Read Ebook: The Baritone's Parish; or All Things to All Men by Ludlow James M James Meeker

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Ebook has 194 lines and 19972 words, and 4 pages

"'So let us duly ponder all The works our feeble strength achieves; For mean, in truth, the man we call Who ne'er what he completes conceives.

And well it stamps our human race, And hence the gift to understand, That man within the heart should trace Whate'er he fashions with the hand.'"

Vox groaned. "That's rather heavy poetry for creatures of our caliber, isn't it, Caleb? But I guess that I catch on.--It means the same as the line of the hymn you gave out to-night, doctor;" and Vox sang:

"'Take my voice, and let me sing Always, only, for my King.'

"That is, if I'm a bell, I should be one on purpose, whether a church-bell, or a door-bell, or only 'God's dog,' to growl"--patting Caleb. "But what is that second thing I lack? Since you've taken the contract to make me over, I want you to be thorough with the job."

"The second thing you need," said the doctor, "is in some way to be made to see that you are doing good. From your perch in the gallery you don't get a glimpse into the people's hearts. I couldn't preach if I didn't go among the people during the week, and get the encouragement of knowing that I had helped somebody."

"Yes," said Vox, "I've heard Joe Jefferson say that he couldn't act worth a cent if the people didn't applaud. I beg your pardon, doctor, for comparing the pulpit with the stage. But go on with your lecture."

"Oh, you've knocked the lecture out of my head with your nonsense, Phil."

"But you knocked it pretty well into mine. I'd like to see somebody I've helped. Show him up."

"Humph!" grunted the doctor, and, after a moment's silence, said abruptly, "Phil, will you go with me to-morrow night?"

"Where?"

"Leave that to me."

"That's a blind sort of an invitation, doctor. But, of course, I will go anywhere you want me to. But what is it? Some holy Sorosis? That reformed theater you talk about? Any charge for admittance, or collection? Of course, going with a distinguished clergyman I shall have to appear in swallow-tails and arctic shirt-front."

"Not a bit of it, Phil; your oldest clothes, so that you will look just as mean as you say you feel; then, for once, you can't accuse yourself of being a hypocrite."

There was a motley crowd in the front room of a Bowery twenty-cent lodging-house. The room was the parlor, but the occupants called it the "deck," in distinction from the rest of the house, which was filled with bunks. There were hard old soakers in a periodical state of repentance; or, to speak more scientifically, in that state of gland-moistening that comes after a certain amount of poor beer has permeated the system. There were young prodigals, in there for the night because they had no money for a night's carousal elsewhere. There was a sprinkling of honest men, thankful for even this refuge from the sleety streets. There were some two hundred pieces of the great human wreck made by the hard times, which were beached in Brady's Harbor, as the place was called.

The usual hubbub had calmed while a story-teller, who sat on the edge of a table, and whose slouch-hat and high ulster collar did not altogether conceal the genial face of Dr. Knox, entertained the crowd with old army yarns, which, as usual with such literature, were taken largely from the apocryphal portion of our national annals.

"Bully for you! Give us another!" was the encore, emphasized with the rattle of backgammon-boards and boot-heels.

"Haven't any more; but I have a friend here who will bring up the reserves in the way of a song."

"Song, song! Rosin your larynx, old boy!" greeted the suggestion, while the crowd gathered closer about Vox, and several who had "turned in" for the night turned out of their bunks again, minus coats and boots. A friendly slap on the back by something less than a ten-pound hand helped the singer to clear his throat.

Vox gave them "O'Grady's Goat" and one or two other classics of the Tenderloin district, with the rapt appreciation of his audience. Tom Moore's "Minstrel Boy," to the genuine old Irish melody, struck the heroic chord in the breasts of men most of whom were deserters from the real battle-fields of life. Then Vox dropped into a lullaby. The tender mother words given in his masculine tones seemed a burlesque as he began; but the deep bass took on the softness and sweetness of a contralto, and made one think, if not of a mother cooing to her baby, at least of some rough, great-hearted man who had found a lost child and was rocking it to sleep in his strong arms. More than one greasy sleeve got into its owner's eyes before Vox ended.

"An' 'aven't ye a Scotch sang, me laddie?" asked an old fellow, knocking the ashes from his pipe against the window-sill.

"My Ain Countrie" followed. As the music floated, the thick smoke of the room seemed to drift away. The land of birds and beauty lay before eyes that for months and years had looked only upon the crowded misery of slumdom. When the voice ceased the illusion continued for a while in spite of the picking sleet at the window-panes.

At length the silence was broken by a voice that came from a distant corner of the room. It repeated the last verse in tones as pure as those of Vox himself, though a high tenor in quality. Some of the notes were broken by hiccups.

Vox looked in amazement at the singer--a half-drunken youngish man curled nearly double in a chair which was tipped back against the wall. His battered derby and unscraped chin did not effectually disguise the handsome fellow beneath them. He was like the Apollo Belvedere when first exhumed from the mud of Antium.

"Who are you, my friend?" asked Vox, in as kindly a tone as his surprise allowed.

"Friend? haven't got any friend," replied the man; and he struck up the verse that had just been rendered. His voice was husky at first, but after a few notes it clarified itself, as brooks do in running. His tones became marvelously sweet, touching the highest note without the slightest suggestion of falsetto. It was a transcendent voice, one that might have once belonged to some spirit, and gone astray among men. The singer went through the verse this time without hiccup or slur; but the instant he stopped the drunk resumed its sway. Down came the chair with a bump on to its front legs, which sent the man headlong into the arms of Vox, with whom he wanted to fight.

"I won't fight you," said Vox, helping him back to his seat; "but I'll dare you to sing with me."

"Sin' wi' you! 'Cept your challenge. I can whip you with my--my tongue as bad as my wife she whipped me with her tongue."

"What shall we sing, old boy?" inquired Vox, with that easy familiarity which showed that he had seen such customers before.

"Sin' a song o' sispence, Pocket full o' rye,"

sang the man. "Say, what's the use o' havin' your pocket full o' rye ? 'D rather have a belly full o' rye; wouldn't you ?"

"You've enough rye in you for to-night," said Vox. "Come, pull the cork out of your throat, and let's have a song."

Vox got a chair, and tipped it back by the side of the maudlin fellow, then struck up Mazzini's two-part song, "The Muleteers." The stranger joined in. Such singing was never heard before nor since in Brady's Harbor, nor, for that matter, in Carnegie Hall. After a bar or two the men rose to their feet and stood with arms interlocked and heads touching as their voices soared in the grand finale.

The noise brought in Brady, who said it was "galoreous," but for all that they'd have to "bolt up their chins," as it was past twelve o'clock, and the "perlice wasn't so easy on lodgin'-houses as they was on the swill-shops."

"See here, Vox," said the doctor, "I am going home alone to-night. Find out your pal. Chum him a bit. A man with that voice has had culture. Scrape the rust off him, and you will find something polished beneath, or I am no judge of human nature. Take him for your parish, Phil."

"A heathenish sort of a mission that," replied Vox, looking at the fellow, who was trying, as he said, to find his night-key to get his boots off with. After a moment's hesitation, Vox added: "All right, doctor; you've had as hard a field with me, if it wasn't so dirty a one. I'll take him for a sobering walk in the drizzle, and then get him into better quarters than he has here."

Vox had his hands full with his job, and at times his arms full too. His companion insisted that the Bowery sidewalk, covered with sleet, was a toboggan-slide, and that he was tumbling off the sled. What could Vox do with his prot?g?? He couldn't walk him or slide him all night. A policeman proposed to relieve him of his anxiety by taking them both to the station-house, but was persuaded not to perform this heroic exploit by the man's assurance that his pal's legs hadn't any snakes in them, and by Vox's demonstration that he could stand alone. Then Vox thought of the story of the good Samaritan, with rising respect for the priest that passed by on the other side. Next, having got into the charity business, he envied the Samaritan at least his ass, "instead," as Vox soliloquized, "of making an ass of myself." He thought of taking the fellow to some hotel, paying for his lodging, and hiring the clerk to see that he was properly sobered off in the morning; but concluded that, whatever might have been the case on the road to Jericho, there was no innkeeper on the Bowery whom he could trust with such a commission, or who would trust him to call in the morning and pay the bill. He could take him back to Brady's Harbor, he thought; but when they turned about the man declared that he wouldn't walk up a toboggan-slide, and sat down on the sidewalk for another ride.

The flash of a passing cab let a little light in upon his problem. Hailing the driver, with whose help he got his load into the vehicle, he told him to drive to No. -- Madison Avenue, where he had his own day quarters--elegant rooms, fitted up for his instruction of the fashionable "daughters of music" at six dollars an hour. Sweezy, the janitor, was roused up, and with his assistance Vox was able to congratulate himself that he had gone "one better" on the good Samaritan, in that he had lodged his man in finer chambers. He could not help laughing at the incongruousness of the snoring mass and the elegant divan on which it lay. He thought of Bottom the weaver, with the ass's head, in the lap of Titania, and, as he piled the cushions so that the fellow would not tumble off, addressed him in the words of the fairy:

"Come, sit thee down upon this flowery bed, While I thy amiable cheeks do coy, And stick musk roses in thy sleek smooth head, And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy."

But tears are near to laughter, and as Vox contemplated his completed work he had to sit down a moment and cry.

"It's a hard sight, sir," said Sweezy, "but bless you, Mr. Vox, the best of us has just sich among our closest friends. I wish, sir, as how it was my own boy, Tommy, you had found the night." And Sweezy cried too.

Sweezy promised to take an early look at the man in the morning when he turned on the steam heat. Vox went away to his boarding-house around the corner, vexed at the doctor for getting him into such a scrape, yet feeling down in the depths of his heart a satisfaction that more than half compensated him for his rough experience. He fell asleep thinking of the good Samaritan, Bottom with the ass's head, Salvation Army lasses, and the Prohibition party; and, in the midst of a horrid dream, woke up imagining himself drunk and about to fall off a precipice.

Before breakfast next morning he went around to the rooms to look after his charge. The fellow had vamosed. Sweezy was taking account of the furniture, and, though nothing was missing, and only a lamp-shade broken, declared that Vox had been victimized by a sharper:

"A regular sharper, sir. I thought so when you brought him in. You ought to have knowed, sir, at a glance of him, what he was. You've nussed, sir, a wiper in your bosom, and it's a mercy, sir, a mercy if he hasn't stung you no worse. Is your pocket-book with you? You ought at least to have took off his boots. That spot on the cover will never come out without piecing."

Vox contemplated the scene of his first charity exploit much as Bonaparte did the battle-field of Waterloo. He had but one remark to make, which was:

"Sweezy, don't you open your head about this business."

Vox was not in an amiable mood when he met the doctor the next Sunday night. He debated with him the inadvisability of decent people attempting to do slumming in the name of either religion or charity. He took the ground that the men who had themselves been rescued from the dens of the city were the only ones to do this work, as they train chetahs to hunt their own kind, and reformed thieves to become detectives.

The doctor was half inclined to agree with him, not so much from conviction as from seeing the disgust the business had wrought in the mind of his friend. Yet he excused himself for having led Vox into this experience on the ground that it is Christian duty to try to rescue the fallen, even though one does not accomplish anything.

"I don't believe in your theory," said Vox, warmly. "Let buzzards clean up the offal, but decent birds had better follow their sweeter instincts and keep away. One thing is certain: I am not going to light on such moral carrion again."

It was more than a month later when a respectable-looking stranger called upon Vox at his rooms. The singer was engaged at the time arranging with a lady of the Four Hundred for the vocal culture of her daughters. The visitor quietly awaited his leisure. He was very genteel in appearance. If one had been critical he might have thought that for such a stinging cold day an ulster would have been more suitable than the light fall overcoat he wore; and some might have observed that it was not the fashion that season to wear one's outer garment so short that the tails of the under-coat protruded. But Vox was occupied with the stranger's face, which was exceedingly prepossessing.

"Mr. Vox, I believe?"

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