The Wood Fire in No. 3 Part 1

The Wood Fire in No. 3.

by F. Hopkinson Smith.

_A WORD OF WELCOME:_

_To those of you who love an easy chair, a mug, a pipe, and a story; to whom a well-swept hearth is a delight and the cheery crackle of hickory logs a joy; the touch of whose elbows sends a thrill through responsive hearts and whose genial talk but knits the circle the closer,--as well as those gentler spirits who are content to listen--how rare they are!--do I repeat Sandy MacWhirter's hearty invitation: "Draw up, draw up! By the G.o.ds, but I'm glad to see you! Get a pipe. The tobacco is in the yellow jar."_

_Yours warmly,_

_THE BACK LOG._

THE HEARTH, Room No. 3, Old Building, October, 1905.

THE WOOD FIRE IN No. 3

PART I

_In which Certain Details regarding a Lost Opal are Set Forth._

Sandy MacWhirter would have an open fire. He had been brought up on blazing logs and warm hearths, and could not be happy without them. In his own boyhood's home the fireplace was the shrine, and half the orchard and two big elms had been offered up on its altar.

There was no chimney in No. 3 when he moved in--no place really to put one, unless he knocked a hole in the roof, started a fire on the bare floor, and sat around it wigwam fas.h.i.+on; nor was there any way of supporting the necessary brickwork, unless a start was made from the bas.e.m.e.nt up through every room to No. 3 and so on to the roof. But trifling obstacles like these never daunted MacWhirter. Lonnegan, a Beaux Arts man, who built the big Opera House, and who also hungered for blazing logs, solved the difficulty. It was only a matter of fifteen feet from where Mac's easel stood to the roof of the building that sheltered him, and it was not many days before Lonnegan's foreman had a hole in the roof and a wide and s.p.a.cious chimney breast rising from Mac's floor, which filled the opening in the ceiling and rose some ten feet above it, the whole resting on an iron plate bolted to four upright iron rods which were in turn bolted to two heavy timbers laid flat on the roof. Lonnegan's men did the work, and Lonnegan settled with the landlord and forgot ever afterward to send Mac the bill, and hasn't to this day.

No one else inside the four walls of the Old Building had any such comfort. All the other denizens had heaters; or choked-up, s.h.i.+vering, contracted grates; or a half-strangled flue from the bas.e.m.e.nt below.

Poor Pitkin relied on a rubber tube fastened to his gas light, which was connected with a sort of Chinese tea-caddy of a stove propped up on four legs, and which was s.h.i.+fted about so as to thaw out the coldest spots in his studio.

It was a great day when Mac's fireplace was completed. Everybody crowded in to see it--not only the men from below and on the same floor, but half a dozen and more cronies from the outside. No one believed Lonnegan's yarn about the bolts, so natural and old-timey did the fireplace seem, until the great architect picked the plaster away with his knife and showed them the irons, and even then one doubting Thomas had to mount the scuttle stairs and peer out through the trap-door before he was convinced that modern science had lent a helping hand to recall a boyhood memory.

And the friends that this old fire had; and the way the men loved it despite the liberties they tried to take with it! And they did, at first, take liberties, and of the most exasperating kind to any well-intentioned, law-abiding, and knowledgeable wood fire. Boggs, the animal painter, whose studio lay immediately beneath MacWhirter's, was never, at first, satisfied until he had punched it black in the face; Wharton, who occupied No. 4, across the hall, would insist that each log should be stood on its head and the kindling grouped about it; while Pitkin, the sculptor, who occupied the bas.e.m.e.nt because of his dirty clay and big chunks of marble, was miserable until he had jammed the back-log so tight against the besmoked chimney that not a breath of air could get between it and the blackened bricks.

But none of these well-meant but inexperienced attacks ever daunted the spirit of this fire. It would splutter a moment with ill-concealed indignation, threatening a dozen times to go out in smoke, and then all of a sudden a little bubble of laughing flame would break out under one end of a log, and then another, and away it would go roaring up the chimney in a very ecstasy of delight.

Now and then it would talk back; I have heard it many a time, when Mac and I would be sitting alone before it listening to its chatter.

"Take a seat," it would crackle; "right in front, where I can warm you.

Sit, too, where you can look into my face and see how ruddy and joyous it is. I'll not bore you; I never bored anybody--never in all my life. I am an endless series of surprises, and I am never twice alike. I can sparkle with merriment, or glow with humor, or roar with laughter, dependent on your mood, or upon mine. Or I can smoulder away all by myself, crooning a low song of the woods--the song your mother loved, your cradle song--so full of content that it will soothe you into forgetfulness. When at last I creep under my gray blanket of ashes and shut my eyes, you, too, will want to sleep--you and I, old friends now with our thousand memories."

Only MacWhirter really understood its many moods--"Alexander MacWhirter, Room No. 3," the sign-board read in the hall below--and only MacWhirter could satisfy its wants; and so, after the first few months, no one dared touch it but our host, whose slightest nudge with the tongs was sufficient to kindle it into renewed activity.

It was not long after this that a certain sense of owners.h.i.+p permeated the coterie. They yielded the chimney and its mechanical contrivances to MacWhirter and Lonnegan, but the blaze and its generous warmth belonged to them as much as to Mac. Soon chairs were sent up from the several studios, each member of the half-circle furnis.h.i.+ng his own--the most comfortable he owned. Then the mugs followed, and the pipe-racks, and soon Sandy MacWhirter's wood fire in No. 3 became the one spot in the building that we all loved and longed for.

And Mac was exactly fas.h.i.+oned for High Priest of just such a Temple of Jollity: Merry-eyed, round-faced, with one and a quarter, perhaps one and a half, of a chin tucked under his old one--a chin though that came from laughter, not from laziness; broad-shouldered, deep-chested, hearty in his voice and words, with the faintest trace--just a trace, it was so slight--of his mother-tongue in his speech; whole-souled, spontaneous, unselfish, ready to praise and never to criticise; br.i.m.m.i.n.g with anecdotes and adventures of forty years of experience--on the Riviera, in Sicily, Egypt, and the Far East, wherever his brush had carried him--he had all the warmth of his blazing logs in his grasp and all the snap of their coals in his eyes.

"By the G.o.ds, but I'm glad to see you!" was his invariable greeting.

"Draw up! draw up! Go get a pipe--the tobacco is in the yellow jar."

This was when Mac was alone or when no one had the floor, and the shuttlec.o.c.k of general conversation was being battledored about.

If, however, Mac or any of his guests had the floor, and was giving his experience at home or abroad, or was reaching the climax of some tale, it made no difference who entered no one took any more notice of him than of a servant who had brought in an extra log, the lost art of listening still being in vogue in those days and much respected by the occupants of the chairs--by all except Boggs, who would always break into the conversation irrespective of restrictions or traditions.

Mac had the floor this afternoon.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MacWhirter.]

I knew this from the sound of his voice through the half-closed door as I reached the top-floor landing.

"Refused, gentlemen, refused point blank," I heard Mac say. "He wouldn't let them search him; wouldn't empty his pockets as the others had done; it made a most disagreeable impression on every one at the table.

Collins, his host, was amazed; so was Moulton."

My own head was now abreast of the old Chinese screen.

"What reason did he give?" Boggs asked.

"Didn't give any. Just hemmed and hawed, and blushed like a girl."

I was inside the cosy room now, its air etched with wavy lines of tobacco smoke, showing blue in the dim glare of the skylight overhead; had nodded to Boggs, whose face was just visible over the top of Mac's most comfortable chair--Boggs always hides his bulk in this particular chair, having furnished none of his own, a weakness or selfishness which we all recognize and permit--and was adding my snow-covered coat and hat to a collection, facing the blazing logs, and within reach of their genial warmth, when Mac's voice again dominated the hum of questioning raised by the half-circle of toasting s.h.i.+ns.

"Collins, of course, never said a word--how could he? The old fellow had been his friend for years; went to school with him. Now, gentlemen, what would you have thought?"

It was easy to see that our host had full possession of the floor. His feet were firmly planted on the half-worn Daghestan, his square, erect back turned to the crackling blaze, his head raised, arms swinging, hands extended, accentuating every point that he made with that peculiar twist of the thumb common to all painters. I dropped quietly into a chair. Better keep still and smoke on with my ear-shutters fastened back and my eyes fixed on the speaker's face. The cue would come my way before Mac had got very far in his story.

Again Mac put the question, this time in a rising voice, demanding an answer.

"What would you have thought?"

"I give it up," said Pitkin. "I knew Peaslee. Life went against him, but that old fellow was as straight as a string. Why, he has been book-keeper for that bank for half a century, more or less; I used to keep an account there; queer-looking chap, all spectacles."

"Collins must have put the jewel in his pocket and had not been able to find it," remarked Ford, discussion now being in order; "like a man losing his railroad ticket and discovering it in his hat-band after he has searched every part of his clothes."

"Old fellow was short in his balance and wanted to make it up," growled Boggs. Boggs did not mean a word of it, but it was his turn and he must hazard an opinion of some kind.

Mac smiled and a laugh went round. Poor old Tim Peaslee stealing Sam Collins's or anybody else's opal to straighten out a deficiency in his account was about as absurd a deduction to those who remembered him, as Diogenes losing his lantern in the effort to sc.r.a.pe acquaintance with a thief.

Marny, his face blue-white with his tramp through the snow, and Jack Stirling, in a new English Macintosh, now entered, shook their wet garments, filled their pipes from the yellow jar, and dragged up chairs to join the half-circle, the puffs of their newly filled pipes adding innumerable wavy lines to the etched plate of the atmosphere.

"Mac has got the most extraordinary story, Marny, that you ever heard,"

cried Wharton. "What do you think of old Tim Peaslee helping himself to Sam Collins's jewelry?"

"Never heard of Peaslee or Collins in my life," answered Marny, dragging his chair closer and opening his chilled fingers to the blaze. "Jack may, he knows everybody--some he oughtn't to. Who are they, burglars or stockbrokers?"