Kitabı oku: «Those Times and These», sayfa 4
She clasped the gift to her breast, holding it there as though it were a priceless thing – too priceless to be intrusted to the keeping of any other than its possessor.
For perhaps five minutes after the departure of his recent patient the great specialist sat at his desk smiling gently to himself. Then he touched with his forefinger a button under the desk. His manservant entered.
“You have heard of troubles being started by a lie, haven’t you?” asked the doctor abruptly.
“Yes, sir – I think so, sir.”
The man was not an Englishman, but he had been trained in the school of English servants. His voice betrayed no surprise.
“Well, did you ever hear of troubles being ended by a lie?”
“Really, sir, I can’t say, sir – offhand.”
“Well, it can be done,” said the doctor; “in fact, it has been done.”
The man stood a moment.
“Was that all, sir?”
“No; not quite,” said the master. “Do you remember an Italian pedlar who was here the other day?”
“An Italian pedlar, sir?”
“Yes; don’t you remember? A street vender who passed the door. I called him in and bought a plaster cast from him – for seventy-five cents, as I recall.”
“Oh, yes, sir; I do remember now.”
The man’s eyes flitted to an empty space on the wall moulding above the bookcase behind his employer’s chair, and back again to his employer’s face.
“Well,” said the doctor, “you keep a lookout for him, in case he passes again. I want to buy another of those casts from him. I think it may be worth the money – the last one was, anyhow.”
CHAPTER III. MR. FELSBURG GETS EVEN
OF all the human legs ever seen in our town I am constrained to admit that Mr. Herman Felsburg’s pair were the most humorous legs. When it came to legs – funny legs – the palm was his without a struggle. Casting up in my mind a wide assortment and a great range of legs, I recall no set in the whole of Red Gravel County that, for pure comedy of contour or rare eccentricity of gait, could compare with the two he owned. In his case his legs achieved the impossible by being at one and the same time bent outward and warped inward, so that he was knock-kneed at a stated point and elsewhere bow-legged. And yet, as legs go, they were short ones. For a finishing touch he was, to a noticeably extent, pigeon-toed.
I remember mighty well the first time Mr. Felsburg’s legs first acquired for me an interest unrelated to their picturesqueness of aspect. As I think backward along the grooves of my memory to that occasion, it defies all the rules of perspective by looming on a larger scale and in brighter and more vivid colours than many a more important thing which occurred in a much more recent period. I reckon, though, that is because our Creator has been good enough to us sometimes to let us view our childhood with the big, round, magnifying eyes of a child.
I feel it to be so in my case. By virtue of a certain magic I see a small, inquisitive boy sitting on the top step of the wide front porch of an old white house; and as he sits he hugs his bare knees within the circle of his arms and listens with two wide-open ears to the talk that shuttles back and forth among three or four old men who are taking their comfort in easy-chairs behind a thick screen of dishrag and morning glory and balsam-apple vines.
I am that small boy who listens; and, as the picture forms and frames itself in my mind, one of the men is apt to be my uncle. He was not my uncle by blood ties or marriage, but through adoption only, as was the custom down our way in those days and, to a certain degree, is still the custom; and, besides, I was his namesake.
I know now, when by comparison I subject the scene to analysis, that they were not such very old men – then. They are old enough now – such of them as survive to this day. None of that group who yet lives will ever see seventy-five again. In those times grown people would have called them middle-aged men, or, at the most, elderly men; but when I re-create the vision out of the back of my head I invest them with an incredible antiquity and a vasty wisdom, because, as I said just now, I am looking at them with the eyes of a small boy again. Also, it seems to me, the season always is summer – late afternoon or early evening of a hot, lazy summer day.
It was right there, perched upon the top step of Judge Priest’s front porch, that I heard, piece by piece, the unwritten history of our town – its tragedies and its farces, its homely romances and its homely epics. There I heard the story of Singin’ Sandy Riggs, who, like Coligny, finally won by being repeatedly whipped; and his fist feud with Harve Allen, the bully; and the story of old Marm Perry, the Witch. I don’t suppose she was a witch really; but she owned a black cat and she had a droopy lid, which hung down over one red eye, and she lived a friendless life.
And so when the babies in the settlement began to sicken and die of the spotted fever somebody advanced the very plausible suggestion that Marm Perry had laid a spell upon the children, and nearly everybody else believed it. A man whose child fell ill of the plague in the very hour when Marm Perry had spoken to the little thing took a silver dollar and melted it down and made a silver bullet of it – because, of course, witches were immune to slugs of lead – and on the night after the day when they buried his baby he slipped up to Marm Perry’s cabin and fired through the window at her as she sat, with her black cat in her lap, mouthing her empty gums over her supper. The bullet missed her – and he was a good shot, too, that man was. Practically all the men who lived in those days on the spot where our town was to stand were good shots. They had to be – or else go hungry frequently.
When the news of this spread they knew for certain that only by fire could the evil charm be broken and the conjure-woman be destroyed. So one night soon after that a party of men broke into Marm Perry’s cabin and made prisoners of her and her cat. They muffled her head in a bedquilt and they thrust the cat into a bag, both of them yowling and kicking; and they carried them to a place on the bluff above Island Creek, a mile or so from the young settlement, and there they kindled a great fire of brush; and when the flames had taken good hold of the wood they threw Marm Perry and her cat into the blaze and stood back to see them burn. Mind you, this didn’t happen at Salem, Massachusetts, in or about the year 1692. It happened less than a century ago near a small river landing on what was then the southwestern frontier of these United States.
There were certain men, though – leaders of opinion and action in the rough young community – who did not altogether hold with the theory that the evil eye was killing off the babies. Somehow they learned what was afoot and they followed, hotspeed, on the trail of the volunteer executioners. As the tale has stood through nearly a hundred years of telling, they arrived barely in time. When they broke through the ring of witch burners and snatched Marm Perry off the pyre, her apron strings had burned in two. As for the cat, it burst through the bag and ran off through the woods, with its fur all ablaze, and was never seen again. I remember how I used to dream that story over and over again. Always in my dreams it reached its climax when that living firebrand went tearing off into the thickets. Somehow, to me, the unsalvaged cat took on more importance than its rescued owner.
There were times, too, when I chanced to be the only caller upon Judge Priest’s front porch, and these are the times which in retrospect seem to me to have been the finest of all. I used to slip away from home alone, along toward suppertime, and pay the Judge a visit. Many and many a day, sitting there on that porch step, I watched the birds going to bed. His big front yard was a great place for the birds. In the deep grass, all summer long and all day long, the cock partridge would be directing the attention of a mythical Bob White to the fact that his peaches were ripe and overripe. If spared by boys and house cats until the hunting season began he would captain a covey. Now he was chiefly concerned with a family. Years later I found that his dictionary name was American quail; but to us then he was a partridge, and in our town we still know him by no other title.
Forgetting all about the dogs and the guns of the autumn before he would even invade Judge Priest’s chicken lot to pick up titbits overlooked by the dull-eyed resident flock; and toward twilight, growing bolder still, he would whistle and whistle from the tall white gate post of the front fence, while his trim brown helpmate clucked lullabies to her speckled brood in the rank tangle back of the quince bushes.
When the redbirds called it a day and knocked off, the mocking birds took up the job and on clear moonlight nights sang all night in the honey locusts. Just before sunset yellow-hammers would be flickering about, tremendously occupied with things forgotten until then; and the chimney swifts that nested in Judge Priest’s chimney would go whooshing up and down the sooty flue, making haunted-house noises in the old sitting room below.
Sprawled in his favourite porch chair, the Judge would talk and I would listen. Sometimes, the situation being reversed, I would talk and he listen. Under the spell of his sympathetic understanding I would be moved to do what that most sensitive and secretive of creatures – a small boy – rarely does do: I would bestow my confidences upon him. And if he felt like laughing – at least, he never laughed. And if he felt that the disclosures called for a lecture he rarely did that, either; but if he did the admonition was so cleverly sugar-coated by his way of framing it that I took it down without tasting it.
As I see the vision now, it was at the close of a mighty warm day, when the sun went down as a red-hot ball and all the west was copper-plated with promise of more heat to-morrow, when Mr. Herman Felsburg passed. I don’t know what errand was taking him up Clay Street that evening – he lived clear over on the other side of town. But, anyway, he passed; and as he headed into the sunset glow I was inspired by a boy’s instinctive appreciation of the ludicrous to speak of the peculiar conformation of Mr. Felsburg’s legs. I don’t recall now just what it was I said, but I do recall, as clearly as though it happened yesterday, the look that came into Judge Priest’s chubby round face.
“Aha!” he said; and from the way he said it I knew he was displeased with me. He didn’t scold me, though – only he peered at me over his glasses until I felt my repentant soul shrivelling smaller and smaller inside of me; and then after a bit he said: “Aha! Well, son, I reckin mebbe you’re right. Old Man Herman has got a funny-lookin’ pair of laigs, ain’t he? They do look kinder like a set of hames that ain’t been treated kindly, don’t they? Whut was it you said they favoured – horse collars, wasn’t it?” I tucked a regretful head down between my hunched shoulders, making no reply. After another little pause he went on:
“Well, sonny, ef you should be spared to grow up to be a man, and there should be a war comin’ along, and you should git drawed into it someway, jest you remember this: Ef your laigs take you into ez many tight places and into ez many hard-fit fights as I’ve saw them little crookedy laigs takin’ that little man, you won’t have no call to feel ashamed of ‘em – not even ef yours should be so twisted you’d have to walk backward in order to go furward.”
At hearing this my astonishment was so great I forgot my remorse of a minute before. I took it for granted that off yonder, in those far-away days, most of the older men in our town had seen service on one side or the other in the Big War – mainly on the Southern side. But somehow it never occurred to me that Mr. Herman Felsburg might also have been a soldier. As far back as I recalled he had been in the clothing business. Boylike, I assumed he had always been in the clothing business. So —
“Was Mr. Felsburg in the war?” I asked.
“He most suttinly was,” answered Judge Priest.
“As a regular sure-nuff soldier!” I asked, still in doubt.
“Ez a reg’lar sure-nuff soldier.”
I considered for a moment.
“Why, he’s Jewish, ain’t he, Judge?” I asked next.
“So fur as my best information and belief go, he’s practically exclusively all Jewish,” said Judge Priest with a little chuckle.
“But I didn’t think Jewish gentlemen ever did any fighting, Judge?”
I imagine that bewilderment was in my tone, for my juvenile education was undergoing enlargement by leaps and bounds.
“Didn’t you?” he said. “Well, boy, you go to Sunday school, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes, sir – every Sunday – nearly.”
“Well, didn’t you ever hear tell at Sunday school of a little feller named David that taken a rock-sling and killed a big giant named Goliath?”
“Yes, sir; but – ”
“Well, that there little feller David was a Jew.”
“I know, sir; but – but that was so long ago!”
“It was quite a spell back, and that’s a fact,” agreed Judge Priest. “Even so, I reckin human nature continues to keep right on bein’ human nature. You’ll be findin’ that out, son, when you git a little further along in years. They learnt you about Samson, too, didn’t they – at that there Sunday school?”
I am quite sure I must have shown enthusiasm along here. At that period Samson was, with me, a favourite character in history. By reason of his recorded performances he held rank in my estimation with Israel Putnam and General N. B. Forrest.
“Aha!” continued the Judge. “Old Man Samson was right smart of a fighter, takin’ one thing with another, wasn’t he? Remember hearin’ about that time when he taken the jawbone of an ass and killed up I don’t know how many of them old Philistines?”
“Oh, yes, sir. And then that other time when they cut off his hair short and put him in jail, and after it grew out again he pulled the temple right smack down and killed everybody!”
“It strikes me I did hear somebody speakin’ of that circumstance too. I expect it must have created a right smart talk round the neighbourhood.”
I can hear the old Judge saying this, and I can see – across the years – the quizzical little wrinkles bunching at the corners of his eyes.
He sat a minute looking down at me and smiling.
“Samson was much of a man – and he was a Jew.”
“Was he?” I was shocked in a new place.
“That’s jest exactly what he was. And there was a man oncet named Judas – not the Judas you’ve heared about, but a feller with the full name of Judas Maccabæus; and he was such a pert hand at fightin’ they called him the Hammer of the Jews. Judgin’ by whut I’ve been able to glean about him, his enemies felt jest as well satisfied ef they could hear, before the hostilities started, that Judas was laid up sick in bed somewheres. It taken considerable of a load off their minds, ez you might say.
“But – jest as you was sayin’, son, about David – it’s been a good while since them parties flourished. When we look back on it, it stretches all the way frum here to B. C.; and that’s a good long stretch, and a lot of things have been happenin’ meantime. But I sometimes git to thinkin’ that mebbe little Herman Felsburg has got some of that old-time Jew fightin’ blood in his veins. Anyhow, he belongs to the same breed. No, sirree, sonny; it don’t always pay to judge a man by his laigs. You kin do that with reguards to a frog or a grasshopper, or even sometimes with a chicken; but not with a man. It ain’t the shape of ‘em that counts – it’s where they’ll take you in time of trouble.”
He cocked his head down at me – I saying nothing at all. There didn’t seem to be anything for me to say; so I maintained silence and he spoke on:
“You jest bear that in mind next time you feel moved to talk about laigs. And ef it should happen to be Mister Felsburg’s laigs that you’re takin’ fur your text, remember this whut I’m tellin’ you now: They may be crooked; but, son, there ain’t no gamer pair of laigs nowheres in this world. I’ve seen ‘em carry in’ him into battle when, all the time, my knees was knockin’ together, the same ez one of these here end men in a minstrel show knocks his bones together. His laigs may ‘a’ trembled a little bit too – I ain’t sayin’ they didn’t – but they kept right on promenadin’ him up to where the trouble was; and that’s the main p’int with a set of shanks. You jest remember that.”
Being sufficiently humbled I said I would remember it.
“There’s still another thing about Herman Felsburg’s laigs that most people round here don’t know, neither,” added Judge Priest when I had made my pledge: “All up and down the back sides of his calves, and clear down on his shins, there’s a whole passel of little red marks. There’s so many of them little scars that they look jest like lacework on his skin.”
“Did he get them in the war?” I inquired eagerly, scenting a story.
“No; he got them before the war came along,” said Judge Priest. “Some of these times, sonny, when you’re a little bit older, I’ll tell you a tale about them scars on Mr. Felsburg’s laigs. There ain’t many besides me that knows it.”
“Couldn’t I hear it now?” I asked.
“I reckin you ain’t a suitable age to understand – y it,” said Judge Priest. “I reckin we’d better wait a few years. But I won’t for-git – I’ll tell you when the time’s ripe. Anyhow, there’s somethin’ else afoot now – somethin’ that ought to interest a hongry boy.”
I became aware of his house servant – Jeff Poindexter – standing in the hall doorway, waiting until his master concluded whatever he might be saying in order to make an important announcement.
“All right, Jeff!” said Judge Priest. “I’ll be there in a minute.” Then, turning to me: “Son-boy, hadn’t you better stay here fur supper with me? I expect there’s vittles enough fur two. Come on – I’ll make Jeff run over to your house and tell your mother I kept you to supper with me.”
After that memorable supper with Judge Priest – all the meals I ever took as his guest were memorable events and still are – ensues a lapse, to be measured by years, before I heard the second chapter of what might be called the tale of Mr. Felsburg’s legs. I heard it one evening in the Judge’s sitting room.
A squeak had come into my voice, and there was a suspicion of down – a mere trace, as the chemists say – on my upper lip. I was in the second week of proud incumbency of my first regular job. I had gone to work on the Daily Evening News– the cubbiest of cub reporters, green as a young gourd, but proud as Potiphar over my new job and my new responsibilities. This time it was professional duty rather than the social instinct that took me to the old Judge’s house.
I had been charged by my editor to get from him divers litigatious facts relating to a decision he had that day rendered in the circuit court where he presided. The information having been vouchsafed, the talk took a various trend. Somewhere in the course of it Mr. Felsburg’s name came up and my memory ran back like a spark along a tarred string to that other day when he had promised to relate to me an episode connected with certain small scars on those two bandy legs of our leading clothing merchant.
The present occasion seemed fitting for hearing this long-delayed narrative. I reminded my host of his olden promise; and between puffs at his corncob pipe he told me the thing which I retell here and now, except that, for purposes of convenience, I have translated the actual wording of it out of Judge Priest’s vernacular into my own.
So doing, it devolves upon me, first off, to introduce into the main theme a character not heretofore mentioned – a man named Thomas Albritton, a farmer in our country, and at one period a prosperous one. He lived, while he lived – for he has been dead a good while now – six miles from town, on the Massac Creek Road. He lived there all his days. His father before him had cleared the timber off the land and built the two-room log house of squared logs, with the open “gallery” between. With additions, the house grew in time to be a rambling, roomy structure, but from first to last it kept its identity; and even after the last of the old tenants died off or moved off, and new tenants moved in, it was still known as the Albritton place. For all I know to the contrary, it yet goes by that name.
From pioneer days on until this Thomas Albritton became heir to the farm and head of the family, the Albrittons had been a forehanded breed – people with a name for thrift. In fact, I had it that night from the old Judge that, for a good many years after he grew up, this Thomas Albritton enjoyed his due share of affluence. He raised as good a grade of tobacco and as many bushels of corn to the acre as anybody in the Massac Bottoms raised; and, so far as ready money went, he was better off than most of his neighbours.
Perhaps, though, he was not so provident as his sire had been; or perhaps, in a financial way, he had in his latter years more than his share of bad luck. Anyhow, after a while he began to go downhill financially, which is another way of saying he got into debt. Piece by piece he sold off strips of the fertile creek lands his father had cleared. There came a day when he owned only the house, standing in its grove of honey locusts, and the twenty acres surrounding it; and the title to those remaining possessions was lapped and overlapped by mortgages.
It is the rule of this merry little planet of ours that some must go up while others go down. Otherwise there would be no room at the top for those who climb. Mr. Herman Felsburg was one who steadily went up. When first I knew him he was rated among the wealthy men of our town. By local standards of those days he was rich – very rich. To me, then, it seemed that always he must have been rich. But here Judge Priest undeceived me.
When Mr. Felsburg, after four years of honourable service as a private soldier in the army of the late Southern Confederacy, came back with the straggling handful that was left of Company B to the place where he had enlisted, he owned of this world’s goods just the rags he stood in, plus a canny brain, a provident and saving instinct, and a natural aptitude for barter and trade.
Somewhere, somehow, he scraped together a meagre capital of a few dollars, and with this he opened a tiny cheap-John shop down on Market Square, where he sold gimcracks to darkies and poor whites. He prospered – it was inevitable that he should prosper. He took unto himself a wife of his own people; and between periods of bearing him children she helped him to save. He brought his younger brother, Ike, over from the old country and made Ike a full partner with him in his growing business.
Long before those of my own generation were born the little store down on Market Square was a reminiscence. Two blocks uptown, on the busiest corner in town, stood Felsburg Brothers’ Oak Hall Clothing Emporium, then, as now, the largest and the most enterprising merchandising establishment in our end of the state. If you could not find it at Felsburg Brothers’ you simply could not find it anywhere – that was all. It was more than a store; it was an institution, like the courthouse and the county-fair grounds.
The multitudinous affairs of the industry he had founded did not engage the energies of the busy little man with the funny legs to the exclusion of other things. As the saying goes, he branched out. He didn’t speculate – he was too conservative for that; but where there seemed a chance to invest an honest dollar with a reasonable degree of certainty of getting back, say, a dollar-ten in due time, he invested. Some people called it luck, which is what some people always call it when it turns out so; but, whether it was luck or just foresight, whatsoever he touched seemed bound to flourish and beget dividends.
Eventually, as befitting one who had risen to be a commanding figure in the commercial affairs of the community, Mr. Felsburg became an active factor in its financial affairs. As a stockholder, the Commonwealth Bank welcomed him to its hospitable midst. Soon it saw its way clear to making him a director and vice president. There was promise of profit in the use of his name. Printed on the letterheads, it gave added solidity and added substantiality to the bank’s roster. People liked him too. Behind his short round back they might gibe at the shape of his legs, and laugh at his ways of butchering up the English language and twisting up the metaphors with which he besprinkled his everyday walk and conversation; but, all the same, they liked him.
So, in his orbit Mr. Herman Felsburg went up and up to the very peaks of prominence; and while he did this, that other man I have mentioned – Thomas Albritton – went down and down until he descended to the very bottom of things.
In the fullness of time the lines of these two crossed, for it was at the Commonwealth Bank that Albritton negotiated the first and, later, the second of his loans upon his homestead. Indeed, it was Mr. Felsburg who both times insisted that Albritton be permitted to borrow, even though, when the matter of making the second mortgage came up, another director, who specialised in county property, pointed out that, to begin with, Albritton wasn’t doing very well; and that, in the second place, the amount of his indebtedness already was as much and very possibly more than as much as the farm would bring at forced sale.
Even though the bank bought it in to protect itself – and in his gloomy mind’s eye this director foresaw such a contingency – it might mean a cash loss; but Mr. Felsburg stood pat; and, against the judgment of his associates, he had his way about it. Subsequently, when Mr. Felsburg himself offered to relieve the bank of all possibility of an ultimate deficit by buying Albritton’s paper, the rest of the board felt relieved. Practically by acclamation he was permitted to do so.
Of this, however, the borrower knew nothing at all, Mr. Felsburg having made it a condition that his purchase should be a private transaction. So far as the borrower’s knowledge went, he owed principal and interest to the bank. There was no reason why Albritton should suspect that Mr. Herman Felsburg took any interest, selfish or otherwise, in his affairs, or that Mr. Felsburg entertained covetous designs upon his possessions. Mr. Felsburg wasn’t a money lender. He was a clothing merchant. And Albritton wasn’t a business man – his present condition, stripped as he was of most of his inheritance, and with the remaining portion heavily encumbered, gave ample proof of that.
Besides, the two men scarcely knew each other. Albritton was an occasional customer at the Oak Hall. But, for the matter of that, so was nearly everybody else in Red Gravel County; and when he came in to make a purchase it was never the senior member of the firm but always one of the clerks who served him. At such times Mr. Felsburg, from the back part of the store, would watch Mr. Albritton steadily. He never approached him, never offered to speak to him; but he watched him.
One day, not so very long after the date when Mr. Felsburg privately took over the mortgages on the Albritton place, Albritton drove in with a load of tobacco for the Buckner & Keys Warehouse; and, leaving his team and loaded wagon outside, he went into the Oak Hall to buy something. Adolph Dreifus, one of the salesmen, waited on him as he often had before.
The owners of the establishment were at the moment engaged in conference in the rear of the store. Mr. Ike Felsburg was urging, with all the eloquence at his command, the advisability of adding a line of trunks and suit cases to the stock – a venture which he personally strongly favoured – when he became aware that his brother was not heeding what he had to say. Instead of heeding, Mr. Herman was peering along a vista of counters and garment racks to where Adolph Dreifus stood on one side of a show case and Tom Albritton stood on the other. There was a queer expression on Mr. Felsburg’s face. His eyes were squinted and his tongue licked at his lower lip.
“Hermy,” said the younger man, irritated that his brother’s attention should go wandering afar while a subject of such importance was under discussion, “Hermy, would you please be so good as to listen to me what I am saying to you?”
There was no answer. Mr. Herman continued to stare straight ahead. Mr. Ike raised his voice impatiently:
“Hermy!”
The older man turned on him with such suddenness that Mr. Ike almost slipped off the stool upon which he was perched.
“What’s the idea – yelling in my ear like a graven image?” demanded Mr. Herman angrily. “Do you think maybe I am deef or something?”
“But, Hermy,” complained Mr. Ike, “you ain’t listening at all. Twice now I have to call you; in fact, three times.”
“Is that so?” said Mr. Herman with elaborate sarcasm. “I suppose you think I got nothing whatever at all to do except I should listen to you? If I should spend all my time listening to you where would this here Oak Hall Clothing Emporium be? I should like to ask you that. Gabble, gabble, gabble all day long – that is you! Me, I don’t talk so much; but I do some thinking.”
“But this is important, what I am trying to tell you, Hermy. Why should you be watching yonder, with a look on your face like as if you would like to bite somebody? Adolph Dreifus ain’t so dumb in the head but what he could sell a pair of suspenders or something without your glaring at him every move what he makes.”
“Did I say I was looking at Adolph Dreifus?” asked Mr. Herman truculently.
“Well, then, if you ain’t looking at Adolph, why should you look so hard at that Albritton fellow? He don’t owe us any money, so far as I know. For what he gets he pays cash, else we positively wouldn’t let him have the goods. I’ve seen you acting like this before, Hermy. Every time that Albritton comes in this place you drop whatever you are doing and hang round and hang round, watching him. I noticed it before; and I should like to ask – ”
