XIX. A WINDFALL FROM “GENTLEMAN JOE”
I went to my rooms, purposing to go straight to bed, and get a good sleep. I did make a start toward undressing; then I realized that I should only lie awake with my brain wearing me out, spinning crazy thoughts and schemes hour after hour—for my imagination rarely lets it do any effective thinking after the lights are out and the limitations of material things are wiped away by the darkness. I put on a dressing-gown and seated myself to smoke and to read.
When I was very young, new to New York, in with the Tenderloin crowd and up to all sorts of pranks, I once tried opium smoking. I don't think I ever heard of anything in those days without giving it a try. Usually, I believe, opium makes the smoker ill the first time or two; but it had no such effect on me, nor did it fill my mind with fantastic visions. On the contrary, it made everything around me intensely real—that is, it enormously stimulated my dominant characteristic of accurate observation. I noticed the slightest details—such things as the slight difference in the length of the arms of the Chinaman who kept the “joint,” the number of buttons down the front of the waist of the girl in the bunk opposite mine, across the dingy, little, sweet-scented room. Nothing escaped me, and also I was conscious of each passing second, or, rather, fraction of a second.
As a rule, time and events, even when one is quietest, go with such a rush that one notes almost nothing of what is passing. The opium seemed to compel the kaleidoscope of life to turn more slowly; in fact, it sharpened my senses so that they unconsciously took impressions many times more quickly and easily and accurately. As I sat there that night after leaving Anita, forcing my mind to follow the printed lines, I found I was in exactly the state in which I had been during my one experiment with opium. It seemed to me that as many days as there had been hours must have elapsed since I got the news of the raised Textile dividend. Days—yes, weeks, even months, of thought and action seemed to have been compressed into those six hours—for, as I sat there, it was not yet eleven o'clock.
And then I realized that this notion was not of the moment, but that I had been as if under the influence of some powerful nerve stimulant since my brain began to recover from the shock of that thunderbolt. Only, where nerve stimulants often make the mind passive and disinclined to take part in the drama so vividly enacting before it, this opening of my reservoirs of reserve nervous energy had multiplied my power to act as well as my power to observe. “I wonder how long it will last,” thought I. And it made me uneasy, this unnatural alertness, unaccompanied by any feverishness or sense of strain. “Is this the way madness begins?”
I dressed myself again and went out—went up to Joe Healey's gambling place in Forty-fourth Street. Most of the well-known gamblers up town, as well as their “respectable” down town fellow members of the fraternity, were old acquaintances of mine; Joe Healey was as close a friend as I had. He had great fame for squareness—and, in a sense, deserved it. With his fellow gamblers he was straight as a string at all times—to be otherwise would have meant that when he went broke he would stay broke, because none of the fraternity would “stake” him. But with his patrons—being regarded by them as a pariah, he acted toward them like a pariah—a prudent pariah. He fooled them with a frank show of gentlemanliness, of honesty to his own hurt; under that cover he fleeced them well, but always judiciously.
That night, I recall, Joe's guests were several young fellows of the fashionable set, rich men's sons and their parasites, a few of the big down town operators who hadn't yet got hipped on “respectability”—they playing poker in a private room—and a couple of flush-faced, flush-pursed chaps from out of town, for whom one of Joe's men was dealing faro from what looked to my experienced and accurate eye like a “brace” box.
Joe, very elegant, too elegant in fact, in evening dress, was showing a new piece of statuary to the oldest son of Melville, of the National Industrial Bank. Joe knew a little something about art—he was much like the art dealers who, as a matter of business, learn the difference between good things and bad, but in their hearts wonder and laugh at people willing to part with large sums of money for a little paint or marble or the like.
As soon as Joe thought he had sufficiently impressed young Melville, he drifted him to a roulette table, left him there and joined me.
“Come to my office,” said he. “I want to see you.”