The Mystery of Murray Davenport Part 7

"Why, certainly, certainly," the old man chirped with alacrity. "Glad to have yuh. I'll be proud to do anything in the cause of literature. Come right up." And he rose and led the way to the street door.

"Take care, Mr. Bud," said the jocular barkeeper. "Don't let them sell you no gold bricks or nothin'. I never see them before, so you can't hold me if you lose your money."

"You keep your mouth shut, Mick," answered the old man, "and send me up a bottle o' whisky and a siphon o' seltzer as soon as your side partner comes in. This way, gentlemen."

He conducted them out to the sidewalk, and then in through another door, and up a narrow stairway, to a room with two windows overlooking the river. It was a room of moderate size, provided with old furniture, a faded carpet, mended curtains, and lithographs of the sort given away with Sunday newspapers. It had, in its shabbiness, that curious effect of cosiness and comfort which these shabby old rooms somehow possess, and luxurious rooms somehow lack. A narrow bed in a corner was covered with an old-fas.h.i.+oned patchwork quilt. There was a cylindrical stove, but not in use, as the weather had changed since the day before; and beside the stove, visible and unashamed, was a large wooden box partly full of coal. While Larcher was noticing these things, and Mr. Bud was offering chairs, Davenport made directly for the window and looked out with an interest limited to the task in hand, and perfunctory even so.

"This is my city residence," said the host, dropping into a chair. "It ain't every hard-worked countryman, these times, that's able to keep up a city residence." As this was evidently one of Mr. Bud's favorite jests, Larcher politically smiled. Mr. Bud soon showed that he had other favorite jests. "Yuh see, I make my livin' up the State, but every now and then I feel like comin' to the city for rest and quiet, and so I keep this place the year round."

"You come to New York for rest and quiet?" exclaimed Larcher, still kindly feigning amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Sure! Why not? As fur as rest goes, I just loaf around and watch other people work. That's what I call rest with a sauce to it. And as fur as quiet goes, I get used to the noises. Any sound that don't concern me, don't annoy me. I go about unknown, with n.o.body carin' what my business is, or where I'm bound fur. Now in the country everybody wants to know where from, and where to, and what fur. The only place to be reely alone is where thur's so many people that one man don't count for anything. And talk about noise!--What's all the clatter and bang amount to, if it's got nothin' to do with your own movements? Now at my home where the noise consists of half a dozen women's voices askin' me about this, and wantin'

that, and callin' me to account for t'other,--that's the kind o' noise that jars a man. Yuh see, I got a wife and four daughters. They're very good women--very good women, the whole bunch--but I do find it restful and refres.h.i.+n' to take the train to New York about once a month, and loaf around a week or so without anybody takin' notice, and no questions ast."

"And what does your family say to that?"

"Nothin', now. They used to say considerable when I first fell into the habit. I hev some poultry customers here in the city, and I make out I got to come to look after business. That story don't go fur with the fam'ly; but they hev their way about everything else, so they got to gimme my way about this."

Davenport turned around from the window, and spoke for the first time since entering:

"Then you don't occupy this room more than half the time?"

"No, sir, I close it up, and thank the Lord there ain't nothin' in it worth stealin'."

"Oh, in that case," Davenport went on, "if I began some sketches here, and you left town before they were done, I should have to go somewhere else to finish them."

It was a remark that made Larcher wonder a little, at the moment, knowing the artist's usual methods of work. But Mr. Bud, ignorant of such matters, replied without question:

"Well, I don't know. That might be fixed all right, I guess."

"I see you have a library," said Davenport, abruptly, walking over to a row of well-worn books on a wooden shelf near the bed. His sudden interest, slight as it was, produced another transient surprise in Larcher.

"Yes, sir," said the old man, with pride and affection, "them books is my chief amus.e.m.e.nt. Sir Walter Scott's works; I've read 'em over again and again, every one of 'em, though I must confess there's two or three that's pretty rough travellin'. But the others!--well, I've tried a good many authors, but gimme Scott. Take his characters! There's stacks of novels comes out nowadays that call themselves historical; but the people in 'em seems like they was cut out o' pasteboard; a bit o' wind would blow 'em away. But look at the _body_ to Scott's people! They're all the way round, and clear through, his characters are.--Of course, I'm no literary man, gentlemen. I only give my own small opinion." Mr. Bud's manner, on his suddenly considering his audience, had fallen from its bold enthusiasm.

"Your small opinion is quite right," said Davenport. "There's no doubt about the thoroughness and consistency of Scott's characters." He took one of the books, and turned over the leaves, while Mr. Bud looked on with brightened eyes. "Andrew Fairservice--there's a character. 'Gude e'en--gude e'en t' ye'--how patronizing his first salutation! 'She's a wild slip, that'--there you have Diana Vernon sketched by the old servant in a touch. And what a scene this is, where Diana rides with Frank to the hilltop, shows him Scotland, and advises him to fly across the border as fast as he can."

"Yes, and the scene in the Tolbooth where Rob Roy gives Bailie Nicol Jarvie them three sufficient reasons fur not betrayin' him." The old man grinned. He seemed to be at his happiest in praising, and finding another to praise, his favorite author.

"Interesting old ill.u.s.trations these are," said Davenport, taking up another volume. "Dryburgh Abbey--that's how it looks on a gray day. I was lucky enough to see it in the suns.h.i.+ne; it's loveliest then."

"What?" exclaimed Mr. Bud. "You been to Dryburgh Abbey?--to Scott's grave?"

"Oh, yes," said Davenport, smiling at the old man's joyous wonder, which was about the same as he might have shown upon meeting somebody who had been to fairy-land, or heaven, or some other place equally far from New York.

"You don't say! Well, to think of it! I _am_ happy to meet you. By George, I never expected to get so close to Sir Walter Scott! And maybe you've seen Abbotsford?"

"Oh, certainly. And Scott's Edinburgh house in Castle Street, and the house in George Square where he lived as a boy and met Burns."

Mr. Bud's excitement was great. "Maybe you've seen Holyrood Palace, and High Street--"

"Why, of course. And the Canongate, and the Parliament House, and the Castle, and the Gra.s.s-market, and all the rest. It's very easy; thousands of Americans go there every year. Why don't you run over next summer?"

The old man shook his head. "That's all too fur away from home fur me.

The women are afraid o' the water, and they'd never let me go alone. I kind o' just drifted into this New York business, but if I undertook to go across the ocean, that _would_ be the last straw. And I'm afraid I couldn't get on to the manners and customs over there. They say everything's different from here. To tell the truth, I'm timid where I don't know the ways. If I was like you--I shouldn't wonder if you'd been to some of the other places where things happen in his novels?"

With a smile, Davenport began to enumerate and describe. The old man sat enraptured. The whisky and seltzer came up, and the host saw that the gla.s.ses were filled and refilled, but he kept Davenport to the same subject. Larcher felt himself quite out of the talk, but found compensation in the whisky and in watching the old man's greedy enjoyment of Davenport's every word. The afternoon waned, and all opportunity of making the intended sketches pa.s.sed for that day. Mr. Bud was for lighting up, or inviting the young men to dinner, but they found pretexts for tearing themselves away. They did not go, however, until Davenport had arranged to come the next day and perform his neglected task. Mr. Bud accompanied them out, and stood on the corner looking after them until they were out of sight.

"You've made a hit with the agriculturist," said Larcher, as they took their way through a narrow street of old warehouses toward the region of skysc.r.a.pers and lower Broadway.

"Scott is evidently his hobby," replied Davenport, with a careless smile, "and I liked to please him in it."

He lapsed into that reticence which, as it was his manner during most of the time, made his strange seasons of communicativeness the more remarkable. A few days pa.s.sed before another such talkative mood came on in Larcher's presence.

It was a drizzling, cheerless night. Larcher had been to a dinner in Madison Avenue, and he thus found himself not far from Davenport's abode.

Going thither upon an impulse, he beheld the artist seated at the table, leaning forward over a confusion of old books, some of them open. He looked pallid in the light of the reading lamp at his elbow, and his eyes seemed withdrawn deep into their hollows. He welcomed his visitor with conventional politeness.

"How's this?" began Larcher. "Do I find you pondering,

'... weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore?'"

"No; merely rambling over familiar fields." Davenport held out the topmost book.

"Oh, Shakespeare," laughed Larcher. "The Sonnets. h.e.l.lo, you've marked part of this."

"Little need to mark anything so famous. But it comes closer to me than to most men, I fancy." And he recited slowly, without looking down at the page:

'When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself, and curse my fate,'--

He stopped, whereupon Larcher, not to be behind, and also without having recourse to the page, went on:

'Wis.h.i.+ng me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possest, Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,'--

"But I think that hits all men," said Larcher, interrupting himself.

"Everybody has wished himself in somebody else's shoes, now and again, don't you believe?"

"I have certainly wished myself out of my own shoes," replied Davenport, almost with vehemence. "I have hated myself and my failures, G.o.d knows!

I have wished hard enough that I were not I. But I haven't wished I were any other person now existing. I wouldn't change selves with this particular man, or that particular man. It wouldn't be enough to throw off the burden of my memories, with their clogging effect upon my life and conduct, and take up the burden of some other man's--though I should be the gainer even by that, in a thousand cases I could name."

"Oh, I don't exactly mean changing with somebody else," said Larcher.

"We all prefer to remain ourselves, with our own tastes, I suppose. But we often wish our lot was like somebody else's."

Davenport shook his head. "I don't prefer to remain myself, any more than to be some man whom I know or have heard of. I am tired of myself; weary and sick of Murray Davenport. To be a new man, of my own imagining--that would be something;--to begin afresh, with an unenc.u.mbered personality of my own choosing; to awake some morning and find that I was not Murray Davenport nor any man now living that I know of, but a different self, formed according to ideals of my own. There _would_ be a liberation!"

"Well," said Larcher, "if a man can't change to another self, he can at least change his place and his way of life."

"But the old self is always there, casting its shadow on the new place. And even change of scene and habits is next to impossible without money."

"I must admit that New York, and my present way of life, are good enough for me just now," said Larcher.