RAPHAEL RISTOFALO.
Richling had a dollar in his pocket. A man touched him on the shoulder.
But let us see. On the day that John and Mary had sold their only
bedstead, Mrs. Riley, watching them, had proposed the joint home. The
offer had been accepted with an eagerness that showed itself in nervous
laughter. Mrs. Riley then took quarters in Prieur street, where John and
Mary, for a due consideration, were given a single neatly furnished back
room. The bedstead had brought seven dollars. Richling, on the day after
the removal, was in the commercial quarter, looking, as usual, for
employment.
The young man whom Dr. Sevier had first seen, in the previous October,
moving with a springing step and alert, inquiring glances from number to
number in Carondelet street was slightly changed. His step was firm, but
something less elastic, and not quite so hurried. His face was more
thoughtful, and his glance wanting in a certain dancing freshness that
had been extremely pleasant. He was walking in Poydras street toward the
river.
As he came near to a certain man who sat in the entrance of a store with
the freshly whittled corner of a chair between his knees, his look and
bow were grave, but amiable, quietly hearty, deferential, and also
self-respectful--and uncommercial: so palpably uncommercial that the
sitter did not rise or even shut his knife.
He slightly stared. Richling, in a low, private tone, was asking him for
employment.
"What?" turning his ear up and frowning downward.
The application was repeated, the first words with a slightly resentful
ring, but the rest more quietly.
The store-keeper stared again, and shook his head slowly.
"No, sir," he said, in a barely audible tone. Richling moved on, not
stopping at the next place, or the next, or the next; for he felt the
man's stare all over his back until he turned the corner and found
himself in Tchoupitoulas street. Nor did he stop at the first place
around the corner. It smelt of deteriorating potatoes and up-river
cabbages, and there were open barrels of onions set ornamentally aslant
at the entrance. He had a fatal conviction that his services would not
be wanted in malodorous places.
"Now, isn't that a shame?" asked the chair-whittler, as Richling passed
out of sight. "Such a gentleman as that, to be beggin' for work from
door to door!"
"He's not beggin' f'om do' to do'," said a second, with a Creole accent
on his tongue, and a match stuck behind his ear like a pen. "Beside,
he's too _much_ of a gennlemun."
"That's where you and him differs," said the first. He frowned upon the
victim of his delicate repartee with make-believe defiance. Number Two
drew from an outside coat-pocket a wad of common brown wrapping-paper,
tore from it a small, neat parallelogram, dove into an opposite pocket
for some loose smoking-tobacco, laid a pinch of it in the paper, and,
with a single dexterous turn of the fingers, thumbs above, the rest
beneath,--it looks simple, but 'tis an amazing art,--made a cigarette.
Then he took down his match, struck it under his short coat-skirt,
lighted his cigarette, drew an inhalation through it that consumed a
third of its length, and sat there, with his eyes half-closed, and all
that smoke somewhere inside of him.
"That young man," remarked a third, wiping a toothpick on his thigh and
putting it in his vest-pocket, as he stepped to the front, "don't know
how to _look_ fur work. There's one way fur a day-laborer to look fur
work, and there's another way fur a gentleman to look fur work, and
there's another way fur a--a--a man with money to look fur somethin'
to put his money into. _It's just like fishing!_" He threw both hands
outward and downward, and made way for a porter's truck with a load of
green meat. The smoke began to fall from Number Two's nostrils in two
slender blue streams. Number Three continued:--
"You've got to know what kind o' hooks you want, and what kind o' bait
you want, and then, after _that_, you've"--
Numbers One and Two did not let him finish.
"--Got to know how to fish," they said; "that's so!" The smoke continued
to leak slowly from Number Two's nostrils and teeth, though he had not
lifted his cigarette the second time.
"Yes, you've got to know how to fish," reaffirmed the third. "If you
don't know how to fish, it's as like as not that nobody can tell you
what's the matter; an' yet, all the same, you aint goin' to ketch no
fish."
"Well, now," said the first man, with an unconvinced swing of his chin,
"_spunk_ 'll sometimes pull a man through; and you can't say he aint
spunky." Number Three admitted the corollary. Number Two looked up: his
chance had come.
"He'd a w'ipped you faw a dime," said he to Number One, took a
comforting draw from his cigarette, and felt a great peace.
"I take notice he's a little deaf," said Number Three, still alluding to
Richling.
"That'd spoil him for me," said Number One.
Number Three asked why.
"Oh, I just wouldn't have him about me. Didn't you ever notice that a
deaf man always seems like a sort o' stranger? I can't bear 'em."
Richling meanwhile moved on. His critics were right. He was not wanting
in courage; but no man from the moon could have been more an alien on
those sidewalks. He was naturally diligent, active, quick-witted, and
of good, though maybe a little too scholarly address; quick of temper,
it is true, and uniting his quickness of temper with a certain
bashfulness,--an unlucky combination, since, as a consequence, nobody
had to get out of its way; but he was generous in fact and in speech,
and never held malice a moment. But, besides the heavy odds which his
small secret seemed to be against him, stopping him from accepting such
valuable friendships as might otherwise have come to him, and besides
his slight deafness, he was by nature a recluse, or, at least, a
dreamer. Every day that he set foot on Tchoupitoulas, or Carondelet, or
Magazine, or Fulton, or Poydras street he came from a realm of thought,
seeking service in an empire of matter.
There is a street in New Orleans called Triton _Walk_. That is what all
the ways of commerce and finance and daily bread-getting were to
Richling. He was a merman--ashore. It was the feeling rather than the
knowledge of this that prompted him to this daily, aimless trudging
after mere employment. He had a proper pride; once in a while a little
too much; nor did he clearly see his deficiencies; and yet the
unrecognized consciousness that he had not the commercial instinct made
him willing--as Number Three would have said--to "cut bait" for any
fisherman who would let him do it.
He turned without any distinct motive and, retracing his steps to the
corner, passed up across Poydras street. A little way above it he paused
to look at some machinery in motion. He liked machinery,--for itself
rather than for its results. He would have gone in and examined the
workings of this apparatus had it not been for the sign above his head,
"No Admittance." Those words always seemed painted for him. A slight
modification in Richling's character might have made him an inventor.
Some other faint difference, and he might have been a writer, a
historian, an essayist, or even--there is no telling--a well-fed poet.
With the question of food, raiment, and shelter permanently settled,
he might have become one of those resplendent flash lights that at
intervals dart their beams across the dark waters of the world's
ignorance, hardly from new continents, but from the observatory, the
study, the laboratory. But he was none of these. There had been a crime
committed somewhere in his bringing up, and as a result he stood in the
thick of life's battle, weaponless. He gazed upon machinery with
childlike wonder; but when he looked around and saw on every hand
men,--good fellows who ate in their shirt-sleeves at restaurants, told
broad jokes, spread their mouths and smote their sides when they
laughed, and whose best wit was to bombard one another with bread-crusts
and hide behind the sugar-bowl; men whom he could have taught in every
kind of knowledge that they were capable of grasping, except the
knowledge of how to get money,--when he saw these men, as it seemed to
him, grow rich daily by simply flipping beans into each other's faces,
or slapping each other on the back, the wonder of machinery was
eclipsed. Do as they did? He? He could no more reach a conviction as to
what the price of corn would be to-morrow than he could remember what
the price of sugar was yesterday.
He called himself an accountant, gulping down his secret pride with an
amiable glow that commanded, instantly, an amused esteem. And, to judge
by his evident familiarity with Tonti's beautiful scheme of mercantile
records, he certainly--those guessed whose books he had extricated
from confusion--had handled money and money values in days before his
unexplained coming to New Orleans. Yet a close observer would have
noticed that he grasped these tasks only as problems, treated them in
their mathematical and enigmatical aspect, and solved them without any
appreciation of their concrete values. When they were done he felt less
personal interest in them than in the architectural beauty of the
store-front, whose window-shutters he had never helped to close without
a little heart-leap of pleasure.
But, standing thus, and looking in at the machinery, a man touched him
on the shoulder.
"Good-morning," said the man. He wore a pleasant air. It seemed to say,
"I'm nothing much, but you'll recognize me in a moment; I'll wait." He
was short, square, solid, beardless; in years, twenty-five or six. His
skin was dark, his hair almost black, his eyebrows strong. In his mild
black eyes you could see the whole Mediterranean. His dress was coarse,
but clean; his linen soft and badly laundered. But under all the rough
garb and careless, laughing manner was visibly written again and again
the name of the race that once held the world under its feet.
"You don't remember me?" he added, after a moment.
"No," said Richling, pleasantly, but with embarrassment. The man waited
another moment, and suddenly Richling recalled their earlier meeting.
The man, representing a wholesale confectioner in one of the smaller
cities up the river, had bought some cordials and syrups of the house
whose books Richling had last put in order.
"Why, yes I do, too!" said Richling. "You left your pocket-book in my
care for two or three days; your own private money, you said."
"Yes." The man laughed softly. "Lost that money. Sent it to the boss.
Boss died--store seized--everything gone." His English was well
pronounced, but did not escape a pretty Italian accent, too delicate for
the printer's art.
"Oh! that was too bad!" Richling laid his hand upon an awning-post and
twined an arm and leg around it as though he were a vine. "I--I forget
your name."
"Ristofalo. Raphael Ristofalo. Yours is Richling. Yes, knocked me flat.
Not got cent in world." The Italian's low, mellow laugh claimed
Richling's admiration.
"Why, when did that happen?" he asked.
"Yes'day," replied the other, still laughing.
"And how are you going to provide for the future?" Richling asked,
smiling down into the face of the shorter man. The Italian tossed the
future away with the back of his hand.
"I got nothin' do with that." His words were low, but very distinct.
Thereupon Richling laughed, leaning his cheek against the post.
"Must provide for the present," said Raphael Ristofalo. Richling dropped
his eyes in thought. The present! He had never been able to see that it
was the present which must be provided against, until, while he was
training his guns upon the future, the most primitive wants of the
present burst upon him right and left like whooping savages.
"Can you lend me dollar?" asked the Italian. "Give you back dollar an'
quarter to-morrow."
Richling gave a start and let go the post. "Why, Mr. Risto--falo,
I--I--, the fact is, I"--he shook his head--"I haven't much money."
"Dollar will start me," said the Italian, whose feet had not moved an
inch since he touched Richling's shoulder. "Be aw righ' to-morrow."
"You can't invest one dollar by itself," said the incredulous Richling.
"Yes. Return her to-morrow."
Richling swung his head from side to side as an expression of disrelish.
"I haven't been employed for some time."
"I goin' t'employ myself," said Ristofalo.
Richling laughed again. There was a faint betrayal of distress in his
voice as it fell upon the cunning ear of the Italian; but he laughed
too, very gently and innocently, and stood in his tracks.
"I wouldn't like to refuse a dollar to a man who needs it," said
Richling. He took his hat off and ran his fingers through his hair.
"I've seen the time when it was much easier to lend than it is just
now." He thrust his hand down into his pocket and stood gazing at the
sidewalk.
The Italian glanced at Richling askance, and with one sweep of the eye
from the softened crown of his hat to the slender, white bursted slit in
the outer side of either well-polished shoe, took in the beauty of his
face and a full understanding of his condition. His hair, somewhat dry,
had fallen upon his forehead. His fine, smooth skin was darkened by the
exposure of his daily wanderings. His cheek-bones, a trifle high,
asserted their place above the softly concave cheeks. His mouth was
closed and the lips were slightly compressed; the chin small, gracefully
turned, not weak,--not strong. His eyes were abstracted, deep, pensive.
His dress told much. The fine plaits of his shirt had sprung apart and
been neatly sewed together again. His coat was a little faulty in the
set of the collar, as if the person who had taken the garment apart and
turned the goods had not put it together again with practised skill. It
was without spot and the buttons were new. The edges of his shirt-cuffs
had been trimmed with the scissors. Face and vesture alike revealed to
the sharp eye of the Italian the woe underneath. "He has a wife,"
thought Ristofalo.
Richling looked up with a smile. "How can you be so sure you will make,
and not lose?"
"I never fail." There was not the least shade of boasting in the man's
manner. Richling handed out his dollar. It was given without patronage
and taken with simple thanks.
"Where goin' to meet to-morrow morning?" asked Ristofalo. "Here?"
"Oh! I forgot," said Richling. "Yes, I suppose so; and then you'll tell
me how you invested it, will you?"
"Yes, but you couldn't do it."
"Why not?"
Raphael Ristofalo laughed. "Oh! fifty reason'."