Chapter 16

The following Sunday, at our meeting, he had an awakening which reminded me of the account of Paul's conversion on the way to Damascus. It revolutionized his mental processes, and he began to give outward expression to his new-found inner joy.

He would buy some stale bread overnight, and early in the morning he would make coffee on the bunk-house stove in a quart tomato-can. Each man, before he left the place, had a bite of stale bread and at least a mouthful of warm coffee. Then they would uncover their heads while the old man asked God to bless them for the day.

He tinkered for a living, but his vocation became the conversion of men. From these small beginnings in quiet evangelism, he branched out into work of the same kind among the tenements. He mended pots, kettles, and pans, and charged for the job a chapter in the Bible. I came on him suddenly one morning in an alley. Snow was on the ground, and he was reading a chapter with his face close to a broken pane. It appeared he had done some soldering for an Irishwoman, and asked the privilege of reading to her.

"Begorra," she said, "the house isn't fit to read the Holy Book in, but if yez w'u'dn't mind reading through the window, I'll take the rags out."

So she took the bundle out of the broken pane, and Dowling bent over and read his chapter.

When the Rev. John Hopkins Dennison took charge of the old Church of Sea and Land, he established a sort of latter-day monastery in the old square tower, and there Brother Dowling had a cell, where he lived and worked among the poor for many years.

In an escapade with two other soldiers in the Sepoy rebellion, Dowling had looted the palace of a raja. In the act of burying several canes filled with diamonds, one of the three was shot dead. Dowling and the other escaped. One day on the Bowery, forty years afterward, a man laid his hand on Dowling's shoulder and asked him what he did with the loot. It was the other man.

"What did _you_ do with it?" Dowling asked. Each had lived in the belief that the other had got away with it.

The tinker-preacher was very much stirred up over this. He wrote at once to the governor-general of India, told the whole story, and offered to come out and locate the stolen booty. Money was appropriated to pay his passage, but the old man was going on another journey. He wrote a full description of the place and transaction, and then lay down in the tower of the old church and died.

_"Doc," our Volunteer Organist_

"Say, Bub," said Gar, the bouncer, to me one day, "what ungodly hour of the mornin' d'ye git up?"

"At the godly hour of necessity," I replied.

"Wal, I hev a pal I want ter interjooce to ye at six."

I met the bouncer and his "pal" at the corner of Broome Street and the Bowery next morning at the appointed hour.

"Dat's Doc!" said Gar, as he clapped his hand on his friend's head.

His friend bowed low and in faultless English said: "I am more than pleased to meet you."

"I can give ye a pointer on Doc," the big fellow continued. "If ye tuk a peaner t' th' top av a mountain an' let her go down the side sorter ez she pleases, 'e cud pick up the remains an' put thim together so's ye w'u'dn't know they'd been apart. Yes, sir; that's no song an' dance, an' 'e c'u'd play any chune iver invented on it."

"Doc" laughed and made some explanations. They had a wheezy old organ in Halloran's dive, and Doc kept it in repair and played occasionally for them. Doc had a Rip Van Winkle look. His hair hung down his back, and his clothes were threadbare and green with age. His shoes were tied to his feet with wire, and stockings he had none. He was a New-Englander, and had studied medicine until his sheep-skin was almost in his hand. Then Doc slipped a cog and went down, down, down, until he landed at Halloran's dive. For twelve years he had been selling penny song-sheets on the streets and in saloons. He was usually in rags, but a score of the wildest inhabitants of that awful dive told me that Doc was their "good angel." He could play the songs of their childhood, he was kind and gentle, and men couldn't be vulgar in his presence.

I saw in Doc an unusual man, and was able to persuade him to go home with me. In a week he was a new man, clothed and in his right mind. He became librarian of a big church library, and our volunteer organist at all the Sunday meetings.

After two years of uninterrupted service as librarian, during which time Doc had been of great service in the bunk-house, I lost him. Five years later, crossing Brooklyn Bridge on a car, I passed Doc, who was walking in the same direction. At the end of the bridge, I planted myself in front of him. "Doc," I said, "you will never get away from me again!" I took him to New Haven, where he has been janitor of a hall in Yale University ever since.

_Gar, Bouncer of the Bismarck_

I have mentioned Gar, or Garfield, bouncer of the Bismarck. A strong, primitive man, he is worth a chapter in himself. When I met him first, I was scrubbing. Before I came, the Bismarck floor, like the Bismarck linen, was cleaned once a month. Having made the house my headquarters, I took some pride in it. I got permission to scrub that floor mid-month, and, dressed in a suitable outfit, I proceeded with the job. I hadn't gone far when a tall, gaunt form lurched into the room.

"Hello," he grunted.

"Hello," I said, as I paused for a moment.

"What's up?" he asked.

"You haven't seen me before, have you?" I asked.

"Don't know ye from a hole in the ground!"

"Well, I'm the missionary, and as there's a vital connection between soap and salvation, I'm making a beginning on the floor. When I finish this, I'll try my hand on you."

He laughed a hoarse, guttural laugh, and said:

"Don't git bug-house, boss; ye'd wind up jest whar ye've begun!"

He had several names; his real name was Brady. In the bunk-house they called him "Gar." He was bull-necked, bullet-headed, tall, round-shouldered, stooped. The story of a hard life was in his face. He had been in the army, but they couldn't drill him. They couldn't even get rid of his stoop. He must have looked like a gorilla with a gun. In the Bismarck, he became the terror of the lesser breeds--the king by right of conquest.

Gar was a challenge to me, for I saw in him something wild, untamed, and, perhaps, untamable. I resolved to dispute with my own methods his mastery of the place. Such was his power over the other men that, could I only conquer him, the rest would be easy. I concentrated on Gar.

It was virgin soil. He was ignorant of the vocabulary of religion. This was the more amazing because he had spent fifteen or twenty years in prisons. His special difficulty, I found, was intemperance. My first task was to cure him of that.

One night, as he approached his bunk, he found me stretched out on the next one.

"Well, I'll be----," he said.

"What's the matter, Gar?"

"Dat's what I ask youse. What's wrong with your machinery? Have ye been rejooced to the ranks, or has Gawd bounced ye?"

I went up close and whispered in his ear:

"Look here, old man, I'm glued to you; night, noon, and day, I'm going to eat, sleep, loaf, work, and play with you until every shred of your miserable soul belongs to God."

He laughed loud enough to wake every man in the dormitory.

"Sonny," he said, "I'll give ye three nights, and if ye haven't lost yer little goat be dat time, I'll set up de drinks fur all hands at Halloran's."

Then Gar set out to make good in the rôle of a prophet. At first he tried to disgust me. He kept up a rapid fire of the most vulgar profanity. That night he started several fights, and put the light out in the dormitory. The men, yelling for light, ran about, smashing every one in their way. When things quieted down, he asked me how I liked the entertainment. I complained that it was tame.

"Gee!" he said, "youse must 'a' been a barker at Coney!"

I kept him sober for a week; then he went back to his cups, and in a frenzy he nearly killed a bartender. I found him hiding in a rag-picker's basement. It appeared that the man had used the name of Christ in a vile connection, and Gar became a champion of the Nazarene.

"Hangin'," said Gar, "is too dead easy fur d' sucker what keeps cool when Jesus's insulted. Dat's d' fust time I ever soaked a guy on account of religion, an', b'jiminy, I'm tickled t' death over it."

When Gar squared himself again, he began a wholesale house-cleaning in the bunk-house. He persuaded the management to make several outlays, and he gave himself to the work. We installed a book-case and books, and Gar himself selected some chromos to hang around. Over a dent in the wall, made by a chair with which he had tried to kill a man, he hung this motto: "Let Brotherly Love Continue."

For ten years Gar struggled to be master of himself. He spent some years in a soldiers' home, but it was against his principles to die in such a tame institution. He wound up where he had spent his strange career--in Chatham Square.

A bunk-house man--old and half blind--was crossing the street, and roaring down on him came a Third Avenue car. It was Gar's one opportunity, and, with a spring, he pushed the old fellow on his face out of danger, but the wheels pinned Gar to the rails.

"I kin tell ye, boys," he said to the few friends who lingered around his cot at the close, "I'll do no simperin' around God wid hard-luck stories; I'll take what's comin' an' vamoose to m' place--whether up or down."

There was a slight pressure of the big hands, then they became limp and cold.

The bouncer was dead.

THE KING OF THE BABOONS

BY PERCEVAL GIBBON

ILLUSTRATION BY EUGENE HIGGINS

The old yellow-fanged dog-baboon that was chained to a post in the yard had a dangerous trick of throwing stones. He would seize a piece of rock in two hands, stand erect and whirl round on his heels till momentum was obtained, and then let go. The missile would fly like a bullet, and woe betide any one who stood in its way! The performance precluded any kind of aim,--the stone was hurled off at any chance tangent,--and it was bad luck rather than any kind of malice that guided one three-pound boulder through the window, across the kitchen, and into a portrait of Judas de Beer which hung on the wall not half a dozen feet from the slumbering Vrouw Grobelaar.

She bounced from her chair and ballooned to the door with a silent, swift agility most surprising to see in a lady of her generous build, and not a sound did she utter. She was of good veldt-bred fighting stock, which never cried out till it was hurt, and there was even something of compassion in her face as Frikkie jumped from the stoop with a twelve-foot thong in his hand. After all, it was the baboon that suffered most, if his yells were any index to his feelings. Frikkie could smudge a fly ten feet off with just a flick of his whip, and all the tender parts of the accomplished animal came in for ruthless attention.

"He ought to be shot," was Frikkie's remark as he coiled up the thong, at the end of the discipline. "A baboon is past teaching if he has bad habits. He is more like a man than a beast."

The Vrouw Grobelaar seated herself in the stoop-chair which by common consent was reserved for her use, and shook her head.

"Baboons are uncanny things," she answered slowly. "When you shoot them, you can never be quite sure how much murder there is in it. The old story is that some of them have souls and some not; and it is quite certain that they can talk when they will. You have heard them crying in the night sometimes. Well, you ask a Kafir what that means. Ask an old wise Kafir, not a young one that has forgotten the wisdom of the black people and learned only the foolishness of the white."

"What does it mean, Tante?" It was I who put the question. Katje, too, seemed curious.

The old lady eyed me gloomily.

"If you were a landed Boer instead of a kind of schoolmaster," she replied witheringly, "you would not need to ask such a question. But I will tell you. A baboon may be wicked,--look at that one showing his teeth and cursing!--but he is not blind nor a fool. He runs about on the hills, and steals and fights and scratches, and all the time he has all the knowledge and twice the strength of a man, if it were not for the tail behind him and the hair on his body. So it is natural that sometimes he should be grieved to be such a mean thing as a baboon, when he could be a useful kind of man if the men would let him. And at nights, particularly, when their troop is in laager and the young ones are on watch among the high rocks, it comes home to the best of them, and they sob and weep like young widows, pretending that they have pains inside, so that the others shall not feel offended and turn on them. Any one may hear them in the kloofs on a windless night, and, I can tell you, the sound of their sorrow is pitiful."

Katje threw out a suggestion to console them with buckshot, and the Vrouw Grobelaar nodded meaningly.

"To hate baboons is well enough in the wife of a burgher," she said sweetly. "I am glad to see there is so much fitness and wifeliness about you, since you will naturally spend all your life on farms."

Katje's flush was a distress-signal. First blood to the Vrouw.

"Baboons," continued the old lady, "are among a farmer's worst enemies; they steal and destroy and menace all the year around. But, for all that, there are many farmers who will not shoot or trap them. And these, you will notice, are always farmers of a ripe age and sense shaped by experience. _They_ know, you may be sure. My stepsister's first husband, Shadrach van Guelder, shot at baboons once, and was so frightened afterwards that he was afraid to be alone in the dark."

There was a story toward, and no one moved.

"There were many Kafirs on his farm, which you have not seen," pursued the Vrouw Grobelaar, adjusting her voice to narrative pitch. "It was on the fringe of the Drakensberg, and many spurs of hill, divided by deep kloofs like gashes, descended on to it. So plenty of water came down, and the cattle were held from straying by the rocks, on one side at any rate. The Kafirs had their kraals dotted all about the land; and as they were of the kind that work, my stepsister's husband suffered them to remain and grow their little patches of mealies, while they worked for him in between. He was, of course, a cattle Boer, as all of our family have always been, but here were so many Kafirs to be had for nothing that he soon commenced to plow great spaces of land and sow valuable crops. There was every prospect that we would make very much money out of that farm; for corn always sells, even when cattle are going for only seven pounds apiece, and Shadrach van Guelder was very cheerful about it.

"But when a farmer weighs an ungrown crop, you will always find that there is something or other he does not take into account. He tells off the weather and the land and the Kafirs and the water on his fingers, and forgets to bend down his thumb to represent God--or something. Shadrach van Guelder lifted up his eyes to the hills from whence came the water, but it was not until the green corn was six inches high that he saw that there came with it baboons--armies and republics of them; more baboons than he had thought to exist. They swooped down on his sprouting lands, and rioted, ate, and rooted, trampled and wantoned, with that kind of bouncing devilishness that not even a Kafir can correctly imitate. In one night they undid all his work on five sown morgen of fat land, and with the first wink of the sun in the east they were back again in their kopjes, leaving devastation and foulness wherever they passed.

"It was my stepsister's husband that stood on one leg and cursed like a Jew. He was wrathful as a Hollander that has been drinking water, and what did not help to make him content was the fact that hardly anything would avail to protect his lands. Once the baboons had tasted the sweetness of the young corn, they would come again and again, camping in the kloofs overhead as long as anything remained for them, like a deaf guest. But, for all that, he had no notion of leaving them to plunder at their ease. The least one can do with an unwelcome visitor is to make him uncomfortable; and he sent to certain kraals on the farm for two old Kafirs he had remarked who had the appearance of cunning old men.

"They came and squatted before him, squirming and shuffling, as Kafirs do when a white man talks to them. One was quite a common kind of Kafir, gone a little gray with age, a tuft of white wool on his chin and little patches of it here and there on his head. But the other was a small, twisted, yellow man, with no hair at all, and eyes like little blots of fire on a charred stick; and his arms were so long and gnarled and lean that he had a bestial look, like a laborious animal.

"'The baboons have killed the crop on the lower lands,' said Shadrach, smacking his leg with his sjambok. 'If they are not checked, they will destroy all the corn on this farm. What is the way to go about it?'

"The little yellow man was biting his lips and turning a straw in his hands, and gave no answer; but the other spoke.

"'I am from Shangaanland,' he said, 'and there, when the baboons plague us, we have a way with them, a good way.'

"He sneered sideways at his yellow companion as he spoke, and the look which the latter returned to him was a thing to shrink from.

"'What is this way?' demanded Shadrach.

"'You must trap a baboon,' explained the old Kafir,--'a leading baboon, for choice, who has a lot to say in the government of the troop; and then you must skin him, and let him go again. The others will travel miles and miles as soon as they see him, and never come back again.'

"'It makes me sick to think of it,' said Shadrach. 'Surely you know some other way of scaring them?'

"The old Kafir shook his head slowly, but the yellow man ceased to smile and play with the straw, and spoke:

"'I do not believe in that way, baas. A Shangaan baboon'--he grinned at his companion--'is more easily frightened than those of the Drakensberg. I am of the bushmen, and I know. If you flay one of those up yonder, the others will make war, and where one came before, ten will come every night. A baboon is not a fat, lazy Kafir; one must be careful with him!'

"'How would _you_ drive them away, then?' asked Shadrach.

"The yellow man shuffled his hands in the dust, squatting on his heels. There, there! See--the baboon in the yard is doing the very same thing!

"'If I were the baas,' said the yellow man, 'I would turn out the young men to walk round the fields at night, with buckets to hit with sticks, and make a noise. And I--well, I am of the bushmen.' He scratched himself and smiled emptily.

"'Yes, yes?' demanded Shadrach. He knew the wonderful ways of the bushmen with some animals.

"'I do not know if anything can be done,' said the yellow man, 'but, if the baas is willing, I can go up to the rocks and try.'

"'How?'

"But he could tell nothing. None of these wizards that have charms to subdue the beasts can tell you anything about it. A Hottentot will smell the air and say what cattle are near, but if you bid him tell you how he does it, he giggles like a fool and is ashamed.

"'I do not know if anything can be done,' the yellow man repeated. 'I cannot promise the baas, but I can try.'

"'Well, try, then,' ordered Shadrach, and went away to make the necessary arrangements to have the young Kafirs in the fields that night.

"They did as he bade, and the noise was loathsome--enough to frighten anything with an ear in its head. The Kafirs did not relish the watch in the dark at first, but when they found that their work was only to thump buckets and howl, they came to do it with zest, and roared and banged till you would have thought a judgment must descend on them. The baboons heard it, sure enough, and came down, after a while, to see what was going on. They sat on their rumps outside the circle of Kafirs, as quiet as people in a church, and watched the niggers drumming and capering as though it were a show for their amusement. Then they went back, leaving the crops untouched, but pulling all the huts in one kraal to pieces as they passed. It was the kraal of the old white-tufted Shangaan, as Shadrach learned afterwards.

"Shadrach was pleased that the row had saved his corn, and next day he gave the twisted man a lump of tobacco. The man tucked it into his cheek and smiled, wrinkling his nose and looking at the ground.

"'Did you get speech of the baboons last night among the rocks?' Shadrach asked.

"The other shook his head, grinning. 'I am old,' he said. 'They pay no attention to me, but I will try again. Perhaps, before long, they will listen.'

"'When they do that,' said Shadrach, 'you shall have five pounds of tobacco and five bottles of dop.'

"The man was squatting on his heels all this time at Shadrach's feet, and his hard fingers, like claws, were picking at the ground. Now he put out a hand and began fingering the laces of the farmer's shoes with a quick, fluttering movement that Shadrach saw with a spasm of terror. It was so exactly the trick of a baboon, so entirely a thing animal and unhuman.

"'You are more than a baboon yourself,' he said. 'Let go of my leg. Let go, I say! Curse you, get away--get away from me!'

"The creature had caught his ankle with both hands, the fingers, hard and shovel-ended, pressing into his flesh.

"'Let go!' cried Shadrach, and struck at the man with his sjambok.

"The man bounded on all fours to evade the blow, but it took him in the flank, and he was human--or Kafir--again in a moment, and rubbed himself and whimpered quite naturally.

"'Let me see no more of your baboon tricks,' stormed Shadrach, the more angry because he had been frightened. 'Keep them for your friends among the rocks. And now, be off to your kraal.'

"That night again the Kafirs drummed all about the green corn, and sang in chorus the song which the mountain Kafirs sing when the new moon shows like a paring from a finger-nail of gold. It is a long and very loud song, with stamping of feet every minute, and again the baboons came down to see and listen. The Kafirs saw them, many hundreds of humped black shapes, and sang the louder, while the crowd of beasts grew ever denser as fresh parties came down and joined it. It was opposite the rocks on which they sat that the singing-men collected, roaring their long verses and clattering on the buckets, doubtless not without some intention to jeer at and flout the baffled baboons that watched them in such a silence. It was drooping now to the pit of night, and things were barely seen as shapes, when from higher up the line, where the guardians of the crops were sparser, there came a discord of shrieks.

"'The baboons are through the line!' they cried; and it was on that instant that the great watching army of apes came leaping in a charge on the main force of the Kafirs. Oh, but that was a wild, a haunting thing! Great, bull-headed dog-baboons, with naked fangs and clutching hands alert for murder; bounding mothers of squealing litters that led their young in a dash to the fight; terrible, lean old bitches that made for the men when others went for the corn,--they swooped like a flood of horror on the aghast Kafirs, biting, tearing, bounding through the air like uncouth birds; and in one second the throng of the Kafirs melted before them, and they were amid the corn.