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A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago

by Ben Hecht · English · Gutenberg #7988 · 462,554 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago

Author: Ben Hecht


        
Release date: April 1, 2005 [eBook #7988]
                Most recently updated: December 31, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7988

Credits: E-text prepared by Eric Eldred, Clare Elliott, Charles Franks, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A THOUSAND AND ONE AFTERNOONS IN CHICAGO ***




E-text prepared by Eric Eldred, Clare Elliott, Charles Franks, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team



A THOUSAND AND ONE AFTERNOONS IN CHICAGO

by

Ben Hecht







Preface


It was a day in the spring of 1921. Dismal shadows, really Hechtian
shadows, filled the editorial "coop" in _The Chicago Daily News_
building. Outside the rain was slanting down in the way that Hecht's own
rain always slants. In walked Hecht. He had been divorced from our staff
for some weeks, and had married an overdressed, blatant creature called
Publicity. Well, and how did he like Publicity? The answer was written in
his sullen eyes; it was written on his furrowed brow, and in the savage
way he stabbed the costly furniture with his cane. The alliance with
Publicity was an unhappy one. Good pay? Oh yes, preposterous pay.
Luncheons with prominent persons? Limitless luncheons. Easy work, short
hours, plenteous taxis, hustling associates, glittering results. But--but
he couldn't stand it, that was all. He just unaccountably, illogically,
and damnably couldn't stand it. If he had to attend another luncheon and
eat sweet-breads and peach melba and listen to some orator pronounce a
speech he, Hecht, had written, and hear some Magnate outline a campaign
which he, Hecht, had invented ... and that wasn't all, either....
Gentlemen, he just couldn't stand it.

Well, the old job was open.

Ben shuddered. It wasn't the old job that he was thinking about. He had a
new idea. Something different. Maybe impossible.

And here followed specifications for "One Thousand and One Afternoons."
The title, I believe, came later, along with details like the salary. Hang
the salary! I doubt if Ben even heard the figure that was named. He merely
said "Uh-huh!" and proceeded to embellish his dream--his dream of a
department more brilliant, more artistic, truer (I think he said truer),
broader and better than anything in the American press; a literary
thriller, a knock-out ... and so on.

So much for the mercenary spirit in which "One Thousand and One
Afternoons" was conceived.

A week or so later Ben came in again, bringing actual manuscript for eight
or ten stories. He was haggard but very happy. It was clear that he had
sat up nights with those stories. He thumbed them over as though he hated
to let them go. They were the first fruits of his Big Idea--the idea that
just under the edge of the news as commonly understood, the news often
flatly and unimaginatively told, lay life; that in this urban life there
dwelt the stuff of literature, not hidden in remote places, either, but
walking the downtown streets, peering from the windows of sky scrapers,
sunning itself in parks and boulevards. He was going to be its
interpreter. His was to be the lens throwing city life into new colors,
his the microscope revealing its contortions in life and death. It was no
newspaper dream at all, in fact. It was an artist's dream. And it had
begun to come true. Here were the stories.... Hoped I'd like 'em.

"One Thousand and One Afternoons" were launched in June, 1921. They were
presented to the public as journalism extraordinary; journalism that
invaded the realm of literature, where in large part, journalism really
dwells. They went out backed by confidence in the genius of Ben Hecht.
This, if you please, took place three months before the publication of
"Erik Dorn," when not a few critics "discovered" Hecht. It is not too much
to say that the first full release of Hecht's literary powers was in "One
Thousand and One Afternoons." The sketches themselves reveal his creative
delight in them; they ring with the happiness of a spirit at last free to
tell what it feels; they teem with thought and impressions long treasured;
they are a recital of songs echoing the voices of Ben's own city and
performed with a virtuosity granted to him alone. They announced to a
Chicago audience which only half understood them the arrival of a prodigy
whose precise significance is still unmeasured.

"Erik Dorn" was published. "Gargoyles" took form. Hecht wrote a play in
eight days. He experimented with a long manuscript to be begun and
finished within eighteen hours. "One Thousand and One Afternoons"
continued to pour out of him. His letter-box became too small for his
mail. He was bombarded with eulogies, complaints, arguments, "tips," and
solicitations. His clipping bureau rained upon him violent reviews of
"Dorn." His publishers submerged him with appeals for manuscript.
Syndicates wired him, with "name your own terms." New York editors tried
to steal him. He continued to write "One Thousand and One Afternoons." He
became weary, nervous and bilious; he spent four days in bed, and gave up
tobacco. Nothing stopped "One Thousand and One Afternoons." One a day, one
a day! Did the flesh fail, and topics give out, and the typewriter became
an enemy? No matter. The venturesome undertaking of writing good newspaper
sketches, one per diem, had to be carried out. We wondered how he did it.
We saw him in moods when he almost surrendered, when the strain of
juggling with novels, plays and with contracts, revises, adblurbs,
sketches, nearly finished "One Thousand and One Afternoon." But a year
went by, and through all that year there had not been an issue of _The
Chicago Daily News_ without a Ben Hecht sketch. And still the
manuscripts dropped down regularly on the editor's desk. Comedies,
dialogues, homilies, one-act tragedies, storiettes, sepia panels,
word-etchings, satires, tone-poems, fugues, bourrees,--something different
every day. Rarely anything hopelessly out of key. Stories seemingly born
out of nothing, and written--to judge by the typing--in ten minutes, but
in reality, as a rule, based upon actual incident, developed by a period
of soaking in the peculiar chemicals of Ben's nature, and written with
much sophistication in the choice of words. There were dramatic studies
often intensely subjective, lit with the moods of Ben himself, not of the
things dramatized. There were self-revelations characteristically frank
and provokingly debonaire. There was comment upon everything under the
sun; assaults upon all the idols of antiquity, of mediaevalism, of
neo-boobism. There were raw chunks of philosophy, delivered with gusto and
sometimes with inaccuracy. There were subtle jabs at well-established
Babbitry. And besides, of the thousand and one Hechts visible in the
sketches, there were several that appear rarely, if at all, in his novels:
The whimsical Hecht, sailing jocosely on the surface of life; the witty
Hecht, flinging out novel word-combinations, slang and snappy endings;
Hecht the child-lover and animal-lover, with a special tenderness for
dogs; Hecht the sympathetic, betraying his pity for the aged, the
forgotten, the forlorn. In the novels he is one of his selves, in the
sketches he is many of them. Perhaps this is why he officially spoke
slightingly of them at times, why he walked in some days, flung down a
manuscript, and said: "Here's a rotten story." Yet it must be that he
found pleasure in playing the whole scale, in hopping from the G-string to
the E-, in surprising his public each day with a new whim or a recently
discovered broken image. I suspect, anyhow, that he delighted in making
his editor stare and fumble in the Dictionary of Taboos.

Ben will deny most of this. He denies everything. It doesn't matter. It
doesn't even matter much, Ben, that your typing was sometimes so blind or
that your spelling was occasionally atrocious, or that it took three
proof-readers and a Library of Universal Knowledge to check up your
historical allusions.

       *       *       *       *       *

The preface is proving horribly inadequate. It is not at all what Ben
wants. It does not seem possible to support his theory that "One Thousand
and One Afternoons," springing from a literary passion so authentic and
continuing so long with a fervor and variety unmatched in newspaper
writing, are hack-work, done for a meal ticket. They must have had the
momentum of a strictly artistic inspiration and gained further momentum
from the need of expression, from pride in the subtle use of words, from
an ardent interest in the city and its human types. Yes, they are
newspaper work; they are the writings of a reporter emancipated from the
assignment book and the copy-desk; a reporter gone to the heaven of
reporters, where they write what they jolly well please and get it printed
too! But the sketches are also literature of which I think Ben cannot be
altogether ashamed; else why does he print them in a book, and how could
Mr. Rosse be moved to make the striking designs with which the book is
embellished? Quite enough has been said. The author, the newspaper editor,
the proof-readers and revisers have done their utmost with "One Thousand
and One Afternoons." The prefacer confesses failure. It is the turn of the
reader. He may welcome the sketches in book form; he may turn scornfully
from them and leave them to moulder in the stock-room of Messrs.
Covici-McGee. To paraphrase an old comic opera lyric:

    "You never can tell about a reader;
    Perhaps that's why we think them all so nice.
    You never find two alike at any one time
    And you never find one alike twice.
    You're never very certain that they read you,
    And you're often very certain that they don't.
    Though an author fancy still that he has the strongest will
    It's the reader has the strongest won't."

Yet I think that the book will succeed. It may succeed so far that Mr.
Hecht will hear some brazen idiots remarking: "I like it better than
'Dorn' or 'Gargoyles'." Yes, just that ruinous thing may happen. But if it
does Ben cannot blame his editor.

HENRY JUSTIN SMITH.

Chicago, July 1, 1922



CONTENTS

A Self-Made Man

An Iowa Humoresque

An Old Audience Speaks

Clocks and Owl Cars

Confessions

Coral, Amber and Jade

Coeur De Lion and The Soup and Fish

Dapper Pete and The Sucker Play

Dead Warrior

Don Quixote and His Last Windmill

"Fa'n Ta Mig!"

Fanny

Fantastic Lollypops

Fog Patterns

Grass Figures

Ill-Humoresque

Jazz Band Impressions

Letters

Meditation in E Minor

Michigan Avenue

Mishkin's Minyon

Mottka

Mr. Winkelberg

Mrs. Rodjezke's Last Job

Mrs. Sardotopolis' Evening Off

Night Diary

Nirvana

Notes For A Tragedy

On A Day Like This

Ornaments

Pandora's Box

Pitzela's Son

Queen Bess Feast

Ripples

Satraps At Play

Schopenhauer's Son

Sergt. Kuzick's Waterloo

Sociable Gamblers

Ten-Cent Wedding Rings

The Auctioneer's Wife

The Dagger Venus

The Exile

The Great Traveler The Indestructible Masterpiece

The Lake

The Little Fop

The Man From Yesterday

The Man Hunt

The Man With A Question

The Mother

The Pig

The Snob

The Soul of Sing Lee

The Sybarite

The Tattooer

The Thing In The Dark

The Watch Fixer

The Way Home

Thumbnail Lotharios

Thumbs Up and Down

To Bert Williams

Vagabondia

Waterfront Fancies

Where The "Blues" Sound

World Conquerors



FANNY


Why did Fanny do this? The judge would like to know. The judge would like
to help her. The judge says: "Now, Fanny, tell me all about it."

All about it, all about it! Fanny's stoical face stares at the floor. If
Fanny had words. But Fanny has no words. Something heavy in her heart,
something vague and heavy in her thought--these are all that Fanny has.

Let the policewoman's records show. Three years ago Fanny came to Chicago
from a place called Plano. Red-cheeked and black-haired, vivid-eyed and
like an ear of ripe corn dropped in the middle of State and Madison
streets, Fanny came to the city.

Ah, the lonely city, with its crowds and its lonely lights. The lonely
buildings busy with a thousand lonelinesses. People laughing and hurrying
along, people eager-eyed for something; summer parks and streets white
with snow, the city moon like a distant window, pretty gewgaws in the
stores--these are a part of Fanny's story.

The judge wants to know. Fanny's eyes look up. A dog takes a kick like
this, with eyes like this, large, dumb and brimming with pathos. The dog's
master is a mysterious and inexplicable dispenser of joys and sorrows. His
caresses and his beatings are alike mysterious; their reasons seldom to be
discerned, never fully understood.

Sometimes in this court where the sinners are haled, where "poised and
prim and particular, society stately sits," his honor has a moment of
confusion. Eyes lift themselves to him, eyes dumb and brimming with
pathos. Eyes stare out of sordid faces, evil faces, wasted faces and say
something not admissible as evidence. Eyes say: "I don't know, I don't
know. What is it all about?"

These are not to be confused with the eyes that plead shrewdly for mercy,
with eyes that feign dramatic naïvetés and offer themselves like primping
little penitents to his honor. His honor knows them fairly well. And
understands them. They are eyes still bargaining with life.

But Fanny's eyes. Yes, the judge would like to know. A vagueness comes
into his precise mind. He half-hears the familiar accusation that the
policeman drones, a terribly matter-of-fact drone.

Another raid on a suspected flat. Routine, routine. Evil has its eternal
root in the cities. A tireless Satan, bored with the monotony of his rôle;
a tireless Justice, bored with the routine of tears and pleadings, lies
and guilt.

There is no story in all this. Once his honor, walking home from a
banquet, looked up and noticed the stars. Meaningless, immutable stars.
There was nothing to be seen by looking at them. They were mysteries to be
dismissed. Like the mystery of Fanny's eyes. Meaningless, immutable eyes.
They do not bargain. Yet the world stares out of them. The face looks
dumbly up at a judge.

No defense. The policeman's drone has ended and Fanny says nothing. This
is difficult. Because his honor knows suddenly there is a defense. A
monstrous defense. Since there are always two sides to everything. Yes,
what is the other side? His honor would like to know. Tell it, Fanny.
About the crowds, streets, buildings, lights, about the whirligig of
loneliness, about the humpty-dumpty clutter of longings. And then explain
about the summer parks and the white snow and the moon window in the sky.
Throw in a poignantly ironical dissertation on life, on its uncharted
aimlessness, and speak like Sherwood Anderson about the desires that stir
in the heart. Speak like Remy de Gourmont and Dostoevsky and Stevie Crane,
like Schopenhauer and Dreiser and Isaiah; speak like all the great
questioners whose tongues have wagged and whose hearts have burned with
questions. His honor will listen bewilderedly and, perhaps, only perhaps,
understand for a moment the dumb pathos of your eyes.

As it is, you were found, as the copper who reads the newspapers puts it,
in a suspected flat. A violation of section 2012 of the City Code. Thirty
days in the Bastile, Fanny. Unless his honor is feeling good.

These eyes lifted to him will ask him questions on his way home from a
banquet some night.

"How old are you?"

"Twenty."

"Make it twenty-two," his honor smiles. "And you have nothing to say?
About how you happened to get into this sort of thing? You look like a
good girl. Although looks are often deceiving."

"I went there with him," says Fanny. And she points to a beetle-browed
citizen with an unshaven face. A quaint Don Juan, indeed.

"Ever see him before?"

A shake of the head. Plain case. And yet his honor hesitates. His honor
feels something expand in his breast. Perhaps he would like to rise and
holding forth his hand utter a famous plagiarism--"Go and sin no more." He
chews a pen and sighs, instead.

"I'll give you another chance," he says. "The next time it'll be jail.
Keep this in mind. If you're brought in again, no excuses will go. Call
the next case."

Now one can follow Fanny. She walks out of the courtroom. The street
swallows her. Nobody in the crowds knows what has happened. Fanny is
anybody now. Still, one may follow. Perhaps something will reveal itself,
something will add an illuminating touch to the incident of the courtroom.

There is only this. Fanny pauses in front of a drug-store window. The
crowds clutter by. Fanny stands looking, without interest, into the
window. There is a little mirror inside. The city tumbles by. The city is
interested in something vastly complicated.

Staring into the little mirror, Fanny sighs and--powders her nose.



THE AUCTIONEER'S WIFE


An auctioneer must have a compelling manner. He must be gabby and
stentorian, witheringly sarcastic and plaintively cajoling. He must be
able to detect the faintest symptoms of avarice and desire in the blink of
an eyelid, in the tilt of a head. Behind his sing-song of patter as he
knocks down a piece of useless bric-a-brac he must be able to remain cool,
remain calculating, remain like a hawk prepared to pounce upon his prey.
Passion for him must be no more than a mask; anger, sorrow, despair,
ecstasy no more than the devices of salesmanship.

But more than all this, an auctioneer must know the magic password into
the heart of the professional or amateur collector. He must know the
glittering phrases that are the keys to their hobbies. The words that
bring a gleam to the eye of the Oriental rug collector. The words that
fire the china collector. The stamp collector. The period furniture
collector. The tapestry enthusiast. The first edition fan. And so on.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I desire your expert attention for a moment. I have
here a curious little thing of exquisite workmanship said to be from the
famous collection of Count Valentine of Florence. This delicately molded,
beautifully painted candelabra has illuminated the feasts of the old
Florentines, twinkled amid the gay, courtly rioting of a time that is no
more. Before the bidding for this priceless souvenir is opened I desire,
ladies and gentlemen, to state briefly----"

       *       *       *       *       *

Nathan Ludlow is an auctioneer who knows all the things an auctioneer must
know. His eye is piercing. His tongue can roll and rattle for twelve hours
at a stretch. His voice is the voice of the tempter, myriad-toned and
irresistible.

It was evening. An auspicious evening. It was the evening of Mr. Ludlow's
divorce. And Mr. Ludlow sat in his room at the Morrison Hotel, a decanter
of juniper juice at his elbow. And while he sat he talked. The subjects
varied. There were tales of Ming vases and Satsuma bargains, of porcelains
and rugs. And finally Mr. Ludlow arrived at the subject of audiences. And
from this subject he progressed with the aid of the juniper juice to the
subject of wives. And from the subject of wives he stepped casually into
the sad story of his life.

"I'll tell you," said Mr. Ludlow. "Tonight I'm a free man. Judge Pam gave
me, or gave her, rather, the divorce. I guess he did well. Maybe she was
entitled to it. Desertion and cruelty were the charges. But they don't
mean anything. The chief complaint she had against me was that I was an
auctioneer."

Mr. Ludlow sighed and ran his long, artist's fingers over his eagle
features and brushed back a Byronic lock of hair from his forehead.

"It was four years ago we met," he resumed, "in the Wabash Avenue place. I
noticed her when the bidding on a rocking chair started. A pretty girl.
And as is often the case among women who attend auctions--a bug, a fan, a
fish. You know, the kind that stiffen up when they get excited. The kind
that hang on your words and breathe hard while you cut loose with the
patter, and lose their heads when you swing into the going-going-gone
finale.

"Well, she didn't get the rocking chair. But she was game and came back on
a Chinese rug. I began to notice her considerably. My words seemed to have
an unusual effect on her. Then I could see that she was not only the kind
of fish that lose their heads at auctions, but the terrible kind that
believe everything the auctioneer says. You know, they believe that the
Oriental rugs really came from the harem of the caliph and that the
antique bed really was the one in which DuBarry slept and that the
Elizabethan tablecloth really was an Elizabethan tablecloth. They are kind
of goofily romantic and they fall hard for everything and they spend their
last penny on a lot of truck, you know. Not bad stuff and probably a good
deal more useful and lasting than the originals would have been."

       *       *       *       *       *

Mr. Ludlow smiled a bit apologetically. "I'm not confessing anything you
don't know, I hope," he said. "Well, to go on about the missus. I knew I
had her from that first day. I wasn't vitally interested, but when she
returned six days in succession it got kind of flattering. And the way she
looked at me and listened to me when I pulled my stuff--say, I could have
knocked down a bouquet of paper roses for the original wreath worn by
Venus, I felt so good. That's how I began to think that she was an
inspiration to me and how I figured that if I could have somebody like her
around I'd soon have them all pocketed as auctioneers.

"I forget just how it was we met, but we did. And I swear, the way she
flattered me would have been enough to turn the head of a guy ten times
smarter than me and forty times as old. So we got married. That's skipping
a lot. But, you know, what's it all amount to, the courting and the things
you say and do before you get married? So we got married and then the fun
started.

"At first I could hardly believe what the drift of it was. But I hope to
die if she wasn't sincere in her ideas about me as an auctioneer. I didn't
get it, as I say, and that's where I made my big mistake. I let her come
to the auctions and told her not to bid. But when I'd start my patter on
some useless piece of 5-and l0-cent store bric-a-brac and give it an
identity and hint at Count Rudolph's collection and so on, she was off
like a two-year-old down a morning track.

"I didn't know how to fix it or how to head her out of it. For a month I
didn't have the heart to disillusion her. I let her buy. Damn it, I never
saw such an absolute boob as she was. She'd pick out the most worthless
junk I was knocking down and go mad over it and buy it with my good money.
It got so that I realized I was slipping. I'd get a promise from her that
she wouldn't come into the auction, but I never could be sure. And if I
felt like cutting loose on some piece of junk and knocking it down with a
lot of flourishes I knew sure as fate that the missus would be there and
that she would be the fish that caught fire first and most and that I'd be
selling the thing to myself.

"Well, after the first two months of my married life I realized that I'd
have to talk turkey to the missus. She was costing me my last nickel at
these auctions and the better auctioneer I was the more money I lost, on
account of her being so susceptible to my line of stuff. It sounds funny,
but it's a fact. So I told her. I made a clean breast. I told her what a
liar I was and how all the stuff I pulled from the auction stand was the
bunk and how she was a boob for falling for it. And so on and so on. Say,
I sold myself to her as the world's greatest, all around, low down,
hideous liar that ever walked in shoe leather. And that's how it started.
This divorce today is kind of an anti-climax. We ain't had much to do with
each other ever since that confession."

Mr. Ludlow stared sorrowfully into the remains of a glass of juniper
juice.

"I'll never marry again," he moaned. "I ain't the kind that makes a good
husband. A good husband is a man who is just an ordinary liar. And me?
Well, I'm an auctioneer."



FOG PATTERNS


The fog tiptoes into the streets. It walks like a great cat through the
air and slowly devours the city.

The office buildings vanish, leaving behind thin pencil lines and smoke
blurs. The pavements become isolated, low-roofed corridors. Overhead the
electric signs whisper enigmatically and the window lights dissolve.

The fog thickens till the city disappears. High up, where the mists thin
into a dark, sulphurous glow, roof bubbles float. The great cat's work is
done. It stands balancing itself on the heads of people and arches its
back against the vanished buildings.

       *       *       *       *       *

I walk along thinking about the way the streets look and arranging
adjectives in my mind. In the heavy mist people appear detached. They no
longer seem to belong to a pursuit in common. Usually the busy part of the
city is like the exposed mechanism of some monstrous clock. And people
scurry about losing themselves in cogs and springs and levers.

But now the monstrous clock is almost hidden. The stores and offices and
factories that form the mechanism of this clock are buried behind the fog.
The cat has eaten them up. Hidden within the mist the cogs still turn and
the springs unwind. But for the moment they seem non-existent. And the
people drifting hurriedly by in the fog seem as if they were not going and
coming from stores, offices and factories. As if they were solitaries
hunting something in the labyrinths of the fog.

Yes, we are all lost and wandering in the thick mists. We have no
destinations. The city is without outlines. And the drift of figures is a
meaningless thing. Figures that are going nowhere and coming from nowhere.
A swarm of supernumeraries who are not in the play. Who saunter, dash,
scurry, hesitate in search of a part in the play.

This is a curious illusion. I stop and listen to music. Overhead a piano
is playing and a voice singing. A song-boosting shop above Monroe and
State streets. A ballad of the cheap cabarets. Yet, because it is music,
it has a mystery in it.

The fog pictures grow charming. There is an idea in them now. People are
detached little decorations etched upon a mist. The cat has eaten up the
monstrous clock and people have rid themselves of their routine, which was
to tumble and scurry among its cogs and levers. They are done with life,
with buying and selling and with the perpetual errand. And they have
become a swarm of little ornaments. Men and women denuded of the city.
Their outlines posture quaintly in the mist. Their little faces say, "The
clock is gone. There is nothing any more to make us alive. So we have
become our unconnected selves."

       *       *       *       *       *

Beside me in the fog a man stands next to a tall paper rack. I remember
that this is the rack where the out-of-town papers are on sale. The papers
are rolled up and thrust like rows of little white dolls in the rack. I
wonder that this should be a newspaper stand. It looks like almost
anything else in the fog.

A pretty girl emerges from the background of fog. She talks to the man
next to the rack.

"Have you a Des Moines newspaper?" she asks.

The man is very businesslike. He fishes out a newspaper and sells it. At
the sight of its headlines the girl's eyes light up. It is as if she had
met a very close friend. She will walk along feeling comforted now.
Chicago is a stranger. Its fog-hidden buildings and streets are strangers
and its crowds criss-crossing everywhere are worse than strangers. But now
she has Des Moines under her arm. Des Moines is a companion that will make
the fog seem less lonely. Later she will sit down in a hotel room and read
of what has happened in Des Moines buildings and Des Moines streets. These
will seem like real happenings, whereas the happenings that the Chicago
papers print seem like unrealities.

This is Dearborn Street now. Dark and cozy. People are no longer
decorations but intimate friends. When it is light and one can see the
cogs of the monstrous clock go round and the springs unwind one thinks of
people as a part of this mechanism. And so people grow vague in one's mind
and unhuman or only half-human.

But now that the mechanism is gone, people stand out with an insistent
humanness. People sitting on lunch-counter stools, leaning over coffee
cups. People standing behind store counters. People buying cigars and
people walking in and out of office buildings. They are very friendly.
Their tired faces smile, or at least look somewhat amused and interested.
They are interested in the fog and in the fact that one cannot see three
feet ahead. And their faces say to each other, "Here we are, all alike.
The city is only a make-believe. It can go away but we still remain. We
are much more important than the big buildings."

       *       *       *       *       *

I hear an odd tapping sound on the pavement. It is faint but growing
nearer. In another moment a man tapping on the pavement with a cane
passes. A blind man. And I think of a plot for a fiction story. If a
terrible murder were committed in a marvelous fog that hid everything the
chief of police would summon a blind man. And the blind man could track
the murderer down in the fog because he alone would be able to move in the
thick, obliterating mists. And so the blind man, with his cane tapping,
tapping over the pavements and able by long practice to move without
sight, would slowly close in on the murderer hemmed in by darkness.

A newsboy cries from the depth of nowhere: "Paper here. Trains crash in
fog. Paper."

       *       *       *       *       *

A friend and I sat in an office. He has been dictating letters, but he
stops and stares out of the window. His eyes grow speculative. He says:

"Wouldn't it be odd if it were always like this? I think I'd like it
better, wouldn't you? But I suppose they'd invent lights able to penetrate
mist and the town would be as garish as ever in a few years. But I like
the fog because it slows things up. Things are too damn fast to suit me. I
like 'em slow. Like they used to be a century ago."

We talk and my friend becomes reminiscent on the subject of stage coaches
and prairie schooners and the days before there were railroads,
telephones, electricity and crowds. He has never known such a time, but
from what he has read and imagined about it--yes, it would be better.

       *       *       *       *       *

When I come out it is mid-afternoon. The fog has gone. The city has popped
back and sprawls triumphantly into space. For a moment it seems as if the
city had sprung up in an hour. Then its sturdy walls and business windows
begin to mock at the memory of the fog in my mind. "Fogs do not devour
us," they say. "We are the ones who do the devouring. We devour fogs and
people and days." Marvelous buildings.

Overhead the sky floats like a gray and white balloon, as if it were a toy
belonging to the city.



DON QUIXOTE AND HIS LAST WINDMILL


Sherwood Anderson, the writer, and I were eating lunch in the back room of
a saloon. Against the opposite wall sat a red-faced little man with an
elaborate mustache and a bald head and a happy grin. He sat alone at a
tilted round table and played with a plate of soup.

"Say, that old boy over there is trying to wigwag me," said Anderson. "He
keeps winking and making signs. Do you know him?"

I looked and said no. The waiter appeared with a box of cigars.

"Mr. Sklarz presents his compliments," said the waiter, smiling.

"Who's Sklarz?" Anderson asked, helping himself to a cigar. The waiter
indicated the red-faced little man. "Him," he whispered.

We continued our meal. Both of us watched Mr. Sklarz casually. He seemed
to have lost interest in his soup. He sat beaming happily at the walls, a
contagious elation about him. We smiled and nodded our thanks for the
cigars. Whereupon after a short lapse, the waiter appeared again.

"What'll you have to drink, gentlemen?" the waiter inquired.

"Nothing," said Anderson, knowing I was broke. The waiter raised his
continental eyebrows understandingly.

"Mr. Sklarz invites you, gentlemen, to drink his health--at his expense."

"Two glasses," Anderson ordered. They were brought. We raised them in
silent toast to the little red-faced man. He arose and bowed as we drank.

"We'll probably have him on our hands now for an hour," Anderson frowned.
I feared the same. But Mr. Sklarz reseated himself and, with many head
bowings in our direction, returned to his soup.

"What do you make of our magnanimous friend?" I asked. Anderson shrugged
his shoulders.

"He's probably celebrating something," he said. "A queer old boy, isn't
he?"

       *       *       *       *       *

The waiter appeared a third time.

"What'll it be, gentlemen?" he inquired, smiling. "Mr. Sklarz is buying
for the house."

For the house. There were some fifteen men eating in the place. Then our
friend, despite his unassuming appearance, was evidently a creature of
wealth! Well, this was growing interesting. We ordered wine again.

"Ask Mr. Sklarz if he will favor us by joining us at our table for this
drink," I told the waiter. The message was delivered. Mr. Sklarz arose and
bowed, but sat down again. Anderson and I beckoned in pantomime. Mr.
Sklarz arose once more, bowed and hesitated. Then he came over.

As he approached a veritable carnival spirit seemed to deepen around us.
The face of this little man with the elaborate black mustache was violent
with suppressed good will and mirth. He beamed, bowed, shook hands and sat
down. We drank one another's health and, as politely as we could, pressed
him to tell us the cause for his celebration and good spirits. He began to
talk.

He was a Russian Jew. His name was Sklarz. He had been in the Russian army
years ago. In Persia. From a mountain in Persia you could see three great
countries. In Turkey he had fought with baggy-trousered soldiers and at
night joined them when they played their flutes outside the coffee-houses
and sang songs about women and war. Then he had come to America and opened
a box factory. He was very prosperous and the factory in which he made
boxes grew too small.

So what did he do but take a walk one day to look for a larger factory.
And he found a beautiful building just as he wanted. But the building was
too beautiful to use for a factory. It should be used for something much
nicer. So what did he do then but decide to open a dance-hall, a
magnificent dance-hall, where young men and women of refined, fun-loving
temperaments could come to dance and have fun.

       *       *       *       *       *

"When does this dance-hall open?" Anderson asked. Ah, in a little while.
There were fittings to buy and put up first. But he would send us special
invitations to the opening. In the meantime would we drink his health
again? Mr. Sklarz chuckled. The amazing thing was that he wasn't drunk. He
was sober.

"So you're celebrating," I said. Yes, he was celebrating. He laughed and
leaned over the table toward us. His eyes danced and his elaborate
mustache made a grotesque halo for his smile. He didn't want to intrude on
us with his story, but in Persia and Turkey and the Urals he had found
life very nice. And here in Chicago he had found life also very nice. Life
was very nice wherever you went. And Anderson quoted, rather imperfectly,
I thought:

    Oh, but life went gayly, gayly
      In the house of Idah Dally;
    There were always throats to sing
      Down the river bank with spring.

Mr. Sklarz beamed.

"Yes, yes," he said, "down the river benk mit spring." And he stood up and
bowed and summoned the waiter. "See vat all the gentlemen vant," he
ordered, "and give them vat they vant mit my compliments." He laughed, or,
rather, chuckled. "I must be going. Excuse me," he exclaimed with a quick
little bow. "I have other places to call on. Good-by. Remember me--Sam
Sklarz. Be good--and don't forget Sam Sklarz when there are throats to
zing down the river benk mit spring."

We watched him walk out. His shoulders seemed to dance, his short legs
moved with a sprightly lift.

"A queer old boy," said Anderson. We talked about him for a half hour and
then left the place.

       *       *       *       *       *

Anderson called me up the next morning to ask if I had read about it in
the paper. I told him I had. A clipping on the desk in front of me ran:

"Sam Sklarz, 46 years old and owner of a box factory on the West Side,
committed suicide early this morning by jumping into the drainage canal.
Financial reverses are believed to have caused him to end his life.
According to friends he was on the verge of bankruptcy. His liabilities
were $8,000. Yesterday morning Sklarz cashed a check for $700, which
represented the remains of his bank account, and disappeared. It is
believed that he used the money to pay a few personal debts and then
wandered around in a daze until the end. He left no word of explanation
behind."



THE MAN HUNT


They were hunting him. Squads of coppers with rifles, detectives, stool
pigeons were hunting him. And the people who had read the story in the
newspapers and looked at his picture, they too, were hunting him.

Tommy O'Connor looked out of the smeared window of the room in which he
sat and stared at the snow. A drift of snow across the roofs. A scribble
of snow over the pavement.

There were automobiles racing through the streets loaded with armed men.
There were crowds looking for a telltale face in their own midst. Guards,
deputies, coppers were surrounding houses and peering into alleys, raiding
saloons, ringing doorbells. The whole city was on his heels. The city was
like a pack of dogs sniffing wildly for his trail. And when they found it
they would come whooping toward him for a leap at his throat.

Well, here he was--waiting. It was snowing outside. There was no noise in
the street. A man was passing. One of the pack? No. Just a man. The man
looked up. Tommy O'Connor took his face slowly away from the window. He
had a gun in his pocket and his hand was holding it. But the man was
walking away. Huh! If the guy knew that Lucky Tommy O'Connor was watching
him from a window he'd walk a little faster. If the guy knew that Lucky
O'Connor, who had busted his way out of jail and was being hunted by a
million people with guns, was sitting up here behind the window, he'd
throw a fit. But he didn't know. He was like the walls and the windows and
the snow outside--quiet and peaceful.

"Nice boy," grinned Tommy O'Connor. Then he began to fidget. He ought to
go out and buy a paper. See what was doing. See what became of Mac and the
rest of the boys. Maybe they'd all been nabbed. But they couldn't do him
harm. On account nobody knew where he was. No pal. No dame. Nobody knew he
was sitting here in the room looking at the snow and just thinking. The
papers were probably full of cock-and-bull stories about his racing across
the country and hiding in haystacks and behind barns. Kid stuff. Maybe he
should ought to of left town. But it felt better in town. Some rube was
always sure to pick out a stranger beating it down a empty road. And there
was no place to hide. Long, empty stretches, where anybody could see you
for a mile.

Better in town. Lots of walls, alleys, roofs. Lots of things like that. No
hare-and-hounds effect like in the country. But the papers were probably
full of a lot of bunk. He'd take a walk later and buy a few. Better sit
still now. There was nothing harder to find than a man sitting still.

       *       *       *       *       *

Tommy O'Connor yawned. Not much sleep the night before. Well, he'd sleep
tonight. Worrying wasn't going to help matters. What if they did come? Let
them come. Fill up the street and begin their damn shooting. They didn't
think Lucky Tommy was sucker enough to let them march him up on a scaffold
and break his neck on the end of a rope. Fat chance. Not him. That sort of
stuff happened to other guys, not to Lucky Tommy.

Snowing outside. And quiet. Everybody at work. Funny about that. Tommy
O'Connor was the only free man in the city. There was nobody felt like him
right now--nobody. Where would he be exactly this time a week from now? If
he could only look ahead and see himself at four o'clock next Monday
afternoon. But he was free now. No breaking his neck on the end of a rope.
If worst came to worst--if worst came to worst--O'Connor's fingers took a
grip on the gun in his pocket. They were hunting him. Up and down the
streets everywhere. Racing around in taxis, with rifles sticking out of
the windows. Well, why didn't they come into this street? All they had to
do was figure out: Here's the street Tommy O'Connor is hiding in. And that
looks like the house. And then somebody would yell out: "There he is!
Behind that window! That's him!" Why didn't this happen?

       *       *       *       *       *

Christmas, maybe, he'd call on the folks. No. Rube stuff. A million
coppers would be watching the house. But he might drop them a letter. Too
bad he didn't have any paper, or he might write a lot of letters. To the
chief of police and all the head hunters. Some more rube stuff, that. They
could tell by the postmark what part of the city he was hiding in and
they'd be on him with a whoop.

Funny how he had landed in this room. No plans, no place in particular to
head for. That was the best way. Like he'd figured it out and it turned
out perfect. Grab the first auto and ride like hell and keep on changing
autos and riding around and around in the streets and crawling deeper into
the city until the trail was all twisted and he was buried. But he ought
to shave his mustache off. Hell. What for? If they came whooping into the
street they'd find him, mustache or no mustache. But what if he wanted to
buy some papers?

It was getting darker now. The snow was letting up. Just dribbling. Better
if it would snow a lot. Then he could sit and have something to
watch--snow falling on the street and turning things white. That was on
account of his headache he was thinking that way. Eats might help, but he
wasn't hungry. Scared? No. Just waiting. Hunters winding in and out like
the snow that was falling. People were funny. They got a big thrill out of
hunting a live man who was free in the streets.

He'd be walking some day. Strolling around the streets free as any of
them. Maybe not in town. Some other town. Take a walk down State Street.
Drop in at a movie. Kid stuff. Walk over to Mac's saloon and kind of
casually say "Hello, fellows." And walk out again. God, they'd never hang
him. If the worst came to the worst--if the worst came to the worst--but
they'd never hang him.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dark now. But the guys hunting him weren't going to sleep. Lights were
going on in the windows. Better light up the room. People might notice a
dark window. But a lighted one would look all right. It was not snowing
any more. Just cold.

Well, he'd go out in a while. Stretch his legs and buy the papers and give
them a reading. And then take a walk. Just walk around and take in the
streets and see if there was anybody he knew. No. Rube stuff, that. Better
stick where he was.

Lucky Tommy walked around in the room. The drawn window blind held his
eye. Wagons were passing. What for? Yes, and there was a noise. Like
people coming. Turn out the light, then. He'd take a look.

Tommy O'Connor peeled back the blind carefully. Dark. Lights in windows.
Some guys on the corner. Hunting him? Sure. And they were coming his way.
Straight down the street. They were looking up. What for? A gun crept out
of Tommy O'Connor's pocket. He pressed himself carefully against the wall.
He waited. The minutes grew long. But this was the hunt closing in. They
were coming. Black figures of men floating casually down the street. All
right--let them come.

Lucky Tommy O'Connor's eyes stared rigidly out of the smeared window at a
vague flurry of figures that seemed to be coming, coming his way.



MR. WINKELBERG


There was never a man as irritating as Winkelberg. He was an encyclopedia
of misfortune. Everything which can happen to a man had happened to him.
He had lost his family, his money and his health. He was, in short, a man
completely broken--tall, thin, with a cadaverous face, out of which shone
two huge, lusterless eyes. He walked with an angular crawl that reminded
one of the emaciated flies one sees at the beginning of winter dragging
themselves perversely along as if struggling across an illimitable expanse
of flypaper.

It was one of Winkelberg's worst habits to appear at unexpected moments.
But perhaps any appearances poor Winkelberg might have made would have had
this irritating quality of unexpectedness. One was never looking forward
to Winkelberg, and thus the sight of his wan, determined smile, his
lusterless eyes and his tenacious crawl was invariably an uncomfortable
surprise.

       *       *       *       *       *

I will be frank. It was Winkelberg's misfortune which first attracted me.
I listened to his story avidly. He talked in slow words and there was
intelligence in the man. He was able to perceive himself not only as a
pain-racked, starving human, but he glimpsed with his large, tired eyes
his relation to things outside himself. I remember he said, and without
emotion: "There is nobody to blame. Not even myself. And if I cannot blame
myself how can I blame the world? The city is like that. I am no good. I
am done. Something worn out and useless. People try to take care of the
useless ones and they would like to. There are institutions. I was kicked
out of two of them. They said I was a faker. Somehow I don't appeal to
charitably inclined people."

Later I understood why. It was because of the man's smile--a feeble,
tenacious grimace that seemed to be offering a sardonic reproof. It could
never have been mistaken for a courageous smile. The secret of its
aggravating quality was this: In it Winkelberg accused himself of his
uselessness, his feebleness, his poverty. It was as if he were regarding
himself continually through the annoyed eyes of others and addressing
himself with the words of others: "You, Winkelberg, get out of here.
You're a nuisance. You make me uncomfortable because you're poor and
diseased and full of gloom. Get out. I don't want you around. Why the
devil don't you die?"

And the aggravating thing was that people looked at Winkelberg's smile as
into a mirror. They saw in it a reflection of their own attitude toward
the man. They felt that Winkelberg understood what they thought of him.
And they didn't like that. They didn't like to feel that Winkelberg was
aware that deep inside their minds they were always asking: "Why doesn't
this Winkelberg die and have it over with?" Because that made them out as
cruel, heartless people, not much different in their attitude toward their
fellow men from predatory animals in their attitude toward fellow
predatory animals. And somehow, although they really felt that way toward
Winkelberg, they preferred not to believe it. But Winkelberg's smile was a
mirror which would not let them escape this truth. And eventually
Winkelberg's smile became for them one of those curious mirrors which
exaggerate images grotesquely. Charitably inclined people, as well as all
other kinds of inclined people, prefer their Winkelbergs more egoistic.
They prefer that unfortunate ones be engrossed in their misfortunes and
not go around wearing sardonic, philosophical smiles.

       *       *       *       *       *

Winkelberg dragged along for a year. He was past fifty. Each time I saw
him I was certain I would never see him again. I was certain he would
die--drop dead while crawling across his flypaper. But he would appear. I
would pretend to be vastly busy. He would sit and wait. He never asked
alms. I would have been relieved if he had. Instead he sat and smiled, and
his smile said: "You are afraid I am going to ask you for money. Don't
worry. I won't ask you for money. I won't bother you at all. Yes, I agree
with you, I ought to be dead. It would be better for everybody."

We would talk little. He would throw out a hint now and then that perhaps
I could use some of his misfortunes for material. For instance, the time
his two children had been burned to death. Or the time he had fallen off
the street car while in a sick daze and injured his spine for life, and
how he had settled with the street car company for $500 and how he had
been robbed on the way to the bank with the money two weeks later.

I refused consistently this offer of "material." This offended Winkelberg.
He would shake his head and then he would nod his head understandingly and
his smile would say:

"Yes, yes. I understand. You don't want to get involved with me. Because
you don't want me to have any more claims on your sympathy than I've got.
I'm sorry."

Toward the end Winkelberg's visits grew more frequent. And he became
suddenly garrulous. He wished to discuss things. The city. The various
institutions. Politics. Art. This phase of Winkelberg was the most
unbearable. He was willing to admit himself a social outcast. He was
reconciled to the fact that he would starve to death and that everybody
who had ever seen him would feel it had been a good thing that he had
finally died. But this final plea came from him. He wanted nothing except
to talk and hear words in order to relieve the loneliness of his days. He
would like abstract discussions that had nothing to do with Winkelberg and
the Winkelberg misfortunes. His smile now said: "I am useless, worn out
and better off dead. But never mind me. My mind is still alive. It still
thinks. I wish it didn't. I wish it crawled around like my body. But
seeing that it does, talk to me as if it were a mind belonging to somebody
else and not to the insufferable Winkelberg."

I grew suspicious finally. I began to think there was something vitally
spurious about this whole Winkelberg business. And I said to myself: "The
man's a downright fake. If anybody were as pathetic and impossible and
useless as this Winkelberg is he would shoot himself. Winkelberg doesn't
shoot himself. So he becomes illogical. Unreal."

       *       *       *       *       *

A woman I know belongs to the type that becomes charitable around
Christmas time. She makes a glowing pretense of aiding the poor. As a
matter of fact, she really does aid them, although she regards the poor as
a sort of social and spiritual asset. They afford her the double
opportunity of appearing in the eyes of her neighbors as a magnanimous
soul and of doing something which reflects great credit upon her
character. But, anyway, she "does good," and we'll let it go at that.

I told this woman about Winkelberg. I became poignant and moving on the
subject of Winkelberg's misfortunes, his trials, sufferings and, above
all, his Spartan stoicism. It pleased me to do this. I felt that I was
making some amends and that the thing reflected credit upon my character.

So she went to the room on the South Side where Winkelberg sleeps. And
they told her there that Winkelberg was dead. He had died last week. She
was upset when she told me about it. She had come too late. She might have
saved him.

It was a curious thing--but when she told me that Winkelberg was dead I
felt combatively that it was untrue. And now since I know certainly that
Winkelberg is dead and buried I have developed a curious state of mind. I
look up from my desk every once in a while expecting to see him. In the
streets I sometimes find myself actually thinking: "I'll bump into him
when I turn the corner."

I have managed to discover the secret of this feeling. It is Winkelberg's
smile. Winkelberg's smile was the interpretation of the world's attitude
toward him, including my own. And thus whenever his name comes to mind his
smile appears as if it were the thought in my head. And in Winkelberg's
smile I hear myself saying: "He is better off dead."



A SELF-MADE MAN


"Over there," said Judge Sabath, "is a man who has been a juror in
criminal cases at least a dozen times."

His honor pointed to a short, thin man with a derby on the back of his
head and a startling mustache, concealing almost half of his wizened face.
The man was sitting a bit childishly on a window ledge in the hall of the
Criminal Court building swinging his legs and chewing rhythmically on a
plug of tobacco.

"They let him go this morning while picking a jury for a robbery case
before me," said the judge. "He tried to stay on, but neither side wanted
him. You might get a story out of him. I think he's broken-hearted."

       *       *       *       *       *

The short, thin man with the derby, swinging his legs from the window
ledge said his name was Martin.

"That's true," he said, "what the judge said. I been a juror fourteen
times. I was on five murders and four big robberies and then I was on five
different assorted kinds of crimes."

"How do you like being a juror, Mr. Martin?"

"Well, sir, I like it a lot. I can say that out of the fourteen times I
been a juror I never lost a case."

Mr. Martin aimed at the new cuspidor--and missed.

"There's some jurors as loses nearly every case they're on. They give in
first crack. But take the Whitely murder trial I was on. That was as near
as I ever come to losing a case. But I managed to hang the jury and the
verdict was one of disagreement. Whitely was innocent. Anybody could have
told that with half an eye."

"How long have you been serving on juries, Mr. Martin?"

"Going nigh on twenty-three years. I had my first case when I was a young
man. It was a minor case--a robbery. I won that despite my youth and
inexperience. In those days the cases were much harder than now on account
of the lawyers. The old-fashioned lawyer was the talkingest kind of a
nuisance I ever had to deal with. He always reminded me of somebody
talking at a mark for two dollars a week.

"I don't refer to the orators. I mean the ones who talk during the case
itself and who slow things up generally by bothering the witnesses to
death with a lot of unnecessary questions. Although the orators are pretty
bad, too. There's many a lawyer who has lost out with me on account of the
way he made faces in the windup. One of my rules as a juror, a successful
one, I might say, is, 'Always mistrust a lawyer who talks too fancy.'"

       *       *       *       *       *

"Judge Sabath just said that they let you go in his court this morning."

"H'm," snorted Mr. Martin. "That was the lawyer. He's mad at me because he
lost a case two years ago that I was on. I won it and he holds a grudge.
That's like some lawyers. They don't like the man who licks them.

"But you were asking about the qualifications of an all-around juryman.
I'll give 'em to you. First and foremost you want a man of wide experience
in human nature. I spend most of my time in the courts when I ain't
serving as juror studyin' human nature. You might say that all human
nature is the same. But it's my experience that some is more so than
others.

"Well, when you know human nature the next step is to figure out about
lawyers. Lawyers as a whole is the hardest nut the juror has to crack. To
begin with, they're deceivin', and if you let them they'll take advantage
of your credulity. There's Mr. Erbstein, for instance, the criminal
lawyer. He's a pretty smart one, but I won a case from him only four years
ago and he's never forgiven me. I was juror in a manslaughter trial he was
trying to run. He thought himself pretty foxy, but when it came to a
showdown I put it all over him. There was a guy who was foreman of the
jury that time who said I had it all over Mr. Erbstein as an argufier and
that my arguments made his look like ten cents. I won easily on five
ballots and Mr. Erbstein has never forgave me.

       *       *       *       *       *

"But I'll go on about the qualifications. First of all, I never read
newspapers. Never. No juror should ought to know anything about anything
that's going on. I found that out in my youth when I first started in. The
first question they ask you is, 'What have you heard about this case and
what have you read or said about it?' That's the first one. Well, the
right answer is 'nothing.'

"If you can say nothing and prove you're right they'll gobble you up as a
juror. For that reason I avoid all newspapers, and right now I don't know
what big crimes or cases have been committed at all. I have a clean,
unprejudiced mind and I keep it that way.

"Nextly," said Mr. Martin, trying a new sight on the cuspidor, "I don't
belong to any lodges whatsoever. They're a handicap. Because if the
defendant is a Mason and you are a Elk he would rather have a brother
Mason be juror than a strange Elk. So I don't belong to any of them and I
don't go to church. I also have no convictions whatsoever about politics
and have no favorites of any kind in the matter of authors or statesmen or
anything. What I try to do is to keep my mind clean and unprejudiced on
all subjects."

"Why do you like serving as a juror?"

Mr. Martin stared.

"Why?" he repeated. "Because it's every man's duty, naturally. And
besides," he went on, narrowing his eyes into shrewd slits, "I've just
been luckier than most people. Most people only get called a few times
during their life. But I get called regularly every year and sometimes
twice a year and sometimes four and five times a year for service. Of
course, I ain't boasting, but the city has recognized my merits, no doubt,
as a juror, knowing all the cases I've won, and it perhaps shows a little
partiality to me for that reason. But I feel that I have earned it and I
would like nothing said about it or any scandal started."

"What do you think of this Taylor death mystery in Los Angeles, Mr.
Martin?"

"Ha, ha," said Mr. Martin, "there you're tryin' to catch me. You thought
you could put that over on me without my seein' through it, didn't you?
That's just the way the lawyers try to trap me when I'm sittin' on one of
my cases. I ain't ever heard of this Taylor death mystery, not reading the
papers, you see."

"That's too bad, Mr. Martin. It's quite a story." Mr. Martin sighed and
slipped from the window ledge, shaking down his wrinkled, high-water
pants.

"Yes," he sighed, a sudden wistfulness coming into his rheumy eyes.
"Things have been pretty slow around here. Chicago used to be the place
for a juror--none better. But I been thinkin' of going west. Not that I
heard anything, mind you, about any of these cases." Mr. Martin glowered
virtuously. "I never read the papers, sir, and have no prejudices
whatsoever.

"But I've just been feelin' lately that there are wider opportunities in
the west for a man of my experience and record than are left around here."



TO BERT WILLIAMS


"Well," said Mr. Bert Williams, in his best "Under the Bamboo Tree"
dialect, "If you like mah singin' and actin' so much, how come, you bein'
a writer, you don't write somethin' about youah convictions on this
subjeck? Oh! It's not youah depahtment! Hm! Tha's jes' mah luck. I was
always the mos' unluckiest puhson who ever trifled with misfohtune. Not
his depahtment! Tha'--tha's jes' it. I never seems to fall jes' exactly in
the ri-right depahtment.

"May I ask, without meanin' to be puhsonal, jes' what is your depahtment?
Murder! Oh, you is the one who writes about murders and murderuhs foh the
paper! Nothin' else? Is tha' so? Jes' murders and murderuhs and--and
things like tha'? Well, tha' jes' shows how deceivin' looks is, fo' when
you came in heah I says to mahself, I says, 'this gen'le-man is a critic
of the drama.' And when I sees you have on a pair o' gloves I added
quickly to mahself, 'Yes, suh, chances are he is not only a critic of the
drama, but likewise even possuhbly a musical critic.' Yes, suh, all mah
life I have had the desire to be interviewed by a musical critic, but no
matter how hard I sing or how frequently, no musical critic has yet taken
cognizance o' me. No, suh, I get no cognizance whatsoever.

"Not meanin' to disparage you, suh, or your valuable depahtment. Foh if
you is in charge o' the murder and murderuh's depahtment o' yo' paper
possuhbly some time you may refer to me lightly between stabbin's or
shootin's in such wise as to say, foh instance, 'the doomed man was
listenin' to Mr. Williams' latest song on the phonograph when he received
the bullet wound. Death was instantaneous, the doomed man dyin' with a
smile on his lips. Mr. Williams' singin' makes death easy--an' desirable.'

"What, suh? You is! Sam, fetch the gen'leman some o' the firewater, the
non-company brand, Sam. All right, say when. Aw, shucks, that ain't enough
to wet a cat's whiskers. Say when again. There, tha's better. Here, Sam.
You got to help drink this. It's important. The gen'leman says if I will
wait a little while, jes' a little while, he is goin' to alter his
depahtment on the newspaper. Wasn't that it? Oh, I see. In the magazine.
Very well. Here's to what you says about me some day in the magazine. An'
when you writes it don't forget to mention somewhere along in it how when
I was playin' in San Francisco and Sarah Bernhardt was playin' there, and
this was years ago, don' forget to mention along with what you write about
mah singin' and actin' that I come to mah dressing room one evenin', in
Frisco, and there's the hugest box o' flowers you ever saw with mah name
on it. An' I open it up and, boy! There plain as the nose on your face is
a card among the flowers readin', 'to a fellow artist, from Sarah
Bernhardt.' And--whilst we are, so to speak, on the subjeck--you can put
in likewise what Eleanora Duse said o' me. You know who she is, I suppose,
the very most superlative genius o' the stage, suh. Yes, suh, the very
most. An' she says o' me when she went back to Italy, how I was the best
artist on the American stage.

"Artist! Tha' always makes Sam laugh, don't it, Sam, when he heahs me
refuhed to as artist. An'--have another beaker o' firewater, suh. It's
strictly non-company brand. An' here's how again to tha' day you speak of
when you write this article about me. An', boy, make it soon, 'cause this
life, this sinful theat'ical life, is killin' me fast. But I'll try an'
wait. Here's howdy."

       *       *       *       *       *

He didn't wait. And today a lazy, crooked grin and a dolorous-eyed black
face drift among the shades in the Valhalla where the Great Actors sit
reading their press notices to one another. The Great Actors who have died
since the day of Euripides--they sit around in their favorite make-ups in
the Valhalla reserved for all good and glorious Thespians.

A company of ladies and gentlemen that would make Mr. Belasco's heart stop
beating! The Booths and Barretts from antiquity down, the Mrs. Siddonses
and Pattis, the Cyranos, Hamlets, buffoons and heroes. All of them in
their favorite make-ups, in their favorite cap and bells, their favorite
swords, their favorite doublet and hose--all of them sit around in the
special Valhalla of the Great Actors reading their press notices to one
another and listening to the hosannas of such critics as have managed to
pry into the anterior heaven.

And today Bert Williams makes his entrance. Yes, suh, it took that long to
find just the right make-up. To get just the right kind of ill-fitting
white gloves and floppy shoes and nondescript pants. But it's an important
entrance. The lazy crooked grin is a bit nervous. The dolorous eyes peer
sadly through the opening door of this new theater.

Lawdy, man, this is got a Broadway first night backed off the boards.
Rejane, Caruso, Coquelin, Garrick and a thousand others sittin' against
the towering walls, sittin' with their eyes on the huge door within' to
see who's a-comin' in now.

All right, professor, jes' a little music. Nothin' much. Anything kind o'
sad and fidgetylike. Tha's it, that-a-boy. There's no use worryin'--much.
'Member what Duse said as I was the greatest artist, an 'member how Sarah
Bernhardt sent me roses in Frisco an' says, 'To a fellow artist'? Yes,
suh, they can't do mo' than walk out on me. An' ah's been walked out on
befo'.

All right, professor. Tha's it. Now I'll stick my hand inside the door and
wiggle mah fingers kind o' slow like. Jes' like that. An' I'll come on
slow. Nothin' to worry about--much.

       *       *       *       *       *

A wrinkled white-gloved hand moving slowly inside the door of the
Valhalla. Sad, fidgety music. Silence in the great hall. This is another
one coming on--another entrance. A lazy, crooked grin and a dolorous-eyed
black face. Floppy shoes and woebegone pants.

Bravo, Mr. Williams! The great hall rings with hand-clapping. The great
hall begins to fill with chuckles. There it is--the same curious grin, the
lugubrious apology of a grin, the weary, pessimistic child of a grin.

The Great Actors, eager-eyed and silent, sit back on their thrones. The
door of the Valhalla of Great Actors swings slowly shut. No Flo Ziegfeld
lighting this time, but a great shoot of sunshine for a "garden." And the
music different, easier to sing to, somehow. Music of harps and flutes.
And a deep voice rises.

Yes, I would have liked to have been there in the Valhalla of the Great
Actors, when Bert Williams came shuffling through the towering doors and
stood singing his entrance song to the silent, eager-eyed throng of
Rejanes, Barretts and Coquelins--

    Ah ain't ever done nothin' to nobody,
    Ah ain't ever got nothin' from nobody--no time, nohow.
    Ah ain't ever goin' t' do nothin' for nobody--
    Till somebody--



MICHIGAN AVENUE


This is a deplorable street, a luxurious couch of a street in which the
afternoon lolls like a gaudy sybarite. Overhead the sky stretches itself
like a holiday awning. The sun lays harlequin stripes across the building
faces. The smoke plumes from the I. C. engines scribble gray, white and
lavender fantasies against the shining air.

A deplorable street--a cement and plate glass Circe. We walk--a long
procession of us. It is curious to note how we adjust ourselves to
backgrounds. In other streets we are hurried, flurried, worried. We summon
portentous frowns to our faces. Our arms swinging at our sides proclaim,
"Make way, make way! We are launched upon activities vital to the
commonwealth!"

But here--the sun bursts a shower of little golden balloons from the high
windows. The green of a park makes a cool salaam to the beetle-topped
traffic of automobiles. Rubber tires roll down the wide avenue and make a
sound like the drawn-out striking of a match. Marble columns, fountains,
incompleted architectural elegancies, two sculptured lions and the
baffling effulgence of a cinder-veiled museum offer themselves like
pensively anonymous guests. And we walk like Pierrots and Pierrettes, like
John Drews and Jack Barrymores and Leo Ditrichsteins; like Nazimovas,
Patricia Collinges and Messalinas on parole.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have squandered an afternoon seduced from labors by this Pied Piper of a
street. And not only I but everybody I ever knew or heard of was in this
street, strutting up and down as if there were no vital projects demanding
their attention, as if life were not a stern and productive routine. And
where was the Rotary Club? Not a sign of the Rotary Club. One billboard
would have saved me; the admonitions that "work is man's duty to his
nation," that my country needed me as much in peace as in war, would have
scattered the insidious spell of this street and sent me back to the
typewriter with at least a story of some waiter in a loop beanery who was
once a reigning prince of Patagonia.

But there was no sign, no billboard to inspire me with a sense of duty. So
we strutted--the long procession of us--a masquerade of leisure and
complacency. Here was a street in which a shave and a haircut, a shine and
a clean collar exhilarated a man with a feeling of power and virtue. As if
there were nothing else to the day than to decorate himself for the
amusement of others.

There were beggars in the street but they only add by way of contrast to
the effulgence of our procession. And, besides, are they beggars? Augustus
Caesar attired himself in beggar's clothes one day each year and asked
alms in the highways of Rome.

       *       *       *       *       *

I begin to notice something. An expression in our faces as we drift by the
fastidious ballyhoos of the shop windows. We are waiting for
something--actors walking up and down in the wings waiting for their cues
to go on. This is intelligible. This magician of a street has created the
illusion in our heads that there are adventure and romance around us.

Fauns, Pierrots, Launcelots, Leanders--we walk, expectantly waiting for
our scenes to materialize. Here the little steno in the green tarn is Laïs
of Corinth, the dowager alighting from the electric is Zenobia. Illusions
dress the entire procession. Semiramis, Leda, and tailored nymphs; dryad
eyes gleam from powder-white masks. Or, if the classics bore you, Watteau
and the rococo pertness of the Grand Monarch. And there are Gothic noses,
Moorish eyebrows, Byzantine slippers. Take your pick, walk up and down and
wait for your cue.

There are two lives that people lead. One is the real life of business,
mating, plans, bankruptcies and gas bills. The other is an unreal life--a
life of secret grandeurs which compensate for the monotony of the days.
Sitting at our desks, hanging on to straps in the street cars, waiting for
the dentist, eating in silence in our homes--we give ourselves to these
secret grandeurs. Day-dreams in which we figure as heroes and Napoleons
and Don Juans, in which we triumph sensationally over the stupidities and
arrogances of our enemies--we think them out detail by detail. Sometimes
we like to be alone because we have a particularly thrilling incident to
tell ourselves, and when our friends say good-by we sigh with relief and
wrap ourselves with a shiver of delight in the mantles of imagination. And
we live for a charming hour through a fascinating fiction in which things
are as they should be and we startle the world with our superiorities.

       *       *       *       *       *

This street, I begin to understand, is consecrated to the unrealities so
precious to us. We come here and for a little while allow our dreams to
peer timorously at life. In the streets west of here we are what we
are--browbeaten, weary-eyed, terribly optimistic units of the boobilariat.
Our secret characterizations we hide desperately from the frowns of
windows and the squeal of "L" trains.

But here in this Circe of streets the sun warms us, the sky and the spaces
of shining air lure us and we step furtively out of ourselves. And give us
ten minutes. Observe--a street of heroes and heroines. Actors all. Great
and irresistible egoists. Do we want riches? Then we have only to raise
our finger. Slaves will attend with sesterces and dinars. A street of
joyous Caligulas and Neros, with here and there a Ghengis Khan, an Attila.

The high buildings waver like gray and golden ferns in the sun. The sky
stretches itself in a holiday awning over our heads. A breeze coming from
the lake brings an odorous spice into our noses. Adventure and romance!
Yes--and observe how unnecessary are plots. Here in this Circe of streets
are all the plots. All the great triumphs, assassinations, amorous
conquests of history unravel themselves within a distance of five blocks.
The great moments of the world live themselves over again in a silent
make-believe.

Here is one who has just swum the Hellespont, one who has subdued
Cleopatra; here one whose eyes are just launching a thousand ships. What a
street!

The afternoon wanes. Our procession turns toward home. For a few minutes
the elation of our make-believes in the Avenue lingers. But the "L" trains
crowd up, the street cars crowd up. It is difficult to remain a Caesar or
a Don Quixote. So we withdraw and our faces become alike as turtle backs.

And see, the afternoon has been squandered. There were things which should
have been done. I blush indignantly at the memory of my thoughts during
the shining hours in the Avenue. For I spent the valuable moments
conversing with the devil. I imagined him coming for me and for two hours
I elaborated a dialogue between him and myself in which I gave him my
immortal soul and he in turn promised to write all the stories, novels and
plays I wanted. All I would have to do was furnish the paper and leave it
in a certain place and call for it the next morning and it would be
completed--anything I asked for, a story, novel or play; a poem, a
world-shattering manifesto--anything.

Alas, I am still in possession of my immortal soul!



COEUR DE LION AND THE SOUP AND FISH

    For they're hangin' Danny Deever--

The voice of Capt. MacVeigh of the British army rose defiantly in the
North La Salle Street hall bedroom. The herculean captain, attired in a
tattered bathrobe, underwear, socks and one slipper, patted the bottom of
the iron with his finger and then carefully applied it to a trouser leg
stretched on an ironing board in front of him.

Again the voice:

    For they're hangin' Danny Deever;
    You can hear the death march play,
    And they're ta ta ta da
    They're taking him away,
    Ta da ta ta--

The captain was on the rocks. _Sic transit gloria mundi_. Or how
saith the poet, "The lion and the lizard keep the courts where Jamshid
gloried and drank deep." Bust, was the captain. "Dying, Egypt, dying, ebbs
the crimson life blood fast." Flatter than a hoecake was the captain.

"Farewell, my bluebell, farewell to thee," sang the captain as the iron
crept cautiously over the great trouser leg of his Gargantuan full-dress
suit. African mines blown up. Two inheritances shot. A last remittance
blah. Rent bills, club bills, grocery bills, tailor bills, gambling bills.
"Ho, Britons never will be slaves," sang the intrepid captain. Fought the
bloody Boers, fought the Irawadi, fought the bloody Huns, and what was it
Lady B. said at the dinner in his honor only two years ago? Ah, yes,
here's to our British Tartarin, Capt. MacVeagh. But who the devil was
Tartarin?

Never mind. "There's a long, long trail a-windin' and ta da ta ta ta tum,"
sang Capt. MacVeagh and he took up the other trouser leg. Egad, what a
life! Not a sou markee left. Not a thin copper, not a farthing! "Strike me
blind, me wife's confined and I'm a blooming father," sang Capt. MacVeagh,
"For they're hangin' Danny Deever, you can hear the death march play----"

       *       *       *       *       *

This was the last phalanx. This thing on the ironing board was Horatius at
the bridge holding in check the hordes of false Tarquin. Everything gone
but this. Not even a pair of pants or a smoking coat. Not a blooming thing
left but this--a full-dress suit beginning to shine a bit in the rear.

"The shades of night were falling fast when through an Alpine village
passed"--egad, what a primitive existence. Like an Irunti in the
Australian bush. Telling time by the sun. It must be approachin' six,
thought the captain as his voice trailed off.

Beautiful thought. "Mabel, little Mabel, with her face against the pane,
sits beside the window, looking at the rain." That was Capt. MacVeagh of
the British army, prisoner in a La Salle Street hall bedroom. No clothes
to wear, nothing but the soup and fish. So he must sit and wait till
evening came, till a gentleman could put on his best bib and tucker, and
then--_allons!_ Freshly shaved, pink jowled, swinging his ebony
stick, his pumps gleaming with a new coat of vaseline, off for the British
Officers' Club!

All day long the herculean captain sulked in his tent--an Achilles with a
sliver in his heel. But come evening, come the gentle shades of darkness,
and presto! Like a lily of the field, who spun not nor toiled; like a
knight of the boulevards, this servant of the king leaped forth in all his
glory. The landlady was beginning to lose her awe of the dress suit, the
booming barytone and the large aristocratic pink face of her mysterious
boarder. And she was pressing for back rent. But the club was still
tolerant.

"A soldier o' the legion lay dyin' in Algiers," chanted the captain, and
with his shoulders back he strode into the wide world. A meal at the club,
and gadzooks but his stomach was in arms! Not a bite since the last club
meal. God bless the club!

"Get a job?" repeated the captain to one of the members, "I would but the
devil take it, how can a man go around asking for a job in a dress suit?
And I'm so rotten big that none of my friends can loan me a suit. And my
credit is gone with at least twelve different tailors. I'm sort o' taboo
as a borrower. Barry, old top, if you will chase the blighter after
another highball, I'll drink your excellent health."

"There's a job if you want it that you can do in your dress suit," said
his friend Barry. "If you don't mind night work."

"Not at all," growled Capt. MacVeagh.

"Well," said the friend, "there's a circus in town and they want a man to
drive the chariot in the chariot race. It's only a little circus. And
there's only three chariots in the race. You get $10 for driving and $25 a
night if you win the race. And they give you a bloomin' toga to put on
over your suit, you know, and a ribbon to tie around your head. And there
you are."

"Righto !" cried the captain, "and where is this rendezvous of skill and
daring? I'm off. I'll drive that chariot out of breath."

Capt. MacVeagh got the job. Capt. MacVeagh won the first race. Clad in a
flapping toga, a ribbon round his forehead, the hero of the British army
went Berserker on the home stretch and, lashing his four ponies into a
panic, came gloriously down the last lap, two lengths ahead and
twenty-five marvelous coins of the realm to the good.

That night at the club Capt. MacVeagh stood treat. British wassail and
what not. The twenty-five dollars melted pleasantly and the captain fell
off in a happy doze as rosy fingered Aurora touched the city roof-tops.

But, alas, the wages of sin! For the captain was not so good when he
mounted his chariot the second night. A beehive buzzed in his head and
huge, globular disturbances seemed to fill the air. And, standing
waveringly on his feet as the giddy chariot bounced down the track, the
captain let forth a sudden yell and sailed off into space. The chariot
ponies and hero of the British army had gone crashing into the side lines.

       *       *       *       *       *

"When they brought him to the hospital in the ambulance," explained the
captain's friend, "they had taken the toga off him, of course, and the old
boy was in his dress clothes. This kind o' knocked their eyes out, so what
do they do but give him the most expensive suite in the place and the
prettiest nurse and the star surgeon. And they mend and feed him up for
two weeks. We all called on him and brought him a few flowers. The lad was
surely in clover.

"The hospital authorities had nothing to go on but this dress suit as
evidence. And when the nurse asked him what he wanted done with the suit,
saying it was a bit torn from the accident, MacVeagh waves his hand and
answers, 'Oh, throw the blasted thing out of the window or give it to the
janitor.' And she did. I always thought it quite a story."

"But how did it end? What became of the captain when they found out he
couldn't pay his bill and all that? And where's he now?"

"You'll have to end the thing to suit yourself," said the captain's
friend. "All I know is that after almost forgetting about MacVeagh I got a
letter from him from London yesterday. A rather mysterious letter on Lady
Somebody's stationery. It read something like this: 'The paths of glory
lead but to the grave. Thanks for the flowers. And three cheers, me lad,
for the British Empire.'"



THE SYBARITE


They had been poor all their lives. The neighbors said: "It's a wonder how
the Sikoras get along."

They lived in a rear flat. Four rooms that were dark and three children
that were noisy. The three children used Wabansia Avenue as a playground.
Dodging wagons and trucks was a diversion which played havoc with their
shoes, but increased their skill in dodging wagons and trucks.

The neighbors said: "Old man Sikora is pretty sick. It's a wonder where
they'll get money to pay the doctor."

Then old man Sikora, who wasn't so old (but poverty and hard work with a
pick give a man an aged look), was taken to the county hospital. The
Sikora children continued to dodge wagons and trucks and Mrs. Sikora went
out three days a week to do washing. And the milkman and the grocer came
around regularly and explained to Mrs. Sikora that they, too, had to live
and she must pay her bills.

Then the neighbors said: "Did you hear about it? Old man Sikora died last
night in the hospital. What will poor Mrs. Sikora do now? They ain't got a
thing."

And old man Sikora was brought home because his widow insisted upon it.
The neighbors came in and looked at the body and wept with Mrs. Sikora,
and the children sat around after school and looked uncomfortably at the
walls. And some one asked: "How you going to bury him, Mrs. Sikora?"

"Oh," said Mrs. Sikora, "I'm going to have a good funeral."

       *       *       *       *       *

There was an insurance policy for $500. The Sikoras had kept it up,
scraping together the $10 premiums when the time came. Mrs. Sikora took
the policy to the husband of a woman whose washing she had done. The
husband was in the real estate business.

"I need money to bury my man," she said. "He died last night in the
hospital."

She was red-eyed and dressed in black and the real estate man said: "What
do you want?"

When Mrs. Sikora explained he gave her $400 for the policy and she went to
an undertaker. Her eyes were still red with crying. They stared at the
luxurious fittings of the undertaker's parlors. There were magnificent
palms in magnificent jardinières, and plush chairs and large, inviting
sofas and an imposing mahogany desk and a cuspidor of shining brass. Mrs.
Sikora felt thrilled at the sight of these luxuries.

Then the undertaker came in and she explained to him.

The neighbors said: "Are you going to Mr. Sikora's funeral? It's going to
be a big funeral. I got invited yesterday."

Wabansia Avenue was alive with automobiles. Innumerable relatives of Mr.
and Mrs. Sikora arrived in automobiles, their faces staring with surprise
out of the limousine windows as if they were seeing the world from a new
angle. There were also neighbors. These were dressed even more
impressively than the relatives. But everybody, neighbors and relatives,
had on their Sunday clothes. And the unlucky ones who hadn't been invited
leaned out of the windows of Wabansia Avenue and looked enviously at the
entourage.

There was a band--fifteen pieces. And there was one open automobile filled
with flowers, filled to overflowing. The band stopped in front of the
Sikora flat, or rather in front of the building, for the Sikora flat was
in the rear and Mrs. Sikora didn't want the band to stop in the alley.
Then the envious ones leaning out of the windows couldn't see the band and
that would be a drawback.

The band played, great, sad songs. The cornets and trombones sent a muted
shiver through the street. The band stopped playing and the people leaning
out of the windows sighed. Ah, it was a nice funeral!

Inside the Sikora house four men stood up beside the handsome black coffin
and sang. Mrs. Sikora in a voluminous black veil listened with tears
running from her face. Never had she heard such beautiful singing
before--all in time and all the notes sweet and inspiring. She wept some
more and solicitous arms raised her to her feet. Solicitous arms guided
her out of the flower-filled room as six men lifted the black coffin and
carried it into the street.

       *       *       *       *       *

Slowly the automobiles rolled away. And behind the open car heaped with
flowers rode Mrs. Sikora. The dolorous music of the band filled her with a
gentle ecstasy. The flower scents drifted to her and when her eyes glanced
furtively out of the back window of the limousine she could see the
procession reaching for almost a half block. All black limousines filled
with faces staring in surprise at the street.

And in front of the flower car in an ornamental hearse rode Mr. Sikora.
The wheels of the hearse were heavily tired. They made no sound and the
chauffeur was careful that his precious burden should not be joggled.

Slowly through the loop the procession picked its way. Crowds of people
paused to stare back at the staring ones in the automobiles and to listen
to the--fine music that rose above the clamor of the "L" trains and the
street cars and the trucks.

The sun lay over the cemetery. The handsome black coffin went out of
sight. The fifteen musicians began to play once more and Mrs. Sikora,
weeping anew, allowed solicitous arms to help her back into the limousine
and with a sigh she leaned back and closed her eyes and let herself weep
while the music played, while the limousine rolled smoothly along. It was
like a dream, a strange thing imagined or read about somewhere.

       *       *       *       *       *

The neighbors sniffed indignantly. "Did you hear about Mrs. Sikora?" they
said. These were the same ones who had leaned enviously out of the
Wabansia Avenue windows.

"She spent all her insurance money on a crazy funeral," the neighbors
said, "and did you hear about it? The Juvenile Court is going to take her
children away because she can't support them. The officer was out to see
her yesterday and she's got no money to pay her bills. She spent the whole
money--it was something like $2,000--on the funeral. Huh!"

Mrs. Sikora, weeping, explained to the Juvenile Court officer.

"My man died," she said, "and--and I spent the money for the funeral. It
was not for myself, but for him I spent the money."

It will turn out all right, some day. And in the meantime Mrs. Sikora,
when she is washing clothes for someone, will be able when her back aches
too much to remember the day she rode in the black limousine and the band
played and the air was filled with the smell of flowers.



DAPPER PETE AND THE SUCKER PLAY


Dapper Pete Handley, the veteran con man, shook hands all around with his
old friends in the detective bureau and followed his captors into the
basement. Another pinch for Dapper Pete; another jam to pry out of. The
cell door closed and Pete composed his lean, gambler's face, eyed his
manicured nails and with a sigh sat down on the wooden cell bench to wait
for his lawyer.

"Whether I'm guilty of this or not," said Dapper Pete, "it goes to show
what a sucker a guy is--even a smart guy. This ain't no sermon against a
life of crime I'm pulling, mind you. I'm too old to do that and my sense
of humor is workin' too good. I'm only sayin' what a sucker a guy
is--sometimes. Take me."

Dapper Pete registered mock woe.

"Not that I'm guilty, mind you, or anything like that. But on general
principles I usually keep out of the way of the coppers. Especially when
there's been a misunderstanding concerning some deal or other. Well, how I
happen to be here just goes to show what a sucker a guy is--even me."

       *       *       *       *       *

Pressed for the key to his self-accusation, Dapper Pete continued:

"I come straight here from Grand Island, Neb. I had a deal on in Grand
Island and worked it for a couple of months. And after I finished there
was trouble and I left. I knew there would be warrants and commotion, the
deal having flopped and a lot of prominent citizens feeling as if they had
been bilked. You know how them get-rich-quick investors are. If they don't
make 3,000 per cent profit over night they raise a squawk right away. And
wanna arrest you.

"So I lit out and came to Chicago and when I got here some friends of mine
tipped me off that there was considerable hunt for me. Well, I figured
that the Nebraska coppers had let out a big holler and I thought it best
to lay kind of low and keep out of trouble. That was only last week, you
see.

"So I get the bright idea. Layin' around town with nothin' to do but keep
out of sight ain't the cinch it sounds. You get so sick and tired of your
own company that you're almost ready to throw your arms around the first
harness bull you meet.

"But," smiled Dapper Pete, "I restrained myself."

There was time out while Pete discussed the irresponsibility, cruelty and
selfishness of policemen in general. After which he continued with his
original narrative:

"It was like this," he said. "I made up my mind that I would take in a few
of the points of interest in the city I ain't ever got around to. Being a
Chicagoan, like most Chicagoans I ain't ever seen any of our natural
wonders at all. So first day out I figured that the place no copper would
ever look for me would be like the Field Museum and in the zoo and on the
beach and like that.

"So, first of all, I join a rubberneck crowd in one of the carryalls with
a megaphone guy in charge. And I ride around all day. I got kind of
nervous owing to the many coppers we kept passing and exchanging
courtesies with. But I stuck all day, knowing that no sleuth was going
looking for Dapper Pete on a rubberneck wagon.

"Well, then I spent three days in the Field Museum, eyeing the exhibits.
Can you beat it? I walk around and walk around rubbering at mummies and
bones and--well, I ain't kiddin', but they was among the three most
interesting days I ever put in. And I felt pretty good, too, knowin' that
no copper would be thinking of Dapper Pete as being in the museums.

"Then after that I went to the zoo and, rubbered at the animals and birds.
And I sat in the park and watched comical ball games and golf games and
the like. And then I went on some of those boats that run between no place
and nowhere--you get on at a pier and ride for a half hour and get off at
a pier and have to call a taxi in order to find your way back to anywhere.
You get me?

"I'm tellin' you all this," said Dapper Pete cautiously, "with no
reference to the charges involved and for which I am pinched and
incarcerated for, see? But I thought you might make a story out of the way
a guy like me with all my experience dogin' coppers can play himself for a
sucker.

"Well, pretty soon I pretty near run out of rube spots to take in. And
then I think suddenly of the observation towers like on the Masonic Temple
and the Wrigley Building. I headed for them right away, figuring to take a
sandwich or so along and spend the day leisurely giving the city the once
over from my eerie perch.

"And when I come home that night and told my friends about it they was all
excited. They all agreed that I had made the discovery of the age and all
claimed to feel sorry they wasn't hiding out from the coppers, just for
the sake of bein' able to lay low on top of a loop building. It does sound
pretty good, even now.

"I was on my fifth day and was just walking in on the Masonic Temple
observation platform when things began to happen. You know how the city
looks from high up. Like a lot of toys crawling around. And it's nice and
cool and on the whole as good a place to lay low in as you want. And
there's always kind of comical company, see? Rubes on their honeymoon and
sightseers and old maids and finicky old parties afraid of fallin' off,
and gals and their Johns lookin' for some quiet place to spoon."

       *       *       *       *       *

Dapper Pete sighed in memory.

"I am sitting there nibbling a sandwich," he went on, "when a hick comes
along and looks at me."

"'Hello, pardner,' he says. 'How's the gas mine business?'

"And I look at him and pretend I don't savvy at all. But this terrible
looking rube grins and walks up to me, so help me God, and pulls back his
lapel and shows me the big star.

"'You better come along peaceabul,' he says. 'I know you, Pete Handley,'
just like that. So I get up and follow this hick down the elevator and he
turns me over to a cop on State Street and I am given the ride to the
hoosegow. Can you beat it?"

"But who was the party with the star and why the pinch?" I asked Dapper
Pete. That gentleman screwed his lean, gambler's face into a ludicrous
frown.

"Him," he sighed, "that was Jim Sloan, constable from Grand Island, Neb.
And they sent him here about two weeks ago to find me. See? And all this
rube does is ride around in rubberneck wagons and take in the museums and
parks, having no idee where I was. He figured merely on enjoyin' himself
at Nebraska's expense.

"And he was just on the observation tower lookin' over the city in his
rube way when I have to walk into him. Yes, sir, Pete Handley, and there
ain't no slicker guy in the country, walkin' like a prize sucker right
into the arms of a Grand Island, Neb., constable. It all goes to show,"
sighed Dapper Pete, "what a small world it is after all."



WATERFRONT FANCIES


Man's capacity for faith is infinite. He is able to believe with passion
in things invisible. He can achieve a fantastic confidence in the
Unknowable. Here he sits on the breakwater near the Municipal Pier, a
fishpole in his hand, staring patiently into the agate-colored water. He
can see nothing. The lake is enormous. It contains thousands of square
miles of water.

And yet this man is possessed of an unshakable faith that by some
mysterious legerdemain of chance a fish, with ten thousand square miles of
water to swim in safely, will seek out the little minnow less than an inch
in length which he has lowered beside the breakwater. And so, the victim
of preposterous conviction, he sits and eyes the tip of his fishpole with
unflagging hope.

It is warm. The sun spreads a brightly colored but uncomfortable woolen
blanket over their heads. A tepid breeze, reminiscent of cinders, whirl
idly over the warm cement. Strung along the pier are a hundred figures,
all in identical postures. They sit in defiance of all logic, all
mathematics. For it is easy to calculate that if there are a half million
fish in Lake Michigan and each fish displaces less than five cubic inches
of water there would be only two and a half million cubic inches of fish
altogether lost in an expanse containing at least eight hundred billion
cubic inches of water. Therefore, the chance of one fish being at any one
particular spot are one in four hundred thousand. In other words, the odds
against each of these strangely patient men watching the ends of their
fishpoles--the odds against their catching a fish--are four hundred
thousand to one.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is therefore somewhat amazing to stand and watch what happens along the
sunny breakwater. Every three minutes one of the poles jerks out of the
water with a wriggling prize on the hook.

"How are they coming?" we ask.

"Oh, so, so," answers one of the fishermen and points mutely to a string
of several dozen perch floating under his feet in the water.

Thus does man, by virtue of his faith, rise above the science of
mathematics and the barriers of logic. Thus is his fantastic belief in
things unseen and easily disproved vindicated. He catches fish where by
the law of probabilities there should be no fish. With the whole lake
stretching mockingly before him he sits consumed with a preposterous, a
fanatical faith in the little half-inch minnow dangling at the end of his
line.

The hours pass. The sun grows hotter. The piles of stone and steel along
the lake front seem to waver. From the distant streets come faint noises.
On a hot day the city is as appealing as a half-cooled cinder patch. Poor
devils in factories, poor devils in stores, in offices. One must sigh
thinking of them. Life is even vaster than the lake in which these
fishermen fish. And happiness is mathematically elusive as the fish for
which the fishermen wait. And yet--

An old man with a battered face. A young man with a battered face. Silent,
stoical, battered-looking men with fishpoles. A hundred, two hundred, they
sit staring into the water of the lake as if they were looking for
something. For fish? Incredible. One does not sit like this watching for
something to become visible. Why? Because then there would be an air of
suspense about the watcher. He would grow nervous after an hour, when the
thing remained still invisible, and finally he would fall into hysterics
and unquestionably shriek.

And these men grow calmer. Then what are they looking at, hour after hour,
under the hot sun? Nothing. They are letting the rhythm of water and sky
lull them into a sleep--a surcease from living. This is a very poetical
thing for a hundred battered-looking men to attempt. Yet life may be as
intimidating to honest, unimaginative ones as to their self-styled
superiors.

There are many types fishing. But all of them look soiled. Idlers,
workers, unhappy ones--they come to forget, to let the agate eye of the
lake stare them into a few hours of oblivion.

But there is something else. Long ago men hunted and fished to keep alive.
They fought with animals and sat with empty stomachs staring at the water,
not in quest of Nirvanas but of fish. So now, after ages and ages have
passed, there is left a vague memory of this in the minds of these
fishermen. This memory makes them still feel a certain thrill in the
business of pursuit. Even as they sit, stoical and inanimate, forgetful of
unpaid bills, unfinished and never-to-be-finished plans--there comes this
curious thrill. A mouth tugs at the little minnow. The pole jerks
electrically in the hand. Something alive is on the hook. And the
fisherman for an instant recovers his past. He is Ab, fighting with an
evening meal off the coast of Wales, two glacial periods ago. His body
quivers, his muscles set, his eyes flash.

Zip! The line leaps out of the water. Another monster of the deep, whose
conquest is necessary for the survival of the race of man, has been
overcome. There he hangs, writhing on a hook! There he swings toward his
triumphant foe, and the hand of the fisherman on the municipal breakwater,
trembling with mysterious elation, closes about the wet, firm body of an
outraged perch.

       *       *       *       *       *

A make-believe hunt that now bears the name of sport. Yes, but not always.
Here is one with a red, battered face and a curiously practical air about
him. He is putting his fish in a basket and counting them. Two dozen
perch.

"Want to sell them?"

He shakes his head.

"What are you going to do with them?"

He looks up and grins slowly. Then he points to his lips with his fingers
and makes signs. This means he is dumb. He places his hand over his
stomach and grins again. He is going to eat them. It is time to go home
and do this, so he puts up his fishpole and packs his primitive
paraphernalia--a tin can, a rusty spike, a bamboo pole.

Here is one, then, who, in the heart of the steel forest called
civilization, still seeks out long forgotten ways of keeping life in his
body. He hunts for fish.

The sun slides down the sky. The fishermen begin to pack up. They walk
with their heads down and bent forward like number 7s. They raise their
eyes occasionally to the piles of stone and steel that mark the city
front. Back to their troubles and their cinder patch, but--and this is a
curious fact--their eyes gleam with hope and curiosity.



THE SNOB


We happen to be on the same street car. A drizzle softens the windows. She
sits with her pasty face and her dull, little eyes looking out at the
dripping street. Her cotton suit curls at the lapels. The ends of her
shoes curl like a pair of burlesque Oriental slippers. She holds her hands
in her lap. Red, thick fingers that whisper tiredly, "We have worked," lie
in her lap.

A slavey on her day off. There is no mistaking this. Nineteen or twenty
years old, homely as a mud fence; ungraceful, doltish, she sits staring
out of the window and her eyes blink at the rain. A peasant from
southeastern Europe, a field hand who fell into the steerage of a
transatlantic liner and fell out again. Now she has a day off and she goes
riding into the country on a street car.

She will get off and slosh with her heavy feet through wet grass. She will
walk down the muddied roads and drink in the odor of fields and trees once
more. These are romantic conjectures. The car jolts along. It is going
west. The rain continues. It runs diagonal dots across the window.

Everybody out. This is the end of the line. I have gone farther than
necessary. But there is the slavey. We have been talking. At least I
talked. She listened, her doltish face opening its mouth, her little eyes
blinking. She has pimples, her skin is muddied. A distressful-looking
creature.  Yet there is something. This is her day off--a day free from
the sweat of labor--and she goes on a street car into the country. So it
would seem that under this blinking, frowzy exterior desire spreads its
wings. She has memories, this blousy one. She has dreams.

The drizzle flies softly through the air. The city has disappeared. We
walk down an incongruous stretch of pavement. It leads toward a forest or
what looks like a forest. There are no houses. The sky asserts itself. I
look up, but the shambling one whose clothes become active under water
keeps her eyes to the pavement. This is disillusioning! "Here, slavey, is
the sky," I think; "it becomes romantic for the moment because to you it
is the symbol of lost dreams, or happy hours in fields. To me it is
nothing but a sky. I have no interest in skies. But I am looking at it for
you and enjoying it through your romantic eyes."

But her romantic eyes are oblivious. They consult the rain-washed pavement
before her and nothing else. Very well, there are other and nicer skies in
her heart that she contemplates. This is an inferior sky overhead. We walk
on.

You see, I have been wrong. It is not green fields that lured the heavy
feet of this slavey. She is not a peasant Cinderella. Grief, yes, hidden
sorrow, has led her here. This is a cemetery.

It rains over the cemetery. There is silence. The white stones glisten.
They stand like beggars asking alms of the winding paths. And this blousy
one has come to be close to one of the white stones. Under one of them
lies somebody whose image still lives in her heart.

She will kneel in the wet grass and her pasty little face will blink its
dull eyes over a grave. Like a little clown in her curling cotton suit,
her lumpy shoes, her idiotic hat, she will offer her tears to the pitiless
silence of trees, wind, rain and white stones.

"Do you like them there?" She asks. She points to a cluster of fancy
headstones.

"Do you?" I ask.

She smiles.

"Oh yes," she says. And she stops. She is admiring the tombstones. We walk
on.

It is incredible. This blousy one, this dull-eyed one has come to the
cemetery on her day off--to admire the tombstones. Ah, here is drama of a
poignant kind. Let us pray God there is nothing pathologic here and that
this is an idyl of despair, that the lumpish little slavey sits on the
rain-washed bench dreaming of fine tombstones as a flapper might dream of
fine dresses.

Yes, at last we are on the track. We talk. These are very pretty, she
says. Life is dull. The days are drab. The place where she works is like
an oven. There is nothing pretty to look at--even in mirrors there is
nothing cool and pretty. Clothes grow lumpy when she puts them on. Boys
giggle and call names when she goes out. And so, outcast, she comes here
to the cemetery to dream of a day when something cool and pretty will
belong to her. A headstone, perhaps a stately one with a figure above it.
It will stand over her. She will be dead then and unable to enjoy it. But
now she is alive. Now she can think of how pretty the stone will look and
thus enjoy it in advance. This, after all, is the technique of all dreams.

We grow confidential. I have asked what sort she likes best, what sort it
pleases her most to think about as standing over her grave when she dies.
And she has pointed some out. It rains. The trees shake water and the wind
hurries past the white stones.

"I will tell you something," she says. "Here, look at this." From one of
her curled pockets she removes a piece of paper. It is crumpled. I open it
and read:

"In Case of Accident please notify Misses Burbley,--Sheridan Road, and
have body removed to Home of Parents who are residants of Corliss
Wisconsin where they have resided for twenty Years and the diseased is a
only Daughter named Clara. Age nineteen and educated in Corliss public
Schools where she Graduated as a girl but came to Chicago in serch of
employment and in case of accident funeral was held from Home of the
Parents, many Frends attending and please Omit flours...."

"I got lot of them writ out," said Clara, blinking. "You wanna read more?
Why I write them out? Oh, because, you can't tell, maybe you get run over
and in accident and how they going to know who you are or what to do with
the diseased if they don't find something?"

Her thick red hands grew excited. She produced further obituaries. From
her pocketbook, from her bosom, from her pockets and one from under her
hat. I read them. They were all alike, couched in vaguely bombastic terms.
We sat in the rain and I thought:

"Alas, Clara is a bounder. A snob. She writes her own obituaries. Alive
she can think of herself only as Clara, the slavey at whom the boys giggle
and call names. But dead, she is the 'deseased'--the stately corpse
commanding unprecedented attention. The prospect stirs a certain
snobbishness in her. And she sits and writes her death notices out--using
language she tries to remember from reading the funeral accounts of rich
and powerful people."

Clara, her hat awry, her doltish body sagging in the rain--shuffled down
the dirt road once more. Her outing is over. Cinderella returns to the
ashes of life.



THE WAY HOME


He shuffles around in front of the Clinton Street employment agency. The
signs say: "Pick men wanted, section hands wanted, farm laborers wanted."

A Mexican stands woodenly against the window front. His eyes are open but
asleep. He has the air of one come from a far country who lives upon
memories.

There are others--roughly dressed exiles. Their eyes occasionally study
the signs, deciphering with difficulty the crudely chalked words on the
bulletin boards. Slav, Swede, Pole, Italian, Greek--they read in a
language foreign to them that men are wanted on the farms in the Dakotas,
in the lumber camps, on the roadbeds in Montana. Hard-handed men with
dull, seamed faces and glittering eyes--the spike-haired proletaire from a
dozen lands looking for jobs.

But this one who shuffles about in a tattered mackinaw, huge baggy
trousers frayed at the feet, this one whose giant's body swings loosely
back and forth under the signs, is a more curious exile. His Mexican
brother leaning woodenly against the window has a slow dream in his eyes.
Life is simple to his thought. It was hard for him in Mexico. And
adventure and avarice sent him northward in quest of easier ways and more
numerous comforts. Now he hunts a job on a chilly spring morning. When the
proper job is chalked up on the bulletin board he will go in and ask for
it. He stands and waits and thinks how happy he was in the country he
abandoned and what a fool he was to leave the white dust of its roads, its
hills and blazing suns. And some day, he thinks, he will go back, although
there is nothing to go back for. Yet it is pleasant to stand and dream of
a place one has known and whither one may return.

But this one who shuffles, this giant in a tattered mackinaw who slouches
along under the bulletin signs asking for section hands and laborers,
there is no dream of remembered places in his eyes. Dull, blue eyes that
peer bewilderedly out of a powerful and empty face. The forehead is
puckered as if in thought. The heavy jaws protrude with a hint of ferocity
in their set. There is a reddish cast to his hair and face and the backs
of his great hands, hanging limply almost to his knees, are covered with
red hair.

The nose of this shuffling one is larger than the noses in the city
streets. His fingers are larger, his neck is larger. There is a curious
earthy look to this shuffling one seldom to be seen about men in streets.
He is a huge creature with great thighs and Laocoön sinews and he towers a
head above his brothers in front of the employment office. He is of a
different mold from the men in the street. Strength ripples under his
tattered mackinaw and his stiff looking hands could break the heads of two
men against each other like eggshells while they rained puny blows on his
dull face.

And yet of all the men moving about on the pavement in front of the
Clinton Street bulletin boards it is this shuffling one who is the most
impotent seeming. His figure is the most helpless. It slouches as under a
final defeat. His eyes are the dullest.

He stops at the corner and stands waiting, his head lowered, his shoulders
hunched in and he looks like a man weighed down by a harness.

       *       *       *       *       *

A curious exile from whose blood has vanished all memory of the country to
which he belongs. A faraway land, ages beyond the sun-warmed roads of
which his Mexican brother dreams as he stands under the bulletin boards. A
land which the ingenuity of the world has left forever behind. This is a
land that once reached over all the seas.

For it was like this that men once looked in an age before the myths of
the Persians and Hindus began to fertilize the animal soul of the race. In
the forests north of the earliest cities of Greece, along the wild coasts
tapering from the Tatar lands to the peninsula of the Basques, men like
this shuffling one once ranged alone and in tribes. Huge, powerful men
whose foreheads sloped back and whose jaws sloped forward and whose stiff
hands reached an inch nearer their knees than today.

This giant in the tattered mackinaw is an exile from this land and there
is no dream of it left in his blood. The body of his fathers has returned
to him. Their long, loose arms, their thick muscles and heavy pounding
veins are his, but their voices are buried too deep to rise again in him.
The mutterings of warrior councils, the shouts of terrible hunts are lost
somewhere in him and he shuffles along, his sloping forehead in a pucker
of thought as if he were trying to remember. But no memories come. Instead
a bewilderment. The swarming streets bewilder him. The towering buildings,
the noises of traffic and people dull his eyes and bring his shoulders
together like the shoulders of some helpless captive.

       *       *       *       *       *

He returns to the employment office and raises his eyes to the bulletin
boards. He reads slowly, his large lips moving as they form words. In
another day or another week he will be riding somewhere, his dull eyes
gazing out of the train window. They will call him Ole or Pat or Jim in
some camp in the Dakotas or along some roadbed in Montana. He will stand
with a puny pick handle in his huge hands and his arms will rise and fall
mechanically as he hews away along a deserted track. And his forehead will
still be puckered in a frown of bewilderment. The thing held in his fists
will seem like a strange toy.

"Farm laborers in Kansas," says the bulletin board as the clerk with his
piece of chalk re-enters the office. The Mexican slowly removes himself
from the window and the contemplation of memories. Kansas lies to the
south and to the south is the way home. He goes in and talks to the man
behind the long desk.

An hour later the clerk and his piece of chalk emerge. The exiles are
still mooching around on the pavement and the shuffling one stands on the
curb staring dully at the street under him.

"Section hands, Alberta, Canada, transportation," says the new bulletin.
There is no stir among the exiles. This is to the north. It is still cold
in the north. But the shuffling one has turned. His eyes again trace the
crudely chalked letters of the bulletin board. His lips move as he tells
himself what is written.

And then as if unconsciously he moves toward the door. Alberta is to the
north and the voices that lie buried deep under the giant's mackinaw
whisper darkly that to the north--to the north is the way home.



THE PIG


"Sofie Popapovitch versus Anton Popapovitch," cries the clerk. A number of
broken-hearted matrons awaiting their turn before the bar of justice in
the Domestic Relations Court find time to giggle at the name Popapovitch.

"Silence," cries the clerk. Very well, silence. Anton steps out. What's
the matter with Anton? An indignant face, its chin raised, its eyes
marching defiantly to the bar of justice. Sofie too, but weeping. And a
lawyer, Sofie's lawyer.

Well, what's up? Why should the Popapovitches take up valuable time. Think
of the taxpayers supporting this court and two Popapovitches marching up
to have an argument on the taxpayers' money. Well, that's civilization.

Ah, ah! It appears that Anton, the rogue, went to a grand ball and raffle
given by his lodge. What's wrong with that? Why must Sofie weep over that?
Women are incredible. He went to the grand ball with his wife, as a man
should. A very fine citizen, Anton. He belongs to a lodge that gives grand
balls and he takes his wife.

Go on, says the judge, what happened? What's the complaint? Time is
precious. Let's have it in a nutshell.

This is a good idea. People spend a frightful lot of unnecessary time
weeping and mumbling in the courts. Mrs. Popapovitch will please stop
weeping and get down to brass tacks. Very well, the complaint is, your
honor, that Mr. Popapovitch got drunk at the grand ball. But that wasn't
the end of it. There's some more. A paragraph of tears and then, your
honor, listen to this: Mr. Popapovitch not only got drunk but he took a
chance on the raffle which cost one dollar and he won.

But what did he win! Oh, oh! He won a pig. A live pig. That was the prize.
A small, live pig with a ribbon round its neck. And, says Mrs. Popapovitch
(there's humor in a long foreign-sounding name because it conjures up
visions of bewildered, flat-faced people and bewildered, flat-faced people
are always humorous), and, says she, they had been married ten years.
Happily married. She washed, scrubbed, tended house. There were no
children. Well, what of that? Lots of people had no children.

Anyway, Anton worked, brought home his pay envelope O.K. And then he wins
this pig. And what does he do? He takes it home. He won't leave it
anywhere.

"What!" he says, "I leave this pig anywhere? Are you crazy? It's my pig. I
win him. I take him home with me."

And then? Well, it's midnight, your honor. And Anton carries the pig
upstairs into the flat. But there's no place to put him. Where can one put
a pig in a flat, your honor? No place. The pig don't like to stand on
carpets. And what pig likes to sleep on hard wood floors? A pig's a pig.
And what's good for a pig? Aha! a pig pen.

So, your honor, Anton puts him in the bathtub. And he starts down stairs
with a basket and all night long he keeps bringing up basketfuls of dirt
dug up from the alley. Dirt, cinders, more dirt. And he puts it in the
bathtub. And what does the pig do? He squeals, grunts and wants to go
home. He fights to get out of the bathtub. There's such a noise nobody can
sleep. But Anton says, "Nice little pig. I fix you up fine. Nice little
pig."

And so he fills the bathtub up with dirt. Then he turns on the water. And
what does he say? He says, "Now, little pig, we have fine mud for you.
Nice fine mud." Yes, your honor, a whole bathtub full of mud. And when the
pig sees this he gets happy and lies down and goes to sleep. And Anton
sits in the bathroom and looks at the pig all night and says, "See. He's
asleep. It's like home for him."

But the next day Anton must go to work. All right, he'll go to work. But
first, understand everybody, he don't want this pig touched. The pig stays
in the bathtub and he must be there when he comes home.

All right. The pig stays in the bathtub, your honor. Anton wants it.
Tomorrow the pig will be killed and that'll be an end for the pig.

Anton comes home and he goes in the bathroom and he sits and looks at the
pig and complains the mud is dried up and why don't somebody take care of
his pig. His damn pig. He brings up more dirt and makes more mud. And the
pig tries to climb out and throws mud all over the bathroom.

That's one day. And then there's another day. And finally a third day.
Will Anton let anybody kill his pig? Aha! He'll break somebody's neck if
he does. But, your honor, Mrs. Popapovitch killed the pig. A terrible
thing, isn't it, to kill a pig that keeps squealing in the bathtub and
splashing mud all day?

But what does Anton do when he comes home and finds his pig killed? My
God! He hits her, your honor. He hits her on the head. His own wife whom
he loves and lives with for ten years. He throws her down and hollers,
"You killed my little pig! You good for nothing. I'll show you."

What a disgrace for the neighbors! Lucky there are no children, your
honor. Married ten years but no children. And it's lucky now. Because the
disgrace would have been worse. The neighbors come. They pull him away
from his wife. Her eye is black and blue. Her nose is bleeding. That's
all, your honor.

A very bad case for Anton Popapovitch. A decidedly bad case. Step forward,
Anton Popapovitch, and explain it, if you can. Did you beat her up? Did
you do this thing? And are you ashamed and willing to apologize and kiss
and make up?

Anton, step forward and tell his honor. But be careful. Mrs. Popapovitch
has a lawyer and it will go bad with you if you don't talk carefully.

All right. Here's Anton. He nods and keeps on nodding. What is this?
What's he nodding about? Did this happen as your wife says, Anton? Anton
blows out his cheeks and rubs his workingman's hand over his mouth. To
think that you should beat your wife who has always been good to you,
Anton. Who has cooked and been true to you! And there are no children to
worry you. Not one. And you beat her. Bah, is that a man? Don't you love
your wife? Yes. All right, then why did you do it?

Anton looks up surprised. "Because," says Anton, still surprised, "like
she say. She kill my pig. You hear yourself, your honor. She say she kill
him. And I put him in the bathtub and give him mud. And she kill him."

But is that a reason to beat your wife and nearly kill her? It is, says
Anton. Well, then, why? Tell the judge, why you were so fond of this pig,
Anton.

Ah, yes, Anton Popapovitch, tell the judge why you loved this little pig
so much and made a home for him with mud in the bathtub. Why you dreamed
of him as you stood working in the factory? Why you ran home to him and
fed him and sat and looked at him and whispered "Nice little pig?" Why?

God knows. But Anton Popapovitch can't explain it. It must remain one of
the mysteries of our city, your honor. Call the next case. Put Anton
Popapovitch on parole. Perhaps it was because..., well, the matter is
ended. Anton Popapovitch sighs and looks with accusing eyes at his wife
Sofie, with accusing eyes that hint at evidence unheard.



THE LITTLE FOP


This little caricature of a fop, loitering in the hotel lobby, enthralled
by his own fastidiousness, gazing furtively at the glisten of his newly
manicured nails and shuddering with awe at the memory of the puckered
white silk lining inside his Prince of Wales derby--I've watched him for
more than a month now. Here he comes, his pointed button shoes, his
razor-edged trousers, his natty tan overcoat with its high waist band and
its amazing lapels that stick up over his shoulders like the ears of a
jackass, here he comes embroidered and scented and looking like a cross
between a soft-shoe dancer and a somnambulist. And here he takes his
position, holding his gloves in his hand, his Prince of Wales derby jammed
down on his patent-leather hair.

Observe him. This is a pose. He is living up to a fashion illustration in
one of the magazines. Or perhaps he is duplicating an attitude of some one
studied in a Michigan Avenue club entrance. His right arm is crooked as if
he were about to place his hand over his heart and bow. His left arm hangs
with a slight curve at his side. His feet should be together, but they
shift nervously. His head is turned to the left and slightly raised--like
a movie actor posing for a cigarette advertisement.

And there he stands, a dead ringer for one of the waxen dummies to be seen
in a Halsted Street Men's Snappy Furnishings Store.

       *       *       *       *       *

I've watched him for a month, off and on. And his face still says nothing.
His eyes are curiously emotionless. They appear suddenly in his face. He
is undersized. His nose, despite the recent massage and powder, has a
slight oleaginous gleam to it. The cheek bones are a bit high, the mouth a
trifle wide and the chin slightly bulbous. As he blinks about him with his
small, almost Mongolian eyes he looks like some honest little immigrant
from Bohemia or Poland whom a malignant sorcerer has changed into a
caricature fashion plate. This is, indeed, the legend of Cinderella and
the fairy godmother with an ending of pathos.

Yet, though his face says nothing, there is a provoking air to this little
fop. His studied inanimation, his crudely self-conscious pose, his dull,
little, peasant eyes staring at the faces that drift by in the
lobby--these ask for translation. Why is he here? What does he want? Why
does he come every evening and stand and watch the little hotel parade?
Ah, one never sees him in the dining room or on the dance floor. One never
meets him between the acts in the theater lobby. And one never sees him
talking to anybody. He is always alone. People pass him with a curious
glance and think to themselves, "Ah, a young man about town! What a shame
to dissipate like that!" They sometimes notice the masterly way in which
he sizes up a fur-coated "chicken" stalking thin-leggedly through the
lobby and think to themselves: "The scoundrel! He's the kind of creature
that makes a big city dangerous. A carefully combed and scented vulture
waiting to swoop down from the side lines."

Evening after evening between 6 o'clock and midnight he drifts in and out
of the lobby, up and down Randolph Street and takes up his position at
various points of vantage where crowds pass, where women pass. I've
watched him. No one ever talks to him. There are no salutations. He is
unknown and worse. For the women, the rouged and ornamental ones, know him
a bit too well. They know the carefully counted nickels in his trousers
pocket, the transfers he is saving for the three-cent rebate that may come
some day, the various newspaper coupons through which he hopes to make a
killing.

All this they know and through a sixth sense, a curious instinct of sex
divination, they know the necktie counter or information desk behind which
he works during the day, the stuffy bedroom to which he will go home to
sleep, the vacuity of his mind and gaudy emptiness of his spirit. They
know all this and pass him up with never a smile. Yes, even the manicure
girls in the barber shop give him the out-and-out sneer and the hat-check
girls and even the floor girls--the chambermaids--all of whom he has tried
to date up--they all respond with an identical raspberry to his
invitations.

But he asks for translation--this determined little caricature of the
hotel lobby. A little peasant masquerading as a dazzled moth around the
bright lights. Not entirely. There is something else. There is something
of a great dream behind the ridiculous pathos of this over-dressed little
fool. There is something in him that desires expression, that will never
achieve expression, and that will always leave him just such an absurd
little clown of a fop.

       *       *       *       *       *

When the manicure girls read this they will snort. Because they know him
too well. "Of all the half-witted dumbbells I ever saw in my life," they
will say, "he wins the cement earmuffs. Nobody home, honest to Gawd, he's
nothin' but a nasty little fourflusher. We know him and his kind."

Fortunately I don't know him as well as the manicure girls do, so there is
room for this speculation as I watch him in the evening now and then. I
see him standing under the blaze of lobby lights, in the thick of passing
fur coats and dinner jackets, in the midst of laughter, escorts,
intrigues, actors, famous names.

He stands perfectly still, with his right arm crooked as if he were going
to place his hand over his heart and bow, with his left arm slightly
curved at his side. Grace. This is a pose denoting grace. He got it
somewhere from an illustration. And he holds it. Here is life. The real
stuff. The real thing. Lights and laughter. Glories, coiffures, swell
dames, great actors, guys loaded with coin. His little Mongolian eyes
blink through his amusing aplomb. Here are gilded pillars and marbled
walls, great rugs and marvelous furniture. Here music is playing somewhere
and people are eating off gold-edged dishes.

       *       *       *       *       *

And now you will smile at me, not him. Because watching him of evenings,
on and off, a curious notion takes hold of my thoughts. I have noticed the
race oddities of his face, the Mongolian eyes, the Slavic cheek bones, the
Italian hair. A mixed breed, this little fop. Mixed through a dozen
centuries. Fathers and mothers that came from a hundred parts of the
earth. But down the centuries they had one thing in common. Servitude. The
Carlovingian courts, the courts of the De Medici, the Valois, and long
before that, the great houses that lay around the Roman hills. Dragged
from their villages, east, west, north and south, they flitted in the
trappings of servitude through the vast halls of tyrants, barons, Caesars,
sybarites, debauchees. They were the torchbearers, the caitiffs, the
varlets, the bathkeepers, the inanimate figures whose faces watched from
the shadows the great orgies of Tiberius, the bacchanals of satraps,
kings, captains and squires.

And here their little great-great-grandson stands as they stood, the ghost
of their servitude in his sluggish blood. He is content with his role of
watcher as his people were content. These slightly grotesque trappings of
his are a disguise. He wishes to disguise the fact that he is of the
torchbearers, the varlets, the bathkeepers who produced him. So he
imitates servilely what he fancies to be the distinguishing marks of his
betters--their clothes, their manners, their aplomb. This accomplished, he
is content to yield himself to the mysterious impulses and dreams that
move silently through him.

And so he takes his position beside his people--the mixed breeds dragged
from their scattered villages--so he stands as they stood through the
centuries, their faces watching from the shadows the gorgeousness and
tumult of the great aristocrats.



MOTTKA


Since most of the great minds that have weighed the subject have arrived
at the opinion that between poverty and crime there is an inevitable
affinity, the suspicion with which the eye of Policeman Billings rested
upon Mottka, the vender of roasted chestnuts, reflected creditably upon
that good officer's grasp of the higher philosophies.

Policeman Billings, sworn to uphold the law and assist in the protection
of property, viewed the complications and mysteries of the social system
with a simple and penetrating logic. The rich are not dangerous, reasoned
Policeman Billings, because they have what they want. But the poor who
have not what they want are, despite paradox and precedent, always to be
watched closely. A raggedly dressed man walking in a dark, lonely street
may be honesty itself. Yet rags, even when worn for virtue's sake, are a
dubious assurance of virtue. They are always ominous to one sworn to
protect property and uphold the law.

There is a maxim by Chateaubriand, or perhaps it was Stendhal--maxims have
a way of leaving home--which claims that the equilibrium of society rests
upon the acquiescence of its oppressed and unfortunate.

       *       *       *       *       *

In passing the battered chestnut roaster of the unfortunate Mottka,
Policeman Billings was aware in his own way of the foregoing elements of
social philosophy. Mottka had chosen for his little shop an old soapbox
which a wastrel providence had deposited in the alley on Twenty-second
Street, a few feet west of State Street. Here Mottka sat, nursing the fire
of his chestnut roaster with odd bits of refuse which seldom reached the
dignity of coal or even wood.

He was an old man and the world had used him poorly. He was, in fact, one
of those upon whom the equilibrium of the social system rests. He was
unfortunate, oppressed and acquiescent. Arriving early in the forenoon he
set up his shop, lighted his fire and took his place on the soapbox. When
the lights began to wink out along this highway of evil ghosts Mottka was
still to be seen hunched over his chestnut roaster and waiting.

Policeman Billings strolling over his beat was wont to observe Mottka.
There were many things demanding the philosophical attention of Policeman
Billings. Not so long ago the neighborhood which he policed had been
renowned to the four corners of the earth as the rendezvous of more
temptations than even St. Anthony enumerated in his interesting brochure
on the subject. And Policeman Billings felt the presence of much of this
evil lingering in the brick walls, broken windows and sagging pavements of
the district.

It was after a number of days on the beat that Policeman Billings began to
take Mottka seriously. There was something curious about the chestnut
vender, and the eye of the good officer grew narrow with suspicion. "This
man," reasoned Policeman Billings, "makes pretense of being a vender of
roasted chestnuts. He sits all day in the alley between two saloons. I
have never noticed him sell any chestnuts. And come to think of it, I have
never seen more than a half-dozen chestnuts on his roasting pan. I begin
to suspect that this old man is a fraud and that his roasting chestnuts is
a blind. He is very likely a lookout for some bootlegger gang or criminal
mob. And I will keep an eye on him."

       *       *       *       *       *

Mottka remained unaware of Policeman Billing's attention. He continued to
sit hunched over his roaster, nursing the little fire under it as best he
could--and waiting. But finally Policeman Billings called himself to his
attention in no uncertain way.

"What's your name?" asked the good officer, stopping before the chestnut
vender.

"Mottka," answered Mottka.

"And what are you doing here?" asked Policeman Billings, frowning.

"I roast chestnuts and sell them," said Mottka.

"Hm!" said Policeman Billings, "you do, eh? Well, we'll see about that.
Come along."

Mottka rose without question. One does not ask questions of an officer of
the law. Mottka stood up and put the fire out and put the handful of
chestnuts in his pocket and picked up his roaster and followed the
officer. A half-hour later Mottka stood before the sergeant in the
Twenty-second street station.

"What's the trouble?" asked the sergeant.

And Policeman Billings explained.

"He claims to be selling chestnuts and roasting them. But I never see him
sell any, much less do I see him roasting any. He's got about a dozen
chestnuts altogether and I think he may bear looking into."

"What about it, Mottka?" asked the sergeant.

Mottka shrugged his shoulders, shook his head and smiled deprecatingly.

"Nothing," he said, "I got a chestnut roaster I got from a friend on the
West Side. And I try to make business. I got a license."

"But the officer says you never roast any chestnuts and he thinks you're a
fake."

"Yes, yes," smiled Mottka; "I don't have so many chestnuts. I can't afford
only a little bit at a time. Some time I buy a basket of chestnuts."

"Where do you live, Mottka?"

"Oh, on the West Side. On the West Side."

"And what did you do before you roasted chestnuts?"

"Me? Oh, I was in a business. Yes, in a business. And it failed. So I got
the chestnut roaster. I got a license."

"It seems to me I've seen you before, Mottka."

"Yes, yes. A policeman bring me here before when I was on Wabash Avenue
with my chestnuts."

"What did he bring you in for?"

"Oh, because he thinks I am a crook, because I don't have enough chestnuts
to sell. He says I am a lookout for crooks and he brings me in."

Mottka laughed softly and shrugged his shoulders.

"I am no crook. Only I am too poor to buy more chestnuts."

Policeman Billings frowned, but not at Mottka.

"Here," said the good officer, and he handed Mottka a dollar. Three other
upholders of the law were present and they too handed Mottka money.

"Go and buy yourself some chestnuts, Mottka," said the sergeant, "so the
officers won't be runnin' you in on suspicion of bein' a criminal."

Now Mottka's chestnut roaster in the alley off State Street is full of
chestnuts. A bright fire burns under the pan and Mottka sits watching the
chestnuts brown and peel as they roast. And if you were to ask him about
things he would say:

"Tell something? What is there to tell? Nothing."



"FA'N TA MIG!"


Avast and belay there! Take in the topgallants, wind up the mizzenmast and
reef the cleets! This is Tobias Wooden-Leg plowing his way through a high
sea in Grand Avenue.

Aye, what a night, what a night! The devil astride the jib boom, his tail
lashing in the wind. "Pokker!" says Tobias, "fa'n ta mig. Hold tight and
here we go!"

The boys in the Elite poolroom stand grinning in the doorway. Old Norske
Tobias is on a tear again, his red face shining with the memory of
Stavanger storms, his beard bristling like a north cat's back. An Odin in
caricature.

They watch him pass. Drunker than a fiddler's wench. Drunker than a
bootlegger's pal. Drunk as the devil himself and roaring at the top of his
voice: "Belay, there! Hold tight and here we go!" Poor Tobias Wooden-Leg,
the years keep plucking out his hairs and twisting his fingers into
talons. Seventy years have squeezed him. And they have brought him piety
and wisdom. They have taught him virtue and holiness.

But the wind suddenly rises and comes blowing out of Stavanger again. The
great sea suddenly lifts under his one good leg. And Tobias with his
Bibles and his prayer books struggles in the dark of his Grand Avenue
bedroom. The devil comes and sits on his window sill, a devil with long
locks and bronze wings beside his ears and a three-pronged pitchfork in
his hand.

"Ho, ho!" cries this one on the window sill. "What are you doing here,
Tobias? With the north wind blowing and the gray seas standing on their
heads? Grown old, Tobias, eh? Sitting in a corner and mumbling over
litanies."

And it has always been like that since he came to Grand Avenue ten years
ago. It has always turned out that Tobias takes off his white shirt and
puts on his sailor's black sweater and fastens on his old wooden leg and
follows the one on the window sill.

       *       *       *       *       *

Avast and belay! The night is still young and a sailor man's abroad. The
sergeant going off duty at the Chicago Avenue station passes and winks and
calls: "Hello, Tobias. Pretty rough tonight."

"Fa'n ta mig!" roars Tobias. "Hold tight." And he steers for Clark Street.
And now the one on the window sill is gone and the storm grows quiet. And
poor Tobias Wooden-Leg, the venerable and pious, who has won the grace of
God through a terrific fight, finds himself again lost and strayed.

Of what good were the prayers and the night after night readings in the
old sea captain's Bible stolen forty years ago? Of what good the promises
and tears of repentance, when this thing that seemed to rise out of
forgotten seas could come and jump up on his window sill and bewitch him
as if he were a heedless boy? When it could sit laughing at him until in
its laugh he heard the sounds of old winds roaring and old seas standing
on their heads, and he put on his black sweater--the moth-eaten badge of
his sinfulness--and he put on his wooden leg and lifted out the handful of
money from under the corner of the carpet?

What good were the prayers if they couldn't keep him pious? Yes, that was
it. And here the habitués along North Clark Street grin. For Tobias
Wooden-Leg is coming down the pavement, his head hanging low, his beard no
longer bristling and his soul on a hunt for a new God. A strong God. A
powerful and commanding God, stronger than the long-locked, bronze-winged
one of the window sill.

They grin because this is an old story. Tobias is an old character. Once
every two or three months for ten years Tobias has come like this with his
head lowered searching for a new and powerful God that would keep him
pious and that would kill the devil that seemed never to die inside his
old Norske soul.

So he had taken them all--a jumble of gods, a patchwork of religions.
Every soapbox apostle in the district had at one time converted him. Holy
Roller, Methodist, Jumper, Yogi, Swami, Zionite--he had bowed his head
before their and a dozen other varied gods. And the missions in the
district had come to know him as "the convert." He had been faithful to
each of the creeds as long as he remained sober and as long as he sat in
his room of nights reading in his Bible.

But come a storm out of Stavanger, come a whistling under the eaves and a
thumping of wind on the window pane and Tobias was off again. "He is not a
good God!" Tobias would cry in his new "repentance." "His religion is too
weak. The devil is stronger than Him. I want a stronger religion. Pagh, I
want somebody big enough to kill this fanden inside me."

The crowd around the soapbox evangelist is rather slight. The night is
cold. The wind bites and the street has a dismal air. The evangelist
stands around the corner from the old book store in whose windows
thousands of musty volumes are piled like the bones of hermits. The man
who owns this curious book store is a sun-worshipper. And the evangelist
on the soapbox is a friend of his.

The slight crowd listens. Peace comes from the sun. The sun is the source
of light and of health. It is the eye of God. Terrible by day and watching
by night. It is the fire of life. The slight crowd grins and the
evangelist, his mind bubbling with a cabalistic jargon remembered out of
musty books, tries to explain something that seems vivid in his heart but
vague to his tongue.

They will drop away soon because the night is cold and the evangelist a
bit too nutty for serious attention. But here comes Tobias Wooden-Leg and
some of the listeners grin and nudge one another. Tobias, with his voice
hoarse and his blue eyes shining with wrath--wrath at himself and wrath at
the God who had abandoned him, unable to cope with the one on the window
sill.

Tobias listens. Terrible by day and ever watchful by night. The King of
Kings, the Great Majesty and secret symbol of the absolute. Tobias drinks
in the jargon of the soapbox man and then shouts: "I'll join, I'll join! I
want a strong God!"

       *       *       *       *       *

So now Tobias Wooden-Leg is a sun-worshipper. The boys in the Elite
poolroom will tell you all about it. How he walks the street at dawn with
his head raised and bows every seven steps. And how in the evening he is
to be seen standing at his window bowing to the sun going down. And how he
has been around saying: "Well, I have found the big God at last. No more
monkey business for me. Listen to what it says in the book about him." And
how he will quote from the sea captain's Bible stolen forty years ago.

But the boys also say: "Just wait."

And they wink, meaning that another storm will blow up out of Stavanger in
Norway and old Tobias will come plowing down the street again howling that
fa'n ta mig the devil has him and that old Thor leaped on his window sill
and tossed the all-powerful sun out of the sky with his hammer.



FANTASTIC LOLLYPOPS


They will never start. No, they will never start. In another two minutes
Mr. Prokofieff will go mad. They should have started at eleven. It is now
ten minutes after eleven. And they have not yet started. Ah, Mr.
Prokofieff has gone mad.

But Mr. Prokofieff is a modernist; so nobody pays much attention.
Musicians are all mad. And a modernist musician, du lieber Gott! A Russian
modernist musician!

The medieval face of Mr. Boris Anisfeld pops over the rows of empty seats.
It is very likely that Mr. Anisfeld will also go mad. For Mr. Anisfeld is,
in a way, a collaborator of Mr. Prokofieff. It is the full dress rehearsal
of "The Love for Three Oranges." Mr. Prokofieff wrote the words and music.
Mr. Anisfeld painted the scenery.

"Mees Garden weel be hear in a meenute," the medieval face of Boris
whispers into the Muscovite ears of Serge.

       *       *       *       *       *

Eleven-fifteen, and Miss Garden has arrived. She is armed, having brought
along her heaviest shillalah. Mr. Prokofieff is on his feet. He takes off
his coat. The medieval face of Mr. Anisfeld vanishes. Tap, tap, on the
conductor's stand. Lights out. A fanfare from the orchestra's right.

Last rehearsal for the world premier of a modernist opera! One winter
morning years ago the music critics of Paris sat and laughed themselves
green in the face over the incomprehensible banalities of an impossible
modernist opera called "Tannhäuser." And who will say that critics have
lost their sense of humor. There will unquestionably be laughter before
this morning is over.

       *       *       *       *       *

Music like this has never come from the orchestra pit of the Auditorium.
Strange combinations of sounds that seem to come from street pianos, New
Year's eve horns, harmonicas and old-fashioned musical beer steins that
play when you lift them up. Mr. Prokofieff waves his shirt-sleeved arms
and the sounds increase.

There is nothing difficult about this music--that is, unless you are
unfortunate enough to be a music critic. But to the untutored ear there is
a charming capriciousness about the sounds from the orchestra. Cadenzas
pirouette in the treble. Largos toboggan in the bass. It sounds like the
picture of a crazy Christmas tree drawn by a happy child. Which is a most
peculiar way for music to sound.

But, attention! The curtain is up. Bottle greens and fantastic reds. Here
is a scene as if the music Mr. Prokofieff were waving out of the orchestra
had come to life. Lines that look like the music sounds. Colors that
embrace one another in tender dissonances. Yes, like that.

And here, galubcheck (I think it's galubcheck), are the actors. What is it
all about? Ah, Mr. Prokofieff knows and Boris knows and maybe the actors
know. But all it is necessary for us to know is that music and color and a
quaint, almost gargoylian, caprice are tumbling around in front of our
eyes and ears.

And there is M. Jacques Coini. He will not participate in the world
premier. Except in spirit. Now M. Coini is present in the flesh. He wears
a business suit, spats of tan and a gray fedora. M. Coini is the stage
director. He instructs the actors how to act. He tells the choruses where
to chorus and what to do with their hands, masks, feet, voices, eyes and
noses.

The hobgoblin extravaganza Mr. Prokofieff wrote unfolds itself with
rapidity. Theater habitués eavesdropping on the rehearsal mumble in the
half-dark that there was never anything like this seen on earth or in
heaven. Mr. Anisfeld's scenery explodes like a succession of medieval
skyrockets. A phantasmagoria of sound, color and action crowds the
startled proscenium. For there is no question but that the proscenium,
with the names of Verdi, Bach, Haydn and Beethoven chiseled on it, is
considerably startled.

Through this business of skyrockets and crescendos and hobgoblins M. Coini
stands out like a lighthouse in a cubist storm. However bewildering the
plot, however humpty-dumpty the music, M. Coini is intelligible drama. His
brisk little figure in its pressed pants, spats and fedora, bounces around
amid the apoplectic disturbances like some busybody Alice in an operatic
Wonderland.

The opus mounts. The music mounts. Singers attired as singers were never
attired before crawl on, bounce on, tumble on. And M. Coini, as
undisturbed as a traffic cop or a loop pigeon, commands his stage. He
tells the singers where to stand while they sing, and when they don't sing
to suit him he sings himself. He leads the chorus on and tells it where to
dance, and when they don't dance to suit him he dances himself. He moves
the scenery himself. He fights with Mr. Prokofieff while the music
splashes and roars around him. He fights with Boris. He fights with
electricians and wigmakers.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is admirable. M. Coini, in his tan spats and gray fedora, is more
fantastic than the entire cast of devils and Christmas trees and
lollypops, who seem to be the leading actors in the play. Mr. Prokofieff
and Miss Garden have made a mistake. They should have let M. Coini play
"The Love for Three Oranges" all by himself. They should have let him be
the dream-towers and the weird chorus, the enchantress and the melancholy
prince. M. Coini is the greatest opera I have ever seen. All he needed was
M. Prokofieff's music and the superbly childish visions of the medieval
Boris for a background.

The music leaps into a gaudy balloon and sails away in marvelous zigzags,
way over the heads of the hobgoblins on the stage and the music critics
off the stage. Miss Garden beckons with her shillalah. Mr. Prokofieff
arrives panting at her side. He bows, kisses the back of her hand and
stands at attention. Also the medieval face of Mr. Anisfeld drifts gently
through the gloom and joins the two.

The first act of "The Oranges" is over. Two critics exchanging opinions
glower at Mr. Prokofieff. One says: "What a shame! What a shame! Nobody
will understand it." The other agrees. But perhaps they only mean that
music critics will fail to understand it and that untutored ones like
ourselves will find in the hurdy-gurdy rhythms and contortions of Mr.
Prokofieff and Mr. Anisfeld a strange delight. As if some one had given us
a musical lollypop to suck and rub in our hair.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have an interview with Mr. Prokofieff to add. The interview came first
and doesn't sit well at the end of these notes. Because Mr. Prokofieff,
sighing a bit nervously in expectation of the world's premier, said: "I am
a classicist. I derive from the classical composers."

This may be true, but the critics will question it. Instead of quoting Mr.
Prokofieff at this time, it may be more apropos merely to say that I would
rather see and listen to his opera than to the entire repertoire of the
company put together. This is not criticism, but a prejudice in favor of
fantastic lolly-pops.



NOTES FOR A TRAGEDY


Jan Pedlowski came home yesterday and found that his wife had run away.
There was supper on the table. And under the soup plate was a letter
addressed to Jan. It read, in Polish:

"I am sick and tired. You keep on nagging me all the time and I can't
stand it any more. You will be better off without me.

"Paula."

Jan ate his supper and then put his hat and coat on and went over to see
the sergeant at the West Chicago Avenue police station. The sergeant
appeared to be busy, so Jan waited. Then he stepped forward and said:

"My wife has run away. I want to catch her."

The sergeant was lacking in sympathy. He told Jan to go home and wait and
that the missus would probably come back. And that if she didn't he could
get a divorce.

"I don't want a divorce," said Jan. "I want to catch her."

       *       *       *       *       *

But Jan went home. It was no use running around looking for her and losing
sleep. And, besides, he had to be in court tomorrow. The landlord had left
a notice that the Pedlowskis must get out of their flat because they
didn't pay their rent.

Before coming home Jan had arranged with the foreman at the plating works
for two hours off, to be taken out of his pay. He could come to work at
seven and work until half-past nine, then go to court and be back, maybe,
by half-past eleven.

So Jan went to bed. He put the letter his wife had left in his coat
pocket, because he had a vague idea it might be evidence. He might show it
to somebody and maybe it would help.

It was snowing when Jan left the plating works in the morning to come to
court. He arrived at the City Hall and wandered around, confused by the
crowd of people pouring in and out of the elevators. But it was growing
late and he only had two hours off. So Jan made inquiries. Where was the
court where he should go?

"Judge Barasa on the eighth floor," said the starter. Jan went there.

A lot of people were in the court room. Jan sat down among them and looked
like them--blank, uninterested, as if waiting for a train in the railroad
station.

One thing worried Jan. The two hours off. If they didn't call him he'd be
late and the foreman would be mad. He might lose his job, and jobs were
hard to get. It took five weeks to get this one. It would take longer now.

But they called Jan Pedlowski and he came forward to where the judge sat.
At first Jan had felt confused and frightened. He had worried about coming
to court and standing before the judge. Now it seemed all right. Everybody
was nice and businesslike. A lawyer said:

"There's almost two months' rent due now. Eighteen dollars for the
November rent and $27.50 for December."

"Can you pay the rent?" the judge asked of Jan.

Jan looked and blinked and tried to think of something to say. He could
only think of "My wife Paula ran away last night. Here, she wrote this
letter left me on the table when I come home last night."

"I see," said the judge. "But what about the rent? If I give you until
January 10, do you think you can pay it?"

"I don't know," said Jan, rubbing his eyes. "I got job now, but they going
to layoff after new year. If I have job I pay it all. I can pay $10 now."

"Have you got it with you," asked the judge.

"Yes," said Jan. "I was going to buy Christmas present for Paula, but she
ran away."

       *       *       *       *       *

Jan handed over the $10 and listened to the judge explain that he would be
allowed to stay where he was until January 10 and have till then to pay
his rent. When this was over he walked out, putting his hat on too soon,
so that the bailiff cried: "Hats off in the courtroom." Jan grabbed his
hat and grew red.

Now he had almost a full hour and a half before going to the factory. It
had taken less time than he thought. Jan started to walk. It was cold and
the streets were slippery. He walked along with his hands in the frayed
pockets of his overcoat and his breath congealing over his walrus
mustache.

His eyes were set and his face serious. Jan's thoughts were simple.
Rent--Paula--jobs. Christmas, perhaps, too. But he walked along like
anybody else in the loop.

       *       *       *       *       *

Jan wandered as far as Quincy and La Salle streets. Here he stopped and
looked around. It was beginning to snow heavier now. He stood still like a
man waiting. And having nothing to do he took the letter his wife had left
under the soup plate and read it again.

When Jan had folded the letter up and started to walk once more his eyes
suddenly lighted up. He turned and started to run and as he ran he cried:
"Paula, Paula!" Some of the crowd moving on paused and looked at a stocky
man with a heavy mustache running across the street and shouting a woman's
name.

The cabs were thick at the moment and it was hard running across. But Jan
kept on, his overcoat flapping behind him and his short legs jumping up
and down as he moved. A young woman with a cheap fur around her neck had
stopped. There were others who paused to watch Jan. But this young woman
was one of the few who didn't smile.

She waited as if puzzled for a moment and then started to lose herself in
the crowd. She walked swiftly ahead, her eyes anxiously on the corner. And
in the meantime Jan came galumphing toward the curbing still crying:
"Paula, Paula!" At the curbing, however, Jan came to a full stop. His toe
had caught the cement and he shot forward, landing on his hands and chin.

A crowd gathered around Jan and some one helped him to his feet. His chin
was bleeding and his hands were scraped from hitting the cold pavement. He
made no sign, however, of injury, but stood blinking in the direction the
young woman with the cheap fur had gone.

A policeman arrived and inquired sympathetically what was wrong. Jan
brushed himself mechanically as the policeman spoke. Then he answered:
"Nothing, I fell down." The policeman went away and Jan turned back to
catch a Milwaukee Avenue street car.

He stood on the corner waiting and fingering his bruised chin. He seemed
to be getting impatient as the car failed to appear. Finally he thrust his
hand inside his pocket and drew out the letter again. He held it without
reading for an instant and then tore it up.

When the car came Jan was still tearing up the letter, his thick fingers
trying vainly to divide it into tinier bits.



CORAL, AMBER AND JADE


There are no gold and scarlet lanterns bobbing like fat little oriental
Pierrots over this street. No firecracker colors daub its sad walls. Walk
the whole length and not a dragon or a thumbnail balcony or a pigtail will
you see.

Instead, a very efficient, very conservative Chinatown and a colony of
very efficient and very matter-of-fact Chinamen who have gradually taken
possession of a small district around Twenty-second Street and Wentworth
Avenue. A rather famous district in its way, where once the city's
tenderloin put forth its red shadows.

But now as you walk, the night stares evilly out of wooden ruins.
Stretches of sagging, empty buildings, whose windows and doors seem to
have been chewed away, an intimidating silence, a graveyard of crumbling
little houses--these remain. And you see Venus, grown old and toothless,
snoozing amid the debris of another day.

Then the Chinamen begin. Lights twinkle. Clean-looking interiors and
carefully washed store windows. Roofs have been hammered back in place,
stairways nailed together again. The sagging walls and lopsided cottages
have taken a new lease on life. Another of the innumerable little business
districts that dot the city has fought its way into evidence.

There are few oddities. Through the glass of the store fronts you see
curiously immobile groups, men seated in chairs, smoking long pipes and
waiting in silence. Strange fruits, foods, herbs, cloths, trinkets, lie on
the orderly shelves around them. The floors look scrubbed and there is an
absence of litter. It is all very efficient and very natural except for
the immobility of the men in the chairs and the silence that seems to have
descended on them.

       *       *       *       *       *

A Chinese silence. And if you linger in the neighborhood you begin to feel
that this is more Chinese than the gaudy dragons and the firecracker daubs
and the bobbing paper lanterns of fiction.

This night I am looking for Billy Lee. No. 2209 Wentworth Avenue, says Mr.
Lee's card. We are to talk over some matters, one of which has already
been made public, others of which may never be.

He sits in his inner office, attired like a very efficient American
business man, does Mr. Lee. We say hello and start the talk. In the rooms
outside the inner office are a dozen Chinese. But there is no sound. They
are sitting in chairs or standing up. All smoking. All silent. A sense of
strange preoccupation lies over the place. Yet one feels that the twelve
silent men are preoccupied with nothing except, possibly, the fact that
they are Chinese.

Mr. Lee himself is none too garrulous. We have been talking for several
minutes when he becomes totally silent and after a long pause hands me a
cablegram. The cablegram reads: "Hongkong--Ying Yan: Bandits captured Foo
Wing and wife. Send $5,000 immediately. Signed: Taichow."

       *       *       *       *       *

"I just received this," says Mr. Lee. "Ying Yan is my father. Foo Wing is
my brother. His American name is Andrew Lee. He went to Hongkong ten
months ago and was married. This is terrible. I am worried to death."

Mr. Lee appears to sink into a studious calm. His eyes regard the
cablegram stolidly. He remarks at length: "Bad news. This is very bad
news."

From outside comes a sudden singsong of Chinese. One of the twelve men has
said something. He finishes. Silence resumes. There seems to be no answer.
Mr. Lee puts the cablegram back in his pocket and some one knocks on the
door.

"Come in," says Mr. Lee. A Chinese youth enters. He carries a bundle.

"Meet Mr. Tang," says Billy Lee. We shake hands and Mr. Tang begins
talking in Chinese. Mr. Lee listens, nods his head and then holds out his
hand for the bundle.

"This is a very interesting event," says Mr. Lee in English. "Mr. Tang is
just over from the Orient. He comes from north of China, from Wu Chang,
where the revolution started, you know. He has with him a very interesting
matter."

Mr. Lee unwraps the bundle. He removes a long necklace made of curiously
carved wooden beads, large balls of jade and pendants of silk and
semi-precious stones.

Next he removes a second necklace somewhat longer than the first. It is
made of marvelously matched amber beads, balls of jade and pendants of
coral.

"A very interesting matter," says Mr. Lee. "Mr. Tang is son of a formerly
very wealthy and high-born mandarin family. But his family has lost
everything and Mr. Tang is here seeking an education in modern business.
He has left of his family's wealth only these two things here. They are
necklaces such as only mandarins could wear when they appeared before the
emperor in court in the old days.

"You see these have three pendants, so they show the mandarin was a
gentleman of the third class under the emperor. They have been in Mr.
Tang's family's possession for generations. You will notice this one of
carved beads is made of beads which are formed from the pits of the
Chinese olive. There are two hundred beads and on each is carved some
figure or scene which in all represent the history of China."

       *       *       *       *       *

Mr. Lee holds the two necklaces in his hand. Mr. Tang stands by silently.
His eyes gaze at the beads.

"Your father wore them at court?" inquires Mr. Lee in the manner of a
host.

Mr. Tang nods his head slowly and adds a word in Chinese.

"He says his family wore them for generations," explains Mr. Lee. "Now the
family is vanished and all that is left are these insignia of their
nobility. And Mr. Tang wishes me to dispose of them for him so he may have
money to go to school."

Mr. Lee and Mr. Tang are then both silent. Mr. Lee slips one of the
necklaces over his head. It hangs down over his American coat and American
silk shirt in a rather incongruous way. But there seems to be nothing
incongruous in the matter for Lee and Tang. Billy Lee with the necklace
around his neck, the three mandarin pendants against his belt, looks at
Mr. Tang and Mr. Tang bows and leaves.

Our matters have been fully discussed and I follow a half-hour later.
There are still twelve men in the room. They stand and sit and smoke. None
speaks. I notice in the group the immobile figure of Mr. Tang. He is
smoking an American cigarette--one of the twelve silently preoccupied
residents of Chinatown who have gathered in Billy Lee's place to wait for
something.



MEDITATION IN E MINOR


Well, well, well. The lady pianist will now oblige with something very
refined. When in the name of 750,000 gods of reason will I ever learn
enough to stay at home and go to bed instead of searching kittenishly for
diversion in neighborhood movie and vaudeville houses?

No. Wrong. The lady is not a pianist. She is merely an accompanist. She is
going to accompany something on cares? They are no more than the ripples
which one's ego a face! Two hundred and eighty-five years old, if a day.

Aha! His nobs. A fiddler. "Silver Threads Among the Gold," and something
fancy from the opera. And all dressed up in his wedding suit. The white
tie is a bit soiled and the white vest longs mutely for the laundryman.
And if he's going to wear a dress suit, if he insists upon wearing a dress
suit, why doesn't he press his pants?

But how did a man with a face like this ever happen to think he could
fiddle? An English nobleman. Or maybe a Swedish nobleman. Hm! A very
interesting face. A little bit touched with flabbiness. And somewhat
soiled, intangibly soiled. Like an English nobleman or a Swedish nobleman
who has stayed up all night drinking.

And he holds his fiddle in an odd way. Like what? Well, like a fiddler.
Like a marvelous fiddler. It hangs limply from his hand as if it were
nonexistent. Kreisler holds his fiddle like that. A close-cropped blond
mustache and the beginnings of a paunch. Nevertheless a very refined
gentleman, a baron somewhat the worse for a night of bourbon.

The idiotic orchestra, the idiotic orchestra! Did anybody ever hear such
an idiotic orchestra? Three violins, one cello, one cornet, one flute and
a drum all out of tune, all out of time. The prelude. And his nobs grins.
Poor fellow. But who taught him how to hold a fiddle like that?

We're off. An E minor chord from our friend at the piano. Hm, something
classical. Ho, ho! Viotti. Well, well, here's a howdeedo. His nobs is
going to play the concerto. Good-by, good luck and God bless him. If I was
in bed, if I was in bed, I wouldn't have to listen to a refined gentleman
with his swell pants unpressed murdering poor Viotti. A swell gentleman
with his eyes carefully made up. I didn't notice his eyes before. All set,
Paganini. Your turn. Let's go.

Ah, that was a note! Well, well, well, his nobs can play. Hm! A cadenza in
double stops! And the E minor scale in harmonics! Listen to the baron in
the dirty white vest. The man's a violinist. Observe--calisthenics on the
G string and in the second position. A very difficult position and easily
faked. And when did Heifetz ever take a run like that? Up, down and the
fingers hammering like thoroughbreds on a fast track. Pizzicato with the
left hand and obbligato glissando!

Hoopla! The fellow's showing off! And it isn't a Drdla souvenir or a
vaudeville Brahms arrangement. But twenty years of practice. Yes, sir,
there are twenty years and eight hours a day, every day for twenty years,
in these acrobatics. There are twenty years, twenty years, behind this
technique. And well-spent years.

But tell me, Cyril, for whom is our baron showing off--for whom? Our baron
with the soiled tie and the made-up eyes, fiddling coldly, elaborately for
a handful of annoyed flappers, amused shoe clerks and bored home lovers
sitting stolidly in the dark, waiting stolidly and defiantly to be
diverted?

Bravo! Five of us applaud. No, six. A gentleman in an upper box applauds
with some degree of violence. And there is the orchestra leader--a
dark-skinned, black-eyed, curly-headed youth, nodding and smiling.

Next on the program? Ah, a ballad. A thing the cabaret ladies sing, "Do
You Think of Me?" A faint smile on our baron's face. But the fiddle leaps
into position as if for another cold, elaborate attack. It takes twenty
years, twenty well-spent years to learn to hold a bow like that. Firmly,
casually, indifferently as one holds a pencil between one's fingers.

Admission 33 cents, including war tax. But this is worth--well, it is what
the novelists call an illuminating experience. This gentleman of music
whose fingers have for twenty years absorbed the souls of Beethoven and
Sarasate, Liszt and Moussorgski, this aristocrat of the catgut is
posturing sardonically before the three bored fates. He is pouring twenty
years, twenty well-spent years, into a tawdry little ballad. Ah, how our
baron's fiddle sings! And the darkened faces in front hum to themselves:
"When you're flirt-ing with another, do you ever think--of--me."

Yes, my tired-faced baron, there's a question. Do you? We, out front, all
have our little underworlds in which we live sometimes while music plays
and beautiful things come to our eyes. And yours? This tin-pan alley
ballad throbbing liquidly from the strings of your fiddle--"When you're
flirt-ing with another do you ever think--of--me?" Of the twenty years,
the twenty well-spent years? Of the soul that your fingers captured? Of
the dream that took form in your firm wrist?

And now the chorus once more. In double stops. In harmonics. With
arpeggios thrown in. And once more, largo. Sure and full. Sobbing organ
notes, whimpering grace notes. Superb, baron! And done with a half smile
at the darkened faces out front. The tired faces that blinked stolidly at
Viotti. A smile at the orchestra leader who stands with his mouth open
waiting as if the song were still in the air.

Applause. All of us this time. More applause. Say this guy can fiddle, he
can. Come on, baron, another tune. The tired faces yammer for another
ditty. "Träumerei." All right, let her go, Paganini. And after that the
"Missouri Waltz."

       *       *       *       *       *

I will stay for the next show. I will stay for the three shows. And each
time this magnifico will come out and make music. But better than that. I
will go back stage and talk with him. I will ask him: "How does it happen,
sir, that a man who can fiddle like you, a man who could play a duet with
Kreisler--how does it happen you're fiddling in a neighborhood movie and
vaudeville house?"

And he will unfold a story. Yes, there's a story there. Something happened
to this nobleman of the soiled white vest and the marvelous fingers. There
was an occurrence in this man's life which would make a good climax for a
second act.

No, that would spoil the picture. To find out, to learn the clumsy
mechanism behind this charming spectacle would take away. Better like
this. The lady at the piano. Ah, indeed, the lady at the piano, a very
elderly lady with a thin nose and hair that was once extremely beautiful,
perhaps she had something to do with it? The orchestra pounds and scrapes
away. And the movie jumps around and the heroine weeps, but somebody saves
her. "Where there is no faith there cannot be true love," confesses the
hero, folding her in his well-pressed arms. And that's that.

Now our friend, the baron, again. No, better to leave. He has left his
smile in the wings this time. He is very serious or perhaps very tired.
Two times tonight to play. Too much--too much.

My hat, and I will walk out on his nobs. And, anyway, Huneker wrote the
story long ago. About a piano player in Coney Island that he called--what
was it? Oh, yes, "A Chopin of the Gutter."



TEN-CENT WEDDING RINGS


A gloomy day and the loop streets grimace behind a mist. The electric
signs are lighted. The buildings open like great fans in the half dark.

The streets invite a mood of melodrama. Windows glint evilly. Doorways
grin with rows of electric teeth. This, _Jonnerrvetter_! is the Great
City of the old-time ten-twenty-thirty thrillers. The devourer of
innocence, the strumpet of stone.

I walk along humming a bar of villainous music, the "skeeter scale" that
the orchestra used to turn turn turn taaaa-tum in the old Alhambra as the
two dockwallopers and the leering Chinaman were climbing in through little
Mabel's hall bedroom window to abduct her.

Those were happy days for the drama, when a scoundrel was a scoundrel and
wore a silk hat to prove it, and a hero was a two-fisted man, as anybody
could tell by a glance at his marcelled hair and his open-at-the-throat
shirt.

Tum tum tum tum taaaa-tum. Pizzicato pianissimo, says the direction on the
score. So we are all set for a melodrama. Here is the Great City
back-drop. Here are the grim-faced crowds shuffling by under the jaundice
glare of electric signs. And Christmas is coming. A vague gray snow
trickles out of the gloom.

A proper time for melodrama. All we need is a plot. Come, come now--a plot
alive with villains and weeping maidens. Halto! The window of the 5--and
10-cent store! a tumble of gewgaws and candies and kitchen utensils.
Christmas tree tinsel and salted peanuts, jazz music and mittens.

The curtain is up. Egad, what a masterly scene. A kitchen Coney Island. A
puzzle picture of isles, signs, smells, noises. Cinderella wandering
wistfully in the glass-bead section looking for a fairy godmother.

A clinking obbligato by the cash registers. The poor are buying gifts.
This garish froth of merchandise is the back ground of their luxuries.
This noisy puzzle-picture store is their horn of plenty. A sad thought and
we'll dismiss it. What we want is plot.

Perhaps the jazz-song booster singing out of the side of his mouth with
tired eyes leering at the crowd of girls: "Won't You Let Me Love You If I
Promise to Be Good?" And "Love Me, Turtle Dove." And "Lovin' Looie." And
"The Lovin' Blues."

All lovin'. Jazz songs, ballads, sad, silly, boobish nut songs--all about
love me--love me. All about stars and kisses, moonlight and "she took my
man away." There are telephones all over the walls and the song booster's
voice pops out over the salted-peanut section, over the safety-pin and
brassware section. A tinny, nasal voice with a whine and a hoarseness
almost hiding the words.

The cash registers clink, clink. "Are you waited on, madam? Five cents a
package, madam." The crowds, tired eyed, shabbily dressed, bundle-laden,
young, old--the crowds shuffle up and down, staring at gewgaws, and the
love-me love songs follow them around. Follow them to the loose-bead
counter where Madge with her Japanese puffs of hair, her wad of gum and
her black shirtwaist that she keeps straightening out continually by
drawing up her bosom and pressing down on her hips with her hands--where
Madge holds forth.

Tum tum tum tum taaaa-tum--halto! Here is our plot. Outside the pizzicato
of the crowds, the Great City, shining, dragon-eyed, through the mist--the
City That Has No Heart. And here under our nose, twinkling up at our eyes,
a huge tray full of 10-cent wedding rings. End of Act One.

Act Two, now--Madge, the sharp-tongued, weary-eyed young woman behind the
counter. Love-me love songs in her ear and people unraveling, faces
unraveling before her. Who buys these wedding rings, Madge? And did you
ever notice anything odd about your customers? And why do you suppose they
buy ten-cent wedding rings, Madge?

"Just a moment," says Madge. "What is it, miss? A ring? What kind? Oh,
yes. Ten cents. Gold or platinum just the same. Yes."

Two giggling girls move off. And Madge, chewing gently on her wad of gum
and smoothing her huge hair puffs out with the coyly stiffened palms of
her hands, talks.

"Sure, I get you. About the wedding rings. Sure, that's easy. We sell
about twenty or thirty of them every day. Oh, mostly to kids--girls and
boys. Sometimes an old Johnny comes in with a moth-eaten fur collar and
blows a dime for a wedding ring. But mostly girls.

"I sometimes take a second look at them. They usually giggle when they ask
for the ring. And they usually pretend it's for somebody as a joke they're
buying it. Or sometimes they walk around the counter for a half hour and
get me nervous as a cat. 'Cause I know what they want and they can't get
their gall up to come and ask for it. But finally they make the break and
come up and pick out a ring without saying a word and hand over ten cents.

"There was one girl no more than sixteen just this morning. She come here
all full of pep and kidded about things and said wasn't them platinum
wedding rings just too grand for words, and so on. Then she said she
wanted a half-dozen of them, and was there a discount when bought in such
quantity? I started wrapping them up when I looked at her and she was
crying. And she dropped her sixty cents on the counter and said: 'Never
mind, never mind. I don't want them. I can't wear them. They'll only make
it worse.'"

A middle-aged-looking man interrupts. "What is it, sir?" asks Madge.
"Anything in rings? What kind?" "Oh, just plain rings," says the man with
a great show of indifference, while his eyes ferret among the trinkets on
the counter. And then, very calmly: "Oh, these will do, I guess." Two
wedding rings, and he spent twenty cents. Madge follows him with her eyes.
"That's it," she whispers, "usually the men buy two. One for themselves
and one for the girl. Or if it's the girl that's buying them it's one for
herself and one for her girl chum who's going with her and the two fellas
on the party. Say, take it from me, these rings don't ever hear no wedding
marches."

       *       *       *       *       *

Back into the gloomy street again. A plot in our head, but who's the
villain and who's the heroine and the hero? An easy answer to that. The
crowd here--sad faced, tired-walking, bundle-laden. The crowd continually
dissolving amid street cars and autos is the villain.

A crowd of shoppers buying slippers for uncle and shawls for mother and
mufflers for brother and some bars of soap for the bathroom. Buying
everything and anything that fill the fan-shaped buildings with their
glinting windows. Buying carpet sweepers and window curtains and linoleum.

Pizzicato, pianissimo, professor--little-girl gigglers and hard-faced dock
wallopers and slick-haired lounge lizards and broken-hearted ones--twenty
a day they sidle up to Madge's counter, where the love me, love me songs
razz the heavy air, and shoot a dime for a wedding ring.



WHERE THE "BLUES" SOUND


    "That St. Louis woman
      Wid her diahmond rings,
    Pulls mah man 'round
      By her apron strings--"

A voice screeches above the boom and hurrah of the black and white 35th
Street cabaret. The round tables rock. Waiters careen. Balanced trays
float at crazy angles through the tobacco smoke. Hats flash. Firecracker
voices explode. A guffaw dances across a smear of faces. Congo gleams,
college boy pallors, the smiles of black and white men and women
interlace. A spotlight shoots its long hypotenuse upon the floor. In its
drifting oval the entertainer, her shoulders back, her elbows out, her
fists clenched and her body twisting into slow patterns, bawls in a
terrifying soprano--

    "If it waren't foh her powdah
      And her stohe bought hair.
    The man Ah love
      Would not have gone nowhere--"

Listen for the tom-tom behind the hurrah. Watch for the torches of Kypris
and Corinth behind the glare of the tungstens. This is the immemorial
bacchanal lurching through the kaleidoscope of the centuries. Pan with a
bootlegger's grin and a checked suit. Dionysius with a saxophone to his
lips. And the dance of Paphos called now the shimmie.

Listen and watch and through the tumult, rising like a strange incense
from the smear of bodies, tables and waiters, will come the curious thing
that is never contained in the vice reports. The gleam of the devil
himself--the echo of some mystic cymbal note.

Later the music will let out a tinny blaze of sound. Men and women will
press together and a pack of bodies will sway on the dance floor. The
tungstens will go out and the spotlight will throw colors--green, purple,
lavender, blue, violet--and as the scene grows darker and the colors
revolve a howl will fill the place. But on the dance floor a silence will
fasten itself over the swaying bodies and there will be only the sound of
feet pushing. The silence of a ritual--faces stiffened, eyes rolling--a
rigid embrace of men and women creeping cunningly among the revolving
colors and the whiplike rhythms of the jazz band.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Lost souls," says the vice reports, and the vice reports speak with a
calm and knowing voice. Women whose bodies and faces are like shells of
evil; vicious seeming men with a rasp in their laughter. These are among
those present. Aphrodite is a blousy wench in the 35th and State streets
neighborhood. And her votaries, although they offer an impressive
ensemble, are a sorry lot taken face by face.

Izzy, who is an old timer, sits at a table and takes it in. Izzy's eyes
and ears have learned to pick details in a bedlam. He can talk softly and
listen easily through the height of the cabaret racket. The scene hits
Izzy as water hits a duck's back.

"Well," he says, "it's a good night tonight. The slummers are out in full
force rubberin' at each other. Well, this is a funny world, take it from
me. Me? Huh, I come here every night or so to have a little drink and look
'em over for a while. Ain't nothing to see but a lot o' molls and a lot of
sucker guys. Them? Say, they never learn no better. Tough guys ain't no
different from soft guys, see? They all fall for the dames just as hard
and just as worse. There's many a good guy in this place that's been gave
a tumble by them, see?

"There, I got an idee he'd blow in tonight. He ain't missed a Saturday
night for months. And he usu'lly makes it four or five times a week. That
guy over there wit' the mop o' gray hair. Yeah, that's him. Well, he's the
professor. I spotted him in the district a year or so ago. He had a dame
wit' him who I know, see? A terrible broad. Say, maybe you've heard of
him. His name is Weintraub. I picked it up from the dame he's goin' wit',
see? He ought to be in your line. He was a reg'lar music professor before
he come down. The leader of a swell orchestra somewhere in the east or in
Europe, I guess. The dame don't know for sure, but she told me he was some
baby on music.

"Well, that's him there, see? He comes in like this and sits down near the
band. Look at him. Do you make him? The way he's movin' his hands? See,
he's leadin' the band. Sure"--Izzy laughed mirthlessly--"that's what the
guy's doin'. Nuts, see? Daffy. He comes in here like that and I always
watch him. He sits still and when the music starts up he begins wit' his
hands. Ain't he the berries?

"Now keep your eye on him. You'll see somethin' pretty quick. He's alone
tonight. I guess the dame has shook him for the evenin'. Look, he's still
conductin'. Ain't he rich? But he's got a good face, you might say. Class,
eh? You'd know he was a musician.

"I tell you I begin to watch him the first time I saw him. And from the
beginnin' he's always conductin' when the band starts in. The dame is
usu'lly wit' him and she don't like it. She tries to stop him, but he
don't see her for sour apples. He keeps right on like now, beatin' time
wit' his hands. Look, the poor nut's growin' excited. Daffy. Can you beat
it? There he goes. See? That's on account of Jerry. Jerry's the black one
on the end wit' the saxophone. Ha, Jerry always does it.

"I told Jerry about this guy and Jerry tried it on him the first night. He
pulled a sour one, you know, blew a mean one through the horn and his nobs
nearly fell out of his seat. Like now. See, he's through. He won't conduct
the band any more tonight. He's sore. No sir, he won't conduct such a lot
of no-good boilermakers like Jerry. Can you beat it?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Izzy's eyes follow a stoop-shouldered gray-haired man from one of the
tables. A thin-faced man with bloodshot eyes. He walks as if he were half
asleep. The crowd swallows him and Izzy laughs again without mirth.

"He's done for the night. That's low down of Jerry. But Jerry says it gets
his goat to see this daffy guy comin' in here night after night and
leadin' the band from the table. So the smoke blows that sour note every
time his nobs gets started on his conductin' and it always knocks his nobs
for a gool. He never stays another minute, but lights out right away.

"Look, there's his dame. The one wit' the green hat, sittin' wit' the guy
with the cheaters over there. Yeah, that's her. I don't know why she ain't
wit' him tonight. Prob'ly a lovers' quarrel." And Izzy grinned. "She's a
tough one, take it from me. I don't know how she hooked the professor, but
she did. She used to be swelled up about him. And once she got him a job
in Buxbaum's old place, she told me, to work in the orchestra. But his
nobs kicked. Said he'd cut his throat before playin' in a roughneck
orchestra and who did she think he was to do such a thing? He says to her:
I'm Weintraub--Weintraub, d'ye understand?' And he hauls off and wallops
her one and she guve up tryin' to get him a job. It makes her sore to
watch him sittin' around like tonight and conductin' the orchestra. She
says it ain't because he's daffy, but on account of his bein' stuck up."

The woman with the green hat had left her table. Izzy's shrewd eyes picked
her out again--this time standing against a far wall talking to the
professor, and the professor was rubbing his forehead and saying "No, no,"
with his hands.

And now the entertainer was singing again:

    "Got de St. Louis Blues, jes' as blue as Ah can be,
    Dat man has a heart like a rock ca-ast in de sea,
    Or else he would not have gone so far away from me."



VAGABONDIA


Here they come. Five merry travelers in a snorting, dust-caked automobile.
Wanderers, egad! Bowling rakishly across the country. Dusters and goggles
and sunburn. Prairie nights have sung to them. Little towns have grinned
at them. Mountains, valleys, forests and stars have danced across their
windshield.

The newspaper man stood watching them haul up to the Adams Street curb.
His heart was tired of tall buildings and the endless grimace of windows.
Here was a chariot out of another world. Motor vagabonds. Scooting into a
city with a swagger to their dust-caked wheels. And scooting out again.

The newspaper man thought, "The world isn't buried yet. There's still a
restlessness left. Things change from triremes to motor boats, from
Rosinante to automobiles. But adventure merely mounts a new seat and goes
on. Dick Hovey sang it once:

   "I am fevered with the sunset,
      I am fretful with the bay,
    For the wander thirst is on me
      And my soul is in Cathay."

The five merry travelers crawled out and stretched themselves. They doffed
their goggles and slipped off their linen dusters and changed forthwith
from a group of flying gnomes into five tired-looking citizens of
California. Two middle aged women. Two middle-aged men and a son.

One of the men said, "Well, we'll lay up here for awhile, I got a blister
on my hand from the wheel."

One of the women answered, "I must buy some hairpins, Martin."

The newspaper man said to himself, "What ho! I'll give them a ring. Why
not? A story of the modern wanderlust. Anyway, they're not averse to
publicity seeing they've got two 'coast to coast' pennants on the back of
their machine. What they've seen. Why they've journeyed. A tirade against
the monotony of business. And I'll stick in one of Hovey's stanzas, the
one that goes:

   "There's a schooner in the offing
      With her topsails shot with fire.
    And my heart has gone aboard her
      For the Islands of Desire."

"You can say," said the spokesman of the wanderers, "that this is Martin
S. Stevers and party. I am Mr. Stevers of the Stevers Linseed Oil Company
in San Francisco. Here's my card."

"Thanks," said the newspaper man, taking the card.

"And now," spake on the spokesman of the wanderers, "what can I do for
you?"

Newspaper men are perhaps the only creatures who as a type never learn how
to ask questions. An embarrassment caused by the stupidity of the gabby
great whom they interrogate daily puts a crimp into their tongues. Their
questions wince in anticipation of the banalities they are doomed to
elicit. Their curiosity collapses under the shadow of the inevitable,
impending bromide.

Thus the newspaper man, wearily certain that regardless of what he asks or
how he asks it, he will hear for answers only the clumsy asininities
behind which the personalities, leaders and sacred white cows pompously
attitudinize, gets so that he mumbles a bit incoherently.

But here was a different case. Here were merry travelers with memories of
wind-swept valleys and star-capped mountains to chatter on. So the
newspaper man unearthed his vocabulary, tilted his hat a trifle and smiled
invitingly.

"Well," said he to the spokesman of the wanderers, "The kind of story I'd
like to get would be a story about five people wandering across the
country. You know. Hills, sunsets, trees and how those things drive away
the monotony that fills up the hearts of city folk. What you enjoyed on
the trip and the advantages of a rover over a swivel-chair statistician."

An eloquence was beginning to skip around on the newspaper man's tongue.
His heart, weary of tall buildings and the endless grimace of city
windows, began to warm under the visions his phrases aroused.

Then he paused. One of the women had interrupted. "Go on Martin, you can
tell him all that. And don't forget about the lovely hotel breakfast room
in Des Moines."

Martin, however, hesitated. He was a heavy-set, large-faced man with
expansive features almost devoid of expression. Suddenly his face lighted
up. His hands jumped together and he rubbed their palms enthusiastically.

"I see," he said with profundity. "I see."

"Yes," breathed the newspaper man.

"Well," said Mr. Stevers, "the first thing I'd like to tell you, young
man, is about the car. You won't believe this, but we've been making
twenty miles on a gallon, that is, averaging twenty miles on each and
every gallon, sir, since we left San Francisco. Pretty good, eh?"

On a piece of scratch paper the newspaper man obediently wrote, "twenty
miles, gallon."

"And then," went on the spokesman for the wanderers, "Our speed, eh? You'd
like to know that? Well, without stretching the thing at all, and you can
verify it from any of my party, we've averaged twenty-six miles an hour
all the time out. I tell you the old boat had to travel some to do that."

'"Twenty-six miles," scribbled the newspaper man, adding after it, "The
man's an idiot."

Mr. Stevers, unmindful, loosened up. The price of gasoline. The price of
breakfasts. The condition of the roads. How long a stretch they had been
able to do without a halt. How many hours a day he himself had stuck at
the wheel. When he had finished the newspaper man bowed and walked
abruptly away.

       *       *       *       *       *

The newspaper man's thoughts form a conclusion.

"It's true, then," he thought, "the world's becoming as stupid as it
looks. People are drying up inside with facts, figures, dollar signs. This
man and his party would have got as much out of their cross-country trip
if they'd all been blindfolded and shot through a tunnel two thousand feet
under the ground. Man is like an audience and he has walked out on mystery
and adventure. The show kind of tired him. And got his goat. It would have
been a good yarn otherwise, the motor vagabonds. I'd have ended with
Hovey's verse:

   "I must forth again tomorrow,
      With the sunset I must be
    Hull down on the trail of rapture
      In the wonder of the sea."

Mumbling the lines to himself, the newspaper man strode on through the
crowded loop with a sudden swagger in his eyes.



NIRVANA


The newspaper man felt a bit pensive. He sat in his bedroom frowning at
his typewriter. About eight years ago he had decided to write a novel. Not
that he had anything particular in his mind to write about. But the city
was such a razzle-dazzle of dreams, tragedies, fantasies; such a crazy
monotone of streets and windows that it filled the newspaper man's thought
from day to day with an irritating blur.

And for eight years or so the newspaper man had been fumbling around
trying to get it down on paper. But no novel had grown out of the blur in
his head.

       *       *       *       *       *

The newspaper man put on his last year's straw hat and went into the
street, taking his pensiveness with him. Warm. Rows of arc lights. A
shifting crowd. There are some streets that draw aimless feet. The blazing
store fronts, clothes shops, candy shops, drug-stores, Victrola shops,
movie theatres invite with the promise of a saturnalia in suspense.

At Wilson Avenue and Sheridan Road the newspaper man paused. Here the
loneliness he had felt in his bedroom seemed to grow more acute. Not only
his own aimlessness, but the aimlessness of the staring, smiling crowd
afflicted him.

Then out of the babble of faces he heard his name called. A rouged young
flapper, high heeled, short skirted and a jaunty green hat. One of the
impudent little swaggering boulevard promenaders who talk like simpletons
and dance like Salomes, who laugh like parrots and ogle like Pierettes.
The birdlike strut of her silkened legs, the brazen lure of her stenciled
child face, the lithe grimace of her adolescent body under the stiff
coloring of her clothes were a part of the blur in the newspaper man's
mind.

She was one of the things he fumbled for on the typewriter--one of the
city products born of the tinpan bacchanal of the cabarets. A sort of
frontispiece for an Irving Berlin ballad. The caricature of savagery that
danced to the caricature of music from the jazz bands. The newspaper man
smiled. Looking at her he understood her. But she would not fit into the
typewritten phrases.

"Wilson Avenue," he thought, as he walked beside her chatter. "The wise,
brazen little virgins who shimmy and toddle, but never pay the fiddler.
She's it. Selling her ankles for a glass of pop and her eyes for a fox
trot. Unhuman little piece. A cross between a macaw and a marionette."

       *       *       *       *       *

Thus, the newspaper man thinking and the flapper flapping, they came
together to a cabaret in the neighborhood. The orchestra filled the place
with confetti of sound. Laughter, shouts, a leap of voices, blazing
lights, perspiring waiters, faces and hats thrusting vivid stencils
through the uncoiling tinsel of tobacco smoke.

On the dance floor bodies hugging, toddling, shimmying; faces fastened
together; eyes glassy with incongruous ecstasies.

The newspaper man ordered two drinks of moonshine and let the scene blur
before him like a colored picture puzzle out of focus. Above the music he
heard the childishly strident voice of the flapper:

"Where you been hiding yourself? I thought you and I were cookies. Well,
that's the way with you Johns. But there's enough to go around, you can
bet. Say boy! I met the classiest John the other evening in front of the
Hopper. Did he have class, boy! You know there are some of these fancy
Johns who look like they were the class. But are they? Ask me. Nix. And
don't I give them the berries, quick? Say, I don't let any John get moldy
on me. Soon as I see they're heading for a dumb time I say 'razzberry.'
And off your little sugar toddles."

"How old are you?" inquired the newspaper man abstractedly.

"Eighteen, nosey. Why the insult? I got a new job yesterday with the
telephone company. That makes my sixth job this year. Tell me that ain't
going good? One of the Johns I met in front of the Edgewater steered me to
it. He turned out kind of moldy, and say! he was dumb. But I played along
and got the job.

"Say, I bet you never noticed my swell kicks." The flapper thrust forth
her legs and twirled her feet. "Classy, eh? They go with the lid pretty
nice. Say, you're kind of dumb yourself. You've got moldy since I saw you
last."

"How'd you remember my name?" inquired the newspaper man.

"Oh, there are some Johns who tip over the oil can right from the start.
And you never forget them. Nobody could forget you, handsome. Never no
more, never. What do you say to another shot of hootch? The stuff's
getting rottener and rottener, don't you think? Come on, swallow. Here's
how. Oh, ain't we got fun!"

       *       *       *       *       *

The orchestra paused. It resumed. The crowd thickened. Shouts, laughter,
swaying bodies. A tinkle of glassware, snort of trombones, whang of
banjos. The newspaper man looked on and listened through a film.

The brazen patter of his young friend rippled on. A growing gamin
coarseness in her talk with a nervous, restless twitter underneath. Her
dark child eyes, perverse under their touch of black paint, swung eagerly
through the crowd. Her talk of Johns, of dumb times and moldy times, of
classy times and classy memories varied only slightly. She liked dancing
and amusement parks. Automobile riding not so good. And besides you had to
be careful. There were some Johns who thought it cute to play caveman.
Yes, she'd had a lot of close times, but they wouldn't get her. Never, no,
never no more. Anyway, not while there was music and dancing and a
whoop-de-da-da in the amusement parks.

The newspaper man, listening, thought, "An infant gone mad with her dolls.
Or no, vice has lost its humanness. She's the symbol of new sin--the
unhuman, passionless whirligig of baby girls and baby boys through the
cabarets."

       *       *       *       *       *

They came back from a dance and continued to sit. The din was still
mounting. Entertainers fighting against the racket. Music fighting against
the racket. Bored men and women finally achieving a bedlam and forgetting
themselves in the artifice of confusion.

The newspaper man looking at his young friend saw her taking it in. There
was something he had been trying to fathom about her during her breathless
chattering. She talked, danced, whirled, laughed, let loose giggling
cries. And yet her eyes, the part that the rouge pot or the bead stick
couldn't reach, seemed to grow deader and deader.

The jazz band let out the crash of a new melody. The voices of the crowd
rose in an "ah-ah-ah." Waiters were shoving fresh tables into the place,
squeezing fresh arrivals around them.

The flapper had paused in her breathless rigmarole of Johns and memories.
Leaning forward suddenly she cried into the newspaper man's ear above the
racket:

"Say this is a dumb place."

The newspaper man smiled.

"Ain't it, though?" she went on. There was a pause and then the breathless
voice sighed. She spoke.

"Gee!"--with a laugh that still seemed breathless--"gee, but it's lonely
here!"



THE INDESTRUCTIBLE MASTERPIECE


"You come with me to the Art Institute today," said Max Kramm. "My friend
Broun has an exhibition. You know Broun? Ah, I think he is today the
greatest living artist. No, we will walk. It is only four or five blocks.
And I tell you a story."

A story from Max Kramm is worth attention even though it is hot and though
the Boul Mich pavement feels like a stove griddle through the leather of
one's shoes. For the Dante-faced Max, in addition to being one of the
leading piano professors of the country, the billiard champion of the
Chicago Athletic Club and the most erudite porcelain connoisseur in Harper
Avenue, is one of the survivors of the race of raconteurs that flourished
in the time of nickel cigars and the free lunch.

"I have eight more lessons to administer today," sighed Max with a parting
glower at the premises of the Chicago Musical College, "But when my old
friend Broun has an exhibition I go."

       *       *       *       *       *

"It was when we lived together in a studio in North Avenue," said Max. "Jo
Davidson, Walter Goldbeck and the bunch, we all roomed together in the
same neighborhood and we were poor, I can tell you. But young. And that
makes up for a lot of things.

"Broun and I, we room together in a little attic where I have a piano and
he paints. Even in those days we all knew Frank Broun would be a great
painter if he didn't starve to death first. And the chances looked even.

"Well, there was Schneider, of course. You never heard of him, I'll bet
you. No, he don't paint. And he don't sing and he don't play the piano. He
was somebody much more important than such things. Schneider was the
proprietor of a beer saloon in North Avenue. Where is he now, I wonder?
Well, in those days he saved our life twice a day regularly.

"Broun and I we keep alive for one whole year on Schneider's free lunch.
Herring, pickles, rye bread, pepper beef, boiled ham, onions, pretzels,
roast beef and a big jar full of fine cheese. And, I forgot, a jar full of
olives and a dish of crackers. Oh, there was food fit for a king in
Schneider's. You buy one glass beer, for five cents, and then you eat till
you bust--for nothing.

"You can't imagine what that meant to us in those days. Broun and I, we
sometimes have so much as ten cents a day between us and on this we must
live. So at noon we both go into Schneider's. Broun says, 'You want a
drink, Max? I say, 'No, Frank.' Then I engage Schneider in talk while
Broun makes away with a meal. Then Broun does the talking and it is my
turn.

"Well, it got so that the good Schneider finally points out to us one day.
'Max,' he says, 'and Frank, I tell you something. You boys owe me three
dollars and you come in here and eat all your meals and you don't even pay
for the one glass beer you buy any more. I am sorry, but your credit is
exhausted.'

"So you can imagine what Broun and I feel when we get home. No more
Schneider's, no more food, and eventually we see ourselves both starving
to death.

"'Max' says Broun, 'I have an idea.' And he did.

"Like all great ideas, it was simple. Broun figures that what we need to
do is to convince Schneider we have wonderful prospects and so Schneider
will give us back our credit. So Broun sits down that day and all day and
most of the night he paints. I think it was the last canvas he had in the
studio, too. And a big one. You know all of Broun's landscapes are big.

"Well, he paints and paints, and when he is finished we take the picture
to Schneider, the two of us carrying it. I tell Schneider that it is one
of the old masters which we just received from Berlin from my father's
studio. Then Broun says that Schneider must keep it in his place. It is
too valuable to hang in our attic. Schneider looks at the picture and, it
being so big, he half believes it.

"Then Broun and I go to the bank and draw out our $10 which we have saved
up for a rainy day. And we go down town and get the picture insured for
$2,000. You can imagine Schneider. We bring the insurance gink out there
and when he gives us the policy and we show it to Schneider--well, our
credit is re-established. Herring, rye bread, roast beef, pickles and
cheese once more. We eat.

"Schneider is more proud of that picture than a peacock. And every day we
drop in to see if it is all right and Broun always goes behind the bar and
dusts it off a little and draws himself another drink. There is never any
question any more of our credit. Don't we own a picture insured for
$2,000? The good Schneider is glad to have such affluent customers, you
can believe me.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Well, things go on like this for some months. Then I am coming home one
night with Broun and the fire engines pass us. So Frank and I we go to the
fire.

"It is Schneider's beer saloon. We see it a block off. Frank turns pale
and he holds my arm and he whispers, 'Max, the picture! It is burning up!'

"I look at Brou

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