The Four Million
finger prints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel
their way to sun and air. A splattered stain, raying like the shadow of
a bursting bomb, witnessed where a hurled glass or bottle had
splintered with its contents against the wall. Across the pier glass
had been scrawled with a diamond in staggering letters the name
“Marie.” It seemed that the succession of dwellers in the furnished
room had turned in fury—perhaps tempted beyond forbearance by its
garish coldness—and wreaked upon it their passions. The furniture was
chipped and bruised; the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed a
horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of some
grotesque convulsion. Some more potent upheaval had cloven a great
slice from the marble mantel. Each plank in the floor owned its
particular cant and shriek as from a separate and individual agony. It
seemed incredible that all this malice and injury had been wrought upon
the room by those who had called it for a time their home; and yet it
may have been the cheated home instinct surviving blindly, the
resentful rage at false household gods that had kindled their wrath. A
hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.
The young tenant in the chair allowed these thoughts to file,
soft-shod, through his mind, while there drifted into the room
furnished sounds and furnished scents. He heard in one room a tittering
and incontinent, slack laughter; in others the monologue of a scold,
the rattling of dice, a lullaby, and one crying dully; above him a
banjo tinkled with spirit. Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains
roared intermittently; a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence. And he
breathed the breath of the house—a dank savour rather than a smell—a
cold, musty effluvium as from underground vaults mingled with the
reeking exhalations of linoleum and mildewed and rotten woodwork.
Then, suddenly, as he rested there, the room was filled with the
strong, sweet odour of mignonette. It came as upon a single buffet of
wind with such sureness and fragrance and emphasis that it almost
seemed a living visitant. And the man cried aloud: “What, dear?” as if
he had been called, and sprang up and faced about. The rich odour clung
to him and wrapped him around. He reached out his arms for it, all his
senses for the time confused and commingled. How could one be
peremptorily called by an odour? Surely it must have been a sound. But,
was it not the sound that had touched, that had caressed him?
“She has been in this room,” he cried, and he sprang to wrest from it a
token, for he knew he would recognize the smallest thing that had
belonged to her or that she had touched. This enveloping scent of
mignonette, the odour that she had loved and made her own—whence came
it?
The room had been but carelessly set in order. Scattered upon the
flimsy dresser scarf were half a dozen hairpins—those discreet,
indistinguishable friends of womankind, feminine of gender, infinite of
mood and uncommunicative of tense. These he ignored, conscious of their
triumphant lack of identity. Ransacking the drawers of the dresser he
came upon a discarded, tiny, ragged handkerchief. He pressed it to his
face. It was racy and insolent with heliotrope; he hurled it to the
floor. In another drawer he found odd buttons, a theatre programme, a
pawnbroker’s card, two lost marshmallows, a book on the divination of
dreams. In the last was a woman’s black satin hair bow, which halted
him, poised between ice and fire. But the black satin hair-bow also is
femininity’s demure, impersonal, common ornament, and tells no tales.
And then he traversed the room like a hound on the scent, skimming the
walls, considering the corners of the bulging matting on his hands and
knees, rummaging mantel and tables, the curtains and hangings, the
drunken cabinet in the corner, for a visible sign, unable to perceive
that she was there beside, around, against, within, above him, clinging
to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly through the finer senses
that even his grosser ones became cognisant of the call. Once again he
answered loudly: “Yes, dear!” and turned, wild-eyed, to gaze on
vacancy, for he could not yet discern form and colour and love and
outstretched arms in the odour of mignonette. Oh, God! whence that
odour, and since when have odours had a voice to call? Thus he groped.
He burrowed in crevices and corners, and found corks and cigarettes.
These he passed in passive contempt. But once he found in a fold of the
matting a half-smoked cigar, and this he ground beneath his heel with a
green and trenchant oath. He sifted the room from end to end. He found
dreary and ignoble small records of many a peripatetic tenant; but of
her whom he sought, and who may have lodged there, and whose spirit
seemed to hover there, he found no trace.
And then he thought of the housekeeper.
He ran from the haunted room downstairs and to a door that showed a
crack of light. She came out to his knock. He smothered his excitement
as best he could.
“Will you tell me, madam,” he besought her, “who occupied the room I
have before I came?”
“Yes, sir. I can tell you again. ’Twas Sprowls and Mooney, as I said.
Miss B’retta Sprowls it was in the theatres, but Missis Mooney she was.
My house is well known for respectability. The marriage certificate
hung, framed, on a nail over—”
“What kind of a lady was Miss Sprowls—in looks, I mean?”
“Why, black-haired, sir, short, and stout, with a comical face. They
left a week ago Tuesday.”
“And before they occupied it?”
“Why, there was a single gentleman connected with the draying business.
He left owing me a week. Before him was Missis Crowder and her two
children, that stayed four months; and back of them was old Mr. Doyle,
whose sons paid for him. He kept the room six months. That goes back a
year, sir, and further I do not remember.”
He thanked her and crept back to his room. The room was dead. The
essence that had vivified it was gone. The perfume of mignonette had
departed. In its place was the old, stale odour of mouldy house
furniture, of atmosphere in storage.
The ebbing of his hope drained his faith. He sat staring at the yellow,
singing gaslight. Soon he walked to the bed and began to tear the
sheets into strips. With the blade of his knife he drove them tightly
into every crevice around windows and door. When all was snug and taut
he turned out the light, turned the gas full on again and laid himself
gratefully upon the bed.
It was Mrs. McCool’s night to go with the can for beer. So she fetched
it and sat with Mrs. Purdy in one of those subterranean retreats where
house-keepers foregather and the worm dieth seldom.
“I rented out my third floor, back, this evening,” said Mrs. Purdy,
across a fine circle of foam. “A young man took it. He went up to bed
two hours ago.”
“Now, did ye, Mrs. Purdy, ma’am?” said Mrs. McCool, with intense
admiration. “You do be a wonder for rentin’ rooms of that kind. And did
ye tell him, then?” she concluded in a husky whisper, laden with
mystery.
“Rooms,” said Mrs. Purdy, in her furriest tones, “are furnished for to
rent. I did not tell him, Mrs. McCool.”
“’Tis right ye are, ma’am; ’tis by renting rooms we kape alive. Ye have
the rale sense for business, ma’am. There be many people will rayjict
the rentin’ of a room if they be tould a suicide has been after dyin’
in the bed of it.”
“As you say, we has our living to be making,” remarked Mrs. Purdy.
“Yis, ma’am; ’tis true. ’Tis just one wake ago this day I helped ye lay
out the third floor, back. A pretty slip of a colleen she was to be
killin’ herself wid the gas—a swate little face she had, Mrs. Purdy,
ma’am.”
“She’d a-been called handsome, as you say,” said Mrs. Purdy, assenting
but critical, “but for that mole she had a-growin’ by her left eyebrow.
Do fill up your glass again, Mrs. McCool.”
THE BRIEF DÉBUT OF TILDY
If you do not know Bogle’s Chop House and Family Restaurant it is your
loss. For if you are one of the fortunate ones who dine expensively you
should be interested to know how the other half consumes provisions.
And if you belong to the half to whom waiters’ checks are things of
moment, you should know Bogle’s, for there you get your money’s
worth—in quantity, at least.
Bogle’s is situated in that highway of _bourgeoisie_, that boulevard of
Brown-Jones-and-Robinson, Eighth Avenue. There are two rows of tables
in the room, six in each row. On each table is a caster-stand,
containing cruets of condiments and seasons. From the pepper cruet you
may shake a cloud of something tasteless and melancholy, like volcanic
dust. From the salt cruet you may expect nothing. Though a man should
extract a sanguinary stream from the pallid turnip, yet will his
prowess be balked when he comes to wrest salt from Bogle’s cruets. Also
upon each table stands the counterfeit of that benign sauce made “from
the recipe of a nobleman in India.”
At the cashier’s desk sits Bogle, cold, sordid, slow, smouldering, and
takes your money. Behind a mountain of toothpicks he makes your change,
files your check, and ejects at you, like a toad, a word about the
weather. Beyond a corroboration of his meteorological statement you
would better not venture. You are not Bogle’s friend; you are a fed,
transient customer, and you and he may not meet again until the blowing
of Gabriel’s dinner horn. So take your change and go—to the devil if
you like. There you have Bogle’s sentiments.
The needs of Bogle’s customers were supplied by two waitresses and a
Voice. One of the waitresses was named Aileen. She was tall, beautiful,
lively, gracious and learned in persiflage. Her other name? There was
no more necessity for another name at Bogle’s than there was for
finger-bowls.
The name of the other waitress was Tildy. Why do you suggest Matilda?
Please listen this time—Tildy—Tildy. Tildy was dumpy, plain-faced, and
too anxious to please to please. Repeat the last clause to yourself
once or twice, and make the acquaintance of the duplicate infinite.
The Voice at Bogle’s was invisible. It came from the kitchen, and did
not shine in the way of originality. It was a heathen Voice, and
contented itself with vain repetitions of exclamations emitted by the
waitresses concerning food.
Will it tire you to be told again that Aileen was beautiful? Had she
donned a few hundred dollars’ worth of clothes and joined the Easter
parade, and had you seen her, you would have hastened to say so
yourself.
The customers at Bogle’s were her slaves. Six tables full she could
wait upon at once. They who were in a hurry restrained their impatience
for the joy of merely gazing upon her swiftly moving, graceful figure.
They who had finished eating ate more that they might continue in the
light of her smiles. Every man there—and they were mostly men—tried to
make his impression upon her.
Aileen could successfully exchange repartee against a dozen at once.
And every smile that she sent forth lodged, like pellets from a
scatter-gun, in as many hearts. And all this while she would be
performing astounding feats with orders of pork and beans, pot roasts,
ham-and, sausage-and-the-wheats, and any quantity of things on the iron
and in the pan and straight up and on the side. With all this feasting
and flirting and merry exchange of wit Bogle’s came mighty near being a
salon, with Aileen for its Madame Récamier.
If the transients were entranced by the fascinating Aileen, the
regulars were her adorers. There was much rivalry among many of the
steady customers. Aileen could have had an engagement every evening. At
least twice a week some one took her to a theatre or to a dance. One
stout gentleman whom she and Tildy had privately christened “The Hog”