The Under Dog Part 29

"'Yes, I'll go,' and I pulled my umbrella into shape, opened it with a flop, and stepped from the shelter of the doorway into the pelt of the driving rain.

"We kept on up the Fondamenta, crossed the bridge by the side of the Ca.n.a.l of San Vio as far as the Caffe Calcina, and then out on the Zattero, which was being soused with the waves of the Giudecca breaking over the coping of its pavement. Hugging the low wall of Clara Montalba's garden, he keeping out of the wind as best he could, we pa.s.sed the church of San Rosario and stopped at the same low door opening into the building next to Pietro's wine-shop--the one I had seen him enter when I was painting. The caffe was still open, for the glow of its lights streamed out upon the night and was reflected in the rain-drenched pavement. Then a thought struck me:

"'Come in here a moment,' I said to him, and I pushed in Pietro's door.

"'Pietro,' I called out, so that everybody in the caffe could hear, 'I'm going up to Mr. Diffendorfer's room. Better get a fiasco of Chianti ready--the old kind you have in the cellar. When I want it I'll send for it.' If I was going into a trap it was just as well to let somebody know whom I was last seen with. The boys had seen me go out with him, but n.o.body knew where he lived or where he had taken me. I was ashamed of it as soon as I had said it, but somehow I felt as if it were just as well to keep my eyes open.

"Diffendorfer pushed past me and called out to Pietro, in a half-angry tone:

"'No, don't you send it. I've got all the wine we'll want,' turned on his heel, held his door open for me to pa.s.s in, and slammed it behind us.

"It was pitch-dark inside as we mounted the stairs one step at a time until we reached the second flight, where the light from a smouldering wick of a fiorentina set in a niche in the wall shed a dim glow. At the sound of our footsteps a door was opened in a pa.s.sageway on our left, a head thrust out, and as suddenly withdrawn. The same thing happened on the third landing. Diffendorfer paid no attention to these intrusions, and kept on down a long corridor ending in a door. I didn't like the heads--it looked as if they were waiting for Diffendorfer to bring somebody home, and so I slipped my umbrella along in my hand until I could use it as a club, and waited in the dark until he had found the key-hole, unlocked the door, and thrown it open. All I saw was the gray light of the windows opposite this door, which made a dim silhouette of Diffendorfer's figure. Then I heard the sc.r.a.ping of a match, and a gas-jet flashed.

"'Come in,' called Diffendorfer, in a cheery tone. 'Wait till I punch up the fire. Here, take this seat,' and he moved a great chair close to the grate.

"I have seen a good many rooms in my time, but I must say this one took the breath out of me for an instant. The walls were hung in old tapestries, the furniture was of the rarest. There were three or four old armchairs that looked as if they had been stolen out of the Doge's Palace.

"Diffendorfer continued punching away at the fire until it burst into a blaze.

"In another moment he was on his feet again, saying he had forgotten something. Then he entered the next room--there were three in the suite--unlocked a closet, brought back a mouldy-looking bottle and two Venetian gla.s.ses, moved up a spider-legged, inlaid table, and said, as he placed the bottle and gla.s.ses beside me:

"'That's the Valpocelli of '71. You needn't worry about helping yourself; I've got a dozen bottles more.'

"I thought the game had gone far enough now, and I squared myself and faced him.

"'See here, Mr. Diffendorfer,' I said, 'before I take your wine I've got some questions to ask you. I'm going to ask them pretty straight, too, and I want you to answer them exactly in the same way. You have followed me round now for two weeks. You invite me to dinner--a man you have never seen before--and when I come you sit like a b.u.mp on a log, and half the time I can't get a word out of you. You spend your money on me like water--none of which I can return, and you know it--and when I tell you I don't like that sort of thing you double the expense. Now, what does it all mean? Who are you, anyway, and where do you come from? If you're all right there's my hand, and you'll find it wide open.'

"He dropped into his chair, put his head into his hands for a moment, and said, in a greatly altered tone:

"'If I told you, you wouldn't understand.'

"'Yes, I would.'

"'No, you wouldn't--you couldn't. You've had everything you wanted all your life--I haven't had anything.'

"'Me!--what rot! You've got a chair under you now that will sell for more money than I see in a year.'

"'Yes--and n.o.body to sit in it; not a man who knows me or wants to know me.'

"'But why did you pick me out?'

"'Because you seemed to be the kind of a man who would understand me best. I watched you for weeks, though you didn't know it. You've got people who love you for yourself. You go into Florian's or the Quadri and you can't get a chance to swallow a mouthful for fellows who want to shake hands with you and slap you on the back. When I saw that, I got up courage enough to speak to you.

"'When that first night you wouldn't introduce me to your friend Roscoff, I saw how it was and how you suspected me, and I came near giving it up. Then I thought I'd try again, and if you hadn't introduced Mr. Cruthers to me, and if he hadn't drank my wine, I would have given it up. But I don't want them to like me because I'm with _you_. I want them to like me for myself, so they'll be glad to see me when I come in, just as they are glad to see you.

"'I come from Pennsylvania. My father owns the oil-wells at Stockville.

He came over from Holland when he was a boy. He sent me over here six months ago to learn something about the world, and told me not to come back till I did. I got to Paris, and I couldn't find a soul to talk to but the hotel porter; then I kept on to Lucerne, and it was no better there. When I got as far as Dresden I mustered up courage to speak to a man in the station, but he moved off, and I saw him afterward speaking to a policeman and pointing to me. Then I came on down here. I thought maybe if I got some good rooms to live in where people could be comfortable, I could get somebody to come in and sit down. So I bought this lot of truck of an Italian named Almadi--a prince or something--and moved in. I tried the fellows who lived here--you saw them sticking their heads out as we came up--but they don't speak English, so I was as bad off as I was before. Then I made up my mind I'd tackle you and keep at it till I got to know you. You might think it queer now that I didn't tell you before who I was or how I came here, or how lonesome I was--just lonesome--but I just couldn't. I didn't want your pity, I wanted your _friendship_. That's all.'

"He had straightened up now, and was leaning back in his chair.

"'And it was just dead lonesomeness, then, was it?' and I held out my hand to him.

"'Yes--the deadliest kind of lonesome. Kind makes you want to fall off a dock. Now, please drink my wine'--and he pushed the bottle toward me--'I had a devil of a hunt for it, but I wanted to do something for you you couldn't do for yourself.'

"We fellows, I tell you, took charge of Diffendorfer after that, and a ripping good fellow he was. We got that high collar off of him, a slouch hat on his head instead of his stove-pipe, and a pipe in his mouth, and before the winter was over he had more friends than any fellow in Venice. It was only awkwardness that made him talk so queer and ugly.

And maybe we didn't have some good times in those rooms of his on the Zattere!"

Marny stopped, threw away the end of his cigar, laid a coin under his plate for the waiter and another on top of it for Henri, the chef, reached for his hat, and said, as he rose from his seat, and flecked the ashes from his coat-sleeve:

"So now, whenever I see a poor devil haunting a place like this, looking around out of the corner of his eye, hoping somebody will speak to him, I say that's a Diffendorfer, and more than half the time I'm right."

m.u.f.fLES--THE BAR-KEEP

My friend m.u.f.fles has had a varied career. m.u.f.fles is not his baptismal name--if he were ever baptized, which I doubt. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, and the brewer--especially the brewer--knew him as Mr. Richard Mulford, proprietor of the Shady Side on the Bronx--and his a.s.sociates as d.i.c.k. Only his intimates knew him as m.u.f.fles. I am one of his intimates. This last sobriquet he earned as a boy among his fellow wharf-rats, by reason of an extreme lightness of foot attended by an equally noiseless step, particularly noticeable when escaping from some guardian of the peace who had suddenly detected him raiding an apple-stand not his own, or in depleting a heap of peanuts the property of some gentleman of foreign birth, or in making off with a just-emptied ash-barrel--m.u.f.fles did the emptying--on the eve of an election.

If any member of his unknown and widely scattered family reached the dignity of being considered the flower of the clan, no stretch of imagination or the truth on the part of his acquaintances--and they were numerous--ever awarded that distinction to m.u.f.fles. He might have been a weed, but he was never a flower. A weed that grew up between the cobbles, crouching under the hoofs of horses and the tramp of men, and who was pulled up and thrown aside and still lived on and flourished in various ways, and all with that tenacity of purpose and buoyancy of spirit which distinguishes all weeds and which never by any possibility marks a better quality of plant, vegetable or animal.

The rise of this gamin from the dust-heap to his present lofty position was as interesting as it was instructive. Interesting because his career was a drama--instructive because it showed a grit, pluck, and self-denial which many of his contemporaries might have envied and imitated: wharf-rat, newsboy, dish-washer in a sailor's dive, bar-helper, bar-tender, bar-keeper, bar-owner, ward heeler, ward politician, clerk of a district committee--go-between, in shady deals, between those paid to uphold the law and those paid to break it--and now, at this time of writing, or was a year or so ago, the husband of "the Missus," as he always calls her, the father of two children, one three and the other five, and the proprietor of the Shady Side Inn, above the Harlem River and within a stone's throw of the historic Bronx.

The reaching of this final goal, the sum of all his hopes and ambitions, was due to the same tenacity of purpose which had characterized his earlier life, aided and abetted by a geniality of disposition which made him countless friends, a conscience which overlooked their faults, together with a total lack of perception as to the legal ownership of whatever happened to be within his reach. As to the keeping of the other commandments, including the one of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you----

Well, m.u.f.fles had grown up between the cobbles of the Bowery, and his early education had consequently been neglected.

The Shady Side Inn, over which m.u.f.fles presided, and in which he was one-third owner--the Captain of the Precinct and a "Big Pipe" contractor owned the other two-thirds--was what was left of an old colonial mansion. There are dozens of them scattered up and down the Bronx, lying back from the river; with porches falling into decay, their gardens overrun with weeds, their s.p.a.cious rooms echoing only the hum of the sewing-machine or the buzz of the loom.

This one belonged to some one of the old Knickerbockers whose winter residence was below Bleecker Street and who came up here to spend the summer and so escape the heat of the dog-days. You can see it any day you drive up the Speedway. It has stood there for over a hundred years and is likely to continue. You know its history, too--or can, if you will take the trouble to look up its record. Aaron Burr stopped here, of course--he stopped about everywhere along here and slept in almost every house; and Hamilton put his horse up in the stables--only the site remains; and George Washington dined on the back porch, his sorrel mare tied to one of the big trees. There is no question about these facts.

They are all down in the books, and I would prove it to you if I could lay my hand on the particular record. Everybody believes it--m.u.f.fles most of all.

Many of the old-time fittings and appurtenances are still to be seen. A knocker clings to the front door--a wobbly old knocker, it is true, with one screw gone and part of the plate broken--but still boasting its colonial descent. And there is a half-moon window over the door above it, with little panes of gla.s.s held in place by a spidery parasol frame, and supported on spindling columns once painted white. And there is an old lantern in the hall and funny little banisters wreathed about a flight of stairs that twists itself up to the second floor.

The relics--now that I come to think of it--stop here. There was a fine old mantel framing a great open fireplace in the front parlor, before which the Father of His Country toasted his toes or sipped his grog, but it is gone now. m.u.f.fles's bar occupied the whole side of this front room, and the cavity once filled with big, generous logs, blazing away to please the host's distinguished guests, held a collection of bottles from m.u.f.fles's cellar--a moving cellar, it is true, for the beer-wagon and the grocer's cart replenished it daily.

The great garden in the rear of the old mansion has also changed. The lines of box and sweet syringa are known only by their roots. The rose-beds are no more, the paths that were woven into long stripes across its gra.s.s-plats are overgrown and hardly traceable. Only one lichen-covered, weather-stained seat circling about an old locust-tree remains, and this is on its last legs and needs propping up--or did the last time I saw it. The trees are still there. These old stand-bys reach up their arms so high, and their trunks are so big and straight and smooth, that nothing can despoil them. They will stay there until the end--that is, until some merciless Commissioner runs the line of a city street through their roots. Then their fine old bodies will be drawn and quartered, and their st.u.r.dy arms and lesser branches go to feed the fires of some near-by factory.

No ladies of high degree now sip their tea beneath their shade, with liveried servants about the slender-legged tables, as they did in the old days. There are tables, of course--a dozen in all, perhaps, some in white cloths and some in bare tops, bare of everything except the gla.s.s of beer--it depends very largely on what one orders, and who orders it--but the servants are missing unless you count m.u.f.fles and his stable-boy. Two of these old aristocrats--I am speaking of the old trees now, not m.u.f.fles, and certainly not the stable-boy--two giant elms (the same that Washington tied his mare to when they were little)--stand guard on either side of the back porch, a wide veranda of a porch with a honeysuckle, its stem, as thick as your arm, and its scraggy, half-dead tendrils plaited in and out of the palings and newly painted lattice-work.

On Sunday mornings--and this tale begins with a Sunday morning--m.u.f.fles always shaved himself on this back porch. On these occasions he was attired in a pair of trousers, a pair of slippers, and a red flannel undershirt.

I am aware that this is not an extraordinary thing for a man living in the country to do on a Sunday morning, and it is not an extraordinary costume in which to do it. It was neither the costume nor the occupation that made the operation notable, but the distinguished company who sat around the operator while it went on.

There was the ex-sheriff--a large, bulbous man with a jet-black mustache hung under his nose, a shirt-collar cut low enough to permit of his breathing, and a skin-tight waistcoat b.u.t.toned over a rotundity that rested on his knees. He had restless, quick eyes, and, before his "ex"

life began and his avoirdupois gained upon him, restless, quick fingers with steel springs inside of them--good fingers for handling the particular people he "wanted."

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

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