“How’ll you have it, sir?” asked the barber: “Wet or dry?”
“It depends,” answered Jerry. “In politics I’m for the wet. In
hair-cuts it’s dry for mine.”
He regarded the mirror not without complacency, studying the image
which he there beheld of a young man about town and noting incidentally
how much it improved the appearance of the same to be well cropped.
The barber, a cold man and an assured, met his eye in the glass:
“I’m with you in politics. But when it comes to hair-cuts I like a
little brilliantine. Your hair seems to be getting a bit thin, too. How
about an application of Pinaud?”
An application! Jerry shook a bored head. He knew them of old, these
barbers, with their soaps, their singeings, their powders, their
pastes, their variously perfumed waters, and their endless ingenuities
for parting a customer and his money. The concluding rites of the
occasion were conducted in a refined silence.
“Will that do, sir?” the barber inquired at length, throwing off the
swathing cloths of his victim. “I’ll show you how it looks.” He
produced a hand-glass which he manipulated in such a way as to reveal
to Jerry the back of his own head.
Jerry saw how it looked. He never had seen it look that way before.
And what he saw disturbingly diminished his complacency. He therefore
distributed more lavish gratuities than was his wont. Then he fled,
conscious but of two purposes. The first was to put forever behind him
the discoverer of his shame. The second was to ascertain as quickly as
possible the true facts of his case.
He was not a man, Jerry, greatly given to the mirror. Not that he was
above criticising the effect of a tie or the cut of a coat. But there
were studies which he pursued more assiduously than that of Narcissus.
When, however, he at last locked himself into his own room it was
with feverish haste that he seized his shaving-glass and made for the
bureau. He then held the glass on high, tipped it this way and that,
finally caught the right angle.
Yes--he met the cruel confirmation with as bold a front as he could--it
was only too true. There it was, the Spot, inexorable, vivid, glaring
at him like a malignant eye. There were things in that eye. There were
things--The sensation it gave him was too absurd.
He tried to laugh it away.
“‘Out, damnëd spot!’” he exclaimed. And he put the glass down. It was
idiotic to be prinking there like a girl in her first ball-dress. As he
walked across the room, however, he could not resist a temptation to
feel of the place. He began to rummage gingerly in his hair. The barber
was right--he felt a sudden flash of fury at the fellow!--it was not so
thick as it had been. Yet it felt as it did yesterday, the day before,
the day before that. Could he not be mistaken? He must take one more
look.
He did so, this time adjusting the complicated reflections more easily.
But his adjuration had been of no avail. Nay, his own touch had
deceived him. The Spot was not out. It was in--very much in. It was
in to stay. It looked at him, whichever way he turned, like a horrid
leering eye. It stared him out of countenance.
He threw the glass down again and once more tried persiflage.
“‘Go up, bald-head!’” he jeered at himself, aloud.
It sounded distinctly foolish in the empty room. The late sunshine
pouring in through the windows made him feel as if someone had caught
him making an ass of himself. He flung himself on the lounge and
proceeded in a detached manner to study the beauties of the ceiling.
As he tilted his head to do so, he scraped the wall paper. The sudden
chill of it against his scalp made him jump up as if he had been
branded. But the iron did not stop at his skull. It went on down
through him. He could almost hear it sizzle in his soul.
“Well,” he remarked with forced philosophy, “it’s come.”
Just what had come, he did not for the moment specify. Perhaps he could
not have done so. It was something very upsetting, though, even if
it were ridiculous; and philosophy didn’t seem to help it any better
than persiflage. And the more he considered it the nastier it grew. It
gradually filled him with a curious cold pang. It filled the room. He
could not bear it.
“All right,” he growled sardonically, looking for his hat. “If it won’t
‘out’ by itself, we’ll have to take it out. It’s too damned stuffy in
here.”
He realised the importance of the occasion, as being his first
public appearance in the character of a bald-headed man. It made
him self-conscious and apologetic. It likewise made him welcome the
opportunity of wearing a hat. For he felt that within-doors, hereafter,
the eyes of men would mockingly follow him wherever he moved. At the
very moment, however, of stepping into the air his attempted assurance
failed him. An old gentleman happened to be passing--an old gentleman
below the rear of whose hat brim projected into the light of day a
ludicrous pink half moon. Jerry instinctively, albeit unobtrusively,
sought the corresponding region of his own person.
“Huh!” he grunted in relief. “I guess we’re not quite so bad as
that--yet a while.”
He resumed his progress a trifle more at ease. But fatalities beset
him. Boys were playing ball in the street, under horses’ hoofs and in
defiance of the police. Most of them were bare-headed. He believed
they did it on purpose to show off their little polls, how absurdly
uniform they were in colour. A sudden resentment boiled in him against
them, as if he had been the Prophet Elisha; and he yearned to set bears
on them. He would throw in the barber as the _pièce de résistance_.
That barber! Jerry had half a mind to go back and--But he dismissed
these low themes from his mind. As he turned the corner, though, the
first thing he beheld was the portrait, on a bill-board, of a splendid
gentleman with Jove-like locks, waving a majestic hand toward the name
of the preparation which had performed so enviable a miracle.
“Really,” muttered Jerry to himself, “I must look those people up. I’m
not so far gone, after all. And at my age--You never can tell.”
Then a motor car went by. There were four persons in it--two young men
and two girls, hatless all. Jerry’s eyes followed them hopefully. If
only they would justify him! But no Spot was there. The young people
whirled gaily up the Avenue as if the world belonged to them. And
Jerry knew it did. His heart sank again. The smartness of the car,
the prettiness of the girls, the hilarity and unconcern of the whole
business, smote him like a blow.
“Yes,” he thought, “it’s come. And why should it come to me rather than
to them? Are they more virtuous than I? Are they more learned? Do they
know Gothic architecture from Renaissance? Or a cosine from an ensign?
No. But they have more hair. Therefore--Q. E. D.!”
This cryptic conclusion, with its somewhat mixed references, apparently
had the effect of guiding Jerry’s thoughts into more definite channels.
“They,” as he walked, became the burden of his meditations. They
made for him a composite of eyes grey, blue, black, brown--even
the modern hues of yellow and green; of auburn, chestnut, bronze,
golden, raven, and every other shade of hair celebrated by poets; of
aspects rosy or pale, grave or smiling, ingenuous or subtle. They
were Venuses, Madonnas, Medeas, Giocondas--the whole gallery of types
most provocative to man. He had always vaguely expected that one of
them--perhaps all of them: such things were not unknown!--would some
day appear, and--Well, he had never quite settled what was to happen
next. It wouldn’t exactly do for them to fall on his neck at that stage
of the game. That would cut out too many of the preliminary thrills
incident to these adventures. Neither would he fall on their neck.
It would be too public. They might not like it. They would probably
run away if he tried. At all events, something very breathless was
to take place. He was to pursue them over land and sea. He was to
endure fire and sword for their sake. And in the end they were, so to
speak, to fall into his mouth like ripe plums. Or perhaps it wouldn’t
come to anything in the end. Things didn’t, nowadays. But at least it
was going to be very ravaging for somebody. If it didn’t turn out a
Browning business it might turn out a Tristan and Isolde affair. And
Tristan and Isolde, as a domestic tableau, were almost more telling
than the Brownings. Or the denouement was to be a noble renunciation,
with moving scenes of parting; and he was to finish up grandly with an
exploded volcano for a heart.
The only trouble was that he had never yet encountered “them.” Julia
Jenkins, hitherto, had been his sole approach to them; and whatever
else Julia might be, she certainly was no Venus. Least of all was
she a Madonna, a Medea, or a Gioconda. And now they, the others, had
maddeningly flashed past him at the one moment in life when he found
himself least disposed to speed after them. For a bald spot, somehow
or other, did not harmonise with the order of experiences he had been
considering. He inwardly contemplated the spectacle of a gentleman so
afflicted pursuing Beauty o’er moor and fen, his Spot gleaming pale
behind him as he sped; and Jerry laughed grimly to himself. But there
was more in it than a laugh. Was not Beauty the portion of every man?
And if Fate were so ironical as to withhold her until Time had shown
his tooth, must she then forever be foresworn? It was too ignoble--the
way tragedy and comedy ran together in the world. He tried to console
himself, for this chaotic state of affairs, with the volcano: by
fancying that he was already dead to the world. But even that
failed--unless extinct volcanoes felt as uncomfortable inside as he did.
“My good fellow,” he admonished himself with some heat, “you started
out to take a walk as a bald-headed man, and you’d better finish it in
that character. You mistook your rôle; that’s all. Some people are born
to autos and ambrosial locks. Other people are born to a bald spot and
the L. You imagined you belonged to the former class, but it turns out
you don’t. So the sooner you stop trying to cover your nakedness with a
hat, and the sooner you take to your predestined conveyance, the less
will you be like a whited sepulchre full of dead men’s bones.”
In accordance with which principle he removed his last year’s Panama
and made for the nearest Elevated station. The next instant he realised
that only on impulse could his courage have risen to such a pitch. He
expected that boys would follow him, hooting; that a mob would collect
to point at him the finger of scorn. But no: the public took it quite
as a matter of course that a young man of his age and talents should
begin to look a little the worse for wear and should patronise such
rapid transit facilities as were within the means of the proletariat.
They took it so much as a matter of course that Jerry began to forget
his agitation in chagrin. He even mounted the steps of a station and
boarded the first train without asking himself where he was going.
It was with some surprise that he presently discovered himself to be
jolting northward, on a level with third and fourth storey windows. He
found a certain distraction in glancing into these as he passed. It
appeared to him that on every other sill leaned a bald-headed man, who
gave him a pointed look--as who should say: “Don’t take it so hard, my
poor young man. You will have company.” They got on his nerves, those
bald-headed apes. Most of them were in shirt-sleeves, too. He was ready
to bestow the most extravagant admiration upon the Park, when the train
rounded the great curve at 110th Street. And the arch of the unfinished
Cathedral had a romantically ruinous effect against the incandescent
sky. These things, however, for some reason reminded him of the young
people in the car. “They’re probably visiting the châteaux of the Loire
by this time,” he reflected. “I wonder how they like it. This is the
kind of travelling we do--we bald-headed people.” And he relapsed into
the volcanic mood....
“One hundred and fifty-fifth Street! All out!” bawled an unsympathetic
conductor.
Jerry got up from his revery with the idea of taking the next train
back. There seemed nothing else to do--for one born to the L. But
when he emerged into the maze of platforms and tracks and stairways,
he found them so vividly intershot by red rays from another level of
existence that he was moved to mount to the viaduct. As he did so he
mounted into the climax of a sunset. The glamour of it glorified his
squalid surroundings. It touched the confusion of traffic with a glint
of romance. It turned the Harlem into a river of enchantment. Jerry
glanced but coldly about him, however. He thought of the valley of
the Loire. And the sight of an Amsterdam Avenue trolley running black
against the west made him bend his steps toward that end of the viaduct.
“That’s what we bald-headed people do,” he said to himself: “We go
to Fort George. We then mount Ferris Wheels and view the landscape
o’er. Thus do we visit the valley of the Loire.” And with that idea
he boarded the next car. But at 181st Street he changed his mind. The
sight of Washington Bridge suddenly drew him. “Go to,” he thought: “Why
shouldn’t we take in our Loire here and now?” To which end he sauntered
easterly across the little plaza.
He had not gone far on the bridge before he stopped. At last he was
really caught. The splendour had died out of the air--the barbaric and
obvious splendour which had failed to move him before. There was now a
warm twilight in which the stream running deep between its banks, the
wooded slopes, the arches of High Bridge, the slim water-tower, took
on an aspect almost of antiquity. But that and the mysterious vista
beyond--the turn of the river, the fading haze of roofs, out of which
myriads of lights began to flicker with a brassy pallor--needed no
antiquity to make them extraordinarily picturesque.
Jerry leaned on the parapet and took it in. The view might have been
one he never had seen. This wonderful valley led to a city he knew
naught of. The strange impression, and the surprise of discovering
a real beauty, led him back in thought to the city to which he had
come from college--how curiously long ago! He recalled that other
impression of strangeness. Threading in imagination the long streets
that somewhere ran there in the dusk, he remembered how they looked to
him when first he wandered through them--in search of something to do.
How vast and forbidding their towers had loomed above him! Would any
of them give entrance to him when he knocked? And which would be the
one? He had knocked at a good many, too. An amazing number had been
oblivious to the honour of harbouring him. Huge as they were, they
were all jammed to the roof with cheerful busy superior persons, who
naturally had no mind to jam themselves still tighter at a mere knock
from without. But one of the towers did take him in at last--the one in
Park Row which made an end to his wanderings, only to send him out on
wanderings more painful still.
He thought of them, looking back into the twilight that deepened
above their sky, as of things almost impersonal. He thought, too, how
different it had come to seem--being a cheerful busy superior person
in one of the towers! For he had lived through a reporter’s probation
days, had climbed at last to a desk high above the city, where the
city noises came to him rather musically in their mingling. But,
listening to them year after year, he had never heard what he always
expected he would hear at last--the sound of his own fame. So many
names came up from the newsboys’ throats, those criers of immortality:
should not his own one day be borne to him? And for better reasons
than gave men the notoriety of an hour--like falling into a man-hole
or finding a lost jewel? Well, there was no reason--except that he had
never done anything....
“Doing things!” That was another piece of youth, like the young ladies
of his more romantic moments. He had never been able very narrowly
to define them, the things. In that case he probably would have done
them. But they were of a highly decorative order. They were also to
prove of inestimable benefit to the World at large--with a large W.
And the World’s gratitude, incidentally, would enable him to retire to
private life on the proceeds. After which there would be an appropriate
tablet up there in the Hall of Fame, and a column or two in future
encyclopædias. Whereas now--
With the very impulse to smile indulgently at himself, there flashed on
Jerry for the first time in his life the full sense of what it meant.
For if he could smile at his youth and the vanities of his youth, it
was because his youth was gone. And that was no smiling matter. That
was what had hung over him all the afternoon. That was what he had been
trying to get away from. But now he had to face it. It was all very
well to tell himself that he was a fool to get into such a state for
so preposterous a reason; that his calamity was by no means unique in
the world; that he was not so old after all. The fact remained that his
youth, his _première jeunesse_, his golden hour, was done for.
The sudden realisation of it filled him with a passionate bitterness.
What under the sun had he been thinking of, that he had not seen that
priceless thing slipping through his fingers? Where had it gone? What
had he done with it? What had he to show for it? It seemed to him
that the darkness which fell while his thoughts were turning in this
hopeless round was symbolic of an obscurity that for him had crept into
the sunlight of the earth. And the things he had lost were as fairylike
and unattainable as the magic city glittering there in the distance,
above those shadowy arches printed against a river of gold.
He scrambled to the parapet and sat staring down into the underlying
chasm. The twinkle of the Speedway and the jewelry of the opposite
switches just made visible the water between. How black it was, and how
noiseless--like another Lethe! The word hung in his mind as it came
back to him how casually one step had followed another this afternoon,
yet how irresistibly, as if foreordained. And one step more would take
him into oblivion.... After all, why not? Wouldn’t it be logical? Had
he any real reason for turning around and going back to life--save
sheer cowardice? The accepted reasons had always struck him as being
childish attempts to decorate a raw animal impulse. If you faced the
thing honestly, what was life, anyway, after the climacteric of youth?
Nothing but a long drawn out decay of the body, a gradual dulling of
the senses, an imperceptible slackening of the will--a slower and more
humiliating death. For a man with someone to live for or something to
create, it might be different. But for him--
“Well, Buddy,” uttered a cheerful voice behind him: “Thinkin’ o’
jumpin’ overboard?”
Jerry did jump, but not in the direction indicated; and his fingers
caught instinctively at the inner edge of the parapet. In the dim light
he discovered his interlocutor to be a policeman, built in the generous
proportions of his kind and of the age that has yielded to the elderly
spread.
“You don’t seem to be doing very much to stop it,” Jerry replied
without hauteur.
“Looks that way, don’t it?” returned the guardian of the law genially,
leaning with elbows on the parapet. “But you see if you really want to
go, you’ll go; an’ if you don’t there ain’t no reason in natur’ why
you shouldn’t enjoy yourself kickin’ your heels over Harlem Speedway.
That’s how it strikes me. Only if you do go over, just do me the favour
not to pick the road. You’d be surprised to see what a mess you’d make.”
Jerry, considering this view of his liberty, gave his attention to a
train which swept in a blur of light down the opposite bank. As for the
policeman, he gave his attention to Jerry:
“What’s the matter? Has she given you the go-by?”
“No” declared Jerry, with a shade of emphasis.
“Been fired from your job then, I s’pose,” pursued he of the helmet, in
the accent of one acquainted with disasters more calamitous than those
of the heart.
“Not that I’ve heard of,” rejoined Jerry.
The policeman took off his helmet and laid it on the parapet beside him.
“Pleasant way to spend an evenin’, ain’t it?” he said. “You make up
your mind just how you’ll go, when you get good and ready. An’ then
you wonder who’ll find you first, an’ whether they’ll take you to the
hospital or the morgue, an’ what a time they’ll have figurin’ out who
the devil you are, an’ how blue your folks’ll be, an’ how they’ll wish
they’d given you that horse-shoe stickpin for Christmas, an’ how your
girl’ll go on, an’ all. O there ain’t nothin’ like it for passin’ the
time.”
“Say” demanded Jerry, turning upon his companion with some loftiness,
“where do you get that stuff?”
“Why? Do you smell it?” asked the policeman. He ran the powerful hand
of the law through a grizzled pompadour.
“N-no,” returned Jerry slowly, eyeing this operation not without
interest. “You don’t mean to say that any of your hair ever came out,
do you?”
“Huh-huh.” The policeman’s singsong betrayed no surprise at this abrupt
turn of the conversation. “It started droppin’ like leaves in the fall
o’ the year, when I was about as young as you.”
“What did you do?” inquired Jerry, not displeased, a little
incredulous, and now unfeignedly interested.
“Why I used oil, if you want a straight tip--just plain castor oil.
It’s twice as good as them high-falutin fixin’s they soak you for in
barber shops. It don’t spoil your pillow, neither. But the missus,” he
added on reflection, “she says a bald spot’s worse inside the bean than
out, an’ there ain’t no oil’ll help it.”
“That’s quite an idea,” commented Jerry elusively. He leaned back, as
if to reconnoitre the field of ideas.
The policeman accepted this tribute of respect. Then he replaced his
helmet on his well-covered crown and stuck his billy under his arm.
“Listen, Bud,” he announced confidentially: “I got another idea. Do you
happen to have as much as a dollar or so about you?”
“I do,” admitted Jerry.
“That’s fine,” continued the policeman. “Now what do you say we go over
to a place I know an’ let me treat you to a shot o’ somethin’ wet? My
old woman gives me hell if I hold anythin’ out on her, an’----”
“Sure!” said Jerry.