I would not have you believe from all this that Mr. Pilkins entertained no views of his own on current topics. His convictions upon certain heads were most definite and settled, and on favourable occasions openly he voiced them. Among other things he believed that if somebody would only start up an old-time minstrel show, such as we used to see when we were boys, it would make a fortune; that the newspapers printed a pack of lies every day because they had to have something to fill up their columns; that there was a great deal of grafting going on and something should be done about it right away; that the winters were changing, because of the Gulf Stream or something, so you couldn’t depend on the climate any more; that owing to the high cost of living it was practically impossible to get a good sixty-cent table-d’hôte dinner nowadays; and that Mrs. Pilkins was in many respects a very unusual woman.
She was all of that. Get Gertrude Maud. She looms before us, large and full of figure, majestic of bearing and fair of face, her general [163] aspect indeed a very general aspect. She was competent by inheritance and domineering by instinct. It was common talk in the circle in which Gertrude Maud moved, towing Chester behind her, that she had Bohemian leanings. True, she had never smoked a cigarette in all her blameless life, nor touched her lips to strong drink; nor yet had she patronised studio teas and attended the indoor anarchistic revels of the parlour-radicals established in the neighbourhood of Washington Square. Rather she betrayed her Bohemian trend by what she wore than by what she did.
She was addicted to festooning about her neck large polished beads of the more popular hard woods and upon her bosom plaquelike articles which apparently had originated with a skilled cabinetmaker and joiner. Her wrists and her forearms she adorned with art-work bracelets of hammered metals set with large muddy-looking stones—almost anything that would look well in a collection of geological specimens was, in the eyes of Gertrude Maud, jewelry. Her costumes of state, displayed in connection with these ornamentations culled from the vegetable and mineral kingdoms, were cut square in the neck and extended straight up and down, being ungirthed at the waistline but set off with red and blue edgings, after the style of fancy tea towels. As her woman friends often remarked in tones of admiration, she had never worn stays in her life, and yet [164] just look what a figure she had! Sometimes, the weather being favourable, she wore sandals.
Excelling, as she did, in the social graces, Mrs. Pilkins was greatly in demand for neighbourhood parties. She was an amateur palmist of great note. At a suitable time in the course of the evening’s festivities she would possess herself of the left hand of some gentleman or lady present—usually a gentleman’s hand—and holding it palm upward, she would gently massage its surface and then begin uttering little gasping sounds betokening intense surprise and gratification.
“Do you know, really,” she would say when she had in part recovered, such being the regular formula, “I don’t believe in all my experience I hardly ever saw such an interesting hand?”
Peering close and ever closer she would trace out the past, the present and the future, seeing strange influences coming into the other’s life, and long journeys and dark strangers; and presently, with a startled cry, she would pounce upon the heart line, and then, believe me, she would find out things worth telling! And if the owner of the captive hand chanced to be a young man whose life was so exemplary as to be downright painful, he would endeavour by his air to convey the impression that the fence round the South Flatbush Young Ladies’ Seminary had been builded extra high and extra strong especially on his dangerous account. [165] Hardly could the rest wait to have Mrs. Pilkins read their palms too. And while this went on, Mr. Pilkins would be hanging about on the outskirts of the group, feeling very null and void. Really his only excuse for being there at all was that Gertrude Maud needed some one to get her rubbers off and on and to bring her home.
Naturally, as one adept in the divination of the dearest characteristics of men and women, and also because she was a wife and subject to the common delusions of wives as a class, Mrs. Pilkins felt she knew Chester—felt she could read him like a book. This only goes to show how wrong a woman and a wife can be. For behind the mild and pinkish mask which he showed to her and to creation at large Chester Pilkins nursed unsuspected ambitions, undreamed-of dreams. He hankered with a hankering which was almost a pain to stand for once anyhow before the eyes of the world. Within him a secret fire seethed; he ached and glowed with it, and yet none knew of it. He would have died in his tracks before he voiced his burning desire to any human being, yet constantly it abode with him. He was tired—oh, so tired—of being merely one of the six millions. He craved to be one among the six millions. He peaked and he pined with it.
This longing is commoner probably among city dwellers than among those who live in the smaller settlements of men, and for that there [166] is, as I believe, a good and sufficient reason. In the little community there are no nobodies. Anybody is somebody. But where the multitude is close-packed, nearly anybody is everybody and nearly everybody is anybody. The greater the number within a given space, the fewer are there available for purposes of pomp, prominence and publicity. A few stand out above the ruck; the rest make up the unconsidered mass—mute, inglorious and, except briefly in the census figures, unsung. And Chester K. Pilkins yearned to stand out.
Twice in his life he had thought he was about to attain conspicuousness and be pointed out by men as something other than Mrs. Chester K. Pilkins’ husband. They were narrow escapes, both of them. Because each was such a narrow escape, that made the disappointment all the greater. Once on a rainy, blowy evening, when the narrow gore of Nassau Street where it debouches into Park Row was a mushroom bed of wet, black umbrella tops and the bridge crush at the mouth of the Bridge took on an added frenzy, a taxicab, driven at most unlawful speed, bored through the fringes of the press, knocked a man galley west, and, never checking its gait, fled into the shelter of the L pillars toward Chatham Square and was gone from sight before more than six or eight spectators could get its license numbers wrong.
The man was Chester K. Pilkins. He was [167] butted violently from behind as he fought his way across the asphalt, with his collar turned up against the wet gusts and his thoughts intent on getting a seat aboard the transpontine car. He never had gotten a seat aboard it yet, but there was no telling when he might. Immediately on being struck he was projected some yards through space in a galley-westerly direction, and when he struck he rolled over and over in the mud, greatly to the detriment of a neat black overcoat buttoning under a fly front, and with silk facings upon the lapels, then in its third season of service. Kind hands—very many of them—lifted him up from where he lay with a long scratch on his nose and a passing delusion within his brain that he had taken a long rough trip somewhere and was coming back by slow stages. Sympathetic persons, about equally divided in their opinion as to whether most of his bones were or were not broken, bore him with all gentleness into the drug store in the World Building, propped him against a show case, and packed about him in a dense mass, those good Samaritans in the front row calling upon those behind them to stand back, in heaven’s name, and give him a little air. There a kindly disposed bootblack brushed him off, and a soda-water clerk offered him malted milk with a dash of nerve tonic in it, and a policeman, using a stubby lead pencil, took down his name and address in a little red book, and a blithe young interne came on the [168] tail of an ambulance with a kit of surgical tools in his hand, and presently departed, obviously disappointed to find there was no need of a capital operation to be performed forthwith upon the spot; and, altogether, the victim was made much of. A little later, somewhat shaken and sore but not materially damaged, he rode home—standing up and swaying in the aisle, as was customary—holding with one hand to a strap and with the other at intervals caressing his wounded nose.