_ CHAPTER XXVI. THE TROUGH OF THE SEA
Narcisse, on receiving his scolding from Richling, had gone to his home in Casa Calvo street, a much greater sufferer than he had appeared to be. While he was confronting his abaser there had been a momentary comfort in the contrast between Richling's ill-behavior and his own self-control. It had stayed his spirit and turned the edge of Richling's sharp denunciations. But, as he moved off the field, he found himself, at every step, more deeply wounded than even he had supposed. He began to suffocate with chagrin, and hurried his steps in sheer distress. He did not experience that dull, vacant acceptance of universal scorn which an unresentful coward feels. His pangs were all the more poignant because he knew his own courage.
In his home he went so straight up to the withered little old lady, in the dingiest of flimsy black, who was his aunt, and kissed her so passionately, that she asked at once what was the matter. He recounted the facts, shedding tears of mortification. Her feeling, by the time he had finished the account, was a more unmixed wrath than his, and, harmless as she was, and wrapped up in her dear, pretty nephew as she was, she yet demanded to know why such a man shouldn't be called out upon the field of honor.
"Ah!" cried Narcisse, shrinkingly. She had touched the core of the tumor. One gets a public tongue-lashing from a man concerning money borrowed; well, how is one going to challenge him without first handing back the borrowed money? It was a scalding thought! The rotten joists beneath the bare scrubbed-to-death floor quaked under Narcisse's to-and-fro stride.
"--And then, anyhow!"--he stopped and extended both hands, speaking, of course, in French,--"anyhow, he is the favored friend of Dr. Sevier. If I hurt him--I lose my situation! If he hurts me--I lose my situation!"
He dried his eyes. His aunt saw the insurmountability of the difficulty, and they drowned feeling in an affectionate glass of green-orangeade.
"But never mind!" Narcisse set his glass down and drew out his tobacco. He laughed spasmodically as he rolled his cigarette. "You shall see. The game is not finished yet."
Yet Richling passed the next day and night without assassination, and on the second morning afterward, as on the first, went out in quest of employment. He and Mary had eaten bread, and it had gone into their life without a remainder either in larder or purse. Richling was all aimless.
"I do wish I had the _art_ of finding work," said he. He smiled. "I'll get it," he added, breaking their last crust in two. "I have the science already. Why, look you, Mary, the quiet, amiable, imperturbable, dignified, diurnal, inexorable haunting of men of influence will get you whatever you want."
"Well, why don't you do it, dear? Is there any harm in it? I don't see any harm in it. Why don't you do that very thing?"
"I'm telling you the truth," answered he, ignoring her question. "Nothing else short of overtowering merit will get you what you want half so surely."
"Well, why not do it? Why not?" A fresh, glad courage sparkled in the wife's eyes.
"Why, Mary," said John, "I never in my life tried so hard to do anything else as I've tried to do that! It sounds easy; but try it! You can't conceive how hard it is till you try it. I can't _do_ it! I _can't_ do it!"
"_I'd_ do it!" cried Mary. Her face shone. "_I'd_ do it! You'd see if I didn't! Why, John"--
"All right!" exclaimed he; "you sha'n't talk that way to me for nothing. I'll try it again! I'll begin to-day!"
"Good-by," he said. He reached an arm over one of her shoulders and around under the other and drew her up on tiptoe. She threw both hers about his neck. A long kiss--then a short one.
"John, something tells me we're near the end of our troubles."
John laughed grimly. "Ristofalo was to get back to the city to-day: maybe he's going to put us out of our misery. There are two ways for troubles to end." He walked away as he spoke. As he passed under the window in the alley, its sash was thrown up and Mary leaned out on her elbows.
"John!"
"Well?"
They looked into each other's eyes with the quiet pleasure of tried lovers, and were silent a moment. She leaned a little farther down, and said, softly:--
"You mustn't mind what I said just now."
"Why, what did you say?"
"That if it were I, I'd do it. I know you can do anything I can do, and a hundred better things besides."
He lifted his hand to her cheek. "We'll see," he whispered. She drew in, and he moved on.
Morning passed. Noon came. From horizon to horizon the sky was one unbroken blue. The sun spread its bright, hot rays down upon the town and far beyond, ripening the distant, countless fields of the great delta, which by and by were to empty their abundance into the city's lap for the employment, the nourishing, the clothing of thousands. But in the dusty streets, along the ill-kept fences and shadowless walls of the quiet districts, and on the glaring facades and heated pavements of the commercial quarters, it seemed only as though the slowly retreating summer struck with the fury of a wounded Amazon. Richling was soon dust-covered and weary. He had gone his round. There were not many men whom he could even propose to haunt. He had been to all of them. Dr. Sevier was not one. "Not to-day," said Richling.
"It all depends on the way it's done," he said to himself; "it needn't degrade a man if it's done the right way." It was only by such philosophy he had done it at all. Ristofalo he could have haunted without effort; but Ristofalo was not to be found. Richling tramped in vain. It may be that all plans were of equal merit just then. The summers of New Orleans in those times were, as to commerce, an utter torpor, and the autumn reawakening was very tardy. It was still too early for the stirrings of general mercantile life. The movement of the cotton crop was just beginning to be perceptible; but otherwise almost the only sounds were from the hammers of craftsmen making the town larger and preparing it for the activities of days to come.
The afternoon wore along. Not a cent yet to carry home! Men began to shut their idle shops and go to meet their wives and children about their comfortable dinner-tables. The sun dipped low. Hammers and saws were dropped into tool-boxes, and painters pulled themselves out of their overalls. The mechanic's rank, hot supper began to smoke on its bare board; but there was one board that was still altogether bare and to which no one hastened. Another day and another chance of life were gone.
Some men at a warehouse door, the only opening in the building left unclosed, were hurrying in a few bags of shelled corn. Night was falling. At an earlier hour Richling had offered the labor of his hands at this very door and had been rejected. Now, as they rolled in the last truck-load, they began to ask for rest with all the gladness he would have felt to be offered toil, singing,--
"To blow, to blow, some time for to blow."
They swung the great leaves of the door together as they finished their chorus, stood grouped outside a moment while the warehouseman turned the resounding lock, and then went away. Richling, who had moved on, watched them over his shoulder, and as they left turned back. He was about to do what he had never done before. He went back to the door where the bags of grain had stood. A drunken sailor came swinging along. He stood still and let him pass; there must be no witnesses. The sailor turned the next corner. Neither up nor down nor across the street, nor at dust-begrimed, cobwebbed window, was there any sound or motion. Richling dropped quickly on one knee and gathered hastily into his pocket a little pile of shelled corn that had leaked from one of the bags.
That was all. No harm to a living soul; no theft; no wrong; but ah! as he rose he felt a sudden inward lesion. Something broke. It was like a ship, in a dream, noiselessly striking a rock where no rock is. It seemed as though the very next thing was to begin going to pieces. He walked off in the dark shadow of the warehouse, half lifted from his feet by a vague, wide dismay. And yet he felt no greatness of emotion, but rather a painful want of it, as if he were here and emotion were yonder, down-street, or up-street, or around the corner. The ground seemed slipping from under him. He appeared to have all at once melted away to nothing. He stopped. He even turned to go back. He felt that if he should go and put that corn down where he had found it he should feel himself once more a living thing of substance and emotions. Then it occurred to him--no, he would keep it, he would take it to Mary; but himself--he would not touch it; and so he went home.
Mary parched the corn, ground it fine in the coffee-mill and salted and served it close beside the candle. "It's good white corn," she said, laughing. "Many a time when I was a child I used to eat this in my playhouse and thought it delicious. Didn't you? What! not going to eat?"
Richling had told her how he got the corn. Now he told his sensations. "You eat it, Mary," he said at the end; "you needn't feel so about it; but if I should eat it I should feel myself a vagabond. It may be foolish, but I wouldn't touch it for a hundred dollars." A hundred dollars had come to be his synonyme for infinity.
Mary gazed at him a moment tearfully, and rose, with the dish in her hand, saying, with a smile, "I'd look pretty, wouldn't I!"
She set it aside, and came and kissed his forehead. By and by she asked:--
"And so you saw no work, anywhere?"
"Oh, yes!" he replied, in a tone almost free from dejection. "I saw any amount of work--preparations for a big season. I think I certainly shall pick up something to-morrow--enough, anyhow, to buy something to eat with. If we can only hold out a little longer--just a little--I am sure there'll be plenty to do--for everybody." Then he began to show distress again. "I could have got work to-day if I had been a carpenter, or if I'd been a joiner, or a slater, or a bricklayer, or a plasterer, or a painter, or a hod-carrier. Didn't I try that, and was refused?"
"I'm glad of it," said Mary.
"'Show me your hands,' said the man to me. I showed them. 'You won't do,' said he."
"I'm glad of it!" said Mary, again.
"No," continued Richling; "or if I'd been a glazier, or a whitewasher, or a wood-sawyer, or"--he began to smile in a hard, unpleasant way,--"or if I'd been anything but an American gentleman. But I wasn't, and I didn't get the work!"
Mary sank into his lap, with her very best smile.
"John, if you hadn't been an American gentleman"--
"We should never have met," said John. "That's true; that's true." They looked at each other, rejoicing in mutual ownership.
"But," said John, "I needn't have been the typical American gentleman,--completely unfitted for prosperity and totally unequipped for adversity."
"That's not your fault," said Mary.
"No, not entirely; but it's your calamity, Mary. O Mary! I little thought"--
She put her hand quickly upon his mouth. His eye flashed and he frowned.
"Don't do so!" he exclaimed, putting the hand away; then blushed for shame, and kissed her.
They went to bed. Bread would have put them to sleep. But after a long time--
"John," said one voice in the darkness, "do you remember what Dr. Sevier told us?"
"Yes, he said we had no right to commit suicide by starvation."
"If you don't get work to-morrow, are you going to see him?"
"I am."
In the morning they rose early.
During these hard days Mary was now and then conscious of one feeling which she never expressed, and was always a little more ashamed of than probably she need have been, but which, stifle it as she would, kept recurring in moments of stress. Mrs. Riley--such was the thought--need not be quite so blind. It came to her as John once more took his good-by, the long kiss and the short one, and went breakfastless away. But was Mrs. Riley as blind as she seemed? She had vision enough to observe that the Richlings had bought no bread the day before, though she did overlook the fact that emptiness would set them astir before their usual hour of rising. She knocked at Mary's inner door. As it opened a quick glance showed the little table that occupied the centre of the room standing clean and idle.
"Why, Mrs. Riley!" cried Mary; for on one of Mrs. Riley's large hands there rested a blue-edged soup-plate, heaping full of the food that goes nearest to the Creole heart--_jambolaya_. There it was, steaming and smelling,--a delicious confusion of rice and red pepper, chicken legs, ham, and tomatoes. Mike, on her opposite arm, was struggling to lave his socks in it.
"Ah!" said Mrs. Riley, with a disappointed lift of the head, "ye're after eating breakfast already! And the plates all tleared off. Well, ye air smairt! I knowed Mr. Richlin's taste for jumbalie"--
Mary smote her hands together. "And he's just this instant gone! John! John! Why, he's hardly"-- She vanished through the door, glided down the alley, leaned out the gate, looking this way and that, tripped down to this corner and looked--"Oh! oh!"--no John there--back and up to the other corner--"Oh! which way did John go?" There was none to answer.
Hours passed; the shadows shortened and shrunk under their objects, crawled around stealthily behind them as the sun swung through the south, and presently began to steal away eastward, long and slender. This was the day that Dr. Sevier dined out, as hereinbefore set forth.
The sun set. Carondelet street was deserted. You could hear your own footstep on its flags. In St. Charles street the drinking-saloons and gamblers' drawing-rooms, and the barber-shops, and the show-cases full of shirt-bosoms and walking-canes, were lighted up. The smell of lemons and mint grew finer than ever. Wide Canal street, out under the darkling crimson sky, was resplendent with countless many-colored lamps. From the river the air came softly, cool and sweet. The telescope man set up his skyward-pointing cylinder hard by the dark statue of Henry Clay; the confectioneries were ablaze and full of beautiful life, and every little while a great, empty cotton-dray or two went thundering homeward over the stony pavements until the earth shook, and speech for the moment was drowned. The St. Charles, such a glittering mass in winter nights, stood out high and dark under the summer stars, with no glow except just in its midst, in the rotunda; and even the rotunda was well-nigh deserted The clerk at his counter saw a young man enter the great door opposite, and quietly marked him as he drew near.
Let us not draw the stranger's portrait. If that were a pleasant task the clerk would not have watched him. What caught and kept that functionary's eye was that, whatever else might be revealed by the stranger's aspect,--weariness, sickness, hardship, pain,--the confession was written all over him, on his face, on his garb, from his hat's crown to his shoe's sole, Penniless! Penniless! Only when he had come quite up to the counter the clerk did not see him at all.
"Is Dr. Sevier in?"
"Gone out to dine," said the clerk, looking over the inquirer's head as if occupied with all the world's affairs except the subject in hand.
"Do you know when he will be back?"
"Ten o'clock."
The visitor repeated the hour murmurously and looked something dismayed. He tarried.
"Hem!--I will leave my card, if you please."
The clerk shoved a little box of cards toward him, from which a pencil dangled by a string. The penniless wrote his name and handed it in. Then he moved away, went down the tortuous granite stair, and waited in the obscurity of the dimly lighted porch below. The card was to meet the contingency of the Doctor's coming in by some other entrance. He would watch for him here.
By and by--he was very weary--he sat down on the stairs. But a porter, with a huge trunk on his back, told him very distinctly that he was in the way there, and he rose and stood aside. Soon he looked for another resting-place. He must get off of his feet somewhere, if only for a few moments. He moved back into the deep gloom of the stair-way shadow, and sank down upon the pavement. In a moment he was fast asleep.
He dreamed that he, too, was dining out. Laughter and merry-making were on every side. The dishes of steaming viands were grotesque in bulk. There were mountains of fruit and torrents of wine. Strange people of no identity spoke in senseless vaporings that passed for side-splitting wit, and friends whom he had not seen since childhood appeared in ludicrously altered forms and announced impossible events. Every one ate like a Cossack. One of the party, champing like a boar, pushed him angrily, and when he, eating like the rest, would have turned fiercely on the aggressor, he awoke.
A man standing over him struck him smartly with his foot.
"Get up out o' this! Get up! get up!"
The sleeper bounded to his feet. The man who had waked him grasped him by the lapel of his coat.
"What do you mean?" exclaimed the awakened man, throwing the other off violently.
"I'll show you!" replied the other, returning with a rush; but he was thrown off again, this time with a blow of the fist.
"You scoundrel!" cried the penniless man, in a rage; "if you touch me again I'll kill you!"
They leaped together. The one who had proposed to show what he meant was knocked flat upon the stones. The crowd that had run into the porch made room for him to fall. A leather helmet rolled from his head, and the silver crescent of the police flashed on his breast. The police were not uniformed in those days.
But he is up in an instant and his adversary is down--backward, on his elbows. Then the penniless man is up again; they close and struggle, the night-watchman's club falls across his enemy's head blow upon blow, while the sufferer grasps him desperately, with both hands, by the throat. They tug, they snuffle, they reel to and fro in the yielding crowd; the blows grow fainter, fainter; the grip is terrible; when suddenly there is a violent rupture of the crowd, it closes again, and then there are two against one, and up sparkling St. Charles street, the street of all streets for flagrant, unmolested, well-dressed crime, moves a sight so exhilarating that a score of street lads follow behind and a dozen trip along in front with frequent backward glances: two officers of justice walking in grim silence abreast, and between them a limp, torn, hatless, bloody figure, partly walking, partly lifted, partly dragged, past the theatres, past the lawyers' rookeries of Commercial place, the tenpin alleys, the chop-houses, the bunko shows, and shooting-galleries, on, across Poydras street into the dim openness beyond, where glimmer the lamps of Lafayette square and the white marble of the municipal hall, and just on the farther side of this, with a sudden wheel to the right into Hevia street, a few strides there, a turn to the left, stumbling across a stone step and wooden sill into a narrow, lighted hall, and turning and entering an apartment here again at the right. The door is shut; the name is written down; the charge is made: Vagrancy, assaulting an officer, resisting arrest. An inner door is opened.
"What have you got in number nine?" asks the captain in charge.
"Chuck full," replies the turnkey.
"Well, number seven?" These were the numbers of cells.
"The rats'll eat him up in number seven."
"How about number ten?"
"Two drunk-and-disorderlies, one petty larceny, and one embezzlement and breach of trust."
"Put him in there."
* * *
And this explains what the watchman in Marais street could not understand,--why Mary Richling's window shone all night long. _