Tales From Bohemia by Robert Neilson Stephens

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The boy took his sister's hand and withdrew into the doorway. Then he said,
"Why, of course. You can see her through the window."

The tramp stood against the edge of the piazza upon his toes, and craned
his neck to see through one of the lighted windows. So he remained for
several seconds. Once during that time he closed his eyes, and the muscles
of his face contracted. Then he opened his eyes again. They were moist.

He could see a gentle old lady, with smooth gray hair, and an expression of
calm and not unhappy melancholy. She was sitting in a rocking-chair, her
hands resting on the arms, her look fixed unconsciously on the paper on the
wall. She was thinking, and evidently her thoughts, though sad, perhaps,
were not keenly painful.

The tramp read that much upon her face. Presently, without a word, he
turned quickly about and hurried away, closing the gate after him.

When the two children told about their visitor later, their mother said:

"You mustn't talk to strange men, Tommy. You and Mamie should have come
right in to grandma."

Their father said: "He was probably looking for a chance to steal
something. I'll let the dog out in the yard to-night."

And their grandmother: "I suppose he was only a man who likes to hear
children talk, and perhaps, poor fellow, he has no little ones of his own."

The tramp knew the way to the cemetery. But first he found the house where
he had lived as a boy. It looked painfully rickety and surprisingly small.
So he hastened from before it and went up by a back street across the town
creek and up a hill, where at last he stood before the cemetery gate. It
was locked; so he climbed over the wall. He went still further up the hill,
past tombstones that looked very white, and trees that looked very green in
the moonlight. At the top of the hill he found his father's grave. Beside
it was another mound, and at the head of this, a plain little pillar. The
moon was high now and the tramp was used to seeing in the night. Word by
word he could slowly read upon the marble this inscription:

"William Albert, beloved son of the late Thomas Kershaw and his wife
Rachel; born in Brickville, August 2, 1862; drowned in the Allegheny River
near Pittsburg, July 27, 1877, while heroically endeavouring to save the
life of a child."

The tramp laughed, and then uttered a sigh.

"I wonder," he said, aloud, "what poor bloke it is that's doin' duty for me
under the ground here."

And at the thought that he owed an excellent posthumous reputation to the
unknown who had happened to resemble him fifteen years before, he laughed
louder. Having no one near to share his mirth, he looked up at the amiable
moon, and nodded knowingly thereat, as if to say:

"This is a fine joke we're enjoying between ourselves, isn't it?"

And by and by he remembered that he was being waited for, and he strode
from the grave and from the cemetery.

By the railroad the short tramp, having smoked all the refuse tobacco in
his possession, was growing impatient. Already the expected coal-train had
heralded its advent by whistle and puff and roar when his associate had
joined him.

"Found out all you wanted to know?" queried the stout little vagabond,
starting down the embankment to mount the train.

"Yep," answered the tall vagrant, contentedly.

The small man grasped the iron rod attached to the side of one of the
moving coal-cars and swung his foot into the iron stirrup beneath. His
companion mounted the next car in the same way.

"Are you all right, Kersh?" shouted back the small tramp, standing safe
above the "bumpers."

"All right," replied the tall tramp, climbing upon the end of a car. "But
don't ever call me Kersh any more. After this I'm always Bill the Bum. Bill
Kershaw's dead--" and he added to himself, "and decently buried on the hill
over there under the moon."

XI

UNDER AN AWNING

For ten minutes we had been standing under the awning, driven there at two
o'clock at night by a shower that had arisen suddenly.

"A pocket umbrella is one of the unsupplied necessities of the age," said
my companion.

"Yes, and the peculiarity of the age is that while such luxuries as the
phonograph and the kinetograph multiply day by day, important necessities
remain unsupplied."

My friend mused for a time, while he watched the reflection of the electric
light in the little street pools that were agitated by the falling fine
drops of rain.

He looked from the reflection to the light itself, and thus his eyes turned
upward.

An expression of surprise changed to mirth, and then dropping his glance
until it met mine, he said:

"Have you noticed anything peculiar about this awning?"

"No, what is it?"

"Simply that there is no awning. Look up and see. Here are the posts and
there is the framework, but only the sky is above, and we've been getting
rained upon for the past ten minutes in blissful ignorance."

It was as he said, so we ran to the next awning, which was a fact, not a
figment of fancy.

"That reminds me," resumed my friend, "of Simpkins. He was a young man who
used to catch cold at the slightest dampness. His being out in the rain
without an umbrella never failed to result in his remaining in the house
for two or three subsequent days.

"One night, Simpkins, surprised by an unexpected shower, took refuge
beneath the framework of an awning, which framework lacked the awning
itself. He waited for an hour, until the shower had passed, and then
joyously took up again his homeward way, without having observed his
mistake. He told me on the next day of his narrow escape from the rain. I
happened to know that the awning to which he alluded had been removed a few
weeks before. But I did not tell him so until there no longer seemed to
exist any likelihood of his catching cold from that wetting. You see, his
imagination had saved him."

"That tale is singularly reminiscent of those dear old stories about the
man who took cold through sitting at a window that was composed of one
solid sheet of glass, so clean that he thought it was no glass at all; and
the men who, awaking in the night, stifling for want of fresh air, broke
open the door of a bookcase which they took to be a window, and immediately
noticed a pleasant draught of pure outside air."

"There is a likeness, which simply goes toward proving the truth of all
three accounts. But the remarkable thing about Simpkins' case is that when
he once learned that there had been nothing over his head during that rain,
he immediately caught cold, although two weeks had passed since the night
of the shower. Wonderful, wasn't it?"

"Astonishing, indeed."

Silence ensued and we meditated for awhile. Evidently the same thought
came simultaneously into the minds of both of us, for while I was mentally
commenting upon the deserted and lonely condition of the city streets at
two o'clock on a rainy night, my friend spoke:

"A man is alone with his conscience, the electric lights, the shadows of
the houses, and the sound of the rain at a time and place like this,
isn't he? Standing as we stand now, under an awning, during a persistent
rainfall, at this hour, with no other human being in sight, a man is for
the time upon a desert island. Which reminds me:

"One night, at a later hour than this, when the rain was heavier than this,
I was alone under an awning that was smaller than this. Being without
umbrella and overcoat, I saw at least a quarter of an hour waiting for me.
The thought was dismal.

"Happy idea! I would smoke. I had a cigar in my mouth in an instant.

"Horrors! I had no matches.

"The desire to smoke instantly increased tenfold. I puffed despairingly at
my unlit cigar. No miracle occurred to ignite it. I looked longingly at the
electric lights and the gas-lamps in the distance.

"Like a sailor cast upon an island and straining his eyes on the lookout
for a ship, I stood there scanning the prospect in search of a man with a
light. I was Enoch Arden; the awning was my palm-tree.

"Ten minutes passed. No craft hove in sight.

"Suddenly uncertain footsteps were heard. I looked. Some one came that way.
It was a squalid-looking personage--a professional beggar, half-drunk. He
landed upon my island, beneath my awning.

"'For charity's sake, give me a match!' I cried.

"He looked at me--'sized me up,' in the technical terminology of his trade.
Intelligence began to illumine his countenance. He saw that the opportunity
of his life had come. He held out a match.

"'I'll sell it to you for fifty cents,' he said, with a grin.

"I had erred in revealing the depth of my want, the extent of my distress.

"I compromised by promising to give him a half-dollar if I should succeed
in lighting my cigar with his solitary match. We did succeed. He took the
fifty and started back for the saloon from whence he had come.

"Oh, my boy, the irony of fate--that same old oft-quoted irony!

"I hadn't blown three mouthfuls of smoke from that cigar when a friend came
along with a lighted cigar, an umbrella, and a box full of matches.

"The whole effect of this story lies in the value that fifty cents
possessed for me at that time. It was my last fifty cents, and two days
stood between that night and salary day.

"I had another experience--"

But a night car came in view from around a corner, my friend ran for it,
and his third tale remains untold.

XII

SHANDY'S REVENGE

He was old enough to know better, and a superficial observer might have
thought that he did. But a severe and haughty manner in repose is not any
indication of knowledge, nor is a well-kept beard, even when it is turning
gray. Melrose Welty, the possessor of these and other ways and features
symbolical of wisdom, had no higher occupation in life than to sit in
club-houses and cafés, telling of conquests won by him over women, chiefly
over soubrettes and chorus girls.

Of his means of livelihood, no one had certain knowledge. He always dressed
well, but he abode in a lodging-house, to which he never invited any of
his associates. He affected the society of newspaper men, some of whom
pronounced him a good fellow until they discovered that he was an ass; and
he never refused an invitation to have a drink.

When he had you at a table in a quiet corner of a café, or in front of
a bar, or in the lobby of a theatre between the acts, no matter how the
conversation began, he would invariably turn it into that realm to which
his thoughts were confined.

"I've got a supper on hand to-night after the performance," he would
probably say, "with a blonde in the ---- Company. A lovely girl, too! It's
curious, old man, how I happened to meet her. I've talked to her only
twice, but I made a hit with her in the first five minutes. I'll tell you
how it was--"

Whereupon, if you were polite, and did not know Welty sufficiently to
flee on a pretext, he would tell you how it was, inflicting upon you the
wearisome minute details of the most commonplace thing in the world, the
birth and growth of an acquaintance between a man about town and a silly
young woman, not fastidious as to who pays for her food and drink as long
as the food and drink are adequate.

If you were a newspaper man, Welty was apt to supplement his story with
something like this:

"By the way, old fellow, if you have any pull with your dramatic editor,
can't you give her a line or two? She hasn't much to do in the piece, but
she does it well, and she's clever. She may get a good part one of these
days. Have something nice said about her, won't you?"

And if you ever gave another thought to this plea, you determined to use
whatever influence you had with the dramatic editor to this effect, that
the young woman would have to exhibit very decided cleverness indeed ere
she should have "something nice" said about her in the paper.

Welty was not wont to retain one divinity on the altar of his conversation
longer than a week. But he did so once. He talked about the same girl every
day for a month. And thereby came his undoing.

She was a slender little girl who was singing badly a small rôle in a
certain comic opera at the time of these occurrences. She had a babyish
manner across the footlights, and she was thought to be a blonde, for she
was wearing a yellow wig over her own short black hair that season. Her
first name was Emily.

Welty managed to be introduced to her by thrusting himself upon a little
party of which she was a member, and in which was one acquaintance of his,
at a restaurant one night. He called upon her at her boarding house the
next day, where she received him with some surprise, and left most of the
conversation to him. When he visited there again, she caused him to be
told that she was out, and this took place a half dozen times. Their real
acquaintance never went any further, but an imaginary acquaintance between
them, growing from Welty's wish, made great progress in his fancy and in
the stories told by him at his club to groups of men, some of whom doubted
and looked bored, while others believed and grinned and envied.

It was at the point where Emily had quite forgotten Welty, and Welty's
stories portrayed her as recklessly adoring him and seeking him in cabs
at all hours, that Barry McGettigan, a despised young reporter, "doing
police," heard one of Welty's accounts of an alleged interview with Emily;
and Barry, who had a way of knowing human nature and observing people,
suspected.

Now Barry cherished a deep-rooted grudge against Welty, all the more
dangerous because Welty was unaware of it. Its exact cause has never been
torn from Barry's breast. Some have ascribed it to Welty's having mimicked
Barry's brogue before a crowd in a saloon one night. Others have laid it to
the following passage of words, which is now a part of the ancient history
of the Nocturnal Club.

"Spakin' of ancestors," Barry began, "I'd loike to bet--"

"I'd like to bet," broke in Welty, "that your own ancestry leads directly
to the Shandy family."

There was a general laugh, which Barry, whose nose was as flat as any
Shandy's could have been but who had never read Sterne, did not understand.

"What did he mane?" Barry asked a friend. The friend told him to read
"Tristram Shandy." He spent two hours in a public library next day and
learned how his facial peculiarity had been used by Welty to create a laugh
and incidentally to insult him.

This he never forgave. And he bided his time.

Now, having heard Welty boast of being the object of this Emily's
infatuation, Barry McGettigan deflected his mind from the contemplation of
murders, infanticides, fires, and other matters of general interest, and
gave his best thoughts and skill to investigating this talked-of love
affair of Welty's.

He discovered the true situation within three days. He found that Emily was
engaged to be married to a college football player who came to the city
once a week to see her.

He borrowed money, made himself very agreeable to Welty, and also got
himself introduced to the football player. The latter was a tall, lithe,
heavy-shouldered, brown-faced, thick-knuckled youth, who practiced all
kinds of athletic diversions.

Barry McGettigan sounded the football man in one brief interview one night,
between the acts of the comic opera, at the saloon next door. He found a
means of fastening himself upon the football player's esteem. The collegian
expressed a mild desire to see something of police-station life. Barry
invited him to spend an evening with him on duty at Central Station. The
collegian accepted. Barry appointed a time and named a certain café as a
meeting place.

Then Barry invited Welty to dine with him at the same café on the same
evening at the same hour. By means of his borrowed money, he had lavished
costly drinks upon Welty of late, and Welty had reason to anticipate a
dinner worth the accepting. Barry told Welty nothing of the collegian and
he told the collegian nothing more of Welty.

When the evening came, Barry found Welty awaiting him at the café. The two
sat down at a table. The preliminary cocktail had only arrived when in
walked the collegian. Barry saluted him as if the meeting had only occurred
by chance. He made the collegian and Welty known to each other by name
only. And then he ordered dinner.

When a bottle had been drunk, Barry innocently turned the current of the
conversation to women. He spoke modestly of a mythical conquest he had
recently made. The football player listened without showing much interest.
Presently Barry paused.

Welty took a drink and began:

"No, my boy," said he to Barry, "you're wrong there. It's like you
youngsters to think you know all about the sex, but the older you grow the
less you think you know about them, until you get to my age."

Barry made no answer, but looked at Welty with becoming deference.

The football man's eyes were wandering about the café, showing him to be
indifferent to the theme of discussion.

"I know," continued Welty, "that many more or less writers have said, as
you say, that women must be sought and pursued to be won. They deduce that
theory from the habits of lower animals and of barbarous nations, in which
the man obtains the woman by chase and force. But it's all a theory, and
simply shows that the learned writers study their books instead of their
fellow men and women."

The collegian looked restless, as if the conversation had gotten beyond his
depth.

Barry remained silent, and with a flattering aspect of great interest in
Welty's observations.

"Now," went on Welty, striking the table with the bottom of his glass,
"I've had a little experience of this sort of thing in my time, and I can
say that in nine cases out of ten, once you've attracted the attention of
your game, let it alone and it will chase you. That's how to win women."

The collegian looked bored.

"Just to illustrate," said Welty, "I'll tell of a little conquest of my
own. I use it because it is the first that comes to my mind, not that I'm
given to bragging about my success in these matters. I suppose you've seen
the opera at the ---- Theatre?"

The collegian ceased looking bored. Barry McGettigan sat perfectly,
unnaturally still.

"And," pursued Welty, "you've doubtless noticed the three girls who appear
as the queen's maids of honour?"

The collegian looked somewhat concerned. Barry stopped breathing.

"Well," continued Welty, "you mayn't believe it, for we've kept it really
quiet, one of them girls is really dead gone on me."

The collegian opened his mouth wide, and Barry began to nervously tap his
hand upon the table.

"It's the one," said Welty, "who wears the big blond wig. Her name's Emi--"

There was the noise of upsetting plates, bottles, and glasses, of a man's
feet rapping up against the bottom of a table and his head thumping down
against the floor. There was the sight of an agile youth leaping across an
overturned table and alighting with one foot at each side of the prostrate
form of an astonished man, whose gray whiskers were spattered with blood.
There was the quick gathering of a crowd, an excited explanation on the
part of the collegian, a slow recovery on the part of the man on the floor,
and Barry McGettigan's vengeance was complete.

For, by one of those incredible coincidences that have the semblance of
fatality, the football player's fist had reduced Melrose Welty's nose to a
flatness which the nose of no imaginable Shandy ever has surpassed.

XIII

THE WHISTLE

She was the wife of a railway locomotive engineer, and the two lived in the
newly built house to which he had taken her as a bride a year before.

Many other people in the country railroad town used to laugh at a thing
which she had once said to a gossiping neighbour:

"I can tell the sound of the whistle on Tom's engine from all other
whistles. Every afternoon when his train gets to the crossing at the
planing-mill, I hear that whistle, and then I know it's time to get Tom's
supper."

The gossips found something humourous in the fact that the engineer's wife
recognized the whistle of her husband's engine and knew by it when to begin
to prepare his supper. So are the small manifestations of love and devotion
regarded by coarse minds. You frequently observe this in the conduct of
certain people at the theatre when tender sentiments are uttered upon the
stage.

Perhaps the men were envious of the engineer. He had a prettier wife,
they said, when he was not present, than was deserved by a mere freight
engineer, very recently elevated from the post of fireman. Perhaps,
also, the petty malevolence of the women was due to the wife's superior
comeliness. Be that as it may, each afternoon at half-past four or
thereabouts, when Tom's whistle was blown at the crossing by the
planing-mill, loungers in the grocery store and wives in their kitchens
smiled knowingly and said:

"Time to begin to get Tom's supper, now."

But the engineer was careless and his wife was disdainful of their
neighbours. She loved the sound of that whistle. In the earliest days of
their married life it even sent the crimson to her cheeks. The engineer
could make it as expressive as music. It began like a sudden glad cry; it
died away lingeringly, tenderly. Virtually it said to one pair of ears:

"My darling, I have come back to you."

Whenever the engineer pulled the rope for that particular signal, he
pictured his wife arising from her work-basket in their little parlour with
a thrill of pleasure and affection, and passing out to the kitchen.

She, likewise, at the signal, made a mental image of Tom, seated in the
engine cab, his one hand fixed upon the shining lever, his eyes fixed upon
the glistening tracks ahead.

At six o'clock, usually, supper was hot, and Tom arrived through the front
gateway, glancing at the flower-bed in the centre of the diminutive grass
plot, carrying his dinner-pail, having divested himself of his grimy,
greasy blouse and overalls at the great repair shops, where his engine had
already begun, with much panting, to spend the night.

In a small railroad town on the main line, one is continually hearing
locomotive whistles. All the inhabitants know that one long moan of the
steam is the signal of the train's swift approach; that two short shrieks
of the whistle direct the trainmen to tighten the brakes; that four, given
when the train is still, are intended for the flagman, who has gone away to
the rear to warn back the next train, and that they tell him to return to
his own train as it is about to start; that five whistles in succession
announce a wreck and command the immediate attendance of the wreck crew.

In the town many cheeks blanch when those five long, ominous wails of the
escaping steam cleave the air. A husband, a son, a father who has gone
forth blithely in the morning, with his dinner-pail full, may be brought
out of the wreck, mangled or dead. And until complete details are known
there is a tremor in the whole community. Some hearts beat faster, others
seem to stand still. People speak in hushed tones.

One afternoon, the engineer's wife, observing the altitude of the sun,
looked at the clock and saw that the time was a few minutes before five.

Tom's whistle had not yet blown.

At five-fifteen came the sound of another whistle. It was prolonged and
then repeated. The engineer's wife stood still and counted.

Five!

The most docile and apparently cheerful patient in the ---- Asylum for the
Insane is a widow, still young, who spends the greater time of each day
sewing and humming tunes softly to herself. Every afternoon at about
half-past four she assumes a listening attitude, suddenly hears an
inaudible whistle, smiles tenderly, starts up and places invisible dishes
and impalpable viands upon an imaginary table, and then loses herself in a
reverie which ends in slumber.

No striking clock is allowed within her hearing. It was long ago noticed
that the stroke of five or any series of five similar sounds would cause
her to moan piteously.

The people afar in the country town do not laugh now when they talk of Tom
and the whistle which was shrieking madly as he and his engine plunged
down the bank together on that day when the huge boulder rolled from the
hillside stone quarry and lay upon the tracks, just on this side of the
curve above the town.

XIV

WHISKERS

The facts about the man we called "Whiskers" linger in my mind, asking to
be recorded, and though they do not make much of a story, I am tempted to
unburden myself by putting them on paper. It was mentally noted as a sure
thing by everybody who saw him go into the managing editor's room, to ask
for a position on the staff of the paper, that if he should obtain a place
and become a fixture in the office, he would be generally known as Whiskers
within twenty-four hours after his instalment.

What tale he told the managing editor no one knew, but every one in the
editorial rooms deduced later that it must have been something a trifle out
of the common, for the managing editor, who had gone through the form of
taking the names of three previous applicants that afternoon and telling
them that he would let them know when a vacancy should occur on the staff,
told the man whom we eventually christened Whiskers that he might come
around the next day and write whatever he might choose to in the way of
Sunday "specials," comic verses, or editorial paragraphs, on the chance of
their being accepted.

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