Delphi complete works of.., p.634
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 634
Impy left by the back way. Before the scrape of her hard, bare feet had died away on the back porch, a wild shriek — I was sure it was hers — filled the hollow house. Then the deep, gruff tones of an angry man’s voice mingled with the girl’s further squeals and unintelligible words.
Azalea Adair rose without surprise or emotion and disappeared. For two minutes I heard the hoarse rumble of the man’s voice; then something like an oath and a slight scuffle, and she returned calmly to her chair.
“This is a roomy house,” she said, “and I have a tenant for part of it. I am sorry to have to rescind my invitation to tea. It was impossible to get the kind I always use at the store. Perhaps to-morrow Mr. Baker will be able to supply me.”
I was sure that Impy had not had time to leave the house. I inquired concerning street-car lines and took my leave. After I was well on my way I remembered that I had not learned Azalea Adair’s name. But to-morrow would do.
That same day I started in on the course of iniquity that this uneventful city forced upon me. I was in the town only two days, but in that time I managed to lie shamelessly by telegraph, and to be an accomplice — after the fact, if that is the correct legal term — to a murder.
As I rounded the corner nearest my hotel the Afrite coachman of the polychromatic, nonpareil coat seized me, swung open the dungeony door of his peripatetic sarcophagus, flirted his feather duster and began his ritual: “Step right in, boss. Carriage is clean — jus’ got back from a funeral. Fifty cents to any—”
And then he knew me and grinned broadly. “‘Souse me, boss; you is de geni’man what rid out with me dis mawnin’. Thank you kindly, suh.”
“I am going out to 861 again to-morrow afternoon at three,” said I, “and if you will be here, I’ll let you drive me. So you know Miss Adair?” I concluded, thinking of my dollar bill.
“I belonged to her father, Judge Adair, suh,” he replied. “I judge that she is pretty poor,” I said. “She hasn’t much money to speak of, has she?”
For an instant I looked again at the fierce countenance of King Cettiwayo, and then he changed back to an extortionate old Negro hack driver.
“She ain’t gwine to starve, suh,” he said slowly. “She has reso’ces, suh; she has reso’ces.”
“I shall pay you fifty cents for the trip,” said I.
“Dat is puffeckly correct, suh,” he answered humbly. “I jus’ had to have dat two dollars dis mawnin’, boss.”
I went to the hotel and lied by electricity. I wired the magazine: “A. Adair holds out for eight cents a word.” The answer that came back was: “Give it to her quick, you duffer.”
Just before dinner “Major” Wentworth Caswell bore down upon me with the greetings of a long-lost friend. I have seen few men whom I have so instantaneously hated, and of whom it was so difficult to be rid. I was standing at the bar when he invaded me; therefore I could not wave the white ribbon in his face. I would have paid gladly for the drinks, hoping, thereby, to escape another; but he was one of those despicable, roaring, advertising bibbers who must have brass bands and fireworks attend upon every cent that they waste in their follies.
With an air of producing millions he drew two one-dollar bills from a pocket and dashed one of them upon the bar. I looked once more at the dollar bill with the upper right-hand corner missing, torn through the middle, and patched with a strip of blue tissue paper. It was my dollar bill again. It could have been no other.
I went up to my room. The drizzle and the monotony of a dreary, eventless Southern town had made me tired and listless. I remember that just before I went to bed I mentally disposed of the mysterious dollar bill (which might have formed the clew to a tremendously fine detective story of San Francisco) by saying to myself sleepily: “Seems as if a lot of people here own stock in the Hack-Driver’s Trust. Pays dividends promptly, too. Wonder if—” Then I fell asleep.
King Cettiwayo was at his post the next day, and rattled my bones over the stones out to 861. He was to wait and rattle me back again when I was ready.
Azalea Adair looked paler and cleaner and frailer than she had looked on the day before. After she had signed the contract at eight cents per word she grew still paler and began to slip out of her chair. Without much trouble I managed to get her up on the antediluvian horse-hair sofa and then I ran out to the sidewalk and yelled to the coffee-colored Pirate to bring a doctor. With a wisdom that I had not suspected in him, he abandoned his team and struck off up the street afoot, realizing the value of speed. In ten minutes he returned with a grave, gray-haired and capable man of medicine. In a few words (worth much less than eight cents each) I explained to him my presence in the hollow house of mystery. He bowed with stately understanding, and turned to the old Negro.
“Uncle Cæsar,” he said calmly, “run up to my house and ask Miss Lucy to give you a cream pitcher full of fresh milk and half a tumbler of port wine. And hurry back. Don’t drive — run. I want you to get back sometime this week.”
It occurred to me that Dr. Merriman also felt a distrust as to the speeding powers of the land-pirate’s steeds. After Uncle Cæsar was gone, lumberingly, but swiftly, up the street, the doctor looked me over with great politeness and as much careful calculation until he had decided that I might do.
“It is only a case of insufficient nutrition,” he said. “In other words, the result of poverty, pride, and starvation. Mrs. Caswell has many devoted friends who would be glad to aid her, but she will accept nothing except from that old Negro, Uncle Cæsar, who was once owned by her family.”
“Mrs. Caswell!” said I, in surprise. And then I looked at the contract and saw that she had signed it “Azalea Adair Caswell.”
“I thought she was Miss Adair,” I said.
“Married to a drunken, worthless loafer, sir,” said the doctor. “It is said that he robs her even of the small sums that her old servant contributes toward her support.”
When the milk and wine had been brought the doctor soon revived Azalea Adair. She sat up and talked of the beauty of the autumn leaves that were then in season, and their height of color. She referred lightly to her fainting seizure as the outcome of an old palpitation of the heart. Impy fanned her as she lay on the sofa. The doctor was due elsewhere, and I followed him to the door. I told him that it was within my power and intentions to make a reasonable advance of money to Azalea Adair on future contributions to the magazine, and he seemed pleased.
“By the way,” he said, “perhaps you would like to know that you have had royalty for a coachman. Old Cæsar’s grandfather was a king in Congo. Cæsar himself has royal ways, as you may have observed.”
As the doctor was moving off I heard Uncle Cæsar’s voice inside: “Did he git bofe of dem two dollars from you, Mis’ Zalea?”
“Yes, Cæsar,” I heard Azalea Adair answer weakly. And then I went in and concluded business negotiations with our contributor. I assumed the responsibility of advancing fifty dollars, putting it as a necessary formality in binding our bargain. And then Uncle Cæsar drove me back to the hotel.
Here ends all of the story as far as I can testify as a witness. The rest must be only bare statements of facts.
At about six o’clock I went out for a stroll. Uncle Cæsar was at his corner. He threw open the door of his carriage, flourished his duster and began his depressing formula: “Step right in, suh. Fifty cents to anywhere in the city — hack’s puffickly clean, suh — jus’ got back from a funeral—”
And then he recognized me. I think his eyesight was getting bad. His coat had taken on a few more faded shades of color, the twine strings were more frayed and ragged, the last remaining button — the button of yellow horn — was gone. A motley descendant of kings was Uncle Cæsar!
About two hours later I saw an excited crowd besieging the front of a drug store. In a desert where nothing happens this was manna; so I edged my way inside. On an extemporized couch of empty boxes and chairs was stretched the mortal corporeality of Major Wentworth Caswell. A doctor was testing him for the immortal ingredient. His decision was that it was conspicuous by its absence.
The erstwhile Major had been found dead on a dark street and brought by curious and ennuied citizens to the drug store. The late human being had been engaged in terrific battle — the details showed that. Loafer and reprobate though he had been, he had been also a warrior. But he had lost. His hands were yet clinched so tightly that his fingers would not be opened. The gentle citizens who had known him stood about and searched their vocabularies to find some good words, if it were possible, to speak of him. One kind-looking man said, after much thought: “When ‘Cas’ was about fo’teen he was one of the best spellers in school.”
While I stood there the fingers of the right hand of “the man that was,” which hung down the side of a white pine box, relaxed, and dropped something at my feet. I covered it with one foot quietly, and a little later on I picked it up and pocketed it. I reasoned that in his last struggle his hand must have seized that object unwittingly and held it in a death grip.
At the hotel that night the main topic of conversation, with the possible exceptions of politics and prohibition, was the demise of Major Caswell. I heard one man say to a group of listeners:
“In my opinion, gentlemen, Caswell was murdered by some of these no-account niggers for his money. He had fifty dollars this afternoon which he showed to several gentlemen in the hotel. When he was found the money was not on his person.”
I left the city the next morning at nine, and as the train was crossing the bridge over the Cumberland River I took out of my pocket a yellow horn overcoat button the size of a fifty-cent piece, with frayed ends of coarse twine hanging from it, and cast it out of the window into the slow, muddy waters below.
I wonder what’s doing in Buffalo!
JEFF PETERS AS A PERSONAL MAGNET
JEFF PETERS has been engaged in as many schemes for making money as there are recipes for cooking rice in Charleston, S. C.
Best of all I like to hear him tell of his earlier days when he sold liniments and cough cures on street corners, throwing heads or tails with fortune for his last coin.
“I struck Fisher Hill, Arkansaw,” said he, “in a buckskin suit, moccasins, long hair and a thirty-carat diamond ring that I got from an actor in Texarkana. I don’t know what he ever did with the pocket knife I swapped him for it.
“I was Dr. Waugh-hoo, the celebrated Indian medicine man. I carried only one best bet just then, and that was Resurrection Bitters. It was made of life-giving plants and herbs accidentally discovered by Ta-qua-la, the beautiful wife of the chief of the Choctaw Nation, while gathering truck to garnish a platter of boiled dog for the annual corn dance.
“Business hadn’t been good at the last town, so I only had five dollars. I went to the Fisher Hill druggist and he credited me for half a gross of eight-ounce bottles and corks. I had the labels and ingredients in my valise, left over from the last town. Life began, to look rosy again after I got in my hotel room with the water running from the tap, and the Resurrection Bitters lining up on the table by the dozen.
“Fake? No, sir. There was two dollars’ worth of fluid extract of cinchona and a dime’s worth of aniline in that half-gross of bitters. I’ve gone through towns years afterwards and had folks ask for ’em again.
“I hired a wagon that night and commenced selling the bitters on Main Street. Fisher Hill was a low, malarial town; and a compound hypothetical pneumo-cardiac anti-scorbutic tonic was just what I diagnosed the crowd as needing. The bitters started off like sweetbreads-on-toast at a vegetarian dinner. I had sold two dozen at fifty cents apiece when I felt somebody pull my coat tail. I knew what that meant; so I climbed down and sneaked a five dollar bill into the hand of a man with a German silver star on his lapel.
“‘Constable,’ says I, ‘it’s a fine night.’
“‘Have you got a city license,’ he asks, ‘to sell this illegitimate essence of spooju that you flatter by the name of medicine?’
“T have not,’ says I. T didn’t know you had a city. If I can find it to-morrow I’ll take one out if it’s necessary.’
‘“HI have to close you up till you do,’ says the constable.
“I quit selling and went back to the hotel. I was talking to the landlord about it.
“‘Oh, you won’t stand no show in Fisher Hill,’ says he. ‘Dr. Hoskins, the only doctor here, is brother-in-law of the Mayor, and they won’t allow no fake doctor to practice in town.’
“‘I don’t practice medicine,’ says I, ‘I’ve got a State peddler’s license, and I take out a city one wherever they demand it.’
“I went to the Mayor’s office the next morning and they told me he hadn’t showed up yet. They didn’t know when he’d be down. So Dr. Waugh-hoo hunches again in a hotel chair and lights a jimpson-weed regalia, and waits.
“By and by a young man in a blue necktie slips into the chair next to me and asks the time.
“‘Half-past ten,’ says I, ‘and you are Andy Tucker. I’ve seen you work. Wasn’t it you that put up the Great Cupid Combination package on the Southern States? Let’s see, it was a Chilean engagement ring, a wedding ring, a potato masher, a bottle of soothing syrup and Dorothy Vernon — all for fifty cents.’
“Andy was pleased to hear that I remembered him. He was a good street man; and he was more than that — he respected his profession, and he was satisfied with 300 per cent profit. He had plenty of offers to go into the illegitimate drug and garden seed business; but he was never to be tempted off of the straight path.
“I wanted a partner, so Andy and me agreed to go out together. I told him about the situation in Fisher Hill and how finances was low on account of the local mixture of politics and jalap. Andy had just got in on the train that morning. He was pretty low himself, and was going to canvass the town for a few dollars to build a new battleship by popular subscription at Eureka Springs. So we went out and sat on the porch and talked it over.
“The next morning at eleven o’clock when I was sitting there alone, an Uncle Tom shuffles into the hotel and asked for the doctor to come and see Judge Banks, who, it seems, was the mayor and a mighty sick man.
‘“I’m no doctor,’ says I. ‘Why don’t you go and get the doctor?’
“‘Boss,’ says he, ‘Doc Hoskins am done gone twenty miles in de country to see some sick persons. He’s de only doctor in de town, and Massa Banks am powerful bad off. He sent me to ax you to please, suh, come.’
“‘As man to man,’ says I, ‘I’ll go and look him over.’ So I put a bottle of Resurrection Bitters in my pocket and goes up on the hill to the mayor’s mansion, the finest house in town, with a mansard roof and two cast iron dogs on the lawn.
“This Mayor Banks was in bed all but his whiskers and feet. He was making internal noises that would have had everybody in San Francisco hiking for the parks. A young man was standing by the bed holding a cup of water.
“‘Doc,’ says the Mayor, ‘I’m awful sick. I’m about to die. Can’t you do nothing for me?’
“‘Mr. Mayor,’ says I, ‘I’m not a regular pre-ordained disciple of S’. Q. Lapius. I never took a course in a medical college,’ says I. ‘I’ve just come as a fellow man to see if I could be of assistance.’
‘“I’m deeply obliged,’ says he. ‘Doc Waugh-hoo, this is my nephew, Mr. Biddle. He has tried to alleviate my distress, but without success. Oh, Lordy! Ow-ow-ow!!’ he sings out.
“I nod at Mr. Biddle and sets down by the bed and feels the mayor’s pulse. ‘Let me see your liver — your tongue, I mean,’ says I. Then I turns up the lids of his eyes and looks close at the pupils of ’em.
“‘How long have you been sick?’ I asked.
“‘I was taken down — ow — ouch — last night,’ says the Mayor. ‘Gimme something for it, doc, won’t you?’
“‘Mr. Fiddle,’ says I, ‘raise the window shade a bit, will you?’
“‘Biddle,’ says the young man. ‘Do you feel like you could eat some ham and eggs, Uncle James?’
“‘Mr. Mayor,’ says I, after laying my ear to his right shoulder blade and listening, ‘you’ve got a bad attact of super-inflammation of the right clavicle of the harpsichord!’
“‘Good Lord!’ says he, with a groan. ‘Can’t you rub something on it, or set it or anything?’
“I picks up my hat and starts for the door.
‘“You ain’t going, Doc?’ says the Mayor with a howl. ‘You ain’t going away and leave me to die with this — superfluity of the clapboards, are you?’
“‘Common humanity, Dr. Whoa-ha,’ says Mr. Biddle, ‘ought to prevent your deserting a fellow-human in distress.’
“‘Dr. Waugh-hoo, when you get through plowing,’ says I. And then I walks back to the bed and throws back my long hair.
“‘Mr. Mayor,’ says I, ‘there is only one hope for you. Drugs will do you no good. But there is another power higher yet, although drugs are high enough,’ says I.
‘“And what is that?’ says he.
‘“Scientific demonstrations,’ says I. ‘The triumph of mind over sarsaparilla. The belief that there is no pain and sickness except what is produced when we ain’t feeling well. Declare yourself in arrears. Demonstrate.’
‘“What is this paraphernalia you speak of, Doc?’ says the Mayor. ‘You ain’t a Socialist, are you?’
‘“I am speaking,’ says I, ‘of the great doctrine of psychic financiering — of the enlightened school of longdistance, sub-conscientious treatment of fallacies and meningitis — of that wonderful in-door sport known as personal magnetism.’
“‘Can you work it, Doc?’ asks the Mayor.
“‘I’m one of the Sole Sanhedrims and Ostensible Hooplas of the Inner Pulpit,’ says I. ‘The lame talk and the blind rubber whenever I make a pass at ’em. I am a medium, a coloratura hypnotist and a spirituous control. It was only through me at the recent seances at Ann Arbor that the late president of the Vinegar Bitters Company could revisit the earth to communicate with his sister Jane.
You see me peddling medicine on the streets,’ says I, * to the poor. I don’t practice personal magnetism on them. I do not drag it in the dust,’ says I, ‘because they haven’t got the dust.’
