: Fiddles 1909 by Smith Francis Hopkinson - Short stories; Americans Germany Fiction; Poachers Fiction

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FIDDLES

This is Marny's story, not mine. He had a hammer in his hand at the time and a tack between his teeth.

Marny stepped back and took in the stuffed head and wide-branched antlers of the magnificent elk and the small, partly faded miniature of a young man in a student cap and high-collared coat.

"Ah, you young fraud," he went on--the position of both head and miniature pleased him now--"do you remember the time I hauled you out from under the table when the hucksters were making a door-mat of your back; and the time I washed you off at the pump, and what you said to the gendarme, and--No, you never remembered anything. You'd rather sprawl out on the grass, or make eyes at Gretchen or the landlady--fifty, if she was a day--maybe fifty-five, and yet she fell in love" , "fell in love with that tramp--a boy of twenty-two,'mind you--Ah! but what a rounder he was! Such a trim, well-knit figure; so light and nimble on his feet; such a pair of eyes in his head, leaking tears one minute and flashing hate the next. And his mouth! I tried, but I couldn't paint it--nobody could--so I did his profile; one of those curving, seductive mouths you sometimes see on a man, that quivers when he smiles, the teeth gleaming between the moist lips."

I had lassoed a chair with my foot by this time, had dragged it nearer the fire, and had settled myself in another.

"Funny name, though for a German," I remarked carelessly--quite as if the fellow's patronymic had already formed part of the discussion.

"Had to call him something for short," Marny retorted. "Feudels-Shimmer was what they called him in Rosengarten--Wilhelm Feudels-Shimmer. I tried all of it at first, then I bit off the Shimmer, and then the Wilhelm, and ran him along on Feudels for a while, then it got down to Fuddles, and at last to Fiddles, and there it stuck. Just fitted him, too. All he wanted was a bow, and I furnished that--enough of the devil's resin to set him going--and out would roll jigs, lullabys, fandangoes, serenades--anything you wanted: anything to which his mood tempted him."

Marny had settled into his chair now, and had stretched his fat legs toward the blaze, his middle distance completely filling the space between the arms. He had pushed himself over many a ledge with this same pair of legs and on this same rotundity, his hand on his Winchester, before his first ball crashed through the shoulder of the big elk whose glass eyes were now looking down upon Fiddles and ourselves--and he would do it again on another big-horn when the season opened. You wouldn't have thought so had you dropped in upon us and scanned his waist measure, but then, of course, you don't know Marny.

Again Marny's eyes rested for a moment on the miniature; then he went on:

"We were about broke when I painted it," he said. "There was a fair of some sort in the village, and I got an old frame for half a mark in a pawnshop, borrowed a coat from Fritz, the stableman, squeezed Fiddles into it, stuck a student's cap on his head, made it look a hundred years old--the frame was all of that--and tried to sell it as a portrait of a 'Gentleman of the Last Century,' but it wouldn't work. Fiddles's laugh gave it away. 'Looks like you,' the old man said. 'Yes, it's my brother,' he blurted out, slapping the dealer on the back."

"Where did you pick Fiddles up?" I asked.

"Nowhere," answered Marny; "he picked me up. That is, the gendarme did who had him by the coat collar."

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