Kitabı oku: «The Dreamers: A Club», sayfa 6
XI
LANG TAMMAS AND DRUMSHEUGH SWEAR OFF
A tale of dialect told by Mr. Berkeley Hights, holder of the twelfth ball
“Hoot mon!”
The words rang out derisively on the cold frosty air of Drumtochty, as Lang Tammas walked slowly along the street, looking for the residence of Drumsheugh. The effect was electrical. Tammas stopped short, and turning about, scanned the street eagerly to see who it was that had spoken. But the highway was deserted, and the old man shook his stick, as if at an imaginary foe.
“I’ll hoot-mon the dour eediot that’s eensoolted a veesitor to Drumtochty!” he shouted. “I haena brought me faithfu’ steck for naething!” he added.
He glared about, now at this closed window, now at that, as if inviting his enemy to come forth and be punished, but seeing no signs of life, turned again to resume his walk, muttering angrily to himself. It was indeed hardly to be tolerated that he, one of the great characters of fiction, should be thus jeered at, as he thought, while on a friendly pilgrimage from Thrums to Drumtochty, the two rival towns in the affections of the consumers of modern letters; and having walked all the way from his home at Thrums, Lang Tammas was tired, and therefore in no mood to accept even a mild affront, much less an insult.
He had scarcely covered ten paces, however, when the same voice, with a harsh cackling laugh, again broke the stillness of the street:
“Gang awa’, gang awa’ – ha, ha, ha!”
Tammas rushed into the middle of the way and picked up a stone.
“Pit your bogie pate oot o’ your weendow, me gillie!” he cried. “I’ll gie it a garry crack. Pit it oot, I say! Pit it oot!”
And the old man drew himself back into an attitude which would have defied the powers of Phidias to reproduce in marble, the stone poised accurately and all too ready to be hurled.
“Ye ramshackle macloonatic!” he cried. “Standin’ in a weendow, where nane may see, an’ heepin’ eensoolts on deecint fowk. Pit it oot – pit it oot – an’ get it crackit!”
The reply was instant:
“Gang awa’, gang awa’ – ha, ha, ha!”
Had Lang Tammas been a creation of Lever, he would at this point have removed his coat and his hat and thrown them down violently to earth, and then have whacked the walk three times with the stout stick he carried in his right hand, as a preliminary to the challenge which followed. But Tammas was not Irish, and therefore not impulsive. He was Scotch – as Scotch as ever was. Wherefore he removed his hat, and, after dusting it carefully, hung it up on a convenient hook; took off his coat and folded it neatly; picked up his “faithfu’ steck,” and observed:
“I hae naething to do that’s of eemportance. Drumsheugh can wait, an’ sae can ee. Pit it oot, pit it oot! Here I am, an’ here I stay until ye pit it oot to be crackit.”
“Gang awa’, gang awa’ – ha, ha, ha!” came the reply.
Lang Tammas turned on the instant to the sources of the sound. He fixed his eyes sternly on the very window whence he thought the words had issued.
“Number twanty-three, saxth floor,” he muttered to himself. “I will call, and then we shall see what we shall see; and if what we see gets off wi’oot a thorough ‘hootin’,’ then I dinna ken me beezniss.”
Hastily discarding his outward wrath, and assuming such portions of his garments as went with his society manner, Tammas walked into the lobby of the apartment-house in which his assumed insulter lived. He pushed the electric button in, and shortly a sweet-faced nurse appeared.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Me,” said Lang Tammas, somewhat abashed. “I’ve called too see the head o’ the hoose.”
“I am sorry,” said the trained nurse, bursting into tears, “but the head of the house is at the point of death, sir, and cannot see you until to-morrow. Call around about ten o’clock.”
“Hoots an’ toots!” sighed Lang Tammas. “Canna we Scuts have e’er a story wi’oot somebody leein’ at the point o’ death! It’s most affectin’, but doonricht wearin’ on the constitootion.”
“Was there anything you wished to say to him?” asked the nurse.
“Oh, aye!” returned Lang Tammas. “I dinna ken hoo to deny that I hed that to say to him, an’ to do to him as weel. I’m a vairy truthfu’ mon, young lady, an’ if ye must be told, I’ve called to wring his garry neck for dereesively gee’in an unoffending veesitor frae Thrums by yelling deealect at him frae the hoose-tops.”
“Are you sure it was here?” asked the nurse, anxiously, the old gentleman seemed so deeply in earnest.
“Sure? Oh, aye – pairfectly,” replied Lang Tammas; but even as he spoke, the falsity of his impression was proved by the same strident voice that had so offended before, coming from the other side of the street:
“What a crittur ye are, ye cow! What a crittur ye are!”
“Soonds are hard to place, ma’am,” said Lang Tammas, jerking about as if he had been shot. It was a very hard position for the old man, for, with the immediate need for an apology to the nurse, there rushed over him an overwhelming wave of anger. Hitherto it was merely a suspicion that he was being made sport of that had irritated him, but this last outburst – “What a crittur ye are, ye cow!” – was convincing evidence that it was to him that the insults were addressed; for in Thrums it is history that Hendry and T’nowhead and Jim McTaggart frequently greeted Lang Tammas’s jokes with “Oh, ye cow!” and “What a crittur ye are!” But the old man was equal to the emergency, and fixing one eye upon the house opposite and the other upon the sweet-faced nurse, he darted glances that should kill at his persecutor, and at the same time apologized for disturbing the nurse. The latter he did gracefully.
“Ye look aweary, ma’am,” he said. “An’ if the head o’ the hoose maun dee, may he dee immejiately, that ye may rest soon.”
And with this, pulling his hat down over his forehead viciously, he turned and sped swiftly across the way. The nurse gazed anxiously after him, and in her secret soul wondered if she would not better send for Jamie McQueen, the town constable. Poor Tammas’s eye was really so glaring, and his whole manner so manifestly that of a man exasperated to the verge of madness, that she considered him somewhat in the light of a menace to the public safety. She was not at all reassured, either, when Tammas, having reached the other side of the street, began gesticulating wildly, shaking his “faithfu’ steck” at the façade of the confronting flat-house. But an immediate realization of the condition of the sick man above led her to forego the attempt to protect the public safety, and closing the door softly to, she climbed the weary stairs to the sixth floor, and soon forgot the disturbing trial of the morning in reading to her patient certain inspiring chapters from the Badminton edition of Haggert’s Chase of Heretics, relieved with the lighter Rules of Golf; or, Auld Putt Idylls, by the Rev. Ian McCrockett, one of the most exquisitely confusing humorous works ever published in the Highlands.
Lang Tammas meanwhile was addressing an invisible somebody in the building over the way, and in no uncertain tones.
“If I were not a geentlemon and a humorist,” he said, impressively, agitating his stick nervously at the building front, “I could say much that nae Scut may say. But were I nae Scut, I’d say this to ye: ‘Ye have all the eelements of a confairmed heeritic. Ye’ve nae sense of deecint fun. Ye’re not a man for a’ that, as most men air – ye’re an ass, plain and simple, wi’ naether the plainness nor the simpleecity o’ the individual that Balaam rode. Further – more – ’”
What Lang Tammas would have said furthermore had he not been a Scot the world will never know, for from the other side of the street – farther along, however – came the squawking voice again:
“Gang awa’, gang awa’, ye crittur, ye cow! Hoot mon – hoot mon – hoot mon! Gang awa’, gang awa’!” And this was followed by a raucous cry, which might or might not have been Scottish, but which was, in any event, distinctly maddening. And even as the previous insults had electrified poor Tammas, so this last petrified him, and he stood for an appreciable length of time absolutely transfixed. His mind was a curious study. His coming had been prompted entirely by the genial spirit which throbbed beneath his stony Scottish exterior. For a long time he had been a resident of the most conspicuous Scotch town in all literature, and he was himself its accepted humorist. Then on a sudden Thrums had a rival. Drumtochty sprang forth, and in the matter of pathos, if not humor, ran Thrums hard; and Lang Tammas, attracted to Drumsheugh, had come this distance merely to pay his respects, and to see what manner of man the real Drumsheugh was.
And this was his reception! To be laughed at – he, a Scotch humorist! Had any one ever laughed at a Scotch humorist before? Never. Was not the test of humor in Scotland the failure to laugh of the hearer of the jest? Would Scotch humor ever prove great if not taken seriously? Oh, aye! Hendry never laughed at his jokes, and Hendry knew a joke when he saw one. McTaggart never smiled at Lang Tammas; and as for the little Minister – he knew what was due to the humorist of Thrums, as well as to himself, and enjoyed the exquisite humor of Tammas with a reserve well qualified to please the Presbytery and the Congregation.
How long Lang Tammas would have stood petrified no man may say; but just then who should come along but the person he had come to call upon – Drumsheugh himself.
“Knox et præterea nihil!” he exclaimed. “What in Glasgie hae we here?”
Lang Tammas turned upon him.
“Ye hae nowt in Glasgie here,” he said, sternly. “Ye hae a vairy muckle pit-oot veesitor, wha hae coom on an airand o’ good-will to be gret wi’ eensoolts.”
“Eensoolts?” retorted Drumsheugh. “Eensoolts, ye say? An’ wha hae bin eensooltin’ ye?”
“That I know nowt of, save that he be a doonricht foo’ a-heepin’ his deealect upon me head,” said Lang Tammas.
“And wha are ye to be so seensitive o’ deealect?” demanded Drumsheugh.
“My name is Lang Tammas – ”
“O’ Thrums?” cried Drumsheugh.
“Nane ither,” said Tammas.
Drumsheugh burst into an uproarious fit of laughter.
“The humorist?” he cried, catching his sides.
“Nane ither,” said Tammas, gravely. “And wha are ye?”
“Me? Oh, I’m – Drumsheugh o’ Drumtochty,” he replied. “Come along hame wi’ me. I’ll gie ye that to make the eensoolt seem a compliment.”
And the two old men walked off together.
An hour later, on their way to the kirk, Drumsheugh observed that after the service was over he would go with Lang Tammas and seek out the man who had insulted him and “gie” him a drubbing, which invitation Tammas was nothing loath to accept. Reverently the two new-made friends walked into the kirk and sat themselves down on the side aisle. A hymn was sung, and the minister was about to read from the book, when the silence of the church was broken by a shrill voice:
“Hoot mon! Hoot mon!”
Tammas clutched his stick. The voice was the same, and here it had penetrated the sacred precincts of the church! Nowhere was he safe from insult. Drumsheugh looked up, startled, and the voice began again:
“Gang awa’ a-that, a-that, a-that – gang awa’! Oh, ye crittur! oh, ye cow!”
And then a titter ran through that solemn crowd; for, despite the gravity of the situation, even John Knox himself must have smiled. A great green parrot had flown in at one of the windows, and had perched himself on the pulpit, where, with front undismayed, he addressed the minister:
“Gang awa’, gang awa’!” he cried, and preened himself. “Hoot mon, gang awa’!”
“Knox nobiscum!” ejaculated Drumsheugh. “It’s Moggie McPiggert’s pairrut,” and he chuckled; and then, as Lang Tammas realized the situation, even he smiled broadly. He had been insulted by a parrot only, and the knowledge of it made him feel better.
The bird was removed and the service proceeded; and later, when it was over, as the two old fellows walked back to Drumsheugh’s house in the gathering shades of the night, Lang Tammas said:
“I acquet Drumtochty o’ its eensoolts, Drumsheugh, but I’ve lairnt a lesson this day.”
“What’s that?” asked Drumsheugh.
“When pairruts speak Scutch deealect, it’s time we Scuts gae it oop,” said Tammas.
“I think so mysel’,” agreed Drumsheugh. “But hoo express our thochts?”
“I dinna ken for ye,” said Lang Tammas, “but for me, mee speakee heathen Chinee this timee on.”
“Vairy weel,” returned Drumsheugh. “Vairy weel; I dinna ken heathen Chinee, but I hae some acqueentance wi’ the tongue o’ sairtain Amairicans, and that I’ll speak from this day on – it’s vairy weel called the Bowery eediom, and is a judeecious mixture o’ English, Irish, and Volapeck.”
And from that time on Lang Tammas and Drumsheugh spoke never another word of Scotch dialect; and while Tammas never quite mastered pidgin-English, or Drumsheugh the tongue of Fadden, they lived happily ever after, which in a way proves that, after all, the parrot is a useful as well as an ornamental bird.
XII
CONCLUSION – LIKEWISE MR. BILLY JONES
The cheers which followed the narration of the curious resolve of Lang Tammas and Drumsheugh were vociferous, and Berkeley Hights sat down with a flush of pleasure on his face. He construed these as directed towards himself and his contribution to the diversion of the evening. It never entered into his mind that the applause involved a bit of subtle appreciation of the kindness of Tammas and of Drumsheugh to the reading public in thus declining to give them more of something of which they had already had enough.
When the cheers had subsided Mr. Jones rose from his chair and congratulated the club upon its exhibit.
“Even if you have but faintly re-echoed the weaknesses of the strong,” he said, “you have done well, and I congratulate you. It is not every man in your walk in life who can write as grammatically as you have dreamed. I have failed to detect in any one of the stories or poems thus far read a single grammatical error, and I have no doubt that the manuscripts that you have read from are gratifyingly free from mistakes in spelling as well, so that, from a newspaper man’s stand-point, I see no reason why you should not get these proceedings published, especially if you do it at your own expense.
“I now declare The Dreamers adjourned sine die!”
“Not much!” cried the members, unanimously. “Where’s your contribution?”
“Out with it, William!” shouted Tom Snobbe. “I can tell by the set of your coat that you’ve got a manuscript concealed in your pocket.”
“There’s nothing ruins the set of a coat more quickly than a rejected manuscript in the pocket,” put in Hudson Rivers. “I’ve been there myself – so, as Lang Tammas said, Billy, ‘Pit it oot, and get it crackit.’”
“Well,” Jones replied, with a pleased smile, “to tell you the truth, gentlemen, I had come prepared in case I was called upon; but the hour is late,” he added, after the manner of one who, though willing, enjoyed being persuaded. “Perhaps we had better postpone – ”
“Out with it, old man. It is late, but it will be later still if you don’t hurry up and begin,” said Tenafly Paterson.
“Very well, then, here goes,” said Jones. “Mine is a ghost-story, gentlemen, and it is called ‘The Involvular Club; or, The Return of the Screw.’ It is, like the rest of the work this evening, imitative, after a fashion, but I think it will prove effective.”
Mr. Jones hereupon took the manuscript from his bulging pocket and read as follows:
THE INVOLVULAR CLUB; OR, THE RETURN OF THE SCREW
The story had taken hold upon us as we sat round the blazing hearth of Lord Ormont’s smoking-room, at Castle Aminta, and sufficiently interfered with our comfort, as indeed from various points of view, not to specify any one of the many, for they were, after all, in spite of their diversity, of equal value judged by any standard, not even excepting the highest, that of Vereker’s disturbing narrative of the uncanny visitor to his chambers, which the reader may recall – indeed, must recall if he ever read it, since it was the most remarkable ghost-story of the year – a year in which many ghost-stories of wonderful merit, too, were written – and by which his reputation was made – or rather extended, for there were a certain few of us, including Feverel and Vanderbank and myself, who had for many years known him as a constant – almost too constant, some of us ventured, tentatively perhaps, but not the less convincedly, to say – producer of work of a very high order of excellence, rivalling in some of its more conspicuous elements, as well as in its minor, to lay no stress upon his subtleties, which were marked, though at times indiscreetly inevident even to the keenly analytical, hinging as these did more often than not upon abstractions born only of a circumscribed environment – circumscribed, of course, in the larger sense which means the narrowing of a circle of appreciation down to the select few constituting its essence – the productions of the greatest masters of fictional style the world has known, or is likely, in view of present tendencies towards miscalled romance, which consists solely of depicting scenes in which bloodshed and murder are rife, soon to know again – it was proper it should, in a company chosen as ours had been from among the members of The Involvular Club, with Adrian Feverel at its head, Vereker as its vice-president, and Lord Ormont, myself, and a number of ladies, including Diana of the Crossways, and little Maisie – for the child was one of our cares, her estate was so pitiable a one – Rhoda Fleming, Daisy Miller, and Princess Cassimassima, one and all, as the reader must be aware, personages – if I may thus refer to a group of appreciation which included myself – who knew a good thing when they saw it, which, it may as well be confessed at once, we rarely did in the raucous fields of fiction outside of, though possibly at times moderately contiguous to, our own territory, although it should be said that Miss Miller occasionally manifested a lamentable lack of regard for the objects for which The Involvular was formed, by showing herself, in her semi-American way, regrettably direct of speech and given over not infrequently to an unhappy use of slang, which we all, save Maisie, who was young, and, in spite of all she knew, not quite so knowledgeable a young person as some superficial observers have chosen to believe, sincerely deprecated, and on occasion when it might be done tactfully, endeavored to mitigate by a reproving glance, or by a still deeper plunge into nebulous rhetoric, as a sort of palliation to the Muse of Obscurity, which in our hearts we felt that good goddess would accept, strove to offset.
[“Excuse me,” said Mr. Tom Snobbe, rising and interrupting the reader at this point, “but is that all one sentence, Mr. Jones?”
“Yes,” Jones replied. “Why not? It’s perfectly clear in its meaning. Aren’t you used to long sentences on the Hudson?” he added, sarcastically.
“No,” retorted Snobbe; “that is to say, not where I live. I believe they have ’em at Sing Sing occasionally. But they never get used to them, I’m told.”
“Be quiet, Tom,” said Harry Snobbe. “It’s bad form to interrupt. Let Billy finish his story.” Mr. Jones then resumed his manuscript.]
A perceptible shudder ran through, or rather rolled over, the group, for it was corrugating in its quality, bringing forcibly to mind, quite as much for its chill, too, as for the wrinkling suggestion of its passage up and down our backs, turned as some of these were towards the fire, and others towards the steam-radiator, which now and again clicked startlingly in the dull red glow of the hearth light, augmenting the all too obvious nervousness of the listeners, the impassive and uninspiring squares of iron of which certain modern architects of a limited decorative sense – if, indeed, they have any at all, for the mere use of corrugated iron in the construction of a façade would seem not to admit of an æsthetic side to its designer’s nature, however ornately distributed over the surface of an exterior it may be – have chosen to avail themselves, prompted either by an appalling parsimony on the part of a client, or for reasons of haste employed for the lack of more immediately available material, it being an undeniable fact that in some portions of the world stucco and terracotta, now frequently used in lieu of more substantial, if not more enduring materials, are difficult of access, and the use of a speedily obtainable substitute becoming thus a requirement as inevitable as it is to be regretted, as in the case of the fruit-market at Venice, standing as it does on the bank of the Grand Canal, a pile of stark, staring, obtrusive, wrinkling zinc thrusting itself brazenly into the line of a vision attuned to the most gloriously towering palazzos, as rich in beauty as in romance, with such self-sufficiency as to bring tears to the eyes of the most stolidly unappreciative, of the most coldly unæsthetic, or, in short, as some one has chosen to say, in an essay the title of which and the name of whose author escape us at this moment, with such complacent vulgarity as to amount to nothing less than a dastardly blot upon the escutcheon of the Venetians, which all of their glorious achievements in art, in history, and in letters can never quite ineradically efface, and alongside of which the whistling steam-tugs with their belching funnels, which are by slow degrees supplanting the romantic gondolier with his picturesque costume and his tender songs of sunny climes in the cab service of the Bride of the Adriatic, seem quite excusable, or, in any event, not so unforgivable as to constitute what the Americans would call an infernal shame.
[At this point the reader was interrupted again.
“Hold on a minute, Billy – will you, please?” said Tenafly Paterson. “Let’s get this story straight. As I understand the first sentence somebody told a ghost-story, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” replied Jones, a trifle annoyed.
“And the second sentence means that those who heard it felt creepy?”
“Precisely.”
“Then why the deuce couldn’t you have said, ‘When So-and-So had finished, the company shuddered’?”
“Because,” replied Jones, “I am reading a story which is constructed after the manner of a certain school. I’m not reading a postal-card or a cable message.”
The reader then resumed.]
Miss Miller, to relieve the strain upon the nerves of those present, which was becoming unbearably tense – and, in fact, poor Maisie had burst into tears with the sheer terror of the climax, and had been taken off to be put to bed by Mrs. Brookenham, who, in spite of many other qualities, was still a womanly woman at heart, and not wholly deficient in those little tendernesses, those trifling but ineffable softnesses of nature, which are at once the chief source of woman’s strength and of her weakness, a fact she was constantly manifesting to us during our stay at Lord Ormont’s, and which we all remarked and in some cases commented upon, since the discovery had in it some of the qualities of a revelation – began to sing one of those extraordinary popular songs that one hears at the music-halls in London, and in the politer and more refined circles of American society, if indeed there may be said to be such a thing in a land so new as to be as yet mostly veneer, with little that is solid in its social substructure, beginning as its constituent factors do at the top and working downward, rather than choosing the more natural course of beginning at the bottom and working upward, and which must materially, one may think, affect the social solidarity of the nation by retarding its growth and in otherwise interfering with its healthy, not to say normal development, and which, as the words and import of it come back to me, was known by the rather vulgar and vernacular title of “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” thus indicating that the life treated of in the melody, which was not altogether unmusical, and was indeed as a matter of fact quite fetching in its quality, running in one’s ears for days and nights long after its first hearing, was that of the negro, and his personal likeness to his other black brethren in the eyes even of one who was supposed to have been at one time, prior to the action of the song if not coincidently with it, the object of his affections.
[Had Jones not been wholly absorbed in the reading of this wonderful story, he might at this moment have heard a slight but unmistakable rumbling sound, and have looked up and seen much that would have interested him. But, as this kind of a story requires for its complete comprehension a complete concentration of mind, he did not hear, and so, continuing, did not see.]
Diana was the first to mitigate the silence with comment [he read] a silence whose depth had only been rendered the more depressing by Miss Miller’s uncalled-for intrusion upon our mood of something that smacked of a society towards which most of us, in so far as we were able to do so, had always cultivated a strenuous aloofness, prompted not by any whelmful sense of our own perfection, latent or obvious, but rather by a realization on our part that it lacked the essentials that could make of it an interesting part of the lives of a group given over wholly, or at least as nearly wholly as the exiguities of existence would permit of a persistent and continuous devotion, to the contemplation of the beautiful in art, letters, or any other phase of human endeavor.
“And did his soul never thaw?” Diana asked.
“Never,” replied Vanderbank, “It is frozen yet.”
Here the rumbling sound grew to such volume that, absorbed as he was in his reading, Jones could no longer fail to hear it. Lowering his manuscript, he looked sternly upon the company. The rumbling sound was a chorus, not unmusical, of snores.
The Dreamers slept.
“Well, I’ll be hanged!” cried Jones, angrily, and then he walked over and looked behind the screen where the stenographer was seated. “I’ll finish it if it takes all night,” he muttered. “Just take this down,” he added to the stenographer; but that worthy never stirred or made reply. He too was sleeping.
Jones muttered angrily to himself.
“Very well,” he said. “I’ll read it to myself, then,” and he began again. For ten minutes he continued, and then on a sudden his voice faltered; his head fell forward upon his chest, his knees collapsed beneath him, and he slid inert, and snoring himself, into his chair. The MS. fluttered to the floor, and an hour later the waiters entering the room found the club unanimously engaged in dreaming once more.
The Involvular Club was too much for them, even for the author of it, but whether this was because of the lateness of the hour or because of the intricacies of the author’s style I have never been able to ascertain, for Mr. Jones is very sore on the point, and therefore reticent, and as for the others, I cannot find that any of them remember enough about it to be able to speak intelligently on the subject.
All I do know is what the landlord tells me, and that is that at 5 A.M. thirteen cabs containing thirteen sleeping souls pursued their thirteen devious ways to thirteen different houses, thus indicating that the Dreamers were ultimately adjourned, and, as they have not met since, I presume the adjournment was, as usual, sine die.
