It was not till early May that I was shown, and, as the thing chanced, it was Forgan who then showed me.
I happened to come in when Ernie was not there. We spoke of him, and Forgan said,
“You know what that old guy’s done?” I shook my head. “Company’s backing him,” said Forgan. “He’s got a great thing. You come down-stairs.”
We went down to the machine shop under the receiving floor. Forgan unlocked the door, led me into a small room. On a bench was set up a tiny electric motor, harnessed to a wheel and connected with a simple bit of apparatus which had no meaning, at first sight, at all. But Forgan stopped the motor and made all clear to me. The power revolved a wooden spindle, which entered a hole in a steel block, whirling there. I could perceive no purpose in this, but Forgan said:
“It’s a test. It don’t do anything. Feel of it. Ain’t hot, is it?”
I touched the steel, touched the spindle that had been revolving so swiftly.
“No.”
“See if you can pull it out.” I tried, and failed. “Tight fit, you see,” Forgan told me. “But she’s been spinning in there for three days now, except when we stop her to measure once in a while. No oil, and no heat, and no wear.”
“But what’s it all about?” I asked.
“That’s an oilless bearing,” Forgan explained, a little disgusted with my stupidity. “Piece of hard wood, filled with oil. Use the stuff to make wrist-pins and all, and you’ll never have to oil your chassis at all.”
The thing broke upon me.
“But does it work?” I asked.
“You see it,” he said. “It works here. Well, it’ll work anywhere.”
“And Ernie figured that out?”
“He sure did.”
“Why, the man’s a genius!”
“Yeah. Ever since he went and got his picture took.”
“How does he make this, anyway—this bearing? Soak the wood in oil?”
Forgan laughed.
“Not as easy as that. He puts her in as hot as the devil, and under a lot of pressure. Don’t just know how. He won’t tell. He’s got a lay-off now to work it out. Figuring on cost. Cost’s too much now; but he’s going to figure to make it cheaper. He—”
Ernie himself came in just then. I hardly knew him. He had on a new suit of clothes; he was close-shaven, and his hair was trimmed. His bearing was that of a successful and confident man, and he nodded to the respectful Forgan as one nods to a chauffeur.
“How is she?” he asked.
“Cool as a cucumber,” Forgan assured him.
“Any wear?”
“I’ll see,” the foreman said with alacrity, andproceeded to dismantle the test-apparatus and apply a micrometer to the bearing. Ernie nodded to me, and I said,
“Seems like a fine thing.”
“It is,” he replied, positively and confidently, yet without a trace of arrogance or ugly pride. “Yes; it will do very well.”
“No wear at all,” Forgan reported, and Ernie nodded assent.
“Keep her going,” he directed.
While Forgan was setting the apparatus again in position, Ernie and I went up the stair together. He said, as we came to the main floor,
“By the way, that film, you know—”
“The one you were in—”
“Yes. It’s at the Globe next week.”
“I’ll surely go and see it,” I promised him.
We separated with a word, and I drove home, marveling at this new man that had been Ernie Budder—marveling at the power of suggestion. He had been told that he looked like a great inventor, and he had emerged from this experience stimulated, sure of himself, alert, and keen—a new man.
Such a slight fillip from the finger of Destiny to throw open before a man’s feet new and lofty ways—
Toward the end of the next week I went to the Globe, and so understood at last that what Destiny had brewed was tragedy. Ernie was in the film; so far he had been right. But in how different a rôle! I could understand how they had trickedhim. An actor on the screen knows nothing, or may know nothing of scenes in which he does not himself appear. Ernie had no doubt been told that he was playing the part of a great inventor upon whom the hopes of the nation rested; he had accepted the explanation, had accepted the barred windows, the steel door, the guard outside, and the solicitous visitors.
But he had been deceived, perhaps because they feared he would not otherwise consent to play the part they assigned to him. For the Ernie in the films was no great inventor but an insane old man; the bars at his windows were the bars of a madman’s cell. Within, this madman pottered at his mad designs, and the guard at the door was not to keep others out but to keep him in; and the solicitous visitors paid him no respect but only humored his poor illusion. There were tears in my eyes before the thing was finished—tears of pity for Ernie, and tears of hot anger at the callous brutality of those who had contrived this thing. I thought of legal action on his behalf; but they had, no doubt, been wise enough to have him sign a release from all responsibility. There was nothing that could be done.
I avoided the service-station for the week thereafter; I could not bear to see Ernie. But at last it was necessary to go in. I planned to tell him, if he asked, that I had missed seeing the film. So much poor kindness I could do the man.
When I drove in, he was on the washing-floor, working about a limousine. The old, ragged hose was in his hand; the sprinkler he had designed was still attached to the ceiling, but unused. Iparked my car in an empty space and walked across to him. He looked up with his old timidly amiable smile, and I saw that the alert confidence and the sense of power were utterly gone.
“There’s a grease-cup missing, Ernie, from the rear end,” I told him. “If you see one kicking around—”
“Why, yes; sure,” he promised me.
I hesitated, then said smilingly, “Won’t need to bother with them in a year or two—”
By his answer, I knew that the dreams were gone and the vision was fled.
“Oh, I guess we’ll have to keep puttering on in the same old ways,” said Ernie Budder hopelessly.
JENKINS was a special writer of national reputation, and he had come on from Philadelphia to see Homer Dean, the automobile man whose name is a registered trade-mark borne by some hundred thousand cars of the first class upon the nation’s thoroughfares. Jenkins’ appointment with Dean was for two-thirty in the afternoon, but he was in the reception room outside the other’s office a little ahead of time.
While he sat there Dean came out with an older man, to whom he was saying goodby, and when this older man was gone the millionaire turned to Jenkins with a friendly nod of invitation, and Jenkins followed him into his office. But Dean at once went to a closet in the corner and brought out his coat and hat, saying: “I’m going to have to put you off till to-morrow, Mr. Jenkins. Old Jasper Hopkins, my first boss—that was him who just went out—has just told me something I should have known twenty years ago. I’ve got to—straighten it out. Come in to-morrow, can you?”
The writer’s disappointment showed in his face. “I had figured on taking the six o’clock to-night.”
Dean hesitated, glancing at his watch. “Just what is it you wanted of me?” he asked.
Jenkins smiled. “The usual thing. The storyof how you did it. People are always interested in such things. Self-made man, you know. It’s old stuff, sir, but it’s sure-fire.”
“I know,” the automobile man agreed, nodding thoughtfully. He considered for a moment, then, with abrupt decision, took off his coat, his hat. “After all, it’s waited twenty years,” he said. “Another two hours won’t matter. And—the affair may interest you.” He turned back to his desk, indicated a chair for the other. “Sit down,” he directed. “I think I understand what you’re planning. ‘How to Make Yourself. By One Who Has Done It.’ Is that the idea?”
“Yes.”
Dean smiled. “I’ve heard folks speak of me as self-made,” he confessed. “In fact, that has been, secretly, my own idea. Until an hour ago. Just how much do you know of my—success, anyway?”
“I know you’re the head of one of the half dozen biggest concerns in the business.”
“Know how I came to be here?”
“You were managing vice-president in the beginning; bought out Hopkins ten years or so ago.”
“Can you go back any farther than that?”
“I’ve understood you were sales manager of the old Hopkins Tool Company; that you were a world beater in that job.”
Dean laughed. “Those were boom times, and sales jumped. I happened to be the head of the department, and I got the credit. Ever hear how Hopkins came to make me sales manager?” Jenkins shook his head.
“He had put me on as a salesman,” Dean explained. “My first trip, a big prospect hunted me up, said he’d decided to trade with us, and gave me a whooping order. My predecessor had worked on them four years; they fell into my lap, and Hopkins thought I was a worker of miracles from that day.”
Jenkins shook his head, smiling. “You give yourself the worst of it,” he commented.
Dean’s eyes had become sober and thoughtful; he spoke slowly, as though invoking memory. “You’ve called me a self-made man. But, as a matter of fact, it was the mere accident that I was on the spot which gave me that first order; and that order made me sales manager within two months’ time. By and by the automobile came along, and Old Jasper remodeled his factory and went after the business—with me in charge. He gave me some stock; and a year or two later his son Charlie died and took the heart out of the old man. He offered to sell out to me, and I gave him a bundle of notes for the whole thing. The business paid them off inside of five years. Do you see? The fact that I was salesman made me sales manager; the fact that I was sales manager made me vice-president; the fact that I was vice-president threw the business into my hands; and the fact that everybody wanted to buy cars has done the rest. Still call me a self-made man?”
“After all,” Jenkins suggested, “you had made good or you wouldn’t have been given the job as salesman.”
Dean nodded emphatically. “That’s the key to the whole structure,” he agreed. “That first jobas salesman. And that’s what I want to tell you about. If you care to hear.”
The reporter did care to hear, and this—as he shaped the tale in his thoughts thereafter—is what he heard:
Homer Dean and Will Matthews grew up in adjoining back yards, fought and bled with and for each other as boys will, went through high school side by side, took a business course given by a broken-down bookkeeper in a bare room over the Thornton Drug Store, and went to work in the offices of the Hopkins Tool Company within a month of each other, as vacancies occurred there. Will got the first job, Homer the second. They helped with labels in the shipping room, kept checking lists, and eventually graduated to keeping books.
The tool company was a one-man concern. Old Jasper Hopkins had founded it, and intended to turn it over to his boy Charlie when his own time should be done. Old Jasper—he was then no more than in his late forties, but he was Old Jasper just the same—was a man of many eccentricities. He had begun as a mechanic, a machinist; and he had mastered the machinery of the shop, but never mastered the machinery of business. He picked machinists for his shop work, but for the white-collar jobs he chose men with no grime under their finger nails. Who sought a job with him began in the shipping room, and advanced—if he had merit—through regular and accustomed channels.Keeping books was the second rung of the ladder. Jasper could not multiply eight by seven; he had a vast respect for any man who could.
Will Matthews could, and so could Homer Dean. Also they recommended themselves to Jasper in other ways. The head of the Hopkins Tool Company had breathed the dust from his own emery wheels in the past; he was of a gritty and abrading disposition. His nerves were tight, his temper was loose; and to arouse him meant an explosion that resembled nothing so much as the commotion which results when the mainspring of an ancient alarm clock, in process of dissection, is injudiciously set free.
His prejudices were tradition. While Will and Homer were still in the shipping room they heard how he had scorched Charlie Dunn with many words over the mere slamming of a door. And how he had reduced Luther Worthing from salesman to bookkeeper again because Luther faced him one morning with waistcoat half unbuttoned. And how he had summarily discharged Jim Porter for carelessly rumpling the corner of the office rug. Noise he hated, neatness and order he demanded and revered; and more than one office boy had lost his job for scanting his daily task of putting a fresh and spotless blotter on the broad pad upon Old Jasper’s desk.
These likes and dislikes Homer and Will respected; to a legitimate extent they catered to them; and thus they attained a certain eminence in their employer’s eyes. He had been known to refer to them as promising young men. They knew this as well as others did, and there was agood-natured rivalry between them to see which should distance the other on the upward way.
This was not the only rivalry between the two young men. Her name was Annie Cool, and she was some four years younger than either. They became aware of her the year after her graduation from high school, when she let down her skirts and put up her prettily luxuriant hair and ceased to be “that Cool kid” in their eyes. There is a wide gulf between twelve and sixteen; there is even a gulf between sixteen and twenty. But when the signs are right, there is no gulf at all between, say, eighteen and twenty-two.
Annie was eighteen and they were twenty-two. Presently she was nineteen and they were twenty-three, and a little after that she was twenty and they were twenty-four.
By this time each of the young men was conscious of much more than a pleasantly intense delight in Annie Cool’s companionship. Will Matthews was always somewhat more mature than Homer Dean; he took Annie more seriously. He wooed her gently, with kindliness and much persistence; and Homer wooed her laughingly, with raillery and the rough teasing that goes with youth. There were times when she liked to be with Will; there were other times when she liked to be with Homer, but most of the time she liked to be with both of them, and said so. Other young men of the community knew the uselessness of intrusion on their intimacy.
It had not come to the point of marriage talk, for Will and Homer were getting only a matter of fifteen dollars weekly wage, and even in those days fifteen dollars a week was not considered a competence. But Jasper never paid his bookkeepers more. A salesman, now, was another matter; beside those of a bookkeeper, his wages were munificent. Enough, that is to say, for marrying.
In the fall of the year, when they were twenty-four and Annie Cool was twenty, Steve Randall was killed in a train wreck. Steve was a salesman in the southern territory, and Old Jasper was accustomed to fill vacancies in his selling force from the men who worked upon his books. Both Will and Homer were in line for the job. For three days, till after Steve’s funeral, everyone ignored this fact; then a certain atmosphere of expectancy began to develop in the office. Old Jasper was in bed at home with a shaking cold, but on the fourth day word came that next morning would see him at the office. Everyone knew his choice would be either Homer or Will.
On their way home together after work that day these two met Charlie Hopkins, the old man’s son; and Charlie stopped, smiling like a bearer of good news. “I’ve just come from father,” he told them, and he added: “Homer, you’ve got to congratulate Will this time.”
He shook Will by the hand, and Homer said:
“You’re going to get it, Will. Good for you. I sure am glad!”
Will looked at the other, and there was a faint mist in his eyes. “I know you are, Homer,” he said. “I’d have been just as glad for you.”
Nevertheless, both knew that this moment must always mark the parting of their ways. Thus far they had gone shoulder to shoulder; hereafter one would lead. Also, both thought of Annie Cool.
That evening after supper Homer Dean went over to see Annie. He did not telephone to ask if he might come, for Annie was always glad to see him, or to see Will, whether she knew they were coming or not. Homer got there early, so early that the Cools were still at supper, and he went into the dining room and sat by the door, refusing Mrs. Cool’s hospitable urgings that he eat a second supper with them. He did surrender to a piece of pumpkin pie, but it failed to raise his spirits. He was not yet able to face with composure the fact that Will had beaten him. Will was his friend; there was no malice in Homer. Nevertheless, he was disappointed, and discouraged, and sick at heart.
This was not apparent to Mr. Cool, nor to Annie’s mother, nor to her younger sister and brother. They all liked Homer, and they talked to him, all at once, but Annie said very little. She watched him, with a curiously wistful questioning in her eyes, but she did not at that time put her question into words.
After supper Mr. Cool and Homer went into the sitting room and smoked together while Mrs. Cool and the two girls cleaned up the supper dishes. Annie’s brother had gone downtown immediatelyafter supper, and soon after they came in from the kitchen Annie’s sister was borne away by one of the boys of the neighborhood. Then Annie drew a scarf across her shoulders and suggested to Homer that they sit on the porch.
“It’s warm to-night,” she told him. “We shan’t be cold.”
So they went outside and sat down a little to one side of the front steps, where they were shadowed and hidden by some wistaria vines from which the leaves were just beginning to fall. And Annie asked at once:
“What is it, Homer? What is wrong?”
He did not ask her how she knew anything was wrong. In a boyish fashion he had rather enjoyed the melancholy mien he wore, and knew she had noticed it.
“Oh—nothing,” he said.
Annie shook her head in slow reproof, her eyes softly shining in the shadows.
“Yes, there is too, Homer,” she insisted. “Please tell me what it is.”
“Why, I haven’t any right to growl,” he told her. “I didn’t mean you to see. Didn’t mean anyone to see.”
“I could see,” she insisted gently.
He and Will had already explained to her the significance of the death of Steve Randall, the salesman; it was not necessary for Homer to repeat these things. He simply said: “Will’s got that job.”
She did not speak for a moment, then asked softly: “Mr. Randall’s—job?”
“Yes. Charlie Hopkins told us to-night hisfather had decided.” He added with careful sportsmanship: “Of course Will deserves it. He’s a better man. But I sort of hoped I’d.... Oh, you know.”
“I know, Homer,” she agreed, in a voice that was scarce more than a whisper. And laid her hand, ever so lightly, upon the hand of Homer Dean.
Now Annie Cool had kissed and been kissed many a time, by Will, and by Homer, and by others, in the cheerful frolicking of youth; and she had held hands on hay rides, or beneath the table at supper parties, or even on more public occasions. Thus that she should touch Homer’s hand had in itself no great significance.
But she had never touched his hand, nor he hers, before this night, save when there were others all about them; and always before this night there had been laughter back of the gesture. This night there was not laughter; there were tears.
A conspicuously different matter.
Ten minutes later they drew their eyes one from another for long enough to see that a man had come across the lawn from the street to the steps; that he stood there, looking at them. A man. Will Matthews.
“Will!” cried Annie; and Homer came to his feet, laughing in nervous exhilaration. “Will, old man,” he exclaimed.
Will stepped up on the porch, and they saw that he was smiling. He held out his hand. “I’m sorry I—butted in,” he apologized. “But I’m glad I was the first to know. You’ll never be sorry, Annie. Homer....” Homer had grippedhis hand; each held the other fast, as good friends will.
He stayed only a minute, then left them alone together; and he left no shadow of sorrow for him to cloud their hour of happiness.
Will Matthews had a practical and straightforward habit of thought; he possessed what men call a level head. He was not given to illusions; and through that long night he faced facts squarely and without self-deception. He had time to weigh many matters, for he did not sleep at all. Time to fight off the first and crushing grief, time to understand fully and beyond changing that he could never love any girl but Annie. He meant that Annie should never know how deeply he had cared, would always care. He could spare her this measure of unhappiness. There was a somber sort of pleasure in planning thus to serve her. Thus and in other fashions.... Do what he could to make her happy as might be.... His thoughts went racing on a half-seen road.
Will was not a heroic figure. Rather a small man, with light hair and a round and amiable countenance, there was nothing about him to arrest the eye. He already wore glasses; his shoulders were already faintly stooped from too close companionship with the ledgers where lay his daily toil. His mother made him wear a strip of oily, red flannel about his throat when he had taken cold. All in all, a man at whom you were like to smile.
But—hear what Will did, and try then if you’re moved to smile.
He made it his business to reach the office next morning some five minutes ahead of the hour. It was chance, a chance that favored what he meant to do, which made Homer Dean ten minutes late. Old Jasper was there before Will; and Will found on his desk a memorandum, commanding him to come at once to Jasper’s office.
He read this memorandum slowly, considering once more the details of his plan.
None of the other bookkeepers had yet arrived; he was alone. Jasper was in his office at the end of the corridor, a few yards away. After a moment Will went out into this corridor and turned toward Jasper’s door. Outside this door he hesitated, and one hand fumbled at his throat, then dropped to the pocket at his side. From within the office he heard old Jasper’s rumbling cough; and he knocked upon the panel.
Jasper called: “Come in.”
Will obeyed. He pushed the door open, stepped slowly inside, and thrust it shut behind him. He did not slam the door; nevertheless the impact was sufficient to make Old Jasper grimace with distaste, and clap his hands to his ears. Will stood still, waiting for the other to speak; and his employer barked:
“What’s the matter with you, anyway? Come here?”
Will moved slowly across the office till he faced Jasper across the other’s immaculate desk. He rested his finger tips on the polished surface, standing uneasily under the older man’s glare.
Abruptly Jasper cried: “Where’s your cravat, Matthews? You’re not half dressed, man. What’s got into you?”
Will’s hand flew to his collar.
“Why, I—I must have forgotten it,” he lamely apologized. “I’m very sorry, sir.”
Jasper snorted; and Will’s hands fidgeted nervously about the tall, old-fashioned ink bottle on the desk before him. The other seemed to hesitate; he cleared his throat importantly. At last he said:
“Well, for God’s sake look out for your appearance better than that hereafter. I sent for you to....”
Will heard him in something like despair. The slammed door, the lost cravat, these had not been sufficient. He set his teeth hard, and one of his nervous hands touched the high ink bottle. It tilted dangerously. He seemed to try to catch it; but the thing escaped him, was overturned. Across the spotless blotter spread a widening black flood; and as Jasper pushed back his chair with awkward haste, those few drops which the blotter had not absorbed flowed over the edge of the desk and descended upon the rug.
The storm broke upon Will’s devoted head; and he stood with burning cheeks under the old man’s profane and scourging tongue, till the first force of Jasper’s anger was spent, and he cried:
“Damn it, I ought to kick you out for good and all. But you never did a thing like this before. You—”
He fell silent, stumped away across the room as though ill at ease. “I meant to—” he began, thenstopped again. Stood a moment by the window, looking out; swung back to where Will stood.
“Look up the Fosdick account for me,” he said, with averted eyes. “Give me the figures on it. That’s all. Get out of here.”
Will got out. In the corridor he paused for a moment to replace his cravat, swiftly fitting the stiff ends under the wings of his collar. He was back on his high stool before the first of the other bookkeepers arrived.
When Homer Dean came in, ten minutes late, Old Jasper’s office boy was in the room, looking for him. “The boss wants to see you, Homer,” he said. Right away.”...
“So,” said Homer Dean, the millionaire, to Jenkins, the reporter. “So I got the job, went on the road, my luck began.”
Jenkins had listened without interruption; now he nodded slow acquiescence. “And he handed it to you. How did you find it out?”
“I’m ashamed of that part,” Homer admitted. “Will and I talked it over at the time, decided Charlie had been mistaken. Old Jasper came in to-day, to talk about old times. I’d never asked him before; to-day I did ask: Why he gave me the job? And he told me what Will did that day.”
“Think it was an accident?” Jenkins asked curiously.
Dean shook his head. “I know Will too well. Besides, the ink might have been an accident, but not the cravat, for he had his cravat on when Icame in that morning. No, I can see it beyond any doubting, now.”
The writer nodded. “A pretty decent thing,” he commented. “What became of Matthews?”
“He’s our head bookkeeper, at the office downtown. I was going straight to find him when you came.”
Jenkins reached for his hat. His words were commonplace enough, but there was eloquence in his tone.
“Don’t let me keep you, Mr. Dean,” he said.
WHEN he was sober the man always insisted that his name was Evans, but in his cups he was accustomed to declare, in a boastful fashion, that his name was not Evans at all. However, he never went further than this, and since none of us were particularly interested, we were satisfied to call him Evans, or, more often, Bum, for short. He was the second assistant janitor; and whereas, in some establishments, a janitor is a man of power and place, it is not so in a newspaper office. In such institutions, where great men are spoken of irreverently and by their first names, a janitor is a man of no importance. How much less, then, his second assistant. It was never a part of Evans’s work, for example, to sweep the floors. There is something lordly in the gesture of the broom. But the janitor’s first assistant attended to that; and Evans’s regular duties were more humble, not unconnected with such things as cuspidors. There was no man so poor to do him honor; yet he had always a certain loftiness of bearing. He was tall, rather above the average height, with a long, thin, bony face like a horse, and an aristocratic stoop about his neck and shoulders. His hands were slender; he walked in afashion that you might have called a shuffle, but which might also have been characterized as a walk of indolent assurance. His eyes were wash-blue, and his straggling mustache drooped at the corners.
Sober, he was a silent man, but when he had drunk he was apt to become mysteriously loquacious. And he drank whenever the state of his credit permitted. At such times he spoke of his antecedents in a lordly and condescending fashion which we found amusing. “You call me Evans,” he would say. “That does well enough, to be sure. Quite so, and all that. Evans! Hah!”
And then he would laugh, in a barking fashion that with his long, bony countenance always suggested to me a coughing horse. But when he was pressed for details, the man—though he might be weaving and blinking with liquor—put a seal upon his lips. He said there were certain families in one of the Midland Counties of England who would welcome him home if he chose to go; but he never named them, and he never chose to go, and we put him down for a liar by the book. All of us except Sheener.
Sheener was a Jewish newsboy; that is to say, a representative of the only thoroughbred people in the world. I have known Sheener for a good many years, and he is worth knowing; also, the true tale of his life might have inspired Scheherazade. A book must be made of Sheener some day. For the present, it is enough to say that he hadthe enterprise which adversity has taught his people; he had the humility which they have learned by enduring insults they were powerless to resent, and he had the courage and the heart which were his ancient heritage. And—the man Evans had captured and enslaved his imagination.
He believed in Evans from the beginning. This may have been through a native credulity which failed to manifest itself in his other dealings with the world. I think it more probable that Evans and his pretensions appealed to the love of romance native to Sheener. I think he enjoyed believing, as we enjoy lending ourselves to the illusion of the theatre. Whatever the explanation, a certain alliance developed between the two; a something like friendship. I was one of those who laughed at Sheener’s credulity, but he told me, in his energetic fashion, that I was making a mistake.
“You got that guy wrong,” he would say. “He ain’t always been a bum. A guy with half an eye can see that. The way he talks, and the way he walks, and all. There’s class to him, I’m telling you. Class, bo.”
“He walks like a splay-footed walrus, and he talks like a drunken old hound,” I told Sheener. “He’s got you buffaloed, that’s all.”
“Pull in your horns; you’re coming to a bridge,” Sheener warned me. “Don’t be a goat all your life. He’s a gent; that’s what this guy is.”
“Then I’m glad I’m a roughneck,” I retorted; and Sheener shook his head.
“That’s all right,” he exclaimed. “That’s allright. He ain’t had it easy, you know. Scrubbing spittoons is enough to take the polish off any guy. I’m telling you he’s there. Forty ways. You’ll see, bo. You’ll see.”
“I’m waiting,” I said.
“Keep right on,” Sheener advised me. “Keep right on. The old stuff is there. It’ll show. Take it from me.”
I laughed at him. “If I get you,” I said, “you’re looking for something along the line of ‘Noblesse Oblige.’ What?”
“Cut the comedy,” he retorted. “I’m telling you, the old class is there. You can’t keep a fast horse in a poor man’s stable.”
“Blood will tell, eh?”
“Take it from me,” said Sheener.
It will be perceived that Evans had in Sheener not only a disciple; he had an advocate and a defender. And Sheener in these rôles was not to be despised. I have said he was a newsboy; to put it more accurately, he was in his early twenties, with forty years of experience behind him, and with half the newsboys of the city obeying his commands and worshiping him like a minor god. He had full charge of our city circulation and was quite as important, and twice as valuable to the paper, as any news editor could hope to be. In making a friend of him, Evans had found an ally in the high places; and it became speedily apparent that Sheener proposed to be more than a mere friend in name. For instance, I learned one day that he was drawing Evans’s wages for him, and had appointed himself in some sort a steward for the other.
“That guy wouldn’t ever save a cent,” he told me when I questioned him. “I give him enough to get soused on, and I stick five dollars in the bank for him every week. I made him buy a new suit of clothes with it last week. Say, you wouldn’t know him if you run into him in his glad rags.”
“How does he like your running his affairs?” I asked.
“Like it?” Sheener echoed. “He don’t have to like it. If he tries to pull anything on me, I’ll poke the old coot in the eye.”
I doubt whether this was actually his method of dominating Evans. It is more likely that he used a diplomacy which occasionally appeared in his dealings with the world. Certainly the arrangement presently collapsed, for Sheener confessed to me that he had given his savings back to Evans. We were minus a second assistant janitor for a week as a consequence, and when Evans tottered back to the office and would have gone to work I told him he was through.
He took it meekly enough, but not Sheener. Sheener came to me with fire in his eye.
“Sa-a-ay,” he demanded, “what’s coming off here, anyhow? What do you think you’re trying to pull?”
I asked him what he was talking about, and he said: “Evans says you’ve given him the hook.”
“That’s right,” I admitted. “He’s through.”
“He is not,” Sheener told me flatly. “You can’t fire that guy.”
“Why not?”
“He’s got to live, ain’t he?”
I answered, somewhat glibly, that I did not seethe necessity, but the look that sprang at once into Sheener’s eye made me faintly ashamed of myself, and I went on to urge that Evans was failing to do his work and could deserve no consideration.
“That’s all right,” Sheener told me. “I didn’t hear any kicks that his work wasn’t done while he was on this bat.”
“Oh, I guess it got done all right. Some one had to do it. We can’t pay him for work that some one else does.”
“Say, don’t try to pull that stuff,” Sheener protested. “As long as his work is done, you ain’t got any kick. This guy has got to have a job, or he’ll go bust, quick. It’s all that keeps his feet on the ground. If he didn’t think he was earning his living, he’d go on the bum in a minute.”
I was somewhat impatient with Sheener’s insistence, but I was also interested in this developing situation. “Who’s going to do his work, anyhow?” I demanded.
For the first time in our acquaintance I saw Sheener look confused. “That’s all right, too,” he told me. “It don’t take any skin off of your back, long as it’s done.”
In the end I surrendered. Evans kept his job; and Sheener—I once caught him in the act, to his vast embarrassment—did the janitor’s work when Evans was unfit for duty. Also Sheener loaned him money, small sums that mounted into an interesting total; and furthermore I know that on one occasion Sheener fought for him.
The man Evans went his pompous way, accepting Sheener’s homage and protection as a matter of right, and in the course of half a dozen years Ileft the paper for other work, saw Sheener seldom, and Evans not at all.
About ten o’clock one night in early summer I was wandering somewhat aimlessly through the South End to see what I might see when I encountered Sheener. He was running, and his dark face was twisted with anxiety. When he saw me he stopped with an exclamation of relief, and I asked him what the matter was.
“You remember old Bum Evans?” he asked, and added: “He’s sick. I’m looking for a doctor. The old guy is just about all in.”
“You mean to say you’re still looking out for that old tramp?” I demanded.
“Sure, I am,” he said hotly; “that old boy is there. He’s got the stuff. Him and me are pals.” He was hurrying me along the street toward the office of the doctor he sought. I asked where Evans was. “In my room,” he told me. “I found him on the street. Last night. He was crazy. The D. T.’s. I ain’t been able to get away from him till now. He’s asleep. Wait. Here’s where the doc hangs out.”
Five minutes later the doctor and Sheener and I were retracing our steps toward Sheener’s lodging, and presently we crowded into the small room where Evans lay on Sheener’s bed. The man’s muddy garments were on the floor; he himself tossed and twisted feverishly under Sheener’s blankets. Sheener and the doctor bent over him,while I stood by. Evans waked, under the touch of their hands, and waked to sanity. He was cold sober and desperately sick.
When the doctor had done what could be done and gone on his way, Sheener sat down on the edge of the bed and rubbed the old man’s head with a tenderness of which I could not have believed the newsboy capable. Evans’s eyes were open; he watched the other, and at last he said huskily:
“I say, you know, I’m a bit knocked up.”
Sheener reassured him. “That’s all right, bo,” he said. “You hit the hay. Sleep’s the dose for you. I ain’t going away.”
Evans moved his head on the pillow, as though he were nodding. “A bit tight, wasn’t it, what?” he asked.
“Say,” Sheener agreed. “You said something, Bum. I thought you’d kick off, sure.”
The old man considered for a little, his lips twitching and shaking. “I say, you know,” he murmured at last. “Can’t have that. Potter’s Field, and all that sort of business. Won’t do. Sheener, when I do take the jump, you write home for me. Pass the good word. You’ll hear from them.”
Sheener said: “Sure I will. Who’ll I write to, Bum?”
Evans, I think, was unconscious of my presence. He gave Sheener a name; his name. Also, he told him the name of the family lawyer, in one of the Midland cities of England, and added certain instructions....
When he had drifted into uneasy sleep Sheenercame out into the hall to see me off. I asked him what he meant to do.
“What am I going to do?” he repeated. “I’m going to write to this guy’s lawyer. Let them send for him. This ain’t no place for him.”
“You’ll have your trouble for your pains,” I told him. “The old soak is plain liar; that’s all.”
Sheener laughed at me. “That’s all right, bo,” he told me. “I know. This guy’s the real cheese. You’ll see.”
I asked him to let me know if he heard anything, and he said he would. But within a day or two I forgot the matter, and would hardly have remembered it if Sheener had not telephoned me a month later.
“Say, you’re a wise guy, ain’t you?” he derided when I answered the phone. I admitted it. “I got a letter from that lawyer in England,” he told me. “This Evans is the stuff, just like I said. His wife run away with another man, and he went to the devil fifteen years ago. They’ve been looking for him ever since his son grew up.”
“Son?” I asked.
“Son. Sure! Raising wheat out in Canada somewhere. They give me his address. He’s made a pile. I’m going to write to him.”
“What does Bum say?”
“Him? I ain’t told him. I won’t till I’m sure the kid’s coming after him.” He said again that I was a wise guy; and I apologized for my wisdom and asked for a share in what was to come. He promised to keep me posted.
Ten days later he telephoned me while I was at supper to ask if I could come to his room. I said: “What’s up?”
“The old guy’s boy is coming after him,” Sheener said. “He’s got the shakes, waiting. I want you to come and help me take care of him.”
“When’s the boy coming?”
“Gets in at midnight to-night,” said Sheener.
I promised to make haste; and half an hour later I joined him in Sheener’s room. Sheener let me in. Evans himself sat in something like a stupor, on a chair by the bed. He was dressed in a cheap suit of ready-made clothes, to which he lent a certain dignity. His cheeks were shaved clean, his mustache was trimmed, his thin hair was plastered down on his bony skull. The man stared straight before him, trembling and quivering. He did not look toward me when I came in; and Sheener and I sat down by the table and talked together in undertones.
“The boy’s really coming?” I asked.
Sheener said proudly: “I’m telling you.”
“You heard from him?”
“Got a wire the day he got my letter.”
“You’ve told Bum?”
“I told him right away. I had to do it. The old boy was sober by then, and crazy for a shot of booze. That was Monday. He wanted to go out and get pied; but when I told him about his boy, he begun to cry. And he ain’t touched a drop since then.”
“You haven’t let him?”
“Sure I’d let him. But he wouldn’t. I always told you the class was there. He says to me: ‘I can’t let my boy see me in this state, you know. Have to straighten up a bit. I’ll need new clothes.’”
“I noticed his new suit.”
“Sure,” Sheener agreed. “I bought it for him.”
“Out of his savings?”
“He ain’t been saving much lately.”
“Sheener,” I asked, “how much does he owe you? For money loaned and spent for him.”
Sheener said hotly: “He don’t owe me a cent.”
“I know. But how much have you spent on him?”
“If I hadn’t have give it to him, I’d have blowed it somehow. He needed it.”
I guessed at a hundred dollars, at two hundred. Sheener would not tell me. “I’m telling you, he’s my pal,” he said. “I’m not looking for anything out of this.”
“If this millionaire son of his has any decency, he’ll make it up to you.”
“He don’t know a thing about me,” said Sheener, “except my name. I’ve just wrote as though I knowed the old guy, here in the house, see. Said he was sick, and all.”
“And the boy gets in to-night?”
“Midnight,” said Sheener, and Evans, from his chair, echoed: “Midnight!” Then asked with a certain stiff anxiety: “Do I look all right, Sheener? Look all right to see my boy?”
“Say,” Sheener told him. “You look like the Prince of Wales.” He went across to where theother sat and gripped him by the shoulder. “You look like the king o’ the world.”
Old Evans brushed at his coat anxiously; his fingers picked and twisted; and Sheener sat down on the bed beside him and began to soothe and comfort the man as though he were a child.
The son was to arrive by way of Montreal, and at eleven o’clock we left Sheener’s room for the station. There was a flower stand on the corner, and Sheener bought a red carnation and fixed it in the old man’s buttonhole. “That’s the way the boy’ll know him,” he told me. “They ain’t seen each other for—since the boy was a kid.”
Evans accepted the attention querulously; he was trembling and feeble, yet held his head high. We took the subway, reached the station, sat down for a space in the waiting room.
But Evans was impatient; he wanted to be out in the train shed, and we went out there and walked up and down before the gate. I noticed that he was studying Sheener with some embarrassment in his eyes. Sheener was, of course, an unprepossessing figure. Lean, swarthy, somewhat flashy of dress, he looked what he was. He was my friend, of course, and I was able to look beneath the exterior. But it seemed to me that sight of him distressed Evans.
In the end the old man said, somewhat furtively: “I say, you know, I want to meet my boy alone. You won’t mind standing back a bit when the train comes in.”
“Sure,” Sheener told him. “We won’t get in the way. You’ll see. He’ll pick you out in a minute, old man. Leave it to me.”
Evans nodded. “Quite so,” he said with some relief. “Quite so, to be sure.”
So we waited. Waited till the train slid in at the end of the long train shed. Sheener gripped the old man’s arm. “There he comes,” he said sharply. “Take a brace, now. Stand right there, where he’ll spot you when he comes out. Right there, bo.”
“You’ll step back a bit, eh, what?” Evans asked.
“Don’t worry about us,” Sheener told him. “Just you keep your eye skinned for the boy. Good luck, bo.”
We left him standing there, a tall, gaunt, shaky figure. Sheener and I drew back toward the stairs that lead to the elevated structure, and watched from that vantage point. The train stopped, and the passengers came into the station, at first in a trickle and then in a stream, with porters hurrying before them, baggage laden.
The son was one of the first. He emerged from the gate, a tall chap, not unlike his father. Stopped for a moment, casting his eyes about, and saw the flower in the old man’s lapel. Leaped toward him hungrily.
They gripped hands, and we saw the son drop his hand on the father’s shoulder. They stood there, hands still clasped, while the young man’s porter waited in the background. We could hear the son’s eager questions, hear the older man’s drawled replies. Saw them turn at last, andheard the young man say: “Taxi!” The porter caught up the bag. The taxi stand was at our left, and they came almost directly toward us.
As they approached, Sheener stepped forward, a cheap, somewhat disreputable, figure. His hand was extended toward the younger man. The son saw him, looked at him in some surprise, looked toward his father inquiringly.
Evans saw Sheener too, and a red flush crept up his gaunt cheeks. He did not pause, did not take Sheener’s extended hand; instead he looked the newsboy through and through.
Sheener fell back to my side. They stalked past us, out to the taxi stand.
I moved forward. I would have halted them, but Sheener caught my arm. I said hotly: “But see here. He can’t throw you like that.”
Sheener brushed his sleeve across his eyes. “Hell,” he said huskily. “A gent like him can’t let on that he knows a guy like me.”
I looked at Sheener, and I forgot old Evans and his son. I looked at Sheener, and I caught his elbow and we turned away.
He had been quite right, of course, all the time. Blood will always tell. You can’t keep a fast horse in a poor man’s stable. And a man is always a man, in any guise.
If you still doubt, do as I did. Consider Sheener.
OLD Eph’s favorite stand was on Tremont street, just outside the subway kiosk, where every foot in Boston soon or late must pass. He appeared here about dusk every evening, when the afternoon rush was over; and he squatted, tailor fashion, on crossed legs, and hugged his banjo to his ragged breast, and picked at it and crooned and shouted his old melodies so long as there were any to listen. He was a cheerful old fellow, with the pathetic cheerfulness of the negro. When coins were tossed to him, he had a nimble trick of whisking his banjo bottom side up, catching the contribution in this improvised receptacle, flipping it into the air and pocketing it without interrupting his music. Each time he did this, his fingers returned to the strings with a sweep and a strumming that suggested the triumphant notes of trumpets. There was an ape-like cast to his head; and his long arms and limber old fingers had the uncanny dexterity of a monkey. Pretty girls, watching him, sometimes said shiveringly to their escorts:
“He hardly seems human—squatting there....”
Old Eph always heard. His ears were unnaturally keen, attuned to the murmur of the crowds. And he used to answer them, chanting his replyin time with the tune he happened at the moment to be playing. Thus: “Don’ you cry, ma Honey ...” might become: