And then one night a ragtag ghost came and answered me.
I
It was eleven o’clock. Outside it was snowing, and so I remained in Pigalle’s, loath to leave, and killing the time with a book. Pigalle’s was one of those basement eating places in New York’s West Thirties, a comfy, tight, cosy sort of a cellar. An Italian table d’hôte, of course, though not like the usual; it had more character and less popularity. You seldom saw a blond skin there, the place being unknown to the night-tramping hordes of avid New Yorkers who crowd into all the “foreign” places and devour all the foreign food they can find. Mostly the habitués were French and Italian, gentle, noisy people who did, in their way, slight damage to the fine arts. By nine-thirty, they were done eating and gone; almost all the lights were turned out and chairs were piled up on the tables, out of the way of the early morning mop. By ten Pigalle and his wife and several others, mostly sculptors, scene painters and musicians, were gathered beneath the light at the main table and had begun their nightly game of poker. From then on it was slim gambling and loud, staccato chatter in French and Italian.
At eleven, then, this night, the cautious door-bell tinkled. Some kind of a world knocking at mine and wanting to get in, I thought. Some kind of an adventure out there, demanding to be encountered; some kind of a soul pounding at the walls of my soul. Every time the doorbell tinkles, whoever has this Show is setting a new scene. Or, no. The wall opens and the genie slips through, spreads his rug on the ground and begins to make new magic before your very eyes. Never a doorbell rang yet, I thought, that didn’t bring a bit of heaven or hell—or mere purgatory—with it.
At eleven the doorbell tinkled and the fat little waitress-maid-scrubwoman-second cook, a Lombard wench by the name, the sweet ineffable name of Philomène, waddled over and opened the door a tiny space. Pigalle occasionally sold liquor without a license; hence his caution as to visitors. She let in an odd apparition; with doubts, I thought; certainly with mutterings and rolling of her black eyes. At any rate she knew him, whether for well or ill.
The man cast his eyes around, saw that the only open table save the poker table was the one I held, and came and sat down opposite me. With a slightly insolent motion he dragged his chair around sidewise, turned his shoulder to me and stared across the room at a gaudy lithograph of the good ship Isabella bound for Naples, eighty-five dollars first class. Philomène, with a porky look, asked him what he wished.
He announced in French that he desired of all things to “strangle a parrokeet.” This was some absurd slang for saying he wanted an absinthe.
He was a gaunt, tall, round-shouldered, queer old fellow with a gray beard and a matted moustache, colored with the brown stain of cigarette smoke. As ugly, I thought, as ugly as—oh, Socrates. And yet with something lovable about him. And his combination of dress was certainly odd enough: a frayed, cutaway coat with extremely long tails, dripping wet and dangling cylindrically like sections of melted stovepipe; mussy, baggy old gray trousers; a blue plush waistcoat; a black, but clean muffler pinned tight up under his chin with a safety pin of the brassiest; and a broad-brimmed black slouch hat, so broad of brim that he walked forever in its shadow. This hat he kept on all the time. His hands were long and clean and white—the virile, sensitive hands of a poet, I thought. The eyes were the fascinating feature of the man. I said to myself right away, “This man is a mystic.” Though they burned brightly in their sockets, they had a trick of turning abruptly dim; a sort of film or veil, closed over them. “Druid or old Celt,” I murmured. “Give him a bit of mistletoe and he’d call his gods right down into my demi-tasse and scare the poker game into fits.”
He swallowed his whole glass of absinthe in five gulps—a performance that it would make a cow shudder to watch—threw back his head, and, with a hoarse burr, called for another. This time he spoke English; but the burr was decidedly Scotch. Pigalle now looked around at him—gross, pleasant, Provençal Pigalle—and nodded; then went on placidly shuffling the tiny cards in his great fat hands.
When the second absinthe came the old man took it slowly; settled himself back on his shoulder-blades and the tail of his spine, and pulled his hat down level with his eyes, as if he intended to spend a considerable time with us. He called for a package of French cigarettes—cigarettes jaunes—and proceeded to color his moustache a riper brown. “Now my adventure has knocked and come in,” I thought. “If he is my adventure, I cannot help him—nor can I keep him off. He is the primum mobile. It is up to him.”