Part 12 — THE MAN WITH THE BIG BOX.

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BY G. G. FOSTER.

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Mr. Robert Short—or, as he was called for shortness, Bob Short—was a genius. He could write a passable poem, and on one occasion—perhaps I should say two—had imprinted a sonnet upon each virgin sole of a pair of stainless satin slippers, kindly loaned him by the fair owner who was to trample upon his mounting aspirations. But some, who accidentally read the verses in the evening—ladies’ slippers will come off and get passed round the room, you know—asserted that Bob had put his foot into it more completely than the lady. And then the pretty excuses he made for the minuteness of the hand, or rather foot writing—“they were really so very small he could scarcely crowd his rhymes upon them, in any character!” It was quite charming and irresistible! Mr. Short rose cent. per cent. in moral and social stature, and eventually swelled to the size of a lion. Don’t be alarmed, ladies—we mean a New York lion—not a real king of the forest, with yellow mane, eyes of fire, and a roar like Niagara Falls; but that much more harmless and docile animal, a civil, social lion—the lion of ladies in want of distinction, the lion of the bas bleu, the lion of Waverley Place and other high latitudes.

But, with all his numerous and admirable qualifications, Mr. Short had no genius for packing big boxes. Indeed, he had no genius for packing at all; and when his wife sent him packing, during his first courtship, he wouldn’t stay packed, but came back and plagued her so with his attentions that at length she fairly married him to get rid of him—and a very good way it is, too, to get rid of a man’s society, as many wives have proved. Mr. Short turned out, as might have been expected, any thing but an efficient housekeeper. He could cut a pigeon-wing, but was incapable of carving a chicken; he could wheedle the Muses, but was invariably cheated by the market-women; he could make bon mots, after a fashion, but bargains not at all. Although his verses were eminently mechanical, his manual dexterity extended to no useful purpose. As for putting up a bedstead, he could no more do it than he could have built a gallows and hung himself with the bed-cord; and he was obliged to wear gaiters all winter from lack of sufficient ingenuity to construct a boot-jack.

But Bob loved his wife, and felt ashamed of his utter inefficiency about the house. When his first child was born, therefore, he determined to reform, and see if he could not acquire some of the faculties in which he found himself so lamentably deficient. So he quit sonneteering and conundrum-making and betook himself to his study, where he passed day and night in profound meditation. His wife thought he was only a little more crazy than usual; but the neighbors contended that he was calculating the centre of gravity. The result, however, upset every body’s gravity, and all their calculations. Bob had invented a cradle! Such a cradle! If I had the pencil of Darley or Martin I could show you something of an idea of this wonderful cradle—but you must imagine. In form it was a happy combination of Cleopatra’s barge and the tub of Diogenes; while in convenience and “general utility” it was at least equal to the Chinese junk at the Battery, or the walking gentleman at the —— theatre. Proud of his baby—for which he was indebted to his wife—he was still prouder of his cradle—which was entirely his own. No sooner was the grand idea perfected than he rushed to the cabinet-maker, who, after anxious reflection on the subject, informed him that it would require a month to give form and mahogany to his magnificent conception. Meanwhile, what was to be done with Baby? He could not, of course, possibly think of sleeping and being rocked in a common cradle—no, that would be rank sacrilege. The father had an idea—Baby should sleep in a champagne-basket, until the cradle was finished. It would be so cool and pleasant—champagne was cool and pleasant—and so promotive of sleep, for were not its contents originally of the pop-py variety? So it was settled that the little Short should take the place of a whole dozen of champagne, and be packed in a basket. Had it been the third, or even the second child, Mrs. Short would have taken the management of affairs more decidedly into her own hands; but young mothers are so tender and yielding!

Mrs. Short was one of those “magnificent creatures” about which newspaper people and dandies “go on so,” in their respective cities throughout Yankeedoodledom; and having taken a husband merely to please Mr. Short, she concluded that she had a perfect right to choose a lover to please herself. Mrs. Short was a tall, majestic woman, with an almost military precision and elegance of carriage. She was one of those sartorial equivoques which the great tailor Nature sometimes suffers to go out of the shop—a full suit of regimentals made up into frock and petticoats. Her complexion was as pure and spotless as a French flower; her hair curled as gracefully about her—curling-tongs—as the young spring tendril round the vine; and her very particular friend was Lieutenant Long of the City Guard. The lieutenant was the exact counterpart of the lady—a military man apparently got up with starch and rice-paper, out of the remnants of a milliner’s shop. But he was not deficient in impudence, and made a pretty income from his thriving trade of trunk-maker. This necessarily brought him more or less acquainted with the invaluable stores of his country’s unread literature, and he even at length managed to get himself on good terms with some of the unappreciated authors and hangers-on of the press. A few suppers at Windust’s, judiciously applied to the reporters, and a thick cotton poultice, applied with equal judgment to each leg, made our hero pass with the public for “that excellent soldier and gallant officer, Lieut. Long,” and in society for a very useful and presentable man.

Mr. Short loved his wife—doted on his baby—and worshiped his cradle. The latter had even exceeded his most sanguine expectations, as is the case of General Tom Thumb with a remarkable number of editors; while, for my own part, that celebrated individual did not come up to my anticipations by several inches. Thus completely occupied, how was it to be expected that Mr. Short should be jealous? If any one had stolen his child—but that’s all humbug—people’s children, especially poor people’s, never are stolen!—or if the model of his new-fashioned cradle had been pirated, he might indeed have been aroused. But while these were all right, the one within the other, and both in their right places, was he not infinitely obliged to Lieutenant Long for his civilities to Mrs. Short? He detested Shakspeare (he supposed that the old humbug still kept his place upon the stage!) and abominated the opera, while his wife was enchantée with both. How very obliging, therefore, of his dear friend, Lieutenant Long, to take her so frequently to these places!—he even insisted upon paying for the tickets!

It was now spring, and Mrs. Short had indicated to her husband the propriety of taking another house and “moving.” The poor man—who entertained the keenest sense of his anti-packing deficiencies—was aghast at the bare idea. It was some time before he could recover the power of speech. When he did, the first use he made of it was to remonstrate.

“But, my dearest Julia, why should we move? Are we not so comfortable and happy here? We have such a nice garden, you know, and then we have just had the Croton put in, and the door-bell mended, and the blowers to all the grates painted black—why does my paragon wish to move?”

“Why? Why, because, because—I’m sure, Mr. Short, you’re very—because, doesn’t every body move? Besides, I’m determined I wont live stuck away in this vulgar part of the town any longer. I declare I’m quite ashamed to tell any body where I live—No. — Madison Street. Nobody lives west of Broadway.”

“Now, my dear angel—”

“Never mind your nonsense—you can save all that, Mr. Short, for little Miss Prim.”

[Mem. Ladies fond of flirting are always particularly jealous of their husbands.]

“My dear Julia, what do you mean about Miss Prim? I never spoke to her but twice in my life.”

“I don’t care—she’s a minx—and you don’t love me.”

“Be calm! I do love you—I swear it by every thing I hold dear—by my child—our child, Julia! by my—by his—cradle!”

“You may go to sea in your stupid old cradle, if you like, and the baby too. I was a fool for ever having either of you.”

Mr. Short was thunderstruck. Such a triple-armed denunciation from the lips of that wife upon whom his very soul doted, was too much—it was annihilation. She boasted that she cared nothing for him—that was dreadful, but he felt that, were it alone, the blow could have been borne. She declared her indifference for his child, his darling, in whose sweet face he was fain to trace, day after day, the mingling beauties of mother and father, softened and purified by the light of infancy. This was awful! But, worse than this, than these, than all—she had actually abused his cradle! she had called it “that stupid old cradle!” Horror! At first he was too overwhelmed to act, or scarcely to think; while the lady kept pinning and unpinning a splendid lace berta around her still more splendid shoulders, and humming a bar of Benedetti’s Tu che a Dio spiegasti l’ali. At length Mr. Short determined to be indignant, and assert the supremacy of outraged manhood. So, swallowing a tremendous mouthful of air, and putting his hands ominously into his trowsers’ pockets, he began,

“Mrs. Short—”

But at the instant her name was uttered, the magnificent creature, throwing aside the slight covering of her beautiful neck, as if by an impulse of spontaneous grace, turned round in a majestic attitude and fixed her eyes, whose fathomless fountains gleamed mysteriously beneath their willowy lids, full upon him.

Reader, have you ever gone a deer-hunting? Well, the first time you took your stand by the “station” where the older sportsmen told you the game was about to pass—you waited with cocked gun and beating heart. At length a rustle—a bound in the bushes, and another in your bosom—you turn, and the noble creature stands directly before you, looking calmly into your very eyes. Well, reader, did you shoot that deer?

Mr. Short took a house the next day in Dishwater Place.

In other cities one day in the year answers for the anniversary of fools, but in Gotham it would seem to require two—and the first of May has come to be infinitely more celebrated for its orgies to Folly than its illustrious predecessor, the first of April. I am not about to attempt its history. Wrecks are its records; strewed along the curb-stones and side-walks that encompass the great ocean of metropolitan life, they beacon with the phosphoric light of decaying wash-stands, and the bleaching bones of dislocated bedsteads, the way to ruin. Suffice it that Mr. Short must “move” on the first of May, simply because every body moved. He had as yet no distinct notion of what he was about to undergo, but it hung over him like a vague, terrible, dark cloud. He counted the days and nights like a criminal waiting the day of his execution, or an undetected bankrupt for the maturity of his first note. He grew thin with apprehension and a kind of nameless terror, which, I have no doubt, furnished Bulwer the hint for his “Dweller of the Threshold.”

At length came the eventful day. Mr. Short had at first tried to escape the horror of moving when every body else was moving, by precipitating his departure from Madison Street—but it was impossible. The house in Dishwater Place was not to be “vacated” until twelve o’clock on the first of May; and at that precise hour, so his landlord informed him, he must “vacate” the premises in Madison Street. Only think of it! Two hundred thousand people turned simultaneously out of house and home, with bed and baggage, on the striking of the clock, and each rushing madly about through a wilderness of fugitive furniture and cracked crockery, in search of a place to lay his head and set down his kettles and bandboxes!

Mr. Short had spent several anxious and sleepless nights. In his waking dreams had passed and repassed in grim procession every article of furniture the house contained, from the mantel-clock to the scrubbing-pail. Ghosts of clamorous cartmen mustered around his pillow, and horrid noises, like the shrieking of broken furniture, blew aside his curtains. A dozen times, in his excited fancy, he packed and re-packed every thing upon the cart. The beds were to be piled thus—the bureaus stood up end-wise in this manner—the looking-glasses, the clock, the carpets, the stoves, the crockery, were all disposed of, at last, and poor Mr. Short, like another great man who don’t know how to pack big boxes, breathed freer and deeper. But then, what was to be done with all the minor utensils, the household “traps,” as they are not inappropriately styled! Where should ride the flat-irons, the preserve-jars, the centre-table ornaments, the lamp-shades, the——he had another idea! He would have a big box, and stow them all safely away in it. Mr. Short was getting to be decidedly a man of mechanical ideas! So the box was ordered and sent home—a gigantic thing, reaching from the door-step to the middle of the street. It was a public wonder. Little niggers played hide and seek around the corners; newsboys cracked jokes against its barn-like sides, and beggars with six children made shelter beneath its shade. Men stared and wondered as they hurried by, and women pointed at it with their parasols, and examined it all round, as if they mistook it for a house to rest, and were curious to see how many rooms there were in the third story.

At last every thing was gone except the big box. Mr. Short had persuaded Mrs. Short to ride out on the Avenue with Lieutenant Long, so as to be out of the way of the racket, and had undertaken to do every thing himself. He had indeed performed wonders. He seemed to have become possessed of a real household inspiration. Like Gen. Taylor at Buena Vista, he was here and there and every where at once, reinforcing every body all round. Up stairs, down cellar, in the box, each hand filled with movables, and a looking-glass, perhaps, under each arm, Mr. Short that day performed prodigies of skill and valor, and actually went far in retrieving the reputation of the family. At the last moment, however, when he was congratulating himself on his brilliant and somewhat unexpected exploits, and, hammer in hand, was preparing to nail down the box, down ran Bridget with the startling announcement,

“Oh, Mr. Short—you like to have forgot the cradle!”

“Good God! so I did! Bring it down in an instant.”

The cradle came, all nicely packed and tucked in with its beautiful white quilt—and in Mr. Short popped it into the box—nailed down the cover with a flourish of triumph, and left it to the tender mercies of the cartman—thoroughly exhausted, and sick with his unusual exertions and the reaction of the tremendous excitement of the day. Knowing that it would be some hours before his wife and the lieutenant would reach home, he strolled, or rather tumbled, into an oyster-cellar, and ate his first meal that day. A glass of punch followed the oysters, and Mr. Short, quite refreshed, emerged from his subterranean paradise, just as the sun stepped across the Hudson and lay down for a nap in the Elysian Fields. Hastening to his new home in Dishwater Place, to see whether his wife and the big box had arrived in safety, he found Bridget busy as a certain personage in a gale of wind, patting things “to rights” in the most notable manner; but neither box nor wife had arrived.

“Well, Bridget, how do you get along?”

“Oh, purty well, I thank ye, Mister Short—but the cartman’s been here, and says the box is stuck fast in Chatham Street, and can’t be got out till morning. And here’s a letter, sir, came this few minutes gone.”

The letter is short, but will materially assist in conducting us to the end of our short story. It was as follows:

“My Dear Sir,—You know I never loved you, and you will not be surprised, therefore, to hear that I have concluded to accept the protection of Lieutenant Long through life. Pursuit will be quite in vain.

Yours, truly,

Julia.”

“P. S. Remember me to Baby—take good care of the precious darling for my sake.”

“The baby! Heavens and earth! Where is the baby then? Bridget, didn’t your lady take the baby with her this morning?”

“Oh no, sir—she took somebody she likes a great deal better than him, sir, I’m thinking.”

“But where is the dear creature? tell me this instant!” shouted the now infuriated man.

“Mercy, mercy, yer honor’s glory! But as I’m a livin’ sinner, it’s in the cradle, packed in the big box, that he is!”