A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago Part 34

All who are in this country are like him--lonely for the homes they left so soon. For their people. All who are in the country whence he came sit and remember only the things of the past. Yes, that is all one does in this marvelous country--remember the things of the past, over and over again.

They will go with him. The miser who has hidden away his gold, the widow and her two orphans, the hungry ones and despairing ones--they will all go back with him.

One comes out of the theater with a strange sense of understanding. The dead have spoken to one. It is never to be forgotten. The youth that was ripped to pieces in the trenches reached out his limp arms across a row of west side footlights and left a cry echoing in one's heart: "My unlived days! My uneaten bread! My uncounted years! They lie in a little corner waiting and no one comes to them."

Propaganda? Yes, a curious undertone of propaganda. The war propaganda of the dead, older than the fall of Liege by a hundred centuries. The primitive propaganda of the world mourning for its lost ones.

You will see the play, perhaps. Or you will wait until it is translated some day. But this month the west side is aglow with the genius of Sholom Ash and with the interpretative genius of Aaron Teitelbaum, who plays the dead man in uniform and who directed the production. I know of no performance today that rivals his.

THE TATTOOER

Here the city kind of runs over at the heel and flaunts a seven-year-old straw hat. Babylon mooches wearily along with a red nose dreaming in the sun, and Gomorrah leans against an ash can. It is South State Street below Van Buren. The ancient palaces of mirth and wonder blink with dusty lithographs.

"Long ago," says Dutch, "yeh, long ago it was different. Then people was people. Then life was something. Then the tattooing business was a business. When the old London Musee was next door and everybody knew how to have a good time."

The automatic piano in the penny arcade whangs dolorously into a forgotten tango. The two errand boys stand with their eyes glued on the interiors of the picture slot machines--"An Artist's Model" and "On the Beach at Atlantic City." A gun pops foolishly in the rear and the 3-inch bullseye clangs. In a corner behind the Postal Card Photo Taken in a Minute gallery sits Dutch, the world's leading tattooer. Sample tattoo designs cover the two walls. Dragons, scorpions, bulbous nymphs, crossed flags, wreathed anchors, cupids, b.u.t.terflies, daggers and quaint decorations that seem the grotesque survivals of the mid-Victorian schools of fantasy. Photographs of famous men also cover the walls--Capt. Constantinus tattooed from head to foot, every inch of him; Barnum's favorites, ancient and forgotten kooch dancers, fire eaters, sword swallowers, magicians and museum freaks.

And a two column article from the Chicago Chronicle of 1897, yellowed and framed and recounting in sonorous phrases ("pulchritudinous epidermis" is featured frequently) that the society folk of Chicago have taken up tattooing as a fad, following the lead of New York's Four Hundred, who followed the lead of London's most aristocratic circles; and that Prof. Al Herman, known from Madagascar to Sandy Hook as "Dutch," was the leading artist of the tattoo needle in the world.

Here in his corner, surrounded by the molding symbols and slogans of a dead world, Dutch is rounding out his career--a Silenus in exile, his eyes still bright with the memory of hurdy-gurdy midnights.

"Long ago," says Dutch, and his sigh evokes a procession of marvelous ghosts tattooed from head to toe and capering like a company of debonair totem poles over the cobblestones of another South State Street. But the macabre days are gone. The Barnum baccha.n.a.l of the nineties lies in its grave with a fading lithograph for a tombstone. Along with the fall of the Russian empire, the collapse of the fourteen points and the general dethronement of reason since the World's Fair, the honorable art of tattooing has come in for its share of vicissitudes.

"Oh, we still do business," says Dutch. "Human nature is slow to decline and there are people who still realize that if you got a handsome watch what do you want to do to it? Engrave it, ain't it? And if you got a handsome skin, what then? Tattoo, naturally. And we tattoo in seven colors now where it used to be three, and use electricity. Do you think it's crazy? Well, you should see who I used to tattoo in the old days. Read the article on the wall. As for being crazy, what do you say about the man who spends his last 50 cents to get into a baseball game, and gets excited and throws his only hat in the air and loses it, and the man who sits all day and all night with a fishpole on the pier and don't catch any fish? Yes, like I tell the judge who picked us up one day in Iowa, you know how they do sometimes when you follow the carnival. And he asks me why I shouldn't go to jail, and if tattooing ain't crazy, and I says give me three minutes and I prove my case. And I begin with the Romans, and how they was the brightest people we knew, and how they went in for tattooing, and how Columbus was tattooed, and all the sailors that was bright enough to discover America was tattooed, also. Then I say, what if Charlie Ross was tattooed? Would he be lost to-day? And what if he had under his name the word Philadelphia? And in addition to that the date where he was born and his address and so on. Would he be lost then? 'You see,' I says, 'a man can't be tattooed enough for his own good,' and the judge says I win my case."

The automatic piano plays "Over There" and the shooting gallery rifles pop too insistently for a moment. Dutch contemplates a plug of fresh tobacco.

Then he resumes. This time a more intimate tale--the story of his romance--a weird, grotesque amour with a gaudy can-can obbligato.

"Long ago," Dutch whispers; "yeh, I knew all the girls. I tattoned them all. And I live in this street for thirty years now. But n.o.body is interested any more in what used to be. How this street has become different! Ach, it is gone, all gone. Everything. Tattooing hangs on a little. Human nature demand it. But human nature is dying likewise. Yeh, I ask you what would old Barnum say if he should come back and see me sitting here? Me, who was as good any day as Capt. Constantinus? I hate to think what. In those days talent counted. If you could sing or dance or tattoo it meant something. Now what does it mean? Look at the dancers and singers they have, and who is there that tattooes any more? It's all gone to smash, the whole world."

Now amid the popping of the rifles and the tinny whanging of the piano Dutch draws forth a final package. He unwraps a yellowed newspaper.

Photographs. One by one he shuffles them out and arranges them on the broken desk as if in some pensive game of solitaire. There is Dutch when he was a boy, when he was a sailor, when he grew up and became a world famous tattooer. There is Dutch surrounded by queens of the Midway, Dutch with his arms debonairly thrown round the shoulders of snake charmers and other bizarre and vanished contemporaries. The photographs are yellowed.

They make a curious collection. They make the soulless piano sound a bit softer. A "where are the snows of yesteryear" motif played on a can-can fife.

Finally a modern photo in a folder, unyellowed. A smiling, wholesome faced girl. Here Dutch pauses in his game of solitaire and looks in silence.

"My daughter," he says finally. "I sent her through college. Yeh, she's graduated now and has a fine job. I help her all I can. What? Is she tattooed?"

The world's greatest tattoo artist bristles and glowers at the designs on the walls, frowns at the cupids, nymphs, anchors, dragons and b.u.t.terflies.

"I should say not," he mutters. "She don't belong in this street, not here. She's got a different life, and I help her all I can and she likes me. No, sir, in this street belongs only those who have a long memory. The new ones should start somewhere else. Not, mind you, that tattooing ain't good enough for anybody. But times have changed."

The piano obliges with "The Blue Danube." A customer saunters in. Dutch is all business. The electricity is switched on. A blue spark crackles. Dutch clears his throat and slaps the customer proudly on the back.

"Only a little more to go," he explains, "all over. Two more s.h.i.+ps at sea and three dragons will do the job, Heinie. And then, h'm, you will get a job any day in any side show, I can guarantee you that."

Heinie grins hopefully.

THE THING IN THE DARK

It has the usual Huron street ending. Emergency case. Psychopathic hospital. Dunning. But the landlady talked to the police sergeant. The landlady was curious. She wanted the police sergeant to tell her something. And the police sergeant, resting his chin on his elbow, leaned forward on his high stool and peered through the part.i.tion window at the landlady--and said nothing. Or rather, he said: "don't know. That's the way with people sometimes. They get afraid."

This man came to Mrs. Balmer's rooming-house in Huron Street when it was spring. He was a short, stocky man with a leathery face and little eyes.

He identified himself as Joseph Crawford, offered to pay $5 a week for a 12 by 12 room on the third floor at the rear end of the long gloomy hallway and arrived the next day at Mrs. Balmer's faded tenement with an equally faded trunk. Nothing happened.

But when Mrs. Balmer entered the room the following morning to straighten it up she found several innovations. There were four kerosene lamps in the room. They stood on small rickety tables, one in each corner. And there was a new electric light bulb in the central fixture. Mrs. Balmer took note of these things with a professional eye but said nothing.

Idiosyncrasies are to be expected of the amputated folk who seek out lonely tenement bedrooms for a home.

A week later, however, Mrs. Balmer spoke to the man. "You burn your light all night," said Mrs. Balmer, "and while I have no objection to that, still it runs up the electric light bill."

The man agreed that this was true and answered that he would pay $1 extra each week for the privilege of continuing to burn the electric light all night.

Nothing happened. Yet Mrs. Balmer, when she had time for such things as contemplation, grew curious about the man in the back room. In fact she transferred her curiosity from the j.a.panese female impersonator on the second floor and the beautiful and remarkably gowned middle-aged woman on the first floor to this man who kept four kerosene lamps and an electric bulb burning all night on the third floor.

For some time Mrs. Balmer was worried over the thought that this man was probably an experimenter. He probably fussed around with things as an old crank does sometimes, and he would end by burning down the house or blowing it up--accidentally.

But Mrs. Balmer's fears were removed one evening when she happened to look down the gloomy hallway and notice that this man's door was open. A gay, festive illumination streamed out of the opened doorway and Mrs. Balmer paid a social call. She found her roomer sitting in a chair, reading.

Around him blazed four large kerosene lamps. But there was nothing else to notice. His eyes were probably bad, and Mrs. Balmer, after exchanging a few words on the subject of towels, transportation and the weather, said good-night.

But always after that Mrs. Balmer noticed that the door remained open.

Open doors are frequent in rooming-houses. People grow lonely and leave the doors of their cubby holes open. There is nothing odd about that. Yet one evening while Mrs. Balmer stood gossiping with this man in the doorway she noticed something about him that disturbed her. She had noticed it first when she looked in the room before saying h.e.l.lo. Mr. Crawford was sitting facing the portieres that covered the folding doors that part.i.tioned the room. The portieres were a very clever ruse of Mrs.

Balmer. Behind them were screwed hooks and these hooks functioned as a clothes-closet.

Mrs. Balmer noticed that Mr. Crawford, as she talked, kept staring at the portieres and watching them and that he seemed very nervous. The next morning, when she was straightening up the room, Mrs. Balmer looked behind the portieres. An old straw hat, an old coat, a few worn s.h.i.+rts hung from the hooks. There was nothing else but the folding-door and this was not only locked but nailed up.

When two months had pa.s.sed Mrs. Balmer had made a discovery. It had to do with the four kerosene lamps and the extra large electric bulb and the portieres. But it was an irritating discovery, since it made everything more mysterious than ever in the landlady's mind.

She had caught many glimpses of this man in the back room when he wasn't looking. Of evenings he sat with his door opened and his eyes fastened on the portieres. He would sit like that for hours and his leathery face would become gray. His little eyes would widen and his body would hunch up as if he were stiffening. But nothing happened.

Finally, however, Mrs. Balmer began to talk. She didn't like this man Crawford. It made her nervous to catch a glimpse of him in his too-brightly lighted room, sitting hour after hour staring at the portieres--as if there was something behind them, when there was nothing behind them except an old hat and coat and s.h.i.+rt. She looked every morning.

But he paid his rent regularly. He left in the morning regularly and always returned at eight o'clock. He was an ideal roomer--except that there never is an ideal roomer--but Mrs. Balmer couldn't stand his lights and his watching the portieres. It frightened her.

Screams sometimes sound in a rooming-house. One night--it was after midnight--Mrs. Balmer woke up. The darkened house seemed filled with noises. A man was screaming.