John Byrnes, hose-cart driver of Engine Company No. 99, was afflicted
with what his comrades called Japanitis.
Byrnes had a war map spread permanently upon a table in the second
story of the engine-house, and he could explain to you at any hour of
the day or night the exact positions, conditions and intentions of both
the Russian and Japanese armies. He had little clusters of pins stuck
in the map which represented the opposing forces, and these he moved
about from day to day in conformity with the war news in the daily
papers.
Wherever the Japs won a victory John Byrnes would shift his pins, and
then he would execute a war dance of delight, and the other firemen
would hear him yell: “Go it, you blamed little, sawed-off,
huckleberry-eyed, monkey-faced hot tamales! Eat ’em up, you little
sleight-o’-hand, bow-legged bull terriers—give ’em another of them Yalu
looloos, and you’ll eat rice in St. Petersburg. Talk about your
Russians—say, wouldn’t they give you a painsky when it comes to a
scrapovitch?”
Not even on the fair island of Nippon was there a more enthusiastic
champion of the Mikado’s men. Supporters of the Russian cause did well
to keep clear of Engine-House No. 99.
Sometimes all thoughts of the Japs left John Byrnes’s head. That was
when the alarm of fire had sounded and he was strapped in his driver’s
seat on the swaying cart, guiding Erebus and Joe, the finest team in
the whole department—according to the crew of 99.
Of all the codes adopted by man for regulating his actions toward his
fellow-mortals, the greatest are these—the code of King Arthur’s
Knights of the Round Table, the Constitution of the United States and
the unwritten rules of the New York Fire Department. The Round Table
methods are no longer practicable since the invention of street cars
and breach-of-promise suits, and our Constitution is being found more
and more unconstitutional every day, so the code of our firemen must be
considered in the lead, with the Golden Rule and Jeffries’s new punch
trying for place and show.
The Constitution says that one man is as good as another; but the Fire
Department says he is better. This is a too generous theory, but the
law will not allow itself to be construed otherwise. All of which comes
perilously near to being a paradox, and commends itself to the
attention of the S. P. C. A.
One of the transatlantic liners dumped out at Ellis Island a lump of
protozoa which was expected to evolve into an American citizen. A
steward kicked him down the gangway, a doctor pounced upon his eyes
like a raven, seeking for trachoma or ophthalmia; he was hustled ashore
and ejected into the city in the name of Liberty—perhaps,
theoretically, thus inoculating against kingocracy with a drop of its
own virus. This hypodermic injection of Europeanism wandered happily
into the veins of the city with the broad grin of a pleased child. It
was not burdened with baggage, cares or ambitions. Its body was lithely
built and clothed in a sort of foreign fustian; its face was brightly
vacant, with a small, flat nose, and was mostly covered by a thick,
ragged, curling beard like the coat of a spaniel. In the pocket of the
imported Thing were a few
coins—denarii—scudi—kopecks—pfennigs—pilasters—whatever the financial
nomenclature of his unknown country may have been.
Prattling to himself, always broadly grinning, pleased by the roar and
movement of the barbarous city into which the steamship cut-rates had
shunted him, the alien strayed away from the sea, which he hated, as
far as the district covered by Engine Company No. 99. Light as a cork,
he was kept bobbing along by the human tide, the crudest atom in all
the silt of the stream that emptied into the reservoir of Liberty.
While crossing Third avenue he slowed his steps, enchanted by the
thunder of the elevated trains above him and the soothing crash of the
wheels on the cobbles. And then there was a new, delightful chord in
the uproar—the musical clanging of a gong and a great shining
juggernaut belching fire and smoke, that people were hurrying to see.
This beautiful thing, entrancing to the eye, dashed past, and the
protoplasmic immigrant stepped into the wake of it with his broad,
enraptured, uncomprehending grin. And so stepping, stepped into the
path of No. 99’s flying hose-cart, with John Byrnes gripping, with arms
of steel, the reins over the plunging backs of Erebus and Joe.
The unwritten constitutional code of the fireman has no exceptions or
amendments. It is a simple thing—as simple as the rule of three. There
was the heedless unit in the right of way; there was the hose-cart and
the iron pillar of the elevated railroad.
John Byrnes swung all his weight and muscle on the left rein. The team
and cart swerved that way and crashed like a torpedo into the pillar.
The men on the cart went flying like skittles. The driver’s strap
burst, the pillar rang with the shock, and John Byrnes fell on the car
track with a broken shoulder twenty feet away, while Erebus—beautiful,
raven-black, best-loved Erebus—lay whickering in his harness with a
broken leg.
In consideration for the feelings of Engine Company No. 99 the details
will be lightly touched. The company does not like to be reminded of
that day. There was a great crowd, and hurry calls were sent in; and
while the ambulance gong was clearing the way the men of No. 99 heard
the crack of the S. P. C. A. agent’s pistol, and turned their heads
away, not daring to look toward Erebus again.
When the firemen got back to the engine-house they found that one of
them was dragging by the collar the cause of their desolation and
grief. They set it in the middle of the floor and gathered grimly about
it. Through its whiskers the calamitous object chattered effervescently
and waved its hands.
“Sounds like a seidlitz powder,” said Mike Dowling, disgustedly, “and
it makes me sicker than one. Call that a man!—that hoss was worth a
steamer full of such two-legged animals. It’s a immigrant—that’s what
it is.”
“Look at the doctor’s chalk mark on its coat,” said Reilly, the desk
man. “It’s just landed. It must be a kind of a Dago or a Hun or one of
them Finns, I guess. That’s the kind of truck that Europe unloads onto
us.”
“Think of a thing like that getting in the way and laying John up in
hospital and spoiling the best fire team in the city,” groaned another
fireman. “It ought to be taken down to the dock and drowned.”
“Somebody go around and get Sloviski,” suggested the engine driver,
“and let’s see what nation is responsible for this conglomeration of
hair and head noises.”
Sloviski kept a delicatessen store around the corner on Third avenue,
and was reputed to be a linguist.
One of the men fetched him—a fat, cringing man, with a discursive eye
and the odors of many kinds of meats upon him.
“Take a whirl at this importation with your jaw-breakers, Sloviski,”
requested Mike Dowling. “We can’t quite figure out whether he’s from
the Hackensack bottoms or Hongkong-on-the-Ganges.”
Sloviski addressed the stranger in several dialects that ranged in
rhythm and cadence from the sounds produced by a tonsilitis gargle to
the opening of a can of tomatoes with a pair of scissors. The immigrant
replied in accents resembling the uncorking of a bottle of ginger ale.
“I have you his name,” reported Sloviski. “You shall not pronounce it.
Writing of it in paper is better.” They gave him paper, and he wrote,
“Demetre Svangvsk.”
“Looks like short hand,” said the desk man.
“He speaks some language,” continued the interpreter, wiping his
forehead, “of Austria and mixed with a little Turkish. And, den, he
have some Magyar words and a Polish or two, and many like the
Roumanian, but not without talk of one tribe in Bessarabia. I do not
him quite understand.”
“Would you call him a Dago or a Polocker, or what?” asked Mike,
frowning at the polyglot description.
“He is a”—answered Sloviski—“he is a—I dink he come from—I dink he is a
fool,” he concluded, impatient at his linguistic failure, “and if you
pleases I will go back at mine delicatessen.”
“Whatever he is, he’s a bird,” said Mike Dowling; “and you want to
watch him fly.”
Taking by the wing the alien fowl that had fluttered into the nest of
Liberty, Mike led him to the door of the engine-house and bestowed upon
him a kick hearty enough to convey the entire animus of Company 99.
Demetre Svangvsk hustled away down the sidewalk, turning once to show
his ineradicable grin to the aggrieved firemen.
In three weeks John Byrnes was back at his post from the hospital. With
great gusto he proceeded to bring his war map up to date. “My money on
the Japs every time,” he declared. “Why, look at them Russians—they’re
nothing but wolves. Wipe ’em out, I say—and the little old jiu jitsu
gang are just the cherry blossoms to do the trick, and don’t you forget
it!”
The second day after Byrnes’s reappearance came Demetre Svangvsk, the
unidentified, to the engine-house, with a broader grin than ever. He
managed to convey the idea that he wished to congratulate the hose-cart
driver on his recovery and to apologize for having caused the accident.
This he accomplished by so many extravagant gestures and explosive
noises that the company was diverted for half an hour. Then they kicked
him out again, and on the next day he came back grinning. How or where
he lived no one knew. And then John Byrnes’s nine-year-old son, Chris,
who brought him convalescent delicacies from home to eat, took a fancy
to Svangvsk, and they allowed him to loaf about the door of the
engine-house occasionally.
One afternoon the big drab automobile of the Deputy Fire Commissioner
buzzed up to the door of No. 99 and the Deputy stepped inside for an
informal inspection. The men kicked Svangvsk out a little harder than
usual and proudly escorted the Deputy around 99, in which everything
shone like my lady’s mirror.
The Deputy respected the sorrow of the company concerning the loss of
Erebus, and he had come to promise it another mate for Joe that would
do him credit. So they let Joe out of his stall and showed the Deputy
how deserving he was of the finest mate that could be in horsedom.
While they were circling around Joe confabbing, Chris climbed into the
Deputy’s auto and threw the power full on. The men heard a monster
puffing and a shriek from the lad, and sprang out too late. The big
auto shot away, luckily taking a straight course down the street. The
boy knew nothing of its machinery; he sat clutching the cushions and
howling. With the power on nothing could have stopped that auto except
a brick house, and there was nothing for Chris to gain by such a
stoppage.
Demetre Svangvsk was just coming in again with a grin for another kick
when Chris played his merry little prank. While the others sprang for
the door Demetre sprang for Joe. He glided upon the horse’s bare back
like a snake and shouted something at him like the crack of a dozen
whips. One of the firemen afterward swore that Joe answered him back in
the same language. Ten seconds after the auto started the big horse was
eating up the asphalt behind it like a strip of macaroni.
Some people two blocks and a half away saw the rescue. They said that
the auto was nothing but a drab noise with a black speck in the middle
of it for Chris, when a big bay horse with a lizard lying on its back
cantered up alongside of it, and the lizard reached over and picked the
black speck out of the noise.
Only fifteen minutes after Svangvsk’s last kicking at the hands—or
rather the feet—of Engine Company No. 99 he rode Joe back through the
door with the boy safe, but acutely conscious of the licking he was
going to receive.
Svangvsk slipped to the floor, leaned his head against Joe’s and made a
noise like a clucking hen. Joe nodded and whistled loudly through his
nostrils, putting to shame the knowledge of Sloviski, of the
delicatessen.
John Byrnes walked up to Svangvsk, who grinned, expecting to be kicked.
Byrnes gripped the outlander so strongly by the hand that Demetre
grinned anyhow, conceiving it to be a new form of punishment.
“The heathen rides like a Cossack,” remarked a fireman who had seen a
Wild West show—“they’re the greatest riders in the world.”
The word seemed to electrify Svangvsk. He grinned wider than ever.
“Yas—yas—me Cossack,” he spluttered, striking his chest.
“Cossack!” repeated John Byrnes, thoughtfully, “ain’t that a kind of a
Russian?”
“They’re one of the Russian tribes, sure,” said the desk man, who read
books between fire alarms.
Just then Alderman Foley, who was on his way home and did not know of
the runaway, stopped at the door of the engine-house and called to
Byrnes:
“Hello there, Jimmy, me boy—how’s the war coming along? Japs still got
the bear on the trot, have they?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said John Byrnes, argumentatively, “them Japs
haven’t got any walkover. You wait till Kuropatkin gets a good whack at
’em and they won’t be knee-high to a puddle-ducksky.”