In all the trade of the city you might not find such another quaint business firm as Solomon John and Billy Wigg. The senior partner was a gentle old giant; the junior a brisk and shaggy little dog. It was Solomon John’s business to stand on a roaring corner and sell papers; it was Billy Wigg’s business to take care of him while he did it, for he was blind. It was our business—Dr. Harvey’s and mine—to pay for our papers and pass on, but we seldom strictly minded it. Instead, we would stop to talk to Solomon John to the detriment of trade, and to be patronised by Billy Wigg, who was much puffed up with self-importance, conceiving himself to be principal owner of the earth and sole proprietor of Solomon John. In the half of which he was correct.
I was very fond of Billy Wigg, despite his airs of superiority. Harvey preferred old Solomon; but this was a semi-professional interest, for my medical friend had contracted the pamphlet habit, which he indulged before scientific bodies made up of gentlemen with weak eyes who knew more about ophthalmology than can be found in many fat tomes. Solomon John was a remarkable case of something quite unpronounceable, and Harvey used to gaze into his eyes with rapt intensity, while Billy Wigg fidgeted and struggled against the temptation to gnaw such portions of him as were within reach; for Billy Wigg didn’t understand, and what he didn’t understand he disapproved of on principle. In the light of subsequent events I believe Billy’s uneasiness to have been an instance of animal prevision.
To see Billy Wigg conduct his master across that mill-race of traffic that swirled between curb and curb, as he did every morning in time for business, was an artistic pleasure. Something more than a mere pilot was the dog; rather the rudder to whose accurate direction old Solomon responded with precise and prompt fidelity. A tug of the trouser leg from behind would bring the ancient newsboy to a halt. A gentle jerk forward would start him again, and in obedience to a steady pull to one side or the other he would trustingly suffer himself to be conducted around a checked wagon or a halted cable car. All the time Billy Wigg would keep up a running conversation made up of admonition, warning, and encouragement.
“Come on, now”—in a series of sharp yaps as they started from the curb. “Push right ahead. Hold hard. That’s all right; it’s by. Hurry now. Hurry, I said. Will you do as I tell you?” Then, to a too pressing cabby, in an angry bark, “What’s the matter with you, anyway? Trying to run folks down? Hey? Well”—apologetically, in response to a jerk on his string—“these fool drivers do stir me up. Wait a bit. Now for it. And here we are.”
How many thousand times dog and man had made the trip in safety before the dire day of the accident not even Solomon John can reckon. Harvey and I had started down town early, while our pair of paper-vending friends chanced to be a little late. As we reached the corner they were already half-way across the street, and Billy Wigg, with all the strength of terror, was striving to haul Solomon John backward.
“What’s the matter with Billy?” said Harvey, for from the sidewalk we could not then see the cause of his excitement.
A second later the question was answered, as there plunged into view from behind a car the galloping horse of a derelict delivery wagon.
“Good heavens! Look at the old man,” I cried, and in the same breath, “Look at the dog,” gasped Harvey.
With one mighty jerk Billy Wigg had torn the leash from his master’s hand. Bereft of his sole guidance in the thunder and rush of traffic, the blind man stretched out piteous hands, warding the death he could not see. “Billy,” he quavered, “where are you, Billy? Come back to me, Billy-dog.”
For once Billy Wigg was deaf to his master’s voice. He was obeying a more imperious call, that unfathomed nobility of dog-nature that responds so swiftly to the summons. He was casting his own life in the balance to save another’s. Straight at the horse’s throat he launched himself, a forlorn hope. It was a very big horse, and Billy was a very little dog. The up-stroke of the knee caught him full; he was flung, whirling, fell almost under the wheels of a cab, rolled into the gutter, and lay there quiet. The horse had swerved a little, not quite enough. There was a scream, and the blind man went down from the glancing impact of the shoulder. Harvey and I were beside him almost as soon as the cross-walk policeman. The three of us carried him to the side-walk.
“No need to call an ambulance, officer,” said Harvey. “I’m a physician and the man is a friend of mine.”
“Bedad, thin, the dawg is a friend of mine,” said the big fellow. “Couldn’t ye take him along too, sir?”
“Well—rather,” said Harvey heartily. “Where is he?” He turned to look for the dog.
Billy Wigg came crawling toward us. Never tell me that dogs have no souls. The eyes in Billy’s shaggy little face yearned with a more than human passion of anxiety and love, as, gasping with pain—for he had been cruelly shaken—he dragged himself to his partner’s face. At the touch of the warm, eager tongue, Solomon John’s eyes opened. He stretched out his hand and buried it in the heavy fur.
“Hello, Billy,” he said weakly. “I was afraid you were hurt. Are you all right, old boy?” And Billy, burrowing a wet nose in Solomon John’s neck, wept for joy with loud whines.
Some rapid and expert wire-pulling on the part of Harvey landed our pair of friends in a private hospital, where Solomon John proved a most grateful and gentle patient, and Billy Wigg a most tumultuous one until arrangement was made for the firm to occupy one and the same cot. Then he became tractable, even enduring the indignity of a flannel jacket and splints with a sort of humorous tolerance. Every day Harvey came and gazed soulfully into Solomon John’s glazed eyes—which is a curious form of treatment for broken collar-bone, not sanctioned by any of the authorities who have written on the subject. It soon became evident that Harvey didn’t care anything about the rib; he had other designs. On a day he came to the point.
“Solomon John, would you like to have your sight back?”
The blind man sat up in his cot and pressed his hands to his head.
“Do you mean it, sir?” he gasped. “You—you wouldn’t go to fool an old man about such a thing?”
“Will you let me operate on you to-morrow?”
“Anything you think best, sir. I don’t quite seem to take it all in yet, sir—not the whole sense of it. But if it does come out right,” added Solomon John in the simplicity of his soul, “won’t Billy Wigg be surprised and tickled!”
Billy Wigg raged mightily and rent the garments of his best friends, because he was shut out during the operation. When he was admitted after it was over he howled tumultuously, because Solomon John was racked with ether sickness, which he mistook for the throes of approaching dissolution. Followed then weeks during which Solomon John wore a white bandage, in place of the old green eye-shade, and at frequent intervals sang a solemn but joyous chant which Billy Wigg accompanied with impatient yelps, because he couldn’t make out what it meant:
It was a long, nerve-trying wait, but the day finally came when the white bandages were removed. After the first gasp of rapture, Solomon John looked about him eagerly.
“Let me see my dog,” he said. “Billy, is this you?” as the junior partner looked with anxious and puzzled eyes into his face. “Well, you’re certainly a mighty handsome doggy, old boy.” (Billy Wigg was homelier than a stack of hay in January, but the eyes that looked on him were as those of a mother when she sees her first babe).
Unhappiness was the portion of Billy in the days that followed. A partner who wandered about unchaperoned and eluded obstacles without relying on his sense of touch was quite beyond his comprehension. So he sulked consistently until the time came for leaving the hospital. Then he chirked up a bit, thinking, presumably, that Solomon John would resume his old habit of blind reliance upon him when once the doors had closed behind them. Poor Billy!
It was three weeks after the operation that they left, Solomon John being discharged as cured. Harvey exulted. He said it was a great operation and proved things. I thought, myself, it was a mean trick on Billy Wigg. My unprofessional diagnosis was that he was on the road to becoming a chronic melancholiac.
The partners called on Harvey soon after the departure from the hospital. They were a study in psychological antithesis; Solomon John bubbling over with boyish happiness, Billy Wigg aged with the weight of woe he was carrying. The old man was touchingly grateful, but his ally surreptitiously essayed to bite a piece out of Harvey’s leg when his back was turned. He nursed an unavenged wrong.
Months passed before we saw the pair again. We returned from our European vacation confident of finding them on the same old corner, and sure enough, they were there. But as we approached Harvey seized me by the arm.
“Good heaven’s! Bob! Look at the old man!”
“What’s wrong with him?” said I. “He looks just the same as he used to.”
“Just the same as he used to,” echoed Harvey bitterly. “Eye-shade and all. All my work gone for nothing. Poor old boy!”
“Billy Wigg’s all right, anyway,” said I, as that superior animal greeted us with every indication of excitement.
“Think so?” said Harvey. “It strikes me that it isn’t exactly welcome that he’s trying to express.” Then, in a louder voice to Solomon John, “How did it happen, old Sol?”
At the sound of his voice Solomon John whirled about and started to thrust up his shade, as if involuntarily. Then he held out tremulous hands, crying; “What! Is that you, Dr. Harvey? God bless you, sir! And is Mr. Roberts with you? Well, well, but this does me good. You’re a sight for sore eyes!”
“Not for yours, Solomon John.”
“And why not, then? Whist! I forgot,” he broke off scaredly, jerking his head toward Billy Wigg, who held us all under jealous scrutiny. “Wait a breath.” Thrusting his hand into his pocket, he whipped it out suddenly. A flight of coins scattered and twinkled and rolled diversely on the side-walk. “Dear, dear!” cried the old man cunningly. “The old fool that I am! I’ll never be rich this way. Pick them up, Billy-boy.”
Billy hated it, for picking small coins from a smooth pavement with lip and tooth is no easy job; hated worse leaving his partner to two such unscrupulous characters as he well knew us to be. But he knew his business, and set about it with all his energies.
“Whisper now,” said the senior partner as Billy swore under his breath at a slithery and elusive dime. “I’ve as fine a pair of eyes as you’d want for star-gazing at noonday.”
“Then what on earth—”
“Sh-h-h! Soft and easy! The beast’s cocking his little ear this way. Sure ’twas all on his account, sirs.”
“On Billy’s account?” we both exclaimed in a breath.
“You didn’t think I’d be faking it?” he asked reproachfully.
We didn’t; and we said so. But we required further enlightenment.
“All on account of Billy Wigg there, sirs. The eyesight was a million blessings to me, but ’twas death to poor Billy. Not a pleasure in life would he take after we left the hospital. When I’d walk free and easy along the streets that looked so pretty to my old eyes, the dog’d be crazy with fear that some harm would come to me through him not leading me. At the last he just laid down and set out to die. He’d not sleep, he’d not eat; and the eyes of him when he’d look at me were fit to make a man weep. I sent for a dog doctor—you being away, sir,” put in Solomon John in polite parenthesis to my friend. “He says, ‘The dog’s dying of a broken heart. I’ve seen it before,’ he says. ‘What’ll I do? ’says I. ‘He’ll not be content till you are, as you were before,’ says the dog doctor. It was a minute before I sensed what he meant. Then my heart got thick and sick inside me. ‘Blind?’ I says. ‘Is that what you mean?’ ‘You old fool,’ says the dog doctor, ‘can’t you do a bit of play-acting? You’ve had enough practice in the part,’ he says.
“Over I went and got my stick and put on the old shade that I hadn’t ever thought to use again, thanks to you sir, and tap-tapped across the floor to Billy Wigg. ‘Come on, Billy,’ says I; ‘I want you to take me out for a walk.’ Billy jumped up with a kind of choky bark, and I hugged Billy and Billy hugged me, and—we’ve been doing business on the corner ever since.”
There was a long pause. Harvey’s expression was queer. I felt a little queer myself. It was a queer story, you know. Finally I asked the old man if business was good. Not that I particularly yearned to know, but it seemed to be time to say something.
“Nicely, sir, thank you,” said Solomon John; “but I want to ask you, Is it a dishonesty, think you, for me to be wearing my shade like a blind man, and me able to see a flea on the end of Billy Wigg’s tail the length of the block away? The Lord’s been mighty good to me, sir—you and the Lord—giving me back my sight,” said Solomon John simply, turning to Harvey, “and I wouldn’t want to do anything that wasn’t just square.”
“I wouldn’t let it weigh on my mind,” said Harvey.
“I’d been thinking of a bit of a sign,” proceeded Solomon John. ‘A friend printed it out for me, but the idea’s my own.”
After some fumbling under his coat he produced a placard artfully designed in large and flourishy letters. This was the order of it:
I Am NOT Blind
but
The Dog
Thinks I Am.
Billy Wigg seemed pleased because Harvey kicked me. No doubt he would have been equally pleased if I had kicked Harvey. But it happened to be I who laughed. Harvey covered it up by soberly telling Solomon John that the sign was sure to be a grand success.
It was a grand success; quite stupendous, in fact. Old Sol did a business on the strength of it that would have made his eyes pop out if he hadn’t kept them tight shut out of respect to Billy’s prejudices. Reporters found his simplicity and naïve honesty a mine of “good stuff,” and the picture of the firm was in all the papers. Billy Wigg began to suffer from swelled head; became haughty, not to say snobbish. But the fierce light of publicity wore upon the simple soul of Solomon John. He discarded the extraordinary placard, and was glad when he faded away from fame. Billy wasn’t. He liked notoriety as well as authority.
Billy continued to exercise his authority. Perhaps tyranny would be nearer the mark. But even so meek a soul as that of Solomon John has limits of endurance beyond which it is not well to press. Only the other day it was that the old man said to Harvey, while Billy Wigg was otherwise engaged:
“It’s as bad as being a henpecked husband, sir. Last night, as I was quietly stepping out the window to take a mug of ale with some friends, Billy wakes up, and the fuss he makes rouses the neighbourhood. Sure, he wouldn’t hark to my going at all. You can see his teeth-marks on my shin this minute, sir. Could you give me something harmless to put in his food that’d make him sleep the sounder?”
Harvey said he’d think about it. He wasn’t obliged to. Less than a week later he got a note in the mail:
“Dear Sir—I could not stand it any longer. I have Absconded to Buffalo to Take a Rest. Please be Good to Billy Wigg. I inclose his Board and Lodging any place you Put him. He is a good Dog, but too Bossy. I am Going to See Things till my Eyes get Tired. I will come Back in Future.—Yrs respectfully,
“Solomon J. Boles.
“P.S.—I know you will Treat Billy Good.”
The enclosure was a twenty-dollar bill. It was the price of freedom, and cheap at the price.