Public-domain ebook
by Owen Johnson
Language: en726 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: Novels·American Literature
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #47640.
The opening · free to read
Teagan’s Arcade stood, and in the slow upward progress of the city it may still stand, at that intersection of Broadway and Columbus Avenue, where the grumbling subway and the roaring elevated meet at Lincoln Square. It covered a block, bisected by an arcade and rising six capacious stories in the form of an enormous H. On Broadway, the glass front was given over to shops and offices of all descriptions, while in the back stretches of the top stories, artists, sculptors, students, and illustrators had their studios alongside of mediums, dentists, curious business offices, and derelicts of all description.
The square was a churning meeting of contending human tides. The Italians had installed their fruit shops and their groceries; the French their florists and their delicatessen shops; the Jews their clothing bazaars; the Germans their jewelers and their shoe stores; the Irish their saloons and their restaurants, while from Healy’s, one of the most remarkable meeting-grounds in the city, they dominated the neighborhood.
The Arcade, which had stood like a great glass barn, waiting the inevitable stone advance of reconstruction, looked down on this rushing stream of all nations, while occasionally from the mixed races outside, swimming on the current of the avenue, a bit of human débris was washed up and found its lodging. It was a bit of the Orient--the flotsam and jetsam of Hong Kong and Singapore in the heart of New York. It was a place where no questions were asked and no advice permitted; where if you found a man wandering in the long, drafty corridors you piloted him to his room and put him to bed and did not seek to reform him in the morning. This was its etiquette. There were the young and unafraid, who were coming up blithely, and the old and tired, who were going down, and it was understood that those who were bent on their own destruction should do it in their own chosen way--a place where souls in hunger and souls in despair met momentarily and passed.
In the whole city there was not such another incongruous gathering of activities. There was a vast billiard-parlor and a theater; a barber shop and shoe parlors; a telegraph station and an ice-cream-and-candy shop, thronged at the luncheon hour with crowds of schoolboys; there was also a millinery shop and one for fancy goods; a clock maker, and two corner saloons. Above, in the lower lofts, every conceivable human oddity was assembled in a sort of mercantile crazy quilt. One read such signs as these:
Besides this, there were offices for a dozen patent medicine cures; a notary public and public stenographers; while banjo lessons, instruction in illustration, commercial advertising and fancy dancing were offered on every floor.
Higher up, on the fifth and particularly on the sixth floor, where the lofts had been transformed into dwelling-rooms and studios, a queer collection had settled and clung tenaciously. For years, oppressed by the vastness and gloom of the reverberating corridors, they had gone on living solitary lives, barely nodding to each other, as though each had a secret to bury (which indeed was often true), and they might have continued thus indefinitely, had it not been for two events--the accident of King O’Leary’s meeting Tootles, and the mystery of Dangerfield’s coming to the corner studio--two unifying events that brought the little group of human stragglers on the sixth floor into a curious fraternity that persisted for several years, and was fated to affect several destinies profoundly.
It was Christmas Eve in Lincoln Square. A fine snow was sifting out of the leaden night, coating the passers-by with silver but dissolving on the warm asphalt stretches in long, gleaming lakes where a thousand reflections quivered. From the glowing subway entrances, the holiday crowds surged up, laden with mysterious packages, scurrying home for the decking out of tinseled trees and the plotting of Christmas surprises. The shop windows flared through the crowds so brightly that they seemed to have brought up electric reinforcements. The restaurants were crowded with brilliant garlands gay with red berries and festal ribbons, while amid the turbulent traffic of the avenues, impudent little taxi-cabs went scooting merrily, with rich glimpses of heaped-up boxes inside.
At Healy’s, under the strident elevated station, a few guests were entering the blazing dining-rooms, laughing and expectant. The tension of the city’s nerves seemed everywhere relaxed. For one merry hour in the long, grinding year, united in the unselfish spirit of revelry, with the zest of secrets to be guarded and secrets to be discovered, the metropolitan crowd bumped good-humoredly on its way, gay with the democracy of good cheer.
King O’Leary left the throng at the bar at Healy’s, whistling loudly to himself, flung a half-dollar to the blind news-dealer under the elevated steps, calling with gruff gusto, “Merry Christmas!” and, resuming his whistling, crossed the square to where Teagan’s Arcade rose in shanty splendor, six stories above Broadway, filling the block with its flashing electric signs which hung against the night like so much cheap jewelry.
If King O’Leary continued to whistle with exaggerated gaiety, tricking himself into a set smile, it was because deep in his heart he felt the irresistible closing-in of his black hour. As he neared the glass descent into the rumbling underground, a flurried eruption of parcel-laden crowds whirled momentarily about him, wrapping him around with youth, laughter, and the aroma of friendship and affection. Home! He felt it so keenly; he saw so clearly rising before him a hundred visions of family groups gathered in the warmth of cozy houses, he felt so out of it, so socially excommunicated, that his pretense at gaiety flattened out. He shifted the soft-brimmed hat over his eyes, as though to shut out memories, turned up the collar of his coat, and, digging his great hands into capacious pockets, swung doggedly on. The world for this one night had run away from him. In the whole city he could think of no door where he could leave a present or imagine from what direction one might descend upon him. With the exception of the half-dollar flung to the blind news-dealer, and a few tips jingling in his pockets, his Christmas giving was over. Twice a year, in his happy-go-lucky existence, rolling down incredible avenues of life from Singapore to Nome, Alaska, meeting each day with unfailing zest, leader and boon companion through whatever crowds he passed--twice a year, at Christmas and on a certain day in mid-April, the secret of which lay buried in his memory, King O’Leary went down into the dark alleys of remembrance.
He entered the Arcade, which was like a warm, friendly furnace after the wet, shivering snow flurries, transparent shops on either side, and ahead the gleam of brass railings barring the entrance to the vaudeville theater, whose evening program shrieked at him from colored sheets of mystery and guaranteed thrills.
“Lord, but this is awful!” he said solemnly, gazing absent-mindedly into the glowing tonsorial parlors inscribed “Joey Shine.” “Wish to the deuce I could think of some one to give a present to!”
All at once he perceived the manicurist, a tall, Amazonian young lady, with reddish hair coiled in amazing tangles, who was examining him with friendly curiosity. He came out of his abstraction, wondered where he had seen her, half smiled, and went slowly on his way to the elevator, an old-fashioned vehicle, which came settling down like an ancient barge.
“Merry Christmas, Mistah O’Leary!”
“Back to you, Sam!” he said, dropping a dollar in the box which was conspicuously advertised. And he added, “Up six.”
“Thank you, sah; thank you!” said Sam, whose eyeballs rolled whitely at the magnificence of the tip.
The twin elevators in the Arcade were sleepy affairs, unoppressed by a sense of time, while the voyage upward was never guaranteed. They were large, open, cage-like affairs, littered with announcements: rooms to be sublet or to be shared; trousers pressed and old clothes bought; washing cheaply offered; instruction in typewriting and stenography; dental parlors; the future foretold and confidential advice given at reasonable rates by Madame Probasco on the fifth floor; while only temporarily reversed, a large sign announced:
Sam lingered a moment, humming sleepily, as though to coax forth another passenger from the shadows. This failing, he shuffled out for a languid survey of the Arcade.
“No hurry here,” said O’Leary, yawning indifferently and settling into the cushioned chair which soothed the attendant in his weary hours.
Thus encouraged, Sam lounged away for a final reconnoitering, slouched back, vacillated a moment on one foot, and had his hand on the sliding gate, when out of the dusk came a hallo in a high, nasal English accent.
“I say there, Sassafras, my man, hold him in!”
Sam began laughing immediately, in a thin, treble, body-shaking laugh,
“He-he-he, Mr. Kidder; I sartainly knew you was coming--yassah!”
A young fellow, barely five feet six, with the figure of a jockey, hopped into the car, and, seizing the regulator, rattled off:
“Cast away there! Smartly now, my man, smartly! Take in your spinnaker! Ship the maintop-gallant sheets! Douse the poop-deck! Stand by the battens!”
In response to this rapid salvo, the elevator began to budge, creaking and protesting, rising at about the rate of six inches a second.
“Do you think we can make it?” said Kidder, with assumed alarm. “How’s the old scow to-night, mate?”
“Why, most surprisin’ well--yassah, most surprisin’.”
“It’s a stormy night, and there’s a bad reef above the fourth. Well, mate, we’re in the hands of Providence. It’s will be done!”
All at once, seeming to perceive King O’Leary for the first time, he inquired anxiously:
“Excuse me, sir, does my presence at the helm cause you any anxiety?”
“Not here,” said King O’Leary, who, in his amusement, had been tricked out of his glumness.
“What floor can I serve you, sir?”
“The sixth will be about right for me.”
“Then we sink or swim, survive or perish, together!”
He was dapperly dressed, and though his yellowish checks were evidently ready-made, they were squeezed in at the waist and hoisted over the ankles in the latest style. He had the hatchet face of the clever Yankee, alert, sharply defined, with a high-bridged and rather bold English nose.
“Youngster looks like a pocket edition of the Duke of Wellington,” thought King O’Leary, registering his favorable impressions, and, before the other’s infectious spirits, he began to recover his natural zest.
Tootles--to give Mr. St. George Kidder at once his workaday name--meanwhile had been examining his companion with the impressionable eye of the artist. He saw the bulky body of a man approaching middle age, yet full of rough, brawny substance and weather-tried endurance. The great half-moon of a mouth was now turning up in its usual indomitable attitude toward life under the broad-spaced, jovial nose set between full cheeks breaking into dimples. Underneath wisps of tawny hair, rather Mephistophelian, were clear-blue eyes, brilliant and sharp as a brigand’s. The whole had a combination of companionable good humor, and instant aggression when necessary.
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