Felix O'Day Part 11

"You don't think there's anything crooked about him, Father, do you?"

said John, who had sat tilted back against the wall and now brought the front legs of his chair to the floor with a bang.

"What do you mean by crooked. John?" asked the priest.

"Well, he blew in here from nowheres, bringin' a couple of trunks and a hat-box, and not much in 'em, from what Kitty says. And he might blow out again some fine night, leavin' his own full of bricks, carting off instead some I keep on storage for my customers, full of G.o.d knows what!--but somethin' that's worth money, or they wouldn't have me take care of 'em. There ain't nothin' to prevent him, for he's got the run of the place day and night. And Kitty's that dead stuck on him she'll believe anything he says."

Kitty wheeled around in her seat, her big strong fist tightly clinched.

"Hold your tongue, John Cleary!" she cried indignantly. "I'd knock any man down--I don't care how big he was--that would be a-sayin' that of ye without somethin' to back it up, and that's what'll happen to ye if ye don't mend your manners. Can't ye see, Father, that Mr. Felix O'Day is the real thing, and no sham about him? I do, and Kling does, and so does that darlin' Masie, and every man, woman, and child around here that can get their hands on him or a word wid him. Shame on ye, John! Tell him so, Father Cruse!"

The priest kept silent, waiting until the slight family squall--never very long nor serious between John and Kitty--had spent itself.

"Well, I'm not sayin' anything against Mr. O'Day, Kitty," broke in John.

"I'm only askin' for information. What do you think of him, Father?

What's he up to, anyhow? There ain't any of 'em can fool ye. I don't want to watch him--I ain't got no time--and I won't if he's all right."

The priest rose from his chair and stood looking down at Kitty, his hands clasped behind his back. "You believe in him, do you not?"

"I do--up to the handle-and I don't care who knows it!"

"Then I would not worry, John Cleary, if I were you."

"Well, what does she know about it, Father?"

"What every good woman always knows about every good man. And now I must go."

Chapter VII

As was to be expected, Kitty's first words to O'Day on the following morning related to his meeting with Father Cruse. "Ye'll not find a better man anywhere," she had said to him, "and there ain't a trouble he can't cure."

Felix had smiled at her enthusiasm for her idol and comforted her by saying that it had given him distinct pleasure to meet him, adding: "A big man with a big soul, that priest of yours, Mistress Kitty. I begin to see now why you and your husband lead such human lives. Yes--a fine man."

But no closer intimacy ensued, nor did he pursue the acquaintance--not even on the following Sunday, when Kitty urged him, almost to importunity, to go and hear the Father say ma.s.s. He was not ready as yet, he said to himself, for friends.h.i.+ps among men of his own intellectual caliber. In the future he might decide otherwise. For the present, at least, he meant to find whatever peace and comfort he could among the simple people immediately around him--meagrely educated, often strangely narrow-minded, but possessing qualities which every day aroused in him a profounder admiration.

With the quick discernment of the man of the world--one to whom many climes and many people were familiar--he had begun to discover for himself that this great middle cla.s.s was really the backbone of the whole civil structure about him, its self-restraint, sanity, and cleanliness marking the normal in the tide-gauge of the city's activities; the hysteria of the rich and the despair of the poor being the two extremes.

Here, as he repeatedly observed, were men absorbed in their several humble occupations, proud of their successes, helpful of those who fell by the wayside, good citizens and good friends, honest in their business relations, each one going about his appointed task and leaving the other fellow unmolested in his. Here, too, were women, good mothers to their children and good wives to their husbands, untiring helpmates, regarding their responsibilities as mutual, and untroubled as yet by thoughts of their own individual ident.i.ties or what their respective husbands owed to them.

This was why, instead of renewing his acquaintance with Father Cruse, he preferred to halt for a few minutes' talk with some one of Kitty's neighbors--it might be the liveryman next door who had been forty years on the Avenue, or one of the shopkeepers near by, most of whom were welcome to Kitty's sitting-room and kitchen, and all of whom had shared her coffee. Or it might be that he would call at Digwell's, whose undertaker's shop was across the way and whose door was always open, the gas burning as befitted one liable to be called upon at any hour of the day or night; or perhaps he would pa.s.s the time of day with Pestler, the druggist; or give ten minutes to Porterfield, listening to his talk about the growing prices of meat.

Had you asked his former a.s.sociates why a man of O'Day's intelligence should have cultivated the acquaintance of an undertaker like Digwell, for instance, whose face was a tombstone, his movements when on duty those of a crow stepping across wet places in a cornfield, they would have shaken their heads in disparaging wonder. Had you asked Felix he would have answered with a smile: "Why to hear Digwell laugh!" And then, warming to his subject, he would have told you what a very jolly person Digwell really was, if you were fortunate enough to find him unoccupied in his private den, way back in the rear of his shop. How he had entertained him by the hour with anecdotes of his early life when he was captain of a baseball team, and what fun he had gotten out of it, and did still, when he could sneak away to help pack the benches.

Had you inquired about Pestler, the druggist, there would have followed some such reply as: "Pestler? Did you say? Because Pestler is one of the most surprising men I know. He has kept that same shop, he tells me, for twenty-two years. Of course, he knows only a very little about drugs--just enough to keep him out of the hands of the police--but then none of you are aware, perhaps, that Pestler is also a student? You might think, when you saw only the top of his fuzzy, half-bald head sticking up above the wooden part.i.tion, that he was putting up a prescription, but you would be wrong. What he is really doing, with the aid of his microscope, is dissecting bugs, and pasting them on gla.s.s slides for use in the public schools. And he plays the violin--and very well, too! He often entertains me with his music."

Sanderson, the florist, was another denizen who interested him. To look at Sanderson tying ribbons on funeral wreaths, no one would ever have supposed that there was rarely a first night at the opera at which he was not present, paying for his ticket, too, and rather despising Pestler, who got his theatre tickets free because he allowed the managers the use of his windows for advertis.e.m.e.nts. Felix forgave even his frozen roses whenever the Scotchman, having found a sympathetic listener, launched out upon his earlier experiences among opera stars, especially his acquaintance with Patti, whom he had known before she became great and whom he always spoke of as devotees do of the Madonna--with bated breath and a sigh of despair that he would never hear her again.

Then, too, there was Codman. O'Day was always enthusiastic over Codman.

"I have taken a great fancy to that fishmonger, and a fine fellow he is," he said one night to Kitty and John. "His shop was shut when I first called on him, but he was good enough to open it at my knock, and I have just spent half an hour, and a very delightful half-hour, watching him handle the sea food, as he calls it, in his big refrigerator. I got a look, too, at his chest and his arms, and at his pretty wife and children. She is really the best type of the two.

American, you say, both of them, and a fine pair they are, and he tells me he pulled a surf-boat in your coast-guard when he was a lad of twenty, then took up fis.h.i.+ng, and then went into Fulton Market, helping at a stall, and now he is up here with two delivery wagons and four a.s.sistants and is a member of a fish union, whatever that is.

It's astonis.h.i.+ng! And yet I have met him many a time pus.h.i.+ng his baby-carriage around the block."

"Yes," Kitty answered, putting on a shovel of coal, "and I'll lay ye a wager, Mr. O'Day, that Polly Codman will be drivin' through Central Park in her carriage before five years is out; and she deserves it, for there ain't a finer woman from here to the Battery."

"I am quite sure of it, Mistress Kitty. That is where the American comes in--or, perhaps it is the New Yorker. I have not been here long enough to find out."

Of all these neighbors, however, it was Timothy Kelsey, the hunchback, largely because of his misfortunes and especially because of his vivid contrast to all the others, who appealed to him most. Tim, as has been said, kept the second-hand book-shop, half-way down the block on the opposite side of the street. He was but a year or two older than O'Day, but you would never have supposed it had Tim not told you--and not then unless you had looked close and followed the lines of care deep cut in his face and the wrinkles that crowded close to his deep, hollowed-out eyes. When he was a boy of two, his sister, a girl of six, had let him drop to the sidewalk, and he had never since straightened his back. The customary outlets by which fully equipped men earn their living having been denied Tim, he had pa.s.sed his boyhood days in one of the small, down-town libraries cataloguing the books. With this came the opportunity to attend the auction sales when some rare volume was to be bid for, he representing the library. A small shop of his own followed in the lower part of the town, and then the one a little below Kling's, where he lived alone with only a caretaker to look after his wants.

Kelsey had arrived one morning shortly after Felix had entered Kling's service, carrying a heavily bound book which he laid on a gla.s.s case under Otto's nose. "Take a look at it, Otto," he said, after pausing a moment to get his breath, the volume being heavy. "There is more bra.s.s than leather on the outside, and more paint than text on the inside. I have two others from the same collection. It is in your line rather than in mine, I take it. What do you think of it? Could you sell it?"

Kling dropped his gla.s.ses from his forehead to the bridge of his flat nose. "Vell! Dot is a funny-looking book, Tim. Dot is awful old, you know."

"Yes, seventeenth century, I think," replied Tim.

"Vot you tink, Mr. O'Day? Ain't dot a k'veer book? Oh, you don't have met my new clerk, have you, Tim? Vell dot's funny, for he lives over at Kitty's. Vell, dis is him--Mr. Felix O'Day. Tim Kelsey is an olt friend of mine, Mr. O'Day. You must have seen dot k'veer shop vich falls down into de cellar from de sidevalk--vell, dat's Tim's."

Felix smiled good-naturedly, bowed to Kelsey, and taking the huge, bra.s.s-bound volume in his hands, pa.s.sed his fingers gently across the leather and then over the heavy clamps, turning the book to the light of the window so as to examine the chasing the closer. Tim, who had been watching him, remarked the ease with which he handled the volume and the care with which he ran his eye along the edges of the inside of the back before paying the slightest attention to the quality of the vellum or to the t.i.tle-page.

"Did you say you thought it was seventeenth century, Mr. Kelsey?" Felix asked thoughtfully.

"Yes, I should say so."

"I would put it somewhat earlier. The binding is wholly tool-work, much older than the bra.s.ses, which, I think, have been renewed--at least the clamps--certainly one of them is of a later period. The vellum and the illuminated text"--again he scrutinized the t.i.tle-page, this time turning a few of the inside leaves--"is before Gutenberg's time. Handwork, of course, by some old monk. Very curious and very interesting. And you say there are two others like this one?"

The hunchback, whose big, s.h.a.ggy head reached but a very little above the case over which the colloquy was taking place, stretched himself upon his toes as if to see Felix the better. "You seem to know something of books, sir," he remarked in a surprised tone. "May I ask where you picked it up?"

Again Felix smiled, a curious expression lurking around his thin lips--a way with him when he intended to be non-committal. He was now more interested in the speaker than in the object before him, especially in the big dome head and sunken eyes, shaded by bushy eyebrows, the only feature of the man which seemed to have had a chance to grow to its normal size. He had caught, too, a certain high-pitched note, one of suffering running through the hunchback's speech--often discernible in those who have been robbed of their full physical strength and completeness.

"Oh, I don't know, Mr. Kelsey. There are, as you know, but few old clamp books like this in existence. There are some in the Bibliotheque in Paris, and a good many in Spain. I remember handling one some years ago in Cordova. When you have seen a fine example you are not apt to forget it. Why do you sell it?"

Kelsey settled down upon his heels--the upper half of his misshapen body telescoping the lower--and shoved both hands into his pockets. "I did not come here to sell it"--there was a touch of irony in his voice--"I came to find out whether Kling could sell it. Do you think YOU could?"

"I might, or I might not. Only a few people about here, so I understand, can appreciate this sort of thing."

"What is it worth?" He was still eying him closely. People who praised his things were those who never wanted to buy.

"Not very much," replied Felix.

"Oh, but I thought you said it was very rare?"

"So it is--almost too rare--and almost too old. If it had been done fifty or more years later, on one of Gutenberg's presses, Quaritch might give you two thousand pounds for it. Hand-work--which ought really to be more valuable than machine-work--is worth pence, where the other sells for pounds. One of Gutenberg's Bibles sold here a year ago for three thousand guineas, so I am told. What are the other two like?"

"No difference--a clasp is gone from one. The other is--" He stopped, his mien suddenly changing to one of marked respect, even to one of awe.

"Will you do me a favor, sir?"

"With pleasure"--again the same quiet smile. He had read the financial workings of the bookseller's mind with infinite amus.e.m.e.nt and decided to see more of him. "What can I do for you?"