The Romance of a Plain Man Part 16

For a moment he stood turning over the discoloured leaves without replying. "I reckon you can tell me the meaning of 'most any word, eh, Ben?" he demanded.

"Not unless it begins with _a_, _b_, or _c_, sir."

"Well, any word beginning with an _a_, then, that's something. There're a precious lot of 'em. How about allelujah, how's that for a mouthful?"

Instinctively my eyes closed, and I began my reply in a tone that seemed to chime in with the negro's melody.

'Falsely written for Hallelujah, a word of spiritual exultation, used in hymns; signifies, _Praise G.o.d. He will set his tongue, to those pious divine strains; which may be a proper praeludium to those allelujahs, he hopes eternally to sing._

"'_Government of the Tongue._'"

"Hooray! That's a whopper!" he exclaimed, with enthusiasm. "What's a prae-lu-di-um?"

"I told you I hadn't got to _p_'s yet," I returned, not without resentment.

The hymn changed suddenly; the negro in the red s.h.i.+rt, with the scar on his neck, turned his great oxlike eyes upon me, and the next instant his superb voice rolled, rich and deep, as the sound of an organ, from his bared black chest.

"A-settin' in de kingdom, Y-e-s, m-y-L-a-w-d!"

"Well, you've got gumption," said Bob, the manager. "That's what I always lacked--just plain gumption, and when you ain't got it, there's nothing to take its place. I was talking to General Bolingbroke about you yesterday, Ben, and that's what I said. 'There's but one word for that boy, General, and it's gumption.'"

I accepted the tribute with a swelling heart. "What good will it do me if I can't get an education?" I demanded.

"It's that will give it to you, Ben. Why, don't you know every blessed word in the English language that begins with an _a_? That's more than I know--that's more, I reckon," he burst out, "than the General himself knows!"

In this there was comfort, if a feeble one. "But there're so many other things besides the _a_'s that you've got to learn," I responded.

"Yes, but if you learn the _a_'s, you'll learn the other things,--now ain't that logic? The trouble with me, you see, is that I learned the other things without knowing a blamed sight of an _a_. I tell you what I'll do, Ben, my boy, I'll speak to the General about it the Very next time he comes to the factory."

He gave me back the dictionary, and I applied myself to its pages with a terrible earnestness while I awaited the great man's attention.

It was a week before it came, for the General, having gone North on affairs of the railroad, did not condescend to concern himself with my destiny until the more important business was arranged and despatched.

Being in a bland mood, however, upon his return, it appeared that he had listened and expressed himself to some purpose at last.

"Tell him to go to Theophilus Pry and let me have his report," was what he had said.

"But who is Theophilus Pry?" I enquired, when this was repeated to me by Bob Brackett.

"Dr. Theophilus Pry, an old friend of the General's, who takes his nephew to coach in the evenings. The doctor's very poor, I believe, because they say of him that he never refuses a patient and never sends a bill. He swears there isn't enough knowledge in his profession to make it worth anybody's money."

"And where does he live?"

"In that little old house with the office in the yard on Franklin Street. The General says you're to go to him this evening at eight o'clock."

The sound of my beating heart was so loud in my ears that I hurriedly b.u.t.toned my jacket across it. Then as if I were to be examined on Johnson's Dictionary, my lips began to move silently while I spelled over the biggest words. If I could only confine my future conversations to the use of the _a_'s and _b_'s, I felt that I might safely pa.s.s through life without desperate disaster in the matter of speech.

It was a mild October evening, with a smoky blue haze, through which a single star shone over the clipped box in Dr. Theophilus Pry's garden, when I opened the iron gate and went softly along the pebbled walk to the square little office standing detached from the house. A black servant, carrying a plate of waffles from the outside kitchen, informed me in a querulous voice that the doctor was still at supper, but I might go in and wait; and accepting the suggestion with more amiability than accompanied it, I entered the small, cheerful room, where a lamp, with a lowered wick, burned under a green shade. Around the walls there were many ancient volumes in bindings of stout English calf, and on the mantelpiece, above which hung one of the original engravings of Latane's "Burial," two enormous gla.s.s jars, marked "Calomel" and "Quinine,"

presided over the apartment with an air of medicinal solemnity. They were the only visible and positive evidence of the doctor's calling in life, and when I knew him better in after years, I discovered that they were the only drugs he admitted to a place in the profession of healing.

To the day of his death, he administered these alternatives with a high finality and an imposing presence. It was told of him that he considered but one symptom, and this he discovered with his hand on the patient's pulse and his eyes on a big loud-ticking watch in a hunting case. If the pulse was quick, he prescribed quinine, if sluggish, he ordered calomel.

To dally with minor ailments was as much beneath him as to temporise with modern medicine. In his last years he was still suspicious of vaccination, and entertained a profound contempt for the knife. Beyond his faith in calomel and quinine, there were but two articles in his creed; he believed first in cleanliness, secondly in G.o.d. "Madam," he is reported to have remarked irreverently to a mother whom he found praying for her child's recovery in the midst of a dirty house, "when G.o.d doesn't respond to prayer, He sometimes answers a broom and a bucket of soapsuds." Honest, affable, adored, he presented the singular spectacle of a physician who scorned medicine, and yet who, it was said, had fewer deaths and more recoveries to his credit than any other pract.i.tioner of his generation. This belief arose probably in the legendary glamour which resulted from his boundless, though mysterious, charities; for despite the fact that he had until his death a large and devoted following, he lived all his life in a condition of genteel poverty. His single weakness was, I believe, an utter inability to appreciate the exchange value of dollars and cents; and this failing grew upon him so rapidly in his declining years that Mrs. Clay, his widowed sister, who kept his house, was at last obliged to "put up pickles" for the market in order to keep a roof over her brother's distinguished head.

I was sitting in one of the worn leather chairs under the green lamp, when the door opened and shut quickly, and Dr. Theophilus Pry came in and held out his hand.

"So you're the lad George was telling me about," he began at once, with a charming, straightforward courtesy. "I hope I haven't kept you waiting many minutes, sir."

He was spare and tall, with stooping shoulders, a hooked nose, bearing a few red veins, and a smile that lit up his face like the flash of a lantern. Everything about his clothes that could be coloured was of a bright, strong red; his cravat, his big silk handkerchief, and the polka dots in his black stockings. "Yes, I like any colour as long as it's red," he was fond of saying with his genial chuckle.

Bending over the green baize cloth on the table, he pushed away a pile of examination papers, and raised the wick of the lamp.

"So you've started out to learn Dr. Johnson's Dictionary by heart," he observed. "Now by a fair calculation how long do you suppose it will take you?"

I replied with diffidence that it appeared to me now as if it would very likely take me till the Day of Judgment.

"Well, 'tis as good an occupation as most, and a long ways better than some," commented the doctor. "You've come to me, haven't you, because you think you'd like to learn a little Latin?"

"I'd like to learn anything, sir, that will help me to get on."

"What's the business?"

"Tobacco."

"I don't know that Latin will help you much there, unless it aids you to name a blend."

"It--it isn't only that, sir, I--I want an education--not just a common one."

A smile broke suddenly like a beam of light on his face, and I understood all at once why his calomel and his quinine so often cured.

At that moment I should have swallowed tar water on faith if he had prescribed it.

"I don't know much about you, my lad," he remarked with a grave, old-fas.h.i.+oned courtesy, which lifted me several feet above the spot of carpet on which I stood, "but a gentleman who starts out to learn old Samuel Johnson's Dictionary by heart, is a gentleman I'll give my hand to."

With my pulses throbbing hard, I watched him take down a dog-eared Latin Grammar, and begin turning the pages; and when, after a minute, he put a few simple questions to me, I answered as well as I could for the lump in my throat. "It's the fas.h.i.+on now to neglect the cla.s.sics," he said sadly, "and a man had the impertinence to tell me yesterday that the only use for a dead language was to write prescriptions for sick people in it. But I maintain, and I will repeat it, that you never find a gentleman of cultured and elevated tastes who has not at least a bowing acquaintance with the Latin language. The common man may deride--"

I looked up quickly. "If you please, sir, I'd like to learn it," I broke in with determination.

He glanced at me kindly, secretly flattered, I suspect, by my spontaneous tribute to his eloquence, and the leaves of the Latin Grammar had fluttered open, when the door swung wide with a cheerful bang, and a boy of about my own age, though considerably under my height and size, entered the room.

"I didn't get in from the ball game till an hour ago, doctor," he exclaimed. "Uncle George says please don't slam me if I am late."

Some surface resemblance to my hero of the railroad made me aware, even before Dr. Pry introduced us, that the newcomer was the "young George"

of whom I had heard. He was a fresh, high-coloured boy, whose features showed even now a slight forecast of General Bolingbroke's awful redness. Before I looked: at him I got a vague impression that he was handsome; after I looked at him I began to wonder curiously why he was not? His hair was of a bright chestnut colour, very curly, and clipped unusually close, in order to hide the natural wave of which, I discovered later, he was ashamed. He had pleasant brown eyes, and a merry smile, which lent a singular charm to his face when it hovered about his mouth.

"I say, doctor, I wish you'd let me off to-night. I'll do double to-morrow," he begged, and then turned to me with his pleasant, intimate manner: "Don't you hate Latin? I do. Before Dr. Theophilus began coaching me I went to a woman, and that was worse--she made it so silly.

I hate women, don't you?"

"Young George," observed Dr. Theophilus, with sternness, "for every disrespectful allusion to the ladies, I shall give you an extra page of grammar."

"I'm no worse than uncle, doctor. Uncle says--"