Local Color Part 24

Somebody suggested to Miriam that she pick the wild flowers and the wild vine tendrils and weave them into garlands. Was it her fault that her very first selections should be a spray of poisoned sumac, first cousin to poison ivy, and that her second should be a handful of nettles?

Somebody else undertook to induct Solly into the pleasures of tree climbing. Was it altogether his fault that he should promptly fall out of the first crotch and painfully sprain and bruise himself in several places?

And when, finally, they had been induced to quit the immediate proximity of the farmhouse, which at least provided a refuge and a shelter from suspected dangers, and had ventured over a fence and into a pasture, a most terrible thing occurred. Toward them there suddenly advanced an enormous red creature, tossing a huge head crowned with sharp horns, and emitting frightful, rumbling sounds from a great rubbery muzzle.

With shrieks of terror, they fled blindly into a patch of woodland that was perhaps two acres in extent; and, losing themselves in its--to them--vast and impenetrable depths, they remained there, crouching behind a tree until discovered, tearful, hungry and disconsolate, by a volunteer search party shortly before sunset. Miriam's subsequent description of the monster that had menaced them, as detailed to her mother, gave Mamma Finkelstein a mental picture of something which might be likened to a cross between a raging rhinoceros and a hook-and-ladder motor truck. For it had been many a year since Mamma Finkelstein herself had seen a yearling heifer. And Miriam never had seen one before.

It was indeed a hard and an irksome week. The end of it saw the two small adventurers, both sun-blistered and peeling, both broken out as to hands and legs with strange, irritating rashes, and both with gladness in their little homesick souls, returning to the beloved perils and the customary pleasures of the torrid town.

After this the Finkelsteins for a while had a welcomed respite from kindness. They fairly revelled in it; but not for a great while, nor, in fact, for very long, did it endure. Following Labor Day, Mrs. F.

Fodderwood Ba.s.s came back from her country place up Greenwich way and reopened her city place. It transpired that with her she had brought a perfectly splendid idea. She was going to establish the Finkelsteins on an abandoned farm. While motoring about over the country lanes in Connecticut she had found the very spot for them--an ideal spot, indeed--nine acres, and nine miles from a railroad, with a ruinous little cottage, all furnished, perched upon a rocky hillock in the centre of the nine acres.

It was upon this site she was resolved they should be domiciled.

There--as she herself said--Papa Finkelstein might turn farmer and maybe make a fortune. There Mamma Finkelstein could rear her brood in peace and quiet, far aloof and remote from the teeming mult.i.tude. There the fresh, pure air of the country would restore the bloom of health to the cheeks of all the little Finkelsteins. What mattered it though the little Finkelsteins were already so healthy that if they had been any healthier than they were it might have been necessary to tap them for it? I am not detailing what was actually the case, but what Mrs. F.

Fodderwood Ba.s.s, in the exuberance engendered by her generous impulses, said about it.

A scheme so large required cooperation. Mrs. F. Fodderwood Ba.s.s secured it from Miss G.o.diva Sleybells, whom she had met upon more than one occasion when the two of them chanced to happen in upon the Finkelsteins at the same time, and from Miss Betty Gwin, who frequently had been called upon to detail to a hungry reading public particulars concerning Mrs. F. Fodderwood Ba.s.s' social and charitable endeavours.

Together these three const.i.tuted a committee on ways, means and publicity. Mrs. F. Fodderwood Ba.s.s provided the funds for leasing the nine acres and for transporting its ten future tenants to their future home. Miss G.o.diva Sleybells agreed, for her part, to insure that the prospective colonists, both big and little, were properly loaded and properly s.h.i.+pped to their destination. Miss Betty Gwin wrote a moving word picture two columns long about it, in which she mentioned the late Baron de Hirsch once and Mrs. F. Fodderwood Ba.s.s a great many times.

Actually the day preceding the day set for the removal of the Finkelsteins arrived before it occurred to the three conferees that they had entirely forgotten until that minute to take the Finkelsteins into their confidence--not that it very much mattered; this was but an incidental detail, which before now had been altogether overlooked. Miss Sleybells volunteered to go and tell them. She went and she did.

Reporting back to the princ.i.p.al factor in this kindly little conspiracy, Miss Sleybells said the Finkelstein family had been stunned--literally stunned into dumb silence by the grateful joy the tidings brought to them. She said surprise and grat.i.tude had left them absolutely speechless. Naturally she had no way of knowing, when she broke the glad news, that Solly thought of Coney's inhospitable sands and treacherous seas; that Miriam thought of the fearsome Catskill cow; that their mother, whose whole life had been bounded by two Ghettos--one in the Old World and one in the New, and who knew no other life--thought of a great variety of things; and that the children, ranging from the twins downward, would have done some thinking, too, had they been of suitable age thus to indulge their juvenile intellects.

She had no way of knowing that, when she was gone from among them, Papa Finkelstein stood erect and, elevating his two hands in pa.s.sionate entreaty toward heaven, with solemn fervour uttered the only words which it is fated that we, in this recital, shall ever hear him utter. He spake them in the tongue with which he was most conversant. He said:

"_Gott bei heit!_"

September's hurried twilight was folding in upon Pike Street. Against the curbing, surrounded by an admiring throng, stood Mrs. F. Fodderwood Ba.s.s' third-best car. Hard by stood an express wagon, its driver ready to receive what puny freightage of household and personal belongings as might be consigned to his care. And upstairs, upon the top floor of a certain tenement, in the narrow hall outside the Finkelstein flat, stood Mrs. F. Fodderwood Ba.s.s, Miss G.o.diva Sleybells and Miss Betty Gwin. The first named of these three was come to witness the accomplishment of her beautiful purpose; the second, to lend her executive abilities to the details of the undertaking; the third, to write a piece about it.

In accord with her regular habit Miss Sleybells turned the k.n.o.b. The k.n.o.b turned part way, but the door did not open; so she rattled the k.n.o.b and knocked with her knuckles on the panel. Mrs. F. Fodderwood Ba.s.s raised her flutelike voice in cooing accents.

"Open the door, my dear charities," she said clearly. "It is I--your good angel."

Miss Betty Gwin stooped and applied a squinted eye at the keyhole. Miss Sleybells knocked again--harder. There was no answer.

I shall tell you why there was no answer. The reason is a good and sufficient one. All day within their two rooms the Finkelstein family had bided, waiting, waiting; hoping against hope. With the sound of well-remembered footsteps in the hall without, with the sound of a well-known voice uplifted, the last faint remnant of hope expired.

In melancholy resignation Papa Finkelstein nodded to Mamma Finkelstein; and Mamma Finkelstein, stifling the plaint of the youngest baby in her shawl, nodded back to him in sorrowful confirmation of the worst. With gestures he imposed deep silence upon all present. He tiptoed into the rear room and his people followed, tiptoeing also. He climbed out of the back window and descended the fire-escape ladder to the fire-escape landing at the level of the next floor below. He balanced himself there and into his extended arms, Mamma Finkelstein pa.s.sed down to him, one by one, their children; and he, in turn, pa.s.sed them in at a window where Mrs. Esther Rabinowitz, a good-hearted neighbour, received them, and deposited them in a mute row upon her kitchen floor. At the last Mamma Finkelstein descended and joined him.

They a.s.sembled their progeny. They noiselessly emerged from Mrs.

Rabinowitz' hall door; and, noiselessly all, they fled down the stairs and out into the gathering twilight of Pike Street, which has a way of growing shabby and soiled-looking as it gathers. They had deserted all their small belongings; they knew not where that night they might lay their heads; they had no idea where they were going--but they were on their way.

Up on the top floor Miss Sleybells knocked and knocked again. Miss Gwin put her ear to the locked, barred door and listened and listened for betraying sounds within; and Mrs. F. Fodderwood Ba.s.s raised her coo to yet a flutier pitch. And while they were thus engaged the Finkelstein family, one and all, vanished into the cloaking, protecting dusk where Pike Street runs toward the river.

Did I say Finkelstein family? I was wrong there.

For purposes of better concealment Papa Finkelstein had changed the name. The inspiration had come to him even as he gripped the topmost round of the fire-escape ladder. Changing it, he had seen fit to honour, by virtue of self-adoption, a race of Irish kings, and notably a policeman of his acquaintance, a descendant of that kingly line. He changed it to Finnigan. Loss to the Finkelsteins would thenceforth be gain to the Finnigans.

So they vanished away--Papa Meyer Finnigan, Mamma Leah Finnigan--nee Pincus--Miriam Finnigan, Solly Finnigan, the Finnigan twins, Izzy and Izzy; Benjamin Finnigan, Rebecca Finnigan, Lena Finnigan, and so on down to Baby Leopold Finnigan--and were gone!

For does it not stand written that----? But see Corinthians--first, thirteenth and fourth--and notably the first three words of the same.

Only it should have been written there, in amplification, that there is a limit.

CHAPTER VIII

ENTER THE VILLAIN

It is conceded, I believe, that every story should have a moral; also, whenever possible, a heroine or a hero, a villainess or a villain, a plot and a climax. Now this story has a villain of sorts, if you choose to look upon him in that light; but no hero, and no climax. And certainly there is no moral to adorn the tale. So far as I have been able to discover it is absolutely moral-less. So then, reader, if you, being thus foreadvised regarding these avowed shortcomings of my narrative, choose to go further with it, the responsibility must be yours and not mine. Don't you come round afterward saying I didn't warn you.

The rise of the curtain discloses the city room of _The Clarion_, a New York morning newspaper. The hour is six-thirty P. M., the period is the approximate present, and the season is summer time. At a desk in the foreground is discovered the head office boy in the act of scissoring certain marked pa.s.sages out of copies of the afternoon papers and impaling them upon spindles. Beyond him, at a big oaken table shaped like half of a pie, a lone copy reader is humped in his chair, chewing on a cold pipestem and editing a bad piece of copy with a relentless black lead. In this case the copy reader is named Hemburg. He is of a type of which at least one example is to be found in nearly every large newspaper shop--a competent failure, gone alcoholically to seed; usually holding down a desk job; rarely quite drunk and rarely quite sober, and in this mid-state of befuddlement performing his work with a strange mechanical accuracy; but once in a while he comes on duty cold sober--cause unknown--and then the chances are he does something unpardonably wrong, something incredibly stupid, which costs him his job. Just such a man is this present man Hemburg. As, shoving his pencil, he carves the very giblets out of the last sheet of the belated typewritten ma.n.u.script lying under his hand, the sunlight, slanting in at a west window behind him, falls over his shoulders in a streaked flood, making his reddened face seem redder than ever--as red as hearth paint--and turning his ears a bright, clear, pinkish colour, as though they might be two little memorial panes set there in dedication to the wasted life and the frittered talents of their owner.

Farther up stage the city-hall reporter, who because he has pa.s.sed his fortieth birthday and has grey in his hair is known as Pop, and the s.h.i.+p-news reporter, who because he is the s.h.i.+p-news reporter is known as Skipper, the same as in all well-regulated newspaper offices, are pasting up their strings, both of them being s.p.a.ce men. Otherwise the big bare room with its rows of desks and its sc.r.a.p-strewn floor is quite empty. This hour, coming between six and seven, in the city room of _The Clarion_ or any other big paper, is apt to be the quietest of all hours between starting time, early in the afternoon, and quitting time, early in the morning. The day city editor, having finished his stint, has gone off watch, leaving behind for his successor, the night city editor, a single scrawled sheet upon which is recorded the tally of things accomplished, things undertaken and things failed at. The reporters who got afternoon a.s.signments have most of them turned in their stories and have taken other a.s.signments which will keep them out of the office until much later. So almost an ecclesiastical quiet fills the city room now.

For the matter of that, it is only in the dramatic versions that a newspaper office ever attains the aspect of frenzied tumult so familiar and so agreeable to patrons of plays purporting to deal with newspaper life. As usually depicted upon the stage, a city room near press time is something like a skating rink, something like the recreation hall of a madhouse, something like a munitions factory working overtime on war orders, and nothing at all like a city room. Even when its manifold activities are in full swing the actual city room, save for the click of typewriter keys, is apt to be as sedately quiet as--let's see now! What would make a suitable comparison? Well--as sedately quiet, say, as the reading room of the average Carnegie Library.

Six-thirty-four--enter the villain.

The practical door at the right opened and Mr. Foxman came in. In just what he stood in he might have posed for the typical picture of the typical New York business man; not the tired business man for whom the musical shows are supposed to be written but the kind of business man who does not tire so easily. A close-cropped, greyish moustache, a pair of nose gla.s.ses riding a short, pugnacious nose in front of two keen eyes, a well-knit middle-age shape inside of a smart-fitting suit, a positive jaw, an air of efficiency and a square shoulder--that briefly would be Mr. Hobart Foxman, managing editor of _The Clarion_.

His nod included the city-hall reporter and the s.h.i.+p-news man. Pa.s.sing by Hemburg without speaking, he halted a minute alongside the desk where the head copy boy speared his shearings upon his battery of spindles.

"Singlebury come in yet?" asked Mr. Foxman.

"No, sir; not yet, sir," said the head copy boy. "But he's due any minute now, I guess. I phoned him you wanted to see him at a quarter to seven."

"When he comes tell him to come right into my office."

"Yes, sir; I'll tell him, sir."

"Did you get those envelopes out of the morgue that I telephoned you about?"

"Yes, sir; they're all four of 'em on your desk, sir," said the boy, and he made as though to get up from his seat.

"Never mind," said Mr. Foxman. "I guess I can find them without any help. ... Oh, yes, Benny, I'm not to be disturbed during the next hour for anything. n.o.body is to see me except Singlebury. Understand?"

"Yes, sir--n.o.body," said Benny. "I'll remember, sir."

Inside his own room, which opened directly upon the city room, Mr.

Foxman brushed from his desk a neatly piled file of the afternoon papers, glanced through a heap of mail--some personal mail, but mostly official--without opening any of the letters, and then gave his attention to four big soiled manila envelopes which rested side by side upon his wide blue blotter pad. One of these envelopes was labelled, across its upper front, "Blake, John W."; the second was labelled "Bogardus, S. P."; the third, "Pratt, Ezra"; and the fourth, "Pearl Street Trolley Line." Each of the four bulged dropsically with its contents, which contents, when Mr. Foxman had bent back the envelope flaps and emptied the envelopes, proved to be sheafs of newspaper clippings, some frayed with handling and yellowed with age, some still fresh and crisp, and all bearing the stencilled identification mark of the functionary who runs what is called in some shops the obit department and in other shops the morgue.

Keeping each set in its own separate pile, Mr. Foxman began running through these clippings, now and then putting aside one for future consideration. In the midst of this he broke off to take up his desk telephone and, when the girl at the private switchboard upstairs answered, bade her ring for him a certain private number, not to be found in the telephone directory.