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The Underdog

F >> F. Hopkinson Smith >> The Underdog




"How outrageous to be so cruel!"--this from the two maiden sisters.

"Give him to me, Katy--oh, the brute of a man!"--this from the fair
owner.

The solitary Englishman with his book and his furled umbrella, who in
his absorption had committed the crime, strode on without even raising
his hat in apology.

"D----d little beast!" I heard him mutter as he neared the boat-house
where Fin and I were stowing cargo. "Ought to be worn on a watch-chain
or in her buttonhole."

Fin had his hand on his lips keeping his laughing apparatus in order
until the solitary disappeared down the path to the trees, then he
leaned my way.

"I know him, sor," he whispered. "He's a barrister down in Temple Bar.
He don't remember me, sor, but I know him. He's always treadin' on
something--something alive--always, sor, and wid both feet! He trod on
me once. I thought it was him when I see him fust--but I wasn't sure
till I asked Landlord Hull about him."

"How came you to know him?"

"Well, sor, he had an old lady on his list two years ago that was always
disputin' distances and goin' to law about her cab-fares. I picked her
up one day in St. James Street and druv her to Kensington Gardens and
charged her the rates, and she kicked and had me up before the
magistrate, and this old ink-bottle appeared for her. She's rich and
always in hot water. Well, we had it measured and I was right, and it
cost her me fare and fifteen bob besides. When it was figured up she
owed me sixpence more measurement I hadn't charged her for the first
time, and I summoned her and made her pay it and twelve bob more to
teach her manners. What pay he got I don't know, but I got me sixpence.
He was born back here about a mile--that's why he comes here for
his holiday."

Fin stopped stowing cargo--two bottles of soda, a piece of ice in a
bucket, two canvases, my big easel and a lunch-basket--and moving his
cap back from his freckled forehead said, with as much gravity as he
could maintain:

"I ought to have been a barrister, sor; I started as one."

The statement did not surprise me. Had he added that he had coached the
winning crew of the regatta the year before, laid the marquetry floors
of Cliveden (not far away), or led the band at the late Lord Mayor's
show, I should have received his statements with equal equanimity. So I
simply remarked, "When was that, Fin"? quite as I should had I been
gathering details for his biography--my only anxiety being to get the
facts chronologically correct.

"When I was a gossoon of twenty, sor--maybe eighteen--I'm fifty now, so
it's far back enough, God knows. And it all happened, too, not far from
that old ink-bottle's place in Temple Bar. I was lookin' at it wan day
last winter when I had a fare down there that I took up in old Bond
Street. I did the sweepin' out and startin' fires. Wan day wan of the
clerks got fired because he couldn't serve a writ on another barrister
chap who owed a bill that me boss was tryin' to collect. Nobody could
git into his rooms, try every way they could. He had nigh broke the head
o' wan o' the young fellers in the office who tried it the day before.
He niver come out, but had his grub sent him. This had been goin' on
for a month. All kinds o' games had been put up on him and he beat
'em all.

"'I'll do it,' I says, 'in a week's time or less.' The manager was goin'
through the office and heard the laugh they give me. 'What's this?' he
says, cross like. 'Fin says he kin serve the writ,' the clerk says. 'I
kin,' I says, startin' up, 'or I'll throw up me job.'

"'Give him the writ,' he says, 'and give him two days off. It kin do no
harm for him to try.'

"Well, I found the street, and went up the stairs and read the name on
the door and heard somebody walkin' around, and knew he was in. Then I
lay around on the other side o' the street to see what I could pick up
in the way o' the habits o' the rat. I knew he couldn't starve for a
week at a time, and that something must be goin' in, and maybe I could
follow up and git me foot in the door before he could close it; but I
soon found that wouldn't work. Pretty soon a can o' milk come and went
up in a basket that he let down from his winder. As he leaned out I saw
his head, and it was a worse carrot than me own. Then along come a man
with a bag o' coal on his back and a bit o' card in his hand with the
coal-yard on it and the rat's name underneath, a-lookin' up at the house
and scratchin' his head as to where he was goin'.

"I crossed over and says, 'Who are ye lookin' for'? And he hands me the
card. 'I'm his man,' I says, 'and I been waitin' for ye--me master's
sick and don't want no noise, and if ye make any I'll lose me place.
I'll carry the bag up and dump it and bring ye the bag back and,
shillin' for yer trouble. Wait here. Hold on,' I says; 'take me hat and
let me have yours, for I don't git a good hat every day, and the bag's
that dirty it'll spile it.'

"'Go on,' he says; 'I've carried it all the way from the yard and me
back's broke.' Well, I pulled his hat ever me eyes and started up the
stairs wid the bag on me shoulder. When I got to the fust landin' I run
me hands over the bag, gittin' 'em good and black, then I smeared me
face, and up I went another flight.

"'Who's there?' he says, when I knocked.

"'Coals,' I says.

"'Where from?' he says.

"I told him the name on the card. He opened the door an inch and I could
see a chain between the crack.

"'Let me see yer face,' he says. I twisted it out from under the edge of
the bag. 'All right,' he says, and he slipped back the chain and in I
went, stoopin' down as if it weighed a ton.

"'Where'll I put it?' I says.

"'In the box,' he says, walkin' toward the grate. 'Have ye brought the
bill?'

"'I have,' I says, still keepin' me head down. 'It's in me side pocket.
Pull it out, please, me hand's that dirty'--and out come the writ!

"Ye ought to have seen his face when he read it. He made a jump for the
door, but I got there fust and downstairs in a tumble, and fell in a
heap at the foot with everything he could lay his hands on comin' after
me--tongs, shovel, and poker.

"I got a raise of five bob when I went back and ten bob besides from the
boss.

"I ought to have stayed at the law, sor; I'd be a magistrate by now
a-sittin' on a sheepskin instead of ------

"Where'll I put this big canvas, sor--up agin the bow or laid flat? The
last coat ain't dry yet," he muttered to himself, touching my picture
with his finger in true paper-hanger style. "Oh, yes, I see--all ready,
sor, ye kin step in. Same place we painted yesterday, sor?--up near the
mill? All right, sor." And we pushed out into the stream.

These talks with Fin are like telephone messages from the great city
hardly an hour away. They always take place in the open, while I am
floating among pond-lilies or drifting under wide-spreading trees, their
drooping leaves dabbling in the silent current like children's fingers,
or while I am sitting under skies as blue as any that bend above my
Beloved City by the Sea; often, too, when the delicious silence about
me is broken only by the lapping of the water around my punt, the
sharpening of a bit of charcoal, or the splash of a fish. That his
stories are out of key with my surroundings, often reminding me of
things I have come miles over the sea to forget, somehow adds to
their charm.

There is no warning given. Suddenly, and apparently without anything
that leads up to the subject in mind, this irrepressible Irishman breaks
out, and before I am aware of the change, the glory of the morning and
all that it holds for me of beauty has faded out of the slide of my
mental camera and another has taken its place. Again I am following
Fin's cab through the mazes of smoky, seething London, now waiting
outside a concert-hall for some young blood, or shopping along Regent
Street, or at full tilt to catch a Channel train at Charing Cross--each
picture enriched by a running account of personal adventure that makes
them doubly interesting.

"You wouldn't mind, sor," he begins, "if I tell ye of a party of three I
took home from a grand ball--one of the toppy balls of the winter, in
one o' them big halls on the Strand? Two o' them Was dressed like the
Royal family in satins that stuck out like a haystack and covered with
diamonds that would hurt your eyes to look at 'em--" And then in his
inimitable dialect--impossible to reproduce by any combination of vowels
at my command, and punctured every few minutes by ringing laughs that
can be heard half a mile away--follows a description of how one of his
fares, Ikey by name, the son of the stoutest of the women, by a sudden
lurch of his cab--Ikey rode outside--while rounding into a side street,
was landed in the mud.

"Oh, that was a great night, sor," he rattles on. "Ye ought to 'a' seen
him when I picked him up. he looked as if they'd been a-swobbin' the
cobbles wid him. 'Oh, me son! me son! it's kilt ye are!' she hollered
out, clawin' him wid both hands, and up they hauled him all over them
satin dresses! And where do ye think I took 'em, sor? To Hanover Square,
or out by St. James Park? No, sor, not a bit of it! Down in an alley in
Whitechapel, sor, that ye'd be afraid to walk through after sundown, and
into a shop wid three balls over it. What do ye think o' that, sor?"

Or he launches forth into an account of how he helped to rescue a
woman's child from the clutches of her brutal husband; and of the race
out King's Road followed by the husband in a hansom, and of the watchful
bobbie who, to relieve a threatened block in the street, held up the
pursuing hansom at the critical moment, thus saving the escaping child,
half-smothered in a blanket, tight locked in its mother's arms, and
earning for Fin the biggest fare he ever got in his life.

"Think of it, sor! Fifteen bob for goin' a mile, she a-hollerin' all
the time that she'd double the fare if I kep' ahead. But, Lord love ye,
sor, she needn't 'a' worried; me old plug had run in the Derby wance,
and for a short spurt like that he was game back to the stump of
his tail."

* * * * *

When the last morning of his enforced exile arrived and Fin, before I
was half-dressed, presented himself outside my bedroom door, an open
letter in his hand, not a trace of the punt-poling Irishman was visible
in his make-up!

He wore a glazed white tile, a yellow-brown coat with three capes, cut
pen-wiper fashion, and a pair of corduroy trousers whose fulness
concealed in part the ellipse of his legs.

"Here's a letter from me boss, sor," he blurted out, holding it toward
me. "He says I kin go to work in the mornin'. Ye don't mind, do
ye, sor?"

"Of course I mind, Fin; I'll have trouble to fill your place. Are you
sorry to leave?"

"Am I sorry, sor? No!--savin' yer presence, I'm glad. What's the good of
the country, anyhow, sor, except to make picters in? Of course, it's
different wid you, sor, not knowin' the city, but for me--why God rest
yer soul, sor, I wouldn't give one cobble of the Strand no bigger'n me
fist for the best farm in Surrey.

"Call me, sor, next time ye're passin' my rank--any time after twelve
at night, and I'll show ye fun enough to last ye yer life."

Something dropped out of the landscape that day--something of its
brilliancy, color, and charm. The water seemed sluggish, the sky-tones
dull, the meadows flat and commonplace.

It must have been Fin's laugh!


LONG JIM

Jim met me at the station. I knew it was Jim when I caught sight of him
loping along the platform, craning his neck, his head on one side as if
in search of someone. He had the same stoop in his shoulders; the same
long, disjointed, shambling body--six feet and more of it--that had
earned him his soubriquet.

"Guess you be him," he said, recognizing me as easily, his face breaking
suddenly into a broad smile as I stepped on to the platform. "Old man
'lowed I'd know ye right away, but I kind o' mistrusted till I see ye
stop and look 'raound same's if ye'd lost the trail. I'll take them
traps and that bag if ye don't mind," and he relieved me of my
sketch-kit and bag. "Buck-board's right out here behind the freight
shed," and he pointed across the track. "Old mare's kinder skeery o' the
engine, so I tied her a piece off."

He was precisely the man I had expected to find--even to his shaggy gray
hair matted close about his ears, wrinkled, leathery face, and long,
scrawny neck. He wore the same rough, cowhide boots and the very hat I
had seen so often reproduced--such a picturesque slouch of a hat with
that certain cant to the rim which betokens long usage and not a little
comfort, especially on balsam boughs with the sky for a covering, and
only the stars to light one to bed.

I had heard all these several details and appointments described ever so
minutely by an enthusiastic brother brush who had spent the preceding
summer with old man Marvin--Jim's employer--but he had forgotten to
mention, or had failed to notice, the peculiar softness of Jim's voice
and his timid, shrinking eyes--the eyes of a dog rather than those of a
man--not cowardly eyes, nor sneaking eyes--more the eyes of one who had
suffered constantly from sudden, unexpected blows, and who shrank from
your gaze and dodged it as does a hound that misunderstands a gesture.

"Old man's been 'spectin' ye for a week," Jim rambled on as he led the
way to the shed, hitching up his one leather suspender that kept the
brown overalls snug up under his armpits. "P'raps ye expected him to
meet ye," he continued, "but ye don't know him. He ain't that kind. He
won't go even for Ruby."

"Who's Ruby?" The brother brush had not mentioned him. "Mr. Marvin's
son?"

"No, she's Mother Marvin's girl. She's away to Plymouth to school.
Stand here a minute till I back up the buck-board."

The buck-board is the only vehicle possible over these mountain-roads.
It is the _volante_ of the Franconia range, and rides over everything
from a bowlder to a wind-slash. This particular example differed only in
being a trifle more rickety and mud-bespattered than any I had seen; and
the mare had evidently been foaled to draw it--a fur-coated,
moth-eaten, wisp-tailed beast, tied to the shafts with clothes-lines and
scraps of deerhide--a quadruped that only an earthquake could have
shaken into nervousness. And yet Jim backed her into position as
carefully as if she had felt her harness for the first time, handing me
the reins until he strapped my belongings to the hind axle, calling
"Whoa, Bess!" every time she rested a tired muscle. Then he lifted one
long leg over the dash-board and took the seat beside me.

It was my first draught of a long holiday; my breathing-spell; my time
for loose neckties and flannel shirts and a kit slung over my shoulder
crammed with brushes and color-tubes; my time for loafing and inviting
my soul. It felt inexpressibly delightful to be once more out in the
open--out under the wide sweep of the sky; rid of the choke of narrow
streets; exempt of bens, mails, and telegrams, and free of him who
knocks, enters, and sits--and sits--and sits. And it was the Indian
summer of the year; when the air is spicy with the smoke of burning
leaves and the mountains are lost in the haze; when the unshaven
cornfields are dotted with yellow pumpkins and under low-branched trees
the apples lie in heaps; when the leaves are aflame and the round sun
shines pink through opalescent clouds.

"Ain't it a hummer of a day?" Jim exclaimed, suddenly, looking toward
the valley swimming in a silver mist below us. "By Jiminy! it makes a
man feel like livin', don't it?"

I turned to look at him. He, too, seemed to have caught the infection.
His shoulders had straightened, his nostrils were dilated like a deer's
that sniffs some distant scent; his face was aglow. I began to wonder
if, with my usual luck, I had not found the companion I always looked
for in my outings--that rare other fellow of the right kind, who
responds to your slightest wish with all the enthusiasm and gusto of a
boy, and so vagabondish in his tendencies that he is delighted to have
you think for him and to follow your lead.

I had not long to wait. Before we had gone a mile into the forest Jim
jerked the mare back upon her haunches and, pointing to a great hemlock
standing sentinel over us, cried out with boyish enthusiasm:

"Take a look at him once. Ain't he a ring-tailed roarer? Seems to me a
tree big as him must be awful proud just o' bein' a tree. Ain't nothin'
'raound here kin see's fur as he kin, anyways." "My luck again," I
thought to myself. I knew I could not be mistaken in the outward signs.

"You like trees, then?" I asked, watching the glow on his face.

"Like 'em! Well, wouldn't you if ye'd lived 'mong 'em long's I have?
Trees don't never go back on ye, and that's what ye can't say o'
everything." The analogy was obscure, but I attributed it to Jim's
slender stock of phrases. "I've knowed that hemlock ever since I come
here, and he's just the same to me as the fust day I see him. Ain't
never no change in trees; once they're good to ye they're allus good to
ye. Birds is different--so is cattle--but trees and dogs ye kin tie to.
Don't the woods smell nice? Do ye catch on to them spruces dead ahead of
us? Maybe ye can't smell 'em till ye git yer nose cleared out o' them
city nosegays," he continued, with a kindly interest in his voice. "But
ye will when ye've been here a spell. Folks that live in cities think
there ain't nothin' smells sweet but flowers and cologne. They ain't
never slep' on balsam-boughs nor got a whiff o' a birchbark fire, nor
tramped a bed o' ferns at night. There's a cool, fresh smell for ye! I
tell ye there's a heap o' perfumes 'raound that ye can't buy at a
flower-store and cork up in a bottle. Well, I guess--Git up, Bess!" and
he flopped the reins once more along the ridges and hollows of the
mare's back while he encouraged her to renewed efforts with that
peculiar clucking sound heeded only by certain beasts of burden.

At the end of the tenth mile he stopped the mare suddenly.

"Hold on," he cried, excitedly, "there's that scraggy-tail. I missed him
when I come down. See! there he is on that green log. I was feared he'd
passed in his chips." I looked and saw a huge gray squirrel with a tail
like a rabbit. "That's him. Durn mean on his tail, warn't it? And one
paw gone, too. The dog catched him one day last year and left him tore
up that way. I found him limping along when I was a-sugaring here in the
spring and kinder fixed him up, and he's sorter on the lookout for me
when I come along. He's got a hole 'round here somewheres."

Jim sprang out of the buck-board. Fumbling under the seat he brought out
a bag of nuts. The squirrel took them from his hand, stuffing his mouth
full, five at a time, limping away to hide them, and back again for more
until the bag was empty, Jim, contented and unhurried, squatting on the
ground, his long knees bent under him. The way in which he did this gave
me infinite delight. No vagabond I had ever known ignored time and duty
more complacently.

We drove on in silence, Jim taking in everything we passed. This
shambling, slenderly educated, and clay-soiled man was fast looming up
as a find of incalculable value--the most valuable of my experience.
The most important thing, however, was still to be settled if a perfect
harmony of interests was to be established between us--_would he
like me_?

Marvin's cabin, in which I was to spend my holiday, lay on a clearing
half a mile or more outside the woods and at the foot of a hill that
helped prop up the Knob. The stage road ran to the left. The house was a
small two-story affair built of logs and clapboards, and was joined to
the outlying stable by a covered passage which was lined with winter
firewood. Marvin, who met us at the pasture-gate, carried a lantern, the
glow of the twilight having faded from the mountain-tops. He was a
small, thick-set man, smooth-shaven as far as the under side of his chin
and jaws, with a whisk-broom beard spread over his shirt-front and half
of his waistcoat. His forehead was low, and his eyes set close
together--sure sign of a close-fisted nature.

To my great surprise his first words, after a limp handshake and a
perfunctory "pleased to see you," were devoted to an outbreak on Jim for
having been so long on the road. "Been waitin' here an hour," he said.
"What in tarnation kep' ye, anyway? Them cows ain't milked yit!"

"Don't worry. I won't go back on them cows," replied Jim, quietly, as he
drove through the gateway, following Marvin, who walked ahead swinging
the lantern to show the mare the road.

Mrs. Marvin's manner was as abrupt as that of her husband.

"Well, well!" she said, as I stepped upon the porch, "guess you must be
beat out comin' so fur. Come in and set by the stove," and she resumed
her work in the pantry without another word.

I was not offended at her curtness. These denizens of the forest pass
too many hours alone and speak too seldom to understand the value of
politeness for politeness' sake. The wife, moreover, redeemed herself
the next morning when I found her on the back porch feeding the birds.

"Snow ain't fur off," she remarked, in explanation, as she scattered the
crumbs about, "and I want 'em to larn early where they kin find
something to eat. Ruby'd never forgive me if I didn't feed the birds.
She loves 'em 'bout as much as Jim does."

Neither she nor her husband became any more cordial as they knew me
better. To them I was only the boarder whose weekly stipend helped to
decrease the farm debt, and who had to be fed three times a day and
given a bed at night. It was Jim who made me feel at home. He was the
fellow I had longed for; the round peg of a chance acquaintance that
exactly fitted into the round hole of my holiday life, and he fulfilled
my every expectation. He would fish or hunt or carry a sketch-trap or
wash brushes, or loaf, or go to sleep beside me--or get up at
daylight--whatever the one half of me wanted to do, Jim, the other
half, agreed to with instant cheerfulness.

And yet, in spite of this constant companionship, I never crossed a
certain line of reserve which he had set up between us. He would ramble
on by the hour about the things around us; about the trees, the birds,
and squirrels; of the way the muskrats lived by the sawmill dam, and
their cleverness in avoiding his traps; about the deer that "yarded"
back of Taft's Knob last winter, and their leanness in the spring.
Sometimes he would speak of Mother Marvin, saying she "thought a heap of
Ruby, and ought to," and now and then he would speak of Ruby with a
certain tender tone in his voice, telling me of the prizes she had won
at school, and how nobody could touch her in "'rithmetic and readin'."
But, to my surprise, he never discussed any of his private affairs with
me. I say "surprise," for until I met Jim I had found that men of his
class talked of little else, especially when over campfires smouldering
far into the night.

This reticence also extended to Marvin's affairs. The relations between
them, I saw, were greatly strained, although Jim always discharged his
duties conscientiously, never failing to render a strict account of the
time he spent with me, which Marvin always itemized in the weekly bill.
I used often to wonder if he were not under some obligation to his
employer which he could not requite; it might be for food and shelter
in his earlier days, or perhaps that he was weighted by a money debt he
was unable to pay.

One morning, after a particularly ugly outbreak in which Jim had been
denounced for some supposed neglect of his duties, I asked him, then
lying beside me, his head cupped upon his saucer of a slouch hat, why he
stayed on with a man like Marvin, so different from himself in every
way. I had often wondered why Jim stood it, and wished that he had the
spirit to try his fortunes elsewhere. In my sympathy for him I had even
gone so far as to hint once or twice at my finding him other employment.
Indeed, I must confess that the only cloud between us dimming my
confidence in him was this very lack of independence.

"Well, I got to git along with him for a spell yit," Jim answered,
slowly, his eyes turned up to the sky. "He _is_ ornery, and no mistake,
and I git mad at him sometimes; but then ag'in I feel kinder sorry for
him somehow. He's a queer kind, ain't he, to be livin' up here all his
life with trees and mountains all 'round him, all doin' their best to
please him--and I don't know nothin' friendlier nor honester--and yet
him bein' what he is? I'd 'a' thought they'd thawed him out 'fore this.
And he's so dog-goned close, too, if I must say it. Why, if it warn't
for Mother Marvin, some o' us 'raound here"--and he stopped and lowered
his voice--"would be out in the cold; some ye wouldn't suspect, too."

This apparently studied reticence only incited my curiosity to learn
something more of the man for whom I had begun to have a real affection.
I wanted particularly to know something of his life before he came to
Marvin's!--twelve years now. I could not, of course, ask Marvin or his
wife for any details--my intimacy with Jim forbade such an invasion of
his privacy--and I met no one else in the forest. I saw plainly that he
was not a mountaineer by birth. Not only did his dialect differ from
those about him, but his habits were not those of a woodsman. For
instance, he would always carry his matches loose in his pocket, instead
of in a dry box; then, again, he would wear his trousers rolled up like
a fireman's, as if to keep out the wet, instead of tucking them into his
boots to tramp the woods the better. Now and then, too, he would let
fall some word or expression which would betray greater familiarity with
the ins and outs of the city than with the intricacies of the forest.

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