He woke late the following morning and emerged sluggishly into a
sparkling rush of sunlight. The huts looked doubly mean in the pellucid
day. They were built of discarded doors and variously painted fragments
of lumber, with blistered and unpinned roofs of tin, in which rusted
smokepipes had been crazily wired; strips of moldy matting hung over an
entrance or so, but the others gaped unprotected. The clay before them
was worn smooth and hard; a replenished fire smoked within blackened
bricks; a line, stretched from a dead stump to a loosely fixed post,
supported some stained and meager red undergarb.
Harry Baggs recognized Peebles and the loquacious tramp at the edge of
the clearing. The latter, clad in a grotesquely large and sorry suit of
ministerial black, was emaciated and had a pinched bluish countenance.
When he saw Baggs he moved forward with a quick uneven step.
“Say,” he proceeded, “can you let me have something to get a
soda-caffeine at a drug store? This ain't a stall; I got a fierce
headache. Come out with a dime, will you? My bean always hurts, but
to-day I'm near crazy.”
Harry Baggs surveyed him for a moment, and then, without comment,
produced the sum in question. The other turned immediately and rapidly
disappeared toward the road.
“He's crazy, all right, to fill himself with that dope,” Peebles
observed; “it's turning him black. You look pretty healthy,” he added.
“You can work, and they're taking all the men they can get at the
Nursery.”
The boy was sharply conscious of a crawling emptiness--hunger. He had
only fifteen cents; when that was gone he would be without resources. “I
don't mind,” he returned; “but I've got to eat first.”
“Can't you stick till night?” his companion urged. “There's only half a
day left now. If you go later there'll be nothing doing till tomorrow.”
“All right,” Harry Baggs assented.
The conviction seized him that this dull misery of hunger and dirt had
settled upon him perpetually--there was no use in combating it; and,
with an animal-like stoicism, he followed the other away from the road,
out of the hollow, to where row upon row of young ornamental trees
reached in mathematical perspective to broad sheds, glittering expanses
of glass, a huddle of toolhouses, and office.
His conductor halted at a shed entrance and indicated a weather-bronzed
individual.
“Him,” he said. “And mind you come back when you're through; we all dish
in together and live pretty good.”
Harry Baggs spent the long brilliant afternoon burning bunches of
condemned peach shoots. The smoke rolled up in a thick ceaseless cloud;
he bore countless loads and fed them to the flames. The hungry crawling
increased, then changed to a leaden nausea; but, accepting it as
inevitable, he toiled dully on until the end of day, when he was given a
dollar and promise of work to-morrow.
He saw, across a dingy street, a small grocery store, and purchased
there coffee, bacon and a pound of dates. Then he returned across the
Nursery to the hollow and huts. More men had arrived through the day,
other fires were burning, and an acrid odor of scorched fat and boiling
coffee rose in the delicate evening. A small group was passing about
a flasklike bottle; a figure lay in a stupor on the clay; a mutter of
voices, at once cautious and assertive, joined argument to complaint.
“Over this way,” Peebles called as Harry Baggs approached. The former
inspected the purchased articles, then cursed. “Ain't you got a bottle
on you?”
But when the bacon had been crisped and the coffee turned into a
steaming thick liquid, he was amply appreciative of the sustenance
offered. They were shortly joined by Runnel, the individual with the
bluish poisoned countenance, and the elaborately ragged tramp.
“Did you frighten any cooks out of their witses?” Peebles asked the last
contemptuously. The other retorted unintelligibly in his appropriately
hoarse voice. “Dake knocks on back doors,” Peebles explained to Harry
Baggs, “and then fixes to scare a nickel or grub from the women who
open.”
Quiet settled over the camp; the blue smoke of pipes and cigarettes
merged imperceptibly into the dusk of evening. Harry Baggs was enveloped
by a momentary contentment, born of the satisfaction of food, relaxation
after toil; and, leaning his head back on clasped hands, he sang:
_“I changed my name when I got free
To Mister, like the res'.
But now ... Ol' Master's voice I hears
Across de river: 'Rome,
You damn ol' nigger, come and bring
Dat boat an' row me home!'”_
His voice rolled out without effort, continuous as a flowing stream,
grave and round as the deep tone of a temple bell. It increased in
volume until the hollow vibrated; the sound, rather than coming from a
single throat, seemed to dwell in the air, to be the harmony of evening
made audible. The simple melody rose and fell; the simple words became
portentous, burdened with the tragedy of vain longing, lost felicity.
The dead past rose again like a colored mist over the sordid reality of
the present; it drifted desirable and near across the hill; it soothed
and mocked the heart--and dissolved.
The silence that followed the song was sharply broken by a thin
querulous question; a tenuous bent figure stumbled across the open.
“Who's singing?” he demanded.
“That's French Janin,” Peebles told Harry Baggs; “he's blind.”
“I am,” the latter responded--“Harry Baggs.”
The man came closer, and Baggs saw that he was old and incredibly worn;
his skin clung in dry yellow patches to his skull, the temples were bony
caverns, and the pits of his eyes blank shadows. He felt forward with
a siccated hand, on which veins were twisted like blue worsted over
fleshless tendons, gripped Harry Baggs' shoulder, and lowered himself to
the ground.
“Another song,” he insisted; “like the last. Don't try any cheap show.”
The boy responded immediately; his serious voice rolled out again in a
spontaneous tide.
“'Hard times,'” Harry Baggs sang; “'hard times, come again no more.'”
The old man said: “You think you have a great voice, eh? All you have to
do to take the great roles is open your mouth!”
“I hadn't thought of any of that,” Baggs responded. “I sing
because--well, it's just natural; no one has said much about it.”
“You have had no teaching, that's plain. Your power leaks like an old
rain barrel. What are you doing here?”
“Tramping.”
Harry Baggs looked about, suddenly aware of the dark pit of being into
which he had fallen. The fires died sullenly, deserted except for an
occasional recumbent figure. Peebles had disappeared; Dake lay in
his rags on the ground; Runnel rocked slowly, like a pendulum, in his
ceaseless pain.
“Tramping to the devil!” he added.
“What started you?” French Janin asked.
“Jail,” Harry Baggs answered.
“Of course you didn't take it,” the blind man commented satirically; “or
else you went in to cover some one else.”
“I took it, all right--eighteen dollars.” He was silent for a moment;
then: “There was something I had to have and I didn't see any other way
of getting it. I had to have it. My stepfather had money that he put
away--didn't need. I wanted an accordion; I dreamed about it till I got
ratty, lifted the money, and he put me in jail for a year.
“I had the accordion hid. I didn't tell them where, and when I got out
I went right to it. I played some sounds, and--after all I'd done--they
weren't any good. I broke it up--and left.”
“You were right,” Janin told him; “the accordion is an impossible
instrument, a thing entirely vulgar. I know, for I am a musician, and
played the violin at the Opéra Comique. You think I am lying; but you
are young and life is strange. I can tell you this: I, Janin, once led
the finale of Hamlet. I saw that the director was pale; I leaned forward
and he gave me the baton. I knew music. There were five staves to
conduct--at the Opéra Comique.”
He turned his sightless face toward Harry Baggs.
“That means little to you,” he spoke sharply; “you know nothing. You
have never seen a gala audience on its feet; the roses--”
He broke off. His wasted palms rested on knees that resembled bones
draped with maculate clothing; his sere head fell forward. Runnel paced
away from the embers and returned. Harry Baggs looked, with doubt and
wonderment, at the ruined old man.
The mere word musician called up in him an inchoate longing, a desire
for something far and undefined. He thought of great audiences, roses,
the accompaniment of violins. Subconsciously he began to sing in a
whisper that yet reached beyond the huts. He forgot his surroundings,
the past without light, the future seemingly shorn of all prospect.
French Janin moved; he fumbled in precarious pockets and at last
produced a small bottle; he removed the cork and tapped out on his palm
a measure of white crystalline powder, which he gulped down. Then
he struggled to his feet and wavered away through the night toward a
shelter.
Harry Baggs imagined himself singing heroic measures; he finished, there
was a tense pause, and then a thunderous acclamation. His spirit mounted
up and up in a transport of emotional splendor; broken visions thronged
his mind of sacrifice, renouncement, death. The fire expired and the
night grew cold. His ecstasy sank; he became once more aware of the
human wreckage about him, the detritus of which he was now a part.