Turns about Town Part 16

I know a young woman--a very handsome young woman she is, too. (I have a decided penchant for handsome young women.) But that is beside the point. As I was about to say (when a pleasant but an extraneous idea interrupted me): this young woman the other day took her young husband by the hand and conducted him to the offices of a publisher. Here she mounted him upon a chair (very much, I fancy, as though the child were about to have his hair cut), and she said to the barber--I mean she said to the editor, with whom she had some acquaintance--she said: "This is my husband. He is just out of the army. I have brought him in to have his head s.h.i.+ngled"---- No, no! that isn't what she said; I am getting my wires crossed. She said, "I have brought him in to get him a position here."

Said the editor, "What would your son, I mean your husband, like to do?"

"I want him," replied the young woman, "to be an editor."

"Has he ever been an editor?" inquired the editor kindly, as he admired the shape of the young woman's nose.

"No," she answered, stroking his hand (the hand, that is, of her husband), "why, no."

"What has been his experience?" asked the editor, as the thought of all the hard work he had to do in the next hour and a half wrestled in his mind with his pleasure in the young woman's voice.

"Why," she said, "before he went into the army I don't know that he had any particular experience. He was just out of college, you see."

"Oh!" said the editor, "I see. And why," he asked musingly, "do you want him to be an editor?"

"Well, I don't know exactly," answered the young woman, "I just thought it would be rather nice to have him be an editor."

Even so. Day after day, come into publis.h.i.+ng houses young persons, and indeed people of all ages, who have a hunch (and apparently nothing more to go by) that they would like to be "an editor." Also, in every other mail, come letters from aspirants in distant parts setting forth (what they deem) their qualifications.

Now and then someone makes such an application who has been an editor before. It (editing) is probably the only business he knows, and perhaps it is too late (or his spirit is too broken) for him to take up another.

So, disillusioned but not misguided, for him there is charity of thought. But the fledglings are in the great majority. Their qualifications (is it necessary to say?) usually are: a university degree, perhaps some a.s.sociation with a college paper, maybe the credit of an article (or a poem) or two published in a minor magazine issued for the Intelligentzia, a very sincere attachment to books of superior worth, a disdain for empyreal literature, openness to a modest salary (to begin), and an abysmal lack of any comprehension of the business of publis.h.i.+ng books or magazines. Every little bit turns up one who (it develops) wants a job on the side, as it were, merely to sustain the real business of life, which (maybe) is taking a graduate course at Columbia, or some such thing. And in many cases (it is obvious) the real business of life is writing poetry, or fiction, though to this end a job must be endured--doubtless temporarily.

Now why anyone should want to be an editor beats me. No, I retract. 'Tis quite plain. Ignorance, ma'am, sheer ignorance of the calamity. I know an editor; in fact, I know six. One, indeed, is a brother of mine, another is a cousin, a third an uncle. Before they became editors they used to read books and magazines--for pleasure, sometimes; or again for profit to their souls. Now they do neither. They read only professionally. They can't read anything unless they have to, in the way of business. Before they became editors they led intellectual lives; spiritually they grew continually. They used to be perfectly delighted, excited (as people should be), by hearing of books, of authors, new to them. They were fascinated by the journey of their minds. They might have gone on thus through their years, interested in themselves, interesting to others, pillars of society. They might even, for all their thoughts (then) were inspirations, have written delightful things themselves. In fact, two of them did. But they became editors.

Now they, subconsciously, count the words of ma.n.u.scripts. They cut articles, like cloth, to fit. They gauge the "rate" to be paid for this, for that. They cannot take an interest in this because something like it has just appeared somewhere else. They can't take an interest in that because it is not like something that has just made a hit somewhere else. Now when they have something to read they say (like Plim, Bimm, whatever his name was, the veteran hack novelist in the early Barrie story), "I'll begin the d.a.m.n thing at eight o'clock."

Worst of all, they have lost, totally lost, that s.h.i.+eld against adversity, that great joy in days of prosperity, that deep satisfaction of life. I mean, of course, the relish of _buying_ books. Everyone knows that to revel in the possession of a book one must covet it before one feels one should buy it. Everyone knows that to love a book jealously one must have made some sacrifice to obtain it. That a library which supplies unending strength to the spirit means in all its parts, a little here, a little there, some self-denial of other things.

But editors, poor fish, are impotent in this high and lasting pleasure; they have lost the power to spend their money for books. They expect books to be given to them free by the publishers. Their money goes for Kelley pool and cigars.

CHAPTER XXVI

A DIP INTO THE UNDERWORLD

"When I go back home," he said, "and tell them about this they won't believe it."

It was a pleasant April Sunday afternoon. We were sitting very comfortably in a saloon over Third Avenue way about the middle of Manhattan Island. Throngs of customers came and went through the front door, whose wicket gate was seldom still. Whiskey gla.s.ses twinkled and tinkled all along the long bar. Only here and there in the closely packed line of patrons stood one with a tall "schooner" of beer before him. Harry and Ed, in very soiled white jackets, led an active life.

You see, since theoretically intoxicants were not being sold, there was no occasion for the pretence of being closed on Sunday and confining business to the side door and the back room. On the table between us lay a newspaper. Its headlines proclaimed yesterday's "liquor raids,"

thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of "rum" confiscated by the city police in the progress of the campaign resulting from the recent pa.s.sage of the New York State "dry" law.

At the bottom of the page was a little story of the conviction of a delicatessen dealer somewhere on the outskirts of Brooklyn on whose premises had been discovered by the authorities a small amount of wine containing more than one-half of one per cent alcohol.

Pete came in hurriedly. Harry and Ed glanced at him questioningly. He nodded to them as though to say "yes," and dropped into the chair before us. "They're comin'," he remarked. "About half a block off." Every whiskey gla.s.s had suddenly disappeared from the bar.

Pete, a little grey man now of about fifty who arises for the day at about noon, has had an interesting career. Once upon a time he was a "bell-hop" in Albany. He is a devoted patron of the silent drama and a man of intellectual interests--making a hobby of clipping from newspapers poems and editorials which impress him and reading them several months later to chance acquaintances who are too drowsy to oppose him. His connection with this establishment is light and picturesque. His duties are chiefly social. That is, he sees home one after another customers who require that friendly attention. He is perpetually agreeable to the suggestion of gratuitous refreshment. He is very cheerful and gentlemanly in the matter of accommodating his tastes to any liquid from ten-cent beer to ninety-cent Scotch which the purchaser is disposed to pay for.

Here they were! The two police officers strolled in slowly, smiling. In their blue and their gold b.u.t.tons they looked very respendent against the somewhat shabby scene. Ranged along before the bar were a number of young men in the uniform of private soldiers. There were several sailors. Here was a postman cheering himself on his rounds. There was a huge fellow the nickel plate on whose cap announced that he was a piano mover. The centre of a group, there was a very large man who looked as though he had something darkly to do with ward politics. At one place in the line was a very dapper little j.a.panese, who produced his money from a wallet carried in his breast pocket. But mostly the motley company was of the riff-raff order of humanity. That is another one of the curious developments of "prohibition." Here, in all places of this character, you may find an endless number of the sort of men who used to be accustomed to paying as little as ten cents for a drink of very fiery and inferior whiskey, now standing before the bar by the hour and paying from fifty to seventy-five cents for whiskey (if you can call it that) considerably worse. How on earth can they do it? I do not know.

The two policemen moved the length of the room, and came to a halt at the open end of the bar. Here they stood for a couple of moments, observing (I felt with some amus.e.m.e.nt) Harry and Ed serving their beakers of beer. Then, as though suddenly having a bright idea, one of them made his way along back of the bar to the cigar case at the front end. He stooped, opened the sliding panel at the bottom of this and poked around inside with his club. As he came along behind the bar back to the open end he stooped several times to peer at the shelf below. He joined his comrade, the two of them thrust their heads into the back room, and then moved out through the side door.

"Well, we're safe for another hour," said Pete. "Why couldn't they find the stuff?" I asked him. "I'll bet you couldn't find it if you'd go behind the bar yourself," he answered. Harry and Ed had found it within two seconds after the shadow of the law had lifted. And the room was humming with the sound of renewed, and somewhat hectic, conviviality.

"We'll get caught pretty soon though, I guess," observed Johnnie, the Italian "chef," who on week-days served the economical lunch of roast beef sandwiches and "hot dogs." Harry and Ed laughed in a rather uncomfortable way. But for the present, at least, business was too brisk for their thoughts to be distracted more than a second or two from the job.

"The old man," remarked Pete, referring to the proprietor, "is on a toot again. Been under the weather for about a week now. He always gets that way whenever one of the new law scares comes along. Gets worried or sore or something and that upsets him."

Pete hadn't been very well himself for several days. Sick in bed, he said, yesterday. He never used to be sick at all, "in the old days," he declared, no matter how much he had taken the day before. Never had a headache, or bad stomach, or anything like that. A little nervous, perhaps, yes. "But it's the kind of stuff we get nowadays," he thought.

"There hasn't been time since prohibition started for the system to get trained to react to this TNT stuff, like it was to regular liquor. Maybe in ten years or in the next generation people's systems will have got adjusted to this kind of poison and it'll be all right with 'em." It's an interesting idea, I think.

A customer was requesting Ed to "fix him up" a pint flask. No, it couldn't be done just now, as the supply was running too low for it to be pa.s.sed out that much at a time. The disappointed customer tried to content himself with endeavoring to absorb as much of a pint as he could obtain through a rapidly consumed series of single drinks. And pretty soon it was officially announced from the bar that there would be "no more until nine o'clock in the morning." I gathered that the reserve stock was upstairs or downstairs and that the "old man" had gone away with the key.

We went forth to take a walk, Pete accompanying us as a sort of cicerone, and discoursing with much erudition of bar-rooms as we went.

"These places are getting scarce," he observed. "There don't seem to be any, or there seems to be hardly any of the old places uptown," I remarked. "Oh! no; not in residential neighborhoods," he replied; and I inferred that the law was, in deference to the innocent spirit of domesticity, keener-eyed there. "And there ain't but very few below the dead-line downtown," Pete said.

They have, the bars, very largely disappeared from Broadway. Have been gone from that thoroughfare for some time. And in this thought we come upon one of the great mockeries of the situation which has existed since the Eighteenth Amendment went (more or less) into effect. What I mean is this: A great many people who had no ferocious opposition to the idea of a c.o.c.ktail being drunk before a meal, or wine with it, or even a liqueur after it, did detest the saloon. It was the inst.i.tution of the common, corner saloon, I fancy, at which the bulk of American temperance sentiment was directed.

The perverse operation of prohibition then was this: It ceased to be possible (openly) to obtain any alcoholic beverage in anything like wholesome surroundings, in a first-cla.s.s restaurant or hotel or in a gentleman's club. But in New York City, as is known to everybody who knows anything at all about the matter, the saloons, and particularly the lower cla.s.s of saloons, have flourished as never before.

As we crossed Broadway Pete pointed out one place which had been going until a short time ago, an odious looking place (as I remember it) within. It was but a short way from a club of distinguished members.h.i.+p.

So much had this doggery become frequented by these gentlemen that it became jocularly known among them as the "club annex."

Continuing on over into the West Side, here was a place, now a shop dealing in raincoats, but formerly a "gin-mill" where throughout this last winter there had been an extraordinary infusion of Bacardi rum, drunk neat, as their favorite drink, by its mult.i.tudinous customers. And there was a place, a baby carriage exhibited for sale in its window now, which as a saloon had burned out one night not long ago; when its proprietor accepted the catastrophe with striking cheerfulness, withdrew his business activities to his nearby apartment and took up calling upon old customers by appointment. Innumerable the places over which Pete breathed a sigh, which had lately turned into tobacco stores or candy shops.

We turned in at a door on Sixth Avenue. A little more caution seemed to be observed here than at the place we had just left. But Pete, of course, would pa.s.s any scrutiny. The liquor bottle, you noted, stood within the safe at the inner end of the bar, its door hanging ready at any moment to be kicked to. The barman covered with his hand the little gla.s.ses he set out until you took them, and admonished, "Get away with it!" The drinks were eighty cents a throw, but they had the feel of genuine good-grade rye.

Night had fallen. We pa.s.sed into the back room, where a pathetic object was banging dismal tunes on a rattle-trap of a piano. A party of four entered. The young women were very young and decidedly attractive. The two couples began to circle about in a dance. Next moment came a terrific thundering on the front of the building. "Cop wants less noise," said the waiter to the dancers; "you'll have to quit." "Throw that into you," he said to the seated customer he was serving, and directly whisked away the gla.s.ses.

"When I go back home," said my friend from the Middle West, "and tell them about this they won't believe it."

CHAPTER XXVII

NOSING 'ROUND WAs.h.i.+NGTON

I

I came very near to being shot in the White House grounds the other day.

Yep! You see, my friend is a bit on the order of what the modistes call "stylish stout." Rather more than a bit, indeed. Looks something like a slightly youthfuller Irvin Cobb. Also wouldn't consider it decent of him out of doors not to "wear" his stag-handled cane. Altogether, not unlikely to be taken for a real somebody. He was fis.h.i.+ng round in his breast pocket for the letter his senator from "back home" had given him to the President's secretary. Drew out what may have seemed an important looking doc.u.ment.

As we came along the path toward the executive offices there was an up-stage looking bunch thronging about the little steps--rollicking gamins, smartly turned out flappers, a sprinkling of rather rakish looking young males, and (in their best black silk) a populous representation of those highly honorable and very ample figures who have generously mothered the young sons and daughters of the American prairies.

Suddenly from the side lines they popped out--a whole battery of them, with their bug-like machines on tall stilts. The motion picture camera men were taking no chances that anything important would escape their fire. Evidently they couldn't quite place us, however, so we got through the door without further incident.