Part 8

“Uh-huh,” said Tommy, who had benefited by his cold sluicing and his rubdown. “I gave him a few bubbles for his very own--through the keyhole into his room, you know. Poked that brass rod through and blew the bubble in his room. Detached it with a little jerk and let it float. Seemed more sociable, you know, to let him in on the fun. Never be stingy with your pleasures, Jack. Shows a mean spirit--a mean soul. Why not cheer the old party up with soap bubbles? Cost little, bubbles do. More than likely he's a stranger in New York. Unfriendly city, he thinks. Big city. Nobody thinks of him. Nobody cares for him. Away from home. Winter day. Melancholy. Well, I say, give him a bubble now and then. Shows some one is thinking of him. Shows the world isn't so thoughtless and gloomy after all. Neighborly sort of thing to do, Jack. Makes him think of his youth--home--mother's knee--all that kind of thing, Jack. Cheers him up. Sat in the tub there and got to thinking of him. Almost cried, Jack, when I thought how lonely the old man must be--got one of these old man's voices. Whiskers. Whiskers deduced from the voice. So I climbed out of the tub every ten or fifteen minutes all afternoon and gave the old man a bubble. Rain outside--fog, sleet. Dark indoors. Old man sits and thinks nobody loves him. Along comes a bubble. Old man gets happy. Laughs. Remembers his infancy. Skies clear. You think I'm a selfish person, Jack? I'm not. I'm a Samaritan. Where will we eat?”

“You are a darned fool,” said Jack. “You say he took them seriously? What do you mean? Did he like 'em?”

“Couldn't quite make out,” said Tommy. “But they moved him. Gasped every now and then. Think he prayed. Emotion, Jack. Probably made him think of boyhood's happy days down on the farm. Heard him talking to himself. Think he cried. Went to bed anyhow with his clothes on and pulled the covers over his head. Looked through the keyhole and saw that. Gray whiskers sticking up, and that's all. Deduced the whiskers from the voice, Jack. Let's give the old party a couple more bubbles and then go eat. It's been an hour since he's had one. Thinks I'm forgetting him, no doubt.”

So they gave the old man a couple of bubbles, poking the brass rod through the keyhole of the door.

The result was startling and unexpected. First there came a gasp from the other room, a sort of whistling release of the breath, and an instant later a high, whining, nasal voice.

“Oh, God! God! Again! You meant it, then, God! You meant it!”

The two young men started back and looked at each other in wonderment. There was such a quivering agony, such an utter groveling terror in this voice from the room beyond that they were daunted.

“What's eating him?” asked Dobson, instinctively dropping his tones to a whisper.

“I don't know,” said Tommy, temporarily subdued. “Sounds like that last one shell-shocked him when it exploded, doesn't it?”

But Tommy was subdued only for a moment.

As they went out into the corridor he giggled and remarked, “Told you he took 'em seriously, Jack.”

II

“Seriously” was a word scarcely strong enough for the way in which the old party in the room beyond had taken it, though he had not, in fact, seen the bubble. He had only seen a puff of smoke coming apparently from nowhere, originating in the air itself, as it seemed to him, manifesting itself, materializing itself out of nothing, and floating in front of the one eye which was peeping fearfully out of the huddled bedclothing which he had drawn over himself. He had lain quaking on the bed, waiting for this puff of smoke for an hour or more, hoping against hope that it would not come, praying and muttering, knotting his bony hands in the whiskers that Tommy had seen sticking up from the coverings, twisting convulsively.

Tommy had whimsically filled the bubble, as he blew it, with smoke from his cigarette. He had in like manner, throughout the afternoon and early-evening, filled all the bubbles that he had given the old man with cigarette or pipe smoke. The old party had not been bowled over by anything in Tommy's tobacco. He had not noticed that the smoke was tobacco smoke, for he had been smoking a pipe himself the greater part of the day, and had not aired out the room. It was neither bubbles nor tobacco that had flicked a raw spot on his soul. It was smoke.

III

Bubbles! They seemed to be in Tommy's brain. Perhaps it was the association of ideas that made him think of champagne. At any rate he declared that he must have some, and vetoed his friend's suggestion that they dine--as they frequently did--at one of the little Italian table d'hote places in Greenwich Village.

“You're a bubble and I'm a bubble and the world is a bubble,” Tommy was saying a little later as he watched the gas stirring in his golden drink.

They had gone to the genial old Brevoort, which was--but why tell persons who missed the Brevoort in its mellower days what they missed, and why cause anguished yearnings in the bosoms of those who knew it well?

“Tommy,” said his friend, “don't, if you love me, hand out any more of your jejune poeticism or musical-comedy philosophy. I'll agree with you that the world is a bubble for the sake of argument, if you'll change the record. I want to eat, and nothing interferes with my pleasure in a meal so much as this line of pseudocerebration that you seem to have adopted lately.”

“Bubbles seem trivial things, Jack,” went on Tommy, altogether unperturbed. “But I have a theory that there aren't any trivial things. I like to think of the world balancing itself on a trivial thing. Look at the Kaiser, for instance. A madman. Well, let's say there's been a blood clot in his brain for years--a little trivial thing the size of a pin point, Jack. It hooks up with the wrong brain cell; it gets into the wrong channel, and--pouf! The world goes to war. A thousand million people are affected by it--by that one little clot of blood no bigger than a pin point that gets into the wrong channel. An atom! A planet balanced on an atom! A star pivoting on a molecule!”

“Have some soup,” said his friend.

“Bubbles! Bubbles and butterflies!” continued Tommy. “Some day, Jack, I'm going to write a play in which a butterfly's wing brushes over an empire.”

“No, you're not,” said Jack. “You're just going to talk about it and think you're writing it and peddle the idea round to everybody you know, and then finally some wise guy is going to grab it off and really write it. You've been going to write a play ever since I knew you.”

“Yes, I am; I'm really going to write that play.”

“Well, Tommy,” said Jack, looking round the chattering dining room, “this is a hell of a place to do it in!”

“Meaning, of course,” said Tommy serenely, “that it takes more than a butterfly to write a play about a butterfly.”

“You get me,” said his friend. And then after a pause he went on with sincerity in his manner: “You know I think you could write the play, Tommy. But unless you get to work on some of your ideas pretty soon, and buckle down to them in earnest, other people will continue to write your plays--and you will continue to josh them and yourself, and your friends will continue to think that you could write better plays if you would only do it. People aren't going to take you seriously, Tommy, till you begin to take yourself a little seriously. Why, you poor, futile, silly, misguided, dear old mutt, you! You don't even have sense enough--you don't have the moral continuity, if you follow me--to stay sore at a man that does you dirt! Now, do you?”

“Oh, I don't know about that,” said Tommy a little more seriously.

“Well now, do you?” persisted his friend. “I don't say it's good Christian doctrine not to forgive people. It isn't. But I've seen people put things across on you, Tommy, and seen you laugh it off and let 'em be friends with you again inside of six weeks. I couldn't do it, and nine-tenths of the fellows we know couldn't do it; and in the way you do it it shouldn't be done. You should at least remember, even if you do forgive; remember well enough not to get bit by the same dog again. With you, old kid, it's all a part of your being a butterfly and a bubble. It's no particular virtue in you. I wouldn't talk to you like a Dutch uncle if I didn't think you had it in you to make good. But you've got to be prodded.”

“There's one fellow that did me dirt,” said Tommy musingly, “that I've never taken to my bosom again.”

“What did you do to him?” asked his friend. “Beat him to death with a butterfly's wing, Tommy, or blow him out of existence with a soap bubble?”

“I've never done anything to him,” said Tommy soberly. “And I don't think I ever would do anything to him. I just remember, that's all. If he ever gets his come-uppance, as they say in the rural districts, it won't be through any act of mine. Let life take revenge for me. I never will.”

“I suppose you're right,” said Dobson. “But who was this guy? And what did he do to you?”

IV

“He was--and is--my uncle,” said Tommy, “and he did about everything to me. Listen! You think I do nothing but flitter, flutter, frivol and flivver! And you may be right, and maybe I never will do anything else. Maybe I never will be anything but a kid.

“I was young when I was born. No, that's not one of my silly lines, Jack. I mean it seriously. I was young when I was born. I was born with a jolly disposition. But this uncle of mine took it out of me. I'll say he did! The reason I'm such a kid now, Jack, is because I had to grow up when I was about five years old, and I stayed grown up until I was seventeen or eighteen. I never had a chance to be a boy. If I showed any desire to be it was knocked out of me on the spot. And if I live two hundred years, and stay nineteen years old all that time, Jack, I won't any more than make up for the childhood I missed--that was stolen from me. Frivol? I could frivol a thousand years and not dull my appetite. I want froth, Jack: froth and bubbles!

“This old uncle of mine--he wasn't so old in years when I first knew him, but in his soul he was as old as the overseers who whipped the slaves that built Cheops' pyramid, and as sandy and as flinty--hated me as soon as he saw me. He hated me before he saw me. He would have hated me if he had never seen me, because I was young and happy and careless.

“I was that, when I went to live with him--young and happy and careless. I was five years old. He was my father's brother, Uncle Ezra was, and he beat my father out of money in his dirty, underhanded way. Oh, nothing illegal! At least, I suppose not. Uncle Ezra was too cautious to do anything that might be found out on him. There was nothing that my mother could prove, at any rate, and my father had been careless and had trusted him. When my father died my mother was ill. He gave us a home, Uncle Ezra did. She had to live somewhere; she had to have a roof over her head and attention of some sort. She had no near relations, and I had to be looked after.

“So she and I went into his house to live. It was to be temporary. We were to move as soon as she got better. But she did not live long. I don't remember her definitely as she was before we went to live with Uncle Ezra. I can only see her as she lay on a bed in a dark room before she died. It was a large wooden bed, with wooden slats and a straw mattress. I can see myself sitting on a chair by the head of the bed and talking to her. My feet did not reach to the floor by any means; they only reached to the chair rungs. I can't remember what she said or what I said. All I remember of her is that she had very bright eyes and that her arms were thin. I remember her arms, but not her face, except the eyes. I suppose she used to reach her arms out to me. I think she must have been jolly at one time, too. There is a vague feeling, a remembrance, that before we went to Uncle Ezra's she was jolly, and that she and I laughed and played together in some place where there was red-clover bloom.

“One day when I was siting on the chair, the door opened and Uncle Ezra came in. There was some man with him that was, I suppose, a doctor. I can recall Uncle Ezra's false grin and the way he put his hand on my head--to impress the doctor, I suppose--and the way I pulled away from him. For I felt that he disliked me, and I feared and hated him.

“Yes, Uncle Ezra gave us a home. I don't know how much you know about the rural districts, Jack. But when an Uncle Ezra in a country town gives some one a home he acquires merit. This was a little town in Pennsylvania that Pm talking about, and Uncle Ezra was a prominent citizen--deacon in the church and all that sort of thing. Truly rural drama stuff, Jack, but I can't help that--it's true. Uncle Ezra had a reputation for being stingy and mean. Giving us a home was a good card for him to play. My mother had a little money, and he stole that, too, when she died.

“I suppose he stole it legally. I don't know. It wasn't much. No one had any particular interest in looking out for me, and nobody would want to start anything in opposition to Uncle Ezra in that town if it could be helped anyhow. He didn't have the whole village and the whole of the farming country round about sewed up, all by himself, but he was one of the little group that did. There's a gang like that in every country town, I imagine. He was one of four or five big ducks in that little puddle--lent money, took mortgages and all that kind of thing you read about. I don't know how much he is worth now, counting what he has been stealing all his life. But it can't be a staggering sum. He's too cowardly to plunge or take a long chance. He steals and saves and grinds in a little way. He is too mean and small and blind and limited in his intelligence to be a big, really successful crook, such as you will find in New York City.

“When my mother died, of course, I stayed with Uncle Ezra. I suppose everybody said how good it was of him to keep me, and that it showed a soft and kindly spot in his nature after all, and that he couldn't be so hard as he had the name of being. But I don't see what else could have been done with me, unless he had taken me out and dropped me in the mill pond like a blind cat. Sometimes I used to wish he had done that.

“It isn't hard to put a five-year-old kid in the wrong, so as to make it appear--even to the child himself--that he is bad and disobedient. Uncle Ezra began that way with me. I'm not going into details. This isn't a howl; it's merely an explanation. But he persecuted me in every way. He put me to work before I should have known what work was--work too hard for me. He deviled me and he beat me, he clothed me like a beggar and he fed me like a dog, he robbed me of childhood and of boyhood. I won't go over the whole thing.

“I never had decent shoes, or a hat that wasn't a rag, and I never went to kid parties or anything, or even owned so much as an air rifle of my own. The only pair of skates I ever had, Jack, I made for myself out of two old files, with the help of the village blacksmith--and I got licked for that. Uncle Ezra said I had stolen the files and the straps. They belonged to him.

“But there's one thing I remember with more of anger than any other. He used to make me kneel down and pray every night before I went to bed, in his presence; and sometimes he would pray with me. He was a deacon in the church. There are plenty of them on the square--likely most of them are. But this one was the kind you used to see in the old-fashioned melodramas. Truly rural stuff, Jack. He used to be quite a shark at prayer himself, Uncle Ezra did. I can remember how he looked when he prayed, with his eyes shut and his Adam's apple bobbing up and down and the sound whining through his nose.

“The only person that was ever human to me was a woman I called Aunt Lizzie. I don't know really what relation she wras to me; a distant cousin of Uncle Ezra's, I think. She was half blind and she was deaf, and he bullied her and made her do all the housework. She was bent nearly double with drudgery. He had given her a home, too. She didn't dare be very good to me. He might find it out, and then we both would catch it. She baked me some apple dumplings once on one of my birthdays. I was nine years old. And he said she had stolen the apples and flour from him; that he had not ordered her to make any apple dumplings, and it was theft; and he made me pray for her, and made her pray for herself, and he prayed for both of us in family prayers every day for a week.

“I was nearly eighteen when I ran away. I might have done it sooner, but I was small for my age, and I was cowed. I didn't dare to call my soul my own, and I had a reputation for being queer, too. For I used to grin and laugh at things no one else thought were funny--when Uncle Ezra wasn't round. I suppose people in that town thought it was odd that I could laugh at all. No one could understand how I had a laugh left in me. But when I was alone I used to laugh. I used to laugh at myself sometimes because I was so little and so queer. When I was seventeen I wasn't much bigger than a thirteen-year-old kid should be. I packed a lot of growing into the years between seventeen and twenty-one.

“When I ran away Aunt Lizzie gave me eighty-seven cents, all in nickels and pennies, and there were two or three of those old-fashioned two-cent pieces in it, too, that she had had for God knows how long. It was all she had. I don't suppose he ever paid her anything at all, and the wonder was she had that much. I told her that when I got out into the world and made good I would come and get her, but she shivered all over with fright at the idea of daring to leave. I have sent her things from time to time in the last ten years--money, and dresses I have bought for her, and little things I thought she would like. But I don't know whether he let her have them or not I never got any letter from her at all. I don't even know whether she can write, to tell the truth, and she wouldn't dare get one of the neighbors to write for her. But if I ever make any real money, Jack, I am going to go and get her, whether she dares to come away or not.

“Well, when I left, the thing I wanted to do was go to school. Uncle Ezra hadn't given me time to go to school much. But I tramped to a town where there was a little fresh-water college that had its own prep school attached, and I did the whole seven years of prep school and college in five years. You see, I had a lot of bounce in me. The minute I got away from Uncle Ezra the whole world brightened up for me. The clouds rolled by and life looked like one grand long joke, and I turned into a kid. I romped through that prep school and that college, and made my own living while I was doing it, and laughed all the time and loved the world and everything in it, and it came as easy to me as water comes to a duck. I came on down here to New York and was lucky enough to get a chance as a reporter, and I've been romping ever since.

“I don't want to do anything but romp. Of course, I want to write some good stuff some day, but I want to keep romping while I write it, and I want it to be stuff that has a romp in it, too. You say I romp so much I'm never serious. Well, I do have some serious moments, too. I have a dream that keeps coming to me. I dream that I'm back in that little town, and that I'm Uncle Ezra's slave again, and that I can't get away.

“Sometimes the dream takes the form of Uncle Ezra coming here to New York to get me, and I know that I've got to go back with him to that place, and I wake up sweating and crying like an eight-year-old kid. If he ever really came it would put a crimp into me, Jack.

“You say I'm a butterfly. And I say, yes, Jack, thank God I am! I used to be a grubworm, and now I'm a butterfly, praise heaven!

“Well, that's the guy I hold the grudge against, and that's why I'm fool enough to rush into every pleasure I can find. I don't know that I'll ever change. And as for the man, I don't ever want to see him. I don't know that I'd ever do anything to him if I did--beat him to death with a butterfly's wing, or blow him up with a soap bubble, as you suggested. Let him alone. He'll punish himself. He is punished by being what he is. I wouldn't put a breath into the scale one way or the other--not even a puff of cigarette smoke.”

He blew a breath of cigarette smoke luxuriously out of his nose as he finished, and then he remarked, “Let's go somewhere and dance.”

“Nazimova is doing Ibsen uptown,” suggested Jack, “and I have a couple of tickets. Let's go and see Ibsen lb a little.”

“Nope,” said Tommy. “Ibsen's got too much sense. I want something silly. Me for a cabaret, or some kind of a hop garden.”

V

But sometimes in this ironical world it happens that we have already beaten a man to death with a butterfly's wing, slain him with a bubble, sent him whirling into the hereafter on a puff of smoke, even as we are saying that such a thing is foreign to our thoughts.

The old party in the room next to Tommy's at the hotel had arrived the day before, with an umbrella, a straw suitcase and a worried eye on either side his long, white, chalkish, pitted nose. He seemed chilly in spite of his large plum-colored overcoat, of a cut that has survived only in the rural districts. He wore a salient, assertive beard, that had once been sandy and was now almost white, but it was the only assertive thing about him. His manner was far from aggressive.

An hour after he had been shown to his room he appeared at the desk again and inquired timidly of the clerk, “There's a fire near here?”

“Little blaze in the next block. Doesn't amount to anything,” said the clerk.

“I heard the--the engines,” said the guest apologetically.

“Doesn't amount to anything,” said the clerk again. And then, “Nervous about fire?”

The old party seemed startled.

“Who? Me? Why should I be nervous about fire? No! No! No!” He beat a sudden retreat. “I was just asking--just asking,” he threw back over his shoulder.

“Old duck's scared of fire and ashamed to own it,” mused the clerk, watching him out of the lobby.

The old party went back to his room, and there one of the first things he saw was a copy of the Bible lying on the bureau. There is an organization which professes for its object the placing of a Bible in every hotel room in the land. The old party had his own Bible with him. As if reminded of it by the one on the bureau, he took it out of his suitcase and sat down and began to turn the leaves like a person familiar with the book--and like a person in need of comfort, as indeed he was.

There was a text in Matthew that he sought--where was it? Somewhere in the first part of Matthew's gospel--ah, here it is: The twelfth chapter and the thirty-first verse:

“All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men....”

There is a terrible reservation in the same verse. He kept his eyes from it, and read the first part over and over, forming the syllables with his lips, but not speaking aloud.

“All manner of sin--all manner of sin-------”

And then, as if no longer able to avoid it, he yielded his consciousness to the latter clause of the verse:

“But the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.”

What was blasphemy against the Holy Ghost? Could what he had done be construed as that? Probably if one lied to God in his prayers, that was blasphemy against the Holy Ghost--one form of it. And had he been lying to God these last two weeks when he had said over and over again in his prayers that it was all a mistake? It hadn't been all a mistake, but the worst part of it had been a mistake.

He went out for his dinner that evening, but he was in again before ten o'clock. He could not have slept well. At two o'clock in the morning he appeared in front of the desk.

He had heard fire engines again.