Local Color

The interlopers looked on and, under the spell of a wizardry, forgot indeed they were interlopers. For before their eyes they saw, wonderfully re-created, a most notable conception, and afterward would have sworn, both of them, that all of it – the drawl and the lisp, the exaggerated walk, the gestures, the play of leg and arm, the swing of body, the skew of head, the lift of eyebrow even – was as true and as faithful to the original as any mirrored image might be to the image itself.

How long they stood and watched neither Verba nor Offutt was subsequently able to say with any reasonable exactitude. It might have been four minutes; it might have been six, or even eight. When later, taking counsel together, they sought to reckon up the time, the estimates varied so widely they gave up trying to reconcile them.

This much, though, they were sure of – that, in his mumming, old Bateman rose magically triumphant above the abundant handicaps of his own years and his own physique, his garb and his environment. Doing the undoable, he for the moment threw aside his years as one might throw aside the weight of a worn-out garment, and for that moment, to suit his own designs of mimicry, made floods of strength and youthfulness course through those withered arteries.

The old man finished with a whimsical turn of his voice and a flirt of his cane to match it. He bowed himself off with the hand which held the hat at his breast, and promptly on the second he disappeared the ancient curtain began to descend, Blinky meanwhile clapping with all his puny might.

Offutt turned to his companion. Behind the shelter of the box Verba’s lean, dark face was twitching.

“Is he there? Can he act? Was I right?” Verba asked himself each question, and himself answered each with a little earnest nod. “Gee, what a find!”

“Not a find, Verba,” whispered Offutt – “a resurrection – maybe. We’ve seen a genius in his grave.”

“And we’re going to dig him up.” In his intentness Verba almost panted it. “Wait! Wait!” he added warningly then, though Offutt had not offered to stir. “This is going to be a Protean stunt, I take it. Let’s let him show some more of his goods; for, by everything that’s holy, he’s got ’em!”

Up once more the curtain lifted, seemingly by its own motive power; and now the seaside drop was raised, and they beheld that, behind it, the stage had been dressed for another scene – a room in a French house. A secrétaire, sadly battered and marred, stood at one side; a bookcase with broken doors and gaping, empty shelves stood at the other, balancing it off. Down stage was an armchair. Its tapestry upholstering was rotted through and a freed spiral of springs upcoiled like a slender snake from its cushioned seat. All three pieces were of a pattern – “Louie-the-Something stuff,” Verba would have called them.

A table, placed fronting the chair but much nearer the right lower entrance than the chair was, and covered with a faded cloth that depended almost to the floor, belonged evidently to the same set. The scenery at the back showed a balcony, with a wide French window, open, in the middle. Beyond the window dangled a drop, dingy and discoloured as all the rest was, but displaying dimly a jumble of painted housetops and, far away in the simulated distance, the Arc de Triomphe. The colours were almost obliterated, but the suggestion of perspective remained, testifying still to the skill of the creator.

From the wings where they had seen him vanish Bateman reappeared. The trousers and the shoes were those he had worn before; but now, thrown on over his shirt, was the melancholy wreck of what once had been a blue uniform coat, with huge epaulets upon the shoulders and gold braid upon the collar and the cuffs, and brass buttons to fasten it in double-breasted fashion down the front. Now, though, it hung open. Some of the buttons were missing, and the gold lacings were mere blackened wisps of rags.

Bateman came on slowly, with dragging feet, his arms and legs and head quivering in a violent palsy. He stared out of the window as he let himself down carefully into the ruined armchair. His first movement proved that he played a venerable, very decrepit man – a man near death from age and ailments; yet by his art he managed to project, through the fleshly and physical weaknesses of the character, a power of dignity, of dominance, and of mental authority. He rolled his head back weakly.

“‘My child,’” he said, addressing a make-believe shape before him, “‘I must help to receive our brave, victorious troops. See! I am fittingly dressed to do them honour.’”

His tones were pitched in the cracked cackle of senility. He paused, as though for an answer out of space. His inflection told as he, in turn, replied that this answer had been a remonstrance:

“‘No, no, no!’” he said almost fiercely. “‘You must not seek to dissuade me.’”

The words stung Verba’s memory, raising a welt of recollection there.

“I’ve got it!” he said exultantly, not forgetting, though, to keep his voice down. “Siege of Berlin, by that French fellow – what’s his name? – Daudet!”

“I remember the story,” answered Offutt.

“I remember the play,” said Verba. “Somebody dramatised it – Lord knows who – and Scudder put it on here as a curtain raiser. I saw it myself, Offutt – think of that! Sitting up yonder in the old peanut roost – a kid no bigger than that kid down there – I saw it. And now I’m seeing it again; seeing Burt Bateman play the part of the old paralytic – you know, the old French officer who was fooled by his doctor and his granddaughter into believing the French had licked the Germans, when all the time ’twas the other way and – ”

“Sh-h!” counselled Offutt.

After another little wait Bateman was going on with his scene:

“‘Listen! Listen!’” he cried, cupping a tremulous palm behind his ear. “‘Do you not hear them far away? – the trumpets – the trumpets of victorious France! Our forces have entered Berlin! Thank God! Thank God! All Paris will celebrate. I must greet them from the balcony.’”

With a mighty effort he reared himself to his feet, straightening his slanted shoulders, erecting his lolled head. His fingers fumbled at button and buttonhole, fastening his coat at the throat. He swung one arm imperiously, warding off imaginary hands.

“‘The trumpets! The trumpets! Hark! They come nearer and nearer! They sound for the victory of France – for a heroic army. I will go! Doctor or no doctor, I pay my homage this day to our glorious army. Stand back, ma chérie!’”

Offutt, fifty feet away, caught himself straining his ears to hear those trumpets too. A rat ran across his foot and Offutt never knew it.

“‘They come! They come! ’” chuckled Bateman.

He dragged himself up stage, mounted the two stairs to the balcony, and stood in the window, at attention, to salute the tri-coloured flag. Nor did he forget to keep his face half turned to the body of the house.

He smiled; and the two unseen spies, staring at that profiled head, saw the joy that was in the smile. Then, in the same moment, the expression changed. Dumb astonishment came first – an unbelieving astonishment; then blank stupefaction; then the shock of horrified understanding; then unutterable rage.

Offutt recalled the tale from which the playlet had been evolved, and Verba, for his part, recalled the playlet; but, had neither known what they knew, the both of them, guided and informed only by the quality of Bateman’s acting, still could have anticipated the climax now impending; and, lacking all prior acquaintance with the plot of it, yet would have read that the cripple, expecting to cheer his beloved French, saw advancing beneath the Arc de Triomphe the heads of the conquering Germans, and heard, above the calling bugles, not the Marseillaise, but the strains of a Teuton marching song. His back literally bristled with his hate. He spun about full face, a mortally stricken man. His clenched fists rose above his head in a command.

“‘To arms! To arms!’” he screamed impotently, with the rattle already in his throat. “‘The Prussians! The Prus – ’”

He choked, tottered down the steps, reeled forward and fell headlong out into the room, rolling in the death spasm behind the draped table; and as, ten seconds later, the curtain began to unroll from above and lengthen down, Offutt found himself saying over and over again, mechanically:

“Why, he’s gone, isn’t he?”

“He kept the table between him and the house and crawled out behind it – trust him not to spoil his picture!” explained Verba. “And trust him to know the tricks of his trade.” He tugged at Offutt’s elbow. “Come on, boy; I’ve seen enough and so have you, I guess. Let’s go sign him.”

He fumbled at the wall.

“Side passageway back to the stage ought to be round here somewhere. Here it is – that’s lucky!”

Guiding himself by the touching of his outstretched hands upon the walls of the opening, Verba felt his way behind the box, with Offutt stumbling along in his rear. So progressing, they came to an iron-sheathed door. Verba lifted its latch and they were in a place of rancid smells and cluttering stage duffel. Roaches fled in front of them. On their left a small wooden door stood partly ajar, and through the cranny they looked, as they passed, into a dressing room, where a pallet of old hangings covered half the floor space, and all manner of dingy stock costumings and stage trappings hung upon hooks.

“Here’s where he must sleep,” said Verba. “What a place for a white man to be living in!”

He felt for his handkerchief to wipe his soiled hands, and then together they saw Bateman advancing toward them from out of the extreme rear of the stage. Over his shoulders was thrown a robe of heavy ragged sacking and upon his face he had hung a long, false beard of white hair. He glared at them angrily. And Offutt, in instantaneous appraisal, interpreted most surely the look out of those staring big grey eyes.

Verba extended his hand and opened his mouth to speak; but Bateman was already speaking.

“What business have you here?” he demanded. “Strangers are not permitted here during performances. How came the stage doorkeeper to admit you? He has been here too long, that doorkeeper, and he grows careless. I shall have him discharged.”

“But, Mr. Bateman,” began Verba, half puzzled, half insistent, “I’m in the business myself. I want to – ”

“Stand aside!” ordered the old man almost violently. “You cannot have been long in the business, young sir, else you would be more mannerly than to interrupt an artist when his public calls for him. Out of my way, please!”

He strutted by them in stilted vanity and gripped the lifting ropes of the old curtain where they swung in the near angle of the wings, and pulled downward on them with an unexpected display of muscular force. The curtain rose; and as Blinky, still at his place, uplifted a little yell of approbation the old man, bending his shoulders, passed out into the centre of the French drawing-room set and, extending a quivering hand, uttered sonorously the command:

“‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!’”

“The mad scene from King Lear,” said Offutt.

“Sure – Shakspere!” agreed Verba. “Old Scudder was a bug on that Bard stuff. So was Bateman. He used to know it from cover to cover – Othello, Hamlet, Lear – the whole string. … Anyhow, Offutt, I’ve found the only man to do the grandfather’s part in that show of yours, haven’t I?”

“I’m sorry to say it, Verba, but you’re wrong,” stated Offutt.

“How do you mean – I’m wrong?” demanded Verba irritably. Out of the corner of his mouth he aimed the protest at his companion; but his eyes, through the gap of the first entrance, were fixed on Bateman as he strode back and forth, and his ears drank in the splendid full-lunged volume and thrill of Bateman’s voice as the player spoke snatches from the play. “He’s not too old – if that’s what you mean; he’s just about old enough. And he’s all there, even if he is old. Didn’t you see the strength he had when he hoisted up that heavy curtain?”

“I think I know where that strength came from,” said Offutt. “Just a minute, Verba – did you ever hear of the Great Auk?”

“He was in vaudeville, wasn’t he?” asked Verba, still staring at Bateman. “A trick juggler or something?”

Offutt forgot to smile.

“The Great Auk was a bird,” he said.

“Oh, I see; and I’ve been calling Bateman Old Bird,” said Verba. “I get you.”

“No, you don’t get me,” went on Offutt. “The Great Auk was a rare creature. It got rarer and rarer until they thought it had vanished. They sent an expedition to the Arctic Circle, or wherever it was the thing bred, to get one specimen for the museums; but they came back without it. And now the Great Auk is an extinct species.”

“What the devil are you driving at?” snapped Verba, swinging on him.

“Listen yonder!” bade the dramatist. “That old man out yonder is telling you, himself, in better words than I could tell you.”

He pointed a finger through the wings. Craning their necks, they heard the deep voice speak the lines:

“‘Pray, do not mock me:I am a very foolish fond old man,Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less;And, to deal plainly,I fear I am not in my perfect mind.’”

Verba hearkened and he understood. After a little he nodded in gloomy affirmation of the younger man’s belief.

“I guess you’re right, Offutt,” he said disappointedly. “I guess I’d have seen it, too, only I was so sort of carried away. Real acting does me that way – when I see it, which ain’t often.”

He paused a minute in uncertainty. Then resolution came to him.

“Well,” he said, “come on; there’s no use of our hanging round here any longer. I’ll give Blinky his quarter – he certainly earned it ten times over – and then we’ll go back uptown, and I’ll telephone Grainger he can have his seventy-five more a week.”

“But what are we going to do about – him?” Offutt indicated who he meant with a wave of his arm toward the stage.

It was Verba’s turn. Verba knew the stage and its people and its ways as Offutt would never know them. He had been an actor, Verba had, before he turned managing director for Cohalan & Hymen.

“What are we going to do about him?” he repeated; and then, as though surprised that the other should be asking the question: “Why, nothing! Offutt, every haunted house is entitled to its ghost. This is a haunted house if ever there was one; and there’s its ghost, standing out there. You mentioned an extinct species, didn’t you? Well, you were dead right, son. So take your good-by look now, before we go, at the last of a great breed. There’ll be no more like him, I’m thinking.”

“But we can’t leave him here like this!” said Offutt. “His mind is gone – you admit it yourself. They’ve got hospitals and asylums in this state – and homes too. It would be a mercy to take him with us.”

“Mercy? It would be the dam’dest cruelty on earth!” snapped Verba. “How long do you suppose he’d live in an asylum if we tore him up by the roots and dragged him away from this place? A week? I tell you, a week would be a blamed long time. No, sir; we leave him right here. And we’ll keep our mouths shut about this too. Come on!”

He tiptoed to the iron door and opened it softly. Then, with his hand on the latch, he halted.

Bateman was just finishing. He spoke the mad king’s mad tag-line and got himself off the stage. He unreeled the stay rope from its chock. The curtain rumbled down. Through it the insistent smacking of Blinky’s skinny paws could be heard.

Smiling proudly the old man listened to the sound. He forgot their presence behind him. He stood waiting. Blinky kept on applauding – Blinky was wise in his part too. Then, still smiling, Bateman stripped off his beard, and, putting forth a bony white hand, he plucked aside the flapping curtain and stepped forth once more.

Scrouging up behind him and holding the curtain agape, they saw him bow low to the pit where Blinky was, and to the empty boxes, and to the yawning emptiness of each balcony; and they knew that to him this was not a mangy cavern of dead memories and dead traditions and dead days, peopled only by gnawing rats and crawling vermin and one lone little one-eyed street boy, but a place of living grandeurs and living triumphs. And when he spoke, then they knew he spoke, not to one but to a worshipping, clamorous host.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, with a bearing of splendid conceit, “I thank you for the ovation you have given me. To an artist – to an artist who values his art – such moments as this are most precious – ”

“Come on, Offutt!” whispered Verba huskily. “Leave him taking his call.”

CHAPTER VII

FIRST CORINTHIANSCHAP. XIII., v. 4

Since this must deal in great part with the Finkelstein family and what charity did for them, I began the task by seeking in the pages of an invaluable book called Ten Thousand Familiar Quotations for a line that suitably might serve as the text to my chapter. Delving there I came upon abundant material, all of it more or less appropriate to our present purpose. There were revealed at least a half a dozen extracts from the works of writers of an established standing that might be made to apply. For instance, Wordsworth, an English poet of the Early Victorian Era, that period which gave so much of rhythmic thought to Britain and so much of antirhythmic furniture to us, is credited with having said:

The charities that soothe and heal and blessAre scattered at the feet of man like flowers.

Now that passage, at first blush, appeared exactly to fit the Finkelsteins. Most certainly charities were scattered at their feet and likewise showered on their heads.

However, before making a definite choice, I went deeper into this handy volume. As a result, I exhumed an expression attributed to Pope – not one of the Roman Popes, but Pope, Alex. (b. 1688; d. 1744) – to the effect that

In faith and hope the world will disagree,But all mankind’s concern is charity.

That statement likewise proved in a measure applicable. To the Finkelsteins it must have seemed that all mankind’s concern was charity, devised for their especial benefit.

Now Hood takes an opposite view. In that choppy style of versification so characteristic of this writer, Hood is discovered saying:

Alas for the rarityOf Christian charityUnder the sun!

Speaking with particular reference to the case in hand I must respectfully but nevertheless firmly take issue with the late Hood. Assuredly the components of this particular household group had no cause to cavil concerning the rarity of Christian charity. Christian charity went miles out of its way to lavish rich treasures from a full heart upon them. Under the sun, too, under the rays of an ardent and a scorching sun, was some of it bestowed. But of that phase, more – as the fancy writers say – anon.

The Scriptures were found to abound in reference to this most precious of the human virtues. What does Peter say? Peter – First Epistle, fourth chapter and eighth verse – says: “Charity shall cover the multitude of sins.” Here, too, a point might be stretched without giving offence to any interested party. I cannot deny there were a multitude of Finkelsteins. That, there is no gainsaying.

Elsewhere in the Good Book it is set forth: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal; … and” – furthermore – “though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.”

One of the most significant recollections of at least two members of the Finkelstein family in their experiences with the manifestations of charity was associated with mountains. And was not the occasion of the outing of the Evening Dispatch’s Fresh Air Fund made glad by the presence and the activities of Prof. Washington Carter’s All-Coloured Silver Cornet Band? If ever you heard this organisation you would know that, when it came to sounding brass and cymbals which tinkled when not engaged in clashing, no band had anything whatsoever on Prof. Washington Carter’s.

But it was hard by, in the Testaments, that I happened on the one verse which seemed best to sum up the situation in its more general aspects; and notably the first three words of the said verse. The text has been chosen, therefore, after much consideration of the subject and its merits.

To proceed: In Pike Street, approximately midway of a block that enjoys the dubious distinction of being a part of the most congested district of the globe, up four flights of stairs and thence back to the extreme rear, the Finkelstein family, at the time of its discovery, resided. There were many of them and their lot was very lowly. To begin at the top, there was Papa Finkelstein, a man bearded and small, shrinking, unobtrusive and diffident; fashioned with sloping shoulders and an indented chest as though in his extreme youth, when his bones were supple and yielding, a partly successful effort had been made to crowd him, head first, into a narrow-mouthed jar. His back was bent, for he was of the race that for more than nineteen centuries has borne, palfrey-like, upon its patient spines the persecutions of the world.

Next in order came Mamma Finkelstein, hiding her dark head beneath a wig of slick brown horsehair in accordance with the same ritual which ordained that her husband should touch not the corners of his beard. To attend to the business of multiplying and replenishing the earth with Finkelsteins was her chief mission in life. From the family stepladder of these two no rungs were missing. Indeed, about a third of the way down there was a double rung – to wit, twins. The married life of the pair extended over a period of less than eleven years and already there were eight little Finkelsteins, ranging from little to littler to littlest.

Papa Finkelstein was by profession an old-clo’ man. It was his custom to go into the favoured sections where people laid aside their weathered habiliments instead of continuing to wear them, and there watching on street corners to waylay pedestrians of an ample and prosperous aspect, and to inquire of them in his timid and twisted English, whether they had any old clothes to sell. A prospective seller being by this method interested, Papa Finkelstein would accompany the other to his apartment – follow him, rather – and when discarded garments had been fetched forth from closets and piled in a heap upon the floor he would gaze deprecatingly at the accumulation and then, with the air of one who courts ruin by his excessive generosity, tender one dollar and thirty-five cents for the entire lot.

So far so good, this course being in perfect accord with the ethics of the old-clo’ business. But if, as most generally, the owner of the raiment indignantly declined the first offer Papa Finkelstein was at a loss to proceed with the negotiations. The chaffering; the bargaining; the raising of the amount in ten-cent advances, each advance accompanied by agonised outcry; the pretended departure; the reluctant return from the door; the protest; the entreaty; the final gesture, betokening abject and complete surrender, with which the buyer came up to two dollars and fifteen cents – all this, so agreeable to the nature of the born old-clo’ man, was quite beyond him. Oftener than not, the trading ended in no trade.

Or if a bargain was arrived at, if he bore away his bundled purchases to the old-clothes mart on Bayard Street, just off the Bowery, where daily the specialist in sick hats, let us say, swaps decrepit odd trousers and enfeebled dress waistcoats for wares more suitable to his needs, still he tempted bankruptcy. Sharper wits than his, by sheer weight of dominance, bore him down and trafficked him, as the saying goes, out of his eyeteeth. He could have taken over a tannery and run it into a shoestring in no time at all. Many a day was there when he returned home at eventide with nothing to show for his day’s industry except lamentable memories and two tired flat feet.

Lacking the commercial instinct, he was a failure in trade; lacking, too, the artistic, neither would he have made headway with his coreligionists as a professional Schnorrer. By persistent and devoutful attendance upon synagogue services, by the constant exhibition of his poverty in public places, he might have enlisted the sympathies of the benevolent among his fellow worshippers. But he was a dilettante in the practice of piety, even as in the practice of the old-clo’ business. Except as the head of a family, he was what this world is pleased to call a failure.