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Page 43
"Not on your Uncle Mark Hanna," responds Toledo, "will we get drunk.
We've been--vaccinated with whiskey--and--cod liver oil. What would send
you to the police station--only gives us a thirst. S-s-set out another
bottle."
It is slow work trying to meet death by that route. Some quicker way
must be found. They leave the saloon and plunge again into the mist. The
sidewalks are mere flanges at the base of the houses; the street a cold
ravine, the fog filling it like a freshet. Not far away is the Mexican
quarter. Conducted as if by wires along the heavy air comes a guitar's
tinkle, and the demoralizing voice of some senorita singing:
"En las tardes sombrillos del invierro En el prado a Marar me reclino Y
maldigo mi fausto destino--Una vida la mas infeliz."
The words of it they do not understand--neither Toledo nor Memphis, but
words are the least important things in life. The music tears the
breasts of the seekers after Nepenthe, inciting Toledo to remark:
"Those kids of mine--I wonder--by God, Mr. Goodall of Memphis, we had
too little of that whiskey! No slow music in mine, if you please. It
makes you disremember to forget."
Hurd of Toledo, here pulls out his watch, and says: "I'm a son of a gun!
Got an engagement for a hack ride out to San Pedro Springs at eleven.
Forgot it. A fellow from Noo York, and me, and the Castillo sisters at
Rhinegelder's Garden. That Noo York chap's a lucky dog--got one whole
lung--good for a year yet. Plenty of money, too. He pays for everything.
I can't afford--to miss the jamboree. Sorry you ain't going along.
Good-by, Goodall of Memphis."
He rounds the corner and shuffles away, casting off thus easily the ties
of acquaintanceship as the moribund do, the season of dissolution being
man's supreme hour of egoism and selfishness. But he turns and calls
back through the fog to the other: "I say, Goodall of Memphis! If you
get there before I do, tell 'em Hurd's a-comin' too. Hurd, of T'leder,
Ah-hia."
Thus Goodall's tempter deserts him. That youth, un-complaining and
uncaring, takes a spell at coughing, and, recovered, wanders desultorily
on down the street, the name of which he neither knows nor recks. At a
certain point he perceives swinging doors, and hears, filtering between
them a noise of wind and string instruments. Two men enter from the
street as he arrives, and he follows them in. There is a kind of
ante-chamber, plentifully set with palms and cactuses and oleanders. At
little marble-topped tables some people sit, while soft-shod attendants
bring the beer. All is orderly, clean, melancholy, gay, of the German
method of pleasure. At his right is the foot of a stairway. A man there
holds out his hand. Goodall extends his, full of silver, the man selects
therefrom a coin. Goodall goes upstairs and sees there two galleries
extending along the sides of a concert hall which he now perceives to
lie below and beyond the anteroom he first entered. These galleries are
divided into boxes or stalls, which bestow with the aid of hanging lace
curtains, a certain privacy upon their occupants.
Passing with aimless feet down the aisle contiguous to these saucy and
discreet compartments, he is half checked by the sight in one of them of
a young woman, alone and seated in an attitude of reflection. This young
woman becomes aware of his approach. A smile from her brings him to a
standstill, and her subsequent invitation draws him, though hesitating,
to the other chair in the box, a little table between them.
Goodall is only nineteen. There are some whom, when the terrible god
Phthisis wishes to destroy be first makes beautiful; and the boy is one
of these. His face is wax, and an awful pulchritude is born of the
menacing flame in his cheeks. His eyes reflect an unearthly vista
engendered by the certainty of his doom. As it is forbidden man to guess
accurately concerning his fate, it is inevitable that he shall tremble
at the slightest lifting of the veil.
The young woman is well-dressed, and exhibits a beauty of distinctly
feminine and tender sort; an Eve-like comeliness that scarcely seems
predestined to fade.
It is immaterial, the steps by which the two mount to a certain plane of
good understanding; they are short and few, as befits the occasion.
A button against the wall of the partition is frequently disturbed and a
waiter comes and goes at signal.
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