hands became briskly active. He fumbled in an inner pocket of his
unbuttoned waistcoat; then his right hand, holding a small cylindrical
vial of a colorless liquid, passed swiftly over one of the two glasses
of slaking champagne and hovered there a second. A few tiny globules
fell dimpling into the top of the yellow wine, then vanished; a heavy
reek, like the smell of crushed peach kernels, spread through the whole
room. In the same motion almost he recorked the little bottle, stowed it
out of sight, and with a quick, wrenching thrust that bent the small
blade of his penknife in its socket he split the peach seed in two
lengthwise and with his thumb-nail bruised the small brown kernel lying
snugly within. He dropped the knife and the halved seed and began
sipping at the undoctored glass of champagne, not forgetting even then
to wave his fingers above it to keep the winged green tormentors out.
The door at the front reopened and the woman came in. Her thoughts were
not upon smells, but instinctively she sniffed at the thick scent on the
poisoned air.
"I accidentally split this peach seed open," he said quickly, with an
elaborate explanatory air. "Stenches up the whole place, don't it? Come,
take that other glass of champagne--it will do you good to----"
Perhaps it was some subtle sixth sense that warned him; perhaps the
lightning-quick realization that she had moved right alongside him,
poised and set to strike. At any rate he started to fling up his
head--too late! The needle point of the jet-headed hatpin entered
exactly at the outer corner of his right eye and passed backward for
nearly its full length into his brain--smoothly, painlessly, swiftly. He
gave a little surprised gasp, almost like a sob, and lolled his head
back against the chair rest, like a man who has grown suddenly tired.
The hand that held the champagne glass relaxed naturally and the glass
turned over on its side with a small tinkling sound and spilled its thin
contents on the table.
It had been easier than she had thought it would be. She stepped back,
still holding the hatpin. She moved around from behind him, and then she
saw his face, half upturned, almost directly beneath the low light.
There was no blood, no sign even of the wound, but his jaw had dropped
down unpleasantly, showing the ends of his lower front teeth, and his
eyes stared up unwinkingly with a puzzled, almost a disappointed, look
in them. A green fly lit at the outer corner of his right eye; more
green flies were coming. And he didn't put up his hand to brush it away.
He let it stay--he let it stay there.
With her eyes still fixed on his face, the woman reached out, feeling
for her glass of the champagne. She felt that she needed it now, and at
a gulp she took a good half of it down her throat.
She put the glass down steadily enough on the table; but into her eyes
came the same puzzled, baffled look that his wore, and almost gently she
slipped down into the chair facing him.
Then her jaw lolled a little too, and some of the other flies came
buzzing toward her.
IV
ANOTHER OF THOSE CUB REPORTER STORIES
The first time I saw Major Putnam Stone I didn't see him first. To be
exact, I heard him first, and then I walked round the end of a
seven-foot partition and saw him.
I had just gone to work for the Evening Press. As I recall now it was my
second day, and I hadn't begun to feel at home there yet, and probably
was more sensitive to outside sights and noises than I would ever again
be in that place. Generally speaking, when a reporter settles down to
his knitting, which in his case is his writing, he becomes impervious to
all disturbances excepting those that occur inside his own brainpan. If
he couldn't, he wouldn't amount to shucks in his trade. Give him a good,
live-action story to write for an edition going to press in about nine
minutes, and the rattles and slams of half a dozen typewriting machines,
and the blattings of a pestered city editor, and the gabble of a couple
of copy boys at his elbow, and all the rest of it won't worry him. He
may not think he hears it, but he does, only instead of being
distracting it is stimulating. It's all a part of the mechanism of the
shop, helping him along unconsciously to speed and efficiency. I've
often thought that, when I was handling a good, bloody murder story,
say, it would tone up my style to have a phonograph about ten feet away
grinding out The Last Ravings of John McCullough. Anyway, I am sure it
wouldn't do any harm. A brass band playing a John Philip Sousa march
makes fine accompaniment to write copy to. I've done it before now,
covering parades and conventions, and I know.
But on this particular occasion I was, as I say, new to the job and
maybe a little nervous to boot, and as I sat there, trying to frame a
snappy opening paragraph for the interview I had just brought back with
me from one of the hotels, I became aware of a voice somewhere in the
immediate vicinity, a voice that didn't jibe in with my thoughts. At the
moment I stopped to listen it was saying: "As for me, sir, I have always
contended that the ultimate fate of the cause was due in great measure
to the death of Albert Sidney Johnston at Shiloh on the evening of the
first day's fight. Now then, what would have been the final result if
Albert Sidney Johnston had lived? I ask you, gentlemen, what would have
been the final result if Albert Sidney Johnston had lived?"
Across the room from me I heard Devore give a hollow groan. His desk was
backed right up against the cross partition, and the partition was built
of thin pine boards and was like a sounding board in his ear. Devore was
city editor.
"Oh, thunder!" he said, half under his breath, "I'll be the goat! What
would have been the result if Albert Sidney Johnston had lived?" He
looked at me and gave a wink of serio-comic despair, and then he ran his
blue pencil up through his hair and left a blue streak like a scar on
his scalp. Devore was one of the few city editors I have ever seen who
used that tool which all of them are popularly supposed to handle so
murderously--a blue pencil. And as he had a habit, when he was flustered
or annoyed--and that was most of the time--of scratching his head with
the point end of it, his forehead under the hair roots was usually
streaked with purplish-blue tracings, like a fly-catcher's egg.
The voice, which had a deep and space-filling quality to it, continued
to come through and over the partition that divided off our cubby-hole
of a workroom--called a city room by courtesy--from the space where
certain other members of the staff had their desks. I got up from my
place and stepped over to where the thin wall ended in a doorway, being
minded to have a look at the speaker. The voice sounded as though it
must belong to a big man with a barrel-organ chest. I was surprised to
find that it didn't.
Its owner was sitting in a chair in the middle of a little space
cluttered up with discarded exchanges and galley proofs. He was rather a
small man, short but compact. He had his hat off and his hair, which was
thin but fine as silk floss, was combed back over his ears and sprayed
out behind in a sort of mane effect. It had been red hair once, but was
now so thickly streaked with white that it had become a faded brindle
color. I took notice of this first because his back was toward me; in a
second or two he turned his head sideways and I saw that he had exactly
the face to match the hair. It was a round, plump, elderly face, with a
short nose, delicately pink at the tip. The eyes were a pale blue, and
just under the lower lip, which protruded slightly, was a small gray-red
goatee, sticking straight out from a cleft in the chin like a dab of a
sandy sheep's wool. Also, as the speaker swung himself further round, I
took note of a shirt of plaited white linen billowing out over his chest
and ending at the top in a starchy yet rumply collar that rolled
majestically and Byronically clear up under his ears. Under the collar
was loosely knotted a black-silk tie such as sailors wear. His vest was
unbuttoned, all except the two lowermost buttons, and the sleeves of
his coat were turned back neatly off his wrists. This, though, could
not have been on account of the heat, because the weather wasn't very
hot yet. I learned later that, winter or summer, he always kept his coat
sleeves turned back and the upper buttons of his vest unfastened. His
hands were small and plump, and his feet were small too and daintily
shod in low, square-toed shoes. About the whole man there was an air
somehow of full-bloomed foppishness gone to tassel--as though having
been a dandy once, he was now merely neat and precise in his way of
dress.
He was talking along with the death of Albert Sidney Johnston for his
subject, not seeming to notice that his audience wasn't deeply
interested. He had, it seemed, a way of stating a proposition as a fact,
as an indisputable, everlasting, eternal fact, an immutable thing. It
became immutable through his way of stating it. Then he would frame it
in the form of a question and ask it. Then he would answer it himself
and go right ahead.
Boynton, the managing editor, was coiled up at his desk, wearing a look
of patient endurance on his face. Harty, the telegraph editor, was
trying to do his work--trying, I say, because the orator was booming
away like a bittern within three feet of him and Harty plainly was
pestered and fretful. Really the only person in sight who seemed
entertained was Sidley, the exchange editor, a young man with hair that
had turned white before its time and in his eye the devil-driven look of
a man who drinks hard, not because he wants to drink but because he
can't help drinking. Sidley, as I was to find out later, had less cause
to care for the old man than anybody about the shop, for he used to
disarrange Sidley's neatly piled exchanges, pawing through them for his
favorite papers. But Sidley could forget his own grievances in watchful
enjoyment of the dumb sufferings of Harty, whom he hated, as I came to
know, with the blind hate a dipsomaniac often has for any mild and
perfectly harmless individual.
As I stood there taking in the picture, the speaker, sensing a
stranger's presence, faced clear about and saw me. He nodded with a
grave courtesy, and then paused a moment as though expecting that one of
the others would introduce us. None of the others did introduce us
though, so he went ahead talking about Albert Sidney Johnston's death,
and I turned away. I stopped by Devore's desk.
"Who is he?" I asked.
"That," he said, with a kind of leashed and restrained ferocity in his
voice, "is Major Putnam P. Stone--and the P stands for Pest, which is
his middle name--late of the Southern Confederacy."
"Picturesque-looking old fellow, isn't he?" I said.
"Picturesque old nuisance," he said, and jabbed at his scalp with his
pencil as though he meant to puncture his skull. "Wait until you've been
here a few weeks and you'll have another name for him."
"Well, anyway, he's got a good carrying voice," I said, rather at a loss
to understand Devore's bitterness.
"Great," he mocked venomously; "you can hear it a mile. I hear it in my
sleep. So will you when you get to know him, the old bore!"
In due time I did get to know Major Stone well. He was dignified,
tiresome, conversational, gentle mannered and, I think, rather lonely.
By driblets, a scrap here and a scrap there, I learned something about
his private life. He came from the extreme eastern end of the state. He
belonged to an old family. His grandfather--or maybe it was his
great-grand-uncle--had been one of the first United States senators that
went to Washington after our state was admitted into the Union. He had
never married. He had no business or profession. From some property or
other he drew an income, small, but enough to keep him in a sort of
simple and genteel poverty. He belonged to the best club in town and the
most exclusive, the Shawnee Club, and he had served four years in the
Confederate army. That last was the one big thing in his life. To the
major's conceptions everything that happened before 1861 had been of a
preparatory nature, leading up to and paving the way for the main
event; and what had happened since 1865 was of no consequence, except in
so far as it reflected the effects of the Civil War.
Daily, as methodically as a milkwagon horse, he covered the same route.
First he sat in the reading room of the old Gaunt House, where by an
open fire in winter or by an open window in summer he discussed the
blunders of Braxton Bragg and similar congenial topics with a little
group of aging, fading, testy veterans. On his way to the Shawnee Club
he would come by the Evening Press office and stay an hour, or two
hours, or three hours, to go away finally with a couple of favored
exchanges tucked under his arm, and leave us with our ears still dinned
and tingling. Once in a while of a night, passing the Gaunt House on my
way to the boarding house where I lived--for four dollars a week--I
would see him through the windows, sometimes sitting alone, sometimes
with one of his cronies.
Round the office he sometimes bothered us and sometimes he interfered
with our work; but mainly all the men on the staff liked him, I think,
or at least we put up with him. In our home town each of us had known
somebody very much like him--there used to be at least one Major Stone
in every community in the South, although most of them are dead now, I
guess--so we all could understand him. When I say all I mean all but
Devore. The major's mere presence would poison Devore's whole day for
him. The major's blaring notes would cross-cut Devore's nerves as with a
dull and haggling saw. He--Devore I mean--disliked the major with a
dislike almost too deep for words. It had got to be an obsession with
him.
"You fellows that were born down here have to stand for him," he said
once, when the major had stumped out on his short legs after an
unusually long visit. "It's part of the penalty you pay for belonging in
this country. But I don't have to venerate him and fuss over him and
listen to him. I'm a Yankee, thank the Lord!" Devore came from Michigan
and had worked on papers in Cleveland and Detroit before he drifted
South. "Oh, we've got his counterpart up my way," he went on. "Up there
he'd be a pension-grabbing old kicker, ready to have a fit any time
anybody wearing a gray uniform got within ninety miles of him, and
writing red-hot letters of protest to the newspapers every time the
state authorities sent a captured battle flag back down South. Down here
he's a pompous, noisy old fraud, too proud to work for a living--or too
lazy--and too poor to count for anything in this world. The difference
is that up in my country we've squelched the breed--we got good and
tired of these professional Bloody Shirt wavers a good while ago; but
here you fuss over this man, and you'll sit round and pretend to listen
while he drools away about things that happened before any one of you
was born. Do you fellows know what I've found out about your Major
Putnam Stone? He's a life member of the Shawnee Club--a life member,
mind you! And here I've been living in this town over a year, and nobody
ever so much as invited me inside its front door!"
All of which was, perhaps, true, even though Devore had an unnecessarily
harsh way of stating the case; the part about the Shawnee Club was true,
at any rate, and I used to think it possibly had something to do with
Devore's feelings for Major Stone. Not that Devore gave open utterance
to his feelings to the major's face. To the major he was always silently
polite, with a little edging of ice on his politeness; he saved up his
spleen to spew it out behind the old fellow's back. Farther than that he
couldn't well afford to go anyhow. The Chief, owner of the paper and its
editor, was the major's friend. As for the major himself, he seemed
never to notice Devore's attitude. For a fact, I believe he actually
felt a sort of pity for Devore, seeing that Devore had been born in the
North. Not to have been born in the South was, from the major's way of
looking at the thing, a great and regrettable misfortune for which the
victim could not be held responsible, since the fault lay with his
parents and not with him. By way of a suitable return for this, Devore
spent many a spare moment thinking up grotesque yet wickedly
appropriate nicknames for the major. He called him Old First and Second
Manassas and Old Hardee's Tactics and Old Valley of Virginia. He called
him an old bluffer too.
He was wrong there, though, certainly. Though the major talked pretty
exclusively about the war, I took notice that he rarely talked about the
part he himself had played in it. Indeed, he rarely discussed anybody
below the rank of brigadier. The errors of Hood's campaign concerned him
more deeply than the personal performances of any individual. Campaigns
you might say were his specialty, campaigns and strategy. About such
things as these he could talk for hours--and he did.
I've known other men--plenty of them--not nearly so well educated as the
major, who could tell you tales of the war that would make you see
it--yes, and smell it too--the smoke of the campfires, the unutterable
fatigue of forced marches when the men, with their tongues lolling out
of their mouths like dogs, staggered along, panting like dogs; the
bloody prints of unshod feet on flinty, frozen clods; the shock and
fearful joy of the fighting; the shamed numbness of retreats; artillery
horses, their hides all blood-boltered and their tails clubbed and
clotted with mire, lying dead with stiff legs between overturned guns;
dead men piled in heaps and living men huddled in panics--all of it. But
when the major talked I saw only some serious-minded officers, in
whiskers of an obsolete cut and queer-looking shirt collars, poring over
maps round a table in a farmhouse parlor. When he chewed on the cud of
the vanished past it certainly was mighty dry chewing.
There came a day, a few weeks after I went to work for the Evening
Press, when for once anyway the major didn't seem to have anything to
say. It was in the middle of a blistering, smothering hot forenoon in
early June, muggy and still and close, when a fellow breathing felt as
though he had his nose buried in layers of damp cotton waste. The city
room was a place fit to addle eggs, and from the composing room at the
back the stenches of melting metals and stale machine oils came rolling
in to us in nasty waves. With his face glistening through the trickling
sweat, the major came in about ten o'clock, fanning himself with his
hat, and when he spoke his greeting the booming note seemed all melted
and gone out of his voice. He went through the city room into the room
behind the partition, and passing through a minute later I saw him
sitting there with one of Sidley's exchanges unfolded across his knee,
but he wasn't reading it. Presently I saw him climbing laboriously up
the stairs to the second floor where the chief had his office. At
quitting time that afternoon I dropped into the place on the corner for
a beer, and I was drinking it, as close to an electric fan as I could
get, when Devore came in and made for where I was standing. I asked him
to have something.
"I'll take the same," he said to the man behind the bar, and then to me
with a kind of explosive snap: "By George, I'm in a good mind to resign
this rotten job!" That didn't startle me. I had been in the business
long enough to know that the average newspaper man is forever
threatening to resign. Most of them--to hear them talk--are always just
on the point of throwing up their jobs and buying a good-paying country
weekly somewhere and taking things easy for the rest of their lives, or
else they're going into magazine work. Only they hardly ever do it. So
Devore's threat didn't jar me much. I'd heard it too often.
"What's the trouble?" I asked. "Heat getting on your nerves?"
"No, it's not the heat," he said peevishly; "it's worse than the heat.
Do you know what's happened? The chief has saddled Old Signal Corps on
me. Yes, sir, I've got to take his old pet, the major, on the city
staff. It seems he's succeeded in losing what little property he
had--the chief told me some rigmarole about sudden financial
reverses--and now he's down and out. So I'm elected. I've got to take
him on as a reporter--a cub reporter sixty-odd years old, mind you, who
hasn't heard of anything worth while since Robert E. Lee surrendered!"
The pathos of the situation--if you could call it that--hit me with a
jolt; but it hadn't hit Devore, that was plain. He saw only the annoying
part of it.
"What's he going to do?" I asked--"assignments, or cover a route like
the district men?"
"Lord knows," said Devore. "Because the old bore knows a lot of big
people in this town and is friendly with all the old-timers in the
state, the chief has a wild delusion that he can pick up a lot of stuff
that an ordinary reporter wouldn't get. Rats!
"Come on, let's take another beer," he said, and then he added: "Well,
I'll just make you two predictions. He'll be a total loss as a
reporter--that's one prediction; and the other is that he'll have a hard
time buying his provender and his toddies over at the Shawnee Club on
the salary he'll draw down from the Evening Press."
Devore was not such a very great city editor, as I know now in the light
of fuller experience, but I must say that as a prophet he was fairly
accurate. The major did have a hard time living on his salary--it was
twelve a week, I learned--and as a reporter he certainly was not what
you would call a dazzling success. He came on for duty at eight the next
morning, the same as the rest of us, and sorry as I felt for him I had
to laugh. He had bought himself a leather-backed notebook as big as a
young ledger, just as a green kid just out of high school would have
done, and he had a long, new, shiny, freshly sharpened lead pencil
sticking out of the breast pocket of his coat. He tried to come in
smartly with a businesslike air, but it wouldn't have fooled a blind
man, because he was as nervous as a debutante. It struck me as one of
the funniest things--and one of the most pathetic--I had ever seen.
I'll say this for Devore--he tried out the major on nearly every kind of
job; and surely it wasn't Devore's fault that the major failed on every
single one of them. His first attempt was as typical a failure as any of
them. That first morning Devore assigned him to cover a wedding at high
noon, high noon being the phrase we always used for a wedding that took
place round twelve o'clock in the day. The daughter of one of the
wealthiest merchants in the town, and also one of our largest
advertisers, was going to be married to the first deputy cotillion
leader of the German Club, or something of that nature. Anyhow the groom
was what is known as prominent in society, and the chief wanted a spread
made of it. Devore sent the major out to cover the wedding, and when he
came back told him to write about half a column.
He wrote half a column before he mentioned the bride's name. He started
off with an eight-line quotation from Walter Scott's Lady of the Lake,
and then he went into a long, flowery dissertation on the sacred rite or
ceremony of matrimony, proving conclusively and beyond the peradventure
of a doubt that it was handed down to us from remote antiquity. And he
forgot altogether to tell the minister's name, and he got the groom's
middle initial wrong--he was the kind of groom who would make a fuss
over a wrong middle initial, too--and along toward the end of his story
he devoted about three closely-written pages to the military history of
the young woman's father. It seems that her parent had served with
distinction as colonel of a North Carolina regiment. And he wound up
with a fancy flourish and handed it in. I know all these details of his
story, because it fell to me to rewrite it.
Devore didn't say a word when the old major reverently laid that armload
of copy down in front of him. He just sat and waited in silence until
the major had gone out to get a bite to eat, and then he undertook to
edit it. But there wasn't any way to edit it, except to throw it away. I
suppose that kind of literature went very well indeed back along about
1850; I remember having read such accounts in the back files of old
weeklies, printed before the war. But we were getting out a live, snappy
paper. Devore tried to pattern the local side after the New York and
Chicago models. As yet we hadn't reached the point where we spoke of any
white woman without the prefix Mrs. or Miss before her name, but we were
up-to-date in a good many other particulars. Why, it was even against
the office rule to run "beauty and chivalry" into a story when
describing a mixed assemblage of men and women; and when a Southern
newspaper bars out that ancient and honorable standby among phrases it
is a sign that the old order has changed.