I
Tommy Hawkins was not so sober that you could tell it on him. Certainly his friend Jack Dobson, calling on him one dreary winter evening—an evening of that winter before John Barleycorn cried maudlin tears into his glass and kissed America good-by—would never have guessed it from Tommy's occupation. Presenting himself at Tommy's door and finding it unlocked, Jack had gone on in. A languid splashing guided him to the bathroom. In the tub sat Tommy with the water up to his shoulders, blowing soap bubbles.
“You darned old fool!” said Jack. “Aren't you ever going to grow up, Tommy?”
“Nope,” said Tommy placidly. “What for?” Sitting on a chair close by the bathtub was a shallow silver dish with a cake of soap and some reddish-colored suds in it. Tommy had bought the dish to give some one for a wedding present, and then had forgotten to send it.
“What makes the suds red?” asked Jack.
“I poured a lot of that nose-and-throat spray stuff into it,” explained Tommy. “It makes them prettier. Look!”
As a pipe he was using a piece of hollow brass curtain rod six or eight inches long and of about the diameter of a fat lead pencil. He soused this thing in the reddish suds and manufactured a bubble with elaborate care. With a graceful gesture of his wet arm he gently waved the rod until the bubble detached itself. It floated in the air for a moment, and the thin, reddish integument caught the light from the electric globe and gave forth a brief answering flash as of fire. Then the bubble suddenly and whimsically dashed itself against the wall and was no more, leaving a faint, damp, reddish trace upon the white plaster.
“Air current caught it,” elucidated Tommy with the air of a circus proprietor showing off pet elephants. In his most facetious moments Tommy was wont to hide his childish soul beneath an exterior of serious dignity. “This old dump is full of air currents. They come in round the windows, come in round the doors, come right in through the walls. Damned annoying, too, for a scientist making experiments with bubbles—starts a bubble and never knows which way it's going to jump. I'm gonna complain to the management of this hotel.”
“You're going to come out of that bathtub and get into your duds,” said Jack. “That water's getting cool now, and between cold water and air currents you'll have pneumonia the first thing you know—you poor silly fish, you.”
“Speaking of fish,” said Tommy elliptically, “there's a bottle of cocktails on the mantel in the room there. Forgot it for a moment. Don't want to be inhospitable, but don't drink all of it.”
“It's all gone,” said Dobson a moment later.
“So?” said Tommy in surprise. “That's the way with cocktails. Here one minute and gone the next—like bubbles. Bubbles! Life's like that, Jack!” He made another bubble with great solemnity, watched it float and dart and burst. “Pouf!” he said. “Bubbles! Bubbles! Life's like that!”
“You're an original philosopher, you are,” said Jack, seizing him by the shoulders. “You're about as original as a valentine. Douse yourself with cold water and rub yourself down and dress. Come out of it, kid, or you'll be sick.”
“If I get sick,” said Tommy, obeying, nevertheless, “I won't have to go to work to-morrow.”
“Why aren't you working to-day?” asked his friend, working on him with a coarse towel.
“Day off,” said Tommy.
“Day off!” rejoined Dobson. “Since when has the Morning Despatch been giving two days off a week to its reporters? You had your day off Tuesday, and this is Thursday.”
“Is it?” said Tommy. “I always get Tuesday and Thursday mixed. Both begin with a T. Hey, Jack, how's that? Both begin with a T! End with a tea party! Good line, hey, Jack? Tuesday and Thursday both begin with a T and end with a tea party. I'm gonna write a play round that, Jack. Broadway success! Letters a foot high! Royalties for both of us! I won't forget you, Jack! You suggested the idea for the plot, Jack. Drag you out in front of the curtain with me when I make my speech. 'Author! Author!' yells the crowd. 'Ladies and gentlemen,' says I, 'here is the obscure and humble person who set in motion the train of thought that led to my writing this masterpiece. Such as he is, I introduce him to you.'”
“Shut up!” said Jack, and continued to lacerate Tommy's hide with the rough towel. “Hold still! Now go and get into your clothes.” And as Tommy began to dress he regarded that person darkly. “You're a brilliant wag, you are! It's a shame the way the copy readers down on the Despatch keep your best things out of print, you splattering supermudhen of journalism, you! You'll wake up some morning without any more job than a kaiser.” And as Tommy threaded himself into the mystic maze of his garments Mr. Dobson continued to look at him and mutter disgustedly, “Bubbles!”
Not that he was afraid that Tommy would actually lose his job. If it had been possible for Tommy to lose his job that must have happened years before. But Tommy wrote a certain joyous type of story better than any other person in New York, and his facetiousness got him out of as many scrapes as it got him into. He was thirty years old. At ninety he would still be experimenting with the visible world in a spirit of random eagerness, joshing everything in it, including himself. He looked exactly like the young gentleman pictured in a widely disseminated collar advertisement. He enjoyed looking that way, and occasionally he enjoyed talking as if he were exactly that kind of person. He loved to turn his ironic levity against the character he seemed to be, much as the mad wags who grace the column of F. P. A. delight in getting their sayings across accompanied by a gentle satirical fillip at all mad waggery.
“Speaking of bubbles,” he suddenly chuckled as he carefully adjusted his tie in the collar that looked exactly like the one in the advertisement, “there's an old party in the next room that takes 'em more seriously than you do, Jack.”
The old downtown hotel in which Tommy lived had once been a known and noted hostelry, and persons from Plumville, Pennsylvania, Griffin, Georgia, and Galva, Illinois, still stopped there when in New York, because their fathers and mothers had stopped there on their wedding journeys perhaps. It was not such a very long way from the Eden Musee, when there was an Eden Musee. Tommy's room had once formed part of a suite. The bathroom which adjoined it had belonged jointly to another room in the suite. But now these two rooms were always let separately. Still, however, the bathroom was a joint affair. When Tommy wished to bathe he must first insure privacy by hooking on the inside the door that led into the bathroom from the chamber beyond.
“Old party in the next room?” questioned Jack.
“Uh-huh,” said Tommy, who had benefited by his cold sluicing and his rubdown. “I gave him a few bubbles for his very own—through the keyhole into his room, you know. Poked that brass rod through and blew the bubble in his room. Detached it with a little jerk and let it float. Seemed more sociable, you know, to let him in on the fun. Never be stingy with your pleasures, Jack. Shows a mean spirit—a mean soul. Why not cheer the old party up with soap bubbles? Cost little, bubbles do. More than likely he's a stranger in New York. Unfriendly city, he thinks. Big city. Nobody thinks of him. Nobody cares for him. Away from home. Winter day. Melancholy. Well, I say, give him a bubble now and then. Shows some one is thinking of him. Shows the world isn't so thoughtless and gloomy after all. Neighborly sort of thing to do, Jack. Makes him think of his youth—home—mother's knee—all that kind of thing, Jack. Cheers him up. Sat in the tub there and got to thinking of him. Almost cried, Jack, when I thought how lonely the old man must be—got one of these old man's voices. Whiskers. Whiskers deduced from the voice. So I climbed out of the tub every ten or fifteen minutes all afternoon and gave the old man a bubble. Rain outside—fog, sleet. Dark indoors. Old man sits and thinks nobody loves him. Along comes a bubble. Old man gets happy. Laughs. Remembers his infancy. Skies clear. You think I'm a selfish person, Jack? I'm not. I'm a Samaritan. Where will we eat?”
“You are a darned fool,” said Jack. “You say he took them seriously? What do you mean? Did he like 'em?”
“Couldn't quite make out,” said Tommy. “But they moved him. Gasped every now and then. Think he prayed. Emotion, Jack. Probably made him think of boyhood's happy days down on the farm. Heard him talking to himself. Think he cried. Went to bed anyhow with his clothes on and pulled the covers over his head. Looked through the keyhole and saw that. Gray whiskers sticking up, and that's all. Deduced the whiskers from the voice, Jack. Let's give the old party a couple more bubbles and then go eat. It's been an hour since he's had one. Thinks I'm forgetting him, no doubt.”
So they gave the old man a couple of bubbles, poking the brass rod through the keyhole of the door.
The result was startling and unexpected. First there came a gasp from the other room, a sort of whistling release of the breath, and an instant later a high, whining, nasal voice.
“Oh, God! God! Again! You meant it, then, God! You meant it!”
The two young men started back and looked at each other in wonderment. There was such a quivering agony, such an utter groveling terror in this voice from the room beyond that they were daunted.
“What's eating him?” asked Dobson, instinctively dropping his tones to a whisper.
“I don't know,” said Tommy, temporarily subdued. “Sounds like that last one shell-shocked him when it exploded, doesn't it?”
But Tommy was subdued only for a moment.
As they went out into the corridor he giggled and remarked, “Told you he took 'em seriously, Jack.”