_An Odd Little Tale_
_By_ HERBERT J. MANGHAM
Mrs. Buhler told him at first that she had no vacancies, but as he
started away she thought of the little room in the basement.
He turned back at her call.
“I have got a room, too,” she said, “but it’s a very small one and in
the basement. I can make you a reasonable price, though, if you’d care
to look at it.”
The room was a problem. She always hesitated to show it to people,
because so often they seemed insulted at her suggestion that they would
be satisfied with such humble surroundings. If she gave it to the
first applicant, he would likely be a disreputable character who might
detract from the respectability of her house, and she would have to
face the embarrassment of getting rid of him. So she was content for
weeks at a time to do without the pittance the room brought her.
“How much is it?” asked the man.
“Seven dollars a month.”
“Let me see it.”
She called her husband to take her place at the desk, picked up a bunch
of keys and led the way to the rear of the basement. The room was a
narrow cell, whose one window was slightly below the level of a tiny,
bare back yard, closed in by a board fence.
A tottering oak dresser was pushed up close to the window, and a small
square table, holding a pitcher and washbowl, was standing beside it.
An iron single-bed against the opposite wall left barely enough space
for one straight-backed chair and a narrow path from the door to the
window. A curtain, hanging across one corner, and a couple of hooks in
the wall provided a substitute for a closet.
“You can have the use of the bathroom on the first floor,” said Mrs.
Buhler. “There is no steam heat in the basement, but I will give you
an oil stove to use if you want it. The oil won’t cost you very much.
Of course, it never gets real cold in San Francisco, but when the fogs
come in off the bay you ought to have something to take the chill off
the room.”
“I’ll take it.”
The man pulled out a small roll of money and counted off seven
one-dollar bills.
“You must be from the East,” remarked Mrs. Buhler, smiling at the paper
money.
“Yes.”
Mrs. Buhler, looking at his pale hair and eyes and wan mustache, never
thought of asking for references. He seemed as incapable of mischief
as a retired fire horse, munching his grass and dreaming of past
adventures.
He told her that his name was Dave Scannon.
And that was all the information he ever volunteered to anybody in the
rooming-house.
* * * * *
An hour later he moved in. By carrying in one suitcase and transferring
its contents to the dresser drawers he was installed.
The other roomers scarcely noticed his advent. He always walked
straight across the little lobby without looking directly at anyone,
never stopping except to pay his rent, which he did promptly on the
fifth of every month.
He did not leave his key at the desk when he went out, as was the
custom of the house, but carried it in his pocket. The chambermaid
never touched his room. At his request she gave him a broom, and every
Sunday morning she left towels, sheets and a pillowcase hanging on his
doorknob. When she returned, she would find his soiled towels and linen
lying in a neat pile beside his door.
Impelled by curiosity, Mrs. Buhler once entered the room with her
master key. There was not so much as a hair to mar the bare tidiness.
A comb and brush on the dresser and a pile of newspapers were the only
visible evidences of occupancy. The oil stove was gathering dust in
the corner: it had never been used. She carried it out with her: it
would be just the thing for that old lady in the north room who always
complained of the cold in the afternoons, when the rest of the hotel
was not uncomfortable enough to justify turning on the steam.
The old lady was sitting in the lobby one afternoon when he came home
from work.
“Is that your basement roomer?” she asked.
She watched him until he disappeared at the end of the hall.
“Oh. I couldn’t think where I’d seen him. But I remember now--he’s a
sort of porter and general helper at that large bakery on lower Market
Street.”
“I really didn’t know where he worked,” admitted Mrs. Buhler. “I had
thought of asking him several times, but he’s an awfully hard man to
carry on a conversation with.”
He had been at the rooming-house four months when he received his first
letter. Its envelope proclaimed it a hay-fever cure advertisement.
As he was not in the habit of leaving his key at the desk, the letter
remained in his box for three days. Finally Mr. Buhler handed it to him
as he was passing the desk on the way to his room.
He paused to read the inscription.
“You never receive any mail,” remarked Mr. Buhler. “Haven’t you any
family?”
“No.”
“Where is your home?”
“Catawissa, Pennsylvania.”
“That’s a funny name. How do you spell it?”
Scannon spelled it, and went on down the hall.
“C-a-t-a-w-i-double-s-a,” repeated Mr. Buhler to his wife. “Ain’t that
a funny name?”
* * * * *
In his room, Scannon removed the advertisement from its envelope and
read it soberly from beginning to end.
Finished, he folded it and placed it on his pile of newspapers. Then he
brushed his hair and went out again.
He ate supper at one of the little lunch counters near the Civic
Center. The rest of the evening he spent in the newspaper room at the
public library. He picked up eastern and western papers with impartial
interest, reading the whole of each page, religiously and without a
change of expression, until the closing bell sounded.
He never ascended to the reference, circulation or magazine rooms.
Sometimes he would take the local papers home with him and read
stretched out on his bed, not seeming to notice that his hands were
blue with the penetrating chill that nightly drifts in from the ocean.
On Sundays he would put on a red-striped silk shirt and a blue serge
suit and take a car to Golden Gate Park. There he would sit for hours
in the sun, impassively watching the hundreds of picnic parties, the
squirrels, or a piece of paper retreating before the breeze. Or perhaps
he would walk west to the ocean, stopping for a few minutes at each of
the animal pens, and take a car home from the Cliff House.
For two years the days came and passed on in monotonous reduplication,
the casual hay-fever cure circulars supplying the only touches of
novelty.
Then one afternoon as he was brushing his hair, he gasped and put his
hand to his throat. A sharp nausea pitched him to the floor.
Inch by inch, he dragged himself to the little table and upset it,
crashing the bowl and pitcher into a dozen pieces.
His energy was spent in the effort, and he lay inert.
* * * * *
Mrs. Buhler consented to accompany her friend to the spiritualist’s
only after repeated urging, and she repented her decision as soon as
she arrived there.
The fusty parlor was a north room to which the sun never penetrated,
and in consequence was cold and damp. The medium, a fat, untidy woman
whose movements were murmurous with the rustle of silk and the tinkle
of tawdry ornaments, sat facing her with one hand pressed to forehead,
and delivered mysteriously-acquired information about relatives and
friends.
“Who is Dave?” she asked finally.
Mrs. Buhler hastily recalled all of her husband’s and her own living
relatives.
“I don’t know any Dave,” she said.
“Yes, yes, you know him,” insisted the medium. “He’s in the spirit land
now. There’s death right at your very door!”
She put her hand to her throat and coughed in gruesome simulation of
internal strangulation.
“But I don’t know any Dave,” reiterated Mrs. Buhler.
She regained the street with a feeling of vast relief.
“I’ll never go to one of those places again!” she asserted, as she said
good-by to her friend. “It’s too creepy!”
A great fog bank was rolling in majestically from the west, blotting
out the sun and dripping a fine drizzle on the pavements. Drawing
her coat collar closer about her neck, Mrs. Buhler plunged into the
enveloping dampness and started to climb the long hill that led to her
rooming-house.
Her husband’s distended eyes and pale face warned her of bad news.
“Dave Scannon’s dead!” he whispered hoarsely.
_Dave Scannon!_ So that was “Dave!”
“He’s been dead two or three days,” continued Mr. Buhler. “I was
beating a rug in the back yard a while ago when I noticed a swarm of
big blue flies buzzing about his window. It flashed over me right
away that I hadn’t seen him for several days. I couldn’t unlock his
door, because his key was on the inside, so I called the coroner and
a policeman, and we broke it in. He was lying between the bed and the
dresser, and the bowl and pitcher lay broken on the floor, where he had
knocked it over when he fell. They’re taking him out now.”
Mrs. Buhler hurried to the back stairway and descended to the lower
hall. Two men were carrying a long wicker basket up the little flight
of steps between the back entrance and the yard. She remained straining
over the banister until the basket had disappeared.
The coroner had found nothing in his room but clothing, about five
dollars in change, and a faded picture in a tarnished silver frame of
an anemic looking woman who might have been a mother, wife or sister.
Mrs. Buhler answered his questions nervously. Yes, the dead man had
been with them about two years. They knew little of him, for he was
very peculiar and never talked, and wouldn’t even allow the maid to
come in and clean up his room. He had said though that he had no family
and that his home was in Catawissa, Pennsylvania. She remembered the
town because it had such an odd name.
The coroner wrote to authorities in Catawissa, who replied that they
could find no traces of anyone by the name of Scannon. No more mail
ever came for the man except the occasional hay-fever cure circulars.
The manager of the bakery telephoned to ask if the death notice in the
paper referred to the same Dave Scannon who had been working for him.
He knew nothing of the man except that he had been very punctual in his
duties until that final day when he did not appear.
* * * * *
Several weeks later, little Mrs. Varnes, who occupied a room at the
rear of the second floor, stopped at the desk to leave her key. She
hovered there for a few minutes of indecision, then impulsively leaned
forward.
“Mrs. Buhler, I just want to ask you something,” she said, lowering her
voice. “One afternoon several weeks ago I saw some men carrying a long
basket out of the back door, and I’ve been wondering what it was.”
“Probably laundry,” hazarded Mrs. Buhler.
“No, it was one of those long baskets such as the undertakers use to
carry the dead in. I’ve often thought about it, but I couldn’t figure
out who could have died in this house, so I decided I would ask you. I
told my husband about it, and he said I was dreaming.”
“You must have been,” said Mrs. Buhler.
[Illustration]
_The_
ACCUSING VOICE
_A Strange Tale_
_By_ MEREDITH DAVIS
“We, the jury, find the defendant, Richard Bland, guilty of murder in
the first degree, in manner and form as charged.”
Allen Defoe, foreman of the twelve men, listened with impassive face
as the judge read away the life of the prisoner in the dock--the man
whose death warrant Defoe had signed only a few minutes before. As the
judge finished, Defoe glanced warily toward the prisoner. Somehow, he
preferred to avoid catching his eye.
Bland, a slight, rather uninteresting type of man, stood with bowed
head; Defoe now turned his gaze full upon him.
“Has the prisoner anything to say why judgment should not be
pronounced?”
The judge’s voice, coming after the short pause, sent a strange chill
into the heart of Allen Defoe, juror. He hoped the prisoner’s counsel
would make the customary motions for a new trial or for time in which
to file an appeal. He did neither: evidently Bland believed the verdict
inescapable--or else he was out of funds.
Now the judge arose in his place, donning with nervous gesture the
black cap that accompanies the most tragic moment in the performance
of a court’s duties. The judge seemed ill at ease in the cap. It was
the first time he had worn it. The grotesque thought flitted through
Defoe’s mind that perhaps the judge had borrowed the cap from one of
his fellow jurists for the occasion.
The almost level rays of the western sun diffused a sombre, aureate
glow athwart the judge’s bench, so that the dark figure of the standing
man was in mystic indistinctness beyond the shaft of light from the
window. A fly now and then craved the spotlight for a moment and lazily
floated from the growing dusk of the room to the avenue of ebbing day,
streaming in from the west. And always there was a constant turmoil of
dust particles, visible only when they moved into the bright relief of
the sun-shaft.
The handful of spectators stirred restlessly while the judge was making
his preparations. The droning noises of approaching summer evening in
a rural county-seat were smothered by the buzz of ill-hushed voices.
Perhaps that was why the judge, in the midst of adjusting his headgear,
rapped sharply thrice with his gavel--or, it may have been only his
excess of nervousness.
Defoe thought the judge never would stop fumbling with his cap. And
finally the judge lost track of the jury’s verdict and had to mess
through the scattered papers before him until he found it. He didn’t
really require it to pronounce sentence of death upon the man in the
dock. Hunting it, though, delayed the inevitable a few seconds;
and Defoe wondered, since he himself was near to screaming out with
impatience, how the prisoner could stand it without going suddenly mad.
“For God’s sake, read the death sentence!” exclaimed Defoe under his
breath, but loud enough to arouse a nod of approval from the two jurors
nearest him.
A moment later the judge found his voice:
“The prisoner will face the court.”
Slowly, deliberately, the prisoner stepped forward in the dock, leaning
slightly against the railing and letting one hand rest upon it. He
looked squarely at the judge now, although he barely could distinguish
his features in the dimness.
Again the judge spoke, and this time his voice was hurried and strained:
“The sentence of the court is that the prisoner be taken, between
the hours of seven a.m. and six p.m. on Tuesday, in the week
beginning October 22 next, from the place of confinement to the
place of execution, and there be hanged by the neck until he is
dead--dead--dead!... And may God, in His infinite wisdom, have mercy on
your soul!”
The judge sank back heavily into the safety of his chair. His hand
swept up to brush his forehead and with the same motion it whisked off
the detestable little black cap.
The prisoner remained staring at the judge as one who is puzzled at a
strange sight. Perhaps he would have stood there untold minutes if a
woman’s hysterical laugh, half-choked by a sudden upraised hand, had
not broken the tension of the entire room. A bailiff tiptoed to the
woman, and, as if revived to duty by the same cause, a prison guard
strode forward to lead the condemned man away.
Defoe could have reached out and touched Bland as he passed the jury
on his way to the cell across the street. But Defoe had no desire even
to look at Bland; indeed, he did not, until Bland’s back was passing
out of sight through the door on the other side of the jury box.
Mechanically, then, Defoe filed out with the other jurors as the judge
announced adjournment.
And the black cap lay forgotten on the rim of the judge’s wastebasket,
where the janitor found it that evening and crossed himself fervently
as he timidly salvaged it from ignoble oblivion.
_II._
Defoe awoke with a shudder.
There was a moment or two, as is always the case when one arouses from
heavy, dream-burdened slumber, during which Defoe could not tell where
his dream ended and realities began. He blinked experimentally into the
smouldering fire in the open grate before him; yes, he was conscious.
For further verification of this he drew forth his watch and noted
the hour. The glow from the fire was scarcely sufficient for reading
the dial and Defoe leaned forward the better to see. He was still too
drowsy even to reach around and turn on the electric lamp on the table
behind him.