has changed into American. I cannot yet spit, but, if I try--mebbe....
The wife, oh, she run all t’rough the rooms, and the children, too;
and they laugh and fall on the floor and laugh. They go out to breathe
and come in and stay as long as they can--_La porte fermée_. Good air
_adië_--like sea diver--till I open windows. We go to store and buy
broom and bed and--everything. In little while, we fix things. Wife,
she go to Mac’s house and peek in window to see where bed go--she on’y
little girl when I take her. An’ good Mrs. Mac, she come over and
laugh and they all laugh. We all so silly. Then, Mrs. Mac, she change
everything different, while she near die laughing. We have bed in the
kitchen, she say, and stoves in the yard with the pump. But, Mrs. Mac
she fix all. And how we work! Ach! My bones hurt. We are vairy grand.
_Ma foi!_ My wife, she cry and say she afraid. The bed go c-r-r-eck,
cr-r-eck, and go down, down, down. But she vairy tired and she sleep.
Then I go out and pull door-bell. _Là! là! là! là!_ I wait, holdin’ in
big laugh. I think I see whole dam’ business come crying for the devils
have come to get t’em. I wait. I hold my laugh back. I ring loud. So!
Schwurunkl-angl-unkl-angl-angle! All so still. I go up the crooked
steps--some day I break my neck, there!--_V’là!_ Sleep like dead....
Me! Wah-oo-eep!” he yawned. “I sleep stan’ up.”
He began a second, healthy, out-in-the-woods yawn, which extended amid
comfortable “ah’s” and “oh’s” and “ee’s” until it snapped back in
ecstatic relief.
“Oh-wo-wo-wo!” imitated Gorgas. “You’ve ow! wow! got me go-ow-ing too,
Bardek. I’m so-ow-oh slee-py.”
Everyone yawned. Bardek outdid himself. Mac nearly dislocated his jaw.
In a moment or two Bardek was put down at his “boards and plaster,” and
Gorgas, Blynn and Morris were saying farewells.
“My pin,” Morris was holding out a hand.
“I think I’ll keep it,” she pushed his hand aside. “You deserve
something for today’s work. You were _great_, boy; simply great!”
Morris said his goodbys quickly and was off to catch a town train.
“And, now, Mr. Professor,” Gorgas turned to Blynn, “I’m going to write
to you when you arrive at Holden, and if you don’t answer within five
days--I’ll--”
“What will you do, child?”
She looked at him steadily. Smiles and little frowns came and went,
like gust ripples on a pond.
“Don’t ever put a girl through that sort of thing again. You don’t know
what it is to be eaten up with shame--every day, too, for months and
months. Well! We’ve dropped that; haven’t we? But I’m still a little
hot about it.... Good night, Allen Blynn ... and good luck to you ...
and remember; don’t back-pedal.”
“Good night, I’m on my mettle,” he tried her old rhyming game, as he
walked away.
“And answer letters,” she retorted, and added, “or with Gorgas Levering
you’ll have to settle.”
XV
THE LADY OF THE INTERRUPTION
She wrote to him at regular intervals, and he answered dutifully. To
him they were the little letters of a lost child; not entirely lost,
for much of the child was in her scrawling notes. With many persons the
written word is much more intelligent than the oral; but with Gorgas
Levering, who in a chat would easily give the impression of the grown
woman, letter-writing exhibited a youngster still in the teens.
She did not seem to know what to say; one wonders why she wrote;
indeed, half of the letter would be announcements of why she could not
write. And the spelling! For a young lady who spoke and read fluently
in four languages, that spelling was inexplicable.
Once Blynn sent back a letter with all the misspelled words underscored
in red ink, and with the fatherly suggestion that she look them up and
send him a re-written copy.
Her answer was a shocker; every word was purposely put out of gear.
“Deer Proffessorr,” it ran. “Eye kannott korresspponndd eney longerr
wwithh U.
“Wun: U R 2 smarrt,
“Too: Ewer minde iz teecher-krazy an kant C anything butt lettres an
semi-coalons.
“Thre: Eye kan beet U left handed inn tennes
“Ewers,
“GOARGASS.”
But she tried. Evidence was abundant enough. All suspicious words were
left either totally blank or half-begun, to be finished out laboriously
later via a small dictionary. The dictionary was not always employed
immediately--her letters were regularly written at the sleepiest hour
of the night; so that Blynn had the greatest joy in seeing dozens of
hard words, like “disappoint” and “necessary,” flaring at him in two
different kinds of ink, black for the first half and pale blue for the
tails. His prize-letter--which he did not dare twit her about, for
fear the supply would suddenly cease--was a mysterious thing, full
of beginnings and no tails at all! Evidently sleep had overtaken the
dictionary benediction.
In their correspondence during the first college terms at Holden, while
she was growing from sixteen to almost eighteen, there was hardly a
personal note struck. One would not suspect that they had ever been
acquainted. Hers resembled school exercises more than anything else,
full of incoherent announcements of local news. His, on the other
hand, were short stories of Holden life; gathered together they might
have been published as the personal impressions of Professor Blynn on
the manners and customs of Holdonians. They were brisk, sprightly
narratives, rather longish, for he dictated them to a by-the-hour
stenographer, but rich in personal flavor and really interesting. The
Levering family read them in turn as they might have passed on the
numbers of a serial story.
From Gorgas, Allen knew that his letters were public property. That
may have had some effect upon their construction and style; certainly,
they grew in finished form and came to lend themselves easily to public
family reading.
But none of the matters that troubled him, nor any of his pedagogic
dreams or literary ambitions found their way into these chatty
epistles. It was a selected, semi-impersonal college world that he
sorted out and presented to the Levering family; but a real one, for
all that.
Through these newsletters Gorgas knew that he had been lured by the
siren of the lecture platform--always lying in wait for talkative
young professors. Diccon saw to it that every public utterance of
the distinguished young scholar who had been called to the chair of
English in Holden College should be properly placed before the readers
of the city newspapers. It worried Blynn, to be sure, to find his
casual illustration made the subject of “small-heads”--there is nothing
more frightful to sincere teachers than this sort of up-side-down
publicity--but he solaced himself by hoping no one would see it.
In Mount Airy Gorgas Levering was searching every page for such
notices and was happy to get even a three-line flyer just above the
obituaries; and she cut them out and pasted them in a scrap-book.
She felt responsible for his going to Holden, she assured herself,
and she developed an I-told-you-so spirit with every discovery of
what she believed to be proper fame. “Professor Allen Blynn, head of
the division of English of Holden College, also spoke,” was often
sufficient proof to her of her wisdom in advising him to go up to the
larger work.
She learned, too, of other matters, his phenomenal success in teaching
his young children by way of correspondence, his pedagogic reforms
in the administration at Holden, all of which she mused over with
something akin to maternal calm; but one day his letter broke forth
with the discovery of a “lady,” and Gorgas grew apprehensive and
suspicious and on guard.
“My dear Leverings,” he wrote. “Here’s Mystery for you! And a Lady! And
local newspaper notoriety--not yet scandalous!”
He had been lecturing before the Alpha Women’s Club on “The Dull
Pleasures of the Mob.” It was one of those defenses of the intellectual
life which every enthusiastic scholar is prepared to utter at a
moment’s notice. The intellectual audience were proud of him; they
applauded every one of his clever shafts as justification for their
life of charming indolence. Then he forgot himself and inquired:
“Is there any question on that point?”
That was an absent-minded schoolroom phrase.
“Yes; there is a question on that point,” came a strong pleasant voice
from the extreme end of the hall. He could not at first discern the
lady, for she did not rise. “Do you really believe all this twaddle you
are giving us, or are you just ‘parroting’ from a book?”
The very young ladies laughed gayly. The rascals! They had been taking
notes on all his golden utterances; yet they turned in glee to search
out the rebellious questionist. The elders buzzed their horror;
but they, too, squirmed about, curious to behold the cause of so
inhospitable an interruption.
“Oh, never mind,” the voice boomed out patiently. “It’s a hopeless
thing to ask anyone.”
She arose to go. Everyone could see the commanding figure and the
perfect smile of good nature which half atoned for the rather shocking
speech.
“Go on, little man,” she nodded. “You’re giving them what they want, I
suppose”--waving an arm over the audience--“or what they are trained
to believe they want. Perhaps they deserve it,” she laughed. “But
I’m a little sorry for you”; she turned to the speaker directly, as
she gathered up her belongings; “you look like the sort who could do
better--with a little honest tutoring.”
“Don’t go, my dear lady, I beg of you,” Blynn called after her.
Lecturers soon get used to eccentric debaters from the floor; although
this one was decidedly of uncommon mould. She stopped at the door.
“Please come back--let us reason together. If you don’t mind, I don’t.
You can’t imagine what a great relief it is to get an interruption.”
She watched Blynn good naturedly, wavering between the desire to speak
and the feeling of the futility of saying anything.
Blynn went on coaxingly.
“You stir my male curiosity deeply. All my life I have been respected
and revered, treated like a special shipment of something valuable. You
cannot know how lonely I have been. Why, even my students respect me.”
She wavered. Already she had dropped her muff into a rear seat.
“I can’t tell you how eager I am to be exposed,” Blynn smiled
engagingly and waved a welcoming hand. “Do come back and let us dispute
as did Plato and his friends; amicably, if possible, but always in the
name of high truth.... You were saying, O Unknown One.”
“I was saying what was in my mind, O Knowing One,” she replied. “But I
am sorry now that I spoke. Your question seemed to touch a spring--the
spring of ‘high truth.’ High truth, I fear, is a rude, uncivilized
thing--most of us keep it thoroughly well guarded--I apologize for
employing it here. But--” she fastened him with her motherly smile,
“please don’t talk so confidently of the dull pleasures of the mob.
Perhaps, as you suggest, Browning and Swinburne touch only the
ultra-violet mind; talk about that, it is within your sphere; but until
you know more about people, let the mob alone. To know the secret you
have to be a mob yourself.... Forgive me for talking straight out,
Professor. It is an uncultivated thing to do, I know; but it is right
in the spirit of the mob, one of its dull pleasures.... I must go....
If I stay I’ll break out, and then someone would have to read me the
riot act.... You’re a first-rate book, Professor; I should enjoy
you--on a shelf; but you have never really _been_. Goodby.”
Of course Blynn turned the event to account and made several quick
epigrams out of the affair.
“The audience cheered my little sallies,” he wrote, “which I accepted
as proof of their regard--a vote of confidence, as it were, after a
thundering attack from the opposition. Everyone apologized and told me
that I had handled the situation with proper urbanity. No one seems to
know her. She is not a member of the Alpha Women’s Club. But I’m glad
she spoke out; to tell the truth, my dull lecture was boring even me!”
The newspapers got a story out of the interruption; and for a nine-days
the cartoonist played up professors and “the dull pleasures of the
mob.” One of the hits in a touring musical comedy company had its
source here.
“Are you happy, Mike?”
“Sure, perfesser, I’m happy; ain’t I got a headache!”
Gorgas wrote a single sentence of disapproval of the lady’s rudeness
and in postscript inquired, “How old is she?”
And Blynn came back with an imitation of the laconic note.
“Dear Gorgas: She was not rude, but enchanting.
“P. S. She is as old as truth, which is ever young and beautiful.”
The “Lady” came in for occasional notice in nearly every letter. “The
‘Interruption,’” he wrote, “has had a disturbing effect on me. Somehow
between my audiences and myself the phantom smile of the unknown mocks
me, although I haven’t seen her again. When I speak confidently out of
my store of book-knowledge the smile seems to broaden into a grin; but
when I quote Aristotle or Plato, it positively laughs in derision.”
In public, he explained, he had come to be consciously on the
defensive. He began to avoid book authorities and seek illustration
from his slender personal experience of men and things. Occasionally
she drove him to take off his glasses and look about him. In his off
hours, instead of burrowing in the library, he walked about the streets
and observed the throngs. He wandered along the aisles of department
stores, chatted with policemen, and elbowed workmen in the trolley
cars; sat in the public squares and talked with the old men who sun
themselves there daily, and with the youngish tramps, down at the heel
and beery.
Once he had wandered on a wharf where excursionists were about to
embark for a brief trip down the river. A rosy mother was struggling
with a huge picnic basket and a medley of children. She let him help
her with the next youngest baby, while the husband with two toddlers
was surging ahead to secure a good seat. Before Blynn had quite made up
his mind what to do next, the boat had slid off into the stream and he
was in for a first-hand experience of the “dull pleasures of the mob.”
It was pleasure, he had to admit some hours later, but by no means
dull. He exhausted all the slot devices for chewing gum and chocolate,
weighed the kiddies on all the machines, invested wholesale in lemonade
and bananas, and actually waltzed to the strains of a harp and one
violin. At Houston Park they swooped down upon the carrousel, captured
places on the scenic railway by vulgar bribery, and eventually “set ’em
up” to a dessert of “hoky-poky” ice cream, as part-payment for a share
of the basket lunch.
The young husband permitted all this gallantry without surprise.
Indeed, in the twilight trip homeward Blynn and he sat together in
the stern of the boat and smoked out a fine friendship--one exhausted
kiddie asleep content in the professor’s arms--and there it was he paid
Blynn the fine compliment of inquiring where he “worked.”
“At Holden College,” Blynn replied, guiltily waving a hand in a vague
professional manner, the which his companion seemed to take as the
motions of mopping a floor.
“Purdy soft, hey?” he grinned.
“Tolerable,” said Blynn.
“Women do all the scrubbin’,” he volunteered.
“Aye, and they do it well,” Blynn told him.
“An’ all summer nothin’ to do at all!” he mused. “Purdy soft! Purdy
soft!”
He looked at Blynn proudly, as if the securing of such a sinecure was
in itself a worthy act.
“I express for Hamilton’s,” he confided. “Furniture vans,” he added in
answer to an inquiring look. “Some days we jess ‘move,’ but most times
we hussels pianos. Y’back feels it nights, I tell y’. But, y’ sleeps
good.”
“Ah!” Blynn said. “I envy you there. I don’t ‘sleep good’ at all. Half
the night I lie awake thinking of foolish unnecessary things.”
“Y’ ain’t got no work to do!” the expressman spoke with emphasis.
“It’ll give any man the bug-eye. What you want is a reg-u-lar job. What
you’re a-doin’, that’s a woman’s business. Oh, I’ve tried my hand at
cinches--grass cutting, drivin’ a wagon, takin’ the dog out walkin’.
Made me sick. I got to put _guts_ in my job. That’s what _you_ need--a
job y’ got to put _guts_ in.”
As the talk grew confidential at parting he let the professor lend
him five dollars without the shadow of a protest. There was nothing
squeamish, self-conscious or over-modest about the expressman. “Sure!”
he said and pocketed the bill without more ado. He treated Blynn so
like an equal that the university man stalked off elated as if he had
just been admitted to an exclusive fraternity.
It was through such wild adventures that Blynn graduated to a deed of
daring. One cool, spring Saturday night found him strolling along the
badly lighted streets of a section known as “The Ditch.” The swinging
doors of an odorous “saloon,” backed by a glaring warm light, which
made the dark street a shade dimmer, seemed to bid a “Welcome All!” He
went in.
The faces of the lounging drinkers at the bar were worth many times
the small admission fee, the price of a strangling glass of ginger
ale. They were like characters in a modern Morality Play, Blynn
thought, as he named them in order: “Simple,” thin nose, hanging lip
and lack-lustre eye; “Low-brow,” a rogue by right of inheritance;
“Toothless,” a boy with the face of a crone; “Evil,” selfish to the
point of cruelty; “Braggart,” serious and self-contemplative; “Sloth,”
simply fat.
Speech was gone to a mumble; cackles of laughter arose over nothing at
all; futile drivel slavered from the chin.
“’S my treat--godda drink ’th me!” fumbled “Simple,” displaying a bill.
The well-groomed barkeep and owner swept it off into his resplendent
cash-register and began the swift passing out of the accustomed drinks.
Blynn’s second ginger ale was slid beside him before he could guess the
meaning of the action.
And so treating went the rounds. Here and there pay-envelopes were
opened and tossed on the counter with bravado. To Blynn’s amazement the
alert barkeep boldly kept the change of those who were too far gone
to protest. When “Evil” called blasphemously for his money the barkeep
roared with delight and spun the coins out from behind a concealed
glass.
“Thought I’d got you that time, Pete!” he shouted gayly.
No one seemed to notice that Blynn’s pile of ginger ale was untouched.
He had resolved not to be a party to the disgusting custom. So he was
about to pay his little bill and depart, when an almost inarticulate
soliloquy from “Evil,” the least sodden of the lot, stopped him short
and sent his head aflaming.
“Wife’s sick ’gin, dam ’er. _Tol’_ ’er, break ’er head. _Will_ break
’er head w’enna g’ home. Las’ night--las’ night--’noth’ dam brat....
Allus havin’ dam brats.... Locked ’er up; ’did. Tol’ ’er, break ’er
head. _Will_ break ’er head w’enna g’ home.”
He went on with this maudlin talk, to which no one attended.
Ordinarily, Allen Blynn looked on the miseries of the poor with a
mild professorial eye. The world is a horrible place for some folks,
“a darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night”; no remedy is
nigh; we must sigh in pity and pass on to our own compelling tasks.
But this fellow’s story, which he enlarged upon until there was no
doubt of his meaning, Blynn viewed in no spirit of philosophic calm.
Perhaps the alcoholic air of the place had got into his vitals, and
had stirred them; perhaps that hidden, scourging priest within him had
broken forth to battle with the evil one; perhaps the Lady had made
him realize that he lacked something of being a man: at any rate, he
strode up back of that villainous beer-sop and spun him about so that
his back leaned at an angle against the bar and his feet spread out in
front of him.
“Where do you live?” Blynn darted the question at him so fiercely that
he answered automatically.
“Twenty-six Hogan street,” he growled, then slid heavily and sat down
in the gutter before the bar. From this posture he hurled weak curses.
The barkeep leaped adroitly across the bar, shoved Blynn aside with,
“Here you! Get out o’ this. Tryin’ to start somethin’?” while he jerked
his customer to normal human posture.
“Evil” reached for a glass and hurled it at random. The shot slid him
down again into the gutter; the glass fell wide with a glorious crash.
“Low-brow” seized a bottle, but was too weak to hold it. It slipped to
the floor, almost an echo of the other smash. “Simple” came up behind,
with only the friendliest intentions, no doubt, and put one beery arm
about the professor’s shoulder. Blynn turned swiftly at the heavy touch
and embraced him--without love, one may be sure--thereby projecting
upon his shirtfront the full contents of that beer-mug, a cavernous
vessel holding, at least, a quart. The vile odor was a lasting memory.
The embrace had been a clumsy thing, but the divorce was swift and
artistic. As Blynn instinctively shoved “Simple” forward--the cold beer
against the chest gave impetus to the push--the barkeep’s grip on
“Simple’s” collar sent him spilling backward. On the way he carried
“Toothless” with him. “Sloth” never even looked around; he leaned
comfortably against the bar and mumbled in his beer.
All these movements Blynn watched with interested eyes, caught every
sound as if it were data for a book. One-half of his mind was a
spectator, cool, undisturbed, careless of the outcome, concerned only
with the spectacle; the other was saying over and over again, “26 Hogan
street! 26 Hogan street!” and it was throbbing with rage.
“Here’s my money for one glass of ginger ale,” Blynn confronted the
barkeep. “And I want my change--all of it, do you hear! You’ve robbed
every drunken sot in the room except that vile cur,” pointing to “Evil”
still sprawling in the gutter before the bar. “I’ve seen you steal
their money out of their pay-envelopes. Give me my change, you viper!”
He slapped a twenty-five cent piece on the sopping counter. “Give me my
change, you bloodsucker, you poisoner, you--”
“Git out!” the barkeep yelled as he rushed at him. “Git out!”
He yelled much more. He told Blynn things concerning his past that were
biologically impossible and made prophetic assertions about the future.
His speeches were wild enough but his actions were genuinely savage.
Before Blynn could get into any proper pugilistic position the barkeep
had welted him across the side of the head with a huge fist.
The Lady had called him a first-rate book! A book? Not much!
It would be a pleasant thing to say here that Allen Blynn had trained
in his youth with a football team or that he had taken recent boxing
lessons from Corbett’s sparring partner. The truth is that his physical
condition was only that of an abstemious “professor” the spry side of
thirty, who jogged daily about the gymnasium track, or pulled a few
perfunctory chest-weights, just to give edge to the evening meal. But
that unexpected blow on the side of the head maddened him and summoned
triple strength.
In one spring he had that barkeep by the throat and had carried him
to the floor over the sprawling legs of “Simple.” Seizing him by his
flap ears he was fiercely pounding his head against the floor, when he
found himself lifted in the air by two bluecoats, turned about and sent
forward at a fearful angle, through the swing-doors, into the darkened
alley of a street. As he went out someone smashed the side of his head
with a bottle, and he always maintained the theory that an officer near
the door had assisted accurately with a boot; but his greatest joy as
he sprawled on the pavement was the feeling--later discovered to be an
illusion--that he still held in his hands the remains of the barkeep’s
ears.
On the way to 26 Hogan street he laughed and sang and exulted in
strange words. Before his mind he summoned the barkeep and that Satan’s
limb, “Evil,” and invited them to “Come on!” Names he called them,
mouthfilling, rhythmic cadences; anathema that never had been in his
vocabulary before, but which every man who has mingled with other men
knows by instinct.
And she had called him a book!
By ’phone and messenger, help was brought to “26 Hogan street.” They
broke in the locked door, conveyed the sick woman to the care of good
nurses, clean linen and real food. Her little brood they kept with her,
and so, in this one instance out of many, lightened the dark hours of
the very poor. Blynn confessed with shame that before this experience
he had not really known of their existence.
Soon after the groggery episode Professor Blynn was scheduled for
a banquet speech at the annual meeting of a local Drama Club. The
subject, selected long before, was “Realism in Modern Dramatic Art and
the Decadence of True Fantasy.” Certain notes which he had put lovingly
together for that evening were not at all consulted as he talked. The
musty references to Freytag, Horace, and Boileau did not suit his mood.
He could not get out of his mind some of the stirring realities of the
life about him; so, casually, and without any deep professional manner,
he talked of the material near at hand out of which great dramas might
come. He drew on his most recent stores. For stage setting he proferred
the blinking steamboats on the dark river, crowded with returning
excursionists, and humming with harp and violin; for characters,
“Simple,” “Low-brow,” “Evil,” “Toothless,” “Braggart,” “Sloth”; and for
theme, The Birth of New Life in the Houses of Failure.