CHAPTER V — A LODGING BY THE RIVER
The day after his introduction to the Kenbys, Larcher went with Murray Davenport on one of those expeditions incidental to their collaboration as writer and illustrator. Larcher had observed an increase of the strange indifference which had appeared through all the artist's loquacity at their first interview. This loquacity was sometimes repeated, but more often Davenport's way was of silence. His apathy, or it might have been abstraction, usually wore the outer look of dreaminess.
“Your friend seems to go about in a trance,” Barry Tompkins said of him one day, after a chance meeting in which Larcher had made the two acquainted.
This was a near enough description of the man as he accompanied Larcher to a part of the riverfront not far from the Brooklyn Bridge, on the afternoon at which we have arrived. The two were walking along a squalid street lined on one side with old brick houses containing junk-shops, shipping offices, liquor saloons, sailors' hotels, and all the various establishments that sea-folk use. On the other side were the wharves, with a throng of vessels moored, and glimpses of craft on the broad river.
“Here we are,” said Larcher, who as he walked had been referring to a pocket map of the city. The two men came to a stop, and Davenport took from a portfolio an old print of the early nineteenth century, representing part of the river front. Silently they compared this with the scene around them, Larcher smiling at the difference. Davenport then looked up at the house before which they stood. There was a saloon on the ground floor, with a miniature ship and some shells among the bottles in the window.
“If I could get permission to make a sketch from one of those windows up there,” said Davenport, glancing at the first story over the saloon.
“Suppose we go in and see what can be done,” suggested Larcher.
They found the saloon a small, homely place, with only one attendant behind the bar at that hour, two marine-looking old fellows playing some sort of a game amidst a cloud of pipe-smoke at a table, and a third old fellow, not marine-looking but resembling a prosperous farmer, seated by himself in the enjoyment of an afternoon paper that was nearly all head-lines.
Larcher ordered drinks, and asked the barkeeper if he knew who lived overhead. The barkeeper, a round-headed young man of unflinching aspect, gazed hard across the bar at the two young men for several seconds, and finally vouchsafed the single word:
“Roomers.”
“I should like to see the person that has the front room up one flight,” began Larcher.
“All right; that won't cost you nothing. There he sets.” And the barkeeper pointed to the rural-looking old man with the newspaper, at the same time calling out, sportively: “Hey, Mr. Bud, here's a couple o' gents wants to look at you.”
Mr. Bud, who was tall, spare, and bent, about sixty, and the possessor of a pleasant knobby face half surrounded by a gray beard that stretched from ear to ear beneath his lower jaw, dropped his paper and scrutinized the young men benevolently. They went over to him, and Larcher explained their intrusion with as good a grace as possible.
“Why, certainly, certainly,” the old man chirped with alacrity. “Glad to have yuh. I'll be proud to do anything in the cause of literature. Come right up.” And he rose and led the way to the street door.
“Take care, Mr. Bud,” said the jocular barkeeper. “Don't let them sell you no gold bricks or nothin'. I never see them before, so you can't hold me if you lose your money.”
“You keep your mouth shut, Mick,” answered the old man, “and send me up a bottle o' whisky and a siphon o' seltzer as soon as your side partner comes in. This way, gentlemen.”
He conducted them out to the sidewalk, and then in through another door, and up a narrow stairway, to a room with two windows overlooking the river. It was a room of moderate size, provided with old furniture, a faded carpet, mended curtains, and lithographs of the sort given away with Sunday newspapers. It had, in its shabbiness, that curious effect of cosiness and comfort which these shabby old rooms somehow possess, and luxurious rooms somehow lack. A narrow bed in a corner was covered with an old-fashioned patchwork quilt. There was a cylindrical stove, but not in use, as the weather had changed since the day before; and beside the stove, visible and unashamed, was a large wooden box partly full of coal. While Larcher was noticing these things, and Mr. Bud was offering chairs, Davenport made directly for the window and looked out with an interest limited to the task in hand, and perfunctory even so.
“This is my city residence,” said the host, dropping into a chair. “It ain't every hard-worked countryman, these times, that's able to keep up a city residence.” As this was evidently one of Mr. Bud's favorite jests, Larcher politically smiled. Mr. Bud soon showed that he had other favorite jests. “Yuh see, I make my livin' up the State, but every now and then I feel like comin' to the city for rest and quiet, and so I keep this place the year round.”
“You come to New York for rest and quiet?” exclaimed Larcher, still kindly feigning amusement.
“Sure! Why not? As fur as rest goes, I just loaf around and watch other people work. That's what I call rest with a sauce to it. And as fur as quiet goes, I get used to the noises. Any sound that don't concern me, don't annoy me. I go about unknown, with nobody carin' what my business is, or where I'm bound fur. Now in the country everybody wants to know where from, and where to, and what fur. The only place to be reely alone is where thur's so many people that one man don't count for anything. And talk about noise!—What's all the clatter and bang amount to, if it's got nothin' to do with your own movements? Now at my home where the noise consists of half a dozen women's voices askin' me about this, and wantin' that, and callin' me to account for t'other,—that's the kind o' noise that jars a man. Yuh see, I got a wife and four daughters. They're very good women—very good women, the whole bunch—but I do find it restful and refreshin' to take the train to New York about once a month, and loaf around a week or so without anybody takin' notice, and no questions ast.”
“And what does your family say to that?”
“Nothin', now. They used to say considerable when I first fell into the habit. I hev some poultry customers here in the city, and I make out I got to come to look after business. That story don't go fur with the fam'ly; but they hev their way about everything else, so they got to gimme my way about this.”
Davenport turned around from the window, and spoke for the first time since entering:
“Then you don't occupy this room more than half the time?”
“No, sir, I close it up, and thank the Lord there ain't nothin' in it worth stealin'.”
“Oh, in that case,” Davenport went on, “if I began some sketches here, and you left town before they were done, I should have to go somewhere else to finish them.”
It was a remark that made Larcher wonder a little, at the moment, knowing the artist's usual methods of work. But Mr. Bud, ignorant of such matters, replied without question:
“Well, I don't know. That might be fixed all right, I guess.”
“I see you have a library,” said Davenport, abruptly, walking over to a row of well-worn books on a wooden shelf near the bed. His sudden interest, slight as it was, produced another transient surprise in Larcher.
“Yes, sir,” said the old man, with pride and affection, “them books is my chief amusement. Sir Walter Scott's works; I've read 'em over again and again, every one of 'em, though I must confess there's two or three that's pretty rough travellin'. But the others!—well, I've tried a good many authors, but gimme Scott. Take his characters! There's stacks of novels comes out nowadays that call themselves historical; but the people in 'em seems like they was cut out o' pasteboard; a bit o' wind would blow 'em away. But look at the body to Scott's people! They're all the way round, and clear through, his characters are.—Of course, I'm no literary man, gentlemen. I only give my own small opinion.” Mr. Bud's manner, on his suddenly considering his audience, had fallen from its bold enthusiasm.
“Your small opinion is quite right,” said Davenport. “There's no doubt about the thoroughness and consistency of Scott's characters.” He took one of the books, and turned over the leaves, while Mr. Bud looked on with brightened eyes. “Andrew Fairservice—there's a character. 'Gude e'en—gude e'en t' ye'—how patronizing his first salutation! 'She's a wild slip, that'—there you have Diana Vernon sketched by the old servant in a touch. And what a scene this is, where Diana rides with Frank to the hilltop, shows him Scotland, and advises him to fly across the border as fast as he can.”
“Yes, and the scene in the Tolbooth where Rob Roy gives Bailie Nicol Jarvie them three sufficient reasons fur not betrayin' him.” The old man grinned. He seemed to be at his happiest in praising, and finding another to praise, his favorite author.
“Interesting old illustrations these are,” said Davenport, taking up another volume. “Dryburgh Abbey—that's how it looks on a gray day. I was lucky enough to see it in the sunshine; it's loveliest then.”
“What?” exclaimed Mr. Bud. “You been to Dryburgh Abbey?—to Scott's grave?”
“Oh, yes,” said Davenport, smiling at the old man's joyous wonder, which was about the same as he might have shown upon meeting somebody who had been to fairy-land, or heaven, or some other place equally far from New York.
“You don't say! Well, to think of it! I am happy to meet you. By George, I never expected to get so close to Sir Walter Scott! And maybe you've seen Abbotsford?”
“Oh, certainly. And Scott's Edinburgh house in Castle Street, and the house in George Square where he lived as a boy and met Burns.”
Mr. Bud's excitement was great. “Maybe you've seen Holyrood Palace, and High Street—”
“Why, of course. And the Canongate, and the Parliament House, and the Castle, and the Grass-market, and all the rest. It's very easy; thousands of Americans go there every year. Why don't you run over next summer?”
The old man shook his head. “That's all too fur away from home fur me. The women are afraid o' the water, and they'd never let me go alone. I kind o' just drifted into this New York business, but if I undertook to go across the ocean, that would be the last straw. And I'm afraid I couldn't get on to the manners and customs over there. They say everything's different from here. To tell the truth, I'm timid where I don't know the ways. If I was like you—I shouldn't wonder if you'd been to some of the other places where things happen in his novels?”
With a smile, Davenport began to enumerate and describe. The old man sat enraptured. The whisky and seltzer came up, and the host saw that the glasses were filled and refilled, but he kept Davenport to the same subject. Larcher felt himself quite out of the talk, but found compensation in the whisky and in watching the old man's greedy enjoyment of Davenport's every word. The afternoon waned, and all opportunity of making the intended sketches passed for that day. Mr. Bud was for lighting up, or inviting the young men to dinner, but they found pretexts for tearing themselves away. They did not go, however, until Davenport had arranged to come the next day and perform his neglected task. Mr. Bud accompanied them out, and stood on the corner looking after them until they were out of sight.
“You've made a hit with the agriculturist,” said Larcher, as they took their way through a narrow street of old warehouses toward the region of skyscrapers and lower Broadway.
“Scott is evidently his hobby,” replied Davenport, with a careless smile, “and I liked to please him in it.”
He lapsed into that reticence which, as it was his manner during most of the time, made his strange seasons of communicativeness the more remarkable. A few days passed before another such talkative mood came on in Larcher's presence.
It was a drizzling, cheerless night. Larcher had been to a dinner in Madison Avenue, and he thus found himself not far from Davenport's abode. Going thither upon an impulse, he beheld the artist seated at the table, leaning forward over a confusion of old books, some of them open. He looked pallid in the light of the reading lamp at his elbow, and his eyes seemed withdrawn deep into their hollows. He welcomed his visitor with conventional politeness.
“How's this?” began Larcher. “Do I find you pondering,
'... weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore?'”
“No; merely rambling over familiar fields.” Davenport held out the topmost book.
“Oh, Shakespeare,” laughed Larcher. “The Sonnets. Hello, you've marked part of this.”
“Little need to mark anything so famous. But it comes closer to me than to most men, I fancy.” And he recited slowly, without looking down at the page:
'When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself, and curse my fate,'—
He stopped, whereupon Larcher, not to be behind, and also without having recourse to the page, went on:
'Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possest, Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,'—
“But I think that hits all men,” said Larcher, interrupting himself. “Everybody has wished himself in somebody else's shoes, now and again, don't you believe?”
“I have certainly wished myself out of my own shoes,” replied Davenport, almost with vehemence. “I have hated myself and my failures, God knows! I have wished hard enough that I were not I. But I haven't wished I were any other person now existing. I wouldn't change selves with this particular man, or that particular man. It wouldn't be enough to throw off the burden of my memories, with their clogging effect upon my life and conduct, and take up the burden of some other man's—though I should be the gainer even by that, in a thousand cases I could name.”
“Oh, I don't exactly mean changing with somebody else,” said Larcher. “We all prefer to remain ourselves, with our own tastes, I suppose. But we often wish our lot was like somebody else's.”
Davenport shook his head. “I don't prefer to remain myself, any more than to be some man whom I know or have heard of. I am tired of myself; weary and sick of Murray Davenport. To be a new man, of my own imagining—that would be something;—to begin afresh, with an unencumbered personality of my own choosing; to awake some morning and find that I was not Murray Davenport nor any man now living that I know of, but a different self, formed according to ideals of my own. There would be a liberation!”
“Well,” said Larcher, “if a man can't change to another self, he can at least change his place and his way of life.”
“But the old self is always there, casting its shadow on the new place. And even change of scene and habits is next to impossible without money.”
“I must admit that New York, and my present way of life, are good enough for me just now,” said Larcher.
Davenport's only reply was a short laugh.
“Suppose you had the money, and could live as you liked, where would you go?” demanded Larcher, slightly nettled.
“I would live a varied life. Probably it would have four phases, generally speaking, of unequal duration and no fixed order. For one phase, the chief scene would be a small secluded country-house in an old walled garden. There would be the home of my books, and the centre of my walks over moors and hills. From this, I would transport myself, when the mood came, to the intellectual society of some large city—that of London would be most to my choice. Mind you, I say the intellectual society; a far different thing from the Society that spells itself with a capital S.”
“Why not of New York? There's intellectual society here.”
“Yes; a trifle fussy and self-conscious, though. I should prefer a society more reposeful. From this, again, I would go to the life of the streets and byways of the city. And then, for the fourth phase, to the direct contemplation of art—music, architecture, sculpture, painting;—to haunting the great galleries, especially of Italy, studying and copying the old masters. I have no desire to originate. I should be satisfied, in the arts, rather to receive than to give; to be audience and spectator; to contemplate and admire.”
“Well, I hope you may have your wish yet,” was all that Larcher could say.
“I should like to have just one whack at life before I finish,” replied Davenport, gazing thoughtfully into the shadow beyond the lamplight. “Just one taste of comparative happiness.”
“Haven't you ever had even one?”
“I thought I had, for a brief season, but I was deceived.” (Larcher remembered the talk of an inconstant woman.) “No, I have never been anything like happy. My father was a cold man who chilled all around him. He died when I was a boy, and left my mother and me to poverty. My mother loved me well enough; she taught me music, encouraged my studies, and persuaded a distant relation to send me to the College of Medicine and Surgery; but her life was darkened by grief, and the darkness fell over me, too. When she died, my relation dropped me, and I undertook to make a living in New York. There was first the struggle for existence, then the sickening affair of that play; afterward, misfortune enough to fill a dozen biographies, the fatal reputation of ill luck, the brief dream of consolation in the love of woman, the awakening,—and the rest of it.”
He sighed wearily and turned, as if for relief from a bitter theme, to the book in his hand. He read aloud, from the sonnet out of which they had already been quoting:
'Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising—Haply I think on thee; and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at Heaven's gate; For thy sweet love—'
He broke off, and closed the book. “'For thy sweet love,'” he repeated.
“You see even this unhappy poet had his solace. I used to read those
lines and flatter myself they expressed my situation. There was a silly
song, too, that she pretended to like. You know it, of course,—a little
poem of Frank L. Stanton's.” He went to the piano, and sang softly, in a
light baritone:
'Sometimes, dearest, the world goes wrong,
For God gives grief with the gift of song,
And poverty, too; but your love is more—'
Again he stopped short, and with a derisive laugh. “What an ass I was! As if any happiness that came to Murray Davenport could be real or lasting!”
“Oh, never be disheartened,” said Larcher. “Your time is to come; you'll have your 'whack at life' yet.”
“It would be acceptable, if only to feel that I had realized one or two of the dreams of youth—the dreams an unhappy lad consoled himself with.”
“What were they?” inquired Larcher.
“What were they not, that is fine and pleasant? I had my share of diverse
ambitions, or diverse hopes, at least. You know the old Lapland song, in
Longfellow:
'For a boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.'”