back and teach thirty-seven young devils that six times five is thirty,
put down the naught and carry six, and that the French are a gay people,
fond of dancing and light wines. But I'll scrimp on everything from
hairpins to shoes, and back again, including pretty collars, and gloves,
and hats, until I've saved up another five hundred, and then I'll try it
all over again, because I--can--write."
From the depths of one capacious pocket the inquiring man took a small
black pipe, from another a bag of tobacco, from another a match. The
long, deft fingers made a brief task of it.
"I didn't ask you," he said, after the first puff, "because I could see
that you weren't the fool kind that objects." Then, with amazing
suddenness, "Know any of the editors?"
"Know them!" cried Mary Louise. "Know them! If camping on their
doorsteps, and haunting the office buildings, and cajoling, and fighting
with secretaries and office boys, and assistants and things constitutes
knowing them, then we're chums."
"What makes you think you can write?" sneered the thin man.
Mary Louise gathered up her brush, and comb, and towel, and parsley, and
jumped off the soap box. She pointed belligerently at her tormentor with
the hand that held the brush.
"Being the scrub-lady's stalwart son, you wouldn't understand. But I can
write. I sha'n't go under. I'm going to make this town count me in as
the four million and oneth. Sometimes I get so tired of being nobody at
all, with not even enough cleverness in me to wrest a living from this
big city, that I long to stand out at the edge of the curbing, and take
off my hat, and wave it, and shout, 'Say, you four million uncaring
people, I'm Mary Louise Moss, from Escanaba, Michigan, and I like your
town, and I want to stay here. Won't you please pay some slight
attention to me. No one knows I'm here except myself, and the rent
collector.'"
"And I," put in the rude young man.
"O, you," sneered Mary Louise, equally rude, "you don't count."
The collarless young man in the shabby slippers smiled a curious little
twisted smile. "You never can tell," he grinned, "I might." Then, quite
suddenly, he stood up, knocked the ash out of his pipe, and came over to
Mary Louise, who was preparing to descend the steep little flight of
stairs.
"Look here, Mary Louise Moss, from Escanaba, Michigan, you stop trying to
write the slop you're writing now. Stop it. Drop the love tales that
are like the stuff that everybody else writes. Stop trying to write
about New York. You don't know anything about it. Listen. You get back
to work, and write about Mrs. Next Door, and the hair-washing, and the
vegetable garden, and bees, and the back yard, understand? You write the
way you talked to me, and then you send your stuff in to Cecil Reeves."
"Reeves!" mocked Mary Louise. "Cecil Reeves, of The Earth? He wouldn't
dream of looking at my stuff. And anyway, it really isn't your affair."
And began to descend the stairs.
"Well, you know you brought me up here, kicking with your heels, and
singing at the top of your voice. I couldn't work. So it's really your
fault." Then, just as Mary Louise had almost disappeared down the
stairway he put his last astonishing question.
"How often do you wash your hair?" he demanded.
"Well, back home," confessed Mary Louise, "every six weeks or so was
enough, but----"
"Not here," put in the rude young man, briskly. "Never. That's all very
well for the country, but it won't do in the city. Once a week, at
least, and on the roof. Cleanliness demands it."
"But if I'm going back to the country," replied Mary Louise, "it won't be
necessary."
"But you're not," calmly said the collarless young man, just as Mary
Louise vanished from sight.
Down at the other end of the hallway on Mary Louise's floor Charlie, the
janitor, was doing something to the windows now, with a rag, and a pail
of water.
"Get it dry?" he called out, sociably.
"Yes, thank you," answered Mary Louise, and turned to enter her own
little apartment. Then, hesitatingly, she came back to Charlie's window.
"There--there was a man up there--a very tall, very thin, very rude,
very--that is, rather nice youngish oldish man, in slippers, and no
collar. I wonder----"
"Oh, him!" snorted Charlie. "He don't show himself onct in a blue moon.
None of the other tenants knows he's up there. Has the whole top floor
to himself, and shuts himself up there for weeks at a time, writin'
books, or some such truck. That guy, he owns the building."
"Owns the building!" said Mary Louise, faintly. "Why he looked--he
looked----"
"Sure," grinned Charlie. "That's him. Name's Reeves--Cecil Reeves.
Say, ain't that a divil of a name?"
XII
WHERE THE CAR TURNS AT 18TH
This will be a homing pigeon story. Though I send it ever so far--though
its destination be the office of a home-and-fireside magazine or one of
the kind with a French story in the back, it will return to me. After
each flight its feathers will be a little more rumpled, its wings more
weary, its course more wavering, until, battered, spent, broken, it will
flutter to rest in the waste basket.
And yet, though its message may never be delivered, it must be sent,
because--well, because----
You know where the car turns at Eighteenth? There you see a glaringly
attractive billboard poster. It depicts groups of smiling, white-clad
men standing on tropical shores, with waving palms overhead, and a
glimpse of blue sea in the distance. The wording beneath the picture
runs something like this:
"Young men wanted. An unusual opportunity for travel, education, and
advancement. Good pay. No expenses."
When the car turns at Eighteenth, and I see that, I remember Eddie
Houghton back home. And when I remember Eddie Houghton I see red.
The day after Eddie Houghton finished high school he went to work. In
our town we don't take a job. We accept a position. Our paper had it
that "Edwin Houghton had accepted a position as clerk and assistant
chemist at the Kunz drugstore, where he would take up his new duties
Monday."
His new duties seemed, at first, to consist of opening the store in the
morning, sweeping out, and whizzing about town on a bicycle with an
unnecessarily insistent bell, delivering prescriptions which had been
telephoned for. But by the time the summer had really set in Eddie was
installed back of the soda fountain.
There never was anything better looking than Eddie Houghton in his white
duck coat. He was one of those misleadingly gold and pink and white men.
I say misleadingly because you usually associate pink-and-whiteness with
such words as sissy and mollycoddle. Eddie was neither. He had played
quarter-back every year from his freshman year, and he could putt the
shot and cut classes with the best of 'em. But in that white duck coat
with the braiding and frogs he had any musical-comedy, white-flannel
tenor lieutenant whose duty it is to march down to the edge of the
footlights, snatch out his sword, and warble about his country's flag,
looking like a flat-nosed, blue-gummed Igorrote. Kunz's soda water
receipts swelled to double their usual size, and the girls' complexions
were something awful that summer. I've known Nellie Donovan to take as
many as three ice cream sodas and two phosphates a day when Eddie was
mixing. He had a way of throwing in a good-natured smile, and an easy
flow of conversation with every drink. While indulging in a little airy
persiflage the girls had a great little trick of pursing their mouths
into rosebud shapes over their soda straws, and casting their eyes upward
at Eddie. They all knew the trick, and its value, so that at night
Eddie's dreams were haunted by whole rows of rosily pursed lips, and seas
of upturned, adoring eyes. Of course we all noticed that on those rare
occasions when Josie Morehouse came into Kunz's her glass was heaped
higher with ice cream than that of any of the other girls, and that
Eddie's usually easy flow of talk was interspersed with certain
stammerings and stutterings. But Josie didn't come in often. She had a
lot of dignity for a girl of eighteen. Besides, she was taking the
teachers' examinations that summer, when the other girls were playing
tennis and drinking sodas.
Eddie really hated the soda water end of the business, as every soda
clerk in the world does. But he went about it good-naturedly. He really
wanted to learn the drug business, but the boss knew he had a drawing
card, and insisted that Eddie go right on concocting faerie queens and
strawberry sundaes, and nectars and Kunz's specials. One Saturday, when
he happened to have on hand an over-supply of bananas that would have
spoiled over Sunday, he invented a mess and called it the Eddie Extra,
and the girls swarmed on it like flies around a honey pot.
That kind of thing would have spoiled most boys. But Eddie had a
sensible mother. On those nights when he used to come home nauseated
with dealing out chop suey sundaes and orangeades, and saying that there
was no future for a fellow in our dead little hole, his mother would give
him something rather special for supper, and set him hoeing and watering
the garden.
So Eddie stuck to his job, and waited, and all the time he was saying,
with a melting look, to the last silly little girl who was drinking her
third soda, "Somebody looks mighty sweet in pink to-day," or while he was
doping to-morrow's ball game with one of the boys who dropped in for a
cigar, he was thinking of bigger things, and longing for a man-size job.
The man-size job loomed up before Eddie's dazzled eyes when he least
expected it. It was at the close of a particularly hot day when it
seemed to Eddie that every one in town had had everything from birch beer
to peach ice cream. On his way home to supper he stopped at the
postoffice with a handful of letters that old man Kunz had given him to
mail. His mother had told him that they would have corn out of their own
garden for supper that night, and Eddie was in something of a hurry. He
and his mother were great pals.
In one corner of the dim little postoffice lobby a man was busily tacking
up posters. The whitewashed walls bloomed with them. They were gay,
attractive-looking posters, done in red and blue and green, and after
Eddie had dumped his mail into the slot, and had called out, "Hello,
Jake!" to the stamp clerk, whose back was turned to the window, he
strolled idly over to where the man was putting the finishing touches to
his work. The man was dressed in a sailor suit of blue, with a
picturesque silk scarf knotted at his hairy chest. He went right on
tacking posters.
They certainly were attractive pictures. Some showed groups of stalwart,
immaculately clad young gods lolling indolently on tropical shores, with
a splendor of palms overhead, and a sparkling blue sea in the distance.
Others depicted a group of white-clad men wading knee-deep in the surf as
they laughingly landed a cutter on the sandy beach. There was a
particularly fascinating one showing two barefooted young chaps on a
wave-swept raft engaged in that delightfully perilous task known as
signaling. Another showed the keen-eyed gunners busy about the big guns.
Eddie studied them all.
The man finished his task and looked up, quite casually.
"Hello, kid," he said.
"Hello," answered Eddie. Then--"That's some picture gallery you're
giving us."
The man in the sailor suit fell back a pace or two and surveyed his work
with a critical but satisfied eye.
"Pitchers," he said, "don't do it justice. We've opened a recruiting
office here. Looking for young men with brains, and muscle, and
ambition. It's a great chance. We don't get to these here little towns
much."
He placed a handbill in Eddie's hand. Eddie glanced down at it
sheepishly.
"I've heard," he said, "that it's a hard life."
The man in the sailor suit threw back his head and laughed, displaying a
great deal of hairy throat and chest. "Hard!" he jeered, and slapped one
of the gay-colored posters with the back of his hand. "You see that!
Well, it ain't a bit exaggerated. Not a bit. I ought to know. It's the
only life for a young man, especially for a guy in a little town.
There's no chance here for a bright young man, and if he goes to the
city, what does he get? The city's jam full of kids that flock there in
the spring and fall, looking for jobs, and thinking the city's sittin' up
waitin' for 'em. And where do they land? In the dime lodging houses,
that's where. In the navy you see the world, and it don't cost you a
cent. A guy is a fool to bury himself alive in a hole like this. You
could be seeing the world, traveling by sea from port to port, from
country to country, from ocean to ocean, amid ever-changing scenery and
climatic conditions, to see and study the habits and conditions of the
strange races----"
It rolled off his tongue with fascinating glibness. Eddie glanced at the
folder in his hand.
"I always did like the water," he said.
"Sure," agreed the hairy man, heartily. "What young feller don't? I'll
tell you what. Come on over to the office with me and I'll show you some
real stuff."
"It's my supper time," hesitated Eddie. "I guess I'd better not----"
"Oh, supper," laughed the man. "You come on and have supper with me,
kid."
Eddie's pink cheeks went three shades pinker. "Gee! That'd be great.
But my mother--that is--she----"
The man in the sailor suit laughed again--a laugh with a sting in it. "A
great big feller like you ain't tied to your ma's apron strings are you?"
"Not much I'm not!" retorted Eddie. "I'll telephone her when I get to
your hotel, that's what I'll do."
But they were such fascinating things, those new booklets, and the man
had such marvelous tales to tell, that Eddie forgot trifles like supper
and waiting mothers. There were pictures taken on board ship, showing
frolics, and ball games, and minstrel shows and glee clubs, and the men
at mess, and each sailor sleeping snug as a bug in his hammock. There
were other pictures showing foreign scenes and strange ports. Eddie's
tea grew cold, and his apple pie and cheese lay untasted on his plate.
"Now me," said the recruiting officer, "I'm a married man. But my wife,
she wouldn't have it no other way. No, sir! She'll be in the navy
herself, I'll bet, when women vote. Why, before I joined the navy I
didn't know whether Guam was a vegetable or an island, and Culebra wasn't
in my geography. Now? Why, now I'm as much at home in Porto Rico as I
am in San Francisco. I'm as well acquainted in Valparaiso as I am in
Vermont, and I've run around Cairo, Egypt, until I know it better than
Cairo, Illinois. It's the only way to see the world. You travel by sea
from port to port, from country to country, from ocean to ocean, amid
ever-changing scenery and climatic conditions, to see and study the----"
And Eddie forgot that it was Wednesday night, which was the prescription
clerk's night off; forgot that the boss was awaiting his return that he
might go home to his own supper; forgot his mother, and her little treat
of green corn out of the garden; forgot everything in the wonder of this
man's tales of people and scenes such as he never dreamed could exist
outside of a Jack London story. Now and then Eddie interrupted with a,
"Yes, but----" that grew more and more infrequent, until finally they
ceased altogether. Eddie's man-size job had come.
When we heard the news we all dropped in at the drug store to joke with
him about it. We had a good deal to say about rolling gaits, and
bell-shaped trousers, and anchors and sea serpents tattooed on the arm.
One of the boys scored a hit by slapping his dime down on the soda
fountain marble and bellowing for rum and salt horse. Some one started
to tease the little Morehouse girl about sailors having sweethearts in
every port, but when they saw the look in her eyes they changed their
mind, and stopped. It's funny how a girl of twenty is a woman, when a
man of twenty is a boy.
Eddie dished out the last of his chocolate ice cream sodas and cherry
phosphates and root beers, while the girls laughingly begged him to bring
them back kimonos from China, and scarves from the Orient, and Eddie
promised, laughing, too, but with a far-off, eager look in his eyes.
When the time came for him to go there was quite a little bodyguard of us
ready to escort him down to the depot. We picked up two or three more
outside O'Rourke's pool room, and a couple more from the benches outside
the hotel. Eddie walked ahead with his mother. I have said that Mrs.
Houghton was a sensible woman. She was never more so than now. Any
other mother would have gone into hysterics and begged the recruiting
officer to let her boy off. But she knew better. Still, I think Eddie
felt some uncomfortable pangs when he looked at her set face. On the way
to the depot we had to pass the Agassiz School, where Josie Morehouse was
substituting second reader for the Wilson girl, who was sick. She was
standing in the window as we passed. Eddie took off his cap and waved to
her, and she returned the wave as well as she could without having the
children see her. That would never have done, seeing that she was the
teacher, and substituting at that. But when we turned the corner we
noticed that she was still standing at the window and leaning out just a
bit, even at the risk of being indiscreet.
When the 10:15 pulled out Eddie stood on the bottom step, with his cap
off, looking I can't tell you how boyish, and straight, and clean, and
handsome, with his lips parted, and his eyes very bright. The
hairy-chested recruiting officer stood just beside him, and suffered by
contrast. There was a bedlam of good-byes, and last messages, and
good-natured badinage, but Eddie's mother's eyes never left his face
until the train disappeared around the curve in the track.
Well, they got a new boy at Kunz's--a sandy-haired youth, with pimples,
and no knack at mixing, and we got out of the habit of dropping in there,
although those fall months were unusually warm.
It wasn't long before we began to get postcards--pictures of the naval
training station, and the gymnasium, and of model camps and of drills,
and of Eddie in his uniform. His mother insisted on calling it his
sailor suit, as though he were a little boy. One day Josie Morehouse
came over to Mrs. Houghton's with a group picture in her hand. She
handed it to Eddie's mother without comment. Mrs. Houghton looked at it
eagerly, her eye selecting her own boy from the group as unerringly as a
mother bird finds her nest in the forest.
"Oh, Eddie's better looking than that!" she cried, with a tremulous
little laugh. "How funny those pants make them look, don't they? And
his mouth isn't that way, at all. Eddie always had the sweetest mouth,
from the time he was a baby. Let's see some of these other boys.
Why--why----"
Then she fell silent, scanning those other faces. Presently Josie bent
over her and looked too, and the brows of both women knitted in
perplexity. They looked for a long, long minute, and the longer they
looked the more noticeable became the cluster of fine little wrinkles
that had begun to form about Mrs. Houghton's eyes.
When finally they looked up it was to gaze at one another questioningly.
"Those other boys," faltered Eddie's mother, "they--they don't look like
Eddie, do they? I mean----"
"No, they don't," agreed Josie. "They look older, and they have such
queer-looking eyes, and jaws, and foreheads. But then," she finished,
with mock cheerfulness, "you can never tell in those silly kodak
pictures."
Eddie's mother studied the card again, and sighed gently. "I hope," she
said, "that Eddie won't get into bad company."
After that our postal cards ceased. I wish that there was some way of
telling this story so that the end wouldn't come in the middle. But
there is none. In our town we know the news before the paper comes out,
and we only read it to verify what we have heard. So that long before
the paper came out in the middle of the afternoon we had been horrified
by the news of Eddie Houghton's desertion and suicide. We stopped one
another on Main Street to talk about it, and recall how boyish and
handsome he had looked in his white duck coat, and on that last day just
as the 10:15 pulled out. "It don't seem hardly possible, does it?" we
demanded of each other.
But when Eddie's mother brought out the letters that had come after our
postal cards had ceased, we understood. And when they brought him home,
and we saw him for the last time, all those of us who had gone to school
with him, and to dances, and sleigh rides, and hayrack parties, and
picnics, and when we saw the look on his face--the look of one who,
walking in a sunny path has stumbled upon something horrible and
unclean--we forgave him his neglect of us, we forgave him desertion,
forgave him the taking of his own life, forgave him the look that he had
brought into his mother's eyes.
There had never been anything extraordinary about Eddie Houghton. He had
had his faults and virtues, and good and bad sides just like other boys
of his age. He--oh, I am using too many words, when one slang phrase
will express it. Eddie had been just a nice young kid. I think the
worst thing he had ever said was "Damn!" perhaps. If he had sworn, it
was with clean oaths, calculated to relieve the mind and feelings.
But the men that he shipped with during that year or more--I am sure that
he had never dreamed that such men were. He had never stood on the
curbing outside a recruiting office on South State Street, in the old
levee district, and watched that tragic panorama move by--those nightmare
faces, drink-marred, vice-scarred, ruined.
I know that he had never seen such faces in all his clean, hard-working
young boy's life, spent in our prosperous little country town. I am
certain that he had never heard such words as came from the lips of his
fellow seamen--great mouth-filling, soul-searing words--words unclean,
nauseating, unspeakable, and yet spoken.
I don't say that Eddie Houghton had not taken his drink now and then.
There were certain dark rumors in our town to the effect that favored
ones who dropped into Kunz's more often than seemed needful were
privileged to have a thimbleful of something choice in the prescription
room, back of the partition at the rear of the drug store. But that was
the most devilish thing that Eddie had ever done.
I don't say that all crews are like that one. Perhaps he was unfortunate
in falling in with that one. But it was an Eastern trip, and every port
was a Port Said. Eddie Houghton's thoughts were not these men's
thoughts; his actions were not their actions, his practices were not
their practices. To Eddie Houghton, a Chinese woman in a sampan on the
water front at Shanghai was something picturesque; something about which
to write home to his mother and to Josie. To those other men she was
possible prey.
Those other men saw that he was different, and they pestered him. They
ill-treated him when they could, and made his life a hellish thing. Men
do those things, and people do not speak of it.
I don't know all the things that he suffered. But in his mind, day by
day, grew the great, overwhelming desire to get away from it all--from
this horrible life that was such a dreadful mistake. I think that during
the long night watches his mind was filled with thoughts of our decent
little town--of his mother's kitchen, with its Wednesday and Saturday
scent of new-made bread--of the shady front porch, with its purple
clematis--of the smooth front yard which it was his Saturday duty to mow
that it might be trim and sightly for Sunday--of the boys and girls who
used to drop in at the drug store--those clear-eyed, innocently
coquettish, giggling, blushing girls in their middy blouses and white
skirts, their slender arms and throats browned from tennis and boating,
their eyes smiling into his as they sat perched at the fountain after a
hot set of tennis--those slim, clean young boys, sun-browned, laughing,
their talk all of swimming, and boating, and tennis, and girls.
He did not realize that it was desertion--that thought that grew and grew
in his mind. In it there was nothing of faithlessness to his country.
He was only trying to be true to himself, and to the things that his
mother had taught him. He only knew that he was deadly sick of these
sights of disease, and vice. He only knew that he wanted to get
away--back to his own decent life with the decent people to whom he
belonged. And he went. He went, as a child runs home when it had
tripped and fallen in the mud, not dreaming of wrong-doing or punishment.