The Jack-Knife Man

He shook Booge’s hand and the sheriff unlocked the gate of the stone-yard, and Peter passed out into the cold world.

XVII. FUNNY CATS

PETER avoided the main street, for he was aware he was a curious sight in his blanket serape, and it was too comfortable to throw away, and, in addition, would be his only bed clothing when he reached his boat. He hurried along Oak Street as less frequented than the main street, for he had almost the entire length of the town to pass through. As it was growing late he was anxious to strike the bluff road in time to catch a ride with some homeward-bound farmer. His bag of provisions was still at the farmer’s on the hillside; the shanty-boat awaited him, and he must take up his life where it had been interrupted. For the present he was powerless to aid either Susie or Buddy.

Peter had a long walk before him if he did not catch a ride, and he started briskly, but in front of the Baptist Church he paused. A bulletin board stood before the door calling attention to a sale to be held in the Sunday-school room, and the heading of the announcement caught his eye. “All For The Children,” it said. It seemed that there were poor children in the town – children with insufficient clothes, children with no shoes, children without underwear, and a sale was to be held for them; candy, cakes, fancy work, toys and all the usual Christmas-time church sale articles were enumerated. Peter read the bulletin, and passed on.

He was successful in catching a ride, and found his sack of provisions at the farmer’s and carried it to the boat on his back. The boat was as he had left it, and little damage had been done during his absence. The river had fallen and his temporary mooring rope – too taut to permit the strain – had snapped, but the shanty-boat had grounded and was safe locked in the ice until spring. Inside the cabin not a thing had been touched. The shavings still lay on the floor where they had fallen while he was making Buddy’s last toy, and the toys themselves were under the bunk just as he had left them. Peter felt a pang of loneliness as he gathered them up and placed them on his table with the new stockings and the A. B. C. blocks. He put the new “Bibel” on the clock-shelf.

The toys made quite an array, and Peter looked at them one by one, thinking of the child. There were more than a dozen of them – all sorts of animals – and they still bore the marks of Buddy’s fingers. It was quite dark by the time Peter had stowed away his provisions, and he lighted the lamp, with a newly formed resolution in his mind. He dropped the A. B. C. blocks into the depths of his gunny-sack and, looking at each for the last time, let the crudely carved animals follow, one by one. He held the funny cat in his hand quite a while, hesitatingly, and then set it on the clock-shelf beside the Bible, but almost immediately he took it down again and dropped it among its fellows in the sack. The Bible, too, he took from the shelf and put in the sack, and, last of all, he added the few bits of clothing Buddy had left in his flight. He tied the neck of the sack firmly with seine twine and set it under the table. All his mementos of Buddy were in that sack, and Peter, with a sigh, chose a clean piece of maple wood, seated himself on the edge of the bunk, and began whittling a kitchen spoon. Once more he was alone; once more he was a hermit; once more he was a mere jack-knife man, and Buddy was but a memory.

Peter tried to put even the memory out of his mind, but that was not as easy as putting toys in a gunny-sack. If he tried to think of painting the boat, he had to think of George Rapp, and then he could think of nothing but the hasty parting in Rapp’s barn and how the soft kinks of Buddy’s hair snuggled under the rough blanket hood. If he tried to think of wooden spoons he thought of funny cats. And if he tried to think of nothing he caught Booge’s nonsense rhymes running through his head and saw Buddy clinging eagerly to Booge’s knee and begging, “Sing it again, Booge, sing it again.”

“Thunder!” he exclaimed at last, “I wisht I had that clock to take apart.”

He put the unfinished spoon aside and, choosing another piece of maple wood, began whittling a funny cat, singing, “Go tell the little baby, the baby, the baby,” as he worked. It was late when his eyelids drooped and he wrapped himself in his blanket. Three more cats had been added to the animals in the gunny-sack.

“Some little kid like Buddy’ll like them,” he thought with satisfaction, and dropped asleep.

Early the next morning he tramped across the “bottom” to the farmer’s.

“You said you was going to town to-day,” Peter said, “and I thought maybe you’d leave this sack at the Baptist Church for me, if it ain’t too much out of your way. It’s some old truck I won’t have any use for, and I took notice they were having a sale there today. You don’t need to say anything. Just hand it in.”

Before the farmer could ask him in to have breakfast Peter had disappeared toward the wood-yard, and when, later, he started for town he could hear Peter’s saw.

At the Baptist Church the farmer left the sack. A dozen or more women were busily arranging for the sale, and one of them took the sack, holding it well out from her skirt.

“For our sale? How nice!” she cried in the excited tone women acquire when a number of them are working together in a church. “Who are we to thank for it?”

“Oh, I guess there ain’t no thanks necessary,” said the farmer. “I guess you won’t find it much. I just brought it along because I promised I would. It’s from a shanty-boatman down my way – Lane ‘s his name – Peter Lane.”

“Oh,” said the woman, her voice losing much of its enthusiasm. “Yes, I know who he is. He’s the jack-knife man. Tell him Mrs. Vandyne thanks him; it is very kind of him to think of us.”

“All right! Gedap!”

Mrs. Vandyne carried the sack into the Sunday school room and snipped the twine with her scissors, which hung from her belt on a pink ribbon. She was a charming little woman, with bright eyes and rosy cheeks, and she was the more excited this afternoon because she had been able to bring her friend and visitor, Mrs. Montgomery, and Mrs. Montgomery was making a real impression. Mrs. Montgomery was from New York, and just how wealthy and socially important she was at home every one knew, and yet she mingled with the ladies quite as if she was one of them. And not only that, but she had ideas. Her manner of arranging the apron table, as she had once arranged one for the Actors’ Fair, was enough to show she was no common person. Already her ideas had quite changed the old cut and dried arrangements. At her request ladies were constantly running out to buy rolls of crêpe paper and other inexpensive decorative accessories, and the dull gray room was blossoming into a fairy garden.

“And when you come to-night, I want each of you to wear a huge bow of crêpe paper on your hair, and – what have you there, Jane?”

Mrs. Montgomery, although beyond her fortieth year, had the fresh and youthfully bright face of a girl of eighteen. She was one of those splendidly large women who retain a vivid interest in life and all its details, and Mrs. Vandyne, who was smaller and lesser in every way, was her Riverbank counterpart.

“Nothing much,” Mrs. Vandyne answered, dipping her hand into the sack. “But it was kind of the man to send what he could. Wooden spoons, I suppose. Well, will you look at this, Anna?”

It was one of the “funny cats.” Mrs. Vandyne held it up, that all the ladies might see.

“How perfectly ridiculous!” exclaimed Mrs. Wilcox. “What do you suppose it was meant to be? Do you suppose it is a bear?”

“Or an otter, or something?” asked Mrs. Ferguson. “Oh, I know! It’s a squirrel. Did you ever see anything so – so ridiculous!”

The ladies, all except Mrs. Montgomery, laughed gleefully at the funny cat Buddy had hugged and loved.

“We might get a dime for it, anyway, Alice,” said one. “Are there any more? They will help fill the toy table. Do you think they would spoil the toy table, Mrs. Montgomery?”

The New Yorker had taken the cat in her hand, and Mrs. Vandyne was standing one after another of Peter’s toys on the table.

“Spoil it!” exclaimed Mrs. Montgomery enthusiastically. “I have not seen anything so naïve since I was in Russia. It is like the Russian peasant toys, but different, too. It has a character of its own. Oh, how charming!”

She had seized another of the funny animals.

“But what is it?” asked Mrs. Wilcox.

“Mercy! I don’t know what it is,” laughed Mrs. Montgomery. “What does that matter? You can call it a cat – it looks something like a cat – yes! I’m sure it is a cat. Or a squirrel. That doesn’t matter. Can’t you see that no one but a master impressionist could have done them? Just see how he has done it all with a dozen quick turns of his – his – ”

“Jack-knife,” Mrs. Vandyne supplied. “Do you think they are worth anything, Alice?”

“Worth anything?” exclaimed Mrs. Montgomery. “My dear, they are worth anything you want to ask for them. Really, they are little masterpieces. Can’t you see how refreshing they are, after all the painted and prim toys we see in the shops? Just look at this funny frog, or whatever it is.”

The ladies all laughed.

“You see,” said Mrs. Montgomery, “you can’t help laughing at it. The man that made it has humor, and he has art and – and untrammeled vision, and really the most wonderful technique.”

Peter Lane and the technique of a jack-knife!

The ladies of the Baptist Aid Society were too surprised to gasp. The enthusiasm of Mrs. Montgomery took their breath away, and Mrs. Montgomery was not loth to speak still more, with a discoverer’s natural pride in her discovery. She examined one toy after another, and her enthusiasm grew, and infected the other women. They, too, began to see the charm of Peter’s handiwork and to glimpse what Mrs. Montgomery had seen clearly: that the toys were the result of a frank, humorous, boyish imagination combined with a man’s masterly sureness of touch. Here was no jig-saw, paper-patterned, conventional German or French slopshop toy, daubed over with ill-smelling paint. She tried to tell the ladies this, and being in New York the president of several important art and literary and musical societies, she succeeded.

“We must ask twenty-five cents apiece for them,” said Mrs. Ferguson.

“Oh! twenty-five cents! A dollar at least,” said Mrs. Montgomery. “The work of an artist. Don’t you see it is not the intrinsic value but the art the people will pay for?”

“But do you think Riverbank will pay a dollar for art?” asked Mrs. Vandyne.

Mrs. Montgomery glanced over the toys. “I will pay a dollar apiece for all of them, and be glad to get them,” she said. “I feel – I feel as if this alone made my trip to Riverbank worth while. You have no idea what it will mean to go home and take with me anything so new and unconventional. I shall be famous, I assure you, as the discoverer of – ”

“His name is Peter Lane,” said Mrs. Vandyne. “He is one of the shanty-boatmen that live on the river. A little, mildly-blue-eyed man; a sort of hermit. They call him the Jack-knife Man, because he whittles wooden spoons and peddles them.”

“Oh, he will be a success!” cried Mrs. Montgomery. “Even his name is delicious. Peter Lane! Isn’t it old-fashioned and charming? Peter Lane, the Jack-knife Man! How many of these toys may I have, Anna?”

“I want one!” said Mrs. Wilcox promptly, and before the ladies were through, Mrs. Montgomery had to insist that she be permitted to claim two of the toys by her right as discoverer.

Later, as they went homeward for supper, Mrs. Vandyne gave a happy little laugh.

“That was splendid, Alice,” she said. “To think you were able to make them pay a dollar apiece for those awful toys!”

“Awful!” exclaimed Mrs. Montgomery. “My dear, I meant every word I said. You will see! Your Peter Lane is going to make me famous yet!”

That evening, while Peter sat in his shanty-boat, lonely and thinking of Buddy as he whittled a spoon, Mrs. Montgomery stood, tall and imposing and sweet-faced, behind the toy table on which all of Buddy’s toys stood with “Sold” tags strung on them, and told about Peter Lane, the Jack-knife Man.

“I’m very sorry,” she said time after time, “but they are all sold. We do not know yet whether we can persuade the Jack-knife Man to make duplicates, but we will take your order subject to his whim, if you wish. We cannot promise anything definite. Artists are so notably irresponsible.”

But there was one voice which, had Peter been able to hear it, would have set him making jack-knife toys on the instant. While the ladies of the Baptist Church were exclaiming over the toys in the Sunday school room a small boy with freckles and white, kinky hair, was leaning on the knee of a harsh-faced woman in a white farm house three miles up the river-road.

“Auntie Potter,” he said longingly, “I wish Uncle Peter would come and make me a funny cat.”

“If he don’t,” said Mrs. Potter with great vigor, “he’s a wuthless scamp.”

XVIII. MORE FUNNY CATS

NEW YORK, being a great mill that grinds off rough corners and operates, as it seems, for no other purpose than to make each New York inhabitant and each New York creation a facsimile of every other New York inhabitant and creation, loves those who introduce the quaint, the strange and the outlandish – which is to say, anything not after the conventional New York model. Women have become rich with the discovery of a rag rug or a corn-husk door-mat.

To Mrs. Montgomery the trip to Peter Lane’s shanty-boat was a path to fame. Her quick perception grasped every detail and saw its value or, to put it most crudely, its advertising potency. As she, with Mr. and Mrs. Vandyne, whirled down the smooth bluff road in the Vandyne barouche, she said: “Anna, I do wish we could have come in an ox-cart, or a-straddle little donkeys, or in a hay-wagon, at least.”

“My dear! Isn’t this comfortable enough?”

“Oh, I was thinking of my talk before the Arts and Crafts Club. It makes such a difference. It is so conventional to be taken in a carriage. And probably I’ll find your Peter Lane just an ordinary man, and his shanty-boat nothing but a common houseboat.”

But when the carriage ran into the farmer’s yard – it was Sunday – and the farmer volunteered to show the route to Peter’s shanty-boat, and warned Mrs. Montgomery, after a glance at her handsome furs, that it would be a rough tramp, her spirits rose again. Perhaps there would be some local color after all. The event fully satisfied her.

In single file they tramped the long path to the boat, stooping under low boughs, climbing over fallen tree trunks, dipping into hollows. Rabbits turned and stared at them and scurried away. Great grapevine swings hung from the water elms, and when the broad expanse of Big Tree Lake came into view Mrs. Montgomery stood still and absorbed the scene. It represented absolute loneliness – acres of waving rice straw, acres of snow-covered ice and, close under the bank, the low, squat shanty-boat overshadowed by the leafless willows. It was a romantic setting for her hermit.

The farmer had brought them by the shorter route, so that they had to cross the lake, and Peter, gathering driftwood, was amazed to see the procession issue from the rice and come toward him across the lake.

“That’s Peter,” said the farmer. “He acts like he didn’t expect comp’ny.”

Peter was standing at the edge of the willows, his arms full of driftwood, the gray blanket serape with its brilliant red stripes hanging to his ankles, and a home-made blanket cap pulled down over his ears. He stood like a statue until they reached him, then doffed his cap politely, and Mrs. Montgomery saw his eyes and knew this was the artist.

“I guess you’d better step inside my boat, if it’s big enough,” said Peter, “but it’s sort of mussy. Maybe you’d like to wait out here ‘til I sweep out. I been whittlin’ all morning.”

“We will go in just as it is,” said Mrs. Montgomery promptly. “I want to see where you work, just as it is when you work.”

Peter looked at her with surprise.

“You ain’t mistook in the man you’re lookin’ for, are you, ma’am?” He asked. “I’m Peter Lane. I don’t work in this boat. Lately I’ve been workin’ up at the farmer’s, sawin’ wood.”

Mrs. Montgomery laughed delightedly, and Peter, looking into her eyes, grinned. He liked this large, wholesome woman.

“You are the man!” said Mrs. Montgomery gaily. “And since Mrs. Vandyne won’t introduce me, I’ll introduce myself.”

Peter was justified in his doubts regarding the capacity of his boat, and the farmer, after trying to feel comfortable inside, went out and sat on the edge of the deck. The shavings on the floor, the wooden-spoons (there were but three or four), the boat itself – when she learned Peter had built it himself – all delighted her. She asked innumerable questions that would have been impertinent but for her kindly smile, and she was delighted when she learned that Peter had but one blanket, which was his coat by day and his bed-clothing by night. But more than all else she liked Peter’s kindly eyes. She explained, in detail, the object of their visit, and Peter listened politely.

“It’s right kind of you to come down so far,” he said when he had heard, “but I guess I’ll have to refuse you, Mrs. Montgomery. I don’t seem to have no desire to make no more funny toys. I guess I won’t.”

“I can understand the feeling perfectly,” said Mrs. Montgomery, too wise to try coaxing. “You have an artist’s reluctance to undertake for pay what you have done for pleasure only.”

“It ain’t that,” said Peter. “I just whittled out them toys for a little feller I had here, because he used to laugh at them. That’s all I done it for, and since he ain’t here to laugh, it don’t seem as if I could get the grin into them. I don’t know as I can explain; I don’t know as you could understand if I did – ”

“But I do, I do,” said Mrs. Montgomery eagerly. “You mean you lack the sympathetic audience.”

“Maybe so,” said Peter doubtfully. “What I do mean is, that I’d miss the look in his eyes and how he quirked up his mouth whilst I was cutting out a toy. Maybe it looks to you like this hand and this old whetted-down jack-knife was what made them toys, but that ain’t so! No, ma’am! All I done was to take a piece of maple wood and start things going. ‘This is going to be a cat, Buddy,’ I’d say, maybe, and he’d sparkle up at me and say, ‘A funny old cat, Uncle Peter!’ and then it had got to be a funny old cat, like he said. And his eyes and his mouth would tell me just how funny to make that cat, and just how funny not to make it. He sort of seen each whittle before I seen it myself, and told me how to make it by the look of his eyes and the way his mouth sort of felt for it until I got it just right. And then he would laugh. So you see, now that Buddy’s gone, I couldn’t – no, I guess I couldn’t!”

“And you made no more after Buddy – after he left?”

“He didn’t die,” said Peter, “if that’s what you mean. He was took away. Yes’m. I did make a couple. I made a couple more cats to put in the gunny-sack. But that was because I sort of saw Buddy a sittin’ there on the floor, even when he was gone.”

“But don’t you see,” cried Mrs. Montgomery eagerly, “that you can always see Buddy? Don’t you know there are hundreds of other Buddys – boys and girls – all over the country, and that, as you work, a man of your imagination can feel their eyes and smiling mouths guiding your hand and your knife? They want your ‘funny cats,’ too, Mr. Lane. Don’t you see that you could sit here in your lonely boat, and have all the children of America clustered about your knee?”

“Yes, I do sort of see it,” said Peter, “but it’s a thing I’m liable to forget any time.”

“But you must not forget it!” exclaimed Mrs. Montgomery. “Your work is too rare, too valuable to permit you to forget How many artists, do you suppose, are, like the musicians, able to draw their inspiration face to face from their audiences? Very few, Mr. Lane. Do you suppose a Dickens was able to have those for whom he wrote crowded in his workroom? And yet those he worked to please guided his pen. He heard the laughs and saw the tears and was guided by them as he chose the words that were to cause the laughs and tears. You, too, can see the children’s faces.”

She paused, for she saw in Peter’s eyes that he understood and agreed.

“But then there’s another reason I can’t whittle more toys,” he said. “I’ve got about thirty more cords of wood to saw this winter.”

“But that is not like you!” said Mrs. Montgomery reproachfully. “You see I know you, Mr. Lane! You are not the man to saw wood when all the Buddys are eager for your toys.”

“It ain’t like me usually,” admitted Peter. “I don’t know who’s been telling you about me, but usually I don’t do any work I don’t have to, and that’s a fact, but certain circumstances – ” he hesitated. “You didn’t know why they took Buddy away from me, did you? I wasn’t fit to keep him. I was like a certain woman was always tellin’ me, I guess – shiftless and no-’count – so they took Buddy. And I guess they were right. But I’ve changed. It’s going to take some time, but I’m going to make money, and I’m going to be like other folks, and I’m going to get Buddy back. So you see,” he said, after this outburst, “I’ve got to saw wood. If it wasn’t for that I’d be right eager to make toys for all the kids you speak of. It would be a pleasure. But I’ve got to make some money.”

Mrs. Montgomery stared at him. “You don’t mean to tell me – ” she began. “You don’t mean to say you thought I wanted you to give up everything and make toys for nothing?”

“Why, yes,” said Peter.

“But, my dear Mr. Lane!” exclaimed Mrs. Montgomery. “I do believe I almost persuaded you to do it!” She laughed joyously. “Oh, you are a true artist! Why, you can make many, many times as much money whittling jack-knife toys as you could make sawing wood! You can hire your own wood sawed.”

She descended to details and told him what he could sell the toys for; how she would tell of them in New York and interest a few dealers.

“You’ll be working for Buddy all the while you are working for the other Buddys,” she ended, “making the home you want while you make the toys that will make little children happy.”

“That’s so,” agreed Peter eagerly, and her battle was won. The rest was mere detail – her address in New York, prices, samples, Peter’s address, and other similar matters. The farmer was willing enough to hunt another man to saw his wood. Mrs. Vandyne placed the orders with which she had been commissioned by the Baptist ladies; Mr. Vandyne – the cashier of the First National Bank – actually shook Peter’s hand in farewell, and Peter was alone again.

When the voices of his visitors had died in the distance he lifted the mattress of his bunk and felt under it with his hand until he found a round, soft ball. He unrolled it and smoothed it out – Buddy’s old, worn stockings, out at knees and toes.

“There, now,” he said, hanging them on a nail under his clock-shelf, “I guess I ain’t afraid to have you look me in the face now.”

“What happened to the child he mentioned?” Mrs. Montgomery asked when she was snugly rug-enwrapped in the barouche once more.

“I think some society took it,” Mrs. Van-dyne answered. “I’ll have Jim look it up. No doubt Jim can have the boy returned to Peter Lane.”

“I’ll do what I can,” said Mr. Vandyne, but Mrs. Montgomery was silent while the carriage traveled a full mile.

“I wouldn’t!” she said at last “No, I wouldn’t! You might see that the boy is where he is properly cared for, but I think it will be best to let the Jack-knife Man earn the boy himself. I know what he has been, and I can see what he hopes to be. If he could step outside himself and see as we see, he would say what I say. The best thing for him is to have something to work for.”

“He could work for money, like the rest of us,” suggested Mr. Vandyne.

“Oh, you utter Philistine!” cried Mrs. Montgomery. “You must wait until he gets the habit, and then – !”

“Then what?”

“Then he will have a bank-book,” laughed Mrs. Montgomery.

The winter passed rapidly enough for Peter. Between the stockings, and the vision of the children Mrs. Montgomery had conjured up, and his eagerness to win a home for Buddy, Peter worked as faithfully as an artist should, and he made many raids on the farmer’s wood-pile to secure dry, well-seasoned, maple wood.