimulating position, he has on a long coat, he swings its skirt from side to side. He feels, undoubtedly so brave and strong. He laughs, when there is opportunity for it, in a deep, manly voice, and often. He sometimes pulls back his head so that he has a double chin. He is every inch a man.
As is quite fitting and proper, he is one of the most photographed of men. This is a family trait. He has ever just had a new photograph taken to send to his people, or his people have just sent some new ones to him, which he shows about with great gusto to his friends. His room is littered with likenesses of the Kirks, a very remarkable family. Here is a photograph of his brother.
"Notice that chest," says Kirk. "He's got an expansion on him like the front of a house.Why, in his freshman year he had the biggest expansion in his class. Athlete! That boy's a boxer." Kirk points the stem of his pipe at you and continues: "He stood up before the huskiest man in Seattle (and there are no huskier men than in Seattle), a big brute of a fireman, a regular giant, with a reputation as a whirlwind slugger. Yes. Why, it's all I can do to hold that boy myself. This," exhibiting another picture, "is my father. See that pair of shoulders? He is a little under the medium height, but the way he carries himself he doesn't look it. He looks to be a rather big man. He has an air. He came West a poor man, but one that could see chances, take them, and hold on to them. He took them and hung on. He built up that business, I think I have a right to say that it's the biggest on the Pacific Slope, in an incredibly short time. Business he was from the word go. He could handle men! An entertainer he is, too; he makes friends wherever he goes; everybody likes him. Here's my sister. 'Sis' is the society woman of the younger set at home. That's my other brother. He's a hunter."
Next to pictures of himself and family, and their pets and live stock, there is nothing Kirkrevels in so much as snapshots of his native country, "greatest country in the world." He has these pasted into several volumes: each print is labeled, as "Mt. Ranier, looking north," "Puget Sound, low tide," and so forth. Each new acquaintance Kirk takes through the lot and explains the circumstances under which each picture was taken.
As Kirk himself remarks, his handwriting is very strong. It is that strong that it has only about three, sometimes four, short words to a line, with good strong spaces in between. The descending loops of letters on one line often come down and lariat small letters on the line below. The sense goes at a splendid break-neck speed, and takes pauses and stops as though they were hurdles. The whole is penned in somewhat that fashion in which express clerks make out receipts.
That reminds us. We one time went with Kirk into an express office to send a package. We ignorantly considered this to be a thing of little moment. That was because we do not know how to handle men. A pale young man, with a high, bald forehead, who had the appearance of an excellent assistant to some one in an office, was standing at the counter. Hewitnessed the entrance of the two without remarking it as an impressive ceremony. Indeed, the clerk was quite apathetic. In an instant all this was changed.
"Let me have your pencil," Kirk demanded. It was the voice of the man born to command, the man that moves an army of subordinates this way or that, as he wills, like chessmen. He took the pencil, hoisted his package onto the counter with a flourish, tilted his cigar upward in one corner of his mouth by a movement of his jaws, and fell into so fine an attitude that the pale young man became interested and leaned over to see what important name would appear in the address. In his strongest hand Kirk addressed it. It was a package worth two dollars Kirk was sending to his brother, who needed it. "Send collect," cried Kirk. And the entire company, Kirk included, and ourself, who also knew the contents of the package, felt, it was evident, that a transaction very important to the interests of business had been accomplished.
Kirk was one time playing checkers when we entered. "Well, how are you coming out?" we inquired. "Are you being beaten, Chester?" He flared up like a flash. "I can beatyou!" he cried. We had never seen the man so beautiful. (He had never in his life seen us play checkers.) He looked to be invincible; though he wasn't; for he had lost every game.
"HULLOthere, Bill! I'm glad to see you. How're you getting along? Do you know, I didn't know you when you first came in. Let me see, it's been a couple—no, four years since I saw you before. I was pretty much down and out then, ha! ha! Just bummed my way to New York, you know. Well, how are things with you? You know, I sat there looking an' a looking at you—couldn't make up my mind whether it was you or not. I says to myself, 'I'll risk it,' I says. 'If it's Bill, we'll have a time,' I says. Ha! Ha! I came over to take abath—there's a fine bath place across the street, where I always go. I'm in the photograph business, you know, over in Brooklyn. Yes, doing well now; I'm manager of the place; I'll take you over to see it. Been in the business three years, same place; first two years work, work all the time, no pay at all, so to speak. But I knew I was learning the business, and I liked the job and liked the boss; we were busted together, you know. I was head musher in a mushhouse at Coney, you know, when I first met him; then I lost the job; we bummed around together awhile. Then I went back to Indiana—by freight—to see my folks.
"Yes, the old man's well; Dora's married, you know; married a Sunday school superintendent, church where she taught Sunday school. Nothing doing in Indiana. Laid around awhile, then I got a letter from this feller. He had come into money, set up a photograph shop, told me to come back and take a job with him. I went to my sister, Dora, you know, and got railroad fare here. I says to her, 'If you can get me the money, I'll pay you as soon as I can, which won't be long,' I says. 'I've got a good job there,' I says. I says, 'Of course, I can bum my way back, butit will take me four or five days, maybe a week,' I says. 'If I have railroad fare I can get on a train here one day and get off there the next,' I says. She got me the money from her husband—sixteen dollars; she's been awful good to me; and I came in a passenger train. First time, you know, ha! ha! Second-class, though; just as good as first, though. I got on at Indianapolis one day, you know, and got off in New York the next day. Twenty-four hours, you know.
"First thing, I went to the feller's place, but he had moved. Didn't leave any address, where he had gone, you know; nobody around there knew anything about him. I was in a deuce of a fix. Didn't have a cent of money—wasn't the first time, though. We used to write to each other sometimes through the General Delivery, so I went there, and sure enough there was a letter for me; but there was some postage due on it somehow. I says to the man, I says, 'I haven't got any money; I can't pay it'; there was a feller standing behind me in the line; he ups and says, 'Here, I'll pay it,' he says; 'it's only two cents' he says. So I got the letter and set right out for the address; the feller had moved to a better place.
"Well, Bill, business has been good; we do a corking business on Saturdays and Sundays, and the feller owns two or three galleries now. He goes around tending to all of them and I have charge of one; there's my card. I'm thinking about quitting, though, and going out West again; business is too good, that's the trouble. No excitement; I'm getting discouraged. Too much responsibility. Lord, Bill, I'm atramp; I am; yes, sir, that's what I am. I was raised that way. I like the life. The man across the street from me owns a restaurant, where I eat; offered to loan me a couple of hundred dollars to buy the gallery where I am. Ha! Ha! That's a good one, isn't it?
"Girls, Bill! you ought to see the girls that come to my place, Bill, yes, sir, to get their pictures taken. They all call me 'Jack.' Yes, everybody around here calls me 'Jack.' I used to be 'John,' you know, at home, where we were boys together; great days those, yes, sir; I never will forget those days.
"Why, you know, I could have been married, Bill; yes, sir, ha! ha! Me, a tramp. A fine girl, too, a regular lady, the real article, yes, sir, rich too, yes, sir. Why I went overthere one day, and their dog—a blame little black dog—was sick; you ought to have seen the case of medicine they had for that dog. A whole blame box full of bottles of medicine; good medicine, too, yes, sir; why, I would have liked to have had some of that medicine myself.
"I'll take you over and introduce you to some of those girls; here's a picture I took of one; she's a daisy. I took her to the theater last Saturday night. You know, it does a feller good to see good shows at the theater. This theater—it's a little place right near my gallery—I go there every once in awhile; they have better shows there than they do at the Opera House; I like 'em better. This was a fine show, 'His Mother's Son.' Yes, sir, it does a feller good to go to the theater.
"What's the matter with your coming over and staying with me to-night? But no, I haven't a room now; you'd have to bunk in the gallery. That's where I sleep now. I did have a room, you know, blame fine room, running water, hot and cold, and all that sort of thing, three dollars a week. But I got tired of it. Yes, too comfortable, bed all made up for me every day, and everything else. It made me sick. I like to make my own bed. I like torough it like I'm used to doing, yes, so I gave it up and sleep in the gallery now where I belong. I feel at home there, and there's plenty of room.
"Say, Bill, how are you fixed? Need any money? I've got more'n I want. Don't know what to do with it all, you know. Not used to it, just blow it in. Well, all right, we'll take and spend it then. Drink up, Bill, and let's go some other place."
WEare much interested in the picturesque character of Caroline. Caroline is twelve. She is like a buxom, rosy apple. Her dress is a "Peter Thompson." Her physical sports are running like the wind, and, in summer, fishing. Our concern, however, is more with her mind. Caroline is a voracious reader. We are somewhat bookish ourselves, and the conversations between us are often frankly literary. Caroline's taste in this matter, for one of her sex, is rather startling.
"Oh, you ought to read the 'Pit and the Pendulum,'"says Caroline. "Is it good?" we ask. "Fine!" Caroline replies. "It's at the time of the Inquisition, you know," she explains. "They take a man and torture him. It's fine," declares Caroline. "The demon's eyes grow brighter and brighter" (phrases we recall from her synopsis of the tale), "the pendulum comes nearer and nearer—but I think he deserved to escape," says Caroline, "because he tried so hard." Now that is really a deep moral observation, "because he tried so hard," and a sound questioning of the philosophical verity of a work of art.
"There's a good murder in here," says Caroline.
"I like Sherlock Holmes," Caroline says.
She reads the "Mark of the Beast" and the "Black Cat" with great satisfaction. For comedy or for psychological moments she does not care, but there is nobody, we believe, with greater capacity for enjoyment of terrible murder in horrible dark places in the land of fiction.
Night after night we heard her voice reading aloud to her visitor Emily after the two had retired, until we fell asleep; and in the morningwe saw that the relish of horror was still upon her.
Emily had gone. Caroline had retired alone. We read by the lamp in the living-room. We were startled and mystified to hear suddenly mingle with the sound of the night rain all around, a long, uncertain wailing, a melancholy, haunting, sinking, rising, halting, gruesome sound, uncannily redolent of weird Gothic tales; the "Castle of Otranto" came into our mind. This apparently proceeded from an "upper chamber," as would be said in the type of story mentioned.
"That," said brother Henry, in replying doubtless to a blank face, "is Caroline playing the flute."
No one alive, of course, has not in his head a picture of another that in the still hours sought solace in and loved a flute, Mr. Richard Swiveler propped up in bed, his nightcap raked, fluting out the sad thoughts in his bosom. So in the night and the storm, does another bizarre soul, Caroline, speak with the elements.
IN"Bleak House," I think it is, that Poor Joe keeps "movin' along." One of the atoms of London, he passes his whole life in the midst of thousands upon thousands of signs. Printed letters, painted letters, carved letters, words, words, words, blaze upon him all about. Yet not a syllable of them all speaks to him; seen but all unheard by him they clothe his path. Poor Joe cannot read. How must he regard these strange, unmeaning signs? What is it goes on in this head which so little can enter?What has filtered in where the great main avenue of approach remains, as far from the first, black and unopened? What does this mind, sitting there far off in the dark, looking out, comprehend of the pageant? And how does it strike him? Some such a mysterious mind looks out from Ida's eyes.
Ida is "colored." It is my belief that though she is grown and well formed a little child dwells in her head. I know that when I ask her to bring me another cup of coffee and she pauses, slightly bends forward, her lips a trifle parted, and fastens her clear, utterly innocent, curious eyes upon me, waiting to hear repeated what she has already heard, she sees me as a sort of toy balloon on a string, whose incomprehensible movements excite a pleasurable wonder. As regularly as the dinner hour comes around Ida asks, with that same amazingly unsophisticated, interested look, if each of us will have soup. If it were our custom occasionally not to take soup, if we had declined soup a couple of times even, a good while ago, if even we had declined soup once—but, as Mr. MacKeene says, what could have put it into her head that we might not take soup? It is the same with dessert, with cerealat breakfast. I hardly know why it is not the same with having our beds made.
It is easy to give Ida pleasure. She has not been satiated, perhaps, with pleasure. A very little quite overjoys her. I turn about in my chair to reach a book, and discover Ida silently dusting the furniture. "Why! I didn't know you were in here," I say to Ida. Ida breaks into great light at this highly entertaining situation. "Didin you know I was in here! Didin you!" Her eyebrows go up with delight. Her pose might be the original of Miss Rogson's "Merely Mary Ann."
"SIR," said Doctor Johnson, "a fallible being will fail somewhere," So far as penetration, at least, is concerned, this is not true of Dean. He is never caught without his grains of salt.
Dean believes nothing that he reads in newspapers. He is not caught, for one thing, believing anecdotes of celebrated persons. These anecdotes are pretty stories yearned for by a sentimental public. The public is amusing, composed as it is of simple, guileless people who know nothing of the world. Newspapers are concoctions of press agents, for the mostpart—bait for the gullible. A citizen of the word is Dean, and he has, alas! lost his innocence. This pleases him. You can't impose on Dean's credulity. He hasn't got any credulity. In this respect he has much the same effect upon his company as the Mark Twain dog that didn't have any hind legs had upon the mind of his antagonist. That dog was hardly a pleasure to his opponent. He was baffling.
It is perhaps a man's misfortune that he should be so without delusions. Dean has found out there is no Santa Claus, in a manner of speaking, while the rest of us are yet humbugged. So while we may be pleased with our callings or our hobby-horses, our coins, or our cockle-shells, our drums, our fiddles, our pictures, our talents, our maggots and our butterflies, he can only shrug his shoulders and depreciate them to the best of his ability, saying that they are very poor cockle-shells, to be sure, though no man more than he deplores it that this is so. Though no doubt it must be a melancholy thing to feel so severely the failings of all, Dean's cavilings are cheerfully made always, and they come to us filtered through a humorous nature. And to do him justice, he is whimsically aware of his ownidiosyncrasies, and readily acknowledges them as he sees them, which is in a mellow, kindly light. "Now I could never make money," he says humorously, as it were. But that is not the sum of life, he knows perhaps too well.
He sees the vanity of it all, does Dean. He sees the vanity of all useful endeavor. He sees the vanity most of all perhaps, of success. What is this success we see around us, after all? What is the fame of this man, this Mr. So-and-So, but sensationalism? Of what the success of that other, but cheap notoriety, and a rich wife? They are both of them, very probably, at heart as miserable as Dean. Ah me! 'tis a profitless world, and there's no satisfaction in it anywhere. "Though probably you are hardly of an age to see it yet," says Dean, and he smiles at the juvenility of ambition. You will see it, however, when you too have failed.
"In this age when every man you meet is a genius," says Dean—it amuses him that he is not of the many—"I have really seen only one really great man, and I have been compelled to know a good many of the geniuses too." This remarkable, unique gentleman, it appears, was an old sou'easter sawbuck of a codger up in the backwoods of Maine, where he lived hermit-wise in a shanty, being a squatter. When Dean met him there he felt instinctively that here he was before aman. Uncle Eli was old: he was a trifle filthy; he was addicted to drink; and not what you would call much good in any way. He was uncouth; a man with the bark on; one of nature's noblemen. He lacked culture, and education, and intelligence; but he had eye-teeth. Lord! He wasn't polite; he wasn't learned; but when it came to downright bull-headed horse-sense he knocked the socks of all of them. He was a philosopher, this old B'gosh half-idiot wreck. By George, he was, and a great one. He reminded Dean of Lincoln. Some of his philosophical splinters from the old rail, rough they were but ready, rather laid over the wisdom of Hercules himself. "Ef 'n ol' hoss wus a Billygoat mighty few Christians there be 'ud git to Heaven." That hits the nail on the head, Dean reckons.
"HAVEyou got any tobacco?" I inquired of Cramis.
"Sure," he replied, "I'm never without it."
He is a slave to the weed, a hopeless smoker. He hands me his pouch; the tobacco is a little old and mildewed. When Cramis comes to visit me he always brings a most disreputable looking pipe along in his mouth, charred and cold. This he calls attention to, musingly, as it were, by remarking that "that looks natural."
"I shouldn't have known you without it," I answer. Then we are the best of friends. An old Swede, an engineer of some rare sort, a whimsical fellow, quite a character—Cramis is greatly interested in characters—was much addicted to his pipe (so runs Cramis's story). It was a limb of his body. He was one of those inveterate smokers that you find here and there about the world. One day placards announcingthat smoking was prohibited among employees in the building were posted at conspicuous places in the mill where Olie was employed. Olie went on smoking. The manager came through; he paused at Olie.
"Look-a-here," he said, "don't you see that sign? No smoking among employees in this building." Olie slowly took the pipe from his mouth, regarding it thoughtfully in his out-stretched hand as he blew a great cloud of blue smoke.
"Where my pipe goes," he said, replacing it between his teeth, "I goes." You may notice it: there is something of the same idiosyncrasy between that picturesque character and Cramis.
For all the idler and the dilettante that he is, no man ever more conscientiously attended to business than Cramis. He is at it early and late. He is very successful. Yet he knows himself to be an impractical cuss, a dreamer, an æsthetic visionary. No man so thoroughly reliable was ever before so irresponsible.
On his visits at my place, Cramis writes a great quantity of letters. All globe trotters do this, I suppose, whether it is necessary or not. It is only natural. If Cramis did not,many of his friends would not, no doubt, be aware that he was in Connecticut, or, indeed, that he ever got off the island of Manhattan.
Though Cramis is by nature shrewd, saving, and methodically economical, he is very careless about money. He has no more idea of the value of it than Oliver Goldsmith. It is pitiful—yet lovable.
Among Cramis's curious circle of acquaintances—his collection of acquaintances is a regular menagerie, as he so often says—was a painter, a fellow twenty-four years old and with nobody to support him. Cramis believed, after carefully inquiring, that the fellow had talent and might amount to something. He loaned him money. The scoundrel squandered it, probably; at any rate, he bought no fame with it. That was a year ago, and Cramis is eight dollars out of pocket. Still, his heart isa brother to genius. He consulted me on the question of the very least amount upon which a man could live, the length of time at the smallest estimate wherein he could reasonably be expected to attain greatness, and was for setting the fellow up in a studio elsewhere. I pointed out to Cramis that it might possibly be years before the hungry man became famous, and he abandoned the idea. It was too great a risk.
TOpatronize barbers' shops is a trying affair. Nothing but a crying need of services obtained there can drive one who knows them well into one of them. When you enter a barber shop, a long row of barber's chairs, like a line of guns down the deck of a man-o'-war, stretching away in perspective, confronts you. Three barbers, say, are engaged with patrons; and they go calmly on. They are unaware of your existence. The rest have been enjoying newspapers and leisure. You interrupt them; and they spring, as one man, each to the head of hischair, and stand at attention. To find such a company of well-fed, well-groomed, better-men than-you-are suddenly at your service is disturbing; to have to insult all the others in your selection of one is an uncomfortable thought. They are all equally friendly toward you; but it is impossible for them all to shave you; you must turn against some of them. There is no retreat for you; you cannot turn around and go out. You choose the nearest man, as the only solution: and the others show their displeasure by returning to their seats. A fiend is in this man whom you have chosen; his suavity was a diabolical mask. He gloats in publicly humiliating you. He forces you to confess there before his "gang" that you do not want anything but a shave. You have brought this man from his newspaper simply to shave you! Now the number of things the barber manages to do to you against your desire is a measure of the resistant force of your character. You deny that you need a shampoo. There is no denying that your hair is falling out. There is no denying that you sometimes shave yourself. You need try to conceal nothing from this man. He sees quite through you. (You recall a certain Roundabout Paper.)He has Found You Out! All you ask is to be allowed to go. He washes your face for you and turns you out of the chair. You pass into the hands of a boy, the same boy you denied to polish your shoes, a boy that has his opinions, who plays the tune of "Yankee Doodle" on you with a whisk-broom very much as if he snapped his fingers in your face; and you may go.
WHATan excellent thing it is that Stratford is comfortably married. He is built for marriage. That is the life for him; a nice, quiet, wholesome, unexciting life of home comforts. Mr. and Mrs. Stratford dwell happily in a little nest called a cottage. Here they are surrounded by all the sundry and divers chattels and effects incident to the life they follow.
In order that he may be properly protected against the elements, Stratford is plentifully supplied with overshoes, earbobs, Storm King chest protectors, mufflers, and umbrellas. Hearms himself with these instruments according to the precise demand of each different occasion. Going out into the weather is an undertaking, and an adventure, accompanied by hazardous risks. With Stratford, preparation for it is a system and a science. Sometimes, however, Stratford's judgment errs in the matter of precaution. One day last week Stratford went downtown. Yielding to his vanity on that day, he recklessly wore kid gloves instead of his mittens, which were so much more suited to the then prevailing inclement weather. Now he suffers from it. He has a cough, and is compelled to keep his breast goose-greased.
Few people realize the importance of health, and the relation of diet to health. Pork is not wholesome. New potatoes are very hard to digest. Cream should never be eaten with peaches. This pernicious combination curdles. Stratford knows much more about these things than does the writer, which is fortunate for Stratford; the writer has only attempted to point out and warn you against a few of the most important, which he learned from Stratford. Stratford learned all this from experience. Last evening at dinner Stratford drank two cups of coffee. He did not sleep a winkall the night in consequence. Coffee is very bad for the nerves, very bad.
It may be that there are many persons like the writer in not knowing how to serve coffee. The cream should always be put in the cup first, then the coffee poured on. Though you may not be aware of the fact, it absolutely ruins coffee to serve it any other way. It is better to put sugar on oatmeal after the cream is on. The writer does not know why; but it is better.
Though one would hardly suspect it, in his youth Stratford was considerable of a rake. He often tells the story. It appears that in a spirit of reckless dare-deviltry on an occasion Stratford partook of some spirituous liquor. Now Stratford has a tolerably strong head. But this wine—or was it cocktail?—proved almost too much for him. Ah, well! those wild and lawless days are past and gone. Stratfordhas reformed, and will not fill a drunkard's grave. No one, we hope, respects Stratford the less for having been a little wild. We all hate a milksop, you will agree.
ACROSSthe table from a lodger sits Mr. Fife. Mr. Fife is a clerk. This statement comprises, not inadequately, his memoirs.
When a man speaks to you of the useful piece of mechanism called a cash register, you comprehend him perfectly. You know what a cash register is, for what purpose it was designed, how it looks, how much approximately it is worth, what it will perform, and what it will remain—a cash register. A cash register could not have been born a toy balloon, spent its youth as a bicycle, been educated as a pulpit, have imprudently marrieda footlight, been forced to obtain employment as a cash register, but cherishes a secret ambition to be a typewriter and solace itself in turn as a violin, a mug of ale, and a tobacco pipe. A lodger does not say that Mr. Fife is no better in any way than a cash register. A mother nursed him at her breast, watched him as he slept; he was somebody's baby. A grown man was strangely moved, probably, when he was born. He played somewhere as a child. Dirty little brothers and sisters, perhaps, were his. He was spanked and had diseases and suffered and was frightened and rejoiced. Hearts have been glad when he was near. One or two little girls, no doubt, have admired him very much. Some woman, probably somewhere, admires him still. A lodger does not say that Mr. Fife has no inner life. He does not say that the forces of existence constantly, ceaselessly beating in on this man (or rather clerk) are not here slowly, inevitably shaping a moral character, this way or that. But as this human life sits here at Mrs. Wigger's board a clerk is here, with his past and his future.
Mr. Fife has a "furnished room" somewhere around on the next street, and only takes his meals at Mrs. Wigger's.
ONthe hotel porch a large, earnest man was delivering the argument. He poised his pipe in his hand; and, moving forward from period to period with judicial deliberation, choosing his words with care, building his sentences with a nice regard for precision, he constructed his exposition in logical sequence. He had time at his command; and, so he gripped his audience, was in no fear of interruption. "For instance, we will take, for instance, just for instance, do you understand? the little town of New York to represent the whole country. Well, here we have the little town of New York. Now, it stands to reason——" One who chanced to overhear passed beyond range.
But what of the disquisition had been caught gave rise to an important reflection. When you examine the subject you find there are three fundamental phrases in arguing, in thedexterous use of which is largely constituted the talent of the born arguer. These home-driving phrases, which are his stock in trade, are: "It stands to reason," "between man and man," and "that's human nature." With these, strongly used, one can do almost anything. "Does capital meet labor?" says the born arguer. "No; what is the consequence? It stands to reason. Labor goes to the wall." Or, again: "You take the generations we have now, the young people." He smokes a while in silence. "It's human nature," comes the philosophical conclusion. And when the arguer addresses his audience "as between man and man," when in this direct, blunt way all the frangipani of class and convention is cleared aside, and only their manhood stands between them, he has got at the bed-rock of argument.
OURfriend MacKeene is a very interesting person. One of his most pronounced characteristics is an assiduous striving on his part to increase his vocabulary. We are always made aware of any of his new acquisitions in this direction by its frequent repetition during a conversation, the loving way in which he appears to dwell upon it, to hug it to his heart, allow it gradually to mount to his throat, roll it in his mouth to suck its flavor, to send it forth at length, to watch it tenderly and admiringly (like a fine ring of tobacco smoke) until it loses itself in the flow of speech that comesafter it. We relish this new word ourselves. It is like a play; it thrills our soul, and we sigh when it is gone—but we know it will come again many times before the night is passed.
It has never been our fortune to see a man that enjoyed the show of life more than does MacKeene. He reads newspapers with a relish that is positively amazing; he smacks his lips over them; their contents are to him the headiest romance. MacKeene goes to the finest theater in the world every evening when he reads his penny paper. The anxiety with which he awaits the account of each new murder, swindle, election, disaster, marriage, or divorce of a special publicity, the mental agility with which he pounces upon it, the astonishing variety of points of view he can take of the thing, and the application with which he follows through successive installments the story to the very end, are delightful to behold.
He invariably winds up his observations upon life with the comment that "it is a funny world; such funny people in it."
True, or, rare MacKeene! Itisa funny world, and therearesuch funny people in it! Everybody is queer but thee and us.
The other evening, after he had devoured hisnewspaper and sat staring at the wall, we started him going by the remark:
"Well, what's in the paper to-night, MacKeene?"
"What's in the paper to-night?" cried he.
"Everything is in the paper, everything—worlds of it—plays, skits, comedies, farces, tragedies, burlesques: material for the student, the historian, the author, the poet, the moralist, the humorist, much matter to be fast applauded for its slapstick good nature, and some bowed with leaden-eyed despair, some replete with rosy schemes, some of waxing hopes and sweet, unprofitable pipe dreams, some of many moneys, births, deaths, marriages and giving in marriages, loves, hatreds, wisdoms, follies, crimes, vices and virtues, heroisms, hypocrisies, arts, commercialism, surprises, bacchanals, hard exigencies, and poor resorts and petty contrivances.Life—ah! that's the boy—life and all its train of consequences, ringing in myears, dancing before my eyes, crowding on the senses, a three-ringed circus in full blast, a roary, noisy, bloomin' spectacle, a mammoth aggregation of prodigious eye-openers and unparalleled splendors, with gorgeous hippodrome under perfect subjection, and a Casino Wonderland Musée of queer, peculiar, wild, domestic, instructing, funny, beautiful, horrible, and revolting curios and monstrosities of land, air, and sea."
WHATa terrible thing is the X-ray!
Terrible?
Listen. Contemplate the prospect of this invention's being brought into popular use, so that, say, anybody might have such an attachment to his kodak. In such case, science, which has been so powerful a force in refining the civilization of man, would by one stroke lay waste the whole of her handiwork. Civilized society would collapse.
A German professor at one time went pretty well into the subject of clothes and the philosophy thereof, and reasoned among other thingsthat society would instantly dissolve without them. Nothing could more vividly bear out this gentleman than contemplation of the possibilities of the Roentgen ray. It is an exciting prospect. A press of the button, and there would be Herr Teufelsdrockh's "straddling Parliament." But a thousand times more grotesque: gentlemen stripped not only of the tailored habiliment of the bodies, the symbols of their gentility, as it were, but of the fleshly garments of their frame, laying bare their mortality. And humorously, witheringly, for among the other distinctions man is said to possess above his brethren the beasts, being the only animal that laughs, and so forth, it is certainly true that of all creation he has the funniest skeleton. It would be the end. No candidate for public office would dare to come forth upon the platform. What stout lady could give a party?
Unless, indeed, as would probably result, for the preservation of society the use and carrying of kodaks would be regulated, like the carrying of revolvers, by statute. To photograph a gentleman or lady on the street would be a criminal deed carrying a penalty of twenty years' imprisonment. For though ladiesblessed by nature might not, in this lingerie-less, tube-skirt age, shrink from further perception of their loveliness, it is doubtful if any man could make love to a woman after having seen an effigy of her skeleton. To snap the President would be equivalent, in the eyes of the law, to assassinating him. To take an X-ray photograph of a fashionable assembly would be, like discharging a dynamite bomb in the midst, punishable with death.
SOMETIMESmy thoughts carry me away from my solitary strife with the world; back to my boyhood, when all men were not thieves and scoundrels, as they are now; back to my old home and my family, where we loved one another and did not, lynx-eyed, watch for a grip upon our neighbors' throats nor count our every friend as a possibility of our own advancement, and every favor we did another a business investment.