by Thomas Dixon
CHAPTER XX
THE BLOW FALLS
For a time Norton lost himself in the stunning immensity of the life of NewYork. He made no effort to adjust himself to it. He simply allowed itswaves to roll over and engulf him.
He stopped with mammy and the boy at a brown-stone boarding house onStuyvesant Square kept by a Southern woman to whom he had a letter ofintroduction.
Mrs. Beam was not an ideal landlady, but her good-natured helplessnessappealed to him. She was a large woman of ample hips and bust, and thoughvery tall seemed always in her own way. She moved slowly and laughed with afinal sort of surrender to fate when anything went wrong. And it wasgenerally going wrong. She was still comparatively young--perhapsthirty-two--but was built on so large and unwieldy a pattern that it wasnot easy to guess her age, especially as she had a silly tendency toharmless kittenish ways at times.
The poor thing was pitifully at sea in her new world and its work. She hadbeen reared in a typically extravagant home of the old South where slaveshad waited her call from childhood. She had not learned to sew, or cook orkeep house--in fact, she had never learned to do anything useful orimportant. So naturally she took boarders. Her husband, on whose shouldersshe had placed every burden of life the day of her marriage, lay somewherein an unmarked trench on a Virginia battlefield.
She couldn't conceive of any human being enduring a servant that wasn'tblack and so had turned her house over to a lazy and worthless crew ofNorthern negro help. The house was never clean, the waste in her kitchenwas appalling, but so long as she could find money to pay her rent andgrocery bills, she was happy. Her only child, a daughter of sixteen, neverdreamed of lifting her hand to work, and it hadn't yet occurred to themother to insult her with such a suggestion.
Norton was not comfortable but he was lonely, and Mrs. Beam's easy ways,genial smile and Southern weaknesses somehow gave him a sense of being athome and he stayed. Mammy complained bitterly of the insolence and lowmanners of the kitchen. But he only laughed and told her she'd get used toit.
He was astonished to find that so many Southern people had drifted to NewYork--exiles of all sorts, with one universal trait, poverty andpoliteness.
And they quickly made friends. As he began to realize it, his heart wentout to the great city with a throb of gratitude.
When the novelty of the new world had gradually worn off a feeling ofloneliness set in. He couldn't get used to the crowds on every street,these roaring rivers of strange faces rushing by like the waters of aswollen stream after a freshet, hurrying and swirling out of its banks.
At first he had found himself trying to bow to every man he met and takeoff his hat to every woman. It took a long time to break himself of thisSouthern instinct. The thing that cured him completely was when he tippedhis hat unconsciously to a lady on Fifth Avenue. She blushed furiously,hurried to the corner and had him arrested.
His apology was so abject, so evidently sincere, his grief so absurd overher mistake that when she caught his Southern drawl, it was her turn toblush and ask his pardon.
A feeling of utter depression and pitiful homesickness gradually crushedhis spirit. His soul began to cry for the sunlit fields and the perfumednights of the South. There didn't seem to be any moon or stars here, andthe only birds he ever saw were the chattering drab little sparrows in theparks.
The first day of autumn, as he walked through Central Park, a magnificentIrish setter lifted his fine head and spied him. Some subtle instinct toldthe dog that the man was a hunter and a lover of his kind. The setterwagged his tail and introduced himself. Norton dropped to a seat, drew theshaggy face into his lap, and stroked his head.
He was back home again. Don, with his fine nose high in the air, wascircling a field and Andy was shouting:
"He's got 'em! He's got 'em sho, Marse Dan!"
He could see Don's slim white and black figure stepping slowly through thehigh grass on velvet feet, glancing back to see if his master werecoming--the muscles suddenly stiffened, his tail became rigid, and thewhole covey of quail were under his nose!
He was a boy again and felt the elemental thrill of man's first work ashunter and fisherman. He looked about him at the bald coldness of theartificial park and a desperate longing surged through his heart to beamong his own people again, to live their life and feel their joys andsorrows as his own.
And then the memory of the great tragedy slowly surged back, he pushed thedog aside, rose and hurried on in his search for a new world.
He tried the theatres--saw Booth in his own house on 23d Street play"Hamlet" and Lawrence Barrett "Othello," listened with rapture to the newItalian Grand Opera Company in the Academy of Music--saw a burlesque in theTammany Theatre on 14th Street, Lester Wallack in "The School for Scandal"at Wallack's Theatre on Broadway at 13th Street, and Tony Pastor in hisvariety show at his Opera House on the Bowery, and yet returned each nightwith a dull ache in his heart.
Other men who loved home less perhaps could adjust themselves to newsurroundings, but somehow in him this home instinct, this feeling ofpersonal friendliness for neighbor and people, this passion for house andlawn, flowers and trees and shrubs, for fields and rivers and hills, seemedof the very fibre of his inmost life. This vast rushing, roaring,impersonal world, driven by invisible titanic forces, somehow didn't appealto him. It merely stunned and appalled and confused his mind.
And then without warning the blow fell.
He told himself afterwards that he must have been waiting for it, that somemysterious power of mental telepathy had wired its message without wordsacross the thousand miles that separated him from the old life, and yet thesurprise was complete and overwhelming.
He had tried that morning to write. A story was shaping itself in his mindand he felt the impulse to express it. But he was too depressed. He threwhis pencil down in disgust and walked to his window facing the littlepark.
It was a bleak, miserable day in November--the first freezing weather hadcome during the night and turned a drizzling rain into sleet. The streetswere covered with a thin, hard, glistening coat of ice. A coal wagon hadstalled in front of the house, a magnificent draught horse had fallen and abrutal driver began to beat him unmercifully.
Henry Berg's Society had not yet been organized.
Norton rushed from the door and faced the astonished driver:
"Don't you dare to strike that horse again!"
The workman turned his half-drunken face on the intruder with a viciousleer:
"Well, what t'ell----"
"I mean it!"
With an oath the driver lunged at him:
"Get out of my way!"
The big fist shot at Norton's head. He parried the attack and knocked theman down. The driver scrambled to his feet and plunged forward again. Asecond blow sent him flat on his back on the ice and his body slipped threefeet and struck the curb.
"Have you got enough?" Norton asked, towering over the sprawling figure.
"Yes."
"Well, get up now, and I'll help you with the horse."
He helped the sullen fellow unhitch the fallen horse, lift him to his feetand readjust the harness. He put shoulder to the wheel and started thewagon again on its way.
He returned to his room feeling better. It was the first fight he hadstarted for months and it stirred his blood to healthy reaction.
He watched the bare limbs swaying in the bitter wind in front of St.George's Church and his eye rested on the steeples the architects said wereunsafe and might fall some day with a crash, and his depression slowlyreturned. He had waked that morning with a vague sense of dread.
"I guess it was that fight!" he muttered. "The scoundrel will be back in anhour with a warrant for my arrest and I'll spend a few days in jail----"
The postman's whistle blew at the basement window. He knew that fellow bythe way he started the first notes of his call--always low, swelling into apeculiar shrill crescendo and dying away in a weird cry of pain.
The call this morning was one of startli
ng effects. It was his high nervetension, of course, that made the difference--perhaps, too, the bitter coldand swirling gusts of wind outside. But the shock was none the less vivid.The whistle began so low it seemed at first the moaning of the wind, thehigh note rang higher and higher, until it became the shout of a fiend, anddied away with a wail of agony wrung from a lost soul.
He shivered at the sound. He would not have been surprised to receive aletter from the dead after that.
He heard some one coming slowly up stairs. It was mammy and the boy. Thelazy maid had handed his mail to her, of course.
His door was pushed open and the child ran in holding a letter in his red,chubby hand:
"A letter, daddy!" he cried.
He took it mechanically, staring at the inscription. He knew now themeaning of his horrible depression! She was writing that letter when itbegan yesterday. He recognized Cleo's handwriting at a glance, though thiswas unusually blurred and crooked. The postmark was Baltimore, anotherstriking fact.
He laid the letter down on his table unopened and turned to mammy:
"Take him to your room. I'm trying to do some writing."
The old woman took the child's hand grumbling:
"Come on, mammy's darlin', nobody wants us!"
He closed the door, locked it, glanced savagely at the unopened letter,drew his chair before the open fire and gazed into the glowing coals.
He feared to break the seal--feared with a dull, sickening dread. Heglanced at it again as though he were looking at a toad that had suddenlyintruded into his room.
Six months had passed without a sign, and he had ceased to wonder at thestrange calm with which she received her dismissal and his flight from thescene after his wife's death. He had begun to believe that her shadow wouldnever again fall across his life.
It had come at last. He picked the letter up, and tried to guess itsmeaning. She was going to make demands on him, of course. He had expectedthis months ago. But why should she be in Baltimore? He thought of ahundred foolish reasons without once the faintest suspicion of the truthentering his mind.
He broke the seal and read its contents. A look of vague incredulityoverspread his face, followed by a sudden pallor. The one frightful thinghe had dreaded and forgotten was true!
He crushed the letter in his powerful hand with a savage groan:
"God in Heaven!"
He spread it out again and read and re-read its message, until each wordburned its way into his soul:
"Our baby was born here yesterday. I was on my way to New York to you, but was taken sick on the train at Baltimore and had to stop. I'm alone and have no money, but I'm proud and happy. I know that you will help me.
"CLEO."
For hours he sat in a stupor of pain, holding this crumpled letter in hishand, staring into the fire.
