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.—FRANK NORRIS.
East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians.
Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a
State. They are the Southerners of the West. Now, Chicagoans are no
less loyal to their city; but when you ask them why, they stammer and
speak of lake fish and the new Odd Fellows Building. But Californians
go into detail.
Of course they have, in the climate, an argument that is good for half
an hour while you are thinking of your coal bills and heavy underwear.
But as soon as they come to mistake your silence for conviction,
madness comes upon them, and they picture the city of the Golden Gate
as the Bagdad of the New World. So far, as a matter of opinion, no
refutation is necessary. But, dear cousins all (from Adam and Eve
descended), it is a rash one who will lay his finger on the map and
say: “In this town there can be no romance—what could happen here?”
Yes, it is a bold and a rash deed to challenge in one sentence history,
romance, and Rand and McNally.
NASHVILLE—A city, port of delivery, and the capital of the State of
Tennessee, is on the Cumberland River and on the N. C. & St. L. and the
L. & N. railroads. This city is regarded as the most important
educational centre in the South.
I stepped off the train at 8 P.M. Having searched the thesaurus in vain
for adjectives, I must, as a substitution, hie me to comparison in the
form of a recipe.
Take a London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts; gas leaks 20 parts;
dewdrops gathered in a brick yard at sunrise, 25 parts; odor of
honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix.
The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a Nashville
drizzle. It is not so fragrant as a moth-ball nor as thick as pea-soup;
but ’tis enough—’twill serve.
I went to a hotel in a tumbril. It required strong self-suppression for
me to keep from climbing to the top of it and giving an imitation of
Sidney Carton. The vehicle was drawn by beasts of a bygone era and
driven by something dark and emancipated.
I was sleepy and tired, so when I got to the hotel I hurriedly paid it
the fifty cents it demanded (with approximate lagniappe, I assure you).
I knew its habits; and I did not want to hear it prate about its old
“marster” or anything that happened “befo’ de wah.”
The hotel was one of the kind described as “renovated.” That means
$20,000 worth of new marble pillars, tiling, electric lights and brass
cuspidors in the lobby, and a new L. & N. time table and a lithograph
of Lookout Mountain in each one of the great rooms above. The
management was without reproach, the attention full of exquisite
Southern courtesy, the service as slow as the progress of a snail and
as good-humored as Rip Van Winkle. The food was worth traveling a
thousand miles for. There is no other hotel in the world where you can
get such chicken livers _en brochette_.
At dinner I asked a Negro waiter if there was anything doing in town.
He pondered gravely for a minute, and then replied: “Well, boss, I
don’t really reckon there’s anything at all doin’ after sundown.”
Sundown had been accomplished; it had been drowned in the drizzle long
before. So that spectacle was denied me. But I went forth upon the
streets in the drizzle to see what might be there.
It is built on undulating grounds; and the streets are lighted by
electricity at a cost of $32,470 per annum.
As I left the hotel there was a race riot. Down upon me charged a
company of freedmen, or Arabs, or Zulus, armed with—no, I saw with
relief that they were not rifles, but whips. And I saw dimly a caravan
of black, clumsy vehicles; and at the reassuring shouts, “Kyar you
anywhere in the town, boss, fuh fifty cents,” I reasoned that I was
merely a “fare” instead of a victim.
I walked through long streets, all leading uphill. I wondered how those
streets ever came down again. Perhaps they didn’t until they were
“graded.” On a few of the “main streets” I saw lights in stores here
and there; saw street cars go by conveying worthy burghers hither and
yon; saw people pass engaged in the art of conversation, and heard a
burst of semi-lively laughter issuing from a soda-water and ice-cream
parlor. The streets other than “main” seemed to have enticed upon their
borders houses consecrated to peace and domesticity. In many of them
lights shone behind discreetly drawn window shades; in a few pianos
tinkled orderly and irreproachable music. There was, indeed, little
“doing.” I wished I had come before sundown. So I returned to my hotel.
In November, 1864, the Confederate General Hood advanced against
Nashville, where he shut up a National force under General Thomas. The
latter then sallied forth and defeated the Confederates in a terrible
conflict.
All my life I have heard of, admired, and witnessed the fine
marksmanship of the South in its peaceful conflicts in the
tobacco-chewing regions. But in my hotel a surprise awaited me. There
were twelve bright, new, imposing, capacious brass cuspidors in the
great lobby, tall enough to be called urns and so wide-mouthed that the
crack pitcher of a lady baseball team should have been able to throw a
ball into one of them at five paces distant. But, although a terrible
battle had raged and was still raging, the enemy had not suffered.
Bright, new, imposing, capacious, untouched, they stood. But, shades of
Jefferson Brick! the tile floor—the beautiful tile floor! I could not
avoid thinking of the battle of Nashville, and trying to draw, as is my
foolish habit, some deductions about hereditary marksmanship.
Here I first saw Major (by misplaced courtesy) Wentworth Caswell. I
knew him for a type the moment my eyes suffered from the sight of him.
A rat has no geographical habitat. My old friend, A. Tennyson, said, as
he so well said almost everything:
Prophet, curse me the blabbing lip,
And curse me the British vermin, the rat.
Let us regard the word “British” as interchangeable _ad lib_. A rat is
a rat.
This man was hunting about the hotel lobby like a starved dog that had
forgotten where he had buried a bone. He had a face of great acreage,
red, pulpy, and with a kind of sleepy massiveness like that of Buddha.
He possessed one single virtue—he was very smoothly shaven. The mark of
the beast is not indelible upon a man until he goes about with a
stubble. I think that if he had not used his razor that day I would
have repulsed his advances, and the criminal calendar of the world
would have been spared the addition of one murder.
I happened to be standing within five feet of a cuspidor when Major
Caswell opened fire upon it. I had been observant enough to perceive
that the attacking force was using Gatlings instead of squirrel rifles;
so I side-stepped so promptly that the major seized the opportunity to
apologize to a noncombatant. He had the blabbing lip. In four minutes
he had become my friend and had dragged me to the bar.
I desire to interpolate here that I am a Southerner. But I am not one
by profession or trade. I eschew the string tie, the slouch hat, the
Prince Albert, the number of bales of cotton destroyed by Sherman, and
plug chewing. When the orchestra plays Dixie I do not cheer. I slide a
little lower on the leather-cornered seat and, well, order another
Würzburger and wish that Longstreet had—but what’s the use?
Major Caswell banged the bar with his fist, and the first gun at Fort
Sumter re-echoed. When he fired the last one at Appomattox I began to
hope. But then he began on family trees, and demonstrated that Adam was
only a third cousin of a collateral branch of the Caswell family.
Genealogy disposed of, he took up, to my distaste, his private family
matters. He spoke of his wife, traced her descent back to Eve, and
profanely denied any possible rumor that she may have had relations in
the land of Nod.
By this time I was beginning to suspect that he was trying to obscure
by noise the fact that he had ordered the drinks, on the chance that I
would be bewildered into paying for them. But when they were down he
crashed a silver dollar loudly upon the bar. Then, of course, another
serving was obligatory. And when I had paid for that I took leave of
him brusquely; for I wanted no more of him. But before I had obtained
my release he had prated loudly of an income that his wife received,
and showed a handful of silver money.
When I got my key at the desk the clerk said to me courteously: “If
that man Caswell has annoyed you, and if you would like to make a
complaint, we will have him ejected. He is a nuisance, a loafer, and
without any known means of support, although he seems to have some
money most the time. But we don’t seem to be able to hit upon any means
of throwing him out legally.”
“Why, no,” said I, after some reflection; “I don’t see my way clear to
making a complaint. But I would like to place myself on record as
asserting that I do not care for his company. Your town,” I continued,
“seems to be a quiet one. What manner of entertainment, adventure, or
excitement have you to offer to the stranger within your gates?”
“Well, sir,” said the clerk, “there will be a show here next Thursday.
It is—I’ll look it up and have the announcement sent up to your room
with the ice water. Good night.”
After I went up to my room I looked out the window. It was only about
ten o’clock, but I looked upon a silent town. The drizzle continued,
spangled with dim lights, as far apart as currants in a cake sold at
the Ladies’ Exchange.
“A quiet place,” I said to myself, as my first shoe struck the ceiling
of the occupant of the room beneath mine. “Nothing of the life here
that gives color and variety to the cities in the East and West. Just a
good, ordinary, humdrum, business town.”
Nashville occupies a foremost place among the manufacturing centres of
the country. It is the fifth boot and shoe market in the United
States, the largest candy and cracker manufacturing city in the South,
and does an enormous wholesale drygoods, grocery, and drug business.
I must tell you how I came to be in Nashville, and I assure you the
digression brings as much tedium to me as it does to you. I was
traveling elsewhere on my own business, but I had a commission from a
Northern literary magazine to stop over there and establish a personal
connection between the publication and one of its contributors, Azalea
Adair.
Adair (there was no clue to the personality except the handwriting) had
sent in some essays (lost art!) and poems that had made the editors
swear approvingly over their one o’clock luncheon. So they had
commissioned me to round up said Adair and corner by contract his or
her output at two cents a word before some other publisher offered her
ten or twenty.
At nine o’clock the next morning, after my chicken livers _en
brochette_ (try them if you can find that hotel), I strayed out into
the drizzle, which was still on for an unlimited run. At the first
corner I came upon Uncle Cæsar. He was a stalwart Negro, older than the
pyramids, with gray wool and a face that reminded me of Brutus, and a
second afterwards of the late King Cettiwayo. He wore the most
remarkable coat that I ever had seen or expect to see. It reached to
his ankles and had once been a Confederate gray in colors. But rain and
sun and age had so variegated it that Joseph’s coat, beside it, would
have faded to a pale monochrome. I must linger with that coat, for it
has to do with the story—the story that is so long in coming, because
you can hardly expect anything to happen in Nashville.
Once it must have been the military coat of an officer. The cape of it
had vanished, but all adown its front it had been frogged and tasseled
magnificently. But now the frogs and tassles were gone. In their stead
had been patiently stitched (I surmised by some surviving “black
mammy”) new frogs made of cunningly twisted common hempen twine. This
twine was frayed and disheveled. It must have been added to the coat as
a substitute for vanished splendors, with tasteless but painstaking
devotion, for it followed faithfully the curves of the long-missing
frogs. And, to complete the comedy and pathos of the garment, all its
buttons were gone save one. The second button from the top alone
remained. The coat was fastened by other twine strings tied through the
buttonholes and other holes rudely pierced in the opposite side. There
was never such a weird garment so fantastically bedecked and of so many
mottled hues. The lone button was the size of a half-dollar, made of
yellow horn and sewed on with coarse twine.
This Negro stood by a carriage so old that Ham himself might have
started a hack line with it after he left the ark with the two animals
hitched to it. As I approached he threw open the door, drew out a
feather duster, waved it without using it, and said in deep, rumbling
tones:
“Step right in, suh; ain’t a speck of dust in it—jus’ got back from a
funeral, suh.”
I inferred that on such gala occasions carriages were given an extra
cleaning. I looked up and down the street and perceived that there was
little choice among the vehicles for hire that lined the curb. I looked
in my memorandum book for the address of Azalea Adair.
“I want to go to 861 Jessamine Street,” I said, and was about to step
into the hack. But for an instant the thick, long, gorilla-like arm of
the old Negro barred me. On his massive and saturnine face a look of
sudden suspicion and enmity flashed for a moment. Then, with quickly
returning conviction, he asked blandishingly: “What are you gwine there
for, boss?”
“What is it to you?” I asked, a little sharply.
“Nothin’, suh, jus’ nothin’. Only it’s a lonesome kind of part of town
and few folks ever has business out there. Step right in. The seats is
clean—jes’ got back from a funeral, suh.”
A mile and a half it must have been to our journey’s end. I could hear
nothing but the fearful rattle of the ancient hack over the uneven
brick paving; I could smell nothing but the drizzle, now further
flavored with coal smoke and something like a mixture of tar and
oleander blossoms. All I could see through the streaming windows were
two rows of dim houses.
The city has an area of 10 square miles; 181 miles of streets, of which
137 miles are paved; a system of water-works that cost $2,000,000, with
77 miles of mains.
Eight-sixty-one Jessamine Street was a decayed mansion. Thirty yards
back from the street it stood, outmerged in a splendid grove of trees
and untrimmed shrubbery. A row of box bushes overflowed and almost hid
the paling fence from sight; the gate was kept closed by a rope noose
that encircled the gate post and the first paling of the gate. But when
you got inside you saw that 861 was a shell, a shadow, a ghost of
former grandeur and excellence. But in the story, I have not yet got
inside.
When the hack had ceased from rattling and the weary quadrupeds came to
a rest I handed my jehu his fifty cents with an additional quarter,
feeling a glow of conscious generosity, as I did so. He refused it.
“It’s two dollars, suh,” he said.
“How’s that?” I asked. “I plainly heard you call out at the hotel:
‘Fifty cents to any part of the town.’”
“It’s two dollars, suh,” he repeated obstinately. “It’s a long ways
from the hotel.”
“It is within the city limits and well within them.” I argued. “Don’t
think that you have picked up a greenhorn Yankee. Do you see those
hills over there?” I went on, pointing toward the east (I could not see
them, myself, for the drizzle); “well, I was born and raised on their
other side. You old fool nigger, can’t you tell people from other
people when you see ’em?”
The grim face of King Cettiwayo softened. “Is you from the South, suh?
I reckon it was them shoes of yourn fooled me. They is somethin’ sharp
in the toes for a Southern gen’l’man to wear.”
“Then the charge is fifty cents, I suppose?” said I inexorably.
His former expression, a mingling of cupidity and hostility, returned,
remained ten seconds, and vanished.
“Boss,” he said, “fifty cents is right; but I _needs_ two dollars, suh;
I’m _obleeged_ to have two dollars. I ain’t _demandin’_ it now, suh;
after I know whar you’s from; I’m jus’ sayin’ that I _has_ to have two
dollars to-night, and business is mighty po’.”
Peace and confidence settled upon his heavy features. He had been
luckier than he had hoped. Instead of having picked up a greenhorn,
ignorant of rates, he had come upon an inheritance.
“You confounded old rascal,” I said, reaching down to my pocket, “you
ought to be turned over to the police.”
For the first time I saw him smile. He knew; _he knew_. HE KNEW.
I gave him two one-dollar bills. As I handed them over I noticed that
one of them had seen parlous times. Its upper right-hand corner was
missing, and it had been torn through the middle, but joined again. A
strip of blue tissue paper, pasted over the split, preserved its
negotiability.
Enough of the African bandit for the present: I left him happy, lifted
the rope and opened a creaky gate.
The house, as I said, was a shell. A paint brush had not touched it in
twenty years. I could not see why a strong wind should not have bowled
it over like a house of cards until I looked again at the trees that
hugged it close—the trees that saw the battle of Nashville and still
drew their protecting branches around it against storm and enemy and
cold.
Azalea Adair, fifty years old, white-haired, a descendant of the
cavaliers, as thin and frail as the house she lived in, robed in the
cheapest and cleanest dress I ever saw, with an air as simple as a
queen’s, received me.
The reception room seemed a mile square, because there was nothing in
it except some rows of books, on unpainted white-pine bookshelves, a
cracked marble-top table, a rag rug, a hairless horsehair sofa and two
or three chairs. Yes, there was a picture on the wall, a colored crayon
drawing of a cluster of pansies. I looked around for the portrait of
Andrew Jackson and the pinecone hanging basket but they were not there.
Azalea Adair and I had conversation, a little of which will be repeated
to you. She was a product of the old South, gently nurtured in the
sheltered life. Her learning was not broad, but was deep and of
splendid originality in its somewhat narrow scope. She had been
educated at home, and her knowledge of the world was derived from
inference and by inspiration. Of such is the precious, small group of
essayists made. While she talked to me I kept brushing my fingers,
trying, unconsciously, to rid them guiltily of the absent dust from the
half-calf backs of Lamb, Chaucer, Hazlitt, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne
and Hood. She was exquisite, she was a valuable discovery. Nearly
everybody nowadays knows too much—oh, so much too much—of real life.
I could perceive clearly that Azalea Adair was very poor. A house and a
dress she had, not much else, I fancied. So, divided between my duty to
the magazine and my loyalty to the poets and essayists who fought
Thomas in the valley of the Cumberland, I listened to her voice, which
was like a harpsichord’s, and found that I could not speak of
contracts. In the presence of the nine Muses and the three Graces one
hesitated to lower the topic to two cents. There would have to be
another colloquy after I had regained my commercialism. But I spoke of
my mission, and three o’clock of the next afternoon was set for the
discussion of the business proposition.
“Your town,” I said, as I began to make ready to depart (which is the
time for smooth generalities), “seems to be a quiet, sedate place. A
home town, I should say, where few things out of the ordinary ever
happen.”
It carries on an extensive trade in stoves and hollow ware with the
West and South, and its flouring mills have a daily capacity of more
than 2,000 barrels.
Azalea Adair seemed to reflect.
“I have never thought of it that way,” she said, with a kind of sincere
intensity that seemed to belong to her. “Isn’t it in the still, quiet
places that things do happen? I fancy that when God began to create the
earth on the first Monday morning one could have leaned out one’s
window and heard the drops of mud splashing from His trowel as He built
up the everlasting hills. What did the noisiest project in the world—I
mean the building of the Tower of Babel—result in finally? A page and a
half of Esperanto in the _North American Review_.”
“Of course,” said I platitudinously, “human nature is the same
everywhere; but there is more color—er—more drama and movement
and—er—romance in some cities than in others.”
“On the surface,” said Azalea Adair. “I have traveled many times around
the world in a golden airship wafted on two wings—print and dreams. I
have seen (on one of my imaginary tours) the Sultan of Turkey bowstring
with his own hands one of his wives who had uncovered her face in
public. I have seen a man in Nashville tear up his theatre tickets
because his wife was going out with her face covered—with rice powder.
In San Francisco’s Chinatown I saw the slave girl Sing Yee dipped
slowly, inch by inch, in boiling almond oil to make her swear she would
never see her American lover again. She gave in when the boiling oil
had reached three inches above her knee. At a euchre party in East
Nashville the other night I saw Kitty Morgan cut dead by seven of her
schoolmates and lifelong friends because she had married a house
painter. The boiling oil was sizzling as high as her heart; but I wish
you could have seen the fine little smile that she carried from table
to table. Oh, yes, it is a humdrum town. Just a few miles of red brick
houses and mud and lumber yards.”
Some one knocked hollowly at the back of the house. Azalea Adair
breathed a soft apology and went to investigate the sound. She came
back in three minutes with brightened eyes, a faint flush on her
cheeks, and ten years lifted from her shoulders.
“You must have a cup of tea before you go,” she said, “and a sugar
cake.”
She reached and shook a little iron bell. In shuffled a small Negro
girl about twelve, barefoot, not very tidy, glowering at me with thumb
in mouth and bulging eyes.
Azalea Adair opened a tiny, worn purse and drew out a dollar bill, a
dollar bill with the upper right-hand corner missing, torn in two
pieces, and pasted together again with a strip of blue tissue paper. It
was one of the bills I had given the piratical Negro—there was no doubt
about it.
“Go up to Mr. Baker’s store on the corner, Impy,” she said, handing the
girl the dollar bill, “and get a quarter of a pound of tea—the kind he
always sends me—and ten cents worth of sugar cakes. Now, hurry. The
supply of tea in the house happens to be exhausted,” she explained to
me.
Impy left by the back way. Before the scrape of her hard, bare feet had
died away on the back porch, a wild shriek—I was sure it was
hers—filled the hollow house. Then the deep, gruff tones of an angry
man’s voice mingled with the girl’s further squeals and unintelligible
words.
Azalea Adair rose without surprise or emotion and disappeared. For two
minutes I heard the hoarse rumble of the man’s voice; then something
like an oath and a slight scuffle, and she returned calmly to her
chair.
“This is a roomy house,” she said, “and I have a tenant for part of it.
I am sorry to have to rescind my invitation to tea. It was impossible
to get the kind I always use at the store. Perhaps to-morrow, Mr. Baker
will be able to supply me.”
I was sure that Impy had not had time to leave the house. I inquired
concerning street-car lines and took my leave. After I was well on my
way I remembered that I had not learned Azalea Adair’s name. But
to-morrow would do.
That same day I started in on the course of iniquity that this
uneventful city forced upon me. I was in the town only two days, but in
that time I managed to lie shamelessly by telegraph, and to be an
accomplice—after the fact, if that is the correct legal term—to a
murder.
As I rounded the corner nearest my hotel the Afrite coachman of the
polychromatic, nonpareil coat seized me, swung open the dungeony door
of his peripatetic sarcophagus, flirted his feather duster and began
his ritual: “Step right in, boss. Carriage is clean—jus’ got back from
a funeral. Fifty cents to any—”
And then he knew me and grinned broadly. “’Scuse me, boss; you is de
gen’l’man what rid out with me dis mawnin’. Thank you kindly, suh.”
“I am going out to 861 again to-morrow afternoon at three,” said I,
“and if you will be here, I’ll let you drive me. So you know Miss
Adair?” I concluded, thinking of my dollar bill.
“I belonged to her father, Judge Adair, suh,” he replied.
“I judge that she is pretty poor,” I said. “She hasn’t much money to
speak of, has she?”
For an instant I looked again at the fierce countenance of King
Cettiwayo, and then he changed back to an extortionate old Negro hack
driver.
“She ain’t gwine to starve, suh,” he said slowly. “She has reso’ces,
suh; she has reso’ces.”
“I shall pay you fifty cents for the trip,” said I.
“Dat is puffeckly correct, suh,” he answered humbly. “I jus’ _had_ to
have dat two dollars dis mawnin’, boss.”
I went to the hotel and lied by electricity. I wired the magazine: “A.
Adair holds out for eight cents a word.”
The answer that came back was: “Give it to her quick you duffer.”
Just before dinner “Major” Wentworth Caswell bore down upon me with the
greetings of a long-lost friend. I have seen few men whom I have so
instantaneously hated, and of whom it was so difficult to be rid. I was
standing at the bar when he invaded me; therefore I could not wave the
white ribbon in his face. I would have paid gladly for the drinks,
hoping, thereby, to escape another; but he was one of those despicable,
roaring, advertising bibbers who must have brass bands and fireworks
attend upon every cent that they waste in their follies.
With an air of producing millions he drew two one-dollar bills from a
pocket and dashed one of them upon the bar. I looked once more at the
dollar bill with the upper right-hand corner missing, torn through the
middle, and patched with a strip of blue tissue paper. It was my dollar
bill again. It could have been no other.
I went up to my room. The drizzle and the monotony of a dreary,
eventless Southern town had made me tired and listless. I remember that
just before I went to bed I mentally disposed of the mysterious dollar
bill (which might have formed the clew to a tremendously fine detective
story of San Francisco) by saying to myself sleepily: “Seems as if a
lot of people here own stock in the Hack-Driver’s Trust. Pays dividends
promptly, too. Wonder if—” Then I fell asleep.
King Cettiwayo was at his post the next day, and rattled my bones over
the stones out to 861. He was to wait and rattle me back again when I
was ready.
Azalea Adair looked paler and cleaner and frailer than she had looked
on the day before. After she had signed the contract at eight cents per
word she grew still paler and began to slip out of her chair. Without
much trouble I managed to get her up on the antediluvian horsehair sofa
and then I ran out to the sidewalk and yelled to the coffee-colored
Pirate to bring a doctor. With a wisdom that I had not expected in him,
he abandoned his team and struck off up the street afoot, realizing the
value of speed. In ten minutes he returned with a grave, gray-haired
and capable man of medicine. In a few words (worth much less than eight
cents each) I explained to him my presence in the hollow house of
mystery. He bowed with stately understanding, and turned to the old
Negro.
“Uncle Cæsar,” he said calmly, “Run up to my house and ask Miss Lucy to
give you a cream pitcher full of fresh milk and half a tumbler of port
wine. And hurry back. Don’t drive—run. I want you to get back sometime
this week.”
It occurred to me that Dr. Merriman also felt a distrust as to the
speeding powers of the land-pirate’s steeds. After Uncle Cæsar was
gone, lumberingly, but swiftly, up the street, the doctor looked me
over with great politeness and as much careful calculation until he had
decided that I might do.
“It is only a case of insufficient nutrition,” he said. “In other
words, the result of poverty, pride, and starvation. Mrs. Caswell has
many devoted friends who would be glad to aid her, but she will accept
nothing except from that old Negro, Uncle Cæsar, who was once owned by
her family.”
“Mrs. Caswell!” said I, in surprise. And then I looked at the contract
and saw that she had signed it “Azalea Adair Caswell.”
“I thought she was Miss Adair,” I said.
“Married to a drunken, worthless loafer, sir,” said the doctor. “It is
said that he robs her even of the small sums that her old servant
contributes toward her support.”
When the milk and wine had been brought the doctor soon revived Azalea
Adair. She sat up and talked of the beauty of the autumn leaves that
were then in season, and their height of color. She referred lightly to
her fainting seizure as the outcome of an old palpitation of the heart.
Impy fanned her as she lay on the sofa. The doctor was due elsewhere,
and I followed him to the door. I told him that it was within my power
and intentions to make a reasonable advance of money to Azalea Adair on
future contributions to the magazine, and he seemed pleased.
“By the way,” he said, “perhaps you would like to know that you have
had royalty for a coachman. Old Cæsar’s grandfather was a king in
Congo. Cæsar himself has royal ways, as you may have observed.”
As the doctor was moving off I heard Uncle Cæsar’s voice inside: “Did
he get bofe of dem two dollars from you, Mis’ Zalea?”
“Yes, Cæsar,” I heard Azalea Adair answer weakly. And then I went in
and concluded business negotiations with our contributor. I assumed the
responsibility of advancing fifty dollars, putting it as a necessary
formality in binding our bargain. And then Uncle Cæsar drove me back to
the hotel.
Here ends all of the story as far as I can testify as a witness. The
rest must be only bare statements of facts.
At about six o’clock I went out for a stroll. Uncle Cæsar was at his
corner. He threw open the door of his carriage, flourished his duster
and began his depressing formula: “Step right in, suh. Fifty cents to
anywhere in the city—hack’s puffickly clean, suh—jus’ got back from a
funeral—”
And then he recognized me. I think his eyesight was getting bad. His
coat had taken on a few more faded shades of color, the twine strings
were more frayed and ragged, the last remaining button—the button of
yellow horn—was gone. A motley descendant of kings was Uncle Cæsar!
About two hours later I saw an excited crowd besieging the front of a
drug store. In a desert where nothing happens this was manna; so I
wedged my way inside. On an extemporized couch of empty boxes and
chairs was stretched the mortal corporeality of Major Wentworth
Caswell. A doctor was testing him for the immortal ingredient. His
decision was that it was conspicuous by its absence.
The erstwhile Major had been found dead on a dark street and brought by
curious and ennuied citizens to the drug store. The late human being
had been engaged in terrific battle—the details showed that. Loafer and
reprobate though he had been, he had been also a warrior. But he had
lost. His hands were yet clinched so tightly that his fingers would not
be opened. The gentle citizens who had known him stood about and
searched their vocabularies to find some good words, if it were
possible, to speak of him. One kind-looking man said, after much
thought: “When ‘Cas’ was about fo’teen he was one of the best spellers
in school.”
While I stood there the fingers of the right hand of “the man that was”
which hung down the side of a white pine box, relaxed, and dropped
something at my feet. I covered it with one foot quietly, and a little
later on I picked it up and pocketed it. I reasoned that in his last
struggle his hand must have seized that object unwittingly and held it
in a death grip.
At the hotel that night the main topic of conversation, with the
possible exceptions of politics and prohibition, was the demise of
Major Caswell. I heard one man say to a group of listeners:
“In my opinion, gentlemen, Caswell was murdered by some of these
no-account niggers for his money. He had fifty dollars this afternoon
which he showed to several gentlemen in the hotel. When he was found
the money was not on his person.”
I left the city the next morning at nine, and as the train was crossing
the bridge over the Cumberland River I took out of my pocket a yellow
horn overcoat button the size of a fifty-cent piece, with frayed ends
of coarse twine hanging from it, and cast it out of the window into the
slow, muddy waters below.
_I wonder what’s doing in Buffalo!_
XIV
PSYCHE AND THE PSKYSCRAPER
If you are a philosopher you can do this thing: you can go to the top
of a high building, look down upon your fellow-men 300 feet below, and
despise them as insects. Like the irresponsible black waterbugs on
summer ponds, they crawl and circle and hustle about idiotically
without aim or purpose. They do not even move with the admirable
intelligence of ants, for ants always know when they are going home.
The ant is of a lowly station, but he will often reach home and get his
slippers on while you are left at your elevated station.
Man, then, to the housetopped philosopher, appears to be but a
creeping, contemptible beetle. Brokers, poets, millionaires,
bootblacks, beauties, hod-carriers and politicians become little black
specks dodging bigger black specks in streets no wider than your thumb.
From this high view the city itself becomes degraded to an
unintelligible mass of distorted buildings and impossible perspectives;
the revered ocean is a duck pond; the earth itself a lost golf ball.
All the minutiae of life are gone. The philosopher gazes into the
infinite heavens above him, and allows his soul to expand to the
influence of his new view. He feels that he is the heir to Eternity and
the child of Time. Space, too, should be his by the right of his
immortal heritage, and he thrills at the thought that some day his kind
shall traverse those mysterious aerial roads between planet and planet.
The tiny world beneath his feet upon which this towering structure of
steel rests as a speck of dust upon a Himalayan mountain—it is but one
of a countless number of such whirling atoms. What are the ambitions,
the achievements, the paltry conquests and loves of those restless
black insects below compared with the serene and awful immensity of the
universe that lies above and around their insignificant city?
It is guaranteed that the philosopher will have these thoughts. They
have been expressly compiled from the philosophies of the world and set
down with the proper interrogation point at the end of them to
represent the invariable musings of deep thinkers on high places. And
when the philosopher takes the elevator down his mind is broader, his
heart is at peace, and his conception of the cosmogony of creation is
as wide as the buckle of Orion’s summer belt.
But if your name happened to be Daisy, and you worked in an Eighth
Avenue candy store and lived in a little cold hall bedroom, five feet
by eight, and earned $6 per week, and ate ten-cent lunches and were
nineteen years old, and got up at 6.30 and worked till 9, and never had
studied philosophy, maybe things wouldn’t look that way to you from the
top of a skyscraper.
Two sighed for the hand of Daisy, the unphilosophical. One was Joe, who
kept the smallest store in New York. It was about the size of a
tool-box of the D. P. W., and was stuck like a swallow’s nest against a
corner of a down-town skyscraper. Its stock consisted of fruit,
candies, newspapers, song books, cigarettes, and lemonade in season.
When stern winter shook his congealed locks and Joe had to move himself
and the fruit inside, there was exactly room in the store for the
proprietor, his wares, a stove the size of a vinegar cruet, and one
customer.
Joe was not of the nation that keeps us forever in a furore with fugues
and fruit. He was a capable American youth who was laying by money, and
wanted Daisy to help him spend it. Three times he had asked her.
“I got money saved up, Daisy,” was his love song; “and you know how bad
I want you. That store of mine ain’t very big, but—”
“Oh, ain’t it?” would be the antiphony of the unphilosophical one.
“Why, I heard Wanamaker’s was trying to get you to sublet part of your
floor space to them for next year.”
Daisy passed Joe’s corner every morning and evening.
“Hello, Two-by-Four!” was her usual greeting. “Seems to me your store
looks emptier. You must have sold a pack of chewing gum.”
“Ain’t much room in here, sure,” Joe would answer, with his slow grin,
“except for you, Daise. Me and the store are waitin’ for you whenever
you’ll take us. Don’t you think you might before long?”
“Store!”—a fine scorn was expressed by Daisy’s uptilted nose—“sardine
box! Waitin’ for me, you say? Gee! you’d have to throw out about a
hundred pounds of candy before I could get inside of it, Joe.”
“I wouldn’t mind an even swap like that,” said Joe, complimentary.
Daisy’s existence was limited in every way. She had to walk sideways
between the counter and the shelves in the candy store. In her own hall
bedroom coziness had been carried close to cohesiveness. The walls were
so near to one another that the paper on them made a perfect Babel of
noise. She could light the gas with one hand and close the door with
the other without taking her eyes off the reflection of her brown
pompadour in the mirror. She had Joe’s picture in a gilt frame on the
dresser, and sometimes—but her next thought would always be of Joe’s
funny little store tacked like a soap box to the corner of that great
building, and away would go her sentiment in a breeze of laughter.
Daisy’s other suitor followed Joe by several months. He came to board
in the house where she lived. His name was Dabster, and he was a
philosopher. Though young, attainments stood out upon him like
continental labels on a Passaic (N. J.) suit-case. Knowledge he had
kidnapped from cyclopedias and handbooks of useful information; but as
for wisdom, when she passed he was left sniffling in the road without
so much as the number of her motor car. He could and would tell you the
proportion of water and muscle-making properties of peas and veal, the
shortest verse in the Bible, the number of pounds of shingle nails
required to fasten 256 shingles laid four inches to the weather, the
population of Kankakee, Ill., the theories of Spinoza, the name of Mr.
H. McKay Twombly’s second hall footman, the length of the Hoosac
Tunnel, the best time to set a hen, the salary of the railway
post-office messenger between Driftwood and Red Bank Furnace, Pa., and
the number of bones in the foreleg of a cat.
The weight of learning was no handicap to Dabster. His statistics were
the sprigs of parsley with which he garnished the feast of small talk
that he would set before you if he conceived that to be your taste. And
again he used them as breastworks in foraging at the boardinghouse.
Firing at you a volley of figures concerning the weight of a lineal
foot of bar-iron 5 × 2¾ inches, and the average annual rainfall at Fort
Snelling, Minn., he would transfix with his fork the best piece of
chicken on the dish while you were trying to rally sufficiently to ask
him weakly why does a hen cross the road.
Thus, brightly armed, and further equipped with a measure of good
looks, of a hair-oily, shopping-district-at-three-in-the-afternoon
kind, it seems that Joe, of the Lilliputian emporium, had a rival
worthy of his steel. But Joe carried no steel. There wouldn’t have been
room in his store to draw it if he had.
One Saturday afternoon, about four o’clock, Daisy and Mr. Dabster
stopped before Joe’s booth. Dabster wore a silk hat, and—well, Daisy
was a woman, and that hat had no chance to get back in its box until
Joe had seen it. A stick of pineapple chewing gum was the ostensible
object of the call. Joe supplied it through the open side of his store.
He did not pale or falter at sight of the hat.
“Mr. Dabster’s going to take me on top of the building to observe the
view,” said Daisy, after she had introduced her admirers. “I never was
on a skyscraper. I guess it must be awfully nice and funny up there.”
“H’m!” said Joe.
“The panorama,” said Mr. Dabster, “exposed to the gaze from the top of
a lofty building is not only sublime, but instructive. Miss Daisy has a
decided pleasure in store for her.”
“It’s windy up there, too, as well as here,” said Joe. “Are you dressed
warm enough, Daise?”
“Sure thing! I’m all lined,” said Daisy, smiling slyly at his clouded
brow. “You look just like a mummy in a case, Joe. Ain’t you just put in
an invoice of a pint of peanuts or another apple? Your stock looks
awful over-stocked.”
Daisy giggled at her favorite joke; and Joe had to smile with her.
“Your quarters are somewhat limited, Mr.—er—er,” remarked Dabster, “in
comparison with the size of this building. I understand the area of its
side to be about 340 by 100 feet. That would make you occupy a
proportionate space as if half of Beloochistan were placed upon a
territory as large as the United States east of the Rocky Mountains,
with the Province of Ontario and Belgium added.”
“Is that so, sport?” said Joe, genially. “You are Weisenheimer on
figures, all right. How many square pounds of baled hay do you think a
jackass could eat if he stopped brayin’ long enough to keep still a
minute and five eighths?”
A few minutes later Daisy and Mr. Dabster stepped from an elevator to
the top floor of the skyscraper. Then up a short, steep stairway and
out upon the roof. Dabster led her to the parapet so she could look
down at the black dots moving in the street below.
“What are they?” she asked, trembling. She had never been on a height
like this before.
And then Dabster must needs play the philosopher on the tower, and
conduct her soul forth to meet the immensity of space.
“Bipeds,” he said, solemnly. “See what they become even at the small
elevation of 340 feet—mere crawling insects going to and fro at
random.”
“Oh, they ain’t anything of the kind,” exclaimed Daisy,
suddenly—“they’re folks! I saw an automobile. Oh, gee! are we that high
up?”
“Walk over this way,” said Dabster.
He showed her the great city lying like an orderly array of toys far
below, starred here and there, early as it was, by the first beacon
lights of the winter afternoon. And then the bay and sea to the south
and east vanishing mysteriously into the sky.
“I don’t like it,” declared Daisy, with troubled blue eyes. “Say we go
down.”
But the philosopher was not to be denied his opportunity. He would let
her behold the grandeur of his mind, the half-nelson he had on the
infinite, and the memory he had for statistics. And then she would
nevermore be content to buy chewing gum at the smallest store in New
York. And so he began to prate of the smallness of human affairs, and
how that even so slight a removal from earth made man and his works
look like one tenth part of a dollar thrice computed. And that one
should consider the sidereal system and the maxims of Epictetus and be
comforted.
“You don’t carry me with you,” said Daisy. “Say, I think it’s awful to
be up so high that folks look like fleas. One of them we saw might have
been Joe. Why, Jiminy! we might as well be in New Jersey! Say, I’m
afraid up here!”
The philosopher smiled fatuously.
“The earth,” said he, “is itself only as a grain of wheat in space.
Look up there.”
Daisy gazed upward apprehensively. The short day was spent and the
stars were coming out above.
“Yonder star,” said Dabster, “is Venus, the evening star. She is
66,000,000 miles from the sun.”
“Fudge!” said Daisy, with a brief flash of spirit, “where do you think
I come from—Brooklyn? Susie Price, in our store—her brother sent her a
ticket to go to San Francisco—that’s only three thousand miles.”
The philosopher smiled indulgently.
“Our world,” he said, “is 91,000,000 miles from the sun. There are
eighteen stars of the first magnitude that are 211,000 times further
from us than the sun is. If one of them should be extinguished it would
be three years before we would see its light go out. There are six
thousand stars of the sixth magnitude. It takes thirty-six years for
the light of one of them to reach the earth. With an eighteen-foot
telescope we can see 43,000,000 stars, including those of the
thirteenth magnitude, whose light takes 2,700 years to reach us. Each
of these stars—”
“You’re lyin’,” cried Daisy, angrily. “You’re tryin’ to scare me. And
you have; I want to go down!”
She stamped her foot.
“Arcturus—” began the philosopher, soothingly, but he was interrupted
by a demonstration out of the vastness of the nature that he was
endeavoring to portray with his memory instead of his heart. For to the
heart-expounder of nature the stars were set in the firmament expressly
to give soft light to lovers wandering happily beneath them; and if you
stand tiptoe some September night with your sweetheart on your arm you
can almost touch them with your hand. Three years for their light to
reach us, indeed!
Out of the west leaped a meteor, lighting the roof of the skyscraper
almost to midday. Its fiery parabola was limned against the sky toward
the east. It hissed as it went, and Daisy screamed.
“Take me down,” she cried, vehemently, “you—you mental arithmetic!”
Dabster got her to the elevator, and inside of it. She was wild-eyed,
and she shuddered when the express made its debilitating drop.
Outside the revolving door of the skyscraper the philosopher lost her.
She vanished; and he stood, bewildered, without figures or statistics
to aid him.
Joe had a lull in trade, and by squirming among his stock succeeded in
lighting a cigarette and getting one cold foot against the attenuated
stove.
The door was burst open, and Daisy, laughing, crying, scattering fruit
and candies, tumbled into his arms.
“Oh, Joe, I’ve been up on the skyscraper. Ain’t it cozy and warm and
homelike in here! I’m ready for you, Joe, whenever you want me.”
XV
A BIRD OF BAGDAD
Without a doubt much of the spirit and genius of the Caliph Harun Al
Rashid descended to the Margrave August Michael von Paulsen Quigg.
Quigg’s restaurant is in Fourth Avenue—that street that the city seems
to have forgotten in its growth. Fourth Avenue—born and bred in the
Bowery—staggers northward full of good resolutions.
Where it crosses Fourteenth Street it struts for a brief moment proudly
in the glare of the museums and cheap theatres. It may yet become a fit
mate for its high-born sister boulevard to the west, or its roaring,
polyglot, broad-waisted cousin to the east. It passes Union Square; and
here the hoofs of the dray horses seem to thunder in unison, recalling
the tread of marching hosts—Hooray! But now come the silent and
terrible mountains—buildings square as forts, high as the clouds,
shutting out the sky, where thousands of slaves bend over desks all
day. On the ground floors are only little fruit shops and laundries and
book shops, where you see copies of “Littell’s Living Age” and G. W. M.
Reynold’s novels in the windows. And next—poor Fourth Avenue!—the
street glides into a mediaeval solitude. On each side are shops devoted
to “Antiques.”
Let us say it is night. Men in rusty armor stand in the windows and
menace the hurrying cars with raised, rusty iron gauntlets. Hauberks
and helms, blunderbusses, Cromwellian breastplates, matchlocks,
creeses, and the swords and daggers of an army of dead-and-gone
gallants gleam dully in the ghostly light. Here and there from a corner
saloon (lit with Jack-o’-lanterns or phosphorus), stagger forth
shuddering, home-bound citizens, nerved by the tankards within to their
fearsome journey adown that eldrich avenue lined with the bloodstained
weapons of the fighting dead. What street could live inclosed by these
mortuary relics, and trod by these spectral citizens in whose sunken
hearts scarce one good whoop or tra-la-la remained?
Not Fourth Avenue. Not after the tinsel but enlivening glories of the
Little Rialto—not after the echoing drum-beats of Union Square. There
need be no tears, ladies and gentlemen; ’tis but the suicide of a
street. With a shriek and a crash Fourth Avenue dives headlong into the
tunnel at Thirty-fourth and is never seen again.
Near the sad scene of the thoroughfare’s dissolution stood the modest
restaurant of Quigg. It stands there yet if you care to view its
crumbling red-brick front, its show window heaped with oranges,
tomatoes, layer cakes, pies, canned asparagus—its papier-mâché lobster
and two Maltese kittens asleep on a bunch of lettuce—if you care to sit
at one of the little tables upon whose cloth has been traced in the
yellowest of coffee stains the trail of the Japanese advance—to sit
there with one eye on your umbrella and the other upon the bogus bottle
from which you drop the counterfeit sauce foisted upon us by the cursed
charlatan who assumes to be our dear old lord and friend, the “Nobleman
in India.”
Quigg’s title came through his mother. One of her ancestors was a
Margravine of Saxony. His father was a Tammany brave. On account of the
dilution of his heredity he found that he could neither become a
reigning potentate nor get a job in the City Hall. So he opened a
restaurant. He was a man full of thought and reading. The business gave
him a living, though he gave it little attention. One side of his house
bequeathed to him a poetic and romantic adventure. The other gave him
the restless spirit that made him seek adventure. By day he was Quigg,
the restaurateur. By night he was the Margrave—the Caliph—the Prince of
Bohemia—going about the city in search of the odd, the mysterious, the
inexplicable, the recondite.
One night at 9, at which hour the restaurant closed, Quigg set forth
upon his quest. There was a mingling of the foreign, the military and
the artistic in his appearance as he buttoned his coat high up under
his short-trimmed brown and gray beard and turned westward toward the
more central life conduits of the city. In his pocket he had stored an
assortment of cards, written upon, without which he never stirred out
of doors. Each of those cards was good at his own restaurant for its
face value. Some called simply for a bowl of soup or sandwiches and
coffee; others entitled their bearer to one, two, three or more days of
full meals; a few were for single regular meals; a very few were, in
effect, meal tickets good for a week.
Of riches and power Margrave Quigg had none; but he had a Caliph’s
heart—it may be forgiven him if his head fell short of the measure of
Harun Al Rashid’s. Perhaps some of the gold pieces in Bagdad had put
less warmth and hope into the complainants among the bazaars than had
Quigg’s beef stew among the fishermen and one-eyed calenders of
Manhattan.
Continuing his progress in search of romance to divert him, or of
distress that he might aid, Quigg became aware of a fast-gathering
crowd that whooped and fought and eddied at a corner of Broadway and
the crosstown street that he was traversing. Hurrying to the spot he
beheld a young man of an exceedingly melancholy and preoccupied
demeanor engaged in the pastime of casting silver money from his
pockets in the middle of the street. With each motion of the generous
one’s hand the crowd huddled upon the falling largesse with yells of
joy. Traffic was suspended. A policeman in the centre of the mob
stooped often to the ground as he urged the blockaders to move on.
The Margrave saw at a glance that here was food for his hunger after
knowledge concerning abnormal working of the human heart. He made his
way swiftly to the young man’s side and took his arm. “Come with me at
once,” he said, in the low but commanding voice that his waiters had
learned to fear.
“Pinched,” remarked the young man, looking up at him with
expressionless eyes. “Pinched by a painless dentist. Take me away,
flatty, and give me gas. Some lay eggs and some lay none. When is a
hen?”
Still deeply seized by some inward grief, but tractable, he allowed
Quigg to lead him away and down the street to a little park.
There, seated on a bench, he upon whom a corner of the great Caliph’s
mantle has descended, spake with kindness and discretion, seeking to
know what evil had come upon the other, disturbing his soul and driving
him to such ill-considered and ruinous waste of his substance and
stores.
“I was doing the Monte Cristo act as adapted by Pompton, N. J., wasn’t
I?” asked the young man.
“You were throwing small coins into the street for the people to
scramble after,” said the Margrave.
“That’s it. You buy all the beer you can hold, and then you throw
chicken feed to— Oh, curse that word chicken, and hens, feathers,
roosters, eggs, and everything connected with it!”
“Young sir,” said the Margrave kindly, but with dignity, “though I do
not ask your confidence, I invite it. I know the world and I know
humanity. Man is my study, though I do not eye him as the scientist
eyes a beetle or as the philanthropist gazes at the objects of his
bounty—through a veil of theory and ignorance. It is my pleasure and
distraction to interest myself in the peculiar and complicated
misfortunes that life in a great city visits upon my fellow-men. You
may be familiar with the history of that glorious and immortal ruler,
the Caliph Harun Al Rashid, whose wise and beneficent excursions among
his people in the city of Bagdad secured him the privilege of relieving
so much of their distress. In my humble way I walk in his footsteps. I
seek for romance and adventure in city streets—not in ruined castles or
in crumbling palaces. To me the greatest marvels of magic are those
that take place in men’s hearts when acted upon by the furious and
diverse forces of a crowded population. In your strange behavior this
evening I fancy a story lurks. I read in your act something deeper than
the wanton wastefulness of a spendthrift. I observe in your countenance
the certain traces of consuming grief or despair. I repeat—I invite
your confidence. I am not without some power to alleviate and advise.
Will you not trust me?”
“Gee, how you talk!” exclaimed the young man, a gleam of admiration
supplanting for a moment the dull sadness of his eyes. “You’ve got the
Astor Library skinned to a synopsis of preceding chapters. I mind that
old Turk you speak of. I read ‘The Arabian Nights’ when I was a kid. He
was a kind of Bill Devery and Charlie Schwab rolled into one. But, say,
you might wave enchanted dishrags and make copper bottles smoke up coon
giants all night without ever touching me. My case won’t yield to that
kind of treatment.”
“If I could hear your story,” said the Margrave, with his lofty,
serious smile.
“I’ll spiel it in about nine words,” said the young man, with a deep
sigh, “but I don’t think you can help me any. Unless you’re a peach at
guessing it’s back to the Bosphorus for you on your magic linoleum.”