“Well?” said Peter, when the major paused.
The major stepped down upon the thick carpet of brown leaves that stretched under the trees. He turned then to whisper: “You wait here, will yeh?” His face was red with determination.
“Well, hol’ on a minnet!” said Peter. “You—I—we’d better—”
“No,” said the major. “You wait here.”
He went stealthily into the thickets. Peter watched him until he grew to be a vague, slow-moving shadow. From time to time he could hear the leaves crackle and twigs snap under the major’s awkward tread. Peter, intent, breathless, waited for the peal of sudden tragedy. Finally, the woods grew silent in a solemn and impressive hush that caused Peter to feel the thumping of his heart. He began to look about him to make sure that nothing should spring upon him from the somber shadows. He scrutinized this cool gloom before him, and at times he thought he could perceive the moving of swift silent shapes. He concluded that he had better go back and try to muster some assistance to the major.
As Peter came through the corn, the women in the road caught sight of the glittering figure and screamed. Many of them began to run. The little boys, with all their valor, scurried away in clouds. Mrs. Joe Peterson, however, cast a glance over her shoulders as she, with her skirts gathered up, was running as best she could. She instantly stopped and, in tones of deepest scorn, called out to the others, “Why, it’s on’y Pete Witheby!” They came faltering back then, those who had been naturally swiftest in the race avoiding the eyes of those whose limbs had enabled them to flee a short distance.
Peter came rapidly, appreciating the glances of vivid interest in the eyes of the women. To their lightning-like questions, which hit all sides of the episode, he opposed a new tranquillity gained from his sudden ascent in importance. He made no answer to their clamor. When he had reached the top of the fence, he called out commandingly: “Here you, Johnnie, you and George, run an’ git my gun! It’s hangin’ on th’ pegs over th’ bench in th’ shop.”
At this terrible sentence, a shuddering cry broke from the women. The boys named sped down the road, accompanied by a retinue of envious companions.
Peter swung his legs over the rail and faced the woods again. He twisted his head once to say: “Keep still, can’t yeh? Quit scufflin’ aroun’!” They could see by his manner that this was a supreme moment. The group became motionless and still. Later, Peter turned to say, “S-s-sh!” to a restless boy, and the air with which he said it smote them all with awe.
The little boys who had gone after the gun came pattering along hurriedly, the weapon borne in the midst of them. Each was anxious to share in the honor. The one who had been delegated to bring it was bullying and directing his comrades.
Peter said, “S-s-sh!” He took the gun and poised it in readiness to sweep the cornfield. He scowled at the boys and whispered angrily: “Why didn’t yeh bring th’ powder horn an’ th’ thing with th’ bullets in? I told yeh t’ bring ’em. I’ll send somebody else next time.”
“Yeh didn’t tell us!” cried the two boys shrilly.
“S-s-sh! Quit yeh noise,” said Peter, with a violent gesture.
However, this reproof enabled other boys to recover that peace of mind which they had lost when seeing their friends loaded with honors.
The women had cautiously approached the fence and, from time to time, whispered feverish questions; but Peter repulsed them savagely, with an air of being infinitely bothered by their interference in his intent watch. They were forced to listen again in silence to the weird and prophetic chanting of the insects and the mystic silken rustling of the corn.
At last the thud of hurrying feet in the soft soil of the field came to their ears. A dark form sped toward them. A wave of a mighty fear swept over the group, and the screams of the women came hoarsely from their choked throats. Peter swung madly from his perch, and turned to use the fence as a rampart.
But it was the major. His face was inflamed and his eyes were glaring. He clutched his rifle by the middle and swung it wildly. He was bounding at a great speed for his fat, short body.
“It’s all right! it’s all right!” he began to yell, some distance away. “It’s all right! It’s on’y ol’ Milt’ Jacoby!”
When he arrived at the top of the fence, he paused and mopped his brow.
“What?” they thundered, in an agony of sudden unreasoning disappointment.
Mrs. Joe Peterson, who was a distant connection of Milton Jacoby, thought to forestall any damage to her social position by saying at once, disdainfully, “Drunk, I s’pose!”
“Yep,” said the major, still on the fence, and mopped his brow. “Drunk as a fool. Thunder! I was surprised. I—I—thought it was a rebel, sure.”
The thoughts of all these women wavered for a time. They were at a loss for precise expression of their emotion. At last, however, they hurled this superior sentence at the major:
“Well, yeh might have known.”
September, 1896
[The Pocket Magazine, Vol. 2, pp. 92–114.]
* The Little Regiment.
IN THE TENDERLOIN:
A DUEL BETWEEN AN ALARM CLOCK AND
A SUICIDAL PURPOSE
Everybody knows all about the Tenderloin district of New York. There is no man that has the slightest claim to citizenship that does not know all there is to know concerning the Tenderloin. It is wonderful—this amount of truth which the world’s clergy and police forces have collected concerning the Tenderloin. My friends from the stars obtain all this information, if possible, and then go into this wilderness and apply it. Upon observing you, certain spirits of the jungle will term you a wise guy, but there is no gentle humor in the Tenderloin, so you need not fear that this remark is anything but a tribute to your knowledge.
Once upon a time there was fought in the Tenderloin a duel between an Alarm Clock and a Suicidal Purpose. That such a duel was fought is a matter of no consequence, but it may be worth a telling, because it may be the single Tenderloin incident about which every man in the world has not exhaustive information.
It seems that Swift Doyer and his girl quarreled. Swift was jealous in the strange and devious way of his kind, and at midnight, his voice burdened with admonition, grief and deadly menace, roared through the little flat and conveyed news of the strife up the air shaft and down the air shaft.
“Lied to me, didn’t you?” he cried. “Told me a lie and thought I wouldn’t get onto you. Lied to me! Lied to me! There’s where I get crazy. If you hadn’t lied to me in one thing, and I hadn’t collared you flat in it, I might believe all the rest, but now—how do I know you ever tell the truth? How do I know I ain’t always getting a game? Hey? How do I know?”
To the indifferent people whose windows opened on the air shaft there came the sound of a girl’s low sobbing, while into it at times burst wildly the hoarse bitterness and rage of the man’s tone. A grim thing is a Tenderloin air shaft.
Swift arose and paused his harangue for a moment while he lit a cigarette. He puffed at it vehemently and scowled, black as a storm-god, in the direction of the sobbing.
“Come! Get up out of that,” he said, with ferocity. “Get up and look at me and let me see you lie!”
There was a flurry of white in the darkness, which was no more definite to the man than the ice floes which your reeling ship passes in the night. Then, when the gas glared out suddenly, the girl stood before him. She was a wondrous white figure in her vestal-like robe. She resembled the priestess in paintings of long-gone Mediterranean religions. Her hair fell wildly on her shoulder. She threw out her arms and cried to Swift in a woe that seemed almost as real as the woe of good people.
“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 quiver
ed 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 pillbox. 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 pillbox 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 whiskey 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 assassination of a royal juke 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. “Hello, 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 tender apologies.
At last she found the fly, and, taking it, 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 gods 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 circumstances? 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 God. 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.
October 1, 1896
[Town Topics, Vol. 36, p. 14.]
A DETAIL*
The tiny old lady in the black dress and curious little black bonnet had at first seemed alarmed at the sound made by her feet upon the stone pavements. But later she forgot about it, for she suddenly came into the tempest of the Sixth Avenue shopping district, where from the streams of people and vehicles went up a roar like that from headlong mountain torrents.
She seemed then like a chip that catches, recoils, turns, and wheels, a reluctant thing in the clutch of the impetuous river. She hesitated, faltered, debated with herself. Frequently she seemed about to address people; then of a sudden she would evidently lose her courage. Meanwhile the torrent jostled her, swung her this and that way.
At last, however, she saw two young women gazing in at a shop window. They were well-dressed girls; they wore gowns with enormous sleeves that made them look like full-rigged ships with all sails set. They seemed to have plenty of time; they leisurely scanned the goods in the window. Other people had made the tiny old woman much afraid because obviously they were speeding to keep such tremendously important engagements. She went close to the girls and peered in at the same window. She watched them furtively for a time. Then finally she said: “Excuse me!”
The girls looked down at this old face with its two large eyes turned toward them.
“Excuse me: can you tell me where I can get any work?”
For an instant the two girls stared. Then they seemed about to exchange a smile, but, at the last moment, they checked it. The tiny old lady’s eyes were upon them. She was quaintly serious, silently expectant. She made one marvel that in that face the wrinkles showed no trace of experience, knowledge; they were simply little soft, innocent creases. As for her glance, it had the trustfulness of ignorance and the candor of babyhood.
“I want to get something to do, because I need the money,” she continued, since, in their astonishment, they had not replied to her first question. “Of course I’m not strong and I couldn’t do very much, but I can sew well; and in a house where there was a good many menfolks, I could do all the mending. Do you know any place where they would like me to come?”
The young women did then exchange a smile, but it was a subtle tender smile, the edge of personal grief.
“Well, no, madam,” hesitatingly said one of them at last; “I don’t think I know any one.”
A shade passed over the tiny old lady’s face, a shadow of the wing of disappointment. “Don’t you?” she said, with a little struggle to be brave in her voice.
Then the girl hastily continued: “But if you will give me your address, I may find some one, and if I do, I will surely let you know of it.”
The tiny old lady dictated her address, bending over to watch the girl write on a visiting card with a little silver pencil. Then she said: “I thank you very much.” She bowed to them, smiling, and went on down the avenue.
As for the two girls, they walked to the curb and watched this aged figure, small and frail, in its black gown and curious black bonnet. At last, the crowd, the innumerable wagons, intermingling and changing with uproar and riot, suddenly engulfed it.
October, 1896
[The Pocket Magazine, Vol. 2, pp. 145–148.]
* Midnight Sketches.
THE VOICE OF THE MOUNTAIN
The old man Popocatep
etl was seated on a high rock with his white mantle about his shoulders. He looked at the sky, he looked at the sea, he looked at the land—nowhere could he see any food. And he was very hungry, too.
Who can understand the agony of a creature whose stomach is as large as a thousand churches, when this same stomach is as empty as a broken water jar?
He looked longingly at some islands in the sea. “Ah, those flat cakes! If I had them.” He stared at storm clouds in the sky. “Ah, what a drink is there.” But the King of Everything, you know, had forbidden the old man Popocatepetl to move at all, because he feared that every footprint would make a great hole in the land. So the old fellow was obliged to sit still and wait for his food to come within reach. Any one who has tried this plan knows what intervals lie between meals.
Once his friend, the little eagle, flew near, and Popocatepetl called to him. “Ho, tiny bird, come and consider with me as to how I shall be fed.”
The little eagle came and spread his legs apart and considered manfully, but he could do nothing with the situation. “You see,” he said, “this is no ordinary hunger which one goat will suffice—”
Popocatepetl groaned an assent.
“—but it is an enormous affair,” continued the little eagle, “which requires something like a dozen stars. I don’t see what can be done unless we get that little creature of the earth—that little animal with two arms, two legs, one head, and a very brave air, to invent something. He is said to be very wise.”
“Who claims it for him?” asked Popocatepetl.
“He claims it for himself,” responded the eagle.
“Well, summon him. Let us see. He is doubtless a kind little animal, and when he sees my distress he will invent something.”
“Good!” The eagle flew until he discovered one of these small creatures. “Oh, tiny animal, the great chief Popocatepetl summons you!”