(1900)
(1900)
In a Hansom
THERE were two men in the cab as it turned into Fifth Avenue and began to skirt the Park on its way down-town. One of them was perhaps fifty; he had grizzled hair, cold, gray eyes, and a square jaw. The other appeared to be scant thirty; he had soft brown eyes, and a soft brown mustache drooped over his rather irresolute mouth. The younger man was the better-looking of the two, and the better dressed; and he seemed also to be more at home in New York, while the elder was probably a stranger in the city—very likely a Westerner, if the black slouch hat was a true witness.
They sat side by side in silence, having nothing to say, the one to the other. The shadows that were slowly stretching themselves across the broad walk on the Park side of the Avenue shivered as the spring breeze played with the tender foliage of the trees that spread their ample branches almost over the wall. The languid scent of blossoming bushes was borne fitfully beyond the border of the Park. To the eyes of the younger of the two men in the hansom the quivering play of light and shade brought no pleasure; and he had no delight in the fragrance of the springtime—although in former years he had been wont to thrill with unspoken joy at the promise of summer.
The elder of the two took no thought of such things; it was as though he had no time to waste. Of course, he was aware that winter followed the fall, and that summer had come in its turn; but this was all in the day’s work. He had the reputation of being a good man in his business; and although the spring had brought no smile to his firm lips, he was satisfied with his success in the latest task intrusted to him. He had in his pocket a folded paper, signed by the Governor of a State in the Mississippi Valley, and sealed with the seal of that commonwealth; and in the little bag on his knees he carried a pair of handcuffs.
As the hansom approached the Plaza at the entrance to the Park, the gray-eyed Westerner caught sight of the thickening crowd, and of the apparent confusion in which men and women and children were mixed, bicycles and electric cabs, carriages and cross-town cars, all weltering together; and he wondered for a moment whether he had done wisely in allowing so much apparent freedom to his prisoner. He looked right and left swiftly, as though sizing up the chances of escape, and then he glanced down at the bag on his knees.
“You needn’t be afraid of my trying to run,” said the younger man. “What good would it do me? You’ve caught me once, and I don’t doubt you could do it again.”
“That’s so,” returned the other, with just a tinge of self-satisfaction in his chilly smile. “I shouldn’t wonder if I could.”
“Besides, I don’t want to get away now,” insisted the first speaker. “I’ve got to face the music sooner or later, and I don’t care how quick the brass band strikes up. I want to take my punishment and have it over. That’s what I want. I’m going to plead guilty and save the State the trouble of trying me, and the expense, too. That ought to count in cutting down the sentence, oughtn’t it? And then I shall study the rules of—of that place, and I mean to learn them by heart. There won’t be anybody there in a greater hurry to get out than I, and so I’m going to be a model of good conduct.”
“It ain’t every fellow that talks like that who’s able to keep it up,” commented the officer of the law.
“I guess I can, anyhow,” replied his prisoner. “I’ve made up my mind to get this thing over as soon as possible, and to have a little life left for me when I’m let out.”
The elder man made no answer. He thought that his companion was sincere and that there would be no attempt to escape, whatever the opportunity. But his experience trained him to take no chances, and he did not relax his vigilance.
A horn sounded behind him; and a minute later a four-in-hand passed with tinkling chains and rumbling wheels. The top of the coach was filled with elaboratelyattired men and with girls in all the gayety of their spring gowns; and they seemed to be having a good time. They did not mean to hurt the younger of the two men in the hansom; they did not know, of course; but just then their mirth smote him to the heart.
Fifth Avenue is an alluring spectacle late in the afternoon of the first Saturday in June; and when the hansom-cab topped the crest of a hill, the two men could see far down the vista of the broad street. The roadway was a solid mass of vehicles in ceaseless motion; and the sidewalks were filled with humanity. To the man who was being taken to his trial the bright color and the brisk joyousness of the scene were actually painful. Of the countless men and women scattered up and down the Avenue in the glaring sunshine, how many knew him to call him by name and to take him by the hand? More than a hundred, no doubt, for he had been popular. And how many of them would give him a second thought after they had read of his arrest and of his trial and his sentence?
How many of them would miss him?—would be conscious even of his absence? And he recalled the disgust of a friend who had gone around the world, and had come back after a year or more with picturesque stories of his wanderings in far countries, only to have the first man he met in his club ask him casually where he’d been “for the last week or so.”
THIS YEAR THE GIRLS WERE PRETTIER THAN USUALTHIS YEAR THE GIRLS WERE PRETTIER THAN USUAL
And now he, too, was going to a strange land; and he foresaw that when he returned—if he ever got back alive!—he would not know what to answer if any one should inquire where he had been for the last week or so. The world was a bitterly selfish place where men had no time to think except of themselves. If a fellow could not keep up with the procession, he had to drop out of the ranks and be glad if the rest of them did not tramp over him. He knew how hard he had tried not to be left behind, and how little the effort had profited him.
With an aggressive movement that made his companion even more alert than usual, the brown-eyed young man shook himself erect, as though to cast behind him these evil thoughts. It was a beautiful day, and flowers blazed in the broad windows of the florists—roses and carnations and lilacs. There were lilacs also in the arbitrary hats the women were wearing, and the same tint was often echoed in their costumes. He had always been attentive to the changes of fashion—always subject to the charm of woman. As he was borne down the Avenue by the side of the man in whose custody he was, it struck him that this year the girls were prettier than usual—younger, more graceful, more fascinating, more desirable. He followed with his eyes first one and then another, noting the sweep of the skirt, the curve of the bodice, the grace of gesture, the straggling tendril of hair that had escaped upon the neck. For abrief moment the pleasure of his eye took his thoughts away from his future; and then swiftly his mind leaped forward to the next spring, when no woman’s face would chance within the range of his vision, and when the unseen blossoming of nature would bring only impotent desire. What zest could there be in life when life was bounded in a whitewashed cell?
At Thirty-fourth Street the hansom was halted to let a funeral cross the current of the Avenue. An open carriage came first, its seats covered with flowers, tortured into stiff set pieces; the white hearse followed, with a satin-covered coffin visible through its plate-glass sides; and then half a dozen carriages trailed after. The prisoner in the hansom noticed that the shades were drawn in the one that followed the hearse; it bore a grief too sacred for observation—a mother’s, no doubt. He was suddenly glad that his parents had both died when he was yet a boy. To be alone in the world, with no family to keep him warm with tolerant affection—this had often saddened him; now at last he rejoiced at it. When a man is on his way to prison to serve a term of years, the fewer those who cherish him, the luckier for them. That he loved a woman—that, indeed, he was going to jail because of his love for her—this might add poignancy to his pain; but he felt himself manly for once in trying to believe it was better now that she did not love him, that she did not even know of his love for her.
In time the hansom turned from Fifth Avenue into Broadway; it went on down-town past Union Square, with its broad trees, and past Grace Church, with its grateful greenery; but the younger of the two men was no longer taking note of what sped before his gaze. He was wondering what the woman he loved would think when she would hear of his going to prison—whether she would care very much—whether she would suspect that his crime was due to his passion for her. That, of course, she could not guess—that he had yielded to the temptation to lay hands on what was not his, solely because he wanted more money to place at her feet. For himself, he had been making enough; but for her he must have more. He could not have ventured to invite her to give up anything for his sake. He wanted to be able to offer her all she had been accustomed to have—and more too, were that possible. He was conceited enough ordinarily, he feared; and yet when he thought of her he felt so humble that he had never dared to dream of going to her empty-handed—of asking her to make any sacrifice in loving him. He had never told her of his love, and perhaps she did not even guess it; and yet women are swift to discover a thing like that. It might be that she had seen it; and that when others should speak of him as he knew he deserved to be spoken of, she might come to his defence and find some word of extenuation for his misdeed. This possibility, remote as it was, gave him pleasure;and he smiled at the suggestion as it came to him.
From this day-dream he was aroused as the driver of the hansom jerked the horse back on his haunches to avoid running down a little old woman who was trying to cross Broadway with a bundle of sticks balanced on her head. As the animal almost touched her she looked up, and her glance crossed that of the prisoner. He perceived instantly that she was an Italian, that she was not so old as she looked, and that she had been beautiful not so long ago. Then he wondered whether any man had done wrong for her sake—whether or not two of her lovers had fought in the soft Sicilian moonlight and one had done the other to death. Well, why not? There were worse things than death, after all.
As they went on farther and farther down-town, Broadway began to seem emptier. It was the first Saturday in June, and most of the stores were closed. When they drew near to the City Hall, the great street, although not so desolate as it is on a Sunday, lacked not a little of its week-day activity. It was as though a truce had been proclaimed in the battle of business; but the forts were guarded, and the fight would begin again on the Monday morning.
After the hansom passed the Post Office the buildings on the right and the left raised themselves higher and higher, until the cab was at last rolling along what might be the bottom of a canyon. And itseemed to him that the cliff-dwellers who inhabited the terraces of this man-made gorge, and who spent the best part of their lives a hundred feet above the level of the sidewalk, were no peaceable folk withdrawn from the strife of the plains; they were relentless savages ever on the war-path, and always eager to torture every chance captive. Wars may be less frequent than they were and less cruel, but the struggle for existence is bitterer than ever, and as meanly waged as any Apache raid.
The young man in the hansom felt his hatred hot within him for those with whom he had meant to match himself. He had been beaten in the first skirmish, and yet—but for the one thing—he could hold himself as good as the best of them. How many of the men under the shadow of Trinity were more honest than he? Some of them, no doubt—but how many? How many names now honorable would be disgraced if the truth were suddenly made known? How many of those who thought themselves honest, and who were honest now, had in the past yielded to a temptation once, as he had done, and having been luckier than he in escaping detection then, had never again risked it? That was what he had intended to do; he knew himself not to be dishonest, although the alluring opportunity had been too much for him. If only he could have held on for another day, all would have been well—no one would have had cause ever to suspect him; and neveragain would he have stepped aside from the narrow path of rectitude.
There was no use in repining. Luck had been against him, that was all. Some men had been guilty of what he had done, and they had been able to bluff it out. His bluff had been called, and he was now going to jail to pay his debt of honor. Perhaps the copy-book was right when it declared honesty to be the best policy. And yet he could not help feeling that fate had played him a mean trick. To put in his possession at the same moment a large sum of money and the information that the most powerful group of capitalists in America had determined to take hold of a certain railroad and re-establish it, and to have thus the possibility put before him at the very hour when he had discovered that perhaps he had a chance to win the woman he loved, if only he could approach her on an equality of fortune—this temptation just then was too great to withstand. He had yielded, and for a little while it had seemed as though he was about to succeed. Twenty-four hours more and he could have put back the money he had borrowed—for so he liked to look on his act. That money once restored, he would have waited patiently for the rest of his profit. Thereafter he could have afforded to be honest; he was resolved never to overstep the law again; he would have kept the letter of it vigorously—if only he had escaped detection that once.
But blind chance smote him down from behind. Suddenly, without an hour’s warning, the leader of the group of sustaining capitalists dropped dead; his heart had failed, worn out by the friction and the strain. The market broke; and all who had bought stocks on a margin were sold out instantly and inexorably. Then the supporting orders came in and prices were pushed up again; but it was too late. Two days before, or a day after, that capitalist might have died without having by his death unwittingly caused an arrest. And as the hansom rolled on toward the Battery the prisoner had again a resentment against the capitalist for choosing so unfortunate a day to die.
Now the end had come; of course, he had been unable to replace the money he had taken, and there was nothing for him to do but to fly. But instead of going to Canada, and hiding his trail, and then slipping across to Europe, he had been foolish enough to come here to New York to have another glimpse of the woman for the love of whom he had become a thief. Once more luck had been against him; as it happened, she had gone out of town for Decoration Day; and instead of taking ship to Europe, he had waited. Only that Saturday morning he had met her brother and had been told of her return to town. But when he was about to call on her that afternoon, the gray-eyed man had called on him; and here he was on his way to his trial, and he had not seen her, after all.
Then he went back to the last time he had had speech with her. It was during one of his frequent visits to New York, and he had dined at the club with her brother, who had told him that she was going to the play that night with her mother. So he had betaken himself to the theater also, and he had gazed at her across the house; and then he had put her and her mother into their carriage, and the old lady had asked him to dinner the next evening. He had supposed it was an eleventh-hour invitation and that he was to fill the seat of some man who had unexpectedly backed out; but none the less he had accepted with obvious pleasure. And it was from a few casual words of her father’s, after dinner, that he got the first inkling of the railroad deal; and then, before the time came for him to go, he had been fortunate enough to have her to himself for a quarter of an hour. She had been graciousness itself, and for the first time he had begun to have hope. He could not recall what he had said, but his memory was clear as to how she had looked. He could not remember whether he had allowed her even a glimpse of his deep passion. It might be that she had guessed it, although she had made no sign; he knew that women were as keen as they were inscrutable.
The hansom was at last under the ugly framework of the Elevated almost at the South Ferry gate. The tide was coming in strongly, and there was a salt savor in the breeze that blew up from the lower bay.The prisoner relished it as he filled his lungs with the fresh air; and then he asked himself how long it would be before that saline taste would touch his nostrils again.
As the cab drew up, the elder of the two men in it laid his hand on the arm of the younger.
“I can trust you without the wristlets, can’t I?” he asked.
The other flushed. “Put them on if you want,” he answered, “but you needn’t. I’m not going to make a fool of myself again. I’ve told you I’m going to plead guilty and do everything else I can to get the thing over as soon as possible.”
The gray-eyed man looked at him firmly.
“You’re talking sense,” he declared. “I’ll trust you.”
As they were about to step out, their horse was somewhat startled by an electric automobile that rolled past clumsily and drew up immediately in front of them.
The prisoner stood stock-still, with his foot vainly reaching out for the sidewalk, as he saw the brother of the woman he loved help her out of the vehicle. Then the brother asked a newsboy to point the way to the boat for Governors Island; and she went with him as the urchin eagerly guided them. She did not look around; she never saw the man who loved her; and in a minute she turned the corner and was out of sight.
The officer of the law tapped his prisoner on the arm again.
“Come on,” he said. “What’s the matter with you? Have you seen a ghost?”
(1899)
(1899)
The Frog that Played the Trombone
ON a corner of my desk there stands a china shell; its flat and oval basin is about as broad as the palm of my hand; it is a spotted brownish-yellow on the outside, and a purply-pinkish white on the inside; and on the crinkled edge of one end there sits a green frog with his china mouth wide open, thus revealing the ruddy hollow of his interior. At the opposite end of the shell there is a page of china music, purporting to be the first four bars of a song by Schubert. Time was when the frog held in his long greenish-yellow arms a still longer trombone made of bright brass wire, bent into shape, and tipped with a flaring disk of gilded porcelain. In the days when the china frog was young he pretended to be playing on the brass trombone. Despite its musical assertiveness, the function of the frog that played the trombone was humble enough: the shell was designed to serve as a receiver for the ashes of cigars and cigarettes. But it is a score of years at least since the china frog has held the brass trombone to its open lips. Only a few months after he gave his first mute concert on the corner of my table the carelessness of a chance visitor toppled him over onthe floor, and broke off both his arms and so bent the trombone that even the barren pretense of his solo became an impossibility. A week or two later the battered musical instrument disappeared; and ever since then the gaping mouth of the frog has seemed to suggest that he was trying to sing Schubert’s song. His open countenance, I am sorry to say, has often tempted my friends to make sport of him. They have filled the red emptiness of his body with the gray ashes of their cigars; they have even gone so far as to put the stump of a half-smoked cigarette between his lips, as though he were solacing himself thus for the loss of his voice.
Although the frog is no longer playing an inaudible tune on an immovable instrument, I keep it on a corner of my desk, where it has been for nearly twenty years. Sometimes of a winter’s night, when I take my seat at the desk before the crackling and cheerful hickory fire, the frog that played the trombone catches my eye, and I go back in memory to the evening when it performed its first solo in my presence, and I see again the beautiful liquid eyes of the friend who brought it to me. We were very young then, both of us, that night before Christmas, and our hearts kept time with the lilt of the tune that the frog played silently on his trombone. Now I am young no longer, I am even getting old, and my friend has been dead this many a year. Sometimes, as I look at the gaping frog, I know that if I couldhear the song he is trying to sing I should hate it for the memories it would recall.
He who gave it to me was not a school fellow, a companion of my boyhood, but he was the friend of my youth and a classmate in college. It was in our Junior year that he joined us, bringing a good report from the fresh-water college where he had been for two years. I can recall his shy attitude the first morning in chapel when we were wondering what sort of a fellow the tall, dark, handsome new-comer might be. The accidents of the alphabet put us side by side in certain class-rooms, and I soon learned to know him, and to like him more and more with increasing knowledge. He was courteous, gentle, kindly, ever ready to do a favor, ever grateful for help given him, and if he had a fault it was this, that he was jealous of his friends. Although his nature was healthy and manly, he had a feminine craving for affection, and an almost womanly unreason in the exactions he made on his friends. Yet he was ever ready to spend himself for others, and to do to all as he would be done by.
Although fond of out-door sports, his health was not robust. He lacked stamina. There was more than a hint of consumption in the brightness of his eye, in the spot of color on his cheek, in the hollowness of his chest, and in the cough which sometimes seized him in the middle of a recitation. Toward the end of our senior year he broke down once, andwas kept from college a week; but the spring came early, and with the returning warmth of the sunshine he made an effort and took his place with us again. He was a good scholar, but not one of the best in the class. He did his work faithfully in the main, having no relish for science, but enjoying the flavor of the classics. He studied German that year, and he used to come to me reciting Heine’s poems with enthusiasm, carried away by their sentiment, but shocked by the witty cynicism which served as its corrective. He wrote a little verse now and then, as young men do, immature, of course, and individual only in so far as it was morbid. I think that he would have liked to devote himself to literature as a career, but it had been decided that he was to study law.
After Class Day and Commencement the class scattered forever. In September, when I returned to New York and settled down to my profession, I found my friend at the Columbia Law School. His father had died during the summer, leaving nothing but a life-insurance policy, on the income of which the mother and son could live modestly until he could get into a law office and begin to make his way in the world. They had taken a floor in a little boarding-house in a side street, and they were very comfortable; their money had been invested for them by one of his father’s business associates, who had so arranged matters that their income was much larger than they had expected. In this modest homehe and his mother lived happily. I guessed that the father had been hard and unbending, and that my friend and his mother had been drawn closer together. Of a certainty I never saw a man more devoted than he was to her, or more tender, and she was worthy of the affection he lavished on her.
In those days the Law School course extended over two years only, and it did not call for very hard work on the part of the student, so he was free to pass frequent evenings in my library. I used to go and see him often, for I liked his mother, and I liked to see them sitting side by side, he holding her hand often as he debated vehemently with me the insoluble questions which interested us then. During the second winter I sometimes saw there a brown-eyed girl of perhaps twenty, pretty enough, but with a sharp, nervous manner I did not care for. This was the daughter of the lady who kept the boarding-house; and my friend was polite to her, as he was to all women; he was attentive even, as a young man is wont to be toward a quick-witted girl. But nothing in the manner led me to suppose that he was interested in her more than in any other woman. I did not like her myself, for she struck me as sharp-tongued.
It is true that I saw less of my friend that second winter, being hard at work myself. It was in the spring, two years after our graduation, that I received a letter from him announcing his engagementto the young lady I had seen him with, his landlady’s daughter. My first thought, I remember, was to wonder how his mother would feel at the prospect of another woman’s coming between them. His letter was a long dithyramb, and it declared that never had there been a man so happy, and that great as was his present joy, it was as nothing compared with the delight in store for him. He wrote me that each had loved the other from the first, and each had thought the other did not care, until at last he could bear it no longer; so he had asked her, and got his answer. “You cannot know,” he wrote, “what this is to me. It is my life—it is the making of my life; and if I should die to-night, I should not have lived in vain, for I have tasted joy, and death cannot rob me of that.”
Of course the engagement must needs be long, because he was as yet in no position to support a wife; but he had been admitted to the bar, and he could soon make his way, with the stimulus he had now.
I was called out of town suddenly about that time, and I saw him for a few minutes only before I left New York. He was overflowing with happiness, and he could talk about nothing but the woman he loved—how beautiful she was! how clever! how accomplished! how devoted to his mother! In the midst of his rhapsody he was seized by a fit of violent coughing, and I saw the same danger signal in his cheeks which had preceded the break-down in hissenior year. I begged him to take care of himself. With a light laugh he answered that he intended to do so—it was his duty to do so, now that he did not belong to himself.
In the fall, when I came back to the city, I found him in the office of a law firm, the head of which had been an intimate of his father’s. The girl he was to marry went one night a week to dine with her grandmother, and he came to me that evening and talked about her. As the cold weather stiffened, his cough became more frequent, and long before Christmas I was greatly alarmed by it. He consulted a distinguished doctor, who told him that he ought to spend the winter in a drier climate—in Colorado, for example.
It was on Christmas eve that year that he brought me the frog that played the trombone. Ever since the first Christmas of our friendship we had made each other little presents.
“This is hardly worth giving,” he said, as he placed the china shell on the corner of my desk, where it stands to this day. “But it is quaint and it caught my fancy. Besides, I’ve a notion that it is the tune of one of Heine’s lyrics set by Schubert that the fellow is trying to play. And then I’ve a certain satisfaction in thinking that I shall be represented here by a performer of marvelous force of lung, since you seem to think my lungs are weak.”
A severe cough seized him then, but, when he hadrecovered his breath, he laughed lightly, and said: "That’s the worst one I’ve had this week. However, when the spring warms me up again I shall be all right once more. It wasn’t on me that the spring poet wrote the epitaph:
'It was a coughThat carried him off;It was a coffinThey carried him off in.'"
'It was a coughThat carried him off;It was a coffinThey carried him off in.'"
“You ought to go away for a month at least,” I urged. “Take a run down South and fill your lungs with the balsam of the pines.”
“That’s what my mother wants me to do,” he admitted; “and I’ve half promised to do it. If I go to Florida for January, can you go with me?”
I knew how needful it was for him to escape from the bleakness of our New York winter, so I made a hasty mental review of my engagements. “Yes,” I said, “I will go with you.”
He held out his hand and clasped mine firmly. “We’ll have a good time,” he responded, “just we two. But you must promise not to object if I insist on talking about her all the time.”
"I WENT TO SEE THE WOMAN MY FRIEND LOVED""I WENT TO SEE THE WOMAN MY FRIEND LOVED"
As it turned out, I was able to keep all my engagements, for we never went away together. Before the new year came there was a change in my friend’s fortunes. The man who had pretended to invest for them the proceeds of his father’s life-insurance policy absconded, leaving nothing behind but debts. Forthe support of his mother and himself my friend had only his own small salary. A vacation, however necessary, became impossible, and the marriage, which had been fixed for the spring, was postponed indefinitely. He offered to release the girl, but she refused.
Through a classmate of ours I was able to get my friend a place in the law department of the Denver office of a great insurance company. In the elevated air of Colorado he might regain his strength, and in a new city like Denver he might find a way to mend his fortunes. His mother went with him, of course, and it was beautiful to see her devotion to him. I saw them off.
“She bore the parting very bravely,” he said to me. “She is braver than I am, and better in every way. I wish I were more worthy of her. You will go and see her, won’t you? There’s a good fellow and a good friend. Go and see her now and then, and write and tell me all about her—how she looks and what she says.”
I promised, of course, and about once a month I went to see the woman my friend loved. He wrote me every fortnight, but it was often from her that I got the latest news. His health was improving; his cough had gone; Denver agreed with him, and he liked it. He was working hard, and he saw the prospect of advancement close before him. Within two years he hoped to take a month off, and returnto New York and marry her, and bear his bride back to Colorado with him.
When I returned to town the next October I expected to find two or three letters from my friend awaiting me. I found only one, a brief note, telling me that he had been too busy to write the month before, and that he was now too tired with overwork to be able to do more than say how glad he was that I was back again in America, adding that a friend at hand might be farther away than one who was on the other side of the Atlantic. The letter seemed to me not a little constrained in manner. I did not understand it; and with the hope of getting some light by which to interpret its strangeness, I went to call on her. She refused to see me, pleading a headache.
It was a month before I had a reply to my answer to his note, and the reply was as short as the note, and quite as constrained. He told me that he was well enough himself, but that his mother’s health worried him, since Denver did not agree with her, and she was pining to be back in New York. He added a postscript, in which he told me that he had dined a few nights before with the local manager of the insurance company, and that he had met the manager’s sister, a wealthy widow from California, a most attractive woman, indeed. With needless emphasis he declared that he liked a woman of the world old enough to talk sensibly.
Another month passed before I heard from him again, and Christmas had gone and the new year had almost come. The contents of this letter, written on Christmas eve, when the frog that played the trombone had been sitting on the corner of my desk for just a year, was as startling as its manner was strange. He told me that his engagement was broken off irrevocably.
If my own affairs had permitted it, I should have taken the first train to Denver to discover what had happened. As it was I went again to call on the landlady’s daughter. But she refused to see me again. Word was brought me that she was engaged, and begged to be excused.
About a fortnight later I chanced to meet on a street corner the classmate who had got my friend the Denver appointment. I asked if there was any news.
“Isn’t there!” was the response. “I should think there was, and lots of it! You know our friend in Denver? Well, we have a telegram this morning: his health is shaky, and so he has resigned his position.”
“Resigned his position!” I echoed. “What does that mean?”
“That’s what we wanted to know,” replied my classmate, “so we telegraphed to our local manager, and he gave us an explanation right off the reel. The manager has a sister who is the widow of a California millionaire, and she has been in Denver for the winter,and she has met our friend; and for all she is a good ten years older than he is, she has been fascinated by him—you know what a handsome fellow he is—and she’s going to marry him next week, and take him to Egypt for his health.”
“He’s going to marry the California widow?” I asked, in astonishment. “Why, he’s enga—” Then I suddenly held my peace.
“He’s going to marry the California widow,” was the answer,—“or she’s going to marry him; it’s all the same, I suppose.”
Two days later I had a letter from Denver confirming this report. He wrote that he was to be married in ten days to a most estimable lady, and that they were to leave his mother in New York as they passed through. Fortunately he had been able to make arrangements whereby his mother would be able to live hereafter where she pleased, and in comfort. He invited me to come out to Colorado for the wedding, but hardly hoped to persuade me, he said, knowing how pressing my engagements were. But as their steamer sailed on Saturday week they would be at a New York hotel on the Friday night, and he counted on seeing me then.
I went to see him then, and I was shocked by his appearance. He was thin, and his chest was hollower than ever. There were dark lines below his liquid eyes, brighter then than I had ever seen them before. There were two blazing spots on his high cheek-bones.He coughed oftener than I had ever known him, and the spasms were longer and more violent. His hand was feverishly hot. His manner, too, was restless. To my surprise, he seemed to try to avoid being alone with me. He introduced me to his wife, a dignified, matronly woman with a full figure and a cheerful smile. She had a most motherly manner of looking after him and of anticipating his wants; twice she jumped up to close a door which had been left open behind him. He accepted her devotion as a matter of course, apparently. Once, when she was telling me of their projects—how they were going direct to Egypt to remain till late in the spring, and then to return to Paris for the summer, with a possible run over to London before the season was over—he interrupted her to say that it mattered little where he went or what he did—one place was as good as another.
When I rose to go he came with me out into the hotel corridor, despite his wife’s suggestion that there was sure to be a draught there.
He thrust into my hand a note-book. “There,” he said, “take that; it’s a journal I started to keep, and never did. Of course you can read it if you like. In the pocket you will find a check. I want you to get some things for me after I’ve gone; I’ve written down everything. You will do that for me, I know.”
I promised to carry out his instructions to the letter.
“Then that’s all right,” he answered.
At that moment his wife came to the door of their parlor. “I know it must be chilly out in the hall there,” she said.
“Oh, I’m coming,” he responded.
Then he grasped my fingers firmly in his hot hand. “Good-by, old man,” he whispered. “You remember how I used to think the frog that played the trombone was trying to execute a Heine-Schubert song? Well, perhaps it is—I don’t know; but what I do know is that it has played a wedding march, after all. And now good-by. God bless you! Go and see my mother as often as you can.”
He gave my hand a hearty shake, and went back into the parlor, and his wife shut the door after him.
I had intended to go down to the boat and see him off the next morning, but at breakfast I received a letter from his wife saying that he had passed a very restless night, and that she thought it would excite him still more if I saw him again, and begging me, therefore, not to come to the steamer if such had been my intention. And so it was that he sailed away and I never saw him again.
In the note-book I found a check for five hundred dollars, and a list of the things he wished me to get and to pay for. They were for his mother mostly, but one was a seal-ring for myself. And there was with the check a jeweler’s bill, “To articles sent as directed,” which I was also requested to pay.
The note-book itself I guarded with care. It was a pocket-journal, and my friend had tried to make it a record of his life for the preceding year. There were entries of letters received and sent, of money earned and spent, of acquaintances made, of business appointments, of dinner engagements, and of visits to the doctor. Evidently his health had been failing fast, and he had been struggling hard to keep the knowledge not only from his mother, but even from himself. While he had set down these outward facts of his life, he had also used the note-book as the record of his inward feelings. To an extent that he little understood, that journal, with its fragmentary entries and its stray thoughts, told the story of his spiritual experience.
Many of the entries were personal, but many were not; they were merely condensations of the thought of the moment as it passed through his mind. Here are two specimens:
“We judge others by the facts of life—by what we hear them say and see them do. We judge ourselves rather by our own feelings—by what we intend and desire and hope to do some day in the future. Thus a poor man may glow with inward satisfaction at the thought of the hospital he is going to build when he gets rich. And a wealthy man can at least pride himself on the fortitude with which he would, if need be, bear the deprivations of poverty.”
“To pardon is the best and the bitterest vengeance.”
Toward the end of the year the business entries became fewer and fewer, as though he had tired of keeping the record of his doings. But the later pages were far fuller than the earlier of his reflections—sometimes a true thought happily expressed, sometimes, more often than not perhaps, a mere verbal antithesis, such as have furnished forth many an aphorism long before my friend was born. And these later sentiments had a tinge of bitterness lacking in the earlier.
“There are few houses,” he wrote, in October, apparently, “where happiness is a permanent boarder; generally it is but a transient guest; and sometimes, indeed, it is only a tramp that knocks at the side door and is refused admittance.”
“Many a man forgets his evil deeds so swiftly that he is honestly surprised when any one else recalls them.”
Except the directions to me for the expenditure of the five hundred dollars, the last two entries in the book were written on Christmas morning. One of these was the passage which smote me most when I first read it, for it struck me as sadness itself when written by a young man not yet twenty-five:
“If we had nothing else to wish, we should at least wish to die.”
At the time I did not seize the full significance of the other passage, longer than this, and far sadder when its meaning was finally grasped.
“The love our parents gave us we do not pay back, nor a tithe of it, even. We may bestow it to our children, but we never render it again to our father and our mother. And what can equal the love of a woman for the son she has borne? No peak is as lofty, and no ocean is as wide; it is fathomless, boundless, immeasurable; it is poured without stint, unceasing and unfailing. And how do we men meet it? We do not even make a pretense of repaying it, most of us. Now and again there may be a son here and there who does what he can for his mother, little as it is, and much as he may despise himself for doing it: and why not? Are there not seven swords in the heart of the Mater Dolorosa? And what sort of a son is he who would add another?”
Although I had already begun to guess at the secret of my friend’s conduct, a mystery to all others, it was the first of these two final entries in his note-book which came flashing back into my memory one evening toward the end of March, ten weeks or so after he had bidden me good-by and had gone away to Egypt. I was seated in my library, smoking, when there came a ring at the door, and a telegram was handed to me. I laid my cigar down on the brownish-yellow shell, at the crinkled edge of which the green frog was sitting, reaching out his broken arms for the trombone whereon he had played in happier days. I saw that the despatch had come by the cable under the ocean, and I wondered who on the other side ofthe Atlantic had news for me that would not keep till a letter could reach me.
I tore open the envelope. The message was dated Alexandria, Egypt, and it was signed by my friend’s widow. He had died that morning, and I was asked to break the news to his mother.
(1893)
(1893)
On an Errand of Mercy
THE ambulance clanged along, now under the elevated railroad, and now wrenching itself outside to get ahead of a cable-car.
With his little bag in his hand, the young doctor sat wondering whether he would know just what to do when the time came. This was his first day of duty as ambulance surgeon, and now he was going to his first call. It was three in the afternoon of an August day, when the hot spell had lasted a week already, and yet the young physician was chill with apprehension as he took stock of himself, and as he had a realizing sense of his own inexperience.
The bullet-headed Irishman who was driving the ambulance as skilfully as became the former owner of a night-hawk cab glanced back at the doctor and sized up the situation.
“There’s no knowin’ what it is we’ll find when we get there,” he began. “There’s times when it’s no aisy job the doctor has. Say you give the man ether, now, or whatever it is you make him sniff, and maybe he’s dead when he comes out of it. Where are you then?”
The young man decided instantly that if anythingof that sort should happen to him that afternoon, he would go back to Georgia at once and try for a place in the country store.
“But nothing ever fazed Dr. Chandler,” the driver went on. “It’s Dr. Chandler’s place you’re takin’ now, ye know that?”
It seemed to the surgeon that the Irishman was making ready to patronize him, or at least to insinuate the new-comer’s inferiority to his predecessor, whereupon his sense of humor came to his rescue, and a smile relieved the tension of his nerves as he declared that Dr. Chandler was an honor to his profession.
“He is that!” the driver returned, emphatically, as with a dextrous jerk he swung the ambulance just in front of a cable-car, to the sputtering disgust of the gripman. “An’ it’s many a dangerous case we’ve had to handle together, him and me.”
“I don’t doubt that you were of great assistance,” the young Southerner suggested.
“Many’s the time he’s tould me he never knew what he’d ha’ done without me,” the Irishman responded. "There was that night, now—the night when the big sailor come off the Roosian ship up in the North River there, an’ he got full, an’ he fell down the steps of a barber shop, an’ he bruck his leg into three paces, so he did; an’ that made him mad, the pain of it, an’ he was just wild when the ambulance come. Oh, it was a lovely jag he had on him, thatRoosian—a lovely jag! An’ it was a daisy scrap we had wid him!”
“What did he do?” asked the surgeon.
“What didn’t he do?” the driver replied, laughing at the memory of the scene. “He tried to do the doctor—Dr. Chandler it was, as I tould you. He’d a big knife—it’s mortial long knives, too, them Roosians carry—an’ he was so full he thought it was Dr. Chandler that was hurtin’ him, and he med offer to put his knife in him, when, begorra, I kicked it out of his hand.”
“I have often heard Dr. Chandler speak of you,” said the doctor, with an involuntary smile, as he recalled several of the good stories that his predecessor had told him of the driver’s peculiarities.
“An’ why w’u’dn’t he?” the Irishman replied. “It’s more nor wanst I had to help him out of trouble. An’ never a worrd we had in all the months he drove out wid me. But it ’sll be some aisy little job we’ll have now, I’m thinkin‘s—a sun-stroke, maybe, or a kid that’s got knocked down by a scorcher, or a thrifle of that kind; you’ll be able to attend to that yourself aisy enough, no doubt.”
To this the young Southerner made no response, for his mind was busy in going over the antidotes for various poisons. Then he aroused himself and shook his shoulders, and laughed at his own preoccupation.
The Irishman did not approve of this. “An’ ofcoorse," he continued, “it may be a scrap 'twixt a ginny and a Polander; or maybe, now, a coon has gone for a chink wid a razzer, and sliced him most in two, I dunno'.”
Then he clanged the bell unexpectedly, and swerved off the track and down a side street toward the river.
The doctor soon found a curious crowd flattening their noses against the windows of a drug-store on a corner of the Boulevard. He sprang off as the driver slowed down to turn and back up.
A policeman stood in the doorway of the pharmacist’s, swinging his club by its string as he kept the children outside. He drew back to let the young surgeon pass, saying, as he did so: “It’s no use now, I think, Doctor. You are too late.”
The body of the man lay flat on the tile pavement of the shop. He was decently dressed, but his shoes were worn and patched. He was a very large man, too, stout even for his length. His cravat had been untied and his collar had been opened. His face was covered with a torn handkerchief.
As the doctor dropped on his knees by the side of the body, the druggist’s clerk came from behind the prescription counter—a thin, undersized, freckled youngster, with short red hair and a trembling voice.
“He’s dead, ain’t he?” asked this apparition.
The doctor finished his examination of the man on the floor, and then he answered, as he rose to his feet: “Yes, he’s dead. How did it happen?”
The delivery of the young druggist was hesitating and broken. “Well, it was this way, you see. The boss was out, and I was in charge here, and there wasn’t anything doing except at the fountain. Then this man came in; he was in a hurry, and he told me he was feeling faint—kind of suffocated, so he said—and couldn’t I give him something. Well, I’m a graduate in pharmacy, you know, and so I fixed him up a little aromatic spirits of ammonia in a glass of soda-water. You know that won’t hurt anybody. But just as he took the glass out of my hand his knees gave way and he squashed down on the floor there. The glass broke, and he hadn’t paid for the spirits of ammonia, either; and when I got round to him he was dead—at least I thought so, but I rang you up to make sure.”
“Yes,” the doctor returned, “apparently he died at once—heart failure. Probably he had fatty degeneration, and this heat has been too much for him.”
“I don’t think any man has a right to come in here and die like that without warning, heart failure or no heart failure, do you?” asked the red-headed assistant. “I don’t know what the boss will say. That’s the kind of thing that spoils trade, and it ain’t any too good here, anyway, with a drug-store 'most every block.”
“Do you know who he is?” the doctor inquired.
“I went through his pockets, but he hadn’t anywatch nor any letters," the druggist answered; “but he’s got about a dollar in change in his pants.”
The doctor looked around the shop. The policeman was still in the doorway, and a group of boys and girls blocked the entrance.
“Does anybody here know this man?” asked the surgeon.
A small boy twisted himself under the policeman’s arm and slipped into the store. “I know him,” he cried, eagerly. “I see him come in. I was here all the time, and I see it all. He’s Tim McEcchran.”
“Where does he live?” the doctor asked, only to correct himself swiftly—“where did he live?”
“I thought he was dead when I saw him go down like he was sandbagged,” said the boy. “He lives just around the corner in Amsterdam Avenue—at least his wife lives there.”
The doctor took the address, and with the aid of the policeman he put the body on the stretcher and lifted it into the ambulance. The driver protested against this as unprecedented.
“Sure it’s none of our business to take a stiff home!” he declared. “That’s no work at all, at all, for an ambulance. Dr. Chandler never done the like in all the months him an’ me was together. Begob, I never contracted to drive hearses.”
The young Southerner explained that this procedure might not be regular, but it revolted him to leave the body of a fellow-mortal lying where it hadfallen on the floor of a shop. The least he could do, so it seemed to him, was to take it to the dead man’s widow, especially since this was scarcely a block out of their way as they returned to the hospital.
The driver kept on grumbling as they drove off. “Sure he give ye no chance at all, at all, Doctor, to go and croak afore iver ye got at him, and you only beginnin’ yer work! Dr. Chandler, now, he’d get ‘em into the wagon ennyway, an’ take chances of there bein’ breath in ‘em. Three times, divil a less, they died on us on the stretcher there, an’ me whippin' like the divil to get ’sem into the hospital ennyhow, where it was their own consarn whether they lived or died. That’s the place for ‘em to die in, an’ not in the wagon; but the wagon’s better than dyin‘s before we can get to ‘em, an’ the divil thank the begrudgers! It’s unlucky, so it is; an’ by the same token, to-day’s Friday, so it is!”
The small boy who had identified the dead man ran alongside of them, accompanied by his admiring mates; and when the ambulance backed up again before a pretentious tenement-house with a brownstone front and beveled plate-glass doors, the small boy rang Mrs. McEcchran’s bell.
“It’s the third floor she lives on,” he declared.
The janitor came up from the basement and he and the driver carried the stretcher up to Mrs. McEcchran’s landing.
The doctor went up before them, and found aninsignificant little old woman waiting for him on the landing.
“Is this Mrs. McEcchran?” he asked.
“Yes,” she answered; then, as she saw the burden the men were carrying, she cried: “My God! What’s that? What are they bringing it here for?”
The young Southerner managed to withdraw her into the front room of the flat, and he noticed that it was very clean and very tidy.
“I am a doctor,” he began, soothingly, “and I am sorry to say that there has been an accident—”
“An accident?” she repeated. “Oh, my God! And is it Tim?”
“You must summon all your courage, Mrs. McEcchran,” the doctor returned. “This is a serious matter—a very serious matter.”
“Is he hurt very bad?” she cried. “Is it dangerous?”
“I may as well tell you the truth, Mrs. McEcchran,” said the physician. “I cannot say that your husband will ever be able to be out again.”
By that time the stretcher had been brought into the room, with the body on it entirely covered by a blanket.
“You don’t mean to tell me that he is going to die?” she shrieked, wringing her hands. “Don’t say that, Doctor! don’t say that!”
The bearers set the stretcher down, and the woman threw herself on her knees beside it.
“Tim!” she cried. “Speak to me, Tim!”
Getting no response, she got to her feet and turned to the surgeon. “You don’t mean he’s dead?” And the last word died away in a wail.
“I’m afraid there is no hope for him,” the doctor replied.
“He’s dead! Tim’s dead! Oh, my God!” she said, and then she dropped into a chair and threw her apron over her head and rocked to and fro, sobbing and mourning.
The young Southerner was not yet hardened to such sights, and his heart was sore with sympathy. Yet it seemed to him that the woman’s emotion was so violent that it would not last long.
While he was getting ready to have the body removed from the stretcher to a bed in one of the other rooms, Mrs. McEcchran unexpectedly pulled the apron from her head.
“Can I look at him?” she asked, as she slipped to the side of the body and stealthily lifted a corner of the covering to peek in. Suddenly she pulled it back abruptly. “Why, this ain’t Tim!” she cried.
“That is not your husband?” asked the doctor, in astonishment. “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure!” she answered, laughing hysterically. “Of course I’m sure! As if I didn’t know Tim, the father of my children! Why, this ain’t even like him!”
The doctor did not know what to say. “Allow meto congratulate you, madam," he began. “No doubt Mr. McEcchran is still alive and well; no doubt he will return to you. But if this is not your husband, whose husband is he?”
The room had filled with the neighbors, and in the crowd the small boy who had brought them there made his escape.
“Can any one tell me who this is?” the surgeon asked.
“I knew that weren’t Mr. McEcchran as soon as I see him,” said another boy. “That’s Mr. Carroll.”
“And where does—did Mr. Carroll live?” the doctor pursued, repenting already of his zeal as he foresaw a repetition of the same painful scene in some other tenement-house.
“It’s only two blocks off—on the Boulevard,” explained the second boy. “It’s over a saloon on the corner. I’ll show you if I can ride on the wagon.”
“Very well,” agreed the doctor; and the body was carried down and placed again in the ambulance.
As the ambulance started he overheard one little girl say to another: “He was killed in a blast! My! ain’t it awful? It blew his legs off!”
To which the other little girl answered, “But I saw both his boots as they carried him out.”
And the first little girl then explained: “Oh, I guess they put his legs back in place so as not to hurt his wife’s feelings. Turrible, ain’t it?”
"MY! AIN'T IT AWFUL? IT BLEW HIS LEGS OFF!""MY! AIN'T IT AWFUL? IT BLEW HIS LEGS OFF!"
When the ambulance started, the driver begangrumbling again: “It’s not Dr. Chandler that ‘ud have a thing like this happen to him. Him an’ me never went traipsing round wid a corp that didn’t belong to nobody. We knew enough to take it where the wake was waitin'.”
The boy on the box with the driver guided the ambulance to a two-story wooden shanty with a rickety stairway outside leading up to the second floor.
He sprang down as the ambulance backed up, and he pointed out to the doctor the sign at the foot of these external steps—“Martin Carroll, Photographer.”
“That’s where he belongs,” the boy explained. “He sleeps in the gallery up there. The saloon belongs to a Dutchman that married his sister. This is the place all right, if it really is Mr. Carroll.”
“What do you mean by that?” shouted the doctor. “Are you not sure about it?”
“I ain’t certain sure,” the fellow replied. “I ain’t as sure as I was first off. But I think it’s Mr. Carroll. Leastways, if it ain’t, it looks like him!”
It was with much dissatisfaction at this doubtfulness of his guide that the doctor helped the driver slide out the stretcher.
Then the side door of the saloon under the landing of the outside stairs opened and a stocky little German came out.
“What’s this? What’s this?” he asked.
The young surgeon began his explanation again. “This is where Mr. Carroll lived, isn’t it? Well, I am sorry to say there has been an accident, and—”
“Is that Martin there?” interrupted the German.
“Yes,” the Southerner replied, “and I’m afraid it is a serious case—a pretty serious case—”
“Is he dead?” broke in the saloon-keeper again.
“He is dead,” the doctor answered.
“Then why didn’t you say so?” asked the short man harshly. “Why waste all that time talking if he’s dead?”
The Southerner was inclined to resent this rudeness, but he checked himself.
“I understand that you are Mr. Carroll’s brother-in-law,” he began again, “so I suppose I can leave the body in your charge—”
The German went over to the stretcher and turned down the blanket.
“No, you don’t leave him here,” he declared. “I’m not going to take him. This ain’t my sister’s husband!”
“This is not Mr. Carroll?” and this time the doctor looked around for the boy who had misinformed him. “I was told it was.”
“The man who told you was a liar, that’s all. This ain’t Martin Carroll, and the sooner you take him away the better. That’s what I say,” declared the saloon-keeper, going back to his work.
The doctor looked around in disgust. What hehad to do now was to take the body to the morgue, and that revolted him. It seemed to him an insult to the dead and an outrage toward the dead man’s family. Yet he had no other course of action open to him, and he was beginning to be impatient to have done with the thing. The week of hot weather had worn on his nerves also, and he wanted to be back again in the cool hospital out of the oven of the streets.
As he and the driver were about to lift up the stretcher again, a man in overalls stepped up to the body and looked at it attentively.
“It’s Dick O’Donough!” he said at once. “Poor old Dick! It’s a sad day for her—and her that excitable!”
“Do you know him?” asked the doctor.
“Don’t I?” returned the man in overalls, a thin, elderly man, with wisps of hair beneath his chin and a shrewd, weazened face. “It’s Dick O’Donough!”
“But are you sure of it?” the young surgeon insisted. “We’ve had two mistakes already.”
“Sure of it?” repeated the other. “Of course I’m sure of it! Didn’t I work alongside of him for five years? And isn’t that the scar on him he got when the wheel broke?” And he lifted the dead man’s hair and showed a cicatrix on the temple.
“Very well,” said the doctor. “If you are sure, where did he live?”
“It’s only a little way.”
“I’m glad of that. Can you show us?”
“I can that,” replied the man in overalls.
“Then jump in front,” said the doctor.
As they started again, the driver grumbled once more. “Begorra, April Day’s a fool to ye,” he began. “Them parvarse gossoons, now, if I got howld of 'em, they’d know what it was hurt 'em, I’m thinkin'.”
The man in overalls directed them to a shabby double tenement in a side street swarming with children. There was a Chinese laundry on one side of the doorway, and on the other side a bakery. The door stood open, and the hallway was dark and dirty.
“It’s a sad day it’ll be for Mrs. O’Donough,” sighed the man in overalls. “I don’t know what it is she’s got, but she’s very queer, now, very queer.”
He went into the bakery and got a man to help the driver carry up the stretcher. Women came out of the shops on both sides of the street, and leaned out of their windows with babies in their arms, and stepped out on the fire-escapes. There were banana peelings and crumpled newspapers and rubbish of one sort or another scattered in the street, and the savor of it all was unpleasant even to a man who was no stranger to the casual ward of a hospital.
The man in overalls went up-stairs with the doctor, warning him where a step was broken or where a bit of the hand-rail was missing. They groped their way along the passage on the first floor and knocked.
The door opened suddenly, and they saw an ill-furnished room, glaring with the sun reflected from its white walls. Two women stood just within the door. One was tall and spare, with gray streaks in her coal-black hair, and with piercing black eyes; the other was a comfortable body with a cheerful smile.
“That’s Mrs. O’Donough,” said the doctor’s guide—“the tall one. See the eyes of her now! The other’s a neighbor woman, who’s with her a good deal, she’s that excitable.”
The doctor stepped into the room, and began once more to break the news. “This is Mrs. O’Donough, is it not?” he said. “I’m a doctor, and I am sorry to have to say there has been an accident, and Mr. O’Donough is—is under treatment.”
Here the driver and the man from the bakery brought in the stretcher.
When the tall woman saw this she gripped the arm of the other and hissed out, “Is itit?” Then she turned her back on the body and sank her head on her friend’s shoulder.
The other woman made signs to the doctor to say little or nothing.
The driver and the baker took a thin counterpane off the bed, which stood against the wall. Then they lifted the body from the stretcher to the bed, and covered it with the counterpane.
The doctor did not know what to say in the faceof the signals he was receiving from the widow’s friend.
“In case I can be of any assistance at any time,” he suggested—and then Mrs. O’Donough lifted her head and looked at him with her burning eyes—“if I can be of service, do not hesitate to call on me. Here is my card.”
As he felt his way down-stairs again he heard a hand-organ break out suddenly into a strident waltz.
When he came out into the street a few little children were dancing in couples, although most of them stood around the ambulance, gazing with morbid curiosity at the driver as he replaced the stretcher. At the door of the baker’s shop stood a knot of women talking it over; but in the Chinese laundry the irons went back and forth steadily, with no interest in what might happen in the street outside.
As the doctor took his seat in the vehicle a shriek came from the room he had just left—a shuddering, heartrending wail—then another—and then there was silence.
The ambulance started forward, the bell clanged to clear the way, the horse broke into a trot, and in a minute or two they turned into the broad avenue.
Then the driver looked at the doctor. “The widdy’s takin’ it harrd, I’m thinkin’, but she’ll get over it before the wake,” he said. “An’ it’s good lungs she has, ennyhow.”