Stories from Everybody's Magazine Part 46

Down in Jerusalem they slew a man, Or G.o.d . . . it may be that he was a G.o.d . . .

Those mad, wild Jews whom Pontius Pilate rules.

Thou knowest Pilate, Claudia--a vain man, Too weak to govern such a howling horde As those same Jews. This man they crucified.

I knew naught of him--never heard his name Until the day they dragged him to his death; Then all tongues wagged about him and his deeds; Some said that he had claimed to be their king, Some that he had blasphemed their deity.

'Twas certain he was poor and meanly born, No warrior he, nor hero; and he taught Doctrines that surely would upset the world; And so they killed him to be rid of him.

Wise, very wise, if he were only man, Not quite so wise if he were half a G.o.d!

I know that strange things happened when he died . . .

There was a darkness and an agony, And some were vastly frightened--not so I!

What cared I if that mob of reeking Jews Had brought a nameless curse upon their heads?

_I_ had no part in that bloodguiltiness.

At least he died; and some few friends of his Took him and laid him in a garden tomb.

A watch was set about the sepulchre, Lest these, his friends, should hide him and proclaim That he had risen as he had foretold.

Laugh not, my Claudia. _I_ laughed when I heard The prophecy; I would I had not laughed!

I Maximus, was chosen for the guard, With all my trusty fellows.

Pilate knew I was a man who had no foolish heart Of softness all unworthy of a man!

I was a soldier who had slain my foes; My eyes had looked upon a tortured slave As on a beetle crushed beneath my tread; I gloried in the splendid strife of war, l.u.s.ting for conquest; I had won the praise Of our stern general on a scarlet field, Red in my veins the warrior pa.s.sion ran, For I had sprung from heroes, Roman born!

That second night we watched before the tomb; My men were merry; on the velvet turf, Bestarred with early blossoms of the spring, They diced with jest and laughter; all around The moonlight washed us like a silver lake, Save where that silent, sealed sepulchre Was hung with shadow as a purple pall.

A faint wind stirred among the olive boughs . . .

Methinks I hear the sighing of that wind In all sounds since, it was so dumbly sad; But as the night wore on it died away, And all was deadly stillness; Claudia, That stillness was most awful, as if some Great heart had broken and so ceased to beat!

I thought of many things, but found no joy In any thought, even the thought of thee; The moon waned in the west and sickly grew, Her light sucked from her in the breaking dawn . . .

Never was dawn so welcome as that pale, Faint glimmer in the cloudless, brooding sky!

Claudia, how may I tell what came to pa.s.s?

I have been mocked at, when I told the tale, For a crazed dreamer punished by the G.o.ds Because he slept on guard; but mock not THOU!

I could not bear it if thy lips should mock The vision dread of that Judean morn.

Sudden the pallid east was all aflame With radiance that beat upon our eyes As from the noonday sun; and then we saw Two shapes that were as the immortal G.o.ds Standing before the tomb; around me fell My men as dead; but I, though through my veins Ran a cold tremor never known before, Withstood the shock and saw one s.h.i.+ning shape Roll back the stone; the whole world seemed ablaze, And through the garden came a rus.h.i.+ng wind Thundering a paean as of victory.

Then that dead man came forth . . . oh, Claudia, If thou couldst but have seen the face of him!

Never was such a conqueror! Yet no pride Was in it . . . naught but love and tenderness, Such as we Romans scoff at, and his eyes Bespake him royal. Oh, my Claudia, Surely he was no Jew but very G.o.d!

Then he looked full upon me; I had borne Much staunchly, but that look I could not bear!

What man may front a G.o.d and live? I fell p.r.o.ne, as if stricken by a thunderbolt; And though I died not, somewhat of me died That made me man; when my long stupor pa.s.sed I was no longer Maximus . . . I was A weakling with a piteous woman soul, All strength and pride, joy and ambition gone!

My Claudia, dare I tell thee what foul curse Is mine because I looked upon a G.o.d?

I care no more for glory; all desire For honor and for strife is gone from me, All eagerness for war. I only care To help and save bruised beings, and to give Some comfort to the weak and suffering; I cannot even hate those Jews; my lips Speak harshly of them, but within my heart I only feel compa.s.sion; and I love All creatures, to the vilest of the slaves, Who seem to me as brothers. Claudia, Scorn me not for this weakness; it will pa.s.s-- Surely 'twill pa.s.s in time and I shall be Maximus strong and valiant once again, Forgetting that slain G.o.d. And yet . . .and yet . . . .

He looked as one who could not be forgot!

Vol. XXIII December 1910 No. 6

THE MAN WHO MADE GOOD {pages 784-799}

By ARTHUR STRINGER

AUTHOR OF "THE SILVER POPPY," "PHANTOM HOUSE," ETC.

Trotter opened his door and listened. Then he tiptoed out to the stairhead. The coast seemed clear. The house lay beneath him as still as a well. It was nothing more than a three-tiered cavern of quietness.

So he crept back to his own room and closed and locked the door after him. It was a top-floor rear, where a hip-roof gave his back wall the rake of a Baltimore buckeye, and a dismantled electric call-bell bore ignominious testimony to the fact that his skyey abode had once been a servant's quarters.

But the room was quiet, and, what counted more, it was cheap. The thought of ever being put out of it terrified the frugal-minded Trotter. For seven weary months he had wandered about New York's skyline, looking for just the right corner, as peevish as a cow-bird looking for a copse nest.

Yet Mrs. Teetzel's laws were adamantine. Her rule was as Procrustean as her thin-lashed eyes were inquisitive. She daily inspected both her lavishly distributed lambrequins and her "gentleman roomers'" mail, with an occasional discreet excursion into their unlocked trunks. Cooking in a bedroom was as illicit as private laundry work in the second-floor bathtub. A young Toronto poet who had learned the trick of b.u.t.tering an envelope and in it neatly s.h.i.+rring an egg over a gas jet was first reminded that he was four weeks behind in his rent and then sadly yet firmly ejected from the top-floor skylight room.

So Trotter, once back in his own quarters, moved about with a caution not untouched with apprehension. Mrs. Teetzel, he knew had a tread that was noiseless. She also had the habit of appearing, in curl-papers, at uncouth moments, as unheralded as an apparition from the other world. And Trotter's conscience was not clear. For months past he had kept secreted in his trunk one of those single-holed gas heaters known as a "hot plate." This he surrept.i.tiously attached to the gas jet, and secretly thereon made coffee and cooked his matutinal hard-boiled egg. There was a thrill of excitement about it, a tang of outlawry, a touch of danger. It took on the romance of a vast hazard. And it also rather suited his purse, since that particular newspaper office which he had journeyed to New York both to augment and to uplift showed no undue haste in receiving him.

His third and last a.s.sault on the Advance office, in fact, had amounted to an unequivocal ejection. Three short questions from the s.h.i.+rt-sleeved autocrat of that benzine-odored bedlam had led to Trotter's undoing. He wasn't expected to know much about newspaper work, but before he came bothering people he ought at least to know a shadow of something about the city he was living in! And the one-time cla.s.s orator of the University of Michigan was calmly and pointedly advised to go and cut his eyeteeth on the coral of adversity. He was disgustedly told to go out and make good, instead of coming round and bothering busy people.

And Trotter went meekly out. But he had not made good.

He drifted hungrily about the great new city, the city that seemed written in a cipher to which he could find no key. He even guardedly shadowed the resentful-eyed Advance reporters on their morning a.s.signments, to get some chance inkling of the magic by which the trick was turned. He wandered about the river front and the s.h.i.+p wharves and the East Side street markets. He nosed inquisitively and audaciously about anarchists' cellars and lodging-houses; he found saloons where for a nickel very palatable lamb stew could be purchased; he located those swing-door corners where the most munificent free lunches were on display; he dipped into halls where Socialistic fire-eaters nightly stilettoed modern civilization; he invaded ginmills where strange and barbaric sailors foregathered and talked. From all this he was not learning Journalism. He was, however, learning New York.

But now he had struck luck--sudden and unlooked for--in the humble creation of "rhyme-ads" for a Sixth Avenue furniture store. So, having his Bohemian young head somewhat turned by his first check of twenty dollars, he had promptly celebrated his return to affluence by as promptly spending a goodly portion of that wealth. He had bidden a cadaverous animal painter named Mershon and two equally hungry-eyed Michiganders yclept Albright to his room with the rakish back wall, where the feast had been a regal if somewhat subdued one.

And now Trotter looked about the room, thoughtfully, and decided it was time to act. All record of this past orgy would have to be wiped out. The window, he knew, was impossible, for already there had been divers complaints as to the mysterious showers of eggsh.e.l.l which day by day fell into the area below.

So Trotter laid several newspapers together. On these outspread newspapers he placed four empty beer bottles, a sardine can, odds and ends of biscuit and zwieback, a well-sc.r.a.ped wooden b.u.t.ter tray, and--what had troubled and haunted him most, from the moment of its purchase in a Sixth Avenue delicatessen store--the lugubrious and clean-picked carca.s.s of a roast turkey.

It had been a fine turkey, and done to a turn. But all along Trotter had been wondering just how he was going to get rid of those telltale bones. At the merriest moments of the feast the question of the corner in which they could be secreted or the aperture out of which they could be thrust had hung over him like a veritable sword of Damocles.

But now he knew there was only one way to solve the problem. And that was to wrap the remains carefully together, tie them up, and make his escape down through the quiet house into the midnight street. There the ever-d.a.m.natory parcel could be casually dropped into a near-by ash barrel or tossed into a refuse can, and he could aimlessly round the block, like a sedentary gentleman enjoying his belated airing.

II

Trotter crept down through the quiet house with all the trepidation of a sneak-thief. His one dread was the apparition of Mrs. Teetzel; she would naturally surmise he was making away with the bedroom stoneware, or the door k.n.o.bs, or even the lead piping.

He felt freer when he had once gained the street. But no peace of mind could be his, he knew, until he had utterly discarded those carefully wrapped turkey bones. It would be easy enough to toss them into an areaway, if the worst came to the worst.

He looked up and down the street for a garbage can. But there was none in sight. So he walked toward the avenue corner, with his parcel under his arm. There he turned south, and at the next corner swung about west again. But the right chance to get rid of his turkey bones had not come. He glanced uneasily about. He suddenly remembered that the police had the habit of holding up belated parcel carriers and inspecting what they carried. So he quickened his steps. But all the while he was covertly on the lookout for his dumping spot.

A moment later he saw a patrolman on the street corner ahead of him. He dreaded the thought of pa.s.sing those scrutinizing eyes.

He eventually decided it would be too risky. So he doubled on his own tracks, rabbit-like, crossing the street and turning north at the next corner. He had had enough of the whole thing. It was getting to be more than a joke. He would s.h.i.+lly-shally no longer, even though he had to toss the cursed thing up on a house step.

He let the parcel slip lower down on his arm, with one finger crooked through the string that tied it together. He was about to fling it into the gloom of a brownstone step shadow when the door above opened and a housemaid in cap and ap.r.o.n thrust a plaintively meowing cat from the portico into the street. Trotter quickened his steps, tingling, abashed, shaken with an inordinate and ridiculous sense of guilt. He felt that he wanted to keep out of the light, that he ought to skulk in the shadows until he was free of the weight on his arm. He hurried on until he became desperate, determined to end the farce at any hazard. So, as he pa.s.sed a building where a house front was being converted into a low-windowed shop face, he dropped the paper package into an abandoned mortar box.

He was startled, a moment later, by a voice calling sharply after him: "Hi, yuh! You've dropped y'ur bundle!"

Trotter turned guiltily about. It was a night watchman. He stepped slowly out to the mortar box as he spoke, and picked up the parcel.

There was nothing for Trotter to do but go back and take it. He mumbled something--he scarcely remembered whether it was a word of explanation or of thanks. But he felt the eye of the night watchman boring through him like a gimlet, and he was glad to edge off and be on his way again.

By this time Trotter could feel the sweat of embarra.s.sment on his tingling body. He began to dramatize ridiculous contingencies. He pictured himself as haled into night court, as cross-examined by domineering and incredulous magistrates, who would send him to the Island as a suspicious person. He began to be haunted by the impression that he was being followed. The parcel became a weight to him, a disheartening and dragging weight. He was now sure he was being followed. He squinted back over his shoulders, only to catch sight of a nocturnal "bill-sniper" placarding vulnerable areas with his lithographed laudations of a vaudeville dancing woman. A child murderer burdened with the body of his victim could not have been more ill at ease, more timorous, more terrified.