(From _The Midland_)
A subway express train roared into the Fourteenth Street Station and
came to a full stop, and the doors slid open. It was just at the lull of
traffic before the rush of the late afternoon, and the cars were only
comfortably filled. As the train stopped, a small, unobtrusive man,
sitting near one end of the third car, quickly rose from his seat on the
side of the car facing the station platform, and peered through the
opposite windows. All the way up from Wall Street this little man had
sat quietly observing through his deep-set grey eyes every man or woman
who had entered or left the car. His figure was slight, and the office
pallor that overspread his serious face seemed to give to his eyes a
singular intensity of gaze. Now he peered intently out at the people on
the Fourteenth Street platform.
Suddenly his eyes dilated; he leaned toward the window, and raised both
hands as if to shade his eyes. Then he turned and ran toward the door,
which was sliding shut. The little man's face was white as chalk; his
eyes were round and blazing with excitement. Against the protests of the
guard, he squeezed through the door and made his escape just as the
train was beginning to move. Heedless of the commotion he caused, the
man dodged wildly across the platform toward a local, which stood there,
gongs ringing and doors closing. For all his haste, the little man was
too late to enter. He pounded on the glass of one of the closed doors
imperiously.
"Next train," said the guard shortly.
"Let me on!" demanded the little man, waving his arms wildly. "Let me
on! You have time!"
"Next train," repeated the guard.
The train began to move swiftly. The little man ran alongside, peering
in through the windows at something or somebody inside.
"Look out!" called the guard, watching him.
The man, however, paid no attention to the warning. It is strange that
he was not hurt as he ran blindly alongside the train. Perilously near
the end of the platform he stopped short and put his hand to his head.
The train thundered away, its colored rear-lights vanishing far-off in
the black tunnel. Oblivious to the interest of the spectators, oblivious
to all the hurrying and running and crowding as other trains roared into
the underground station, the little man leaned limply against a pillar.
"He's gone!" he muttered to himself. "He's gone!"
For upward of twenty years Mr. James Neal had been a clerk in the
offices of Fields, Jones & Houseman on Lower Broadway. Every day of
these twenty-odd years, if we except Sundays and holidays, Mr. Neal had
spent an hour and a half on subway trains. An hour and a half every day
for more than twenty years he had spent in the great underground system
of the Interborough. Its ceaseless roar benumbed his senses as he was
hurtled from the Bronx, where he had a room, to the Imperial Building,
where he worked, and back again. This, as he had often computed,
amounted to fifty-eight and a half working days each year, or about two
months' time. Such was the fee he paid to Time for the privilege of
using other hours for working and living. It had seemed a cruel loss at
first--this hour and a half from every working day--but that was in the
early days of his experience in the city. Then he had been driven by
boundless energy and hope--the same energy and the same hope that had
brought him here from his little mid-western community in the first
place. Year by year, however, as custom calloused him to the only part
in life he seemed fit to play, he forgot about the waste of time in the
Interborough cars. Destiny, he said to himself, had hollowed out the
subway as the rut in which his life was ordained to travel; destiny had
condemned him inescapably to an underground roar.
He never confessed to anyone that he held the subway as the sign and
symbol of the rut into which his life had grown. There was, indeed,
nobody to whom he might impart such thoughts as he had about the deeper
meanings of life. When Mr. Neal first came to Fields, Jones &
Houseman's, timid and green from the country, he had been repelled by
the lack of interest in his new problems on the part of his fellow
clerks, and he had then put on for the first time that armor of
indifference which now clung to him with the familiarity of an
accustomed garment. Nor did he feel a greater kinship with the family in
the Bronx with which he lodged. They were at pains not to annoy him; he
kept apart from them.
Perhaps the pallid little clerk with the large grey eyes would have
become very lonesome if he had not eventually found a real interest in
life. This, then, was the manner and substance of his finding.
As he traveled back and forth on the subway morning and evening, day in
and day out, week after week, he wasted the hours much more completely
than most of his fellow travelers. The average subway passenger reads
his newspaper and forgets the world; he knows by some sixth sense when
the train has arrived at his station, and only then does he look up from
his reading. Mr. Neal seldom read newspapers. The blatancy, the
crassness of the daily prints revolted him. Perhaps there was another
reason, too, which Mr. Neal himself did not realize; perhaps the settled
selfishness which his manner of life had fixed upon him had destroyed a
natural craving for the so-called "human interest" that is spread over
the pages of the journals of the metropolis. He despised the little
brawls aired in the papers, the bickerings of politics, the fights and
strikes and broils of all humanity reflected in daily mirrors.
Self-deprived of the newspapers, it was natural that he should fall to
watching the people on the cars. He got to studying faces. At first he
did it unconsciously, and he had probably been analyzing features idly
for years before he discovered and fully realized how extremely
interesting this occupation was becoming. One half holiday he went up to
the library and read a book on physiognomy, and after that he laid out
his course of study carefully, classifying and laying away in his memory
the various types of faces that he saw. He pursued his investigations in
the detached, careful spirit of the scientist, but as time passed he was
absorbingly interested. Every morning and every evening he worked in his
laboratory--the subway trains.
He never had to stand up in the cars, for he boarded them, whether at
one end of his trip or the other, before they were crowded; but as soon
as crowds began to fill up the aisles he always gave up his seat. This
naturally gained him repeated credit for courtesy, but the real reason
for his apparent gallantry was that he could not see people's faces when
he was sitting while others stood in the aisles. But when he hung to a
strap and looked at the window in front of him, the blackness outside
combined with the bright light of the car to make the glass of the
windows an excellent mirror to reflect the faces of those who stood near
him.
To classify faces according to nationality was not easy in the polyglot
crowds of this East Side line. But Mr. Neal devised many schemes to help
him. He watched the papers they read: everybody read papers! He even
ventured when greatly curious, to ask a question of the object of his
interest, so that the man might reveal his origin. Usually he was
rebuffed, but sometimes he was successful. He read all the books on
immigrants he could get his hands on. More than once he even followed a
rare specimen--shadowed him to his work and there made guarded
inquiries. Such investigations had several times made him late to work,
so that his chief had made sarcastic remarks. The chief clerk at Fields,
Jones & Houseman's was a tall, gaunt, old-young man with a hawk-like
nose that carried eyeglasses perched perilously astride it, and he had a
tongue that spit caustic. But the chief clerk's ugly words did not annoy
Mr. Neal if his inquiry had been successful.
At length he became so skillful that he could separate the Slavic types
into their various nationalities, and he could tell Polish, Lithuanian
and Roumanian Jews apart. He could name the provinces from which
Italians and Germans came with few errors.
But the most interesting set of categories, according to which he filed
away the various faces he saw was that of their ruling passions. There
was the scholar, the sport, the miser, the courtesan, the little
shopkeeper, the clerk, the housewife, the artist, the brute, the
hypocrite, the clergyman, the bar-hound, the gambler. The charm of this
classification was that the categories were not mutually exclusive, and
permitted infinite variation.
Mr. Neal became as devoted to this fascinating game as ever any
enthusiast has been to billiards, golf, baseball or poker. He looked
forward all day, while in the midst of the ancient grind of Fields,
Jones & Houseman, to the moment when he could establish himself in a
position of vantage on a subway car, and get back to his study of faces.
All night long he dreamed of faces--faces wise and foolish, good and
evil.
Yet more and more the ugliness in the subway faces oppressed Mr. Neal.
Sometimes he looked into faces loosened by liquor and saw such an empty
foulness looking out at him that he was heartsick. Then he would look at
all the faces about him and see sin in manifold guise marking all of
them. The sodden eyes of disillusion, the protruding underlip of lust,
the flabby wrinkles of dissipation, the vacuous faces of women: it was a
heart-breaking picture gallery.
Every face was stamped with the little passion peculiar to it--the mark
of its peculiar spirit. The mouths, especially, betrayed the souls
within. Somewhere Mr. Neal had once read weird stories of souls seen to
escape from the bodies of dying persons, and always they had been seen
to issue from the open mouths of the corpses. There was a singular
appropriateness in this phenomenon, it seemed to Mr. Neal, for the soul
stamped the mouth even before it marked the eyes. Lewd mouths, and
cunning mouths, and hateful mouths there were aplenty. Even the mouths
of children were old in evil.
"I'm sorry I've learned it," breathed Mr. Neal one day. "Now I must
always look into a man's soul when I look into his face."
It was true. Men who could hide secret sins from bosom friends--even
from their wives--were defenseless against this little clerk hanging to
a strap--this man with the serious pale face and the large grey eyes who
had learned by years of systematic observation to pierce every barrier
of reserve.
His study and classification went on for several years before it
occurred to him that there was one kind of face that he never saw--one
type that he never found in all the Manhattan crowds. When he had first
discovered that this face was missing he had called it "the good face;"
and though he realized the insufficiency of this designation he could
not think of a better, and the term stuck. It was not that he never saw
faces with good qualities stamped upon them: he sometimes saw faces
marked with benevolence, honesty and resolution, for example, and these
were all good faces in a way. But they were not what Mr. Neal was
looking for--what he searched for more intently with the passing months.
He remembered the face of his own mother dimly through the years; it was
a little like what he wanted to see here in the subway. He searched for
simplicity, for transparent truth, for depth of spirituality, for meek
strength and gentle power. But simplicity in the subway? Guileless
transparency of any sort? Spirituality? Mockery!
The face he never saw became an obsession with Mr. Neal. He hunted for
it in various parts of the city. He tried the Broadway line of the
subway where the faces are notably pleasanter, more prosperous, and
smugger. But neither there nor about the Universities on Morningside
Heights and on the banks of the Harlem, nor in Brooklyn, nor anywhere he
looked, did he find the face he sought. He could always see it when he
closed his eyes. At night he dreamed of it continuously--of meeting it
on the subway and looking into eyes of ineffable kindness.
It came finally to affect his life--this search for the unseen face. It
gradually altered his attitude toward all his subway folk. He came to
have a great pity for the ignorant, and pain filled his heart at all the
marks of Cain he saw. He came to have an inexpressible hunger for the
sight of spiritual quality lighting the faces of the people of the
subway crowds. He did not express his hunger in words, as people do when
they want to make a thing definite and tangible. It was perfectly clear
and distinct to him when he closed his eyes; then he saw the face.
The time came when Mr. Neal could not sleep of nights for the evil faces
that leered at him from every side out of the darkness. It was only when
he slept that he could see, in his dreams, the "good face." Finally, he
was driven to make a resolution. He would consciously seek for the good
faces; evil ones he would pass over quickly. Thenceforward he was
happier. As his train roared through the tunnels of night under New
York, his eyes dwelt most upon the faces that were marked, however
lightly, with the qualities that reached their united culmination in the
"good face." He found his old faith in the perfectibility of man
renewed, and often he would keep his eyes closed for many minutes
together, so that he could see the face of his dreams.
So months went on, and joined together into years.
Then, one day in the subway, with his eyes full open, James Neal
suddenly saw the face! He had been going home from work in the evening
quite as usual. The express train on which he was riding was about to
leave Fourteenth Street Station when a tall man who was about to enter
the local train standing at the other side of the station platform
turned and looked directly at him. Mr. Neal's heart almost stopped
beating. His eyes were blinded, and yet he saw the face so distinctly
that he could never forget it. It was just as he had known it would be,
and yet gentler and stronger. A moment Mr. Neal stood spellbound. The
door of his own car was sliding shut; he leaped toward it, and, as we
have already seen, squeezed through and ran toward the other train.
Though he was too late to get in, still he could see the face within the
moving car. Thinking about it later, as he did very, very often, he
realized that he could not tell how the man with the "good face" was
dressed; he could see only his face, and that for a moment only, as the
local moved swiftly out of the station. Suddenly he found himself alone
and disconsolate.
He went home sick in spirit. As he lay in his bed that night, trying to
go to sleep, he said to himself that if ever he should see the face
again--and he prayed that he might--no merely physical barriers should
keep him from seeking out the rare spirit that animated such features.
Ah, but it had been much even to have seen that face; even that had been
worth living for. At last he fell asleep peacefully.
The next morning Mr. Neal entered upon a new life. He had seen the face;
it had not been a dream after all. He felt young again--not young with
the ambition he had once felt so strongly, but glad and cleansed and
strengthened by a sure faith in the supremacy of truth and goodness in
the world. A happy smile lighted his serious face that morning; a faint
flush touched the pallor of his cheeks; and his deep grey eyes were
unusually luminous.
Even the roar of the subway did not pull his spirits down, and when he
briskly entered the office of Fields, Jones & Houseman, the
old-fashioned high desks and stools and all the worn, dingy furniture of
the room seemed to the little clerk with the shining face to be
strangely new. The chief clerk, sitting at a dusty old roll-top desk in
the corner, looked up at Mr. Neal sharply as he entered. The chief clerk
always looked up sharply. There was a preternatural leanness about the
chief clerk which was accentuated by his sharp hawk's nose, and when he
looked up quickly from his position hunched over his desk, his sharp
little eyes pierced his subordinate through and through, and his
glasses, perched halfway down his nose, trembled from the quickness of
his movements.
"Morning!" he said briefly, and dived down again into his work, with his
shoulders humped.
But Mr. Neal was more expansive.
"Good morning!" he called, so cheerily that the whole office felt the
effect of his good humor.
A young man with a very blond pompadour was just slipping into a worn
office coat.
"Well, Mr. Neal!" he exclaimed. "I swear you're getting younger every
day!"
Mr. Neal laughed happily as he changed his own coat and climbed upon his
familiar stool. His desk neighbor turned and regarded him
good-naturedly.
"He'll be running off and getting married pretty soon," prophesied the
neighbor, for the benefit of the whole office force.
Mr. Neal laughed again.
"You're judging me by your own case, Bob," he rejoined. Then in a lower
tone, "That romance of yours now--how is it coming?"
That was enough to cause the young man to pour into Mr. Neal's willing
ear all the latest developments of Bob's acquaintance with the only girl
in the world.
For a long time Mr. Neal lived in daily hope of seeing the face again.
He got into the habit of changing to a local at Fourteenth Street
because it was at that station he had seen the face before, but he
caught not a glimpse of any face resembling the one that he could see at
any time he closed his eyes. Yet he was not discouraged. He was happy,
because he felt that something big and noble had come into his
life--that now he had something to live for. It was only a question of
time, he told himself, until he should find the face. It was but a
question of time--and he could wait.
So the weeks and months passed by. Mr. Neal never relaxed his search for
the face; it had become a part of his life. There was no monotony in his
great game. He always found new faces interesting to classify, some
unusual combination, some degree of emotional development he had not
seen before. But _the_ face never.
Until one Saturday half holiday in December. This is the way it
happened.
Mr. Neal employed this particular half holiday at Columbus Park. Long
ago he had found this park, adjoining Chatham Square and near Chinatown,
Mulberry Bend and the Bowery, a great gathering place for the lower
types of humanity, and such half holidays as he did not spend at the
library studying Lombroso, Darwin, Piderit, Lavater, and other
physiognomists, he usually employed at Columbus Park. Sometimes he
wandered over to Hester Street, or up Orchard or some other Ghetto
street off Delancey, or sometimes he spent a few hours in Battery Park
or in the tenement district of the lower West Side. On this particular
Saturday he found Columbus Park less populous than it had been on his
last visit a month before, for many of its habitues had sought warmer
climes. The weather was seasonably cold, and Mr. Neal felt really sorry
for some of the old, broken-down men and women he saw.
Toward the end of the short December afternoon, he found an old man,
shaking with the cold, huddled up on one of the benches of the park. The
haggard, unshaven face told the usual story of the derelict, but
something in the face--perhaps the abject fear that glowered in the
eyes--sounded before he knew it the depths of pity in the little clerk's
heart. Mr. Neal tried to talk to him, but there was no ready beggar's
tale to be poured into the ears of benevolence; there was only fear of
the cold, and of misery, and of death. Yielding suddenly to an impulse
so strong that it bore down all thoughts of prudence, Mr. Neal slipped
out of his own overcoat and put it about the man's threadbare shoulders,
and then hurried off toward the Worth Street Station of the subway.
The wintry breeze chilled him as he hastened along, a slight figure in
worn business suit, leaning against the wind, but his heart was warm and
light within him. Down he hurried into the subway station, and dropped
his tithe of tribute into the multiple maw of the Interborough. The
train was thundering in, its colored lights growing momentarily brighter
as they came down the black tunnel. The train was crammed to the doors,
for it was the rush hour and even down here the trains were crowded. Mr.
Neal edged into the nearest door and then squirmed over to a place
against the opposite door in the vestibule, where he could see people as
they came out.
The train shot again into the dark tunnels. A thousand men and women
were being hurtled at terrific thundering speed, by some strange power
but half understood, through the black corridors of the night that
reigned under old Manhattan, to some unseen goal. It was magnificent;
it was colossal; but it was uncanny. Mr. Neal had always been moved by
the romance of the subway, but tonight, in his elevation of spirit, it
seemed something of epic quality, full of a strange, unreal grandeur.
Faint red lights here and there revealed nothing of the tunnel; they but
lent mystery to dimly seen arches and darkling bastions, fleeting by the
roaring train.
They stopped a minute at Canal Street, and more people pushed into the
overcrowded car, and then the train was off again. The man pushing
against Mr. Neal was heavy-jowled as a prize-fighter, but if ever he had
followed the ring his fighting days were over now. Good feeding had done
for him; he breathed heavily in the fetid atmosphere of the car. He was
almost squeezing the breath out of the little man with a heavy red
mustache who stood just behind him. The red mustache made the little
man's face seem out of proportion; there was not enough of chin to make
a proper balance.
At Spring Street two women struggled to get off.
"Let 'em off!" came the familiar admonition of the guard.
Those about the women made every effort to give them room, but at the
best they had a hard fight to make their way out. Both the women were
modishly dressed, and their complexions were correctly made. There was,
too, that hardness about the mouths of both of them that Mr. Neal found
in the faces of most of the women he saw--a hardness that even the
stress of their effort to get out of the car could not disturb. When
they finally got out, others crowded in.
Mr. Neal was happy, and he looked about him to find other happy faces.
But they were nowhere to be seen; the faces were stolid, or indifferent,
or intent, or vacuous. None of them were glad. If their mouths would
only turn up at the corners! Well, it was the same old story. Mouths
that turned up at the corners were seldom met with in Mr. Neal's book of
subway faces.
Bleecker Street, and a worse jam than ever, but there was encouragement
in the thought that Fourteenth Street would soon relieve the pressure.
Two girls crowded on at Bleecker, amid shrill laughter and many
smothered exclamations. Their lips were carmined and their eyes bold.
Every swerve of the train brought fresh giggles or stifled screams from
them.
As the train was slowing down for Astor Place Station an express train
passed it, speeding for Fourteenth Street. Mr. Neal turned with an
effort (for he was wedged in tightly) and looked through the glass door
at the brightly lighted cars as they passed, and then slowly gained
upon, his own train. The express was crowded too, with people standing
in the aisles, hanging to straps. The faces were very clearly
distinguishable in the bright light; and Mr. Neal, strangely excited at
this rapid panorama of faces, saw each one distinctly. Suddenly he
leaned forward, close to the glass. He saw it! The face! It was there!
But it was gone in a moment. It had been like a flash in the dark
tunnel. His own train had come to a jarring stop, and the express was
only thunder in the distance.
Mr. Neal felt that he must rush out of the car, must get out into the
open. But the big prize-fighter still pressed against him, and in a
moment they were rushing on again into the darkness.
Now the clerk had no eyes for the occupants of his car. His face was
pressed against the glass door. He saw, out there in the darkness, that
serenely beautiful face, beatific, transcendent. And even as he looked,
he saw again the rear-lights of the express. They were going to overtake
it--to pass it again. It had been halted by the block signals of the
train ahead, perhaps--at any rate it was now moving very slowly. As the
local shot by, the panorama of faces was unfolded much more rapidly than
it had been before, but Mr. Neal caught a glimpse of the face once more.
It looked directly at him, as it had before, and he thought it smiled
upon him a little.
The little clerk was greatly excited. As soon as the local had come to a
stop at the Fourteenth Street Station and the doors had been opened, he
darted out and hurried to the other side of the platform. There he stood
leaning out to watch for the approach of the express. In a moment it
came, rumbling in quite as usual, mechanically and regularly, and the
doors slid open to allow the flood of people to pour out. Mr. Neal
squirmed through the crowd, looking in at the windows and watching the
people coming out; but he did not see the face, and frantic lest he
should lose it once more, he crowded into one of the cars again at the
last minute. He tried at first to pass through the train searching for
the man with the "good face," but the guards rebuffed him, and the
usually good-natured crowd was provoked to impatience by his squirming
efforts; and he himself soon became so exhausted in his attempt that he
gave it up. At Grand Central Station he again hurried out upon the
platform to watch the crowds getting off. The gong had begun to ring
again when he caught sight of a tall figure mounting a short flight of
stairs toward the upper platform, and he immediately knew that there was
the man he sought. The face was turned away, yet he thought he could not
be mistaken. He rushed toward the stairway, bumping into others so many
times in his haste that he really made little speed. When he reached the
top of the stairs he looked about. For one heartsick moment he thought
he had lost the man after all. Then, away across the station, near one
of the exits, he saw the tall figure again. The man was leaving the
station, and as he passed out, for a moment he turned his face toward
the crowd within; and Mr. Neal knew then that he had not been mistaken.
To the little clerk it seemed an age before he could reach the exit
through which the tall figure had passed. He ran around people and
dodged and ducked, oblivious of the curious watching of the crowd. At
last he gained the exit. The tall man was nowhere to be seen.
Mr. Neal found himself on Forty-Second Street, east of Fourth Avenue. It
was night, and the December wind pierced his clothing and cut to his
very bones like a knife. He buttoned his sack coat up tightly and turned
up the collar. He decided to walk east down Forty-Second Street, in the
hope of seeing the face again. He walked very rapidly, impelled both by
the desire to keep as warm as possible, and the thought that whatever
chance he had of finding the man would be lost if he did not hurry.
As he stood for a moment on the curb before crossing Lexington Avenue,
halted by a long string of passing automobiles, he thought he saw the
tall man at about the middle of the next block. Taking his life in his
hands, he scurried across the street, dodging in and out among the
vehicles with the curses of drivers in his ears. But he got across
safely, and now he was certain that he had been right: there was the
tall figure he could not mistake. Now he gained on the man, who turned
south into Third Avenue. As Mr. Neal breathlessly turned the corner he
saw the tall man mounting the stoop of a shabby four-story apartment
house a little way down the street. About to enter, he turned his face
toward the running clerk, and even by the dim light at the entrance to
the dingy house, Mr. Neal could see how ineffably spiritual and strong
the face was. Joy filled the little clerk's heart so full that tears
came to his eyes. At last he was to meet the man with the "good
face"--after so long! He managed to find breath to call out.
"I say!" he shouted.
But he was too late, for the door had closed almost before the words
left his mouth.
Leaping up the steps, he found that the door was not locked, and he
entered a dark hallway. He heard a step on the landing above, and called
out again, but there was no answer. He hurried up the creaking stairs,
but he was just in time to see the first door on his left closed
silently but firmly.
Mr. Neal hesitated. He took off his hat and wiped his forehead, which
was damp with perspiration. Then he rang the bell.
The hallway was dimly lighted with one small gas jet over against the
discolored wall. Mr. Neal waited. Presently he heard footsteps. Then the
door was opened and a flood of warm light poured into the dim little
hall. A short, white-bearded old man stood in the doorway. He seemed the
very personification of serene happiness, and over his shoulder peered
an old lady whose face was lighted by the same kindly joy. There was an
atmosphere of quiet goodness about them both; it flooded out into the
hallway as sensibly as the glow of light itself. The old couple looked
questioningly at Mr. Neal. The little clerk was somewhat embarrassed.
"I--I wanted to see the gentleman who just came in here," he said.
The white-bearded old man seemed surprised.
"Why, nobody has come in here," he said in a gentle voice. "Not since I
came home over an hour ago."
"Oh, the tall man, with--with--"
"But nobody has come in, sir," reiterated the old man.
"Just now, you know," insisted Mr. Neal. "A tall man--"
A shadow crossed the old man's face--a shade of alarm. The woman
withdrew a little. Some of the happiness seemed to leave their faces,
allowing the wrinkles of age to show themselves.
"I don't know what you mean, sir," the old man said slowly, "but we two
are alone here. There is no tall man here, I assure you. Please--"
"But haven't you a lodger?" asked Mr. Neal hopefully. "This was a very
tall man; that was the reason I could see him so well in the subway. He
has a good face--a really wonderful face--"
Mr. Neal hesitated a moment, realizing that he had been led to reveal
his secret to one who might not understand.
Pity came into the old gentleman's eyes.
"Ah," he said, and nodded. "If I could be of any help to you--Would you
come in?"
"Didn't he come in here, really? Hasn't a tall man been here?"
"Nobody is here, sir, but us. But if I could do anything for you, I'd be
glad to."
Mr. Neal saw that the old gentleman thought he was dealing with a
demented man; he saw, too, that the denial was an honest one.
"Thank you," said Mr. Neal. "No. I must be going. I am very sorry I
troubled you."
The old man bade him a cheery good-night, but he looked after Mr. Neal
in solicitude as the clerk went slowly down the steps.
The air was bitter cold outside, and Mr. Neal realized for the first
time that he did not have his overcoat. He shivered.
Hunching his shoulders up against the blast, he hurried back to the
subway.
Heartbreaking though his disappointment was, Mr. Neal was not
embittered. There was one thing that he knew now beyond all cavil or
doubt: he knew that he should find the man with the good face. He knew
that he should eventually meet him somewhere, sometime, and come to know
him. How Mr. Neal longed for that time words cannot describe, but his
settled faith that his desire would one day be fulfilled kept him
tranquil and happy. Why should he be impatient? Perhaps today, or
tomorrow--perhaps in this car he was entering, perhaps just around the
next corner--he would see the face.
"It will be soon," he would say to himself. "I know it will be soon."
The beggars in front of the Imperial building came to know the little
clerk and thank him in advance for his alms. The elevator men and the
newsies came to watch for him. Mr. Neal himself took an interest in
everybody. He formed the habit of watching crowds wherever they were
greatest, partly because thereby his chance of discovering the face was
enhanced, and partly because crowds thrilled him. What a tremendous mass
of emotions--hopes, fears, ambitions, joys, sorrows--were in these
thousand faces swirling about him in ceaseless tide! They were all
individuals; that was the wonder of it! All were individuals with
personalities of their own, with their own lives to live and their own
problems to think out. He would like to help them all.
Mr. Neal at last formed the acquaintance of the members of the family
with whom he had lodged so long. One evening just outside his room he
met a red-cheeked boy whom he supposed to be the son of his landlord,
and it came to him with a shock that he scarcely knew these people under
whose roof he had lived for many years. The boy seemed surprised and a
little frightened when Mr. Neal tried to talk to him, and the clerk
resolved there and then to make amends for past neglect. The very next
evening he made an excuse to visit the father of the household. A fine
hearty fellow he found him, sitting in the kitchen with his stockinged
feet up on a chair, smoking an old clay pipe and reading the evening
paper. Mr. Neal learned he was a hard-working teamster. The man seemed
pleased with his lodger's attentions, and invited him to come again, and
Mr. Neal did come again and often, for he liked his landlord from the
start. There were three children, two of them pictures of health, but
the third thin and pale and unable to romp about because of a twisted
leg.
Mr. Neal became a veritable member of the household, and when he
discovered from a chance remark of the father that they were saving
money, penny by penny, to buy a brace for the crooked leg, he insisted
on "loaning" the money to make up the balance still lacking.
"Funny thing," commented the teamster one evening. "We used to think you
wasn't human exactly." He laughed heartily. "Gotta get acquainted with a
guy, ain't you?"
Then his wife, a thin, washed-out little woman, embarrassed the little
clerk greatly by saying gravely:
"Mr. Neal, you're a good man."
Her eyes were on the little cripple.
In the same vein was the comment of the office force at Fields, Jones &
Houseman's on the occasion of Arnold's injury in the elevator accident,
when Mr. Neal took up a collection for the injured man, heading the
subscription himself.
"Funny thing," exclaimed the chief clerk to a stenographer as they were
leaving the office that afternoon. "Funny thing: when I first came here
James Neal was close as a clam; never a word out of him. Paid no
attention to anybody, all gloom. Now look at him helping everybody! Best
old scout in the office!"
As he nodded his head in emphasis, his eyeglasses trembled on his
nose--but they stuck.
"I've not got a better friend in the whole town than James Neal, and I
know it," he added, "and I guess that's true of everybody in the
office!"
It was true that Mr. Neal and the chief clerk had become fast friends.
They had come to spend their Sundays together, and even to share
confidences, and so it was natural that when Mr. Neal saw the face for
the third time he should be moved to tell his friend about it. This
telling of his secret was epochal in Mr. Neal's life.
The two men sat on a bench in a more or less secluded part of Bronx
Park. Mr. Neal looked off among the trees as he told the story of the
face hesitatingly, often in difficulty for the right word, the light of
the mystic in his glowing eyes. The chief clerk listened attentively,
his cane across his knees, his lean face serious. His eyes bored into
the very mind of his friend with their keen gaze. When Mr. Neal told of
his failure to find the man with the good face in the house on Third
Avenue, his friend shook his head definitely.
"No!" he said. "No! I'll tell you what it is: it is what they call a
hallucination."
"Oh, no," replied Mr. Neal calmly. "It is real, John. There's no doubt
it's real."
The chief clerk shook his head sharply again, and there was a pause.
"I felt I must tell you," resumed Mr. Neal at length, "because I saw him
again last night."
His friend looked quickly at the little clerk, who gazed away among the
trees, his eyes luminous.
"I saw him in the Pennsylvania subway station, and I followed him out.
There was no doubt about it: I saw his face. He went down Eighth Avenue,
and I saw him turn in at a door. I wasn't far behind him. The door was
right next to a pawnshop. It was unlatched, and I went in. I found
myself in a dark hallway, but toward the other end there was light
coming from a half opened door. I was excited, John. Tremendously. You
see, John, it was the great experience of my life--no wonder I was
trembling.
"I stepped quietly back to where the light was, and looked into the room
that it came from. What do you think I saw, John? There was a young
mother and two fresh-cheeked boys; one of the boys was reading at the
table, and the other one sat in a low chair at his mother's knee and she
was talking to him--telling him stories, I think. The room was poor,
John, but the mother's face! It was wonderful! It reminded me of my own
mother's. There is just one word to describe it, John: it was a
Madonna's face--a Madonna of Eighth Avenue!"
Mr. Neal paused and glanced at his friend. The chief clerk said nothing,
but dug at the turf with his stick.
"But the tall man was not there," resumed Mr. Neal. "I knocked at the
door and asked about him. The woman didn't know; no man was in their
rooms, she said. She was a poor widow. She wanted to know how I got in.
I could see I was frightening her, so I left, and I could hear the door
locked behind me."
The little clerk sighed, and passed his hand over his eyes.
His friend rose suddenly.
"Come," he said. "Let's walk--and talk about something else."
This was but the first of many talks the two clerks had about the face.
Mr. Neal's friend became more and more sympathetic toward the quest. One
afternoon Mr. Neal detained the chief clerk as he was leaving the office
after work. The little clerk's eyes were very serious, and his voice was
low as he said:
"John, I know that I am going to find him very soon. I know it."
"How do you know it?" asked the chief clerk. "Something--well--psychic?"
"Oh, no. It's not mysterious. It's just a--a certainty, John. I know I
shall find him very, very soon."
"Well, you know--" and the chief clerk looked at Mr. Neal steadily, "you
know that I--I should like to know him, too."
Mr. Neal wrung his friend's hand. They went down together in the
elevator, and parted. Mr. Neal hurried down into his subway station.
There were not many waiting on the platforms. Far down the black tunnels
in either direction the little white lights glimmered. The echoing
silence of a great cave was in the station. Then suddenly the red and
green lights of a train appeared far away; then a rumble and a roar, the
doors of the train slid open and Mr. Neal stepped in. All the way home
he kept his eyes shut. The hurtling roar, the crush of people growing
greater as they approached the great business sections, the calls of
the guards, did not disturb Mr. Neal. He kept his eyes closed so he
might see the face.
It was about one o'clock of the next day that the accident occurred of
which James Neal was the victim. He had been trying to cross the street
in defiance of traffic regulations, and had been struck by a heavily
loaded truck and knocked down, with some injury to his skull. He had
been taken, unconscious, to St. Cecilia's Hospital.
Little work was done by the clerks of Fields, Jones & Houseman that
afternoon. One of the clerks had seen the accident; indeed he had been
talking to Mr. Neal just before the latter had rushed into the street.
He had seen the little clerk suddenly raise his hand and point across
the street.
"I see it! There he is!" Mr. Neal had said in a voice exultant with joy,
and then he had dodged into the traffic, reckless of life and limb.
The chief clerk was greatly distressed. He could not work. He would sit
with his lank form huddled up in his office chair, gazing fixedly over
his eyeglasses at nothing in particular. About two o'clock he bethought
himself to look up the family with which Mr. Neal lodged in the
telephone directory and to inform them of the accident. The whole office
force listened to the conversation over the telephone, and heard the
chief's voice break as he told of the seriousness of the injury. Then
the chief clerk shut his books sharply, clapped on his street coat and
rusty straw hat, and set out for the hospital.
Long before the chief clerk arrived at the hospital, a white-coated
doctor, standing momentarily in a doorway of the ward in which Mr. James
Neal lay, met a nurse coming out. The doctor's face was such a one as
would have delighted Mr. Neal if he had been able to see it. It was a
benevolent face. A profound knowledge of the problems of humanity had
marked it with depth of understanding, and withal, a kindliness and
sympathy, that made it worthy a second and a third glance in any
company, however distinguished.
"How about the skull fracture?" asked the doctor in a low voice, as the
nurse was passing out.
"He is dead," said the nurse.
"When?" asked the doctor.
"Just now. I just left him."
"There was no chance," said the doctor.
The nurse was about to pass on when the doctor detained her.
"That tall man," he said, "who was with him: where has he gone?"
The nurse looked at the doctor in surprise.
"There was no one with him but me," she said.
"Oh, yes," said the doctor. "I saw a man bending over the bed--a very
tall man with a remarkable face. I wondered who he could be."
The nurse turned, and with the doctor looked over toward the bed where
the body of James Neal lay.
"That is strange," said the nurse.
"I saw him there," said the doctor, "just as you were leaving the
patient; now he is gone."
"Queer! I saw no one," said the nurse, and moved away to attend to other
duties.
The doctor walked over to the bed where the body of the little clerk
lay.
"It _is_ strange," he mused. "I surely saw him.--The most beautiful face
I ever saw."
Then he looked down at what had been James Neal.
"He was very fortunate," said the doctor in a low tone, "to die with a
face like that looking into his."
There was a smile on the death-white lips of the little clerk.