ease. He reflected upon the mysterious dishes that were brought
into the dining room, the green bottles in buckets of ice, as he
had seen them in the supper party pictures of the Sunday
World supplement. A quick gust of wind brought the rain down
with sudden vehemence, and Paul was startled to find that he was
still outside in the slush of the gravel driveway; that his boots
were letting in the water and his scanty overcoat was clinging wet
about him; that the lights in front of the concert hall were out
and that the rain was driving in sheets between him and the
orange glow of the windows above him. There it was, what be
wanted--tangibly before him, like the fairy world of a Christmas
pantomime--but mocking spirits stood guard at the doors, and, as
the rain beat in his face, Paul wondered whether he were destined
always to shiver in the black night outside, looking up at it.
He turned and walked reluctantly toward the car tracks. The
end had to come sometime; his father in his nightclothes at the
top of the stairs, explanations that did not explain, hastily
improvised fictions that were forever tripping him up,
his upstairs room and its horrible yellow wallpaper, the creaking
bureau with the greasy plush collarbox, and over his painted
wooden bed the pictures of George Washington and John Calvin, and
the framed motto, "Feed my Lambs," which had been worked in red
worsted by his mother.
Half an hour later Paul alighted from his car and went
slowly down one of the side streets off the main thoroughfare.
It was a highly respectable street, where all the houses were
exactly alike, and where businessmen of moderate means begot and
reared large families of children, all of whom went to Sabbath
school and learned the shorter catechism, and were interested in
arithmetic; all of whom were as exactly alike as their homes, and
of a piece with the monotony in which they lived. Paul never
went up Cordelia Street without a shudder of loathing. His home
was next to the house of the Cumberland minister. He approached
it tonight with the nerveless sense Of defeat, the hopeless
feeling of sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that
he had always had when he came home. The moment he turned into
Cordelia Street he felt the waters close above his head. After
each of these orgies of living he experienced all the physical
depression which follows a debauch; the loathing of respectable
beds, of common food, of a house penetrated by kitchen odors; a
shuddering repulsion for the flavorless, colorless mass of
everyday existence; a morbid desire for cool things and soft
lights and fresh flowers.
The nearer he approached the house, the more absolutely
unequal Paul felt to the sight of it all: his ugly sleeping
chamber; the cold bathroom with the grimy zinc tub, the cracked
mirror, the dripping spiggots; his father, at the top of the
stairs, his hairy legs sticking out from his nightshirt, his feet
thrust into carpet slippers. He was so much later than usual
that there would certainly be inquiries and reproaches. Paul
stopped short before the door. He felt that he could not be
accosted by his father tonight; that he could not toss again on
that miserable bed. He would not go in. He would tell his
father that he had no carfare and it was raining so hard he had
gone home with one of the boys and stayed all night.
Meanwhile, he was wet and cold. He went around to the back
of the house and tried one of the basement windows, found it
open, raised it cautiously, and scrambled down the cellar wall to
the floor. There he stood, holding his breath, terrified by the
noise he had made, but the floor above him was silent, and there
was no creak on the stairs. He found a soapbox, and carried it
over to the soft ring of light that streamed from the furnace
door, and sat down. He was horribly afraid of rats, so he did
not try to sleep, but sat looking distrustfully at the dark,
still terrified lest he might have awakened his father. In such
reactions, after one of the experiences which made days and
nights out of the dreary blanks of the calendar, when his senses
were deadened, Paul's head was always singularly clear. Suppose
his father had heard him getting in at the window and had come
down and shot him for a burglar? Then, again, suppose his father
had come down, pistol in hand, and he had cried out in time to
save himself, and his father had been horrified to think how
nearly he had killed him? Then, again, suppose a day should come
when his father would remember that night, and wish there had
been no warning cry to stay his hand? With this last supposition
Paul entertained himself until daybreak.
The following Sunday was fine; the sodden November chill was
broken by the last flash of autumnal summer. In the morning Paul
had to go to church and Sabbath school, as always. On seasonable
Sunday afternoons the burghers of Cordelia Street always sat out
on their front stoops and talked to their neighbors on the next
stoop, or called to those across the street in neighborly
fashion. The men usually sat on gay cushions placed upon the
steps that led down to the sidewalk, while the women, in their
Sunday "waists," sat in rockers on the cramped porches, pretending
to be greatly at their ease. The children played in the
streets; there were so many of them that the place resembled the
recreation grounds of a kindergarten. The men on the steps--all
in their shirt sleeves, their vests unbuttoned--sat with their
legs well apart, their stomachs comfortably protruding, and
talked of the prices of things, or told anecdotes of the sagacity
of their various chiefs and overlords. They occasionally looked
over the multitude of squabbling children, listened
affectionately to their high-pitched, nasal voices, smiling to
see their own proclivities reproduced in their offspring, and
interspersed their legends of the iron kings with remarks about
their sons' progress at school, their grades in arithmetic, and
the amounts they had saved in their toy banks.
On this last Sunday of November Paul sat all the afternoon
on the lowest step of his stoop, staring into the street, while
his sisters, in their rockers, were talking to the minister's
daughters next door about how many shirtwaists they had made in
the last week, and bow many waffles someone had eaten at the last
church supper. When the weather was warm, and his father was in
a particularly jovial frame of mind, the girls made lemonade,
which was always brought out in a red-glass pitcher, ornamented
with forget-me-nots in blue enamel. This the girls thought very
fine, and the neighbors always joked about the suspicious color
of the pitcher.
Today Paul's father sat on the top step, talking to a young
man who shifted a restless baby from knee to knee. He happened
to be the young man who was daily held up to Paul as a model, an
d
after whom it was his father's dearest hope that he would
pattern. This young man was of a ruddy complexion, with a
compressed, red mouth, and faded, nearsighted eyes, over which he
wore thick spectacles, with gold bows that curved about his ears.
He was clerk to one of the magnates of a great steel corporation,
and was looked upon in Cordelia Street as a young man with a
future. There was a story that, some five years ago--he was now
barely twenty-six--he had been a trifle dissipated, but in order
to curb his appetites and save the loss of time and strength that
a sowing of wild oats might have entailed, he had taken his
chief's advice, oft reiterated to his employees, and at twenty-
one had married the first woman whom he could persuade to share
his fortunes. She happened to be an angular schoolmistress, much
older than he, who also wore thick glasses, and who had now borne
him four children, all nearsighted, like herself.
The young man was relating how his chief, now cruising in
the Mediterranean, kept in touch with all the details of
the business, arranging his office hours on his yacht just as
though he were at home, and "knocking off work enough to keep two
stenographers busy." His father told, in turn, the plan his
corporation was considering, of putting in an electric railway
plant in Cairo. Paul snapped his teeth; he had an awful
apprehension that they might spoil it all before he got there.
Yet he rather liked to hear these legends of the iron kings that
were told and retold on Sundays and holidays; these stories of
palaces in Venice, yachts on the Mediterranean, and high play at
Monte Carlo appealed to his fancy, and he was interested in the
triumphs of these cash boys who had become famous, though he had
no mind for the cash-boy stage.
After supper was over and he had helped to dry the dishes,
Paul nervously asked his father whether he could go to George's
to get some help in his geometry, and still more nervously asked
for carfare. This latter request he had to repeat, as his
father, on principle, did not like to hear requests for money,
whether much or little. He asked Paul whether he could not go to
some boy who lived nearer, and told him that he ought not to
leave his schoolwork until Sunday; but he gave him the dime. He
was not a poor man, but he had a worthy ambition to come up in
the world. His only reason for allowing Paul to usher was that
he thought a boy ought to be earning a little.
Paul bounded upstairs, scrubbed the greasy odor of the
dishwater from his hands with the ill-smelling soap he hated, and
then shook over his fingers a few drops of violet water from the
bottle he kept hidden in his drawer. He left the house with his
geometry conspicuously under his arm, and the moment he got out
of Cordelia Street and boarded a downtown car, he shook off the
lethargy of two deadening days and began to live again.
The leading juvenile of the permanent stock company which played at
one of the downtown theaters was an acquaintance of Paul's, and the
boy had been invited to drop in at the Sunday-night rehearsals
whenever he could. For more than a year Paul had spent every
available moment loitering about Charley Edwards's dressing room.
He had won a place among Edwards's following not only because the
young actor, who could not afford to employ a dresser, often found
him useful, but because he recognized in Paul something akin to
what churchmen term "vocation."
It was at the theater and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really
lived; the rest was but a sleep and a forgetting. This was
Paul's fairy tale, and it had for him all the allurement of a
secret love. The moment he inhaled the gassy, painty, dusty odor
behind the scenes, he breathed like a prisoner set free, and felt
within him the possibility of doing or saying splendid,
brilliant, poetic things. The moment the cracked orchestra beat
out the overture from Martha, or jerked at the serenade from
Rigoletto, all stupid and ugly things slid from him, and his
senses were deliciously, yet delicately fired.
Perhaps it was because, in Paul's world, the natural nearly
always wore the guise of ugliness, that a certain element of
artificiality seemed to him necessary in beauty. Perhaps it was
because his experience of life elsewhere was so full of Sabbath-
school picnics, petty economies, wholesome advice as to how to
succeed in life, and the inescapable odors of cooking, that he
found this existence so alluring, these smartly clad men and
women so attractive, that he was so moved by these starry apple
orchards that bloomed perennially under the limelight.
It would be difficult to put it strongly enough how
convincingly the stage entrance of that theater was for Paul the
actual portal of Romance. Certainly none of the company ever
suspected it, least of all Charley Edwards. It was very like the
old stories that used to float about London of fabulously rich
Jews, who had subterranean halls there, with palms, and
fountains, and soft lamps and richly appareled women who never
saw the disenchanting light of London day. So, in the midst of
that smoke-palled city, enamored of figures and grimy toil, Paul
had his secret temple, his wishing carpet, his bit of blue-and-
white Mediterranean shore bathed in perpetual sunshine.
Several of Paul's teachers had a theory that his imagination
had been perverted by garish fiction, but the truth was that he
scarcely ever read at all. The books at home were not such as
would either tempt or corrupt a youthful mind, and as for reading
the novels that some of his friends urged upon him--well, he got
what he wanted much more quickly from music; any sort of music,
from an orchestra to a barrel organ. He needed only the spark, the
indescribable thrill that made his imagination master of his
senses, and he could make plots and pictures enough of his own. It
was equally true that he was not stagestruck-not, at any rate, in
the usual acceptation of that expression. He had no desire to
become an actor, any more than he had to become a musician. He
felt no necessity to do any of these things; what he wanted was
to see, to be in the atmosphere, float on the wave of it, to be
carried out, blue league after blue league, away from everything.
After a night behind the scenes Paul found the schoolroom
more than ever repulsive; the bare floors and naked walls; the
prosy men who never wore frock coats, or violets in their
buttonholes; the women with their dull gowns, shrill voices, and
pitiful seriousness about prepositions that govern the dative.
He could not bear to have the other pupils think, for a moment,
that he took these people seriously; he must convey to them that
he considered it all trivial, and was there only by way of a
jest, anyway. He had autographed pictures of all the members of
the stock company which he showed his classmates, telli
ng them
the most incredible stories of his familiarity with these people,
of his acquaintance with the soloists who came to Carnegie Hall,
his suppers with them and the flowers he sent them. When these
stories lost their effect, and his audience grew listless, he
became desperate and would bid all the boys good-by, announcing
that he was going to travel for a while; going to Naples, to
Venice, to Egypt. Then, next Monday, he would slip back,
conscious and nervously smiling; his sister was ill, and he
should have to defer his voyage until spring.
Matters went steadily worse with Paul at school. In the
itch to let his instructors know how heartily he despised them
and their homilies, and how thoroughly he was appreciated
elsewhere, he mentioned once or twice that he had no time to fool
with theorems; adding--with a twitch of the eyebrows and a touch
of that nervous bravado which so perplexed them--that he was
helping the people down at the stock company; they were old
friends of his.
The upshot of the matter was that the Principal went to
Paul's father, and Paul was taken out of school and put to work.
The manager at Carnegie Hall was told to get another usher in his
stead; the doorkeeper at the theater was warned not to admit him
to the house; and Charley Edwards remorsefully promised the boy's
father not to see him again.
The members of the stock company were vastly amused when
some of Paul's stories reached them--especially the women. They
were hardworking women, most of them supporting indigent husbands
or brothers, and they laughed rather bitterly at having stirred
the boy to such fervid and florid inventions. They agreed with
the faculty and with his father that Paul's was a bad case.
The eastbound train was plowing through a January snowstorm;
the dull dawn was beginning to show gray when the engine whistled
a mile out of Newark. Paul started up from the seat where he had
lain curled in uneasy slumber, rubbed the breath-misted window
glass with his hand, and peered out. The snow was whirling in
curling eddies above the white bottom lands, and the drifts lay
already deep in the fields and along the fences, while here and
there the long dead grass and dried weed stalks protruded black
above it. Lights shone from the scattered houses, and a gang of
laborers who stood beside the track waved their lanterns.
Paul had slept very little, and he felt grimy and uncomfortable.
He had made the all-night journey in a day coach, partly because he
was ashamed, dressed as he was, to go into a Pullman, and partly
because he was afraid of being seen there by some Pittsburgh
businessman, who might have noticed him in Denny & Carson's office.
When the whistle awoke him, he clutched quickly at his breast
pocket, glancing about him with an uncertain smile. But the
little, clay-bespattered Italians were still sleeping, the
slatternly women across the aisle were in open-mouthed oblivion,
and even the crumby, crying babies were for the nonce stilled.
Paul settled back to struggle with his impatience as best he could.
When he arrived at the Jersey City station he hurried through his
breakfast, manifestly ill at ease and keeping a sharp eye about
him. After he reached the Twenty-third Street station, he
consulted a cabman and had himself driven to a men's-furnishings
establishment that was just opening for the day. He spent upward
of two hours there, buying with endless reconsidering and great
care. His new street suit he put on in the fitting room; the frock
coat and dress clothes he had bundled into the cab with his linen.
Then he drove to a hatter's and a shoe house. His next errand was
at Tiffany's, where he selected his silver and a new scarf pin. He
would not wait to have his silver marked, he said. Lastly, he
stopped at a trunk shop on Broadway and had his purchases packed
into various traveling bags.
It was a little after one o'clock when he drove up to the
Waldorf, and after settling with the cabman, went into the
office. He registered from Washington; said his mother and