“And what did you make out of my looks, Pyn?”
He stopped, stood off, and eyed me.
“Do you know what you’re like now?”
“I know I’m not like anything human.”
“You’re like a twenty-dollar bill that’s been in every pawnshop, and
every bar, and every old woman’s stocking, and every old bum’s pocket,
and is covered with dirt and grease and microbes till you wouldn’t hardly
hold it in your hand; but it’s still a twenty-dollar bill—that’ll buy
twenty dollars’ worth every time—and whenever you like you can get gold
for it.”
“Thank you, Pyn,” I returned, humbly, as we went on our way again.
“That’s the whitest thing that has ever been said to me.”
Before we reached Vandiver Street, Pyn had given us two bits of
information, both of which I was glad to receive.
One was entirely personal, being a brief survey of his fall and rise.
The son of a barber in one of the small towns near New York, he had gone
to work with a druggist on leaving the high school. His type, as he
described it, had been from the beginning that of the cheap sport. Cheap
sports had been his companions, and before he was twenty-one he had
married a pretty manicure girl from his father’s establishment. He had
married her while on a spree, and after the spree had repented. Repenting
chiefly because he wasn’t earning enough to keep a wife, he threw the
blame for his mistake on her. When a baby came he was annoyed; when a
second baby came he was desperate; when a third baby promised to appear
he was overwhelmed. Since the expenses of being a cheap sport couldn’t be
reduced, he saw no resource but flight to New York, leaving his wife to
fend for herself and her children.
Folly having made of him a hard drinker, remorse made of him a harder
one. And since no young fellow of twenty-four is callous enough to take
wife-desertion with an easy conscience, my own first talks with him had
been filled with maudlin references to a kind of guilt I hadn’t at the
time understood. All I knew was that from bad he had gone to worse,
and from worse he was on the way to the worst of all, when old Colonel
Straight rescued him.
The tale of that rescue unfolded some of the history of the Down and
Out. As to that, Pyn laid the emphasis on the fact that the club was
not a mission—that is, it was not the effort of the safe to help those
who are in danger; it was the effort of those who are in danger to help
themselves. Built up on unassisted effort, it was self-respecting. No
bribes had ever been offered it, and no persuasions but such as a man who
has got out of hell can bring to bear on another who is still frying in
the fire. Its action being not from the top downward, but from the bottom
upward, it had a native impulse to expansion.
Its inception had been an accident. Two men who had first met as Pyncheon
and I had first met had lost sight of each other for several years. At
a time when each had worked his salvation out they had come together
by accident on Broadway, and later had by another accident become
responsible for a third. Finding him one night lying on the pavement of
a lonely street, they had seemingly had no choice but to pick him up and
carry him to a cheap but friendly hostelry which they knew would not
refuse him. Here they had kept him till he had sobered up and taken the
job they found for him. Watching over him for months, they finally had
the pleasure of restoring him to his wife and seeing a broken home put on
its feet again. This third man, in gratitude for what had been done for
him, went after a fourth, and the fourth after a fifth, and so the chain
was flung out. By the time their number had increased to some twenty-five
or thirty Providence offered them a dwelling-place.
The dwelling-place, with the few apparently worthless articles it
contained, was all the club had ever accepted as a gift. Even that
might have been declined had it not been for the fact that it was going
begging. When old Miss Smedley died it was found that she had left her
residence in Vandiver Place as a legacy to St. David’s Church, across
the way. She had left it, however, as an empty residence. As an empty
residence it was in a measure a white elephant on the hands of a legatee
that had no immediate use for it.
St. David’s Church, you will remember, was not now the fashionable house
of prayer it had been in its early days. Time was when Vandiver Place was
the heart of exclusive New York. In the ’forties and ’fifties no section
of the city had been more select. In the ’sixties and ’seventies, when
Doctor Grace was rector of St. David’s, it had become time-honored. In
the ’eighties and ’nineties the old families began to move up-town and
the boarding-houses to creep in; and in the early years of the twentieth
century the residents ceded the ground entirely to the manufacturer of
artificial flowers and the tailor of the ready-to-wear. In 1911 the
line of houses that made it a cul-de-sac was torn down and a broad
thoroughfare cut through a congeries of slums, the whole being named
Vandiver Street. Vandiver Place was gone; and with it went Miss Smedley.
Rufus Legrand, who succeeded Doctor Grace as rector of St. David’s,
offered Miss Smedley’s house as a home for the Down and Out; but it was
Beady Lamont, a husky furniture-mover and ardent member of the club, who
suggested this philanthropic opportunity to Rufus Legrand.
“Say, reverent, my buddy’s give in at last, on’y I haven’t got no place
to put him. But, say, reverent, there’s that old house I helped to move
the sticks out of two or three months ago. There’s three beds left in it,
and a couple of chairs. Me and him could bunk there for a few nights,
while he got straightened out, and—”
“But you’d have no bedclothes.”
“Say, reverent, we don’t want no bedclothes. Sleepin’ in the Park’ll
learn you how to do without sheets.”
“My daughter, Mrs. Ralph Coningsby, could undoubtedly supply you with
some.”
“Say, reverent, that ain’t our way. We don’t pass the buck on no one.
What we haven’t got we do without till we can pay for it ourselves. But
that old house ain’t doin’ nothing but sit on its haunches; and if I
could just get Tiger into the next bed to mine at night—we don’t want no
bedclothes nor nothing but what we lay down in—and take him along with me
when I go to work by day, so as to keep my search-lights on him, like—”
Rufus Legrand had already sufficiently weighed the proposal.
“I’m sure I don’t see why you shouldn’t sleep in the old place as long as
you like, Beady, if you can only make yourselves comfortable.”
“Say, reverent, now you’re shouting.”
So another accident settled the fate of Miss Smedley’s lifelong home; and
before many weeks the Down and Out was in full possession.
It was in full possession of the house with the refuse the heirs had
not considered good enough to take away—three iron bedsteads that the
servants had used; an equal number of humble worn-out mattresses; two
tolerably solid wooden chairs, three that needed repairs, which were
speedily given them; some crockery more or less chipped and cracked; and
a stained steel-engraving of Franklin in the _salon_ of Marie Antoinette.
True to its principles, the club accepted neither gifts of money nor
contributions in kind. Its members were all graduates of the school of
doing without. To those who came there a roof over the head was a luxury,
while to have a friend to stand by them and care whether they went to the
devil or not was little short of a miracle.
But by the time Billy Pyncheon had been brought in by old Colonel
Straight, gratitude, sacrifice, and enthusiasm on the part of one or
another of the members had adequately fitted up this house to which Lovey
and I were on the way. It had become, too, the one institution of which
the saloon-keepers of my acquaintance were afraid. We were all afraid of
it. It had worked so many wonders among our pals that we had come to look
on it as a home of the necromantic. Missions of any kind we knew how to
cope with; but in the Down and Out there was a sort of wizardry that
tamed the wildest hearts among us, cast out devils, and raised the nearly
dead. I myself for a year or more—ever since I had seen the spell it had
wrought on Pyn, for whom from the first I had felt a sympathy—had been
haunted by the dread of it; and here I was at the door.
The door when we got to it was something of a disappointment. It was at
the head of a flight of old-time brownstone steps, and was just like any
other door. About it was nothing of the magical or cabalistic Lovey and I
had been half expecting.
More impressive was the neat little man who opened to our ring. He was a
wan, wistful, smiling little figure of sixty-odd, on whom all the ends of
the world seemed to have come. He was like a man who has been dead and
buried and has come to life again—but who shows he has been dead. If I
had to look like that....
But I took comfort in the thought of Pyn. Pyn showed nothing. He was like
one of the three holy men who went through Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace—the
smell of fire had not passed on him. A heartier, healthier, merrier
fellow it would have been difficult to find.
He entered now with the air of authority which belongs to the member of a
club.
“Fellows had their breakfast, Spender?”
Spender was all welcome, of the wistful, yearning kind.
“The men at work is gone; but the guys under restraint is still at table.”
“Mr. Christian not here yet?”
“Never gets here before nine; and it’s not half past seven yet.”
Pyn turned to me. “Say, do you want to go in and feed, or will you wash
up first, or go to bed, or what?”
With this large liberty of choice I asked if we could do whatever we
liked. It was Spender who explained.
“That’s the rule for new arrivals, unless they’ve got to be put under
restraint at once.”
“I don’t want to be put under no restraint,” Lovey declared, indignantly.
“That’ll be all right,” Spender replied, kindly, “unless there’s vermin—”
Lovey jumped.
“See here, now! Don’t you begin no such immodest talk to me.”
“There, there, Lovikins,” Pyn broke in. “Spender don’t mean no harm. All
sorts have to come to a place like this. But when we see a gentleman we
treat him like a gentleman. All Spender wants to know is this, Is it eats
for you first, or a bath?”
“And I don’t want no bath,” Lovey declared, proudly.
“Then it’ll be eats. Quick march! I’ve got to beat it back to my job.”
Pyn’s introduction of us to those already in the dining-room was simple.
“This is Lovey. This is Slim. You guys’ll make ’em feel at home.”
Making us feel at home consisted in moving along the table so as to give
us room. In words there was no response to Pyn, who withdrew at once, nor
was there more than a cursory inspection of us with the eyes. Whatever
was kindly was in the atmosphere, and that was perceptible.
As we sat before two empty places, one of our new companions rose, went
to the dresser behind us, and brought us each a plate, a spoon, a knife,
and a cup and saucer. A big man went to the kitchen door and in a voice
like thunder called out, “Mouse!”
By the time he had returned to his place a stumpy individual with a big
red mustache and a limp appeared on the threshold. An explanation of the
summons was given him when a third of our friends pointed at us with a
spoonful of oatmeal porridge before he put it in his mouth.
Mouse withdrew into the kitchen, coming back with two basins of porridge,
which he placed, steaming hot, before us. Presently, too, he filled our
cups with coffee. Bread and butter, sugar and milk, were all on the
table. The meal went on in silence, except for the smacking of lips and
the clinking of spoons on the crockeryware.
Of our fellow-guests I can only say that they presented different
phases of the forlorn. The man next to me was sallow, hatchet-faced,
narrow-breasted, weak of physique, and looked as if he might have been a
tailor. His hair was a shock of unkempt black curls, and his dark eyes
the largest and longest and most luminous I ever saw in a man. In their
nervous glance they made me think of a horse’s eyes, especially when he
rolled them toward me timidly.
Opposite was a sandy, freckled-face type, whom I easily diagnosed as a
Scotchman. Light hair, light eyebrows, and a heavy reddish mustache set
off a face scored with a few deep wrinkles, and savage like that of a
beast fretted with a sense of helplessness. The shaking hand that passed
the bread to me was muscular, freckled, and covered with coarse, reddish
hairs. I put him down as a gardener.
At the head of the table was a huge, unwieldy fellow who looked as if
he had all run to fat, but who, as I afterward learned, was a mass of
muscle and sinew, like a Japanese wrestler. He had bloated cheeks and
bloated hands, and a voice so big and bass that when he spoke, as he
did on going to the door to summon Mouse, he almost shook the dishes on
the dresser. He proved to be, too, a pal of Beady Lamont’s, and as a
piano-mover by profession he frequented Beady’s spheres.
At the big man’s right was a poor little whippersnapper, not more than
five foot two, who looked as if a puff would blow him away; and opposite
him a tall, spare, fine-looking Irishman, a hospital attendant, whose
face would have been full of humor had it not been convulsed for the time
being with a sense of mortal anguish. It was he who had brought us our
dishes and took pains to see that our needs were supplied.
No more than any of the others were we eager for conversation. The fact
that we were having good warm food served in a more or less regular
way was enough to occupy all that was uppermost in our thoughts. Poor
Lovey ate as he had drunk the chocolate half an hour before, with a
greed that was almost terrible. Once more I might have done the same
had I not taken his example as a warning. Not that anything I did would
have attracted attention in that particular gathering. Each man’s gaze
was turned inward. His soul’s tragedy absorbed him to the exclusion of
everything else. Reaction from the stupor of excess brought nothing but
a sense of woe. There was woe on all faces. There would have been woe in
all thoughts if conscious thought had not been outside the range of these
drugged and stultified faculties.
What was more active than anything else was a blind fellow-feeling. They
did little things for one another. They did little watchful things for
Lovey and me. They even quarreled over their kindnesses like children
eager to make themselves useful.
“You’ll want to know where the barth-room is,” the timid tailor said to
me as we rose from the table. “I’ll show you.”
There was a snarl from the whippersnapper across the way.
“Aw, put your lid on, Headlights. How long have you been showin’
barth-rooms in this here shebang?” He beckoned to me. “You come along o’
me, Slim—”
It was the Irishman who intervened to keep the peace.
“Listen to Daisy now, will you? He’s like a fox-terrier that owns the
house and grounds and barks at every wan who goes by. Look now, Daisy!
You take this ould gent up to the bath-room on the top floor; and you,
Headlights, show Slim to the one on the second floor, and every wan o’
you’ll have a bite at the cake.”
With this peaceable division of the honors we started off.
I must describe the club as very humble. The rooms themselves, as was
natural with an old New York residence, did not lack dignity. Though too
narrow for their height, they had admirable cornices and some exquisite
ceiling medallions. It is probable, too, that in days when there were no
skyscrapers in the neighborhood the house was light enough, but now it
wore a general air of dimness. The furnishings were just what you might
have expected from the efforts of very poor men in giving of their small
superfluity. There were plenty of plain wooden chairs, and a sufficiency
of tables to match them. In the two down-stairs sitting-rooms, which
must once have been Miss Smedley’s front and back drawing-rooms, there
were benches against the wall. A roll-top desk, which I learned was the
official seat of Mr. Christian, was so placed as to catch the light from
Vandiver Street. A plain, black, wooden cross between the two front
windows, and Franklin in the _salon_ of Marie Antoinette in the place
of honor over a fine old white marble mantelpiece, completed the two
reception-rooms.
The floor above was given over to the dormitories for outsiders, and
contained little more than beds. They were small iron beds, made up
without counterpanes. As every man made his own, the result would
not have passed the inspection of a high-class chambermaid, but they
satisfied those who lay down in them. Since outsiders came in, like
Lovey and me, with little or nothing in the way of belongings, it was
unnecessary to make further provision for their wardrobes than could be
found in the existing closets and shelves. In the front bedroom, which
I suppose must have been Miss Smedley’s, there were nine small beds; in
the room back of that there were seven; and in a small room over the
kitchen, given up to the men positively under restraint, there were five.
Twenty-one outsiders could thus be cared for at a time.
On the third floor were the dormitories for club members—men who had kept
sober for three months and more, and who wore a star of a color denoting
the variety of their achievements. On this floor, too, was a billiard,
card, and smoking room, accessible to any one, even to outsiders, who had
kept sober for three weeks. On the top floor of all were a few bedrooms,
formerly those of Miss Smedley’s servants, reserved for the occasional
occupancy of such grandees as had preserved their integrity for three
years and more; and here, too, was the sacred place known as “the
lounge,” to which none were admitted who didn’t wear the gold or silver
star representing sobriety for at least a year.
The whole was, therefore, a carefully arranged hierarchy in which one
mounted according to one’s merit. Little Spender wore the gold star,
indicating a five years’ fight with the devil; and Mouse, the cook, a
blue one, which meant that he had been victorious for three months.
All others in the club when Lovey and I arrived were outsiders like
ourselves. Outsiders gave their word to stay a week, generally for the
purpose of sobering up, but beyond that nothing was asked of them. At the
beginning of the second week they could either continue their novitiate
or go.
This information was given me by Spender as we stood on the threshold of
the bath-room before I passed in. When the tale was ended, however, the
Scotchman, who had taken little or no part in our reception, pushed by me
and entered.
“You’ll be wanting a shave,” he said, in explanation of his rudeness.
“There are my things”—he got down on all-fours to show me a safety razor
and a broken cup containing a brush and shaving-soap, hidden behind
one of the legs of the bath-tub—“and you’ll oblige me by putting them
back. Daisy, the wee bye you saw at the table, is doing the same by
your chum. I make no doubt your own things have been held in your last
rooming-house.”
When I had admitted that this was exactly the case and had thanked my
friends for their courtesies, they withdrew, leaving me to my toilet.
After the good meal the bath was a genuine luxury. It was a decent
bath-room, kept by the men, as all the house was kept, in a kind of dingy
cleanliness. Cleanliness, I found, was not only a principle of the club;
it was one of the first indications that those who came in for shelter
gave of a survival of self-respect. Some of their efforts in that way
were amusing or pathetic, as the case might be, but they were always
human and touching.
While shaving I had an inspiration that was to have some effect on what
happened to me afterward. I decided to let my mustache grow. As it grew
strongly in any case, a four days’ absence of the razor had given my
upper lip a deep walnut tinge, and, should I leave the club after the
week to which I had tacitly pledged myself by coming there at all, I
should look different from when I entered. To look different was the
first of the obscure and violent longings of which my heart was full. It
would be the nearest possible thing to getting away from my old self. Not
to be the same man at all as the one who had exchanged those few strange
sentences with Regina Barry seemed to be the goal toward which I was
willing to struggle at any cost of sacrifice.
Having bathed and shaved, I was not an ill-looking fellow till it
came to putting on my shirt again. Any man who has worn a shirt for
forty-eight hours in a city or on a train knows what a horror it becomes
in the exposed spots on the chest and about the wrists. I had had but
one shirt for a week and more—and but the one soft collar. You can see
already, then, that in spite of some success in smartening up my damp and
threadbare suit I left the bath-room looking abject.
I was not, however, so abject as Lovey when I found him again in the
front sitting-room down-stairs.
In the back sitting-room our table companions were all arranged in a row
against the wall. In spite of the fact that there were plenty of chairs,
they sat huddled together on one bench; and though there was tobacco,
as there were books, papers, and magazines, they sought no occupation.
When I say that they could have smoked and didn’t, the wrench that had
been given to their normal state of mind will be apparent. Close up to
one another they pressed, the Scotchman against the piano-mover, and the
piano-mover against the wee bye Daisy, like lovebirds on the perch of a
cage or newly captured animals too terrified even to snap.
Without comment on any one’s part, Lovey roamed the front sitting-room
alone.
“I say, sonny,” he began, fretfully, as I entered, “this ain’t no place
for you and me.”