“Foxmaster!” he called. “Foxmaster, you’re free! You’re free! I tell you, you’re free! Foxmaster, look at me! Foxmaster, do you hear me? You’re free, I tell you!”
But the Major did not hear him. The Major was flat on his back, with his arms outstretched and the fingers of both his hands gripped in the rags of a black crêpe veil; and at the corners of his mouth the little patches of spittle bubbles were drying up. The Major would never hear anything again in this world.
[159]
CHAPTER V
THE EYES OF THE WORLD
If there were a hundred men in a crowd and Chester K. Pilkins was there he would be the hundredth man. I like that introduction. If I wrote a book about him I doubt whether I could sum up Mr. Pilkins’ personality more completely than already I have done in this the first sentence of this the first paragraph of my tale. Nevertheless, I shall try.
Card-indexing him, so to speak, filling in the dotted lines after the fashion pursued by a candidate for admission to Who’s Whosoever Can, we attain this result: Name? Chester K(irkham) Pilkins; born? certainly; parentage? one father and one mother; lives? only in a way of speaking; married? extensively so; business? better than it was during the panic but not so good as it might be; recreations? reading, writing, arithmetic and the comic supplements; clubs? Prospect Slope Pressing, Montauk Chess, Checkers and Whist, King’s County [160] Civic Reform and Improvement; religion? twice on Sunday, rarely on week-days; politics? whatever is the rule; height? sub-average; weight? less than sub-average; hair? same as eyes; eyes? same as hair; complexion? variable, but inclining to be fair, and warmer in moments of embarrassment; special distinguishing characteristics? Oh, say, what’s the use?
This would apply to Chester K. Pilkins as once he was, not as now he is. For there has been a change. As will develop. But at the time when we begin our study of him Mr. Pilkins resided in a simple and unostentatious manner in Brooklyn, N. Y., on one of those streets which are named for semi-tropical flowering shrubs for the same reason that hunting dogs are named for Greek goddesses and race horses for United States senators and tramp steamers for estimable maiden ladies. In a small, neat house, almost entirely surrounded by rubber plants, he lived with his wife, Mrs. Gertrude Maud Pilkins. This phraseology is by deliberate intent. His wife did not live with him. He lived with her. To have referred
to this lady as his better half would be dealing in improper fractions. At the very lowest computation possible, she was his better eight-tenths.
By profession he was an expert bookkeeper, in the employ of a firm doing a large bond and stock brokerage business on the sinful or Manhattan shore of the East River. The tragedy [161] and the comedy, the sordid romance and the petty pathos of Wall Street rolled in an unheeded torrent over his head as he, submerged deep in the pages of his ledgers, sat all day long dotting his i’s and crossing his t’s, adding his columns and finding his totals. Sometimes of evenings he stayed on to do special accounting jobs for smaller concerns in need of his professional services.
Otherwise, when five o’clock came he took off his little green-baize apron, his green eyeshade and his black calico sleeve protectors, slipped on his detachable cuffs, his hat and his coat, took his umbrella in hand, and leaving New York and its wicked, wanton ways behind him, he joined with half a million other struggling human molecules in the evening bridge crush—that same bridge crush of which the metropolis is so justly ashamed and so properly proud—and was presently at home in Brooklyn, which is a peaceful country landscape, pastoral in all its instincts, but grown up quite thickly with brick and mortar. There he gave his evenings to the society of his wife, to the chess problems printed from time to time in the Eagle, and to reading his encyclopedia, which had been purchased on the instalment plan, at the rate of so much down, so much a week. It seemed probable that Mr. Pilkins would finish reading his encyclopedia before he finished paying for it, which is more than most of us can say, however literary our [162] aims and aspirations. He liked to pick up a volume for half an hour or so immediately prior to his retiring. He said it rested him. He had got as far as the middle of the very interesting one named Gib to Jibe. Once in a while, though, the Pilkinses went out in society. That is to say, Mrs. Pilkins went, and took Mr. Pilkins with her.