by Van Reid
“Not at all,” insisted Eagleton. “It was marvelously read. Wasn’t it marvelously read, Thump?”
“I believe it was.” Thump appeared to be in deep thought, and this was often the case even if he wasn’t. Perhaps it was his beard, or even his continued absorption with that deepest of subjects, the sea. Ships and the tide and all things nautical were Joseph Thump’s hobbyhorse; he often read about sea matters and was even known to ask questions of sailors when he met them. He would check the tides each day in the Portland Courier, an organ that had once supported the Greenback Silver Standard Bearer Party, to which organization Thump considered himself allied, though it had been more or less defunct for the last ten years. He was an Episcopalian.
“It gratifies me that you think so,” Ephram was saying in response to the praise of his reading. They paused and considered whether to retrace their footsteps or to ascend Park Street, which was a direct if unfamiliar route to more familiar environs.
“I have never walked Park Street,” said Ephram, who was filled with new ideas tonight. Since Mister Walton had accepted the chairmanship of their society (in fact, since they first met him) Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump had become extremely bold; they had each purchased a telephone and a number in the local telephone exchange, Thump had read Stanley’s account of the search for Livingstone (with his hair generally standing on end), and Eagleton had mentioned once that he would like to try riding a bicycle. With this spirit investing them, they resolved to take the street less traveled.
“I was rather struck by Miss Tucker in her previous performance,” said Eagleton when they commenced the climb up Park Street.
“Yes,” said Ephram thoughtfully. “I, too. I, too, was struck. What do you think, Thump?”
“Yes,” said Thump. “She was very ... striking.”
The hill was not very steep, and yet they had already strolled some distance (this after a hearty meal) so their conversation was more deliberate while they put their energies into attaining the slope. The way was a little murky; the lower portion of Park Street was taken up with businesses and emporiums, closed at this hour and dark and quiet. Ahead of them, and a little to their left, there came the faint strains of music and voices. The temperature was dropping and the cloudless sky was salted with stars. The breeze from the harbor chased at their backs and fog billowed up behind.
Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump walked to distinctive beats—Eagleton occasionally pausing so that his friends could catch up with his long strides, Ephram’s boots ringing the most regularly along the pavement, and the shorter, stouter Thump hurrying his pace to stay alongside his friends. It was natural that they would quickly apprehend a fourth, somewhat staccato rhythm that did not seem to belong to their efforts.
Ephram pulled up and said, “What’s that?”
Thump looked behind them with a “Hmmm?”
Eagleton, who had been unaware of a strange tension growing within his own heart, shouted, “What?! What’s that? What’s what?”
This, in turn, startled Ephram, who said, “Good heavens!” and Thump, who turned back around and said, “Hmmm?”
“Was there something?” said Eagleton.
“I thought there was,” said Ephram. “I thought I heard something.”
They peered about and listened. They were in a section of the city they had never walked before and the street had grown darker still. Fog slunk up the cobbles. There was the sound of music and voices, a little louder now. A dog barked somewhere. Eagleton caught with his ear the rapid tapping that had engendered Ephram’s first remark.
“There it is,” said Ephram.
“It is up ahead, I think,” said Eagleton, though a moment before he would have guessed it was behind them.
They considered the way they had come, but the fog looked thick and chilly in the halo of the infrequent streetlamps. There was a more inviting light ahead of them; to their left there was a well-lit block some distance down Danforth Street. When they reached this crossing, the music was clearer, as was the general roar that accompanies a crowd.
“Danforth Street,” said Eagleton. “This is your territory, Ephram.”
“Indeed,” said Ephram, though he looked doubtful. He lived at the very western end of Danforth Street but had seldom frequented the more crowded lengths of that avenue. (To be accurate, he had only ridden through this section of his own thoroughfare and knew little or nothing about it.)
“Our friend Mr. Spark said that his establishment is just off Danforth Street,” said Eagleton. “On Brackett Street.”
“The Faithful Mermaid,” said Thump. It sounded a pleasant enterprise.
“It’s very busy down this way,” said Ephram, peering at the distant movement and keening an ear to the voices and music.
“Hmmm,” hmmmed Thump.
These nearby blocks appeared a little hectic, even (dare they say) wild. The long way around seemed good enough and they were about to cross Danforth Street, toward the center of town and away from this interesting commotion, when they perceived a person standing at the opposite comer. They stopped.
It was a woman somewhere beyond her middle years. Her dress was simple and she had no coat or hat. She wore an apron, which domestic accoutrement did nothing to dispel the sense of potential energy in her frame. There was in her hand a kitchen implement (a rather large kitchen implement) with which she tapped at her other hand, like a policeman with a truncheon. She was that type of female who strikes fear in otherwise valiant men, and who might have been termed “formidable.” She glowered at the three friends. She was not physically imposing (not as tall as Eagleton, nor as broad as Thump), but she had an impressive sense of purpose about her, not to say tenacity, not to say displeasure—a sort of raw displeasure that the three men had not often encountered. Faced with the battlements of her folded arms, the kitchen implement in her hand (a rather large kitchen implement), and the brisk, intemperate manner with which she tapped her foot, the members of the club were more or less discouraged from further crossing the street.
Thump remembered reading once that kitchen implements were a principal cause of household accidents.
They considered her. She glowered at them. They stood in the middle of the crossroad. She tapped her foot. Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump decided (each to himself, and without actually consulting one another) that they did not know this woman and that the music and hubbub down Danforth Street was of great curiosity to them. Before they understood what they were about, they were striding down the eastern length of Danforth Street, where the sidewalks turned to wooden planks and the ditches were damp and muddy with recent rain.
“Perhaps we will find Mr. Spark,” said Eagleton encouragingly.
“The Faithful Mermaid,” said Thump again, and this was conducive to cheery thoughts.
The music down the street sounded merry, but there was a shout from ahead of them, and then a woman’s scream that nearly lifted the hair beneath their top hats, and though the scream metamorphosed into high-pitched laughter they advanced with less certainty. Indeed, before the wild laughter had yet died on the air they were walking on their toes, looking as if someone had lifted them by their collars.
Soon they had walked almost a block; the voices and singing grew louder and more articulate but no more encouraging. The music was like a dear old tune played at several times the normal velocity and without benefit of common key among the musicians. Some doors up, a man stepped out of a well-lit and noisy building to amble the street in a circuitous manner. He sang as he walked—something about his beloved mother, his little gold ringlets, and his Sunday hat. Oddly the man was hatless and appeared to be bald.
“It’s a very musical place,” ventured Ephram hopefully. It was a very bustling place; the establishments ahead of them were glowing in the fog, and when the door to some house or tavern opened the sounds from within blared out as from a trumpet. A carriage trundled past and drew up before one of these places; a man and three women extricated themselves from this ve
hicle with some difficulty, and with further difficulty maintained their feet on the sidewalk. Eventually they clambered up a set of steps and disappeared inside.
The way ahead appeared less promising, and yet, when they turned back, the Moosepathians could still spy the figure of the woman at the corner. As they passed the circuitously ambling man, he stopped singing, stopped ambling (circuitously or otherwise), and let out a sudden and startling “Whoop!”
Thump had read somewhere (perhaps the same place where he had read about kitchen accidents) that certain animals (dogs, to be sure) were believed to have an ability to foretell earthquakes and other natural catastrophes, and he would wonder, later on, if this man had similar skills. Before the man shouted, the clamor from down the street persisted at the level of a dull and constant roar; one might have even considered getting used to it. But as soon as that single “Whoop!” was roared into the night, the undeviating ruckus fell into a momentary lull, which, as it proved, was the proverbial calm before the storm.
A cannon shot could not have seemed more deafening or more alarming than the sound that then spewed forth from a building just ahead of Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump on Danforth Street at twenty-four minutes past the hour of ten (Matthew Ephram’s time).
5. No Way to Handle the Upright
The afternoon edition of the next day’s Portland Courier carried a front-page item that commenced in this manner: Some time before eleven o’clock last night, citizens at large on Danforth Street were witness to an extraordinary commotion, the origin of which was difficult at first to ascertain.
All that Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump ascertained, when the front doors of the incongruently named Weary Sailor burst open, was that they had never seen such a mob of figures emerge from any place so swiftly and with so little regard for who or what stood in their way. The swarm of people fell out, or were hurled through the door as by some irresistible force, and the general cacophony they rendered into the night air was, indeed, like an explosion.
“Good heavens!” declared Eagleton.
“There seems to be a commotion!” agreed Ephram.
They thought it unconscionable to hie away if some disaster had occurred and so they crept up the sidewalk; no expressed consensus led them on, but only those unspoken attributes of obligation and curiosity, which historians of the Moosepath League understand to be a hallmark of that society.
They were not long in gaining the perimeter of the crowd, which formed a semicircle before the front door of a tavern. There was a distinctive aura about the mob that the members of the club had difficulty understanding. The gathering was wild-eyed and exhausted in appearance; some in the mob (men and women) swayed as they stood, and one or two propped themselves up by another’s shoulder. One man was singing. Eagleton realized, with a start, that many of them had bottles or large drinking vessels in their hands.
The building they stood before was an odd old tavern with a short porch, double doors, and a balcony above. The babble of the crowd echoed off the side of the house, and as Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump approached it was difficult to understand the nature of the crisis; the din of many voices raised in ire and fear and even delighted excitement drowned away any single utterance that might define what had happened.
There was a resounding crash from within and the sign above the tavern door shook as if in a stiff wind.
“It is an interesting emblem on that placard,” said Eagleton, though his friends did not hear him above the din. The sign depicted a man of the sea sleeping in a chair.
The Weary Sailor was not very conducive to repose just then, for through the crowd of voices there could be heard a powerful bellow from inside. There was another crash, and the mob greeted each of these thunderclaps with a collective shout. One voice in the crowd was heard to cry out “Put it on them, Gillie!” which provoked unexpected cheers and laughter.
People continued to gather before the tavern and the Moosepathians were pressed forward when they might have wished to step back. The noise fell away somewhat and an official-sounding proclamation rose up from the center of the mob as a single police officer plowed his way through. Thump could just see the man’s hat and a blue-sleeved arm that rose up to indicate the need for order.
“Gory, people! Keep it down!” declared the policeman. He mounted the steps and considered the tavern doors, then turned to the crowd and addressed one man in particular. “What’s to be had in there, Mickey?”
“It’s Gillie Hicks, Calvin,” said the fellow, amid several other similar, if unsolicited, answers.
Officer Calvin Drum looked the smallest bit daunted by this news; his face fell, but he took a deep breath that lifted his shoulders. “Gillie, eh?”
Another member of the city’s constabulary, Officer Sam Skillings, was just then reaching the outskirts of the crowd, and as he made his way through he was informed of Gillie Hicks’s presence within. A new clamor came from inside while the policemen conferred.
“What’s he doing to it?” queried someone near Eagleton.
It sounded as if someone were dancing on the keys of a piano, which, as it happened, was not so very far from the truth.
Thump looked down to see a mist at his feet. Toward the harbor, fingers of vapor seeped from between the buildings, and there was an express chill in the air as the fog slipped over cobblestones and wrapped itself around people’s legs.
“Gillie!” Officer Drum was shouting. “What are you doing?” There was no answer, and the policemen cautiously approached the tavern doors. These opened easily enough, but the portal beyond was blocked.
There was another jumble and clang of out-of-harmony notes, and then a third, and with each dissonant crash the crowd flinched in unison.
“Gillie!” shouted Officer Drum again.
There was a narrow bar of light between the lintel of the doorway and the object that hindered the officers’ entry; part of a face appeared at this horizontal aperture. “Is that you, Officer Drum?” came a man’s voice. Anything else that was said was momentarily lost beneath another unmusical crash.
“Who is that?” demanded the second policeman. A third officer, Malcolm Beam, was just then arriving, and he pushed between Eagleton and Thump on his way through the crowd.
“It’s Safely Saturday,” came the voice from within. The fellow thrust a hand out and waved at the policemen. “Gillie is taking the piano upstairs.”
“What is he, drunk?” asked Officer Beam. The question was academic.
Officer Skillings climbed over the end railing of the porch and disappeared round the back.
Kachang! went the instrument in question.
“Upstairs?” said Officer Drum. “Safely, what is he doing that for?”
“I don’t know, exactly. He and Duffy Wimple were kind of arguing, from what I could see.”
Kachang!
“But upstairs?” said Officer Drum.
“Oh, yes. He’s rolling it end for end.”
“He must be thick into it,” said the policeman, almost to himself.
“He’s been drinking for nine days!” announced an expert witness in the crowd; the speaker’s tone was scandalized but his thick tongue indicated that he himself might have been doing his best to keep up with Gillie.
“He’s sober as a judge!” insisted someone else.
“He’s just a little irked, is all,” said another, and the crowd broke into raucous laughter.
Kachang!
Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump regarded the scene with open mouths and saucer eyes. They had never viewed, nor even suspected, such astonishing behavior, and it was a little difficult to believe.
“Yes, well,” said Eagleton, his back stiff, his eyes wide. “Increasing clouds tonight. Showers possible tomorrow.” A woman (and a rather wild-haired sort of woman at that) gave Eagleton a long glance. Eagleton, in turn, looked about for a means of retreat but he and his friends were hemmed in.
“High tide at 1:33,” said Thump to the grinning fellow beside him.
“Twenty-six minutes before eleven,” offered Ephram.
Kachang!
A tall and narrow man, well dressed and with a cultured accent, turned to Ephram and said, “I have always been interested that the piano is numbered among the percussive instruments.”
Ephram had never thought very much on the place of pianos in the scheme of things. “My friend Eagleton,” he said, “once met a gentleman who arranged piano stools around his dining-room table.”
The well-dressed man’s eyes widened.
“The backdoor is barred as well,” said Officer Skillings as he reappeared at the edge of the crowd.
Kachang!
“He’s almost up there,” reported Safely Saturday from behind the barrier.
“Were they the adjustable sort of stools?” asked the cultured gentleman.
“I believe they were,” said Ephram.
Officers Drum, Skillings, and Beam considered the barricade before them. Skillings took off his hat and scratched his head.
“That would be efficacious for people of unstandard height,” said the man beside Ephram.
“We perceived that to be the gentleman’s purpose,” agreed Ephram. He could not help but admire this gentleman’s acute comprehension.
Officer Skillings rapped on the barrier before him. “Safely,” he inquired, “what is in the way here?”
“Gillie tore up part of the bar, and dropped it in front of the door.”
“Can we push it aside?” wondered Calvin Drum to his fellow officers.
“He’s got it wedged in here somehow,” said the helpful Safely. Kaching!! sounded the abused instrument.
The man beside Ephram looked saddened, and the Moosepathian would not have been surprised to see him doff his hat. “As they said of the aged soprano,” intoned the fellow, “‘I fear she is losing some of her notes.’”
