Produced by Al Haines.
*THE THIRD CIRCLE*
BY
FRANK NORRIS
AUTHOR OF "THE PIT," "THE OCTOPUS," ETC.
INTRODUCTION BY
WILL IRWIN
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
1909
CHEAP EDITION
_Printed from electrotype plates
by Butler & Tanner, Frome and London._
_*TABLE OF CONTENTS*_
The Third Circle
The House With the Blinds
Little Dramas of the Curbstone
Shorty Stack, Pugilist
The Strangest Thing
A Reversion to Type
"Boom"
The Dis-Associated Charities
Son of a Sheik
A Defense of the Flag
Toppan
A Caged Lion
"This Animal of a Buldy Jones"
Dying Fires
Grettir at Drangey
The Guest of Honour
_*Introduction*_
It used to be my duty, as sub editor of the old San Francisco _Wave_, to
"put the paper to bed." We were printing a Seattle edition in those
days of the Alaskan gold rush; and the last form had to be locked up on
Tuesday night, that we might reach the news stands by Friday. Working
short-handed, as all small weeklies do, we were everlastingly late with
copy or illustrations or advertisements; and that Tuesday usually
stretched itself out into Wednesday. Most often, indeed, the foreman
and I pounded the last quoin into place at four or five o'clock
Wednesday morning and went home with the milk-wagons--to rise at noon
and start next week's paper going.
For Yelton, most patient and cheerful of foremen, those Tuesday night
sessions meant steady work. I, for my part, had only to confer with him
now and then on a "Caption" or to run over a late proof. In the heavy
intervals of waiting, I killed time and gained instruction by reading
the back files of the _Wave_, and especially that part of the files
which preserved the early, prentice work of Frank Norris.
He was a hero to us all in those days, as he will ever remain a heroic
memory--that unique product of our Western soil, killed, for some hidden
purpose of the gods, before the time of full blossom. He had gone East
but a year since to publish the earliest in his succession of rugged,
virile novels--"Moran of the Lady Letty," "McTeague," "Blix," "A Man's
Woman," "The Octopus," and "The Pit." The East was just beginning to
learn that he was great; we had known it long before. With a special
interest, then, did I, his humble cub successor as sub editor and sole
staff writer, follow that prentice work of his from the period of his
first brief sketches, through the period of rough, brilliant short
stories hewed out of our life in the Port of Adventures, to the period
of that first serial which brought him into his own.
It was a surpassing study of the novelist in the making. J. O'Hara
Cosgrave, owner, editor and burden-bearer of the _Wave_, was in his
editing more an artist than a man of business. He loved "good stuff";
he could not bear to delete a distinctive piece of work just because the
populace would not understand. Norris, then, had a free hand. Whatever
his thought of that day, whatever he had seen with the eye of his flash
or the eye of his imagination, he might write and print. You began to
feel him in the files of the year 1895, by certain distinctive sketches
and fragments. You traced his writing week by week until the sketches
became "Little Stories of the Pavements." Then longer stories, one
every week, even such stories as "The Third Circle," "Miracle Joyeaux,"
and "The House with the Blinds"; then, finally, a novel, written
_feuilleton_ fashion week by week--"Moran of the Lady Letty." A curious
circumstance attended the publication of "Moran" in the _Wave_. I
discovered it myself during those Tuesday night sessions over the files;
and it illustrates how this work was done. He began it in the last
weeks of 1897, turning it out and sending it straight to the printer as
part of his daily stint. The _Maine_ was blown up February 14, 1898. In
the later chapters of "Moran," he introduced the destruction of the
_Maine_ as an incident! It was this serial, brought to the attention of
_McClure's Magazine_, which finally drew Frank Norris East.
"The studio sketches of a great novelist," Gellett Burgess has called
these ventures and fragments. Burgess and I, when the _Wave_ finally
died of too much merit, stole into the building by night and took away
one set of old files. A harmless theft of sentiment, we told ourselves;
for by moral right they belonged to us, the sole survivors in San
Francisco of those who had helped make the _Wave_. And, indeed, by this
theft we saved them from the great fire of 1906. When we had them safe
at home, we spent a night running over them, marveling again at those
rough creations of blood and nerve which Norris had made out of that
city which was the first love of his wakened intelligence, and in which,
so wofully soon afterward, he died.
I think that I remember them all, even now; not one but a name or a
phrase would bring back to mind. Most vividly, perhaps, remains a
little column of four sketches called "Fragments." One was a scene
behind the barricades during the Commune--a gay _flaneur_ of a soldier
playing on a looted piano until a bullet caught him in the midst of a
note. Another pictured an empty hotel room after the guest had left.
Only that; but I always remember it when I first enter my room in a
hotel. A third was the nucleus for the description of the "Dental
Parlors" in McTeague. A fourth, the most daring of all, showed a sodden
workman coming home from his place of great machines. A fresh violet
lay on the pavement. He, the primal brute in harness, picked it up.
Dimly, the aesthetic sense woke in him. It gave him pleasure, a
pleasure which called for some tribute. He put it between his great
jaws and crushed it--the only way he knew.
Here collected are the longest and most important of his prentice
products. Even without those shorter sketches whose interest is, after
all, mainly technical, they are an incomparable study in the way a
genius takes to find himself. It is as though we saw a complete
collection of Rembrandt's early sketches, say--full technique and
co-ordination not yet developed, but all the basic force and vision
there. Admirable in themselves, these rough-hewn tales, they are most
interesting when compared with the later work which the world knows, and
when taken as a melancholy indication of that power of growth which was
in him and which must have led, if the masters of fate had only spared
him, to the highest achievement in letters.
WILL IRWIN.
March, 1909.
_*The Third Circle*_
There are more things in San Francisco's Chinatown than are dreamed of
in Heaven and earth. In reality there are three parts of Chinatown--the
part the guides show you, the part the guides don't show you, and the
part that no one ever hears of. It is with the latter part that this
story has to do. There are a good many stories that might be written
about this third circle of Chinatown, but believe me, they never will be
written--at any rate not until the "town" has been, as it were, drained
off from the city, as one might drain a noisome swamp, and we shall be
able to see the strange, dreadful life that wallows down there in the
lowest ooze of the place--wallows and grovels there in the mud and in
the dark. If you don't think this is true, ask some of the Chinese
detectives (the regular squad are not to be relied on), ask them to tell
you the story of the Lee On Ting affair, or ask them what was done to
old Wong Sam, who thought he could break up the trade in slave girls, or
why Mr. Clarence Lowney (he was a clergyman from Minnesota who believed
in direct methods) is now a "dangerous" inmate of the State Asylum--ask
them to tell you why Matsokura, the Japanese dentist, went back to his
home lacking a face--ask them to tell you why the murderers of Little
Pete will never be found, and ask them to tell you about the little
slave girl, Sing Yee, or--no, on the second thought, don't ask for that
story.
The tale I am to tell you now began some twenty years ago in a See Yup
restaurant on Waverly Place--long since torn down--where it will end I
do not know. I think it is still going on. It began when young
Hillegas and Miss Ten Eyck (they were from the East, and engaged to be
married) found their way into the restaurant of the Seventy Moons, late
in the evening of a day in March. (It was the year after the downfall
of Kearney and the discomfiture of the sand-lotters.)
"What a dear, quaint, curious old place!" exclaimed Miss Ten Eyck.
She sat down on an ebony stool with its marble seat, and let her gloved
hands fall into her lap, looking about her at the huge hanging lanterns,
the gilded carven screens, the lacquer work, the inlay work, the
coloured glass, the dwarf oak trees growing in Satsuma pots, the
marquetry, the painted matting, the incense jars of brass, high as a
man's head, and all the grotesque jim-crackery of the Orient. The
restaurant was deserted at that hour. Young Hillegas pulled up a stool
opposite her and leaned his elbows on the table, pushing back his hat
and fumbling for a cigarette.
"Might just as well be in China itself," he commented.
"Might?" she retorted; "we are in China, Tom--a little bit of China dug
out and transplanted here. Fancy all America and the Nineteenth Century
just around the corner! Look! You can even see the Palace Hotel from
the window. See out yonder, over the roof of that temple--the Ming Yen,
isn't it?--and I can actually make out Aunt Harriett's rooms."
"I say, Harry (Miss Ten Eyck's first name was Harriett) let's have some
tea."
"Tom, you're a genius! Won't it be fun! Of course we must have some
tea. What a lark! And you can smoke if you want to."
"This is the way one ought to see places," said Hillegas, as he lit a
cigarette; "just nose around by yourself and discover things. Now, the
guides never brought us here."
"No, they never did. I wonder why? Why, we just found it out by
ourselves. It's ours, isn't it, Tom, dear, by right of discovery?"
At that moment Hillegas was sure that Miss Ten Eyck was quite the most
beautiful girl he ever remembered to have seen. There was a daintiness
about her--a certain chic trimness in her smart tailor-made gown, and
the least perceptible tilt of her crisp hat that gave her the last
charm. Pretty she certainly was--the fresh, vigorous, healthful
prettiness only seen in certain types of unmixed American stock. All at
once Hillegas reached across the table, and, taking her hand, kissed the
little crumpled round of flesh that showed where her glove buttoned.
The China boy appeared to take their order, and while waiting for their
tea, dried almonds, candied fruit and watermelon rinds, the pair
wandered out upon the overhanging balcony and looked down into the
darkening streets.
"There's that fortune-teller again," observed Hillegas, presently.
"See--down there on the steps of the joss house?"
"Where? Oh, yes, I see."
"Let's have him up. Shall we? We'll have him tell our fortunes while
we're waiting."
Hillegas called and beckoned, and at last got the fellow up into the
restaurant.
"Hoh! You're no Chinaman," said he, as the fortune-teller came into the
circle of the lantern-light. The other showed his brown teeth.
"Part Chinaman, part Kanaka."
"Kanaka?"
"All same Honolulu. Sabe? Mother Kanaka lady--washum clothes for
sailor peoples down Kaui way," and he laughed as though it were a huge
joke.
"Well, say, Jim," said Hillegas; "we want you to tell our fortunes. You
sabe? Tell the lady's fortune. Who she going to marry, for instance."
"No fortune--tattoo."
"Tattoo?"
"Um. All same tattoo--three, four, seven, plenty lil birds on lady's
arm. Hey? You want tattoo?"
He drew a tattooing needle from his sleeve and motioned towards Miss Ten
Eyck's arm.
"Tattoo my arm? What an idea! But wouldn't it be funny, Tom? Aunt
Hattie's sister came back from Honolulu with the prettiest little
butterfly tattooed on her finger. I've half a mind to try. And it
would be so awfully queer and original."
"Let him do it on your finger, then. You never could wear evening dress
if it was on your arm."
"Of course. He can tattoo something as though it was a ring, and my
marquise can hide it."
The Kanaka-Chinaman drew a tiny fantastic-looking butterfly on a bit of
paper with a blue pencil, licked the drawing a couple of times, and
wrapped it about Miss Ten Eyck's little finger--the little finger of her
left hand. The removal of the wet paper left an imprint of the drawing.
Then he mixed his ink in a small sea-shell, dipped his needle, and in
ten minutes had finished the tattooing of a grotesque little insect, as
much butterfly as anything else.
"There," said Hillegas, when the work was done and the fortune-teller
gone his way; "there you are, and it will never come out. It won't do
for you now to plan a little burglary, or forge a little check, or slay
a little baby for the coral round its neck, 'cause you can always be
identified by that butterfly upon the little finger of your left hand."
"I'm almost sorry now I had it done. Won't it ever come out? Pshaw!
Anyhow I think it's very chic," said Harriett Ten Eyck.
"I say, though!" exclaimed Hillegas, jumping up; "where's our tea and
cakes and things? It's getting late. We can't wait here all evening.
I'll go out and jolly that chap along."
The Chinaman to whom he had given the order was not to be found on that
floor of the restaurant. Hillegas descended the stairs to the kitchen.
The place seemed empty of life. On the ground floor, however, where tea
and raw silk was sold, Hillegas found a Chinaman figuring up accounts by
means of little balls that slid to and fro upon rods. The Chinaman was a
very gorgeous-looking chap in round horn spectacles and a costume that
looked like a man's nightgown, of quilted blue satin.
"I say, John," said Hillegas to this one, "I want some tea. You
sabe?--up stairs--restaurant. Give China boy order--he no come. Get
plenty much move on. Hey?"
The merchant turned and looked at Hillegas over his spectacles.
"Ah," he said, calmly, "I regret that you have been detained. You will,
no doubt, be attended to presently. You are a stranger in Chinatown?"
"Ahem!--well, yes--I--we are."
"Without doubt--without doubt!" murmured the other.
"I suppose you are the proprietor?" ventured Hillegas.
"I? Oh, no! My agents have a silk house here. I believe they sub-let
the upper floors to the See Yups. By the way, we have just received a
consignment of India silk shawls you may be pleased to see."
He spread a pile upon the counter, and selected one that was
particularly beautiful.
"Permit me," he remarked gravely, "to offer you this as a present to
your good lady."
Hillegas's interest in this extraordinary Oriental was aroused. Here
was a side of the Chinese life he had not seen, nor even suspected. He
stayed for some little while talking to this man, whose bearing might
have been that of Cicero before the Senate assembled, and left him with
the understanding to call upon him the next day at the Consulate. He
returned to the restaurant to find Miss Ten Eyck gone. He never saw her
again. No white man ever did.
* * * * *
There is a certain friend of mine in San Francisco who calls himself
Manning. He is a Plaza bum--that is, he sleeps all day in the old Plaza
(that shoal where so much human jetsom has been stranded), and during
the night follows his own devices in Chinatown, one block above. Manning
was at one time a deep-sea pearl diver in Oahu, and, having burst his
ear drums in the business, can now blow smoke out of either ear. This
accomplishment first endeared him to me, and latterly I found out that
he knew more of Chinatown than is meet and right for a man to know. The
other day I found Manning in the shade of the Stevenson ship, just
rousing from the effects of a jag on undiluted gin, and told him, or
rather recalled to him the story of Harriett Ten Eyck.
"I remember," he said, resting on an elbow and chewing grass. "It made
a big noise at the time, but nothing ever came of it--nothing except a
long row and the cutting down of one of Mr. Hillegas's Chinese
detectives in Gambler's Alley. The See Yups brought a chap over from
Peking just to do the business."
"Hatchet-man?" said I.
"No," answered Manning, spitting green; "he was a two-knife Kai-Gingh."
"As how?"
"Two knives--one in each hand--cross your arms and then draw 'em
together, right and left, scissor-fashion--damn near slashed his man in
two. He got five thousand for it. After that the detectives said they
couldn't find much of a clue."
"And Miss Ten Eyck was not so much as heard from again?"
"No," answered Manning, biting his fingernails. "They took her to China,
I guess, or may be up to Oregon. That sort of thing was new twenty
years ago, and that's why they raised such a row, I suppose. But there
are plenty of women living with Chinamen now, and nobody thinks anything
about it, and they are Canton Chinamen, too--lowest kind of coolies.
There's one of them up in St. Louis Place, just back of the Chinese
theatre, and she's a Sheeny. There's a queer team for you--the Hebrew
and the Mongolian--and they've got a kid with red, crinkly hair, who's a
rubber in a Hammam bath. Yes, it's a queer team, and there's three more
white women in a slave girl joint under Ah Yee's tan room. There's
where I get my opium. They can talk a little English even yet. Funny
thing--one of 'em's dumb, but if you get her drunk enough she'll talk a
little English to you. It's a fact! I've seen 'em do it with her
often--actually get her so drunk that she can talk. Tell you what,"
added Manning, struggling to his feet, "I'm going up there now to get
some dope. You can come along, and we'll get Sadie (Sadie's her name)
we'll get Sadie full, and ask her if she ever heard about Miss Ten Eyck.
They do a big business," said Manning, as we went along. "There's Ah
Yeo and these three women and a policeman named Yank. They get all the
yen shee--that's the cleanings of the opium pipes, you know, and make it
into pills and smuggle it into the cons over at San Quentin prison by
means of the trusties. Why, they'll make five dollars worth of dope sell
for thirty by the time it gets into the yard over at the Pen. When I
was over there, I saw a chap knifed behind a jute mill for a pill as big
as a pea. Ah Yee gets the stuff, the three women roll it into pills,
and the policeman, Yank, gets it over to the trusties somehow. Ah Yee
is independent rich by now, and the policeman's got a bank account."
"And the women?'
"Lord! they're slaves--Ah Yee's slaves! They get the swift kick most
generally."
Manning and I found Sadie and her two companions four floors underneath
the tan room, sitting cross-legged in a room about as big as a big
trunk. I was sure they were Chinese women at first, until my eyes got
accustomed to the darkness of the place. They were dressed in Chinese
fashion, but I noted soon that their hair was brown and the bridges of
each one's nose was high. They were rolling pills from a jar of yen
shee that stood in the middle of the floor, their fingers twinkling with
a rapidity that was somehow horrible to see.
Manning spoke to them briefly in Chinese while he lit a pipe, and two of
them answered with the true Canton sing-song--all vowels and no
consonants.
"That one's Sadie," said Manning, pointing to the third one, who
remained silent the while. I turned to her. She was smoking a cigar,
and from time to time spat through her teeth man-fashion. She was a
dreadful-looking beast of a woman, wrinkled like a shriveled apple, her
teeth quite black from nicotine, her hands bony and prehensile, like a
hawk's claws--but a white woman beyond all doubt. At first Sadie
refused to drink, but the smell of Manning's can of gin removed her
objections, and in half an hour she was hopelessly loquacious. What
effect the alcohol had upon the paralysed organs of her speech I cannot
say. Sober, she was tongue-tied--drunk, she could emit a series of
faint bird-like twitterings that sounded like a voice heard from the
bottom of a well.
"Sadie," said Manning, blowing smoke out of his ears, "what makes you
live with Chinamen? You're a white girl. You got people somewhere. Why
don't you get back to them?"
Sadie shook her head.
"Like um China boy better," she said, in a voice so faint we had to
stoop to listen. "Ah Yee's pretty good to us--plenty to eat, plenty to
smoke, and as much yen shee as we can stand. Oh, I don't complain."
"You know you can get out of this whenever you want. Why don't you make
a run for it some day when you're out? Cut for the Mission House on
Sacramento street--they'll be good to you there."
"Oh!" said Sadie, listlessly, rolling a pill between her stained palms,
"I been here so long I guess I'm kind of used to it. I've about got out
of white people's ways by now. They wouldn't let me have my yen shee
and my cigar, and that's about all I want nowadays. You can't eat yen
shee long and care for much else, you know. Pass that gin along, will
you? I'm going to faint in a minute."
"Wait a minute," said I, my hand on Manning's arm. "How long have you
been living with Chinamen, Sadie?"
"Oh, I don't know. All my life, I guess. I can't remember back very
far--only spots here and there. Where's that gin you promised me?"
"Only in spots?" said I; "here a little and there a little--is that it?
Can you remember how you came to take up with this kind of life?"
"Sometimes I can and sometimes I can't," answered Sadie. Suddenly her
head rolled upon her shoulder, her eyes closing. Manning shook her
roughly:
"Let be! let be!" she exclaimed, rousing up; "I'm dead sleepy. Can't
you see?"
"Wake up, and keep awake, if you can," said Manning; "this gentleman
wants to ask you something."
"Ah Yee bought her from a sailor on a junk in the Pei Ho river," put in
one of the other women.
"How about that, Sadie?" I asked. "Were you ever on a junk in a China
river? Hey? Try and think?"
"I don't know," she said. "Sometimes I think I was. There's lots of
things I can't explain, but it's because I can't remember far enough
back."
"Did you ever hear of a girl named Ten Eyck--Harriett Ten Eyck--who was
stolen by Chinamen here in San Francisco a long time ago?"
There was a long silence. Sadie looked straight before her, wide-eyed,
the other women rolled pills industriously, Manning looked over my
shoulder at-the scene, still blowing smoke through his ears; then
Sadie's eyes began to close and her head to loll sideways.
"My cigar's gone out," she muttered. "You said you'd have gin for me.
Ten Eyck! Ten Eyck! No, I don't remember anybody named that." Her
voice failed her suddenly, then she whispered:
"Say, how did I get that on me?"
She thrust out her left hand, and I saw a butterfly tattooed on the
little finger.
_*The House With the Blinds*_
It is a thing said and signed and implicitly believed in by the
discerning few that San Francisco is a place wherein Things can happen.
There are some cities like this--cities that have come to be
picturesque--that offer opportunities in the matter of background and
local colour, and are full of stories and dramas and novels, written and
unwritten. There seems to be no adequate explanation for this state of
things, but you can't go about the streets anywhere within a mile radius
of Lotta's fountain without realising the peculiarity, just as you would
realise the hopelessness of making anything out of Chicago, fancy a
novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee.
There are just three big cities in the United States that are "story
cities"--New York, of course, New Orleans, and best of the lot, San
Francisco.
Here, if you put yourself in the way of it, you shall see life uncloaked
and bare of convention--the raw, naked thing, that perplexes and
fascinates--life that involves death of the sudden and swift variety,
the jar and shock of unleased passions, the friction of men foregathered
from every ocean, and you may touch upon the edge of mysteries for which
there is no explanation--little eddies on the surface of unsounded
depths, sudden outflashings of the inexplicable--troublesome,
disquieting, and a little fearful.
About this "House With the Blinds" now.
If you go far enough afield, with your face towards Telegraph Hill,
beyond Chinatown, beyond the Barbary Coast, beyond the Mexican quarter
and Luna's restaurant, beyond even the tamale factory and the Red House,
you will come at length to a park in a strange, unfamiliar, unfrequented
quarter. You will know the place by reason of a granite stone set up
there by the Geodetic surveyors, for some longitudinal purposes of their
own, and by an enormous flagstaff erected in the center. Stockton
street flanks it on one side and Powell on the other. It is an Italian
quarter as much as anything else, and the Societa Alleanza holds dances
in a big white hall hard by. The Russian Church, with its minarets
(that look for all the world like inverted balloons) overlook it on one
side, and at the end of certain seaward streets you may see the masts
and spars of wheat ships and the Asiatic steamers. The park lies in a
valley between Russian and Telegraph Hills, and in August and early
September the trades come flogging up from the bay, overwhelming one
with sudden, bulging gusts that strike downward, blanket-wise and
bewildering. There are certain residences here where, I am sure,
sea-captains and sailing masters live, and on one corner is an ancient
house with windows opening door-fashion upon a deep veranda, that was
used as a custom office in Mexican times.
I have a very good friend who is a sailing-master aboard the "_Mary
Baker_," a full-rigged wheat ship, a Cape Horner, and the most beautiful
thing I ever remember to have seen. Occasionally I am invited to make a
voyage with him as supercargo, an invitation which you may be sure I
accept. Such an invitation came to me one day some four or five years
ago, and I made the trip with him to Calcutta and return.
The day before the "_Mary Baker_" cast off I had been aboard (she was
lying in the stream off Meigg's wharf) attending to the stowing of my
baggage and the appointment of my stateroom. The yawl put me ashore at
three in the afternoon, and I started home via the park I have been
speaking about. On my way across the park I stopped in front of that
fool Geodetic stone, wondering what it might be. And while I stood
there puzzling about it, a nurse-maid came up and spoke to me.
The story of "The House With the Blinds" begins here.
The nurse-maid was most dreadfully drunk, her bonnet was awry, her face
red and swollen, and one eye was blackened. She was not at all
pleasant. In the baby carriage, which she dragged behind her, an
overgrown infant yelled like a sabbath of witches.
"Look here," says she; "you're a gemmleman, and I wantcher sh'd help me
outen a fix. I'm in a fix, s'wat I am--a damn bad fix."
I got that fool stone between myself and this object, and listened to it
pouring out an incoherent tirade against some man who had done it dirt,
b'Gawd, and with whom it was incumbent I should fight, and she was in a
fix, s'what she was, and could I, who was evidently a perfick gemmleman,
oblige her with four bits? All this while the baby yelled till my ears
sang again. Well, I gave her four bits to get rid of her, but she stuck
to me yet the closer, and confided to me that she lived in that house
over yonder, she did--the house with the blinds, and was nurse-maid
there, so she was, b'Gawd. But at last I got away and fled in the
direction of Stockton street. As I was going along, however, I
reflected that the shrieking infant was somebody's child, and no doubt
popular in the house with the blinds. The parents ought to know that
its nurse got drunk and into fixes. It was a duty--a dirty duty--for me
to inform upon her.
Much as I loathed to do so I turned towards the house with the blinds.
It stood hard by the Russian Church, a huge white-painted affair, all
the windows closely shuttered and a bit of stained glass in the front
door--quite the most pretentious house in the row. I had got directly
opposite, and was about to cross the street when, lo! around the corner,
marching rapidly, and with blue coats flapping, buttons and buckles
flashing, came a squad of three, seven, nine--ten policemen. They
marched straight upon the house with the blinds.
I am not brilliant nor adventurous, but I have been told that I am good,
and I do strive to be respectable, and pay my taxes and pew rent. As a
corollary to this, I loathed with, a loathing unutterable to be involved
in a mess of any kind. The squad of policemen were about to enter the
house with the blinds, and not for worlds would I have been found by
them upon its steps. The nurse-girl might heave that shrieking infant
over the cliff of Telegraph Hill, it were all one with me. So I shrank
back upon the sidewalk and watched what followed.
Fifty yards from the house the squad broke into a run, swarmed upon the
front steps, and in a moment were thundering upon the front door till
the stained glass leaped in its leads and shivered down upon their
helmets. And then, just at this point, occurred an incident which,
though it had no bearing upon or connection with this yarn, is quite
queer enough to be set down. The shutters of one of the top-story
windows opened slowly, like the gills of a breathing fish, the sash
raised some six inches with a reluctant wail, and a hand groped forth
into the open air. On the sill of the window was lying a gilded
Indian-club, and while I watched, wondering, the hand closed upon it,
drew it under the sash, the window dropped guillotine-fashion, and the
shutters clapped to like the shutters of a cuckoo clock. Why was the
Indian-club lying on the sill? Why, in Heaven's name, was it gilded?
Why did the owner of that mysterious groping hand, seize upon it at the
first intimation of danger? I don't know--I never will know. But I do
know that the thing was eldritch and uncanny, ghostly even, in the glare
of that cheerless afternoon's sun, in that barren park, with the trade
winds thrashing up from the seaward streets.
Suddenly the door crashed in. The policemen vanished inside the house.
Everything fell silent again. I waited for perhaps fifty
seconds--waited, watching and listening, ready for anything that might
happen, expecting I knew not what--everything.
Not more than five minutes had elapsed when the policemen began to
reappear. They came slowly, and well they might, for they carried with
them the inert bodies of six gentlemen. When I say carried I mean it in
its most literal sense, for never in all my life have I seen six
gentlemen so completely, so thoroughly, so hopelessly and helplessly
intoxicated. Well dressed they were, too, one of them even in full
dress. Salvos of artillery could not have awakened that drunken half
dozen, and I doubt if any one of them could even have been racked into
consciousness.
Three hacks appeared (note that the patrol-wagon was conspicuously
absent), the six were loaded upon the cushions, the word was given and
one by one the hacks rattled down Stockton street and disappeared in the
direction of the city. The captain of the squad remained behind for a
few moments, locked the outside doors in the deserted shuttered house,
descended the steps, and went his way across the park, softly whistling
a quickstep. In time he too vanished. The park, the rows of houses, the
windflogged streets, resumed their normal quiet. The incident was
closed.
Or was it closed? Judge you now. Next day I was down upon the wharves,
gripsack in hand, capped and clothed for a long sea voyage. The "_Mary
Baker's_" boat was not yet come ashore, but the beauty lay out there in
the stream, flirting with a bustling tug that circled about her,
coughing uneasily at intervals. Idle sailormen, 'longshoremen and
stevedores sat upon the stringpiece of the wharf, chewing slivers and
spitting reflectively into the water. Across the intervening stretch of
bay came the noises from the "_Mary Baker's_" decks--noises that were
small and distinct, as if heard through a telephone, the rattle of
blocks, the straining of a windlass, the bos'n's whistle, and once the
noise of sawing. A white cruiser sat solidly in the waves over by
Alcatraz, and while I took note of her the flag was suddenly broken out
and I heard the strains of the ship's band. The morning was fine.
Tamalpais climbed out of the water like a rousing lion. In a few hours
we would be off on a voyage to the underside of the earth. There was a
note of gayety in the nimble air, and one felt that the world was young
after all, and that it was good to be young with her.
A bum-boat woman came down the wharf, corpulent and round, with a roll
in her walk that shook first one fat cheek and then the other. She was
peddling trinkets amongst the wharf-loungers--pocket combs, little round
mirrors, shoestrings and collar-buttons. She knew them all, or at least
was known to all of them, and in a few moments she was retailing to them
the latest news of the town. Soon I caught a name or two, and on the
instant was at some pains to listen. The bum-boat woman was telling the
story of the house with the blinds:
"Sax of um, an' nobs ivry wan. But that bad wid bug-juice! Whoo!
Niver have Oi seen the bate! An' divil a wan as can remimber owt for
two days by. Bory-eyed they were; struck dumb an' deef an' dead wid
whiskey and bubble-wather. Not a manjack av um can tell the tale, but
wan av um used his knife cruel bad. Now which wan was it? Howse the
coort to find out?"
It appeared that the house with the blinds was, or had been, a gambling
house, and what I had seen had been a raid. Then the rest of the story
came out, and the mysteries began to thicken. That same evening, after
the arrest of the six inebriates, the house had been searched. The
police had found evidences of a drunken debauch of a monumental
character. But they had found more. In a closet under the stairs the
dead body of a man, a well dressed fellow--beyond a doubt one of the
party--knifed to death by dreadful slashes in his loins and at the base
of his spine in true evil hand-over-back fashion.
Now this is the mystery of the house with the blinds.
Beyond all doubt, one of the six drunken men had done the murder. Which
one? How to find out? So completely were they drunk that not a single
one of them could recall anything of the previous twelve hours. They
had come out there with their friend the day before. They woke from
their orgie to learn that one of them had worried him to his death by
means of a short palm-broad dagger taken from a trophy of Persian arms
that hung over a divan.
Whose hand had done it? Which one of them was the murdered? I could
fancy them--I think I can see them now--sitting there in their cells,
each man apart, withdrawn from his fellow-reveler, and each looking
furtively into his fellow's face, asking himself, "Was it you? Was it
you? or was it I? Which of us, in God's name, has done this thing?"
Well, it was never known. When I came back to San Francisco a year or
so later I asked about the affair of the house with the blinds, and
found that it had been shelved with the other mysterious crimes: The six
men had actually been "discharged for the want of evidence."
But for a long time the thing harassed me. More than once since I have
gone to that windy park, with its quivering flagstaff and Geodetic
monument, and, sitting on a bench opposite the house, asked myself again
and again the bootless questions. Why had the drunken nurse-maid
mentioned the house to me in the first place? And why at that
particular time? Why had she lied to me in telling me that she lived
there? Why was that gilded Indian-club on the sill of the upper window?
And whose--here's a point--whose was the hand that drew it inside the
house? And then, of course, last of all, the ever recurrent question,
which one of those six inebriates should have stood upon the drop and
worn the cap--which one of the company had knifed his friend and bundled
him into that closet under the stairs? Had he done it during the night
of the orgie, or before it? Was his friend drunk at the time, or sober?
I never could answer these questions, and I suppose I shall never know
the secret of "The House With the Blinds."
A Greek family lives there now, and rent the upper story to a man who
blows the organ in the Russian Church, and to two Japanese, who have a
photograph gallery on Stockton street. I wonder to what use they have
put the little closet under the stairs?
_*Little Dramas of the Curbstone*_
The first Little Drama had for backing the red brick wall of the clinic
at the Medical Hospital, and the calcium light was the feeble glimmer of
a new-lighted street lamp, though it was yet early in the evening and
quite light. There were occasional sudden explosions of a northeast
wind at the street corners, and at long intervals an empty cable-car
trundled heavily past with a strident whirring of jostled glass windows.
Nobody was in sight--the street was deserted. There was the pale red
wall of the clinic, severe as that of a prison, the livid grey of the
cement sidewalk, and above the faint greenish blue of a windy sky. A
door in the wall of the hospital opened, and a woman and a young boy
came out. They were dressed darkly, and at once their two black figures
detached themselves violently against the pale blue of the background.
They made the picture. All the faint tones of the wall and the sky and
the grey-brown sidewalk focused immediately upon them. They came across
the street to the corner upon which I stood, and the woman asked a
direction. She was an old woman, and poorly dressed. The boy, I could
see, was her son. Him I took notice of, for she led him to the steps of
the nearest house and made him sit down upon the lowest one. She guided
all his movements, and he seemed to be a mere figure of wax in her
hands. She stood over him, looking at him critically, and muttering to
herself. Then she turned to me, and her muttering rose to a shrill,
articulate plaint:
"Ah, these fool doctors--these dirty beasts of medical students! They
impose upon us because we're poor and rob us and tell us lies."
Upon this I asked her what her grievance was, but she would not answer
definitely, putting her chin the air and nodding with half-shut eyes, as
if she could say a lot about that if she chose.
"Your son is sick?" said I.
"Yes--or no--not sick; but he's blind, and--and--he's blind and he's an
idiot--born that way--blind and idiot."
Blind and an idiot! Blind and an idiot! Will you think of that for a
moment, you with your full stomachs, you with your brains, you with your
two sound eyes. Born blind and idiotic! Do you fancy the horror of
that thing? Perhaps you cannot, nor perhaps could I myself have
conceived of what it meant to be blind and an idiot had I not seen that
woman's son in front of the clinic, in the empty, windy street, where
nothing stirred, and where there was nothing green. I looked at him as
he sat there, tall, narrow, misshapen. His ready-made suit, seldom
worn, but put on that day because of the weekly visit to the clinic,
hung in stupid wrinkles and folds upon him. His cheap felt hat, clapped
upon his head by his mother with as little unconcern as an extinguisher
upon a candle, was wrong end foremost, so that the bow of the band came
upon the right hand side. His hands were huge and white, and lay open
and palm upward at his side, the fingers inertly lax, like those of a
discarded glove, and his face----
When I looked at the face of him I know not what insane desire, born of
an unconquerable disgust, came up in me to rush upon him and club him
down to the pavement with my stick and batter in that face--that face of
a blind idiot--and blot it out from the sight of the sun for good and
all. It was impossible to feel pity for the wretch. I hated him
because he was blind and an idiot. His eyes were filmy, like those of a
fish, and he never blinked them. His mouth hung open.
Blind and an idiot, absolute stagnation, life as unconscious as that of
the jelly-fish, an excrescence, a parasitic fungus in the form of a man,
a creature far below the brute. The last horror of the business was
that he never moved; he sat there just as his mother had placed him, his
motionless, filmy eyes fixed, his jaw dropped, his hands open at his
sides, his hat on wrong side foremost. He would sit like that, I knew,
for hours--for days, perhaps--would, if left to himself, die of
starvation, without raising a finger. What was going on inside of that
misshapen head--behind those fixed eyes?
I had remembered the case by now. One of the students had told me of
it. His mother brought him to the clinic occasionally, so that the
lecturer might experiment upon his brain, stimulating it with
electricity. "Heredity," the student had commented, "father a
degenerate, exhausted race, drank himself into a sanitarium."
While I was thinking all this the mother of the boy had gone on talking,
her thin voice vibrant with complaining and vituperation. But indeed I
could bear with it no longer, and went away. I left them behind me in
the deserted, darkening street, the querulous, nagging woman and her
blind, idiotic boy, and the last impression I have of the scene was her
shrill voice ringing after me the oft-repeated words:
"Ah, the dirty beasts of doctors--they robs us and impose on us and tell
us lies because we're poor!"
* * * * *
The second Little Drama was wrought out for me the next day. I was
sitting in the bay window of the club watching the world go by, when my
eye was caught by a little group on the curbstone directly opposite. An
old woman, meanly dressed, and two little children, both girls, the
eldest about ten, the youngest, say, six or seven. They had been coming
slowly along, and the old woman had been leading the youngest child by
the hand. Just as they came opposite to where I was sitting the younger
child lurched away from the woman once or twice, dragging limply at her
hand, then its knees wobbled and bent and the next moment it had
collapsed upon the pavement. Some children will do this from sheer
perversity and with intent to be carried. But it was not perversity on
this child's part. The poor old woman hauled the little girl up to her
feet, but she collapsed again at once after a couple of steps and sat
helplessly down upon the sidewalk, staring vaguely about, her thumb in
her mouth. There was something wrong with the little child--one could
see that at half a glance. Some complaint, some disease of the muscles,
some weakness of the joints, that smote upon her like this at
inopportune moments. Again and again her old mother, with very painful
exertion--she was old and weak herself--raised her to her feet, only
that she might sink in a heap before she had moved a yard. The old
woman's bonnet fell off--a wretched, battered black bonnet, and the
other little girl picked it up and held it while she looked on at her
mother's efforts with an indifference that could only have been born of
familiarity. Twice the old woman tried to carry the little girl, but
her strength was not equal to it; indeed, the effort of raising the
heavy child to its feet was exhausting her. She looked helplessly at
the street cars as they passed, but you could see she had not enough
money to pay even three fares. Once more she set her little girl upon
her feet, and helped her forward half a dozen steps. And so, little by
little, with many pauses for rest and breath, the little group went down
the street and passed out of view, the little child staggering and
falling as if from drunkenness, her sister looking on gravely, holding
the mother's battered bonnet, and the mother herself, patient,
half-exhausted, her grey hair blowing about her face, labouring on step
by step, trying to appear indifferent to the crowd that passed by on
either side, trying bravely to make light of the whole matter until she
should reach home. As I watched them I thought of this woman's husband,
the father of this paralytic little girl, and somehow it was brought to
me that none of them would ever see him again, but that he was alive for
all that.
* * * * *
The third Little Drama was lively, and there was action in it, and
speech, and a curious, baffling mystery. On a corner near a certain
bank in this city there is affixed to the lamp post a call-box that the
police use to ring up for the patrol wagon. When an arrest is made in
the neighbourhood the offender is brought here, the wagon called for,
and he is conveyed to the City Prison. On the afternoon of the day of
the second Little Drama, as I came near to this corner, I was aware of a
crowd gathered about the lamp post that held the call-box, and between
the people's heads and over their shoulders I could see the blue helmets
of a couple of officers. I stopped and pushed up into the inner circle
of the crowd. The two officers had in custody a young fellow of some
eighteen or nineteen years. And I was surprised to find that he was as
well dressed and as fine looking a lad as one would wish to see. I did
not know what the charge was, I don't know it now,--but the boy did not
seem capable of any great meanness. As I got into the midst of the
crowd, and while I was noting what was going forward, it struck me that
the people about me were unusually silent--silent as people are who are
interested and unusually observant. Then I saw why. The young fellow's
mother was there, and the Little Drama was enacting itself between her,
her son, and the officers who had him in charge. One of these latter
had the key to the call-box in his hand. He had not yet rung for the
wagon. An altercation was going on between the mother and the son--she
entreating him to come home, he steadily refusing.
"It's up to you," said one of the officers, at length; "if you don't go
home with your mother, I'll call the wagon."
"No!"
"Jimmy!" said the woman, and then, coming close to him, she spoke to him
in a low voice and with an earnestness, an intensity, that it hurt one
to see.
"No!"
"For the last time, will you come?"
"No! No! No!"
The officer faced about and put the key into the box, but the woman
caught at his wrist and drew it away. It was a veritable situation. It
should have occurred behind footlights and in the midst of painted flats
and flies, but instead the city thundered about it, drays and cars went
up and down in the street, and the people on the opposite walk passed
with but an instant's glance. The crowd was as still as an audience,
watching what next would happen. The crisis of the Little Drama had
arrived.
"For the last time, will you come with me?"
"No!"
She let fall her hand then and turned and went away, crying into her
handkerchief. The officer unlocked and opened the box, set the
indicator and opened the switch. A few moments later, as I went on up
the street, I met the patrol-wagon coming up on a gallop.
What was the trouble here? Why had that young fellow preferred going to
prison rather than home with his mother? What was behind it all I shall
never know. It was a mystery--a little eddy in the tide of the city's
life, come and gone in an instant, yet reaching down to the very depths
of those things that are not meant to be seen.
And as I went along I wondered where was the father of that young fellow
who was to spend his first night in jail, and the father of the little
paralytic girl, and the father of the blind idiot, and it seemed to me
that the chief actors in these three Little Dramas of the Curbstone had
been somehow left out of the programme.
_*Shorty Stack, Pugilist*_
Over at the "Big Dipper" mine a chuck-tender named Kelly had been in
error as regards a box of dynamite sticks, and Iowa Hill had elected to
give an "entertainment" for the benefit of his family.
The programme, as announced upon the posters that were stuck up in the
Post Office and on the door of the Odd Fellows' Hall, was quite an
affair. The Iowa Hill orchestra would perform, the livery-stable keeper
would play the overture to "William Tell" upon his harmonica, and the
town doctor would read a paper on "Tuberculosis in Cattle." The evening
was to close with a "grand ball."
Then it was discovered that a professional pugilist from the "Bay" was
over in Forest Hill, and someone suggested that a match could be made
between him and Shorty Stack "to enliven the entertainment." Shorty
Stack was a bedrock cleaner at the "Big Dipper," and handy with his
fists. It was his boast that no man of his weight (Shorty fought at a
hundred and forty) no man of his weight in Placer County could stand up
to him for ten rounds, and Shorty had always made good this boast.
Shorty knew two punches, and no more--a short-arm jab under the ribs
with his right, and a left upper-cut on the point of the chin.