John Marvel, Assistant Part 22

"I vill tell you vat I vill does," he proceeded. "I vill say vat I tam please before you about anybodies." He paused and cast about for something which would prove his boast. "Tere is nod a woman in tis town or in America, py tam! that vill nod gif herself to fon t.i.tle--to me if I hax her, and say, 'tank you, Count.' Ha, ah?" He bent his body forward and stuck his face almost into mine with a gesture as insulting as he could make it, and as I stepped back a pace to get a firm stand, he stuck out his tongue and wagged his head in derision. The next second he had turned almost a somersault. I had taken boxing lessons since Wolffert thrashed me. I saw the bottom of his boots. He was at precisely the right distance for me and I caught him fairly in the mouth. His head struck the floor and he lay so still that for a few moments I thought I had killed him. But after a little he came to and began to rise.

"Get up," I said, "and apologize to these gentlemen and to me." I caught him and dragged him to his feet and faced him around.

"You haf insulted me. I vill see about tis," he spluttered, turning away. But I caught him with a grip on his shoulder and steadied him. The others were all on my side now; but I did not see them, I saw only him.

"Apologize, or I will fling you out of the window." He apologized.

The affair pa.s.sed. The Count explained his bruises by some story that he had been run down by a bicycle, to which I learned he afterward added a little fiction about having stopped a runaway and having saved some one.

But I had left before this little touch occurred to him. Mrs. Starling must have had some idea of the collision, though not of the original cause; for she was very decided in the expression of her wishes to have possession of "the dressing room" that night for the "gentleman," and I yielded possession.

The curious thing about it was that one reason I could not pay Mrs.

Starling again in advance was that he still had my money which he had borrowed the day after I had arrived.

From Mrs. Starling's I went back to my old boarding-house, kept by Mrs.

Kale, as a much cheaper one, in a much poorer neighborhood, where I was not asked to pay in advance, but paid at the end of the month by p.a.w.ning my scarf-pins and s.h.i.+rt studs, and gradually everything else I had.

I was brought up to go to church, my people having all been earnest Christians and devoted church people; but in my college years I had gone through the usual conceited phase of callow agnosticism; and partly from this intellectual juvenile disease and partly from self-indulgence, I had allowed the habit to drop into desuetude, and later, during my first years at the bar, I had been gradually dropping it altogether. My conscience, however, was never quite easy about it. My mother used to say that the promise as to training up a child in the way he should go was not to be fulfilled in youth, but in age, and as my years advanced, I began to find that the training of childhood counted for more and more. Lilian Poole, however, had no more religion than a cat. She wished to be comfortable and to follow the general habit of the feline cla.s.s to which she belonged. She went to the Episcopal Church because it was fas.h.i.+onable, and whenever she had half an excuse she stayed away from church unless it were on a new-bonnet Sunday, like Easter or some such an occasion, when she made up by the lowness of her genuflexions and the apparent devoutness of her demeanor for all omissions. I must confess that I was very easily influenced by her at that time, and was quite as ready to absent myself from church as she was, though I should have had a much deeper feeling for her if she had not violated what I esteemed a canon of life, that women, at least, should profess religion, and if she had not pretended to have questionings herself as to matters as far beyond her intellect as the Copernican system or Kepler's laws. I remember quoting to her once Dr. Johnson's reply to Boswell, when the latter asked if Poole, the actor, were not an atheist: "Yes, sir, as a dog is an atheist; he has not thought on the matter at all."

"Dr. Samuel Johnson?" she asked. "You mean the one who wrote the Dictionary?" and I saw that she was so pleased with her literary knowledge in knowing his name that she never gave a thought to the matter that we were discussing, so let it drop.

As David said, that in his trouble he called upon the Lord, so now, in my solitude and poverty, I began once more to think on serious things, and when Sunday came I would dress up and go to church, partly in obedience to the feeling I speak of, and partly to be a.s.sociated with people well dressed and good mannered, or pa.s.sably so. The church I selected was a large stone edifice, St. ----'s, with a gilded cross on its somewhat stumpy spire, toward which I saw a richly clad congregation wending their way Sunday morning.

The rector, as was stated in gilded letters on a large sign, was the Rev. Dr. Bartholomew Capon. I cannot say that the congregation were especially refined looking or particularly cordial; in fact, they were very far from cordial, and the solemn verger to whom I spoke, after turning a deaf ear to my request for a seat, took occasion, as soon as he had bowed and sc.r.a.ped a richly dressed, stout lady up the aisle, to look me over on the sly, not omitting my shoes, before he allowed me to take a seat in one of the rear pews.

The preacher--"The Rector," as he spoke of himself in the notices, when he occasionally waived the rather frequent first personal p.r.o.noun--was a middle-aged gentleman with a florid complexion, a sonorous voice, a comfortable round person, and fair hands of which he was far from ashamed; for he had what, but for my reverence for the cloth, I should call a trick of using his hand with a voluminous, fine cambric handkerchief held loosely in it. His face was self-contained rather than strong, and handsome rather than pleasing. He was so good-looking that it set me on reflecting what relation looks bear to the rectors.h.i.+p of large and fas.h.i.+onable churches; for, as I recalled it, nearly all the rectors of such churches were men of looks, and it came to me that when Sir Roger de Coverley requested his old college friend to send him down a chaplain, he desired him to find out a man rather of plain sense than much learning, of a good aspect, a clear voice, a sociable temper, and, if possible, a man who knew something of backgammon. His sermon was altogether a secondary consideration, for he could always read one of the Bishop of St. Asaph's or Dr. South's or Dr. Tillotson's. Possibly, it is something of the same feeling that subordinates the sermons to the looks of rectors of fas.h.i.+onable churches. However, I did not have long to reflect on that idea, for my thoughts were given a new and permanently different, not to say pleasanter, direction, by the sudden appearance of a trim figure, clad in a gray suit and large gray hat, which, as it moved up the aisle, quite eclipsed for me "the priest and all the people." I was struck, first, by the easy grace with which the young girl moved. But, before she had turned into her pew and I caught sight of her face under the large hat which had hidden it, I knew it was my young lady, Miss Leigh, whom I had helped up on the train and afterward into her carriage. It is not too much to say that the Rev. Dr.

Capon secured that moment a new permanent member of his congregation.

Before the service was over, however, I had been solemnized by her simple and unaffected devoutness, and when, in one of the chants, I caught a clear liquid note perfectly sweet and birdlike, I felt as though I had made a new and charming discovery.

The rector gave a number of notices from which I felt the church must be one of the great forces of the city for work among the poor, yet, when I glanced around, I could not see a poor person in the pews except myself and two old ladies in rusty black, who had been seated near the door. I was struck by the interest shown in the notices by my young lady of the large hat, from whose shapely little head with its well-coiled brown hair my eyes did not long stray.

"I have," he said, "in addition to the notable work already mentioned, carried on, through my a.s.sistant in charge, the work of St. Andrew's chapel with gratifying success. This work has reached, and I am glad to be able to say, is reaching more than ever before, the great ignorant cla.s.s that swarms in our midst, and exhibits a tendency to unrest that is most disturbing. This is the cla.s.s which causes most of the uneasiness felt in the minds of the thoughtful."

I observed that he did not mention the name of "the a.s.sistant in charge," and my sympathy rather went out to the nameless priest, doing his work without the reward of even being mentioned.

As to the sermon, I can only say that it was twenty minutes long, and appeared aimed exclusively at the sins of Esau (whom I had always esteemed a quite decent sort of fellow), rather than at those of the doctor's congregation, whom he appeared to have a higher opinion of than of the Patriarchs. I recall the text: "Seek ye first the kingdom of G.o.d, and all these things shall be added unto you." He made it very plain that to be pious and prudent was the best way to secure wealth. He held up a worldly motive and guaranteed a worldly reward. Such a sermon as that would have eased the most uneasy conscience in Christendom.

When the congregation came out I dawdled in the aisle until my young lady pa.s.sed, when I feasted my eyes on her face and finely curved cheek, straight nose, and soft eyes veiled under their long lashes. My two old ladies in black were waiting in the end of a pew and, as I observed by their smiles when she approached, waiting like myself to see her. I had already recognized them as the old ladies of the bundles, whom I had once helped on the street. How I envied them the smile and cordial greeting they received in return! I made the observation then, which I have often had confirmed since, that tenderness to the aged, like that to the very young, is the mark of a gentle nature.

I heard them say, "We know who has done the work out at the Chapel," and she replied, "Oh! no, you must not think that. My poor work has been nothing. Your friend has done it all, and I think that the Doctor ought to have said so," to which they a.s.sented warmly, and I did the same, though I did not know their friend's name.

As I had nowhere to go in particular, I strolled slowly up the street, and then walked back again. And as I neared the church, I met the rector who had just left his robing-room. He was a fine-looking man on the street as well as in the chancel, and I was prompted to speak to him, and say that I had just heard him preach. He was, however, too impatient at my accosting him and so manifestly suspicious that I quickly regretted my impulse. His, "Well, what is it?" was so prompt on his lips and his suspicion of me was so clear in his cold, bluish eyes, that I drew myself up and replied: "Oh! nothing. I was only going to say that I had just heard you preach--that's all."

"Oh! Ah! Well, I'm much obliged. I'm very glad if I've helped you." He pulled out his watch.

"Helped me! You haven't," I said dryly and turned away.

A quarter of an hour later, as I strolled along the street lonely and forlorn, I saw him hurrying up the steps of the large house which had been pointed out to me as Mrs. Argand's, the great philanthropist.

XVII

THE GULF

As I saw more of the city, its vastness, its might and its inhumanity grew on me. It was a world in itself, a world constructed on lines as different from that in which I had lived as if it had been Mars; a city as different from the smaller cities I had known as if it had been Babylon or Nineveh. The contrasts were as great as they could have been in the capitals Sardanapalus built--structures so vast that they must have dwarfed the towers of Sardis--so rich and splendid that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon must have been outshone--reared their stupendous bulk into the smoky air and cast into perpetual shade all that lay near them.

Hard beside their towering ma.s.s lay a region filled with the wretched tenements of the poor, and a little further off the houses of the well-to-do. And there was not a greater contrast between the vastness of the one and the pitiful squalor of the other than between the life of the owners of the former and that of the denizens of the closely packed tenements which dwindled in their shadow. Splendor and squalor were divided often only by a brick wall. The roar of the tide that swept through the teeming streets drowned the cry of wretchedness, and only the wretched knew how loud it was. I had never seen such wealth, and I had never dreamed of such poverty.

The vulgar make the parade; the refined pa.s.s so quietly as scarcely to be observed. The vulgarity of the display of riches began to oppress me.

I discovered later the great store of refinement, goodness and sweetness that was hidden in the homes alike of an element of the wealthy, the merely well-to-do and the poor. But for a time it was all eclipsed by the glare of the vulgar and irresponsible rich. Arrogance, discontent, hardness, vulgarity, were stamped in many faces, and spoke in every movement of many of those I saw, even of the most richly dressed.

I think it was more the vulgarity and insolence of those I saw decked in the regalia of wealth than anything else--than even my own poverty--that changed my views and turned me for a time from my easy indifference as to social conditions toward a recognition that those conditions are ridiculously antiquated, a bent I have never quite got over, though I was later drawn back to a more conservative point of view than, under the hatred of sham and the spur of want, I was driven to occupy for some time. They have no traditions and no ideals. They know no standard but wealth, and possess no ability to display it but through parade. They feel it necessary to prove their novel position by continual a.s.sertion.

They think that wealth has exempted them from decency. They mistake civility for servility and rudeness for gentility. Their best effort is only a counterfeit, a poor imitation of what they imagine to be the manners of the upper cla.s.s abroad whose indifferent manners they ape.

"Misery loves company," and when I wanted comfort I left the section of splendor and display, of riotous extravagance and glittering wealth, and went to those poorer than myself; a practice I can commend from experience.

When I got so desperate that I could not stand it any longer, and was afraid I might fall down dead or do myself violence, I used to turn my steps in another direction and walk through the poorer part of the city--not the worst part--where there was nothing but dirt and squalor and filth: that sickened me, and I had never had much sympathy with the cla.s.s that lived there. They always appeared contented enough with their surroundings and rather to enjoy themselves in their own way. And not the successful workman's quarter. There was an a.s.surance and a.s.sumption there that offended me. The a.s.sumption bred of sudden success, no matter in what cla.s.s, is everywhere equally vulgar after its kind. It was the part of the city where the people were respectable, but where they could just hold on with all their struggling and striving, that I used to go into; the part where there were patches, not rags; and sometimes an effort to keep down the dirt, and where a bit of a plant in a little pot or a little cheap ornament in a window told of the spark of sentiment that could yet live amid the poverty and hardness about it. They always place them in the windows, partly, no doubt, to get the light, and partly, perhaps, to show pa.s.sers-by that there is something within better than might be looked for next door. These people on their holidays always make toward the open country; they try to get away from their robuster, more successful brothers, and get back near to Nature--the old mother that cares nothing for success; and repays only according to the love her children bear her. Here I often walked as I grew more wretched.

In this section I used to see people with whom I felt in touch: a man with the badgered look in his eye that made me know that he was at bay; or a woman with that resigned air which hopeless struggling stamps in the face and binds on the shoulders. These drew me nearer to my kind, and made me feel that there were others in a harder case than I, and gave me a desire to help them. I came to know some of them by sight and the houses in which they lived, and sometimes I spoke to them and exchanged a word or two, and the effort to take a cheerful view with them helped me, and sent me back to my little lonely cubby-hole cheered and in some sort comforted and resolute to hold out a little longer. But it was hungry work.

This element composed the great body of the population, but deep down below them lay a yet lower element weltering in an infinite and hopeless misery to which even the poor cla.s.s I speak of were alien. They were generically spoken of at times as the criminal cla.s.ses. They were not this at all, though among them were many criminals--driven to crime by necessity--because there was no means for them to subsist, no possible means nor hope outside of their casual and occasional violation of the statute law by which they secure enough for empty bellies and freezing bodies merely to keep alive. They live among and on the poor, and one of the bitterest trials of poverty is the continual presence and preying of these parasites who like other vermin pursue them and cannot be kept off. Their only common crime is desperate, infinite poverty--poverty beyond hope, for they have nothing--not work, nor the hope of work--not even the power to work, if it should be offered them. As the well-to-do look with anxiety to the loss of their property and the consequent sinking to some lower plane of moderate poverty, so the poor look with shuddering or, at last, with despair to sinking into the slough of this hopeless state for which there is no name, because none has been devised adequate to describe its desperate misery. Often but a block, or even but a wall divides the reeking slum where they creep and fester and rot, from the broad, well-lighted, smooth-paved avenue where irresponsible wealth goes clattering by in its wild orgy of extravagance and reckless mirth. The eye of the mangy and starving wolf from his thicket gleams dully at the glittering pageant of heartless irresponsibility and waste.

Should the pack ever find a leader bold enough to spring, what will be the end?

At present they are hungry enough, but they have not organized; they are not yet a hunting pack, but only scattered bands, slinking about hungrily, fighting and preying on each other, the larger bands with the bolder leaders driving off the weaker and unorganized. But let them all organize once and the end will not be yet.

Day after day I saw my last few dollars leak away, and, though I replenished my thin purse at times by p.a.w.ning everything p.a.w.nable I had, yet this, too, gradually oozed away. Fortunately I had plenty of clothes, which I had bought in my flush days, so I could still make a respectable appearance.

As money got low all sorts of schemes used to present themselves to me to replenish my pocket. One was to go out as a laborer on the streets, clean bricks, or do anything. I was not lazy. I would have walked around the world for a case. I do not think I was ashamed of it, for I knew it was respectable, but I was afraid some one I knew might pa.s.s by; I was afraid that Pushkin or Mrs. Starling might see me, and--yes, that that young girl from the colonial house might recognize me. I had often thought of her violets since I had dropped them into my pocket-book. And now, when this idea came to me, I took them out and looked at them. They still retained a faint fragrance. What would be the result if she should pa.s.s by and see me cleaning bricks--me a laborer, and Pushkin--the thoughts came together--should see me? I would win on my own line if it took me all my life.

The idea of Pushkin suggested another plan. Why not gamble? Gambling was gentlemanly--at least, gentlemen gambled. But did they play for a living? I had gambled a little myself in the past; played poker, and, like most men, prided myself on my game, though I generally lost in the long run; and when I was making good resolutions after my failure, I had made up my mind never to play again anywhere. And I had always held to the opinion that, as soon as a man played for his living, he crossed the line and ceased to be a gentleman. Now, however, it began to appear to me as if this were the only plan by which I could make anything, and as if I should have a good excuse for breaking my resolution. I resisted the temptation for some time; but one night, when I had p.a.w.ned nearly everything and had only three or four dollars left, I went out, and after a long but half-hearted battle gave up, as such are always lost, and turned into a street across an alley from my office where I knew there was a gambling place over a saloon kept by one Mick Raffity. I went boldly up the stairs. Even as I mounted them I felt a sort of exhilaration. I stopped at the door and my old resolution not to play again stirred and struggled a little. I caught it, however, with a sort of grip almost physical, and gave it a shake till it was quiet. I knew I should win. The blaze of light within cheered me, and, without hesitating an instant, I walked across the room to where a crowd stood watching the play of some one seated at a table. It was a large and richly decorated room, with a few rather daring pictures on the walls and much gilding about the ceiling. The hot air, heavy with tobacco smoke and fumes of one kind and another, met me in a blast as I entered, and involuntarily I thought of a sweat-shop I had once seen in my earlier days. But the sensation pa.s.sed and left me warm and exhilarated.

As I pa.s.sed along, a man looked at me and half nodded. I knew he was the proprietor. I made my way in and caught the dealer's expressionless eye, and taking out a note as carelessly as if my pockets were stuffed with them, I glanced over the board to select my bet. At one end of the table sat the large, heavy-browed, middle-aged man I had run into one night on the stairway leading from the alley to the building where I had my office. He was somewhat tipsy and evidently in bad luck; for he was heated and was betting wildly. Near by sat a big, sour-looking fellow, flas.h.i.+ly dressed, whom I recognized as having been one of my fellow-travellers on the side-tracked train, the one who had talked to the trainmen of their wrongs. He still wore his paste diamonds, his silk hat and patent-leather shoes. But I took little notice of these.

Casually, as I dropped my note, my eye fell on the player at the middle of the table. He was surrounded by stacks of chips. As I looked he raked in a new pile; at least a hundred dollars, and he never changed a particle. He was calmer than the dealer before him. He was in evening dress and success had given him quite an air. I caught up my note without knowing it and fell back behind a group of young men who had just come up. Curious things happen sometimes. I found my note doubled up in my hand when I had got out of doors, a quarter of an hour later.

All I remember is my revulsion at seeing that gambler sitting there raking in money so calmly, with my money for his stake in his pocket, and I turned out for him: an adventurer who said all American women were at his bidding. It recalled to me the girl I had seen on the train and had handed, later, into her carriage, and the good resolutions I had formed. And it strung me up like wine. I felt that I was a coward to have come there and as bad as Pushkin.

Just as I turned to leave the place a party of young fellows entered the room. They had come from a dinner at Mr. Leigh's, as I understood from their talk, and were "going on" to a dance unless the luck should run to suit them. They were in high spirits, "Mr. Leigh's champagne" having done its work, and they were evidently habitues of the place, and good patrons, I judged, from the obsequious respect paid them by the attendants. The leader of them was a large, rather good-looking young fellow, but with marks of dissipation on a face without a line of refinement in it. The others all seemed to be his followers. They greeted familiarly and by name the eager attendants who rushed forward to take their coats, and the leader asked them casually who was in to-night.

"The Count's here, I think, sir," said one whom they called Billy.

"The Count! Coll McSheen's staked him again," said the young leader.

"And he swore to me he'd never let him have another cent, with oaths enough to d.a.m.n him deeper than he will be d.a.m.ned anyhow. Come on, I'll skin him clean."

I lingered for a moment to see him "skin" Pushkin.

They sauntered up to the table and, after a greeting to the Count, began to toss bills on the board as though they grew on trees. The least of them would have kept me going for months. I had never seen money handled so before and it staggered me.

"Who is that young man?" I asked of a man near me, nodding toward the leader. "He must be pretty rich."