Part 9 (2/2)
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”THE SITE OF THE OLD LENOX LIBRARY IS NOW OCCUPIED BY THE HOUSE OF MR. HENRY C. FRICK, ONE OF THE GREAT SHOW RESIDENCES OF THE AVENUE AND THE CITY. A BROAD GARDEN SEPARATES THE HOUSE, WHICH IS EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH, FROM THE SIDEWALK”]
”But I haven't said that it was true, have I? Nor again have I said that it wasn't. Strange things have happened on the Avenue. There have been nights of violence. Sometimes, on late trips, my nerves have jumped at the sound of some terrified cry. Often it has come from one of the most respectable of houses. Again, in broad daylight, I have seen startled faces pressed against upper windows. I have seen hands dropping notes to the pavement. Once in a while a pa.s.ser-by has picked up one of those notes. But as a rule they were caught by the wind and whisked away. What was in those notes? That's what I want to know. Again, when it was dark, there has been the sound of running feet, and a panting man has jumped from the roadway to my rear step while we were in motion. The next morning there were stains on my cus.h.i.+ons--the stains left by b.l.o.o.d.y hands. They never could wash them out. They never could wash them out.”
There was a lurch as a wheel b.u.mped down into a hollow in the rough road, and the exile fell to groaning and blaspheming.
”Ah, my rheumatic joints; my poor old bones! This climate!”
So the old Fifth Avenue bus complained of the rheumatism. I recalled that the diligence that carried M. Tartarin across the Algerian desert also gave vent to many ”Ai's” about aching joints and sudden twinges.
What creatures of imitation we are, to be sure!
”But it is the loss of old friends that hurts the most,” so the confidences went on. ”There was Mulligan, for example, of whom I was speaking just now--he of the long coat and the dented brown derby hat.
Far up, near the end of the line, there was an old one-story frame roadhouse, that had been there in my father's time, in my grandfather's time, in my great-grandfather's time. Mulligan knew it well, and many the time, when he came out of it, he was swaying slightly, and had to pull himself up to the box by means of the seat rails. Then there were anxious moments, as we raced over the cobble-stones, and my wheels sc.r.a.ped other wheels to the right and left. In those days there was a strap, one end of which was attached to the driver's boot, and the other end to the door at the rear. When a pa.s.senger wished to alight he pulled the strap and the driver released his hold. Sometimes the young bucks--we called them dudes in those days--inside had been dining well, and were hunting for mischief. Two or three of them would grab the strap and pull with all their strength. My sides are creaky now, but they ache with laughing when I recall how Mulligan used to swear. Sometimes the strap gave and sometimes the driver' leg was twisted half off. Was that the origin of the expression 'pulling his leg'? I wonder! The fare was dropped into the box up in front. At first the driver was the one who made the change. Later the change was handed out in sealed paper envelopes. Mulligan was of the early days. What became of him? Oh, he went into politics.
”I'll tell you what you can do for me,” the exile went on. ”Some day, when you are back in the old town just drop into the Hoffman House bar and take a drink for me, all the time looking up at the pictures of the lovely ladies about to go in bathing in a beautiful brook in the woods.”
”Stop!” said I, sternly. The piratical old plagiarist of a vehicle was about to begin filching from another source. There had been a guilty squeak in the voice that had roused my suspicions. ”No doubt,” I said, with pointed sarcasm, ”among the many pa.s.sengers you carried at various times was the late Mr. Richard Harding Davis. He was a literary man of parts, and wrote, among other books, a charming little story called 'The Exiles.'”
”What! Is he d----? I mean I never heard of the gent,” was the brazen response. ”There was a Davis, now, a Sebastian Davis, I think the name was, in the hair-oil business, if I am not mistaken. A little fellow, with mutton-chop side whiskers. But as I was saying, I don't know anything better than Fifth Avenue at Madison Square of a summer's night, with the hobos dozing already on the park benches, and people hanging round the entrance of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and the men lined up three deep at the Hoffman bar, and the girls walking by on their way to dance the minuet at the Haymarket up at Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street. I said the minuet. Do you get me?” There was an evil chuckle. ”Across the Square Diana is twinkling up there in the sky, and beneath, in the Garden, they are pulling off a middle-weight bout to a decision. Just round the corner, in the Madison Square Theatre, you can hear the clapping. The play is Hoyt's 'A Trip to Chinatown.' Listen:
”'Oh, the Bowery, the Bowery, They say such things and they do such things On the Bowery,'
”Or maybe it's:
”'You will think she's going to faint, But she'll fool you, for she ain't; She has been there many times before.'”
”I see,” said I, for both the theft of ideas and the pretence of innocence were too flagrant; ”that your memories are of what we lovingly called 'the golden,' and detractors called the 'yellow' nineties. We were both young once.”
But the a.s.sumption of friendliness seemed only to irritate.
”The nineties! Why, I was an old man in the nineties! An old, old man! I wasn't a youngster in the eighties, or the seventies, for that matter.
There's another one of the old Avenue buses on this line. No. 27. He says he is older than I am. He's a liar. Sometimes I think I am the oldest bus in all the world, and that I ought to be enjoying myself in the Smithsonian, instead of dragging out my existence b.u.mping over boulders and prairie gra.s.s.
”Come to think of it,” the old bus went on meditatively, ”the Smithsonian does not appeal to me after all. I think that I would be better pleased in a corner of the Third Degree room down at Number 300 Mulberry Street, or in the Chamber of Horrors at the Eden Musee. For, as you may have noticed, I am partial to crime. It is the result of my bringing up. It is the excitement of my early days that I miss most now.
When I first came out here it was with a feeling of pleased expectancy.
I antic.i.p.ated a daily hold-up. I had visions of stage robbers in cambric masks, and running gun fights, and horses in frightened flight, and my driver stricken to the heart and tumbling from his seat. But it is a degenerate and tame world out here. Give me little old New York.”
”But the statistics--” I began.
”You do not know one-quarter. The police do not know one-half. But I know. You have read what the papers have printed, or what some retired Inspector has seen fit to tell in his Memoirs. You did not pa.s.s, night after night, the sinister house of the woman whose open boast was that, if she wished to, she could take half the roofs off the Avenue. You did not know how real that terrible threat was, for you never saw the cloaked men issuing from its doors bearing their ghastly burdens. You have heard of the Burdell murder but you never knew the real solution.
You have read of the Nathan murder at the corner of the Avenue and Twenty-third Street. But you did not hear, as I heard, that piercing wail, or see the shaking figure that climbed on my rear step at Twenty-fourth Street and rode twenty blocks northward. A man once wrote an Australian story called 'The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.' My life had not one mystery but a score of mysteries. You think you know something of Fifth Avenue. What do you know of the killing the Girl in Green, or of Colt and the William Street printer, the Suicides of No. X Was.h.i.+ngton Square, North, or The Enigma of the Fifteenth Street House, or of The Case of Giuseppe and the Italian Amba.s.sador, which was hushed up by orders from Was.h.i.+ngton and Rome, or The Affair of the t.i.tled s.e.xton, or The Madison Square Tower Episode?”
But I was growing weary of the voice of the old impostor.
”Ever hear of Conan Doyle?” I asked.
”Now come to think of it, a drummer from Altoona left a paper copy of one of his books the last trip.”
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