The Mysteries of New Orleans (The Longfellow Series of American Languages and Literatures)

by Baron Ludwigvon Reizenstein

  His Little Obsessive’s death had a bad influence on the hitherto orderly life of our bureaucrat. In his grief, he utterly neglected his business, and in a calm moment he used his remaining money to buy the old frame house near Broadway and establish the bar, Farmer’s Home. Our bureaucrat had told this story to the worker at the lumbermill.

  After the Hungarian had settled down at the bar with his savior, a man entered and went to a spirit lamp to light up his cigar. The Hungarian stood in such a way that his back was turned to the man, while the German worker from the lumbermill was about to join his glass with the Hungarian’s in order to give the customary toast.

  “Don’t clink glasses,” Lajos declared rather harshly, bringing his glass to his mouth. “It is possible to put down booze without ceremony or ancestral customs. You are and shall remain Philistines, all of you—you don’t even understand boozing as you should. I pray to hell if you could ever show me a Hungarian who would have been pleased by such a foolish comment and would not use his glass to shove the teeth down the throat of anyone who dared such pretension.”

  The German worker stared at the Hungarian with large eyes, and he was at a loss as to what he should do, as is the case with all good-humored persons in the presence of such characters.

  “So you are a Hungarian?” was the sole question his distress permitted. Then, when the Hungarian did not respond, he asked again, in order to cover his embarrassment.

  “If you are a Hungarian, then you are certainly one of many who had to flee to our hospitable shores, pursued by Austrian bloodhounds?”

  “On the contrary,” Lajos declaimed in his bitterly cold and cutting tone, “if I had not had to leave my homeland due to a dumb stunt, Görgey would have found in me a good friend.”9

  “Görgey? The scoundrel Görgey?” the worker asked in an agitated tone, seeming to wake from his repose, for he puffed out his breast and pounded on the table with a clenched fist.

  “Scoundrel? How was he a scoundrel? More courage is required for grandiose betrayal such as Arthur Görgey committed than to run away to the Turks. Scoundrel? Only a coward is a scoundrel! But that’s stupid stuff—drop it—I am no friend of arguing at a bar. Let’s drink one more, then we will go our own ways—but have you heard of Rosza Sandor?”10

  “Why?” the other declared, his face red with the agitation the Hungarian had caused him.

  “Why? Because I hope he lives! He was the only one of the entire bunch who still has courage in his body. Such a fellow is worth more than a thousand Kossuths, of whom I unfortunately carry the Christian name.”11

  “If I did not have a wife and children,” the worker said with all the dignity of an offended hero of freedom, “you would not leave this place alive. You deserve to be run through by every Hungarian who still wishes well to his fatherland.”

  “Hm! Hm! That sounds pathetic, and it would lead to a suitable response if my spittle glands were in better condition and I had not lost too much of that noble juice through abusing calomel.”

  On speaking these words, the Hungarian turned about and showed his face to the man who had just entered and lit his cigar on the spirit lamp.

  “By the devil, Karl—how did you come here, not from New Orleans?” the Hungarian said to him, with a tremor of displeasure despite his coolness and composure.

  “Lajos!” the man he addressed responded with astonishment, inspecting the Hungarian from top to toe with a slow gaze. Then he approached and extended his hand.

  The Hungarian responded to the handshake of the cousin of his New Orleans wife with feigned friendliness.

  “Goodbye!” he said to the worker from the lumbermill with an irritated nonchalance, slapping the money for the two rounds on the counter. Without Lajos’s seeing it, the worker pushed back the part for his own drinks and paid them himself.

  When they were back on the street, Lajos held Karl by the arm; Karl did not appear very charmed by this friendliness. He was still thinking about the exchange he had just overheard, not to mention the shameful abandonment of Frida. He was too distressed to be able to speak right away.

  “Karl, What do you think of this fellow I wound up so much? The fellow was ready to box me or fire a slingshot at my head—if he didn’t have a wife and child,” Lajos added, looking at Karl with repellent warmth.

  “You were certainly not serious,” the cousin of the two sisters declared with a touch of light irony, putting both his hands into the broad sleeves of his paletôt. It was a bitterly cold morning.

  “I would take it badly, Karl, if you harbored the least doubt. You know already from New Orleans that I like to make jokes, and that it gives me unending pleasure to lead dumb, stupid people around by the nose. I cannot resist this vice. It is a true passion of mine.”

  “Lajos, it was a very bad trick when you abandoned your dear wife, and it brands you a man without feeling,” Karl said earnestly, pulling his arm back from the Hungarian.

  “I beseech you not to not preach morality to me now. It was a bad trick on my part, I admit, but please do not confuse frivolity with lack of feeling. Even before we met, I had decided to rush to New Orleans and beg her forgiveness. It will certainly be a tough knot to untie, but I am determined, and I flatter myself that I can win her heart, which I have so dreadfully injured, once more.”

  “You might be deceived, Lajos. I know your wife’s character too well.”

  “You are surely a great devotee of her amiability, Karl?”

  “It would do you better to avoid any ambiguous references and inform yourself of your wife’s current situation. Your decision to go to New Orleans appears very dubious, in fact, and is probably a ruse to put me off, to avoid just punishment from me. Do not expect me to try to talk you into returning or offer myself as an intermediary between you and your honorable wife. On the contrary, I would advise her against it, should you ever presume to enter into an intimate relationship with her.”

  The Hungarian stepped back a bit when he heard this, sounding so loud a roar of laughter that several persons passing on the other side of Broadway stopped and stared at the two of them, surprised and curious.

  Karl, who saw full well that the Hungarian was not going to part so quickly, sought to control his raw outbreaks on the open street, preferring instead to draw him to his hotel, where they could reach an understanding in private, unobserved by others—if there was anything about which to reach an understanding.

  “If love does not speak through these words, may all my friends go to the hangman. You, Karl, peacemaker, matchmaker, protector and advisor to tearless straw widows, venerator of the domestic hearth—you want to stand in the way as I pour out the remorse of my heart and call out the voice of my conscience to abandoned household gods? Karl, you are in love with my wife? Confess it, poor sinner!”

  “If you would accompany me to my hotel, you will learn further details. The street is not the place to have this sort of discussion,” responded the cousin of the two sisters in a decisive tone; he was deeply offended by the Hungarian’s rudeness.

  “Wouldn’t it be the same if I besought you to accompany me to my hotel? The initiative rests above all with me, cousin Karl, or do you not understand that?”

  “I really don’t care, so long as it does not take place in another world,” Karl declared. He could tell from the Hungarian’s appearance that he was not staying at any hotel where appearance or elegance was insisted upon.

  “You certainly believe,” Lajos responded mockingly, “that I am not staying at any hotel, or at least at one which is quite miserable, such as an ordinary boardinghouse. That is easy to excuse, Cousin Karl, since you judge my situation from the shabby farmer’s rags I am wearing, and so you believe you are justified in placing my nobility in question.”

  As he said this, the Hungarian reached into the side-pocket of his blanket cloak which he had received from Farmer Watson, and he drew out the two twenty-dollar bills, holding them up close to Karl’s face.

  “What do you m
ean by that?” Karl said, pushing the Hungarian’s hand away.

  “A proof that the greatest bum can still have money,” the Hungarian declared.

  “That doesn’t concern me, and when you call yourself a bum, you are accusing yourself. Now I would like to ask you to follow me to my hotel.”

  “Good!” Lajos answered, pushing the paper money back into his pocket. They then walked more rapidly, laying a great stretch of road behind them without exchanging a word.

  Each of them seemed to be brooding about something. Only their thoughts were worlds away from each other.

  They turned onto Franklin Avenue and arrived at the corner of the first block, at Fourth Street. Here the sidewalks and pavements had been completely cleared by the store people or homeowners who swept the snow into the gutters. The vegetable market on Third Street was poorly supplied due to the deep snow, and on Fourth Street there were no lurkers: even the eighty-seven-year-old Dutch Mary, also called the Tomatoes Lady, with her quavering chant of Eier und Butter zu stah’n, had been kept away by the stormy weather. There was only one hen-man present, and his plucked geese and cackling hens cried out. Across the way, in Louis Bach’s beerhouse,12 the German element of St. Louis held forth in its full consciousness, proclaiming over eternally full glasses the approaching springtime of the people and a dreadful defeat for the natives at the next municipal election. Further down, a news carrier for the Demokratische Presse was in over his head—he was trying to give his paper to a man and decry the Anzeiger des Westens, and he was being severely beaten for it.13 A bit further along, a rabid horse-trader was leading four ponies of similar coloration toward the courthouse,14 where a considerable market for these animals was held on certain days. This is a trade that is carried on by a type of person who always has a stud ready and also makes a lot of money breaking mules. These business heroes in such an occupation are people of the most dangerous character, both here and elsewhere in the Union, and they often dominate the voters at the ballot boxes with their ingenious rudeness.

  They had now arrived at the Planters’ House.15

  Planters’ House takes the first rank among the hotels of St. Louis, and it is, so far as comfort goes, better arranged than our St. Charles, Verandah, St. Louis, and City Hotels, although it is far behind what these have to offer in splendor and external appearance.

  “So this is your hotel, Cousin Karl?” the Hungarian asked his wife’s cousin as he entered with him. He said this in a tone entirely different from that which he had used earlier. He also buttoned his farmer’s coat up to the throat, probably to hide a shirt of dubious whiteness. Karl was silent and went quickly up the broad stairs. Here he stepped to the side for a moment, taking his key from the blackboard. Then he sped up the narrow steps along the main hall to the third floor, opening room 135. Perhaps without meaning to, the Hungarian removed his crushed hat and arranged his tousled, long, black hair with his right hand. Then he straightened his cravat and entered after Karl.

  “You live quite grandly here, Cousin Karl. What are you paying?” Lajos asked, looking in every direction.

  “Two dollars fifty a day,” he answered dryly.

  “That’s not much,” the Hungarian responded with relief. “When you figure everything together, as well as the comfort that is offered here, you are always better in a house of the first rank than with the loafer mob in the Virginia Hotel.16 What you pay there for the comfort is lost through the poor company and bad atmosphere.”

  “I don’t think so,” Karl responded, offering Lajos a place at his side on the sofa. “If I were paying for it myself, I would not be such a fool as to pay two dollars fifty every day for lodging and food, even if I had a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “If you did not pay for it, then I am free enough to ask you who has been so good to you? I have never had the good fortune, though I have often had more need of it than you.”

  “That could very well be,” Karl declared, “and concerning payment, it goes to the account of a firm in New Orleans that entrusts me with the delivery of western products.”

  “Then you are no longer involved selling slaves? That was always a profitable business, and you understood it from the ground up. One must concede that.”

  “I gave that business up when my first problems of survival had been overcome. It had disgusted me from the start, and I have always been glad to be free of it.”

  “That would be a matter of indifference to me if I could make money doing it. Whether you lead people or oxen to the market, it’s all the same thing. Could you fix me up with a position of that sort, Cousin Karl? I would do my duty scrupulously. The sale of slaves remains the most noble of enterprises. And then there is the splendid thrill in your own skin when you’ve unloaded the colored blokes! You see, Cousin Karl, I am a man with southern principles, a passionate champion of National Democracy!”

  “Let us speak of other matters,” Karl took the initiative again, after he’d sat quietly for a few moments.

  “About what, for example?” the Hungarian asked, who was half-aware of why Cousin Karl wanted to speak with him in his room.

  “We will have a duel!” Karl responded, standing up.

  “I’m happy with that, only I want to know the grounds in advance.”

  “You know what you said when we turned onto Broadway?”

  “God damn it, I don’t remember anymore.”

  “Just think about it!”

  The Hungarian acted as if he were thinking, then he hastily asked: “Perhaps it’s because I said you were in love with my Frida?”

  “Yes. That’s why we will have a duel.”

  “But all joking aside, Cousin Karl, that is childish. Men such as ourselves would not put a bullet in another’s brain over a woman. Nonsense, Karl—stupid business, a game for kids!”

  “I will accept it if you will. I find sufficient ground to be my own second. Will you accept?”

  “Yes indeed, if you are set on it. We will shoot at each other on a sackcloth, that would be the most reasonable. Right now, here in the room, I’m ready. The bullet will be the arbitrator, Satan will sit on the pistol barrel.”

  “I did not bring you here to make jokes. I hope that you will duel with me in a manner proper to a gentleman.”

  “Well all right. With pistols, not cannons, obviously—you have two pieces available, since you are so hot to fight?”

  “If you agree, say it and spare me your frivolous jokes.”

  “Yes, I want to! You could give me a pistol, since I have no weapon save this Bowie knife.”

  Karl stepped to a bureau and drew a six-shot Colt revolver from the drawer.

  “I only have this one weapon, but I will give it to you and buy one for myself, if that will satisfy you.”

  “I don’t want your revolver, but I want to go buy one myself, if you will give a few dollars based on my honest face, since the money I have is already committed elsewhere.”

  “That should not create any problems for you—here are ten dollars.”

  “I would throw these ten dollars back in the face of anyone but you—when is the duel?”

  “Tomorrow morning between six and seven.”

  “Good—where?”

  “Behind Weizenecker’s vineyard, in New Bremen, if you know the place.”

  “To be sure, not far from Hyde Park.”17

  “We’ll meet again, then,” Karl said, making a movement with his hand which told the Hungarian to get up and leave the room.

  Once the Hungarian had left, Karl reached into his travel bag and took out a small sheet of paper edged with a narrow gold band and laid an elegant, carefully pressed envelope next to it. After some consideration he reached for his pen and wrote the following lines:

  Dear Cousin,

  If I do not arrive in New Orleans after the passage of four weeks, I ask you to pass the enclosed papers through Tiberius or some other reliable person to the firm of K. & W. Do not delay the delivery any longer than the period I have indicated,
since it is possible that the business of that firm could suffer if there is delay. What moves me to request your assistance is—please have enough presence of mind not to be shocked—I am going to have a duel tomorrow morning with an acquaintance I have met here in St. Louis who has badly offended me. Pardon my laconic proceedings, and do not accuse me of lack of feeling or tenderness. Many greetings to your sister Jenny, and if my luck is good, we will be able to spend a couple fine, happy days with the lovely family of Doctor Austin in Ocean Spring. How much it would please me if I could move Jenny to leave New Orleans for good. For her thoughts of Emil find all the more nourishment in this odious city. Live well, dear cousin, and find nothing amiss in the apparent contradiction that one can think lovingly of a woman friend far away and thus write something of this sort.

  With friendship, your cousin

  Karl

  Karl had hardly written half the letter before a remarkable episode took place one floor below him, on the second floor of the Planters’ House. When the Hungarian descended, his attention was seized by a lady he glimpsed through a half-opened door, swaying in a rocking chair. The lady had her back turned to him and appeared sunk in thought, with her head on her chest. Through the wicker webbing of the chair back he could clearly see the form of her head, with thick blonde curls cascading down over the upper portion of her dress. A shawl laying half on the floor, half on her left chair arm, shocked him out of his usual coldness and indifference.