Читать книгу The City of Comrades - Basil King - Страница 5

Table of Contents

The city was beginning to wake. Mysterious carts and wagons rumbled along the neighboring avenues. From a parallel street came the buzz and clang of a lonely early-morning electric car. Running footsteps would have startled one if they had not been followed by the clinking of peaceful milk-bottles in back yards. Clanking off into the distance one heard the tread of solitary pedestrians bent on errands that stirred the curiosity. Here and there the lurid flames of torches lit up companies of gnomelike men digging in the roadways.

Going toward Greeley’s Slip, I skirted the Park, though it made the walk longer. Under the dark trees men were lying on benches and on the grass, but for reasons I couldn’t yet analyze I refused to thrust myself among them. A few hours earlier I would have done this without thinking, as without fear; but something had happened to me that now made any such course impossible.

My immediate need was to get back to poor old Lovey and lie down by his side. That again was beyond my power to analyze. I suppose it was something like a homing instinct, and Lovey was all there was to welcome me.

“Is that you, sonny?” he asked, sleepily, as I stooped to creep into the cubby-hole which a chance arrangement of planks made in a pile of lumber.

“Yes, Lovey.”

“Glad ye’ve come.”

When I had stretched myself out I felt him snuggle a little nearer me.

“You don’t mind, sonny, do you?”

“No, Lovey. It’s all right. Go to sleep again.”

For myself, I could do nothing but lie and watch the coming of the dawn. I could see it beating itself into the darkness long before there was anything to which one could give the name of light. It was like a succession of great cosmic throbs, after each of which the veil was a little more translucent.

In my nostrils was the sweet, penetrating smell of lumber, subtly laden with the memories of the days when I was a boy. The Canadian differs from the American largely, I think, in the closeness of his forest-and-farm associations. Not that the American hasn’t the farm and the forest, too, but he has moved farther away from them. The mill, the factory, and the office have supplanted them—in imagination when not in fact, and in fact when not in imagination. If the woods call him he has to go to them—for a week, or two, or three at a time; but he comes back inevitably to a life in which the woods play little part. The Canadian never leaves that life. The primeval still enters into his cities and his thoughts. Some day it may be different; but as yet he is the son of rivers, lakes, and forests. There is always in him a strain of the voyageur. The true Canadian never ceases to smell balsam or to hear the lapping of water on wild shores.

It was balsam that I smelled now. The lapping of water soothed me as the river, too, began to wake. It woke with a faint noise of paddle-wheels, followed by a bellow like the call of some sea monster to its mate. Right below me and close to the slip I heard the measured dip of oars. Hoarse calls of men, from deck to deck or from deck to dock, had a weird, watchful sound, as though the darkness were peopled with Flying Dutchmen. Lights glided up and down the river—which itself remained unseen—mostly gold lights, but now and then a colored one. Chains of lights fringed the New Jersey shore, where, far away, sleepless factories threw up dim red flares. A rising southeast wind not only hid the stars under banks of clouds, but went whistling eerily round the corners of the lumber-piles. The scent of pine, and all the pungent, nameless odors of the riverside, began to be infused with the smell—if it is a smell—of coming rain.

I can best describe myself as in a kind of trance in which past and present were merged into one, and in which there seemed to be no period when two wonderful, burning eyes had not been watching me in pity and amazement. As long as I lived I knew they would watch me still. In their light I got my life’s significance. In their light I saw myself as a boy again, with a boy’s vision of the future. The smell of lumber carried me back to our old summer home on the banks of the Ottawa, where I had had my dreams of what I should do when I was big. All boys being patriotic, they were dreams not merely of myself, but of my country. It worried me that it was not sufficiently on the great world map, that apart from its lakes and prairies and cataracts it had no wonders to show mankind. As we were a traveling family, I was accustomed to wonders in other countries, and easily annoyed when one set of cousins in New York and another in England took it for granted that we lived in an Ultima Thule of snow. I meant to show them the contrary.

From the beginning my ardors and indignations translated themselves into stone. I had seen St. Peter’s in one country, St. Paul’s in another, and Chartres and châteaux in a third. I had seen New York transforming itself under my very eyes—the change began when I was in my teens—into a town of prodigious towers which in themselves were symbolical. Then I would go home to a red-gray city, marvelously placed between river and mountain, where any departure from its original French austerity was likely to be in the direction of the exuberant, the unchastened, the fantastic. All new buildings in Canada, as in most of the States, lacked “school.”

“School” was, more or less in secret, the preoccupation of my youth—“school” with some such variation from traditional classic lines as would create or stimulate the indigenous. I had not yet learned what New York was to teach me later—that necessity was the mother of art, and that pure new styles were formed not by any one’s ingenuity or by the caprice of changing taste, but because human needs demanded them. Rejecting the art nouveau, which later made its permanent home in Germany, I combined all the lines in which great buildings had ever been designed, from the Doric to the Georgian, in the hope of evolving a type which the world would recognize as distinctively Canadian, and to which I should give my name. In imagination I built castles, cathedrals and theaters, homes, hotels and offices. They were in the style to be known as Melburyesque, and would draw students from all parts of the architectural earth to Montreal.

It was not an unworthy dream, and even if I could never have worked it out I might have made of it something of which not wholly to be ashamed. But as early as before I went to the Beaux Arts the curse of Canada—the curse, more or less, of all northern peoples—began to be laid upon me. In Paris I had some respite from it, but almost as soon as I had hung out my shingle at home I was suffering again from its cravings. I will not say that I put up no fight, but I put up no fight commensurate with the evil I had to face. The result was what I have told you, and for which I now had to suffer in my soul the most scorching form of recompense.

The point I found it difficult to decide was as to whether or not I ever wanted to see Regina Barry again—or whether I had it in me to go back and show myself to her in the state from which I had fallen more than three years before. In the end it was that possibility alone which enabled me to endure the real coming of the dawn.

For it came—this new day which out of darkness might be bringing me a new life.

As I lay with my face turned toward the west I got none of its first glories. Even on a cloudy morning, with a spattering of rain, I knew there must be splendors in the east, if no more than gray and lusterless splendors. Light to a gray world is as magical as hope to a gray heart; and as I watched the lamps on the New Jersey heights grow wan, while the river unbared its bosom to the day, that thing came to me which makes disgrace and shame and humiliation and every other ingredient of remorse a remedy rather than a poison.

I myself was hardly aware of the fact till Lovey and I had crept out of our cubby-hole, because all round us men were going to work. Sleepers in the open generally rise with daylight, but we had kept longer than usual to our refuge because we didn’t want to fare forth into the rain. As sooner or later it would come to a choice between going out and being kicked out, we decided to move of our own accord.

I must leave to your imagination the curious sensation of the down and out in having nothing to do but to get up, shake themselves, and walk away. On waking after each of these homeless nights it had seemed to me that the necessity for undressing to go to bed and dressing when one got up in the morning was the primary distinction between being a man and being a mere animal. Not to have to undress just to dress again reduced one to the level of the horse. Stray dogs got up and went off to their vague leisure just as Lovey and I were doing. Not to wash, not to go to breakfast, not to have a duty when washing and breakfasting were done—knocked out from under one all the props that civilization had built up and deprived one of the right to call oneself a man.

I think it was this last consideration that had most weight with me as Lovey and I stood gazing at the multifarious activities of the scene. There were men in sight, busy with all kinds of occupations. They were like ants; they were like bees. They came and went and pulled and hauled and hammered and climbed and dug, and every man’s eyes seemed bent on his task as if it were the only one in the world.

“It means two or three dollars a day to ’em if they ain’t,” Lovey grunted, when I had pointed this fact out to him. “Don’t suppose they’d work if they didn’t ’ave to, do ye?”

“I dare say they wouldn’t. But my point is that they do work. It’s Emerson who says that every man is as lazy as he dares to be, isn’t it?”

“Oh, anybody could say that.”

“And in spite of the fact that they’d rather be lazy, they’re all doing something. Look at them. Look at them in every direction to which your eyes can turn—droves of them, swarms of them, armies of them—every one bent on something into which he is putting a piece of himself!”

“Well, they’ve got ’omes or boardin’-’ouses. It’s easy enough to git a job when ye can give an address. But when ye carn’t—”

We were to test that within a minute or two. Fifteen or twenty brownies were digging in a ditch. Of all the forms of work in sight it seemed that which demanded the least in the way of special training.

Approaching a fiercely mustachioed man of clearly defined nationality, I said, “Say, boss, could you give my buddy and me a job?”

Rolling toward me a pair of eyes that would have done credit to a bandit in an opera, he emitted sounds which I can best transcribe as, “Where d’live?”

“That’s the trouble,” I answered, truthfully. “We don’t live anywhere and we should like to.”

He looked us over. “Beat it,” he commanded, nodding toward the central quarters of the city.

“But, boss,” I pleaded, “my buddy and I haven’t got a quarter between us.”

He pointed with his thumb over his left shoulder. “Getta out.”

“We haven’t got a nickel,” I insisted; “we haven’t got a cent.”

“Cristoforo, ca’ da cop.”

As Cristoforo sprang from the ditch to look for a policeman, Lovey and I shuffled off again into the rain.

We stood for a minute at the edge of one of the long, sordid avenues where a sordid life was surging up and down. Men, women, and children of all races and nearly all ranks were hurrying to and fro, each bent on an errand. It was the fact that life provided an errand for each of them that suddenly struck me as the most wonderful thing in creation. There was no one so young or so old, no one so ignorant or so alien, that he was not going from point to point with a special purpose in view. Among the thousands and the tens of thousands who would in the course of the morning pass the spot on which we stood, there would probably not be one who hadn’t dressed, washed, and breakfasted as a return for his daily contribution to the common good. Never before and hardly ever since did I have such a sense of life’s infinite and useful complexity. There was no height to which it didn’t go up; there was no depth to which it didn’t go down. No one was left out but the absolute wastrel like myself, who couldn’t be taken in.

Though it was not a cold day, the steadiness of the drizzle chilled me. The dampness of the pavements got through the worn soles of my boots, and I suppose it did the same with Lovey’s. The lack of food made the old man white, and that of drink set him to trembling. The fact that he hadn’t shaved for the past day or two gave his sodden face a grisly look that was truly appalling. Though the pale-blue eyes were extinct, as if the spirit in them had been quenched, they were turned toward me with the piteous appeal I had sometimes seen in those of a blind dog.

It was for me to take the lead, and yet I couldn’t wholly see in what direction to take it. While I was pondering, Lovey made a variety of suggestions.

“There doesn’t seem to be nothink for it, sonny, but to go and repent for a day or two. I ’ate to do it; kind o’ deceivin’ like, it is; but they’ll let us dry ourselves and give us a feed if we ’ave a sense of sin.”

I wondered if he had in mind anything better than what I had myself.

“Where?”

He took the negative side first.

“We couldn’t go to the Saviour, because I’ve put it over on ’em twice this year already. And the ’Omeless Men won’t do nothink for ye onless you make it up in menial work.”

“I won’t try either of them,” I said, briefly.

“Don’t blame you, sonny, not a bit. Kind o’ makes a hypercrite of a man, it does. I ’ate to be a hypercrite, only when I carn’t ’elp it.”

He went on to enumerate other agencies for the raising of the fallen, of most of which he had tested the hospitality during the past few years. I rejected them as he named them, one by one. To this rejection Lovey subscribed with the unreasoning dislike all outcast men feel for the hand stretched down to them from higher up. Nothing but starvation would have forced him to any of these thresholds; and for me even starvation would not work the miracle.

“What’s the matter with the Down and Out?” I sprang on him, suddenly.

He groaned. “Oh, sonny! It’s just—just what I was afeared of.”

I turned and looked down into his poor, bleared, suffering old face.

“Why?”

“Because—because—oncet ye try that they’ll—they’ll never let ye go.”

“But suppose you don’t want them to let you go?”

He backed away from me. If the dead eyes could waken to expression, they did it then.

“Oh, sonny!” He shook as if palsied. “Ye don’t know ’em, my boy. I’ve summered and wintered ’em—by lookin’ on. I’ve had pals of my own—”

“And what are they doing now, those pals of your own?”

“God knows; I don’t. Yes, I do; some of ’em. I see ’em round, goin’ to work as reg’lar as reg’lar, and no more spunk in ’em than in a goldfish when ye shakes yer finger at their bowl.”

Afraid of exciting suspicion by standing still, we began drifting with the crowd.

“Is there much that you can call spunk in you and me?”

Again he lifted those piteous, drunken eyes. “We’re fellas together, ain’t we? We’re buddies. I ’ear ye say so yerself when you was speakin’ to that Eyetalian.”

I have to confess that with his inflection something warm crept into my cold heart. You have to be as I was to know what the merest crumbs of trust and affection mean. A dog as stray and homeless as myself might have been more to me; but since I had no dog....

“Yes, Lovey,” I answered, “we’re buddies, all right. But for that very reason don’t you think we ought to try to help each other up?”

He stopped, to turn to me with hands crossed on his breast in a spirit of petition.

“But, sonny, you don’t mean—you carn’t mean—on—on the wagon?”

“I mean on anything that’ll get us out of this hell of a hole.”

“Oh, well, if it’s only that, I’ve—I’ve been in tighter places than this before—and—and look at me now. There’s ways. Ye don’t have to jump at nothink onnat’rel. If ye’d only ’ave listened to me yesterday—but it ain’t too late even now. What about to-night? Just two old ladies—no violence—nothink that’d let you in for nothink dishonorable.”

“No, Lovey.”

We drifted on again. He spoke in a tone of bitter reproach.

“Ye’d rather go to the Down and Out! It’ll be the down, all right, sonny; but there’ll be no out to it. Ye’ll be a prisoner. They’ll keep at ye and at ye till yer soul won’t be yer own. Now all these other places ye can put it over on ’em. They’re mostly ladies and parsons and greenhorns that never ’ad no experience. A little repentance and they’ll fall for it every time. Besides”—he turned to me with another form of appeal—“ye’re a Christian, ain’t ye? A little repentance now and then’ll do ye good. It’s like something laid by for a rainy day. I’ve tried it, so I know. Ye’re young, sonny. Ye don’t understand. And when it’ll tide ye over a time like this—they’ll git ye a job, very likely—and ye can backslide by and by when it’s safe. Why, it’s all as easy as easy.”

“It isn’t as easy as easy, Lovey, because you say you don’t like it yourself.”

“I like it better than the Down and Out, where they won’t let ye backslide no more. Why, I was in at Stinson’s one day and there was a chap there—Rollins was his name, a plumber—just enj’yin’ of himself like—nothink wrong—and come to find out he’d been one of their men. Well, what do ye think, sonny? A fellow named Pyncheon blew in—awful ’ard drinker for a young ’and, he used to be—and he sat down beside Rollins and pled with ’im and plod with ’im, and—well, ye don’t see Rollins round Stinson’s no more. I tell ye, sonny, ye carn’t put nothing over on ’em. They knows all the tricks and all the trade. Give me kind-’earted ladies; give me ministers of the gospel; give me the stool o’ repentance two or three times a month; but don’t give me fellas that because they’ve knocked off the booze theirselves wants every one else to knock it off, too, and don’t let it be a free country.”

We came to the corner to which I had been directing our seemingly aimless steps. It was a corner where the big red and green jars that had once been the symbols for medicines within now stood as a sign for soda-water and ice-cream.

“Let’s go in here.”

Lovey hung back. “What’s the use of that? That ain’t no saloon.”

“Come on and let us try.”

Pushing open the screen door, I made him pass in before me. We found ourselves in front of a white counter fitted up like a kind of bar. As a bar of any sort was better than none, Lovey’s face took on a leaden shade of brightness.

In the way of a guardian all we could see at first was a white-coated back bent behind the counter. When it straightened up it was topped by a friendly, boyish face.

Lovey leaped back, pulling me by the arm.

“That’s that very young Pyncheon I was a-tellin’ you of,” he whispered, tragically; “him what got Rollins, the plumber, out of Stinson’s. Let’s ’ook it, sonny! He won’t do us no good.”

But the boyish face had already begun to beam.

“Hel-lo, old sport! Haven’t seen you in a pair of blue moons. Put it there!”

The welcome was the more disconcerting because in the mirror behind Pyncheon I could see myself in contrast to his clean, young, manly figure. I have said I was shabby without being hideously so, but that was before I had slept a fourth night on the bare boards of a lumber-yard, to be drenched with rain in the morning. It was also before I had gone a fourth morning without shaving, and with nothing more thorough in the way of a wash than I could steal in a station lavatory. The want of food, the want of drink, to say nothing of the unspeakable anguish within, had stamped me, moreover, with something woebegone and spectral which, now that I saw it reflected in the daylight, shook me to the soul.

I never was so timid, apologetic, or shamefaced in my life as when I grasped the friendly hand stretched out to me across the counter. I had no smile to return to Pyncheon’s. I had no courtesies to exchange. Not till that minute had I realized that I was outside the system of fellowship and manhood, and that even a handshake was a condescension.

“Pyn,” I faltered, hoarsely, “I want you to take me to the Down and Out. Will you?”

“Sure I will!” He glanced at Lovey. “And I’ll take old Lovikins, too.”

“Don’t you be so fresh with your names, young man!” Lovey spoke up, tartly. “’Tain’t the first time I’ve seen you—”

“And I hope it won’t be the last,” Pyn laughed.

“That’ll depend on how polite ye’re able to make yerself.”

“Oh, you can count me in on politeness, old sport, so long as you come to the Down and Out.”

“I’ll go to the Down and Out when I see fit. I ain’t goin’ to be dragged there by the ’air of the ’ead, as I see you drag poor Rollins, the plumber, a month or two ago.”

“Quit your kiddin’, Lovey. How am I going to drag you by the ’air of the ’ead when you’re as bald as a door-knob? Say, you fellows,” he went on, pulling one of the levers before him, “I’m going to start you off right now with a glass of this hot chocolate. The treat’s on me. By the time you’ve swallowed it Milligan will be here, and I can get off long enough to take you over to Vandiver Street.” He dashed in a blob of whipped cream. “Here, old son, this is for you; and there’s more where it came from.”

“I didn’t come in ’ere for nothink of the kind,” Lovey protested. “I didn’t know we was comin’ in ’ere at all. You take it, sonny.”

“Go ahead, Lovikins,” Mr. Pyncheon insisted. “’E’s to ’ave a bigger one,” he mimicked. “Awful good for the ’air of the ’ead. ’Ll make it sprout like an apple-tree—I beg your pardon, happle-tree—in May.”

Before Pyncheon had finished, the primitive in poor Lovey had overcome both pride and reluctance, and the glass of chocolate was pretty well drained. The sight of his sheer animal avidity warned me not to betray myself. While Pyncheon explained to Milligan and made his preparations for conducting us, I carried my chocolate to the less important part of the shop, given up to the sale of tooth-brushes and patent medicines, to consume it at ease and with dignity.

Pyncheon having changed to a coat, in the buttonhole of which I noticed a little silver star, and a straw hat with a faint silver line in the hatband, we were ready to depart.

“I’ll go with ye, sonny,” Lovey explained; “but I ain’t a-goin’ to stay. No Down and Out for mine.”

“You wouldn’t leave me, Lovey?” I begged, as I replaced the empty glass on the counter. “I’m looking to you to help me to keep straight.”

He edged up to me, laying a shaking hand on my arm.

“Oh, if it’s that— But,” he added more cheerfully, “we don’t have to stay no longer than we don’t want to. There’s no law by which they can keep us ag’in’ our will, there ain’t.”

“No, Lovey. If we want to go we’ll go—but we’re buddies, aren’t we? And we’ll stick by each other.”

“Say, you fellows! Quick march! I’ve only got half an hour to get there and back.”

Out in the street, Lovey and I hung behind our guide. He was too brisk and smart and clean for us to keep step with. Alone we could, as we phrased it, get by. With him the contrast called attention to the fact that we were broken and homeless men.

“You go ahead, Pyn—” I began.

“Aw, cut that out!” he returned, scornfully. “Wasn’t I a worse looker than you, two and a half years ago? Old Colonel Straight picked me up from a bench in Madison Square—the very bench from which he’d been picked up himself—and dragged me down to Vandiver Street like a nurse’ll drag a boy that kicks like blazes every step of the way.”

As we were now walking three abreast, with Pyn in the middle, I asked the question that was most on my mind:

“Was it hard, Pyn—cutting the booze out?”

“Sure it was hard! What do you think? You’re not on the way to a picnic. For the first two weeks I fought like hell. If the other guys hadn’t sat on my head—well, you and old Lovey wouldn’t have had no glass of hot chocolate this morning.”

“I suppose the first two weeks are the worst.”

“And the best. If you’re really out to put the job through you find yourself toughening to it every day.”

“And you mean by being out to put the job through?”

“Wanting to get the durned thing under you so as you can stand on it and stamp it down. Booze’ll make two kinds of repenters, and I guess you guys stand for both. Old Lovey here”—he pinched my companion’s arm—“he’ll forsake his bad habits just long enough to get well fed up, a clean shirt on his back, and his nerves a bit quieted down. But he’ll always be looking forward to the day when he’ll be tempted again, and thinking of the good time he’ll have when he falls.”

“If you’ll mind yer own business, young Pyn—” Lovey began, irritably.

“Then there’s another kind,” this experienced reformer went on, imperturbably, “what’ll have a reason for cutting the blasted thing out, like he’d cut out a cancer or anything else that’ll kill him. I’ve always known you was that kind, Slim, and I told you so nearly a year ago.”

“I seen ye,” Lovey put in. “Was speakin’ about it only yesterday. Knew you was after no good. I warned ye, didn’t I, Slim?”

Curiosity prompted me to say, “What made you think I had a motive for getting over it?”

“Looks. You can always tell what a man’s made for by the kind of looker he is. As a looker you’re some swell. Lovikins here, now—”

“If I can’t do as well as the likes o’ you, ye poor little snipe of a bartender for babies—”

“What’ll you bet you can’t?” Pyn asked, good-naturedly.

“I ain’t a bettin’ man, but I can show!”

“Well, you show, and I’ll lay fifty cents against you. You’ll be umpire, Slim, and hold the stakes. Is that a go?”

“I don’t ’ave no truck o’ that kind,” Lovey declared, loftily. “I’m a doer, I am—when I get a-goin’. I don’t brag beforehand—not like some.”

I was still curious, however, about myself.

“And what did you make out of my looks, Pyn?”

He stopped, stood off, and eyed me.

“Do you know what you’re like now?”

“I know I’m not like anything human.”

“You’re like a twenty-dollar bill that’s been in every pawnshop, and every bar, and every old woman’s stocking, and every old bum’s pocket, and is covered with dirt and grease and microbes till you wouldn’t hardly hold it in your hand; but it’s still a twenty-dollar bill—that’ll buy twenty dollars’ worth every time—and whenever you like you can get gold for it.”

“Thank you, Pyn,” I returned, humbly, as we went on our way again. “That’s the whitest thing that has ever been said to me.”

Before we reached Vandiver Street, Pyn had given us two bits of information, both of which I was glad to receive.

One was entirely personal, being a brief survey of his fall and rise. The son of a barber in one of the small towns near New York, he had gone to work with a druggist on leaving the high school. His type, as he described it, had been from the beginning that of the cheap sport. Cheap sports had been his companions, and before he was twenty-one he had married a pretty manicure girl from his father’s establishment. He had married her while on a spree, and after the spree had repented. Repenting chiefly because he wasn’t earning enough to keep a wife, he threw the blame for his mistake on her. When a baby came he was annoyed; when a second baby came he was desperate; when a third baby promised to appear he was overwhelmed. Since the expenses of being a cheap sport couldn’t be reduced, he saw no resource but flight to New York, leaving his wife to fend for herself and her children.

Folly having made of him a hard drinker, remorse made of him a harder one. And since no young fellow of twenty-four is callous enough to take wife-desertion with an easy conscience, my own first talks with him had been filled with maudlin references to a kind of guilt I hadn’t at the time understood. All I knew was that from bad he had gone to worse, and from worse he was on the way to the worst of all, when old Colonel Straight rescued him.

The tale of that rescue unfolded some of the history of the Down and Out. As to that, Pyn laid the emphasis on the fact that the club was not a mission—that is, it was not the effort of the safe to help those who are in danger; it was the effort of those who are in danger to help themselves. Built up on unassisted effort, it was self-respecting. No bribes had ever been offered it, and no persuasions but such as a man who has got out of hell can bring to bear on another who is still frying in the fire. Its action being not from the top downward, but from the bottom upward, it had a native impulse to expansion.

Its inception had been an accident. Two men who had first met as Pyncheon and I had first met had lost sight of each other for several years. At a time when each had worked his salvation out they had come together by accident on Broadway, and later had by another accident become responsible for a third. Finding him one night lying on the pavement of a lonely street, they had seemingly had no choice but to pick him up and carry him to a cheap but friendly hostelry which they knew would not refuse him. Here they had kept him till he had sobered up and taken the job they found for him. Watching over him for months, they finally had the pleasure of restoring him to his wife and seeing a broken home put on its feet again. This third man, in gratitude for what had been done for him, went after a fourth, and the fourth after a fifth, and so the chain was flung out. By the time their number had increased to some twenty-five or thirty Providence offered them a dwelling-place.

The dwelling-place, with the few apparently worthless articles it contained, was all the club had ever accepted as a gift. Even that might have been declined had it not been for the fact that it was going begging. When old Miss Smedley died it was found that she had left her residence in Vandiver Place as a legacy to St. David’s Church, across the way. She had left it, however, as an empty residence. As an empty residence it was in a measure a white elephant on the hands of a legatee that had no immediate use for it.

St. David’s Church, you will remember, was not now the fashionable house of prayer it had been in its early days. Time was when Vandiver Place was the heart of exclusive New York. In the ’forties and ’fifties no section of the city had been more select. In the ’sixties and ’seventies, when Doctor Grace was rector of St. David’s, it had become time-honored. In the ’eighties and ’nineties the old families began to move up-town and the boarding-houses to creep in; and in the early years of the twentieth century the residents ceded the ground entirely to the manufacturer of artificial flowers and the tailor of the ready-to-wear. In 1911 the line of houses that made it a cul-de-sac was torn down and a broad thoroughfare cut through a congeries of slums, the whole being named Vandiver Street. Vandiver Place was gone; and with it went Miss Smedley.

Rufus Legrand, who succeeded Doctor Grace as rector of St. David’s, offered Miss Smedley’s house as a home for the Down and Out; but it was Beady Lamont, a husky furniture-mover and ardent member of the club, who suggested this philanthropic opportunity to Rufus Legrand.

“Say, reverent, my buddy’s give in at last, on’y I haven’t got no place to put him. But, say, reverent, there’s that old house I helped to move the sticks out of two or three months ago. There’s three beds left in it, and a couple of chairs. Me and him could bunk there for a few nights, while he got straightened out, and—”

“But you’d have no bedclothes.”

“Say, reverent, we don’t want no bedclothes. Sleepin’ in the Park’ll learn you how to do without sheets.”

“My daughter, Mrs. Ralph Coningsby, could undoubtedly supply you with some.”

“Say, reverent, that ain’t our way. We don’t pass the buck on no one. What we haven’t got we do without till we can pay for it ourselves. But that old house ain’t doin’ nothing but sit on its haunches; and if I could just get Tiger into the next bed to mine at night—we don’t want no bedclothes nor nothing but what we lay down in—and take him along with me when I go to work by day, so as to keep my search-lights on him, like—”

Rufus Legrand had already sufficiently weighed the proposal.

“I’m sure I don’t see why you shouldn’t sleep in the old place as long as you like, Beady, if you can only make yourselves comfortable.”

“Say, reverent, now you’re shouting.”

So another accident settled the fate of Miss Smedley’s lifelong home; and before many weeks the Down and Out was in full possession.

It was in full possession of the house with the refuse the heirs had not considered good enough to take away—three iron bedsteads that the servants had used; an equal number of humble worn-out mattresses; two tolerably solid wooden chairs, three that needed repairs, which were speedily given them; some crockery more or less chipped and cracked; and a stained steel-engraving of Franklin in the salon of Marie Antoinette.

True to its principles, the club accepted neither gifts of money nor contributions in kind. Its members were all graduates of the school of doing without. To those who came there a roof over the head was a luxury, while to have a friend to stand by them and care whether they went to the devil or not was little short of a miracle.

But by the time Billy Pyncheon had been brought in by old Colonel Straight, gratitude, sacrifice, and enthusiasm on the part of one or another of the members had adequately fitted up this house to which Lovey and I were on the way. It had become, too, the one institution of which the saloon-keepers of my acquaintance were afraid. We were all afraid of it. It had worked so many wonders among our pals that we had come to look on it as a home of the necromantic. Missions of any kind we knew how to cope with; but in the Down and Out there was a sort of wizardry that tamed the wildest hearts among us, cast out devils, and raised the nearly dead. I myself for a year or more—ever since I had seen the spell it had wrought on Pyn, for whom from the first I had felt a sympathy—had been haunted by the dread of it; and here I was at the door.

The door when we got to it was something of a disappointment. It was at the head of a flight of old-time brownstone steps, and was just like any other door. About it was nothing of the magical or cabalistic Lovey and I had been half expecting.

More impressive was the neat little man who opened to our ring. He was a wan, wistful, smiling little figure of sixty-odd, on whom all the ends of the world seemed to have come. He was like a man who has been dead and buried and has come to life again—but who shows he has been dead. If I had to look like that....

But I took comfort in the thought of Pyn. Pyn showed nothing. He was like one of the three holy men who went through Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace—the smell of fire had not passed on him. A heartier, healthier, merrier fellow it would have been difficult to find.

He entered now with the air of authority which belongs to the member of a club.

“Fellows had their breakfast, Spender?”

Spender was all welcome, of the wistful, yearning kind.

“The men at work is gone; but the guys under restraint is still at table.”

“Mr. Christian not here yet?”

“Never gets here before nine; and it’s not half past seven yet.”

Pyn turned to me. “Say, do you want to go in and feed, or will you wash up first, or go to bed, or what?”

With this large liberty of choice I asked if we could do whatever we liked. It was Spender who explained.

“That’s the rule for new arrivals, unless they’ve got to be put under restraint at once.”

“I don’t want to be put under no restraint,” Lovey declared, indignantly.

“That’ll be all right,” Spender replied, kindly, “unless there’s vermin—”

Lovey jumped.

“See here, now! Don’t you begin no such immodest talk to me.”

“There, there, Lovikins,” Pyn broke in. “Spender don’t mean no harm. All sorts have to come to a place like this. But when we see a gentleman we treat him like a gentleman. All Spender wants to know is this, Is it eats for you first, or a bath?”

“And I don’t want no bath,” Lovey declared, proudly.

“Then it’ll be eats. Quick march! I’ve got to beat it back to my job.”

Pyn’s introduction of us to those already in the dining-room was simple.

“This is Lovey. This is Slim. You guys’ll make ’em feel at home.”

Making us feel at home consisted in moving along the table so as to give us room. In words there was no response to Pyn, who withdrew at once, nor was there more than a cursory inspection of us with the eyes. Whatever was kindly was in the atmosphere, and that was perceptible.

As we sat before two empty places, one of our new companions rose, went to the dresser behind us, and brought us each a plate, a spoon, a knife, and a cup and saucer. A big man went to the kitchen door and in a voice like thunder called out, “Mouse!”

By the time he had returned to his place a stumpy individual with a big red mustache and a limp appeared on the threshold. An explanation of the summons was given him when a third of our friends pointed at us with a spoonful of oatmeal porridge before he put it in his mouth.

Mouse withdrew into the kitchen, coming back with two basins of porridge, which he placed, steaming hot, before us. Presently, too, he filled our cups with coffee. Bread and butter, sugar and milk, were all on the table. The meal went on in silence, except for the smacking of lips and the clinking of spoons on the crockeryware.

Of our fellow-guests I can only say that they presented different phases of the forlorn. The man next to me was sallow, hatchet-faced, narrow-breasted, weak of physique, and looked as if he might have been a tailor. His hair was a shock of unkempt black curls, and his dark eyes the largest and longest and most luminous I ever saw in a man. In their nervous glance they made me think of a horse’s eyes, especially when he rolled them toward me timidly.

Opposite was a sandy, freckled-face type, whom I easily diagnosed as a Scotchman. Light hair, light eyebrows, and a heavy reddish mustache set off a face scored with a few deep wrinkles, and savage like that of a beast fretted with a sense of helplessness. The shaking hand that passed the bread to me was muscular, freckled, and covered with coarse, reddish hairs. I put him down as a gardener.

At the head of the table was a huge, unwieldy fellow who looked as if he had all run to fat, but who, as I afterward learned, was a mass of muscle and sinew, like a Japanese wrestler. He had bloated cheeks and bloated hands, and a voice so big and bass that when he spoke, as he did on going to the door to summon Mouse, he almost shook the dishes on the dresser. He proved to be, too, a pal of Beady Lamont’s, and as a piano-mover by profession he frequented Beady’s spheres.

At the big man’s right was a poor little whippersnapper, not more than five foot two, who looked as if a puff would blow him away; and opposite him a tall, spare, fine-looking Irishman, a hospital attendant, whose face would have been full of humor had it not been convulsed for the time being with a sense of mortal anguish. It was he who had brought us our dishes and took pains to see that our needs were supplied.

No more than any of the others were we eager for conversation. The fact that we were having good warm food served in a more or less regular way was enough to occupy all that was uppermost in our thoughts. Poor Lovey ate as he had drunk the chocolate half an hour before, with a greed that was almost terrible. Once more I might have done the same had I not taken his example as a warning. Not that anything I did would have attracted attention in that particular gathering. Each man’s gaze was turned inward. His soul’s tragedy absorbed him to the exclusion of everything else. Reaction from the stupor of excess brought nothing but a sense of woe. There was woe on all faces. There would have been woe in all thoughts if conscious thought had not been outside the range of these drugged and stultified faculties.

What was more active than anything else was a blind fellow-feeling. They did little things for one another. They did little watchful things for Lovey and me. They even quarreled over their kindnesses like children eager to make themselves useful.

“You’ll want to know where the barth-room is,” the timid tailor said to me as we rose from the table. “I’ll show you.”

There was a snarl from the whippersnapper across the way.

“Aw, put your lid on, Headlights. How long have you been showin’ barth-rooms in this here shebang?” He beckoned to me. “You come along o’ me, Slim—”

It was the Irishman who intervened to keep the peace.

“Listen to Daisy now, will you? He’s like a fox-terrier that owns the house and grounds and barks at every wan who goes by. Look now, Daisy! You take this ould gent up to the bath-room on the top floor; and you, Headlights, show Slim to the one on the second floor, and every wan o’ you’ll have a bite at the cake.”

With this peaceable division of the honors we started off.

I must describe the club as very humble. The rooms themselves, as was natural with an old New York residence, did not lack dignity. Though too narrow for their height, they had admirable cornices and some exquisite ceiling medallions. It is probable, too, that in days when there were no skyscrapers in the neighborhood the house was light enough, but now it wore a general air of dimness. The furnishings were just what you might have expected from the efforts of very poor men in giving of their small superfluity. There were plenty of plain wooden chairs, and a sufficiency of tables to match them. In the two down-stairs sitting-rooms, which must once have been Miss Smedley’s front and back drawing-rooms, there were benches against the wall. A roll-top desk, which I learned was the official seat of Mr. Christian, was so placed as to catch the light from Vandiver Street. A plain, black, wooden cross between the two front windows, and Franklin in the salon of Marie Antoinette in the place of honor over a fine old white marble mantelpiece, completed the two reception-rooms.

The floor above was given over to the dormitories for outsiders, and contained little more than beds. They were small iron beds, made up without counterpanes. As every man made his own, the result would not have passed the inspection of a high-class chambermaid, but they satisfied those who lay down in them. Since outsiders came in, like Lovey and me, with little or nothing in the way of belongings, it was unnecessary to make further provision for their wardrobes than could be found in the existing closets and shelves. In the front bedroom, which I suppose must have been Miss Smedley’s, there were nine small beds; in the room back of that there were seven; and in a small room over the kitchen, given up to the men positively under restraint, there were five. Twenty-one outsiders could thus be cared for at a time.

On the third floor were the dormitories for club members—men who had kept sober for three months and more, and who wore a star of a color denoting the variety of their achievements. On this floor, too, was a billiard, card, and smoking room, accessible to any one, even to outsiders, who had kept sober for three weeks. On the top floor of all were a few bedrooms, formerly those of Miss Smedley’s servants, reserved for the occasional occupancy of such grandees as had preserved their integrity for three years and more; and here, too, was the sacred place known as “the lounge,” to which none were admitted who didn’t wear the gold or silver star representing sobriety for at least a year.

The whole was, therefore, a carefully arranged hierarchy in which one mounted according to one’s merit. Little Spender wore the gold star, indicating a five years’ fight with the devil; and Mouse, the cook, a blue one, which meant that he had been victorious for three months. All others in the club when Lovey and I arrived were outsiders like ourselves. Outsiders gave their word to stay a week, generally for the purpose of sobering up, but beyond that nothing was asked of them. At the beginning of the second week they could either continue their novitiate or go.

This information was given me by Spender as we stood on the threshold of the bath-room before I passed in. When the tale was ended, however, the Scotchman, who had taken little or no part in our reception, pushed by me and entered.

“You’ll be wanting a shave,” he said, in explanation of his rudeness. “There are my things”—he got down on all-fours to show me a safety razor and a broken cup containing a brush and shaving-soap, hidden behind one of the legs of the bath-tub—“and you’ll oblige me by putting them back. Daisy, the wee bye you saw at the table, is doing the same by your chum. I make no doubt your own things have been held in your last rooming-house.”

When I had admitted that this was exactly the case and had thanked my friends for their courtesies, they withdrew, leaving me to my toilet.

After the good meal the bath was a genuine luxury. It was a decent bath-room, kept by the men, as all the house was kept, in a kind of dingy cleanliness. Cleanliness, I found, was not only a principle of the club; it was one of the first indications that those who came in for shelter gave of a survival of self-respect. Some of their efforts in that way were amusing or pathetic, as the case might be, but they were always human and touching.

While shaving I had an inspiration that was to have some effect on what happened to me afterward. I decided to let my mustache grow. As it grew strongly in any case, a four days’ absence of the razor had given my upper lip a deep walnut tinge, and, should I leave the club after the week to which I had tacitly pledged myself by coming there at all, I should look different from when I entered. To look different was the first of the obscure and violent longings of which my heart was full. It would be the nearest possible thing to getting away from my old self. Not to be the same man at all as the one who had exchanged those few strange sentences with Regina Barry seemed to be the goal toward which I was willing to struggle at any cost of sacrifice.

Having bathed and shaved, I was not an ill-looking fellow till it came to putting on my shirt again. Any man who has worn a shirt for forty-eight hours in a city or on a train knows what a horror it becomes in the exposed spots on the chest and about the wrists. I had had but one shirt for a week and more—and but the one soft collar. You can see already, then, that in spite of some success in smartening up my damp and threadbare suit I left the bath-room looking abject.

I was not, however, so abject as Lovey when I found him again in the front sitting-room down-stairs.

In the back sitting-room our table companions were all arranged in a row against the wall. In spite of the fact that there were plenty of chairs, they sat huddled together on one bench; and though there was tobacco, as there were books, papers, and magazines, they sought no occupation. When I say that they could have smoked and didn’t, the wrench that had been given to their normal state of mind will be apparent. Close up to one another they pressed, the Scotchman against the piano-mover, and the piano-mover against the wee bye Daisy, like lovebirds on the perch of a cage or newly captured animals too terrified even to snap.

Without comment on any one’s part, Lovey roamed the front sitting-room alone.

“I say, sonny,” he began, fretfully, as I entered, “this ain’t no place for you and me.”

I tried to buck him up.

“Oh, well, it’s only for a week. We can stand it for that long. They’re very civil to us.”

“But they’re watchin’ of us already like so many cats.”

“Oh no, they’re not. They’re only kind.”

“I don’t want none o’ that sort of kindness. What do ye think that two-foot-four of a Daisy says to me when ’e offered me the loan of ’is razor? ‘Lovey,’ says ’e, ‘I’m goin’ to ’elp ye to knock off the booze. It’ll be terr’ble hard work for an old man like you.’ ‘To ’ell with you!’ says I. ‘Ye ain’t goin’ to ’elp me to do no such thing, because knock it off is somethink I don’t mean.’ ‘Well, what did you come in ’ere for?’ says ’e. ‘I come in ’ere,’ I says to ’im, ‘because my buddy come in ’ere; and wherever ’e goes I’ll foller ’im.’”

“Then that’s understood, Lovey,” I said, cheerfully. “If I go at the end of the week, you go; and if I stay, you stay. We’ll be fellas together.”

He shook his head mournfully.

“If you go at the end of the week, sonny, I go, too; but if you stay—well, I don’t know. I’ve been in jails, but I ’ain’t never been in no such place as this—nobody with no spunk. Look at ’em in there now—nothink but a bunch of simps.”

“You won’t leave me, Lovey?”

The extinct-blue eyes were raised to mine.

“No, sonny; I won’t leave ye—not for ’ardly nothink.”