Transcriber's Note
McClure's Magazine
July, 1908.
Vol. XXXI. No. 3
TABLE OF CONTENTS
GUARDIANS OF THE PUBLIC HEALTH. By Samuel Hopkins Adams. [241]
Our Health Boards and Their Powers [242]
Our Absurd Vital Statistics [244]
The Criminal Negligence of Physicians [246]
"Business Interests" and Yellow Fever [246]
Newspapers, Politicians, and the Bubonic Plague [248]
Fighting Prejudice and the Death Rate in Charleston [250]
Killing Off the City Negro [251]
Private Interests in Public Murder [251]
A LITTLE VICTORY FOR THE GENERAL. By Josephine Daskam Bacon. [253]
AMERICAN IMPRESSIONS. By Ellen Terry. [263]
THE HERITAGE OF HAM. By Lieutenant Hugh M. Kelly, U. S. A. [277]
THE SINGER'S HEART. By Harris Merton Lyon. [291]
THE REPUDIATION OF JOHNSON'S POLICY. By Carl Schurz. [297]
The Fourteenth Amendment [298]
A Campaign to Destroy a President [298]
Killing of Negroes at Memphis and New Orleans [300]
Johnson "Swings Around the Circle" [301]
New Congress Overwhelmingly Anti-Johnson [304]
The Movement Toward Negro Suffrage [304]
Reconstruction Under Military Control [305]
The Public Fear of Johnson [306]
The Fatal Bungling of Reconstruction [307]
THE THIRTEENTH MOVE. By Alberta Bancroft. [308]
GIFFORD PINCHOT, FORESTER. By Will C. Barnes. [319]
CHIEF KITSAP, FINANCIER. By Joseph Blethen. [328]
THE WAYFARERS. By Mary Stewart Cutting. [337]
THE CATHEDRAL. By Florence Wilkinson. [357]
THE NEW GOSPEL IN CRIMINOLOGY. By Judge McKenzie Cleland. [358]
ILLUSTRATIONS
[DR. CHARLES HARRINGTON, SECRETARY OF THE MASS STATE BOARD OF HEALTH]
[DR. THOMAS DARLINGTON, COMMISSIONER OF HEALTH FOR NEW YORK CITY]
[DR. CHARLES V. CHAPIN, SUPERINTENDENT OF HEALTH IN PROVIDENCE, RI]
[DR. JOHN N. HURTY, SECRETARY OF THE BOARD OF HEALTH IN INDIANA]
[DR. GEORGE W. GOLER, HEALTH OFFICER OF ROCHESTER, NEW YORK]
[DR. J. MERCIER GREEN, HEALTH OFFICER OF CHARLESTON, SC]
[THE SCAVENGERS OF CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA]
[CAROLINE WALKED AHEAD, HER CHIN WELL UP, HER NOSE SNIFFING PLEASURABLY THE UNACCUSTOMED ASPHALT]
[YOUNG GIRLS ... CANTERED BY; THEIR LINEN HABITS ROSE AND FELL DECOROUSLY, THEIR HAIR WAS SMOOTH]
[THE STANDING CROWD CRANED THEIR NECKS, AS DELIA SAT UP STRAIGHT AND HELD OUT HER ARMS]
['WHO—WHO—WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?' HE WHISPERED HOARSELY]
[HENRY IRVING AS CARDINAL WOLSEY IN "HENRY VIII."]
[ELLEN TERRY WITH HER FOX-TERRIERS, DUMMY AND FUSSIE]
[AUGUSTIN DALY AND HIS COMPANY OF PLAYERS]
[JOHN DREW AS PETRUCHIO IN "THE TAMING OF THE SHREW"]
[ADA REHAN AS KATHARINE IN "THE TAMING OF THE SHREW"]
[JOSEPH JEFFERSON AS RIP VAN WINKLE]
[CABLE THE PRESIDENT! WHAT A JOKE!]
[THE CIRCLE CLOSED IN AS THE SEA SURGES UP UPON THE LAND]
[HE GRINNED AND WINKED AND FRISKED AND CAPERED]
['OH, YOU DIVVIL, YOU! YOU OLD, BLATHERSKITING DIVVIL']
[HE SAT STARING INTO THE BLANKNESS OF THE LITTLE ROOM]
[JOHN POTTER STOCKTON, THE DEMOCRATIC SENATOR FROM NEW JERSEY]
['I'VE BEEN FOLLOWING YOU EVER SINCE YOU LEFT YOUR OFFICE,' HE SAID]
['IT'S A DESPICABLE LETTER,' SHE TOLD HERSELF]
['HOW DO YOU SUPPOSE I FEEL, BEING IN THIS POSITION—TO YOU?']
[SECTION OF A REDWOOD FOREST IN CALIFORNIA, SHOWING WASTEFUL AND DESTRUCTIVE METHODS OF LUMBERING]
[THE EFFECT OF EROSION ON A HILLSIDE FROM WHICH THE FOREST COVER HAS BEEN REMOVED]
[THE SAME HILLSIDE AFTER TWO YEARS OF CAREFUL AND SYSTEMATIC GRAZING]
[HERD OF SHEEP GRAZING UPON A NATIONAL FOREST]
[KITSAP, THE CLERK, DONNED THE TRIBAL FINERY OF HIS ANCESTORS]
[ON ALL SIDES THE HOP-PICKERS WERE MAKING MERRY]
[PICKING PROGRESSED TO AN END, AND THE INDIANS HELD THEIR LAST FEAST AND DEPARTED]
[STOOD THERE LEANING AGAINST 'DADDY'S' SIDE]
[IT WAS SWEET TO BE CHAFFED, TO BE HEEDLESSLY YOUNG ONCE MORE]
[SHE CREPT OUT UPON THE LANDING OF THE STAIRS, AND SAT THERE DESOLATELY ON THE TOP STEP]
[SHE TOOK THE PISTOL FROM HIS RELAXED HOLD]
['THEY'LL GET FULL OF EARTH AGAIN,' SHE PROTESTED]
Copyright, 1908, by The S. S. McClure Co. All rights reserved
Copyright by Arnold Genthe
GUARDIANS
OF
THE PUBLIC HEALTH
BY
SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS
John Chinaman is the logician of hygiene. To his family doctor he says: "I pay you to keep me well. Earn your money." Let him or his fall sick, and the physician's recompense stops until health returns to that household. Being fair-minded as well as logical, the Oriental obeys his physical guardian's directions. Now, it may be possible to criticize certain Chinese medical methods, such as burning parallel holes in a man's back to cure him of appendicitis, or banging for six hours a day on a brass tom-tom to eliminate the devil of headache; but the underlying principle of "No health, no pay" is worthy of consideration.
This principle it is which, theoretically, we have adopted in the matter of the public health. To our city, State, or national doctors we pay a certain stipend (when we pay them at all) on the tacit understanding that they are to keep us free from illness. With the cure of disease they have no concern. The minute you fall ill, Mr. Taxpayer, you pass into the hands of your private physician. No longer are you an item of interest to your health officer, except as you may communicate your disease to your fellow citizens. If he looks after you at all, it is not that you may become well, but that others may not become ill through you. Being less logical in our conduct than the Chinese, we, as a people, pay little or no heed to the instructions of the public doctors whom we employ. We grind down their appropriations; we flout the wise and by no means over-rigorous regulations which they succeed in getting established, usually against the stupid opposition of unprogressive legislatures; we permit—nay, we influence our private physicians to disobey the laws in our interest, preferring to imperil our neighbors rather than submit to the inconvenience necessary to prevent the spread of disease; and we doggedly, despite counsel and warning, continue to poison ourselves perseveringly with bad air, bad water, and bad food, the three B's that account for 90 per cent. of our unnecessary deaths. Then, if we are beset by some well-deserved epidemic, we resentfully demand to know why such things are allowed to occur. For it usually happens that the virtuous public which fell asleep with a germ in its mouth, wakes up with a stone in its hand to throw at the health officer. Considering what we, as a people, do and fail to do, we get, on the whole, better public health service than we deserve, and worse than we can afford.
Our Health Boards and Their Powers
As a nation, we have no comprehensive health organization. The crying need for one I shall point out in a future article. Our only Federal guardianship is vested in the United States Public Health and Marine Hospital Service, which, by some mystery of governmental construction, got itself placed in the Treasury Department, where it certainly does not belong. It is, with the exception of a few ancient political appointees now relegated to unimportant posts, a highly trained and efficient body of hygienists and medical men, the best of whom have also qualified as diplomats in trying crises. Any germ-beleaguered city may call upon this Service for aid. It is a sort of flying squadron of sanitative defence. When yellow fever broke out in New Orleans, it was the M. H. S. men who, working quietly and inconspicuously with the local volunteers, mapped out the campaign which rid the city of the scourge. In the San Francisco panic eight years ago, when bubonic plague beset the city, it was the Marine Hospital Service which restored confidence: and a Service man has been there ever since as the city's chief adviser. The Federal "surgeons," as they are called, may be in St. Louis helping to check smallpox, or in Seattle, blocking the spread of a plague epidemic, or in Mobile, Alabama, fighting to prevent the establishment of an unnecessary and injurious quarantine against the city by outsiders, because of a few cases of yellow jack; and all the while the Service is studying and planning a mighty "Kriegspiel" against the endemic diseases in their respective strongholds—malaria, typhoid, tuberculosis, and the other needless destroyers of life which we have always with us. In the Marine Hospital Service is the germ of a mighty force for national betterment.
DR. CHARLES HARRINGTON
SECRETARY OF THE MASSACHUSETTS STATE BOARD OF HEALTH, WHICH, BY THE DISTRIBUTION OF VACCINE AND ANTITOXIN ALONE, HAS SAVED THE STATE $210,000
Of the State boards, perhaps a fourth may be regarded as actively efficient. The rest are honorary and ornamental. Undoubtedly a majority would be ready and willing to perform the services for which they are not (as a rule) paid anything; but they lack any appropriation upon which to work. South Carolina, for example, has an excellent State board. Its president, Dr. Robert Wilson, is an able and public-spirited physician of the highest standing; an earnest student of conditions, and eager for the sanitary betterment of his State. But when he and his board undertook to get one thousand dollars from the legislature to demonstrate the feasibility of enforcing the pure food law and of turning away the decayed meat for which the State is a dumping-ground, they were blandly informed that there was no money available for that purpose. It was in South Carolina, by the way, that a medical politician who served on the public health committee of the legislature addressed this question to a body of physicians who had come there to appeal for certain sanitary reforms: "What do you want of laws to prevent folks being sick? Ain't that the way you make your livin'?" Which is, I fear, typical of the kind of physicians that go into politics and get into our legislatures, where, unhappily, they are usually assigned to the public health committees.
DR. THOMAS DARLINGTON
COMMISSIONER OF HEALTH FOR NEW YORK CITY, WHICH HAS THE MOST THOROUGHLY ORGANIZED CITY HEALTH DEPARTMENT IN THE UNITED STATES
Under the State boards, in the well-organized States, are the county boards and officers, who report to the State boards and may call upon the latter for advice or help in time of epidemic or danger.
In certain circumstances the State officials may arbitrarily take charge. This is done in Indiana, in Maryland, in Pennsylvania, and in Massachusetts. The last State not only grants extraordinary powers to its health executive, Dr. Charles Harrington, but it appropriated last year for the work the considerable sum of $136,000. By the issuance alone of vaccine and antitoxin, the Board saved to the citizens of the State $210,000, or $74,000 more than the total appropriation for all the varied work of the institution. Some vague idea of the economy in lives which it achieves may be gained from the established fact that death results in only sixteen out of every thousand cases of diphtheria, when the antitoxin is given on or before the second day of the illness; 110, when given on the third day; and 210 when the inoculation is performed later. The old death rate from diphtheria, before antitoxin was discovered, ranged from 35 to 50 per cent. of those stricken.
DR. CHARLES V. CHAPIN
SUPERINTENDENT OF HEALTH IN PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND, ONE OF THE CITIES WHICH HAS BEEN FOREMOST IN PROSECUTING PHYSICIANS FOR FAILURE TO GIVE NOTICE OF INFECTIOUS DISEASE
Finally, there are the city bureaus, with powers vested, as a rule, in a medical man designated as "health officer," "agent," or "superintendent." What Massachusetts is to the State boards, New York City is to the local boards, but with even greater powers. Under the charter it has full power to make a sanitary code. Matters ranging from flat wheels on the Metropolitan Street Railway Company's antiquated cars, to soft coal smoke belched forth from factory chimneys, are subject to control by the New York City Department of Health. The Essex Street resident who keeps a pig in the cellar, and the Riverside Drive house-holder who pounds his piano at 1 a.m. to the detriment of his neighbor's slumber, are alike amenable to the metropolis' hired doctors.
The province of the city, State, and Federal health organization is broad. "Control over all matters affecting the public health" is a comprehensive term. "All the powers not already given to the school committees," observed a Massachusetts judge, "are now ceded to the Boards of Health." In theory, then, almost unlimited powers are vested in the authorities. But how carefully they must be exercised in order not to excite public jealousy and suspicion, every city health official well knows. More serious than interference and opposition, however, is the lack of any general equipment. At the very outset the loosely allied army of the public health finds itself lacking in the primal weapon of the campaign; comprehensive vital statistics.
Our Absurd Vital Statistics
Vital statistics in this country are an infant science. Yet they are the very basis and fundament of any attempt to better the general health. Knowledge of what is killing us before our time is the first step toward saving our lives. The Census Bureau does its best to acquire this essential information. For years Director North has been persistently hammering away at this point. But progress is slow. Only fifteen States, representing 48 per cent. of our population, are comprised in the "registration area"; that is, record all deaths, and forbid burial without a legal permit giving the cause of death and other details. Outside of this little group of States, the decedent may be tucked away informally underground and no one be the wiser for it. This is convenient for the enterprising murderers, and saves trouble for the undertakers. Indeed, so interested are the latter class, that in Iowa they secured the practical repeal of a law which would have brought that State within the area; and in Virginia this year they snowed under a similar bill in the legislature, by a flood of telegrams. Ohio, the third largest State in the Union, keeps no accurate count of the ravages of disease. Probably not more than 60 per cent. of its deaths are reported. Why? Inertia, apparently, on the part of the officials who should take the matter in charge. Governor Harris in his January message made a strong plea for registration, but without result. As for births, there is no such thing as general registration of them. So this matter is neglected, upon which depend such vital factors as school attendance, factory employment, marriage, military duty, and the very franchise which is the basis of citizenship. It is curious to note that Uruguay, in its official tables of comparative statistics, regrets its inability to draw satisfactory conclusions regarding the United States of America, because that nation has not yet attained to any scientific method of treating the subject. Patriotism may wince; but let us not haughtily demand any explanation from our sneering little neighbor. Explanations might be embarrassing. For the taunt is well founded.
DR. JOHN N. HURTY
SECRETARY OF THE BOARD OF HEALTH IN INDIANA, WHICH HAS RECENTLY PASSED A LAW FORBIDDING THE MARRIAGE OF IMBECILES, EPILEPTICS, AND PERSONS SUFFERING FROM CONTAGIOUS DISEASE
Is it strange that, having no basis in national statistics, our local health figures "speak a varied language"? We have no standards even of death on which to base comparisons. But a dead man is a dead man, isn't he, whether in Maine or California? Not necessarily and unqualifiedly. In some Southern cities he may be a "dead colored man," hence thrown out of the figures on the "white death rate" which we are asked to regard as the true indication of health conditions. In New Orleans, until recently, he might be a "death in county hospital," and as such not counted—this to help produce a low death rate. In Salt Lake City he's a "dead stranger," and unpopular on account of raising the total figures for the city. They reckon their total rate there as 16.38, but their home rate or "real" rate as 10.88. That is to say, less than 11 out of every 1,000 residents die in a year. If this be true, the Salt Lake citizens must send their moribund into hasty exile, or give them rough on rats, so that they may not "die in the house." As for the "strangers within our gates" who raise the rate over 50 per cent. by their pernicious activity in perishing, the implication is clear: either Salt Lake City is one of the deadliest places in the world to a stranger, or else the newcomers simply commit suicide in large batches out of a malevolent desire to vitiate the mortality figures. The whole thing is an absurdity; as absurd as the illiterate and fallacious three-page leaflet which constitutes this community's total attempt at an annual health report.
DR. GEORGE W. GOLER
HEALTH OFFICER OF ROCHESTER, NEW YORK, WHO REFUSES CHILDREN CERTIFICATES TO WORK IN FACTORIES, UNLESS THE APPLICANTS ARE IN SOUND PHYSICAL CONDITION
St. Joseph, Missouri, claimed, one year, a rate of 6.5 deaths out of every 1,000 inhabitants. Were this figure authentic, the thriving Missouri city, by the law of probability, should be full of centenarians. It isn't. I essayed to study the local reports, hoping to discover some explanation of the phenomenon, but was politely and regretfully informed that St. Joseph's health authorities issued no annual reports. The natural explanation of the impossibly low rate is that the city is juggling its returns. In the first place, that favorite method of securing a low per capita death rate—estimating a population greatly in advance of its actual numbers—is indicated; since the community has fewer lines of sewers and a smaller area of parks than other cities of the size it claims—two elements which, by the way, would in themselves tend to militate against a low mortality. Perhaps, too, the city has that ingenious way of eliminating one disturbing feature, the deaths under one week or ten days, by regarding them as "still-births." Chicago used to have this habit; also the trick of counting out non-residents, who were so thoughtless as to die in the city. At present, it is counting honestly, I believe. Buffalo used to pad for publication purposes. One year it vaunted itself as the healthiest large city in the country. The boast was made on the original assumption of a population nearly 25,000 in excess of the United States Census figures, to which 20,000 more was added arbitrarily, the given reason being a "general belief" that the city had grown to that extent.
Perhaps as complete returns as any are obtained in Maryland, where the health official, Dr. Price, culls the death notices from 60 papers, checks up the returns from the official registrars, and if any are missing, demands an explanation by mail. It behooves the registrar to present a good excuse. Otherwise he is haled to court and fined. The Board has thus far never failed to secure a conviction.
Now, if the most concrete and easily ascertainable fact in public health statistics, the total of deaths, is often qualified or perverted, it follows that dependent data, such as the assigned causes of death, as required by law, are still more unreliable; so I shall keep as far away from statistics as possible except where some specific condition can be shown by approved figures or by figures so inherently self-disproved that they carry their own refutation.
The Criminal Negligence of Physicians
This unreliability may be set down to the account of the medical profession. Realizing though they do the danger of concealment from the proper authorities, and in the face of the law which, as it gives them special privileges, requires of them a certain return, a considerable percentage of physicians falsify the returns to protect the sensibilities of their patrons. That they owe protection rather to the lives of the public, they never stop to think. Tuberculosis is the disease most misreported. In many communities it is regarded as a disgrace to die of consumption. So it is. But the stigma rests upon the community which permits the ravage of this preventable disease; not upon the victims of it, except as they contribute to the general lethargy. In order to save the feelings of the family, a death from consumption is reported as bronchitis or pneumonia. The man is buried quietly. The premises are not disinfected, as they should be, and perhaps some unknowing victim moves into that germ-reeking atmosphere, as into a pitfall. Let me give an instance. A clergyman in a New York city told me of a death from consumption in his parish. The family had moved away, and the following week a young married couple with a six-months-old baby moved in.
DR. J. MERCIER GREEN
HEALTH OFFICER OF CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA, WHO STAMPED OUT A SMALLPOX EPIDEMIC AND REFORMED THE CITY'S WATER SUPPLY
"What can I do about it?" asked the clergyman. "Mr. Blank's death was said to be from pneumonia; but that was only the final cause. He had been consumptive for a year."
"Warn the new tenants," I suggested, "and have them ask the Health Board to disinfect."
More than a year later I met the clergyman on a train and recalled the case to him. "Yes," he said, "those people thought it was too much trouble to disinfect, particularly since the reports did not give tuberculosis as the cause of death. Now their child is dying of tuberculosis of the intestines."
In this case, had the death been properly reported by the dead man's physician, as the law required, the City Board would have compelled disinfection of the house before the new tenants were allowed to move in. The physician who obligingly falsified that report is morally guilty of homicide through criminal negligence.
In Salt Lake City, in 1907, 43 deaths were ascribed to tuberculosis—undoubtedly a broad understatement. And in the face of the ordinance requiring registration of all cases of consumption, only five persons were reported as ill of the disease. By all the recognized rules of proportion, 43 deaths in a year meant at least 500 cases, which, unreported, and hence in many instances unattended by any measures for prevention of the spread of infection, constituted so many separate radiating centers of peril to the whole community.
Why is such negligence on the part of physicians not punished? Because health officials dread to offend the medical profession. In this respect, however, a vast improvement is coming about. Pennsylvania, Maryland, Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and other States are not afraid to prosecute and fine delinquents; nor are a growing number of cities, among them Boston, New York, Rochester, Providence, and New Orleans. The great majority of such prosecutions, however, are for failure to notify the authorities of actively contagious diseases, such as scarlet fever, diphtheria, and smallpox.
"Business Interests" and Yellow Fever
Epidemics are, nevertheless, in the early stages, often misreported. If they were not—if early knowledge of threatening conditions were made public—the epidemics would seldom reach formidable proportions. But—and here is the national hygienic failing—the first instinct is to conceal smallpox, typhoid, or any other disease that assumes epidemic form. Repeated observations of this tendency have deprived me of that knock-kneed reverence for Business Interests which is the glorious heritage of every true American. As a matter of fact, Business Interests when involved with hygienic affairs are always a malign influence, and usually an incredibly stupid one. It was so in New Orleans, where the leading commercial forces of the city, in secret meeting, called the health officer before them and brow-beat him into concealing the presence of yellow fever, lest other cities quarantine against their commerce. And "concealed" it was, until it had secured so firm a foothold that suppression was no longer practicable, and the city only averted a tremendously disastrous epidemic by the best-fought and most narrowly won battle ever waged in this country against an invading disease.
THE SCAVENGERS OF CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA
It is interesting to note, by the way, that this epidemic, with its millions of dollars of loss to the city of New Orleans, might have been averted at a comparatively small cost, had the city fathers possessed the intelligence and foresight to adopt a plan devised by Dr. Quitman Kohnke, the city health officer. New Orleans gets its drinking water from private cisterns. Each of these is a breeding place for the yellow-fever-bearing mosquito. Dr. Kohnke introduced a bill a year before the epidemic, providing for the screening of all the cisterns, so that the mosquitos might not spread abroad; and also for the destruction by oil of the insects in the open pools. The total cost would hardly have exceeded $200,000. But there was no yellow fever in the city then; the public had recovered from its latest scare; and the bill was voted down with derision. I suppose the saving of that $200,000 cost New Orleans some forty or fifty million dollars in all.
Seldom does a Southern State discover yellow fever within its own borders. It is always Mississippi that finds the infection in New Orleans, and Louisiana that finds it in Galveston. This apparently curious condition of affairs is explicable readily enough, on the ground that no State wishes to discover the germ in its own veins, but is quite willing, for commercial reasons, to point out the bacillus in the system of its neighbor. In 1897 Texas was infected pretty widely with yellow fever; but pressure on the boards of health kept them from reporting it for what it was. In light cases they called it dengue or breakbone fever. Now, dengue has this short-coming: that people do not die of it. Disobliging sufferers from the alleged "dengue" began to fill up the cemeteries, thereby embarrassing the local authorities, until one of the health officers had a brilliant idea. "When they die," he said, "we'll call it malarial fever." And as such it went upon the records. Two recalcitrant members of the Galveston Health Board reported certain extremely definite cases as yellow fever. They were forced to resign, and the remainder of the Board passed resolutions declaring that there was no yellow fever, there never had been any yellow fever, and there never would be any yellow fever as long as they held their jobs—or words to that effect. San Antonio also had the epidemic; so much of it that the mail service was suspended; but nothing worse than dengue was permitted to go on the records. Later a Marine Hospital Service surgeon was sent by the government to investigate and report on the Texas situation. He told the truth as he found it and became exceedingly unpopular. Lynching was one of the mildest things they were going to do to him in Texas. And all this time, while Texas was strenuously claiming freedom from the yellow plague, her emissaries were discovering cases in New Orleans that the local authorities there had somehow carelessly overlooked. The game of quarantine, as played by the health authorities of the far Southern States, and played for money stakes, if you please, is not an edifying spectacle in twentieth century civilization.
Newspapers, Politicians, and the Bubonic Plague
But if it is bad in the South, it is worse in the West. To-day California is paying for her sins of eight years ago in suppressing honest reports of bubonic plague, when she should have been suppressing the plague itself. That the dreaded Asiatic pest maintains its foothold there is due to the cowardice and dishonesty of the clique then in power, which constituted a scandal unparalleled in our history, a scandal that, with the present growing enlightenment, can never be repeated.
Early in 1900 the first case of the present bubonic plague onset appeared in San Francisco's Chinatown. I say "present" because I believe it has never wholly died out in the last eight years. A conference of the managing editors of the newspapers, known as the "midnight meeting," was held, at which it was decided that no news should be printed admitting the plague. The Chronicle started by announcing under big headlines: "Plague Fake Part of Plot to Plunder." "There Is No Bubonic Plague in San Francisco." This was "in the interest of business." Meantime the Chinese, aided by local politicians, were hiding their sick. Out of the first 100 cases, I believe only three were discovered otherwise than by the finding of the dead bodies. Sick Chinamen were shipped away; venal doctors diagnosed the pest as "chicken cholera," "septemia hemorrhagica," "diphtheria" and other known and unknown ailments.
In May, 1900, came the blow that all San Francisco had dreaded: Texas and New Orleans quarantined against the city, and business languished. At this time two men were in control of the plague situation: Dr. Williamson of the City Board of Health and Dr. J. J. Kinyoun of the Marine Hospital Service. Dr. Williamson and Dr. Kinyoun both declared plague to be present in the city. The business interests represented in the Merchants' Association appealed to Kinyoun to suppress his reports to Washington. In return he invited them to read the law which compelled him to make reports. They then tackled Dr. Williamson, who replied that he'd tell the truth as he found it, and if it was distasteful to them, they needn't listen. They went to Mayor Phelan demanding Williamson's head on a salver. Mayor Phelan stuck by his man. Governor Gage they found more amenable. He issued a proclamation declaring that there was no plague. Governor Gage is not a physician or a man of scientific attainment. There is nothing in his record or career to show that he could distinguish between a plague bacillus and a potato-bug. Nevertheless he spent considerable of the State's money wiring positive and unauthorized statements to Washington. His State Board of Health refused to stand by him and he cut off their appropriation; whereupon they resigned, and he secured another and more servile board, remolded nearer to the heart's desire. Meantime the newspapers were strenuously denying all the real facts of the epidemic, their policy culminating in the complete suppression of plague news. Before this, however, they so inflamed public opinion against Dr. Kinyoun and Dr. Williamson that these two gentlemen became pariahs. Here are a few of the amenities of journalism in the golden West, culled from the display heads of the papers:
"Kinyoun, Enemy of the City."
"Desperate, Kinyoun Commits Another Outrage on San Francisco."
"Board of Health for Graft and Plunder."
"Our Bubonic Board."
One gentle patriot in the State Senate suggested in a thoughtful and logical speech that Dr. Kinyoun should be hanged. This practical spirit so appealed to the Chinese organizations (it was Chinatown that suffered chiefly from the quarantine rigors) that those bodies put a price of $10,000 on Kinyoun's head—not his political head, understand, but the head which was very firmly set on a pair of broad shoulders. Some of the officer's friends went to the Chinese Consul-General and explained unofficially that they would hold him responsible for any accident to Dr. Kinyoun. That personage, supposing that they were suggesting the slow accounting of diplomacy, smiled blandly and said:
"Gentlemen, I sympathize with you; but what can I do?" "Do?" said the spokesman, "Why, you can climb a lamp-post at the end of a rope within one hour of the time that Kinyoun is killed. That's what you can and will do."
The bland smile disappeared from the Oriental's face. He summoned a conference of the secret societies, and the reward for Kinyoun's death was abrogated. Next, the white politicians of Chinatown tried their hand and organized a lynching bee, but the intrepid doctor fortified his quarters, armed his men, and was so obviously prepared for trouble that the mob did nothing more than gather. Arrested twice on trumped-up charges, threatened for contempt of court, he continued to fulfill his duties. Governor Gage and the Republican State Committee now inaugurated a campaign of influence upon President McKinley, which resulted in a Federal Commission, consisting of Drs. Flexner, Barker, and Novy, all eminent scientists, being sent to the troubled city; where, instead of being received with honors, they were abused by the newspapers; insulted by the Governor; and had the humiliation of seeing the doors of the University of California slammed in their faces after they had been invited there. Of course, the Commission found bubonic plague, because it was there for any one to find.
Thus far the United States Marine Hospital authorities had stood back of their men. Now they began to weaken. The findings of the Federal Commission were kept out of the weekly service reports, and data of the epidemic were edited out of the public health bulletins, in disregard of the law. Even this subserviency did not satisfy the California delegation; they wanted Kinyoun out.
And, on April 6, 1901, after a year's brave fight in the face of public contumely and constant physical danger, Dr. Kinyoun was kicked up-stairs into a soft berth at Detroit. He resigned. So the M. H. S. lost a brave, faithful, and able public servant and for once blackened its own fine record.
There isn't space to give the rest of the plague history; how it cropped out in other parts of California; how it was shipped to Matanza, Mexico, and all but ruined that town; how the hated local Health Board, in the face of the Governor of the State, and the Federal authorities, stuck to their guns and won the fight, for San Francisco finally admitted the presence of the plague, and asked for governmental aid. Rupert Blue, one of the best surgeons in the Marine Hospital Service, was assigned to the terrified city, and though he has not been able to wipe out the pestilence, the fact that the smoldering danger has not broken into devastating flame is due largely to his unremitting watchfulness and his unhampered authority. "Business Interests" have had their trial in San Francisco. And San Francisco has had enough of "suppression." To-day the truth is being told about bubonic plague in the public health reports, and, I believe, in the newspapers.
Rochester, New York, one of the most progressive cities in the country in hygienic matters, has established an excellent system of school inspection and free treatment. But the children who most need attention lack it through the carelessness or negligence of their parents. Now, it is this very "submerged tenth" who are set to work early in life. Under the law, the health officer cannot say, "Unless you are sound, you shall not attend school." But there is an ordinance providing that, without a certificate of good physical condition, no child shall be permitted to work in a store or factory. So Dr. Goler refuses these certificates, not only in cases of low vitality and under-nutrition, but for any defect in the applicant's teeth, sense-apparatus, or tonsils, a fertile source of future debility. What is the result? There is a rush of these neglected youngsters to the clinics, and the Rochester schools graduate every year into the world of labor a class of young citizens in splendid physical condition, unhandicapped by the taints which make, not for death alone, but for vice and crime. For the great moral lesson of modern hygiene is that debility and immorality run in a vicious parallel.
As I have said, the most thoroughly organized city department is that of New York City, and this is so because public opinion in New York, taught by long experience that its trust will not be betrayed, is, in so far as it turns upon sanitary matters at all, solidly behind its health department. Hence its guardians work with a free hand.
Fighting Prejudice and the Death Rate in Charleston
But what is the guardian to do when the guarded refuse to bear their share of the burden; refuse, indeed, to manifest any calculable interest, except in the way of occasional opposition? Such is the case in Charleston, South Carolina, where every man aspires to do just as his remotest recognizable ancestor did, and the best citizens would all live in trees and eat nuts if they were fully convinced of the truth of the Darwinian theory. Charleston, lovely, romantic, peaceful Charleston, swept by ocean breezes and the highest death rate of any considerable American city; breathing serenely the perfume of its flowers and the bacilli of its in-bred tuberculosis; Charleston, so delightful to the eye, so surprising to the nose!
By accident Charleston got an efficient health officer not long ago. A deserved epidemic of smallpox had descended upon the unvaccinated negroes and scared the tranquil city. Dr. J. Mercier Green was called from private practice to tackle the situation. For weeks he waded in the gore of lacerated arms, and his path through darkest Charleston could be followed by rising and falling waves of Afro-American ululations; but he checked the epidemic, and when three months later the city physician died, he got the place. Now, had Dr. Green been wise in his generation, he would have been content to keep his municipal patient reasonably free from smallpox and live a quiet life. But he straightway manifested an exasperating interest in other ailments. He stirred up the matter of the water supply, regardless of the fact that all Charleston's great-great-grandfather had drunk water from polluted cisterns and died of typhoid as a gentleman should. He pitched into doctors nearly old enough to be his own great-great-grandfather because they failed to report diseases properly. He answered back, in the public prints, the unanswerable Good-Old-Way argument. He opined, quite openly, that there was too much tuberculosis, too high an infant mortality, too prevalent a habit of contagious disease, and he more than hinted that the city itself was at fault.
In the matter of the cisterns, for instance. Charleston now has a good city water supply, fairly free from contamination where it starts, and safely filtered before it reaches the city. But a great many of "our best citizens" prefer their own cisterns, on the grandfather principle. These are underground, for the most part, and are regularly supplied from the roof-drainage. Also, they are intermittently supplied by leakage from adjacent privy-vaults, Charleston having a very rudimentary and fractional sewerage-system. Therefore typhoid is not only logical but inevitable. I have no such revolutionary contempt for private rights as to deny the privilege of any gentleman to drink such form of sewage as best pleases him; but when it comes to supplying the public schools with this poison, the affair is somewhat different. Yet, as far as the Charleston Board of School Commissioners has felt constrained to go, up to date, is this: they have written to the City Physician asking that "occasional inspection" of the cisterns be made, and decorating their absurd request with ornamental platitudes.
With sewage it is the same situation. There is, indeed, a primitive sewer system in part of the city. But any attempt to extend it meets with a determined and time-rooted opposition. The Charlestonians are afraid of sewer-gas, but apparently have no fear of the filth which generates sewer-gas; said filth accumulating in Charleston's streets, subject only to the attention of the dissipated-looking buzzards, which are one of the conservative and local features of the place. I have seen these winged scavengers at work. It is not an appetizing sight. But with one exception they afford the only example of unofficial effort toward the betterment of sanitary conditions, that I witnessed in Charleston. The other came from a policeman, patiently poking with his club at the vent of one of the antediluvian sewers, which had—as usual—become blocked. Yet, despite public indifference and opposition, Dr. Green, without any special training or brilliant ability as a sanitarian, is, by dogged, fighting persistency lowering the death-rate of his city.
There is also a non-medical legislator to whom Charleston owes a debt of unacknowledged gratitude. Mr. James Cosgrove succeeded in getting the Charleston Neck marshes, wherein breeds the malaria-mosquito, drained. Since then the death rate from malaria, which was nothing less than scandalous, has dwindled to proportions that are almost respectable—if, indeed, it were respectable to permit any deaths from an easily destructible nuisance like the mosquito. Nearly all our cities, by the way, are curiously indifferent to the depredations of this man-eater. Suppose, for an example, that Trenton, New Jersey, were suddenly beset by a brood of copperhead snakes, which killed, let us say, two or three people a week and dangerously poisoned ten times that number. What an anti-snake campaign there would be in that aroused and terrified community! Well, that much more dangerous wild creature, the Anopheles mosquito, in a recent year slew more than 100 people in Savannah, Georgia, without arousing any public resentment. And Jacksonville's home brood in 1901 slaughtered 90 of its 30,000 citizens and dangerously poisoned probably 1000 more. New Orleans, by the way, having executed a triumphant massacre of the yellow fever mosquito (stegomyia) is now undertaking to rid itself of all the other varieties. And Baltimore's health bureau has succeeded in obtaining a grant of $10,000 for the purpose of demonstrating the feasibility of mosquito-extermination.
Killing Off the City Negro
Throughout the South, figures and conditions alike are complicated by the negro problem. Southern cities keep a separate roster of mortalities; one for the whites, one for the blacks. In so far as they expect to be judged by the white rate alone, this is a manifestly unfair procedure, since, allowing for a certain racial excess of liability to disease, the negro in the South corresponds, in vital statistics, to the tenement-dweller in the great cities. If New Orleans is to set aside its negro mortality, that is; the death rate among those living in the least favorable environment, New York should set apart the deaths in the teeming rookeries east of the Bowery, the most crowded district in the world, and ask to be judged on the basis of what remains after that exclusion. New York, however, would be glad to diminish the mortality in its tenements. New Orleans, Atlanta, Charleston, or Savannah would be loath to diminish their negro mortality. That is the frank statement of what may seem a brutal fact. The negro is extremely fertile. He breeds rapidly. In those cities where he gathers, unless he also died rapidly, he would soon overwhelm the whites by sheer force of numbers. But, as it is, he dies about as rapidly as he breeds. Recent statistics in Savannah, for instance, showed this curious situation:
Excess of births over deaths among the whites, 245.
Excess of births over deaths among the blacks, 10.
Health Officer Brunner has stated the case, in a manner which, I fancy, required no little courage in an official of a Southern community:
We face the following issues: First: one set of people, the Caucasian, with a normal death-rate of less than 16 per thousand per annum, and right alongside of them is the Negro race with a death-rate of 25 to 30 per thousand. Second: the first named race furnishing a normal amount of criminals and paupers and the second race of people furnishing an abnormal percentage of lawbreakers and paupers.
Is the Negro receiving a square deal? Let this commission investigate the houses he lives in; why, in his race, tuberculosis is increasing; why he furnishes his enormous quota to the chain-gang and the penitentiary. Observe the house he must live in, the food that he must eat, and learn of all his environments. The negro is with you for all time. He is what you will make him and it is "up" to the white people to prevent him from becoming a criminal and to guard him against tuberculosis, syphilis, etc. If he is tainted with disease you will suffer; if he develops criminal tendencies you will be affected.
Will not the white South, eventually, in order to save itself from disease, be forced to save its negroes from disease? It would seem an inevitable conclusion.
Private Interests in Public Murder
Always and everywhere present are the private influences which work against the public health. Individuals and corporations owning foul tenements or lodging-houses resent, by all the evasions inherent in our legal system, every endeavor to eliminate the perilous conditions from which they take their profit. For the precious right to dump refuse into streams and lakes, sundry factories, foundries, slaughter-houses, glue works, and other necessary but unsavory industries send delegations to the legislature and oppose the creation of any body having authority to abate the nuisances.
Purveyors of bad milk decline to clean up their dairies until the outbreak of some disease which they have been distributing by the can brings down the authorities upon them. Could the general public but know how often minor accesses of scarlet fever, diphtheria, and typhoid follow the lines of a specific milk route, there would be a tremendous and universal impetus to the needed work of milk inspection. In this respect the country is the enemy of the city: the country, which, with its own overwhelming natural advantages, distributes and radiates what disease it does foster among its urban neighbors, by sheer ignorance or sheer obstinate resistance to the "new-fangled notions of science." Such men as the late Colonel Waring of New York, Dr. Fulton of Baltimore, and Dr. Wende of Buffalo have repeatedly pointed out the debt of death and suffering which the city, often well organized against infections, owes to the unorganized and uncaring rural districts. Reciprocity in health matters can be represented, numerically, by the figure zero. It occasionally happens that the conflict between private and public interests assumes an obviously amusing phase. The present admirable Food and Drug Department of the Indiana board was not established without considerable opposition. One of the chief objectors was a member of the legislature, who made loud lamentation regarding the expense. Up rose another legislator, all primed for the fight, and asked if the objector would answer a few questions. The objector consented.
"Do you know the W—— baking-powder?"
"Yes."
"Do you know that it would naturally come to the food laboratory for analysis, were such a laboratory established?"
"I suppose it might."
"Do you know that the W—— baking-powder is 20 per cent. clay?"
"No."
"Would it surprise you to learn that it contained a high percentage of clay?"
No answer.
"Are you counsel for the W—— Baking Powder Co.?"
"Yes."
"That's all."
It was enough. The bill passed.
Everybody's health is nobody's business. There, as I see it, is the bane of the whole situation at present. To be sure, epidemics occasionally wake us up. And, really, an epidemic is a fine thing for a city to have. It is the only scourge that drives us busy Americans to progress. It took an epidemic of typhoid, a shameful and dreadful one, to teach Ithaca that it must not drink filth. Only after Scranton faced a thousand cases of the fever did it assert itself and demand protection for its water supply. New Orleans would probably be having (and concealing) yellow fever yet, but for the paralysis of fright which the onset of three years ago caused. Boston's fine system of medical inspection in the schools is the outcome of a diphtheria scare. Smallpox is a splendid stimulator of vaccination; so much so that some of the country's leading sanitarians now advocate the abolition of pest-houses for this avoidable ailment, and dependence upon the vaccine virus alone.
But epidemics are only the guerrilla attacks of the general enemy. It is in the diseases always with us that the peril lies. Tuberculosis, carrying off ten per cent. of the entire nation, and making its worst ravages upon those in the prime of life, is a more terrible foe than was ever smallpox, or cholera, or yellow fever, or any of the grisly sounding bugaboos. Why, not so long ago, three highly civilized States went into quite a little frenzy over a poor dying wretch of a leper who had got loose; whereas every man that spits on the floor of a building wherein people live or work is more of an actual peril, in that one foul act, than the leper in his whole stricken life. The twin shames of venereal disease, blinked by every health board in the country (Detroit possibly deserves a partial exception) are, in their effect upon the race, in blindness, deafness, idiocy, and death so dreadful a menace to-day, that consumption alone can march beside them in the leadership of the destroyers. Typhoid, so easily conquerable, claims its annual thousands of sacrificed victims. And the slaughter of the innocents goes endlessly on, recorded only in the dire figures of infant mortality. To-day, as I write, the whole nation is thrilled with horror at the tragedy of 150 young lives snuffed out in a needless school panic in Cleveland. Had my pen the power, perhaps I could thrill the nation with horror over the more dreadful fact that some 1100 children under five years of age die yearly in Fall River, the vast majority of them sacrificed to bad food and living conditions that might better be called dying conditions. One half of the total mortality of that busy, profit-yielding city is among children under five years of age, two-fifths among children under one year. Does no baneful light shine from those figures?
Yet, over and above the minor discouragements, failures, and set-backs, looms the tremendous fact of a universal and gathering movement. It is still, in any general sense, inchoate, and, except in certain specific relations, invertebrate. But one cannot follow the work of the public health guardians without feeling the cumulative force of progress. As I have said, the newspapers have been a vital element in awaking the public. Associations are being formed the country over for the prevention of disease. There is a steady increase in the power and authority of those officially charged with hygienic control. Makers of deleterious or poisonous foods, and the vultures who prey on the sick through fraudulent patent medicines are being curbed by pure food and drug laws. Milk inspection is saving the lives of more children every year, as meat inspection is prolonging the lives of the poor. Definite instances of progress are almost startling: the fact that Massachusetts has so purified its public waters that for a year there has been no typhoid epidemic ascribable to any public supply; the passage of a radical law in Indiana which forbids the marriage of imbeciles, epileptics, and persons suffering from a contagious or venereal disease; the saving of babies' lives at $10 a life in Rochester by pure milk protected and guaranteed by the municipality; the halving of the diphtheria death rate by the free distribution of antitoxin; the slow but sure and universal yearly decrease in the Great White Plague—all these and more are the first, slow, powerful evidences of national progress.
A LITTLE VICTORY FOR THE GENERAL
BY JOSEPHINE DASKAM BACON
ILLUSTRATIONS BY REGINALD BIRCH
Caroline, Miss Honey, and the General were taking the morning air. Caroline walked ahead, her chin well up, her nose sniffing pleasurably the unaccustomed asphalt, the fresh damp of the river, and the watered bridle path. The starched ties at the back of her white pinafore fairly took the breeze, as she swung along to the thrilling clangor of the monster hurdy-gurdy. Miss Honey, urban and blasé, balanced herself with dignity upon her long, boat-shaped roller-skates, and watched with patronizing interest the mysterious jumping through complicated diagrams chalked on the pavement by young persons with whom she was unacquainted.
The General sucked a clothespin meditatively: his eyes were fixed on something beyond his immediate surroundings. Occasionally a ravishing smile swept up from the dimples at his mouth to the yellow rings beneath his cap frill; he flapped his hands, emitting soft, vague sounds. At such times a wake of admiration bubbled behind him. Delia, who propelled his carriage, pursed her lips consciously and affected not to hear the enraptured comments of the women who passed them.
To the left the trees, set in a smooth green carpet, threw out tiny, polished, early May leaves; graceful, white-coated children dotted the long park. Beyond them the broad blue river twinkled in the sun, the tugs and barges glided down, the yachts strained their white sails against the purple bluffs of the Palisades. To the right towered the long, unbroken rows of brick and stone; story on story of shining windows, draped and muffled in silk and lace; flight after flight of clean granite steps, polite, impersonal, hostile as the monuments in a graveyard.
Immobile ladies glided by on the great pleasure drive, like large tinted statues, dressed altogether as the colored pictures in fashion books, holding white curly dogs in their curved arms; the coachmen in front of them seemed carved in plum-colored broadcloth; only by watching the grooms' eyelids could one ascertain that they were flesh and blood. Young girls, two, three, and four, cantered by; their linen habits rose and fell decorously, their hair was smooth. Mounted policemen, glorious in buttons, breathing out authority, curvetted past, and everywhere and always the chug-chug-chug of the gleaming, fierce-eyed motor cars filled one's ears. They darted past, flaming scarlet, somber olive, and livid white; a crouching, masked figure intent at the wheel, veiled, shapeless women behind, a whir of dust to show where they had been a breath before.
And everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, a thin stream of white and pink and blue, a tumbling river of curls and caps and bare legs, were the children. A babble of shrill cries, of chattering laughter, of fretful screams, an undercurrent of remonstrance, of soothing patience, of angry threatening, marked their slow progress up and down the walk.
To Caroline, fresh from untrammeled sporting through neighborly suburban yards, this disciplined procession, under the escort of Delia and the General, was fascinating to a degree. Far from resenting the authority she would have scorned at home, she derived an intense satisfaction from it, and pranced ostentatiously beside the perambulator, mimicking Miss Honey's unconscious reference to a higher power in the matter of suitable crossings and preferred playfellows with the absorbed gravity of the artist.
"See! General, see the wobblybubble," Delia murmured affectionately. "(Will you see that child turn his head just like a grown person? Did you ever see anything as smart as that?) Did he like the red one best? So does Delia. We'll come over here, and then you won't get the sun in your precious eyes. Do you want me to push you frontwards, so you can see me? Just wait till we get across, and I will. Look out, Miss Honey! Take hold of your cousin's hand and run across together, now, like good girls."
Miss Honey made an obedient snatch at Caroline's apron strings, and darted forward with a long roll of her skates. The road was clear for a block. Delia, with a quick glance to left and right, lowered the perambulator to the road level and forged ahead. Caroline, nose in air, studied the nearest policeman curiously.
"Look out, there! Look out!"
A man's voice like a pistol shot crashed behind them. Caroline heard quick steps and a woman's scream, and looked up at a huge, blood-red bulk that swooped around the corner and dashed forward. But Miss Honey's hand was clutching her apron string, and Miss Honey's weight as she fell, tangled in the skates, dragged her down. Caroline, toppling, caught in one dizzy backward glance a vision of a face staring down on her, white as chalk under a black mustache and staring goggles, and another face, Delia's, white too, with eyes more strained and terrible than the goggles themselves. One second that look swept her and Miss Honey, and then, shifting, fell upon the General strapped securely into his carriage. Even as Caroline caught her breath, he flew by her like an arrow, his blue eyes round with surprise under a whirl of white parasol, the wicker body of the perambulator swaying and lurching. With that breath still in her nostrils, she was pushed violently against Miss Honey, who was dragged over her from the other side by a large hairy hand. A sharp blow from her boot heel struck Caroline's cheek, and she screamed with the pain; but her cry was lost in the louder one that echoed around her as the dust from the red monster blew in her eyes and shut out Delia's figure, flat on the ground, one arm over her face as the car rushed over.
"My God! She's down!" That was the man.
"Take his number!" a shrill voice pierced the growing confusion.
Caroline, crying with pain, was forced to her feet and stumbled along, one apron string twisted fast in Miss Honey's hand.
"Here, get out o' this—don't let the children see anything! Let's get home."
"No, wait a minute. Let's see if she's alive. Have they got the ambulance?"
"Look out, there, Miss Dorothy, you just stop by me, or you'll be run over, too!"
"See! She's moving her head! Maybe she's not——"
Sobbing with excitement, Caroline wrenched herself free from the tangle of nurses and carriages, and pushed her way through the crowd. Against the curb, puffing and grinding, stood the great red engine; on the front seat a tall policeman sat; one woman in the back leaned over another, limp against the high cushions, and fanned her with the stiff vizor of her leather cap.
"It's all right, dear, it's all right," she repeated monotonously, with set lips, "the doctor's coming. It's all right."
Caroline wriggled between two policemen, and made for a striped blue and white skirt that lay motionless on the ground. Across the white apron ran a broad, dirty smudge.
Caroline ran forward.
"Delia! Delia!" she gulped. "Is she—is she dead?"
A little man with eye-glasses looked up from where he knelt beside the blue and white skirt.
"I don't believe so, my dear," he said briskly. "Is this your nurse? See, she's opening her eyes now—speak to her gently."
As he shifted a leather-covered flask from one hand to the other, Caroline saw a strange face with drawn, purplish lids where she had always known two merry gray eyes, and tight thin lips she could not believe Delia's. A nervous fear seized her, and she turned to run away; but she remembered suddenly how kind Delia had been to her; how that very morning—it seemed so long ago, now—Delia had helped her with her stubby braids of hair, and chided Miss Honey for laughing at her ignorance of the customs of the park. She gathered her courage together and crouched down by the silent, terrifying figure.
"Hel—hello, Delia!" she began jerkily, wincing as the eyes opened and stared stupidly at the ring of anxious faces. "How do you feel, Delia?"
"Lean down," said the little man softly, "she wants to say something."
Caroline leaned lower.
"General," Delia muttered, "where's General?"
The little man frowned.
"Do you know what she means?" he asked.
Caroline patted her bruised cheek.
"Of course I do," she said shortly. "That's the baby. Oh," as she remembered, "where is the General?"
"Here—here's the baby," called some one. "Push over that carriage," and a woman crowded through the ring with the General, pink and placid under his parasol.
"Lift him out," said the little man, and as the woman fumbled at the strap, he picked the baby out neatly and held him down by the girl on the ground.
"Here's your baby, Delia," he said, with a kind roughness in his voice. "Safe and sound—not a scratch! Can you sit up and take him?"
And then, while the standing crowd craned their necks, and even the steady procession, moving in the way the police kept clear for them, paused a moment to stare, while the little doctor held his breath and the ambulance came clanging up the street, Delia sat up as straight as the mounted policeman beside her and held out her arms.
"CAROLINE WALKED AHEAD, HER CHIN WELL UP, HER NOSE SNIFFING PLEASURABLY THE UNACCUSTOMED ASPHALT"
"General, oh, General!" she cried, and buried her face in his fat warm neck.
The men coughed, the women's faces twisted, but the little doctor watched her intently.
"Move your leg," he said sharply. "Now the other. Hurt you? Not at all?"
He turned to the young man in a white jacket, who had jumped from the back of the ambulance.
"I thought so," he said. "Though it didn't seem possible. I saw the thing go over her. Right over her apron—never touched her. Half an inch more——"
"Please, is Miss—the other little girl—is she——"
This was Delia's old voice, and Caroline smiled happily at her.
"She's all right, Delia—here she is!"
Miss Honey limped across on one roller skate, pale, but conscious of her dramatic value, and the crowd drew a long breath of relief.
"You are a very brave girl," said the doctor, helping Delia to her feet and tucking the General, who alternately growled and cooed at his clothespin, into the perambulator. "You have undoubtedly saved the lives of all three of these children, and their parents will appreciate it, you may be sure. The way you sent that baby wagon flying across the street—well, any time you're out of a job, just come to me, that's all. Dr. Gibbs, West Forty-ninth. Can you walk now? How far do you have to go?"
The crowd had melted like smoke. Only the most curious and the idlest lingered and watched the hysteria of the woman in the automobile, who clutched her companion, weeping and laughing. The chauffeur sat stolid, but Caroline's keen round eyes saw that he shook from the waist down like a man in a chill.
"Yes, sir, I'm all right. It's not so very far." But Delia leaned on the handle she pushed, and the chug-chug of the great car sent the blood out of her cheeks. The little doctor frowned.
"Look here," he said, "I'll tell you what you'll do. You come down these steps with me, there aren't but three of them, you see, and we'll just step in here a moment. I don't know what house it is, but I guess it'll be all right."
Before Delia could protest, he had pressed the button, and a man in livery was opening the door.
"We've just escaped a nasty accident out here," said the little doctor easily. "You were probably looking out of the window? Yes. Well, this young woman is a sort of a patient of mine—Dr. Gibbs, West Forty-ninth Street—and though she's very plucky and perfectly uninjured, I want her to rest a moment in the hall here and have a drink of water, if your mistress doesn't object. Just take this card up and explain the circumstances and"—his hand went into his pocket a moment—"that's about all. Sit down, my dear."
The man took in at a glance the neat uniform of the nurse, the General's smart, if diminutive, apparel, and the unmistakable though somewhat ruffled exterior of Miss Honey.
"Very well, sir," he said, politely, taking the card. "It will be all right, sir, I'm sure. Thank you, sir. Sit down, please. It will be all right. I will tell Madame Nicola."
"Well, well, so this is Madame Nicola's!" The little doctor looked around him appreciatively, as the servant ran up the stairs.
"I wish I could stay with you, chickens, but I'm late for an appointment as it is. I must rush along. Now, mind you, stay here half an hour, Delia, and sit down. You're no trouble at all, and Madame Nicola knows who I am—if she remembers. I sprayed her throat once, if I'm not mistaken—she was on a tour, at Pittsburg. She'll take care of you." He opened the door. "You're a good girl, you biggest one," he added, nodding at Caroline. "You do as you're told. Good-bye."
"YOUNG GIRLS ... CANTERED BY; THEIR LINEN HABITS ROSE AND FELL DECOROUSLY, THEIR HAIR WAS SMOOTH"
The door shut, and Caroline, Miss Honey, and Delia looked at each other in a daze. Tears filled Delia's eyes, but she controlled her voice and only said huskily, "Come here, Miss Honey, and let me brush you off—you look dreadful. Did it—were you—are you hurt, dear?"
"No, but you pushed me awful hard, Delia, and a nasty big man grabbed me and tore my guimpe—see! I wish you'd told me what you were going to do," began Miss Honey irritably.
"And you gave me a big kick—it was me he grabbed—look at my cheek!" Caroline's lips began to twitch; she felt hideously tired, suddenly.
"Children, children, don't quarrel. General, darling, won't you sit still, please? You hurt Delia's knees, and you feel so heavy. Oh, I wish we were all home!"
The man in uniform came down the stairs. "Will you all step up, madame says, and she has something for you up there. I'll take the baby," as Delia's eyes measured the climb. "Lord, I won't drop her—I've got two o' my own. 'Bout a year, isn't she?"
"He's a boy," panted Delia, as she rested her weight on the rail, "and he's only eight months last week," with a proud smile at the General's massive proportions.
"Well, he is a buster, isn't he? Here is the nurse, madame, and the children. The doctor has gone."
Caroline stretched her eyes wide and abandoned herself to a frank inspection of her surroundings. For this she must be pardoned, for every square inch of the dark, deep-colored room had been taken bodily from Italian palaces of the most unimpeachable Renaissance variety. With quick intuition, she immediately recognized a background for many a tale of courts and kings hitherto unpictured to herself, and smiled with pleasure at the Princess who advanced, most royally clad in long, pink, lace-clouded draperies, to meet them.
"You are the brave nurse my maid told me about," said the Princess; "she saw it all. You ought to be very proud of your quick wit. I have some sherry for you, and you must lie down a little, and then I will send you home."
Delia blushed and sank into a high carved chair, the General staring curiously about him. "It wasn't anything at all," she said awkwardly; "if I could have a drink——"
Caroline checked the Princess as she moved toward a wonderful colored decanter with wee sparkling tumblers like curved bits of rainbow grouped about it.
"Delia means a drink of water," she explained politely. "She only drinks water—sometimes a little tea, but most usu'lly water."
"The sherry will do her more good, I think," the Princess returned, noticing Caroline for the first time, apparently, her hand on the decanter.
"THE STANDING CROWD CRANED THEIR NECKS, AS DELIA SAT UP STRAIGHT AND HELD OUT HER ARMS"
At this point Miss Honey descended from a throne of faded wine-colored velvet, and addressed the Princess with her most impressive and explanatory manner.
"It won't do you any good at all to pour that out," she began, with her curious little air of delivering a set address, prepared in private some time before, "and I'll tell you why. Delia knew a nurse once that drank some beer, and the baby got burned, and she never would drink anything if you gave her a million dollars. Besides, it makes her sick."
The Princess looked amused and turned to a maid who appeared at that moment, with apron strings rivaling Caroline's.
"Get me a glass of water, please," she said, "and what may I give you—milk, perhaps? I don't know very well what children drink."
"Thank you, we'd like some water, too," Miss Honey returned primly; "we had some soda-water, strawberry, once to-day."
Caroline cocked her head to one side and tried to remember what the lady's voice made her think of. Suddenly it came to her. It was not like a person talking at all, it was like a person singing. Up and down her voice traveled, loud and soft; it was quite pleasant to hear it.
"Do you feel better now? I am very glad. Bring in that reclining chair, Ellis, from my room; these great seats are rather stiff," said the Princess, and Delia, protesting, was made comfortable in a large curved lounging basket, with the General, contentedly putting his clothespin through its paces, in her arm.
"How old is it?" the Princess inquired after an interval of silence.
"He's eight months, madame, last week—eight months and ten days, really."
"That's not very old, now, is it?" pursued the lady. "I suppose they don't know very much, do they, so young?"
"Indeed he does, though," Delia protested. "You'll be surprised. Just watch him, now. Look at Delia, darlin'; where's Delia?"
The General withdrew his lingering gaze from the clothespin, and turned his blue eyes wonderingly up to her. The corners of his mouth trembled, widened, his eyelids crinkled, and then he smiled delightfully, straight into the eyes of the nurse, stretched up a wavering pink hand, and patted her cheek. A soft, gurgling monosyllable, difficult of classification but easy to interpret, escaped him.
The Princess smiled appreciatively, and moved with a stately, long step toward them.
"That was very pretty," she said, but Delia did not hear her.
"My baby, my own baby!" she murmured with a shiver, and hiding her face in the General's neck she sobbed aloud.
Miss Honey, shocked and embarrassed, twisted her feet nervously and looked at the inlaid floor. Caroline shared these feelings, but though she turned red, she spoke sturdily.
"I guess Delia feels bad," she suggested shyly, "when she thinks about—about what happened, you know. She don't cry usu'lly."
"'I'VE GOT TWO O' MY OWN'"
The Princess smiled again, this time directly at Caroline, who fairly blinked in the radiance. With her long brown eyes still holding Caroline's round ones, she patted Delia's shoulder kindly, and both children saw her chin tremble.
The General, smothered in that sudden hug, whimpered a little and kicked out wildly with his fat, white-stockinged legs. Seen from the rear he had the appearance of a neat, if excited, package, unaccountably frilled about with embroidered flannel. Delia straightened herself, dabbed apologetically at her eyes, and coughed.
"It's bottle time," she announced in horror-stricken tones, consulting a large nickel watch hanging from her belt, under the apron. "It's down in the carriage. Could I have a little boiling water to heat it, if you please?"
"Assuredly," said the Princess. "Ellis, will you get the—the bottle from the baby's carriage and some boiling water, please. Do you mix it here?"
"Mix—the food is all prepared, madam." Delia spoke with repressed scorn. "I only want to heat it for him."
"Oh, in that case, Ellis, take it down and have it heated, or," as the nurse half rose, "perhaps you would feel better about it if you attended to it yourself?"
"Yes, I think I will go down if you don't mind—when persons aren't used to 'em they're apt to be a little careless, and I wouldn't have it break and him losing his three o'clock bottle, for the world. You know how it is."
The Princess shook her head whimsically. "But surely you will leave the baby," and she moved toward them again. "I will hold it," with a half grimace at her own condescension. "It seems so very good and cheerful—I thought they cried. Will it come to me?"
Delia loosened her arms, but tightened them again as the little creature leaned forward to catch at the swinging lace on the lady's gown.
"I—I think I'll take baby with me. Thank you just the same, and he'll go to any one—yes, indeed—but I feel sort of nervous, I think I'd better take him. If anything should happen.... Wave your hand good-bye, now, General!"
The General flapped his arms violently, and bestowed a toothless but affectionate grin upon the wearer of the fascinating, swaying lace, before he disappeared with the delighted Ellis in the van.
"And can you buy all that devotion for twenty, thirty, or is it forty dollars a month, I wonder?" mused the Princess. "Dear me," she added, petulantly. "It really makes one actually want to hold it! It seems a jolly little rat—they're not all like that, are they? They howl, I'm sure."
Again Miss Honey took the floor.
"When babies are sick or you don't treat them right," she announced didactically, "they cry, but not a well baby, Delia says. I"—with conscious pride—"screamed night and day for two weeks!"
"Really!" observed the Princess. "That must have been—er—trying for your family!"
"Worried to death!" Miss Honey rejoined airily, with such an adult intonation that the Princess started.
"The General, he just laughs all the time," Caroline volunteered, "unless you tease him," she added guiltily, "and then he squawks."
"Yes, indeed," Miss Honey bore witness, jealous of the lady's flashing smile to Caroline, "my mother says I'm twice the trouble he is!"
The Princess laughed aloud. "You're all trouble enough, I can well believe," she said carelessly, "though you particular three are certainly amusing little duds—for an afternoon. But for a steady diet—I'm afraid I'd get a bit tired of you, eh?"
She tapped their cheeks lightly with a cool, sweet-smelling finger. Miss Honey smiled uncertainly, but Caroline edged away. There was something about this beautiful tall lady she could not understand, something that alternately attracted and repelled. She was grown up, certainly; her skirts, her size, and her coiled hair proved that conclusively, and the servants obeyed her without question. But what was it? She was not like other grown-up people one knew. One moment she sparkled at you and the next moment she forgot you. It was perfectly obvious that she wanted the General only because Delia had not wanted to relinquish him, which was not like grown people; it was like—yes, that was it: she was like a little girl, herself, even though she was so tall and had such large red and blue rings on her fingers.
Vaguely this rushed through Caroline's mind, and it was with an unconscious air of patronage that she said, as one making allowances for inexperience, "When you get married, then you'll have to get tired of them, you know."
"But you'll be glad you've got 'em, when they're once in bed," Miss Honey added encouragingly. "My mother says I'm a real treasure to her, after half-past seven!"
The Princess flushed; her straight dark eyebrows quivered and met for an instant.
"But I am married," she said.
There was an utter silence.
"I was married five years ago yesterday, as it happens," she went on, "but it's not necessary to set up a day nursery, you know, under those circumstances."
Still silence. Miss Honey studied the floor, and Caroline, after an astonished stare at the Princess, directed her eyes from one tapestry to another.
"I suppose you understand that, don't you?" demanded the Princess sharply. She appeared unnecessarily irritated, and as a matter of fact embarrassed her guests to such an extent that they were utterly unable to relieve the stillness that oppressed them quite as much as herself.
The Princess uttered an angry exclamation and paced rapidly up and down the room, looking more regal and more unlike other people than ever.
"For heaven's sake, say something, you little sillies!" she cried. "I suppose you want me to lose my temper?"
Caroline gulped and Miss Honey examined her shoe-ties mutely.
Suddenly a well-known voice floated toward them.
"Was his nice bottle all ready? Wait a minute, only a minute now, General, and Delia'll give it to you!"
The procession filed into the room, Delia and the General, Ellis deferentially holding a tiny white coat, the man in livery bearing a small copper saucepan in which he balanced a white bottle with some difficulty. His face was full of anxious interest.
Delia thanked them both gravely, seated herself on the foot of the basket-chair, arranged the General flat across her knees, and, amid the excited silence of her audience, shook the bottle once or twice with the air of an alchemist on the brink of an epoch-making discovery.
"Want it? Does Delia's baby want it?" she asked enticingly. The General waved his arms and legs wildly; wreathed in smiles, he opened and shut his mouth in quick alternation, chirping and clucking, as she held it up before him; an ecstatic wriggling pervaded him, and he chuckled unctuously. A moment later only his deep-drawn, nozzling breaths could be heard in the room.
"He takes it beautiful," said Delia, in low tones, looking confidentially at the Princess. "I didn't know but being in a strange place might make a difference with him, but he's the best-baby!——"
She wiped his mouth when he had finished, and lifting him, still horizontal, approached her hostess.
"You can hold him now," she said superbly, "but keep him flat for twenty minutes, please. I'll go and take the bottle down, and get his carriage ready. He'll be good. He'll take a little nap, most likely."
She laid him across the rose-colored lap of the Princess, who looked curiously down on him, and offered him her finger tentatively. "I never held one before," she explained. "I—I don't know." ... The General smiled lazily and patted the finger, picking at the great sapphire.
"How soft its hands are," said the Princess. "They slip off, they are so smooth! And how good—does it never cry?" This she said half to herself, and Caroline and Miss Honey, knowing there was no need to answer her, came and leaned against her knee unconsciously, and twinkled their fingers at the baby.
"Hello, General! Hello!" they cried softly, and the General smiled impartially at them and caressed the lady's finger.
The Princess stroked his cheek. "What a perfectly exquisite skin!" she said, and bending over him, kissed him delicately.
"How good it smells—how—how different!" she murmured. "I thought they—I thought they didn't."
Miss Honey had taken the lady's other hand, and was examining the square ruby with a diamond on either side.
"My mother says that's the principal reason to have a baby," she remarked, absorbed in the glittering thing. "You sprinkle 'em all over with violet powder—just like doughnuts with sugar—and kiss 'em. Some people think they get germs that way, but my mother says if she couldn't kiss 'em she wouldn't have 'em!"
The Princess bent over the baby again.
"It's going to sleep here!" she said, half fearfully, with an inquiring glance at the two. "Oughtn't one to rock it?"
Miss Honey shook her head severely. "Not General," she answered, "he won't stand it. My mother tried again and again—could I take that blue ring a minute? I'd be awful careful—but he wouldn't. He sits up and he lies down, but he won't rock."
"I might sing to him," suggested the Princess, brushing a damp lock from the General's warm forehead and slipping her ringless finger into his curved fist carefully. "Would he like it?"
"No, he wouldn't," said Miss Honey bluntly, twisting the ring around her finger. "He only likes two people to sing—Delia and my mother. Was that ruby ring a 'ngagement ring?"
Caroline interfered diplomatically, "General would be very much obliged," she explained politely, "except that my Aunt Deedee is a very good singer indeed, and Uncle Joe says General's taste is ruined for just common singing."
The Princess stared at her blankly.
"Oh, indeed!" she remarked. Then she smiled, again in that whimsical, expressive way. "You don't think I could sing well enough for him—as well as your mother?"
Miss Honey laughed carelessly. "My mother is a singer," she said, "a real one. She used to sing in concerts—real ones. In theaters. Real theaters, I mean," as the lady appeared to be still amused.
"If you know where the Waldorf Hotel is," Caroline interrupted, "she has sung in that, and it was five dollars to get in. It was to send the poor children to a Fresh Air Fund. It—it's not the same as you would sing—or me," she added politely.
The lady arose suddenly and deposited the General, like a doll, with one swift motion, in the basket-chair. Striding across the room she turned, flushed and tall, and confronted the wondering children.
"'WHO—WHO—WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?' HE WHISPERED HOARSELY"
"I will sing for you," she said haughtily, "and you can judge better!"
With a great sweep of her half bare arm, she brushed aside a portiére and disappeared. A crashing chord rolled out from a piano behind the curtains and ceased abruptly.
"What does your mother sing?" she demanded, not raising her voice, it seemed, and yet they heard her as plainly as when they had leaned against her knee.
"She sings, 'My Heart's Own Heart,'" Miss Honey called back defiantly.
"And it's printed on the song, 'To Madame Edith Holt'!" shrilled Caroline.
The familiar prelude was played with a firm, elastic touch, the opening chords struck, and a great, shining voice, masterful, like a golden trumpet, filled the room. Caroline sat dumb; Miss Honey, instinctively humming the prelude, got up from her foot-stool and followed the music, unconscious that she walked. She had been privileged to hear more good singing in her eight years than most people in twenty-four, had Miss Honey, and she knew that this was no ordinary occasion. She did not know she was listening to one of the greatest voices her country had ever produced—perhaps in time to be known for the head of them all—but her sensitive little soul swelled in her, and her childish jealousy was drowned deep in that river of wonderful sound.
Higher and sweeter and higher yet climbed the melody; one last triumphant leap, and it was over.
"My heart—my heart—my heart's own heart!"
The Princess stood before them in the echoes of her glory, her breath quick, her eyes brilliant.
"Well?" she said, looking straight at Miss Honey, "do I sing as well as your mother?"
Miss Honey clenched her fists and caught her breath. Her heart was breaking, but she could not lie.
"You—you"—she motioned blindly to Caroline, and turned away.
"You sing better," Caroline began sullenly, but the lady pointed to Miss Honey.
"No, you tell me," she insisted remorselessly.
Miss Honey faced her.
"You—you sing better than my m—mother," she gulped, "but I love her better, and she's nicer than you, and I don't love you at all!"
She buried her face in the red velvet throne, and sobbed aloud with excitement and fatigue. Caroline ran to her: how could she have loved that cruel woman? She cast an ugly look at the Princess as she went to comfort Miss Honey, but the Princess was at the throne before her.
"Oh, I am abominable!" she cried. "I am too horrid to live! It wasn't kind of me, chérie, and I love you for standing up for your mother. There's no one to do as much for me, when I'm down and out—no one!" Sorrow swept over her flexible face like a veil, and seizing Miss Honey in her strong, nervous arms, she wept on her shoulder.
Caroline, worn with the strain of the day, wept too, and even the General, abandoned in the great chair, burst into a tiny warning wail.
Quick as thought the Princess was upon him, and had raised him against her cheek.
"Hush, hush, don't cry—don't cry, little thing," she whispered, and sank into one of the high carved chairs with him.
"No, no, I'll hold him," she protested, as Delia entered, her arms out. "I'm going to sing to him. May I? He's sleepy."
Delia nodded indulgently. "For half an hour," she said, as one allowing a great privilege, "and then we must go."
"What do you sing to him?" the Princess questioned humbly.
"I generally sing 'Flow Gently Sweet Afton,'" the nurse answered. "Do you know it?"
"I think so," and the Princess began a sort of glorified humming, like a great drowsy bee, all resonant and tremulous.
Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes,
Flow gently, I'll sing thee a song in thy praise.
Soft the great voice was, soft and widely flowing: to Caroline, who had retreated to the further end of the music-room, so that Delia should not see her tears, it seemed as if Delia herself, a wonderful new Delia, were singing her, a baby again, to sleep. She felt soothed, cradled, protected by that lapping sea of melody that drifted her off her moorings, out of the room....
Vaguely she saw Miss Honey, relaxed on the red throne, smile in her sleep, one arm falling over the broad seat. Was it in her dream that some one in a blue and white apron—not Delia, for Delia was singing—leaned back slowly in the long basket-chair and closed her tired eyes? Who was it that held the General close in her arms, and smiled as he patted her cheek at the familiar song, and mumbled her fingers with happy, cooing noises?
My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream,
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream!
The General's head was growing heavy, but he smiled confidingly into the dark eyes above him and stretched himself out in full-fed, drowsy content. One hand slipped through the lace under his cheek and rested on the singer's soft breast. She started like a frightened woman, and her voice broke.
Down in the hall the butler and the maid sat on the lower stair.
"Ain't it grand?" she whispered, and Haddock nodded dreamily.
"Mother used to sing us that in the old country," he said. "There was Tom and 'Enry an' me—Lord, Lord!"
The General was asleep. Sometimes a tiny frown drew his eyebrows together. Sometimes he clenched and uncurled his warm hands. Sometimes he sucked softly at nothing with moist, reminiscent lips. But on and on, over and over, rose and fell the quaint old song.
My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream!
It flooded the hushed house, it spread a net of dreams about the listening people there and coaxed them back to childhood and a child's protected sleep. It seemed a song that could not stop, that must return on its simple refrain so long as there were arms to encircle and breasts to lean upon.
Two men came softly up a smaller stair than the grand entrance flight, and paused in amazement at sight of Caroline stretched full length across the threshold. The older and smaller of the men had in fact stepped on her, and confused and half awake, she listened to his apologies.
"Sh! sh!" he whispered excitedly, "not a vordt! not a vordt! Mein Gott! but it is marvelous! My friend, vot is this?"
He peeped behind the drawn curtains and withdrew a face of wonder.
"It is nodding but children—and they sleep!" he hissed. "Oh, but listen, listen! And I offered her fifteen hundert dollars for two hours only of that!"
The other man peeped behind the curtains in his turn, and seizing Caroline by the arm tiptoed with her to a farther room.
"What—who—what is the meaning of this?" he whispered hoarsely. "That child—where——"
Caroline rubbed her eyes. The golden voice rose and fell around her.
"General—Delia," she muttered, and stumbled against him. He lifted her limp little body and laid it gently on a leather sofa.
"Another time," he said softly to the other man, "I—we cannot talk with you now. Will you excuse us?"
The man looked longingly at the curtains.
"She will never do more well than that. Never!" he hissed. "Oh, my friend, hear it grow soft! Yes, yes, I am going."
It seemed to Caroline that in a dream some one with a red face and glasses askew shook her by the shoulder and said to her sternly, "Sh! sh! Listen to me. To-day you hear a great artist—hey? Vill you forget it? I must go because they do not vant me, but you vill stay and listen. There is here no such voice. Velvet! Honey! Sh! sh!" and he went the way of dreams.
The man who stayed looked long through the curtains.
As a swing droops slow and slower, as the ripples fade from a stone thrown in the stream, the song of the Princess softened and crooned and hushed. Now it was a rich breath, a resonant thread.
Flow gently, sweet Afton——
The man stepped across the room and sank below the General at her feet. With her finger on her lips she turned her eyes to his and looked deep into them. He caught his breath with a sob, and wrapping his arm about her as he knelt, hid his face on her lap, against the General. She laid her hand on his head, across the warm little body, and patted it tenderly. Around them lay the sleepers; the General's soft breath was in their ears. The man lifted his head and looked adoringly at the Princess; her hand caressed his cheek, but her eyes looked beyond him into the future.
AMERICAN IMPRESSIONS
BY
ELLEN TERRY
ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS AND WITH A DRAWING BY ERIC PAPE
Copyright, 1908, by Ellen Terry (Mrs. Carew)
It is only human to make comparisons between American and English institutions, although they are likely to turn out as odious as the proverb says! The first institution in America that distressed me was the steam heat. It is far more manageable now than it was, both in hotels and theatres, because there are more individual heaters. But how I suffered from it at first I cannot describe. I used to feel dreadfully ill, and when we could not turn the heat off at the theatre, the play always went badly. My voice was affected, too. At Toledo, once, it nearly went altogether. Then the next night, after a good fight, we got the theatre cool, and the difference to the play was extraordinary. I was in my best form, feeling well and jolly!
If I did not like steam heat, I loved the ice which is such a feature at American meals. Everything is served on ice. I took kindly to their dishes—their cookery, at its best, is better than the French—and I sadly missed planked shad, terrapin, and the oyster—at its best and at its cheapest in America—when I returned to England.
Travelling in America
The American hotels seemed luxurious even in 1883; but it only takes ten years there for an hotel to be quite done, to become old-fashioned and useless as a rusty nail. Hotel life in America is now the perfection of comfort. Hotels as good as the Savoy, the Ritz, the Carlton, and Claridge's can be counted by the dozen in New York, and are to be found in all the principal cities.
I liked the travelling, but then we travelled in a very princely fashion. The Lyceum Company and baggage occupied eight cars, and Henry's private parlour-car was lovely. The only thing that we found was better understood in England, so far as railway travelling is concerned, was privacy. You may have a private car, but all the conductors on the train, and there is one to each car, can walk through it. So can any official, baggage-man, or newsboy who has the mind!
There were, of course, people ready to say that the Americans did not like Henry Irving as an actor, and that they only accepted him as a manager—that he triumphed in New York, as he had done in London, through his lavish spectacular effects. This is all moonshine. Henry made his first appearance in "The Bells," his second in "Charles I," his third in "Louis XI." By that time he had conquered, and without the aid of anything at all notable in the mounting of the plays. It was not until we did "The Merchant of Venice" that he gave the Americans anything of a "production."
My first appearance in America in Shakespeare was as Portia, and I could not help feeling pleased by my success. A few weeks later I played Ophelia at Philadelphia. It is in Shakespeare that I have been best liked in America, and I consider that Beatrice was the part about which they were most enthusiastic.
During our first tour we visited in succession New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Detroit, and Toronto. To most of these places we paid return visits. I think it was in Chicago that a reporter approached Henry Irving with the question: "To what do you attribute your success, Mr. Irving?"
"To my acting," was the simple reply.
HENRY IRVING AS CARDINAL WOLSEY IN "HENRY VIII."
FROM A DRAWING BY ERIC PAPE
We never had poor houses except in Baltimore and St. Louis. Our journey to Baltimore was made in a blizzard. They were clearing the snow before us all the way from New Jersey, and we took forty-two hours to reach Baltimore. The bells of trains before us and behind us sounded very alarming. We opened in Baltimore on Christmas Day. The audience was wretchedly small, but the poor things who were there had left their warm firesides to drive or tramp through the slush of melting snow, and each one was worth a hundred on an ordinary night.
At the hotel I put up holly and mistletoe, and produced from my trunks a real Christmas pudding that my mother had made. We had it for supper, and it was very good.
Burned Hare Soup and Camphor Pudding in Pittsburg
It never does to repeat an experiment. Next year at Pittsburg my little son Teddy brought me out another pudding from England. For once we were in an uncomfortable hotel, and the Christmas dinner was deplorable. It began with burned hare soup.
"It seems to me," said Henry, "that we aren't going to get anything to eat, but we'll make up for it by drinking!"
He had brought his own wine out with him from England, and the company took him at his word and did make up for it.
"Never mind!" I said, as the soup was followed by worse and worse. "There's my pudding!"
It came on blazing and looked superb. Henry tasted a mouthful.
"Very odd," he said, "but I think this is a camphor pudding."
He said it so politely—as if he might easily be mistaken. My maid in England had packed the pudding with my furs! It simply reeked of camphor.
So we had to dine on Henry's wine and L. F. Austin's wit. This dear, brilliant man, now dead, acted for many years as Henry's secretary, and one of his gifts was the happy knack of hitting off people's peculiarities in rhyme. This dreadful Christmas dinner at Pittsburg was enlivened by a collection of such rhymes, which Austin called a "Lyceum Christmas Play."
Everyone roared with laughter until it came to the verse of which he was the victim, when suddenly he found the fun rather laboured.
The first verse was spoken by Loveday, who announces that the "Governor" has a new play which is "wonderful"—a great word of Loveday's.
George Alexander replies:
But I say, Loveday, have I got a part in it,
That I can wear a cloak in and look smart in it?
Not that I care a fig for gaudy show, dear boy—
But juveniles must look well, don't you know, dear boy;
And shall I lordly hall and tuns of claret own?
And may I murmur love in dulcet baritone?
Tell me, at least, this simple fact of it—
Can I beat Terriss hollow in one act of it?[1]
Norman Forbes:
Pooh for Wenman's[2] bass! Why should he make a boast of it?
If he has a voice, I have got the ghost of it!
When I pitch it low, you may say how weak it is,
When I pitch it high, heavens! what a squeak it is!
But I never mind; for what does it signify?
See my graceful hands, they're the things that dignify:
All the rest is froth, and egotism's dizziness—
Have I not played with Phelps?
(To Wenman) I'll teach you all the business!
T. Mead (of whom much has already been written in these pages):
What's this about a voice? Surely you forget it, or
Wilfully conceal that I have no competitor!
I do not know the play, or even what the title is,
But safe to make success a charnel house recital is!
So please to bear in mind, if I am not to fail in it
That Hamlet's father's ghost must rob the Lyons Mail in it!
No! that's not correct! But you may spare your charity—
A good sepulchral groan's the thing for popularity!
ELLEN TERRY
FROM A PAINTING, NEVER BEFORE REPRODUCED, BY GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
H. Howe (the "agricultural" actor, as Henry called him):
Boys take my advice, the stage is not the question
But whether at three score you'll all have my digestion,
Why yearn for plays, to pose as Brutuses or Catos in,
When you may get a garden to grow the best potatoes in?
You see that at my age by Nature's shocks unharmed I am!
Tho' if I sneeze but thrice, good heavens, how alarmed I am!
But act your parts like men, and tho' you all great sinners are,
You're sure to act like men wherever Irving's dinners are!
J. H. Allen (our prompter):
Whatever be the play, I must have a hand in it,
For won't I teach the supers how to stalk and stand in it?
Tho' that blessed Shakespeare never gives a ray to them,
I explain the text, and then it's clear as day to them!
Plain as A, B, C is a plot historical.
When I overhaul allusions allegorical!
Shakespeare's not so bad; he'd have more pounds and pence in him,
If actors stood aside, and let me show the sense in him![3]
ELLEN TERRY
WITH HER FOX-TERRIERS, DUMMY AND FUSSIE; FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN 1889
Louis Austin's little "Lyceum Play" was presented to me with a silver water-jug, a souvenir from the company, and ended up with the following pretty lines spoken by Katie Brown, a clever little girl who played all the small pages' parts at this time:
Although I'm but a little page,
Who waits for Portia's kind behest,
Mine is the part upon this stage
To tell the plot you have not guessed.
Dear lady, oft in Belmont's hall
Whose mistress is so sweet and fair,
Your humble slaves would gladly fall
Upon their knees, and praise you there.
To offer you this little gift,
Dear Portia, now we crave your leave.
And let it have the grace to lift
Our hearts to yours this Christmas eve.
And so we pray that you may live
Thro' many, many, happy years,
And feel what you so often give,
The joy that is akin to tears!
How nice of Louis Austin! It quite made up for my mortification over the camphor pudding!
MISS ROSA CORDER
FROM THE PAINTING BY JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER
Reproduced from an approved print in the possession of the Lenox Library.
The Best Ophelia of My Life
When I played Ophelia for the first time in Chicago, I played the part better than I had ever played it before, and I don't believe I ever played it so well again. Why, it is almost impossible to say. I had heard a good deal of the crime of Chicago, that the people were a rough, murderous, sand-bagging crew. I ran on to the stage in the mad scene, and never have I felt such sympathy. This frail wraith, this poor demented thing could hold them in the hollow of her hand! The audience seemed to me like wine that I could drink, or spill upon the ground.... It was splendid! "How long can I hold them?" I thought. "For ever!" Then I laughed. That was the best Ophelia laugh of my life—my life that is such a perfect kaleidoscope, with the people and the places turning round and round.
At Chicago I made my first speech. The Haverley Theatre, at which we first appeared in 1884, was altered and rechristened the "Columbia" in 1885. I was called upon for a speech after the special performance in honour of the occasion, consisting of scenes from "Charles I.," "Louis XI.," "The Merchant of Venice," and "The Bells," had come to an end. I think it must be the shortest speech on record:
"Ladies and Gentlemen, I have been asked to christen your beautiful theatre. 'Hail Columbia'!"
"Lonesome Brooklyn"
When we acted in Brooklyn, we used to stay in New York and drive over that wonderful bridge every night. There were no trolley cars on it then. I shall never forget how it looked in winter, with the snow and ice on it—a gigantic trellis of dazzling white, as incredible as a dream. The old stone bridges were works of art—this bridge, woven of iron and steel for a length of over five hundred yards, and hung high in the air over the water so that great ships can pass beneath it, is the work of science. It is like the work of some impersonal power.
SIR HENRY IRVING
FROM A SNAP-SHOT TAKEN IN THE UNITED STATES
It was during our week at Brooklyn in 1885 that Henry was ill, too ill to act, for four nights. Alexander played Benedick and got through it wonderfully well. Then old Mr. Mead did (did is the word) Shylock. There was no intention behind his words or what he did.
I had such a funny batch of letters on my birthday that year: "Dear, sweet Miss Terry, etc., etc. Will you give me a piano?" etc., etc.; another: "Dear Ellen. Come to Jesus. Mary"; another, a lovely letter of thanks from a poor woman in the most ghastly distress; and lastly an offer of a two years' engagement in America. There was a simple coming-in for one woman acting at Brooklyn on her birthday!
Brooklyn is as sure a laugh in New York as the mother-in-law in a London music-hall. "All cities begin by being lonesome," a comedian explained, "and Brooklyn has never got over it."
My only complaint against Brooklyn was that they would not take Fussie in at the hotel there. Fussie was still my dog during the early American tours. Later on he became Henry's. He had his affections alienated by a course of chops, tomatoes, strawberries, "ladies' fingers" soaked in champagne, and a beautiful fur rug of his very own presented by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts.
Fussie
How did I come by Fussie? I went to Newmarket with Rosa Corder, whom Whistler painted. She was one of those plain-beautiful women who are so far more attractive than some of the pretty ones. She had wonderful hair,—like a fair, pale veil,—a white, waxen face, and a very good figure; and she wore very odd clothes. She had a studio in Southampton Row, and another at Newmarket, where she went to paint horses. I went to Cambridge once and drove back with her across the heath to her studio.
MISS ELLEN TERRY
FROM A SNAP-SHOT TAKEN IN THE UNITED STATES
"How wonderfully different are the expressions on terriers' faces," I said to her, looking at a painting of hers of a fox-terrier pup. "That's the only sort of dog I should like to have."
"That one belonged to Fred Archer," Rosa Corder said. "I daresay he could get you one like it."
We went out to find Archer. Curiously enough, I had known the famous jockey at Harpenden, when he was a little boy, and I believe used to come round with vegetables.
"I'll send you a dog, Miss Terry, that won't be any trouble. He's got a very good head, a first-rate tail, stuck in splendidly, but his legs are too long. He'd follow you if you went to America."
Prophetic words! On one of our departures for America, Fussie was left behind by mistake at Southampton. He found his way back from there to his own theatre in the Strand, London.
Fred Archer sent him originally to the stage door at the Lyceum. The man who brought him out to my house in Earl's Court said:
"I'm afraid he gives tongue. Miss, he don't like music anyway. There was a band at the bottom of your road, and he started hollering."
Fussie and "Charles I."
We were at luncheon when Fussie made his début into the family circle, and I very quickly saw that his stomach was his fault. He had a great dislike to "Charles I.," we could never make out why. Perhaps it was because Henry wore armour in one act—and Fussie may have barked his shins against it. Perhaps it was the firing off of big guns. But more probably it was because the play once got him into trouble. As a rule, Fussie had the most wonderful sense of the stage, and at rehearsal would skirt the edge of it, but never cross it. But at Brooklyn one night when we were playing "Charles I.," the last act, and that most pathetic part of it where Charles is taking a last farewell of his wife and children, Fussie, perhaps excited by his run over the bridge from New York, suddenly bounded on to the stage! The good children who were playing Princess Mary and Prince Henry didn't even smile; the audience remained solemn; but Henry and I nearly went into hysterics. Fussie knew directly that he had done wrong. He lay down on his stomach, then rolled over on his back, a whimpering apology, while carpenters kept on whistling and calling to him from the wings. The children took him up to the window at the back of the scene, and he stayed there cowering between them until the end of the play.
America seems to have been always fatal to Fussie. Another time when Henry and I were playing in some charity performance in which John Drew and Maude Adams were also acting, he disgraced himself again. Henry having "done his bit" and put on hat and coat to leave the theatre, Fussie thought the end of the performance must have come; the stage had no further sanctity for him, and he ran across it to the stage door barking! John Drew and Maude Adams were playing "A Pair of Lunatics." Maude Adams, sitting looking into the fire, did not see Fussie, but was amazed to hear John Drew departing madly from the text:
"Is this a dog I see before me,
His tail towards my hand?
Come, let me clutch thee."
She began to think he had really gone mad!
From the collection of Robert Coster
AUGUSTIN DALY AND HIS COMPANY OF PLAYERS
ADA REHAN, MRS. GILBERT, AND JOHN DREW FORM THE GROUP DIRECTLY FACING DALY
When Fussie first came, Charlie was still alive, and I have often gone into Henry's dressing-room and seen the two dogs curled up in both the available chairs, Henry standing while he made up, rather than disturb them!
When Charlie died, Fussie had Henry's idolatry all to himself. I have caught them often sitting quietly opposite each other at Grafton Street, just adoring each other. Occasionally Fussie would thump his tail on the ground to express his pleasure.
Irving's Strategy
Wherever we went in America, the hotel people wanted to get rid of the dog. In the paper they had it that Miss Terry asserted that Fussie was a little terrier, while the hotel people regarded him as a pointer; and funny caricatures were drawn of a very big me with a very tiny dog, and a very tiny me with a dog the size of an elephant. Henry often walked straight out of an hotel where an objection was made to Fussie. If he wanted to stay, he went in for strategy. At Detroit the manager of the hotel said that dogs were against the rules. Being very tired, Henry let Fussie go to the stables for the night, and sent Walter to look after him. The next morning he sent for the manager.
"Yours is a very old-fashioned hotel, isn't it?"
"Yes, sir, very old and ancient."
"Got a good chef? I didn't think much of the supper last night—but still—the beds are comfortable enough—I am afraid you don't like animals?"
"Yes, sir, in their proper place."
"It's a pity," said Henry meditatively, "because you happen to be overrun by rats!"
"Sir, you must have made a mistake. Such a thing couldn't——"
"Well, I couldn't pass another night here without my dog," Henry interrupted. "But there are, I suppose, other hotels?"
"If it would be any comfort to you to have your dog with you, sir, do, by all means, but I assure you that he'll catch no rat here."
"I'll be on the safe side," said Henry calmly.
And so it was settled. That very night Fussie supped off, not rats, but terrapin and other delicacies in Henry's private sitting room.
Photograph by Sarony
AUGUSTIN DALY
It was the 1888 tour, the great blizzard year, that Fussie was left behind by mistake at Southampton. He jumped out at the station, just outside where they stopped to collect tickets. After this long separation, Henry naturally thought that the dog would go nearly mad with joy when he saw him again. He described to me the meeting in a letter:
"My dear Fussie gave me a terrible shock on Sunday night. When we got in, J——, H——, and I dined at the Câfé Royale. I told Walter to bring Fussie there. He did, and Fussie burst into the room while the waiter was cutting some mutton, when, what d'ye think—one bound at me—another instantaneous bound at the mutton, and from the mutton nothing would get him until he'd got his plateful.
"Oh what a surprise it was indeed! He never now will leave my side, my legs, or my presence, but I cannot but think, alas, of that seductive piece of mutton!"
The Death of Fussie
Poor Fussie! He met his death through the same weakness. It was at Manchester, I think. A carpenter had thrown down his coat with a ham sandwich in the pocket, over an open trap on the stage. Fussie, nosing and nudging after the sandwich, fell through and was killed instantly. When they brought up the dog after the performance, every man took his hat off. Henry was not told until the end of the play. He took it so very quietly that I was frightened, and said to his son Laurence, who was on that tour:
"Do let's go to his hotel and see how he is."
We drove there and found him sitting, eating his supper, with the poor dead Fussie, who would never eat supper any more, curled up in his rug on the sofa. Henry was talking to the dog exactly as if it were alive. The next day he took Fussie back in the train with him to London, covered with a coat. He is buried in the dog's cemetery, Hyde Park.
His death made an enormous difference to Henry. Fussie was his constant companion. When he died, Henry was really alone. He never spoke of what he felt about it, but it was easy to know.
We used to get hints how to get this and that from watching Fussie. His look, his way of walking! He sang, whispered eloquently and low—then barked suddenly, and whispered again. Such a lesson in the law of contrasts!
The first time that Henry went to the Lyceum after Fussie's death, every one was anxious and distressed, knowing how he would miss the dog in his dressing-room. Then an odd thing happened. The wardrobe cat, who had never been near the room in Fussie's life-time, came down and sat on Fussie's cushion! No one knew how the "Governor" would take it. But when Walter was sent out to buy some meat for it, we saw that Henry was not going to resent it! From that night onwards the cat always sat, night after night, in the same place, and Henry liked its companionship. In 1902, when he left the theatre for good, he wrote to me:
"The place is now given up to the rats—all light cut off, and only Barry (the stage door-keeper) and a foreman left. Everything of mine I've moved away, including the Cat!"
Photograph by Sarony
JOHN DREW
AS PETRUCHIO IN "THE TAMING OF THE SHREW"
The Old Daly Company
The Daly players were a revelation to me of the pitch of excellence which American acting had reached. My first night at Daly's was a night of enchantment. I wrote to Mr. Daly and said: "You've got a girl in your company who is the most lovely, humorous darling I have ever seen on the stage." It was Ada Rehan! Now, of course I didn't "discover" her or any rubbish of that kind; the audience were already mad about her; but I did know her for what she was, even in that brilliant "all-star" company and before she had played in the classics and got enduring fame. The audacious, superb, quaint Irish creature! Never have I seen such splendid high comedy. Then the charm of her voice,—a little like Ethel Barrymore's when Miss Ethel is speaking very nicely,—her smiles, and dimples, and provocative, inviting coquetterie! Her Rosalind, her Country Wife, her Helena, her Railroad of Love, and above all, her Katharine in "The Taming of the Shrew!" I can only ejaculate. Directly she came on I knew how she was going to do the part. She had such shy, demure fun—she understood, like all great comedians, that you must not pretend to be serious so sincerely that no one in the audience sees through it.
Photograph by Sarony
ADA REHAN
AS KATHARINE IN "THE TAMING OF THE SHREW"
As a woman off the stage Ada Rehan was even more wonderful than as a shrew on. She had a touch of dignity, of nobility, of beauty, rather like Eleonora Duse's. The mouth and the formation of the eye were lovely. Her guiltlessness of make-up off the stage was so attractive! She used to come in to a supper with a lovely shining face which scorned a powder-puff. The only thing one missed was the red hair which seemed such a part of her on the stage.
Here is a dear letter from the dear, written in 1890:
"My dear Miss Terry:
"Of course, the first thing I was to do when I reached Paris was to write and thank you for your lovely red feathers. One week is gone. To-day it rains and I am compelled to stay at home, and at last I write. I thought you had forgotten me and my feathers long ago. So imagine my delight when they came at the very end. I liked it so. It seemed as if I lived all the time in your mind; and they came as a good-bye.
"I saw but little of you, but in that little I found no change. That was gratifying to me, for I am over-sensitive, and would never trouble you if you had forgotten me. How I shall prize those feathers—Henry Irving's presented by Ellen Terry to me for my Rosalind Cap. I shall wear them once and then put them by as treasures. Thank you so much for the pretty words you wrote me about 'As You Like It.' I was hardly fit on that matinée. The great excitement I went through during the London season almost killed me. I am going to try and rest, but I fear my nerves and heart won't let me.
"You must try and read between the lines all I feel. I am sure you can if anyone ever did; but I cannot put into words my admiration for you—and that comes from deep down in my heart. Good-bye, with all good wishes for your health and success.
"I remain,
"Yours most affectionately,
"Ada Rehan"
I wish I could just once have played with Ada Rehan. When Mr. Tree could not persuade Mrs. Kendal to come and play in "The Merry Wives of Windsor" a second time, I hoped that Ada Rehan would come and rollick with me as Mrs. Ford,—but it was not to be.
From the collection F. H. Meserve
HELENA MODJESKA
Mr. Daly himself interested me greatly. He was an excellent manager, a man in a million. But he had no artistic sense. The productions of Shakespeare at Daly's were really bad from the pictorial point of view. But what pace and "ensemble" he got from his company!
May Irwin was the low comedian who played the servants' parts in Daly's comedies from the German. I might describe her—except that she was far more genial—as a kind of female Rutland Barrington. On and off the stage her geniality distinguished her like a halo. It is a rare quality on the stage, yet without it the comedian has up-hill work. Generous May Irwin! Lucky those who have her warm friendship and jolly, kind companionship!
The John Drew Family
John Drew, the famous son of a famous mother, was another Daly player whom I loved. With what loyalty he supported Ada Rehan! He never played for his own hand, but for the good of the piece. His mother, Mrs. John Drew, had the same quiet methods as Mrs. Alfred Wigan. Everything that she did told. I saw Mrs. Drew play Mrs. Malaprop, and it was a lesson to people who overact. Her daughter, Georgie Drew, Ethel Barrymore's mother, was also a charming actress. Maurice Barrymore was a brilliantly clever actor. Little Ethel, as I still call her, though she is a big "star," is carrying on the family traditions. She ought to play Lady Teazle. She may take it from me that she would make a success in it.
Modjeska, who, though she is a Polish actress, is associated with the American stage, made a great impression on me. She was exquisite in many parts, but in none finer than in "Adrienne Lecouvreur." Her last act electrified me. I have never seen it better acted, although I have seen all the great ones do it since. Her Marie Stuart, too, was a beautiful and distinguished performance. Her Juliet had lovely moments, but I did not so much care for that, and her broken English interfered with the verse of Shakespeare. Some years ago I met Modjeska and she greeted me so warmly and sweetly, although she was very ill.
During my more recent tours in America, Maude Adams is the actress of whom I have seen most, and "to see her is to love her!" In "The Little Minister" and in "Quality Street" I think she is at her best, but above all parts she herself is most adorable. She is just worshipped in America, and has an extraordinary effect—an educational effect—upon all American girlhood.
Mary Anderson
From the collection of Robert Coster
MARY ANDERSON
I never saw Mary Anderson act. That seems a strange admission, but during her wonderful reign at the Lyceum Theatre, which she rented from Henry Irving, I was in America, and another time when I might have seen her act, I was very ill and ordered abroad. I have, however, had the great pleasure of meeting her and she has done me many little kindnesses. Hearing her praises sung on all sides, and her beauties spoken of everywhere, I was particularly struck by her modest evasion of publicity off the stage. I personally only knew her as a most beautiful woman—as kind as beautiful—constantly working for her religion—always kind, a good daughter, a good wife, a good woman.
She cheered me before I sailed for America by saying that her people would like me.
"Since seeing you in Portia and Letitia," she wrote, "I am convinced you will take America by storm." Certainly she took England by storm! But she abandoned her triumphs almost as soon as they were gained. They never made her happy, she once told me, and I could understand her better than most, since I had had success too, and knew that it did not mean happiness.
Henry and I were so fortunate as to gain the friendship and approval of Dr. Horace Howard Furness, perhaps the finest Shakespearean scholar in America, and editor of the Variorum Shakespeare, which Henry considered the best of all editions—"the one which counts." It was in Boston, I think, that I disgraced myself at one of Dr. Furness' lectures. He was discussing "As You Like It" and Rosalind, and proving with much elaboration that English in Shakespeare's time was pronounced like a broad country dialect, and that Rosalind spoke Warwickshire! A little girl who was sitting in the front of me had lent me her copy of the play a moment before, and now, absorbed in Dr. Furness' argument, I forgot the book wasn't mine and began scrawling controversial notes in it with my very thick and blotty fountain pen.
"Give me back my book! Give me my book!" cried the little girl. "How dare you write in my book!" she cried with rage.
Her mother tried to hush her up: "It's Miss Ellen Terry."
"I don't care! She's spoilt my nice book!"
I am glad to say that when the little girl understood, she forgave me. Still, it was dreadful of me and I did feel ashamed at the time.
From the collection of F. H. Meserve
JOSEPH JEFFERSON AS RIP VAN WINKLE
Joseph Jefferson
In November, 1901, I wrote in my diary: "Philadelphia. Supper at Henry's. Jefferson there, sweeter and more interesting than ever—and younger."
Dear Joe Jefferson—actor, painter, courteous gentleman, profound student of Shakespeare! When the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy was raging in America (it really did rage there!) Jefferson wrote the most delicious doggerel about it. He ridiculed, and his ridicule killed the Bacon enthusiasts all the more dead because it was barbed with erudition.
He said that when I first came into the box to see him as "Rip," he thought I did not like him, because I fidgetted and rustled and moved my place, as is my wicked way. "But I'll get her, and I'll hold her," he said to himself. I was held indeed—enthralled!
The Night of the Great Blizzard
Our first American tours were in 1883-1884; the third was in 1887-88, the year of the great blizzard. We were playing in New York when the storm began, and Henry came to fetch us at half-past ten in the morning. His hotel was near the theatre where we were to play at night. He said the weather was stormy, and we had better make for his hotel while there was time. The German actor, Ludwig Barnay, was to open in New York that night, but the blizzard affected his nerves to such an extent that he did not appear at all and returned to Germany directly the weather improved!
Most of the theatres closed for three days, but we remained open, although there was a famine in the town and the streets were impassable. The cold was intense. Henry sent Walter out to buy some violets for Barnay, and when he brought them in to the dressing-room—he had only carried them a few yards—they were frozen so hard that they could have been chipped with a hammer.
We rang up on "Faust" three-quarters of an hour late. This was not bad, considering all things. Although the house was sold out, there was hardly any audience, and only a harp and two violins in the orchestra. But discipline was so strong in the Lyceum Company that every member of it reached the theatre by eight o'clock, although some of them had had to walk from Brooklyn Bridge. The Mayor of New York and his daughter managed to reach their box somehow. Then we thought it was time to begin. A few members of Daly's company, including John Drew, came in, and a few friends. It was the oddest, sparsest audience! But the enthusiasm was terrific.
Five years went by before we visited America again. Five years in a country of rapid changes is a long time, long enough for friends to forget. But they didn't forget. This time we made new friends, too, in the Far West. We went to San Francisco, among other places. We attended part of a performance at the Chinese theatre. Oh, those rows of impenetrable faces gazing at the stage with their long, shining, inexpressive eyes. What a look of the everlasting the Chinese have! "We have been before you—we shall be after you," they seem to say.
The chief incident of the fifth American tour was our production at Chicago of Laurence Irving's one-act play "Godefroi and Yolande." I regard that little play as an inspiration. By instinct the young author did everything right.
In 1900-1 I was ill and hated the parts I was playing in America. The Lyceum was not what it had been. Everything was changed.
In 1907—only the other day—I toured in America for the first time on my own account—playing modern plays for the first time. I made new friends and found my old ones still faithful.
But this tour was chiefly momentous to me because at Pittsburg I was married for the third time, and married to an American, Mr. James Usselman of Indiana, who acts under the name of James Carew.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Alexander had just succeeded Terriss as our leading young man.
[2] Wenman had a rolling bass voice of which he was very proud. He was a valuable actor, yet somehow never interesting. Young Norman Forbes-Robertson played Sir Andrew Ague-Cheek with us on our second American tour.
[3] Once when Allen was rehearsing the supers in the Church Scene in "Much Ado about Nothing," we overheard him "show the sense" in Shakespeare like this:
"This 'Ero, let me tell you, is a perfect lady, a nice, innercent young thing, and when the feller she's engaged to calls 'er an 'approved wanton,' you naturally claps yer 'ands to yer swords. A wanton is a kind of—well, you know—she ain't what she ought to be!"
Allen would then proceed to read the part of Claudio: "... not to knit my soul to an approved wanton."
Seven or eight times the supers clapped their "'ands to their swords" without giving Allen satisfaction.
"No, no, no, that's not a bit like it, not a bit! If any of your sisters was 'ere and you 'eard me call 'er —— ——, would yer stand gapin' at me as if this was a bloomin' tea party?"
THE HERITAGE OF HAM
BY
LIEUTENANT HUGH M. KELLY, U. S. A.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARTHUR S. COVEY
"To be hanged by the neck until dead." Well, no one was surprised. It was a foregone conclusion. Desertion to the enemy in time of war is one of the crimes military that cuts a man off from any chance for clemency. When he lifts his hands against his former comrades, he is as one already dead; that is, if he is caught. Private Wilson made the fatal mistake of being caught. The result was inevitable.
Though Private Wilson was expecting these very words, the sound of them, cutting the absolute silence, sent a cold contraction to his heart, and his thick lips drew themselves over his white teeth. Doubtless, if it had been possible, he would have turned pale; but since he was as black as the proverbial ace of spades, this was out of the question. Private Wilson belonged to the 19th Cavalry, which, as the initiated know, is a negro regiment.
There was no movement in the still line of the squadron when the fatal order was read, except a slight tremor, almost imperceptible, like the first faint rustling of leaves in the dead quiet that precedes a storm. Then from the right of "B" Troop there came a deep, indrawn breath, and the first sergeant's horse sprang sideways, in amazement, against that of the guidon. The animal was accustomed to being treated as tenderly as an infant, and now, for no fault whatever, he had received a rough pressure from his rider's knees, and a sharp dig from the spurs. The first sergeant was old Jeremiah Wilson, and the prisoner, standing to the "front and center" in the gathering dusk, and hearing his fate pronounced, was Jeremiah's son.
Sergeant Wilson was the one man in the squadron who had hoped against hope, and now that hope was dead. It died hard, and its death was recorded in that contraction of the knees and dig of the spurs. The guidon paid no attention. In his heart he believed that the sentence was just; but his pity went out to the old soldier on his right. His eyes, however, were fixed on Private Wilson, as were those of the rest of the squadron. The prisoner had acquired a new status. Here was a human being within two weeks of the solution of the greatest of all mysteries. He was worth looking at. The condemned man saw the interest shown in him, and, upheld by the feeling of self-importance inherent in the negro character, and always brought to the surface by applause or other manifestation of unusual attention, bore himself jauntily.
There was nothing of this to sustain his old father. He had participated in executions before. For him there were no visions of walking to death with a "firm tread," as the papers say, and "dying game" before the admiring eyes of soldiers and natives. With him it was steel-ribbed facts. He could hear the bang of the trap, the snap of the rope, and the quivering creak of the scaffold. And afterward, the lonely, hopeless years. Besides, the dishonor of it. What irony to parade with thirty years of service chevrons on his sleeves, and be pointed out as the father of a man hanged for deserting to the Filipinos!
The officers went to the front and center and the formation was over. Private Wilson departed to his closely guarded prison, and old Jeremiah took the troop to quarters and dismissed it. For the first time in twenty years he forgot to "open chamber and magazine," and publish the details for the next day. He wanted to be alone; away from the pitying eyes of the black men of the troop.
He had honestly believed that there were grounds for hope. He could not see now, in the face of the evidence, how the court could have given "Buff" the extreme penalty. He thought he had explained the circumstances so clearly. Hadn't he told the tribunal of the baleful influence of Mercedes Martinez? how this mestiza, had lured his boy to his downfall? He thought he had shown positively, by his testimony, that this woman had terrible "voodoo" powers and had conjured "Buff." Hadn't they apparently listened with wonder while he related the charms that had been brought to bear on his son? the devils that had pursued him; the angels that had beckoned him away to the hills; the divine call he had received to be the George Washington of the Filipinos, and lead them to freedom?
"ALL DAY LONG OLD SERGEANT WILSON SAT IN THE CORNER OF THE SQUAD ROOM, CLASPING AND UNCLASPING HIS STRAINING HANDS"
The old soldier's pride in his son's physical perfection had always blinded him to the fact that the private was constantly in trouble, and was known as a "bad egg." If any one had told him that he was an object of pity because of his boy's worthlessness, he would have sputtered with indignation. He never realized that Buff escaped many a "bawling out" because the officers respected the father's long years of faithful service and did not want to humiliate him. He knew that his boy flew high occasionally, but that was because he was "jess nachally sprightly and full o' devilment." No one could deny that Private Wilson was one of the finest animals, physically, that ever wore the uniform; or that he had gained a wide reputation among his comrades and the Filipinos on account of his terrible abilities in a hand-to-hand engagement. It was this very notoriety that had attracted the insurgents' attention to him, and led to his downfall.
"CABLE THE PRESIDENT! WHAT A JOKE!"
The little brown men stood in awe of this black demon, and wanted him on their side. His military training and reputation as a fighter would be of inestimable value. With their usual craft the insurgent officials went about to wean the soldier from his allegiance, and by the aid of the mestiza beauty, Mercedes Martinez, succeeded in their purpose. Between retreat and reveille of one July night, Private Wilson, led by visions of love and a brigadier-general's star, took to the hills. He longed to emulate the black renegade, Fagan, but having none of Fagan's "foxiness" or ability, he was soon laid by the heels. Men of his own squadron took him. He demanded at first to be treated as befitted his rank; but none of his self-importance went with his black captors. "We'll brigidiale-gene'al yer, yer black scound'al," they remarked cheerfully, as they stripped off his tinsel stars. "Yer oughter be lynched."
They "Gen'al Wilsoned" him until he was sick of it and begged them to stop. Then, when they got back to the station, they popped him into the "jigger" along with privates charged with sassing the cook and other heinous offenses—a most humiliating experience for a brigadier general. Now he must die; and it came to him that it was as hard for a general officer to die as ever it was for a private.
"THE CIRCLE CLOSED IN AS THE SEA SURGES UP UPON THE LAND"
When his son had disappeared, old Sergeant Wilson had borne himself proudly, even in the face of rumors and insinuations. His boy would not desert. That he might have gone outside the lines to see some "lady friend" and been captured, yes; but no desertion. Even when tales of his lurid doings out in the province began to come in, old Jeremiah had not faltered in his faith. They were lies, all of them, or it was some other man. Nor when Buff was taken, with his patent-leather boots and tin stars, was the old man shaken; for the explanation that the private gave as to how he had been conjured was easier for Wilson to believe than that his "baby" had been false to his salt. But now the case was different. The disgrace of being parent to a "bobtailed" and condemned criminal was as the bitterness of death.
Up to now, for all his hard sixty years of life, he had carried himself like a lance. The whiteness of age in his woolly hair was not reflected in the iron spirit that upheld his wrinkled body. But the shame of those words spoken on parade had undone that, as suddenly as ashes crumble before the touch.
The days immediately following the publishing of Buff's sentence were nightmares of pain and humiliation. The old negro could hardly bring himself to go to headquarters at first sergeant's call. When he did go, he moved heavily, like a man asleep, and with his eyes fixed on the ground, that he might not meet the curious, pitying glances of his fellow soldiers.
After a week of this, old Jeremiah began to make mistakes at drill and mistakes in his troop papers; a thing hitherto unknown. Finally Lieutenant Perkins, the troop commander, lost his patience at some bull the old sergeant made, and called him down roughly, in the presence of the troop.
"Look here, Sergeant Wilson, I won't have any more of this. I'll bust you higher than a kite. I don't care if you've had fifty years of service. If you are mooning about that worthless boy of yours, you had better get over it. It's a damn good riddance, and you know it as well as I do. You'll have to take a brace or something will drop."
If Perkins had not been born several degrees north of Mason and Dixon's line he would have known better than that; as it was, he did not understand these negroes. He hadn't the faintest conception of how to handle these simple-hearted black men. He was not popular with them at any time, and this unheard-of piece of cruelty cut every tender-hearted trooper as deeply as if it had been aimed at him personally. This was the first break, and, as a consequence, something did drop, in a way that Perkins hardly expected.
The old sergeant made no reply to this reprimand, but simply stood at attention, though his black, weazened face worked and his lips trembled. It was the first time since he was a buck private that he had been spoken to in such a manner. For the first time, the yoke of discipline galled him. The bitterness of his inferiority and servitude was as wormwood within him. The harsh injustice of such treatment in this, his black hour, after years of faithful work, aroused in him a demon of resentment that made him long to strike back.
The occurrence startled him from his lethargy. He suddenly realized that his son's few remaining hours on earth were slipping by, and the boy had not been comforted. When this came to him, his self-reproach cut him sharply, and he resolved to make amends at once. He obtained permission from the officer of the day, and that evening, after retreat, went to see Buff.
He found the general plucked of his plumage. The prospect of death so close to him had narrowed the black boy's perspective. "The worldly hope men set their hearts upon" had turned ashes, and it were hard to find "a man who looked so wistfully on the day" as this doomed soldier. He wanted to live. Every atom of animal strength in his perfect body was charged with a desire to exist. This living, day after day, in close proximity to the grave had tended to a simplification of ideas. He had harked back to childhood, and when his father came, the prisoner, in his clanking irons, turned to him as a pickaninny might have done for protection from some bugaboo.
Old Jeremiah sat on the cot, while Buff occupied a small stool directly in front of him. They talked in low tones, of ordinary subjects, at first; then gradually went back through the years. The white-haired old negro and the young soldier both smiled as they recalled childish escapades of the latter, 'way back in "God's country." They lost themselves in reminiscence, and forgot the present, until the wan moon, coming up, cast the shadows of the bars in the window across them. Then with a shiver they remembered.
Suddenly the private began to talk of his death, and as he spoke the terror of it grew on him. This man, known to have killed more than one American soldier and to be absolutely fearless in battle, quaked with abject fright. He would contend gladly in a contest against hopeless odds; but at the thought of his end creeping on him thus, slowly, inexorably his soul writhed in terror. He leaned forward and pressed his face on his father's knees.
"Oh, paw, ain't yer gwine ter help me? Won't you do somethin' fer me? Ah doan' wanter die yit. Tain't my time ter die. Ah nevah meant no hahm, paw. Ef they'll just give me one moah chanst, ah'll do anything they say. Honest, ah will. Gawd! paw, yer ain't gwine ter let 'em kill me, is yer?"
The soldier raised his head and looked into the sergeant's black face as though the latter were omnipotent, and only had to say the word to make him free. Then, with a shivering sigh, he laid his head on his father's knees again.
"Sh—sh," the old sergeant said softly, "Sh—sh"; and that was all he could do; but his wrinkled hand wandered tenderly over the prisoner's black, kinky hair, and tears rolled down his seamed face.
When Buff's panic wore off a bit, he was made to lie down, and Jeremiah, sitting beside him, crooned softly, as the old black mammies do to the little children. By the time call to quarters sounded, the condemned man's quiet breathing told that his earthly troubles were forgotten, for a time at least.
After this visit, Sergeant Wilson's apparent neglect of his duties became more pronounced than ever. The simplest orders and directions received from his troop's commander, he either forgot to perform or executed in such a bunglesome manner as to drive Lieutenant Perkins' irritable nature to the verge of hysteria. The latter, with his narrow sympathies, could make no allowance for the old negro's state of mind, and his "roasts" became more frequent and rougher with each repetition. The sergeant took it all with apparent resignation; but within him the troubled spirit was surging to and fro. How could he be expected to copy troop returns and muster rolls, with that cry—"Gawd, paw, yer ain't gwine ter let 'em kill me, is yer?" ringing in his ears, hour by hour? It was the unfairness of it that aroused his resentment.
If the "ole Cap'n" were only here, all would be well. It was another cruel stroke that he should be absent on detached service just when Jeremiah needed him most.
Soldiers are a peculiar breed. They are more nearly like children in certain characteristics than any other class of men. They are so accustomed to being taken care of by their officers that they look to the latter for everything. When they find one who they know will stand up for them, and whom they can trust, their faith and confidence in him are absolute. They will follow him through fire and flood, and obey any order that he may give, in the blind belief that he knows what is best for them. This is true of white soldiers, and much more so of the darkies. This is the feeling that old Jeremiah and the men of the troop held for Captain North, whom they all called the "ole Cap'n."
In all the years these two had served together, since the battle of the Rosebud, when Lieutenant John T. North earned a medal of honor for "bringing in Private J. Wilson, 19th Cavalry, who was wounded, under a heavy fire from the Indians, at the imminent risk of his own life," the sergeant had never received a harsh word or a rebuke that he did not know was merited. But the sullen fury that this young prig aroused in him was unbearable. He felt that his inherent subordination to discipline was being torn to shreds.
This went on for three days. The discipline in the troop was growing ragged with startling rapidity, and Perkins felt it. The men, under the constant abuse heaped upon one whom they respected and pitied, were growing sullen and restive. Each of these soft-hearted troopers was gradually acquiring and nursing a personal grudge. They were forgetting their ideas of the fitness of things. They lost sight of everything except a clearly monumental piece of injustice.
Instead of meeting the issue fairly, and acknowledging the error of his position, Perkins became obstinately harsher and harsher. Not only was he unnecessarily abusive to old Jeremiah, but his treatment of the whole troop was stern to a degree. Finally, on this third day, after a violent harangue in presence of the troop, he reduced the old negro from first sergeant to sergeant.
This was the second break, and when Perkins went that morning to inspect the old church that served as quarters, he found the men congregated in little groups in the squad room. There was not the usual loud-voiced chatter and laughter, but a sullen murmur that dropped to quick silence when he entered. This was bad. There was nothing specific, but he instinctively felt that he was losing his hold. He chafed to do something to "smash these niggers," but there was nothing to seize upon; so he swore at a man loudly for not having his clothing arranged properly, and ordered him to the guard-house. When the officer left, the same ominous murmur arose in the quarters.
It was evident, also, that outside influences were beginning to work—the sign of the Katapunan. There was hardly a man in "B" Troop but had his querida or sweetheart among the native women. As one of the black soldiers remarked: "Ef de gem'men Filypinos had 'a' been as complacent as de ladies, der nevah would 'a' bin no insurrecshun nohow." In their off hours the men, in their grim anger, confided their troubles to these dusky females, and the crafty women began to work upon the spirit of rebellion amongst the simple colored soldiers.
Why did they submit themselves to such a wretch as this Teniente Perkins? Why didn't they show him that they were men to be feared? Why did they allow that magnificent black comrade, Wilson, to be hanged, without making an effort to save him; when doing so would be the one thing that would make Teniente Perkins wild with rage? They were too cunning to urge open mutiny, but the seed they sowed gave growth to thought.
The darkies of "B" Troop were, first of all, soldiers. Subordination to the wills of their superiors was ingrained in their natures. They did not want to "buck," but it seemed as if the troop commander were trying to force them to rebel. They endeavored to forget the words of the Filipino women; but how could they, when all day long old Sergeant Wilson sat in the corner of the squad room, clasping and unclasping his straining hands; while on his sleeves were the marks where his first sergeant's chevrons had been ripped off?
Two more days dragged by, and conditions in the troop grew worse. Perkins had heard some loud-mouthed private baying forth incendiary, not to say uncomplimentary remarks; had placed the troop on the straight ration, and suppressed the pass list. The men wandered about the quarters with a nervous, preoccupied air. They did not look at each other. They felt that if they gave rein to their feelings, something horrible would happen. They did not want it to happen; they wanted to be good soldiers. But this man was forcing them; forcing their hands. There is a limit to everything. What he had done was nothing if they had deserved it. It was the rank injustice that made them furious. They felt that they must have some escape for their feelings or they would burst through the bonds. Consequently, when Sergeant Potter broached his scheme, they hailed it with acclamation. A little conference was held in one end of the quarters, and after it was over Potter went to speak to old Jeremiah.
The ex-first sergeant had taken no part in the proceedings—in fact, he knew nothing of them. He had stayed in his corner, where he had sat for the last three days, with his eyes fixed on the floor, clasping and unclasping his hands. Sergeant Potter sat down on a bunk beside him and touched him on the shoulder. The old man started.
"Look a yere, sarge, yer oughter take a brace. Me and the res' of de boys is mighty sorry fer yer—we showly is. But yer mussent grieve so, cause yer showly gwineter be sick ef yer does."
"I'se obleeged to yer, Potter, you and de boys."
"Yes, suh, me an de boys feels mighty bad cause yer got busted, an'—an' about the other things. Ef yer'll 'scuse me, sarge, fer talkin' about it, we wondered ef dere wahnt somethin' yer could do fur—fur Buff."
Seeing the drawn look come back to the older man's face, Potter continued hurriedly——
"Thar now, sarge, I'se powerful sorry ef I'se hu't yoh feelin's, but me an' de boys thought ef yer'd telegraph to Division Headquatahs, dey might do somethin'. 'Twon't do no hahm, nohow."
He then went on and talked in such a persuasive strain that, in spite of his common-sense, a gleam of hope began to burn in Jeremiah's eyes. Yes, it would cost something, but the boys had got together a little purse to defray the expenses of the telegram. This could be turned over to the Lieutenant, who would doubtless have no difficulty in getting the necessary permission from the squadron commander. The old man had been inactive and without hope for so long that the idea of any effort embracing a chance of success aroused in him a fierce energy. Once persuaded, he was impatient to be at work. If anything were to be done, it must be done at once. In the next day and the next, Private Wilson's sands would have run out.
It was apparently a good omen that Lieutenant Perkins should walk into the quarters while they were talking. Potter and Jeremiah went to him without loss of time and respectfully broached their request. The rest of the men stood around at attention, trying to look as though they were not listening, but straining their ears to catch every word. The officer heard them through, and then burst out impatiently——
"Well, of all the wild-cat schemes I ever heard of, that is the worst. The idea, Wilson, of a man of your length of service proposing such a thing. Hanging is too good for that son of yours, and you know it. I'll have nothing to do with this, and don't want to hear any more of it. That'll do now."
The silence that followed these words was silence indeed. Every man in the room caught them, and there was not one of the fifty present who did not feel a hot, uncomfortable throbbing at his temples.
In the old sergeant, the last connecting link of discipline was strained nearly to the breaking point. An angry gleam appeared in his eyes, and he said in a low, shaking voice:
"Ve'ly well, Suh, I shall go to de commandin' officah."
"All right, you can do as you please about that; but you will hear from it," and Perkins walked into the orderly room, where he proceeded to make life miserable for the subdued wretch who was acting first sergeant of the troop.
In a few minutes the commanding officer's orderly presented the commanding officer's compliments to Lieutenant Perkins, and informed him that the commanding officer would like to see him at the office.
Major Don Carlos Bliss, who was known throughout the service as a splendid soldier, did not think much of Perkins. He had had his eye on "B" Troop lately, and did not like the looks of things a little bit. He was a man of strong convictions and never hesitated to express them. He had known old Jeremiah Wilson for years, and when he learned of the latter's reduction, his opinion that Perkins was a fool was duly confirmed. He knew that much of the lieutenant's irritability was due to "nerves" acquired by a steady and conscientious course of drinking, with which procedure he had no patience.
Perkins, when he entered, found the sergeant standing at the desk.
"Mr. Perkins," the Major said shortly, "while Sergeant Wilson's request is a little out of the ordinary, I have no objection to his sending a telegram through this office. I can put no recommendation for clemency in it, however, for I consider the sentence a just one. When you get this message drafted the way Sergeant Wilson wants it, bring it to me, and let me see it, and," he concluded, looking Perkins steadily in the eye from under his bushy brows, "I advise you to do it at once."
The telegram went that afternoon. The plea for clemency was based, principally, upon Sergeant Wilson's years of faithful service, and the fact that his son was too young to appreciate the enormity of his crime.
Twenty-four hours passed, and there was no answer to the message. In that time Sergeant Jeremiah Wilson drank deeply of the bitter cup. He had aged suddenly in the last two weeks. Brooding in the hot, sticky, tropical days is not good for a man, especially when that man is no longer young. Shapes and shadows in the brain grow rapidly, and soon assume enormous proportions. Now the fluctuating tides of hope and despair gnawed steadily at the weakened foundation of his reason. The men of the troop were more restless and ill at ease than ever. They had lost sight of the fact that the prisoner's guilt was as black as the mouth of the pit. All they saw was a darky soldier clinging tenaciously to his life, and the agony of that darky's father. Each sympathetic trooper had begotten a personal interest that ruled him completely. Besides, the mad hatred they bore Perkins and the hope of backsetting him led them on. Shapes and shadows were growing in their minds also.
Twenty-seven hours after the appeal was sent to Division Headquarters a signal corps private walked into "B" Troop's barracks and asked for Sergeant Jeremiah Wilson. When the latter was pointed out, the man handed him the familiar yellow envelope, with the crossed signal flags on the cover, and the burning torch. An instant quiet fell in the room, as Jeremiah received the crackling paper. He took it deliberately, and with trembling fingers fumbled for his glasses. Deliberately he put them on, and deliberately abstracted the message from the envelope, while the silent troopers watched him with fascinated gaze. He unfolded the paper and stared at it, then, taking off his glasses, wiped them and stared again; but it was no use, the mist dimmed the lenses.
"Heah, Potter, you read hit," he said finally with unsteady voice. "De light's too bad. Ah can't see."
Sergeant Potter took the telegram and spelled it out slowly:
Manila, P. I., Oct. 2, 1900.
5.30 p.m.Sergeant J. Wilson,
Tr, "B," 19th Cav.(Thro the Commanding Officer Guinibongbong, P. I.)
The Division Commander will take no action nor grant any delay in case of Private B. Wilson, Nineteenth Cavalry. Has no objection to laying of case before President provided cable is without expense to government. Upon receipt of cable through this office indicating that such action is contemplated order of suspension will be issued.
By order Major General Wheatley,
Castin, Adjutant General.
So that was the end of it. The irony, the humor of giving permission to lay the case before the President; by cable, too, with cable-grams only costing fifty cents a word! What magnanimity, what sarcasm, in sending such permission to a negro sergeant drawing twenty-six dollars a month! It would have been better for Jeremiah's peace of mind if that part had been left out. After it was over, and in the years to come, he would never be able to escape the thought that one thing more might have been done to save Buff's life—that once chance was left untried because of the lack of a few paltry dollars. Potter handed back the telegram slowly, and Jeremiah walked out into the darkness to fight his fight alone.
The sergeant stopped on the small stone porch and looked out into the town plaza. The clouds were low and dark in the late twilight, and as he stood, a few big drops fell, slowly increasing until there was a heavy down-pour. The rains had come, and soon the monotonous roar on the metal roofs, steady as the beating of a giant heart, told that the earth was receiving its semi-annual deluge.
Jeremiah stood in a small niche where he was partially exposed to the rain. When it and the water from a broken gutter, striking a balustrade beside him, splashed him with fine spray, he made no effort to move. Why should he care? He was only a worthless old nigger. A little wetness more or less would make no difference. A carelessness for all things earthly and pertaining to his own worn-out old body grew upon him. Then he suddenly ceased to think of himself. The sound of the rain in his ears seemed to be boring into his brain. Steady, inexorable, unanswerable as fate, it weighed upon him like a giant hand, and it came to him that he was comparing that roar to the death that was approaching his son.
When old Jeremiah left the squad room, there had been general silence for a time, and then events began to move rapidly, as they continued to do until the end of this peculiar episode. Sergeant Potter stood for a moment, with his hands behind his back, gazing at the floor, then he looked up, and cried out to the whole room:
"Look a heah, boys, is yer gwine ter be beat dis a way? Is yer gwine ter tuck yer tails atween yer laigs, and say 'let 'er go!' as long as dere is a chanst? Is yer goin' to 'low dat monkey-faced lootinint to grin at yer sarcastic? Yer know me. I'se as strong fur discipline as any pu'son; but dere's a eend to every man's patience." He jerked a hat off a bunk near him, and threw it down. "Dis is all de dough I got in de worl'," he said, holding up two silver dollars, "but she'll send fo' words to de Presydent of dese United States, so heah she goes," and he tossed them into the hat at his feet. "Come on, boys, dem as wants to be high-tone and pass de time o' day with de Presydent, chip in."
As soon as they grasped the idea, the appeal was effectual. Out came all the cash the black men had. It was mostly Mex. medio pesos and pesetas, for "pay day, pay day" had not sounded for over a month. The silver jingled merrily into the hat, and the affair became a sort of jollification, each man vying with the others to see how much more he could "dig up." Their volatile natures, guided solely by impulse and an undercurrent of generosity, led them to give all they had without thinking. Man after man, in high good-humor, plunged his hands into some corner of his box locker and raked up little hoards of cash that he had saved for tobacco, soap, and such necessities. However, when the silver was poured on the bed and counted, Sergeant Potter scratched his woolly head.
"Tain't no kinder use, boys. Twenty-fo' dollars an' ten cents. Dat'll sen' fo'ty-eight big words and one little 'un. Dat ain't nowhere near a'nuf. He'd show'ly feel mightly slighted, de Presydent would, ef we did'n sen' 'im no mo' talk dan dat. We gotter 'spress dis thing logical an' ellygant, ur he won't take no notice uf it, none whatever. We nacherally gotter have mo' uf de muzuma."
This was very discouraging, and produced more deep thought and head rubbing, until Private Andy Smith broke out:
"Well, dis ain't no time fer tu back out. Damn de 17th Article uv Wah[4]! Jess watch my smoke, niggers."
The rest of the men observed him curiously as he shouldered his way out of the circle. He went to his gold medal cot, and jerking off one of the fine, heavy army blankets, spread it on the floor. Then he rummaged amongst the clothing in his locker, and taking out a pair of extra shoes, a flannel shirt, and a white stable suit, rolled them into his blanket. Throwing the bundle thus made over his shoulder, he stalked out into the rain.
The effect of this eminently lawless example was instantaneous. The splendid regulation blankets and flannel shirts were at a premium among the natives, and the market was never dull. They could be coined into pesos on sight. There was a grand rush, and soon the blankets and spare articles of clothing went forth into the night, lugged by their respective owners. Shortly the darkies, wet and steaming, began to stamp back into the quarters, and the "dobie dollars" again clinked into the crown of Potter's old campaign hat.
Lieutenant Roger Williams Perkins was what is known as a solitary drinker. They are the worst kind. They drink by themselves, and purely for the effect. Doubtless their mental processes at such times are curious indeed.
The rain was falling steadily outside. There was no chance that any of the other men would come in to-night. Perkins sat alone at his table, as he had sat since six o'clock. It was now eight, and as he reached to take "another one," he heard two persons coming up the steps. He swore to himself and set the glass down. Turning, he found Sergeants Potter and Wilson at the head of the stairs, their dripping hats in their hands. Their ponchos glistened in the lamp-light, and from them ran little streams of water that gathered in globular pools, like quick-silver, on the oiled floor.
Perkins, of course, had heard of the answer to the telegram, and had thought the matter closed; but now these niggers had come to trouble him again. They came forward, trailing their streams of water behind them. He heard them through. He answered them craftily, smiling behind his hand, with the cunning born of the fog in his brain. Shortly they went away again, leaving on the table a pile of silver. Cable the President! What a joke! and he chuckled aloud. He would teach them to come and worry him with their foolishness.
Still the rain roared on the roof. Still he sat and drank, and drank again, until the lamp-light grew sick and wan in the damp gray day.
The first sergeant, with the Morning Report, found Perkins seated in the same place. Perkins signed the book in a sprawling scrawl, and the sergeant went his way. The Chino cook brought the meals, and then came and took them off again. The day dragged through, the gray evening fell; the rain streamed down; and still the officer sat as before.
At eight fifteen he looked up to find Wilson and Potter before him. There were the same glistening ponchos, the same little streams of water, the same pools on the oiled floor. He himself sat in the same place. The soldiers might have been gone ten minutes instead of twenty-four hours, for all the change there was in the scene. Only the pile of silver had disappeared.
No, no answer to the cablegram had been received, and Perkins could hardly conceal his desire to roar with laughter, as the two turned and trailed their streams of water back down the stairs.
At four o'clock he wobbled to the bed and threw himself down with all his clothes on. He awoke at six, and, getting up uncertainly, went to the window and looked out. Still rain and murky grayness everywhere. As he stood, the assembly went; for when a man is to be hanged, a little thing like rain does not interfere. Perkins turned from the window quickly, and plunged his head into a basin of cold water. Then, in spite of the early hour, he took a stiff "bracer," and throwing on his slicker, went out. At the foot of the stairs he found the orderly with the horses, and, mounting with suspicious care, he rode to the stables.
The troop was in ranks and waiting. Before the roll was called, Sergeant Wilson, his face drawn and wrinkled like old parchment, came forward and asked hesitatingly if there were any news from Washington. The officer shook his head. The cords in the old negro's throat worked convulsively, and he requested rather brokenly that he might be excused from this formation, and be allowed to remain in charge of quarters.
"No," the Lieutenant replied thickly; "there is no reason why you should be excused any more than any one else. The regular man will remain in charge of quarters." The whole troop heard, as he intended they should. The "bracer" was getting in its work, and Perkins was feeling good again. The wily schemes, the shapes and shadows of the previous night, were growing in his brain once more. He would teach these niggers who was who.
And so they took Private Buff Wilson out into the falling rain and hanged him. In the center of the square, formed by the squadron he had disgraced, he paid the price. The solemn hills, shrouded in mist, looked down, sadly, impassively. They were not more motionless on their everlasting foundations than was Sergeant Jeremiah Wilson, sitting his big bay like a granite statue, the tragedy of the ages and of his race deep in the hollow sockets of his eyes. For is it not written: "A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren"?
The signal was given. The trap fell with a bang; the spray flew from the snapping rope; and Private Wilson was jerked unceremoniously into the presence of his Maker. Justice was satisfied, and the account was balanced.
When a man is hanged, he must be buried. To bury a man it takes a detail in charge of a non-commissioned officer. The non-commissioned officer is designated by name from the sergeant-major's office. He is also chosen by roster in his proper order. It happened to be Sergeant Jeremiah Wilson's turn for duty. Consequently Sergeant Jeremiah Wilson was told off to bury his own son.
There was no detachment, no ceremony, no firing squad—only an escort wagon containing a black Q. M. coffin, upon which were perched four or five wet, disconsolate troopers armed with picks and shovels. Old Jeremiah followed, mounted, a feverish light in his eyes and drops of moisture standing on his grizzled mustache. So he went forth and saw them consign to earth the clod that had been his son—or rather, consign to water, for the grave was half full when they reached it. He did not see it, either; but he heard it.
He heard the splash as the casket was dropped into the half-filled grave. He heard the grating of the bamboo poles used to hold it down until the earth could be placed upon it. He heard the sucking and bubbling as the water forced its way in and the air forced its way out. He heard the splash of the muddy clay until the heaviness of it seemed to descend upon his own heart. The shapes and shadows struggled to and fro in his aching brain until they triumphed. Sergeant Wilson, to the naked eye as sane as any man, was mad; mad as a hatter.
He went back to the quarters and to his old corner. There, as before, he sat hour after hour, clasping and unclasping his hands. At times he startled all in hearing by throwing back his head and laughing harshly. The men regarded him furtively and with uneasiness.
The dreary night, with its drearier unending rain, had dropped once more. Lieutenant Perkins was seated in his old place. He had been there since the execution in the morning. This was the longest session he had ever indulged in; but the moral fiber degenerates rapidly in the tropics. Besides, the friendly rain had curtained him and kept away the spoil-sports. All day he had sat communing with the shapes and shadows. And it was very pleasant. He had triumphed.
Lately, however, an unpleasant idea had been flitting elusively through his consciousness—a something that marred the full measure of his achievement. Time and again he almost grasped it, only to have it slip from him. What was it? What was it?
Ah, yes; he had it. They were, as yet, ignorant of how he had fooled them! They must know it to make the joy complete. What sport to take their money back to them and tell them to their faces what monkeys he had made of them! Why not do it now? Yes; what a brilliant idea! He would do it at once.
Just before call to quarters Perkins staggered into the main squad room. The men stood to attention and observed him with wonder. He was soaking wet, and the water was streaming down from his uncovered hair. Without speaking, he walked to the end of the big nara-wood table in the center of the room, and began to take silver coins from his bulging pockets. He clawed out handfuls of them and planked them down in a pile; the smaller ones leaking through his fingers and falling to the stone floor, where they rolled away with musical tinklings, or hid themselves in the cracks. Finally, when he had succeeded, with laborious care, in extracting one last dime from the depths of his pocket, he said thickly, waving his arms with an all-embracing oratorical gesture:
"All you men come here." The troopers moved close, and formed on three sides of the table. They stepped quietly, some hint of what was to be having come to them.
"Got somethin' to tell you. You think you are very smart, doncher? You think you—" he rubbed his forehead reflectively and struggled for words. What was it he wanted to tell them? Oh, yes; that was it. "You think you're smart, doncher?" and he leaned forward on the table, peering around the circle; "but 'cher all damn fools. Me, I'm a smart man," and he indicated the center button of his blouse with his thumb, drawing himself up haughtily.
"You thought I cabled to the President, din'cher?" he continued, leaning forward again, and returning to his confidential tone. "Not on your life. See, there's the money. What a joke," and he burst into drunken hilarity, reeling from side to side, while the tears ran down his face.
The quiet in the room was absolute, except for the officer's unholy mirth, and the steady fall of the rain. At the sound of that laughter, old Jeremiah, who had sat in his corner unmindful of the officer's presence, got up and came forward to the opposite end of the table. There was a dazed look in his face as though he were just waking from a deep sleep. He glanced around at the other negroes, standing silently with wide eyes, then at the drunken officer, and finally at the pile of silver. Then he knew. As soon as Perkins saw the old soldier, he chuckled with renewed glee.
"Hallo, sergeant, you ole fool. The joke's on you. Yessir, the joke's on you. You thought I cabled to the President; but I did'n'. Nosir, I did'n'." And he went off into renewed peals of laughter.
Suddenly he stopped short. He saw that there was no appreciation of his witticisms; only a blur of blank black faces and white, rolling eyes.
"Why don't you laugh, you damn apes? You damn black idiots, why don't you laugh? You——you——"
He ceased quickly, for another voice broke the silence. It was old Sergeant Wilson speaking. No one could tell when he had begun. He stood slightly crouched, with his hands on the edge of the table. His face was absolutely blank and expressionless, while his eyes were fixed on the officer with a tense, glassy stare. His voice was cold and monotonous, without rise or fall, halt or intonation, and seemed to be more the wail of the spirit rising from somewhere deep within him than the voice of the flesh.
"You heah that, boys? You heah what he says? He calls us apes; us that God made as well as him. 'Cause we ahr black he calls us apes. We ahr no better dan de dirt undah his feet. He tooken ouh money an' fooled us, an' now he is laughin' 'cause he fooled us. He tooken ouh money and lied to us. An' while he wuz a-foolin' us, us apes, dey taken mah boy, mah baby, out an' killed him. Out in de rain. An' ah heered de trap fall, an' de rope snap. An' he heered it, an' laughed when he heered it!"
As he spoke, the sergeant never took his eyes from the officer's face, and moved slowly around the table, crouching a little, and creeping stealthily as a beast of prey might move upon an animal that it was attempting to fascinate. And the officer was being fascinated. He stood as though transfixed, his jaw hanging and his straining glance bent on the approaching soldier.
The body of troopers was getting restless. Their eyes, too, had taken on a peculiar shine, and were all focused upon the white face of the officer.
The wail of that dead, monotonous voice was to these negroes as the call of the wild. It touched a chord in them that antedated the deluge. They moved closer, imperceptibly, and moistened their dry lips with their tongues. There is something mortally appalling in that simple action. The dead voice continued: "An' dey sent me out to bury him, my own baby. An' he laughed when ah went. Ah seen 'im laugh. An' dey tooken mah boy and put 'im in a deep black grave; an' de col', col' watah wuz on 'im an' raoun' 'im, an' ah heerd it splash when dey put 'im thar. An' he is thar now, in de col' black grave, an' de watah is on 'im, an' ah kin feel de watah; an' de dirt is a-weighin' me down. Heah on my ches'. An' dis man is a-laughin' at us an' says hit is a joke!"
The old sergeant was now within three feet of the officer. The latter was gray as putty, and sober. It did not take the inclosing circle, the heavy breathing, the wild, staring eyes and tight-drawn lips to tell him his danger. He felt the Presence. The air was pregnant with it. He took a step backward and moved his stiff lips as though to speak; but there was no sound. The voice went on:
"He laughed at us; but he won't laugh no moah. God done made 'im to look lak a man; but he ain't no man. He is a snake an' creeps in de grass. God sez in his book dat all snakes mus' be killed an'—" the sergeant took another step; the officer took a step backward, and the crowd surged forward with a quick, hoarse gasp. Then the terror gripped him, and turning, the officer made a dash for the door.
Again the circle closed in as the sea surges up upon the land. There were tossing arms; there was the hissing of breath through clenched teeth, the sickening thud of blows, and a gurgling cry of mortal agony. Then the sea surged out again, and there on the floor lay the thing that had been Lieutenant Roger Williams Perkins.
The ring of negroes stood fast. Their shoulders rose and fell as their convulsive breaths were indrawn and exhaled. They seemed to be wondering what had happened. Several raised their hands and observed them curiously, first one and then the other, as though they were strange objects never seen before. One placed his fingers to his nose and smelt them furtively. Another tried to rub off the thick, dark stain, but with little success. The "moving finger" had written.
When the catastrophe occurred, five or ten of the weak-kneed had rushed from the building, and even as these guilty ones stood there, there was a clatter of arms outside. Some one yelled: "the guahd," and they knew that their deeds had overtaken them.
In the momentary pandemonium that followed, old Sergeant Wilson was heard calling above the din: "Out with dem lights! Pile de bunks agin' de doahs an' winders!" They had learned to obey that voice before, in many a tight place, and now it had its old-time ring. So they went and did. A saber hilt rattled on the portal. "Open the door! This is the officer of the guard."
"To hell wiff de officah of de guahd. Open hit yo'se'f!" was bellowed in reply. The strain was relieved, and the sally was greeted with a wild yapping from the rest, such as might have risen from a den of trapped wolves. Several ran to the windows. There was a sputtering volley of carbine shots, and Troop "B," 19th U.S. Cavalry, was in open mutiny.
Now when a troop of United States cavalry rises against those in authority, incidents begin to occur at once. The times when such a thing has happened can be counted on the fingers of one hand, with some digits to spare. There was, in this case, no room for parley or exchange of flags of truce. The thing with which the ants were already busy there on the floor was an uncontrovertible fact. Consequently, there being no grounds upon which to arbitrate the matter, the mutineers blazed away cheerfully at anything that showed itself on the plaza. They had now nothing to lose.
Then, shortly, there sounded from the guard-house, through the rain-drenched night, the call that jerks the soldier out of his bunk, all standing, from any sleep but that of death: the "call to arms."
In fifteen minutes "B" Troop's quarters were surrounded on all sides by the other troops of the squadron, the men of which, from safe cover, observed the carbine flashes and wild yells emanating therefrom with mild surprise, and wondered "what de hell had broke loose."
Major Bliss sat under the smoky lantern at the guard-house, surrounded by the officers of the station. He questioned sharply the men who had escaped from "B" Troop's barracks. At intervals he swore mightily and cursed the day that Roger Williams Perkins was born.
"And to think that old Wilson should be at the head of this! Old Wilson, of all men! Why, he is worth fifty thousand Perkinses, dead or alive. I am only sorry that Perkins didn't get away. I should like to have got hold of him myself, damn him."
There was no hesitation in the makeup of Major Bliss. He intended to suppress this outbreak in a manner that would tend to discourage any such ebullitions in the future. Consequently, he made his dispositions with grimness and determination. His plan was simple, his orders being to "rush 'em and give 'em hell." His greatest regret was that the interests of discipline should make such a step necessary, since he was sure that a majority of the mutineers had acted upon impulse, and were already excessively sorry for themselves.
In the midst of these untoward events, the "Tarlac," coastwise transport blew into the bay through the murk and rain, and Captain North, of "B" Troop, the "Ole Cap'n," returned to the station. Hearing the shots and yells, he concluded that the Major was "shooting up the town," and splashed hurriedly to his quarters for his saber and revolver. There in the darkness he stumbled over his muchacho, who had deposited himself at the foot of the steps and was earnestly beseeching his patron saint to have him spared this once; promising an altar cloth and innumerable candles if he should be allowed to exist long enough to secure them, thus putting on that gentleman's intercession a premium that he trusted would be effective. The Captain being naturally impulsive, the accident did not improve his temper to any appreciable extent. Besides this, the matches were wet, and there was no oil in the lamp. Consequently he had to search for his weapons in the dark. After falling over his bunk and numberless chairs, and upsetting his field desk, he found his saber and revolver, only to discover that both, owing to the neglect of that same sanctified muchacho on the stairs, were covered with rust; that the cylinder of the revolver would not revolve; and that at least two strong men and a boy would be required to coax the saber from its scabbard!
All this while the shooting and yelling were going on, and by the time he splashed out into the rain once more, the good Captain was what is technically known as "mad as a hornet!" He started on a run to "B" Troop's quarters, to take command of his men, only to be stopped by a sentinel, who informed him that "B" Troop was in no mood to be taken command of, and that he had "bettah go to de guahd-house." Being ordered to the guard-house by a private did not tend to quiet his state of mind any, even when the situation was explained. By the time he burst in on the assembled officers at the post of the guard, Captain North was madder than ever.
"What the devil is going on here, Bliss? What's this I hear about 'B' Troop's busting loose? This is a hell of a state of affairs."
"That is just what I think, North, and very neatly expressed," the Major replied dryly. "Lovely discipline you have in that band of Indians of yours. They've mutinied, no less, and apparently they have got Perkins. A nice——"
"Mutinied, have they? Why, the infernal black scoundrels," almost roared the irate officer, striding up and down the room. "Mutinied, have they? What the devil do they mean by doing a thing like that without saying anything to me about it? I'll mutiny 'em! Don't you interfere with me, Bliss," he continued, halting in his walk, "don't you interfere with me. This is my troop, and I can handle them. Don't you interfere with me."
"My dear North, no one has shown any inclination to interfere with you, has he?"
"That's right," and the Captain continued his march, "that's right. I can attend to these gentlemen. This plan of rushing them, though, is all wrong, all wrong"; and he stopped again. "They'll fight, fight like the devil. I ought to know. I've seen them do it often enough. You'll lose good men. In opposing them with force you recognize the strength in them. What you need is moral force. One man power. Same principle in training lions. Same principle. If a lion-tamer went into a cage of ten lions with ten men, he'd have trouble on his hands from the jump; but he can go alone and bluff 'em. Same principle here. If I could get into the middle of that bunch over there without their seeing me until I was there, I'd scare them out of ten years' growth. How to get there, that's the question."
"Why, North, you are crazy. They'd get you, sure. They'd eat you up, man."
"Eat me up? Why, they'd as soon think of tackling the late Mr. Peter Jackson. They know me. How to get there, that's the question. Walking across the plaza they couldn't tell me from any one else."
"Beg yoah pahdin', sah," and Private Massay of "B" Troop, who was the commanding officer's orderly for the day, spoke up, "Ef de Cap'n could git in through de little doah in de stoah-room, and go through de kitchen, I speck he could git in widout bein' ketched."
"Right, Massay, the very thing. Somebody give me a lantern. Confound it, one of you men get me a lantern, and be quick about it." A member of the guard gave him the required article, and concealing it carefully under his poncho, he went quickly out. The Major and other officers jumped up and followed. All the way down the dreary, rain-swept street the Major attempted to persuade the Captain to give up his foolhardy enterprise, but without result. Finally, when they reached the cordon of surrounding troops, the senior officer said:
"Well, North, this is absolutely absurd, and out of the question. If you insist, I shall have to give you an order not to go."
"No, you won't do that, Bliss." The Captain's anger had left him now, and he spoke quietly. "We have known each other a long time, and seen a lot of service together. You won't take advantage of your rank to stop me now. I am only doing what you would do in my place. It is my troop. The shame and disgrace are mine. You won't stop me now."
The Major hesitated a moment and then spoke slowly, and with evident feeling:
"Well—well. Have your way; but be careful, John, be careful."
They saw him move quietly along under the shadow of a wall, cross the street, and disappear in a small side door of "B" Troop's quarters. He was not discovered.
For the last half hour the silence and the blackness of the grave had existed in "B" Troop's big squad room. The "shouting and the tumult" had died a lingering death. One cannot yell and hurl challenge indefinitely, and shouting up one's courage begins to lose its efficacy if long continued. One big-lunged mutineer had held out with his firing and bellowing until the nerves of the rest could stand it no longer. They then rudely suppressed him. He sounded so absurdly and pathetically foolish. He was typical of their own status. "One nigger shootin' a bluff at de whole United States Army!" They realized that with fifty it was no less idiotic.
If it had not been for old Wilson passing stealthily to and fro among them, with that wild light in his eyes, and those crazy mumblings, doubtless there would have, already, been breaks in the ranks. But no; there was that other thing, lying over there where it fell. There was no use now; there could be no looking back. Each turned wearily to his door or window and renewed his wide-eyed effort to pierce the web of blackness over the square. And the everlasting rain still fell.
A door swung cautiously somewhere. There was the sound of some one moving with steady, determined step down the center of the room. Then, without warning, their unaccustomed eyes were momentarily blinded by a light taken suddenly from under a poncho; and there in the center of the room stood a lone officer; in one hand a lantern, in the other a big blue revolver.
For an instant there was no movement. Then there was a counter reaction. With the snarl of wild animals, the fifty negroes sprang toward the center of the room. Sergeant Wilson was first. With a cry of: "Kill him! kill him!" he bounded over a bunk, and landed within three feet of the officer, revolver upraised. As he did so, the officer lifted the lantern to a level with his own face. The sergeant stopped. The whole circle halted, as though Circe had transfixed them. They had recognized the "Ole Cap'n."
"Well, Wilson." At the sound of the voice the old negro's countenance changed instantly. It became the face of a man in mortal anguish, as indeed he was. In that moment the scales had fallen from his vision. He saw his position clearly in the light of the sorrowful glance from the "ole Cap'n's" eyes. It was as though the main pillar of the heavens had been pulled out, and the skies were thundering down about his dazed old ears.
"Oh, Gawd, oh, Gawd!" he groaned, putting one hand to his head, and rocking it from side to side, as though the pain there were more than he could stand.
"Oh, Gawd, oh, Gawd." The revolver was lowered slowly from its upraised position, and suddenly, before the officer could stop him, the sergeant turned it against himself. There was a flash, an earsplitting report, and the old soldier sank to the floor. There he stretched himself wearily, as though for a long sleep, and Sergeant Jeremiah Wilson, of the "old Army," was gathered to his fathers.
The Captain turned away abruptly. He knew that old Wilson was a good shot.
"Open the doors," he said to the troopers, as though he had been telling them good morning. Compliance to that voice, raised in command, was to these soldiers a second nature. There was not the slightest hesitation. With eager alacrity they hastened to obey, like children who had been caught misbehaving.
In the first faintness of the dawn the tired-faced troopers cheerfully filed out and formed in front of the quarters, each one, as he passed through the door, depositing his arms at the officer's feet. Oh, but it was good to be on the right side again; and the "ole Cap'n" would take care of his own.
FOOTNOTES:
[ [4] Art. 17. Any soldier who sells, or through neglect loses or spoils his horse, arms, clothing, or accoutrements, shall be punished as a court martial may adjudge, subject to such humiliations as may be prescribed by the President, by virtue of the power vested in him.
THE SINGER'S HEART
BY
HARRIS MERTON LYON
ILLUSTRATIONS BY J. B. MASTERS
"I never cared for the singer's fame,
But, oh, for the singer's heart
Once more—
The bleeding, passionate heart!"—"B. V."
These are a few films from the human biograph of Harry Barnes, old actor. You know, when you are old, you accept life with more or less of a sigh of quiet acquiescence, and by your cozy fire you sit and nod to an inner voice, a gentle old voice which over and over whispers and murmurs—"Once upon a time, once upon a time." And possibly Barnes would have nodded, too, but he lacked the cozy fire. Life has its dramatic unities, it would seem, and if one thing or another is awry we are apt not to perform as the book says we should. No cozy fire, says the Great Stage Manager; no nodding acquiescence, replies the Mummer in the Play.
Barnes listened, it is true, over and over to the voice which murmured "Once upon a time," but he sat not by a comfortable open grate, amid grandchildren. Instead, he lurked in East Fourteenth Street amid decaying agents' offices, hunting a chance to do a bad monologue in a worse vaudeville show. He had outlasted his time; he could not get work. He lived on those two heartless things, Hope and Memory. And for all I know he is living on them yet.
Now, you will not in your careless youth or your sceptical maturity find beauty in this story, you will not "get under the skin" of it, as the saying is, unless you have stopped sometime in your busy going, to consider, aside and with understanding, the pathos of the old actor. It is a curiously poignant human thing, written about by a few, suffered by many, and ignored by the loud, inordinate world.
The old actor out of employment! A target for jokes, a piece of battered, ancient "property" cluttering up a new and very busy stage. You smile at his curious figure, unconscious of the broken misery that aches beneath, where life has died and living goes paradoxically on; and only sometimes late at night do you get a part of that hidden ache when you hear old legs drag weary feet up the boarding-house stairs, past your door and on up into the skylight room on the roof, despondently to bed; and you know that the old man has had another unsuccessful day among the agents and the managers. You can sometimes interpret the querulous little laugh over the thin oatmeal at breakfast, sometimes you can guess the water in the rapidly winking eyes; but of course you do not proclaim your deductions. Civilization is a process of making less noise about things.
This is a segment of the life-film of Harry Barnes, old actor, as he traveled the stones of Fourteenth Street. Not the Rialto, where fat men adorned with fat diamonds smoke fat cigars in order to narcotize fat consciences; but Fourteenth Street, grimy with old, sparsely-tenanted buildings, where theatrical offices three flights up bargain for the driblets of trade among the low music-halls and the cheapest vaudeville houses, where niggardly, gray-haired agents have for two generations sat among their dusty contracts and their rusty pens, haggling over bread-and-water salaries with the jetsam of a too-volatile profession.
Harry was old and dropsical with drink, a sad hero for a careless story. The only ideal he had ever had, besides one, was to arrive at the fine fame of printer's ink: headlines, bill-boards, critical notices, reproductions of his photograph. But this was long ago. He had longed to be chronicled in his time, preëminent and large; this he had desired with that hungry passion for display which only an actor can feel. But this, remember, was once upon a time. His other ideal—no need to mention it amid Momus and his mimes!—was to sway people with laughter and tears, to burn them with romance, to chasten them with tragedy, to carry them with him in his frenzy, to play upon them with his art.
Art! Do you care for a grotesque, serious evening in its humblest presence? Have you time to listen, over beer glass and cigarette, to a broken-down old actor out of a job?
HARRY BARNES, OLD ACTOR
Barnes was incongruously named when he was given the name of Harry. It is a flippant name. It calls up merriness, youth, bravado, color, song. Barnes was forty-nine, streaked with grey, heart-sick, pallid, shuffling, timorous, sorry, and forlorn. Three decades of grease paint had made his skin flabby; and three decades of what the grease paint stood for had done likewise by his soul. It was thus that he drifted from doorway to doorway in Fourteenth Street, down by the Elevated, where dry little agents told him in dry little voices that there was nothing for him from day to day. It was thus that he dragged his feet up the boarding-house stairs to his skylight room, night after night, carrying the two heartless fardels, Hope and Memory.
It was approaching a certain holiday, a holiday which came on Sunday.
"Harry," said old Tony Sanderson, after he had finished informing the actor that there was no news for him, "why don't you do a little press-agent work for yourself? Get your name in the paper. That might help you get something to do."
The other listened despondently.
"Now here's a chance," went on the agent, in a confidential tone. "No money in it, of course, but, as I said, there's a chance to get into print. Some sort of a newsboys' benefit bunch is going to get together Sunday night and give a little entertainment fer the kids up in Beals' gymnasium on the Bowery. They're callin' for volunteers among the actors. You take your monologue stunt down there and get onto the program. The newspapers always plays up this newsboy dope strong and you'll get a good mention sure. Clip the notices and then you've got somethin' to flash. See?"
Barnes stood uneasily by the desk. "I—I don't know, Tony," he answered. "To tell yuh the truth, I'd be a little bit scared to try it. Yuh see, I—well, if you wasn't an old friend of mine, I couldn't say it—but, confidentially, Tony, I—I've kind o' lost my grip. I'm a—a back number, Tony. I'm afraid o' them kids; they're too wise. My old act wouldn't go." He waited, awkwardly; then, as if he hoped he were wrong, he asked: "Would it?"
Sanderson snapped his grim eyes. "What're yuh tryin' to put it on fer, at all, then—if yuh think it won't take with a gang of kids at a free doin's?" Then his tone softened. "Look here, Harry. It'll only be ten or twenty minutes. Go ahead. You'll get through all right. You ain't as much of a dead one as you think you are."
Barnes straightened up. It was all right for him to make a slight confession, but Sanderson had wounded his professional vanity. "A dead one!" he exclaimed. "Certainly not. Harry Barnes a dead one! After a thirty years' career in the companies of the best——"
The agent shoved a card in his hand and cut him off short. "Go around there and tell 'em to put you down for a monologue." And Harry went, with dignity and misgivings.
His misgivings were all the more increased when he saw the list of promised performers: La Belle Marie, the famous little toe dancer in her attractive transformations; the Brothers Zincatello, Risley experts at the Hippodrome; Julian Jokes, "in his inimitable Hebrew monologue"; the Seven Sebastians, the world's most marvelous Herculean acrobatic performers; Mlle. Joujou, the popular singing comedienne, Prima Donna and Star, direct from her unusual and most distinguished triumph at the Palace Theater, London; and a dozen more of the younger and more popular people of the stage, all adorned, with adjectives and hyperbole. Down at the bottom of the list with a trembling pencil he wrote: "Harry Barnes, Singing and Talking." Then he shook hands with the secretary of the organization and walked back to his boarding-house in a mild fever of excitement.
In his room he went eagerly about his work. He rehearsed again and again his meager little bag of tricks, his funny Irishman, his Chinaman—no, the Chinaman came first, because he used the queue afterward to wrap around his chin and simulate Irish "galloways"—his Dutch comedian monologue about married life, his old-time songs and dances. He furbished up some old "patter" and injected new anecdotes. And this he kept up morning and evening until the notable Sunday came.
"HE GRINNED AND WINKED AND FRISKED AND CAPERED"
He was so nervous, this old actor of a thousand parts, that he could eat no supper that night. He almost trotted to the gymnasium in his excitement, and, though his pockets bulged with grease paint, mustaches, wigs, and other paraphernalia, he forgot almost half of his material. At the door he had to push his way through a wriggling, impish mass of small boys who blocked the steps and the sidewalk. Inside the hall, young faces packed the place to the window-sills. To the old man the newsboys seemed as so many antagonistic bits of the younger generation, the generation which evidently would have none of him, which relegated him carelessly to the warehouse for old scenery and old settings.
He stood in dismay behind an extemporized "wing" and peered out at the restless little bodies. He fancied already that he could see grins on their sophisticated faces, ridicule in their eyes; he remembered once hearing a gallery god shout "Twenty-three!" in the middle of an actor's monologue, and what had then seemed humorous precocity now seemed hard, bitter cruelty. He fumbled at his make-up in his pockets, shuffled uneasily, and waited.
It was almost time to begin. Where were the other actors who had promised to come? The boys out front were whistling, kicking their feet upon the floor, clapping their hands, and shouting to one another. A distracted official raced here and there among other officials, asking some sort of exasperated question. Barnes could not hear what it was; but telepathically he felt that there was a hitch in the program.
At last, after waiting a quarter of an hour, the manager stepped forward and said:
"Boys, we had arranged a fine program for you to-night——"
"Good fer you!" yelled a voice.
The speaker held up his hand. "But it seems that actors are better promisers than they are actors." He smiled at his own joke, but the audience gave one long "Aw-w-w!"
"However," he continued, "we are all here now and we intend to do the best we can. If we make up our mind to, we can have a bully good time just the same. We have with us at least one kind gentleman who appreciates what a celebration like this means to the boys." ... Barnes heard and saw things as if through a fog. The arms of the speaker were gyrating and a voice shouted in the ear of the old actor: "What's your name?"
"Harry Barnes," he said, moistening his lips. Nobody had shown up except him, he kept thinking over and over to himself: nobody except him. He had the thankless job of "opening the show."
"... Harry Barnes," echoed the speaker at the end of some sort of practical talk concerning the newsboys' organization and its management. "Mister Harry Barnes"—he squinted at the program—"in singing and talking."
He turned and smiled at the old man, and to Barnes the smile seemed diabolical. Somebody clapped him on the back. There was a hurricane of whistles and shouts, and before he knew it he was in the middle of the rostrum.
Mechanically he had made his old comic entrance, tripping his right toe over his left heel, and turning to shake his fist at an imaginary enemy. The boys, determined to be pleased, giggled appreciatively.
"How—how are you, boys?" Barnes asked, seriously.
The audience snickered with delight. He was such a funny-looking old man!
"I hope you'll like my work," he went on, desperately, "or else we might as well go home. I guess I'm the whole show, for a little while, at least, as the feller said when he fell out o' the balloon." The house roared with approval.
"Go wan, Barnesy," shouted a young pair of lungs in the front row.
He straightened up, turned his back for a moment, stuck a queer set of mustaches on his upper lip, faced the crowd again, and began: "I was walkin' down the street the other day when my friend J. Pierpoint Morgan stepped up to me an' says, 'Barney, my boy'"....
The show had begun. Harry Barnes, singing and talking, had opened his carefully rehearsed bag of tricks.
There is some peculiar psychology about humor. If people make up their minds that they are going to laugh and that a performance is bound to be funny, nothing on earth can keep them from enjoying themselves. The most serious remark will be greeted with howls of approval; the most ancient joke takes on a novel and present sprightliness. In the slang of the stage, Barnes' line of patter took.
Four hundred boys simpered, smirked, grinned, giggled, tittered, chuckled, and guffawed. A wine of merriment flushed the crowd and mounted to the old mummer's brain and heart. He skipped and danced and sang; he went through all the drollery and tomfoolery, all the old comic business he could recall.
The children nudged each other, dug their fists into each other, and cheered: "Oh, you Barnesy!" "Kill it, Kid!" "Whatcha know about dat!" "Sand it down, Barnesy!" The old-timer was doing the famous lock-step jig he had done with Pat Rooney in "Patrice" fifteen or twenty years before. It was so old that it was new. Encore followed encore. The perspiration cascaded through his pores; he grinned and winked and frisked and capered. They would not let him stop. At the end of twenty-five minutes he bowed himself off the stage, and still they called him back. When he gave them, for the "call," the Little Johnny Dugan pantomime from "The Rainmakers," the East Side children, born since the day of such things, were suffocated with delight.
What did Dugan do to him?
—They say he was untrue to him.
Did Dugan owe him money?
—No; he stole McCarthy's wife!
Who? Little Johnny Dugan?
sang Barnes with a quizzical flirt of his head; and lungs that were wont to fill the city streets with news could not even gasp for laughter.
The secretary of the organization followed with a speech about future entertainments; another official read a letter from a prominent financier promising the boys a swimming-pool and a half dozen summer excursions.
"Somebody bang de box!" suggested a voice, after a pause.
Nobody could—except Barnes; and he volunteered. The whole affair was now like one big family circle, each one secure in the amity of the other, and when the old man sat down at the cracked piano, he sang as if he were singing to himself, easily and without restraint. A quiet held the house, and even the children were touched; for Harry Barnes was quavering through the simple lines of "Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot." After that he gave them the Lullaby Song from "Erminie," and somehow it did not at all appear incongruous that a careworn mimic of fifty should be singing to careworn workingmen of ten, down on the Bowery, in a gymnasium, a verse about pretty little eyelids and sleeping darlings. The world, fortunately, is not always with us; and the song ended in a silent applause.
For two hours the entertainment went on, speeches and official plans interspersed with the antics of Barnes.
"'OH, YOU DIVVIL, YOU! YOU OLD, BLATHERSKITING DIVVIL'"
Was there anything he could not do? He mimicked birds and animals; he imitated a wheezy phonograph playing "When We Were a Couple of Kids"; he recited "The Raven" and "Paul Revere's Ride"; he gave a cutting from Dickens and one from Sheridan Knowles; he showed how Joe Jefferson played Rip Van Winkle, how Sol Smith Russell did "A Poor Relation."
And all through his soul and body, as he watched his haphazard audience follow him in his moods and changes, ran the quiet magic of Art Satisfied. It is a noble braggart madness, this glorification of a cheap art by an old actor.
"Barnes, my boy," he said to himself, with a glow of rapid blood, "you have not lost them yet! See them laugh with you! Feel them cry! What does it matter if you eat watery oatmeal and live in a skylight room; are you not an artist, a resonant instrument of poetry and music and mirth, a true actor of the best parts? You are; and these are matters of the undying soul. A boarding-house is a vulgar, temporal thing. You were right to come here to-night, and do this thing without pay, for Art's sake. You uphold the honor of a calling which is founded upon Art. And, oh, most of all, you have not lost your power, you have not outlived your time! Sanderson intimated that you were a dead one—very well, to-morrow you shall triumphantly cut the acquaintance of Sanderson! To have lived until this evening before the youth of this land; to have caught the right intonation, the proper gesture; to have swept through the hearts of your hearers like a vibration of music—this is to have transcended, this is to have justified yourself! And justified yourself to whom? To Sanderson? To the world? No! You have justified Harry Barnes to Harry Barnes! You carry this human throng over the footlights and into your soul with a Chinaman's queue and a putty nose. Your Art is still that fine, secure Art which you have carried in your memory as you traversed dingy stairways on Fourteenth Street. Barnes, you live, you act, you accomplish! Bravo!"
He shook hands abstractedly all around when the affair came to a close. He remembered bundling his make-up and trinkets into a piece of newspaper and tucking it under his arm. A pleased face presented itself at one time before his eyes and a voice said, confidentially, "Mr. Barnes, I congratulate you; and the dramatic critic of the Star was here to-night."
He found himself at last out in the cool darkness of the street, and he had to stop a moment to think which way his boarding-house lay. Then he walked home, to save carfare. All the way up the silent streets his brain sang with triumph. His blood jumped in gladness; he could hardly keep from running. He declaimed aloud bits of Shakespeare, tag ends of poems; he snapped his fingers and flung out his arms in sheer excess of enthusiasm. He smiled, threw back his head, even made faces at the passersby. He boomed into a solo from an opera, and kicked his foot at a cigar stub on the sidewalk. And had anybody wished to observe when he reached his house, the spectacle would have presented itself of a caricature, funny-paper barn-stormer tramping merrily up the rattling stairs and humming, "The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la, have nothing to do with the case."
All the next day he did not leave his room, save at meal times; for he wished to be alone and hug his exultation. To the four flat walls he repeated snatches of the things he had done the night before; up and down the rag carpet he smirked and grimaced and laughed and jigged. He sang the songs that had "taken" so well. He went through certain gestures and then deliberately exaggerated them, in a high good-humor. He was as young again as on the day when he had signed his first contract. He puffed out his chest, looked at himself in the glass with mock seriousness, and then, when the pent-up good feeling burst out in his merry eye, he winked it gleefully and said: "Oh, you divvil, you! You old blatherskiting divvil!"
At half-past four he went down to the corner and bought a copy of the Star, the late edition which had the dramatic news in it.
There it was! He felt like jumping up in the air and whooping the length of the street. On the editorial page it was. His name was in the headlines! Beneath, in the article itself, almost every other word seemed to be Barnes. It praised him here, it admired him there, it thanked him, it congratulated him, it asserted that he had saved the night for four hundred newsboys. He was so anxious to read it through and to read it fast that he skipped from paragraph to paragraph. There was over a column of it! He hurried back up to the room; and then regretted that he had not stopped to buy more copies of the paper. He locked the door and spread the paper out on the little center-table. His heart and breath almost stopped as he read the good words slowly through. When he had finished, he threw the paper aside and bounded into the middle of the room.
"Press agent, hey?" he laughed. "Press agent! I guess yes! A small matter of a column and a quarter; that's all. Only a column and a quarter about Harry Barnes! Wonder what Sanderson will think about that? Wonder if he won't get me something to do? Oh, no; I guess not. A column and a quarter!"
He sat down again and smoothed out the paper before him. This time he began noticing little niceties of the critic's phrasing ... "entertaining, not to say pathetic rendition," etc., etc.... "Not to say?" Funny; look at it a moment, and it seems to mean it wasn't pathetic. But here it said: "Infectious and heart-tickling old-time Irish humor" ... "excellent characterization of Uriah Heep" ... and so on.
"HE SAT STARING INTO THE BLANKNESS OF THE LITTLE ROOM"
After a few minutes he ceased reading and sat, picking at the edge of the paper, staring into the blankness of the little room. He stayed thus immovable for a long, long time, and then slowly the tears slipped across his cheeks, down on the forgotten "notice," his throat ached with a tender sobbing, and he bowed his head into the newspaper.
He was thinking of the children; he had made them laugh and cry. And this was the thrill, once more, of the singer's heart.
THE REPUDIATION
OF
JOHNSON'S POLICY
BY
CARL SCHURZ
ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
In consequence of the threatening situation which the President's reactionary policy had precipitated, the belief grew stronger and stronger in the Northern country that the predominance of the Republican party was—and would be for a few years, at least—necessary for the safety and the honor of the Republic; and steps taken to insure that predominance, even such as would have in less critical times evoked strong criticism, were now looked upon with seductive leniency of judgment. Mr. Stockton of New Jersey was unseated in the Senate upon grounds which would hardly pass muster in ordinary times, to make room for a Republican successor, and even Mr. Fessenden approved the transaction. Advantage was taken in the same body of the sickness or casual absence of some Democratic senator to rush through a vote when a two-thirds majority was required to kill a veto; and other proceedings were resorted to at a pinch which were hardly compatible with the famous "courtesy of the Senate." But there was more thorough and lasting work to be done to prepare for the full restoration of the States lately in rebellion. The Republican majority was by no means of one mind as to the constitutional status of the communities that had been in insurrection against the National Government. I have already spoken of the theory of State-suicide advanced by Mr. Stevens and a comparatively small school of extremists. The theory most popular with most of the Republicans, which was finally formulated by the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, was that the rebel States had not been out of the Union, but had lost their working status inside of the Union, and had to be restored to their regular constitutional relations to the Union by action of Congress, upon such conditions as Congress might deem proper.
To meet the dangers which so far had become visible on the horizon, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction devised the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which was long and laboriously debated in both Houses. In the form in which it was finally adopted it declared (1) that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States and of the States in which they reside, and that no State shall make or enforce any law abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens, nor deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person the equal protection of the laws; (2) that if in any State the right to vote at any election for the choice of national or State officers is denied or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation in Congress or the electoral college shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State; (3) that no person who had taken part in the rebellion, having previously, as a national or State officer, military or civil, sworn to support the Constitution of the United States, shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or any State, unless relieved of that disability by a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress; (4) that the validity of the public debt of the United States shall not be questioned, nor shall any debt or obligation contracted in aid of rebellion, or any claim for emancipated slaves be paid.
The Fourteenth Amendment
Thus the Fourteenth Amendment stopped short of the extension of the suffrage to negroes—a subject which many Republicans were still afraid to touch directly. But by implication it punished the States denying that extension by reducing the basis of representation; it excluded from office, unless relieved of the disability by a two-thirds vote of Congress, the most influential class of those who had taken an active part in the rebellion; and it safeguarded the public debt. With only one of its provisions serious fault could be found;—not with that which guaranteed to the freedmen the essential civil rights of free men, nor with that which excluded the freedmen from the basis of representation—so long as they were not permitted to vote. Only the advocates of negro suffrage might logically have objected to this clause; inasmuch as it by implication recognized the right of a State to exclude the colored people from the suffrage if the State paid a certain penalty for such exclusion. Neither could the clause safeguarding the public debt and prohibiting the payment of debts incurred in aid of the rebellion be objected to. The really exceptionable provision was that which excluded so large a class of Southern men from public office, and just that class with which a friendly understanding was most desirable. The provision that their disqualification could be removed by a two-thirds vote in each House of Congress mended the mischief thus done a little, but not enough for the public good.
It was not expressly enacted, but it was generally understood, that those of the States lately in rebellion, which ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, would thereby qualify themselves for full restoration in the Union. Tennessee, where a faction of the Union party hostile to President Johnson had gained the ascendency, did so, and was accordingly fully restored by the admission to their seats in Congress of its Senators and Representatives. The full restoration of the other late rebel States would probably have been expedited in the same way, had they followed the example of Tennessee. But President Johnson, as became publicly known in one or two instances, obstinately dissuaded them from doing so, and the fight went on. He also vetoed a second Freedmen's Bureau bill in which some of the provisions he had objected to in his veto of the first were remedied. But things had now come to such a pass between Congress and the President that his veto messages were hardly considered worth listening to, but were promptly overruled almost without debate by two-thirds votes in each House.
A Campaign to Destroy a President
Under such circumstances the Congressional election of 1866 came on. The people were to pronounce judgment between the President and Congress. The great quarrel had created excitement so intense as to affect men's balance of mind. About the time of the assembling of Congress Mr. Preston King of New York (the same rotund gentleman with whom, in the National Convention of 1860, I conducted Mr. Ashmun to the chair), who had been a Senator of the United States and had been appointed Collector of Customs by President Johnson, committed suicide by jumping into the North River from a ferry-boat. He had been a Republican of the radical type, and when he took the office he supposed the President to be of the same mind; but Mr. Johnson's course distressed him so much that he became melancholy; his brain gave way, and he sought relief in death. Another suicide which greatly startled the country a few months later, that of Senator Lane of Kansas, was attributed to a similar cause. "Jim" Lane had been one of the most famous free-State fighters in Kansas Territory. Since then he was ranked among the extreme anti-slavery men and as a Senator he was counted upon as a firm opponent of President Johnson's policy. To the astonishment of everybody he voted against the Civil Rights bill. This somewhat mysterious change of front, which nobody seemed able satisfactorily to explain, cost him his confidential intercourse with his former associates in the Senate, and brought upon him stinging manifestations of disapproval from his constituents. He was reported to have expressed profound repentance of what he had done and finally made away with himself as one lost to hope. He was still in the full vigor of manhood—only fifty-one years old—when he sought the grave.
JOHN POTTER STOCKTON
THE DEMOCRATIC SENATOR FROM NEW JERSEY WHO WAS UNSEATED IN THE SENATE OF 1866 TO MAKE ROOM FOR A REPUBLICAN SUCCESSOR. HE WAS LATER REELECTED TO THE SENATE
The campaign of 1866 was remarkable for its heat and bitterness. In canvasses carried on for the purpose of electing a President, I had seen more enthusiasm, but in none so much animosity and bad blood as in this, an incidental object of which was politically to destroy a president. Andrew Johnson had not only manifested a disposition to lean upon the Democratic party in the pursuit of his policy, but he had also begun to dismiss public officers who refused to coöperate with him politically and to put in their places men who adhered to him. This touched partisan spirit in an exceedingly sensitive spot. The so-called "bread-and-butter brigade" was looked down upon with a contempt that could hardly be expressed in words.
Killing of Negroes at Memphis and New Orleans
But there were more serious things to inflame the temper of the North. The Southern whites again proved themselves their own worst enemies. Early in May news came from Memphis of riots in which twenty-four negroes were killed and one white man was wounded. The conclusion lay near and was generally accepted that the whites had been the aggressors and the negroes the victims. In the last days of July more portentous tidings arrived from New Orleans. An attempt was made by Union men to revive the constitutional convention of 1864 for the purpose of remodeling the constitution of the State. The attempt was of questionable legality, but, if wrong, it could easily have been foiled by legal and peaceable means. The municipal government of New Orleans was in possession of the ex-Confederates. It resolved that the meeting of the remnant of the convention should not be held. When it did meet, the police, consisting in an overwhelming majority of ex-Confederate soldiers, aided by a white mob, broke into the hall and fired upon those assembled there. The result was thirty-seven negroes killed and one hundred and nineteen wounded, and three of the white Union men killed and seventeen wounded, against one of the assailants killed and ten wounded. General Sheridan, the commander of the Department, telegraphed to General Grant: "It was no riot; it was an absolute massacre by the police which was not excelled in murderous cruelty by that of Fort Pillow. It was a murder which the Mayor and the police of this city perpetrated without the shadow of necessity." A tremor of horror and rage ran over the North. People asked one another: "Does this mean that the rebellion is to begin again?" I heard the question often.
The Administration felt the blow, and to neutralize its effects a national convention of its adherents, North and South, planned by Thurlow Weed and Secretary Seward, was to serve as the principal means. This "National Union Convention" met in Philadelphia on August 14th. It was respectably attended in point of character as well as of numbers. It opened its proceedings with a spectacular performance which under different conditions might have struck the popular imagination favorably. The delegates marched into the Convention Hall in pairs, one from the South arm in arm with one from the North, Massachusetts and South Carolina leading. But with the Memphis riot and the New Orleans "massacre" and Andrew Johnson's sinister figure in the background, the theatrical exhibition of restored fraternal feeling, although calling forth much cheering on the spot, fell flat, and even became the subject of ridicule, since it earned for the meeting the derisive nickname of the "arm-in-arm convention." The proceedings were rather dull, and much was made by the Republicans of the fact that the Chairman, Senator Doolittle from Wisconsin, was careful not to let Southern members say much lest they say too much. It was also noticed and made much of that among the members of the convention the number of men supposed to curry favor with the Administration for the purpose of getting office—men belonging to the "bread-and-butter-brigade"—was conspicuously large. Among the resolutions passed by the convention was one declaring slavery abolished and the emancipated negro entitled to equal protection in every right of person and property, and another heartily endorsing President Johnson's reconstruction policy.
No doubt many of the respectable and patriotic men who attended that convention thought they had done very valuable work for the general pacification by getting their Southern friends publicly to affirm that slavery was dead never to be revived, and that the civil rights of the freedmen were entitled to equal protection and would have it. But the effect of such declarations upon the popular mind at the North was not as great as had been expected. Such affirmations by respectable Southern gentlemen, who were perfectly sincere, had been heard before. In fact, almost everybody in the South was ready to declare himself likewise, and with equal sincerity, as to the abolition of the old form of chattel slavery. But the question of far superior importance was, what he would put in the place of the old form of chattel slavery. There was the rub, and this had come to be well understood at the North in the light of the reports from the South, which the advocates of President Johnson's policy could not deny nor obscure. The moral effect of the National Union Convention was therefore very feeble.
From the collection of Joseph Keppler
SENATOR CARL SCHURZ
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN ABOUT 1879
Johnson "Swings Around the Circle"
If the members of the National Union Convention thought that their conciliatory utterances would pour oil on the angry waves of the campaign, they reckoned without their host. When a committee appointed for that purpose presented to President Johnson a copy of its proceedings, there was rather a note of defiance to his opponents, than of conciliation, in his response. "We have witnessed in one department of the government every endeavor to prevent the restoration of peace, harmony, and union," he said. "We have seen hanging upon the verge of the government, as it were, a body called, or which assumes to be, the Congress of the United States, while, in fact, it is a Congress of only a part of the United States. We have seen a Congress in a minority assume to exercise power which, allowed to be consummated, would result in despotism or monarchy itself." Here was again the thinly veiled threat that, because certain States were not represented in it, the validity of the acts of Congress might be attacked. But worse was to follow. It is a well-known fact that presidents, under the influence of the Washington atmosphere, are apt to become victims of the delusion that they are idolized by the American people. Even John Tyler is said to have thought so. It may have been under a similar impression that President Johnson, who had great confidence in the power of his influence over the masses when he personally confronted them, accepted an invitation requesting his presence at the unveiling of a Douglas statue in Chicago, and he made this an occasion for a "presidential progress" through some of the States. He started late in August. Several members of his cabinet, Seward among others, accompanied him, and so did General Grant and Admiral Farragut, by command, to give additional luster to the appearance of the chief.
Reproduced by permission of the New York Customs House
SENATOR PRESTON KING
WHOM PRESIDENT JOHNSON APPOINTED COLLECTOR OF THE PORT OF NEW YORK. HIS SUICIDE IN 1865 WAS ATTRIBUTED TO WORRY OVER THE PRESIDENT'S RECONSTRUCTION POLICY
His journey, the famous "swinging around the circle,"—a favorite phrase of his to describe his fight against the Southern enemies of the Union, the Secessionists, at one time, and against the Northern disunionists, the radical Republicans, at another—was a series of the most disastrous exhibitions. At Philadelphia he was received with studied coldness. At New York he had an official reception, and he used the occasion to rehearse his often-told story of his wonderful advancement from the position of alderman in his native town to the presidency of the United States, with some insignificant remarks about his policy attached. At Cleveland he appeared before a large audience, according to abundant testimony, in a drunken condition. Indeed, the character of his speech cannot be explained in any other way. He descended to the lowest tone of partizan stump speaking. He bandied epithets with some of his hearers who interrupted him. The whole speech was a mixture of inane drivel and reckless aspersion. His visit at Chicago passed without any particular scandal. But the speech he made at St. Louis fairly capped the climax. He accused the Republicans in Congress of substantially having planned the New Orleans massacre. He indulged himself in a muddled tirade about Judas, Christ, and Moses. He declared that all his opponents were after was to hold on to the offices; but that he would kick them out; that they wanted to get rid of him, but that he defied them. And so on. At Indianapolis a disorderly crowd hooted him down and would not let him speak at all.
Lent by the Century Co.
SENATOR JAMES LANE
ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS FREE-STATE FIGHTERS IN KANSAS TERRITORY. HIS DEFECTION TO THE SIDE OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON WAS BITTERLY CRITICISED BY HIS CONSTITUENTS, AND WAS THOUGHT TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR HIS SUICIDE IN 1866
New Congress Overwhelmingly Anti-Johnson
He returned to Washington an utterly discomfited and disgraced man, having gone out to win popular support, and having earned only popular disgust. The humorists, pictorial as well as literary, pounced upon the "swinging around the circle" as a fruitful subject for caricature or satire, turning serious wrath into a bitter laugh. Andrew Johnson became the victim not only of detestation but of ridicule.
The campaign was then—about the middle of September—virtually decided. There was no longer any doubt that the election would not only preserve, but materially increase, the anti-Johnson majority in Congress. But before President Johnson started on his ill-starred journey, arrangements had been made for the other national conventions. One of them was designed to bring Southern loyalists, that is, Southern men who had stood loyally by the National Government, together with Northern Republicans. It met at Philadelphia on the 3rd of September. Senator Zachariah Chandler and myself attended it as delegates sent there by the Republicans of Michigan. It was a large gathering, the roll of which bore many distinguished names from all parts of the country. Southern members having been permitted to say but very little in the Johnson convention a fortnight before, it was a clever stroke of policy on the part of our managers to give the floor to the Southern loyalists altogether. They availed themselves of the opportunity to lay before the people of the country an account of their experiences and sufferings, since the promulgation of the Johnson policy, which could not fail to stir the popular heart. Their recitals of the atrocities committed in the South were indeed horrible. Over a thousand Union citizens had been murdered there since the surrender of Lee and in no case had the assassins been brought to judgment. But after Mr. Johnson's "swing around the circle" no further exertions could have saved his cause, and no further exertion could have very much augmented the majority against him. I am convinced he would have been beaten without his disgraceful escapade. But his self-exhibitions made his defeat overwhelming. The Republicans won in one hundred and forty-three Congressional districts, the Democrats in only forty-nine. President Johnson was more at the mercy of Congress than ever.
During the canvass I was somewhat in demand as a speaker and addressed large meetings at various places. One of my speeches, delivered at Philadelphia on the 8th of September, was printed in pamphlet form and widely circulated as a campaign document. I have read it again—thirty-nine years after its delivery—and I may say that after the additional light and the experience which this lapse of time has given us, I would now draw the diagnosis of the situation then existing substantially as I did in that speech—barring some, not many—extravagances of oratorical coloring, and the treatment of the disqualification clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
The Movement Toward Negro Suffrage
It was in this campaign that the matter of negro suffrage was first discussed on the hustings with a certain frankness. Efforts have since been made, and are now being made, to make the Southern people believe—and, I deeply regret to say, many of them actually do believe—that the introduction of negro suffrage was a device of some particularly malignant and vindictive radicals, to subject the South to the extreme of distress and humiliation. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Admitting that there were people in the North who, before the passions of the War had subsided, wished to see the rebels and their sympathizers and abettors in some way punished for what they had done, negro suffrage never was thought of as a punitive measure. I may say that in all my intercourse with various classes of people—and my opportunities were large—I have never heard it mentioned or suggested, still less advocated, as a punitive measure. It never was in itself popular with the masses—reason enough for the ordinary politicians to be afraid of openly favoring it. There were only two classes of men who at all thought of introducing it generally; those whom, without meaning any disparagement, I would for the sake of convenience call the doctrinaires,—men who, like Mr. Sumner, would insist as a general principle that the negro, being a man, was as a matter of right as much entitled to the suffrage as the white man; and those who, after a faithful and somewhat perplexed wrestle with the complicated problem of reconstruction, finally landed—or, it might almost be said, were stranded—at the conclusion that to enable the negro to protect his own rights as a free man by the exercise of the ballot was after all the simplest way out of the tangle, and at the same time the most in accordance with our democratic principles of government.
SENATOR ZACHARIAH CHANDLER
WHO WAS SENT, TOGETHER WITH CARL SCHURZ, TO THE PHILADELPHIA CONVENTION OF 1866, BY THE REPUBLICANS OF MICHIGAN
This view of the matter grew rapidly in popular appreciation as the results of reconstruction on the Johnson plan became more and more unsatisfactory. It gained very much in strength when it appeared that the tremendous rebuke administered to the President's policy by the Congressional elections of 1866 had not produced any effect upon Mr. Johnson's mind, but that, as his annual message delivered on December 3rd showed, he was doggedly bent upon following his course. It was still more strengthened when all the Southern legislatures set up under the President's plan, save that of Tennessee, rejected the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution,—some unanimously, or nearly so,—and even with demonstrations of contemptuous defiance. Then the question was asked at the North with great pertinency: Are we to understand that the white people of the States lately in rebellion will not agree that all persons born or naturalized in the United States shall be constitutionally recognized as citizens entitled in their civil rights to the equal protection of the laws? That those States insist, not only that the colored people shall not have the right of suffrage, but that those people so excluded from the franchise shall even serve to increase the basis of representation in favor of the whites—or in other words, that the white people of the South shall come out of the rebellion politically stronger than they were when they went into it? That all those who engaged in the rebellion and fought to destroy the Union shall be entitled to participate on even more favorable terms than ourselves in the government of the same Union which but yesterday they sought to destroy? That they refuse to safeguard the public debt incurred for saving the Union and wish to keep open the possibility of an assumption of the debts incurred by the rebel States for destroying the Union?
The fact was not overlooked that the great mass of the Southern negroes were grossly ignorant and in other respects ill-fitted for the exercise of political privileges. Many who then favored negro suffrage would have greatly preferred its gradual introduction, first limiting it, as Mr. Lincoln suggested to Governor Hahn of Louisiana, to those who had served as soldiers in the Union army and those who were best fitted for it by intelligence and education. But this would have reduced the negro vote to so small a figure as to render it insufficient to counteract or neutralize the power of the reactionary element. To that end the whole vote was required; and for that reason it was demanded, in spite of the imperfections it was known to possess and of the troubles it threatened—which, however, at that period were much underestimated, as is apt to be the case under similar circumstances.
Reconstruction Under Military Control
When the session of Congress opened on the 3rd of December, it was virtually certain that unrestricted negro suffrage would come and that President Johnson's reconstruction policy would be swept out of the way. The Republican majority without delay passed a bill extending the suffrage to the negroes in the District of Columbia, which then had a municipal government of its own. The President put his veto on the bill, but the veto was promptly overruled by two-thirds majorities in both Houses. Then followed a series of legislative measures designed substantially to substitute for the reconstruction work done by the President a method of reconstruction based upon universal suffrage including the negro vote, and to strip the President as much as possible of all power to interfere. The first, upon the ground that life and property were not safe under the existing provisional governments, divided the late rebel States into five military divisions, each to be under the command of a general officer who was to have the power to declare martial law and to have offenders tried by military commission, as the condition of public safety and order might seem to them to require. Under their protection conventions were to be elected by universal suffrage including the negro vote and excluding the disqualified "rebel" vote, to frame new State constitutions containing provision for the same sort of universal suffrage, such constitutions to be subject to the approval of the people of the respective States and of Congress. The State officers to be elected under these new constitutions were, of course, to be elected by the same electorate, and the States were to be regarded as entitled to representation in Congress, after having ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the National Constitution, and after that Amendment had been ratified by a sufficient number of the States generally to make it a valid part of the Constitution. A supplementary reconstruction act gave the military commanders very extensive control over the elections to be held, as to the registration of voters, the mode of holding the elections, the appointment of election officers, the canvassing of results, and the reporting of such results to the President and through him to Congress. In order to strip President Johnson of all power to interfere with the execution of this measure beyond the appointment of the commanders of the various military divisions, a provision was introduced in the Army Appropriation bill which substantially ordained that all military orders and instructions should be issued through the General of the Army (General Grant), who was to have his headquarters at Washington; and that all orders and instructions issued otherwise should be null and void. And when the generals commanding the several divisions had expressed some doubt as to the interpretation of some provisions of the Reconstruction Act, and the President had issued instructions concerning those points which displeased Congress, another act was passed, which, by way of explanation of the meaning of its predecessors, still further enlarged the powers of the military commanders and made them virtually rulers over everything and everybody in those States. In the mean time, to tie the President's hands still farther, the Tenure of Office Act had been passed, which was to curtail or hamper President Johnson's power to dismiss office-holders from their places so as to reduce as much as possible his facilities for punishing the opponents and for rewarding the friends of his policy, and thus, as it would now be called, for building up an office-holders' machine for his use.
The Public Fear of Johnson
President Johnson in every case promptly vetoed the bills objectionable to him or fulminated his protests against what he considered unwarrantable encroachments upon his constitutional prerogatives. Some of his messages, reported to have been written either by Mr. Seward or by Mr. Jeremiah Black, a man of brilliant abilities, were strong in argument as well as eloquent in expression. But they were not listened to—much less considered. Mr. Johnson had personally discredited himself to such a degree that the connection of his personality with anything he advocated fatally discredited his cause. The air, not only in Washington, but throughout the country, was buzzing with rumors of iniquities which Andrew Johnson was meditating and would surely attempt if he were not disarmed. He was surely plotting a coup d'état; he had already slyly tried to get General Grant out of the way by sending him on a trumped-up diplomatic errand to Mexico. When, therefore, the news came from Washington that Andrew Johnson was to be impeached, to deprive him of his office, it was not only welcomed by reckless partizanship, but as everybody who has lived through those times will remember, it struck a popular chord. There was a widespread feeling among well-meaning and sober people that the country was really in some sort of peril, and that it would be a good thing to get rid of that dangerous man in the presidential chair.
But for this vague feeling of uneasiness approaching genuine alarm, I doubt whether Congress would ever have ventured upon the tragi-comedy of the impeachment.
It explains also the fact that so many lawyers in Congress, as well as in the country, although they must have seen the legal weakness of the case against Andrew Johnson, still labored so hard to find some point upon which he might be convicted. It was for political, not for legal reasons that they did so—not reasons of political partizanship, but the higher political reason that they thought the public interest made the removal of Andrew Johnson from his place of power eminently desirable. I have to confess that I leaned somewhat to that opinion myself—not that I believed in the sinister revolutionary designs of Mr. Johnson, but because I thought that the presence of Mr. Johnson in the presidential office encouraged among the white people of the South hopes and endeavors which, the longer they were indulged in, the more grievous the harm they would do to both races. It can indeed not be said that President Johnson failed to execute the reconstruction laws enacted by Congress by refusing to perform the duties imposed upon him, such as the appointment of the commanders of military divisions. He even effectively opposed, through his able and accomplished Attorney-General, Mr. Stanbery, the attempts of two Southern governors to stop the enforcement of the Reconstruction Act by the legal process of injunction. But the mere fact that he was believed to favor the reactionary element in the South and would do all in his power to let it have its way was in itself an influence constantly inflaming the passions kindled by mischievous hopes.
The Fatal Bungling of Reconstruction
The condition of things in the South had become deplorable in the extreme. Had the reconstruction measures enacted by Congress, harsh as they were, been imposed upon the Southern people immediately after the War, when the people were stunned by their overwhelming defeat, and when there was still some apprehension of bloody vengeance to be visited upon the leaders of the rebellion—as was the case, for instance, in Hungary in 1849 after the collapse of the great insurrection—those measures would have been accepted as an escape from something worse. Even negro suffrage in a qualified form, as General Lee's testimony before the Reconstruction Committee showed, might then have been accepted as a peace-offering.
But the propitious moment was lost. Instead of gently persuading the Southerners, as Lincoln would have done, that the full restoration of the States lately in rebellion would necessarily depend upon the readiness and good faith with which they accommodated themselves to the legitimate results of the War, and that there were certain things which the victorious Union government was bound to insist upon, not in a spirit of vindictiveness, but as a simple matter of honor and duty—instead of this President Johnson told them that their instant restoration to their old status in the Union, that is, to complete self-government and to participation in the National Government, on equal terms with the other States, had become their indefeasible constitutional right as soon as the insurgents laid down their arms and went through the form of taking an oath of allegiance, and that those who refused to recognize the immediate validity of that right were no better than traitors and public enemies. Nothing could have been more natural, under such circumstances, than that the master class in the South should have seen a chance to establish something like semi-slavery, and that, pressed by their economic perplexities, they should have eagerly grasped at that chance. No wonder that what should have been as gentle as possible a transition from one social state into another degenerated into an angry political brawl, which grew more and more furious as it went on. No wonder, finally, that when at last the Congressional reconstruction policy, which at first might have been quietly submitted to as something that might have been worse, and that could not be averted, came at last in the midst of that brawl, it was resented in the South as an act of diabolical malice and tyrannical oppression not to be endured. And the worst outcome of all was, that many white people of the South who had at first cherished a kindly feeling for the negroes on account of their "fidelity" during the War, now fell to hating the negroes as the cause of all their woes; that, on the other hand, the negroes, after all their troubles, raised to a position of power, now were tempted to a reckless use of that power; and that a selfish partizan spirit growing up among the Republican majority, instead of endeavoring to curb that tendency, encouraged, or, at least, tolerated it for party advantage.
I have to confess that I took a more hopeful view of the matter at the time, for I did not foresee the mischievous part which selfish partizan spirit would play in that precarious situation. I trusted that the statesmen of the Republican party would prove clear-sighted enough to perceive in time the danger of excesses which their reconstruction policy would bring to the South, and that they would be strong enough in influence to combat that danger. Nothing could have been farther from my mind than the expectation that before long it would be my lot to take an active part in that combat on the most conspicuous political stage in the country.
THE THIRTEENTH MOVE
BY ALBERTA BANCROFT
ILLUSTRATIONS BY M. J. SPERO
Ikey stood on the street corner and fingered her veil to keep passersby from seeing her lips tremble. She was sure that she was going to cry right there in the open, and she was furious about it, because she did not approve of weepy females.
"If you dare," she whispered fiercely, "if you dare, I'll—I'll—you shan't have that nickel's worth of peanut candy, or those currant buns, either."
This threat proving effective, she turned, head held high, and entered the bakery.
There was the usual Saturday afternoon crowd, jostling on the shoddy thoroughfare. To-day the jostling was intensified; for the car strike was on in full blast, feeling ran high, and demonstrations were being made against the company. Now and again a car passed slowly up or down the street, drays and express wagons blocking its progress wherever possible, scab conductor and motorman hooted at by San Francisco men and beplumed ladies for their pains.
Ikey looked at the mob in disgust. Then she hurried around the corner and away from the scene of commotion.
"And to think that it has come to this, that I can't ride up and down in those cars all day long—just to show 'em."
The beach was what she really wanted—one of those little sand hummocks with juicy plants sprawling over it, that protect one from the wind and yet reveal beyond ravishing glimpses of cliff and breaker and sapphire shining sea.
But the beach was not to be found in the heart of town. And she was too tired to walk there—not having had any lunch and being very angry besides. And she would lose her "job"—her miserable, wretched, disgusting, good-for-nothing job (Ikey loved adjectives), if she rode. For any and all women connected with any and all union men had been forbidden to use the company's cars. And business houses—who had anything to gain from it—had promised their employees instant dismissal for even one ride. And the firm that employed Ikey would lose three-fourths of its trade if the union boycotted it.
So the sand-dunes would have to wait. But there were some vacant lots, backed by a scraggle of rough, red rock, only half a dozen blocks away. If luck were with her, the loafers might be in temporary abeyance and the refugee tents not unduly prominent.
Luck was with her. And Ikey sat down on the lea of the little cliff, quite alone, spread out her buns,—you got three for ten cents these catastrophe days,—and faced the situation.
The landlady had raised the rent.
Ikey could have screamed with laughter over the situation—if only the matter were not so vital.
"This'll make the thirteenth move for you, Ikey, my love, since the eighteenth of April—and the thirteenth move is bound to be unlucky. But you'll have to go, sure as Fate; for you can't stand another raise. The Wandering Jew gentleman takes the road again."
She pursed her lips as she said it. She had invented the appelation for herself after nine moves in three months. "I don't know what his name really was," she confessed—there was no one else to talk to, no one she cared for, so she talked, sub voice, to herself—"but it must have been Ikey. I'm sure it was Ikey—and that I look just like him." And deriving much comfort from this witticism, she went on her way.
"Ikey, the Wandering Jew, on the move again," she repeated. "But where to move to, that is the question. It's funny what a difference money makes"—her eyebrows went up—"or rather, lack of it. I've never considered that until recently."
Then her eyes fell on her shoes.
They had been very swagger little shoes in the beginning—Ikey had made rather a specialty of footgear—but they were her "escape" shoes; and their looks told the tale of their wanderings. Also, she had had no others since.
She wriggled her toes.
"You'll be poking through before long, looking at the stars," she told them severely. "Imagine your excitement."
And her suit.
"'I'VE BEEN FOLLOWING YOU EVER SINCE YOU LEFT YOUR OFFICE,' HE SAID"
Ikey looked away so as not to see the perfect cut of it, the perfect fit of it, the utter shabbiness of it. It was her "escape" suit, too. She had slept on the hills in it to the tune of dynamiting and the flare of the burning city. She would never have another like it—never. For her job——
Her job.
She leaned back suddenly and closed her eyes. Her job. The rage of this noon was coming back again; rage, and with it a strange, new sensation—fear. She had never known fear before, not even during the earthquake days. "Only at the dentist's," she told herself, giggling half hysterically behind closed lids.
And back of it all—back of the landlady's unconcealed dislike and latest slap, back of the disintegration of a wardrobe that could not be replaced, and the question as to whether her "job" had not become an impossibility since to-day—and that job simply could not become an impossibility: one had to live—back of all this was the dull hurt, smothered and always coming again, that Bixler McFay had not taken the trouble to look her up when his regiment came through on the way to Manila.
"You may as well face that, too, while you're about it," Ikey observed sarcastically. She opened her eyes with a snap and bit into the first bun.
"The regiment was only here three days," a little voice inside of her whispered fearfully.
"Three days!" Ikey's scorn was unbounded. "If he had cared, he could have found you in three hours—and he always said he cared. It's a thing you've got to live with. It's nothing so unusual. It happens every day. Why can't you treat it like a poor relation?"
And her thoughts went back to Fort Leavenworth, and the gowns on gowns she had worn, all burned up at the St. Francis last spring, with the rest of her things, a week after she had reached the city; and Cousin Mary, suave and elegant and impressive as her chaperon; and herself, petted and made much of on all sides, and incidentally pointed out as the richest girl on the field, and an orphan; and Bixler McFay, handsome, brilliant, devoted, always on hand, always protesting——
A whimsical, sarcastic little smile curved her lips for a moment. The earthquake had certainly made a difference. A vision of Cousin Mary arose—not the suave and elegant chaperon of a wealthy young relative, but a frightened, self-centered, middle-aged woman, who had taken the earthquake as a personal affront put upon her by her young charge and insisted on being the first consideration in no matter what environment she found herself.
"'IT'S A DESPICABLE LETTER,' SHE TOLD HERSELF"
Then came another vision. She recalled her parting with Bixler McFay in the late winter, when she had left Leavenworth for the Coast, saying it wasn't decent not to know anything about the place where all your income came from, and he had left Leavenworth to rejoin his regiment in Arizona. How his voice had trembled that morning as he bade her good-bye, declaring he should always consider himself engaged to her, even if she did not consider herself engaged to him; begging that she wear his class pin, or at least keep it for him if she would not wear it, because the thought of its being in her possession would comfort him in his loneliness.
It had comforted her in those first dreadful days after the fire to think that he was alive and on his way to her. It never entered her head but what he would come at once: when friends were looking for friends and enemies were succoring one another, how should he fail her?
And then—not one word. Not even an inquiry in the paper; when that was about all the papers were made up of for days after—column after column of addresses and inquiries, along with the death notices.
And afterwards—not one word——
II
"I won't pretend this is accidental, Miss Stanton."
Ikey looked up startled, began to curl her feet up under her skirt, decided that it was not worth while,—he was only one of the boarders,—and offered buns and candy with indifferent promptness.
"There's a gang of toughs coming down over the hill. Strikers, maybe. I thought they might startle you."
He seated himself unceremoniously on a rock near by.
Ikey settled back with a little comfortable movement against her own rock and raised her eyebrows.
"The proper thing for me to do at this stage is to inquire in a haughty voice how you happened to know I was here."
"I followed you."
There was no hint of apology, and she looked at him more closely. She had sat opposite him at the unesthetic boarding-house dining-table for the past six weeks now. He ate enormously,—but in cultured wise,—never said anything, was something over six feet tall, wore ready-made, dust-colored clothes, and was utterly inconspicuous. "Like a big gray wall." Just now it was the expression of his face, intangibly different—or had she never taken the trouble to notice him before?—that fixed her attention.
He was looking straight at her.
"I've been following you ever since you left your office," he said after a deliberate pause; and Ikey's eyes grew large and frightened as she took in his meaning.
"Then you saw——"
"I did." There was another pause. "It won't happen again." His tone was quite final. "Why do you lay yourself open to that sort of thing? Don't you know that the burnt district is no place for any woman at all these days—not even one block of it? Why don't you ride?"
His voice was quite cross, and Ikey could have laughed aloud. This, to her, who had the burnt district on her nerves to such an extent that she dreamed of the brick-and-twisted-iron chaos by night—the miles of desolation, punctuated by crumbling chimneys and tottering walls—dreamed of it by night and turned sick at the sight of it by day. Did this stupid hulk of a person think she liked the burnt district—and to walk there?
After all, his attitude was less funny than impertinent. She would be angry. It was better. She would respond icily and put him in his place.
At least, such was her intention. But she discovered to her amazement that she was trembling—her encounter of the noon was responsible for that—and her teeth seemed inclined to hit against each other rapidly with a little clicking noise. So it seemed on the whole more expedient to blurt out her remarks without any attempt at frills or amplification.
"Why don't you ride?"
Ikey gathered herself together.
"My dear Mr. Hammond, there is a street car strike on here in San Francisco. No union wagons run out this way—and I lose my position if I use the cars."
He was welcome to that. She looked off into the distance while he assimilated it.
"I had not thought of that," he said at last slowly. "In that case there is but one thing to do. You must stop that work at once."
"And stand in the bread line? Now? Along with—those others?" A little smile twisted her lips. "I should look handsome doing that."
"But surely——"
His tone was beginning to be puzzled. So was his expression. Ikey ascertained this by allowing a glance to brush past him.
"'HOW DO YOU SUPPOSE I FEEL, BEING IN THIS POSITION—TO YOU?'"
Suddenly he had changed his position. He was beside her on the ground, facing her, staring her out of countenance.
"We may as well get the clear of this right now——"
"It is needlessly clear to me, Mr. Hammond."
"But not to me. In the first place——"
"I will not trouble you——"
"It is no trouble. In the first place, has that fellow followed you, spoken to you before?"
"Never—never like that."
She wondered whether he had noticed her unsuccessful effort to rise and put an end to the interview.
"Do you know who he is?"
"He is the junior member of the firm I work for."
"What! Well, I am glad I smashed him." Then he added quickly, "This, of course, puts an end to your going there, at once. You've been at it too long anyway. It's stopped being a joke, and as a pose——"
"'Pose.'"
The intonation was subtle. A moment's bewilderment, and he burst out, "You're not doing this because you—have to?"
"That—or something."
"But—but—Good Lord, child! Where is your money?"
With pomp and ceremony—but languidly withal, for her head was beginning to ache, and she wanted desperately to cry—she laid her purse in his hand. But she did not look at him.
The big hand closed over the flat little thing impatiently.
"I am referring to your bank account."
"And by what right——"
"We'll settle that later. The banks have opened up again——"
"That's all I have."
"But what has become—You're not going to faint?"
"No."
"Then what has become——"
Quite against her will she was beginning to find herself faintly amused. Of all pigheaded, impertinent people, this individual with whom she had hardly had more than five minutes' conversation, except at meal times during the past six weeks, was certainly the worst.
"I really must know, Miss Stanton, what has become——"
"I gave it away."
"You—gave it—away!" Italics could never do justice to his intonation. He was staring at her as though he considered her demented. "To whom?" came his indignant question.
After all, why not tell him? It was none of his business; and he was desperately impertinent; but she was desperately forlorn; and, though it could not better the situation to talk about it, it might better her feelings.
She slipped farther down against her rock; and he bent forward, listening intently.
"I gave it to—a relative. She was living with me at the time of the fire. We had only just come up from Los Angeles—because I wanted to—I had some property here; all my income came from it; and I felt I ought to know more about it—in case anything happened. And after the earthquake she acted as though I had led her up to the—jaws of death—and pushed her in—and later she was so afraid of typhoid—and everything. And so—at last, when the banks opened up again—I gave her all the money I had in the bank—and she went East right away—and I stayed here."
"With nothing?"