THE NICE PEOPLE.
“We looked off from the brow of the mountain over fifteen miles of billowing green.”
“They certainly are nice people,” I assented to my wife’s observation, using the colloquial phrase with a consciousness that it was any thing but “nice” English, “and I’ll bet that their three children are better brought up than most of—“
“Two children,” corrected my wife.
“Three, he told me.”
“My dear, she said there were two.”
“He said three.”
“You’ve simply forgotten. I’m sure she told me they had only two—a boy and a girl.”
“Well, I didn’t enter into particulars.”
“No, dear, and you couldn’t have understood him. Two children.”
“All right,” I said; but I did not think it was all right. As a near-sighted man learns by enforced observation to recognize persons at a distance when the face is not visible to the normal eye, so the man with a bad memory learns, almost unconsciously, to listen carefully and report accurately. My memory is bad; but I had not had time to forget that Mr. Brewster Brede had told me that afternoon that he had three children, at present left in the care of his mother-in-law, while he and Mrs. Brede took their Summer vacation.
“Two children,” repeated my wife; “and they are staying with his aunt Jenny.”
“He told me with his mother-in-law,” I put in. My wife looked at me with a serious expression. Men may not remember much of what they are told about children; but any man knows the difference between an aunt and a mother-in-law.
“But don’t you think they’re nice people?” asked my wife.
“Oh, certainly,” I replied. “Only they seem to be a little mixed up about their children.”
“That isn’t a nice thing to say,” returned my wife.
I could not deny it.
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And yet, the next morning, when the Bredes came down and seated themselves opposite us at table, beaming and smiling in their natural, pleasant, well-bred fashion, I knew, to a social certainty, that they were “nice” people. He was a fine-looking fellow in his neat tennis-flannels, slim, graceful, twenty-eight or thirty years old, with a Frenchy pointed beard. She was “nice” in all her pretty clothes, and she herself was pretty with that type of prettiness which outwears most other types—the prettiness that lies in a rounded figure, a dusky skin, plump, rosy cheeks, white teeth and black eyes. She might have been twenty-five; you guessed that she was prettier than she was at twenty, and that she would be prettier still at forty.
And nice people were all we wanted to make us happy in Mr. Jacobus’s Summer boarding-house on top of Orange Mountain. For a week we had come down to breakfast each morning, wondering why we wasted the precious days of idleness with the company gathered around the Jacobus board. What joy of human companionship was to be had out of Mrs. Tabb and Miss Hoogencamp, the two middle-aged gossips from Scranton, Pa.—out of Mr. and Mrs. Biggle, an indurated head-bookkeeper and his prim and censorious wife—out of old Major Halkit, a retired business man, who, having once sold a few shares on commission, wrote for circulars of every stock company that was started, and tried to induce every one to invest who would listen to him? We looked around at those dull faces, the truthful indices of mean and barren minds, and decided that we would leave that morning. Then we ate Mrs. Jacobus’s biscuit, light as Aurora’s cloudlets, drank her honest coffee, inhaled the perfume of the late azaleas with which she decked her table, and decided to postpone our departure one more day. And then we wandered out to take our morning glance at what we called “our view;” and it seemed to us as if Tabb and Hoogencamp and Halkit and the Biggleses could not drive us away in a year.
I was not surprised when, after breakfast, my wife invited the Bredes to walk with us to “our view.” The Hoogencamp-Biggle-Tabb-Halkit contingent never stirred off Jacobus’s verandah; but we both felt that the Bredes would not profane that sacred scene. We strolled slowly across the fields, passed through the little belt of woods, and as I heard Mrs. Brede’s little cry of startled rapture, I motioned to Brede to look up.
“By Jove!” he cried, “heavenly!”
We looked off from the brow of the mountain over fifteen miles of billowing green, to where, far across a far stretch of pale blue lay a dim purple line that we knew was Staten Island. Towns and villages lay before us and under us; there were ridges and hills, uplands and lowlands, woods and plains, all massed and mingled in that great silent sea of sunlit green. For silent it was to us, standing in the silence of a high place—silent with a Sunday stillness that made us listen, without taking thought, for the sound of bells coming up from the spires that rose above the tree-tops—the tree-tops that lay as far beneath us as the light clouds were above us that dropped great shadows upon our heads and faint specks of shade upon the broad sweep of land at the mountain’s foot.
“And so that is your view?” asked Mrs. Brede, after a moment; “you are very generous to make it ours, too.”
Then we lay down on the grass, and Brede began to talk, in a gentle voice, as if he felt the influence of the place. He had paddled a canoe, in his earlier days, he said, and he knew every river and creek in that vast stretch of landscape. He found his landmarks, and pointed out to us where the Passaic and the Hackensack flowed, invisible to us, hidden behind great ridges that in our sight were but combings of the green waves upon which we looked down. And yet, on the further side of those broad ridges and rises were scores of villages—a little world of country life, lying unseen under our eyes.
“A good deal like looking at humanity,” he said: “there is such a thing as getting so far above our fellow-men that we see only one side of them.”
Ah, how much better was this sort of talk than the chatter and gossip of the Tabb and the Hoogencamp—than the Major’s dissertations upon his everlasting circulars! My wife and I exchanged glances.
“Now, when I went up the Matterhorn,” Mr. Brede began.
“Why, dear,” interrupted his wife; “I didn’t know you ever went up the Matterhorn.”
“It—it was five years ago,” said Mr. Brede, hurriedly. “I—I didn’t tell you—when I was on the other side, you know—it was rather dangerous—well, as I was saying—it looked—oh, it didn’t look at all like this.”
A cloud floated overhead, throwing its great shadow over the field where we lay. The shadow passed over the mountain’s brow and reappeared far below, a rapidly decreasing blot, flying eastward over the golden green. My wife and I exchanged glances once more.
Somehow, the shadow lingered over us all. As we went home, the Bredes went side by side along the narrow path, and my wife and I walked together.
“Should you think,” she asked me, “that a man would climb the Matterhorn the very first year he was married?”
“I don’t know, my dear,” I answered, evasively; “this isn’t the first year I have been married, not by a good many, and I wouldn’t climb it—for a farm.”
“You know what I mean,” she said.
I did.
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When we reached the boarding-house, Mr. Jacobus took me aside.
“You know,” he began his discourse, “my wife, she used to live in N’ York!”
I didn’t know; but I said “Yes.”
“She says the numbers on the streets runs criss-cross like. Thirty-four’s on one side o’ the street an’ thirty-five on t’ other. How’s that?”
“That is the invariable rule, I believe.”
“Then—I say—these here new folk that you ’n’ your wife seem so mighty taken up with—d’ ye know any thing about ’em?”
“I know nothing about the character of your boarders, Mr. Jacobus,” I replied, conscious of some irritability. “If I choose to associate with any of them—“
“Jess so—jess so!” broke in Jacobus. “I hain’t nothin’ to say ag’inst yer sosherbil’ty. But do ye know them?”
“Why, certainly not,” I replied.
“Well—that was all I wuz askin’ ye. Ye see, when he come here to take the rooms—you wasn’t here then—he told my wife that he lived at number thirty-four in his street. An’ yistiddy she told her that they lived at number thirty-five. He said he lived in an apartment-house. Now there can’t be no apartment-house on two sides of the same street, kin they?”
“What street was it?” I inquired, wearily.
“Hunderd ’n’ twenty-first street.”
“May be,” I replied, still more wearily. “That’s Harlem. Nobody knows what people will do in Harlem.”
I went up to my wife’s room.
“Don’t you think it’s queer?” she asked me.
“I think I’ll have a talk with that young man to-night,” I said, “and see if he can give some account of himself.”
“But, my dear,” my wife said, gravely, “she doesn’t know whether they’ve had the measles or not.”
“Why, Great Scott!” I exclaimed, “they must have had them when they were children.”
“Please don’t be stupid,” said my wife. “I meant their children.”
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After dinner that night—or rather, after supper, for we had dinner in the middle of the day at Jacobus’s—I walked down the long verandah to ask Brede, who was placidly smoking at the other end, to accompany me on a twilight stroll. Half way down I met Major Halkit.
“That friend of yours,” he said, indicating the unconscious figure at the further end of the house, “seems to be a queer sort of a Dick. He told me that he was out of business, and just looking round for a chance to invest his capital. And I’ve been telling him what an everlasting big show he had to take stock in the Capitoline Trust Company—starts next month—four million capital—I told you all about it. ‘Oh, well,’ he says, ‘let’s wait and think about it.’ ‘Wait!’ says I, ‘the Capitoline Trust Company won’t wait for you, my boy. This is letting you in on the ground floor,’ says I ‘and it’s now or never.’ ‘Oh, let it wait,’ says he. I don’t know what’s in-to the man.”
“I don’t know how well he knows his own business, Major,” I said as I started again for Brede’s end of the verandah. But I was troubled none the less. The Major could not have influenced the sale of one share of stock in the Capitoline Company. But that stock was a great investment; a rare chance for a purchaser with a few thousand dollars. Perhaps it was no more remarkable that Brede should not invest than that I should not—and yet, it seemed to add one circumstance more to the other suspicious circumstances.
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When I went upstairs that evening, I found my wife putting her hair to bed—I don’t know how I can better describe an operation familiar to every married man. I waited until the last tress was coiled up, and then I spoke.
“I’ve talked with Brede,” I said, “and I didn’t have to catechize him. He seemed to feel that some sort of explanation was looked for, and he was very out-spoken. You were right about the children—that is, I must have misunderstood him. There are only two. But the Matterhorn episode was simple enough. He didn’t realize how dangerous it was until he had got so far into it that he couldn’t back out; and he didn’t tell her, because he’d left her here, you see, and under the circumstances—“
“Left her here!” cried my wife. “I’ve been sitting with her the whole afternoon, sewing, and she told me that he left her at Geneva, and came back and took her to Basle, and the baby was born there—now I’m sure, dear, because I asked her.”
“Perhaps I was mistaken when I thought he said she was on this side of the water,” I suggested, with bitter, biting irony.
“You poor dear, did I abuse you?” said my wife. “But, do you know, Mrs. Tabb said that she didn’t know how many lumps of sugar he took in his coffee. Now that seems queer, doesn’t it.”
It did. It was a small thing. But it looked queer. Very queer.
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The next morning, it was clear that war was declared against the Bredes. They came down to breakfast somewhat late, and, as soon as they arrived, the Biggleses swooped up the last fragments that remained on their plates, and made a stately march out of the dining-room. Then Miss Hoogencamp arose and departed, leaving a whole fish-ball on her plate. Even as Atalanta might have dropped an apple behind her to tempt her pursuer to check his speed, so Miss Hoogencamp left that fish-ball behind her, and between her maiden self and Contamination.
We had finished our breakfast, my wife and I, before the Bredes appeared. We talked it over, and agreed that we were glad that we had not been obliged to take sides upon such insufficient testimony.
After breakfast, it was the custom of the male half of the Jacobus household to go around the corner of the building and smoke their pipes and cigars where they would not annoy the ladies. We sat under a trellis covered with a grape-vine that had borne no grapes in the memory of man. This vine, however, bore leaves, and these, on that pleasant Summer morning, shielded from us two persons who were in earnest conversation in the straggling, half-dead flower-garden at the side of the house.
“I don’t want,” we heard Mr. Jacobus say, “to enter in no man’s pry-vacy; but I do want to know who it may be, like, that I hev in my house. Now what I ask of you, and I don’t want you to take it as in no ways personal, is—hev you your merridge-license with you?”
“No,” we heard the voice of Mr. Brede reply. “Have you yours?”
I think it was a chance shot; but it told all the same. The Major (he was a widower), and Mr. Biggle and I looked at each other; and Mr. Jacobus, on the other side of the grape-trellis, looked at—I don’t know what—and was as silent as we were.
Where is your marriage-license, married reader? Do you know? Four men, not including Mr. Brede, stood or sate on one side or the other of that grape-trellis, and not one of them knew where his marriage-license was. Each of us had had one—the Major had had three. But where were they? Where is yours? Tucked in your best-man’s pocket; deposited in his desk—or washed to a pulp in his white waistcoat (if white waistcoats be the fashion of the hour), washed out of existence—can you tell where it is? Can you—unless you are one of those people who frame that interesting document and hang it upon their drawing-room walls?
Mr. Brede’s voice arose, after an awful stillness of what seemed like five minutes, and was, probably, thirty seconds:
“Mr. Jacobus, will you make out your bill at once, and let me pay it? I shall leave by the six o’clock train. And will you also send the wagon for my trunks?”
“I hain’t said I wanted to hev ye leave—” began Mr. Jacobus; but Brede cut him short.
“Bring me your bill.”
“But,” remonstrated Jacobus, “ef ye ain’t—“
“Bring me your bill!” said Mr. Brede.
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My wife and I went out for our morning’s walk. But it seemed to us, when we looked at “our view,” as if we could only see those invisible villages of which Brede had told us—that other side of the ridges and rises of which we catch no glimpse from lofty hills or from the heights of human self-esteem. We meant to stay out until the Bredes had taken their departure; but we returned just in time to see Pete, the Jacobus darkey, the blacker of boots, the brusher of coats, the general handy-man of the house, loading the Brede trunks on the Jacobus wagon.
And, as we stepped upon the verandah, down came Mrs. Brede, leaning on Mr. Brede’s arm, as though she were ill; and it was clear that she had been crying. There were heavy rings about her pretty black eyes.
My wife took a step toward her.
“Look at that dress, dear,” she whispered; “she never thought any thing like this was going to happen when she put that on.”
It was a pretty, delicate, dainty dress, a graceful, narrow-striped affair. Her hat was trimmed with a narrow-striped silk of the same colors—maroon and white—and in her hand she held a parasol that matched her dress.
“She’s had a new dress on twice a day,” said my wife; “but that’s the prettiest yet. Oh, somehow—I’m awfully sorry they’re going!”
But going they were. They moved toward the steps. Mrs. Brede looked toward my wife, and my wife moved toward Mrs. Brede. But the ostracised woman, as though she felt the deep humiliation of her position, turned sharply away, and opened her parasol to shield her eyes from the sun. A shower of rice—a half-pound shower of rice—fell down over her pretty hat and her pretty dress, and fell in a spattering circle on the floor, outlining her skirts—and there it lay in a broad, uneven band, bright in the morning sun.
Mrs. Brede was in my wife’s arms, sobbing as if her young heart would break.
“Oh, you poor, dear, silly children!” my wife cried, as Mrs. Brede sobbed on her shoulder, “why didn’t you tell us?”
“W-W-W-We didn’t want to be t-t-taken for a b-b-b-b-bridal couple,” sobbed Mrs. Brede; “and we d-d-didn’t dream what awful lies we’d have to tell, and all the aw-aw-ful mixed-up-ness of it. Oh, dear, dear, dear!”
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“Pete!” commanded Mr. Jacobus, “put back them trunks. These folks stays here’s long’s they wants ter. Mr. Brede—” he held out a large, hard hand—“I’d orter’ve known better,” he said. And my last doubt of Mr. Brede vanished as he shook that grimy hand in manly fashion.
The two women were walking off toward “our view,” each with an arm about the other’s waist—touched by a sudden sisterhood of sympathy.
“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Brede, addressing Jacobus, Biggle, the Major and me, “there is a hostelry down the street where they sell honest New Jersey beer. I recognize the obligations of the situation.”
We five men filed down the street. The two women went toward the pleasant slope where the sunlight gilded the forehead of the great hill. On Mr. Jacobus’s verandah lay a spattered circle of shining grains of rice. Two of Mr. Jacobus’s pigeons flew down and picked up the shining grains, making grateful noises far down in their throats.
MR. COPERNICUS AND THE PROLETARIAT.
“’Gentlemen,’ he drawled, ‘you’ll excuse my not gig-gig-getting up.’”
The old publishing house of T. Copernicus & Son was just recovering from the rush of holiday business—a rush of perhaps a dozen purchasers. Christmas shoppers rarely sought out the dingy building just around the corner from Astor Place, and T. C. & Son had done no great business since young T. C., the “Son,” died, fifteen years before. The house lived on two or three valuable copyrights; and old Mr. Copernicus kept it alive just for occupation’s sake, now that Tom was dead. But he liked to maintain the assumption that his queer old business, with its publication of half-a-dozen scientific or theological works per annum, was the same flourishing concern that it had been in his prime. That it did not flourish was nothing to him. He was rich, thanks to himself; his wife was rich, thanks to her aunt; his daughter was rich, thanks to her grandmother. So he played at business, and every Christmas-time he bought a lot of fancy stationery and gift-books that nobody called for, and hired a couple of extra porters for whom the head-porter did his best to find some work. Then, the week after New Year’s, he would discharge his holiday hands, and give each of them a dollar or two apiece out of his own pocket.
“Barney,” he said to the old porter, “you don’t need those two extra men any longer?”
“‘Deed an’ we do not, sorr!” said Barney; “th’ wan o’ thim wint off av himself the mornin’, an’ t’ other do be readin’ books the whole day long.”
“Send him to me,” Mr. Copernicus ordered, and Barney yelled unceremoniously, “Mike!”
The figure of a large and somewhat stout youth, who might have been eighteen or twenty-eight years old, appeared, rising from the sub-cellar. His hair was black, his face was clean-shaven, and although he held in his hand the evidence of his guilt, a book kept partly open with his forefinger, he had an expression of imperturbable calm, and placid, ox-like fixity of purpose. He wore a long, seedy, black frock-coat, buttoned up to the neck-band of his collarless shirt.
“How’s this?” inquired Mr. Copernicus. “I’m told that you spend your time reading my books.” The young man slowly opened his mouth and answered in a deliberate drawl, agreeably diversified by a peculiar stutter.
“I haven’t been reading your b-b-books, sir; I’ve been reading my own. All I had to do was to hand up boxes of fuf-fuf-fancy stationery, and—“
“I see,” interposed Mr. Copernicus, hurriedly, “there hasn’t been any very great call for fancy stationery this year.”
“And when there wasn’t any c-c-call for it, I read. I ain’t going to be a pip-pip-porter all my life. Would you?”
“Why, of course, my boy,” said Mr. Copernicus, “if you are reading to improve your mind, in your leisure time—let’s see your book.”
The young man handed him a tattered duodecimo.
“Why, it’s Virgil!” exclaimed his employer. “You can’t read this.”
“Some of it I kik-kik-can,” returned the employee, “and some of it I kik-kik-can’t.”
Mr. Copernicus sought out “Arma virumque” and “Tityre, tu patulæ,” and one or two other passages he was sure of, and the studious young porter read them in the artless accent which the English attribute to the ancient Romans, and translated them with sufficient accuracy.
“Where did you learn to read Latin?”
“I p-p-picked it up in odd hours.”
“What else have you studied?”
“A little Gig-Gig-Greek.”
“Any thing else?”
“Some algebra and some Fif-Fif-French.”
“Where do you come from?”
“From Baltimore,” drawled the prodigy, utterly unmoved by his employer’s manifest astonishment. “I was janitor of a school there, and the principal lent me his bib-bib-books.”
“What is your name?”
“M-M-Michael Quinlan.”
“And what was your father’s business?”
“He was a bib-bib-bricklayer,” the young man replied calmly, adding, reflectively, “when he wasn’t did-did-drunk.”
“Bless my old soul!” said Mr. Copernicus to himself, “this is most extraordinary! I’ll see you again, young man. Barney!” he called to the head porter, “this young man will remain with us for the present.”
A couple of days later, Mr. Copernicus sent for Michael Quinlan, and invited him to call at the Copernican residence on Washington Square, that evening.
“I want to have Professor Barcalow talk with you,” he explained.
At the hour appointed, Mr. M. Quinlan presented himself at the basement door of the old house, and was promptly translated to the library, where Professor Barcalow, once President of Clear Creek University, Indiana, rubbed his bald head and examined the young man at length.
Quinlan underwent an hour’s ordeal without the shadow of discomposure.
He drawled and stuttered with a placid face, whether his answers were right or wrong. At the end of the hour, the Professor gave his verdict.
“Our young friend,” he said, “has certainly done wonders for himself in the way of self-tuition. He is almost able—mind, I say almost—to pass a good Freshman examination. Of course, he is not thorough. There is just the same difference, Mr. Copernicus, between the tuition you do for yourself and the tuition that you receive from a competent teacher as there is between the carpentering you do for yourself and the carpentering a regular carpenter does for you. I can see the marks of self-tuition all over this young man’s conversation. He has never met a competent instructor in his life. But he has done very well for himself—wonderfully well. He in entitled to great credit. Try to remember, Quinlan, what I told you about the use of the ablative absolute.”
Quinlan said he would, and made his exit by the basement door.
“If he works hard,” remarked the Professor, “he will be able to enter Clear Creek by June, and work his way through.”
“And as it happens,” said Mr. Copernicus, “I’m going to lose my night-watchman next week, and I think I’ll put Quinlan in. And then I’ve been thinking—there are all poor Tom’s books that he had when he went to Columbia. I’ll let the boy come here and borrow them, and I can keep an eye on him and see how he’s getting along.”
“H’m! yes, of course,” the Professor assented hesitatingly, dubious of Mr. Copernicus’s classics.
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“Well, Barney,” Mr. Copernicus hailed his head-porter a month or two later, “how does our new night-watchman do?”
“Faith, I’ve seen worse than him,” said Barney. “He’s a willing lad.”
Barney’s heart had been won. He came down to the store each morning and found that Quinlan had saved him the trouble of taking off the long sheets of cotton cloth that protected the books on the counters from the dust.
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Every week thereafter, Quinlan presented himself at the basement door, shabby, but no longer collarless, was admitted to the library, by way of the back-stairs, and received from Mrs. Copernicus the books that Mr. Copernicus had set aside for him. But one day Mr. Copernicus forgot the books, and Mrs. Copernicus asked the young man into the parlor to explain to him how it had happened. When she had explained, being a kindly soul, she made a little further conversation, and asked Quinlan some questions about his studies. Greek was Greek indeed to her; but when he spoke of French, she felt as though she had a sort of second-hand acquaintance with the language.
“Floretta,” she said to her daughter, “talk to Mr. Quinlan in French, and find out how much he knows.”
Floretta blushed. She was a wren-like little thing, with soft brown hair, rather pretty, and yet the sort of girl whom men never notice. To address this male stranger was an agony to her. But she knew that her French had been bought at a fashionable boarding-school, and bought for show, and her mother had a right to demand its exhibition. She asked M. Quinlan how he portrayed himself, and M. Quinlan, with no more expression on his face than a Chinese idol, but with a fluency checked only by his drawl and his stutter, poured forth what sounded to Mrs. Copernicus like a small oration.
“What did he say then, Floretta?” she demanded.
“He said how grateful he was to Papa for giving him such a chance, and how he wants to be a teacher when he knows enough. And, oh, Mama, he speaks ever so much better than I do.”
“Where did you learn to speak so well?” inquired Mrs. Copernicus, incredulously.
“I lived for some years in a French house, Ma’am. At least, the lady of the house was French, and she never spoke any thing else.”
Beneficence is quick to develop into an insidious habit. When Mr. Copernicus heard this new thing of his prodigy and protegé, a new idea came to him.
“Old Haverhill, down at the office, speaks French like a native. I’ll let him feel Quinlan’s teeth, and if he is as good as you say he is, he’d better come once a week and talk French to Floretta for an hour. You can sit in the room. She ought to keep up her French.”
And every Wednesday, from four to five, Mr. Quinlan and Miss Floretta conversed, Floretta blushing ever, Quinlan retaining his idol-like stolidity. Sometimes the dull monotony of his drawl, broken only by his regular and rhythmic stutter, lulled Mrs. Copernicus into a brief nap over her book or her fancy work.
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Spring had come. The trees had brought out their pale and gauzy green veils, the beds of tulips and Alpine daisies made glad spots in the parks, and Quinlan, at his employer’s suggestion, had purchased a ready made Spring suit, in which he looked so presentable that Mr. Copernicus was half minded to ask him to dinner.
For Mrs. Copernicus had said something to Mr. Copernicus that had set him to thinking of many things. The Chinese idol had abated no jot of his stolidity, and yet—perhaps—he had found a worshiper. Floretta began blushing of Wednesdays, a full hour before the lesson.
What was to come of it? On the face of it, it seemed impossible. A Quinlan and a Copernicus! And yet—great-grandfather Copernicus, who founded the family in America—was not he a carpenter? And did not his descendants point with pride to his self-made solidity? And here was native worth; high ambition; achievement that promised more. And Floretta was twenty-four, and had never had an offer. “What,” inquired Mr. Copernicus of himself, “is my duty toward the proletariat?”
One thing was certain. If the question was not settled in the negative at once, Quinlan must be educated. So, instead of inviting Quinlan to dinner, he invited Mr. Joseph Mitts, the traveling agent of the Hopkinsonian Higher Education Association, who, by a rare chance, was in town.
Cynical folk said that the Hopkinsonian Association existed only to sell certain textbooks and curious forms of stationery which were necessary to the Hopkinsonian system. But no such idea had ever entered the head of Mr. Mitts. He roamed about the land, introducing the System wherever he could, and a brisk business agent followed him and sold the Hopkinsonian Blackboards and the Hopkinsonian Ink and the Hopkinsonian Teachers’ Self-Examination Blanks, on commission.
As they smoked their cigars in the Library after dinner, Mr. Copernicus told Mr. Mitts about Quinlan. Mr. Mitts was interested. He knew a Professor at a fresh-water college who would put Quinlan through his studies during the vacation.
“Well, that’s settled,” Mr. Copernicus said, and he beamed with satisfaction. “I knew you’d help me out, Mitts. Only it’s so hard ever to get a sight of you—you are always traveling about.”
“We don’t often meet,” Mr. Mitts assented. “And it is curious that this visit should have been the means of giving me sight of a man in whom I want to interest you. His name is Chester—Dudley Winthrop Chester. He is the son of my old clergyman, and he has given his parents a deal of trouble. I don’t know that Dud ever was vicious or dissolute. But he was the most confirmed idler and spendthrift I ever knew. He couldn’t even get through college, and he never would do a stroke of work. He made his father pay his debts half a dozen times, and when that was stopped, he drifted away, and his family quite lost sight of him. I met him in Baltimore last year, and lent him money to come to New York. He said he was going to work. And just as I came in your front door, I saw him going out of your basement door with a package under his arm, so I infer he is employed by one of your trades-people—your grocer, perhaps.”
“Just as you came in? Why—a large, dark-haired young man?”
“Yes; clean-shaven.”
“Why, that was Quinlan!”
“No,” said Mr. Mitts, with the smile of superior knowledge. “It was Chester, and if I’m not mistaken, he was kissing the cook.”
“Then you are mistaken!” cried Mr. Copernicus; “my cook is as black as the ace of spades. There isn’t a white servant in the house.”
“Why, that’s so!” Mr. Mitts was staggered for the moment. “But—wait a minute—does your man Quinlan speak with a drawl, and just one stutter to the sentence?”
“I think he does,” replied his host; “but—“
“Dudley Chester!” said Mr. Mitts.
“But, my dear Mitts, where did he get the Latin and Greek?”
“He had to learn something at Yale.”
“And the French?”
“His mother was a French Canadian. That’s where he gets his French—and his laziness.”
Mr. Copernicus made one last struggle.
“But he has been most industrious and faithful in my employ.”
“What is he?”
“My—my night-watchman.”
“Mr. Copernicus,” inquired Mr. Mitts, “have you a watchman’s clock in your building?”
“No, sir,” said Mr. Copernicus, indignantly. “I have none of those degrading new-fangled machines. I prefer to trust my employees.”
“Then Dudley Chester is asleep in your store at this minute.”
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A soft, moist breeze, with something of the sea in it, blew gently in at an open window of the second floor of the business establishment of T. Copernicus & Son. Near the window a gas-jet flickered. Under the gas-jet, on, or rather in, a bed ingeniously constructed of the heaped-up covering-cloths from the long counters, lay Mr. Michael Quinlan, half-supported on his left elbow. In his other hand he held, half-open, a yellow-covered French novel. Between his lips was a cigarette. A faint shade of something like amusement lent expression to his placid features as he listened to Mr. Copernicus puffing his way up the stairs, followed by Mr. Mitts and Barney. The hands on the clock pointed to eleven. Mr. Quinlan’s attire was appropriate to the hour. He wore only a frayed cotton night-shirt. His other clothes were carelessly disposed about his couch.
He waited calmly until his visitors had appeared before him, and then he greeted them with a gracious wave of his hand—an easy gesture that seemed to dismiss Quinlan and announce Chester.
“Gentlemen,” he drawled, “you’ll excuse my not gig-gig-getting up to welcome you. Ah, Joseph! I saw you this evening, and I supposed the j-j-jig was up.”
Mr. Copernicus was purple and speechless for the better part of a minute. Then he demanded, in a husky whisper:
“Who are you?”
Mr. Chester, with nothing of the Quinlan left about him, waved his hand once more.
“Mr. Joseph Mitts is a gentleman of irre-pip-pip-proachable veracity,” he said. “I can kik-kik-confidently confirm any statements he has made about me.”
“And why—” Mr. Copernicus had found his voice—“why have you humbugged me in this iniquitous—infamous way?”
The late Quinlan gazed at him with blank surprise.
“My dear sir, did-did-don’t you see? If I’d told you who I was, you’d have thought I was a did-did-damn fool not to know more than I did. Whereas, don’t you see? you thought I was a did-did-devil of a fellow.”
“Get up and dress yourself and get out of here!” said his employer.
“The jig, then,” inquired Mr. Dudley Chester, slowly rising, “is did-did-definitely up? No more Fif-Fif-French lessons? No? Well,” he continued, as he leisurely pulled on his trousers, “that’s the kik-kik-cussèd inconsistency. The j-j-jig is up for the gentleman; but when you thought I was a did-did-damn Mick, I was right in the bib-bib-bosom of the blooming family.”
“Here are your week’s wages,” said Mr. Copernicus, trembling with rage. “Now, get out!”
“Not exactly,” responded the unperturbed sinner: “a ticket to Chicago!”
“I’m afraid you had best yield,” whispered Mr. Mitts. “Your family, you know. It wouldn’t do to have this get out.”
Mr. Copernicus had a minute of purple rage. Then he handed the money to Mr. Mitts.
“Put him on the train,” he said. “There’s one at twelve.”
“We can make it if we hurry,” said the obliging Mr. Mitts. “Where’s your lodging-house, Chester?”
Chester opened his eyes inquiringly. “Why, this is all I’ve got,” he said; “what’s the mim-mim-matter with this?”
“But your—your luggage?” inquired Mr. Mitts.
Mr. Chester waved a much-worn tooth-brush in the air.
“Man wants but lil-lil-little here below,” he remarked.
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“You see,” explained Mr. Dudley Winthrop Chester, formerly Quinlan, as he stepped out into the night air with Mr. Mitts, “the scheme is bib-bib-busted here, but I’ve got confidence in it. It’s good—it’ll gig-gig-go. Chicago’s the pip-pip-place for me. I suppose if you flash up ‘amo, amas’ to a Chicago man, he thinks you’re Elihu Burritt, the learned bib-bib-blacksmith.”
“Aren’t you tired of this life of false pretences?” asked Mr. Mitts, sternly.
“You can bib-bib-bet I am,” responded Chester, frankly; “I haven’t said a cuss-word in six months. Did-did-did-damn—damn—damn—damn!” he vociferated into the calm air of night, by way of relieving his pent-up feelings. “How long is it, Dudley,” pursued the patient Mitts, “since your parents heard from you?”
“Two years, I gig-gig-guess,” said Chester. “By Jove,” he added, as his eye fell on the blue sign of a telegraph office, “did-did-damn if I don’t telegraph them right now.”
Mr. Mitts was deeply gratified. “That’s a good idea,” he said.
“Lend me a kik-kik-quarter,” said Dudley Chester.
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At midnight sharp, Mr. Mitts saw his charge ascend the rear platform of the Chicago train just as it moved out of the gloomy Jersey City station of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
A young woman of slight figure, with a veil about her face, emerged from the interior of the car and threw her arms around the neck of Mr. Chester, late Quinlan.
“I thought I wasn’t mistaken,” said Mr. Mitts to himself.
The next week he received an envelope containing a scrap roughly torn out of a daily paper. It read as follows:
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And yet, within six months, Mr. Mitts received cards. They bade him to a reception given by Mr. and Mrs. Chester at the house of Mr. Thomas Copernicus.
“I couldn’t have done that,” said Mr. Mitts to himself.
HECTOR.
“Three slats!—and a vast black body leaped high in the air.”
It was such a quiet old home, so comfortably covered with wistaria from basement to chimney-tops, and it stood on the corner of two such quiet, old-fashioned streets on the East side of New York that you would never have imagined that it held six of the most agitated and perturbed women in the great city. But the three Miss Pellicoes, their maid, their waitress and their cook, could not have been more troubled in their feminine minds had they been six exceptionally attractive Sabines with the Roman soldiery in full cry.
For twenty years—ever since the death of old Mr. Pellicoe—these six women had lived in mortal fear of the marauding man, and the Man had come at last. That very evening, at a quarter past eight o’clock, a creature who called himself a book-agent had rung the front door bell. Honora, the waitress, had opened the door a couple of inches, inquired the stranger’s business, learned it, told him to depart, tried to close the door, and discovered that the man had inserted his toe in the opening. She had closed the door violently, and the man had emitted a single oath of deep and sincere profanity. He had then kicked the door and departed, with a marked limp.
At least this was the story as Honora first related it. But as she stood before the assembled household and recounted it for the seventh time, it had assumed proportions that left no room for the charitable hypothesis that an innocent vendor of literature had been the hapless victim of his own carelessness or clumsiness.
“And whin he had the half of his big ugly body in the crack o’ th’ dure,” she said, in excited tones and with fine dramatic action, “and him yellin’ an’ swearin’ and cussin’ iv’ry holy name he could lay his black tongue to, and me six years cook in a convent, and I t’rew th’ whole weight o’ me on th’ dure, an’—“
“That will do, Honora,” said Miss Pellicoe, who was the head of the household. She perceived that the combat was deepening too rapidly. “You may go. We will decide what is to be done.”
And Miss Pellicoe had decided what was to be done.
“Sisters,” she said to her two juniors, “we must keep a dog.”
“A dog!” cried Miss Angela, the youngest; “oh, how nice!”
“I do not think it is nice at all,” said Miss Pellicoe, somewhat sternly, “nor would you, Angela, if you had any conception of what it really meant. I do not propose to keep a lap-dog, or a King Charles spaniel, but a dog—a mastiff, or a bloodhound, or some animal of that nature, such as would spring at the throat of an invader, and bear him to the ground!”
“Oh, dear!” gasped Miss Angela. “I should be afraid of him!”
“You do not understand as yet, Angela,” Miss Pellicoe explained, knitting her brows. “My intention is to procure the animal as a—in fact—a puppy, and thus enable him to grow up and to regard us with affection, and be willing to hold himself at all times in readiness to afford us the protection we desire. It is clearly impossible to have a man in the house. I have decided upon a mastiff.”
When Miss Pellicoe decided upon a thing, Miss Angela Pellicoe and her other sister promptly acquiesced. On this occasion they did not, even in their inmost hearts, question the wisdom of the decision of the head of the house. A man, they knew, was not to be thought of. For twenty years the Pellicoe house had been a bower of virginity. The only men who ever entered it were the old family doctor, the older family lawyer, and annually, on New Year’s Day, in accordance with an obsolete custom, Major Kitsedge, their father’s old partner, once junior of the firm of Pellicoe & Kitsedge. Not ever the butcher or the baker or the candlestick-maker forced an entrance to that innocent dovecote. They handed in their wares through a wicket-gate in the back yard and were sent about their business by the chaste Honora.
The next morning, having awakened to find themselves and the silver still safe, Miss Pellicoe and Miss Angela set out for a dog store which they had seen advertised in the papers. It was in an unpleasantly low and ill-bred part of the town, and when the two ladies reached it, they paused outside the door, and listened, with lengthened faces, to the combined clamor and smell that emanated from its open door.
“This,” said Miss Pellicoe, after a brief deliberation, “is not a place for us. If we are to procure a dog, he must be procured in some other way. It need not entail a loss of self-respect.”
“I have it!” she added with a sudden inspiration. “I will write to Hector.”
Hector was the sole male representative of the Pellicoe family. He was a second cousin of the Misses Pellicoe. He lived out West—his address varying from year to year. Once in a long while Miss Pellicoe wrote to him, just to keep herself in communication with the Man of the family. It made her feel more secure, in view of possible emergencies. She had not seen Hector since he was nineteen. He was perhaps the last person of any positive virility who had had the freedom of the Pellicoe household. He had used that freedom mainly in making attempts to kiss Honora, who was then in her buxom prime, and in decorating the family portraits with cork moustaches and whiskers. Miss Pellicoe clung to the Man of the family as an abstraction; but she was always glad that he lived in the West. Addressing him in his capacity of Man of the family, she wrote to him and asked him to supply her with a young mastiff, and to send her bill therefor. She explained the situation to him, and made him understand that the dog must be of a character to be regarded as a male relative.
Hector responded at once. He would send a mastiff pup within a week. The pup’s pedigree was, unfortunately, lost, but the breed was high. Fifty dollars would cover the cost and expenses of transportation. The pup was six months old.
For ten days the Pellicoe household was in a fever of expectation. Miss Pellicoe called in a carpenter, and, chaperoned by the entire household, held an interview with him, and directed him how to construct a dog-house in the back-yard—a dog-house with one door about six inches square, to admit the occupant in his innocent puphood, and with another door about four feet in height to emit him, when, in the pride of his mature masculinity, he should rush forth upon the burglar and the book-agent. The carpenter remarked that he “never seen no such a dorg as that;” but Miss Pellicoe thought him at once ignorant and ungrammatical, and paid no heed to him.
In conclave assembled, the Misses Pellicoe decided to name the dog Hector. Beside the consideration of the claims of gratitude and family affection, they remembered that Hector was a classical hero.
The ten days came to an end when, just at dusk of a dull January day, two stalwart expressmen, with much open grumbling and smothered cursing, deposited a huge packing-case in the vestibule of the Pellicoe house, and departed, slamming the doors behind them. From this box proceeded such yelps and howls that the entire household rushed affrighted to peer through the slats that gridironed the top. Within was a mighty black beast, as high as a table, that flopped itself wildly about, clawed at the sides of the box, and swung in every direction a tail as large as a policeman’s night-club.
It was Hector. There was no mistake about it, for Mr. Hector Pellicoe’s card was nailed to a slat. It was Hector, the six-months-old pup, for whose diminutive proportions the small door in the dog-house had been devised; Hector, for whom a saucer of lukewarm milk was even then waiting by the kitchen range.
“Oh, Sister!” cried Miss Angela, “we never can get him out! You’ll have to send for a man!”
“I certainly shall not send for a man at this hour of the evening,” said Miss Pellicoe, white, but firm; “and I shall not leave the poor creature imprisoned during the night.” Here Hector yawped madly.
“I shall take him out,” concluded Miss Pellicoe, “myself!”
They hung upon her neck, and entreated her not to risk her life; but Miss Pellicoe had made up her mind. The three maids shoved the box into the butler’s pantry, shrieking with terror every time that Hector leaped at the slats, and at last, with the two younger Pellicoes holding one door a foot open, and the three maids holding the other door an inch open, Miss Pellicoe seized the household hatchet, and began her awful task. One slat! Miss Pellicoe was white but firm. Two slats! Miss Pellicoe was whiter and firmer. Three slats!—and a vast black body leaped high in the air. With five simultaneous shrieks, the two doors were slammed to, and Miss Pellicoe and Hector were left together in the butler’s pantry.
The courage of the younger Pellicoes asserted itself after a moment, and they flung open the pantry door. Miss Pellicoe, looking as though she needed aromatic vinegar, leaned against the wall. Hector had his fore-paws on her shoulders, and was licking her face in exuberant affection.
“Sisters,” gasped Miss Pellicoe, “will you kindly remove him? I should like to faint.”
But Hector had already released her to dash at Miss Angela, who frightened him by going into such hysterics that Miss Pellicoe was obliged to deny herself the luxury of a faint. Then he found the maids, and, after driving them before him like chaff for five minutes, succeeded in convincing Honora of the affectionate purpose of his demonstrations, and accepted her invitation to the kitchen, where he emptied the saucer of milk in three laps.
“I think, Honora,” suggested Miss Pellicoe, who had resumed command, “that you might, perhaps, give him a slice or two of last night’s leg of mutton. Perhaps he needs something more sustaining.”
Honora produced the mutton-leg. It was clearly what Hector wanted. He took it from her without ceremony, bore it under the sink and ate all of it except about six inches of the bone, which he took to bed with him.
The next day, feeling the need of masculine advice, Miss Pellicoe resolved to address herself to the policeman on the beat, and she astonished him with the following question:
“Sir,” she said, in true Johnsonian style, “what height should a mastiff dog attain at the age of six months?”
The policeman stared at her in utter astonishment.
“They do be all sizes, Mum,” he replied, blankly, “like a piece of cheese.”
“My relative in the West,” explained Miss Pellicoe, “has sent me a dog, and I am given to understand that his age is six months. As he is phenomenally large, I have thought it best to seek for information. Has my relative been imposed upon?”
“It’s har-r-rd to tell, Mum,” replied the policeman, dubiously. Then his countenance brightened. “Does his feet fit him?” he inquired.
“What—what do you mean?” asked Miss Pellicoe, shrinking back a little.
“Is his feet like blackin’-boxes on th’ ind of his legs?”
“They are certainly very large.”
“Thin ’tis a pup. You see, Mum, with a pup, ’tis this way. The feet starts first, an’ the pup grows up to ’em, like. Av they match him, he’s grown. Av he has arctics on, he’s a pup.”
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Hector’s growth in the next six months dissipated all doubts as to his puphood. He became a four-legged Colossus, martial toward cats, aggressive toward the tradesmen at the wicket-gate, impartially affectionate toward all the household, and voracious beyond all imagining. But he might have eaten the gentle ladies out of house and home, and they would never have dreamed of protesting. The house had found a Head—even a Head above Miss Pellicoe.
The deposed monarch gloried in her subjection. She said “Hector likes this,” or “Hector likes that,” with the tone of submissive deference in which you may hear a good wife say, “Mr. Smith will not eat cold boiled mutton,” or “Mr. Smith is very particular about his shirt-bosoms.”
As for Miss Angela, she never looked at Hector, gamboling about the back-yard in all his superabundance of strength and vitality, without feeling a half-agreeable nervous shock, and a flutter of the heart. He stood for her as the type of that vast outside world of puissant manhood of which she had known but two specimens—her father and Cousin Hector. Perhaps, in the old days, if Cousin Hector had not been so engrossed in frivolity and making of practical jokes, he might have learned of something to his advantage. But he never did.
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For the first time in her life, Miss Angela found herself left to watch the house through the horrors of the Fourth of July. This had always been Miss Pellicoe’s duty; but this year Miss Pellicoe failed to come back from the quiet place in the Catskills, where no children were admitted, and where the Pellicoe family, two at a time, spent the Summer in the society of other old maids and of aged widows.
“I feel that you are safe with Hector,” she wrote.
Alack and alack for Miss Pellicoe’s faith in Hector! The first fire-cracker filled him with excitement, and before the noises of the day had fairly begun, he was careering around the yard, barking in uncontrollable frenzy. At twelve o’clock, when the butcher-boy came with the chops for luncheon, Hector bounded through the open wicket, right into the arms of a dog-catcher. Miss Angela wrung her hands as she gazed from her window and saw the Head of the House cast into the cage with a dozen curs of the street and driven rapidly off.
In her lorn anguish she sought the functionary who was known in the house as “Miss Pellicoe’s policeman.”
“Be aisy, Miss,” he said. “Av the dog is worth five dollars, say, to yez, I have a friend will get him out for th’ accommodation.”
“Oh, take it, take it!” cried Miss Angela, trembling and weeping.
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After six hours of anxious waiting, Miss Angela received Hector at the front door, from a boy who turned and fled as soon as his mission was accomplished. Hector was extremely glad to be at home, and his health seemed to be unimpaired; but to Miss Angela’s delicate fancy, contact with the vulgar of his kind had left a vague aroma of degradation about him. With her own hands she washed him in tepid water and sprinkled him with eau de cologne. And even then she could not help feeling that to some extent the bloom had been brushed from the peach.
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Hector was ill—very ill. The family conclave assembled every night and discussed the situation with knit brows and tearful eyes. They could not decide whether the cause of his malady was the unwholesomeness of the Summer air in the city, or whether it was simply over-feeding. He was certainly shockingly fat, and much indisposed to exertion. He had lost all his activity; all his animal spirits. He spent most of the time in his house. Even his good-nature was going. He had actually snapped at Honora. They had tried to make up their minds to reduce his rations; but their hearts had failed them. They had hoped that the cool air of September would help him; but September was well nigh half gone; and Hector grew worse and worse.
“Sisters,” said Miss Pellicoe, at last, “we shall have to send for a Veterinary!” She spoke as though she had just decided to send for an executioner. And even as the words left her lips there came from Hector such a wail of anguish that Miss Pellicoe’s face turned a ghastly white.
“He is going mad!” she cried.
There was no sleep in the Pellicoe household that night, although Hector wailed no more. At the break of day, Miss Pellicoe led five other white-faced women into the back yard.
Hector’s head lay on the sill of his door. He seemed too weak to rise, but he thrashed his tail pleasantly against the walls, and appeared amiable and even cheerful. The six advanced.
Miss Pellicoe knelt down and put her hand in to pet him. Then a strange expression came over her face.
“Sister,” she said, “I think—a cat has got in and bitten him.”
She closed her hand on something soft, lifted it out and laid it on the ground. It was small, it was black, it was dumpy. It moved a round head in an uncertain, inquiring way, and tried to open its tightly-closed eyes. Then it squeaked.
Thrice more did Miss Pellicoe thrust her hand into the house. Thrice again did she bring out an object exactly similar.
“Wee-e-e-e!” squeaked the four objects. Hector thrashed her tail about and blinked joyfully, all unconscious of the utter wreck of her masculinity, looking as though it were the most natural thing in the world for her to have a litter of pups—as, indeed, it was.
Honora broke the awful silence,—Miss Angela was sobbing so softly you could scarcely hear her.
“Be thim Hector’s?” Honora inquired.
“Honora!” said Miss Pellicoe, rising, “never utter that name in my presence again.”
“An’ fwat shall I call the dog?”
“Call it”—and Miss Pellicoe made a pause of impressive severity, “call it—Andromache.”