Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a
certain vast bulk of the population of the red brick district of the lower West
Side. Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to
furnished room, transients forever—transients in abode, transients in heart and
mind. They sing "Home, Sweet Home" in ragtime; they carry their lares
et penates in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a picture hat; a rubber
plant is their fig tree.
Hence the houses
of this district, having had a thousand dwellers, should have a thousand tales
to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but it would be strange if there could not
be found a ghost or two in the wake of all these vagrant guests.
One evening after
dark a young man prowled among these crumbling red mansions, ringing their
bells. At the twelfth he rested his lean hand-baggage upon the step and wiped
the dust from his hatband and forehead. The bell sounded faint and far away in
some remote, hollow depths.
To the door of
this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung, came a housekeeper who made him
think of an unwholesome, surfeited worm that had eaten its nut to a hollow
shell and now sought to fill the vacancy with edible lodgers.
He asked if there
was a room to let.
"Come
in," said the housekeeper. Her voice came from her throat; her throat
seemed lined with fur. "I have the third floor back, vacant since a week
back. Should you wish to look at it?"
The young man
followed her up the stairs. A faint light from no particular source mitigated
the shadows of the halls. They trod noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its
own loom would have forsworn. It seemed to have become vegetable; to have
degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that
grew in patches to the staircase and was viscid under the foot like organic
matter. At each turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the wall. Perhaps
plants had once been set within them. If so they had died in that foul and
tainted air. It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but it was
not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them forth in the
darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished pit below.
"This is the
room," said the housekeeper, from her furry throat. "It's a nice
room. It ain't often vacant. I had some most elegant people in it last
summer—no trouble at all, and paid in advance to the minute. The water's at the
end of the hall. Sprowls and Mooney kept it three months. They done a
vaudeville sketch. Miss B'retta Sprowls—you may have heard of her—Oh, that was
just the stage names—right there over the dresser is where the marriage
certificate hung, framed. The gas is here, and you see there is plenty of
closet room. It's a room everybody likes. It never stays idle long."
"Do you have
many theatrical people rooming here?" asked the young man.
"They comes
and goes. A good proportion of my lodgers is connected with the theatres. Yes,
sir, this is the theatrical district. Actor people never stays long anywhere. I
get my share. Yes, they comes and they goes."
He engaged the
room, paying for a week in advance. He was tired, he said, and would take
possession at once. He counted out the money. The room had been made ready, she
said, even to towels and water. As the housekeeper moved away he put, for the
thousandth time, the question that he carried at the end of his tongue.
"A young
girl—Miss Vashner—Miss Eloise Vashner—do you remember such a one among your
lodgers? She would be singing on the stage, most likely. A fair girl, of medium
height and slender, with reddish, gold hair and a dark mole near her left
eyebrow."
"No, I don't
remember the name. Them stage people has names they change as often as their
rooms. They comes and they goes. No, I don't call that one to mind."
No. Always no.
Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the inevitable negative. So much
time spent by day in questioning managers, agents, schools and choruses; by
night among the audiences of theatres from all-star casts down to music halls
so low that he dreaded to find what he most hoped for. He who had loved her
best had tried to find her. He was sure that since her disappearance from home
this great, water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous
quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its upper
granules of to-day buried to-morrow in ooze and slime.
The furnished
room received its latest guest with a first glow of pseudo-hospitality, a
hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the specious smile of a demirep. The
sophistical comfort came in reflected gleams from the decayed furniture, the
ragged brocade upholstery of a couch and two chairs, a foot-wide cheap pier
glass between the two windows, from one or two gilt picture frames and a brass
bedstead in a corner.
The guest
reclined, inert, upon a chair, while the room, confused in speech as though it
were an apartment in Babel, tried to discourse to him of its divers tenantry.
A polychromatic
rug like some brilliant-flowered rectangular, tropical islet lay surrounded by
a billowy sea of soiled matting. Upon the gay-papered wall were those pictures
that pursue the homeless one from house to house—The Huguenot Lovers, The First
Quarrel, The Wedding Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel's chastely
severe outline was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly
askew like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it was some desolate
flotsam cast aside by the room's marooned when a lucky sail had borne them to a
fresh port—a trifling vase or two, pictures of actresses, a medicine bottle,
some stray cards out of a deck.
One by one, as
the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the little signs left by the
furnished room's procession of guests developed a significance. The threadbare
space in the rug in front of the dresser told that lovely woman had marched in
the throng. Tiny finger prints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to
feel their way to sun and air. A splattered stain, raying like the shadow of a
bursting bomb, witnessed where a hurled glass or bottle had splintered with its
contents against the wall. Across the pier glass had been scrawled with a
diamond in staggering letters the name "Marie." It seemed that the
succession of dwellers in the furnished room had turned in fury—perhaps tempted
beyond forbearance by its garish coldness—and wreaked upon it their passions.
The furniture was chipped and bruised; the couch, distorted by bursting
springs, seemed a horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of
some grotesque convulsion. Some more potent upheaval had cloven a great slice
from the marble mantel. Each plank in the floor owned its particular cant and
shriek as from a separate and individual agony. It seemed incredible that all
this malice and injury had been wrought upon the room by those who had called
it for a time their home; and yet it may have been the cheated home instinct
surviving blindly, the resentful rage at false household gods that had kindled
their wrath. A hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.
The young tenant
in the chair allowed these thoughts to file, soft-shod, through his mind, while
there drifted into the room furnished sounds and furnished scents. He heard in
one room a tittering and incontinent, slack laughter; in others the monologue
of a scold, the rattling of dice, a lullaby, and one crying dully; above him a
banjo tinkled with spirit. Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains roared
intermittently; a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence. And he breathed the
breath of the house—a dank savour rather than a smell—a cold, musty effluvium as
from underground vaults mingled with the reeking exhalations of linoleum and
mildewed and rotten woodwork.
Then, suddenly,
as he rested there, the room was filled with the strong, sweet odour of
mignonette. It came as upon a single buffet of wind with such sureness and
fragrance and emphasis that it almost seemed a living visitant. And the man
cried aloud: "What, dear?" as if he had been called, and sprang up
and faced about. The rich odour clung to him and wrapped him around. He reached
out his arms for it, all his senses for the time confused and commingled. How
could one be peremptorily called by an odour? Surely it must have been a sound.
But, was it not the sound that had touched, that had caressed him?
"She has
been in this room," he cried, and he sprang to wrest from it a token, for
he knew he would recognize the smallest thing that had belonged to her or that
she had touched. This enveloping scent of mignonette, the odour that she had
loved and made her own—whence came it?
The room had been
but carelessly set in order. Scattered upon the flimsy dresser scarf were half
a dozen hairpins—those discreet, indistinguishable friends of womankind,
feminine of gender, infinite of mood and uncommunicative of tense. These he
ignored, conscious of their triumphant lack of identity. Ransacking the drawers
of the dresser he came upon a discarded, tiny, ragged handkerchief. He pressed
it to his face. It was racy and insolent with heliotrope; he hurled it to the
floor. In another drawer he found odd buttons, a theatre programme, a
pawnbroker's card, two lost marshmallows, a book on the divination of dreams.
In the last was a woman's black satin hair bow, which halted him, poised
between ice and fire. But the black satin hair-bow also is femininity's demure,
impersonal, common ornament, and tells no tales.
And then he
traversed the room like a hound on the scent, skimming the walls, considering
the corners of the bulging matting on his hands and knees, rummaging mantel and
tables, the curtains and hangings, the drunken cabinet in the corner, for a
visible sign, unable to perceive that she was there beside, around, against,
within, above him, clinging to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly
through the finer senses that even his grosser ones became cognisant of the
call. Once again he answered loudly: "Yes, dear!" and turned,
wild-eyed, to gaze on vacancy, for he could not yet discern form and colour and
love and outstretched arms in the odour of mignonette. Oh, God! whence that
odour, and since when have odours had a voice to call? Thus he groped.
He burrowed in
crevices and corners, and found corks and cigarettes. These he passed in
passive contempt. But once he found in a fold of the matting a half-smoked
cigar, and this he ground beneath his heel with a green and trenchant oath. He
sifted the room from end to end. He found dreary and ignoble small records of
many a peripatetic tenant; but of her whom he sought, and who may have lodged
there, and whose spirit seemed to hover there, he found no trace.
And then he
thought of the housekeeper.
He ran from the
haunted room downstairs and to a door that showed a crack of light. She came
out to his knock. He smothered his excitement as best he could.
"Will you
tell me, madam," he besought her, "who occupied the room I have
before I came?"
"Yes, sir. I
can tell you again. 'Twas Sprowls and Mooney, as I said. Miss B'retta Sprowls
it was in the theatres, but Missis Mooney she was. My house is well known for
respectability. The marriage certificate hung, framed, on a nail over—"
"What kind
of a lady was Miss Sprowls—in looks, I mean?"
Why,
black-haired, sir, short, and stout, with a comical face. They left a week ago
Tuesday."
"And before
they occupied it?"
"Why, there
was a single gentleman connected with the draying business. He left owing me a
week. Before him was Missis Crowder and her two children, that stayed four
months; and back of them was old Mr. Doyle, whose sons paid for him. He kept
the room six months. That goes back a year, sir, and further I do not
remember."
He thanked her
and crept back to his room. The room was dead. The essence that had vivified it
was gone. The perfume of mignonette had departed. In its place was the old,
stale odour of mouldy house furniture, of atmosphere in storage.
The ebbing of his hope drained his faith. He sat staring at the
yellow, singing gaslight. Soon he walked to the bed and began to tear the
sheets into strips. With the blade of his knife he drove them tightly into
every crevice around windows and door. When all was snug and taut he turned out
the light, turned the gas full on again and laid himself gratefully upon the
bed.
* * *
It was Mrs. McCool's night to go with the can for
beer. So she fetched it and sat with Mrs. Purdy in one of those subterranean
retreats where house-keepers foregather and the worm dieth seldom.
"I rented
out my third floor, back, this evening," said Mrs. Purdy, across a fine
circle of foam. "A young man took it. He went up to bed two hours
ago."
"Now, did
ye, Mrs. Purdy, ma'am?" said Mrs. McCool, with intense admiration.
"You do be a wonder for rentin' rooms of that kind. And did ye tell him,
then?" she concluded in a husky whisper, laden with mystery.
"Rooms,"
said Mrs. Purdy, in her furriest tones, "are furnished for to rent. I did
not tell him, Mrs. McCool."
"'Tis right
ye are, ma'am; 'tis by renting rooms we kape alive. Ye have the rale sense for
business, ma'am. There be many people will rayjict the rentin' of a room if
they be tould a suicide has been after dyin' in the bed of it."
"As you say,
we has our living to be making," remarked Mrs. Purdy.
"Yis, ma'am;
'tis true. 'Tis just one wake ago this day I helped ye lay out the third floor,
back. A pretty slip of a colleen she was to be killin' herself wid the gas—a
swate little face she had, Mrs. Purdy, ma'am."
"She'd
a-been called handsome, as you say," said Mrs. Purdy, assenting but
critical, "but for that mole she had a-growin' by her left eyebrow. Do
fill up your glass again, Mrs. McCool."