Neat, grave, and courteous in the morning, was Eddie. "What's yours, sir?"
Slightly subdued in the drowsier hours of the afternoon, but courteous still. "What are you having, gentlemen?"
Cheerful, hospitable, and almost convivial in the evening. "What is it this time, boys?"
All things to all men, was Eddie, quiet with the quiet, affable with the affable, cheerful with the exhilarated and the gay; in himself nothing, a perfect reflection of his customer's own mind.
"Have one yourself, Ed," said the customer.
"Thanks, I'll take a cigar."
Eddie's waistcoat pockets, as day drew slowly on to evening, bristled with cigars like a fortress with cannon.
"Here, don't take a smoke, have a drink!" said the customer.
"Thanks, I'll take a lemon sour. Here's luck." Lemon sours, sarsaparillas, and sickly beverages taken in little glassfuls, till the glassfuls ran into gallons -- these were the price that Eddie paid for his abstemiousness.
"Don't you ever take anything, Ed?" asked the uninitiated.
"I never use it," he answered.
But Eddie's principal office was that of a receptive listener, and, as such, always in agreement.
"Cold, ain't it?" said the customer.
"It sure is!" answered Eddie with a shiver.
"By Gosh, it's warm!" said another ten minutes later.
''Certainly a hot day/' Ed murmured, quite faint with the heat.
Out of such gentle agreement is fabricated the structure of companionship.
"I'll bet you that John L. will lick Jim Corbett in one round!"
''I wouldn't be surprised/' says Eddie.
'Til bet you that this young Jim Corbett will trim John L. in five minutes!"
"Yes, I guess he might easily enough/' says Eddie.
Out of this followed directly and naturally Eddie's function as arbitrator, umpire, and world's court.
'Til leave it to Ed," calls the customer. "See here, Ed, didn't Maud S. hold the record at 2.35 before ever Jay Eye See ran at all? Ain't that so? I bet him a dollar and I says, Til leave it to Ed/ says I."
That was the kind of question that Eddie had to arbitrate -- technical, recondite, controversial. The chief editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica couldn't have touched it. And he had to do it with peace and good will on both sides, and make it end somehow with the interrogation, "What are you having, gentlemen?"
But Eddie was not only by profession a conversationalist, a companion, and a convivialist, he was also in his degree a medical man, prescribing for his patients.
This was chiefly in the busy early morning, when the bar first opened up for the day.
Eddie's "patients" lined up before him, asking for eye-openers, brain-clearers, head-removers.
Behind Eddie, on little shelves, was a regular pharmacopoeia; a phalanx of bottles -- ticketed, labelled -- some with marbles in the top stopper, some with little squirting tubes in the mouth. Out of these came bitters, sweets, flavours, peppers-- things that would open the eyes, lift the hair, and renovate the whole man.
Eddie, shaking and mixing furiously, proceeded to open their eyes, clear up their brains, and remove their heads.
"I've got a head this morning, Ed. Fix me up something to take it away."
"Sure,' said Eddie in return, "I'll fix it for you."
By 8 a.m. Eddie had them all straightened up and fixed. Some were even able to take a drink and start over.
This was in the early morning. But at other times, as for example, quite late at night, Ed appeared in another role -- that of the champion strong man. Who would suspect the muscles of steel concealed behind Eddie's wicker cuffs and his soft white shirt-sleeves? Who could expect anger from a countenance so undisturbed, a nature so unruffled, a mind so little given to argument?
But wait! Listen to that fierce quarrel punctuated with unpunctuable language between two "bums" out on the barroom floor. Lo! at the height of it Eddie clears the mahogany counter in a single leap, seizes the two "bums" each by the collar, and with a short rush and a flying throw hurls them both out of the swinging doors bang on the sidewalk!
Anger? No, not that; inspired indignation is the proper phrase. Ed represented the insulted majesty of a peaceful public anxious only to be let alone.
"Don't make no trouble in here," was Eddie's phrase. There must be "no trouble" within the sacred precincts. Trouble was for the outside, for the sidewalk, for the open street, where "trouble" could lie breathing heavily in the gutter till a "cop" took it where it belonged.
Thus did Eddie, and his like, hurl "trouble" out into the street, and with it, had they only known it, hurled away their profession and their livelihood.
This was their downfall.
Thus on the sunshine of Eddie's tranquil life descended, shadow by shadow, the eclipse of prohibition.
Eddie watched its approach, nearer and nearer.
"What are you going to go at, Ed?" they asked.
"I've been thinking of going into chicken farming," Eddie used to answer, as he swabbed off the bar. 'They say there's good money in chickens."
Next week it was turkeys.
"A fellow was in here telling me about it/' Ed said. 'They say there's big money in turkeys."
After that it was a farm in Vermont, and then it was a ranch out in Kansas. But it was always something agricultural, bucolic, quiet.
Meanwhile Eddie stayed right there, pumping up the flooding beer and swabbing off the foam from the mahogany, till the days, the hours, and the minutes ticked out his livelihood.
Like the boy on the burning deck, he never left.
Where is he now? Eddie and all the other Eddies, the thousands of them? I don't know. There are different theories about them. Some people say they turned into divinity students and that they are out as canvassers selling Bibles to the farmers. You may still recognize them, it is claimed, by the gentle way in which they say, "What's yours this morning?"
There is no doubt their tranquil existence, sheltered behind the tall mahogany, unfitted them for the rough and tumble of ordinary life.
Perhaps, under prohibition, they took to drink. In the cities, even their habitat has gone. The corner saloon is now a soda fountain, where golden-headed blondes ladle out red and white sundaes and mushy chocolates and smash eggs into orange phosphates.
But out in the solitude of the country you may still see, here and there, boarded up in oblivion and obliquity, the frame building that was once the "tavern." No doubt at night, if it's late enough and dark enough, ghostly voices still whisper in the empty barroom, haunted by the spectres of the Eddies -- "What's yours, gentlemen?"
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