Beggars of Life (16 page)

W
E
hurried through the sleepy streets of San Antonio as though our lives depended on our arriving at a certain destination in a given length of time. I had no idea what the hurry was all about, but asked no questions.

My companion mumbled several times, “Student, ain't you, Kid?” People stared at us as we passed them, and no wonder. My companion walked in a peculiar manner, jerking and jumping as he stepped with frenzied feet.

He was in the middle thirties, a thin and wasted figure of a man, with yellow skin on his bones. His trousers were torn in zigzag fashion in many places, through which hairy skin showed. A large safety pin fastened his blue shirt over his breast. On one foot he had a button shoe, and on the other a shoe which laced. It was fastened with a white cord. His hair had once been black, but it was now streaked grey and straggled.

We came to a cheap drug store. “I know a guy here,” he said, then tersely aside to me, “Wait.”

I walked down to the next corner and waited. Presently he came toward me, the back of his right hand rubbing his left nostril. I noticed his face had a keener expression on it. He walked along with me as before, and still mumbled the same sentence, this time adding another word, “Hungry! Student, ain't you, Kid!” The youngster on the road is called a student by many of the older tramps. This is an appropriate name. For he attends a hard and ever changing school.

Feeling that the tramp had money, and that I might be saved the necessity of begging at back doors for food, I remained with him, and hopefully waited.

We passed one restaurant, and then another, but the man apparently did not see them. We stopped in an alley while he nervously twitched his muscles and contracted his right hand until the fingers were closed and the thumb stuck out rigid, forming a hole between it and the first finger. With incredible speed, he put a preparation in the hole and breathed it into his nostrils with frenzy, his eyes rolling as his head circled around.

Never having spoken more than a mumbled sentence at a time, he now began talking more fluently.

We passed another restaurant, but food was not considered by the man whose mind was rolling through infinite space. I stopped and said, “Listen, I'd like to get a feed.” The man looked alarmed for a minute and hesitated. In desperation, I clutched his forearm. He yelled, “Ouch! Don't do that,” and rubbed the arm beneath his sleeve. It was purple and festered and full of holes made by a hypodermic needle.

We entered the restaurant where I ordered food. The man looked on, mumbling, “My name's Peter. I am one o' the twelve. Student, ain't you, Kid?”

He rattled a dollar on the counter, and I picked up the change. The waiter busied himself with some tables in the rear, and I, well fed, was in the mood to talk.

I asked the man several questions, and received disjointed answers. Finally, I said, “Have you got any folks living!”

He answered tersely, “Nope,—wife dead, all dead,—hope dead.”

Then suddenly, placing his head near me, he said, “Listen, shh! shh! I'll tell you somethin' if you don't tell no one. I'm St. Peter. I betrayed Him. I denied Him. I stay on the road so's He won't find me. When I hear roosters crowin', it makes me think of Him. I did Him a dirty trick, an' He was a good guy. They tell you I was the first Pope. That's the bunk. The first Pope was a Jew. He run a hock shop in Rome. Be quiet though. If they knew I told you, they'd ditch me off every train goin'.”

He ran his claw-like hands through his grey streaked hair, and then pointed at the ceiling. “See them stars up there. I fixed them where they are. It was some job. I knew God when He was a kid. We went to school together. He was all right till He bought the world,—then He got the swell head. I worked with Him 'leven hundred years gittin' the sky fixed up. We raised the world up on big derricks. It sunk in one place and God got His foot caught under it. Hurt it bad. He swore like hell. We used two oceans of glue stickin' the stars in. We had an airplane longer'n a railroad. We shot the stars out of the airplane with a big cannon eighty-eight miles long. We sailed a thousand miles a minute, and God sure could whiz that ship around. Once His whiskers caught in the propeller. It darn near fixed us.

“We had a good time when we wasn't workin', though. We knew a lot of girl angels that come sailin' over to us on clouds. We lived in a peach of a house. Red lilies and purple grass an' everything around it.

“I got sore at God one time. I wanted to draw a million dollars to get a pint of booze with. He turned me down after I'd worked a whole day for it. So I quit Him cold and started to get even by buildin' a big bowl out of lumber right inside the sky. I wanted to shut out the light from His little old earth, just to show Him He couldn't bamboozle me that way. I sure got a bunch of lumber for the job. I started to shut out the sun and moon too.

“We sure had a time gettin' the sun up there. We kept it in cakes of ice bigger'n Texas, an' she'd sizzle 'em right up.

“I talked to God when I was half through, an' He said, ‘All right, old boy, I'll let you go to it, but just remember, I'm God. I've built a lot of little old worlds like this one, and you can't slip nothing over on me. I can roll the mountains under you like little balls. I can make them shrivel like a kid's marble, and go whirlin' around like specks of dirt. I don't bother about plannin' things. I just get world started and turn people loose in them, hatched out of monkey eggs. Then I watch them for the fun of the thing. I've seen a million worlds go to hell in my time. They had generals and poets and statesmen that thought they were the whole works. I snapped my fingers—Bingo!—Zooey!—Where's the big men of fifty thousand years ago? Go to it, old kid. You won't get far.'

“I had Him worried though, for I kept pluggin' along, and was about all done. Everywhere you looked, you could see boards, and the sun peekin' through the cracks. She was gettin' darker down below, and I was sure workin' up high.

“The people kept shriekin' for light, but God couldn't give 'em none. I even saw Him laughin' at them.

“Finely, they sent big airships up after me, but I'd watch the men freeze, and the ships turn white with cold and go shootin' down like snowflakes. A lot of other airplanes followed till it looked like a snowstorm, and God comes bumpin' over to me on a green cloud trimmed in pink, and said, ‘Good God! What the devil are you doin'?' You've got to figger it would take a thousand years to get up to me. Big eagles flew at me with wings longer'n a train, and beaks that twisted around, big as a ship. They was afraid of my hammer. Lots of men a hundred feet long flew around without heads too. And comets! Say! you never saw no fireworks like them. The stars whizzed aroun' like lightnin' bugs. One time two of them bumped into each other and sparks flew bigger'n houses on fire.

“When I had the sky about all nailed up, God was almost cryin'. His beard was blowin' in the breeze a mile long. Then He bumped into me on a cloud, and I rapped my thumb with the hammer and started to fall—and all the way down, for a hundred years, I saw little pieces of whitelike frozen airplanes sailin' all aroun' me.”

An engine whistled. “Well, so long,” yelled the man who worked with God, as he dashed out of the place, and ran like a madman toward the yards.

M
ISERY
crawls to misery for the reason that it can crawl nowhere else… . That it gains solace thereby is rather an uneven possibility.

I lived much among the women of looser sex in my youth because I was able to obtain a certain amount of understanding from them, and as understanding is near to sympathy, the latter also.

Rabbit Town was that section of St. Marys where men only went at night. It consisted of some frame houses furnished with tawdry attempts at finery. Edna lived in one of these houses.

Edna was not quite eighteen. She had been seduced by her own father at fourteen and then an older brother carried on the work. She had a very low opinion of men.

Edna was beautiful. Her hair shone like yellow corn silk in the sun. Her eyes were a deep and vivid brown and they contrasted strangely with her yellow hair which she often wore unbraided down her back. She was slender, and moved with the grace of a fawn. She had a strong sex appeal, the only extenuating circumstance for the degenerate father and brother. When men enter the bawdy houses of the middle west, a bell is rung, and the girl inhabitants file in that the male may have his choice. Edna appealed so strongly to many men that the landlady, not wishing to work a faithful animal to death, as it were, would often keep her back, or, in many cases charge two dollars for her services instead of one.

Edna had shot her father and wounded her brother in a state bounding Ohio. Neither is Edna her first name, as I still like her, and would do no one thing to injure her getting along in a social system that is full of prudes and prudence.

Edna had never read a book that I know of, though I read paper-bound copies of
Sappho
and
Camille
to her, and later,
From the Ballroom to Hell
, by some hell of a writer.

But Edna had a certain gift. It was the gift of wonder. She wondered about everything—about the sun and the moon and why the world was round, and how we happened to be here and who God's father was, and if he worked for a living. She was a sophisticated and charming young person, and was one of the few underworld women I ever met who was not a sentimentalist.

She kept me in affluence for some months, such as it was. She earned about one hundred and fifty dollars a week, but the landlady took half of that amount. Then Edna had other expenses, the heaviest among them being a thousand dollars which she owed to the lawyer who had secured her acquittal on the charge of murder. She sent twenty five dollars to this man every week. Edna was soft spoken. Her voice was well modulated, and she never became angry. Her mother was dead, and Edna had kept house for the father and brother. She was naturally kindly and responded to kindness from the vilest sinner. She seemed to have taken the men's sex desire for fatherly and brotherly affection.

At fifteen she ran away to——in a delicate condition. She went to a hospital and told the head nurse of her condition, as she wanted to talk to a person of her own sex. That woman heard the story and said tersely, “I'd shoot 'em both if it was me!”

Edna replied, “I think I will!”

She worked in the hospital until it was time for her confinement. The baby came, opened its eyes two or three times, and went away again. Edna was nearly strangled with grief.

The great-hearted head nurse held the broken young mother in her arms and said, “Shoot them, God damn them!”

Edna left the hospital in five weeks. The head nurse loaned her twenty-five dollars, which she paid back. She bought a little blue revolver and returned to her father's house.

She walked alone, a worn and tired little blonde girl to the grave of her mother at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Over that grave the child knelt while the sun turned the green of the mountains brown.

“Mother,” she said, “I hope you can see me, I'm going to kill your man!” She sat there among the ragweeds and withered geraniums that covered the grave until the sun rolled behind the mountains. Her father would be home from work at six. It was time to go.

As everybody knew her in the town her walk homeward was somewhat retarded. “Gee, you've been away off to Cincinnati, hain't you, Edna!” “Yes,” replied Edna, “I've been much farther than that!”

“My, it must be great to travel,” said the woman all unknowing, as Edna walked on.

An ancient cat met her at the gate, and rubbed against her well-shaped ankles, remembering. She entered the house without knocking. Her father was preparing the evening meal. He leaned over the kitchen stove with a skillet in his hand. Her brother sat peeling potatoes on a stool nearby.

She looked about the kitchen. The father turned, in surprise at seeing her, and died the next moment. Two bullets ripped through his brain, and he fell across the hot stove and rolled on the floor.

The brother jumped and ran quickly through the door, a bullet flying after him and going through his left lung.

Edna walked quietly to the police station and said, “I've killed my father and brother with this gun. I told my mother I would this afternoon!”

She was six months in jail, and was tried and acquitted. She told me this tale one evening when the lights burned low in Rabbit Town.

It was on Sunday night, and Edna was weary from the night before. The landlady had allowed her to spend the afternoon and night in her room. So Edna was not at home to the leading business men of the town. She chose to spend her time smoking and drinking with a vagabond kid.

She often became melancholy over the little child who left the hospital so quickly. To relieve herself she would say, “Oh, well, dammit, it wouldn't have lived anyhow, besides, it was that dead bastard's—one of them.” And then once, in a sweeping after thought. “But Jimmy, it was mother's grandson, twice I”

Edna had been intimate with her lawyer, but not out of love for him. “He was kind to me, and that was all I had to give him,” she said. “Besides,” she continued, “after a girl once gets started it's hard to stop!”

“Would you go straight, Edna,” I once asked her, “if you could?” “Sure,” she answered, “but I've got to pay that damn lawyer, and I won't scrub any hussy's kitchen to do it. To hell with morals!”

“Would you be happier out of a sporting house?”

“Are you happier out of one?” she asked me in return.

“I wonder if my baby did die, you don't think they'd take it from me, do you, Jimmy?”

“No, I don't think so, the head nurse wouldn't do that.”

“You can't tell what anybody'll do,” Edna replied.

“The only thing that gets me is that men are such damn fools. They come down here and brag about their daughters and their half dead wives and get peeved because we don't love our heads off for them. I get so I never want to see a man again.”

Edna was an inmate of the house when the landlady died.

The landlady was over six feet tall and raw boned. She had a hard face that blended the buzzard and the eagle, but her heart was kind.

She had long suffered from palpitation of the heart and I once heard her say to Edna, “I'll kick off in a minute one of these days!” She did. She was dusting the picture of a naked woman on the housemaid's afternoon off. Her heart missed a beat or two, she gasped and fell, and hurried away to join Edna's baby.

The landlady had been everybody's friend and her loss was really felt. She had once told Edna to allow a struggling young undertaker to bury her if she died. “He's not a bad kid an' he may's well have the dough's anybody!”

The young undertaker came and laid her out in a purple coffin on cushions soft as down. Her old face had a weird smile upon it as if she were saying, “It's a hell of a mess, don't wake me up!”

There was much excitement in the town when the landlady went to seat herself on the right hand of God. Many beautiful flowers came. No names were signed to them. One might care for an ancient harlot in private, but it certainly is not proper to allow the public to know of it.

“Just think of it, Jimmy,” said Edna, “I've slept with half the business men in this town, and there isn't a one of them with nerve enough to sign his name to a card. What a lot of crooked devils they are!”

But the landlady smiled sardonically through it all. A heavy gold wedding ring was on her third finger. The bauble of romance was going to the grave with her for the worms to crawl through.

Three moral ladies called at the house and suggested casually that it might be a good idea to bury the landlady at night. Edna became at once the girl who shot her father. Without raising her voice she said, “Mother goes out of this house in broad daylight and if they don't like it they can pull down their God damn blinds!”

“But,” said one of the ladies, “we must think of the children of the town.”

“The children of the town be damned. Don't make me laugh while Mother's lying dead.”

The funeral was held at two that afternoon, and when the lid was clamped over the sardonically smiling old lady with the heavy wedding ring, Edna broke into a spasm of weeping.

No minister was invited and a bartender said a few words. “She never turned a down and out guy down and she always went fifty-fifty with everybody. She kept a bunch of guys in this town from goin' to the wall but they ain't here to own up to it now.” The coffin was carried out of the house, and two white horses took it to the graveyard. Before the first shovelful of dirt was thrown in, a slight wind blew some yellow and green leaves into the grave. Then everyone turned away.

The sardonic mitigator of sex was at last completely alone.

No one came to the house after the funeral, so I spent the evening with Edna.

“You know, now that Mother's gone, I'm going to beat it out of here one of these days. It won't be long till I have that lawyer paid up and then I'm going so darn far it'll take a dollar to send me a postal card. I hate goodbyes and everything like that, they give me the blues, so if I slip out of here quick and you don't see me again, don't get sore, for that's the way I'm made!”

“That's all right,” was my answer.

In two days she left the town without saying a word to anybody. A card came to me from Chicago, and then life closed around her.

I once sent a letter of enquiry to her lawyer. The word came back from his partner that he was dead and that Edna had not been heard of.

I hope greatly that she may read these lines.