PART II—THE VISION
CHAPTER I
Mrs. Brashear’s rooming-house on Grove Street wore its air of respectability like a garment, clean and somber, in an environment of careful behavior. Greenwich Village, not having fully awakened to the commercial advantages of being a locale, had not yet stretched between itself and the rest of New York that gauzy and iridescent curtain of sprightly impropriety and sparkling intellectual naughtiness, since faded to a lather tawdry pattern. An early pioneer of the Villager type, emancipated of thought and speech, chancing upon No. 11 Grove, would have despised it for its lack of atmosphere and its patent conservatism. It did not go out into the highways and byways, seeking prospective lodgers. It folded its hands and waited placidly for them to come. When they came, it pondered them with care, catechized them tactfully, and either rejected them with courteous finality or admitted them on probation. Had it been given to self-exploitation, it could have boasted that never had it harbored a bug or a scandal within its doors.
Now, on this filmy-soft April day it was nonplussed. A type new to its experience was applying for a room, and Mrs. Brashear, who was not only the proprietress, but, as it were, the familiar spirit and incarnation of the institution, sat peering near-sightedly and in some perturbation of soul at the phenomenon. He was young, which was against him, and of a winning directness of manner, which was in his favor, and extremely good to look at, which was potential of complications, and encased in clothing of an uncompromising cut and neutral pattern (to wit; No. 45 T 370, “an ideal style for a young business man of affairs; neat, impressive and dignified”), which was reassuring.
“My name is Banneker,” he had said, immediately the door was opened to him. “Can I get a room here?”
“There is a room vacant,” admitted the spirit of the house unwillingly.
“I’d like to see it.”
As he spoke, he was mounting the stairs; she must, perforce, follow. On the third floor she passed him and led the way to a small, morosely papered front room, almost glaringly clean.
“All right, if I can have a work-table in it and if it isn’t too much,” he said, after one comprehensive glance around.
“The price is five dollars a week.”
Had Banneker but known it, this was rather high. The Brashear rooming-house charged for its cleanliness, physical and moral. “Can I move in at once?” he inquired.
“I don’t know you nor anything about you, Mr. Banneker,” she replied, but not until they had descended the stairs and were in the cool, dim parlor. At the moment of speaking, she raised a shade, as if to help in the determination.
“Is that necessary? They didn’t ask me when I registered at the hotel.”
Mrs. Brashear stared, then smiled. “A hotel is different. Where are you stopping?”
“At the St. Denis.”
“A very nice place. Who directed you here?”
“No one. I strolled around until I found a street I liked, and looked around until I found a house I liked. The card in the window—”
“Of course. Well, Mr. Banneker, for the protection of the house I must have references.”
“References? You mean letters from people?”
“Not necessarily. Just a name or two from whom I can make inquiries. You have friends, I suppose.”
“No.”
“Your family—”
“I haven’t any.”
“Then the people in the place where you work. What is your business, by the way?”
“I expect to go on a newspaper.”
“Expect?” Mrs. Brashear stiffened in defense of the institution. “You have no place yet?”
He answered not her question, but her doubt. “As far as that is concerned, I’ll pay in advance.”
“It isn’t the financial consideration,” she began loftily—“alone,” she added more honestly. “But to take in a total stranger—”
Banneker leaned forward to her. “See here, Mrs. Brashear; there’s nothing wrong about me. I don’t get drunk. I don’t smoke in bed. I’m decent of habit and I’m clean. I’ve got money enough to carry me. Couldn’t you take me on my say-so? Look me over.”
Though it was delivered with entire gravity, the speech provoked a tired and struggling smile on the landlady’s plain features. She looked.
“Well?” he queried pleasantly. “What do you think? Will you take a chance?”
That suppressed motherliness which, embodying the unformulated desire to look after and care for others, turns so many widows to taking lodgers, found voice in Mrs. Brashear’s reply:
“You’ve had a spell of sickness, haven’t you?”
“No,” he said, a little sharply. “Where did you get that idea?”
“Your eyes look hot.”
“I haven’t been sleeping very well. That’s all.”
“Too bad. You’ve had a loss, maybe,” she ventured sympathetically.
“A loss? No.... Yes. You might call it a loss. You’ll take me, then?”
“You can move in right away,” said Mrs. Brashear recklessly.
So the Brashear rooming-house took into its carefully guarded interior the young and unknown Mr. Banneker—who had not been sleeping well. Nor did he seem to be sleeping well in his new quarters, since his light was to be seen glowing out upon the quiet street until long after midnight; yet he was usually up betimes, often even before the moving spirit of the house, herself. A full week had he been there before his fellow lodgers, self-constituted into a Committee on Membership, took his case under consideration in full session upon the front steps. None had had speech with him, but it was known that he kept irregular hours.
“What’s his job: that’s what I’d like to know,” demanded in a tone of challenge, young Wickert, a man of the world who clerked in the decorative department of a near-by emporium.
“Newsboy, I guess,” said Lambert, the belated art-student of thirty-odd with a grin. “He’s always got his arms full of papers when he comes in.”
“And he sits at his table clipping pieces out of them and arranging them in piles,” volunteered little Mrs. Bolles, the trained nurse on the top floor. “I’ve seen him as I go past.”
“Help-wanted ads,” suggested Wickert, who had suffered experience in that will-o’-the-wisp chase.
“Then he hasn’t got a job,” deduced Mr. Hainer, a heavy man of heavy voice and heavy manner, middle-aged, a small-salaried accountant.
“Maybe he’s got money,” suggested Lambert.
“Or maybe he’s a dead beat; he looks on the queer,” opined young Wickert.
“He has a very fine and sensitive face. I think he has been ill.” The opinion came from a thin, quietly dressed woman of the early worn-out period of life, who sat a little apart from the others. Young Wickert started a sniff, but suppressed it, for Miss Westlake was held locally in some degree of respect, as being “well-connected” and having relatives who called on her in their own limousines, though seldom.
“Anybody know his name?” asked Lambert.
“Barnacle,” said young Wickert wittily. “Something like that, anyway. Bannsocker, maybe. Guess he’s some sort of a Swede.”
“Well, I only hope he doesn’t clear out some night with his trunk on his back and leave poor Mrs. Brashear to whistle,” declared Mrs. Bolles piously.
The worn face of the landlady, with its air of dispirited motherliness, appeared in the doorway. “Mr. Banneker is a gentleman,” she said.
“Gentleman” from Mrs. Brashear, with that intonation, meant one who, out of or in a job, paid his room rent. The new lodger had earned the title by paying his month in advance. Having settled that point, she withdrew, followed by the two other women. Lambert, taking a floppy hat from the walnut rack in the hall, went his way, leaving young Wickert and Mr. Hainer to support the discussion, which they did in tones less discreet than the darkness warranted.
“Where would he hail from, would you think?” queried the elder. “Iowa, maybe? Or Arkansas?”
“Search me,” answered young Wickert. “But it was a small-town carpenter built those honest-to-Gawd clothes. I’d say the corn-belt.”
“Dressed up for the monthly meeting of the Farmers’ Alliance, all but the oil on his hair. He forgot that,” chuckled the accountant.
“He’s got a fine chance in Nuh Yawk—of buying a gold brick cheap,” prophesied the worldly Wickert out of the depths of his metropolitan experience. “Somebody ought to put him onto himself.”
A voice from the darkened window above said, with composure, “That will be all right. I’ll apply to you for advice.”
“Oh, Gee!” whispered young Wickert, in appeal to his companion. “How long’s he been there?”
Acute hearing, it appeared, was an attribute of the man above, for he answered at once:
“Just put my head out for a breath of air when I heard your kind expressions of solicitude. Why? Did I miss something that came earlier?”
Mr. Hainer melted unostentatiously into the darkness. While young Wickert was debating whether his pride would allow him to follow this prudent example, the subject of their over-frank discussion appeared at his elbow. Evidently he was as light of foot as he was quick of ear. Meditating briefly upon these physical qualities, young Wickert said, in a deprecatory tone:
“We didn’t mean to get fresh with you. It was just talk.”
“Very interesting talk.”
Wickert produced a suspiciously jeweled case. “Have a cigarette?”
“I have some of my own, thank you.”
“Give you a light?”
The metropolitan worldling struck a match and held it up. This was on the order of strategy. He wished to see Banneker’s face. To his relief it did not look angry or even stern. Rather, it appeared thoughtful. Banneker was considering impartially the matter of his apparel.
“What is the matter with my clothes?” he asked.
“Why—well,” began Wickert, unhappy and fumbling with his ideas; “Oh, they’re all right.”
“For a meeting of the Farmers’ Alliance.” Banneker was smiling good-naturedly. “But for the East?”
“Well, if you really want to know,” began Wickert doubtfully. “If you won’t get sore—” Banneker nodded his assurance. “Well, they’re jay. No style. No snap. Respectable, and that lets ’em out.”
“They don’t look as if they were made in New York or for New York?”
Young Mr. Wickert apportioned his voice equitably between a laugh and a snort. “No: nor in Hoboken!” he retorted. “Listen, ‘bo,” he added, after a moment’s thought. “You got to have a smooth shell in Nuh Yawk. The human eye only sees the surface. Get me? And it judges by the surface.” He smoothed his hands down his dapper trunk with ineffable complacency. “Thirty-eight dollars, this. Bernholz Brothers, around on Broadway. Look it over. That’s a cut!”
“Is that how they’re making them in the East?” doubtfully asked the neophyte, reflecting that the pinched-in snugness of the coat, and the flare effect of the skirts, while unquestionably more impressive than his own box-like garb, still lacked something of the quiet distinction which he recalled in the clothes of Herbert Cressey. The thought of that willing messenger set him to groping for another sartorial name. He hardly heard Wickert say proudly:
“If Bernholz’s makes ’em that way, you can bet it’s up to the split-second of date, and maybe they beat the pistol by a jump. I bluffed for a raise of five dollars, on the strength of this outfit, and got it off the bat. There’s the suit paid for in two months and a pair of shoes over.” He thrust out a leg, from below the sharp-pressed trouser-line of which protruded a boot trimmed in a sort of bizarre fretwork. “Like me to take you around to Bernholz’s?”
Banneker shook his head. The name for which he sought had come to him. “Did you ever hear of Mertoun, somewhere on Fifth Avenue?”
“Yes. And I’ve seen Central Park and the Statue of Liberty,” railed the other. “Thinkin’ of patternizing Mertoun, was you?”
“Yes, I’d like to.”
“Like to! There’s a party at the Astorbilt’s to-morrow night; you’d like to go to that, wouldn’t you? Fat chance!” said the disdainful and seasoned cit. “D’you know what Mertoun would do to you? Set you back a hundred simoleons soon as look at you. And at that you got to have a letter of introduction like gettin’ in to see the President of the United States or John D. Rockefeller. Come off, my boy! Bernholz’s ‘ll fix you just as good, all but the label. Better come around to-morrow.”
“Much obliged, but I’m not buying yet. Where would you say a fellow would have a chance to see the best-dressed men?”
Young Mr. Wickert looked at once self-conscious and a trifle miffed, for in his own set he was regarded as quite the mould of fashion. “Oh, well, if you want to pipe off the guys that think they’re the whole thing, walk up the Avenue and watch the doors of the clubs and the swell restaurants. At that, they haven’t got anything on some fellows that don’t spend a quarter of the money, but know what’s what and don’t let grafters like Mertoun pull their legs,” said he. “Say, you seem to know what you want, all right, all right,” he added enviously. “You ain’t goin’ to let this little old town bluff you; ay?”
“No. Not for lack of a few clothes. Good-night,” replied Banneker, leaving in young Wickert’s mind the impression that he was “a queer gink,” but also, on the whole, “a good guy.” For the worldling was only small, not mean of spirit.
Banneker might have added that one who had once known cities and the hearts of men from the viewpoint of that modern incarnation of Ulysses, the hobo, contemptuous and predatory, was little likely to be overawed by the most teeming and headlong of human ant-heaps. Having joined the ant-heap, Banneker was shrewdly concerned with the problem of conforming to the best type of termite discoverable. The gibes of the doorstep chatterers had not aroused any new ambition; they had merely given point to a purpose deferred because of other and more immediate pressure. Already he had received from Camilla Van Arsdale a letter rich in suggestion, hint, and subtly indicated advice, with this one passage of frank counsel:
If I were writing, spinster-aunt-wise, to any one else in your position, I should be tempted to moralize and issue warnings about—well, about the things of the spirit. But you are equipped, there. Like the “Master,” you will “go your own way with inevitable motion.” With the outer man—that is different. You have never given much thought to that phase. And you have an asset in your personal appearance. I should not be telling you this if I thought there were danger of your becoming vain. But I really think it would be a good investment for you to put yourself into the hands of a first-class tailor, and follow his advice, in moderation, of course. Get the sense of being fittingly turned out by going where there are well-dressed people; to the opera, perhaps, and the theater occasionally, and, when you can afford it, to a good restaurant. Unless the world has changed, people will look at you. But you must not know it. Important, this is!... I could, of course, give you letters of introduction. “Les morts vont vite,” it is true, and I am dead to that world, not wholly without the longings of a would-be revenant; but a ghost may still claim some privileges of memory, and my friends would be hospitable to you. Only, I strongly suspect that you would not use the letters if I gave them. You prefer to make your own start; isn’t it so? Well; I have written to a few. Sooner or later you will meet with them. Those things always happen even in New York.... Be sure to write me all about the job when you get it—
Prudence dictated that he should be earning something before he invested in expensive apparel, be it never so desirable and important. However, he would outfit himself just as soon as a regular earning capacity justified his going into his carefully husbanded but dwindling savings. He pictured himself clad as a lily of the field, unconscious of perfection as Herbert Cressey himself, in the public haunts of fashion and ease; through which vision there rose the searing prospect of thus encountering Io Welland. What was her married name? He had not even asked when the news was broken to him; had not wanted to ask; was done with all that for all time.
He was still pathetically young and inexperienced. And he had been badly hurt.
CHAPTER II
Dust was the conspicuous attribute of the place. It lay, flat and toneless, upon the desk, the chairs, the floor; it streaked the walls. The semi-consumptive office “boy’s” middle-aged shoulders collected it. It stirred in the wake of quiet-moving men, mostly under thirty-five, who entered the outer door, passed through the waiting-room, and disappeared behind a partition. Banneker felt like shaking himself lest he should be eventually buried under its impalpable sifting. Two hours and a half had passed since he had sent in his name on a slip of paper, to Mr. Gordon, managing editor of the paper. On the way across Park Row he had all but been persuaded by a lightning printer on the curb to have a dozen tasty and elegant visiting-cards struck off, for a quarter; but some vague inhibition of good taste checked him. Now he wondered if a card would have served better.
While he waited, he checked up the actuality of a metropolitan newspaper entrance-room, as contrasted with his notion of it, derived from motion pictures. Here was none of the bustle and hurry of the screen. No brisk and earnest young figures with tense eyes and protruding notebooks darted feverishly in and out; nor, in the course of his long wait, had he seen so much as one specimen of that invariable concomitant of all screen journalism, the long-haired poet with his flowing tie and neatly ribboned manuscript. Even the office “boy,” lethargic, neutrally polite, busy writing on half-sheets of paper, was profoundly untrue to the pictured type. Banneker wondered what the managing editor would be like; would almost, in the wreckage of his preconceived notions, have accepted a woman or a priest in that manifestation, when Mr. Gordon appeared and was addressed by name by the hollow-chested Cerberus. Banneker at once echoed the name, rising.
The managing editor, a tall, heavy man, whose smoothly fitting cutaway coat seemed miraculously to have escaped the plague of dust, stared at him above heavy glasses.
“You want to see me?”
“Yes. I sent in my name.”
“Did you? When?”
“At two-forty-seven, thirty,” replied the visitor with railroad accuracy.
The look above the lowered glasses became slightly quizzical. “You’re exact, at least. Patient, too. Good qualities for a newspaper man. That’s what you are?”
“What I’m going to be,” amended Banneker.
“There is no opening here at present.”
“That’s formula, isn’t it?” asked the young man, smiling.
The other stared. “It is. But how do you know?”
“It’s the tone, I suppose. I’ve had to use it a good deal myself, in railroading.”
“Observant, as well as exact and patient. Come in. I’m sorry I misplaced your card. The name is—?”
“Banneker, E. Banneker.”
Following the editor, he passed through a large, low-ceilinged room, filled with desk-tables, each bearing a heavy crystal ink-well full of a fluid of particularly virulent purple. A short figure, impassive as a Mongol, sat at a corner desk, gazing out over City Hall Park with a rapt gaze. Across from him a curiously trim and graceful man, with a strong touch of the Hibernian in his elongated jaw and humorous gray eyes, clipped the early evening editions with an effect of highly judicious selection. Only one person sat in all the long files of the work-tables, littered with copy-paper and disarranged newspapers; a dark young giant with the discouraged and hurt look of a boy kept in after school. All this Banneker took in while the managing editor was disposing, usually with a single penciled word or number, of a sheaf of telegraphic “queries” left upon his desk. Having finished, he swiveled in his chair, to face Banneker, and, as he spoke, kept bouncing the thin point of a letter-opener from the knuckles of his left hand. His hands were fat and nervous.
“So you want to do newspaper work?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I think I can make a go of it.”
“Any experience?”
“None to speak of. I’ve written a few things. I thought you might remember my name.”
“Your name? Banneker? No. Why should I?”
“You published some of my things in the Sunday edition, lately. From Manzanita, California.”
“No. I don’t think so. Mr. Homans.” A graying man with the gait of a marionnette and the precise expression of a rocking-horse, who had just entered, crossed over. “Have we sent out any checks to a Mr. Banneker recently, in California?”
The new arrival, who was copy-reader and editorial selecter for the Sunday edition, repeated the name in just such a wooden voice as was to be expected. “No,” he said positively.
“But I’ve cashed the checks,” returned Banneker, annoyed and bewildered. “And I’ve seen the clipping of the article in the Sunday Sphere of—”
“Just a moment. You’re not in The Sphere office. Did you think you were? Some one has directed you wrong. This is The Ledger.”
“Oh!” said Banneker. “It was a policeman that pointed it out. I suppose I saw wrong.” He paused; then looked up ingenuously. “But, anyway, I’d rather be on The Ledger.”
Mr. Gordon smiled broadly, the thin blade poised over a plump, reddened knuckle.
“Would you! Now, why?”
“I’ve been reading it. I like the way it does things.”
The editor laughed outright. “If you didn’t look so honest, I would think that somebody of experience had been tutoring you. How many other places have you tried?”
“None.”
“You were going to The Sphere first? On the promise of a job?”
“No. Because they printed what I wrote.”
“The Sphere’s ways are not our ways,” pronounced Mr. Gordon primly. “It’s a fundamental difference in standards.”
“I can see that.”
“Oh, you can, can you?” chuckled the other. “But it’s true that we have no opening here.”
(The Ledger never did have an “opening”; but it managed to wedge in a goodly number of neophytes, from year to year, ninety per cent of whom were automatically and courteously ejected after due trial. Mr. Gordon performed a surpassing rataplan upon his long-suffering thumb-joint and wondered if this queer and direct being might qualify among the redeemable ten per cent.)
“I can wait.” (They often said that.) “For a while,” added the youth thoughtfully.
“How long have you been in New York?”
“Thirty-three days.”
“And what have you been doing?”
“Reading newspapers.”
“No! Reading—That’s rather surprising. All of them?”
“All that I could manage.”
“Some were so bad that you couldn’t worry through them, eh?” asked the other with appreciation.
“Not that. But I didn’t know the foreign languages except French, and Spanish, and a little Italian.”
“The foreign-language press, too. Remarkable!” murmured the other. “Do you mind telling me what your idea was?”
“It was simple enough. As I wanted to get on a newspaper, I thought I ought to find out what newspapers were made of.”
“Simple, as you say. Beautifully simple! So you’ve devised for yourself the little job of perfecting yourself in every department of journalism; politics, finances, criminal, sports, society; all of them, eh?”
“No; not all,” replied Banneker.
“Not? What have you left out?”
“Society news” was the answer, delivered less promptly than the other replies.
Bestowing a twinkle of mingled amusement and conjecture upon the applicant’s clothing, Mr. Gordon said:
“You don’t approve of our social records? Or you’re not interested? Or why is it that you neglect this popular branch?”
“Personal reasons.”
This reply, which took the managing editor somewhat aback, was accurate if not explanatory. Miss Van Arsdale’s commentaries upon Gardner and his quest had inspired Banneker with a contemptuous distaste for this type of journalism. But chiefly he had shunned the society columns from dread of finding there some mention of her who had been Io Welland. He was resolved to conquer and evict that memory; he would not consciously put himself in the way of anything that recalled it.
“Hum! And this notion of making an intensive study of the papers; was that original with you?”
“Well, no, not entirely. I got it from a man who made himself a bank president in seven years.”
“Yes? How did he do that?”
“He started by reading everything he could find about money and coinage and stocks and bonds and other financial paper. He told me that it was incredible the things that financial experts didn’t know about their own business—the deep-down things—and that he guessed it was so with any business. He got on top by really knowing the things that everybody was supposed to know.”
“A sound theory, I dare say. Most financiers aren’t so revealing.”
“He and I were padding the hoof together. We were both hoboes then.”
The managing editor looked up, alert, from his knuckle-tapping. “From bank president to hobo. Was his bank an important one?”
“The biggest in a medium-sized city.”
“And does that suggest nothing to you, as a prospective newspaper man?”
“What? Write him up?”
“It would make a fairly sensational story.”
“I couldn’t do that. He was my friend. He wouldn’t like it.”
Mr. Gordon addressed his wedding-ring finger which was looking a bit scarified. “Such an article as that, properly done, would go a long way toward getting you a chance on this paper—Sit down, Mr. Banneker.”
“You and I,” said Banneker slowly and in the manner of the West, “can’t deal.”
“Yes, we can.” The managing editor threw his steel blade on the desk. “Sit down, I tell you. And understand this. If you come on this paper—I’m going to turn you over to Mr. Greenough, the city editor, with a request that he give you a trial—you’ll be expected to subordinate every personal interest and advantage to the interests and advantages of the paper, except your sense of honor and fair-play. We don’t ask you to give that up; and if you do give it up, we don’t want you at all. What have you done besides be a hobo?”
“Railroading. Station-agent.”
“Where were you educated?”
“Nowhere. Wherever I could pick it up.”
“Which means everywhere. Ever read George Borrow?”
“Yes.”
The heavy face of Mr. Gordon lighted up. “Ree-markable! Keep on. He’s a good offset to—to the daily papers. Writing still counts, on The Ledger. Come over and meet Mr. Greenough.”
The city editor unobtrusively studied Banneker out of placid, inscrutable eyes, soft as a dove’s, while he chatted at large about theaters, politics, the news of the day. Afterward the applicant met the Celtic assistant, Mr. Mallory, who broadly outlined for him the technique of the office. With no further preliminaries Banneker found himself employed at fifteen dollars a week, with Monday for his day off and directions to report on the first of the month.
As the day-desk staff was about departing at six o’clock, Mr. Gordon sauntered over to the city desk looking mildly apologetic.
“I practically had to take that young desert antelope on,” said he.
“Too ingenuous to turn down,” surmised the city editor.
“Ingenuous! He’s heir to the wisdom of the ages. And now I’m afraid I’ve made a ghastly mistake.”
“Something wrong with him?”
“I’ve had his stuff in the Sunday Sphere looked up.”
“Pretty weird?” put in Mallory, gliding into his beautifully fitting overcoat.
“So damned good that I don’t see how The Sphere ever came to take it. Greenough, you’ll have to find some pretext for firing that young phenomenon as soon as possible.”
Perfectly comprehending his superior’s mode of indirect expression the city editor replied:
“You think so highly of him as that?”
“Not one of our jobs will be safe from him if he once gets his foot planted,” prophesied the other with mock ruefulness. “Do you know,” he added, “I never even asked him for a reference.”
“You don’t need to,” pronounced Mallory, shaking the last wrinkle out of himself and lighting the cigarette of departure. “He’s got it in his face, if I’m any judge.”
Highly elate, Banneker walked on springy pavements all the way to Grove Street. Fifteen a week! He could live on that. His other income and savings could be devoted to carrying out Miss Camilla’s advice. For he need not save any more. He would go ahead, fast, now that he had got his start. How easy it had been.
Entering the Brashear door, he met plain, middle-aged little Miss Westlake. A muffler was pressed to her jaw. He recalled having heard her moving about her room, the cheapest and least desirable in the house, and groaning softly late in the night; also having heard some lodgers say that she was a typist with very little work. Obviously she needed a dentist, and presumably she had not the money to pay his fee. In the exultation of his good luck, Banneker felt a stir of helpfulness toward this helpless person.
“Oh!” said he. “How do you do! Could you find time to do some typing for me quite soon?”
It was said impulsively and was followed by a surge of dismay. Typing? Type what? He had absolutely nothing on hand!
Well, he must get up something. At once. It would never do to disappoint that pathetic and eager hope, as of a last-moment rescue, expressed in the little spinster’s quick flush and breathless, thankful affirmative.
CHAPTER III
Ten days’ leeway before entering upon the new work. To which of scores of crowding purposes could Banneker best put the time? In his offhand way the instructive Mallory had suggested that he familiarize himself with the topography and travel-routes of the Island of Manhattan. Indefatigably he set about doing this; wandering from water-front to water-front, invading tenements, eating at queer, Englishless restaurants, picking up chance acquaintance with chauffeurs, peddlers, street-fakers, park-bench loiterers; all that drifting and iridescent scum of life which variegates the surface above the depths. Everywhere he was accepted without question, for his old experience on the hoof had given him the uncoded password which loosens the speech of furtive men and wise. A receptivity, sensitized to a high degree by the inspiration of new adventure, absorbed these impressions. The faithful pocket-ledger was filling rapidly with notes and phrases, brisk and trenchant, set down with no specific purpose; almost mechanically, in fact, but destined to future uses. Mallory, himself no mean connoisseur of the tumultuous and flagrant city, would perhaps have found matter foreign to his expert apprehension could he have seen and translated the pages of 3 T 9901.
Banneker would go forward in the fascinating paths of exploration; but there were other considerations.
The outer man, for example. The inner man, too; the conscious inner man strengthened upon the strong milk of the philosophers, the priests, and the prophets so strangely mingled in that library now stored with Camilla Van Arsdale; exhilarated by the honey-dew of “The Undying Voices,” of Keats and Shelley, and of Swinburne’s supernal rhythms, which he had brought with him. One visit to the Public Library had quite appalled him; the vast, chill orderliness of it. He had gone there, hungry to chat about books! To the Public Library! Surely a Homeric joke for grim, tomish officialdom. But tomish officialdom had not even laughed at him; it was too official to appreciate the quality of such side-splitting innocence.... Was he likely to meet a like irresponsiveness when he should seek clothing for the body?
Watch the clubs, young Wickert had advised. Banneker strolled up Fifth Avenue, branching off here and there, into the more promising side streets.
It was the hour of the First Thirst; the institutions which cater to this and subsequent thirsts drew steadily from the main stream of human activity flowing past. Many gloriously clad specimens passed in and out of the portals, socially sacred as in the quiet Fifth Avenue clubs, profane as in the roaring, taxi-bordered “athletic” foundations; but there seemed to the anxious observer no keynote, no homogeneous character wherefrom to build as on a sure foundation. Lacking knowledge, his instinct could find no starting-point; he was bewildered in vision and in mind. Just off the corner of the quietest of the Forties, he met a group of four young men, walking compactly by twos. The one nearest him in the second line was Herbert Cressey. His heavy and rather dull eye seemed to meet Banneker’s as they came abreast. Banneker nodded, half checking himself in his slow walk.
“How are you?” he said with an accent of surprise and pleasure.
Cressey’s expressionless face turned a little. There was no response in kind to Banneker’s smile.
“Oh! H’ware you!” said he vaguely, and passed on.
Banneker advanced mechanically until he reached the corner. There he stopped. His color had heightened. The smile was still on his lips; it had altered, taken on a quality of gameness. He did not shake his fist at the embodied spirit of metropolitanism before him, as had a famous Gallic precursor of his, also a determined seeker for Success in a lesser sphere; but he paraphrased Rastignac’s threat in his own terms.
“I reckon I’ll have to lick this town and lick it good before it learns to be friendly.”
A hand fell on his arm. He turned to face Cressey.
“You’re the feller that bossed the wreck out there in the desert, aren’t you? You’re—lessee—Banneker.”
“I am.” The tone was curt.
“Awfully sorry I didn’t spot you at once.” Cressey’s genuineness was a sufficient apology. “I’m a little stuffy to-day. Bachelor dinner last night. What are you doing here? Looking around?”
“No. I’m living here.”
“That so? So am I. Come into my club and let’s talk. I’m glad to see you, Mr. Banneker.”
Even had Banneker been prone to self-consciousness, which he was not, the extreme, almost monastic plainness of the small, neutral-fronted building to which the other led him would have set him at ease. It gave no inkling of its unique exclusiveness, and equally unique expensiveness. As for Cressey, that simple, direct, and confident soul took not the smallest account of Banneker’s standardized clothing, which made him almost as conspicuous in that environment as if he had entered clad in a wooden packing-case. Cressey’s creed in such matters was complete; any friend of his was good enough for any environment to which he might introduce him, and any other friend who took exceptions might go farther!
“Banzai!” said the cheerful host over his cocktail. “Welcome to our city. Hope you like it.”
“I do,” said Banneker, lifting his glass in response.
“Where are you living?”
“Grove Street.”
Cressey knit his brows. “Where’s that? Harlem?”
“No. Over west of Sixth Avenue.”
“Queer kind of place to live, ain’t it? There’s a corkin’ little suite vacant over at the Regalton. Cheap at the money. Oh!-er-I-er-maybe—”
“Yes; that’s it,” smiled Banneker. “The treasury isn’t up to bachelor suites, yet awhile. I’ve only just got a job.”
“What is it?”
“Newspaper work. The Morning Ledger.”
“Reporting?” A dubious expression clouded the candid cheerfulness of the other’s face.
“Yes. What’s the matter with that?”
“Oh; I dunno. It’s a piffling sort of job, ain’t it?”
“Piffling? How do you mean?”
“Well, I supposed you had to ask a lot of questions and pry into other people’s business and—and all that sorta thing.”
“If nobody asked questions,” pointed out Banneker, remembering Gardner’s resolute devotion to his professional ideals, “there wouldn’t be any news, would there?”
“Sure! That’s right,” agreed the gilded youth. “The Ledger’s the decentest paper in town, too. It’s a gentleman’s paper. I know a feller on it; Guy Mallory; was in my class at college. Give you a letter to him if you like.”
Informed that Banneker already knew Mr. Mallory, his host expressed the hope of being useful to him in any other possible manner—“any tips I can give you or anything of that sort, old chap?”—so heartily that the newcomer broached the subject of clothes.
“Nothin’ easier,” was the ready response. “I’ll take you right down to Mertoun. Just one more and we’re off.”
The one more having been disposed of: “What is it you want?” inquired Cressey, when they were settled in the taxi which was waiting at the club door for them.
“Well, what do I want? You tell me.”
“How far do you want to go? Will five hundred be too much?”
“No.”
Cressey lost himself in mental calculations out of which he presently delivered himself to this effect:
“Evening clothes, of course. And a dinner-jacket suit. Two business suits, a light and a dark. You won’t need a morning coat, I expect, for a while. Anyway, we’ve got to save somethin’ out for shirts and boots, haven’t we?”
“I haven’t the money with me” remarked Banneker, his innocent mind on the cash-with-order policy of Sears-Roebuck.
“Now, see here,” said Cressey, good-humoredly, yet with an effect of authority. “This is a game that’s got to be played according to the rules. Why, if you put down spot cash before Mertoun’s eyes he’d faint from surprise, and when he came to, he’d have no respect for you. And a tailor’s respect for you,” continued Cressey, the sage, “shows in your togs.”
“When do I pay, then?”
“Oh, in three or four months he sends around a bill. That’s more of a reminder to come in and order your fall outfit than it is anything else. But you can send him a check on account, if you feel like it.”
“A check?” repeated the neophyte blankly. “Must I have a bank account?”
“Safer than a sock, my boy. And just as simple. To-morrow will do for that, when we call on the shirt-makers and the shoe sharps. I’ll put you in my bank; they’ll take you on for five hundred.”
Arrived at Mertoun’s, Banneker unobtrusively but positively developed a taste of his own in the matter of hue and pattern; one, too, which commanded Cressey’s respect. The gilded youth’s judgment tended toward the more pronounced herringbones and homespuns.
“All right for you, who can change seven days in the week; but I’ve got to live with these clothes, day in and day out,” argued Banneker.
To which Cressey deferred, though with a sigh. “You could carry off those sporty things as if they were woven to order for you,” he declared. “You’ve got the figure, the carriage, the—the whatever-the-devil it is, for it.”
Prospectively poorer by something more than four hundred dollars, Banneker emerged from Mertoun’s with his mentor.
“Gotta get home and dress for a rotten dinner,” announced that gentleman cheerfully. “Duck in here with me,” he invited, indicating a sumptuous bar, near the tailor’s, “and get another little kick in the stomach. No? Oh, verrawell. Where are you for?”
“The Public Library.”
“Gawd!” said his companion, honestly shocked. “That’s a gloomy hole, ain’t it?”
“Not so bad, when you get used to it. I’ve been putting in three hours a day there lately.”
“Whatever for?”
“Oh, browsing. Book-hungry, I suppose. Carnegie hasn’t discovered Manzanita yet, you know; so I haven’t had many library opportunities.”
“Speaking of Manzanita,” remarked Cressey, and spoke of it, reminiscently and at length, as they walked along together. “Did the lovely and mysterious I.O.W. ever turn up and report herself?”
Banneker’s breath caught painfully in his throat.
“D’you know who she was?” pursued the other, without pause for reply to his previous question; and still without intermission continued: “Io Welland. That’s who she was. Oh, but she’s a hummer! I’ve met her since. Married, you know. Quick work, that marriage. There was a dam’ queer story whispered around about her starting to elope with some other chap, and his going nearly batty because she didn’t turn up, and all the time she was wandering around in the desert until somebody picked her up and took care of her. You ought to know something of that. It was supposed to be right in your back-yard.”
“I?” said Banneker, commanding himself with an effort; “Miss Welland reported in with a slight injury. That’s all.”
One glance at him told Cressey that Banneker did indeed “know something” of the mysterious disappearance which had so exercised a legion of busy tongues in New York; how much that something might be, he preserved for future and private speculation, based on the astounding perception that Banneker was in real pain of soul. Tact inspired Cressey to say at once: “Of course, that’s all you had to consider. By the way, you haven’t seen my revered uncle since you got here, have you?”
“Mr. Vanney? No.”
“Better drop in on him.”
“He might try to give me another yellow-back,” smiled the ex-agent.
“Don’t take Uncle Van for a fool. Once is plenty for him to be hit on the nose.”
“Has he still got a green whisker?”
“Go and see. He’s asked about you two or three times in the last coupla months.”
“But I’ve no errand with him.”
“How can you tell? He might start something for you. It isn’t often that he keeps a man in mind like he has you. Anyway, he’s a wise old bird and may hand you a pointer or two about what’s what in New York. Shall I phone him you’re in town?”
“Yes. I’ll get in to see him some time to-morrow.”
Having made an appointment, in the vital matter of shirts and shoes, for the morning, they parted. Banneker set to his browsing in the library until hunger drove him forth. After dinner he returned to his room, cumbered with the accumulation of evening papers, for study.
Beyond the thin partition he could hear Miss Westlake moving about and humming happily to herself. The sound struck dismay to his soul. The prospect of work from him was doubtless the insecure foundation of that cheerfulness. “Soon” he had said; the implication was that the matter was pressing. Probably she was counting on it for the morrow. Well, he must furnish something, anything, to feed the maw of her hungry typewriter; to fulfill that wistful hope which had sprung in her eyes when he spoke to her.
Sweeping his table bare of the lore and lure of journalism as typified in the bulky, black-faced editions, he set out clean paper, cleansed his fountain pen, and stared at the ceiling. What should he write about? His mental retina teemed with impressions. But they were confused, unresolved, distorted for all that he knew, since he lacked experience and knowledge of the environment, and therefore perspective. Groping, he recalled a saying of Gardner’s as that wearied enthusiast descanted upon the glories of past great names in metropolitan journalism.
“They used to say of Julian Ralph that he was always discovering City Hall Park and getting excited over it; and when he got excited enough, he wrote about it so that the public just ate it up.”
Well, he, Banneker, hadn’t discovered City Hall Park; not consciously. But he had gleaned wonder and delight from other and more remote spots, and now one of them began to stand forth upon the blank ceiling at which he stared, seeking guidance. A crowded corner of Essex Street, stewing in the hard sunshine. The teeming, shrill crowd. The stench and gleam of a fish-stall offering bargains. The eager games of the children, snatched between onsets of imminent peril as cart or truck came whirling through and scattering the players. Finally the episode of the trade fracas over the remains of a small and dubious weakfish, terminating when the dissatisfied customer cast the delicacy at the head of the stall-man and missed him, the corpus delicti falling into the gutter where it was at once appropriated and rapt away by an incredulous, delighted, and mangy cat. A crude, commonplace, malodorous little street row, the sort of thing that happens, in varying phases, on a dozen East-Side corners seven days in the week.
Banneker approached and treated the matter from the viewpoint of the cat, predatory, philosophic, ecstatic. One o’clock in the morning saw the final revision, for he had become enthralled with the handling of his subject. It was only a scant five pages; less than a thousand words. But as he wrote and rewrote, other schemata rose to the surface of his consciousness, and he made brief notes of them on random ends of paper; half a dozen of them, one crowding upon another. Some day, perhaps, when there were enough of them, when he had become known, had achieved the distinction of a signature like Gardner, there might be a real series.... His vague expectancies were dimmed in weariness.
Such was the genesis of the “Local Vagrancies” which later were to set Park Row speculating upon the signature “Eban.”