Robert Neilson Stephens

“ It is well known that power lies in a saltatorial ensemble of white lace skirts, pale blue hose, lustrous naked arms, undulating bodice, magnetic eyes, flying hair, and an unchanging smile, to focus the perceptions of a man, to absorb his consciousness, aided by a tune which seems to close out from him all the rest of the world.
And there, while this plump little girl danced and the frivolous, stupid crowd looked eagerly on, from all parts of the overheated theatre, began the tragedy of Billy Folsom. ”

“ Chorus girls in ulsters emerge in troops, usually by twos, from the door beneath the light, and it is constantly opening and shutting. In the gloom opposite the door hover a few bold youths, suddenly become timid, smoking cigarettes and trying to look like men of the world. As the comedian and I came forth, one of these young men struck a match to light a cigarette. The momentary flash attracted my eye, and I saw in the farthest shadow, with his gaze upon the stage door, my man of the restaurant, and the manuscript, and the gallery. ”

“ This is not an attempt to palliate the foolishness of Billy Folsom. It is not an essay in the emotional or the pathetic. You may pity him or reproach him, if you like, but my purpose is not to evoke any feeling toward or opinion of him. I do not seek to play upon your sympathies or to put you into a mood, or to delineate a character. I simply tell the story of how certain critical points in a man's life were accompanied by music; how a destiny was affected by a tune. Anything aside from mere narrative in this account will be incidental and accidental. ”

“ Sometimes folks wait at the corner of the street to see the stage people come out. If the piece is a burlesque or a comic opera, much life moves in the darkness back here. Light comes from the up-stairs windows of the theatre, the dressing rooms of the subordinate players being up there. Snatches of song from feminine throats, mere trills sometimes, isolated fragments of melody, break into the silence. These are always numerous during the half-hour after the performance and before the actors have left the theatre. ”

“ It was a bit of Berlin transplanted to Philadelphia and thriving beneath a Teutonic eating-house. Imagine a great cellar, with stone floor, ornamented ceiling, massive rectangular pillars of brown wood, substantial tables, heavy mediaeval chairs, crossbeams bearing pictures of peasant girls and lettered with sentiments of good cheer in German, and walls covered with beer-mugs of every size and device.
Scores of men sat talking at the tables, smoking, devouring sandwiches, upturning their mugs of beer over the capacious receptacles provided by nature. ”

“ The methods of free transportation by means of freight-trains and free living, by means of beggary and small thievery in country towns, were no secret to him. He walked to the suburbs, and at nightfall he scrambled up the side of a coal-car in a train slowly moving westward.
What hunger he suffered, what cold he endured, what bread he begged, what police station cells he passed nights in, what human scum he associated with, what thirst he quenched, and with what incredibly bad whiskey, are particulars not for this unobjectionable narrative, for do they not belong to low life? ”

“ Yes, I loved her,—if to fill one's life with thoughts of a woman, if in fancy to see her face by day and night, if to have the will to die for her or to bear pain for her, if those and many more things mean love. ”

“ One would not think that within that door is a short corridor leading to the mystic realm which the people “in front" idealize into a wonderful inaccessible country, the playworld. Back here, especially on a rainy night and before the playworld's inhabitants begin to sally forth to partake of terrestrial beer and sandwiches, one seems millions of miles away from the crowds of men and women in the theatre and from the illumined street in front. ”

“ She answered softly, with downcast eyes:
“I would be willing if I were sure of one thing.”
“What's that?”
“That you have never loved any other woman. Have you?”
“How can you ask? Believe me, you are the only girl I have ever loved.”
That evening, after dinner, Morrow and Clara, the newly affianced, about starting from the hotel to the boardwalk, were at the top of the hotel steps when a man appeared at the bottom.
Morrow uttered a cry of recognition.
“Why, Haddon, old boy, I'm glad to see you. Let me introduce you to my wife that is to be.” ”

“ Tobit McStenger had his word to say upon all village topics. When in Couch's saloon one night he learned that the school directors had decided to take the primary school from the tutorship of a woman and to put a man over it as teacher, Tobit pricked up his ears and had many words to say. He was working at the time, and he spoke in loud, coarse tones, as he wielded his oyster-knife, having for an audience the usual dozen barroom tarriers.
“I know what that means,” cried Tobit McStenger. “It means they ain't satisfied with having our children ruled with kindness. ”

“ She went off with the tenor, and Billy went off with the cab and made himself drunker than he had ever been in his life. At dawn his feet were seen protruding from the window of a coupé that was being driven up Broadway, and he was bawling forth, as best he could, the tune which had served indirectly to bring the little Tyrrell into his life.
After that night, it was the old story, a woman ridding herself of a man for whom she had never cared, and who indeed was not worth caring for. But the operation was just as hard upon Folsom as if he had been. You know the stages of the process. ”

“ Barry made no answer, but looked at Welty with becoming deference.
The football man's eyes were wandering about the café, showing him to be indifferent to the theme of discussion.
“I know,” continued Welty, “that many more or less writers have said, as you say, that women must be sought and pursued to be won. They deduce that theory from the habits of lower animals and of barbarous nations, in which the man obtains the woman by chase and force. But it's all a theory, and simply shows that the learned writers study their books instead of their fellow men and women.” ”

“ The air, whistled by the boy, clung to Appleton's sense, and he unconsciously hummed it to himself as his cab went on its grinding way over the stones.
The cabman was considerate of his horse, and he coolly ignored Appleton's occasional shouts of, “Get along there, won't you?”
It was, therefore, not impossible for the bicyclists to keep in sight of the coupé.
“All this concern about a man you say you don't care for,” said Haslam to Amy, as the bicycle turned up Broad Street. “It's unprecedented.”
“It's only humanity.” ”

“ A tolerant, amiable expression saved the youth's smooth, handsome face from vacuity. He was dressed with careful nicety.
“But,” said Haslam, “a man about to take leave of this life doesn't ordinarily waste time going to the opera.”
“Why not? He probably came here to think. One can do that well at the opera.”
“Tom Appleton think?—I beg pardon again. But see, he's talking to a girl now, Miss Estabrook, of North Broad Street. His smile to her is not the kind of a smile that commonly lights up a man's face on his way to death.” ”

“ The collegian opened his mouth wide, and Barry began to nervously tap his hand upon the table.
“It's the one,” said Welty, “who wears the big blond wig. Her name's Emi—”
There was the noise of upsetting plates, bottles, and glasses, of a man's feet rapping up against the bottom of a table and his head thumping down against the floor. There was the sight of an agile youth leaping across an overturned table and alighting with one foot at each side of the prostrate form of an astonished man, whose gray whiskers were spattered with blood. ”

“ Many other people in the country railroad town used to laugh at a thing which she had once said to a gossiping neighbour:
“I can tell the sound of the whistle on Tom's engine from all other whistles. Every afternoon when his train gets to the crossing at the planing-mill, I hear that whistle, and then I know it's time to get Tom's supper.”
The gossips found something humourous in the fact that the engineer's wife recognized the whistle of her husband's engine and knew by it when to begin to prepare his supper. So are the small manifestations of love and devotion regarded by coarse minds. ”

“ He was soon lost in a prolonged contemplation of the limited bill of fare posted on the wall, a study which resulted in his ordering, through a hustling, pugnacious-looking waiter, a bowl of oatmeal.
A bowl of oatmeal is the least expensive item on the bill of fare at Gorson's. When I hear a man ordering oatmeal in a cheap eating-house, my heart aches for him. I had just the money and the intention to procure another bottle of beer and another box of cigarettes. The sum required to obtain these necessaries of life is exactly the price of a bowl of oatmeal and a steak at Gorson's. ”

“ In the middle of the third week, at nine o'clock in the evening, when the lamps in P. Gibbs's saloon were exerting their smallest degree of dimness and the bar was doing a good business, the door opened and in staggered Busted Blake. His staggering on this occasion was manifestly not due to drink. His face had the hideous concavities of a starved man and the uncertainty of his gait was the token of a mortal feebleness. ”

“ Evidently the same thought came simultaneously into the minds of both of us, for while I was mentally commenting upon the deserted and lonely condition of the city streets at two o'clock on a rainy night, my friend spoke:
“A man is alone with his conscience, the electric lights, the shadows of the houses, and the sound of the rain at a time and place like this, isn't he? Standing as we stand now, under an awning, during a persistent rainfall, at this hour, with no other human being in sight, a man is for the time upon a desert island. ”

“ In the afternoon, while Morrow and Clara stood on the boardwalk looking down at the Salvation Army tent, along came that innocent eccentric “Professor” Walters in bathing costume and with his swimming machine. The tall, lean whiskered, loquacious “Professor” had made Morrow's acquaintance in a former summer and now greeted him politely.
“How d'ye do?” said the “Professor.” “Glad to see you here. You turn up every year.” ”

“ He prated of his past achievements as a newspaper man in other cities. He had a cheerful way of talking in a voice that was high but not loud. His undaunted manner of uttering self-praise caused the exchange editor to wink at the editorial writer. It engendered, too, a small degree of dislike on the part of these worthies; and the exchange editor made it a point to watch for some of the new man's work in the paper, that he might be certain whether the new man's ability was equal to the new man's opinion of it. ”

“ He held out the clod to Mr. Monroe.
The spectacle of the division superintendent talking to the old negro attracted a group of lazy fellows,—the driver of an express wagon, the man who hauls the mail to the post-office, a boy who sold fruit to passengers on the train, two porters, with tin signs upon their hats, who solicited patronage from the hotels.
“Why, Pop,” said the superintendent, winking to the expressman, “this lump looks as though it contained gold.”
“Yes,” put in the expressman, “that's how gold comes in a mine. I've often handled it. That's the stuff, sure.” ”

“ I mean the lady to whom you take roses every week, of course.”
Whiskers simply stared at the exchange editor, as if quite bewildered.
“Oh, pardon me,” said the exchange editor, somewhat abashed. “I didn't mean to offend you. One's affairs of the heart are sacred, I know. But we all guy each other about each other's amours here. We're hardened to that sort of pleasantry.”
A look of enlightenment, a blush, a deep sigh, and an “Oh, I'm not offended,” were the only manifestations made by Whiskers after the exchange editor's apology. ”

“ I can't respect a man who would take advantage of a love-struck girl's ignorance of life. If you meet her, you will simply be obtaining favours on false pretences, anyhow, for you know you're not really half the fascinating, romantic, clever youth that you seem when you're on the stage speaking another man's thoughts. ”

“ Such were Tobit and little Tobe, the most conspicuous of the village “characters” of Brickville, a Pennsylvania town deriving sustenance from its brick-kiln, its railroads, and its contiguous farming interests.
It was town talk that Tobit McStenger was a hard father; drunk or sober, he chastised little Tobe upon the slightest occasion.
“But,” said Tobit McStenger, after admitting his severity as a parent before the bar in Couch's saloon, “let any one else lay a finger on that kid! Just let 'em! They'll find out, jail or no jail, I'm ugly!” ”

“ Those great brown eyes, the plush sack, the lovely face that had borne the impress of sorrow so speedily, had felt death—those might never have existed, so soon had they been forgotten by the one being in the world for whom that face had worn the aspect of a perfect love. ”

“ XXIV. — NEWGAG THE COMEDIAN
It was not his real name or his stage name, but it was the one under which he was best known by those who best knew him. It had been thrown at him in a café one night by a newspaper man after the performance, and had clung to him. Its significance lay in the fact that his “gags”—supposedly comic things said by presumably comic men in nominal opera or burlesque—invariably were old. The man who bestowed the title upon him thought it a fine bit of irony. ”