第33章 THE DOOR OF UNREST(4)

"Why, yes," said the judge."And that reminds me of my shoes he has for mending.Here is his shop now."Judge Hoover stepped into a dingy, small shop.I looked up at the sign, and saw "Mike O'Bader, Boot and Shoe Maker," on it.Some wild geese passed above, honking clearly.I scratched my ear and frowned, and then trailed into the shop.

There sat my Wandering Jew on his shoemaker's bench, trimming a half-sole.He was drabbled with dew, grass-stained, unkempt, and miserable; and on his face was still the unexplained wretchedness, the problematic sorrow, the esoteric woe, that had been written there by nothing less, it seemed, than the stylus of the centuries.

Judge Hoover inquired kindly concerning his shoes.The old shoemaker looked up, and spoke sanely enough.He had been ill, he said, for a few days.The next day the shoes would be ready.He looked at me, and Icould see that I had no place in his memory.So out we went, and on our way.

"Old Mike," remarked the candidate, "has been on one of his sprees.He gets crazy drunk regularly once a month.But he's a good shoemaker.""What is his history?" I inquired.

"Whiskey," epitomized Judge Hoover."That explains him."I was silent, but I did not accept the explanation.And so, when I had the chance, I asked old man Sellers, who browsed daily on my exchanges.

"Mike O'Bader," said he, "was makin' shoes in Montopolis when I come here goin' on fifteen year ago.I guess whiskey's his trouble.Once a month he gets off the track, and stays so a week.He's got a rigmarole somethin' about his bein' a Jew pedler that he tells ev'rybody.Nobody won't listen to him any more.When he's sober he ain't sich a fool --he's got a sight of books in the back room of his shop that he reads.Iguess you can lay all his trouble to whiskey."But again I would not.Not yet was my Wandering Jew rightly construed for me.I trust that women may not be allowed a title to all the curiosity in the world.So when Montopolis's oldest inhabitant (some ninety score years younger than Michob Ader) dropped in to acquire promulgation in print, I siphoned his perpetual trickle of reminiscence in the direction of the uninterpreted maker of shoes.

Uncle Abner was the Complete History of Montopolis, bound in butternut.

"O'Bader," he quavered, "come here in '69.He was the first shoemaker in the place.Folks generally considers him crazy at times now.But he don't harm nobody.I s'pose drinkin' upset his mind -- yes, drinkin' very likely done it.It's a powerful bad thing, drinkin'.I'm an old, old man, sir, and I never see no good in drinkin'."I felt disappointment.I was willing to admit drink in the case of my shoemaker, but I preferred it as a recourse instead of a cause.Why had he pitched upon his perpetual, strange note of the Wandering Jew? Why his unutterable grief during his aberration? I could not yet accept whiskey as an explanation.

"Did Mike O'Bader ever have a great loss or trouble of any kind?" I asked.

"Lemme see! About thirty year ago there was somethin' of the kind, Irecollect.Montopolis, sir, in them days used to be a mighty strict place.

"Well, Mike O'Bader had a daughter then -- a right pretty girl.She was too gay a sort for Montopolis so one day she slips off to another town and runs away with a circus.It was two years before she comes back, all fixed up in fine clothes and rings and jewellery, to see Mike.He wouldn't have nothin' to do with her, so she stays around town awhile, anyway.I reckon the men folks wouldn't have raised no objections, but the women egged 'em on to order her to leave town.But she had plenty of spunk, and told 'em to mind their own business.

"So one night they decided to run her away.A crowd of men and women drove her out of her house, and chased her with sticks and stones.She run to her father's door, callin' for help.Mike opens it, and when he sees who it is he hits her with his fist and knocks her down and shuts the door.

"And then the crowd kept on chunkin' her till she run clear out of town.

And the next day they finds her drowned dead in Hunter's mill pond.Imind it all now.That was thirty year ago."I leaned back in my non-rotary revolving chair and nodded gently, like a mandarin, at my paste-pot.

"When old Mike has a spell," went on Uncle Abner, tepidly garrulous, "he thinks he's the Wanderin' Jew.""He is," said I, nodding away.

And Uncle Abner cackled insinuatingly at the editor's remark, for he was expecting at least a "stickful" in the "Personal Notes" of the _Bugle_.