Fiddles 1909

This is Marny’s story, not mine. He had a hammer in his hand at the time and a tack between his teeth.

“Going to hang Fiddles right under the old fellow’s head,” he burst out. “That’s where he belongs. I’d have given a ten-acre if he could have drawn a bead on that elk himself. Fiddles behind a .44 Winchester and that old buck browsing to windward”--and he nodded at the elk’s head--“would have made the village Mayor sit up and think. What a picturesque liar you are, Fiddles”--here the point of the tack was pressed into the plaster with Marny’s fat thumb--“and what a good-for-nothing, breezy, lovable vagabond”--(Bang! Bang! Hammer at play now)--“you could be when you tried. There!”

Marny stepped back and took in the stuffed head and wide-branched antlers of the magnificent elk (five feet six from skull to tips) and the small, partly faded miniature of a young man in a student cap and high-collared coat.

I waited and let him run on. It is never wise to interrupt Marny. He will lose the thread of his talk if you do, and though he starts off immediately on another lead, and one, perhaps equally graphic, he has left you suspended in mid-air so far as the tale you were getting interested in is concerned. Who Fiddles was and why his Honor the Mayor should sit up and think; why, too, the miniature of the young man--and he was young and remarkably good-looking, as I well knew, having seen the picture many times before on his mantel--should now be suspended below the elk’s head, would come out in time if I loosened my ear-flaps and buttoned up my tongue, but not if I reversed the operation.

“Ah, you young fraud,” he went on--the position of both head and miniature pleased him now--“do you remember the time I hauled you out from under the table when the hucksters were making a door-mat of your back; and the time I washed you off at the pump, and what you said to the gendarme, and--No, you never remembered anything. You’d rather sprawl out on the grass, or make eyes at Gretchen or the landlady--fifty, if she was a day--maybe fifty-five, and yet she fell in love” (this last was addressed directly to me; it had been reminiscent before that, fired at the ceiling, at the hangings in his sumptuous studio, or the fire crackling oil the hearth), “fell in love with that tramp--a boy of twenty-two, mind you--Ah! but what a rounder he was! Such a trim, well-knit figure; so light and nimble on his feet; such a pair of eyes in his head, leaking tears one minute and flashing hate the next. And his mouth! I tried, but I couldn’t paint it--nobody could--so I did his profile; one of those curving, seductive mouths you sometimes see on a man, that quivers when he smiles, the teeth gleaming between the moist lips.”

I had lassoed a chair with my foot by this time, had dragged it nearer the fire, and had settled myself in another.

“Funny name, though for a German,” I remarked carelessly--quite as if the fellow’s patronymic had already formed part of the discussion.

“Had to call him something for short,” Marny retorted. “Feudels-Shimmer was what they called him in Rosengarten--Wilhelm Feudels-Shimmer. I tried all of it at first, then I bit off the Shimmer, and then the Wilhelm, and ran him along on Feudels for a while, then it got down to Fuddles, and at last to Fiddles, and there it stuck. Just fitted him, too. All he wanted was a bow, and I furnished that--enough of the devil’s resin to set him going--and out would roll jigs, lullabys, fandangoes, serenades--anything you wanted: anything to which his mood tempted him.”

Marny had settled into his chair now, and had stretched his fat legs toward the blaze, his middle distance completely filling the space between the arms. He had pushed himself over many a ledge with this same pair of legs and on this same rotundity, his hand on his Winchester, before his first ball crashed through the shoulder of the big elk whose glass eyes were now looking down upon Fiddles and ourselves--and he would do it again on another big-horn when the season opened. You wouldn’t have thought so had you dropped in upon us and scanned his waist measure, but then, of course, you don’t know Marny.

Again Marny’s eyes rested for a moment on the miniature; then he went on:

“We were about broke when I painted it,” he said. “There was a fair of some sort in the village, and I got an old frame for half a mark in a pawnshop, borrowed a coat from Fritz, the stableman, squeezed Fiddles into it, stuck a student’s cap on his head, made it look a hundred years old--the frame was all of that--and tried to sell it as a portrait of a ‘Gentleman of the Last Century,’ but it wouldn’t work. Fiddles’s laugh gave it away. ‘Looks like you,’ the old man said. ‘Yes, it’s my brother,’ he blurted out, slapping the dealer on the back.”

“Where did you pick Fiddles up?” I asked.

“Nowhere,” answered Marny; “he picked me up. That is, the gendarme did who had him by the coat collar.”

“‘This fellow insists you know him,’ said the officer of the law. ‘He says that he is honest and that this rabbit’--here he pointed to a pair of long ears sticking out of a game bag--‘is one he shot with the Mayor this morning. Is this true?’

“Now if there is one thing, old man,” continued Marny, “that gets me hot around the collar, it is to see a brother sportsman arrested for killing anything that can fly, run, or swim. So I rose from my sketching stool and looked him over: his eyes--not a bit of harm in ‘em; his loose necktie thrown over one shoulder; trim waist, and so on down to the leather leggings buttoned to his knees. If he was a poacher and subject to the law, he certainly was the most picturesque specimen I had met in many a day. I had, of course, never laid eyes on him before, having been but a few days in the village, but that made the situation all the more interesting. To rescue a friend would be commonplace, to rescue a stranger smacked of adventure.

“I uncovered my head and bowed to the ground. ‘His Honor shoots almost every day, your Excellency,’ I said to the gendarme. ‘I have seen him frequently with his friends--this young man is no doubt one of them--Let--me--think--was it this morning, or yesterday, I met the Mayor? It is at best a very small rabbit’--here I fingered the head and ears--‘and would probably have died of hunger anyway. However, if any claim should be made by the farmer I will pay the damages’--this with a lordly air, and I with only a week’s board in my pocket.

“The gendarme released his hold and stood looking at the young fellow. The day was hot and the village lock-up two miles away. That the rabbit was small and the Mayor an inveterate sportsman were also undeniable facts.

“‘Next time,’ he said sententiously, with a scowl, ‘do you let his Honor carry the game home in his own bag,’ and he walked away.

“Oh, you just ought to have seen Fiddles skip around when a turn in the road shut out the cocked hat and cross-belts, and heard him pour out his thanks. ‘His name was Wilhelm, he cried out; it had only been by chance that he had got separated from his friends. Where did I live? Would I let him give me the rabbit for a stew for my dinner? Was I the painter who had come to the inn? If so he had heard of me. Could he and his friends call upon me that night? He would never forget my kindness. What was the use of being a gentleman if you couldn’t help another gentleman out of a scrape? As for Herr Rabbit--the poor little Herr Rabbit-here he stroked his fur--what more honorable end than gracing the table of the Honorable Painter? Ah, these dogs of the law--when would they learn not to meddle with things that did not concern them?”

“And did Fiddles come to your inn, Marny?” I asked, merely as a prod to keep him going.

“Yes, a week later, and with the same gendarme. The cobbler in the village, who sat all day long pegging at his shoes, and who, it seemed, was watch-goose for the whole village and knew the movements of every inhabitant, man, woman, and child, and who for some reason hated Fiddles, on being interviewed by the gendarme, had stated positively that the Mayor had not passed his corner with his gun and four dogs on the day of Fiddles’s arrest. This being the case, the gendarme had rearrested the culprit, and would have taken him at once to the lock-up had not Fiddles threatened the officer with false arrest. Would the Herr Painter accompany the officer and himself to the house of the Mayor and settle the matter as to whether his Honor was or was not out hunting on that particular morning?

“All this time Fiddles was looking about the dining-room of the inn, taking in the supper-table, the rows of mugs, especially the landlady, who was frightened half out of her wits by Cocked Hat’s presence, and more especially still little Gretchen--such a plump, rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed little Dutch girl--with two Marguerite pig-tails down her back. (Gretchen served the beer, and was the life of the place. ‘Poor young man!’ she said to the landlady, who had by this time come to the same conclusion--‘and he is so good-looking and with such lovely eyes.’)

“When we got to the Mayor’s the old fellow was asleep in a big armchair, his pipe out, his legs far apart--a keg-shaped kind of a man, with a head flattened on his shoulders like a stove-lid, who said ‘Ach Gott’ every five minutes, and spluttered when he talked.

“I went in first, leaving the two on the porch until I should send for them. I didn’t know how things were going to turn out and had become a little anxious. I had run up from Munich for a few weeks’ outdoor work and wanted to stay out, not behind iron bars for abetting crime.

“‘Your Supreme Highness,’ I began, ‘I have heard of your great prowess as a sportsman, and so I wanted to pay my respects. I, too, am a shootist--an American shootist.’ Here I launched out on our big game (I had been six months in the Rockies before I came abroad, and knew what I was talking about). He was wide awake by this time and was listening. Dropping into the chair which he had drawn up for me, I told him of our elk--‘As big as horses, your Honor’; of our mountain lions--savage beasts that could climb trees and fall upon the defenseless; of our catamounts, deer, wolves, bears, foxes--all these we killed without molestation from anybody; I told him how all American sportsmen were like the Nimrods of old. How galling, then, for a true shootist to be misunderstood, decried, denounced, and arrested for so insignificant a beastie as a rabbit! This indignity my very dear friend, Herr Wilhelm Fuedels-Shimmer, had suffered--a most estimable young man--careless, perhaps, in his interpretation of the law, but who would not be--that is, what sportsman would not be? I had in Wilhelm’s defense not only backed up his story, but I had gone so far as to hazard the opinion to the officer of that law, that it was not on some uncertain Tuesday or Friday or Saturday, but on that very Wednesday, that his Supreme Highness had been wont to follow with his four accomplished dogs the tracks of the nimble cotton-tail. Would his Highness, therefore, be good enough to concentrate his giant brain on his past life and fish from out his memory the exact day on which he last hunted? While that was going on I would excuse myself long enough to bring in the alleged criminal.