Chapter IV: Part 4

Now he had almost a full hour and a half before going to the factory. It had taken less time than he thought. Jan started to walk. It was cold and the streets were slippery. He walked along with his hands in the frayed pockets of his overcoat and his breath congealing over his walrus mustache.

His eyes were set and his face serious. Jan's thoughts were simple. Rent--Paula--jobs. Christmas, perhaps, too. But he walked along like anybody else in the loop.

* * * * *

Jan wandered as far as Quincy and La Salle streets. Here he stopped and looked around. It was beginning to snow heavier now. He stood still like a man waiting. And having nothing to do he took the letter his wife had left under the soup plate and read it again.

When Jan had folded the letter up and started to walk once more his eyes suddenly lighted up. He turned and started to run and as he ran he cried: "Paula, Paula!" Some of the crowd moving on paused and looked at a stocky man with a heavy mustache running across the street and shouting a woman's name.

The cabs were thick at the moment and it was hard running across. But Jan kept on, his overcoat flapping behind him and his short legs jumping up and down as he moved. A young woman with a cheap fur around her neck had stopped. There were others who paused to watch Jan. But this young woman was one of the few who didn't smile.

She waited as if puzzled for a moment and then started to lose herself in the crowd. She walked swiftly ahead, her eyes anxiously on the corner. And in the meantime Jan came galumphing toward the curbing still crying: "Paula, Paula!" At the curbing, however, Jan came to a full stop. His toe had caught the cement and he shot forward, landing on his hands and chin.

A crowd gathered around Jan and some one helped him to his feet. His chin was bleeding and his hands were scraped from hitting the cold pavement. He made no sign, however, of injury, but stood blinking in the direction the young woman with the cheap fur had gone.

A policeman arrived and inquired sympathetically what was wrong. Jan brushed himself mechanically as the policeman spoke. Then he answered: "Nothing, I fell down." The policeman went away and Jan turned back to catch a Milwaukee Avenue street car.

He stood on the corner waiting and fingering his bruised chin. He seemed to be getting impatient as the car failed to appear. Finally he thrust his hand inside his pocket and drew out the letter again. He held it without reading for an instant and then tore it up.

When the car came Jan was still tearing up the letter, his thick fingers trying vainly to divide it into tinier bits.

CORAL, AMBER AND JADE

There are no gold and scarlet lanterns bobbing like fat little oriental Pierrots over this street. No firecracker colors daub its sad walls. Walk the whole length and not a dragon or a thumbnail balcony or a pigtail will you see.

Instead, a very efficient, very conservative Chinatown and a colony of very efficient and very matter-of-fact Chinamen who have gradually taken possession of a small district around Twenty-second Street and Wentworth Avenue. A rather famous district in its way, where once the city's tenderloin put forth its red shadows.

But now as you walk, the night stares evilly out of wooden ruins. Stretches of sagging, empty buildings, whose windows and doors seem to have been chewed away, an intimidating silence, a graveyard of crumbling little houses--these remain. And you see Venus, grown old and toothless, snoozing amid the debris of another day.

Then the Chinamen begin. Lights twinkle. Clean-looking interiors and carefully washed store windows. Roofs have been hammered back in place, stairways nailed together again. The sagging walls and lopsided cottages have taken a new lease on life. Another of the innumerable little business districts that dot the city has fought its way into evidence.

There are few oddities. Through the glass of the store fronts you see curiously immobile groups, men seated in chairs, smoking long pipes and waiting in silence. Strange fruits, foods, herbs, cloths, trinkets, lie on the orderly shelves around them. The floors look scrubbed and there is an absence of litter. It is all very efficient and very natural except for the immobility of the men in the chairs and the silence that seems to have descended on them.

* * * * *

A Chinese silence. And if you linger in the neighborhood you begin to feel that this is more Chinese than the gaudy dragons and the firecracker daubs and the bobbing paper lanterns of fiction.

This night I am looking for Billy Lee. No. 2209 Wentworth Avenue, says Mr. Lee's card. We are to talk over some matters, one of which has already been made public, others of which may never be.

He sits in his inner office, attired like a very efficient American business man, does Mr. Lee. We say hello and start the talk. In the rooms outside the inner office are a dozen Chinese. But there is no sound. They are sitting in chairs or standing up. All smoking. All silent. A sense of strange preoccupation lies over the place. Yet one feels that the twelve silent men are preoccupied with nothing except, possibly, the fact that they are Chinese.

Mr. Lee himself is none too garrulous. We have been talking for several minutes when he becomes totally silent and after a long pause hands me a cablegram. The cablegram reads: "Hongkong--Ying Yan: Bandits captured Foo Wing and wife. Send $5,000 immediately. Signed: Taichow."

* * * * *

"I just received this," says Mr. Lee. "Ying Yan is my father. Foo Wing is my brother. His American name is Andrew Lee. He went to Hongkong ten months ago and was married. This is terrible. I am worried to death."

Mr. Lee appears to sink into a studious calm. His eyes regard the cablegram stolidly. He remarks at length: "Bad news. This is very bad news."

From outside comes a sudden singsong of Chinese. One of the twelve men has said something. He finishes. Silence resumes. There seems to be no answer. Mr. Lee puts the cablegram back in his pocket and some one knocks on the door.

"Come in," says Mr. Lee. A Chinese youth enters. He carries a bundle.

"Meet Mr. Tang," says Billy Lee. We shake hands and Mr. Tang begins talking in Chinese. Mr. Lee listens, nods his head and then holds out his hand for the bundle.

"This is a very interesting event," says Mr. Lee in English. "Mr. Tang is just over from the Orient. He comes from north of China, from Wu Chang, where the revolution started, you know. He has with him a very interesting matter."

Mr. Lee unwraps the bundle. He removes a long necklace made of curiously carved wooden beads, large balls of jade and pendants of silk and semi-precious stones.

Next he removes a second necklace somewhat longer than the first. It is made of marvelously matched amber beads, balls of jade and pendants of coral.

"A very interesting matter," says Mr. Lee. "Mr. Tang is son of a formerly very wealthy and high-born mandarin family. But his family has lost everything and Mr. Tang is here seeking an education in modern business. He has left of his family's wealth only these two things here. They are necklaces such as only mandarins could wear when they appeared before the emperor in court in the old days.

"You see these have three pendants, so they show the mandarin was a gentleman of the third class under the emperor. They have been in Mr. Tang's family's possession for generations. You will notice this one of carved beads is made of beads which are formed from the pits of the Chinese olive. There are two hundred beads and on each is carved some figure or scene which in all represent the history of China."

* * * * *

Mr. Lee holds the two necklaces in his hand. Mr. Tang stands by silently. His eyes gaze at the beads.

"Your father wore them at court?" inquires Mr. Lee in the manner of a host.

Mr. Tang nods his head slowly and adds a word in Chinese.

"He says his family wore them for generations," explains Mr. Lee. "Now the family is vanished and all that is left are these insignia of their nobility. And Mr. Tang wishes me to dispose of them for him so he may have money to go to school."

Mr. Lee and Mr. Tang are then both silent. Mr. Lee slips one of the necklaces over his head. It hangs down over his American coat and American silk shirt in a rather incongruous way. But there seems to be nothing incongruous in the matter for Lee and Tang. Billy Lee with the necklace around his neck, the three mandarin pendants against his belt, looks at Mr. Tang and Mr. Tang bows and leaves.

Our matters have been fully discussed and I follow a half-hour later. There are still twelve men in the room. They stand and sit and smoke. None speaks. I notice in the group the immobile figure of Mr. Tang. He is smoking an American cigarette--one of the twelve silently preoccupied residents of Chinatown who have gathered in Billy Lee's place to wait for something.

MEDITATION IN E MINOR

Well, well, well. The lady pianist will now oblige with something very refined. When in the name of 750,000 gods of reason will I ever learn enough to stay at home and go to bed instead of searching kittenishly for diversion in neighborhood movie and vaudeville houses?

No. Wrong. The lady is not a pianist. She is merely an accompanist. She is going to accompany something on cares? They are no more than the ripples which one's ego a face! Two hundred and eighty-five years old, if a day.

Aha! His nobs. A fiddler. "Silver Threads Among the Gold," and something fancy from the opera. And all dressed up in his wedding suit. The white tie is a bit soiled and the white vest longs mutely for the laundryman. And if he's going to wear a dress suit, if he insists upon wearing a dress suit, why doesn't he press his pants?

But how did a man with a face like this ever happen to think he could fiddle? An English nobleman. Or maybe a Swedish nobleman. Hm! A very interesting face. A little bit touched with flabbiness. And somewhat soiled, intangibly soiled. Like an English nobleman or a Swedish nobleman who has stayed up all night drinking.

And he holds his fiddle in an odd way. Like what? Well, like a fiddler. Like a marvelous fiddler. It hangs limply from his hand as if it were nonexistent. Kreisler holds his fiddle like that. A close-cropped blond mustache and the beginnings of a paunch. Nevertheless a very refined gentleman, a baron somewhat the worse for a night of bourbon.

The idiotic orchestra, the idiotic orchestra! Did anybody ever hear such an idiotic orchestra? Three violins, one cello, one cornet, one flute and a drum all out of tune, all out of time. The prelude. And his nobs grins. Poor fellow. But who taught him how to hold a fiddle like that?

We're off. An E minor chord from our friend at the piano. Hm, something classical. Ho, ho! Viotti. Well, well, here's a howdeedo. His nobs is going to play the concerto. Good-by, good luck and God bless him. If I was in bed, if I was in bed, I wouldn't have to listen to a refined gentleman with his swell pants unpressed murdering poor Viotti. A swell gentleman with his eyes carefully made up. I didn't notice his eyes before. All set, Paganini. Your turn. Let's go.

Ah, that was a note! Well, well, well, his nobs can play. Hm! A cadenza in double stops! And the E minor scale in harmonics! Listen to the baron in the dirty white vest. The man's a violinist. Observe--calisthenics on the G string and in the second position. A very difficult position and easily faked. And when did Heifetz ever take a run like that? Up, down and the fingers hammering like thoroughbreds on a fast track. Pizzicato with the left hand and obbligato glissando!

Hoopla! The fellow's showing off! And it isn't a Drdla souvenir or a vaudeville Brahms arrangement. But twenty years of practice. Yes, sir, there are twenty years and eight hours a day, every day for twenty years, in these acrobatics. There are twenty years, twenty years, behind this technique. And well-spent years.

But tell me, Cyril, for whom is our baron showing off--for whom? Our baron with the soiled tie and the made-up eyes, fiddling coldly, elaborately for a handful of annoyed flappers, amused shoe clerks and bored home lovers sitting stolidly in the dark, waiting stolidly and defiantly to be diverted?

Bravo! Five of us applaud. No, six. A gentleman in an upper box applauds with some degree of violence. And there is the orchestra leader--a dark-skinned, black-eyed, curly-headed youth, nodding and smiling.

Next on the program? Ah, a ballad. A thing the cabaret ladies sing, "Do You Think of Me?" A faint smile on our baron's face. But the fiddle leaps into position as if for another cold, elaborate attack. It takes twenty years, twenty well-spent years to learn to hold a bow like that. Firmly, casually, indifferently as one holds a pencil between one's fingers.

Admission 33 cents, including war tax. But this is worth--well, it is what the novelists call an illuminating experience. This gentleman of music whose fingers have for twenty years absorbed the souls of Beethoven and Sarasate, Liszt and Moussorgski, this aristocrat of the catgut is posturing sardonically before the three bored fates. He is pouring twenty years, twenty well-spent years, into a tawdry little ballad. Ah, how our baron's fiddle sings! And the darkened faces in front hum to themselves: "When you're flirt-ing with another, do you ever think--of--me."

Yes, my tired-faced baron, there's a question. Do you? We, out front, all have our little underworlds in which we live sometimes while music plays and beautiful things come to our eyes. And yours? This tin-pan alley ballad throbbing liquidly from the strings of your fiddle--"When you're flirt-ing with another do you ever think--of--me?" Of the twenty years, the twenty well-spent years? Of the soul that your fingers captured? Of the dream that took form in your firm wrist?

And now the chorus once more. In double stops. In harmonics. With arpeggios thrown in. And once more, largo. Sure and full. Sobbing organ notes, whimpering grace notes. Superb, baron! And done with a half smile at the darkened faces out front. The tired faces that blinked stolidly at Viotti. A smile at the orchestra leader who stands with his mouth open waiting as if the song were still in the air.

Applause. All of us this time. More applause. Say this guy can fiddle, he can. Come on, baron, another tune. The tired faces yammer for another ditty. "Träumerei." All right, let her go, Paganini. And after that the "Missouri Waltz."

* * * * *

I will stay for the next show. I will stay for the three shows. And each time this magnifico will come out and make music. But better than that. I will go back stage and talk with him. I will ask him: "How does it happen, sir, that a man who can fiddle like you, a man who could play a duet with Kreisler--how does it happen you're fiddling in a neighborhood movie and vaudeville house?"

And he will unfold a story. Yes, there's a story there. Something happened to this nobleman of the soiled white vest and the marvelous fingers. There was an occurrence in this man's life which would make a good climax for a second act.

No, that would spoil the picture. To find out, to learn the clumsy mechanism behind this charming spectacle would take away. Better like this. The lady at the piano. Ah, indeed, the lady at the piano, a very elderly lady with a thin nose and hair that was once extremely beautiful, perhaps she had something to do with it? The orchestra pounds and scrapes away. And the movie jumps around and the heroine weeps, but somebody saves her. "Where there is no faith there cannot be true love," confesses the hero, folding her in his well-pressed arms. And that's that.

Now our friend, the baron, again. No, better to leave. He has left his smile in the wings this time. He is very serious or perhaps very tired. Two times tonight to play. Too much--too much.

My hat, and I will walk out on his nobs. And, anyway, Huneker wrote the story long ago. About a piano player in Coney Island that he called--what was it? Oh, yes, "A Chopin of the Gutter."

TEN-CENT WEDDING RINGS

A gloomy day and the loop streets grimace behind a mist. The electric signs are lighted. The buildings open like great fans in the half dark.

The streets invite a mood of melodrama. Windows glint evilly. Doorways grin with rows of electric teeth. This, _Jonnerrvetter_! is the Great City of the old-time ten-twenty-thirty thrillers. The devourer of innocence, the strumpet of stone.

I walk along humming a bar of villainous music, the "skeeter scale" that the orchestra used to turn turn turn taaaa-tum in the old Alhambra as the two dockwallopers and the leering Chinaman were climbing in through little Mabel's hall bedroom window to abduct her.

Those were happy days for the drama, when a scoundrel was a scoundrel and wore a silk hat to prove it, and a hero was a two-fisted man, as anybody could tell by a glance at his marcelled hair and his open-at-the-throat shirt.

Tum tum tum tum taaaa-tum. Pizzicato pianissimo, says the direction on the score. So we are all set for a melodrama. Here is the Great City back-drop. Here are the grim-faced crowds shuffling by under the jaundice glare of electric signs. And Christmas is coming. A vague gray snow trickles out of the gloom.

A proper time for melodrama. All we need is a plot. Come, come now--a plot alive with villains and weeping maidens. Halto! The window of the 5--and 10-cent store! a tumble of gewgaws and candies and kitchen utensils. Christmas tree tinsel and salted peanuts, jazz music and mittens.

The curtain is up. Egad, what a masterly scene. A kitchen Coney Island. A puzzle picture of isles, signs, smells, noises. Cinderella wandering wistfully in the glass-bead section looking for a fairy godmother.

A clinking obbligato by the cash registers. The poor are buying gifts. This garish froth of merchandise is the back ground of their luxuries. This noisy puzzle-picture store is their horn of plenty. A sad thought and we'll dismiss it. What we want is plot.

Perhaps the jazz-song booster singing out of the side of his mouth with tired eyes leering at the crowd of girls: "Won't You Let Me Love You If I Promise to Be Good?" And "Love Me, Turtle Dove." And "Lovin' Looie." And "The Lovin' Blues."

All lovin'. Jazz songs, ballads, sad, silly, boobish nut songs--all about love me--love me. All about stars and kisses, moonlight and "she took my man away." There are telephones all over the walls and the song booster's voice pops out over the salted-peanut section, over the safety-pin and brassware section. A tinny, nasal voice with a whine and a hoarseness almost hiding the words.

The cash registers clink, clink. "Are you waited on, madam? Five cents a package, madam." The crowds, tired eyed, shabbily dressed, bundle-laden, young, old--the crowds shuffle up and down, staring at gewgaws, and the love-me love songs follow them around. Follow them to the loose-bead counter where Madge with her Japanese puffs of hair, her wad of gum and her black shirtwaist that she keeps straightening out continually by drawing up her bosom and pressing down on her hips with her hands--where Madge holds forth.

Tum tum tum tum taaaa-tum--halto! Here is our plot. Outside the pizzicato of the crowds, the Great City, shining, dragon-eyed, through the mist--the City That Has No Heart. And here under our nose, twinkling up at our eyes, a huge tray full of 10-cent wedding rings. End of Act One.

Act Two, now--Madge, the sharp-tongued, weary-eyed young woman behind the counter. Love-me love songs in her ear and people unraveling, faces unraveling before her. Who buys these wedding rings, Madge? And did you ever notice anything odd about your customers? And why do you suppose they buy ten-cent wedding rings, Madge?

"Just a moment," says Madge. "What is it, miss? A ring? What kind? Oh, yes. Ten cents. Gold or platinum just the same. Yes."

Two giggling girls move off. And Madge, chewing gently on her wad of gum and smoothing her huge hair puffs out with the coyly stiffened palms of her hands, talks.

"Sure, I get you. About the wedding rings. Sure, that's easy. We sell about twenty or thirty of them every day. Oh, mostly to kids--girls and boys. Sometimes an old Johnny comes in with a moth-eaten fur collar and blows a dime for a wedding ring. But mostly girls.

"I sometimes take a second look at them. They usually giggle when they ask for the ring. And they usually pretend it's for somebody as a joke they're buying it. Or sometimes they walk around the counter for a half hour and get me nervous as a cat. 'Cause I know what they want and they can't get their gall up to come and ask for it. But finally they make the break and come up and pick out a ring without saying a word and hand over ten cents.

"There was one girl no more than sixteen just this morning. She come here all full of pep and kidded about things and said wasn't them platinum wedding rings just too grand for words, and so on. Then she said she wanted a half-dozen of them, and was there a discount when bought in such quantity? I started wrapping them up when I looked at her and she was crying. And she dropped her sixty cents on the counter and said: 'Never mind, never mind. I don't want them. I can't wear them. They'll only make it worse.'"

A middle-aged-looking man interrupts. "What is it, sir?" asks Madge. "Anything in rings? What kind?" "Oh, just plain rings," says the man with a great show of indifference, while his eyes ferret among the trinkets on the counter. And then, very calmly: "Oh, these will do, I guess." Two wedding rings, and he spent twenty cents. Madge follows him with her eyes. "That's it," she whispers, "usually the men buy two. One for themselves and one for the girl. Or if it's the girl that's buying them it's one for herself and one for her girl chum who's going with her and the two fellas on the party. Say, take it from me, these rings don't ever hear no wedding marches."

* * * * *

Back into the gloomy street again. A plot in our head, but who's the villain and who's the heroine and the hero? An easy answer to that. The crowd here--sad faced, tired-walking, bundle-laden. The crowd continually dissolving amid street cars and autos is the villain.

A crowd of shoppers buying slippers for uncle and shawls for mother and mufflers for brother and some bars of soap for the bathroom. Buying everything and anything that fill the fan-shaped buildings with their glinting windows. Buying carpet sweepers and window curtains and linoleum.

Pizzicato, pianissimo, professor--little-girl gigglers and hard-faced dock wallopers and slick-haired lounge lizards and broken-hearted ones--twenty a day they sidle up to Madge's counter, where the love me, love me songs razz the heavy air, and shoot a dime for a wedding ring.

WHERE THE "BLUES" SOUND

"That St. Louis woman
Wid her diahmond rings,
Pulls mah man 'round
By her apron strings--"

A voice screeches above the boom and hurrah of the black and white 35th Street cabaret. The round tables rock. Waiters careen. Balanced trays float at crazy angles through the tobacco smoke. Hats flash. Firecracker voices explode. A guffaw dances across a smear of faces. Congo gleams, college boy pallors, the smiles of black and white men and women interlace. A spotlight shoots its long hypotenuse upon the floor. In its drifting oval the entertainer, her shoulders back, her elbows out, her fists clenched and her body twisting into slow patterns, bawls in a terrifying soprano--

"If it waren't foh her powdah
And her stohe bought hair.
The man Ah love
Would not have gone nowhere--"

Listen for the tom-tom behind the hurrah. Watch for the torches of Kypris and Corinth behind the glare of the tungstens. This is the immemorial bacchanal lurching through the kaleidoscope of the centuries. Pan with a bootlegger's grin and a checked suit. Dionysius with a saxophone to his lips. And the dance of Paphos called now the shimmie.

Listen and watch and through the tumult, rising like a strange incense from the smear of bodies, tables and waiters, will come the curious thing that is never contained in the vice reports. The gleam of the devil himself--the echo of some mystic cymbal note.

Later the music will let out a tinny blaze of sound. Men and women will press together and a pack of bodies will sway on the dance floor. The tungstens will go out and the spotlight will throw colors--green, purple, lavender, blue, violet--and as the scene grows darker and the colors revolve a howl will fill the place. But on the dance floor a silence will fasten itself over the swaying bodies and there will be only the sound of feet pushing. The silence of a ritual--faces stiffened, eyes rolling--a rigid embrace of men and women creeping cunningly among the revolving colors and the whiplike rhythms of the jazz band.

* * * * *

"Lost souls," says the vice reports, and the vice reports speak with a calm and knowing voice. Women whose bodies and faces are like shells of evil; vicious seeming men with a rasp in their laughter. These are among those present. Aphrodite is a blousy wench in the 35th and State streets neighborhood. And her votaries, although they offer an impressive ensemble, are a sorry lot taken face by face.

Izzy, who is an old timer, sits at a table and takes it in. Izzy's eyes and ears have learned to pick details in a bedlam. He can talk softly and listen easily through the height of the cabaret racket. The scene hits Izzy as water hits a duck's back.

"Well," he says, "it's a good night tonight. The slummers are out in full force rubberin' at each other. Well, this is a funny world, take it from me. Me? Huh, I come here every night or so to have a little drink and look 'em over for a while. Ain't nothing to see but a lot o' molls and a lot of sucker guys. Them? Say, they never learn no better. Tough guys ain't no different from soft guys, see? They all fall for the dames just as hard and just as worse. There's many a good guy in this place that's been gave a tumble by them, see?

"There, I got an idee he'd blow in tonight. He ain't missed a Saturday night for months. And he usu'lly makes it four or five times a week. That guy over there wit' the mop o' gray hair. Yeah, that's him. Well, he's the professor. I spotted him in the district a year or so ago. He had a dame wit' him who I know, see? A terrible broad. Say, maybe you've heard of him. His name is Weintraub. I picked it up from the dame he's goin' wit', see? He ought to be in your line. He was a reg'lar music professor before he come down. The leader of a swell orchestra somewhere in the east or in Europe, I guess. The dame don't know for sure, but she told me he was some baby on music.

"Well, that's him there, see? He comes in like this and sits down near the band. Look at him. Do you make him? The way he's movin' his hands? See, he's leadin' the band. Sure"--Izzy laughed mirthlessly--"that's what the guy's doin'. Nuts, see? Daffy. He comes in here like that and I always watch him. He sits still and when the music starts up he begins wit' his hands. Ain't he the berries?

"Now keep your eye on him. You'll see somethin' pretty quick. He's alone tonight. I guess the dame has shook him for the evenin'. Look, he's still conductin'. Ain't he rich? But he's got a good face, you might say. Class, eh? You'd know he was a musician.

"I tell you I begin to watch him the first time I saw him. And from the beginnin' he's always conductin' when the band starts in. The dame is usu'lly wit' him and she don't like it. She tries to stop him, but he don't see her for sour apples. He keeps right on like now, beatin' time wit' his hands. Look, the poor nut's growin' excited. Daffy. Can you beat it? There he goes. See? That's on account of Jerry. Jerry's the black one on the end wit' the saxophone. Ha, Jerry always does it.

"I told Jerry about this guy and Jerry tried it on him the first night. He pulled a sour one, you know, blew a mean one through the horn and his nobs nearly fell out of his seat. Like now. See, he's through. He won't conduct the band any more tonight. He's sore. No sir, he won't conduct such a lot of no-good boilermakers like Jerry. Can you beat it?"

* * * * *

Izzy's eyes follow a stoop-shouldered gray-haired man from one of the tables. A thin-faced man with bloodshot eyes. He walks as if he were half asleep. The crowd swallows him and Izzy laughs again without mirth.

"He's done for the night. That's low down of Jerry. But Jerry says it gets his goat to see this daffy guy comin' in here night after night and leadin' the band from the table. So the smoke blows that sour note every time his nobs gets started on his conductin' and it always knocks his nobs for a gool. He never stays another minute, but lights out right away.

"Look, there's his dame. The one wit' the green hat, sittin' wit' the guy with the cheaters over there. Yeah, that's her. I don't know why she ain't wit' him tonight. Prob'ly a lovers' quarrel." And Izzy grinned. "She's a tough one, take it from me. I don't know how she hooked the professor, but she did. She used to be swelled up about him. And once she got him a job in Buxbaum's old place, she told me, to work in the orchestra. But his nobs kicked. Said he'd cut his throat before playin' in a roughneck orchestra and who did she think he was to do such a thing? He says to her: I'm Weintraub--Weintraub, d'ye understand?' And he hauls off and wallops her one and she guve up tryin' to get him a job. It makes her sore to watch him sittin' around like tonight and conductin' the orchestra. She says it ain't because he's daffy, but on account of his bein' stuck up."

The woman with the green hat had left her table. Izzy's shrewd eyes picked her out again--this time standing against a far wall talking to the professor, and the professor was rubbing his forehead and saying "No, no," with his hands.

And now the entertainer was singing again:

"Got de St. Louis Blues, jes' as blue as Ah can be,
Dat man has a heart like a rock ca-ast in de sea,
Or else he would not have gone so far away from me."

VAGABONDIA

Here they come. Five merry travelers in a snorting, dust-caked automobile. Wanderers, egad! Bowling rakishly across the country. Dusters and goggles and sunburn. Prairie nights have sung to them. Little towns have grinned at them. Mountains, valleys, forests and stars have danced across their windshield.

The newspaper man stood watching them haul up to the Adams Street curb. His heart was tired of tall buildings and the endless grimace of windows. Here was a chariot out of another world. Motor vagabonds. Scooting into a city with a swagger to their dust-caked wheels. And scooting out again.

The newspaper man thought, "The world isn't buried yet. There's still a restlessness left. Things change from triremes to motor boats, from Rosinante to automobiles. But adventure merely mounts a new seat and goes on. Dick Hovey sang it once:

"I am fevered with the sunset,
I am fretful with the bay,
For the wander thirst is on me
And my soul is in Cathay."

The five merry travelers crawled out and stretched themselves. They doffed their goggles and slipped off their linen dusters and changed forthwith from a group of flying gnomes into five tired-looking citizens of California. Two middle aged women. Two middle-aged men and a son.

One of the men said, "Well, we'll lay up here for awhile, I got a blister on my hand from the wheel."

One of the women answered, "I must buy some hairpins, Martin."

The newspaper man said to himself, "What ho! I'll give them a ring. Why not? A story of the modern wanderlust. Anyway, they're not averse to publicity seeing they've got two 'coast to coast' pennants on the back of their machine. What they've seen. Why they've journeyed. A tirade against the monotony of business. And I'll stick in one of Hovey's stanzas, the one that goes:

"There's a schooner in the offing
With her topsails shot with fire.
And my heart has gone aboard her
For the Islands of Desire."

"You can say," said the spokesman of the wanderers, "that this is Martin S. Stevers and party. I am Mr. Stevers of the Stevers Linseed Oil Company in San Francisco. Here's my card."

"Thanks," said the newspaper man, taking the card.

"And now," spake on the spokesman of the wanderers, "what can I do for you?"

Newspaper men are perhaps the only creatures who as a type never learn how to ask questions. An embarrassment caused by the stupidity of the gabby great whom they interrogate daily puts a crimp into their tongues. Their questions wince in anticipation of the banalities they are doomed to elicit. Their curiosity collapses under the shadow of the inevitable, impending bromide.

Thus the newspaper man, wearily certain that regardless of what he asks or how he asks it, he will hear for answers only the clumsy asininities behind which the personalities, leaders and sacred white cows pompously attitudinize, gets so that he mumbles a bit incoherently.

But here was a different case. Here were merry travelers with memories of wind-swept valleys and star-capped mountains to chatter on. So the newspaper man unearthed his vocabulary, tilted his hat a trifle and smiled invitingly.

"Well," said he to the spokesman of the wanderers, "The kind of story I'd like to get would be a story about five people wandering across the country. You know. Hills, sunsets, trees and how those things drive away the monotony that fills up the hearts of city folk. What you enjoyed on the trip and the advantages of a rover over a swivel-chair statistician."

An eloquence was beginning to skip around on the newspaper man's tongue. His heart, weary of tall buildings and the endless grimace of city windows, began to warm under the visions his phrases aroused.

Then he paused. One of the women had interrupted. "Go on Martin, you can tell him all that. And don't forget about the lovely hotel breakfast room in Des Moines."

Martin, however, hesitated. He was a heavy-set, large-faced man with expansive features almost devoid of expression. Suddenly his face lighted up. His hands jumped together and he rubbed their palms enthusiastically.

"I see," he said with profundity. "I see."

"Yes," breathed the newspaper man.

"Well," said Mr. Stevers, "the first thing I'd like to tell you, young man, is about the car. You won't believe this, but we've been making twenty miles on a gallon, that is, averaging twenty miles on each and every gallon, sir, since we left San Francisco. Pretty good, eh?"

On a piece of scratch paper the newspaper man obediently wrote, "twenty miles, gallon."

"And then," went on the spokesman for the wanderers, "Our speed, eh? You'd like to know that? Well, without stretching the thing at all, and you can verify it from any of my party, we've averaged twenty-six miles an hour all the time out. I tell you the old boat had to travel some to do that."

'"Twenty-six miles," scribbled the newspaper man, adding after it, "The man's an idiot."

Mr. Stevers, unmindful, loosened up. The price of gasoline. The price of breakfasts. The condition of the roads. How long a stretch they had been able to do without a halt. How many hours a day he himself had stuck at the wheel. When he had finished the newspaper man bowed and walked abruptly away.

* * * * *

The newspaper man's thoughts form a conclusion.

"It's true, then," he thought, "the world's becoming as stupid as it looks. People are drying up inside with facts, figures, dollar signs. This man and his party would have got as much out of their cross-country trip if they'd all been blindfolded and shot through a tunnel two thousand feet under the ground. Man is like an audience and he has walked out on mystery and adventure. The show kind of tired him. And got his goat. It would have been a good yarn otherwise, the motor vagabonds. I'd have ended with Hovey's verse:

"I must forth again tomorrow,
With the sunset I must be
Hull down on the trail of rapture
In the wonder of the sea."

Mumbling the lines to himself, the newspaper man strode on through the crowded loop with a sudden swagger in his eyes.

NIRVANA

The newspaper man felt a bit pensive. He sat in his bedroom frowning at his typewriter. About eight years ago he had decided to write a novel. Not that he had anything particular in his mind to write about. But the city was such a razzle-dazzle of dreams, tragedies, fantasies; such a crazy monotone of streets and windows that it filled the newspaper man's thought from day to day with an irritating blur.

And for eight years or so the newspaper man had been fumbling around trying to get it down on paper. But no novel had grown out of the blur in his head.

* * * * *

The newspaper man put on his last year's straw hat and went into the street, taking his pensiveness with him. Warm. Rows of arc lights. A shifting crowd. There are some streets that draw aimless feet. The blazing store fronts, clothes shops, candy shops, drug-stores, Victrola shops, movie theatres invite with the promise of a saturnalia in suspense.

At Wilson Avenue and Sheridan Road the newspaper man paused. Here the loneliness he had felt in his bedroom seemed to grow more acute. Not only his own aimlessness, but the aimlessness of the staring, smiling crowd afflicted him.

Then out of the babble of faces he heard his name called. A rouged young flapper, high heeled, short skirted and a jaunty green hat. One of the impudent little swaggering boulevard promenaders who talk like simpletons and dance like Salomes, who laugh like parrots and ogle like Pierettes. The birdlike strut of her silkened legs, the brazen lure of her stenciled child face, the lithe grimace of her adolescent body under the stiff coloring of her clothes were a part of the blur in the newspaper man's mind.

She was one of the things he fumbled for on the typewriter--one of the city products born of the tinpan bacchanal of the cabarets. A sort of frontispiece for an Irving Berlin ballad. The caricature of savagery that danced to the caricature of music from the jazz bands. The newspaper man smiled. Looking at her he understood her. But she would not fit into the typewritten phrases.

"Wilson Avenue," he thought, as he walked beside her chatter. "The wise, brazen little virgins who shimmy and toddle, but never pay the fiddler. She's it. Selling her ankles for a glass of pop and her eyes for a fox trot. Unhuman little piece. A cross between a macaw and a marionette."

* * * * *

Thus, the newspaper man thinking and the flapper flapping, they came together to a cabaret in the neighborhood. The orchestra filled the place with confetti of sound. Laughter, shouts, a leap of voices, blazing lights, perspiring waiters, faces and hats thrusting vivid stencils through the uncoiling tinsel of tobacco smoke.

On the dance floor bodies hugging, toddling, shimmying; faces fastened together; eyes glassy with incongruous ecstasies.

The newspaper man ordered two drinks of moonshine and let the scene blur before him like a colored picture puzzle out of focus. Above the music he heard the childishly strident voice of the flapper:

"Where you been hiding yourself? I thought you and I were cookies. Well, that's the way with you Johns. But there's enough to go around, you can bet. Say boy! I met the classiest John the other evening in front of the Hopper. Did he have class, boy! You know there are some of these fancy Johns who look like they were the class. But are they? Ask me. Nix. And don't I give them the berries, quick? Say, I don't let any John get moldy on me. Soon as I see they're heading for a dumb time I say 'razzberry.' And off your little sugar toddles."

"How old are you?" inquired the newspaper man abstractedly.

"Eighteen, nosey. Why the insult? I got a new job yesterday with the telephone company. That makes my sixth job this year. Tell me that ain't going good? One of the Johns I met in front of the Edgewater steered me to it. He turned out kind of moldy, and say! he was dumb. But I played along and got the job.

"Say, I bet you never noticed my swell kicks." The flapper thrust forth her legs and twirled her feet. "Classy, eh? They go with the lid pretty nice. Say, you're kind of dumb yourself. You've got moldy since I saw you last."

"How'd you remember my name?" inquired the newspaper man.

"Oh, there are some Johns who tip over the oil can right from the start. And you never forget them. Nobody could forget you, handsome. Never no more, never. What do you say to another shot of hootch? The stuff's getting rottener and rottener, don't you think? Come on, swallow. Here's how. Oh, ain't we got fun!"

* * * * *

The orchestra paused. It resumed. The crowd thickened. Shouts, laughter, swaying bodies. A tinkle of glassware, snort of trombones, whang of banjos. The newspaper man looked on and listened through a film.

The brazen patter of his young friend rippled on. A growing gamin coarseness in her talk with a nervous, restless twitter underneath. Her dark child eyes, perverse under their touch of black paint, swung eagerly through the crowd. Her talk of Johns, of dumb times and moldy times, of classy times and classy memories varied only slightly. She liked dancing and amusement parks. Automobile riding not so good. And besides you had to be careful. There were some Johns who thought it cute to play caveman. Yes, she'd had a lot of close times, but they wouldn't get her. Never, no, never no more. Anyway, not while there was music and dancing and a whoop-de-da-da in the amusement parks.

The newspaper man, listening, thought, "An infant gone mad with her dolls. Or no, vice has lost its humanness. She's the symbol of new sin--the unhuman, passionless whirligig of baby girls and baby boys through the cabarets."

* * * * *

They came back from a dance and continued to sit. The din was still mounting. Entertainers fighting against the racket. Music fighting against the racket. Bored men and women finally achieving a bedlam and forgetting themselves in the artifice of confusion.

The newspaper man looking at his young friend saw her taking it in. There was something he had been trying to fathom about her during her breathless chattering. She talked, danced, whirled, laughed, let loose giggling cries. And yet her eyes, the part that the rouge pot or the bead stick couldn't reach, seemed to grow deader and deader.

The jazz band let out the crash of a new melody. The voices of the crowd rose in an "ah-ah-ah." Waiters were shoving fresh tables into the place, squeezing fresh arrivals around them.

The flapper had paused in her breathless rigmarole of Johns and memories. Leaning forward suddenly she cried into the newspaper man's ear above the racket:

"Say this is a dumb place."

The newspaper man smiled.

"Ain't it, though?" she went on. There was a pause and then the breathless voice sighed. She spoke.

"Gee!"--with a laugh that still seemed breathless--"gee, but it's lonely here!"

THE INDESTRUCTIBLE MASTERPIECE

"You come with me to the Art Institute today," said Max Kramm. "My friend Broun has an exhibition. You know Broun? Ah, I think he is today the greatest living artist. No, we will walk. It is only four or five blocks. And I tell you a story."

A story from Max Kramm is worth attention even though it is hot and though the Boul Mich pavement feels like a stove griddle through the leather of one's shoes. For the Dante-faced Max, in addition to being one of the leading piano professors of the country, the billiard champion of the Chicago Athletic Club and the most erudite porcelain connoisseur in Harper Avenue, is one of the survivors of the race of raconteurs that flourished in the time of nickel cigars and the free lunch.

"I have eight more lessons to administer today," sighed Max with a parting glower at the premises of the Chicago Musical College, "But when my old friend Broun has an exhibition I go."

* * * * *

"It was when we lived together in a studio in North Avenue," said Max. "Jo Davidson, Walter Goldbeck and the bunch, we all roomed together in the same neighborhood and we were poor, I can tell you. But young. And that makes up for a lot of things.

"Broun and I, we room together in a little attic where I have a piano and he paints. Even in those days we all knew Frank Broun would be a great painter if he didn't starve to death first. And the chances looked even.

"Well, there was Schneider, of course. You never heard of him, I'll bet you. No, he don't paint. And he don't sing and he don't play the piano. He was somebody much more important than such things. Schneider was the proprietor of a beer saloon in North Avenue. Where is he now, I wonder? Well, in those days he saved our life twice a day regularly.

"Broun and I we keep alive for one whole year on Schneider's free lunch. Herring, pickles, rye bread, pepper beef, boiled ham, onions, pretzels, roast beef and a big jar full of fine cheese. And, I forgot, a jar full of olives and a dish of crackers. Oh, there was food fit for a king in Schneider's. You buy one glass beer, for five cents, and then you eat till you bust--for nothing.

"You can't imagine what that meant to us in those days. Broun and I, we sometimes have so much as ten cents a day between us and on this we must live. So at noon we both go into Schneider's. Broun says, 'You want a drink, Max? I say, 'No, Frank.' Then I engage Schneider in talk while Broun makes away with a meal. Then Broun does the talking and it is my turn.

"Well, it got so that the good Schneider finally points out to us one day. 'Max,' he says, 'and Frank, I tell you something. You boys owe me three dollars and you come in here and eat all your meals and you don't even pay for the one glass beer you buy any more. I am sorry, but your credit is exhausted.'

"So you can imagine what Broun and I feel when we get home. No more Schneider's, no more food, and eventually we see ourselves both starving to death.

"'Max' says Broun, 'I have an idea.' And he did.

"Like all great ideas, it was simple. Broun figures that what we need to do is to convince Schneider we have wonderful prospects and so Schneider will give us back our credit. So Broun sits down that day and all day and most of the night he paints. I think it was the last canvas he had in the studio, too. And a big one. You know all of Broun's landscapes are big.

"Well, he paints and paints, and when he is finished we take the picture to Schneider, the two of us carrying it. I tell Schneider that it is one of the old masters which we just received from Berlin from my father's studio. Then Broun says that Schneider must keep it in his place. It is too valuable to hang in our attic. Schneider looks at the picture and, it being so big, he half believes it.

"Then Broun and I go to the bank and draw out our $10 which we have saved up for a rainy day. And we go down town and get the picture insured for $2,000. You can imagine Schneider. We bring the insurance gink out there and when he gives us the policy and we show it to Schneider--well, our credit is re-established. Herring, rye bread, roast beef, pickles and cheese once more. We eat.

"Schneider is more proud of that picture than a peacock. And every day we drop in to see if it is all right and Broun always goes behind the bar and dusts it off a little and draws himself another drink. There is never any question any more of our credit. Don't we own a picture insured for $2,000? The good Schneider is glad to have such affluent customers, you can believe me.

* * * * *

"Well, things go on like this for some months. Then I am coming home one night with Broun and the fire engines pass us. So Frank and I we go to the fire.

"It is Schneider's beer saloon. We see it a block off. Frank turns pale and he holds my arm and he whispers, 'Max, the picture! It is burning up!'

"I look at Broun and I suppose I tremble a little myself. Who wouldn't? Two thousand dollars! 'Max,' says Broun, 'We go around the world together. And I saw a suit today and a cane I must have.'

"But we couldn't talk. We walk slowly to the beer saloon. We walk already like plutocrats, arm in arm, and our faces with a faraway look. We are spending the two thousand, you can imagine.

"The saloon is burning fine. Everything is going up in smoke. Broun and I, we hold on to each other. We see Jo Davidson running to the fire and we nod at him politely. Money makes a big difference, you know.

"And then we hear a cry. I recognize Schneider and I see him break loose from the crowd. He runs back into the burning saloon, a fireman after him. Broun and I, we stand and watch. He is probably gone after one of his kids. But I count the kids who are all in the street and they are all there.

"Then Schneider comes out and the fireman, too. And they are carrying something. Broun falls against the delicatessen store window and groans. And I close my eyes. Yes, it is the picture.

"Schneider sees us and comes rushing. He is half burned up. But the picture is not touched. He and the fireman hand us the picture. As for me, I turn away and I lose command of the English language.

"'You boys trusted me,' says Schneider, 'and I remembered just in time. I remembered your picture. I may not be an artist, but I don't let a masterpiece burn up. Not in my saloon. So I save it. It is the only thing I save out of the whole saloon.' And he wrings Broun's hand, and I say, 'thanks.' That night, all night long, I played Beethoven. The Ninth Symphony is good for feelings such as mine and Broun's."

* * * * *

It is cooler in the Art Institute and Max, smiling in memory of other days, looks at the Broun exhibition.