Part 20

“And when through sheer fatigue I at last gave up the self imposed task that I knew was hopeless at the beginning, one of the boys approached me and tearfully whispered, ‘Please, doctor, won’t you tell me your name? We want to see that you get paid for trying to save our little friend. You did just the best you could.’

“And,” said the doctor, “I couldn’t answer him as I would have done had he been grown up. The poor boy would not have understood. I just choked up and sputtered, ‘See you again, by and by, my boy, I’m in a hurry now.’

“Just think,” concluded the doctor, “here was a _rara avis_--a dead person’s friend who thought a doctor should be rewarded for doing the best he could.”

And when I heard the story I said, “Old fellow, that boy’s sentiments were awfully out of place, but who shall say that they were out of tune?”

There are many book-made heroes, but few of real flesh and blood. There was one among the injured ones who were brought in unconscious and laid upon the tables at that restaurant. He was a boy of some twelve or fourteen years of age. He remained unconscious for fully half an hour. Just as the doctors were about to give him up as hopeless, he began to revive, and was soon out of danger. Several policemen approached him.

“What’s your name, sonny?” asked one of the officers.

“I won’t tell you my name,” replied the boy.

“Yes, but you _must_ tell me your name.”

“But I won’t do it, so there now,” and the boy set his teeth defiantly.

Curious to know why the boy objected to telling who he was, I motioned the officers aside and asked quietly,

“Why don’t you give the policemen your name, my boy?”

“’Cause,” replied the boy, “if I do, my pa and my ma’ll hear about my bein’ hurt an’ it’ll scare ’em most to death.”

And the boy would not be cajoled until I told him the only way to prevent shock to his parents was to notify them that he was safe. He grasped the situation and smiled happily as he gave his name and started for the ambulance.

Ah, Jimmy Kerwin, you are a thoroughbred, if ever there was one.

But why recall all the details of that frightful disaster--the most awful experience I have ever met with. Have I not told enough to justify the indignation that filled me when I saw the Death’s head and read those heartless legends?

* * * * *

The new Music Hall opened last evening as per schedule. I was not surprised to read in the papers this morning that the opening night was a brilliant success. Every seat was sold. The audience was as enthusiastic as it was large. This was well--a smaller audience would not have been a fitting crown to Chicago’s shame and humanity’s disgrace. Humanity has glossed itself over with a veneer of what it pleases to term civilization, but primitive man peeps out from beneath its edges and obtrudes itself whenever and wherever the veneer is cracked ever so little. And so, a large audience was to have been expected. The managers of the place well knew human nature.

The applause of that audience was the apotheosis of poor old Rip Van Winkle’s lament, “How soon we are forgot.” Things inanimate revolted at the sight and sound of it. A drop curtain caught, precisely as that cheap, flimsy asbestos fraud did on that memorable day at the Iroquois. And then the insensate human things remembered--remembered that they were not fire proof. They remembered, not the dead, but that other caught curtain, the flame, the gas, the trampling, crushing, tearing rush of madmen fighting for life, and the farcical exits. They remembered themselves only, and were startled, affrighted, ripe for a panic for a moment, and then--they laughed again!

Human beings seeking gay diversion in a crypt of death, splitting the air of a charnel house with vociferous applause, startling the ghosts that people the place by boisterous laughter--faugh!

The performance over, the callous ones filed slowly out of the hall, chatting like magpies and discussing the merits of the various features of the performance. They traversed the same road over which the ghastly forms of that other audience were carried. And as the pleasure seekers gaily tripped along, they passed between and over scores and scores of recumbent ghosts. Had the forms of these poor wraiths been more substantial there would have been brushings against them, stumblings over them.

Over the door the Death’s head still grinned. Chicago’s shame was complete. Her burnt offerings on the altar of Mammon were forgotten.

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors and missing or unbalanced quotation marks were silently corrected by Transcriber.

Page 156: “step was bring him nearer” was printed that way.