What's-His-Name Part 24

Some one was speaking to him.

"Ain't you going West with 'em, Mr.--, Mr.--?" queried the baggage master.

Harvey gazed at him dumbly for a moment or two. Then he lifted his chin.

"I--I've got to wait over a few days to see to the packing and storing of my household effects," he said, briskly. Then he trudged up the hill.

Sure enough, the packers appeared "bright and early" Monday morning, just as Buckley had said they would. By nine o'clock the house was upside down and by noon it was full of excelsior, tar paper, and crating materials. The rasp of the saw and the bang of the hammer resounded throughout the little cottage. Burly men dragged helpless and unresisting articles of furniture about as if they had a personal grudge against each separate piece, and pounded them, and drove nails into them, and mutilated them, and scratched them, and splintered them, and after they were completely conquered marked their pine board coffins with the name "Nellie Duluth," after which they were ready for the fireproof graveyard in Harlem.

Dazed and unsteady, Harvey watched the proceedings with the air of one who superintends. He gave a few instructions, offered one or two suggestions--princ.i.p.ally as to the state of the weather--and was on the jump all day long to keep out of the way of the energetic workmen.

He had seen Marceline at the Hippodrome on one memorable occasion.

Somehow he reminded himself of the futile but nimble clown, who was always in the way and whose good intentions invariably were attended by disaster.

The foreman of the gang, doubtless with a shrewd purpose in mind, opened half the windows in the house, thus forcing his men to work fast and furiously or freeze. Harvey almost perished in the icy draughts. He shut the front door fifty times or more, and was beginning to sniffle and sneeze when Bridget took pity on him and invited him into the kitchen. He hugged the cook stove for several hours, mutely watching the two servants through the open door of their joint bedroom off the kitchen while they stuffed their meagre belongings into a couple of trunks.

At last it occurred to him that it would be well to go upstairs and pack his own trunk before the workmen got to asking questions. He carried his set of d.i.c.kens upstairs, not without interrogation, and stored the volumes away at the bottom of his trunk. So few were his individual belongings that he was hard put to fill the trays compactly enough to prevent the shifting of the contents. When the job was done he locked the trunk, tied a rope around it and then sat down upon it to think. Had he left anything out? He remembered something. He untied the knots, unlocked the trunk, shifted half of the contents and put in his fishing tackle and an onyx clock Nellie had given him for Christmas two years before.

Later on he repeated the operation and made room for a hand saw, an auger, a plane, and a hatchet; also a smoking-jacket she had given him, and a lot of paper dolls Phoebe had left behind. (Late that night, after the lights were out, he remembered the framed motto, "G.o.d Bless Our Home," which his dear old mother had worked for him in yarns of variegated hues while they were honeymooning in Blakeville. The home was very cold and still, and the floor was strewn with nails, but he got out of bed and put the treasure in the top tray of the trunk.)

Along about four in the afternoon he experienced a sensation of uneasiness--even alarm. It began to look as if the workmen would have the entire job completed by nightfall. In considerable trepidation he accosted the foreman.

"If it's just the same to you I'd rather you wouldn't pack the beds until to-morrow--that is, of course, if you are coming back to-morrow."

"Maybe we'll get around to 'em and maybe we won't," said the foreman, carelessly. "We've got to pack the kitchen things to-morrow and the china."

"You see, it's this way," said Harvey. "I've got to sleep somewhere!"

"I see," said the foreman, and went on with his work, leaving Harvey in doubt.

"Have a cigar?" he asked, after a doleful pause. The man took it and looked at it keenly.

"I'll smoke it after a while," he said.

"Do the best you can about the bed in the back room upstairs," said Harvey, engagingly.

An express wagon came at five o'clock and removed the servants'

trunks. A few minutes later the two domestics, be-hatted and cloaked, came up to say good-bye to him.

"You're not leaving to-day?" he cried, aghast.

"If it's just the same to you, sor," said Bridget. "We've both got places beginnin' to-morry."

"But who'll cook my----"

"Niver you worry about that, sor; I've left a dozen av eggs, some bacon, rolls, and----"

"All right. Good-bye," broke in the master, turning away.

"Good luck, sor," said Bridget, amiably. Then they went away.

His dismal reflections were broken by the foreman, who found him in the kitchen.

"We'll be back early in the morning and clean up everything. The van will be here at ten. Is everything here to go to the warehouse? I notice some things that look as though they might belong to you personally."

There were a few pieces of furniture and bric-a-brac that Harvey could claim as his own. He stared gloomily at the floor for a long time, thinking. Of what use were they to him now? And where was he to put them in case he claimed them?

"I guess you'd better store everything," he said, dejectedly.

"They--they all go together."

"The--your trunk, sir; how about that?"

"If you think you've got room for it, I----"

"Sure we have."

"Take it, too. I'm going to pack what clothes I need in a suitcase. So much easier to carry than a trunk." He was unconsciously funny, and did not understand the well-meant guffaw of the foreman.

It was a dreary, desolate night that he spent in the topsy-turvy cottage. He was quite alone except for the queer shapes and shadows that haunted him. When he was downstairs he could hear strange whisperings above; when he was upstairs the mutterings were below.

Things stirred and creaked that had never shown signs of animation before. The coals in the fireplace spat with a malignant fury, as if blown upon by evil spirits lurking in the chimney until he went to bed so that they might come forth to revel in the gloom. The howl of the wind had a different note, a wail that seemed to come from a child in pain; forbidding sounds came up from the empty cellar; always there was something that stood directly behind him, ready to lay on a ghostly hand. He crouched in the chair, feeling never so small, never so impotent as now. The chair was partially wrapped for crating. Every time he moved there was a crackle of paper that sounded like the rattle of thunder before the final ear-splitting crash. As still as a mouse he sat and listened for new sounds, more sinister than those that had gone before; and, like the mouse, he jumped with each recurring sound.

Towering crates seemed on the verge of toppling over upon him, boxes and barrels appeared to draw closer together to present a barrier against any means of escape; cords and ropes wriggled with life as he stared at them, serpentine things that kept on creeping toward him, never away.

Oh, for the sound of Phoebe's voice!

"Quoth the raven, nevermore!" That sombre sentence haunted him. He tried to close his ears against it, but to no purpose. It crept up from some inward lurking place in his being, crooning a hundred cadences in spite of all that he could do to change the order of his thoughts.

Far in the night he dashed fearfully up to his dismantled bedroom, a flickering candle in his hand. He had gone about the place to see that all of the doors and windows were fastened. Removing his shoes and his coat, he hurriedly crawled in between the blankets and blew out the light. Sleep would not come. He was sobbing. He got up twice and lighted the candle, once to put away the motto, again to take out of the trunk the cabinet size photograph of himself and Nellie and the baby, taken when the latter was three years old. Hugging this to his breast, he started back to bed.

A sudden thought staggered him. For a long time he stood in the middle of the room, shivering as he debated the great question this thought presented. At last, with a shudder, he urged his reluctant feet to carry him across the room to the single gas jet. Closing his eyes he turned on the gas full force and then leaped into the bed, holding the portrait to his heart. Then he waited for the end of everything.

When he opened his eyes broad daylight was streaming in upon him. Some one was pounding on the door downstairs. He leaped out of bed and began to pull on his shoes.

Suddenly it occurred to him that by all rights he should be lying there stiff and cold, suffocated by the escaping gas. He sniffed the air. There was no odour of gas. With a gasp of alarm he rushed over and turned off the stopc.o.c.k, a cold perspiration coming out all over him.

"Gee, I hope I'm in time!" he groaned aloud. "I don't want to die.

I--I--it's different in the daytime. The darkness did it. I hope I'm----" Then, considerably puzzled, he interrupted himself to turn the thing on again. He stood on his toes to smell the tip. "By jingo, I remember now, that fellow turned it off in the meter yesterday. Oh, Lord; what a close call I've had!"

He was so full of glee when he opened the door to admit the packers that they neglected, in their astonishment, to growl at him for keeping them standing in the cold for fifteen or twenty minutes.

"Thought maybe you'd gone and done it," said the foreman. "Took poison or turned on the gas, or something. You was mighty blue yesterday, Mr.--Mr. Duluth."

With the arrival of the van he set off to pay the bills due the tradespeople in town, returning before noon with all the receipts, and something like $20 left over. The world did not look so dark and dreary to him now. In his mind's eye he saw himself rehabilitated in the sight of the scoffers, prospering ere long to such an extent that not only would he be able to reclaim Phoebe, but even Nellie might be persuaded to throw herself on his neck and beg for reinstatement in his good graces. With men like Harvey the ill wind never blows long or steadily; it blows the hardest under cover of night. The sunshine takes the keen, bitter edge off it, and it becomes a balmy zephyr.

Already he was planning the readjustment of his fortunes.

At length the van was loaded. His suitcase sat on the front porch, puny and pathetic. The owner of the house was there, superintending the boarding up of the windows and doors. Harvey stood in the middle of the walk, looking on with a strange yearning in his heart. All of his worldly possessions reposed in that humble bag, save the cotton umbrella that he carried in his hand. A cotton umbrella, with the mercury down to zero!

"Well, I'm sorry you're leaving," said the owner, pocketing the keys as he came up to the little man. "Can I give you a lift in my cutter down to the station?"