Читать книгу Vagabond Adventures - Ralph Keeler - Страница 6

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ESCAPING from the house at night, I did not have time or presence of mind to take anything with me but what I carried on my back.

One of my school-fellows, who had been forewarned of my design, met me by appointment on the neighboring corner, and smuggled me into his father’s stable. Here, it had been agreed, I was to lodge on the hay.

My friend was a doughty, reassuring sort of hero, who was a great comfort to me at that nervous moment when I entered the darkness of the hay-mow. I would not for the world have betrayed any fraction of the fear which his swaggering manner may have failed to dispel. He would assuredly have laughed at me; and I believe now, moreover, he would have taken that, or any shadow of an excuse, for joining me in my flight.

So strong, indeed, was the romantic instinct upon that young gentleman that he lingered long about the spot where I had crawled into the hay and covered up my head, before he could prevail upon himself to go back to the house and to his regular bed. He had assured me before we came into the stable, out of the pleasant moonlight of that late spring evening, that he envied me very much, as I was going to have lots of fun; he only wished he had a good reason to run away from home too; but then, he added thoughtfully, as he looked up at the lights in the window of the family sitting-room, his mother was so “derned kind,” and his father so “blamed good,” that he didn’t see how he could leave them just now.

The next morning my friend found me sleeping very comfortably, with my head and one arm protruding limply out of the hay. Awaking me, he proceeded to draw from his trousers pocket several pieces of bread-and-butter for my breakfast; which was none the less toothsome from its somewhat dishevelled state, consequent upon the manner of its previous stowage.

While munching that surreptitious meal, my thoughts very naturally wandered to the breakfast-table, where I should that morning probably be missed for the first time by the people from whom I had fled; and I amused myself, as well as my romantic caterer, with what we both of us, no doubt, considered a highly humorous account of the grievous commotion which would ensue at that ordinarily so solemn victualling.

Emboldened by the lively appreciation of my school-fellow, and by the reviving influence of the bread-and-butter, I grew imaginative and grotesque in my daring pleasantry. I went so far as to describe the scene at that breakfast-table when Bridget came to the dining-room door with wild eyes, and the announcement that my room had not been occupied on the night before; how the pater-familias, at that dramatic moment, had dropped a surprised spoon into the splattering gravy of the stewed meat; and how his wife opposite, then in the act of pouring chiccory, had—whether in dismay at the overwhelming news or at the sudden soiling of her tablecloth—upset the coffee-pot.

These and many more very brilliant and mirth-provoking feats of boyish humor—very brilliant and mirth-provoking, of course, I mean, to my friend and myself—did I perform that morning in the hay-mow; all bearing upon the assumed utter discomfiture of the bereaved people about that breakfast-table. But, alas! even a precocious autobiographer, with his mouth full of bread-and-butter, may make the mistake, so common to the adult of his species, of over-estimating his own importance. I have since learned that there was no sensation of any consequence at the breakfast-table in question, and that my subsequent permanent loss was taken with remarkable equanimity and resignation.

It was an expressive, nay, eloquent, look of envy and admiration that my friend gave me, when it came time for him to leave me to my own devices for the forenoon, while he went reluctantly to school. Even to this moment I cannot say that I covet the amount of knowledge he carried away from his books that day, or, indeed, the succeeding three days.

I sallied stealthily forth to amuse myself in the by-streets till he came back at noon to bring my dinner; which consisted of a repetition of the breakfast, with the added dessert of an apple. This latter he carried carefully in his hand, but the bread-and-butter he invariably bore stowed away in his trousers pocket; I say invariably, for I lived two or three days thus on his secret bounty.

About dusk of the second evening he came to me with—in addition to the bread-and-butter for my supper—the startling news, that he was going to take me to the theatre. I do not remember how we got in—it was not, certainly, by paying our way. I incline to the opinion that my friend had some secret understanding with the door-tender. I know merely that, by some means, we achieved our entrance to the pit of the old Eagle Street Theatre.

I have heard good citizens of Buffalo complain that, since Lola Montez burned down that seat of the histrionic Muse, the drama has languished in their city. Of course I am not competent to decide in such matters; but, that being the first playhouse of any kind I ever entered, I am glad to be able to say that I have never since seen anything in the theatrical line so absorbingly thrilling, or so gorgeously magnificent, as the old Eagle Street Theatre was to me that night. The name and plot of the play I have forgotten; but the dark frown of that smooth villain in the third act—where his villany first began to show itself to my unpractised comprehension—will never fade from my remembrance.

I do not know how it was, but up to that time I recollect I was under the juvenile impression that virtue and correct grammar always went together. I can therefore convey no idea of the shock with which I learned so late in the play, that the splendidly dressed man who could talk such eloquent, persuasive language, and withal in such scrupulous conformity to that most difficult of rules which keeps the verb under the regimental discipline of its subject-nominative—that the man whose plaintive periods sometimes rose to the iambic majesty of blank verse, and who never got a case or tense wrong, howsoever wild, ecstatic, or dithyrambic his utterances of devotion to that innocent, long-suffering angel, the walking-lady—that this man, I say, should nevertheless turn out to be a monster, whom, to borrow a little from his style of phraseology, it were mild flattery to call the greatest and vilest of rogues.

My memory of the whole evening is swallowed up in the overwhelming shock of that sad surprise. The grammatical Arcadia of my boyish belief was laid waste as with an earthquake.

The next morning, after I had eaten my usual bread-and-butter with more than usual appetite, I received a few choice friends at my lodgings in the hay-mow, and we had a consultation.

It was suggested that I was too near my former haunts to be safe. Indeed, rumors of an actual search for me had reached the ears of one boy, of whom, oddly enough, I can recall nothing more now than that those ears of his were remarkably large ones, and stood out prominently from each side of his head; that the best and most picturesque view of those ears was, in my opinion, to be had from my desk just behind him at school; and that I was especially attracted and edified by my observations upon them immediately after he had had his hair clipped short.

Those are grotesque pranks, by the way, which the memory sometimes plays us when we attempt to grope back too far. Another one of those daring spirits, for instance, who was loudest, and therefore, I fear, most influential, with his counsels that morning in the hay-mow has faded, as to body, name, and station, wholly from my mind, and exists to me now literally as a cherub with a mammoth straw hat for wings. From anything that I can positively remember, I would not be prepared to take my oath that he ever had any arms, legs, or trunk at all. I can recall only his big, round, staring eyes, which stood out at the tops of his puffy cheeks like a couple of glass knobs, and his red hair, whose decisive, precipitate ending all around his head left a queer impression that rats, or some larger and more ferocious animal, had been his barber. I forget now whether it was in sport or earnest that I used to say to myself, that boy’s hair had been “chawed off.”

It must have been that his facial aspect, heightened, of course, by his winged straw hat, aided him materially in the expression of his fears with regard to my safety; for this cherubic Agamemnon carried every point in that council of war; and it was unanimously resolved that I should change my quarters.

Accordingly, the next night, I was entertained in the stable of another of my school-fellows, residing at the remotest corner of the district. Now I do not want to be considered fastidious or luxurious in my tastes; but I must own to a very loud complaint, entered the morning afterward, against the comparative discomforts of this new lodging. There was very little hay in the stable to which I had been transferred; and the boards, moreover, were very hard indeed. It may have been an improper spirit in which I made the remark; but I went back again to the first school-fellow who has figured in this narrative, and told him if a boy hadn’t a respectable barn to invite a friend to, he needn’t think I was going to be his guest—that’s all!

After watching, for a moment, the impression of my words upon my friend, I said furthermore, that I was going to strike out for myself, as I was growing tired of the monotony of hay-mows and bread-and-butter, anyways. I wanted a change.

Then came one of the most impressive moments that I shall have to chronicle in these memoirs; for, as soon as I had finished speaking, my friend slapped me vigorously on the back, making at the same time, with excited shrillness, this observation, “Hey!”—which, being a common juvenile exclamation, had, of course, no jocose allusion to the principal subject of my discourse.

“Hey! bully for you!” continued my enthusiastic friend and school-fellow, as soon as he could get his breath, which the suddenness of his lucky thought had evidently taken away. “Hey! that’s just what I’d do. I’d go out into the world, and seek my fortune, like the boys in the story-books; and,” said he, suddenly changing his tone and manner to those of the most excessive gravity and deliberation—“and, that you needn’t be without means to help you along, take these!”

Whereupon he drew forth from his capacious trousers pocket, and placed in my hand, five large copper cents, which at first had the appearance of so many oysters fried in batter, so girt about and covered were they with fragments of bread-and-butter, deposited, I suppose, in the course of my friend’s entire catering.

It was, indeed, as he assured me, his whole cash capital; but he would not hear to my scruples at taking it. More earnest or impressive about it, or, under the circumstances, more self-denying and truly generous, he could not have been if he had been giving the world away.

So, that morning, we parted—he wending his way, by no means con amore, to school; and I, with a queer, uncertain feeling in the region of my small waistcoat, going forth, my five coppers in my pocket, to seek my fortune.