The City of Masks/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
THE UNFAILING MEMORY
PRINCE WALDEMAR DE BOSKY, confronted by the prospect of continued cold weather, decided to make an appeal to Mrs. Moses Jacobs, sometime Princess Mariana di Pavesi. She had his overcoat, the precious one with the fur collar and the leather lining,—the one, indeed, that the friendly safe-blower who lodged across the hall from him had left behind at the outset of a journey up-state.
"More than likely," said the safe-blower, who was not only surprised but gratified when the "little dago" came to visit him in the Tombs, "more than likely I shan't be needin' an overcoat for the next twelve or fourteen year, kid, so you ain't robbin' me,—no, sir, not a bit of it. I make you a present of it, with my compliments. Winter is comin' on an' I can't seem to think of anybody it would fit better'n it does you. You don't need to mention as havin' received it from me. The feller who owned it before I did might accidentally hear of it and—but I guess it ain't likely, come to think of it. To the best of my recollection, he lives 'way out West somewhere,—Toledo, I think, or maybe Omaha,—and he's probably got a new one by this time. Much obliged fer droppin' in here to see me, kid. So long,—and cut it out. Don't try to come any of that thanks guff on me. You might as well be usin' that coat as the moths. Besides, I owe you something for storage, don't forget that. I was in such a hurry the last time I left town I didn't have a chance to explain. You didn't know it then,—and I guess if you had knowed it you wouldn't have been so nice about lookin' out for my coat durin' the summer,—but I was makin' a mighty quick getaway. Thanks fer stoppin' in to remind me I left the coat in your room that night. I clean forgot it, I was in such a hurry. But lemme tell you one thing, kid, I'll never ferget the way you c'n make that fiddle talk. I don't know as you'd 'a' played fer me as you used to once in awhile if you'd knowed I was what I am, but it makes no difference now. I just loved hearin' you play. I used to have a hard time holdin' in the tears. And say, kid, keep straight. Keep on fiddlin'! So long! I may see you along about 1926 or 8. And say, you needn't be ashamed to wear that coat. I didn't steal it. It was a clean case of mistaken identity, if there ever was one. It happened in a restaurant." He winked.
And that is how the little violinist came to be the possessor of an overcoat with a sable collar and a soft leather lining.
He needed it now, not only when he ventured upon the chilly streets but when he remained indoors. In truth, he found it much warmer walking the streets than sitting in his fireless room, or even in going to bed.
It was a far cry from the dapper, dreamy-eyed courtier who kissed the chapped knuckles of the Princess Mariana on Wednesday night to the shrinking, pinched individual who threaded his way on Friday through the cramped lanes that led to the rear of the pawn-shop presided over by Mrs. Jacobs.
And an incredibly vast gulf lay between the Princess Mariana and the female Shylock who peered at him over a glass show-case filled with material pledges in the shape of watches, chains, rings, bracelets, and other gaudy tributes left by a shifting constitutency.
"Well?" she demanded, fixing him with a cold, offensive stare. "What do you want?"
He turned down the collar of his thin coat, and straightened his slight figure in response to this unfriendly greeting.
"I came to see if you would allow me to take my overcoat for a few days,—until this cold spell is over,—with the understanding—"
"Nothing doing," said she curtly. "Six dollars due on it."
"But I have not the six dollars, madam. Surely you may trust me."
"Why didn't you bring your fiddle along? You could leave it in place of the coat. Go and get it and I'll see what I can do."
"I am to play tonight at the house of a Mr. Carpenter. He has heard of me through our friend Mr. Trotter, his chauffeur. You know Mr. Trotter, of course."
"Sure I know him, and I don't like him. He insulted me once."
"Ah, but you do not understand him, madam. He is an Englishman and he may have tried to be facetious or even pleasant in the way the English—"
"Say, don't you suppose I know when I'm insulted? When a cheap guy like that comes in here with a customer of mine and tells me I'm so damned mean they won't even let me into hell when I die,—well, if you don't call that an insult, I'd like to know what it is. Don't talk to me about that bum!"
"Is that all he said?" involuntarily fell from the lips of the violinist, as if, to his way of thinking, Mr. Trotter's remark was an out-and-out compliment. "Surely you have no desire to go to hell when you die."
"No, I haven't, but I don't want anybody coming in here telling me to my face that there'd be a revolution down there if I tried to get in. I've got as much right there as anybody, I'd have him know. Cough up six or get out. That's all I've got to say to you, my little man."
"It is freezing cold in my room. I—"
"Don't blame me for that. I don't make the weather. And say, I'm busy. Cough up or—clear out."
"You will not let me have it for a few days if I—"
"Say, do you think I'm in business for my health? I haven't that much use—" she snapped her fingers—"for a fiddler anyhow. It's not a man's job. That's what I think of long-haired guys like— Beat it! I'm busy."
With head erect the little violinist turned away. He was half way to the door when she called out to him.
"Hey! Come back here! Now, see here, you little squirt, you needn't go turning up your nose at me and acting like that. I've got the goods on you and a lot more of those rummies up there. I looked 'em over the other night and I said to myself, says I: 'Gee whiz, couldn't I start something if I let out what I know about this gang!' Talk about earthquakes! They'd— Here! What are you doing? Get out from behind this counter! I'll call a cop if you—"
The pallid, impassioned face of Prince Waldemar de Bosky was close to hers; his dark eyes were blazing not a foot from her nose.
"If I thought you were that kind of a snake I'd kill you," he said quietly, levelly.
"Are—are you threatening me?" sputtered Mrs. Jacobs, trying in vain to look away from those compelling eyes. She could not believe her senses.
"No. I am merely telling you what I would do if you were that kind of a snake."
"See here, don't you get gay! Don't you forget who you are addressing, young man. I am—"
"I am addressing a second-hand junk dealer, madam. You are at home now, not sitting in the big chair up at—at—you know where. Please bear that in mind."
"I'll call some one from out front and have you chucked into—"
"Do you even think of violating the confidence we repose in you?" he demanded. "The thought must have been in your mind or you would not have uttered that remark a moment ago. You are one of us, and we've treated you as a—a queen. I want to know just where you stand, Mrs. Jacobs."
"You can't come in here and bawl me out like this, you little shrimp! I'll—"
"Keep still! Now, listen to me. If I should go to our friends and repeat what you have just said, you would never see the inside of that room again. You would never have the opportunity to exchange a word with a single person you have met there. You would be stripped of the last vestige of glory that clings to you. Oh, you may sneer! But down in your heart you love that bit of glory,—and you would curse yourself if you lost it."
"It's—it's all poppy-cock, the whole silly business," she blurted out. But it was not anger that caused her voice to tremble.
"You know better than that," said he, coldly.
"I don't care a rap about all that foolishness up there. It makes me sick," she muttered.
"You may lie to me but you cannot lie to yourself, madam. Under that filthy, greasy skin of yours runs the blood that will not be denied. Pawn-broker, miser,—whatever you may be to the world, to yourself you are a princess royal. God knows we all despise you. You have not a friend among us. But we can no more overlook the fact that you are a princess of the blood than we can ignore the light of day. The blood that is in you demands its tribute. You have no control over the mysterious spark that fires your blood. It burns in spite of all you may do to quench it. It is there to stay. We despise you, even as you would despise us. Am I to carry your words to those who exalt you despite your calling, despite your meanness, despite all that is base and sordid in this rotten business of yours? Am I to let them know that you are the only—the only—what is the name of the animal I've heard Trotter mention?—ah, I have it,—the only skunk in our precious little circle? Tell me, madam, are you a skunk?"
Her face was brick red; she was having difficulty with her breathing. The pale, white face of the little musician dazzled her in a most inexplicable way. Never before had she felt just like this.
"Am I a—what?" she gasped, her eyes popping.
"It is an animal that has an odour which—"
"Good God, you don't have to tell me what it is," she cried, but in suppressed tones. Her gaze swept the rear part of the shop. "It's a good thing for you, young fellow, that nobody heard you call me that name. Thank the good Lord, it isn't a busy day here. If anybody had heard you, I'd have you skinned alive."
"A profitless undertaking," he said, smiling without mirth, "but quite in your line, if reports are true. You are an expert at skinning people, alive or dead. But we are digressing. Are you going to turn against us?"
"I haven't said I was going to, have I?"
"Not in so many words."
"Well, then, what's all the fuss about? You come in here and shoot off your mouth as if— And say, who are you, anyhow? Tell me that! No, wait a minute. Don't tell me. I'll tell myself. When a man is kicked out of his own family because he'd sooner play a fiddle than carry a sword, I don't think he's got any right to come blatting to me about—"
"The cruelest monster the world has ever known, madam," he interrupted, stiffening, "fiddled while Rome was burning. Fiddlers are not always gentle. You may not have heard of one very small and unimportant incident in my own life. It was I who fiddled,—badly, I must confess,—while the Opera House in Poltna was burning. A panic was averted. Not a life was lost. And when it was all over some one remembered the fiddler who remained upon the stage and finished the aria he was playing when the cry of fire went up from the audience. Brave men,—far braver men than he,—rushed back through the smoke and found him lying at the footlights, unconscious. But why waste words? Good morning, madam. I shall not trouble you again about the overcoat. Be good enough to remember that I have kissed your hand only because you are a princess and not because you have lent me five dollars on the wretched thing."
The angry light in his brown eyes gave way to the dreamy look once more. He bowed stiffly and edged his way out from behind the counter into the clogged area that lay between him and the distant doorway. Towering above him on all sides were heaps of nondescript objects, classified under the generic name of furniture. The proprietress of this sordid, ill-smelling crib stared after him as he strode away, and into her eyes there stole a look of apprehension.
She followed him to the front door, overtaking him as his hand was on the latch.
"Hold on," she said, nervously glancing at the shifty-eyed, cringing assistant who toiled not in vain,—no one ever toiled in vain in the establishment of M. Jacobs, Inc.,—behind a clump of chairs;—"hold on a second. I don't want you to say a word to—to them about—about all this. You are right, de Bosky. I—I have not lost all that once was mine. You understand, don't you?"
He smiled. "Perfectly. You can never lose it, no matter how low you may sink."
"Well," she went on, hesitatingly, "suppose we forget it."
He eyed her for a moment in silence, shaking his head reflectively. "It is most astonishing," he said at last.
"What's astonishing?" she demanded sharply.
"I was merely thinking of your perfect, your exquisite French, madam!"
"French? Are you nutty? I've been talkin' to you in English all the time."
He nodded his head slowly. "Perhaps that is why your French is so astonishing," he said, and let it go at that.
"Look at me," she exclaimed, suddenly breaking into French as she spread out her thick arms and surveyed with disgust as much of her ample person as came within range of an obstructed vision, "just look at me. No one on earth would take me for a princess, would he? And yet that is just what I am. I think of myself as a princess, and always will, de Bosky. I think of myself,—of my most unlovely, unregal self,—as the superior of every other woman who treads the streets of New York, all of these base born women. I cannot help it. I cannot think of them as equals, not even the richest and the most arrogant of them. You say it is the blood, but you are wrong. Some of these women have a strain of royal blood in them—a far-off, remote strain, of course,—but they do not know it. That's the point, my friend. It is the knowing that makes us what we are. It isn't the blood itself. If we were deprived of the power to think, we could have the blood of every royal family in Europe in our veins, and that is all the good it would do us. We think we are nobler, better than all the rest of creation, and we would keep on thinking it if we slept in the gutter and begged for a crust of bread. And the proof of all this is to be found in the fact that the rest of creation will not allow us to forget. They think as we do, in spite of themselves, and there you have the secret of the supremacy we feel, in spite of everything."
Her brilliant, black eyes were flashing with something more than excitement. The joy, the realization of power glowed in their depths, welling up from fires that would never die. Waldemar de Bosky nodded his head in the most matter-of-fact way. He was not enthralled. All this was very simple and quite undebatable to him.
"I take it, therefore, that you retract all that you said about its being poppycock," he said, turning up his coat collar and fastening it close to his throat with a long and formidable looking safety pin.
"It may be poppycock," she said, "but we can't help liking it—not to save our lives."
"And I shall not have to kill you as if you were a snake, eh?"
"Not on your life," said Mrs. Moses Jacobs in English, opening the door for him.
He passed out into the cold and windy street and she went back to her dingy nook at the end of the store, pausing on the way to inform an assistant that she was not to be disturbed, no matter who came in to see her.
While she sat behind her glittering show-case and gazed pensively at the ceiling of her ugly storehouse, Waldemar de Bosky went shivering through the streets to his cold little backroom many blocks away. While, she was for the moment living in the dim but unforgotten past, a kindly memory leading her out of the maze of other people's poverty and her own avarice into broad marble halls and vaulted rooms, he was thinking only of the bitter present with its foodless noon and of pockets that were empty. While maudlin tears ran down her oily cheeks and spilled aimlessly upon a greasy sweater with the spur of memory behind them, tears wrought by the sharp winds of the street glistened in his squinting eyes.
Memory carried him back no farther than the week before and he was distressed only by its exceeding frailty. He could not, for the life of him, remember the address of J. Bramble, bookseller,—a most exasperating lapse in view of the fact that J. Bramble himself had urged him to come up some evening soon and have dinner with him, and to bring his Stradivarius along if he didn't mind. Mind? Why, he would have played his heart out for a good square meal. The more he tried to remember J. Bramble's address, the less he thought of the overcoat with the fur collar and the soft leather lining. He couldn't eat that, you know.
In his bleak little room in the hall of the whistling winds, he took from its case with cold-benumbed fingers the cherished violin. Presently, as he played, the shivering flesh of him grew warm with the heat of an inward fire; the stiff, red fingers became limp and pliable; the misty eyes grew bright and feverish. Fire,—the fires of love and genius and hope combined,—burnt away the chill of despair; he was as warm as toast!
And hours after the foodless noon had passed, he put the treasure back into its case and wiped the sweat from his marble brow. Something flashed across his mind. He shouted aloud as he caught at what the flash of memory revealed.
"Lexington Avenue! Three hundred and something, Lexington Avenue! J. Bramble, bookseller! Ha! Come! Come! Let us be off!"
He spoke to the violin as if it were a living companion. Grabbing up his hat and mittens, he dashed out of the room and went clattering down the hall with the black leather case clasped tightly under his arm.
It was a long, long walk to three hundred and something Lexington Avenue, but in due time he arrived there and read the sign above the door. Ah, what a great thing it is to have a good, unfailing memory!
And so it came to pass that Prince Waldemar de Bosky and Lady Jane Thorne met at the door of J. Bramble, bookseller, at five of the clock, and entered the shop together.