“We are going to my house in the country,” explained Tootler. “We are going to drive and drive and talk over old times, and have some iced punch after the old fashion, and a pipe after punch. For your part, you are going to be made love to by Mrs. Tootler; she shall sing to you, with her divinest voice, everything that you have loved in old times, and a thousand new things that you will love when you hear them; she shall play to you on the dulcinea, sackbut, psaltery, spinnet, harp, lute, and every kind of instrument, including a piano. Her name was a prophecy—there’s something in a name. Now yours—I don’t believe you would have been bolting off to India as you did, forgetting all your friends, if your name had not been Ira.”
“No more o’ that, Tommy,” protested Ira, “now that one of my friends has proved that he has not forgotten me. But tell me, is it usual for merchants of Boston, in wool or out of it, to carry pocket flutes or bassoons, and while away the noontide hour with dulcet strains, such as you gave me? Do they all play solos in solitude?”
“They might do worse, and some of ’em do. The fact is, Ira, I meet such a set of inharmonious knaves that I must soothe me with a little blow now and then. I have had the doors felted. Not much sound goes through. Generally, I can wait till I get to the Shrine—so I call my box—St. Cecilia’s Shrine—for my music, but sometimes these confounded beggars rasp me so with their mean tricks and tempting swindles that I have to pipe up. The clerks wait till I’ve done and then ask for half-holidays. I have to deal with a pretty shabby crew. These manufacturers are always hard up and keep sending a lot of daggered scallawags here to get contributions to put little bills through Congress about the tariff. They don’t get much out of Tommy Tootler—nor much ahead of him—the loafers!” and Tommy, to tranquillise his soul, took his flute and gave “Il segreto” with thrilling trills.
As he closed, a small knock smote the door and the youngest clerk, aged fifteen, peered in. His pantaloons were hitched up by his hasty descent from a high stool.
“Mr. Tootler,” he began timidly, but gathering courage at every word, “my sisters are going to have a raspberry party this evening and—and my mother’s not very well. Can I go home at three?”
“Go along, my boy!” said the merchant, “and don’t take too many raspberries or you may be more ill than your mother.”
Clerkling disappeared and a suppressed cheer came through the felted door.
Mr. Waddy laughed heartily. Tootler also smiled in length and breadth; in breadth over his rosy cheeks of indigenous cheerfulness, and in greater length from where his chin showed the cloven dimple up to the apex of his tonsure. It was doing Mr. Waddy vast good—this intercourse with his old comrade. It seems to me quite possible that if he had found his friend transmuted from the old nimble sixpence to a slow shilling—corrupted into a man of the two-and-sixpenny type, slim, prim, close, pious to the point of usury—that the returning man would have been disgusted away from all his possibilities of content and hopes of home; would have scampered back to the lounges of Europe and there withered away. Then, certes, never would this tale of his Return have been written.
But Mr. Waddy found his old friend now even more a friend. The meeting carried each back to the dear days of youth, jolly and joyous, ardent, generous, unsuspecting. How many were left who could call either by prenomen? These were two who, together, had done all the boyish mischiefs—all for which boyhood is walloped and riper years remember with delight. Had they not together lugged away the furtive watermelon? What Boston bell-pulls were not familiar with their runaway rings? Who, as time went on, were the best skaters but they? Who went farthest for water lilies for boyish sweethearts; who, into stickiest mud for the second joints of that amphibious kangaroo, the frog? To enumerate their joint adventures and triumphs demands a folio. Were this written, the old types of friendship would be forgotten, and even now, as I think of Waddy and Tootler, those other duos of history, Orestes and Pythias, Damon and Jonathan, Pylades and David, mingle themselves like uncoupled hounds—their conjunctions seem only casual and temporary.
There must have been good reason for their reciprocal silence during so many years, for their meeting was not as of two who have wished to forget each other, and such a meeting, with so unchanged a comrade, was, as I have said, to Mr. Waddy a wondrous good. It seems impossible that a man of his many noble traits should not have had other friends, all in their way as sincere as this one. But whether this prove to be so or not, here we have the first fact a favourable fact. The first hand he grasps returns the pressure warmly, and not with traitorous warmth. The first face he recognises even precedes his in recognition. Pleasant omens these! If not ominous, pleasant enough as facts.