Concerning an Abandoned Hotel, and who lived there; also of
an Abandoned Youth, who lived somewhere else, Far Away; how a
Slum Doctor dressed for a Function, such as involved Studs;
and how Kern Garland wishted she was a Lady.
Mrs. Garland, catching sight of Doctor as he came up the decayed
grand-stairway, cried out, well, she never, just in the nig of time!
Why, the words was no more'n out of her mouth that the stoo was just
done to a hair, she did declare, and Kern she said, quick as anything,
what, a hair in the stoo, now, mommer, that'd never do....
The clocks of the city had just struck six for the last time that year.
Dr. Vivian, having placed his suitcase and overcoat on the second-hand
operating-table in the office, washed face and hands, brushed his
coat-collar with a whisk whose ranks had been heavily thinned in wars
with dust and lint, and, repairing in sound spirits to the Garland
combination dining-and living-room, with the kitchen in the corner, made
his interesting confidence relative to the suitcase. He made it in
mouth-filling phrases, with many teasing generalizations about the ways
of the world and the evils of modern society, which was only his
gempman's way when playful. But by close application his auditors soon
got at the heart of his meaning, to wit: Doctor actually was going
uptown to his swell Uncle Beirne's swell Noo Year's reception to-night
in Mr. O'Neill's fulldressuit.
Naturally the Garlands were much interested and excited by the tidings,
which brought them so close to great events that, practically speaking,
they themselves became members of the fash'nable set: and Mrs. Garland
publicly thanked God that she was not as other women were, lazying and
keeping back their gentlemen's shirts till Saturday night, or worse.
Laid away tidy in the second bureau drawer, her shirts were. The doctor
himself seemed not a little enlivened by the evening's prospect. It is
imaginable that the Dabney House grew a little lonely at times....
"And to think your swell uncle wants you so special, sir!" said Mrs.
Garland, in her harsh, inflectionless voice. "A compliment, I'm sure.
And his party all a fizzle unless you come, and his gai'ty a
mockery! Well!"
Such indeed was the way in which Vivian had been pleased to depict his
fashionable uncle's attitude. He smiled slightly, sipped his feeble
coffee and said:
"Bear in mind that he's a bad, bad (though personally not displeasing)
old man, ridden by ruinous ideas about the almightiness of the dollar,
or lucre as we term it.... I have observed for some time that he desires
to corrupt me with his Persian luxuries."
"Persian! Well, I never!"
Mrs. G., a stout woman and a dress-reformer by the look of her, got hot
corn muffins from the kitchenette in the corner, and added:
"Them rugs is beautiful."
"He said lux'ries, mommer, like lowneg dresses, and tchampagne, and
ice-cream all like animals," said Kern.
"I do declare! Well, they do say the mawls of some of them swells is
something nawful. Not alloodin' to your uncle now, well, of
course, sir."
"I know a girl named Sadie Whirtle," continued Kern, "and there was a
man named Toatwood made a lot of money, corntracting, and his wife she
took some of the money and went to Europe in a steamer and stayed more'n
two months buying clo'es. And one day Sadie Whirtle goes up to him and
says, 'Mist' Toatwood, hear your wife's come home with some fine
Parisian clo'es.' And Mist' Toatwood says, 'Shucks'--on'y he says
somep'n worse'n shucks--'Shucks,' says he, 'why, my wife never been to
Persia in her life.'"
Kern was eighteen, with six years of bread-winning behind her, but she
told her story exactly in the manner of a child of eight. That is to
say, she told it in a monotone without evincing, and clearly without
feeling, the slightest amusement in it, and at the end, continuing quite
grave, watched for its effect on others with a curious, staring
interest. Her immobile, investigatory expression made the doctor laugh,
which seemed, of late, to be the object in life of all Kern's anecdotes.
"Where'd you get that story, Corinne?"
His odd habit of so calling her had often been privately discussed
between Kern and her mother, who had so long ago shortened their own
original Kurrin that even that had passed from memory. They had
concluded that this was only one of his jokey gempman's ways.
"Off Sadie Whirtle," said Kern, rocking backward and forward in her
chair. "On'y I don't see anything comical in it."
And then she giggled for some time.
The talk and stoo went forward cheerfully. Beside the Goldnagels, on the
ground floor, these two women were the doctor's only fellow lodgers, for
Mister Garland, of the wanderlust, had not visited his family since the
day in October, and so hardly counted. In the early weeks of the
doctor's tenancy, which began only last September, he had walked three
times a day to the Always Open Lunch Room, known among the baser sort as
the Suicide Club, and had then become possibly the most discriminating
judge of egg-sandwiches in all the city. Later, having made the better
acquaintance of the Garlands, he had rightly surmised that the earnings
derivable from a medical boarder might not be unacceptable in that
quarter. The present modus vivendi, then worked out, had proved most
satisfactory to all, from both the financial and the social viewpoints.
"I wisht I had a red satin dress, and a necklace all pearls, and was
going to the party, too, and had a dark sad-faced man with a mustache
and a neye-glass engaged to me, like a count. I wisht I was a Lady,"
said Kern.
"You don't need a red satin dress to be a lady."
"It'd come easier, kinder, with the dress, Mr. V.V. And I wisht I had a
writin'-desk, too. And a founting pen."
"Lawk's sakes, Kern, an' I've asked you a hundred times what would you
do with a writin'-desk, now?"
"Mommer, I'd set at it."
"An' what time you got for settin', I'd like to know? Fairy-dreamin'
again!"
"An' I'd keep notes in it in the pigeonholes. Like it says in my
Netiquette."
"You don't get no notes."
Kern was silenced by her mother's addiction to actuality, but presently
said: "I'd get notes if I was a lady, wouldn't I, Mr. V.V.?"
The doctor assured her that she would, and that all these things would
come some day. He sighed inwardly and wondered, not for the first time,
where the link could possibly lie between the matter-of-fact mother and
the strange child of fancy. There was nothing to do but attribute the
phenomenon to Mister, the whimsical knight of the open road. The boarder
asked what he should bring Kern from the party: he feared they wouldn't
have writing-desks, it not being at all a literary set. The girl thought
a rapturous moment and then asked could she have three of them
marrowglasses, all in curly white paper.
Vivian promised, and departed on his duties. First there was a call at
the Miggses' down the block, where the little boy Tub lay with scarlet
fever, very sick; and then there was his seven o'clock office hour for
workers, in which one, a teamster with Bright's disease and seven
children, remained long....
These matters occupied the doctor till eight o'clock: alone in his
office he computed the fact roughly from his watch, a battered heirloom
whose word was not to be taken literally. Good!--half an hour before
time to dress. Leisure, being a scant commodity, was proportionally
valued. The young man advanced to his secretary, before whose open face
plain living and high thinking could be so freely indulged in.
The secretary was of fine mahogany, hand-made in Virginia in the year
that Sir Edward Pakenham did not take New Orleans. It was the hero of so
many travels that its present proprietor once called it a
field-secretary, a pleasantry which would doubtless have convulsed Miss
Mamie Willis, if only she had ever heard it. The great tall office, bare
but for cheap doctorly paraphernalia, was even more storied. A bleak
grandeur clung to it still. Decayed mouldings, it had aplenty: great
splotches on wall and ceiling, where plaster had been tried through the
year and found wanting; unsightlier splotch between the windows whence
the tall gilt mirror had been plucked away for cash; broken chandelier,
cracked panes, loose flooring, dismantled fireplace. But view the
stately high pitch of the chamber, the majestic wide windows and private
balcony without, the tall mantel of pure black marble, the still
handsome walnut paneling, waist-high, the massive splendid doors. No
common suburban room, this: clearly a room with meaning, a past, soul.
The look was not deceptive. Royalty had on a time sat in this room: here
granted audience to the great's higher circle, of greatness; there,
beyond that door, nowadays admitting ragged sufferers from a
fourth-class "waiting-room," slept in state with doubtless royal snores.
This, in fact, was the old Dabney House's famous "state suite," Vivian's
office the culminating grand sitting-room, the building art's best in
the '40s. A famous hostelry the Dabney House had been in its day, the
chosen foregathering-place of notabilities now long dusted to the common
level. Hither had trooped the gallant and the gay, the knight in his
pride and beauty in her power, great statesmen and greater belles, their
lovers and their sycophants. Here, in the memorable ball still talked of
by silvered ladies of an elder day, the Great Personage had trod his
measure with peerless Mary Marshall.
A great history had the Dabney House, and now nothing much else beside.
Built upon a flouting of a common law, it had lived to see the westward
course of progress, deaf to sentiment as ever, kick it far astern. Long
since had the world of fashion deserted it to its memories. Desolate and
mice-ridden stood the fading pile in a neighborhood where further decay
was hardly possible, enveloped by failure and dirt and poverty, misery
and sin and the sound of unholy revelry by night. 'The lion and the
lizard keep the courts where Jamshýd gloried and drank deep.' And the
vast moulded corridors, historied with great names, echoed to the feet
of Garlands, Vivians, and Goldnagels, and over the boards once ennobled
by the press of royal feet, a shabby young man sat writing into a book
with a villainous pen, as follows:
Rent $12.
Board 20.
Laundry 3.25
Dr. Vivian had, in short, induced himself to the casting-up of his
monthly accounts, a task of weariness and travail. As to-morrow was the
first day of the year, it was natural that he should thus occupy his
half-hour of leisure, but as he was unmethodical by nature it was also
natural that he should be casting up the account for November, December
(which included Christmas) being as yet unlooked into. Jottings on loose
bits of paper supplied the necessary data, or didn't, as the case
might be.
The young man scratched his head, and continued:
Car-tickets $1.25
Tobacco .40
Soap .15
Shaving ditto .19
Gas 2.40
Pencils .03
"Aha!" said V. Vivian, after a considerable interval; and penned
triumphantly:
Matches .05
Beads (Corinne) .49
Followed a long pause.
On the opposite, or left-hand, page of the ledger there stood:
Income 50.
Receipts 6.40
-----
Total 56.40
Vivian's dead father, though the absent-minded inventor of the turbine
that would never quite work, had somehow contrived not to make away with
every penny of his wife's Beirne inheritance. Very few unsuccessful
inventors could say as much. And this fact accounted for the
complicating term "Income," whose regular presence in the budget was
certainly a trifle awkward for the despiser of property, aligning him
out of hand with the wealthy classes; but to the individual was
undoubtedly most comforting, since it set a man economically free
forever. You never have to do anything for money, with fifty dollars a
month. Receipts were, of course, moneys taken in for services rendered.
If Vivian's sick insisted on paying him a little something for his
trouble, he thought it moral not to restrain them. However, the sick's
attitude was commonly the reverse of the above....
Ignoring "Receipts," as a highly uncertain quantity, the scheme of
income and outgo commonly left a net monthly balance of about ten
dollars for works of a philanthropic nature. From a strictly scientific
point of view, the budget contained an unsoundness, in that it allowed
nothing for depreciation of plant, so to say: the necessity for fresh
supplies of a personal nature really was not duly faced in it. However,
the doctor had so far eliminated all expenditures in that quarter, save
only for a little half-soling matter week before last. He was confident
that it would all work out very satisfactorily when occasion arose.
The trial balance to-night developed a shortage of $1.22. Before the
budgeteer could precisely place it, his attention became diverted by
something else, to return no more that evening. Having drawn a stray
sheet of paper toward him to scribble on it "Milk for Miggs," he was
caught and engrossed by other inscriptions on the sheet, noted down in
the early forenoon. They ran:
Heth Works (Pickle) Art in _Factory Worker_
See Mr. Dayne--Settlement--Begin canvass not
before Feb. 1. H. Cooney
Todd Inst.--Night School?
Socks?--Or darning
Playground. (Council Com. meets Fri. 5 P.M.)
Jack D.
Mrs. G. Loan 20c.
Through the next to the last item, Vivian absently drew a pencil mark,
the weekly cheering letter to Weymouth, Texas, having been written just
after the memorandum. However, the young man's eye remained fixed on the
item erased. He lit his pipe, took his head in both hands and continued
to stare....
Dalhousie had called at the Dabney House on the night of his departure
for the new country. His reappearance in the flesh proved at least that
that fierce instability of character, which betrays men in moments of
disaster to the irreparable rashness, was not in him. So much was a
comfort, for the witch fear had ridden Vivian in the silent weeks
following the Beach.
But the reparting was a heart-rack none the less. Dalhousie was no
lifelong friend like O'Neill, or even like Chas Cooney. But Vivian,
having made his acquaintance most informally one night in the summer,
had responded at sight to the unconscious claim of weakness; he had come
to feel a strong bond, conceived splendid reformatory plans. The boy's
fall and disgrace, coming like a crash from the blue, had been a severe
shock to him, which would last. His self-exile, while probably advisable
for a time at least, had been a prospect full of sadness. If poor
Dalhousie had, woven into him, a vitiating twist for self-dramatization,
if he said, "My God, why can't I die?" less with the terrible dignity of
ruin than like a lad portraying his idea of ruin on the stage, his
native missing of the utter ring of truth never occurred to Vivian. To
him this boy, broken for cowardice and cast off by his father and
friends, was as tragic a figure as Oedipus.
And what made the farewell so peculiarly sad was that Dal, out of his
painful bewilderment, was evidently still clinging to some sort of hope.
He himself had said, and said again, that there was no hope for such as
he. He admitted with bitterness his insane passion that sunny afternoon;
remembered and acknowledged a wild impulse to overturn the boat, and let
come what might. He paced the floor and cried out that nothing that they
said of him could be too bad. And yet he hoped. He had come to the
Dabney House with hope. He had given his Texas address with a falter
of hope.
But of course there was no hope. Drink, the great fowler, had bagged
one more....
Without, there rose a lonesome booming, far and ghostly in the stillness
of the great empty hotel. It was the Garlands' crazy clock, memento of
Mister in his prodigal bridal days. Harried forever by some obscure
intestinal disorder, the mad timepiece stayed voiceless for days
together, and then, without warning, embarked upon an orgy of profligate
strikings. Now it struck fourteen, and fell abruptly silent.
Vivian stirred, and remembered the reception. His uncle, who derided and
castigated his Dabney House career, had said emphatically that he would
consider it most disrespectful if his solitary nephew absented himself
from the annual greeting of friends. The nephew, since his home-coming,
had grown very fond of the old gentleman. Yet he knew quite well that he
wasn't giving up this evening solely to please his uncle.
He rose, relit his pipe, and walked about. Though useful bones were
missing from his left foot, he liked to walk: was rather an accomplished
pedestrian. In time he came to a halt before a dilapidated little
cabinet partly full of the shiny tools of his trade. The cabinet seemed
quite out of place in the tall state chamber: but then so did the man.
He did not look in the least like a doctor (just as Miss Heth had said).
The faint scent of iodoform that he now gave off was a heterogeneity,
like a whiff of brandy on a parson.
The young man stood gazing into his cabinet, fathoms deep in thought.
That Miss Heth was responsible for a meaningless lie which took away
more than life itself from one who had loved her truly in his way: this
was a hypothesis so wild and weak that it collapsed at the first
opportunity for calm, just examination. The sight of her again, the
other night, had merely clinched the matter; driven by a glance the last
nail in the coffin of Dalhousie's hope; and by the same stroke, swept
away the last lingering trace of diabolical suspicion. But that Miss
Heth had treated Dal pretty badly before the Beach was only too
probable. The boy's bitter complainings had left small doubt of that.
It is a world in which we must be just before we are generous.
Unfortunately, there could be little question that this girl with the
heavenly face had a certain touch--should we say?--of earthy hardness in
her, a certain induration of the spirit. She had shown it quite plainly
in her general attitude toward Dal in the hour of his need. She had
shown it again, in a sort of way, in her attitude toward the Works.
Not, indeed, in her resentment at his letter. Anything but resentment
there would have been unnatural, not to say inhuman and despisable, in a
daughter. Of course no girl worth a pinch of salt would allow you to
stand up and say that her father was a shameless homicide. Her anger
there did her the greatest credit: showed beyond doubt that she was
absolutely sound at heart.... Trouble was, of course, that she didn't
know anything about the Works, and didn't want to know. She supposed
that those scores of girls who went daily to her father's bunching-room
had nothing to do with her.
The night was cold; V. Vivian stood warming his hands over a second-hand
gas-stove, which leaked perceptibly.... Great heavens, how could it
possibly be otherwise? Was not this the way of all the world? Let a
little prosperity come to a poor peasant, and the first thing he did was
to stop eating five from the same bowl. That was Tolstoy; and that was
the way, through all peoples and all times, riches had meant segregation
from the Common.... Round and round them pulsed the great warm tide of
real life, and, stung by this mad blindness, men sweated and fought
their lives away trying to scramble up out of the enriching stream upon
a sterile little island. You could almost have forgiven them if they
were happy upon their island. But happiness is born in the heart, and
they who seek it elsewhere in the end hold Sodom apples in fingers
through which the pearl of great price has somewhere slipped on
the way....
"Mr. V.V.! Ain't you dressing _yet_!" said a voice from without. "Mommer
says remind you it's after nine o'clock."
The tall young man came to earth with a thud. A startled frown gathered
quickly on his brow.
"_What?_... Then I'm late indeed. _Nine o'clock!_ I don't see how it's
possible...."
He seized Commissioner O'Neill's suitcase from the operating-table, with
a panic show of hurry.
Kern's voice took on a cheering inflection.
"Don't you mind, Mr. V.V. All the swells'll be late. D'you want me to
help you, sir? Don't you want me put in your studs 'r something?"
Mr. V.V. set down the suitcase, dealt a mortal blow.
"I have no studs," he said, in a quiet, scared way.