The Apaches of New York

by Alfred Henry Lewis

The Doc kept his flat in Catherine Street as bright and burnished as the captain's cabin of a man-of-war. There was no prodigious wealth of furniture, no avalanche of ornament to overwhelm the taste. Aside from an outfit of dental tools, the most expensive belongings appeared to be what lamps and pipes and kindred paraphernalia were required in the smoking of opium.

Those who visited the Doc were compelled to one formality. Before he would open his door, they must push the bell four times and four times tap on the panel. Thus did they prove their friendly identity. Lawful dentists, in their jealousy, had had the Doc arrested and fined, from time to time, for intromitting with the teeth of his fellow worms without a license. Hence that precautionary quartet of rings, followed by the quartet of taps, indicative that a friend and not a foe was at his gate.

The Doc had many callers who came to smoke opium. For these he did divers kindly offices, mostly in the letter-writing line. As they reclined and smoked, they dictated while the Doc transcribed, and many and weird were the epistles from Nineteen Catherine Street which found their way into the mails. For this service, as for his opium and dentistry, the Doc's callers never failed to press upon him an honorarium. And so he lived.

Love, that flowerlike sentiment for which—as some jurist once remarked of justice—all places are palaces, all seasons summer, is not incompatible with either dentistry or opium. The Doc had a sweetheart named Lulu. Lulu was very beautiful and very jealous. Also, she was broadly popular. All Chinatown made songs to the deep glories of her eyes, which were supposed to have excited the defeated envy of many stars. The Doc, in what odd hours he could snatch from tooth-drawing and opium-smoking, worshipped at the shrine of Lulu; and Lulu was wrapped up in the Doc. Number Nineteen Catherine Street served as their Garden of Eden.

Now it is among the many defects of opium that it renders migratory the fancy. An ebon evidence of this was to be given at number Nineteen. The I love of the Doc became, as it were, pipe-deflected, and one day left Lulu, and, after a deal of fond circling, settled like some errant dove upon a rival belle called May.

Likewise, there was a dangerous side to this dulcet, new situation. The enchanting May, when the Doc chose her for his goddess, vice Lulu thrown down, could not be described as altogether disengaged. Was she not also the goddess of Jackeen? Had not that earnest safe-robber laid his heart at her feet?

Moreover, there were reasons even more substantial. The gentle May was in her way a breadwinner. When the fortunes of Jackeen were low, she became their mutual meal-ticket. May was the most expert shoplifter in all of broad New York. If not upon heart arguments, then upon arguments of the pocket, not to say stomach, Jackeen might be expected to fiercely resent any effort to win her love away.

Jackeen?

Not much is to be told by an appearance, although physiognomists have sung otherwise. The egg of the eagle is less impressive than the egg of: the goose. And yet it hotly houses in its heart an' eagle. The egg of the nightingale shows but-meanly side by side with the egg of the crow. And: yet it hides within its modest bosom the limpid music of the moon.

So it is with men.