V
One of the charms of old Eph’s nightly performances at his chosen spot near the subway kiosk was that he never asked for money. The mercenary side of his activities was never prominent. It was his custom to remain, sitting cross-legged upon the paving, from beginning to end. He never rose to pass his hat or his palm solicitously among the listeners; and he never went so far as to set a tin cup or a similar receptacle invitingly beside him. If coins were tossed his way, he caught them with skinny fingers or inverted banjo; if none were tossed, no matter. Eph never complained.
But about the time Jim Forrest enlisted, it was remarked that old Eph began to grow greedy. At first he interspersed among his songs little half-caught remarks about the exceeding hard times; the high cost of living, even for a dry old darky; and the necessity of eating which possesses every man. A little later, he introduced the custom of passing his battered old hat out through the crowd. He never carried it from man to man himself; he simply tossed it to the nearest, and then broke into a gay and chuckling melody to hide his own confusion while it went from hand to hand and came back to him. Eventually, he fell into the habit of leaving his hat, bottom side up, upon the paving between his feet; and he referred now and then, in his songs, to the necessity for putting coins into it.
Some people who had known Eph for a good many years thought he was becoming miserly. They told stories, from man to man, about beggars of whom they had heard who owned half a dozen apartment houses out in Dorchester. And they quit coming to hear Eph sing. Others deplored the old man’s avarice, but gave. Still others decided that the high cost of living must have hit Eph hard, and offered to help him.
All in all, his earnings did increase. His old, unbusiness-like arrangement had in the past sufficed. There was always a little money; there was sometimes a considerable sum. He might go home with one dollar, or two, or even five; or he might trudge up the hill with only a few pennies to show for his night’s singing. On the whole, however, there had always been enough. He lived in some measure of comfort; and he laid up something for a rainy day. This hoard had been long years accumulating....
Eph told no one his troubles; no one had known of his little wealth; no one knew that it was gone. Eph was bankrupt; and not only that, but he had mortgaged his earnings. He had pledged his future. He had given hostages to fortune. He had promised to find and send to Jim Forrest’s mother the sum of ten dollars every week.
And in spite of the fact that in the past he had never averaged earning ten dollars a week, he proposed to keep his word.
He believed, in the beginning, that this would not be hard. He would have to demean himself, to ask for money, to invite gifts.... The thought irked him; yet he was ready to do it. And to help out, he himself prepared to make sacrifices. Down in his boarding house, he gave up his comfortable little two dollar room and took another, in the very top of the house, which cost him half a dollar less. Likewise he cut down on his food. He gave up altogether the sliced, roast ham that had always been his delight; the occasional eggs; the bananas. He ate meagerly, and scouted the scolding insistences of his old colored landlady when she tried to force food upon him.
“I ain’ no beggar, Mis’ Hopkins,” he told her, over and over. “When old Eph cain’ pay his way, he gwine git out o’ here to som’eres where he can.”
In the beginning, matters went well enough. The people who stopped to listen to his singing opened their purses at his unwilling hints to them. He was able to take the promised ten dollars to the lawyer every week, and to live on what remained. And when he heard Jim Forrest was in the army, the old darky sang in a fashion that he had not equalled for a dozen years, and the next day he boasted to his landlady of the matter.
“Ol’ Eph ain’ here, at all, Mis’ Hopkins,” he told her gleefully. “Y’all jes’ thinks he is. He ain’ here, I’m tellin’ you.”
She shooed him, with fat hands. “Go ’long, Eph, you ol’ scamp,” she scolded.
“I’m tellin’ you,” he repeated. “Eph ain’ here. Ol’ Eph’s in de army, now. Ain’ old Eph no more; he’s a fine, stroppin’ boy big enough to cut de Dutch. A fixin’ tuh fight, Mis’ Hopkins. A fixin’ tuh fight!”
“Whut you tryin’ let out, anyhows?” she demanded. “You sayin’ somethin; or is you jes’ talkin’ th’ough yore hat?”
“I’m tellin’ you,” he chanted. “Eph’s in de army, now.”
But he did not lay bare his secret to her, even then. Eph knew white folks. He knew that Jim Forrest wouldn’t want it noised abroad that a nigger street singer was supporting his mother. And he kept his tongue in his head; but he exulted. He carried his old head high; and when he met on the street one day that Sergeant Hare who had refused him enlistment, Eph went into a fit of merriment that made the Sergeant think the old darky had gone witless.
“Dat man ’lowed he ’uz gwine keep me out o’ dis here war,” he boasted to Mis’ Hopkins next day. “But I showed him. Old Eph showed whut ’uz whut.”
“Yo’re crazy,” Mis’ Hopkins told him scornfully. “Git out o’ my way.”
Eph told his lawyer, the next week, to ask Jim’s mother to give them word of Jim; and when she wrote, two weeks later, that the boy had been admitted to an officer’s training camp, Eph danced on his bowed legs, and told Mis’ Hopkins loftily that she would have to step lively now.
“Howcome?” she demanded.
“’Caze I’m an orf’cer now,” Eph told her proudly.
“Yo’re bughouse,” she assured him. “De booby man’ll git you.”
Eph thought nothing of her word at that time; but two or three weeks later, it was repeated in a way that frightened him.
He had fallen into the habit of acting a little comedy of his own; a habit infinitely soothing to his soul. When he climbed the Hill every night, on his way home, he passed the Shaw Memorial, and he had always stopped to look at it. Now he fell into the habit of marching stiffly down the middle of the road to face the Memorial, and of coming to a halt there, standing at attention, and saluting after the ancient fashion of his Rebellion days. He used to fancy that the eyes in the sculptured faces of the marching soldiers turned sidewise to look at him; he used to imagine that the arm of the officer graven in the stone flicked upward in an answering gesture. And there were nights when he stood thus for a minute or two, speaking his thoughts aloud....
Walter Ragan came upon him so, one bleak dawn in mid-November. Old Eph, very stiff and straight, was saying respectfully:
“Yas suh, Cunnel; I’se a soldier now. Ol’ Eph. Yas suh; gwine tuh be an orf’cer, too.”
Ragan called to him: “You, Eph, what are you doing out there?”
Eph saw the patrolman, and cackled. “Howdy, Miste’ Ragan,” he called.
“What are you up to, you old rascal?”
“Jes’ makin’ my reports to de Cunnel,” said Eph gleefully. “Makin’ my reports on a little matter.”
“Look out, Eph,” Ragan warned him. “You’ll go bugs, next thing I know, and I’ll have to ship you out to Waverly.”
Now when Mis’ Hopkins had warned Eph that he was showing symptoms of insanity, Eph had laughed; but Ragan’s warning was another matter. Ragan, for all he was Eph’s good friend, was a policeman, an arm of the law; and Eph had the negro’s deep-rooted and abiding awe of the blue uniform and the helmet. Ragan’s word hushed him instantly; and it chilled him with a sudden, cold fear....
That accumulated hoard of the years had been Eph’s safeguard against old age. He had expected it would one day make him comfortable while he smoked, and sang, and waited his time to die; he had known it would always keep him out of the institutions he dreaded. But now it was gone; and when he thought of this fact, Eph felt stripped and defenseless and afraid. So now he was afraid; he hushed his mirth and touched his cap to Ragan.
“Yas suh,” he said respectfully.
“Get along home to bed,” Ragan advised him.
“I’m gone,” said Eph; and he went.
Ragan, considering the matter afterward, wondered if old Eph’s mind might not indeed be weakening. He decided to keep an eye on the darky.
He thought, during the next month, that Eph was aging. The old negro was growing thin; and Ragan guessed this might be the sudden wastage of age. But he was wrong. It was something distinctly more tangible. It was a matter of money, and of food.
Times were tightening purse-strings. There were a thousand calls for money besetting every man; and each had the high urge of country behind it. People who had never considered dollars before began to count pennies. A quarter thrown to Eph would buy a thrift stamp.... And men, thinking this, returned the quarter to their pockets and turned away. Old Eph, after all, was only a beggar. No doubt he wasted his money on rum; or if not that, he must own at least one “three-decker” that brought him in fat rents. The legend of the wealth of beggars harassed Eph and was like to ruin him. He did his best; he labored manfully; he descended to covert pleadings....
One week in mid-December, he had only nine dollars and thirty cents on the appointed day. He borrowed the remaining seventy cents from the lawyer, and repaid the loan next day, in spite of that gentleman’s insistence.
“Naw suh,” Eph told him proudly. “Dis heah’s my arrangement, suh. I’ll manage. Lemme alone.”
The next week he brought ten dollars; and the next. But for two days of that second week he ate nothing. He admitted this, in the bleak dawn, when he stopped for a whispered colloquy with the stone figure of his old Colonel, at the Memorial.
“But dat ain’ no matter, suh,” he assured the inscrutable officer. “Dis ol’ coon don’ need tuh eat. Nothin’ but skin an’ bone, anyhow. Lawdy, suh, whut good is vittles tuh me?”
Cold had struck down on Boston in December; and it held and intensified as January came. Sometimes people, listening to Eph’s singing, thought the old man must be shivering where he sat upon the stones; and Ragan drove him away two or three nights and bade him warm himself. But each time Eph looked at him with such pitiful entreaty against this kindness that Ragan gave up. “Have it your own way, you old idiot,” he told Eph. “If you want to freeze, go ahead and freeze. But don’t look at a man like he’s kicked you....”
“Yas suh,” said Eph. “Thank’e kindly, suh.”
Neither Ragan, nor Eph’s friend, the lawyer, realized how serious the matter was. They found Eph stubbornly determined to hold his own course; they decided he would not otherwise be content; and Eph was but one figure in their crowded lives. They let him have his way.
Eph duly met his obligations in the first week of that cold January; he was at his post through the second week. On the appointed day, he went to make the payment....
The lawyer had good news for him. Jim Forrest’s mother wrote that Jim had won a commission in the training camp; he had won, by exceptional merit, a commission as Captain.
“You understand, Eph,” the attorney explained, “this means he’ll have a good salary, about two hundred dollars a month. So his mother can get along all right, now....”
Eph’s feet were shuffling on the floor in something that sounded very like a soft but jubilant hornpipe; he disregarded utterly the attorney’s word. “My man’s a captain, suh,” he chanted. “An’ I put him in where he c’ud be it. Same as if I ’uz a captain in de army, now....”
“By Jove, Eph, you’re right,” the lawyer agreed. “I ... I’d like to....”
There were tears in his eyes when he had shaken Eph’s hand and seen him go; but there were no tears in old Eph. He was riotously happy, madly happy, tenderly happy.... He went out, and down the street, and in the early dusk spread a newspaper on the cold stones of the pavement by the kiosk there, and sat him down, and lifted up his voice in song....
People said afterward that Eph had never sung so tunefully as that last evening. His voice had an unusual purity and sweetness; it was as tender as a woman’s. There was an exaltation about the old man, so that the discerning eye seemed to see a glory hanging over him. He sang and sang....
That was a bitter cold night, and the streets cleared early. Ragan came along about one o’clock and found Eph still singing, with no one near to hear. He bade Eph stop and go home; but Eph protested:
“Please suh, Miste’ Ragan; dis is my night tuh sing, suh.”
Ragan, shivering in his warm garments, said harshly: “This’ll be your night to freeze to death. Get up and go home, before I run you in.”
Eph got up. There was nothing else to do when a policeman commanded. And Ragan watched him cross the street, and called: “Good night.”
Eph looked back and nodded. “Good night, suh,” he echoed. “I’m gwine right along.”
He started up Park street; and Ragan went on his way, trying the shop doors, huddling in the doorways to avoid the wind, blowing on his aching hands.
“By God, I don’t see how the old fool stands it,” he said to himself. “It’s a wonder he’s not stiff....”