Episodes Before Thirty/Chapter 22
CHAPTER XXII
The search for Boyde was a prolonged nightmare; used several times already, this phrase alone describes it. It lasted over a fortnight. Every night, from nine o'clock till two, or even later in the morning, it continued. The old doctor almost invariably came with me. It was mid-winter and bitter cold, I still had no overcoat, a thin summer vest being my only underwear. The disreputable haunts we searched were heated to at least 70° F., whereas the street air was commonly not far from zero, with biting winds or icy moisture that cut like a knife. It must have been the drug that saved me from pneumonia, for I was in and out of a dozen haunts each night. . . . I was a prey to contrary and alternating emotions—the desire to let the fellow go free, the conviction that it was my duty to save him from himself, to save others from him as well. The distress, unhappiness and doubt I experienced made that prolonged man-hunt indeed a nightmare.
Plans were laid with care and knowledge. Boyde, we argued, had money, or he would have returned to East 19th Street. Had he enough to bribe the police, or to go to Canada? We decided that his contempt for me would outweigh any fear he felt that I might take action. The "Night Owls" were now away on tour; he would hardly go after Pauline M———. We concluded he was "doing the town," as it was called, and was not very far from East 19th Street. With his outstanding figure and appearance, it ought not to be difficult to find some trace of him in the disreputable places. The "Tenderloin"—a region about Broadway and 30th Street, so packed with illegal "joints" that their tribute to the police was the richest and juiciest of the whole city—was sure to be his hunting ground. To the Tenderloin haunts, accordingly, we went that first night of the chase.
As a reporter I knew the various places well already, and felt quite equal to making my search alone, but the doctor, though in no condition to traipse about the icy street after dark, insisted on accompanying me. Nothing I said could prevent him coming. Truth to tell, I was not sorry to have him with me—in some of the saloons; besides which I had no money, and something—lager beer cost only five cents a glass—had to be ordered in each place. We hurried from one saloon to another, looking in at various gambling hells, opium joints, dancing places and music-halls of the poorer kind where men and women met on easy terms, and we stayed at each one just long enough to make inquiries, and to benefit by the warmth and comfort, without being pestered by the habitual frequenters.
I had in my possession a small photograph of Boyde; it was on tin, showing the head and shoulders; it had been taken one day earlier in our acquaintance when we went together to a Dime Museum in 14th Street, It now proved very useful. It showed his full face, big eyes, drooping moustaches and eyeglass. The absence of the moustache altered him a great deal, but the eyeglass and the six feet two inches in height counterbalanced this.
At every "joint" I produced this photograph, asking the attendants, bar-tenders, and any women I judged to be frequenters of the place, whether they had seen the original recently, or anyone like him. Some laughed and said they had, others said the opposite, but the majority refused to say anything, showed insolently their suspicion of me and my purpose, and, more than once, made it advisable for us to get out before we were put out. At such places customers are chary about information of each other. Among the women, however, were some who knew clearly who it was we "wanted," though saying nothing useful, and soon the doctor decided it was a mistake to show the photograph too much, for Boyde would be warned by these women, while many, fearful that they themselves were "wanted," would merely lie in self protection, and set us upon false trails. Any woman who had not paid her weekly blackmail money to the ward man was in danger, and few, to judge by their appearance, were not involved in robbery, knock-out drops, or the ubiquitous "badger-game." Yet these, I knew, were the places Boyde would feel at home in. My being a newspaper man proved of value to us more than once, at any rate. My thoughts, as we sat in a curtained corner of some "hell," whose overheated atmosphere of smoke, scent, alcohol and dope was thick enough to cut with a knife, watching, waiting, listening, must be imagined. I watched every arrival. The tension on nerves already overstrained was almost unbearable. A habit of the doctor's intensified this strain. He did not, I think, remember Boyde very well, and was constantly imagining that he saw him. The street door would open; he would nudge me and whisper "Sehen Sie, da kommt der Kerl nun endlich...!" He pointed, my heart leapt into my mouth; nothing could induce me to arrest him, it seemed, and my relief on seeing it was a stranger was always genuine--at the moment.
One night--or early morning, rather--the doctor, who had been silent for a long time, turned to me with a grey, exhausted face. The morphine was beginning to fail him, and he must inject another dose. This happened several times.... Behind a curtain, or in a place aside where we were not even alone, he opened his clothes, found a clear space of skin, and applied the needle, while I rubbed the spot with my finger for about a minute to prevent a blister forming. No one, except perhaps a very drunken man or woman occasionally, paid the smallest attention to the operation; to them it was evidently a familiar and commonplace occurrence.... "You must not stay up any longer," he would say another time, after a sudden examination of my face. "You look dreadful. Come, we will go home."
I was only too glad to be marched off. We paced the icy streets arm in arm, numerous people still about on various errands, tramcars and elevated trains still roaring, saloons and joints blazing with light, wide open till dawn, while the old man, rejuvenated and stimulated by the drug, discoursed eloquently the whole way, I dragging by his side, silent, depressed, weary with pains that seemed more poignant then than hunger or mere physical fatigue.
The next night it would be the same, and the one after that, and the next one after that too--the search continued. It wore me down. I saw the eyeglass staring furtively at me from behind every corner, even in the daytime. His footstep sounded behind me often. At night I locked my door, for fear he might steal back into the room.... Once or twice I reported to headquarters that I was on the trail, but the detective had lost interest in the case; a conviction was doubtful, anyhow; he was not "going to sit around catching flies"; only the fact that I was a reporter on the Sun made him pause. "Telephone when you get him," he said, "and I'll come up and do the rest." Much fresh information about Boyde had also come my way; he had even stolen the vases from a Church communion table--though he denied this in his confession later--and pawned them. In every direction, and this he did not deny, he had borrowed money in my name, giving me the worst possible character while doing so. Probably indeed, I never lived down all he said about me....
It was a bitter, and apparently, an endless search. From the West Side joints, we visited the East Side haunts of vice and dissipation. I now knew Boyde too well to think he would "fly high"; his tastes were of the lowest. The ache it all gave me I can never describe....
We went from place to place as hour after hour passed. We found his trail, and each time we found it my heart failed me. A woman, gorgeously painted, showing her silk stockings above the knee, her atmosphere reeking of bad scent and drink, came sidling up, murmuring this and that.... The Doctor's eye was on me, though he said no word, made no single gesture.... The tin-type photograph was produced.... "Yep, I seen dat fellar," grinned the woman in her "tough" bowery talk they all affected in the Tenderloin. "A high flier ... raining in London, too"--a gibe at the "English" habit of turning up one's trousers--with a stream of local slang, oaths, filthy hints and repeated demands to "put 'em up," meaning drinks. Then a whispered growl from the old German "Nichts! ... sie luegt ... los mit ihr!" A further stream of lurid insults ... and she was gone, while another sidled up a little later. They all knew German, these women. Was not New York the third biggest German city, qua population, in the Empire? Few, as a matter of fact, were American. Barring the mulattos and quadroon girls, to say nothing of the negresses, the majority were French, Hungarian, Spanish, Italian, Dutch or some polyglot mixture not even the British Museum could define....
Never did the old German's kindness prove itself as in these hideous night-watches. Apart from all questions of trouble and expense, he was obliged to take extra doses of morphine to meet the charge upon his system, at a time, too, when he was struggling to reduce the quantity. Compared to what he did, even the fact that he gave the poison to others, possibly to his own child among them, seemed negligible. Not only did he accompany me during the chase, spending hours in low, suffocating dens of beastliness, walking the wind-swept streets in mid-winter, suffering insults and acute discomfort, but also he bestowed practical care and kindness on me during the day, providing me with food (I was in no state even to pose in the studios at the time), and even suggesting that I should fit up a bed in his workshop where he kept the lathe and made the chessmen. All this, too, from an old man, himself in deep misery, and on the losing side of a fight far more terrible than I ever knew or imagined, a fight, he then realized already, was to end before very long in failure, which meant death. The strange, broken old being, twisted and distorted though his nervous system was by a drug, showed--to me, at any rate--that rare thing which experience of life proves greater than intellect, than success, than power, or brilliance may achieve--a heart. If reincarnation, with its karmic law, be true, either he owed me a heavy debt from some forgotten past, or I owe to him a debt some future life will enable, and enforce me, to repay.
It was at the end of the first ten days that, quite by chance, we stumbled upon the trail of Boyde. He had been seen in a "swell dive" on the West Side--with a woman. He was spending money like water. How had he come by it? Whom had he swindled now? We were in the East Side, following a false clue, when this information was given to us--under conditions impossible to describe--and we hurried across to the neighbourhood indicated. An hour later we were only a short thirty minutes behind his glittering path. He was visiting expensive joints. Champagne flowed. The woman wore furs. He wore a light coloured box-cloth overcoat. Both were "high fliers." And he was drinking hard.
The information, I confess, had the effect of stiffening me. It was impossible not to wonder, as we sat in the cross-town tram of East 23rd Street, whether in his gay career he gave a single thought to the room in East 19th Street, where he shared my bed, wore my suit, ate my food, such as it was, and where he had left me ill, alone and starving. The old doctor was grim and silent, but a repressed fury, I could see, bit into him. Was there, perhaps, vengeance, in the old, crumpled man? "No weakness, remember," he growled from time to time. "I hold him, while you telephone to Mulberry Street. Pflicht, pflicht! It is your duty to--to everybody...!"
The trail led us to Mouquin's, where he had undoubtedly been shortly before, then on to a place in 34th Street ... and there we lost it hopelessly. It was not a false alarm, but the trail ran up a tree and vanished. He had gone home with the woman, but who she was or where she lived, not even the ward man--whom I knew by chance, and, equally by chance, met at the door--could tell us. I telephoned to headquarters to warn Detective Lawler to be in readiness. Lawler was out on a "big story" elsewhere, but another man would come up with the warrant the moment I sent word. I had, however, no occasion to telephone again that night, nor even the next night, though we must evidently have been within an ace of catching him. It was like searching for a needle in a haystack, or for a rabbit in a warren. The neighbourhood, this joint in particular, was alive with similar characters; all the women wore furs; all the men were tall, many of them had "glass-eyes," the majority seemed English with "their trousers turned up." We sat for hours in one den after another, but we caught no further indication of the trail. It had vanished into thin air. And after these two exciting and exhausting nights, the old doctor collapsed; he could do no more; he told me he felt unequal to the strain and could not accompany me even one more time. The old man was done.
The day after the search stopped temporarily, Kay arrived in the city, to my great delight. It was a keen relief to have him back. The tour had been a failure, and the company had become stranded in Port Hope, Ontario. Salaries were never paid; he had received hotel board, railway ticket, laundry, but rarely any cash. What luggage he possessed was in the Port Hope hotel, held in lieu of payment. It remained there.
We talked things over, and the news about Boyde, heard now for the first time in detail, shocked him. There was no doubt or hesitation in Kay's mind. "Of course you must arrest him; we'll go out to-night and look." We did so, but with no result. Kay had the remains of a borrowed $10, we dined at Krisch's; he had cigarettes, too.... We passed a happy evening, coming home early from the chase. Like myself, he had no overcoat, but the money did not reach to getting it from Ikey where Boyde had pawned it. We sat indoors, and talked.... Only a short three months before we had sat talking round a camp-fire on our island. It seemed incredible. We discussed my plan for settling in the woods, to which he was very favourably inclined. Meanwhile, he explained, his Company was preparing another tour with better plays and better cast. They hoped to start out after Christmas, now only a week away. The word "Christmas" made us laugh. I still had the Christmas menu of our Hub dinner, and we pinned it upon the wall. It might suggest something to the long-suffering Mrs. Bernstein, Kay thought.
But instead we ate our oatmeal and dried apples. . . .