The Red Book Magazine/Volume 14/Number 6/The Cruel Town

by Earl Derr Biggers

The Cruel Town

 

BY EARL DERR BIGGERS

 

EVERY night at midnight, or a little after, the fire dies out of New York's heart and leaves it cold and pitiless. The last red lobster has perished; the last taxicab meter has sold its short story for a tidy sum; the last sight-seeing automobile has crept down Broadway, carrying Little Rock, Peoria, Akron, and Fargo, to investigate the midnight wickedness of the Bowery.

The electric fire on the big street fades, and the great city, looming gray in the half-light, stares cruelly down upon the haggard army that lingers homeless in its parks.

And with the naked hate in their eyes, such of the army as cannot wrap the mockery of their benches about them and lie down to pleasant dreams, stare back. In the great, gray city's stolid face they shake their angry fists. Whereupon the city mingles with its stare a well-bred sneer.

Shaking such a metaphorical fist, Jimmy Merrick sat on a bench in the quietest corner of Madison Square. He was scorned of the city. With a long distance sneer it had regarded the two leather-bound, typewritten tragedies he held in his lap, and the third, which he held in his heart.

You, sir, with your gout, and I with my dyspepsia, might have looked into Jimmy Merrick's strong young face and denied him that tragedy in his heart, as fancy-waistcoated managers had denied him the two in the leather covers. But that would not have made it any less real to Jimmy. For he was young, and he thought he was suffering for the cause of art, which the compositor will be careful to set upper-case.

He shook that metaphorical fist once more in the face of the heartless town. Only that evening the town had spoken, through a frowsy landlady, and, because of a little matter of unpaid gold, had deprived him of the shelter of his room—all because he chose to linger in the purple twilight of tragedy, rather than gather news for a subsidized daily of national reputation. Jimmy stuck out also, a metaphorical tongue. Then he lurched disconsolately in his seat, his long legs stretching far over the gravel path.

A little man, with the sloop of dejection in his shoulders and the slouch of gloom in his hat, wandered down the path and fell absently over the Merrick feet.

“Pardon, Monsieur,” he said in French, and then dropped to the bench as if the apology were but begun.

The little man looked also at the gray town, and in his eyes dejection mingled with the hatred.

Jimmy Merrick slid quickly along the bench and laid his hand on a brother's shoulder.

“Misery,” he said bitterly, “is as lonesome as merit on Broadway. The city has spurned you, too, my friend?”

With renewed energy the little man leaped to his feet, and made belligerent motions toward the giant scrapers of the sky.

“My grievance,” he cried, “is against a city of degenerate tastes. Where once I bowed to applauding thousands, ballet dancers kick up their soiled pink heels. Aged acrobats oust me from the boards. The doors of the managers, that open so readily to her of the green tights who has cribbed a dance from classic literature, are forever barred to me—the artist!”

Jimmy Merrick hugged tightly the manuscripts of two great, unacted tragedies.

“Our sorrow is the same,” he said. “But for that very degeneracy of taste, a brass bed and not an iron bench would receive me to-night. The efforts of schoolboys are flaunted in electric letters, while men of parts stand in the bread line. And your name—Monsieur?”

“You have seen,” responded the little man, “that name on a thousand bills, both here and at home, in Paris. A great headliner, Monsieur—but oh, so long ago. The king of vaudeville. They recognized me—in those days—oui, at a glance. Professor Alphonse Perrin. So, you have seen it on the bills?”

“And your act—?”

“Mon Dieu—you also have forgotten. I, Monsieur, am a trainer of that noble beast, the elephant. Think—have you not seen them—my beloved children—Mark and Miranda? The two performing elephants—the most clever ever before the public? But no—why is it that I ask? We have played nothing better than Hoboken in ten years. And now—homeless—forgotten—but you, Monsieur? What is your act?”

“I,” said Mr. James Merrick, dignity, “am a writer of plays. Not ordinary plays. Not such plays as your ash-man, or your butcher, or your elevator-boy, toil over in the long night. Not such plays as the sordid mechanicians of Broadway construct for gleaming gold. In my work is the soul of Art laid bare.”

He stood up and pointed a long, lean finger at the city.

“And what do they tell me?” he cried. “They tell me to go. 'Be off, you and your plays,' they sneer. 'On your way! Beat it!'”

“So,” he cried, “they welcome me. 'Take your elephants away. Back to the provinces.' Ah, Monsieur, it was ever thus with Art.”

The two gazed a moment into each other's eyes, and the flame of sympathy burned bright. The little man sighed a tremendous sigh and again seated himself.

“In France,” he murmured, “I had a father who baked bread. Dough, dough—rolls, rolls, all his life long. It was his wish that I, too, should become a baker. He dreamed of it.”

One more sigh from the little man.

“But I—I, too, dreamed. Of a lighted stage, and spangles, and the applause of the mob. I heard the call of Art. And I gave the waiting world elephants, instead of bread and cake.”

Jimmy Merrick nodded down Broadway.

“Across from City Hall Park,” he said, “gleam the lights of my bake shop—of the newspaper that would erase my name from the roll of genius. They like my stories—my funny stories—over there, Monsieur. The cap and bells were mine. But I, too, heard the call, and I ran away to do tragedies, I also have given the world elephants, instead of cake.”

Professor Perrin, intent on his own story, broke in.

“Even now,” he said, “I could go back. My brother Henri presides over the bakery of our father. Only Wednesday came a letter from him: 'Return,' it pleaded. 'The business is most prosperous. A part is yours. Say good-by to this life of wandering, and return.'”

Still another sigh—almost a groan—from the little man.

“I cannot deny,” he whispered, “even to a fellow artist like you, Monsieur, I cannot deny that there are times when the peace of our little town and of that bakery calls me. The city is cold, so cold to Art. But my brother's command is that before I come back I be forever rid of Mark and Miranda—as an evidence of my faith. Monsiuer—how can he ask it? They are my well-beloved—my children. But for them, it is true, I might know quiet and content; but rather than give them up, I would wander homeless forever, knocking on the barred door of the city.”

Young Merrick regarded him with wide eyes.

“The parallel in our cases,” he cried, “is strikingly similar. They want me again on the newspaper, but I must come back to a life of jests minus my tragedies—as an evidence of faith. It is argued that they interfere with good stories—as Mark and Miranda, Monsieur, might interfere with good rolls. The city-editor is a man devoid of soul.

“'Be an original fool at least,' he said, when I left, 'if you must dabble in idiocy. Every weak-minded clerk writes plays. Each publication of the newest dramatist's income sets a new batch of janitors to dreaming scenarios.' An unreasonable man, Monsieur.”

“Like my brother,” sympathized the little one. “He scorns my elephants. But sacre bleu—even he would pity Mark and Miranda to-night—if he could see them—homeless, as I am—wandering—”

“Monsieur—you do not tell me—”

“At midnight,” moaned Professor Perrin, “they were driven from the stable where I have kept them by the burly brute in charge. What was it that he said? Oui—pay or get out! He, too, has no real soul for Art. At this moment the faithful Sancho is bringing them to me here. They walk the streets with me to-night.”

“The heartless town,” cried Merrick.

“Poor Sancho,” almost sobbed the little man. ““To-night he leaves me forever. He has secured a good position with the circus that shows over there, and I have bade him go. Good Sancho! As faithful as he was black. In the pleasant days I treated him kindly. To-night he returned to me the trousers I gave him when we played the big week in Ashtabula. And—ah, Monsieur, conceive of my grief—I had to take them. The pitiless town!”

The town sneered down upon them mockingly. From a nearby bench was wafted the snore of one who had wearied of sneering back. A late car clanged somewhere on the other side of the park, and through the leafy trees the stars shone down.

“Voila!” cried the little man, leaping to his feet.

From out a dark side street, to the east, moved a procession strange even in New York. Out of the dim gray cañon crept two lumbering elephants prodded on by a shabby black man of enormous stature. Sleepily the three moved over toward the shelter of the park.

The few pedestrians abroad in that neighborhood paused with a startled air and rubbed their eyes. Odd are the sights that New York boasts. You may see furs worn on Broadway in July; or a claimant to some dusky throne enthroned on a mighty truck. You may even behold a statue of Virtue wearing a scarlet tiara where Broadway and Forty-second street meet. But you seldom see a detachment of the Roosevelt hunting-party, even in Manhattan's maddest moments.

The eyes of one of the startled pedestrians traveled over to Madison Square Garden, where a gay bill board flashed its message of coming splendor.

“Oh—the circus,” he called to the others.

They laughed, and passed on.

At the curb the little man and Sancho said a sad farewell, and Professor Perrin himself coaxed the elephants up the walk to the bench where the near-playwright sat.

There he paused, pointing dramatically to the swaying, unlovely beasts.

“Look at them, Monsieur,” he cried. “But for them I might be happy in the town of my people. But what am I to do? I cannot slay them—I am fond of them. I cannot sell them—the gold would blister my palms. There is nothing I can do. Forever I am linked to them—and Art.”

Merrick shifted his own leather-bound elephants on his knees.

“The beasts are small, Monsieur,” he offered.

“Small,” cried the slave of Art. “That they are. And yet, Monsieur, no vaudeville stage-door in Manhattan is wide enough to receive them. Wonder of wonders!”

“No wonder at all,” replied Merrick, holding up his plays. “Behold the size of these. And yet no stage-door on this little old island can open to let them pass.”

Shrugging his shoulders, the little man sat again upon the bench. Before the dejected pair, like some optical illusion, swayed the famous trained elephants—great, gray, silent, like the cruel town itself. The wind rustled through the green leaves above—as if the city stirred in its sleep.

And then upon the two on the bench fell the usual fever of the artist. You who have friends writing plays—and who has not?—know it well. Its warning symptom is “Listen!”

“Monsieur,” spoke the little man, “has never seen Mark and Miranda perform. With trunks locked they waltz like humans—to the tune of the Merry Widow. See! Ta-te-ta-tum, ta-te-ta—”

But Merrick had already stripped the leather covers from his tragedies, and was hotly turning the thin pages.

“You should hear,” he cried, “how I work up to my climax in the third act of 'The Ancient Game.' Muriel is waiting in the conservatory for her lover to return. The light effects—”

“Miranda,” cried the little man, oblivious, “stands upon her hind feet as easily as you or I. Behold!”

“At this point,” continued Merrick, “Muriel has a great line. It sums up the whole proposition of the play. All that has gone before—”

“And Mark,” interrupted Professor Perrin, “lifts me from the ground and carries me in his trunk. You shall see—”

“Into the darkened conservatory,” went on Merrick, seizing on the little man's arm with an Ancient Mariner grip, “comes Randolph Courcey, and on his arm is the gay widow whose frivolity spells tragedy for Muriel. The poor girl gives one look—”

“But Miranda's greatest act,” put in the elephant trainer, “came near the close of our twenty minutes on the stage. I would stand with my face toward the audience, holding a newspaper in my hand.”

He stooped to the grass and picked up a stray sheet.

“Miranda crept upon me—here! here!—ah, so. She reached out her trunk like a flash, and seized the paper in it—so. In a second she had swallowed it. Monsieur, it—what you say?—tore down the house.”

“If that scene could be staged,” Merrick was saying, pointing to the manuscript, “it would set the town afire. I have seen it acted—a million times—in my dreams. Oh—its possibilities—magnificent! But they cannot see—the managers.”

“Pigs!” commented the Professor, angrily.

The fever passed. Again they sat in silence. Across the grass, wet with dew, crept the chill of the morning—thence into their hearts. Along Broadway, on the far side of the park, crept silently a great sight-seeing auto—Fargo and Little Rock, and Peoria and Akron, back from wickedness and the Bowery. From an all-night lunch-cart not far away, the little man thought he caught the odor of hot coffee.

“Down by the river,” he sighed, Neilson, the one-eyed Swede, waits for my elephants. He has offered a good price. But no—no, a thousand times, Monsieur. I have not the heart. Though it mean that I may eat and be content, never will I take that step, my friend.”

“And I,” sighed also the young man, while he, too, wondered if he did not catch, ever so faintly, the odor of hot coffee, “I could tear these plays into a thousand pieces and be fed again. No other copies remain. I could scatter tragedy over the wet grass and go back to a brass bed and a pay-envelope once more. But I am no quitter. I have marked out my path, and I shall tread on.”

Bedraggled, with faces that belied the determination in their words, the two sat disconsolate before the waking city's pitiless sneer. Into their hearts crept the fire of hate—hate for a town too big and sordid to know the worth of Art.

Merrick leaped to his feet at last and faced the gray giant.

“Hang such a town!” he shouted. “Look how it stands and mocks us poor devils whom it has barred from its cash-drawer. It peeps at us over its smoky roofs and shouts: 'Down and out! Down and out!' We're a joke to it—a tremendous, funny joke, and each night, when it has nothing else to do, it pauses to laugh at us.”

“Dog of a city!” screamed the little man.

Merrick held out his two great, unacted tragedies.

“I offer it my plays,” he cried. “Not ordinary plays, Monsieur. Plays written with my own heart's blood in a narrow hall-bedroom, while the landlady charged me for all-night gas. And can it appreciate them—”

“Non—vilest of cities!” guessed the elephant man.

“I offer it my plays,” went on Merrick, holding them out before him. “I beg it to read—”

He paused. Something gray and sinister had reached from behind unexpectedly. The plays had disappeared.

It was a terrible moment. The little man scarcely dared breathe. Too well he knew that the accomplished Miranda had repeated without request her most screaming act of all—that she had swallowed the two greatest tragedies of the decade.

“Mon Dieu!” he cried in fear. “See what you have done, you beast! Gone—in a second! The gentleman's great work, for which he was charged extra gas! The children of his soul!”

He looked at Merrick appealingly.

“Can you ever forgive?” he cried.

Merrick had stood for a moment in dazed wonder, now he shook his broad shoulders as if a great load had fallen from them, and—the little man scarcely believed his eyes—smiled happily.

“By the gods,” he declared, “Miranda has decided it! Oh, the wisdom of women! All night, Monsieur, I have been faltering, despite my large talk of Art. I have longed for a good meal, for comfort, for the old days. But with those plays in my arms there loomed nothing but hopeless waiting.”

He looked up at the sky where the first red of the morning crept from east to west.

“And now, I am free, free, free!” he cried. “Miranda has done for me what I could not have done for myself. I was never so happy before. This very morning I go back to the paper—to the old ways—and the old meals. Monsieur, it is glorious!”

The surprise had gradually faded from the little man's face. He rose suddenly to his feet.

“You decide me!” he cried. “Such heroism in a dark hour, splendid, noble, immortal! Or is it that it is not a dark hour. I suspect, Monsieur, that it is not. At any rate, mon ami, I go to find out.”

“Where?”

“To Neilson, the one-eyed Swede. This very morning I shall sell him Mark and Miranda. It will be hard—that parting—but I shall accomplish it. The smile on your face, the light in your eyes—they shall inspire me in that bitter hour. I thank you—you have shown me the way.”

“It was Miranda, Monsieur, who showed it to me.”

“Even so,” returned the Professor. He was prodding his heavy charges down the path. “Farewell,” he called. “Farewell, Monsieur. It is a gloomy parting I go to—but who knows—the next hour may be bright.”

He paused.

“Monsieur.”

“Well?”

“Would to Heaven,” called the little man, “the tragedies might have eaten the elephants.”

And he passed across the pavement, out of sight down the street beyond.

Just five minutes later Patrolman O'Brien strolled through the park and paused at the bench where Merrick sat.

“Shure—'tis Jimmy,” he cried. “Where ha-ave ye been this long time, me la-ad? Th' byes at th' station ha-ave missed ye.”

“It's all right,” said Merrick, smiling happily, “I go back on the paper to-day.”

“'Tis glad I am to hear it,” returned the patrolman. He stooped to pick something from the grass. “Are they yours, Jimmy?” he asked.

Merrick looked at the two leather covers the policeman held in his hand.

“They were,” he said, “but I'm through with them—forever.”

“Good,” said O'Brien, “I'll just be takin' thim home to me girl. She'll be wild to be makin' a sofa pillow iv thim, I'm thinkin'.”

Ye gods! Upon covers that had once sheltered tragedies written out of a man's heart, a female O'Brien would sit, holding, perhaps, a bricklayer's hand the while. And this was the end of Art!

But Jimmy Merrick whistled as, amid the clatter of early traffic, he strolled down Broadway in the first light of the new day. At a restaurant of the old time, just off Park Row, they gave him, on his mere promise to pay, his first real meal in weeks.

The gas light over the day city-editor's desk was a ghastly yellow compared with the radiance that lit the world beyond the dingy windows, when Jimmy Merrick strolled in and threw his hat on a desk. The city-editor was engaged in comparing his own paper with those issued by his rivals. He swore continually, and some of the oaths were glad, and many were sad.

“I'm back,” announced Jimmy.

The city-editor looked up quickly through his double-convex lenses.

“How about the plays?” he asked, meanly groping for the chance to gloat.

“I'm through with them—forever,” Merrick said.

The “born newspaperman” suddenly decided to postpone his gloating. After all—

“Good,” he said. He wrinkled his brows. “I was wishing for you only a few minutes ago. There was a story—let me see—oh yes, the circus opens at the Garden to-day.”

“I know,” said Merrick quickly.

“One of your old time tales, Jimmy,” said his chief. “You know—the gayest sign of Spring—the small boy rampant—the passionate press agent—the clowns—the acrobats—and—oh, yes, the elephants.”

“I'm on,” said Merrick.