Butler Ellis Parker
The Jack-Knife Man
XVIII. MORE FUNNY CATS
NEW YORK, being a great mill that grinds off rough corners and operates, as it seems, for no other purpose than to make each New York inhabitant and each New York creation a facsimile of every other New York inhabitant and creation, loves those who introduce the quaint, the strange and the outlandish – which is to say, anything not after the conventional New York model. Women have become rich with the discovery of a rag rug or a corn-husk door-mat.
To Mrs. Montgomery the trip to Peter Lane’s shanty-boat was a path to fame. Her quick perception grasped every detail and saw its value or, to put it most crudely, its advertising potency. As she, with Mr. and Mrs. Vandyne, whirled down the smooth bluff road in the Vandyne barouche, she said: “Anna, I do wish we could have come in an ox-cart, or a-straddle little donkeys, or in a hay-wagon, at least.”
“My dear! Isn’t this comfortable enough?”
“Oh, I was thinking of my talk before the Arts and Crafts Club. It makes such a difference. It is so conventional to be taken in a carriage. And probably I’ll find your Peter Lane just an ordinary man, and his shanty-boat nothing but a common houseboat.”
But when the carriage ran into the farmer’s yard – it was Sunday – and the farmer volunteered to show the route to Peter’s shanty-boat, and warned Mrs. Montgomery, after a glance at her handsome furs, that it would be a rough tramp, her spirits rose again. Perhaps there would be some local color after all. The event fully satisfied her.
In single file they tramped the long path to the boat, stooping under low boughs, climbing over fallen tree trunks, dipping into hollows. Rabbits turned and stared at them and scurried away. Great grapevine swings hung from the water elms, and when the broad expanse of Big Tree Lake came into view Mrs. Montgomery stood still and absorbed the scene. It represented absolute loneliness – acres of waving rice straw, acres of snow-covered ice and, close under the bank, the low, squat shanty-boat overshadowed by the leafless willows. It was a romantic setting for her hermit.
The farmer had brought them by the shorter route, so that they had to cross the lake, and Peter, gathering driftwood, was amazed to see the procession issue from the rice and come toward him across the lake.
“That’s Peter,” said the farmer. “He acts like he didn’t expect comp’ny.”
Peter was standing at the edge of the willows, his arms full of driftwood, the gray blanket serape with its brilliant red stripes hanging to his ankles, and a home-made blanket cap pulled down over his ears. He stood like a statue until they reached him, then doffed his cap politely, and Mrs. Montgomery saw his eyes and knew this was the artist.
“I guess you’d better step inside my boat, if it’s big enough,” said Peter, “but it’s sort of mussy. Maybe you’d like to wait out here ‘til I sweep out. I been whittlin’ all morning.”
“We will go in just as it is,” said Mrs. Montgomery promptly. “I want to see where you work, just as it is when you work.”
Peter looked at her with surprise.
“You ain’t mistook in the man you’re lookin’ for, are you, ma’am?” He asked. “I’m Peter Lane. I don’t work in this boat. Lately I’ve been workin’ up at the farmer’s, sawin’ wood.”
Mrs. Montgomery laughed delightedly, and Peter, looking into her eyes, grinned. He liked this large, wholesome woman.
“You are the man!” said Mrs. Montgomery gaily. “And since Mrs. Vandyne won’t introduce me, I’ll introduce myself.”
Peter was justified in his doubts regarding the capacity of his boat, and the farmer, after trying to feel comfortable inside, went out and sat on the edge of the deck. The shavings on the floor, the wooden-spoons (there were but three or four), the boat itself – when she learned Peter had built it himself – all delighted her. She asked innumerable questions that would have been impertinent but for her kindly smile, and she was delighted when she learned that Peter had but one blanket, which was his coat by day and his bed-clothing by night. But more than all else she liked Peter’s kindly eyes. She explained, in detail, the object of their visit, and Peter listened politely.
“It’s right kind of you to come down so far,” he said when he had heard, “but I guess I’ll have to refuse you, Mrs. Montgomery. I don’t seem to have no desire to make no more funny toys. I guess I won’t.”
“I can understand the feeling perfectly,” said Mrs. Montgomery, too wise to try coaxing. “You have an artist’s reluctance to undertake for pay what you have done for pleasure only.”
“It ain’t that,” said Peter. “I just whittled out them toys for a little feller I had here, because he used to laugh at them. That’s all I done it for, and since he ain’t here to laugh, it don’t seem as if I could get the grin into them. I don’t know as I can explain; I don’t know as you could understand if I did – ”
“But I do, I do,” said Mrs. Montgomery eagerly. “You mean you lack the sympathetic audience.”
“Maybe so,” said Peter doubtfully. “What I do mean is, that I’d miss the look in his eyes and how he quirked up his mouth whilst I was cutting out a toy. Maybe it looks to you like this hand and this old whetted-down jack-knife was what made them toys, but that ain’t so! No, ma’am! All I done was to take a piece of maple wood and start things going. ‘This is going to be a cat, Buddy,’ I’d say, maybe, and he’d sparkle up at me and say, ‘A funny old cat, Uncle Peter!’ and then it had got to be a funny old cat, like he said. And his eyes and his mouth would tell me just how funny to make that cat, and just how funny not to make it. He sort of seen each whittle before I seen it myself, and told me how to make it by the look of his eyes and the way his mouth sort of felt for it until I got it just right. And then he would laugh. So you see, now that Buddy’s gone, I couldn’t – no, I guess I couldn’t!”
“And you made no more after Buddy – after he left?”
“He didn’t die,” said Peter, “if that’s what you mean. He was took away. Yes’m. I did make a couple. I made a couple more cats to put in the gunny-sack. But that was because I sort of saw Buddy a sittin’ there on the floor, even when he was gone.”
“But don’t you see,” cried Mrs. Montgomery eagerly, “that you can always see Buddy? Don’t you know there are hundreds of other Buddys – boys and girls – all over the country, and that, as you work, a man of your imagination can feel their eyes and smiling mouths guiding your hand and your knife? They want your ‘funny cats,’ too, Mr. Lane. Don’t you see that you could sit here in your lonely boat, and have all the children of America clustered about your knee?”
“Yes, I do sort of see it,” said Peter, “but it’s a thing I’m liable to forget any time.”
“But you must not forget it!” exclaimed Mrs. Montgomery. “Your work is too rare, too valuable to permit you to forget How many artists, do you suppose, are, like the musicians, able to draw their inspiration face to face from their audiences? Very few, Mr. Lane. Do you suppose a Dickens was able to have those for whom he wrote crowded in his workroom? And yet those he worked to please guided his pen. He heard the laughs and saw the tears and was guided by them as he chose the words that were to cause the laughs and tears. You, too, can see the children’s faces.”
She paused, for she saw in Peter’s eyes that he understood and agreed.
“But then there’s another reason I can’t whittle more toys,” he said. “I’ve got about thirty more cords of wood to saw this winter.”
“But that is not like you!” said Mrs. Montgomery reproachfully. “You see I know you, Mr. Lane! You are not the man to saw wood when all the Buddys are eager for your toys.”
“It ain’t like me usually,” admitted Peter. “I don’t know who’s been telling you about me, but usually I don’t do any work I don’t have to, and that’s a fact, but certain circumstances – ” he hesitated. “You didn’t know why they took Buddy away from me, did you? I wasn’t fit to keep him. I was like a certain woman was always tellin’ me, I guess – shiftless and no-’count – so they took Buddy. And I guess they were right. But I’ve changed. It’s going to take some time, but I’m going to make money, and I’m going to be like other folks, and I’m going to get Buddy back. So you see,” he said, after this outburst, “I’ve got to saw wood. If it wasn’t for that I’d be right eager to make toys for all the kids you speak of. It would be a pleasure. But I’ve got to make some money.”
Mrs. Montgomery stared at him. “You don’t mean to tell me – ” she began. “You don’t mean to say you thought I wanted you to give up everything and make toys for nothing?”
“Why, yes,” said Peter.
“But, my dear Mr. Lane!” exclaimed Mrs. Montgomery. “I do believe I almost persuaded you to do it!” She laughed joyously. “Oh, you are a true artist! Why, you can make many, many times as much money whittling jack-knife toys as you could make sawing wood! You can hire your own wood sawed.”
She descended to details and told him what he could sell the toys for; how she would tell of them in New York and interest a few dealers.
“You’ll be working for Buddy all the while you are working for the other Buddys,” she ended, “making the home you want while you make the toys that will make little children happy.”
“That’s so,” agreed Peter eagerly, and her battle was won. The rest was mere detail – her address in New York, prices, samples, Peter’s address, and other similar matters. The farmer was willing enough to hunt another man to saw his wood. Mrs. Vandyne placed the orders with which she had been commissioned by the Baptist ladies; Mr. Vandyne – the cashier of the First National Bank – actually shook Peter’s hand in farewell, and Peter was alone again.
When the voices of his visitors had died in the distance he lifted the mattress of his bunk and felt under it with his hand until he found a round, soft ball. He unrolled it and smoothed it out – Buddy’s old, worn stockings, out at knees and toes.
“There, now,” he said, hanging them on a nail under his clock-shelf, “I guess I ain’t afraid to have you look me in the face now.”
“What happened to the child he mentioned?” Mrs. Montgomery asked when she was snugly rug-enwrapped in the barouche once more.
“I think some society took it,” Mrs. Van-dyne answered. “I’ll have Jim look it up. No doubt Jim can have the boy returned to Peter Lane.”
“I’ll do what I can,” said Mr. Vandyne, but Mrs. Montgomery was silent while the carriage traveled a full mile.
“I wouldn’t!” she said at last “No, I wouldn’t! You might see that the boy is where he is properly cared for, but I think it will be best to let the Jack-knife Man earn the boy himself. I know what he has been, and I can see what he hopes to be. If he could step outside himself and see as we see, he would say what I say. The best thing for him is to have something to work for.”
“He could work for money, like the rest of us,” suggested Mr. Vandyne.
“Oh, you utter Philistine!” cried Mrs. Montgomery. “You must wait until he gets the habit, and then – !”
“Then what?”
“Then he will have a bank-book,” laughed Mrs. Montgomery.
The winter passed rapidly enough for Peter. Between the stockings, and the vision of the children Mrs. Montgomery had conjured up, and his eagerness to win a home for Buddy, Peter worked as faithfully as an artist should, and he made many raids on the farmer’s wood-pile to secure dry, well-seasoned, maple wood.
When the vision of Buddy’s eyes grew dim Peter was always able to bring it back by humming Booge’s song, and before the winter was over Peter had crowded his clock shelf with toys and had constructed another shelf, which was filling rapidly, for while he made many duplicates he kept one of each for Buddy – “Buddy’s menagerie,” he called them. Thus he kept his own interest alive, too, for when it flagged he made a new animal, making it as he thought Buddy would like it made and so that it would bring that happy “Ho! ho! That’s a funny old squ’arl, Uncle Peter.”
One letter Peter wrote, soon after the visit to his boat, which was to Mrs. Vandyne. It brought this answer: “My husband called at the place you mentioned, but the little girl is there no longer. I can find no trace of her. Mr. Briggles, I understand, has had to leave this state and no one knows where he is.”
Peter had no time to go to town. Mrs. Montgomery had been as good as her word, and had, on her return to New York in midseason, introduced the “Peter Lane Jack-Knife Toys” to her Arts and Crafts Club, and to two of those small shops on the Avenue that seem so inconspicuous and yet are known to every one. The toys, after their first few weeks as a fashionable fad, settled into a vogue and James Vandyne, whom Mrs. Montgomery had wisely asked to act as Peter’s agent, received letters from other shops, and from wholesalers, asking for them. The toys were, of course, almost immediately counterfeited by other dealers, and it was Vandyne who wisely secured copyrights on Peter’s models, and who, later in the winter, sent Peter a small branding-iron with which he could burn his autograph on each toy.
Peter’s farmer friend stopped at the bank on each trip to town, delivering the toys, which Vandyne tagged and turned over to the express company. The farmer brought back such supplies as Peter had commissioned him to buy. The entire business was crude and unsystematic, even to Peter’s method of packing the toys in hay and sewing the parcels in gunny-sacking, but it all served. It was naïve.
When the ice in the river went out, and that in Big Tree Lake softened and honeycombed, Peter put aside his jack-knife for a few days and repaired the old duck-blind that had been Booge’s damp and temporary home, and built two more, knowing George Rapp and his friends would be down before long. He built two more bunks in the narrow shanty-boat and cleared a tent space on the highest ground near the boat, constructing a platform four feet above the ground, in case the high water should come with the ducks. All this put a temporary close to his toy-making, but Peter was ready for Rapp when the first flock of ducks dropped into the lake, and that night he sent the farmer’s hired man to town with a message to Rapp. Late the next evening Rapp and his two friends found Peter waiting for them at the road, and the best part of the night was spent getting the provisions and duck-boats to the slough. The four men dropped asleep the instant they touched their beds, and it was not until the next morning, when Peter was cooking breakfast that he had an opportunity to ask a question that had been in his mind.
“George,” he said, “you didn’t ever hear where they took Buddy to, did you?”
Rapp looked up, and stared at Peter until the match with which he had been lighting his pipe burned his fingers, and he snapped them with pain.
“Do you mean to tell me you don’t know where that boy is?” he asked. “Well – I’ll – be – Petered! Why, Mrs. Potter’s got him!”
Peter was holding a plate, but he was quick, and he caught it before it struck the floor.
“I – I caught that one,” he said in silly fashion.
“You’re going to catch something else when Widow Potter sees you,” said George Rapp.
XIX. PETER GOES TO TOWN
ONE DAY, if we saw a woman gowned as Mrs. Montgomery was gowned when she visited Riverbank, we would laugh her to ridicule, but the toys Peter Lane whittled that winter are still admired for their design and execution. There is a collection of them in the rooms of the Riverbank Historical Society. We laugh, too, when we see photographs of Main Street as it was when Peter came to town after his winter on Big Tree Lake, with the mud almost hub deep. That was before the new banks were built or the brick-paving laid, and Main Street was a ragged, ill-kept thoroughfare, with none of the city airs it has since donned. But as Peter stepped out of the First National Bank, and stood for a minute on the steps in the warm spring sunshine, the street looked like an old friend, and this was the more odd because it had never looked like a friend before.
Jim Vandyne had just cashed the checks and money orders Peter had accumulated during the winter. They were for small amounts – a few dollars each – and not until the cashier had pushed the pile of crisp bills under the wicket, mentioning the amount, did happy-go-lucky Peter realize how much his winter earnings had amounted to.
“Quite a lot of money,” Jim had said. “How would you like to open an account?” and Peter had opened his first bank account. The warm, leather-bound bank-book now reposed in his pocket. Peter could feel it pressing against him, and he could feel the extra bulge the check-book made in his hip pocket. He felt like a serf raised to knighthood, with armor protecting him against harm. As he stood there, Mr. Howard, the bank’s president, came briskly down the street. He was a short, chubby man, and he had always nodded cheerfully to Peter, but now he stopped and extended his hand.
“How do you do!” he said cheerfully. “Jim Vandyne has been telling me what you have been doing this winter. Glad to know you are making a go of it.”
It was not much. The bank president was not a great bank president, and the bank was not much of a bank – as great banks go – and he had not, after all, said much, but it made Peter’s brown cheeks glow. Bank presidents do not often stop to shake hands with shanty-boatmen, nor do they pause to congratulate them, although the bank president may be an infernal rascal and the shanty-boatman a moral king. But Peter did not philosophize. He knew that if enough bank presidents shake the hand of an ex-shanty-boatman the world will consider the shanty-boatman respectable enough to raise one freckle-faced, kinky-headed little waif of a boy.
Peter raised his head higher than ever, and he had always held it high. He was a man, like other men, now. He could, if he wished, build another shanty-boat. He could hire it built. He could rent a house and put a carpet on the parlor floor. He could say he was going to Florida and people would believe him. He could – buy a suit of clothes! A whole, complete, entire suit, vest and all! It had been years and years since he could do that, and when he had been able to do it he had always spent the money otherwise. Now he crossed the street and entered the Riverbank Clothing Emporium. It gave him a warming feeling of respectability to be buying clothes, but he did not plunge recklessly. He bought everything he needed, from socks and shoes to tie and hat, but the shoes were stout and cheap, and the shirt a woolen one, and the hat a soft felt that would stand wind and weather.
Mr. Rosenheim himself came and stood by Peter when he was trying on the shoes.
“My wife was showing me the piece about you in the magazine,” he said. “I guess you are the first man in Riverbank to get into magazines. We should be proud of you, Lane.”
“Who, me in a magazine? I guess not.”
“Oh, sure! I read some of it. Some such Art and Crafts magazine, with photo cuts from them toys you make. Ain’t you seen it?”
“Nope! Let me try on a seven and a half B,” he said calmly, but his pulse quickened.
“Well, I suppose you are used to being puffed up already,” said Mr. Rosenheim. “I wish I could get such free advertising.”
When Peter looked at himself in the store mirror he was well satisfied. Mr. Rosenheim nodded his approval.
“That suit looks like it was made for you, Mr. Lane,” he said, and he did not know what a great truth he was uttering, for Peter, so long in rags, and the simple, quiet suit seemed well fitted for each other’s company. Peter went out upon the street, and at the first corner he met – Booge!
He was the same old, frowsy, hairy Booge, and he greeted Peter in the same deep bass.
“Did you get the papers, to rescue the cheeild?” he asked melodramatically. “I hid them under the stone at the corner of the lane. Meet me at midnight! Hush! A stranger approaches!”
There were several strangers approaching, for they were standing on the corner of the two principal streets. Peter grinned.
“George Rapp brought it down to me,” he said. “I thought you were in for six months.”
“Sheriff discharged me,” said Booge. “I ate too much. He couldn’t figure a profit, so he kicked me out.”
“You don’t mean it!”
“No, teacher excused me at noon so I could go to dancing class,” said Booge.
“How did you get out?” Peter insisted. “There wasn’t room for me and Briggles in the same jail,” said Booge. “We was always singin’ out of harmony.”
“Was Briggles in jail?”
“They caught the old kazoozer, kazoozer, kazoozer,
They caught the old kazoozer and took him to the jail,”
hummed Booge, “and I got excused so I could go and hunt up Susie: I was her responsible guardian. Ain’t that a joke?”
“What are you going to do now?” asked Peter.
“I dunno!” said Booge thoughtfully. “I ain’t made up my mind whether to run for mayor or buy the op’ry house, but if anybody was to give me a nickel I’d give up whisky and buy beer. If not, I’ll stand around here ‘til I do get arrested. The town cop has promised and promised to do it, but he ain’t reliable. I’ve got so I don’t depend on his word no more.”
Peter took a silver dollar from his pocket and handed it to the tramp, and Booge started across the street to the nearest saloon without farewell. Peter took a step after him and then turned back.
“I guess it’s what he likes,” he said, “and I couldn’t stop him if I wanted to.”
Peter turned into the Star Restaurant and took a seat at one of the red-covered tables.
“Bob,” he said, “can you get me up one of them oyster stews of yours? One of them milk stews, with plenty of oysters and a hunk of butter thawing out on top. Fix me one. And then I want a chicken – a nice, fresh, young chicken, killed about day before yesterday – split open and br’iled right on top of the coals, so the burned smell will come sifting in before the chicken is ready, and I want it on a hot plate – a plate so hot I’ll holler when I grab it. And I want some of your fried potatoes in a side dish – hashed browned potatoes, browned almost crisp in the dish, with bacon chopped up in them. And I want a big cup of coffee with real cream, even if you have to send out for it. And then, Bob, I want a whole lemon meringue pie. A whole one, three inches thick and fourteen inches across. I’ve been wanting to eat a whole lemon meringue pie ever since I was fourteen years old, and now I’m going to. I’m going to have one full, fine, first-class meal and then – ”
“Then what?” asked Bob.
“Then I’m going to go and get an alarm-clock that belongs to me.”
