Part 19 (1/2)
”Oh, oh, my heart is broken! My heart is broken!”
But Swift knew as well as the rest of mankind that these girls have no hearts to be broken, and this acting filled him with a new rage. He grabbed an alarm clock from the dresser and banged her heroically on the head with it.
She fell and quivered for a moment. Then she arose, and, calm and dry-eyed, walked to the mirror. Swift thought she was taking an account of the bruises, but when he resumed his cyclonic tirade, she said: ”I've taken morphine, Swift.”
Swift leaped at a little red pill box. It was empty. Eight quarter-grain pills make two grains. The Suicidal Purpose was distinctly ahead of the Alarm Clock. With great presence of mind Swift now took the empty pill box and flung it through the window.
At this time a great battle was begun in the dining-room of the little flat. Swift dragged the girl to the sideboard, and in forcing her to drink whisky he almost stuffed the bottle down her throat. When the girl still sank to the depths of an infinite drowsiness, sliding limply in her chair like a cloth figure, he dealt her furious blows, and our decorous philosophy knows little of the love and despair that was in those caresses. With his voice he called the light into her eyes, called her from the sinister slumber which her senses welcomed, called her soul back from the verge.
He propped the girl in a chair and ran to the kitchen to make coffee. His fingers might have been from a dead man's hands, and his senses confused the coffee, the water, the coffee-pot, the gas stove, but by some fortune he managed to arrange them correctly. When he lifted the girlish figure and carried her to the kitchen, he was as wild, haggard, gibbering, as a man of midnight murders, and it is only because he was not engaged in the respectable and literary a.s.sa.s.sination of a royal duke that almost any sensible writer would be ashamed of this story. Let it suffice, then, that when the steel-blue dawn came and distant chimneys were black against a rose sky, the girl sat at the dining-room table chattering insanely and gesturing. Swift, with his hands pressed to his temples, watched her from the other side of the table, with all his mind in his eyes, for each gesture was still a reminiscence, and each tone of her voice a ballad to him. And yet he could not half measure his misery. The tragedy was made of homeliest details. He had to repeat to himself that he, worn-out, stupefied from his struggle, was sitting there awaiting the moment when the unseen hand should whirl this soul into the abyss, and that then he should be alone.
The girl saw a fly alight on a picture. ”Oh,” she said, ”there's a little fly.” She arose and thrust out her finger. ”h.e.l.lo, little fly,” she said, and touched the fly. The insect was perhaps too cold to be alert, for it fell at the touch of her finger. The girl gave a cry of remorse, and, sinking to her knees, searched the floor, meanwhile uttering apologies.
At last she found the fly, and, taking it, [in] her palm went to the gas-jet which still burned weirdly in the dawning. She held her hand close to the flame. ”Poor little fly,” she said, ”I didn't mean to hurt you. I wouldn't hurt you for anything. There now-p'r'aps when you get warm you can fly away again. Did I crush the poor little bit of fly? I'm awful sorry-honest. I am. Poor little thing! Why I wouldn't hurt you for the world, poor little fly-”
Swift was woefully pale and so nerve-weak that his whole body felt a singular coolness. Strange things invariably come into a man's head at the wrong time, and Swift was aware that this scene was defying his preconceptions. His instruction had been that people when dying behaved in a certain manner. Why did this girl occupy herself with an accursed fly? Why in the name of the G.o.ds of the drama did she not refer to her past? Why, by the shelves of the saints of literature, did she not clutch her brow and say: ”Ah, once I was an innocent girl?” What was wrong with this death scene? At one time he thought that his sense of propriety was so scandalized that he was upon the point of interrupting the girl's babble.
But here a new thought struck him. The girl was not going to die. How could she under these circ.u.mstances? The form was not correct.
All this was not relevant to the man's love and despair, but, behold, my friend, at the tragic, the terrible point in life there comes an irrelevancy to the human heart direct from the Wise G.o.d. And this is why Swift Doyer thought those peculiar thoughts.
The girl chattered to the fly minute after minute, and Swift's anxiety grew dim and more dim until his head fell forward on the table and he slept as a man who has moved mountains, altered rivers, caused snow to come because he wished it to come, and done his duty.
For an hour the girl talked to the fly, the gas-jet, the walls, the distant chimneys. Finally she sat opposite the slumbering Swift and talked softly to herself When broad day came they were both asleep, and the girl's fingers had gone across the table until they had found the locks on the man's forehead. They were asleep, and this after all is a human action, which may safely be done by characters in the fiction of our time.
THE ”TENDERLOIN” AS IT REALLY IS BY STEPHEN CRANE. THE FIRST OF A SERIES OF STRIKING SKETCHES OF NEW YORK LIFE BY THE FAMOUS NOVELIST.
MANY REQUIEMS HAVE BEEN sung over the corpse of the Tenderloin. Dissipated gentlemen with convivial records burn candles to its memory each day at the corner of Twenty-eighth street and Broadway. On the great thoroughfare there are 4,000,000 men who at all times recite loud anecdotes of the luminous past.
They say: ”Oh, if you had only come around when the old Haymarket was running!” They relate the wonders of this prehistoric time and fill the mind of youth with poignant regret. Everybody on earth must have attended regularly at this infernal Haymarket. The old gentlemen with convivial records do nothing but relate the glories of this place. To be sure, they tell of many other resorts, but the old gentlemen really do their conjuring with this one simple name-”the old Haymarket.”
The Haymarket is really responsible for half the tales that are in the collections of these gay old boys of the silurian period. Some time a man will advertise ”The Haymarket Restored,” and score a clamoring, popular success. The interest in a reincarnation of a vanished Athens must pale before the excitement caused by ”The Haymarket Restored.”
Let a thing become a tradition, and it becomes half a lie. These moss-grown columns that support the sky over Broadway street corners insist that life in this dim time was a full joy. Their descriptions are short, but graphic.
One of this type will cry: ”Everything wide open, my boy; everything wide open! You should have seen it. No sneaking in side doors. Everything plain as day. Ah, those were the times! Reubs from the West used to have their bundles lifted every night before your eyes. Always somebody blowing champagne for the house. Great! Great! Diamonds, girls, lights, music. Well, maybe it wasn't smooth. Fights all over Sixth avenue. Wasn't room enough. Used to hold over-flow fights in the side streets. Say, it was great!”
Then the type heaves a sigh and murmurs: ”But now? Dead-dead as a mackerel. The Tenderloin is a graveyard. Quiet as a tomb. Say, you ought to have been around here when the old Haymarket was running.
Perchance they miss in their definition of the Tenderloin. They describe it as a certain condition of affairs in a metropolitan district. But probably it is in truth something more dim, an essence, an emotion-something superior to the influences of politics or geographies, a thing unchangeable. It represents a certain wild impulse, and a wild impulse is yet more lasting than an old Haymarket. And so we come to reason that the Tenderloin is not dead at all and that the old croakers on the corners are men who have mistaken the departure of their own youth for the death of the Tenderloin, and that there still exists the spirit that flings beer bottles, jumps debts and makes havoc for the unwary; also sings in a hoa.r.s.e voice at 3 A.M.
There is one mighty fact, however, that the croakers have clinched. In the old days there was a great deal of money and few dress clothes exhibited in the Tenderloin. Now it is all clothes and no money. The spirit is garish, for display, as are the flaming lights that advertise theatres and medicines. In those days long ago there might have been freedom and fraternity.
Billie Maconnigle is probably one of the greatest society leaders that the world has produced. Seventh avenue is practically one voice in this matter.
He asked Flossie to dance with him, and Flossie did, seeming to enjoy the attentions of this celebrated cavalier. He asked her again, and she accepted again. Johnnie, her fellow, promptly interrupted the dance.
”Here!” he said, grabbing Maconnigle by the arm. ”Dis is me own private snap! Youse gitaway f 'm here an' leggo d' loidy!”
”A couple a nits,” rejoined Maconnigle swinging his arm clear of his partner. ”Youse go chase yerself. I'm spieling wit' dis loidy when I likes, an' if youse gits gay, I'll knock yer block off-an dat's no dream!”
”Youse'll knock nuttin' off.”
”Won't I?”
”Nit. An' if yeh say much I'll make yeh look like a lobster, you fresh mug. Leggo me loidy!”
”A couple a nits.”
”Won't?”
”Nit.”
Blim! Blam! Cras.h.!.+
The orchestra stopped playing and the musicians wheeled in their chairs, gazing with that semi-interest which only musicians in a dance hall can bring to bear upon such a scene. Several waiters ran forward, crying ”Here, gents, quit dat!” A tall, healthy individual with no coat slid from behind the bar at the far end of the hall, and came with speed. Two well-dressed youths, drinking bottled beer at one end of the tables, nudged each other in ecstatic delight, and gazed with all their eyes at the fight. They were seeing life. They had come purposely to see it.
The waiters grabbed the fighters quickly. Maconnigle went through the door some three feet ahead of his hat, which came after him with a battered crown and a torn rim. A waiter with whom Johnnie had had a discussion over the change had instantly seized this opportunity to a.s.sert himself. He grappled Johnnie from the rear and flung him to the floor, and the tall, healthy person from behind the bar, rus.h.i.+ng forward, kicked him in the head. Johnnie didn't say his prayers. He only wriggled and tried to s.h.i.+eld his head with his arms, because every time that monstrous foot struck it made red lightning flash in his eyes.
But the tall, healthy man and his cohort of waiters had forgotten one element. They had forgotten Flossie. She could worry Johnnie ; she could summon every art to make him wildly jealous; she could cruelly, wantonly harrow his soul with every device known to her kind, but she wouldn't stand by and see him hurt by G.o.ds nor men.
Blim! As the tall person drew back for his fourth kick, a beer mug landed him just back of his ear. Scratch! The waiter who had grabbed Johnnie from behind found that fingernails had made a ribbon of blood down his face as neatly as if a sign painter had put it there with a brush.
This cohort of waiters was, however, well drilled. Their leader was p.r.o.ne, but they rallied gallantly, and flung Johnnie and Flossie into the street, thinking no doubt that these representatives of the lower cla.s.ses could get their harmless pleasure just as well outside.
The crowd at the door favored the vanquished. ”Sherry!” said a voice. ”Sherry! Here comes a cop!” Indeed a helmet and bra.s.s b.u.t.tons shone brightly in the distance. Johnnie and Flossie sherried with all the prompt.i.tude allowed to a wounded man and a girl whose sole anxiety is the man. They ended their flight in a little dark alley.
Flossie was sobbing as if her heart was broken. She hung over her wounded hero, wailing and making moan to the sky, weeping with the deep and impressive grief of gravesides, when he swore because his head ached.
”Dat's all right,” said Johnnie. ”Nex' time youse needn't be so fresh wit' every guy what comes up.”
”Well, I was only kiddin', Johnnie,” she cried, forlornly.
”Well, yeh see what yeh done t' me wit'cher kiddin,” replied Johnnie.