Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a certain vast bulk of
the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side.
Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to
furnished room, transients forever—transients in abode, transients in
heart and mind. They sing “Home, Sweet Home” in ragtime; they carry
their _lares et penates_ in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a
picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree.
Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers,
should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but
it would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the
wake of all these vagrant guests.
One evening after dark a young man prowled among these crumbling red
mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth he rested his lean
hand-baggage upon the step and wiped the dust from his hatband and
forehead. The bell sounded faint and far away in some remote, hollow
depths.
To the door of this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung, came a
housekeeper who made him think of an unwholesome, surfeited worm that
had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy
with edible lodgers.
He asked if there was a room to let.
“Come in,” said the housekeeper. Her voice came from her throat; her
throat seemed lined with fur. “I have the third floor back, vacant
since a week back. Should you wish to look at it?”
The young man followed her up the stairs. A faint light from no
particular source mitigated the shadows of the halls. They trod
noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn.
It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank,
sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to
the staircase and was viscid under the foot like organic matter. At
each turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the wall. Perhaps plants
had once been set within them. If so they had died in that foul and
tainted air. It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but
it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them
forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished
pit below.
“This is the room,” said the housekeeper, from her furry throat. “It’s
a nice room. It ain’t often vacant. I had some most elegant people in
it last summer—no trouble at all, and paid in advance to the minute.
The water’s at the end of the hall. Sprowls and Mooney kept it three
months. They done a vaudeville sketch. Miss B’retta Sprowls—you may
have heard of her—Oh, that was just the stage names—right there over
the dresser is where the marriage certificate hung, framed. The gas is
here, and you see there is plenty of closet room. It’s a room everybody
likes. It never stays idle long.”
“Do you have many theatrical people rooming here?” asked the young man.
“They comes and goes. A good proportion of my lodgers is connected with
the theatres. Yes, sir, this is the theatrical district. Actor people
never stays long anywhere. I get my share. Yes, they comes and they
goes.”
He engaged the room, paying for a week in advance. He was tired, he
said, and would take possession at once. He counted out the money. The
room had been made ready, she said, even to towels and water. As the
housekeeper moved away he put, for the thousandth time, the question
that he carried at the end of his tongue.
“A young girl—Miss Vashner—Miss Eloise Vashner—do you remember such a
one among your lodgers? She would be singing on the stage, most likely.
A fair girl, of medium height and slender, with reddish, gold hair and
a dark mole near her left eyebrow.”
“No, I don’t remember the name. Them stage people has names they change
as often as their rooms. They comes and they goes. No, I don’t call
that one to mind.”
No. Always no. Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the
inevitable negative. So much time spent by day in questioning managers,
agents, schools and choruses; by night among the audiences of theatres
from all-star casts down to music halls so low that he dreaded to find
what he most hoped for. He who had loved her best had tried to find
her. He was sure that since her disappearance from home this great,
water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous
quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its
upper granules of to-day buried to-morrow in ooze and slime.
The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of
pseudo-hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the
specious smile of a demirep. The sophistical comfort came in reflected
gleams from the decayed furniture, the ragged brocade upholstery of a
couch and two chairs, a foot-wide cheap pier glass between the two
windows, from one or two gilt picture frames and a brass bedstead in a
corner.
The guest reclined, inert, upon a chair, while the room, confused in
speech as though it were an apartment in Babel, tried to discourse to
him of its divers tenantry.
A polychromatic rug like some brilliant-flowered rectangular, tropical
islet lay surrounded by a billowy sea of soiled matting. Upon the
gay-papered wall were those pictures that pursue the homeless one from
house to house—The Huguenot Lovers, The First Quarrel, The Wedding
Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel’s chastely severe outline
was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew
like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it was some desolate
flotsam cast aside by the room’s marooned when a lucky sail had borne
them to a fresh port—a trifling vase or two, pictures of actresses, a
medicine bottle, some stray cards out of a deck.
One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the
little signs left by the furnished room’s procession of guests
developed a significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of
the dresser told that lovely woman had marched in the throng. Tiny
finger prints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel
their way to sun and air. A splattered stain, raying like the shadow of
a bursting bomb, witnessed where a hurled glass or bottle had
splintered with its contents against the wall. Across the pier glass
had been scrawled with a diamond in staggering letters the name
“Marie.” It seemed that the succession of dwellers in the furnished
room had turned in fury—perhaps tempted beyond forbearance by its
garish coldness—and wreaked upon it their passions. The furniture was
chipped and bruised; the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed a
horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of some
grotesque convulsion. Some more potent upheaval had cloven a great
slice from the marble mantel. Each plank in the floor owned its
particular cant and shriek as from a separate and individual agony. It
seemed incredible that all this malice and injury had been wrought upon
the room by those who had called it for a time their home; and yet it
may have been the cheated home instinct surviving blindly, the
resentful rage at false household gods that had kindled their wrath. A
hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.
The young tenant in the chair allowed these thoughts to file,
soft-shod, through his mind, while there drifted into the room
furnished sounds and furnished scents. He heard in one room a tittering
and incontinent, slack laughter; in others the monologue of a scold,
the rattling of dice, a lullaby, and one crying dully; above him a
banjo tinkled with spirit. Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains
roared intermittently; a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence. And he
breathed the breath of the house—a dank savour rather than a smell—a
cold, musty effluvium as from underground vaults mingled with the
reeking exhalations of linoleum and mildewed and rotten woodwork.
Then, suddenly, as he rested there, the room was filled with the
strong, sweet odour of mignonette. It came as upon a single buffet of
wind with such sureness and fragrance and emphasis that it almost
seemed a living visitant. And the man cried aloud: “What, dear?” as if
he had been called, and sprang up and faced about. The rich odour clung
to him and wrapped him around. He reached out his arms for it, all his
senses for the time confused and commingled. How could one be
peremptorily called by an odour? Surely it must have been a sound. But,
was it not the sound that had touched, that had caressed him?
“She has been in this room,” he cried, and he sprang to wrest from it a
token, for he knew he would recognize the smallest thing that had
belonged to her or that she had touched. This enveloping scent of
mignonette, the odour that she had loved and made her own—whence came
it?
The room had been but carelessly set in order. Scattered upon the
flimsy dresser scarf were half a dozen hairpins—those discreet,
indistinguishable friends of womankind, feminine of gender, infinite of
mood and uncommunicative of tense. These he ignored, conscious of their
triumphant lack of identity. Ransacking the drawers of the dresser he
came upon a discarded, tiny, ragged handkerchief. He pressed it to his
face. It was racy and insolent with heliotrope; he hurled it to the
floor. In another drawer he found odd buttons, a theatre programme, a
pawnbroker’s card, two lost marshmallows, a book on the divination of
dreams. In the last was a woman’s black satin hair bow, which halted
him, poised between ice and fire. But the black satin hair-bow also is
femininity’s demure, impersonal, common ornament, and tells no tales.
And then he traversed the room like a hound on the scent, skimming the
walls, considering the corners of the bulging matting on his hands and
knees, rummaging mantel and tables, the curtains and hangings, the
drunken cabinet in the corner, for a visible sign, unable to perceive
that she was there beside, around, against, within, above him, clinging
to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly through the finer senses
that even his grosser ones became cognisant of the call. Once again he
answered loudly: “Yes, dear!” and turned, wild-eyed, to gaze on
vacancy, for he could not yet discern form and colour and love and
outstretched arms in the odour of mignonette. Oh, God! whence that
odour, and since when have odours had a voice to call? Thus he groped.
He burrowed in crevices and corners, and found corks and cigarettes.
These he passed in passive contempt. But once he found in a fold of the
matting a half-smoked cigar, and this he ground beneath his heel with a
green and trenchant oath. He sifted the room from end to end. He found
dreary and ignoble small records of many a peripatetic tenant; but of
her whom he sought, and who may have lodged there, and whose spirit
seemed to hover there, he found no trace.
And then he thought of the housekeeper.
He ran from the haunted room downstairs and to a door that showed a
crack of light. She came out to his knock. He smothered his excitement
as best he could.
“Will you tell me, madam,” he besought her, “who occupied the room I
have before I came?”
“Yes, sir. I can tell you again. ’Twas Sprowls and Mooney, as I said.
Miss B’retta Sprowls it was in the theatres, but Missis Mooney she was.
My house is well known for respectability. The marriage certificate
hung, framed, on a nail over—”
“What kind of a lady was Miss Sprowls—in looks, I mean?”
“Why, black-haired, sir, short, and stout, with a comical face. They
left a week ago Tuesday.”
“And before they occupied it?”
“Why, there was a single gentleman connected with the draying business.
He left owing me a week. Before him was Missis Crowder and her two
children, that stayed four months; and back of them was old Mr. Doyle,
whose sons paid for him. He kept the room six months. That goes back a
year, sir, and further I do not remember.”
He thanked her and crept back to his room. The room was dead. The
essence that had vivified it was gone. The perfume of mignonette had
departed. In its place was the old, stale odour of mouldy house
furniture, of atmosphere in storage.
The ebbing of his hope drained his faith. He sat staring at the yellow,
singing gaslight. Soon he walked to the bed and began to tear the
sheets into strips. With the blade of his knife he drove them tightly
into every crevice around windows and door. When all was snug and taut
he turned out the light, turned the gas full on again and laid himself
gratefully upon the bed.
It was Mrs. McCool’s night to go with the can for beer. So she fetched
it and sat with Mrs. Purdy in one of those subterranean retreats where
house-keepers foregather and the worm dieth seldom.
“I rented out my third floor, back, this evening,” said Mrs. Purdy,
across a fine circle of foam. “A young man took it. He went up to bed
two hours ago.”
“Now, did ye, Mrs. Purdy, ma’am?” said Mrs. McCool, with intense
admiration. “You do be a wonder for rentin’ rooms of that kind. And did
ye tell him, then?” she concluded in a husky whisper, laden with
mystery.
“Rooms,” said Mrs. Purdy, in her furriest tones, “are furnished for to
rent. I did not tell him, Mrs. McCool.”
“’Tis right ye are, ma’am; ’tis by renting rooms we kape alive. Ye have
the rale sense for business, ma’am. There be many people will rayjict
the rentin’ of a room if they be tould a suicide has been after dyin’
in the bed of it.”
“As you say, we has our living to be making,” remarked Mrs. Purdy.
“Yis, ma’am; ’tis true. ’Tis just one wake ago this day I helped ye lay
out the third floor, back. A pretty slip of a colleen she was to be
killin’ herself wid the gas—a swate little face she had, Mrs. Purdy,
ma’am.”
“She’d a-been called handsome, as you say,” said Mrs. Purdy, assenting
but critical, “but for that mole she had a-growin’ by her left eyebrow.
Do fill up your glass again, Mrs. McCool.”