The juggler

by Charles Egbert Craddock

“I ain’t talkin’ ’bout him. I mean the stiff. What was the stiff’s name?”

“Oh, Royce. Lucien Royce,—that’s the stiff’s name. Lucien Leonard Royce.”

And thus it was that the juggler realized that he was dead.

He made haste to leave the trading-boat as soon as he could stand, however unsteadily, on his feet. And the boatmen were not ill pleased to see him go. The humane search for all survivors of the wreck and the rescue of the bodies had been in progress for some days, but with a vague terror of implication in crime which must indeed be appalling to the poor, who believe that justice is meted out according to the price the victim can pay for it, the flatboatmen were drifting night and day further and further away from the dreaded locality. When they had chanced to meet the skiffs sent out by the search-parties for victims of the disaster, they had said naught of the man whom they had rescued, who lay between life and death in the bunk. They had even relinquished the opportunity of “scrapping” about the waters for floating articles, of scant value in themselves, hardly worth the gathering of them together by the owners, but precious indeed to those of so restricted opportunities,—tins of edibles, cutlery, bedding, cooking utensils, bits of furniture, table-ware, garments, and the like. Once a stranger had boarded the craft, but he came no further than the door of the store, where he was furnished with a flask of whiskey needed for a half-drowned man lying hard by on a sand-bar. So when their guest was at last on his feet again they bade him farewell with a right good will, and the trifle of change that was in the pocket of poor John Grayson’s knickerbockers was a superfluity to their satisfaction.

They set Royce ashore one night at a point which they stated was half a mile from the railroad; it seemed a league or more through the dense oak forests, clear of undergrowth, level as a park, before he sighted a red lantern and an empty box car on a siding near a great tank. There was apparently not another soul in the world, so unutterably lonely was the spot. He clambered into the car, knowing that he could not well play the rôle of tramp on any discerning train-man while wearing Grayson’s expensive russet shoes, albeit somewhat the worse for water, and his natty knickerbockers and blazer. He would invent some story and beg a ride. He lay down behind a pile of bagging, and when he awoke he saw that the car was moving rapidly, that it was half full of freight, that an afternoon sun was streaming in dusty bars through the chinks in the door, that he must have traversed many a mile of the inland country from the scene of the disaster; so many miles that, the next morning, when the car was opened in the yard of the freight depot of a small town, the whole landscape was as strange to him as if he had entered a new world. Great purple mountains, wooded to their crests, encircled the horizon, itself seeming lifted to a great height, in contrast with the low-lying skies of the swamp country; and now and again, where the summit-lines were broken by gaps, further visions of enchanted heights in ethereal tints of blue and alluring sun-flooded slopes met his gaze. There was a river, too, narrow, smoothly flowing, but cliff-bound, crystal-clear in a rocky channel that curved between the mountains it reflected. The sunshine was so dazzling that he made scant shift to see the men, who, in moving the freight, discovered him. The first demonstration of the yardmaster was wrathful bluster because of the impudent device of the supposed tramp and his success in stealing a ride. But as Lucien Royce rose to his feet, and his costume that of a young gentleman of bucolic proclivities taking his ease and dispensing with ceremony, became visible, he was received with banter and laughter. He was presumed to be engaged in some kind of adolescent escapade,—stealing a ride for a wager, perhaps; and as, with his quick intelligence, he perceived this fact, he answered in the same vein. He leaped out of the car, made his way from the yard and up the main street of the town, and when, reaching its opposite extremity, he was out in the country, he walked as if for his life. All day long he trudged at the top of his speed. Pedestrianism had been one of his many fads, and he wished more than once for his pedometer, that he might have his score to boast of and break the record of the pedestrian club of which he was an active member; and then he would check himself suddenly, remembering that it was decreed that he should never see his old comrades again. He was dead! His safety imperatively required that he should remain dead.

Apparently he left the sunshine behind him; the wind flagged and fell back; only certain clouds maintained an equal pace, congregating about the summits of the mountains, showing tier on tier above them, so darkly purple that sometimes he could hardly tell which was shadowy earth and which over-shadowing sky. Always, as he clambered over the flank of some great ridge and looked upon the deep dells of the valley, these clouds were already crossing it, and rising, peak on peak and towering height over height, above the crest of the mountains still beyond. In one of these sequestered nooks among the vast ranges, when the swift lightnings were unleashed and the thunder reverberated from dome to dome and the weighty rain fell in tumultuous torrents, he dragged his stumbling feet to a lighted window dimly flickering in the gloom, and found the latch-string of Tubal Cain Sims’s door on the outside, as the hospitable mistress of the cabin said it always should be, when she welcomed the wayfarer.

And thus it came to pass that within a fortnight after the disaster the juggler sat listening to the miller’s daughter as she read the account of the terrible death of young Lucien Royce. He could have given the journalist many points on the details of the accident. But his mind ceased its retrospection, and he hearkened with keen interest, for one so very dead, to the narrative of the supplemental events occurring in the city of his home. As Euphemia droned drearily on, he gathered that the firm had made an assignment, the result of the loss of the funds of which Lucien Royce had been robbed, and their consequent inability to take up their paper. The amount was stated at thrice the reality, and his lips curved with a scornful wonder as to whether this was a commercial device to render the failure more seemly and respectable, or was merely due to the magnifying proclivities natural to the race of reporters. “It lets the house down easier,—that’s one good thing,” he reflected. And then he checked himself, marveling if other people who were dead could not immediately dissever their interests and affections from those subjects and associations that had once enthralled them. “It must take a long time to get thoroughly acclimated to another world,” he thought, realizing that the impulse of satisfaction which he had experienced because the “break” had its justification in the eyes of the commercial world was the loyal sentiment to the firm shared by every man on their pay-roll. “We could have weathered the flurry easily enough but for this,” he knew the various employees were all severally saying to their personal friends and such of the general public as came within their opportunity. It seems that cynicism is not a growth exclusively native to this sphere, for he presently found himself attributing to a wish to fix general attention on this subject of the loss of the money the firm’s elaborate attention to the details of the obsequies of their unfortunate employee. But they would not overdo it, he realized even before Euphemia, hobbling painfully among words whose existence had hitherto been undreamed-of by her, and whose structure would serve to render them obsolete forever in her vocabulary after this single usage, had reached the description of the funeral arrangements. He had feared she would flag, and would thus balk his palpitating curiosity; but the mournful pageantry of death has its fascination for certain temperaments, and it is fair to say she would not have read so long, nor would Tubal Sims and his wife have waking listened, had the theme been more cheerful.

No, the firm would not overdo it. They were men of good taste and acumen. The public received sundry reminders that Lucien Royce’s deceased father had been a member of the firm for many years, and much of the quondam prosperity had been due to his sagacity and sterling qualities. The young man’s inherited interest in the business was of course swamped with the rest. And all this made the presence of each of the partners and of all the employees, together with large and showy floral tributes at St. —— Church, the more appropriate and natural. As no simple interment could have done, however, it had also riveted attention on that especial feature, the loss of the money, which was in itself calculated to excite much sympathy and commiseration in the commercial heart, and to be of service in securing a composition with creditors and the possibility of continuance.

“They needn’t have been so mighty particular,” he said to himself a moment afterward, his eyes bright and shining, the color in his cheeks. “I could have gotten up a big enough blow-out all by myself.”

For that meed of popularity which many better men never achieve had been a gratuitous gift to Lucien Royce, who had never done aught to secure it or given it a thought in his life. His gay young friends were bereaved. All experiencing a sense of personal loss, all struck aghast with dismay and pity, those attended in a body who were of his many clubs and societies, and others singly if they happened to be merely friends outside the bonds of fraternities. The church was densely thronged; a wealth of flowers filled the chancel. The words of a popular hymn were sung by a member of the Echo Quartet, a singer of local renown, to an air composed by the late Lucien Royce,—so pathetic, with such sudden minor transitions, such dying falls (it had been a love-song, and he had written the words as well as the music), that the congregation were in tears as they listened.