Dr. Sevier

CHAPTER XVI.

MANY WATERS

As the day faded away it began to rain. The next morning the water was coming down in torrents. Richling, looking out from a door in Prieur street, found scant room for one foot on the inner edge of the sidewalk; all the rest was under water. By noon the sidewalks were completely covered in miles of streets. By two in the afternoon the flood was coming into many of the houses. By three it was up at the door-sill on which he stood. There it stopped.

He could do nothing but stand and look. Skiffs, canoes, hastily improvised rafts, were moving in every direction, carrying the unsightly chattels of the poor out of their overflowed cottages to higher ground. Barrels, boxes, planks, hen-coops, bridge lumber, piles of straw that waltzed solemnly as they went, cord-wood, old shingles, door-steps, floated here and there in melancholy confusion; and down upon all still drizzled the slackening rain. At length it ceased.

Richling still stood in the door-way, the picture of mute helplessness. Yes, there was one other thing he could do; he could laugh. It would have been hard to avoid it sometimes, there were such ludicrous sights, – such slips and sprawls into the water; so there he stood in that peculiar isolation that deaf people content themselves with, now looking the picture of anxious waiting, now indulging a low, deaf man’s chuckle when something made the rowdies and slatterns of the street roar.

Presently he noticed, at a distance up the way, a young man in a canoe, passing, much to their good-natured chagrin, a party of three in a skiff, who had engaged him in a trial of speed. From both boats a shower of hilarious French was issuing. At the nearest corner the skiff party turned into another street and disappeared, throwing their lingual fireworks to the last. The canoe came straight on with the speed of a fish. Its dexterous occupant was no other than Narcisse.

There was a grace in his movement that kept Richling’s eyes on him, when he would rather have withdrawn into the house. Down went the paddle always on the same side, noiselessly, in front; on darted the canoe; backward stretched the submerged paddle and came out of the water edgewise at full reach behind, with an almost imperceptible swerving motion that kept the slender craft true to its course. No rocking; no rush of water before or behind; only the one constant glassy ripple gliding on either side as silently as a beam of light. Suddenly, without any apparent change of movement in the sinewy wrists, the narrow shell swept around in a quarter circle, and Narcisse sat face to face with Richling.

Each smiled brightly at the other. The handsome Creole’s face was aglow with the pure delight of existence.

“Well, Mistoo Itchlin, ’ow you enjoyin’ that watah? As fah as myseff am concerned, ‘I am afloat, I am afloat on the fee-us ’olling tide.’ I don’t think you fine that stweet pwetty dusty to-day, Mistoo Itchlin?”

Richling laughed.

“It don’t inflame my eyes to-day,” he said.

“You muz egscuse my i’ony, Mistoo Itchlin; I can’t ’ep that sometime’. It come natu’al to me, in fact. I was on’y speaking i’oniously juz now in calling allusion to that dust; because, of co’se, theh is no dust to-day, because the g’ound is all covvud with watah, in fact. Some people don’t understand that figgah of i’ony.”

“I don’t understand as much about it myself as I’d like to,” said Richling.

“Me, I’m ve’y fon’ of it,” responded the Creole. “I was making seve’al i’onies ad those fwen’ of mine juz now. We was ’unning a ’ace. An’ thass anotheh thing I am fon’ of. I would ’ather ’un a ’ace than to wuck faw a livin’. Ha! ha! ha! I should thing so! Anybody would, in fact. But thass the way with me – always making some i’onies.” He stopped with a sudden change of countenance, and resumed gravely: “Mistoo Itchlin, looks to me like you’ lookin’ ve’y salad.” He fanned himself with his hat. “I dunno ’ow ’tis with you, Mistoo Itchlin, but I fine myseff ve’y oppwessive thiz evening.”

“I don’t find you so,” said Richling, smiling broadly.

And he did not. The young Creole’s burning face and resplendent wit were a sunset glow in the darkness of this day of overpowering adversity. His presence even supplied, for a moment, what seemed a gleam of hope. Why wasn’t there here an opportunity to visit the hospital? He need not tell Narcisse the object of his visit.

“Do you think,” asked Richling, persuasively, crouching down upon one of his heels, “that I could sit in that thing without turning it over?”

“In that pee-ogue?” Narcisse smiled the smile of the proficient as he waved his paddle across the canoe. “Mistoo Itchlin,” – the smile passed off, – “I dunno if you’ll billiv me, but at the same time I muz tell you the tooth?” —

He paused inquiringly.

“Certainly,” said Richling, with evident disappointment.

“Well, it’s juz a poss’bil’ty that you’ll wefwain fum spillin’ out fum yeh till the negs cawneh. Thass the manneh of those who ah not acquainted with the pee-ogue. ‘Lost to sight, to memo’y deah’ – if you’ll egscuse the maxim. Thass Chawles Dickens mague use of that egspwession.”

Richling answered with a gay shake of the head. “I’ll keep out of it.” If Narcisse detected his mortified chagrin, he did not seem to. It was hard; the day’s last hope was blown out like a candle in the wind. Richling dared not risk the wetting of his suit of clothes; they were his sole letter of recommendation and capital in trade.

“Well, au ’evoi’, Mistoo Itchlin.” He turned and moved off – dip, glide, and away.

Dr. Sevier stamped his wet feet on the pavement of the hospital porch. It was afternoon of the day following that of the rain. The water still covering the streets about the hospital had not prevented his carriage from splashing through it on his double daily round. A narrow and unsteady plank spanned the immersed sidewalk. Three times, going and coming, he had crossed it safely, and this fourth time he had made half the distance well enough; but, hearing distant cheers and laughter, he looked up street; when – splatter! – and the cheers were redoubled.

“Pretty thing to laugh at!” he muttered. Two or three bystanders, leaning on their umbrellas in the lodge at the gate and in the porch, where he stood stamping, turned their backs and smoothed their mouths.

“Hah!” said the tall Doctor, stamping harder. Stamp! – stamp! He shook his leg. – “Bah!” He stamped the other long, slender, wet foot and looked down at it, turning one side and then the other. – “F-fah!” – The first one again. – “Pshaw!“ – The other. – Stamp! – stamp! – ”Right—into it! – up to my ankles!” He looked around with a slight scowl at one man, who seemed taken with a sudden softening of the spine and knees, and who turned his back quickly and fell against another, who, also with his back turned, was leaning tremulously against a pillar.

But the object of mirth did not tarry. He went as he was to Mary’s room, and found her much better – as, indeed, he had done at every visit. He sat by her bed and listened to her story.

“Why, Doctor, you see, we did nicely for a while. John went on getting the same kind of work, and pleasing everybody, of course, and all he lacked was finding something permanent. Still, we passed through one month after another, and we really began to think the sun was coming out, so to speak.”

“Well, I thought so, too,” put in the Doctor. “I thought if it didn’t you’d let me know.”

“Why, no, Doctor, we couldn’t do that; you couldn’t be taking care of well people.”

“Well,” said the Doctor, dropping that point, “I suppose as the busy season began to wane that mode of livelihood, of course, disappeared.”

“Yes,” – a little one-sided smile, – “and so did our money. And then, of course,” – she slightly lifted and waved her hand.

“You had to live,” said Dr. Sevier, sincerely.

She smiled again, with abstracted eyes. “We thought we’d like to,” she said. “I didn’t mind the loss of the things so much, – except the little table we ate from. You remember that little round table, don’t you?”

The visitor had not the heart to say no. He nodded.

“When that went there was but one thing left that could go.”

“Not your bed?”

“The bedstead; yes.”

“You didn’t sell your bed, Mrs. Richling?”

The tears gushed from her eyes. She made a sign of assent.

“But then,” she resumed, “we made an excellent arrangement with a good woman who had just lost her husband, and wanted to live cheaply, too.”

“What amuses you, madam?”

“Nothing great. But I wish you knew her. She’s funny. Well, so we moved down-town again. Didn’t cost much to move.”

She would smile a little in spite of him.

“And then?” said he, stirring impatiently and leaning forward. “What then?”

“Why, then I worked a little harder than I thought, – pulling trunks around and so on, – and I had this third attack.”

The Doctor straightened himself up, folded his arms, and muttered: —

“Oh! – oh! Why wasn’t I instantly sent for?”

The tears were in her eyes again, but —

“Doctor,” she answered, with her odd little argumentative smile, “how could we? We had nothing to pay with. It wouldn’t have been just.”

“Just!” exclaimed the physician, angrily.

“Doctor,” said the invalid, and looked at him.

“Oh – all right!”

She made no answer but to look at him still more pleadingly.

“Wouldn’t it have been just as fair to let me be generous, madam?” His faint smile was bitter. “For once? Simply for once?”

“We couldn’t make that proposition, could we, Doctor?”

He was checkmated.

“Mrs. Richling,” he said suddenly, clasping the back of his chair as if about to rise, “tell me, – did you or your husband act this way for anything I’ve ever said or done?”

“No, Doctor! no, no; never! But” —

“But kindness should seek – not be sought,” said the physician, starting up.

“No, Doctor, we didn’t look on it so. Of course we didn’t. If there’s any fault it’s all mine. For it was my own proposition to John, that as we had to seek charity we should just be honest and open about it. I said, ‘John, as I need the best attention, and as that can be offered free only in the hospital, why, to the hospital I ought to go.’”

She lay still, and the Doctor pondered. Presently he said: —

“And Mr. Richling – I suppose he looks for work all the time?”

“From daylight to dark!”

“Well, the water is passing off. He’ll be along by and by to see you, no doubt. Tell him to call, first thing to-morrow morning, at my office.” And with that the Doctor went off in his wet boots, committed a series of indiscretions, reached home, and fell ill.

In the wanderings of fever he talked of the Richlings, and in lucid moments inquired for them.

“Yes, yes,” answered the sick Doctor’s physician, “they’re attended to. Yes, all their wants are supplied. Just dismiss them from your mind.” In the eyes of this physician the Doctor’s life was invaluable, and these patients, or pensioners, an unknown and, most likely, an inconsiderable quantity; two sparrows, as it were, worth a farthing. But the sick man lay thinking. He frowned.

“I wish they would go home.”

“I have sent them.”

“You have? Home to Milwaukee?”

“Yes.”

“Thank God!”

He soon began to mend. Yet it was weeks before he could leave the house. When one day he reëntered the hospital, still pale and faint, he was prompt to express to the Mother-Superior the comfort he had felt in his sickness to know that his brother physician had sent those Richlings to their kindred.

The Sister shook her head. He saw the deception in an instant. As best his strength would allow, he hurried to the keeper of the rolls. There was the truth. Home? Yes, – to Prieur street, – discharged only one week before. He drove quickly to his office.

“Narcisse, you will find that young Mr. Richling living in Prieur street, somewhere between Conti and St. Louis. I don’t know the house; you’ll have to find it. Tell him I’m in my office again, and to come and see me.”

Narcisse was no such fool as to say he knew the house. He would get the praise of finding it quickly.

“I’ll do my mose awduous, seh,” he said, took down his coat, hung up his jacket, put on his hat, and went straight to the house and knocked. Got no answer. Knocked again, and a third time; but in vain. Went next door and inquired of a pretty girl, who fell in love with him at a glance.

“Yes, but they had moved. She wasn’t jess ezac’ly sure where they had moved to, unless-n it was in that little house yondeh between St. Louis and Toulouse; and if they wasn’t there she didn’t know where they was. People ought to leave words where they’s movin’ at, but they don’t. You’re very welcome,” she added, as he expressed his thanks; and he would have been welcome had he questioned her for an hour. His parting bow and smile stuck in her heart a six-months.

He went to the spot pointed out. As a Creole he was used to seeing very respectable people living in very small and plain houses. This one was not too plain even for his ideas of Richling, though it was but a little one-street-door-and-window affair, with an alley on the left running back into the small yard behind. He knocked. Again no one answered. He looked down the alley and saw, moving about the yard, a large woman, who, he felt certain, could not be Mrs. Richling.

Two little short-skirted, bare-legged girls were playing near him. He spoke to them in French. Did they know where Monsieu’ Itchlin lived? The two children repeated the name, looking inquiringly at each other.

“Non, miché.” – “No, sir, they didn’t know.”

“Qui reste ici?” he asked. “Who lives here?”

“Ici? Madame qui reste là c’est Mizziz Ri-i-i-ly!” said one.

“Yass,” said the other, breaking into English and rubbing a musquito off of her well-tanned shank with the sole of her foot, “tis Mizziz Ri-i-i-ly what live there. She jess move een. She’s got a lill baby. – Oh! you means dat lady what was in de Chatty Hawspill!”

“No, no! A real, nice lady. She nevva saw that Cha’ity Hospi’l.”

The little girls shook their heads. They couldn’t imagine a person who had never seen the Charity Hospital.

“Was there nobody else who had moved into any of these houses about here lately?” He spoke again in French. They shook their heads. Two boys came forward and verified the testimony. Narcisse went back with his report: “Moved, – not found.”

“I fine that ve’y d’oll, Doctah Seveeah,” concluded the unaugmented, hanging up his hat; “some peop’ always ’ard to fine. I h-even notiz that sem thing w’en I go to colic’ some bill. I dunno ’ow’ tis, Doctah, but I assu’ you I kin tell that by a man’s physio’nomie. Nobody teach me that. ’Tis my own ingeenu’ty ’as made me to discoveh that, in fact.”

The Doctor was silent. Presently he drew a piece of paper toward him and, dipping his pen into the ink, began to write: —

“Information wanted of the whereabouts of John Richling” —

“Narcisse,” he called, still writing, “I want you to take an advertisement to the ‘Picayune’ office.”

“With the gweatez of pleazheh, seh.” The clerk began his usual shifting of costume. “Yesseh! I assu’ you, Doctah, that is a p’oposition moze enti’ly to my satizfagtion; faw I am suffe’ing faw a smoke, and deztitute of a ciga’ette! I am aztonizh’ ’ow I did that, to egshauz them unconsciouzly, in fact.” He received the advertisement in an envelope, whipped his shoes a little with his handkerchief, and went out. One would think to hear him thundering down the stairs, that it was twenty-five cents’ worth of ice.

“Hold o – ” The Doctor started from his seat, then turned and paced feebly up and down. Who, besides Richling, might see that notice? What might be its unexpected results? Who was John Richling? A man with a secret at the best; and a secret, in Dr. Sevier’s eyes, was detestable. Might not Richling be a man who had fled from something? “No! no!” The Doctor spoke aloud. He had promised to think nothing ill of him. Let the poor children have their silly secret. He spoke again: “They’ll find out the folly of it by and by.” He let the advertisement go; and it went.

CHAPTER XVII.

RAPHAEL RISTOFALO

Richling had a dollar in his pocket. A man touched him on the shoulder.

But let us see. On the day that John and Mary had sold their only bedstead, Mrs. Riley, watching them, had proposed the joint home. The offer had been accepted with an eagerness that showed itself in nervous laughter. Mrs. Riley then took quarters in Prieur street, where John and Mary, for a due consideration, were given a single neatly furnished back room. The bedstead had brought seven dollars. Richling, on the day after the removal, was in the commercial quarter, looking, as usual, for employment.

The young man whom Dr. Sevier had first seen, in the previous October, moving with a springing step and alert, inquiring glances from number to number in Carondelet street was slightly changed. His step was firm, but something less elastic, and not quite so hurried. His face was more thoughtful, and his glance wanting in a certain dancing freshness that had been extremely pleasant. He was walking in Poydras street toward the river.

As he came near to a certain man who sat in the entrance of a store with the freshly whittled corner of a chair between his knees, his look and bow were grave, but amiable, quietly hearty, deferential, and also self-respectful – and uncommercial: so palpably uncommercial that the sitter did not rise or even shut his knife.

He slightly stared. Richling, in a low, private tone, was asking him for employment.

“What?” turning his ear up and frowning downward.

The application was repeated, the first words with a slightly resentful ring, but the rest more quietly.

The store-keeper stared again, and shook his head slowly.

“No, sir,” he said, in a barely audible tone. Richling moved on, not stopping at the next place, or the next, or the next; for he felt the man’s stare all over his back until he turned the corner and found himself in Tchoupitoulas street. Nor did he stop at the first place around the corner. It smelt of deteriorating potatoes and up-river cabbages, and there were open barrels of onions set ornamentally aslant at the entrance. He had a fatal conviction that his services would not be wanted in malodorous places.

“Now, isn’t that a shame?” asked the chair-whittler, as Richling passed out of sight. “Such a gentleman as that, to be beggin’ for work from door to door!”

“He’s not beggin’ f’om do’ to do’,” said a second, with a Creole accent on his tongue, and a match stuck behind his ear like a pen. “Beside, he’s too much of a gennlemun.”

“That’s where you and him differs,” said the first. He frowned upon the victim of his delicate repartee with make-believe defiance. Number Two drew from an outside coat-pocket a wad of common brown wrapping-paper, tore from it a small, neat parallelogram, dove into an opposite pocket for some loose smoking-tobacco, laid a pinch of it in the paper, and, with a single dexterous turn of the fingers, thumbs above, the rest beneath, – it looks simple, but ’tis an amazing art, – made a cigarette. Then he took down his match, struck it under his short coat-skirt, lighted his cigarette, drew an inhalation through it that consumed a third of its length, and sat there, with his eyes half-closed, and all that smoke somewhere inside of him.

“That young man,” remarked a third, wiping a toothpick on his thigh and putting it in his vest-pocket, as he stepped to the front, “don’t know how to look fur work. There’s one way fur a day-laborer to look fur work, and there’s another way fur a gentleman to look fur work, and there’s another way fur a – a – a man with money to look fur somethin’ to put his money into. It’s just like fishing!” He threw both hands outward and downward, and made way for a porter’s truck with a load of green meat. The smoke began to fall from Number Two’s nostrils in two slender blue streams. Number Three continued: —

“You’ve got to know what kind o’ hooks you want, and what kind o’ bait you want, and then, after that, you’ve” —

Numbers One and Two did not let him finish.

“ – Got to know how to fish,” they said; “that’s so!” The smoke continued to leak slowly from Number Two’s nostrils and teeth, though he had not lifted his cigarette the second time.

“Yes, you’ve got to know how to fish,” reaffirmed the third. “If you don’t know how to fish, it’s as like as not that nobody can tell you what’s the matter; an’ yet, all the same, you aint goin’ to ketch no fish.”

“Well, now,” said the first man, with an unconvinced swing of his chin, “spunk ’ll sometimes pull a man through; and you can’t say he aint spunky.” Number Three admitted the corollary. Number Two looked up: his chance had come.

“He’d a w’ipped you faw a dime,” said he to Number One, took a comforting draw from his cigarette, and felt a great peace.

“I take notice he’s a little deaf,” said Number Three, still alluding to Richling.

“That’d spoil him for me,” said Number One.

Number Three asked why.

“Oh, I just wouldn’t have him about me. Didn’t you ever notice that a deaf man always seems like a sort o’ stranger? I can’t bear ’em.”

Richling meanwhile moved on. His critics were right. He was not wanting in courage; but no man from the moon could have been more an alien on those sidewalks. He was naturally diligent, active, quick-witted, and of good, though maybe a little too scholarly address; quick of temper, it is true, and uniting his quickness of temper with a certain bashfulness, – an unlucky combination, since, as a consequence, nobody had to get out of its way; but he was generous in fact and in speech, and never held malice a moment. But, besides the heavy odds which his small secret seemed to be against him, stopping him from accepting such valuable friendships as might otherwise have come to him, and besides his slight deafness, he was by nature a recluse, or, at least, a dreamer. Every day that he set foot on Tchoupitoulas, or Carondelet, or Magazine, or Fulton, or Poydras street he came from a realm of thought, seeking service in an empire of matter.

There is a street in New Orleans called Triton Walk. That is what all the ways of commerce and finance and daily bread-getting were to Richling. He was a merman – ashore. It was the feeling rather than the knowledge of this that prompted him to this daily, aimless trudging after mere employment. He had a proper pride; once in a while a little too much; nor did he clearly see his deficiencies; and yet the unrecognized consciousness that he had not the commercial instinct made him willing – as Number Three would have said – to “cut bait” for any fisherman who would let him do it.

He turned without any distinct motive and, retracing his steps to the corner, passed up across Poydras street. A little way above it he paused to look at some machinery in motion. He liked machinery, – for itself rather than for its results. He would have gone in and examined the workings of this apparatus had it not been for the sign above his head, “No Admittance.” Those words always seemed painted for him. A slight modification in Richling’s character might have made him an inventor. Some other faint difference, and he might have been a writer, a historian, an essayist, or even – there is no telling – a well-fed poet. With the question of food, raiment, and shelter permanently settled, he might have become one of those resplendent flash lights that at intervals dart their beams across the dark waters of the world’s ignorance, hardly from new continents, but from the observatory, the study, the laboratory. But he was none of these. There had been a crime committed somewhere in his bringing up, and as a result he stood in the thick of life’s battle, weaponless. He gazed upon machinery with childlike wonder; but when he looked around and saw on every hand men, – good fellows who ate in their shirt-sleeves at restaurants, told broad jokes, spread their mouths and smote their sides when they laughed, and whose best wit was to bombard one another with bread-crusts and hide behind the sugar-bowl; men whom he could have taught in every kind of knowledge that they were capable of grasping, except the knowledge of how to get money, – when he saw these men, as it seemed to him, grow rich daily by simply flipping beans into each other’s faces, or slapping each other on the back, the wonder of machinery was eclipsed. Do as they did? He? He could no more reach a conviction as to what the price of corn would be to-morrow than he could remember what the price of sugar was yesterday.