* * * * *When the Prodigal Son became hungry he came to himself. So it was with Schuster. Living on two slices of bacon per day (eaten raw for fear of kindling fires) is what might be called starving under difficulties, and within a week Schuster was remembering and longing for floor-walking and respectability. Within a month of his strange disappearance he was back in San Francisco again knocking at the door of his aunt's house on Geary street. A week later he was taken on again at his old store, in his old position, his unexcused absence being at length, and under protest, condoned by a remembrance of "long and faithful service."Schuster picked up his old life again precisely where he had left it on the second of May, six weeks previously—picked it up and stayed by it, calmly, steadily, uneventfully. The day before he died he told this story to his maiden aunt, who told it to me, with the remark that it was, of course, an absurd lie. Perhaps it was.One thing, however, remains to tell. I repeated the absurd lie to a friend of mine who is in the warden's office over at the prison of San Quentin. I mentioned Schuster's name."Schuster! Schuster!" he repeated; "why we had a Schuster over here once—a long time ago, though. An old fellow he was, and a bad egg, too. Commuted for life, though. Son was a barber at the Palace Hotel.""What was old Schuster up for?" I asked."Highway robbery," said my friend."Boom"San Diego in Southern California, is the largest city in the world. If your geographies and guide-books and encyclopædias have told you otherwise, they have lied, or their authors have never seen San Diego. Why, San Diego is nearly twenty-five miles from end to end! Why, San Diego has more miles of sidewalk, more leagues of street railways, more measureless lengths of paved streets, more interminable systems of sewer-piping, than has London or Paris or even—even—even Chicago (and I who say so was born in Chicago, too)! There are statelier houses in San Diego than in any other "of the world's great centres," more spacious avenues, more imposing business blocks, more delicious parks, more overpowering public buildings, the pavements are better laid, the electric lighting is more systematic, the railroad and transportation facilities more accommodating, the climate is better than the Riviera, the days are longer, the nights shorter, the men finer, the women prettier, the theatres more attractive, the restaurants cheaper, the wines more sparkling, "business opportunities" lie in wait for the unfortunate at dark street-corners and fly at his throat till he must fain fight them off. Life is one long, glad fermentation. There is no darkness in San Diego, nor any more night.Incidentally corner lots are desirable.All of this must be so, because you may read it in the green and gold prospectus of the San Diego Land and Improvement Company (consolidated), sent free on application—that is, at one time during the boom it was sent free—but to-day the edition is out of print, and can only be seen in the collection of bibliophiles and wealthy amateurs, and the boom is only an echo now. But when the guests of the big Coronado Hotel over on the island come across to the main land and course jackrabbits with greyhounds in the country to the north of the town, their horses' hoofs, as they plunge through the sagebrush and tar weed, will sometimes slide and clatter upon a bit of concrete sidewalk, half sunk of its own weight into the sand; or the jack will be started in a low square of bricks, such as is built for frame house foundations, and which make excellent jumping for the horses. There is a colony of rattlers on the shores of a marsh to the southwest (the maps call it Amethyst Lake) and the little half-breed Indians catch the tarantulas and horned toads that you buy alive in glass jars on the hotel veranda, near the postoffice site, and everything is very gay and pleasant and picturesque.Why I remember it all so well is because I found Steele in this place. You see, Steele was a very good friend of mine though he was Oxon, and I only a man from Chicago. When his wife knew I was coming west she gave me Steele's address, and told me I was to look him up. Since she told me this with much insistence and reiteration and with tears in her voice, I made it a point to be particular. She had not heard from Steele in two years. The address she gave me was "Hon. Ralph Truax-Steele, Elmwood avenue and One Hundred and Eighty-eighth street, San Diego, California."When I arrived at San Diego I found it would be advisable to hire a horse, for 188th street, instead of waiting for the Elmwood Avenue electric car, and when I asked for directions a red-headed man whose father was Irish and whose mother was Chinese, offered to act as guide for twenty dollars. He said, though, he would furnish his own outfit. I demurred and he went away. I was told that some eight miles out beyond the range I would find a water-hole, and that if I held to the southwest after leaving this hole, keeping my horse's ears between the double peak of a distant mountain called Little Two Top, I would come after a while to a lamp-post with a tarantula's nest where the lamp should have been. It would be hard to miss this lamp-post, they told me, as the desert was very flat thereabouts, and the lamp-posts could be seen for a radius of ten miles. Also, there might be water there—the horse would smell it out if there was. Also, it was a good place to camp, because of a tiny ledge of shale outcropping there. I was to be particular about this lamp-post, because it stood at the corner of Elmwood avenue and 188th street.When I asked about the Hon. Truax-Steele, Oxon, information was less explicit. They shook their heads. One of them seemed to recollect a "shack" about a mile hitherward of Two Top, a statement that was at once contradicted by someone else. Might have been an old Digger "wicky-up." Sometimes the Indians camped in the valley on their way to ghost dances and tribal feasts. It wasn't a place for a white man to live, chiefly because the climate offered so many advantages and attractions to horned toads, tarantulas and rattlesnakes. Then the red-headed Chinese-Irishman came back and said, with an accent that was beyond all words, that a sheepherder had once told him of a loco-man out beyond McIntyre's waterhole, and another man said that, "Yes, that was so; he'd passed flasks with a loco-man out that way once last June, when he was out looking for a strayed pony. In fact, the loco-man lived out there, had a son, too, leastways a kid lived with him." This seemed encouraging. The Hon. Truax-Steele, Oxon, was accredited with a son—so his wife had said, who should know. So I started out, simultaneously hoping and dreading that the loco-man and the honourable Truax might be one flesh.I left San Diego at four o'clock A.M. to avoid as much as possible the heat of mid-day, and just at sunset saw what might have been a cactus plant standing out stark and still on the white blur of sage and alkali like an exclamation point on a blank page. It was the lamp-post of the spider's nest that marked the intersection of Elmwood avenue and 188th street. And then my horse shied, with his hind legs only, in the way good horses have, and Ralph Truax-Steele rose out of a dried muck-hole under the bit.I had expected a madman, but his surprise and pleasure at seeing me were perfectly sane. After awhile he said: "Sorry, old boy. It's the hospitality of the Arab I can give you; nothing better. A handful of dates (we call 'em caned prunes out here), the dried flesh of a kid (Californian for jerked beef), and a mouthful of cold water, which the same we will thicken with forty-rod rye; incidentally, coffee, black and unsweet, and tobacco, which at one time I should have requested my undergroom to discontinue."We went to his "shack" (I observed it to be built of discarded bricks, mortared with 'dobe mud) and I was made acquainted with his boy, Carrington Truax-Steele, fitting for Oxford under tutelage of his father.We had supper, after which the Hon. Truax, Sr. stood forth under the kindling glory of that desert twilight by that incongruous, reeling lamp-post, booted, bare-headed and woolen-shirted, and to the low swinging scimitar of the new welded moon declaimed Creon's speech to Oedipus in sonorous Greek. When he was done he exclaimed, abruptly: "Come along, I'll show you 'round."I looked about that stricken reach of alkali, and followed him wondering. That evening the Hon. Ralph Truax-Steele, Oxon, showed me his real estate and also, unwittingly, the disordered workings of his brain. The rest I guessed and afterwards confirmed.Steele had gone mad over the real estate "boom" that had struck the town five years previously, when land was worth as many dollars as could cover it, and men and women fought with each other to buy lots around the water hole called Amethyst Lake. The "boom" had collapsed, and with it Steele's reason, for to him the boom was on the point of recommencing; sane enough on other points, in this direction the man's grip upon himself was gone for good."There," he said to me that evening as we crushed our way through the sagebrush, indicating a low roll on the desert surface, "there are my villa sites, here will run a driveway, and yonder where you see the skeleton of that steer I'm thinking of putting up a little rustic stone chapel.""Ralph, Ralph," I said, "come out of this. Can't you see that the whole business is dead and done for long since? You're going back with me to God's country to-morrow—going back to your wife, you and the boy. She sent me to fetch you."He stared at me wonderingly."Why, it's bound to come within a few days," he said. "Wait till next Wednesday, say, and you won't recognise this place. There'll be a rush here such as there was when Oklahoma was opened. We have everything for us—climate, temperature, water. Harry," he added in my ear, "look around you. You are standing on the site of one of the grandest, stateliest cities of civilisation."That night the boy Carrington and I sat late in consultation while Steele slept. "Nothing but force will do it," said the lad. "I know him well, and I've tried it again and again. It's no use any other way." So force it was.How we got Steele back to San Diego I may not tell. Carrington is the only other person who knows, and I'm sure he will say nothing. When Steele found himself in the heart of a real city and began to look about him, and take stock of his surroundings, the real collapse came. He is in a sanitarium now somewhere in Illinois, and his wife and son see him on Wednesday and Sunday afternoons from two till five. Steele will never come out of that sanitarium, though he now realises that his desert city was a myth, a creation of his own distorted wits. He's sound enough on that point, but a strange inversion has taken place. It is now upon all other subjects that he is insane.The Dis-Associated CharitiesThere used to be a place in feudal Paris called the Court of Miracles, and Mister Victor Hugo has told us all about it. This Court was a quarter of the town where the beggars lived, and it was called "of the miracles", because once across its boundaries the blind saw, the lame walked and the poor cared not to have the gospel preached unto them.San Francisco has its Court of Miracles too. It is a far cry thither, for it lies on the other side of Chinatown and Dagotown, and blocks beyond Luna's restaurant. It is in the valley between Telegraph Hill and Russian Hill, and you must pass through it as you go down to Meigg's Wharf where the Government tugs tie up.One has elected to call it the Court of Miracles, but it is not a court, and the days of miracles are over. It is a row of seven two-story houses, one of them brick. The brick house is over a saloon kept by a Kanaka woman and called "The Eiffel Tower." Here San Francisco's beggars live and have their being. That is, a good many of them.The doubled-up old man with the white beard and neck-handkerchief who used to play upon a zither and the sympathies of the public on the corner of Sutter street has moved out, and one can find no trace of him, and Father Elphick, the white-headed vegetarian of Lotta's Fountain, is dead. But plenty of the others are left. The neatly dressed fellow with dark blue spectacles, who sings theMarseillaise, accompanying himself upon an infinitesimal hand organ, is here; Mrs. McCleaverty is here, and the old bare-headed man who sits on the street corner by the Bohemian Club, after six o'clock in the evening and turns the crank of a soundless organ, has here set up his everlasting rest.The beggars of the Seven Houses are genuine miserables. Perhaps they have an organisation and a president, I don't know. But I do know that Leander and I came very near demoralising the whole lot of them.More strictly speaking, it was Leander who did the deed, I merely looked on and laughed, but Leander says that by laughing I lent him my immoral support, and am therefore party to the act.Leander and I had been dining at the "Red House," which is a wine-shop that Gelett Burgess discovered in an alley not far from the county jail. Leander and I had gone there because we like to sit at its whittled tables and drink itsVin Ordinaire(très ordinaire) out of tin gill measures; also we like its salad and its thick slices of bread that you eat after you have rubbed them with an onion or a bit of garlic. We always go there in evening dress in order to impress the Proletariat.On this occasion after we had dined and had come out again into the gas and gaiety of the Mexican quarter we caromed suddenly against Cluness. Cluness is connected with some sort of a charitable institution that has a house somewhere in the "Quarter." He says that he likes to alleviate distress wherever he sees it; and that after all, the best thing in life is to make some poor fellow happy for a few moments.Leander and I had nothing better to do that evening so we went around with Cluness, and watched him as he gave a month's rent to an infirm old lady on Stockton street, a bundle of magazines to a whining old rascal at the top of a nigger tenement, and some good advice to a Chinese girl who didn't want to go to the Presbyterian Mission House."That's my motto," says he, as we came away from the Chinese girl, "alleviate misery wherever you see it and try and make some poor fellow happy for a few moments.""Ah, yes," exclaimed this farceur Leander, sanctimoniously, while I stared, "that's the only thing worth while," and he sighed and wagged his head.Cluness went on to tell us about a deserving case he had—we were going there next—in fact, innocently enough, he described the Seven Houses to us, never suspecting they were the beggar's headquarters. He said there was a poor old paralytic woman lived there, who had developed an appetite for creamed oysters."It's the only thing," said Cluness, "that she can keep on her stomach.""She told you so?" asked Leander."Yes, yes.""Well, she ought to know."We arrived at the Seven Houses and Cluness paused before the tallest and dirtiest."Here's where she lives; I'm going up for a few moments.""Have a drink first," suggested Leander, fixing his eyes upon the saloon under the brick house.We three went in and sat down at one of the little round zinc tables—painted to imitate marble—and the Kanaka woman herself brought us our drinks. While we were drinking, one of the beggars came in. He was an Indian, totally blind, and in the day time played a mouth-organ on Grant Avenue near a fashionable department store."Tut, tut," said Cluness, "poor fellow, blind, you see, what a pity, I'll give him a quarter.""No, let me," exclaimed Leander.As he spoke the door opened again and another blind man groped in. This fellow I had seen often. He sold lavender in little envelopes on one of the corners of Kearny street. He was a stout, smooth-faced chap and always kept his chin in the air."What misery there is in this world," sighed Cluness as his eye fell upon this latter, "one half the world don't know how—""Look, they know each other," said Leander. The lavender man had groped his way to the Indian's table—evidently it was their especial table—and the two had fallen a-talking. They ordered a sandwich apiece and a small mug of beer."Let's do something for 'em," exclaimed Cluness, with a burst of generosity. "Let's make 'em remember this night for years to come. Look at 'em trying to be happy over a bit of dry bread and a pint of flat beer. I'm going to give 'em a dollar each.""No, no," protested Leander. "Let me fix it, I've more money than you. Let me do a little good now and then. You don't want to hog all the philanthropy, Cluness,I'llgive 'em something."It would be very noble and generous of you, indeed," cried Cluness, "and you'll feel better for it, see if you don't. But I must go to my paralytic. You fellows wait for me. I'll be down in twenty minutes."I frowned at Leander when Cluness was gone. "Now what tom-foolery is it this time?" said I."Tom-foolery," exclaimed Leander, blankly. "It's philanthropy. By Jove, here's another chap with his lamps blown out. Look at him."A third unfortunate, blind as the other two, had just approached the Indian and the lavender man. The three were pals, one could see that at half a glance. No doubt they met at this table every night for beer and sandwiches. The last blind man was a Dutchman. I had seen him from time to time on Market street, with a cigar-box tied to his waist and a bunch of pencils in his fist."Eins!" called the Dutchman to the Kanaka, as he sat down with the lavender man and the Indian. "Eins—mit a hem sendvidge.""Excuse me," said Leander, coming up to their table.What was it? Did those three beggars, their instinct trained by long practice, recognise the alms-giver in the sound of Leander's voice, or in the step. It is hard to say, but instantly each one of them dropped the mildly convivial and assumed the humbly solicitous air, turning his blind head towards Leander, listening intently. Leander took out his purse and made a great jingling with his money. Now, I knew that Leander had exactly fifteen dollars—no more, no less—fifteen dollars, in three five-dollar gold pieces—not a penny of change. Could it be possible that he was going to give a gold piece to the three beggars? It was, evidently, for I heard him say:"Excuse me. I've often passed you fellows on the street, in town, and I guess I've always been too short of change, or in too much of a hurry to remember you. But I'm going to make up for it now, if you'll permit me. Here—" and he jingled his money, "here is a five dollar gold piece that I'd like to have you spend between the three of you to-night, and drink my health, and—and—have a good time, you know. Catch on?"They caught on."May God bless you, young man!" exclaimed the old lavender man.The Indian grunted expressively.The Dutchman twisted about in his place and shouted in the direction of the bar:"Mek ut er bottle Billzner und er Gotha druffle, mit einim-borted Frankfooter bei der side on."The Kanaka woman came up, and the Dutchman repeated his order. The lavender man paused reflectively tapping his brow, then he delivered himself: "A half spring chicken," he said with profound gravity, "rather under done, and some chicory salad and a bottle of white wine—put the bottle in a little warm water for about two minutes—and some lyonnaise potatoes with onions, and—"Donner wetter," shouted the Dutchman, "genuch!" smiting the table with his fist.The other subsided. The Kanaka woman turned to the Indian."Whiskey," he grunted, "plenty whiskey, big beefsteak, soh," and he measured off a yard on the table."Leander," said I, when he rejoined me, "that was foolishness, you've thrown away your five dollars and these fellows are going to waste it in riotous living. You see the results of indiscriminate charity.""I'venotthrown it away. Cluness would say that if it made them happier according to their lights it was well invested. I hate the charity that means only medicines, clean sheets, new shoes and sewerage. Let 'em be happy in their own way." There could be no doubt that the three blind men were happy. They loaded their table with spring chickens, Gotha truffles, beefsteaks, and all manner of "alcoholic beverages," till the zinc disappeared beneath the accumulation of plates and bottles. They drank each other's health and they pledged that of Leander, standing up. The Dutchman ordered: "Zwei Billzner more alreatty." The lavender man drank his warmed white wine with gasps of infinite delight, and after the second whiskey bottle had been opened, the Indian began to say strange and terrible things in his own language.Cluness came in and beamed on them."See how happy you've made them, Leander," he said gratefully. "They'll always remember this night.""They always will," said Leander solemnly."I've got to go though," said Cluness. I made as if to go with him but Leander plucked my coat under the table. I caught his eye."I guess we two will stay," said I. Cluness left, thanking us again and again."I don't know what it is," said I seriously to Leander, "but to-night you seem to me to be too good to be wholesome.""I," said Leander, blankly. "But I suppose I should expect to be misjudged."Just then the Kanaka woman came over to give us our check."This is on me," said Leander, but he was so slow in fumbling for his purse that I was obliged, in all decency, to pay.After she leftus, the Kanaka went over to the blind men's table, and, check-pad in hand, ran her eye over the truffles, beer, chicken, beefsteak, wine and whiskey, and made out her check."Four dollars, six bits," she announced.There was a silence, not one of the blind men moved."Watch now," said Leander."Four, six bits," repeated the Kanaka, her hand on her hip.Still none of the blind men moved."Vail, den," cried the Dutchman, "vich von you two vellars has dose money, pay oop. Fier thalers und sax beets.""I haven't it," exclaimed the lavender man, "Jim has it," he added, turning to the Indian."No have got, no have got," grunted the Indian. "Youhave got, you or Charley."I looked at Leander."Now, what have you done?"For answer Leander showed me three five dollar gold pieces in the palm of his hand."Each one of those chaps thinks that one of the other two has the gold piece. I just pretended to give it to one of 'em, jingled my coin, and then put it back, I didn't give 'em a cent. Each one thought I had given it to the other two. How could they tell, they were blind, don't you see."I reached for my hat."I'm going to get out of here."Leander pulled me back."Not just yet, wait a few moments. Listen.""Vail, vail," cried the Dutchman, beginning to get red. "You doand vants to cheats Missus Amaloa, den berhaps—yes, Zhim," he cried to the Indian, "pay oop, or ees utyouden, Meest'r Paites, dat hab dose finf thalers?""No have got," gurgled the Indian, swaying in his place as he canted the neck of the whiskey bottle towards his lips."I thought you had the money," protested Mr. Bates, the lavender man, "you or Jim.""No have got," whooped the Indian, beginning to get angry. "Hug-gh!Yougot money. He give you money," and he turned his face towards the Dutchman."That's whatIthought," asserted Mr. Bates."Tausend Teufelsno," shouted the other. "I tell youno.""You, you," growled the Indian, plucking at Mr. Bates' coat sleeve, "you have got.""Yah, soh," cried the Dutchman, shaking his finger at the lavender man, excitedly, "pay dose finf thalers, Meest'r Paites.""Pay yourself," exclaimed the other, "I haven't touched them. I'll beanyname, I'll beanyname if I've touched them.""Well, I ain't going to wait here all night," shrilled the Kanaka woman impatiently. The Dutchman shook his finger solemnly towards where he thought the Indian was sitting."It's der Indyun. It's Zhim. Get ut vrom Zhim.""Lie, lie," vociferated the Indian, "white man lie. No have got.Youhav got, oryou.""I'll turn my pockets inside out," exclaimed Mr. Bates."Schmarty," cried the Dutchman. "Can Iseedose pocket?""Thief, thief," exclaimed the Indian, shaking his long black hair. "You steal money."The other two turned on him savagely."There aint no man going to call me that.""Vat he say, vait, und I vill his het mit der boddle demolisch. Who you say dat to,mee, or Meest'r Bates?""Oh, you make me tired," cried the lavender man, "you two.Oneof you two, pay Missus Amaloa and quit fooling.""Come on," cried the Kanaka, "pay up or I'll ring for the police.""Vooling, vooling," shouted the Dutchman, dancing in his rage. "You sheats Missus Amaloa und you gall dot vooling.""Whocheats," cried the other two simultaneously."Vail, how doIknow," yelled the Dutchman, purple to the eyes. "How doIknow vich."The Kanaka turned to Leander."Say, which of these fellows did you give that money to?"Leander came up."Ah-h,nowwe vill know," said the Dutchman.Leander looked from one to the other. Then an expression of perplexity came into his face. He scratched an ear."Well, I thought it was this German gentleman.""Vat!""Only it seems to me I had the money in my left hand, and he, you see, is on the right hand of the table. It might have been him, and then again it might have been one of the other two gentlemen. It's so difficult to remember. Wasn't it you," turning to Mr. Bates, "or no, wasn't ityou," to the Indian. "But itcouldn'thave been the Indian gentleman, and it couldn't have been Mr. Bates here, and yet I'm sure it wasn't the German gentleman, and, however, Imusthave given it to one of the three. Didn't I lay the coin down on the table and go away and leave it." Leander struck his forehead. "Yes, I think that's what I did. I'm sorry," he said to the Kanaka, "that you are having any trouble, it's some misunderstanding.""Oh, I'll get it all right," returned the Kanaka, confidently. "Come on, one of you fellows dig up."Then the quarrel broke out afresh. The three blind men rose to their feet, blackguarding and vilifying one another till the room echoed. Now it was Mr. Bates and the Dutchman versus the Indian, now the Indian and Dutchman versus Mr. Bates, now the Indian and Mr. Bates versus the Dutchman. At every instant the combinations varied with kaleidoscopic swiftness. They shouted, they danced, and they shook their fists towards where they guessed each other's faces were. The Indian, who had been drinking whiskey between intervals of the quarrel, suddenly began to rail and howl in his own language, and at times even the Dutchman lapsed into the vernacular. The Kanaka woman lost her wits altogether, and declared that in three more minutes she would ring for the police.Then all at once the Dutchman swung both fists around him and caught the Indian a tremendous crack in the side of the head. The Indian vented an ear-splitting war-whoop and began pounding Mr. Bates who stood next to him. In the next instant the three were fighting all over the room. They lost each other, they struck furious blows at the empty air, they fell over tables and chairs, or suddenly came together with a dreadful shock and terrible cries of rage. The Dutchman bumped against Leander and before he could get away had smashed his silk hat down over his ears. The noise of their shouting could have been heard a block."Thief, thief.""Teef yourselluf, pay oop dose finf thalers.""No have got, no have got."And then the door swung in and four officers began rounding them up like stampeded sheep. Not until he was in the wagon could the Dutchman believe that it was not the Indian and Mr. Bates who had him by either arm, and even in the wagon, as they were being driven to the precinct station-house, the quarrel broke out from time to time.As we heard the rattle of the patrol-wagon's wheels growing fainter over the cobbles, we rose to go. The Kanaka stood with her hands on her hips glaring at the zinc table with its remnants of truffle, chicken and beefsteak and its empty bottles. Then she exclaimed, "AndI'mshy four dollars and six bits."On the following Saturday night Leander and I were coming from a Mexican dinner at Luna's. Suddenly some one caught our arms from behind. It was Cluness."I want to thank you fellows again," he exclaimed, "for your kindness to those three blind chaps the other night. It was really good of you. I believe they had five dollars to spend between them. It was really fine of you, Leander.""Oh, I don't mind five dollars," said Leander, "if it can make a poor fellow any happier for a few moments. That's the only thing that's worth while in this life.""I'll bet you felt better and happier for doing it.""Well, it did make me happy.""Of course, and those three fellows will never forget that night.""No, I guess they won't," said Leander.Son of a SheikThe smell of the warm slime on the Jeliffe River and the sweet, heavy and sickening odour that exhaled into the unspeakable heat of the desert air from the bunches of dead and scorched water-reeds are with me yet; also the sight of the long stretch of dry mud bank, rising by shallow and barely perceptible degrees to the edge of the desert sands, and thus disclosed by the shrinkage of the Jeliffe during the hot months. The mud banks were very broad and very black except where they touched the desert; here the sand had sifted over them in light transparent sprinklings. In rapidly drying under the sun of the Sahara, they had cracked and warped into thousands of tiny concave cakes that looked, for all the world, like little saucers in which Indian ink has been mixed. (If you are an artist, as was Thévenot, you will the better understand this.)Then there was the reach of the desert that drew off on either hand and rolled away, ever so gently, toward the place where the hollow sky dropped out of sight behind the shimmering horizon, swelling grandly and gradually like some mighty breast which, panting for breath in the horrible heat, had risen in a final gasp and had then, in the midst of it, suddenly stiffened and become rigid. On this colourless bosom of the desert, where nothing stirred but the waxing light in the morning and the waning light in the night, lay tumbled red and gray rocks, with thin drifts of sand in their rifts and crevices and grey-green cacti squatting or sprawling in their blue shadows. And there was nothing more, nothing, nothing, except the appalling heat and the maddening silence.And in the midst of it all,—we.Now "we" broadly and generally speaking, were the small right wing of General Pawtrot's division of the African service; speaking less broadly and less generally, "we" were the advance-guard of said division; and, speaking in the narrowest and most particular sense, "we" were the party of war-correspondents, specials, extras, etc., who were accompanying said advance-guard of said wing of said army of said service for reasons herein to be set forth.As the long, black scow of the commissariat went crawling up the torpid river with the advance-guard straggling along upon the right, "we" lay upon the deck under the shadow of the scow's awning and talked and drank seltzer.I forget now what led up to it, but Ponscarme had said that the Arabs were patriotic, when Bab Azzoun cut in and said something which I shall repeat as soon as I have told you about Bab Azzoun himself.Bab Azzoun had been born twenty-nine years before this time, at Tlemcen, of Kabyle parents (his father was a sheik). He had been transplanted to France at the age of ten, and had flourished there in a truly remarkable manner. He had graduated fifth from the Polytéchnique; he had written books that had been "couronné par l'Académie"; he had become naturalised; he had been prominent in politics (no one can cut a wide swath in Paris in anything without hitting againstla politique;) he had occupied important positions in two embassies; he was a diplomat of no mean qualities; he had influence; he dressed in faultless French fashion; he had owned "Crusader"; he had lost money on him; he had applied to the government for the office of "Sous-chef-des bureaux-Arabes dans l'Oran," in order to recoup; he had obtained it; he had come on with "us", and was now on this, his first visit to his fatherland since his tenth year, on his way to his post.And when Ponscarme had spoken thus about the patriotism of the Arabs, Bab Azzoun made him answer: "The Arabs are not sufficiently educated to be true patriots.""Bah!" said Santander, "a man does not require to be educated in order to be a patriot. And, indeed, the rudest nations have ever been the most devotedly patriotic.""Yes," said Bab Azzoun, "but it is a narrow and a very selfish patriotism.""I can't see that," put in Ponscarme; "a patriot is like an egg—he is either good or bad. There is no such thing as a 'good enough egg,' there is no such thing as a 'good enough patriot'—if a man is one at all, he is a perfect one.""I agree," answered Bab Azzoun; "yet patriotism can be more or less narrow. Listen and I will explain"—he raised himself from the deck on his elbow and gestured with the amber mouth-piece of his chibouk—"Patriotism has passed through five distinct stages; first, it was only love of family—of parents and kindred; then, as the family grows and expands into the tribe, it, too, as merely a large family, becomes the object of affection, of patriotic devotion. This is the second stage—the stage of the tribe, the dan. In the third stage, the tribe has sought protection behind the inclosure of walls. It is the age of cities; patriotism is the devotion to the city; men are Athenians ere Grecians, Romans ere Italians. In the next period, patriotism means affection for the state, for the county, for the province; and Burgundian, Norman and Fleming gave freely of their breast-blood for Burgundy, Normandy and Flanders; while we of to-day form the latest, but not the last, link of the lengthening chain by honouring, loving and serving thecountryabove all considerations, be they of tribe, or town, or tenure. Yet I do not believe this to be the last, the highest, the noblest form of patriotism."No," continued Bab Azzoun, "this development shall go on, ever expanding, ever mounting, until, carried upon its topmost crest, we attain to that height from which we can look down upon the world as our country, humanity as our countrymen, and he shall be the best patriot who is the least patriotic.""Ah-h,fichtre!" exclaimed Santander, listlessly, throwing a cushion at Bab Azzoun's head; "va te coucher. It's too hot to theorise; you're either a great philosopher, Bab, or a large sized"—he looked at him over the rim of his tin cup before concluding—"idiot." ...But Bab Azzoun had gone on talking in the meanwhile, and now finishing with "and so you must not blame me, if, looking upon them" (he meant the Arabs) "and theirs, in this light, I find this African campaign a sorry business for France to be engaged in,—a vast and powerful government terrorising into submission a horde of half-starved fanatics," he yawned, "all of which is very bad—very bad. Give me some more seltzer."We were aroused by the sudden stoppage of the scow. A detachment of "Zephyrs," near us upon the right bank, scrambled together in a hollow square. A battalion of Coulouglis, withhaikandbournousrippling, scuttled by us at a gallop, and the Twenty-Third Chasseurs d'Afrique in the front line halted at an "order" on the crest of a sand ridge, which hid the horizon from sight. The still, hot air of the Sahara was suddenly pervaded with something that roused us to our feet in an instant. Thévenot whipped out his ever-ready sketch-book and began blocking in the landscape and the position of the troops, while Santander snatched his note-book and stylograph.Of the scene which now gathered upon us, I can remember little, only out of that dark chaos can I rescue a few detached and fragmentary impressions—all the more vivid, nevertheless, from their isolation, all the more distinct from the grey blur of the background against which they trace themselves.Instantly, somewhere disquietingly near, an event, or rather a whirl of events that rushed and writhed themselves together into a maze of dizzying complexity, suddenly evolved and widened like the fierce, quick rending open of some vast scroll, and there were zigzag hurryings to and fro and a surging heavenward of a torrent of noises, noises of men and noises of feet, noises of horses and noises of arms, noises that hustled fiercely upward above the brown mass and closed together in the desert air, blending or jarring one with another, joining and separating, reuniting and dividing; noises that rattled; noises that clanked; noises that boomed, or shrilled, or thundered, or quavered. And then came sight of blue-grey tumulous curtains—but whether of smoke or dust, I could not say, rumbling and billowing, bellying out with the hot tempest-breath of the battle-demon that raged within, and whose outermost fringes were torn by serrated files of flashing steel and wavering ranks of red.And this was all at first. I knew we had been attacked and that behind those boiling smoke-billows, somewhere and somehow, men, infuriated into beasts, were grappling and struggling, each man, with every sinew on the strain, striving to kill his fellow.And now we were in the midst of a hollow square of our soldiery, yet how we came there I cannot recall, though I remember that the water of the Jeliffe made my clothes heavy and uncomfortable, although a mortal fear sat upon me of being shot down by some of our own frenzied soldiers. And then came that awful rib-cracking pressure, as, from some outward, unseen cause, the square was thrown back upon itself. And with it all the smell of sweat of horses, and of men, the odour of the powder-smoke, the blinding, suffocating, stupefying clouds of dust, the horrible fear, greater than all others, of being pushed down beneath those thousands of trampling feet, the pitch of excitement that sickens and weakens, the momentary consciousness—vanishing as soon as felt—that this was what men called "war," and that we were experiencing the reality of what we had so often read.It was not inspiring; there was no romance, no poetry about it; there was nothing in it but the hideous jar, one against the other, of men drunk with the blood-lust that eighteen hundred years had not quenched.I looked at Bab Azzoun; he was standing at the gunwale of the scow (somehow we were back on the scow again) with an unloaded pistol in his hand. He was watching the battle on the bank. His nostrils quivered, and he shifted his feet exactly like an excited thorough-bred. On a sudden, a trooper of the Eleventh Cuirassiers came spinning round and round out of the brown of the battle, gulping up blood, and pitched, wheezing, face downwards, into the soft ooze where the river licked at the bank, raising ruddy bubbles in the water as he blew his life-breath in gasps into it, and raking it into gridiron patterns as his quivering, blue fingers closed into fists. Instantly afterward came a mighty rush across the river beneath our very bows. Forty-odd cuirassiers burst into it, followed by eighty or a hundred Kabyles.I can recall just how the horse-hoofs rattled on the saucer-like cakes of dry mud and flung them up in countless fragments behind them. They were a fine sight, those Kabyles, with their fierce, red horses, their dazzling whitebournouses, their long, thin, murderous rifle-barrels, thundering and splashing past, while from the whole mass of them, from under the shadow of every whitehaik, from every black-bearded lip, was rolling their war-cry: "Allah, Allah-il-Allah!"Some long dormant recollections stirred in Bab Azzoun at this old battle-shout. As he faced them now, he was no longer the cold, cynicalboulevardierof the morning. He looked as he must have looked when he played, a ten year-old boy, about the feet of the horses in his father's black tent. He saw the long lines of thedouarsof his native home; he saw the camels, and the caravan crawling toward the sunset; he saw the women grinding meal; he saw his father, the bearded sheik; he saw the Arab horsemen riding down to battle; he saw the palm-broad spear-points and the blue yataghans. In an instant of time all the long years of culture and education were stripped away as a garment. Once more he stood and stepped the Kabyle. And with these recollections, his long-forgotten native speech came rushing to his tongue, and in a long, shrill cry, he answered his countrymen in their own language:"Allah-il-Allah, Mohammed ressoul Allah."He passed me at a bound, leaped from the scow upon the back of a riderless horse, and, mingling with the Kabyles, rode out of sight.And that was the last I ever saw of Bab Azzoun.
* * * * *
When the Prodigal Son became hungry he came to himself. So it was with Schuster. Living on two slices of bacon per day (eaten raw for fear of kindling fires) is what might be called starving under difficulties, and within a week Schuster was remembering and longing for floor-walking and respectability. Within a month of his strange disappearance he was back in San Francisco again knocking at the door of his aunt's house on Geary street. A week later he was taken on again at his old store, in his old position, his unexcused absence being at length, and under protest, condoned by a remembrance of "long and faithful service."
Schuster picked up his old life again precisely where he had left it on the second of May, six weeks previously—picked it up and stayed by it, calmly, steadily, uneventfully. The day before he died he told this story to his maiden aunt, who told it to me, with the remark that it was, of course, an absurd lie. Perhaps it was.
One thing, however, remains to tell. I repeated the absurd lie to a friend of mine who is in the warden's office over at the prison of San Quentin. I mentioned Schuster's name.
"Schuster! Schuster!" he repeated; "why we had a Schuster over here once—a long time ago, though. An old fellow he was, and a bad egg, too. Commuted for life, though. Son was a barber at the Palace Hotel."
"What was old Schuster up for?" I asked.
"Highway robbery," said my friend.
"Boom"
San Diego in Southern California, is the largest city in the world. If your geographies and guide-books and encyclopædias have told you otherwise, they have lied, or their authors have never seen San Diego. Why, San Diego is nearly twenty-five miles from end to end! Why, San Diego has more miles of sidewalk, more leagues of street railways, more measureless lengths of paved streets, more interminable systems of sewer-piping, than has London or Paris or even—even—even Chicago (and I who say so was born in Chicago, too)! There are statelier houses in San Diego than in any other "of the world's great centres," more spacious avenues, more imposing business blocks, more delicious parks, more overpowering public buildings, the pavements are better laid, the electric lighting is more systematic, the railroad and transportation facilities more accommodating, the climate is better than the Riviera, the days are longer, the nights shorter, the men finer, the women prettier, the theatres more attractive, the restaurants cheaper, the wines more sparkling, "business opportunities" lie in wait for the unfortunate at dark street-corners and fly at his throat till he must fain fight them off. Life is one long, glad fermentation. There is no darkness in San Diego, nor any more night.
Incidentally corner lots are desirable.
All of this must be so, because you may read it in the green and gold prospectus of the San Diego Land and Improvement Company (consolidated), sent free on application—that is, at one time during the boom it was sent free—but to-day the edition is out of print, and can only be seen in the collection of bibliophiles and wealthy amateurs, and the boom is only an echo now. But when the guests of the big Coronado Hotel over on the island come across to the main land and course jackrabbits with greyhounds in the country to the north of the town, their horses' hoofs, as they plunge through the sagebrush and tar weed, will sometimes slide and clatter upon a bit of concrete sidewalk, half sunk of its own weight into the sand; or the jack will be started in a low square of bricks, such as is built for frame house foundations, and which make excellent jumping for the horses. There is a colony of rattlers on the shores of a marsh to the southwest (the maps call it Amethyst Lake) and the little half-breed Indians catch the tarantulas and horned toads that you buy alive in glass jars on the hotel veranda, near the postoffice site, and everything is very gay and pleasant and picturesque.
Why I remember it all so well is because I found Steele in this place. You see, Steele was a very good friend of mine though he was Oxon, and I only a man from Chicago. When his wife knew I was coming west she gave me Steele's address, and told me I was to look him up. Since she told me this with much insistence and reiteration and with tears in her voice, I made it a point to be particular. She had not heard from Steele in two years. The address she gave me was "Hon. Ralph Truax-Steele, Elmwood avenue and One Hundred and Eighty-eighth street, San Diego, California."
When I arrived at San Diego I found it would be advisable to hire a horse, for 188th street, instead of waiting for the Elmwood Avenue electric car, and when I asked for directions a red-headed man whose father was Irish and whose mother was Chinese, offered to act as guide for twenty dollars. He said, though, he would furnish his own outfit. I demurred and he went away. I was told that some eight miles out beyond the range I would find a water-hole, and that if I held to the southwest after leaving this hole, keeping my horse's ears between the double peak of a distant mountain called Little Two Top, I would come after a while to a lamp-post with a tarantula's nest where the lamp should have been. It would be hard to miss this lamp-post, they told me, as the desert was very flat thereabouts, and the lamp-posts could be seen for a radius of ten miles. Also, there might be water there—the horse would smell it out if there was. Also, it was a good place to camp, because of a tiny ledge of shale outcropping there. I was to be particular about this lamp-post, because it stood at the corner of Elmwood avenue and 188th street.
When I asked about the Hon. Truax-Steele, Oxon, information was less explicit. They shook their heads. One of them seemed to recollect a "shack" about a mile hitherward of Two Top, a statement that was at once contradicted by someone else. Might have been an old Digger "wicky-up." Sometimes the Indians camped in the valley on their way to ghost dances and tribal feasts. It wasn't a place for a white man to live, chiefly because the climate offered so many advantages and attractions to horned toads, tarantulas and rattlesnakes. Then the red-headed Chinese-Irishman came back and said, with an accent that was beyond all words, that a sheepherder had once told him of a loco-man out beyond McIntyre's waterhole, and another man said that, "Yes, that was so; he'd passed flasks with a loco-man out that way once last June, when he was out looking for a strayed pony. In fact, the loco-man lived out there, had a son, too, leastways a kid lived with him." This seemed encouraging. The Hon. Truax-Steele, Oxon, was accredited with a son—so his wife had said, who should know. So I started out, simultaneously hoping and dreading that the loco-man and the honourable Truax might be one flesh.
I left San Diego at four o'clock A.M. to avoid as much as possible the heat of mid-day, and just at sunset saw what might have been a cactus plant standing out stark and still on the white blur of sage and alkali like an exclamation point on a blank page. It was the lamp-post of the spider's nest that marked the intersection of Elmwood avenue and 188th street. And then my horse shied, with his hind legs only, in the way good horses have, and Ralph Truax-Steele rose out of a dried muck-hole under the bit.
I had expected a madman, but his surprise and pleasure at seeing me were perfectly sane. After awhile he said: "Sorry, old boy. It's the hospitality of the Arab I can give you; nothing better. A handful of dates (we call 'em caned prunes out here), the dried flesh of a kid (Californian for jerked beef), and a mouthful of cold water, which the same we will thicken with forty-rod rye; incidentally, coffee, black and unsweet, and tobacco, which at one time I should have requested my undergroom to discontinue."
We went to his "shack" (I observed it to be built of discarded bricks, mortared with 'dobe mud) and I was made acquainted with his boy, Carrington Truax-Steele, fitting for Oxford under tutelage of his father.
We had supper, after which the Hon. Truax, Sr. stood forth under the kindling glory of that desert twilight by that incongruous, reeling lamp-post, booted, bare-headed and woolen-shirted, and to the low swinging scimitar of the new welded moon declaimed Creon's speech to Oedipus in sonorous Greek. When he was done he exclaimed, abruptly: "Come along, I'll show you 'round."
I looked about that stricken reach of alkali, and followed him wondering. That evening the Hon. Ralph Truax-Steele, Oxon, showed me his real estate and also, unwittingly, the disordered workings of his brain. The rest I guessed and afterwards confirmed.
Steele had gone mad over the real estate "boom" that had struck the town five years previously, when land was worth as many dollars as could cover it, and men and women fought with each other to buy lots around the water hole called Amethyst Lake. The "boom" had collapsed, and with it Steele's reason, for to him the boom was on the point of recommencing; sane enough on other points, in this direction the man's grip upon himself was gone for good.
"There," he said to me that evening as we crushed our way through the sagebrush, indicating a low roll on the desert surface, "there are my villa sites, here will run a driveway, and yonder where you see the skeleton of that steer I'm thinking of putting up a little rustic stone chapel."
"Ralph, Ralph," I said, "come out of this. Can't you see that the whole business is dead and done for long since? You're going back with me to God's country to-morrow—going back to your wife, you and the boy. She sent me to fetch you."
He stared at me wonderingly.
"Why, it's bound to come within a few days," he said. "Wait till next Wednesday, say, and you won't recognise this place. There'll be a rush here such as there was when Oklahoma was opened. We have everything for us—climate, temperature, water. Harry," he added in my ear, "look around you. You are standing on the site of one of the grandest, stateliest cities of civilisation."
That night the boy Carrington and I sat late in consultation while Steele slept. "Nothing but force will do it," said the lad. "I know him well, and I've tried it again and again. It's no use any other way." So force it was.
How we got Steele back to San Diego I may not tell. Carrington is the only other person who knows, and I'm sure he will say nothing. When Steele found himself in the heart of a real city and began to look about him, and take stock of his surroundings, the real collapse came. He is in a sanitarium now somewhere in Illinois, and his wife and son see him on Wednesday and Sunday afternoons from two till five. Steele will never come out of that sanitarium, though he now realises that his desert city was a myth, a creation of his own distorted wits. He's sound enough on that point, but a strange inversion has taken place. It is now upon all other subjects that he is insane.
The Dis-Associated Charities
There used to be a place in feudal Paris called the Court of Miracles, and Mister Victor Hugo has told us all about it. This Court was a quarter of the town where the beggars lived, and it was called "of the miracles", because once across its boundaries the blind saw, the lame walked and the poor cared not to have the gospel preached unto them.
San Francisco has its Court of Miracles too. It is a far cry thither, for it lies on the other side of Chinatown and Dagotown, and blocks beyond Luna's restaurant. It is in the valley between Telegraph Hill and Russian Hill, and you must pass through it as you go down to Meigg's Wharf where the Government tugs tie up.
One has elected to call it the Court of Miracles, but it is not a court, and the days of miracles are over. It is a row of seven two-story houses, one of them brick. The brick house is over a saloon kept by a Kanaka woman and called "The Eiffel Tower." Here San Francisco's beggars live and have their being. That is, a good many of them.
The doubled-up old man with the white beard and neck-handkerchief who used to play upon a zither and the sympathies of the public on the corner of Sutter street has moved out, and one can find no trace of him, and Father Elphick, the white-headed vegetarian of Lotta's Fountain, is dead. But plenty of the others are left. The neatly dressed fellow with dark blue spectacles, who sings theMarseillaise, accompanying himself upon an infinitesimal hand organ, is here; Mrs. McCleaverty is here, and the old bare-headed man who sits on the street corner by the Bohemian Club, after six o'clock in the evening and turns the crank of a soundless organ, has here set up his everlasting rest.
The beggars of the Seven Houses are genuine miserables. Perhaps they have an organisation and a president, I don't know. But I do know that Leander and I came very near demoralising the whole lot of them.
More strictly speaking, it was Leander who did the deed, I merely looked on and laughed, but Leander says that by laughing I lent him my immoral support, and am therefore party to the act.
Leander and I had been dining at the "Red House," which is a wine-shop that Gelett Burgess discovered in an alley not far from the county jail. Leander and I had gone there because we like to sit at its whittled tables and drink itsVin Ordinaire(très ordinaire) out of tin gill measures; also we like its salad and its thick slices of bread that you eat after you have rubbed them with an onion or a bit of garlic. We always go there in evening dress in order to impress the Proletariat.
On this occasion after we had dined and had come out again into the gas and gaiety of the Mexican quarter we caromed suddenly against Cluness. Cluness is connected with some sort of a charitable institution that has a house somewhere in the "Quarter." He says that he likes to alleviate distress wherever he sees it; and that after all, the best thing in life is to make some poor fellow happy for a few moments.
Leander and I had nothing better to do that evening so we went around with Cluness, and watched him as he gave a month's rent to an infirm old lady on Stockton street, a bundle of magazines to a whining old rascal at the top of a nigger tenement, and some good advice to a Chinese girl who didn't want to go to the Presbyterian Mission House.
"That's my motto," says he, as we came away from the Chinese girl, "alleviate misery wherever you see it and try and make some poor fellow happy for a few moments."
"Ah, yes," exclaimed this farceur Leander, sanctimoniously, while I stared, "that's the only thing worth while," and he sighed and wagged his head.
Cluness went on to tell us about a deserving case he had—we were going there next—in fact, innocently enough, he described the Seven Houses to us, never suspecting they were the beggar's headquarters. He said there was a poor old paralytic woman lived there, who had developed an appetite for creamed oysters.
"It's the only thing," said Cluness, "that she can keep on her stomach."
"She told you so?" asked Leander.
"Yes, yes."
"Well, she ought to know."
We arrived at the Seven Houses and Cluness paused before the tallest and dirtiest.
"Here's where she lives; I'm going up for a few moments."
"Have a drink first," suggested Leander, fixing his eyes upon the saloon under the brick house.
We three went in and sat down at one of the little round zinc tables—painted to imitate marble—and the Kanaka woman herself brought us our drinks. While we were drinking, one of the beggars came in. He was an Indian, totally blind, and in the day time played a mouth-organ on Grant Avenue near a fashionable department store.
"Tut, tut," said Cluness, "poor fellow, blind, you see, what a pity, I'll give him a quarter."
"No, let me," exclaimed Leander.
As he spoke the door opened again and another blind man groped in. This fellow I had seen often. He sold lavender in little envelopes on one of the corners of Kearny street. He was a stout, smooth-faced chap and always kept his chin in the air.
"What misery there is in this world," sighed Cluness as his eye fell upon this latter, "one half the world don't know how—"
"Look, they know each other," said Leander. The lavender man had groped his way to the Indian's table—evidently it was their especial table—and the two had fallen a-talking. They ordered a sandwich apiece and a small mug of beer.
"Let's do something for 'em," exclaimed Cluness, with a burst of generosity. "Let's make 'em remember this night for years to come. Look at 'em trying to be happy over a bit of dry bread and a pint of flat beer. I'm going to give 'em a dollar each."
"No, no," protested Leander. "Let me fix it, I've more money than you. Let me do a little good now and then. You don't want to hog all the philanthropy, Cluness,I'llgive 'em something.
"It would be very noble and generous of you, indeed," cried Cluness, "and you'll feel better for it, see if you don't. But I must go to my paralytic. You fellows wait for me. I'll be down in twenty minutes."
I frowned at Leander when Cluness was gone. "Now what tom-foolery is it this time?" said I.
"Tom-foolery," exclaimed Leander, blankly. "It's philanthropy. By Jove, here's another chap with his lamps blown out. Look at him."
A third unfortunate, blind as the other two, had just approached the Indian and the lavender man. The three were pals, one could see that at half a glance. No doubt they met at this table every night for beer and sandwiches. The last blind man was a Dutchman. I had seen him from time to time on Market street, with a cigar-box tied to his waist and a bunch of pencils in his fist.
"Eins!" called the Dutchman to the Kanaka, as he sat down with the lavender man and the Indian. "Eins—mit a hem sendvidge."
"Excuse me," said Leander, coming up to their table.
What was it? Did those three beggars, their instinct trained by long practice, recognise the alms-giver in the sound of Leander's voice, or in the step. It is hard to say, but instantly each one of them dropped the mildly convivial and assumed the humbly solicitous air, turning his blind head towards Leander, listening intently. Leander took out his purse and made a great jingling with his money. Now, I knew that Leander had exactly fifteen dollars—no more, no less—fifteen dollars, in three five-dollar gold pieces—not a penny of change. Could it be possible that he was going to give a gold piece to the three beggars? It was, evidently, for I heard him say:
"Excuse me. I've often passed you fellows on the street, in town, and I guess I've always been too short of change, or in too much of a hurry to remember you. But I'm going to make up for it now, if you'll permit me. Here—" and he jingled his money, "here is a five dollar gold piece that I'd like to have you spend between the three of you to-night, and drink my health, and—and—have a good time, you know. Catch on?"
They caught on.
"May God bless you, young man!" exclaimed the old lavender man.
The Indian grunted expressively.
The Dutchman twisted about in his place and shouted in the direction of the bar:
"Mek ut er bottle Billzner und er Gotha druffle, mit einim-borted Frankfooter bei der side on."
The Kanaka woman came up, and the Dutchman repeated his order. The lavender man paused reflectively tapping his brow, then he delivered himself: "A half spring chicken," he said with profound gravity, "rather under done, and some chicory salad and a bottle of white wine—put the bottle in a little warm water for about two minutes—and some lyonnaise potatoes with onions, and—
"Donner wetter," shouted the Dutchman, "genuch!" smiting the table with his fist.
The other subsided. The Kanaka woman turned to the Indian.
"Whiskey," he grunted, "plenty whiskey, big beefsteak, soh," and he measured off a yard on the table.
"Leander," said I, when he rejoined me, "that was foolishness, you've thrown away your five dollars and these fellows are going to waste it in riotous living. You see the results of indiscriminate charity."
"I'venotthrown it away. Cluness would say that if it made them happier according to their lights it was well invested. I hate the charity that means only medicines, clean sheets, new shoes and sewerage. Let 'em be happy in their own way." There could be no doubt that the three blind men were happy. They loaded their table with spring chickens, Gotha truffles, beefsteaks, and all manner of "alcoholic beverages," till the zinc disappeared beneath the accumulation of plates and bottles. They drank each other's health and they pledged that of Leander, standing up. The Dutchman ordered: "Zwei Billzner more alreatty." The lavender man drank his warmed white wine with gasps of infinite delight, and after the second whiskey bottle had been opened, the Indian began to say strange and terrible things in his own language.
Cluness came in and beamed on them.
"See how happy you've made them, Leander," he said gratefully. "They'll always remember this night."
"They always will," said Leander solemnly.
"I've got to go though," said Cluness. I made as if to go with him but Leander plucked my coat under the table. I caught his eye.
"I guess we two will stay," said I. Cluness left, thanking us again and again.
"I don't know what it is," said I seriously to Leander, "but to-night you seem to me to be too good to be wholesome."
"I," said Leander, blankly. "But I suppose I should expect to be misjudged."
Just then the Kanaka woman came over to give us our check.
"This is on me," said Leander, but he was so slow in fumbling for his purse that I was obliged, in all decency, to pay.
After she leftus, the Kanaka went over to the blind men's table, and, check-pad in hand, ran her eye over the truffles, beer, chicken, beefsteak, wine and whiskey, and made out her check.
"Four dollars, six bits," she announced.
There was a silence, not one of the blind men moved.
"Watch now," said Leander.
"Four, six bits," repeated the Kanaka, her hand on her hip.
Still none of the blind men moved.
"Vail, den," cried the Dutchman, "vich von you two vellars has dose money, pay oop. Fier thalers und sax beets."
"I haven't it," exclaimed the lavender man, "Jim has it," he added, turning to the Indian.
"No have got, no have got," grunted the Indian. "Youhave got, you or Charley."
I looked at Leander.
"Now, what have you done?"
For answer Leander showed me three five dollar gold pieces in the palm of his hand.
"Each one of those chaps thinks that one of the other two has the gold piece. I just pretended to give it to one of 'em, jingled my coin, and then put it back, I didn't give 'em a cent. Each one thought I had given it to the other two. How could they tell, they were blind, don't you see."
I reached for my hat.
"I'm going to get out of here."
Leander pulled me back.
"Not just yet, wait a few moments. Listen."
"Vail, vail," cried the Dutchman, beginning to get red. "You doand vants to cheats Missus Amaloa, den berhaps—yes, Zhim," he cried to the Indian, "pay oop, or ees utyouden, Meest'r Paites, dat hab dose finf thalers?"
"No have got," gurgled the Indian, swaying in his place as he canted the neck of the whiskey bottle towards his lips.
"I thought you had the money," protested Mr. Bates, the lavender man, "you or Jim."
"No have got," whooped the Indian, beginning to get angry. "Hug-gh!Yougot money. He give you money," and he turned his face towards the Dutchman.
"That's whatIthought," asserted Mr. Bates.
"Tausend Teufelsno," shouted the other. "I tell youno."
"You, you," growled the Indian, plucking at Mr. Bates' coat sleeve, "you have got."
"Yah, soh," cried the Dutchman, shaking his finger at the lavender man, excitedly, "pay dose finf thalers, Meest'r Paites."
"Pay yourself," exclaimed the other, "I haven't touched them. I'll beanyname, I'll beanyname if I've touched them."
"Well, I ain't going to wait here all night," shrilled the Kanaka woman impatiently. The Dutchman shook his finger solemnly towards where he thought the Indian was sitting.
"It's der Indyun. It's Zhim. Get ut vrom Zhim."
"Lie, lie," vociferated the Indian, "white man lie. No have got.Youhav got, oryou."
"I'll turn my pockets inside out," exclaimed Mr. Bates.
"Schmarty," cried the Dutchman. "Can Iseedose pocket?"
"Thief, thief," exclaimed the Indian, shaking his long black hair. "You steal money."
The other two turned on him savagely.
"There aint no man going to call me that."
"Vat he say, vait, und I vill his het mit der boddle demolisch. Who you say dat to,mee, or Meest'r Bates?"
"Oh, you make me tired," cried the lavender man, "you two.Oneof you two, pay Missus Amaloa and quit fooling."
"Come on," cried the Kanaka, "pay up or I'll ring for the police."
"Vooling, vooling," shouted the Dutchman, dancing in his rage. "You sheats Missus Amaloa und you gall dot vooling."
"Whocheats," cried the other two simultaneously.
"Vail, how doIknow," yelled the Dutchman, purple to the eyes. "How doIknow vich."
The Kanaka turned to Leander.
"Say, which of these fellows did you give that money to?"
Leander came up.
"Ah-h,nowwe vill know," said the Dutchman.
Leander looked from one to the other. Then an expression of perplexity came into his face. He scratched an ear.
"Well, I thought it was this German gentleman."
"Vat!"
"Only it seems to me I had the money in my left hand, and he, you see, is on the right hand of the table. It might have been him, and then again it might have been one of the other two gentlemen. It's so difficult to remember. Wasn't it you," turning to Mr. Bates, "or no, wasn't ityou," to the Indian. "But itcouldn'thave been the Indian gentleman, and it couldn't have been Mr. Bates here, and yet I'm sure it wasn't the German gentleman, and, however, Imusthave given it to one of the three. Didn't I lay the coin down on the table and go away and leave it." Leander struck his forehead. "Yes, I think that's what I did. I'm sorry," he said to the Kanaka, "that you are having any trouble, it's some misunderstanding."
"Oh, I'll get it all right," returned the Kanaka, confidently. "Come on, one of you fellows dig up."
Then the quarrel broke out afresh. The three blind men rose to their feet, blackguarding and vilifying one another till the room echoed. Now it was Mr. Bates and the Dutchman versus the Indian, now the Indian and Dutchman versus Mr. Bates, now the Indian and Mr. Bates versus the Dutchman. At every instant the combinations varied with kaleidoscopic swiftness. They shouted, they danced, and they shook their fists towards where they guessed each other's faces were. The Indian, who had been drinking whiskey between intervals of the quarrel, suddenly began to rail and howl in his own language, and at times even the Dutchman lapsed into the vernacular. The Kanaka woman lost her wits altogether, and declared that in three more minutes she would ring for the police.
Then all at once the Dutchman swung both fists around him and caught the Indian a tremendous crack in the side of the head. The Indian vented an ear-splitting war-whoop and began pounding Mr. Bates who stood next to him. In the next instant the three were fighting all over the room. They lost each other, they struck furious blows at the empty air, they fell over tables and chairs, or suddenly came together with a dreadful shock and terrible cries of rage. The Dutchman bumped against Leander and before he could get away had smashed his silk hat down over his ears. The noise of their shouting could have been heard a block.
"Thief, thief."
"Teef yourselluf, pay oop dose finf thalers."
"No have got, no have got."
And then the door swung in and four officers began rounding them up like stampeded sheep. Not until he was in the wagon could the Dutchman believe that it was not the Indian and Mr. Bates who had him by either arm, and even in the wagon, as they were being driven to the precinct station-house, the quarrel broke out from time to time.
As we heard the rattle of the patrol-wagon's wheels growing fainter over the cobbles, we rose to go. The Kanaka stood with her hands on her hips glaring at the zinc table with its remnants of truffle, chicken and beefsteak and its empty bottles. Then she exclaimed, "AndI'mshy four dollars and six bits."
On the following Saturday night Leander and I were coming from a Mexican dinner at Luna's. Suddenly some one caught our arms from behind. It was Cluness.
"I want to thank you fellows again," he exclaimed, "for your kindness to those three blind chaps the other night. It was really good of you. I believe they had five dollars to spend between them. It was really fine of you, Leander."
"Oh, I don't mind five dollars," said Leander, "if it can make a poor fellow any happier for a few moments. That's the only thing that's worth while in this life."
"I'll bet you felt better and happier for doing it."
"Well, it did make me happy."
"Of course, and those three fellows will never forget that night."
"No, I guess they won't," said Leander.
Son of a Sheik
The smell of the warm slime on the Jeliffe River and the sweet, heavy and sickening odour that exhaled into the unspeakable heat of the desert air from the bunches of dead and scorched water-reeds are with me yet; also the sight of the long stretch of dry mud bank, rising by shallow and barely perceptible degrees to the edge of the desert sands, and thus disclosed by the shrinkage of the Jeliffe during the hot months. The mud banks were very broad and very black except where they touched the desert; here the sand had sifted over them in light transparent sprinklings. In rapidly drying under the sun of the Sahara, they had cracked and warped into thousands of tiny concave cakes that looked, for all the world, like little saucers in which Indian ink has been mixed. (If you are an artist, as was Thévenot, you will the better understand this.)
Then there was the reach of the desert that drew off on either hand and rolled away, ever so gently, toward the place where the hollow sky dropped out of sight behind the shimmering horizon, swelling grandly and gradually like some mighty breast which, panting for breath in the horrible heat, had risen in a final gasp and had then, in the midst of it, suddenly stiffened and become rigid. On this colourless bosom of the desert, where nothing stirred but the waxing light in the morning and the waning light in the night, lay tumbled red and gray rocks, with thin drifts of sand in their rifts and crevices and grey-green cacti squatting or sprawling in their blue shadows. And there was nothing more, nothing, nothing, except the appalling heat and the maddening silence.
And in the midst of it all,—we.
Now "we" broadly and generally speaking, were the small right wing of General Pawtrot's division of the African service; speaking less broadly and less generally, "we" were the advance-guard of said division; and, speaking in the narrowest and most particular sense, "we" were the party of war-correspondents, specials, extras, etc., who were accompanying said advance-guard of said wing of said army of said service for reasons herein to be set forth.
As the long, black scow of the commissariat went crawling up the torpid river with the advance-guard straggling along upon the right, "we" lay upon the deck under the shadow of the scow's awning and talked and drank seltzer.
I forget now what led up to it, but Ponscarme had said that the Arabs were patriotic, when Bab Azzoun cut in and said something which I shall repeat as soon as I have told you about Bab Azzoun himself.
Bab Azzoun had been born twenty-nine years before this time, at Tlemcen, of Kabyle parents (his father was a sheik). He had been transplanted to France at the age of ten, and had flourished there in a truly remarkable manner. He had graduated fifth from the Polytéchnique; he had written books that had been "couronné par l'Académie"; he had become naturalised; he had been prominent in politics (no one can cut a wide swath in Paris in anything without hitting againstla politique;) he had occupied important positions in two embassies; he was a diplomat of no mean qualities; he had influence; he dressed in faultless French fashion; he had owned "Crusader"; he had lost money on him; he had applied to the government for the office of "Sous-chef-des bureaux-Arabes dans l'Oran," in order to recoup; he had obtained it; he had come on with "us", and was now on this, his first visit to his fatherland since his tenth year, on his way to his post.
And when Ponscarme had spoken thus about the patriotism of the Arabs, Bab Azzoun made him answer: "The Arabs are not sufficiently educated to be true patriots."
"Bah!" said Santander, "a man does not require to be educated in order to be a patriot. And, indeed, the rudest nations have ever been the most devotedly patriotic."
"Yes," said Bab Azzoun, "but it is a narrow and a very selfish patriotism."
"I can't see that," put in Ponscarme; "a patriot is like an egg—he is either good or bad. There is no such thing as a 'good enough egg,' there is no such thing as a 'good enough patriot'—if a man is one at all, he is a perfect one."
"I agree," answered Bab Azzoun; "yet patriotism can be more or less narrow. Listen and I will explain"—he raised himself from the deck on his elbow and gestured with the amber mouth-piece of his chibouk—"Patriotism has passed through five distinct stages; first, it was only love of family—of parents and kindred; then, as the family grows and expands into the tribe, it, too, as merely a large family, becomes the object of affection, of patriotic devotion. This is the second stage—the stage of the tribe, the dan. In the third stage, the tribe has sought protection behind the inclosure of walls. It is the age of cities; patriotism is the devotion to the city; men are Athenians ere Grecians, Romans ere Italians. In the next period, patriotism means affection for the state, for the county, for the province; and Burgundian, Norman and Fleming gave freely of their breast-blood for Burgundy, Normandy and Flanders; while we of to-day form the latest, but not the last, link of the lengthening chain by honouring, loving and serving thecountryabove all considerations, be they of tribe, or town, or tenure. Yet I do not believe this to be the last, the highest, the noblest form of patriotism.
"No," continued Bab Azzoun, "this development shall go on, ever expanding, ever mounting, until, carried upon its topmost crest, we attain to that height from which we can look down upon the world as our country, humanity as our countrymen, and he shall be the best patriot who is the least patriotic."
"Ah-h,fichtre!" exclaimed Santander, listlessly, throwing a cushion at Bab Azzoun's head; "va te coucher. It's too hot to theorise; you're either a great philosopher, Bab, or a large sized"—he looked at him over the rim of his tin cup before concluding—"idiot." ...
But Bab Azzoun had gone on talking in the meanwhile, and now finishing with "and so you must not blame me, if, looking upon them" (he meant the Arabs) "and theirs, in this light, I find this African campaign a sorry business for France to be engaged in,—a vast and powerful government terrorising into submission a horde of half-starved fanatics," he yawned, "all of which is very bad—very bad. Give me some more seltzer."
We were aroused by the sudden stoppage of the scow. A detachment of "Zephyrs," near us upon the right bank, scrambled together in a hollow square. A battalion of Coulouglis, withhaikandbournousrippling, scuttled by us at a gallop, and the Twenty-Third Chasseurs d'Afrique in the front line halted at an "order" on the crest of a sand ridge, which hid the horizon from sight. The still, hot air of the Sahara was suddenly pervaded with something that roused us to our feet in an instant. Thévenot whipped out his ever-ready sketch-book and began blocking in the landscape and the position of the troops, while Santander snatched his note-book and stylograph.
Of the scene which now gathered upon us, I can remember little, only out of that dark chaos can I rescue a few detached and fragmentary impressions—all the more vivid, nevertheless, from their isolation, all the more distinct from the grey blur of the background against which they trace themselves.
Instantly, somewhere disquietingly near, an event, or rather a whirl of events that rushed and writhed themselves together into a maze of dizzying complexity, suddenly evolved and widened like the fierce, quick rending open of some vast scroll, and there were zigzag hurryings to and fro and a surging heavenward of a torrent of noises, noises of men and noises of feet, noises of horses and noises of arms, noises that hustled fiercely upward above the brown mass and closed together in the desert air, blending or jarring one with another, joining and separating, reuniting and dividing; noises that rattled; noises that clanked; noises that boomed, or shrilled, or thundered, or quavered. And then came sight of blue-grey tumulous curtains—but whether of smoke or dust, I could not say, rumbling and billowing, bellying out with the hot tempest-breath of the battle-demon that raged within, and whose outermost fringes were torn by serrated files of flashing steel and wavering ranks of red.
And this was all at first. I knew we had been attacked and that behind those boiling smoke-billows, somewhere and somehow, men, infuriated into beasts, were grappling and struggling, each man, with every sinew on the strain, striving to kill his fellow.
And now we were in the midst of a hollow square of our soldiery, yet how we came there I cannot recall, though I remember that the water of the Jeliffe made my clothes heavy and uncomfortable, although a mortal fear sat upon me of being shot down by some of our own frenzied soldiers. And then came that awful rib-cracking pressure, as, from some outward, unseen cause, the square was thrown back upon itself. And with it all the smell of sweat of horses, and of men, the odour of the powder-smoke, the blinding, suffocating, stupefying clouds of dust, the horrible fear, greater than all others, of being pushed down beneath those thousands of trampling feet, the pitch of excitement that sickens and weakens, the momentary consciousness—vanishing as soon as felt—that this was what men called "war," and that we were experiencing the reality of what we had so often read.
It was not inspiring; there was no romance, no poetry about it; there was nothing in it but the hideous jar, one against the other, of men drunk with the blood-lust that eighteen hundred years had not quenched.
I looked at Bab Azzoun; he was standing at the gunwale of the scow (somehow we were back on the scow again) with an unloaded pistol in his hand. He was watching the battle on the bank. His nostrils quivered, and he shifted his feet exactly like an excited thorough-bred. On a sudden, a trooper of the Eleventh Cuirassiers came spinning round and round out of the brown of the battle, gulping up blood, and pitched, wheezing, face downwards, into the soft ooze where the river licked at the bank, raising ruddy bubbles in the water as he blew his life-breath in gasps into it, and raking it into gridiron patterns as his quivering, blue fingers closed into fists. Instantly afterward came a mighty rush across the river beneath our very bows. Forty-odd cuirassiers burst into it, followed by eighty or a hundred Kabyles.
I can recall just how the horse-hoofs rattled on the saucer-like cakes of dry mud and flung them up in countless fragments behind them. They were a fine sight, those Kabyles, with their fierce, red horses, their dazzling whitebournouses, their long, thin, murderous rifle-barrels, thundering and splashing past, while from the whole mass of them, from under the shadow of every whitehaik, from every black-bearded lip, was rolling their war-cry: "Allah, Allah-il-Allah!"
Some long dormant recollections stirred in Bab Azzoun at this old battle-shout. As he faced them now, he was no longer the cold, cynicalboulevardierof the morning. He looked as he must have looked when he played, a ten year-old boy, about the feet of the horses in his father's black tent. He saw the long lines of thedouarsof his native home; he saw the camels, and the caravan crawling toward the sunset; he saw the women grinding meal; he saw his father, the bearded sheik; he saw the Arab horsemen riding down to battle; he saw the palm-broad spear-points and the blue yataghans. In an instant of time all the long years of culture and education were stripped away as a garment. Once more he stood and stepped the Kabyle. And with these recollections, his long-forgotten native speech came rushing to his tongue, and in a long, shrill cry, he answered his countrymen in their own language:
"Allah-il-Allah, Mohammed ressoul Allah."
He passed me at a bound, leaped from the scow upon the back of a riderless horse, and, mingling with the Kabyles, rode out of sight.
And that was the last I ever saw of Bab Azzoun.