Part 4

We were to test that within a minute or two. Fifteen or twenty brownies were digging in a ditch. Of all the forms of work in sight it seemed that which demanded the least in the way of special training.

Approaching a fiercely mustachioed man of clearly defined nationality, I said, “Say, boss, could you give my buddy and me a job?”

Rolling toward me a pair of eyes that would have done credit to a bandit in an opera, he emitted sounds which I can best transcribe as, “Where d’live?”

“That’s the trouble,” I answered, truthfully. “We don’t live anywhere and we should like to.”

He looked us over. “Beat it,” he commanded, nodding toward the central quarters of the city.

“But, boss,” I pleaded, “my buddy and I haven’t got a quarter between us.”

He pointed with his thumb over his left shoulder. “Getta out.”

“We haven’t got a nickel,” I insisted; “we haven’t got a cent.”

“Cristoforo, ca’ da cop.”

As Cristoforo sprang from the ditch to look for a policeman, Lovey and I shuffled off again into the rain.

We stood for a minute at the edge of one of the long, sordid avenues where a sordid life was surging up and down. Men, women, and children of all races and nearly all ranks were hurrying to and fro, each bent on an errand. It was the fact that life provided an errand for each of them that suddenly struck me as the most wonderful thing in creation. There was no one so young or so old, no one so ignorant or so alien, that he was not going from point to point with a special purpose in view. Among the thousands and the tens of thousands who would in the course of the morning pass the spot on which we stood, there would probably not be one who hadn’t dressed, washed, and breakfasted as a return for his daily contribution to the common good. Never before and hardly ever since did I have such a sense of life’s infinite and useful complexity. There was no height to which it didn’t go up; there was no depth to which it didn’t go down. No one was left out but the absolute wastrel like myself, who couldn’t be taken in.

Though it was not a cold day, the steadiness of the drizzle chilled me. The dampness of the pavements got through the worn soles of my boots, and I suppose it did the same with Lovey’s. The lack of food made the old man white, and that of drink set him to trembling. The fact that he hadn’t shaved for the past day or two gave his sodden face a grisly look that was truly appalling. Though the pale-blue eyes were extinct, as if the spirit in them had been quenched, they were turned toward me with the piteous appeal I had sometimes seen in those of a blind dog.

It was for me to take the lead, and yet I couldn’t wholly see in what direction to take it. While I was pondering, Lovey made a variety of suggestions.

“There doesn’t seem to be nothink for it, sonny, but to go and repent for a day or two. I ’ate to do it; kind o’ deceivin’ like, it is; but they’ll let us dry ourselves and give us a feed if we ’ave a sense of sin.”

I wondered if he had in mind anything better than what I had myself.

“Where?”

He took the negative side first.

“We couldn’t go to the Saviour, because I’ve put it over on ’em twice this year already. And the ’Omeless Men won’t do nothink for ye onless you make it up in menial work.”

“I won’t try either of them,” I said, briefly.

“Don’t blame you, sonny, not a bit. Kind o’ makes a hypercrite of a man, it does. I ’ate to be a hypercrite, only when I carn’t ’elp it.”

He went on to enumerate other agencies for the raising of the fallen, of most of which he had tested the hospitality during the past few years. I rejected them as he named them, one by one. To this rejection Lovey subscribed with the unreasoning dislike all outcast men feel for the hand stretched down to them from higher up. Nothing but starvation would have forced him to any of these thresholds; and for me even starvation would not work the miracle.

“What’s the matter with the Down and Out?” I sprang on him, suddenly.

He groaned. “Oh, sonny! It’s just—just what I was afeared of.”

I turned and looked down into his poor, bleared, suffering old face.

“Why?”

“Because—because—oncet ye try that they’ll—they’ll never let ye go.”

“But suppose you don’t want them to let you go?”

He backed away from me. If the dead eyes could waken to expression, they did it then.

“Oh, sonny!” He shook as if palsied. “Ye don’t know ’em, my boy. I’ve summered and wintered ’em—by lookin’ on. I’ve had pals of my own—”

“And what are they doing now, those pals of your own?”

“God knows; I don’t. Yes, I do; some of ’em. I see ’em round, goin’ to work as reg’lar as reg’lar, and no more spunk in ’em than in a goldfish when ye shakes yer finger at their bowl.”

Afraid of exciting suspicion by standing still, we began drifting with the crowd.

“Is there much that you can call spunk in you and me?”

Again he lifted those piteous, drunken eyes. “We’re fellas together, ain’t we? We’re buddies. I ’ear ye say so yerself when you was speakin’ to that Eyetalian.”

I have to confess that with his inflection something warm crept into my cold heart. You have to be as I was to know what the merest crumbs of trust and affection mean. A dog as stray and homeless as myself might have been more to me; but since I had no dog....

“Yes, Lovey,” I answered, “we’re buddies, all right. But for that very reason don’t you think we ought to try to help each other up?”

He stopped, to turn to me with hands crossed on his breast in a spirit of petition.

“But, sonny, you don’t mean—you carn’t mean—on—on the wagon?”

“I mean on anything that’ll get us out of this hell of a hole.”

“Oh, well, if it’s only that, I’ve—I’ve been in tighter places than this before—and—and look at me now. There’s ways. Ye don’t have to jump at nothink onnat’rel. If ye’d only ’ave listened to me yesterday—but it ain’t too late even now. What about to-night? Just two old ladies—no violence—nothink that’d let you in for nothink dishonorable.”

“No, Lovey.”

We drifted on again. He spoke in a tone of bitter reproach.

“Ye’d rather go to the Down and Out! It’ll be the down, all right, sonny; but there’ll be no out to it. Ye’ll be a prisoner. They’ll keep at ye and at ye till yer soul won’t be yer own. Now all these other places ye can put it over on ’em. They’re mostly ladies and parsons and greenhorns that never ’ad no experience. A little repentance and they’ll fall for it every time. Besides”—he turned to me with another form of appeal—“ye’re a Christian, ain’t ye? A little repentance now and then’ll do ye good. It’s like something laid by for a rainy day. I’ve tried it, so I know. Ye’re young, sonny. Ye don’t understand. And when it’ll tide ye over a time like this—they’ll git ye a job, very likely—and ye can backslide by and by when it’s safe. Why, it’s all as easy as easy.”

“It isn’t as easy as easy, Lovey, because you say you don’t like it yourself.”

“I like it better than the Down and Out, where they won’t let ye backslide no more. Why, I was in at Stinson’s one day and there was a chap there—Rollins was his name, a plumber—just enj’yin’ of himself like—nothink wrong—and come to find out he’d been one of their men. Well, what do ye think, sonny? A fellow named Pyncheon blew in—awful ’ard drinker for a young ’and, he used to be—and he sat down beside Rollins and pled with ’im and plod with ’im, and—well, ye don’t see Rollins round Stinson’s no more. I tell ye, sonny, ye carn’t put nothing over on ’em. They knows all the tricks and all the trade. Give me kind-’earted ladies; give me ministers of the gospel; give me the stool o’ repentance two or three times a month; but don’t give me fellas that because they’ve knocked off the booze theirselves wants every one else to knock it off, too, and don’t let it be a free country.”

We came to the corner to which I had been directing our seemingly aimless steps. It was a corner where the big red and green jars that had once been the symbols for medicines within now stood as a sign for soda-water and ice-cream.

“Let’s go in here.”

Lovey hung back. “What’s the use of that? That ain’t no saloon.”

“Come on and let us try.”

Pushing open the screen door, I made him pass in before me. We found ourselves in front of a white counter fitted up like a kind of bar. As a bar of any sort was better than none, Lovey’s face took on a leaden shade of brightness.

In the way of a guardian all we could see at first was a white-coated back bent behind the counter. When it straightened up it was topped by a friendly, boyish face.

Lovey leaped back, pulling me by the arm.

“That’s that very young Pyncheon I was a-tellin’ you of,” he whispered, tragically; “him what got Rollins, the plumber, out of Stinson’s. Let’s ’ook it, sonny! He won’t do us no good.”

But the boyish face had already begun to beam.

“Hel-lo, old sport! Haven’t seen you in a pair of blue moons. Put it there!”

The welcome was the more disconcerting because in the mirror behind Pyncheon I could see myself in contrast to his clean, young, manly figure. I have said I was shabby without being hideously so, but that was before I had slept a fourth night on the bare boards of a lumber-yard, to be drenched with rain in the morning. It was also before I had gone a fourth morning without shaving, and with nothing more thorough in the way of a wash than I could steal in a station lavatory. The want of food, the want of drink, to say nothing of the unspeakable anguish within, had stamped me, moreover, with something woebegone and spectral which, now that I saw it reflected in the daylight, shook me to the soul.

I never was so timid, apologetic, or shamefaced in my life as when I grasped the friendly hand stretched out to me across the counter. I had no smile to return to Pyncheon’s. I had no courtesies to exchange. Not till that minute had I realized that I was outside the system of fellowship and manhood, and that even a handshake was a condescension.

“Pyn,” I faltered, hoarsely, “I want you to take me to the Down and Out. Will you?”

“Sure I will!” He glanced at Lovey. “And I’ll take old Lovikins, too.”

“Don’t you be so fresh with your names, young man!” Lovey spoke up, tartly. “’Tain’t the first time I’ve seen you—”

“And I hope it won’t be the last,” Pyn laughed.

“That’ll depend on how polite ye’re able to make yerself.”

“Oh, you can count me in on politeness, old sport, so long as you come to the Down and Out.”

“I’ll go to the Down and Out when I see fit. I ain’t goin’ to be dragged there by the ’air of the ’ead, as I see you drag poor Rollins, the plumber, a month or two ago.”

“Quit your kiddin’, Lovey. How am I going to drag you by the ’air of the ’ead when you’re as bald as a door-knob? Say, you fellows,” he went on, pulling one of the levers before him, “I’m going to start you off right now with a glass of this hot chocolate. The treat’s on me. By the time you’ve swallowed it Milligan will be here, and I can get off long enough to take you over to Vandiver Street.” He dashed in a blob of whipped cream. “Here, old son, this is for you; and there’s more where it came from.”

“I didn’t come in ’ere for nothink of the kind,” Lovey protested. “I didn’t know we was comin’ in ’ere at all. You take it, sonny.”

“Go ahead, Lovikins,” Mr. Pyncheon insisted. “’E’s to ’ave a bigger one,” he mimicked. “Awful good for the ’air of the ’ead. ’Ll make it sprout like an apple-tree—I beg your pardon, happle-tree—in May.”

Before Pyncheon had finished, the primitive in poor Lovey had overcome both pride and reluctance, and the glass of chocolate was pretty well drained. The sight of his sheer animal avidity warned me not to betray myself. While Pyncheon explained to Milligan and made his preparations for conducting us, I carried my chocolate to the less important part of the shop, given up to the sale of tooth-brushes and patent medicines, to consume it at ease and with dignity.

Pyncheon having changed to a coat, in the buttonhole of which I noticed a little silver star, and a straw hat with a faint silver line in the hatband, we were ready to depart.

“I’ll go with ye, sonny,” Lovey explained; “but I ain’t a-goin’ to stay. No Down and Out for mine.”

“You wouldn’t leave me, Lovey?” I begged, as I replaced the empty glass on the counter. “I’m looking to you to help me to keep straight.”

He edged up to me, laying a shaking hand on my arm.

“Oh, if it’s that— But,” he added more cheerfully, “we don’t have to stay no longer than we don’t want to. There’s no law by which they can keep us ag’in’ our will, there ain’t.”

“No, Lovey. If we want to go we’ll go—but we’re buddies, aren’t we? And we’ll stick by each other.”

“Say, you fellows! Quick march! I’ve only got half an hour to get there and back.”

Out in the street, Lovey and I hung behind our guide. He was too brisk and smart and clean for us to keep step with. Alone we could, as we phrased it, get by. With him the contrast called attention to the fact that we were broken and homeless men.

“You go ahead, Pyn—” I began.

“Aw, cut that out!” he returned, scornfully. “Wasn’t I a worse looker than you, two and a half years ago? Old Colonel Straight picked me up from a bench in Madison Square—the very bench from which he’d been picked up himself—and dragged me down to Vandiver Street like a nurse’ll drag a boy that kicks like blazes every step of the way.”

As we were now walking three abreast, with Pyn in the middle, I asked the question that was most on my mind:

“Was it hard, Pyn—cutting the booze out?”

“Sure it was hard! What do you think? You’re not on the way to a picnic. For the first two weeks I fought like hell. If the other guys hadn’t sat on my head—well, you and old Lovey wouldn’t have had no glass of hot chocolate this morning.”

“I suppose the first two weeks are the worst.”

“And the best. If you’re really out to put the job through you find yourself toughening to it every day.”

“And you mean by being out to put the job through?”

“Wanting to get the durned thing under you so as you can stand on it and stamp it down. Booze’ll make two kinds of repenters, and I guess you guys stand for both. Old Lovey here”—he pinched my companion’s arm—“he’ll forsake his bad habits just long enough to get well fed up, a clean shirt on his back, and his nerves a bit quieted down. But he’ll always be looking forward to the day when he’ll be tempted again, and thinking of the good time he’ll have when he falls.”

“If you’ll mind yer own business, young Pyn—” Lovey began, irritably.

“Then there’s another kind,” this experienced reformer went on, imperturbably, “what’ll have a reason for cutting the blasted thing out, like he’d cut out a cancer or anything else that’ll kill him. I’ve always known you was that kind, Slim, and I told you so nearly a year ago.”

“I seen ye,” Lovey put in. “Was speakin’ about it only yesterday. Knew you was after no good. I warned ye, didn’t I, Slim?”

Curiosity prompted me to say, “What made you think I had a motive for getting over it?”

“Looks. You can always tell what a man’s made for by the kind of looker he is. As a looker you’re some swell. Lovikins here, now—”

“If I can’t do as well as the likes o’ you, ye poor little snipe of a bartender for babies—”

“What’ll you bet you can’t?” Pyn asked, good-naturedly.

“I ain’t a bettin’ man, but I can show!”

“Well, you show, and I’ll lay fifty cents against you. You’ll be umpire, Slim, and hold the stakes. Is that a go?”

“I don’t ’ave no truck o’ that kind,” Lovey declared, loftily. “I’m a doer, I am—when I get a-goin’. I don’t brag beforehand—not like some.”

I was still curious, however, about myself.

“And what did you make out of my looks, Pyn?”

He stopped, stood off, and eyed me.

“Do you know what you’re like now?”

“I know I’m not like anything human.”

“You’re like a twenty-dollar bill that’s been in every pawnshop, and every bar, and every old woman’s stocking, and every old bum’s pocket, and is covered with dirt and grease and microbes till you wouldn’t hardly hold it in your hand; but it’s still a twenty-dollar bill—that’ll buy twenty dollars’ worth every time—and whenever you like you can get gold for it.”

“Thank you, Pyn,” I returned, humbly, as we went on our way again. “That’s the whitest thing that has ever been said to me.”

Before we reached Vandiver Street, Pyn had given us two bits of information, both of which I was glad to receive.

One was entirely personal, being a brief survey of his fall and rise. The son of a barber in one of the small towns near New York, he had gone to work with a druggist on leaving the high school. His type, as he described it, had been from the beginning that of the cheap sport. Cheap sports had been his companions, and before he was twenty-one he had married a pretty manicure girl from his father’s establishment. He had married her while on a spree, and after the spree had repented. Repenting chiefly because he wasn’t earning enough to keep a wife, he threw the blame for his mistake on her. When a baby came he was annoyed; when a second baby came he was desperate; when a third baby promised to appear he was overwhelmed. Since the expenses of being a cheap sport couldn’t be reduced, he saw no resource but flight to New York, leaving his wife to fend for herself and her children.

Folly having made of him a hard drinker, remorse made of him a harder one. And since no young fellow of twenty-four is callous enough to take wife-desertion with an easy conscience, my own first talks with him had been filled with maudlin references to a kind of guilt I hadn’t at the time understood. All I knew was that from bad he had gone to worse, and from worse he was on the way to the worst of all, when old Colonel Straight rescued him.

The tale of that rescue unfolded some of the history of the Down and Out. As to that, Pyn laid the emphasis on the fact that the club was not a mission—that is, it was not the effort of the safe to help those who are in danger; it was the effort of those who are in danger to help themselves. Built up on unassisted effort, it was self-respecting. No bribes had ever been offered it, and no persuasions but such as a man who has got out of hell can bring to bear on another who is still frying in the fire. Its action being not from the top downward, but from the bottom upward, it had a native impulse to expansion.

Its inception had been an accident. Two men who had first met as Pyncheon and I had first met had lost sight of each other for several years. At a time when each had worked his salvation out they had come together by accident on Broadway, and later had by another accident become responsible for a third. Finding him one night lying on the pavement of a lonely street, they had seemingly had no choice but to pick him up and carry him to a cheap but friendly hostelry which they knew would not refuse him. Here they had kept him till he had sobered up and taken the job they found for him. Watching over him for months, they finally had the pleasure of restoring him to his wife and seeing a broken home put on its feet again. This third man, in gratitude for what had been done for him, went after a fourth, and the fourth after a fifth, and so the chain was flung out. By the time their number had increased to some twenty-five or thirty Providence offered them a dwelling-place.

The dwelling-place, with the few apparently worthless articles it contained, was all the club had ever accepted as a gift. Even that might have been declined had it not been for the fact that it was going begging. When old Miss Smedley died it was found that she had left her residence in Vandiver Place as a legacy to St. David’s Church, across the way. She had left it, however, as an empty residence. As an empty residence it was in a measure a white elephant on the hands of a legatee that had no immediate use for it.

St. David’s Church, you will remember, was not now the fashionable house of prayer it had been in its early days. Time was when Vandiver Place was the heart of exclusive New York. In the ’forties and ’fifties no section of the city had been more select. In the ’sixties and ’seventies, when Doctor Grace was rector of St. David’s, it had become time-honored. In the ’eighties and ’nineties the old families began to move up-town and the boarding-houses to creep in; and in the early years of the twentieth century the residents ceded the ground entirely to the manufacturer of artificial flowers and the tailor of the ready-to-wear. In 1911 the line of houses that made it a cul-de-sac was torn down and a broad thoroughfare cut through a congeries of slums, the whole being named Vandiver Street. Vandiver Place was gone; and with it went Miss Smedley.

Rufus Legrand, who succeeded Doctor Grace as rector of St. David’s, offered Miss Smedley’s house as a home for the Down and Out; but it was Beady Lamont, a husky furniture-mover and ardent member of the club, who suggested this philanthropic opportunity to Rufus Legrand.

“Say, reverent, my buddy’s give in at last, on’y I haven’t got no place to put him. But, say, reverent, there’s that old house I helped to move the sticks out of two or three months ago. There’s three beds left in it, and a couple of chairs. Me and him could bunk there for a few nights, while he got straightened out, and—”

“But you’d have no bedclothes.”

“Say, reverent, we don’t want no bedclothes. Sleepin’ in the Park’ll learn you how to do without sheets.”

“My daughter, Mrs. Ralph Coningsby, could undoubtedly supply you with some.”

“Say, reverent, that ain’t our way. We don’t pass the buck on no one. What we haven’t got we do without till we can pay for it ourselves. But that old house ain’t doin’ nothing but sit on its haunches; and if I could just get Tiger into the next bed to mine at night—we don’t want no bedclothes nor nothing but what we lay down in—and take him along with me when I go to work by day, so as to keep my search-lights on him, like—”

Rufus Legrand had already sufficiently weighed the proposal.

“I’m sure I don’t see why you shouldn’t sleep in the old place as long as you like, Beady, if you can only make yourselves comfortable.”

“Say, reverent, now you’re shouting.”

So another accident settled the fate of Miss Smedley’s lifelong home; and before many weeks the Down and Out was in full possession.

It was in full possession of the house with the refuse the heirs had not considered good enough to take away—three iron bedsteads that the servants had used; an equal number of humble worn-out mattresses; two tolerably solid wooden chairs, three that needed repairs, which were speedily given them; some crockery more or less chipped and cracked; and a stained steel-engraving of Franklin in the _salon_ of Marie Antoinette.

True to its principles, the club accepted neither gifts of money nor contributions in kind. Its members were all graduates of the school of doing without. To those who came there a roof over the head was a luxury, while to have a friend to stand by them and care whether they went to the devil or not was little short of a miracle.

But by the time Billy Pyncheon had been brought in by old Colonel Straight, gratitude, sacrifice, and enthusiasm on the part of one or another of the members had adequately fitted up this house to which Lovey and I were on the way. It had become, too, the one institution of which the saloon-keepers of my acquaintance were afraid. We were all afraid of it. It had worked so many wonders among our pals that we had come to look on it as a home of the necromantic. Missions of any kind we knew how to cope with; but in the Down and Out there was a sort of wizardry that tamed the wildest hearts among us, cast out devils, and raised the nearly dead. I myself for a year or more—ever since I had seen the spell it had wrought on Pyn, for whom from the first I had felt a sympathy—had been haunted by the dread of it; and here I was at the door.