Chapter IX

Concerning an Abandoned Hotel, and who lived there; also of
an Abandoned Youth, who lived somewhere else, Far Away; how a
Slum Doctor dressed for a Function, such as involved Studs;
and how Kern Garland wishted she was a Lady.

Mrs. Garland, catching sight of Doctor as he came up the decayed grand-stairway, cried out, well, she never, just in the nig of time! Why, the words was no more'n out of her mouth that the stoo was just done to a hair, she did declare, and Kern she said, quick as anything, what, a hair in the stoo, now, mommer, that'd never do....

The clocks of the city had just struck six for the last time that year. Dr. Vivian, having placed his suitcase and overcoat on the second-hand operating-table in the office, washed face and hands, brushed his coat-collar with a whisk whose ranks had been heavily thinned in wars with dust and lint, and, repairing in sound spirits to the Garland combination dining-and living-room, with the kitchen in the corner, made his interesting confidence relative to the suitcase. He made it in mouth-filling phrases, with many teasing generalizations about the ways of the world and the evils of modern society, which was only his gempman's way when playful. But by close application his auditors soon got at the heart of his meaning, to wit: Doctor actually was going uptown to his swell Uncle Beirne's swell Noo Year's reception to-night in Mr. O'Neill's fulldressuit.

Naturally the Garlands were much interested and excited by the tidings, which brought them so close to great events that, practically speaking, they themselves became members of the fash'nable set: and Mrs. Garland publicly thanked God that she was not as other women were, lazying and keeping back their gentlemen's shirts till Saturday night, or worse. Laid away tidy in the second bureau drawer, her shirts were. The doctor himself seemed not a little enlivened by the evening's prospect. It is imaginable that the Dabney House grew a little lonely at times....

"And to think your swell uncle wants you so special, sir!" said Mrs. Garland, in her harsh, inflectionless voice. "A compliment, I'm sure. And his party all a fizzle unless you come, and his gai'ty a mockery! Well!"

Such indeed was the way in which Vivian had been pleased to depict his fashionable uncle's attitude. He smiled slightly, sipped his feeble coffee and said:

"Bear in mind that he's a bad, bad (though personally not displeasing) old man, ridden by ruinous ideas about the almightiness of the dollar, or lucre as we term it.... I have observed for some time that he desires to corrupt me with his Persian luxuries."

"Persian! Well, I never!"

Mrs. G., a stout woman and a dress-reformer by the look of her, got hot corn muffins from the kitchenette in the corner, and added:

"Them rugs is beautiful."

"He said lux'ries, mommer, like lowneg dresses, and tchampagne, and ice-cream all like animals," said Kern.

"I do declare! Well, they do say the mawls of some of them swells is something nawful. Not alloodin' to your uncle now, well, of course, sir."

"I know a girl named Sadie Whirtle," continued Kern, "and there was a man named Toatwood made a lot of money, corntracting, and his wife she took some of the money and went to Europe in a steamer and stayed more'n two months buying clo'es. And one day Sadie Whirtle goes up to him and says, 'Mist' Toatwood, hear your wife's come home with some fine Parisian clo'es.' And Mist' Toatwood says, 'Shucks'--on'y he says somep'n worse'n shucks--'Shucks,' says he, 'why, my wife never been to Persia in her life.'"

Kern was eighteen, with six years of bread-winning behind her, but she told her story exactly in the manner of a child of eight. That is to say, she told it in a monotone without evincing, and clearly without feeling, the slightest amusement in it, and at the end, continuing quite grave, watched for its effect on others with a curious, staring interest. Her immobile, investigatory expression made the doctor laugh, which seemed, of late, to be the object in life of all Kern's anecdotes.

"Where'd you get that story, Corinne?"

His odd habit of so calling her had often been privately discussed between Kern and her mother, who had so long ago shortened their own original Kurrin that even that had passed from memory. They had concluded that this was only one of his jokey gempman's ways.

"Off Sadie Whirtle," said Kern, rocking backward and forward in her chair. "On'y I don't see anything comical in it."

And then she giggled for some time.

The talk and stoo went forward cheerfully. Beside the Goldnagels, on the ground floor, these two women were the doctor's only fellow lodgers, for Mister Garland, of the wanderlust, had not visited his family since the day in October, and so hardly counted. In the early weeks of the doctor's tenancy, which began only last September, he had walked three times a day to the Always Open Lunch Room, known among the baser sort as the Suicide Club, and had then become possibly the most discriminating judge of egg-sandwiches in all the city. Later, having made the better acquaintance of the Garlands, he had rightly surmised that the earnings derivable from a medical boarder might not be unacceptable in that quarter. The present modus vivendi, then worked out, had proved most satisfactory to all, from both the financial and the social viewpoints.

"I wisht I had a red satin dress, and a necklace all pearls, and was going to the party, too, and had a dark sad-faced man with a mustache and a neye-glass engaged to me, like a count. I wisht I was a Lady," said Kern.

"You don't need a red satin dress to be a lady."

"It'd come easier, kinder, with the dress, Mr. V.V. And I wisht I had a writin'-desk, too. And a founting pen."

"Lawk's sakes, Kern, an' I've asked you a hundred times what would you do with a writin'-desk, now?"

"Mommer, I'd set at it."

"An' what time you got for settin', I'd like to know? Fairy-dreamin' again!"

"An' I'd keep notes in it in the pigeonholes. Like it says in my Netiquette."

"You don't get no notes."

Kern was silenced by her mother's addiction to actuality, but presently said: "I'd get notes if I was a lady, wouldn't I, Mr. V.V.?"

The doctor assured her that she would, and that all these things would come some day. He sighed inwardly and wondered, not for the first time, where the link could possibly lie between the matter-of-fact mother and the strange child of fancy. There was nothing to do but attribute the phenomenon to Mister, the whimsical knight of the open road. The boarder asked what he should bring Kern from the party: he feared they wouldn't have writing-desks, it not being at all a literary set. The girl thought a rapturous moment and then asked could she have three of them marrowglasses, all in curly white paper.

Vivian promised, and departed on his duties. First there was a call at the Miggses' down the block, where the little boy Tub lay with scarlet fever, very sick; and then there was his seven o'clock office hour for workers, in which one, a teamster with Bright's disease and seven children, remained long....

These matters occupied the doctor till eight o'clock: alone in his office he computed the fact roughly from his watch, a battered heirloom whose word was not to be taken literally. Good!--half an hour before time to dress. Leisure, being a scant commodity, was proportionally valued. The young man advanced to his secretary, before whose open face plain living and high thinking could be so freely indulged in.

The secretary was of fine mahogany, hand-made in Virginia in the year that Sir Edward Pakenham did not take New Orleans. It was the hero of so many travels that its present proprietor once called it a field-secretary, a pleasantry which would doubtless have convulsed Miss Mamie Willis, if only she had ever heard it. The great tall office, bare but for cheap doctorly paraphernalia, was even more storied. A bleak grandeur clung to it still. Decayed mouldings, it had aplenty: great splotches on wall and ceiling, where plaster had been tried through the year and found wanting; unsightlier splotch between the windows whence the tall gilt mirror had been plucked away for cash; broken chandelier, cracked panes, loose flooring, dismantled fireplace. But view the stately high pitch of the chamber, the majestic wide windows and private balcony without, the tall mantel of pure black marble, the still handsome walnut paneling, waist-high, the massive splendid doors. No common suburban room, this: clearly a room with meaning, a past, soul.

The look was not deceptive. Royalty had on a time sat in this room: here granted audience to the great's higher circle, of greatness; there, beyond that door, nowadays admitting ragged sufferers from a fourth-class "waiting-room," slept in state with doubtless royal snores. This, in fact, was the old Dabney House's famous "state suite," Vivian's office the culminating grand sitting-room, the building art's best in the '40s. A famous hostelry the Dabney House had been in its day, the chosen foregathering-place of notabilities now long dusted to the common level. Hither had trooped the gallant and the gay, the knight in his pride and beauty in her power, great statesmen and greater belles, their lovers and their sycophants. Here, in the memorable ball still talked of by silvered ladies of an elder day, the Great Personage had trod his measure with peerless Mary Marshall.

A great history had the Dabney House, and now nothing much else beside. Built upon a flouting of a common law, it had lived to see the westward course of progress, deaf to sentiment as ever, kick it far astern. Long since had the world of fashion deserted it to its memories. Desolate and mice-ridden stood the fading pile in a neighborhood where further decay was hardly possible, enveloped by failure and dirt and poverty, misery and sin and the sound of unholy revelry by night. 'The lion and the lizard keep the courts where Jamshýd gloried and drank deep.' And the vast moulded corridors, historied with great names, echoed to the feet of Garlands, Vivians, and Goldnagels, and over the boards once ennobled by the press of royal feet, a shabby young man sat writing into a book with a villainous pen, as follows:

Rent $12.
Board 20.
Laundry 3.25

Dr. Vivian had, in short, induced himself to the casting-up of his monthly accounts, a task of weariness and travail. As to-morrow was the first day of the year, it was natural that he should thus occupy his half-hour of leisure, but as he was unmethodical by nature it was also natural that he should be casting up the account for November, December (which included Christmas) being as yet unlooked into. Jottings on loose bits of paper supplied the necessary data, or didn't, as the case might be.

The young man scratched his head, and continued:

Car-tickets $1.25
Tobacco .40
Soap .15
Shaving ditto .19
Gas 2.40
Pencils .03

"Aha!" said V. Vivian, after a considerable interval; and penned triumphantly:

Matches .05
Beads (Corinne) .49

Followed a long pause.

On the opposite, or left-hand, page of the ledger there stood:

Income 50.
Receipts 6.40
-----
Total 56.40

Vivian's dead father, though the absent-minded inventor of the turbine that would never quite work, had somehow contrived not to make away with every penny of his wife's Beirne inheritance. Very few unsuccessful inventors could say as much. And this fact accounted for the complicating term "Income," whose regular presence in the budget was certainly a trifle awkward for the despiser of property, aligning him out of hand with the wealthy classes; but to the individual was undoubtedly most comforting, since it set a man economically free forever. You never have to do anything for money, with fifty dollars a month. Receipts were, of course, moneys taken in for services rendered. If Vivian's sick insisted on paying him a little something for his trouble, he thought it moral not to restrain them. However, the sick's attitude was commonly the reverse of the above....

Ignoring "Receipts," as a highly uncertain quantity, the scheme of income and outgo commonly left a net monthly balance of about ten dollars for works of a philanthropic nature. From a strictly scientific point of view, the budget contained an unsoundness, in that it allowed nothing for depreciation of plant, so to say: the necessity for fresh supplies of a personal nature really was not duly faced in it. However, the doctor had so far eliminated all expenditures in that quarter, save only for a little half-soling matter week before last. He was confident that it would all work out very satisfactorily when occasion arose.

The trial balance to-night developed a shortage of $1.22. Before the budgeteer could precisely place it, his attention became diverted by something else, to return no more that evening. Having drawn a stray sheet of paper toward him to scribble on it "Milk for Miggs," he was caught and engrossed by other inscriptions on the sheet, noted down in the early forenoon. They ran:

Heth Works (Pickle) Art in _Factory Worker_
See Mr. Dayne--Settlement--Begin canvass not
before Feb. 1. H. Cooney
Todd Inst.--Night School?
Socks?--Or darning
Playground. (Council Com. meets Fri. 5 P.M.)
Jack D.
Mrs. G. Loan 20c.

Through the next to the last item, Vivian absently drew a pencil mark, the weekly cheering letter to Weymouth, Texas, having been written just after the memorandum. However, the young man's eye remained fixed on the item erased. He lit his pipe, took his head in both hands and continued to stare....

Dalhousie had called at the Dabney House on the night of his departure for the new country. His reappearance in the flesh proved at least that that fierce instability of character, which betrays men in moments of disaster to the irreparable rashness, was not in him. So much was a comfort, for the witch fear had ridden Vivian in the silent weeks following the Beach.

But the reparting was a heart-rack none the less. Dalhousie was no lifelong friend like O'Neill, or even like Chas Cooney. But Vivian, having made his acquaintance most informally one night in the summer, had responded at sight to the unconscious claim of weakness; he had come to feel a strong bond, conceived splendid reformatory plans. The boy's fall and disgrace, coming like a crash from the blue, had been a severe shock to him, which would last. His self-exile, while probably advisable for a time at least, had been a prospect full of sadness. If poor Dalhousie had, woven into him, a vitiating twist for self-dramatization, if he said, "My God, why can't I die?" less with the terrible dignity of ruin than like a lad portraying his idea of ruin on the stage, his native missing of the utter ring of truth never occurred to Vivian. To him this boy, broken for cowardice and cast off by his father and friends, was as tragic a figure as Oedipus.

And what made the farewell so peculiarly sad was that Dal, out of his painful bewilderment, was evidently still clinging to some sort of hope. He himself had said, and said again, that there was no hope for such as he. He admitted with bitterness his insane passion that sunny afternoon; remembered and acknowledged a wild impulse to overturn the boat, and let come what might. He paced the floor and cried out that nothing that they said of him could be too bad. And yet he hoped. He had come to the Dabney House with hope. He had given his Texas address with a falter of hope.

But of course there was no hope. Drink, the great fowler, had bagged one more....

Without, there rose a lonesome booming, far and ghostly in the stillness of the great empty hotel. It was the Garlands' crazy clock, memento of Mister in his prodigal bridal days. Harried forever by some obscure intestinal disorder, the mad timepiece stayed voiceless for days together, and then, without warning, embarked upon an orgy of profligate strikings. Now it struck fourteen, and fell abruptly silent.

Vivian stirred, and remembered the reception. His uncle, who derided and castigated his Dabney House career, had said emphatically that he would consider it most disrespectful if his solitary nephew absented himself from the annual greeting of friends. The nephew, since his home-coming, had grown very fond of the old gentleman. Yet he knew quite well that he wasn't giving up this evening solely to please his uncle.

He rose, relit his pipe, and walked about. Though useful bones were missing from his left foot, he liked to walk: was rather an accomplished pedestrian. In time he came to a halt before a dilapidated little cabinet partly full of the shiny tools of his trade. The cabinet seemed quite out of place in the tall state chamber: but then so did the man. He did not look in the least like a doctor (just as Miss Heth had said). The faint scent of iodoform that he now gave off was a heterogeneity, like a whiff of brandy on a parson.

The young man stood gazing into his cabinet, fathoms deep in thought. That Miss Heth was responsible for a meaningless lie which took away more than life itself from one who had loved her truly in his way: this was a hypothesis so wild and weak that it collapsed at the first opportunity for calm, just examination. The sight of her again, the other night, had merely clinched the matter; driven by a glance the last nail in the coffin of Dalhousie's hope; and by the same stroke, swept away the last lingering trace of diabolical suspicion. But that Miss Heth had treated Dal pretty badly before the Beach was only too probable. The boy's bitter complainings had left small doubt of that.

It is a world in which we must be just before we are generous. Unfortunately, there could be little question that this girl with the heavenly face had a certain touch--should we say?--of earthy hardness in her, a certain induration of the spirit. She had shown it quite plainly in her general attitude toward Dal in the hour of his need. She had shown it again, in a sort of way, in her attitude toward the Works.

Not, indeed, in her resentment at his letter. Anything but resentment there would have been unnatural, not to say inhuman and despisable, in a daughter. Of course no girl worth a pinch of salt would allow you to stand up and say that her father was a shameless homicide. Her anger there did her the greatest credit: showed beyond doubt that she was absolutely sound at heart.... Trouble was, of course, that she didn't know anything about the Works, and didn't want to know. She supposed that those scores of girls who went daily to her father's bunching-room had nothing to do with her.

The night was cold; V. Vivian stood warming his hands over a second-hand gas-stove, which leaked perceptibly.... Great heavens, how could it possibly be otherwise? Was not this the way of all the world? Let a little prosperity come to a poor peasant, and the first thing he did was to stop eating five from the same bowl. That was Tolstoy; and that was the way, through all peoples and all times, riches had meant segregation from the Common.... Round and round them pulsed the great warm tide of real life, and, stung by this mad blindness, men sweated and fought their lives away trying to scramble up out of the enriching stream upon a sterile little island. You could almost have forgiven them if they were happy upon their island. But happiness is born in the heart, and they who seek it elsewhere in the end hold Sodom apples in fingers through which the pearl of great price has somewhere slipped on the way....

"Mr. V.V.! Ain't you dressing _yet_!" said a voice from without. "Mommer says remind you it's after nine o'clock."

The tall young man came to earth with a thud. A startled frown gathered quickly on his brow.

"_What?_... Then I'm late indeed. _Nine o'clock!_ I don't see how it's possible...."

He seized Commissioner O'Neill's suitcase from the operating-table, with a panic show of hurry.

Kern's voice took on a cheering inflection.

"Don't you mind, Mr. V.V. All the swells'll be late. D'you want me to help you, sir? Don't you want me put in your studs 'r something?"

Mr. V.V. set down the suitcase, dealt a mortal blow.

"I have no studs," he said, in a quiet, scared way.

A little exclamation without was followed by: "Can I come in, sir?"

"Yes, yes; come in. But this is rather serious. I confess I--don't see how it's going to work out...."

The door opened and Kern tripped in with a little kick, and a flash and tinkle of jewelry at neck and waist. She never merely walked when it was possible to dance.

"My regular shirts," said the young man, standing on the floor and brushing his hair with a worried hand, "have the buttons sewed on, of course.... Seems to me O'Neill might have thought of this contingency."

Kern repressed a desire to giggle at Doctor's air of helplessness, and controlled her itching feet. She was not wanting in the resourcefulness of the poor.

"I'll get you studs, Mr. V.V.," said she, eagerly. "Less see now--where'll I get 'em?... I'll get 'em at Lazarus's--that's where! I'll have 'em here in five minutes, and right in your shirt."

Lazarus? Why, they shut up at six o'clock. Yes, but Willie Walter, he slept behind the counter, and was abed right now, on account of getting up so early. Just let her bang the door in the alley a couple of times, that was all. Moreover, Walter being obliging, it agreeably developed that the studs would come as a temporary loan, if desired. An evening's wear out of them, and then back on the card and into stock again, the same as new, and nobody the wiser. Lazarus would do the same.

"It's very nice of you, Corinne," said the young man, picking up the suitcase again. "Something in pearl or plain gold, perhaps. Come straight back now. I don't like at all for you to be running the streets at night--"

"Maybe I won't come back at all," said Kern, improvising a barn dance about the long office. "Maybe I'll run off with a count and go to Europe on a steamer like, and have mand'lins played under my winder by moonlight, and sit at a gool' writin'-desk all day and make up po'try."

"That would be rather hard on the count, wouldn't it?" said Mr. V.V., absently; and added at once: "What makes you do that?"

"Stitch in me side," said she, impishly. "Machineetis, _I_ call it. Like 'pendicitis, y' know? It's gone now. I don't get tired when I dance."

Kern had a quantity of dark brown hair, covered now by a picture hat supporting a base red imitation of a willow plume; she put on the hat every night nowadays, whether she was going out or not. By two years' steady practice she was esteemed one of the best operatives in the Heth Cheroot Works; but her new passion in life was to learn from Mr. V.V. what it was to be a lady. Dearly as Kern loved beads, pins, buckles, and all that shone and glittered, her particular desire for Christmas had been a Netiquette and Complete Letter Writer, and this Mr. V.V. had duly obtained for her, though it had run to a dollar and a quarter. The little girl might have been any age or no age; she was unformed for her years, somewhat elfin of countenance, and thin in the cheek. On one of these cheeks, Dr. Vivian now laid the back of his hand, and told Kern to stick out her tongue. She did it as she did everything (except cheroot-making), like a game, sticking it out much farther than was necessary and repeatedly winking her left eye.

Vivian set down the suitcase again.

"You go to bed," said he. "I'll attend to the studs."

Kern stuck back her tongue and unwinked her eye, with something like consternation.

"I feel _very_ well, Mr. V.V.--honest! I'll get 'em and come straight back, sir,--truly, truly!"

The young man reached for his overcoat. "I don't want you to go out to-night. It's just the same as if you did it for me, because you want to do it. That's what counts. Now go on to bed. You aren't well at all, I fear."

Kern turned, much depressed. "It was me thought of Willie Walter. I think you might lemme."

"You must do what I say, Corinne."

"Ain't I doin' it, no matter how hard it is, sir?"

"Don't call me sir, I've told you."

Kern sadly retired. However, she did not do exactly what Mr. V.V. said. When, after forty minutes of storm and stress, he emerged from his bedroom and shouted to Mrs. Garland to come and see him if she liked, Kern, too, came running down the hall, still in her hat. Her interest in the gay evening being so peculiarly strong, Vivian did not have the heart to scold her very hard, especially as she cried ahead the promise to go to bed the very minute he was gone. And it might be that he was secretly rather glad to have his little friend see him in his splendid regalia.

He stood under the chandelier in his decaying chamber, revolving himself with complacence for the Garlands' inspection. It was O'Neill's old suit that he had borrowed, which, as the Honorable Commissioner had pointed out, really made a much better fit than the costly brand-new one just from Begg's. At the first sight of their boarder in it, the two women cried out with pleasure, likening him to dooks and dashing villains on the stage, well seen by them from upper galleries of the past. But with the dying of the first enthusiastic burst, Kern, the connoisseur, who had herself been clasped by gentlemen's fulldressuits at union hops, developed a more searching tendency. By the elbow she incited the doctor to keep on rotating.

"There's _something_ wrong, sir, Mr. V.V., but I can't make out just what it is."

"It's these shoes," said Mr. V.V., frankly. "I really ought to have patent leathers to look like the rest of the bloods, but these'll do very nicely, when I have them well shined up. I'll stop by the stand at Ninth Street."

"This spot right in front of the coat don't look so _very_ good," said Kern, scratching it with a small finger, which only whitened it up.

"Shuh, Kern! That!" said Mrs. Garland, who had seen the spot, but decided to say nothing about it. "Why, hot suds and a drop ammonia'll fade it out like sunshine, and nobody never know't was there. Wait till I get my pan now, Doctor."

"I wisht the coat could set a little snugger round your neck, Mr. V.V. But mercy, who cares, when you look so beautiful anyway! And you'll have the most beautiful lady and set and talk to her, won't you, Mr. V.V.?"

"Stranger things have happened, my dear Corinne!"

"There'll be roses and violets and little pink lights and chicking salad and conservatories and fountings all lit up. And what'll you and her talk about, Mr. V.V., with the band playing kind of soft and settin' behind some rubber-plants like?"

"Probably something for her own good," said Mr. V.V., with a close-set mouth; leaving Kern to reflect that that was a funny way to talk at a party.

Mrs. Garland rushed in with a steaming pan, and plumped down on her knees at the unshone feet. The little girl prattled on. But the tall doctor, on his own word, had relapsed abruptly into a brown study....

"It sags a little in front," Kern was saying. "Lemme just get my hand on the buckle a minute. Mr. V.V., what makes you look so mad, kind of?"

The young man started a little.

"I was thinking," said he, "that life is hard at times."

"It's truth, Doctor.... Hadn't his negtie ought to be tightened up a weeny bit, Kern, now?" said Mrs. Garland harshly, staring up from her adoring position. "Not but _I_ think the shine of his gool' collar-button ain't pretty...."

* * * * *

When Mr. V.V. and his gala raiment were gone, Kern skipped into his bedroom and hastily tackled the marked disorder there prevalent. She thought that an extra minute or so stolen for this purpose would not really be so very wrong. Care of the rooms was strictly included in the boarder's twenty dollars a month, but Kern was not thinking of it that way exactly.

"Mommer, what makes him have that kinder sorry look all the time, I wonder?" she said, when Mrs. Garland followed her in.

"Sorry, what you talkin' about? A pleasanter spoke gempman I never see. Hand me them pants."

"I'll fold'em, mommer.--I don't mean speakin', but the look he's got, just the same when he's laughin' and jokin' and all. It's the look he's got, don't you notice, someway?"

"It's that foot o' his, I reckon. Pains him prob'ly. The mess he's left things.... He'd ought to have a fulldressuit of his own, 'stead o' borrowin' that fat O'Neill's."

"Mommer, if he had one, somebody 'd ask it off him. Like he gave Mister his Sunday cutaway coat.... How'd he hurt his foot, mommer, jever hear him say?"

"Berkler bone, _I_ hear."

They worked in silence for a time.

"I'm right tired to-night. Put 'em here in his clo'es-bag, mommer.... Don't seem it could be just his foot. Torm Hartman's leg's right off to his hip, and he's got a fat look to him. Mr. V.V.'s sorry like he wanted to do something, and something in him knewed all the time he couldn't ever."

"Somep'n in him knewed--jever hear such foolishness! I'll take the broom to this floor. You go along to bed now. Didn't I hear you promise him?"

"Mommer, I'm going. Only I druther of went to the party," said Kern.