THE TROUGH OF THE SEA.
Narcisse, on receiving his scolding from Richling, had gone to his home
in Casa Calvo street, a much greater sufferer than he had appeared to
be. While he was confronting his abaser there had been a momentary
comfort in the contrast between Richling's ill-behavior and his own
self-control. It had stayed his spirit and turned the edge of Richling's
sharp denunciations. But, as he moved off the field, he found himself,
at every step, more deeply wounded than even he had supposed. He began
to suffocate with chagrin, and hurried his steps in sheer distress. He
did not experience that dull, vacant acceptance of universal scorn which
an unresentful coward feels. His pangs were all the more poignant
because he knew his own courage.
In his home he went so straight up to the withered little old lady, in
the dingiest of flimsy black, who was his aunt, and kissed her so
passionately, that she asked at once what was the matter. He recounted
the facts, shedding tears of mortification. Her feeling, by the time
he had finished the account, was a more unmixed wrath than his, and,
harmless as she was, and wrapped up in her dear, pretty nephew as she
was, she yet demanded to know why such a man shouldn't be called out
upon the field of honor.
"Ah!" cried Narcisse, shrinkingly. She had touched the core of the
tumor. One gets a public tongue-lashing from a man concerning money
borrowed; well, how is one going to challenge him without first handing
back the borrowed money? It was a scalding thought! The rotten joists
beneath the bare scrubbed-to-death floor quaked under Narcisse's
to-and-fro stride.
"--And then, anyhow!"--he stopped and extended both hands, speaking, of
course, in French,--"anyhow, he is the favored friend of Dr. Sevier. If
I hurt him--I lose my situation! If he hurts me--I lose my situation!"
He dried his eyes. His aunt saw the insurmountability of the difficulty,
and they drowned feeling in an affectionate glass of green-orangeade.
"But never mind!" Narcisse set his glass down and drew out his tobacco.
He laughed spasmodically as he rolled his cigarette. "You shall see. The
game is not finished yet."
Yet Richling passed the next day and night without assassination, and
on the second morning afterward, as on the first, went out in quest of
employment. He and Mary had eaten bread, and it had gone into their life
without a remainder either in larder or purse. Richling was all aimless.
"I do wish I had the _art_ of finding work," said he. He smiled. "I'll
get it," he added, breaking their last crust in two. "I have the science
already. Why, look you, Mary, the quiet, amiable, imperturbable,
dignified, diurnal, inexorable haunting of men of influence will get you
whatever you want."
"Well, why don't you do it, dear? Is there any harm in it? I don't see
any harm in it. Why don't you do that very thing?"
"I'm telling you the truth," answered he, ignoring her question.
"Nothing else short of overtowering merit will get you what you want
half so surely."
"Well, why not do it? Why not?" A fresh, glad courage sparkled in the
wife's eyes.
"Why, Mary," said John, "I never in my life tried so hard to do anything
else as I've tried to do that! It sounds easy; but try it! You can't
conceive how hard it is till you try it. I can't _do_ it! I _can't_ do
it!"
"_I'd_ do it!" cried Mary. Her face shone. "_I'd_ do it! You'd see if I
didn't! Why, John"--
"All right!" exclaimed he; "you sha'n't talk that way to me for nothing.
I'll try it again! I'll begin to-day!"
"Good-by," he said. He reached an arm over one of her shoulders and
around under the other and drew her up on tiptoe. She threw both hers
about his neck. A long kiss--then a short one.
"John, something tells me we're near the end of our troubles."
John laughed grimly. "Ristofalo was to get back to the city to-day:
maybe he's going to put us out of our misery. There are two ways for
troubles to end." He walked away as he spoke. As he passed under the
window in the alley, its sash was thrown up and Mary leaned out on her
elbows.
"John!"
"Well?"
They looked into each other's eyes with the quiet pleasure of tried
lovers, and were silent a moment. She leaned a little farther down, and
said, softly:--
"You mustn't mind what I said just now."
"Why, what did you say?"
"That if it were I, I'd do it. I know you can do anything I can do, and
a hundred better things besides."
He lifted his hand to her cheek. "We'll see," he whispered. She drew in,
and he moved on.
Morning passed. Noon came. From horizon to horizon the sky was one
unbroken blue. The sun spread its bright, hot rays down upon the town
and far beyond, ripening the distant, countless fields of the great
delta, which by and by were to empty their abundance into the city's lap
for the employment, the nourishing, the clothing of thousands. But in
the dusty streets, along the ill-kept fences and shadowless walls of the
quiet districts, and on the glaring facades and heated pavements of the
commercial quarters, it seemed only as though the slowly retreating
summer struck with the fury of a wounded Amazon. Richling was soon
dust-covered and weary. He had gone his round. There were not many men
whom he could even propose to haunt. He had been to all of them. Dr.
Sevier was not one. "Not to-day," said Richling.
"It all depends on the way it's done," he said to himself; "it needn't
degrade a man if it's done the right way." It was only by such
philosophy he had done it at all. Ristofalo he could have haunted
without effort; but Ristofalo was not to be found. Richling tramped in
vain. It may be that all plans were of equal merit just then. The
summers of New Orleans in those times were, as to commerce, an utter
torpor, and the autumn reawakening was very tardy. It was still too
early for the stirrings of general mercantile life. The movement of the
cotton crop was just beginning to be perceptible; but otherwise almost
the only sounds were from the hammers of craftsmen making the town
larger and preparing it for the activities of days to come.
The afternoon wore along. Not a cent yet to carry home! Men began to
shut their idle shops and go to meet their wives and children about
their comfortable dinner-tables. The sun dipped low. Hammers and saws
were dropped into tool-boxes, and painters pulled themselves out of
their overalls. The mechanic's rank, hot supper began to smoke on its
bare board; but there was one board that was still altogether bare and
to which no one hastened. Another day and another chance of life were
gone.
Some men at a warehouse door, the only opening in the building left
unclosed, were hurrying in a few bags of shelled corn. Night was
falling. At an earlier hour Richling had offered the labor of his hands
at this very door and had been rejected. Now, as they rolled in the last
truck-load, they began to ask for rest with all the gladness he would
have felt to be offered toil, singing,--
"To blow, to blow, some time for to blow."
They swung the great leaves of the door together as they finished their
chorus, stood grouped outside a moment while the warehouseman turned the
resounding lock, and then went away. Richling, who had moved on, watched
them over his shoulder, and as they left turned back. He was about to do
what he had never done before. He went back to the door where the bags
of grain had stood. A drunken sailor came swinging along. He stood still
and let him pass; there must be no witnesses. The sailor turned the next
corner. Neither up nor down nor across the street, nor at dust-begrimed,
cobwebbed window, was there any sound or motion. Richling dropped
quickly on one knee and gathered hastily into his pocket a little pile
of shelled corn that had leaked from one of the bags.
That was all. No harm to a living soul; no theft; no wrong; but ah! as
he rose he felt a sudden inward lesion. Something broke. It was like a
ship, in a dream, noiselessly striking a rock where no rock is. It
seemed as though the very next thing was to begin going to pieces. He
walked off in the dark shadow of the warehouse, half lifted from his
feet by a vague, wide dismay. And yet he felt no greatness of emotion,
but rather a painful want of it, as if he were here and emotion were
yonder, down-street, or up-street, or around the corner. The ground
seemed slipping from under him. He appeared to have all at once melted
away to nothing. He stopped. He even turned to go back. He felt that if
he should go and put that corn down where he had found it he should feel
himself once more a living thing of substance and emotions. Then it
occurred to him--no, he would keep it, he would take it to Mary; but
himself--he would not touch it; and so he went home.
Mary parched the corn, ground it fine in the coffee-mill and salted and
served it close beside the candle. "It's good white corn," she said,
laughing. "Many a time when I was a child I used to eat this in my
playhouse and thought it delicious. Didn't you? What! not going to eat?"
Richling had told her how he got the corn. Now he told his sensations.
"You eat it, Mary," he said at the end; "you needn't feel so about it;
but if I should eat it I should feel myself a vagabond. It may be
foolish, but I wouldn't touch it for a hundred dollars." A hundred
dollars had come to be his synonyme for infinity.
Mary gazed at him a moment tearfully, and rose, with the dish in her
hand, saying, with a smile, "I'd look pretty, wouldn't I!"
She set it aside, and came and kissed his forehead. By and by she
asked:--
"And so you saw no work, anywhere?"
"Oh, yes!" he replied, in a tone almost free from dejection. "I saw any
amount of work--preparations for a big season. I think I certainly
shall pick up something to-morrow--enough, anyhow, to buy something to
eat with. If we can only hold out a little longer--just a little--I am
sure there'll be plenty to do--for everybody." Then he began to show
distress again. "I could have got work to-day if I had been a carpenter,
or if I'd been a joiner, or a slater, or a bricklayer, or a plasterer,
or a painter, or a hod-carrier. Didn't I try that, and was refused?"
"I'm glad of it," said Mary.
"'Show me your hands,' said the man to me. I showed them. 'You won't
do,' said he."
"I'm glad of it!" said Mary, again.
"No," continued Richling; "or if I'd been a glazier, or a whitewasher,
or a wood-sawyer, or"--he began to smile in a hard, unpleasant way,--"or
if I'd been anything but an American gentleman. But I wasn't, and I
didn't get the work!"
Mary sank into his lap, with her very best smile.
"John, if you hadn't been an American gentleman"--
"We should never have met," said John. "That's true; that's true." They
looked at each other, rejoicing in mutual ownership.
"But," said John, "I needn't have been the typical American
gentleman,--completely unfitted for prosperity and totally unequipped
for adversity."
"That's not your fault," said Mary.
"No, not entirely; but it's your calamity, Mary. O Mary! I little
thought"--
She put her hand quickly upon his mouth. His eye flashed and he frowned.
"Don't do so!" he exclaimed, putting the hand away; then blushed for
shame, and kissed her.
They went to bed. Bread would have put them to sleep. But after a long
time--
"John," said one voice in the darkness, "do you remember what Dr. Sevier
told us?"
"Yes, he said we had no right to commit suicide by starvation."
"If you don't get work to-morrow, are you going to see him?"
"I am."
In the morning they rose early.
During these hard days Mary was now and then conscious of one feeling
which she never expressed, and was always a little more ashamed of than
probably she need have been, but which, stifle it as she would, kept
recurring in moments of stress. Mrs. Riley--such was the thought--need
not be quite so blind. It came to her as John once more took his
good-by, the long kiss and the short one, and went breakfastless away.
But was Mrs. Riley as blind as she seemed? She had vision enough to
observe that the Richlings had bought no bread the day before, though
she did overlook the fact that emptiness would set them astir before
their usual hour of rising. She knocked at Mary's inner door. As it
opened a quick glance showed the little table that occupied the centre
of the room standing clean and idle.
"Why, Mrs. Riley!" cried Mary; for on one of Mrs. Riley's large hands
there rested a blue-edged soup-plate, heaping full of the food that goes
nearest to the Creole heart--_jambolaya_. There it was, steaming and
smelling,--a delicious confusion of rice and red pepper, chicken legs,
ham, and tomatoes. Mike, on her opposite arm, was struggling to lave his
socks in it.
"Ah!" said Mrs. Riley, with a disappointed lift of the head, "ye're
after eating breakfast already! And the plates all tleared off. Well, ye
air smairt! I knowed Mr. Richlin's taste for jumbalie"--
Mary smote her hands together. "And he's just this instant gone! John!
John! Why, he's hardly"-- She vanished through the door, glided down
the alley, leaned out the gate, looking this way and that, tripped
down to this corner and looked--"Oh! oh!"--no John there--back and up to
the other corner--"Oh! which way did John go?" There was none to answer.
Hours passed; the shadows shortened and shrunk under their objects,
crawled around stealthily behind them as the sun swung through the
south, and presently began to steal away eastward, long and slender.
This was the day that Dr. Sevier dined out, as hereinbefore set forth.
The sun set. Carondelet street was deserted. You could hear your own
footstep on its flags. In St. Charles street the drinking-saloons and
gamblers' drawing-rooms, and the barber-shops, and the show-cases full
of shirt-bosoms and walking-canes, were lighted up. The smell of lemons
and mint grew finer than ever. Wide Canal street, out under the darkling
crimson sky, was resplendent with countless many-colored lamps. From the
river the air came softly, cool and sweet. The telescope man set up his
skyward-pointing cylinder hard by the dark statue of Henry Clay; the
confectioneries were ablaze and full of beautiful life, and every little
while a great, empty cotton-dray or two went thundering homeward over
the stony pavements until the earth shook, and speech for the moment was
drowned. The St. Charles, such a glittering mass in winter nights, stood
out high and dark under the summer stars, with no glow except just in
its midst, in the rotunda; and even the rotunda was well-nigh deserted
The clerk at his counter saw a young man enter the great door opposite,
and quietly marked him as he drew near.
Let us not draw the stranger's portrait. If that were a pleasant task
the clerk would not have watched him. What caught and kept that
functionary's eye was that, whatever else might be revealed by the
stranger's aspect,--weariness, sickness, hardship, pain,--the confession
was written all over him, on his face, on his garb, from his hat's crown
to his shoe's sole, Penniless! Penniless! Only when he had come quite up
to the counter the clerk did not see him at all.
"Is Dr. Sevier in?"
"Gone out to dine," said the clerk, looking over the inquirer's head as
if occupied with all the world's affairs except the subject in hand.
"Do you know when he will be back?"
"Ten o'clock."
The visitor repeated the hour murmurously and looked something dismayed.
He tarried.
"Hem!--I will leave my card, if you please."
The clerk shoved a little box of cards toward him, from which a pencil
dangled by a string. The penniless wrote his name and handed it in. Then
he moved away, went down the tortuous granite stair, and waited in the
obscurity of the dimly lighted porch below. The card was to meet the
contingency of the Doctor's coming in by some other entrance. He would
watch for him here.
By and by--he was very weary--he sat down on the stairs. But a porter,
with a huge trunk on his back, told him very distinctly that he was in
the way there, and he rose and stood aside. Soon he looked for another
resting-place. He must get off of his feet somewhere, if only for a few
moments. He moved back into the deep gloom of the stair-way shadow, and
sank down upon the pavement. In a moment he was fast asleep.
He dreamed that he, too, was dining out. Laughter and merry-making were
on every side. The dishes of steaming viands were grotesque in bulk.
There were mountains of fruit and torrents of wine. Strange people of no
identity spoke in senseless vaporings that passed for side-splitting
wit, and friends whom he had not seen since childhood appeared in
ludicrously altered forms and announced impossible events. Every one ate
like a Cossack. One of the party, champing like a boar, pushed him
angrily, and when he, eating like the rest, would have turned fiercely
on the aggressor, he awoke.
A man standing over him struck him smartly with his foot.
"Get up out o' this! Get up! get up!"
The sleeper bounded to his feet. The man who had waked him grasped him
by the lapel of his coat.
"What do you mean?" exclaimed the awakened man, throwing the other off
violently.
"I'll show you!" replied the other, returning with a rush; but he was
thrown off again, this time with a blow of the fist.
"You scoundrel!" cried the penniless man, in a rage; "if you touch me
again I'll kill you!"
They leaped together. The one who had proposed to show what he meant was
knocked flat upon the stones. The crowd that had run into the porch made
room for him to fall. A leather helmet rolled from his head, and the
silver crescent of the police flashed on his breast. The police were not
uniformed in those days.
But he is up in an instant and his adversary is down--backward, on his
elbows. Then the penniless man is up again; they close and struggle,
the night-watchman's club falls across his enemy's head blow upon blow,
while the sufferer grasps him desperately, with both hands, by the
throat. They tug, they snuffle, they reel to and fro in the yielding
crowd; the blows grow fainter, fainter; the grip is terrible; when
suddenly there is a violent rupture of the crowd, it closes again, and
then there are two against one, and up sparkling St. Charles street, the
street of all streets for flagrant, unmolested, well-dressed crime,
moves a sight so exhilarating that a score of street lads follow behind
and a dozen trip along in front with frequent backward glances: two
officers of justice walking in grim silence abreast, and between them
a limp, torn, hatless, bloody figure, partly walking, partly lifted,
partly dragged, past the theatres, past the lawyers' rookeries of
Commercial place, the tenpin alleys, the chop-houses, the bunko shows,
and shooting-galleries, on, across Poydras street into the dim openness
beyond, where glimmer the lamps of Lafayette square and the white marble
of the municipal hall, and just on the farther side of this, with a
sudden wheel to the right into Hevia street, a few strides there, a turn
to the left, stumbling across a stone step and wooden sill into a
narrow, lighted hall, and turning and entering an apartment here again
at the right. The door is shut; the name is written down; the charge is
made: Vagrancy, assaulting an officer, resisting arrest. An inner door
is opened.
"What have you got in number nine?" asks the captain in charge.
"Chuck full," replies the turnkey.
"Well, number seven?" These were the numbers of cells.
"The rats'll eat him up in number seven."
"How about number ten?"
"Two drunk-and-disorderlies, one petty larceny, and one embezzlement and
breach of trust."
"Put him in there."
* * *
And this explains what the watchman in Marais street could not
understand,--why Mary Richling's window shone all night long.