Compliments of the Season
There are no more Christmas stories to write. Fiction is exhausted;and newspaper items, the next best, are manufactured by clever youngjournalists who have married early and have an engagingly pessimisticview of life. Therefore, for seasonable diversion, we are reducedto very questionable sources--facts and philosophy. We will beginwith--whichever you choose to call it.
Children are pestilential little animals with which we have to copeunder a bewildering variety of conditions. Especially when childishsorrows overwhelm them are we put to our wits' end. We exhaust ourpaltry store of consolation; and then beat them, sobbing, to sleep. Thenwe grovel in the dust of a million years, and ask God why. Thus we callout of the rat-trap. As for the children, no one understands them exceptold maids, hunchbacks, and shepherd dogs.
Now comes the facts in the case of the Rag-Doll, the Tatterdemalion,and the Twenty-fifth of December.
On the tenth of that month the Child of the Millionaire lost herrag-doll. There were many servants in the Millionaire's palace on theHudson, and these ransacked the house and grounds, but without findingthe lost treasure. The child was a girl of five, and one of thoseperverse little beasts that often wound the sensibilities of wealthyparents by fixing their affections upon some vulgar, inexpensive toyinstead of upon diamond-studded automobiles and pony phaetons.
The Child grieved sorely and truly, a thing inexplicable to theMillionaire, to whom the rag-doll market was about as interesting as BayState Gas; and to the Lady, the Child's mother, who was all form--thatis, nearly all, as you shall see.
The Child cried inconsolably, and grew hollow-eyed, knock-kneed,spindling, and corykilverty in many other respects. The Millionairesmiled and tapped his coffers confidently. The pick of the output ofthe French and German toymakers was rushed by special delivery to themansion; but Rachel refused to be comforted. She was weeping for herrag child, and was for a high protective tariff against all foreignfoolishness. Then doctors with the finest bedside manners andstop-watches were called in. One by one they chattered futilely aboutpeptomanganate of iron and sea voyages and hypophosphites until theirstop-watches showed that Bill Rendered was under the wire for show orplace. Then, as men, they advised that the rag-doll be found as soonas possible and restored to its mourning parent. The Child sniffed attherapeutics, chewed a thumb, and wailed for her Betsy. And all thistime cablegrams were coming from Santa Claus saying that he would soonbe here and enjoining us to show a true Christian spirit and let up onthe pool-rooms and tontine policies and platoon systems long enough togive him a welcome. Everywhere the spirit of Christmas was diffusingitself. The banks were refusing loans, the pawn-brokers had doubledtheir gang of helpers, people bumped your shins on the streets with redsleds, Thomas and Jeremiah bubbled before you on the bars while youwaited on one foot, holly-wreaths of hospitality were hung in windows ofthe stores, they who had 'em were getting their furs. You hardly knewwhich was the best bet in balls--three, high, moth, or snow. It was notime at which to lose the rag-doll or your heart.
If Doctor Watson's investigating friend had been called in to solve thismysterious disappearance he might have observed on the Millionaire'swall a copy of "The Vampire." That would have quickly suggested, byinduction, "A rag and a bone and a hank of hair." "Flip," a Scotchterrier, next to the rag-doll in the Child's heart, frisked through thehalls. The hank of hair! Aha! X, the unfound quantity, represented therag-doll. But, the bone? Well, when dogs find bones they--Done! It werean easy and a fruitful task to examine Flip's forefeet. Look, Watson!Earth--dried earth between the toes. Of course, the dog--but Sherlockwas not there. Therefore it devolves. But topography and architecturemust intervene.
The Millionaire's palace occupied a lordly space. In front of it was alawn close-mowed as a South Ireland man's face two days after a shave.At one side of it, and fronting on another street was a pleasauncetrimmed to a leaf, and the garage and stables. The Scotch pup hadravished the rag-doll from the nursery, dragged it to a corner ofthe lawn, dug a hole, and buried it after the manner of carelessundertakers. There you have the mystery solved, and no checks to writefor the hypodermical wizard or fi'-pun notes to toss to the sergeant.Then let's get down to the heart of the thing, tiresome readers--theChristmas heart of the thing.
Fuzzy was drunk--not riotously or helplessly or loquaciously, as you orI might get, but decently, appropriately, and inoffensively, as becomesa gentleman down on his luck.
Fuzzy was a soldier of misfortune. The road, the haystack, thepark bench, the kitchen door, the bitter round of eleemosynarybeds-with-shower-bath-attachment, the petty pickings and ignoblygarnered largesse of great cities--these formed the chapters of hishistory.
Fuzzy walked toward the river, down the street that bounded one side ofthe Millionaire's house and grounds. He saw a leg of Betsy, the lostrag-doll, protruding, like the clue to a Lilliputian murder mystery,from its untimely grave in a corner of the fence. He dragged forth themaltreated infant, tucked it under his arm, and went on his way crooninga road song of his brethren that no doll that has been brought up to thesheltered life should hear. Well for Betsy that she had no ears. Andwell that she had no eyes save unseeing circles of black; for the facesof Fuzzy and the Scotch terrier were those of brothers, and the heart ofno rag-doll could withstand twice to become the prey of such fearsomemonsters.
Though you may not know it, Grogan's saloon stands near the river andnear the foot of the street down which Fuzzy traveled. In Grogan's,Christmas cheer was already rampant.
Fuzzy entered with his doll. He fancied that as a mummer at the feast ofSaturn he might earn a few drops from the wassail cup.
He set Betsy on the bar and addressed her loudly and humorously,seasoning his speech with exaggerated compliments and endearments, asone entertaining his lady friend. The loafers and bibbers around caughtthe farce of it, and roared. The bartender gave Fuzzy a drink. Oh, manyof us carry rag-dolls.
"One for the lady?" suggested Fuzzy impudently, and tucked anothercontribution to Art beneath his waistcoat.
He began to see possibilities in Betsy. His first-night had been asuccess. Visions of a vaudeville circuit about town dawned upon him.
In a group near the stove sat "Pigeon" McCarthy, Black Riley, and"One-ear" Mike, well and unfavorably known in the tough shoestringdistrict that blackened the left bank of the river. They passed anewspaper back and forth among themselves. The item that each solid andblunt forefinger pointed out was an advertisement headed "One HundredDollars Reward." To earn it one must return the rag-doll lost, strayed,or stolen from the Millionaire's mansion. It seemed that grief stillravaged, unchecked, in the bosom of the too faithful Child. Flip, theterrier, capered and shook his absurd whisker before her, powerless todistract. She wailed for her Betsy in the faces of walking, talking,mama-ing, and eye-closing French Mabelles and Violettes. Theadvertisement was a last resort.
Black Riley came from behind the stove and approached Fuzzy in hisone-sided parabolic way.
The Christmas mummer, flushed with success, had tucked Betsy under hisarm, and was about to depart to the filling of impromptu dateselsewhere.
"Say, 'Bo," said Black Riley to him, "where did you cop out dat doll?"
"This doll?" asked Fuzzy, touching Betsy with his forefinger to be surethat she was the one referred to. Why, this doll was presented to me bythe Emperor of Beloochistan. I have seven hundred others in my countryhome in Newport. This doll--"
"Cheese the funny business," said Riley. "You swiped it or picked it upat de house on de hill where--but never mind dat. You want to take fiftycents for de rags, and take it quick. Me brother's kid at home might bewantin' to play wid it. Hey--what?"
He produced the coin.
Fuzzy laughed a gurgling, insolent, alcoholic laugh in his face. Go tothe office of Sarah Bernhardt's manager and propose to him that she bereleased from a night's performance to entertain the Tackytown Lyceumand Literary Coterie. You will hear the duplicate of Fuzzy's laugh.
Black Riley gauged Fuzzy quickly with his blueberry eye as a wrestlerdoes. His hand was itching to play the Roman and wrest the rag Sabinefrom the extemporaneous merry-andrew who was entertaining an angelunaware. But he refrained. Fuzzy was fat and solid and big. Three inchesof well-nourished corporeity, defended from the winter winds by dingylinen, intervened between his vest and trousers. Countless small,circular wrinkles running around his coat-sleeves and knees guaranteedthe quality of his bone and muscle. His small, blue eyes, bathed in themoisture of altruism and wooziness, looked upon you kindly, yet withoutabashment. He was whiskerly, whiskyly, fleshily formidable. So, BlackRiley temporized.
"Wot'll you take for it, den?" he asked.
"Money," said Fuzzy, with husky firmness, "cannot buy her."
He was intoxicated with the artist's first sweet cup of attainment.To set a faded-blue, earth-stained rag-doll on a bar, to hold mimicconverse with it, and to find his heart leaping with the sense ofplaudits earned and his throat scorching with free libations poured inhis honor--could base coin buy him from such achievements? You willperceive that Fuzzy had the temperament.
Fuzzy walked out with the gait of a trained sea-lion in search of othercafés to conquer.
Though the dusk of twilight was hardly yet apparent, lights werebeginning to spangle the city like pop-corn bursting in a deep skillet.Christmas Eve, impatiently expected, was peeping over the brink of thehour. Millions had prepared for its celebration. Towns would be paintedred. You, yourself, have heard the horns and dodged the capers of theSaturnalians.
"Pigeon" McCarthy, Black Riley, and "One-ear" Mike held a hasty converseoutside Grogan's. They were narrow-chested, pallid striplings, notfighters in the open, but more dangerous in their ways of warfare thanthe most terrible of Turks. Fuzzy, in a pitched battle, could have eatenthe three of them. In a go-as-you-please encounter he was alreadydoomed.
They overtook him just as he and Betsy were entering Costigan's Casino.They deflected him, and shoved the newspaper under his nose. Fuzzy couldread--and more.
"Boys," said he, "you are certainly damn true friends. Give me a week tothink it over."
The soul of a real artist is quenched with difficulty.
The boys carefully pointed out to him that advertisements were soulless,and that the deficiencies of the day might not be supplied by themorrow.
"A cool hundred," said Fuzzy thoughtfully and mushily.
"Boys," said he, "you are true friends. I'll go up and claim the reward.The show business is not what it used to be."
Night was falling more surely. The three tagged at his sides to the footof the rise on which stood the Millionaire's house. There Fuzzy turnedupon them acrimoniously.
"You are a pack of putty-faced beagle-hounds," he roared. "Go away."
They went away--a little way.
In "Pigeon" McCarthy's pocket was a section of one-inch gas-pipe eightinches long. In one end of it and in the middle of it was a lead plug.One-half of it was packed tight with solder. Black Riley carried aslung-shot, being a conventional thug. "One-ear" Mike relied upon apair of brass knucks--an heirloom in the family.
"Why fetch and carry," said Black Riley, "when some one will do it forye? Let him bring it out to us. Hey--what?"
"We can chuck him in the river," said "Pigeon" McCarthy, "with a stonetied to his feet."
"Youse guys make me tired," said "One-ear" Mike sadly. "Ain't progressever appealed to none of yez? Sprinkle a little gasoline on 'im, anddrop 'im on the Drive--well?"
Fuzzy entered the Millionaire's gate and zigzagged toward the softlyglowing entrance of the mansion. The three goblins came up to the gateand lingered--one on each side of it, one beyond the roadway. Theyfingered their cold metal and leather, confident.
Fuzzy rang the door-bell, smiling foolishly and dreamily. An atavisticinstinct prompted him to reach for the button of his right glove. But hewore no gloves; so his left hand dropped, embarrassed.
The particular menial whose duty it was to open doors to silks and lacesshied at first sight of Fuzzy. But a second glance took in his passport,his card of admission, his surety of welcome--the lost rag-doll of thedaughter of the house dangling under his arm.
Fuzzy was admitted into a great hall, dim with the glow from unseenlights. The hireling went away and returned with a maid and the Child.The doll was restored to the mourning one. She clasped her lost darlingto her breast; and then, with the inordinate selfishness and candor ofchildhood, stamped her foot and whined hatred and fear of the odiousbeing who had rescued her from the depths of sorrow and despair. Fuzzywriggled himself into an ingratiatory attitude and essayed the idioticsmile and blattering small talk that is supposed to charm the buddingintellect of the young. The Child bawled, and was dragged away, huggingher Betsy close.
There came the Secretary, pale, poised, polished, gliding in pumps, andworshipping pomp and ceremony. He counted out into Fuzzy's hand tenten-dollar bills; then dropped his eye upon the door, transferred it toJames, its custodian, indicated the obnoxious earner of the reward withthe other, and allowed his pumps to waft him away to secretarialregions.
James gathered Fuzzy with his own commanding optic and swept him as faras the front door.
When the money touched fuzzy's dingy palm his first instinct was to taketo his heels; but a second thought restrained him from that blunderof etiquette. It was his; it had been given him. It--and, oh, what anelysium it opened to the gaze of his mind's eye! He had tumbled to thefoot of the ladder; he was hungry, homeless, friendless, ragged, cold,drifting; and he held in his hand the key to a paradise of the mud-honeythat he craved. The fairy doll had waved a wand with her rag-stuffedhand; and now wherever he might go the enchanted palaces with shiningfoot-rests and magic red fluids in gleaming glassware would be open tohim.
He followed James to the door.
He paused there as the flunky drew open the great mahogany portal forhim to pass into the vestibule.
Beyond the wrought-iron gates in the dark highway Black Riley and histwo pals casually strolled, fingering under their coats the inevitablyfatal weapons that were to make the reward of the rag-doll theirs.
Fuzzy stopped at the Millionaire's door and bethought himself. Likelittle sprigs of mistletoe on a dead tree, certain living green thoughtsand memories began to decorate his confused mind. He was quite drunk,mind you, and the present was beginning to fade. Those wreaths andfestoons of holly with their scarlet berries making the great hallgay--where had he seen such things before? Somewhere he had knownpolished floors and odors of fresh flowers in winter, and--and some onewas singing a song in the house that he thought he had heard before.Some one singing and playing a harp. Of course, it was Christmas--Fuzzythough he must have been pretty drunk to have overlooked that.
And then he went out of the present, and there came back to him out ofsome impossible, vanished, and irrevocable past a little, pure-white,transient, forgotten ghost--the spirit of _noblesse oblige_. Upon agentleman certain things devolve.
James opened the outer door. A stream of light went down the graveledwalk to the iron gate. Black Riley, McCarthy, and "One-ear" Mike saw,and carelessly drew their sinister cordon closer about the gate.
With a more imperious gesture than James's master had ever used or couldever use, Fuzzy compelled the menial to close the door. Upon a gentlemancertain things devolve. Especially at the Christmas season.
"It is cust--customary," he said to James, the flustered, "when agentleman calls on Christmas Eve to pass the compliments of the seasonwith the lady of the house. You und'stand? I shall not move shtep tillI pass compl'ments season with lady the house. Und'stand?"
There was an argument. James lost. Fuzzy raised his voice and sent itthrough the house unpleasantly. I did not say he was a gentleman. He wassimply a tramp being visited by a ghost.
A sterling silver bell rang. James went back to answer it, leaving Fuzzyin the hall. James explained somewhere to some one.
Then he came and conducted Fuzzy into the library.
The lady entered a moment later. She was more beautiful and holy thanany picture that Fuzzy had seen. She smiled, and said something about adoll. Fuzzy didn't understand that; he remembered nothing about a doll.
A footman brought in two small glasses of sparkling wine on a stampedsterling-silver waiter. The Lady took one. The other was handed toFuzzy.
As his fingers closed on the slender glass stem his disabilities droppedfrom him for one brief moment. He straightened himself; and Time, sodisobliging to most of us, turned backward to accommodate Fuzzy.
Forgotten Christmas ghosts whiter than the false beards of the mostopulent Kris Kringle were rising in the fumes of Grogan's whisky. Whathad the Millionaire's mansion to do with a long, wainscoted Virginiahall, where the riders were grouped around a silver punch-bowl, drinkingthe ancient toast of the House? And why should the patter of the cabhorses' hoofs on the frozen street be in any wise related to the soundof the saddled hunters stamping under the shelter of the west veranda?And what had Fuzzy to do with any of it?
The Lady, looking at him over her glass, let her condescending smilefade away like a false dawn. Her eyes turned serious. She saw somethingbeneath the rags and Scotch terrier whiskers that she did notunderstand. But it did not matter.
Fuzzy lifted his glass and smiled vacantly.
"P-pardon, lady," he said, "but couldn't leave without exchangin'comp'ments sheason with lady th' house. 'Gainst princ'ples gen'leman dosho."
And then he began the ancient salutation that was a tradition in theHouse when men wore lace ruffles and powder.
"The blessings of another year--"
Fuzzy's memory failed him. The Lady prompted:
"--Be upon this hearth."
"--The guest--" stammered Fuzzy.
"--And upon her who--" continued the Lady, with a leading smile.
"Oh, cut it out," said Fuzzy, ill-manneredly. "I can't remember. Drinkhearty."
Fuzzy had shot his arrow. They drank. The Lady smiled again the smile ofher caste. James enveloped and re-conducted him toward the front door.The harp music still softly drifted through the house.
Outside, Black Riley breathed on his cold hands and hugged the gate.
"I wonder," said the Lady to herself, musing, "who--but there were somany who came. I wonder whether memory is a curse or a blessing to themafter they have fallen so low."
Fuzzy and his escort were nearly at the door. The Lady called: "James!"
James stalked back obsequiously, leaving Fuzzy waiting unsteadily, withhis brief spark of the divine fire gone.
Outside, Black Riley stamped his cold feet and got a firmer grip on hissection of gas-pipe.
"You will conduct this gentleman," said the lady, "Downstairs. Then tellLouis to get out the Mercedes and take him to whatever place he wishesto go."
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