Felix O'Day

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 mass. He was not ready as yet, he said to himself, for friendships 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 class 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 identities 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 pass 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 associates 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 partition, 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 glass 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 advertisements. 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 fishing, and then went into Fulton Market, helping at a stall, and now he is up here with two delivery wagons and four assistants and is a member of a fish union, whatever that is. It's astonishing! And yet I have met him many a time pushing 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 passed 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 glass 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 brass 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 glasses 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, brass-bound volume in his hands, passed 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 title-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 brasses, 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 title-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, shaggy 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 amusement and decided to see more of him. “What can I do for you?”

“I want you to come over with me to my shop. You won't object, will you, Otto? I won't keep him a minute.”

“Let me come a little later, sir, say about nine o'clock. I have work here until six and an engagement, which is important, until nine. You are open as late as that?”

“Oh, I am always open, or can be,” Kelsey answered. “What would I shut up shop for except to keep out the rats—human and otherwise? I live in my place, and, as I live alone, nobody ever disturbs me—nobody I want to see—and I do want you, and want you very much. Well, then, come at nine, and if the blinds are up, ring the bell.” And so the acquaintance began.

And yet, interesting as he found these diversions with his neighbors, there were moments when, despite his determination to be cheerful and to add his quota to the general fund of good-fellowship, he had to summon all his courage to prevent his spirit sinking to its lowest ebb. It was then he would turn to the thing that lay nearest to hand, his work—work often so irksome to him that, but for his sense both of obligation and of justice to his employer and his love for Masie, he would have abandoned it altogether.

A possible relief came when through the protests of a customer he had begun to realize the clearer Kling's deficiencies and had, in consequence, cast about for some plan of helping him to do a larger and more remunerative business.

Several ways by which this could be accomplished were outlined in his mind. The disorder everywhere apparent in the shop should first come to an end. The present chaos of tables, chairs, bureaus, and sideboards, heaped higgledy-piggledy one upon the other—the customers edging their way between lanes of dusty furniture—must next be abolished. So must the jumble of glass, china, curios, and lamps. This completed, color and form would be considered, each taking its proper place in the general scheme.

To accomplish these results, all the unsalable, useless, and ugly furniture taking up valuable space must be carted away to some auction room and sold for what it would bring. Light, air, and much-needed room would then follow, and prices advanced to make up for the loss on the “rattletrap” and the “rickety.” Stuffs which had been poked away in worthless bureau drawers for years, as being too ragged even to show, were next to be hauled out, patched, and darned, and then hung on the bare white walls, concealing the dirt and the cracks.

And these improvements, strange to say—Kling being as obstinate as the usual Dutch cabinetmaker, and as set in his ways—were finally carried out; slowly at first, and with a rush later when every customer who entered the door began by complimenting Otto on the improvement. Soon the sales increased to such an extent and the stock became so depleted that Kling was obliged to look around for articles of a better and higher grade to take its place.

At this juncture a happy and unforeseen accident came to his aid. A bric-a-brac dealer with a shop in Jersey City filled with some very good English and Italian patterns and a fine assortment of European gatherings—most of them rare, and all of them good—fell ill and was ordered to Colorado for his health. His wife had insisted on going with him, and thus the whole concern, including its good-will—worthless to Kling—was offered to him at half its value.

O'Day spent the entire morning crawling in and out of the interstices of the choked-up Jersey City shop; Masie, as his valuable assistant, propped up with Fudge on a big table until he had finished. The next day the bargain was made. Mike, Bobby, the two Dutchies, and both Kitty's teams were then called in and the transfer began.

It was when this collection of things really worth having were being moved into their new home under Felix's personal direction that Masie announced to him an important event. They were on the second floor at the time, overlooking Hans and Mike, who had just brought up-stairs the first of the purchase, a huge, high-backed gilt chair, stately in its proportions—Spanish, Felix thought—with a few renovations about the arms and back, but a good specimen withal. The chair had evidently excited her imagination, reminding her, perhaps, of some of the pictures in Tim Kelsey's fairy books, for after looking at it for a moment she began clapping her hands and whirling about the room.

“I've thought of such a lovely thing, Uncle Felix! Let's play kings and queens! I will sit in this chair and will dress Fudge up like a page and everybody will come up and courtesy, or I will be the fairy princess and you will be my beauty prince, and—”

Felix, who was holding up the heavy end of a piece of tapestry while the two men were clearing a place for it behind the chair, called out, “When's all this to happen, Tootcoms?”—one of his pet names; he had a dozen of them.

“Next Saturday.”

“Why next Saturday?”

“Because then I'm eleven years old, and you know that a great many fairy princesses are never any older.”

Down went the tapestry. “Your birthday! You blessed little angel! Eleven years old! My goodness, how time flies! Pretty soon you will be in long dresses, with your hair in a knot on the top of your head. You never told me a word about it!”

“No, but I do now. And I am just going to have a party—a real party. And I am going to invite everybody, all the girls I know and all the boys and all the old people.”

Felix had her beside him now, her fresh young cheek against his. “You don't tell me! Well! I never heard anything like it! And what will your father say?”

Her face fell. “Don't let's tell him! Let's have a surprise.”

Felix shook his head. “I am afraid we could never do that, unless we locked him up in the cellar and did not give him a thing to eat until everything was ready. Oh, just think how he would beg for mercy!”

Masie rubbed her cheek up and down that of Felix in disapproval. “No, you wouldn't be so mean to poor Popsy.”

“Well, then, suppose—suppose—” and he held her teasingly from him to note the effect of his words—“suppose we make him go away—way off somewhere, to buy something—so far away that he could not come back until the next day. How would that do?”

“No, that won't do—not a little bit! I've got a better plan. You go right down-stairs this minute and tell him it's all fixed, and that I'm going out this very afternoon to invite everybody myself.”

Felix made a wry fate. “Suppose he sends me about my business?”

“He won't. He thinks you are the most WONDERFUL man in the world—he told Mr. Kelsey so; I heard him—and he won't refuse you anything—oh, Uncle Felix”—both arms were around his neck now, always her last argument—“I do so want a birthday party and I want it right here in this room.”

Felix smoothed back the hair from her pleading eyes and kissed her tenderly on the forehead. For a moment there was silence between them, he continuing to smooth back her hair, she cuddling the tighter, her usual way. She always let him think a while and it always came out right. But he had made up his mind. It had been years since a birthday of his own had been celebrated; nor had he ever helped, so far as he could recollect, to celebrate the birthday of any child. Yes, Masie should have her birthday, if he could bring it about, and it should be the happiest of all her life.

Suddenly he rose, releasing his neck from her grasp, and ran his eyes around the almost bare interior—the big chair being the only article, so far, in place. “It will make a grand banquet hall, Masie,” he said, as if speaking more to himself than to her. “Let me see!” He walked half the length of the floor and began studying the walls and the bare rafters of the ceiling. These last had once been yellow-washed, age and dust having turned the kalsomine to an old-gold tint, reminding him of a ceiling belonging to a Venetian palace.

“Yes,” he continued, with the same abstracted air, his head upturned, “there's a good place for hanging a big lamp, if there is one in the new lot, and there are spots where I can hang twenty or more smaller ones. I will cover the side walls with stuffs and embroideries and put those long Italian settees against—yes, Tweety-kins, it will come out all right. It will make a splendid banquet hall! And after the party we will leave it just so. Fine, my child! And I have an idea, too—a brilliant idea. Hans, ask Mr. Kling to be good enough to come up here!”

With the surrender of her Uncle Felix, Masie resumed her spinning around the room and kept it up until the father's bald head showed clear above the top of the stairs.

“Masie has had one brilliant idea, Mr. Kling, and I have another. I will tell you mine first.” It was wonderful how thoroughly he understood the Dutchman.

“Vell, vot is it?” Otto had sniffed something unusual in the atmosphere and was on the defensive. When there was only one to deal with he sometimes had his way; never when they were leagued together.

“I propose,” continued O'Day, “to turn this whole floor into the sort of a room one could live in—like many of the great halls I have seen abroad—and I think we have enough material to make a success of it, plenty of space in which to put everything where it belongs. Leave that big chair where I have placed it, throw some rugs on the floor, nail the stuffs and tapestries to the walls, fasten the brackets and sconces and appliques on top of them, filled with candles, and hang the lanterns and church lamps to the rafters. When I finish with it, you will have a room to which your customers will flock.”

Kling, bewildered, followed the play of O'Day's fingers in the air as if he were already placing the ornaments and hangings with which his mind was filled.

“Vell, vot ve do vid de stuff dot's comin'—all dem sideboards and chairs and de pig tables? Ve ain't got de space.”

“Half of them will go here, and the balance we will pile away on the top floor. When these are sold then we'll bring down the others—always keeping up the character of the room. That is my idea. What do you think of it?”

The shopkeeper hesitated, his fat features twisted in calculation. Every move of his new salesman had brought him in double his money. The placing of his goods so that a customer would be compelled to crawl over a table in order to see whether a chair had three whole legs or two, dust and darkness helping, had always seemed to him one of the tricks of the trade and not to be abandoned lightly.

“You mean dot ve valk 'round loose in de middle, and everyting is shoved back de Vall behind, so you can see it all over?”

Felix smothered a smile. “Certainly, why not?”

“Vell, Mr. O'Day, I don't know.” Then, noticing the quickly drawn brows of his clerk's face and the shadow of disappointment: “Of course, ve can try it, and if it don't vork ve do it over, don't ve?”

Masie slipped her arm through O'Day's and began a joyous tattoo with her foot. She knew now that Felix had carried the day.

“And now for Masie's idea, Mr. Kling.”

“Oh, dere is someting else, eh? I tought dere vould be ven you puts your two noddles togedder—Vell, vot is dot all about, eh?”

“She is to have a birthday. She will be eleven years old next Saturday.”

“By Jeminy, yes, dot's so! I forgot dot, Masie. Yes, it comes on de tventy-fust. Vy you don't tell me before, little Beesvings?”

“Yes, next Saturday; only four days off,” continued Felix, forging ahead to avoid any side-tracking of his main theme. “And what are you going to do for her? Not many more of them before she will be out of the window like a bird, and off with somebody else.”

Otto ruminated. He loved his daughter, even if he did sometimes forget her very existence. “Oh, I don't know. I guess ve buy her sometings putty—vot you like to have, Beesvings? Or maybe you like to go to de teater vid Auntie Gossburger. I get de tickets.”

The child disengaged her hand from O'Day's arm, pushed back her hair and tiptoed to her father. “I want a party, Popsy—a real party,” she whispered, tipping his chin back with her fingers, so he could look at her through his spectacles—not over them, like an ogre.

“Vere you have it?” This came in a bewildered way, as if the pair had the big ballroom at Delmonico's in the back of their heads.

“Here, in this very place,” broke in Felix, “after I get it in order.”

Kling, gently freeing himself from Masie's hold, stared at his clerk. “Dot vill cost a lot of money, don't it?”

“No, I do not think so.”

“Vell, who is coming? De childer all around?”

“Everybody is coming—big, little, and middle-sized,” answered Felix. The cat was all out of the bag now.

“Vell, dot's vot I said. You don't can get someting for nodding. You must have blenty to eat and drink.”

“No. Some simple refreshment will do—sandwiches, cake, and some ice-cream. I'll take care of that myself, if you'll permit me.”

“Vell, now stop a minute vunce—here is anudder idea. Suppose ve make it a Dutch treat—everybody bring sometings. Ve had vun last vinter at Budvick's, de upholsterer, ven he vas married tventy-five years. I give de apples—more as half a peck.”

Felix broke into a hearty, ringing laugh—one of the few either Masie or his employer had ever heard escape his lips.

“We will let you off without even the apples this time,” he said, when he recovered himself. “They are not coming to get something to eat this time. I will give them something better.”

“And you say everybody is comin'. Who is dot everybody?”

“Just leave it all to me, Mr. Kling. And give yourself no concern. I am going to use everything we have: all our cups and saucers, no matter whether they are Spode, Lowestoft, or Worcester; all the platters, German beer mugs, candlesticks—even that rare old tablecloth trimmed with church lace. This is an entertainment to be given by a distinguished antiquary in honor of his lovely daughter”—and he bowed to each in turn—“the whole conducted under the management of his junior clerk, Mr. F. O'Day, who is very much at your service, sir.”