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The Underdog

F >> F. Hopkinson Smith >> The Underdog




Then there was the "Big Pipe" contractor--a lean man with half-moon
whiskers, a red, weather-beaten, knotted face, bushy gray eyebrows, and
a clean-shaven mouth that looked when shut like a healed scar. On Sunday
this magnate wore a yellow diamond pin and sat in his shirt-sleeves.

There could be found, too, now and then, tilted back on their chairs,
two or three of the light-fingered gentry from the race-course near
by--pale, consumptive-looking men, with field-glasses hung over their
shoulders and looking like bank-clerks, they were so plainly and neatly
dressed; as well as some of the less respectable neighbors, besides a
few intimate personal friends like myself.

While Muffles shaved and the group about him discussed the several
ways--some of them rather shady, I'm afraid--in which they and their
constituents earned their daily bread, the stable-boy--he was a street
waif, picked up to keep him from starving--served the beverages. Muffles
had no Sunday license, of course, but a little thing like that never
disturbed Muffles or his friends--not with the Captain of the Precinct
as part owner.

My intimacy with Muffles dated from a visit I had made him a year
before, when I stopped in one of my sketching-tramps to get something
cooling. A young friend of mine--a musician--was with me. Muffles's
garden was filled with visitors: some celebration or holiday had called
the people out. Muffles, in expectation, had had the piano tuned and had
sent to town for an orchestra of three. The cornet and bass-viol had put
in an appearance, but the pianist had been lost in the shuffle.

"De bloke ain't showed up and we can't git nothin' out o' de fish-horn
and de scrape--see?" was the way Muffles put it.

My friend was a graduate of the Conservatoire, an ex-stroke, crew of
'91, owned a pair of shears which he used twice a year in the vaults of
a downtown bank, and breakfasted every day at twelve--but none of these
things had spoiled him.

"Don't worry," he said; "put a prop under your piano-lid and bring me a
chair. I'll work the ivories for you."

He played till midnight, drank his free beers between each selection,
his face as grave as a judge except when he would wink at me out of the
corner of his eye to show his intense enjoyment of the whole situation.
You can judge of its effect on the audience when I tell you that one
young girl in a pink shirt-waist was so overcome with emotion and so
sorry for the sad young man who had to earn his living in any such way,
that she laid a ten-cent piece on the piano within reach of my friend's
fingers. The smile of intense gratitude which permeated his face--a
"thank-God-you-have-saved-me-from-starvation" smile, was part of the
evening's enjoyment. He wears the dime now on his watch-chain; he says
it is the only money he ever earned by his music; to which one of his
club-friends added, "Or in your life."

Since that time I have been _persona grata_ to Muffles. Since that time,
too, I have studied him at close range: on snowy days--for I like my
tramps in winter, with the Bronx a ribbon of white, even though it may
be too cold to paint--as well as my outings on Sunday summer mornings
when I sit down with his other friends to watch Muffles shave.

On one of these days I found a thin, cadaverous, long-legged, long-armed
young man behind the bar. He had yellow-white hair that rested on his
head like a window-mop, whitey blue eyes, and a pasty complexion. When
he craned his neck in his anxiety to get my order right, I felt that his
giraffe throat reached down to his waist-line and that all of it would
come out of his collar if I didn't make up my mind at once "what it
should be."

"Who's he, Muffles?" I asked.

"Dat's me new bar-keep. I've chucked me job."

"What's his name?"

"Bowser."

"Where did you get him?"

"Blew in here one night las' month, purty nigh froze--out of a job and
hungry. De Missus got soft on him--she's dat kind, ye know. Yer oughter
seen him eat! Well, I guess! Been in a littingrapher's shop--ye kin tell
by his fingers. Say, Bowser, show de gentleman yer fingers."

Bowser held them up as quickly as if the order had come down the barrel
of a Winchester.

"And ye oughter see him draw. Gee! if I could draw like him I wouldn't
do nothin' else. But I ain't never had nothin' in my head like that. A
feller's got to have sumpin' besides school-larnin' to draw like him.
Now you're a sketch-artist, and know. Why, he drawed de Sheriff last
Sunday sittin' in de porch huggin' his bitters, to de life. Say, Bowse,
show de gentleman de picter ye drawed of de Sheriff."

Bowser slipped his hand under the bar and brought out a charcoal sketch
of a black mustache surrounded by a pair of cheeks, a treble chin, and
two dots of eyes.

"Kin hear him speak, can't ye? And dat ain't nothin' to de way he kin
print. Say, Bowse"--the intimacy grew as the young man's talents loomed
up in Muffles's mind--"tell de gentleman what de boss said 'bout yer
printin'."

"Said I could print all right, only there warn't no more work." There
was a modesty in Bowser's tone that gave me a better opinion of him.

"Said ye could print all right, did he? Course he did--and no guff in
it, neither. Say, Missus"--and he turned to his wife, who had just
come in, the youngest child in her arms. She weighed twice as much as
Muffles--one of those shapeless women with a kindly, Alderney face, and
hair never in place, who lets everything go from collar to waist-line.

"Say, Missus, didn't de Sheriff say dat was a perfec' likeness?" And he
handed it to her.

The wife laughed, passed it back to Muffles and, with a friendly nod to
me, kept on to the kitchen.

"Bar-room ain't no place for women," Muffles remarked in an undertone
when his wife had disappeared. "Dat's why de Missus ain't never 'round.
And when de kids grow up we're goin' to quit, see? Dat's what de Missus
says, and what she says goes!"

All that summer the Shady Side prospered. More tables were set out under
the trees; Bowser got an assistant; Muffles wore better clothes; the
Missus combed out her hair and managed to wear a tight-fitting dress,
and it was easy to see that fame and fortune awaited Muffles--or what he
considered its equivalent. Muffles entertained his friends as usual on
the back porch on Sunday mornings, but he shaved himself upstairs and
wore an alpaca coat and boiled shirt over his red flannel underwear. The
quality of the company improved, too--or retrograded, according to the
point of view. Now and then a pair of deer, with long tails and manes,
hitched to a spider-web of a wagon, would drive up to the front
entrance and a gentleman wearing a watch-chain, a solitaire diamond
ring, a polished silk hat, and a white overcoat with big pearl buttons,
would order "a pint of fiz" and talk in an undertone to Muffles while he
drank it. Often a number of these combinations would meet in Muffles's
back room and a quiet little game would last until daylight. The orders
then were for quarts, not pints. On one of these nights the Captain of
the Precinct was present in plain clothes. I learned this from
Bowser--from behind his hand.

One night Muffles was awakened by a stone thrown at his bedroom window.
He went downstairs and found two men in slouch hats; one had a black
carpet-bag. They talked some time together, and the three went down into
the cellar. When they came up the bag was empty.

The next morning one of those spider-wheeled buggies, driven by one of
the silk hat and pearl-buttoned gentlemen, accompanied by a friend,
stopped at the main gate. When they drove away they carried the contents
of the black carpet-bag stowed away under the seat.

The following day, about ten o'clock in the morning, a man in a derby
hat and with a pair of handcuffs in his outside pocket showed Muffles a
paper he took from his coat, and the two went off to the city. When
Muffles returned that same night--I had heard he was in trouble and
waited for his return--he nodded to me with a smile, and said:

"It's all right. Pipes went bail."

He didn't stop, but walked through to the back room. There he put his
arms around his wife. She had sat all day at the window watching for his
return, so Bowser told me.


II

One crisp, cool October day, when the maples blazed scarlet and the
Bronx was a band of polished silver and the hoar-frost glistened in the
meadows, I turned into the road that led to the Shady Side. The outer
gate was shut, and all the blinds on the front of the house were closed.
I put my hand on the old brass knocker and rapped softly. Bowser opened
the door. His eyes looked as if he had not slept for a week.

"What's the matter--anybody sick?"

"No--dead!" and he burst into tears.

"Not Muffles!"

"No--the Missus."

"When?"

"Last night. De boss is inside, all broke up."

I tiptoed across the hall and into the bar-room. He was sitting by a
table, his head in his hands, his back toward me.

"Muffles, this is terrible! How did it happen?"

He straightened up and held out his hand, guiding me to a seat beside
him. For some minutes he did not speak. Then he said, slowly, ignoring
my question, the tears streaming down his cheeks:

"Dis ends me. I ain't no good widout de Missus. You thought maybe when
ye were 'round that I was a runnin' things; you thought maybe it was me
that was lookin' after de kids and keepin' 'em clean; you thought maybe
when I got pinched and they come near jugging me that some of me pals
got me clear--you don't know nothin' 'bout it. De Missus did that, like
she done everything."

He stopped as if to get his breath, and put his head in his hands
again--rocking himself to and fro like a man in great physical pain. I
sat silent beside him. It is difficult to decide what to do or say to a
man under such circumstances. His reference to some former arrest arose
in my mind, and so, in a perfunctory way--more for something to say than
for any purpose of prying into his former life--I asked:

"Was that the time the Pipe Contractor went bail for you?"

He moved his head slightly and without raising it from his hands looked
at me from over his clasped fingers.

"What, dat scrape a month ago, when I hid dem goods in de cellar? Naw!
Dat was two pals o' mine. Dey was near pinched and I helped 'em out.
Somebody give it away. But dat ain't noth-in'--Cap'n took care o' dat.
Dis was one o' me own five year ago. What's goin' to become o' de kids
now?" And he burst out crying again.


III

A year passed.

I had been painting along the Thames, lying in my punt, my face up to
the sky, or paddling in and out among the pond-lilies. I had idled, too,
on the lagoons of my beloved Venice, listening to Luigi crooning the
songs he loves so well, the soft air about me, the plash of my
gondolier's oar wrinkling the sheen of the silver sea. It had been a
very happy summer; full of color and life. The brush had worked easily,
the weather had lent a helping hand; all had been peace and quiet.
Ofttimes, when I was happiest, somehow Muffles's solitary figure rose
before me, the tears coursing down his cheeks, and with it that cold
silence--a silence which only a dead body brings to a house and which
ends only with its burial.

The week after I landed--it was in November, a day when the crows flew
in long wavy lines and the heavy white and gray clouds pressed close
upon the blue vista of the hills--I turned and crossed through the wood,
my feet sinking into the soft carpet of its dead leaves. Soon I caught a
glimpse of the chimneys of Shady Side thrust above the evergreens; a
curl of smoke was floating upward, filling the air with a filmy haze. At
this sign of life within, my heart gave a bound.

Muffles was still there!

When I swung back the gate and mounted the porch a feeling of
uncertainty came over me. The knocker was gone, and so was the sign. The
old-fashioned window-casings had been replaced by a modern door newly
painted and standing partly open. Perhaps Muffles had given up the bar
and was living here alone with his children.

I pushed open the door and stepped into the old-fashioned hall. This,
too, had undergone changes. The lantern was missing, and some modern
furniture stood against the walls. The bar where Bowser had dispensed
his beverages and from behind which he had brought his drawings had been
replaced by a long mahogany counter with marble top, the sideboard being
filled with cut glass and the more expensive appointments of a modern
establishment. The tables and chairs were also of mahogany; and a new
red carpet covered the floor. The proprietor was leaning against the
counter playing with his watch-chain--a short man with a bald head. A
few guests were sitting about, reading or smoking.

"What's become of Mulford," I asked; "Dick Mulford, who used to be
here?"

The man shook his head.

"Why, yes, you must have known him--some of his friends called him
Muffles."

The man continued to shake his head. Then he answered, carelessly:

"I've only been here six months--another man had it before me. He put
these fixtures in."

"Maybe you can tell me?"--and I turned to the bar-keeper.

"Guess he means the feller who blew in here first month we come," the
bar-keeper answered, addressing his remark to the proprietor. "He said
he'd been runnin' the place once."

"Oh, you mean that guy! Yes, I got it now," answered the proprietor,
with some animation, as if suddenly interested. "He come in the week we
opened--worst-lookin' bum you ever see--toes out of his shoes, coat all
torn. Said he had no money and asked for something to eat. Billy here
was goin' to fire him out when one of my customers said he knew him. I
don't let no man go hungry if I can help it, and so I sent him
downstairs and cook filled him up. After he had all he wanted to eat he
asked Billy if he might go upstairs into the front bedroom. I don't want
nobody prowlin' 'round--not that kind, anyhow--but he begged so I sent
Billy up with him. What did he do, Billy? You saw him." And he turned to
his assistant.

"Didn't do nothin' but just look in the door, he held on to the jamb and
I thought he was goin' to fall. Then he said he was much obliged, and
he walked downstairs again and out the door cryin' like a baby, and I
ain't seen him since."

Another year passed. To the picture of the man sitting alone in that
silent, desolate room was added the picture of the man leaning against
the jamb of the door, the tears streaming down his face. After this I
constantly caught myself peering into the faces of the tramps I would
meet in the street. Whenever I walked before the benches of Madison Park
or loitered along the shady paths of Union Square, I would stop, my eye
running over the rows of idle men reading the advertisements in the
morning papers or asleep on the seats. Often I would pause for a moment
as some tousled vagabond would pass me, hoping that I had found my
old-time friend, only to be disappointed. Once I met Bowser on his way
to his work, a roll of theatre-bills under his arm. He had gone back to
his trade and was working in a shop on Fourteenth Street. His account of
what had happened after the death of "the Missus" only confirmed my
fears. Muffles had gone on from bad to worse; the place had been sold
out by his partners; Muffles had become a drunkard, and, worse than all,
the indictment against him had been pressed for trial despite the
Captain's efforts, and he had been sent to the Island for a year for
receiving and hiding stolen goods. He had been offered his freedom by
the District Attorney if he would give up the names of the two men who
had stolen the silverware, but he said he'd rather "serve time than give
his pals away," and they sent him up. Some half-orphan asylum had taken
the children. One thing Bowser knew and he would "give it to me
straight," and he didn't care who heard it, and that was that there was
"a good many gospil sharps running church-mills that warn't half as
white as Dick Mulford--not by a d---- sight."

One morning I was trying to cross Broadway, dodging the trolleys that
swirled around the curves, when a man laid his hand on my arm with a
grip that hurt me.

It was Muffles!

Not a tramp; not a ragged, blear-eyed vagabond--older, more serious, the
laugh gone out of his eyes, the cheeks pale as if from long confinement.
Dressed in dark clothes, his face cleanshaven; linen neat, a plain black
tie--the hat worn straight, not slouched over his eyes with a rakish
cant as in the old days.

"My God! but I'm glad to see ye," he cried. "Come over in the Square and
let's sit down."

He was too excited to let me ask him any questions. It all poured out of
him in a torrent, his hand on my knee most of the time.

"Oh, but I had it tough! Been up for a year. You remember about it, the
time Pipes went bail. I didn't git none o' the swag; it warn't my job,
but I seed 'em through. But that warn't nothin'. It was de Missus what
killed me. Hadn't been for de kids I'd been off the dock many a time.
Fust month or two I didn't draw a sober breath. I couldn't stand it.
Soon's I'd come to I'd git to thinkin' agin and then it was all up wid
me. Then Pipes and de Sheriff went back on me and I didn't care. Bowser
stuck to me the longest. He got de kids took care of. He don't know I'm
out, or he'd turn up. I tried to find him, but nobody don't know where
he was a-workin'--none of de barrooms I've tried. Oh, but it was tough!
But it's all right now, d'ye hear? All right! I got a job up in Harlem,
see? I'm gittin' orders for coal." And he touched a long book that stuck
out of his breast-pocket. "And I've got a room near where I work. And I
tell ye another thing," and his hand sought mine, and a peculiar light
came into his eyes, "I got de kids wid me. You just oughter see de
boy--legs on him thick as your arm! I toll ye that's a comfort, and
don't you forgit it. And de little gal! Ain't like her mother?
what!--well, I should smile!"



HIS LAST CENT<

Jack Waldo stood in his studio gazing up at the ceiling, or, to be more
exact, at a Venetian church-lamp--which he had just hung and to which he
had just attached a red silk tassel bought that morning of a bric-a-brac
dealer whose shop was in the next street. There was a bare spot in that
corner of his sumptuously appointed room which offended Waldo's
sensitive taste--a spot needing a touch of yellow brass and a note of
red--and the silk tassel completed the color-scheme. The result was a
combination which delighted his soul; Jack had a passion for having his
soul delighted and an insatiable thirst for the things that did the
delighting, and could no more resist the temptation to possess them when
exposed for sale than a confirmed drunkard could resist a favorite
beverage held under his nose. That all of these precious objects of
bigotry and virtue were beyond his means, and that most of them then
enlivening his two perfectly appointed rooms were still unpaid for,
never worried Jack.

"That fellow's place," he would say of some dealer, "is such a jumble
and so dark that nobody can see what he's got. Ought to be very grateful
to me that I put 'em where people could see 'em. If I can pay for 'em,
all right, and if I can't, let him take 'em back. He always knows where
to find 'em. I'm not going to have an auction."

This last course of "taking his purchases back" had been followed by a
good many of Jack's creditors, who, at last, tired out, had driven up a
furniture van and carted the missing articles home again. Others, more
patient, dunned persistently and continually--every morning some one of
them--until Jack, roused to an extra effort, painted pot-boilers
(portrait of a dog, or a child with a rabbit, or Uncle John's exact
image from a daguerrotype many years in the family) up to the time the
debt was discharged and the precious bit of old Spanish leather or the
Venetian chest or Sixteenth Century chair became his very own for all
time to come.

This "last-moment" act of Jack's--this reprieve habit of saving his
financial life, as the noose was being slipped over his bankrupt
neck--instead of strangling Jack's credit beyond repair, really improved
it. The dealer generally added an extra price for interest and the
trouble of collecting (including cartage both ways), knowing that his
property was perfectly safe as long as it stayed in Jack's admirably
cared-for studio, and few of them ever refused the painter anything he
wanted. When inquiries were made as to his financial standing the report
was invariably, "Honest but slow--he'll pay some time and somehow," and
the ghost of a bad debt was laid.

The slower the better for Jack. The delay helped his judgment. The
things he didn't want after living with them for months (Jack's test of
immortality) he was quite willing they should cart away; the things he
loved he would go hungry to hold on to.

This weeding-out process had left a collection of curios, stuffs,
hangings, brass, old furniture, pottery, china, costumes and the like,
around Jack's rooms, some of which would have enriched a museum: a Louis
XVI. cabinet, for instance, that had been stolen from the Trianon (what
a lot of successful thieves there were in those days); the identical
sofa that the Pompadour used in her afternoon naps, and the undeniable
curtain that covered her bed, and which now hung between Jack's
two rooms.

In addition to these ancient and veritable "antiques" there was a
collection of equally veritable "moderns," two of which had arrived that
morning from an out-of-town exhibition and which were at this precise
moment leaning against the legs of an old Spanish chair. One had had
three inches of gilt moulding knocked off its frame in transit, and both
bore Jack's signature in the lower left-hand corner.

"Didn't want 'em, eh?" cried Jack, throwing himself on to the divan,
temporarily exhausted with the labor of hanging the lamp and attaching
the tassel. "Wanted something painted with darning-needle
brushes--little tooty-wooty stuff that everybody can understand. 'See
the barndoor and the nails in the planks and all them knots!'"--Jack was
on his feet now, imitating the drawl of the country art-buyer--"'Ain't
them natural! Why, Maria, if you look close ye can see jes' where the
ants crawl in and out. My, ain't that wonderful!'"

These remarks were not addressed to the offending canvas nor to the
imaginary countryman, but to his chum, Sam Ruggles, who sat hunched up
in a big armchair with gilt flambeaux on each corner of its high
back--it being a holiday and Sam's time his own. Ruggles was entry clerk
in a downtown store, lived on fifteen dollars a week, and was proud of
it. His daily fear--he being of an eminently economical and practical
turn of mind--was that Jack would one day find either himself tight shut
in the lock-up in charge of the jailer or his belongings strewed loose
on the sidewalk and in charge of the sheriff. They had been college
mates together--these two--and Sam loved Jack with an affection in which
pride in his genius and fear for his welfare were so closely interwoven,
that Sam found himself most of the time in a constantly unhappy frame of
mind. Why Jack should continue to buy things he couldn't pay for,
instead of painting pictures which one day somebody would want, and at
fabulous prices, too, was one thing he could never get through his head.

"Where have those pictures been, Jack?" inquired Sam, in a sympathetic
tone.

"Oh, out in one of those God's-free-air towns where they are studying
high art and microbes and Browning--one of those towns where you can
find a woman's club on every corner and not a drop of anything to drink
outside of a drug-store. Why aren't you a millionnaire, Sam, with a
gallery one hundred by fifty opening into your conservatory, and its
centre panels filled with the works of that distinguished impressionist,
John Somerset Waldo, R.A.?"

"I shall be a millionnaire before you get to be R.A.," answered Sam,
with some emphasis, "if you don't buckle down to work, old man, and
bring out what's in you--and stop spending your allowance on a lot of
things that you don't want any more than a cow wants two tails. Now,
what in the name of common-sense did you buy that lamp for which you
have just hung? It doesn't light anything, and if it did, this is a
garret, not a church. To my mind it's as much out of place here as that
brass coal-hod you've got over there would be on a cathedral altar."

"Samuel Ruggles!" cried Jack, striking a theatrical attitude, "you talk
like a pig-sticker or a coal-baron. Your soul, Samuel, is steeped in
commercialism; you know not the color that delights men's hearts nor
the line that entrances. The lamp, my boy, is meat and drink to me, and
companionship and a joy unspeakable. Your dull soul, Samuel, is clay,
your meat is figures, and your drink profit and loss; all of which
reminds me, Samuel, that it is now two o'clock and that the nerves of my
stomach are on a strike. Let--me--see"--and he turned his back, felt in
his pocket, and counted out some bills and change--"Yes, Sam"--here his
dramatic manner changed--"the account is still good--we will now lunch.
Not expensively, Samuel"--with another wave of the hand--"not
riotously--simply, and within our means. Come, thou slave of the
desk--eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die--or bust, Samuel,
which is very nearly the same thing!"

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