I can’t guarantee—”
“Try!” insisted Culhane violently. “You can’t do any worse than that other mutt, if you blow for a million years. Blow it! Blow it!”
Mr. Kerrigan turned back and being very cheerfully tendered the horn by the last failure, wetted and adjusted his lips, lifted it upward and backward—and—
It was pathetic. It was positively dreadful, the wheezing, grinding sounds that were emitted.
“God!” shouted Culhane, pulling up the coach to a dead stop. “Stop that! Whoa! Whoa!!! Do you mean to say that that’s the best you can do? Well, this finishes me! Whoa! What kind of a bunch of cattle have I got up here, anyhow? Whoa! And out in this country too where I’m known and where they know all about such things! God! Whoa! Here I spend thousands of dollars to get together an equipment that will make a pleasant afternoon for a crowd of gentlemen, and this is what I draw—hams! A lot of barflies who never saw a tally-ho! Well, I’m done! I’m through! I’ll split the damned thing up for firewood before I ever take it out again! Get down! Get out, all of you! I’ll not haul one of you back a step! Walk back or anywhere you please—to hell, for all I care! I’m through! Get out! I’m going to turn around and get back to the barn as quick as I can—up some alley if I can find one. To think of having such a bunch of hacks to deal with!”
Humbly and wearily we climbed down and, while he drove savagely on to some turning-place, stood about first in small groups, then by twos and threes began making our way—rather gingerly, I must confess, in our fine clothes—along the winding road back to the place on the hill. But such swearing! Such un-Sabbath-like comments! The number of times his sturdy Irish soul was wished into innermost and almost sacrosanct portions of Sheol! He was cursed from more angles and in more artistically and architecturally nobly constructed phrases and even paragraphs than any human being that I have ever heard of before or since, phrases so livid and glistening that they smoked.
Talk about the carved ivories of speech! The mosaics of verbal precious stones!
You should have heard us on our way back!
And still we stayed.
* * * * *
Some two years later I was passing this place in company with some friends, when I asked my host, who also knew of the place, to turn in. During my stay it had been the privilege and custom among those who knew much of this institution to drive through the grounds and past the very doors of the “repair shop,” even to stop if Culhane chanced to be visible and talking to or at least greeting him, in some cases. A custom of Culhane’s was, in the summer time, to have erected on the lawn a large green-and-white striped marquee tent, a very handsome thing indeed, in which was placed a field-officer’s table and several camp chairs, and some books and papers. Here of a hot day, when he was not busy with us, he would sit and read. And when he was in here or somewhere about, a little pennant was run up, possibly as guide to visiting guests or friends. At any rate, it was the presence of this pennant which caused me to know that he was about and to wish that I might have a look at him once more, great lion that he was. As “guests,” none of us were ever allowed to come within more than ten feet of it, let alone in it. As passing visitors, however, we might, and many did, stop, remind him that we had once been his humble slaves, and ask leave to congratulate him on his health and sturdy years. At such times, if the visitors looked interesting enough, or he remembered them well, he would deign to come to the tent-fly and, standing there a la Napoleon at Lodi or Grant in the Wilderness, be for the first time in his relations with them a bit civil.
Anyway, on this occasion, urged on by curiosity to see my liege once more and also to learn whether he would remember me at all, I had my present host roll his car up to the tent door, where Culhane was reading. Feeling that by this venturesome deed I had “let myself in for it” and had to “make a showing,” I climbed briskly out and, approaching, recalled myself to him. With a semi-wry expression, half smile, half contemptuous curl of the corners of his mouth, he recalled me and took my extended hand; then seeing that possibly my friends if not myself looked interesting, he arose and came to the door. I introduced them—one a naval officer of distinction, the other the owner of a great estate some miles farther on. For the first time in my relations with him I had an opportunity to note how grandly gracious he could be. He accepted my friends’ congratulations as to the view with a princely nod and suggested that on other days it was even better. He was soon to be busy now or he would have some one show my friends through the shop. Some Saturday afternoon, if they would telephone or stop in passing, he would oblige.
I noted at once that he had not aged in the least. He was sixty-two or -three now and as vigorous and trim as ever. And now he treated me as courteously and formally as though he had never browbeaten me in the least. “Good heavens,” I said, “how much better to be a visitor than a guest!” After a moment or two we offered many thanks and sped on, but not without many a backward glance on my part, for the place fascinated me. That simply furnished institution! That severe regimen! This latter-day Stoic and Spartan in his tent! And, above all things, and the most astounding to me, so little could one know him, the book he had been reading and which he had laid upon his little table as I entered—I could not help noting the title for he laid it back up, open face down—was Lecky’s “History of European Morals”!
Now!
Well!
IN RETROSPECT
Two years after this visit, in a serious attempt to set down what I really did think of him, I arranged the following thoughts with which I closed my sketch then and which I now append for what they may be worth. They represented my best thought concerning him then:
“Thomas Culhane belongs to that class of society which the preachers and the world’s army of conventional merchants, lawyers, judges and reputable citizens generally are presumably, if one may judge by the moral and religious literature of the day, trying to reach and reform. Yet here at his sanitarium are gathered representatives of those same orders, the so-called better element. And here we see them suddenly dominated, mind and soul, by this being whom they, theoretically at least, look upon as a brand to be snatched from the burning.
“As the Church and society view Culhane, so they view all life outside their own immediate circles. Culhane is in fact a conspicuous figure among the semi-taboo. He has been referred to in many an argument and platform and pulpit and in the press as a type of man whose influence is supposed to be vitiating. Now a minister enters the sanitarium, broken down by his habits of life, and this same Culhane is able to penetrate him, to see that his dogmatic and dictatorial mental habits are the cause of his ailment, and he has the moral courage to shock him, to drag him by apparently brutal processes out of his rut. He reads the man accurately, he knows him better than he knows himself, and he effects a cure.
“This astonishing condition is certainly a new light for those seeking to labor among men. Those who are
