Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 198
Mr Greville’s head against the velvet rest let his face look up at the fly papers dangling from the low ceiling: it wore an air of unruffled calm as if he were in bed.
“You’ve had the journalists at you?” he asked, “about the late Mr Kelleg?”
Mr Kratzenstein stood with the lather brush elevated in his hand; he peered at Mr Greville’s face above his glasses, put on another pair and looked at him again.
“Staying in the hotel?” he asked; and to Mr Greville’s question of what hotel, he answered shortly, “Dis is a hotel.” And he added: “So you ain’t stayin’ in the hotel.” He put the lather brush upon Mr Greville’s chin, stayed to reflect a moment, and above his glasses, without moving his head, looked at Don, who, in an agony of solicitude as to Mr Greville’s temper, was sitting against a fly-blown mirror with a red velvet frame, upon a very hard red velvet bench.
“If you ain’d stayin’ in the hotel,” he said, “and if you ain’d read the New York papers, how’d you come to know of me and old man Kelleg?”
“Suppose,” said Mr Greville, with the utmost equanimity, “I’d read the article about you in the magazine a year ago.”
Mr Kratzenstein continued to lather his customer for a full three minutes without speaking. Then he put on his glasses with the gold rims and took up his razor.
“Suppose you had!” he said, and commenced his stropping with an air of a doctor leisurely engaged in operation.
Mr Greville winced his eyes a little under the tickle of the drying lather.
“Suppose then, in addition, that Mr Kelleg’s son, considering the story of the mine, were anxious to make you reparation.”
Mr Kratzenstein waddled slowly from the marble slab to Mr Greville’s head.
“Suppose that too!” he said. Mr Greville took refuge in silence and Mr Kratzenstein shaved. At last he brought out: “What does Don Kelleg know about the mine?” Mr Greville answered that he knew what had appeared in the magazine, and Mr Kratzenstein, who had removed one half the lather, baring Mr Greville’s face to the centre of the chin, came again to a halt, the razor raised in his fat, greyish hand.
“Let’s put it in words,” he said. He removed the rest of the beard and then spoke: “Don Kelleg knows that I was bankrupt for 600 dollars. Don Kelleg knows that I made over the mine in secret to his father to cheat my creditors. Don Kelleg knows that when my bankruptcy was over and I wanted the mine back his father didn’t give it...” He waddled to the basin in the recess of the store, turned on a tap and dipped a towel in water. And suddenly he turned, shaking apparently with fury.
“If Don Collar Kelleg,” he said, “was to come here offering me his charity I’d bat him on the pants as I’ve done fifty times already.”
He waddled swiftly to Mr Greville and upon his motionless, brown face dropped suddenly the towel, that was so hot that Mr Greville’s legs drew themselves up in the chair. He kept the towel pressed down with his hands, and above Mr Greville’s invisible eyes and forehead brought out:
“I’m a free citizen of a free country. I haven’t no use for charity.”
Don dropped his eyes upon the floor.
“Reporters and churnalists and drummers and touts haf bin coming all the week,” he said. “I’m sick of talkin’. I’ve got a house of my own above the Palisades: I’ve got a wife of my own: I’ve got two boys of mine own at College. I don’t want charity.”
He removed the towel from Mr Greville’s face, and waddling back and forward between the basin and the head of his patient with new towels of different temperatures kept up a long monologue in a language that, as he approached agitation, grew more incomprehensible. But it bore itself gradually to Don’s senses that Mr Kratzenstein accepted the fact that his father’s robbing him of the mine was a perfectly legitimate stroke of business: that Mr Kratzenstein had been an adventurer all over the world: that, as he phrased it, he hadn’t gathered no moss to speak of, but that he’d kick in an unpoetical region any man who offered him a penny he hadn’t a right to or couldn’t steal.
“So that that,” Don said, breaking the silence for the first time, “is your last word?”
Kratzenstein was rubbing cold cream, with weighty fingers, into the skin of Mr Greville’s cheeks. He looked at Don askew with a sedate, jocular, heavy manner.
“You ain’d changed much,” he said, and rubbed a little more, with his finger tips. He chuckled in a very oily manner without moving a feature of his heavy, tired face. “D’you suppose I didn’t know you the first moment you came down my steps, Don Collar Kelleg?”
He pulled the towel deliberately from above Mr Greville’s form and wheezily set the chair to its vertical position.
“As you ain’d made me no offer of charity I ain’d got no call to be grouchy. But doan’d you do it! Doan’d you do it!”
He proceeded to enlarge upon what it was to be a citizen of a free country and told Don not to come the Englishman over him. He said he’d never made much dollars and never supposed he would: he’d been a rolling stone. He’d been all over the world from Hamburg to ‘Frisco and back again to N’ York. And there he was. He squared at Don his massive chest and great white waistcoat. His hooked nose, his gold glasses, his black coat and his air of being a specialist whom you might consult as to your ailments, and the slightly truculent gleam in his eyes — all these things carried very weightily the idea that he was not a man you could do anything for. And faced with that “proposition” Don hadn’t a word to say. Mr Greville too was quite silent — there wasn’t any room for action from him. But suddenly an arch look came into Kratzenstein’s grey, flabby features.
“I ain’d hog-proud!” he said. “I’ve just a thousand shares in the Carey Gold Co. They ain’d worth a penny: there’s no gold there and no engines. But if you’re the man your father was you can make those shares go up to four hundred dollars apiece!”
“But,” Don said...
Kratzenstein surveyed him above his glasses, and Don continued:
“If there’s no gold it would be robbing the public!”
Kratzenstein chuckled: he put his hands upon his sides, he put his hands to his face, he pulled off his glasses, and he burst into a volcanic peal of laughter.
“De best... choke... I’ve effer... heard!” he panted. “And from your father’s son!”
He resumed a sudden immobility.
“That’s the only thing I’ll take from you, Mr Don Collar Kelleg,” he said. “You kin do it. Make them shares worth four hundred apiece. It’s what one friend can do for another....”
He wouldn’t, in his view, lose caste in accepting that service.
The episode gave, as it were, the note to all Don’s experience of New York — amongst, at least, that part of the population that was in any way Americanised. As he said to Eleanor and her father at the end of the fortnight they spent in the city: What the population wanted of you was not the abolition of Trusts, it was just the chance to turn worthless stocks into half a million dollars. He wouldn’t have minded if Kratzenstein had asked him to advertise a pomade of his own invention: he would have minded still less if Kratzenstein had asked him to advertise his saloon in each one of the 21,000 papers of the United States. But Kratzenstein had been, as it were, given a wish — as in the old days men were given wishes by favouring gods — and the only wish that his independence had allowed him to accept carried with it the swindling of the whole community.
“Rigging the market! Rigging the market! That’s the note of New York!” he said in his bitterness.
He didn’t, indeed, utter it in haste, though he may have formed the opinion before ever he began his investigations. But he had, at least, the caution to make investigations that took up the greater part of fourteen days, and he had experiences that tended to harden his ideas. His step-mother sent him down from Boston, with the Pullman car that she returned to be at his disposal, a mild, smooth-haired, smooth-faced and very quiet young man who had been his father’s secretary when he travelled. His father’s other secretaries were all working as hard as could be at producing some sort of statement of accounts. The young man was actually a Scotchman, but you couldn’t have told him from a Harvard graduate; his name was Saunders, and Don’s first impulse was to pack him about his business. He was going to destroy all his father’s work: he was going to dismiss all his father’s agents. But the thought came to him that he hadn’t the right to do this. This young man — whose home appeared to be the Pullman, so solely had his duties consisted of attending to Mr Kelleg when he travelled, — this young man, in addition to his payment for service that had undoubtedly been faithful, had established a claim to some sort of a career. It was Don’s duty to satisfy this claim: he couldn’t turn Saunders adrift!
Very happily it turned out that Saunders hadn’t ever had very much to do with the details of Don’s father’s business: his principal function seemed to have been to aid Mr Kelleg in getting about. He had at his fingers’ ends not so much the prices of railway stocks as the contents of all the railway timetables, the disposition of all the lines of rails, the knowledge of what train could be stopped to make way for Mr Kelleg’s “Special” and of what — they were very few — couldn’t. If Mr Kelleg had wanted to rush — as he very frequently did — from Hut, Ma., to New York, N.Y., it had been Saunders’s business to clear all the lines, right across the continent: he had to pull all the wires, have all the trains out of the way, and impress all the railway officials with the sense that to keep Mr Kelleg’s train waiting two minutes was to cause the ruin of that system for ever.
He was, in fact, the king of couriers, and since it was Don’s business to see New York in fourteen days, he was, very exactly, the man to lead Don and his father-in-law about the poorer streets. He did it with absolute efficiency: they visited the negro quarters, they visited the lowest American white quarters; they spent two whole days among the Jews and half a day in the underground passages of the Chinese; they ate incredible dishes in Hungarian restaurants; they saw wild dances in Bosnian cafés; they saw the trolley cars in one of the crosstown streets down by Eleventh Avenue bombarded by brickbats from the house tops; they even heard revolver shots fired from side to side of the street that was half negro and half white. The foul atmospheres gave them bad headaches; the language of the Ward politicians that they interviewed across the zinc counters of their saloons — the language of these huge, obese, hard-voiced men addled their very senses of hearing: the world seemed to Don so horribly brown, so crowded, so foul, so arrogant, so vile, that he hadn’t any eyes at all for the blue, tranquil and light-begemmed nights of the tiny and soaring city.
They were — he and Mr Greville — very efficiently guided, and if Mr Greville saw reason to imagine that a riot between a colony of toughs in a turning off Pearl Street — a riot from which they escaped with a decided sense of danger — if Mr Greville saw reason to believe that this riot had been actually engineered by the efficient Saunders, with the aid of several obese and benevolent policemen and three or four prize-fighters, there wasn’t the least doubt that one man — Don visited him in hospital — was actually killed with a pickaxe. And Don had the comment to make that it showed a horrible social order when you could have men fight and bribe policemen to manage the tumult. If it wasn’t an exhibition of a real tumult he was just as much obliged to Saunders for showing him how it was possible to “arrange” something that, morally considered, was infinitely worse.
The Press, too, filled him with an equal horror. If the papers hadn’t got word of the fact that he was in New York they had got hold of several of his early friends with whom he had studied Art in Paris. And it grieved him more than anything that a man he’d really loved — a man he’d regarded as a genius — should have sold to the New York H — a photograph that Don had given him, together with a string of confidences — including the anecdote of the Master who had told Don that he was a muff — and including the fact that Don was engaged to Eleanor.
The New York H — published indeed a photograph of a well-known London music-hall star artiste labelled: “Photo of Eleanor,” and with a headline all across the page: “Eleanor collars Collar! Richest American potted by British Pauper Portraitist!” And the intimate friend had added three columns of Eleanor’s own conversation.
As Don put it in apologising to her, they would have to expect that sort of thing of the papers. They couldn’t object to the Sunday N — , which replied to the details of the New York H —— — with ten columns of simple inventions about the pair of them. They hadn’t any right to worry about the inventions of New York. What was lamentable was that all the use the United States could make of a man — their former fellow-student — whom they both remembered as a genius, was to set him to betray confidences. They couldn’t use him as an artist: he was starving: they could make use of his dishonourable gossip. But by an odd coincidence a little adventure of Mr Greville found its way into all the New York papers. Mr Greville, in returning from the post-office upon a Broadway trolley, had, by a sort of miracle, found a seat. Next him there had sat a Californian fruit-grower who had insisted on forcing on Mr Greville a huge and red-cheeked apple, adding over and over again:
“Eat it: eat it right now. It’s a peach!”
And Mr Greville, reclining in the palm-filled marble office of the hotel, had taken the apple from the tail-pocket of his frock-coat and had remarked to an interested stranger on the oddness of that locution. And next day all the New York papers were filled with headlines: “British Peer and Peach. Earl of Greville goes one on Adam.” Because Mr Greville had refused to eat an apple.
But if, on the other hand, Don had set out to see the blacknesses, Eleanor had found the good time that Don was so anxious for her to have — the good time that, for his sake, she was quite determined to secure. The train that brought the travelling secretary of Mr Kelleg had brought also his travelling stenographer — a lady called Dubose, half Irish and half Manhattan Dutch. Tall, with a tight, sweet figure, reddish hair, and brownish, golden, shortsighted eyes, Miss Dubose was, Eleanor found, exactly the person to help her in seeing New York. They went to all sorts of places that Eleanor found gay and excellently arranged; they walked with a sense of freedom and delight right from Washington Square to the Art Gallery; they shopped at the hugest shops; they went even with a gay male friend of Miss Dubose to the last big baseball match of the season: they lunched, with the same young friend, in the last-discovered Italian restaurant, where, on broken - backed chairs, in a backyard, beneath strings of washing, they ate little messes of rice and tomatoes and laughed extravagantly.
They spent the evenings — Don and Eleanor alone — in going to innumerable theatres that Don found uniformly vulgar and abject. And Eleanor reminded him that there weren’t two decent pieces ever to be seen in London at once. And when they went with her father to Coney Island by boat — she insisted on it because she was certain that Don was growing ill — she became almost angry because he refused to see how fairy-like was the aspect of New York Bay at night. He couldn’t see it simply because he was so filled with the idea that the illuminated dime-shows to be found in Coney Island itself were imbecile and degrading that he couldn’t see anything at all. The good behaviour, the good order, the cheerfulness, the decorum of the crowd — the things that to her were noticeable — counted to him for nothing: the lights counted for nothing: the pleasure counted for nothing. He couldn’t let himself go: he wandered in the blaze, in the crowd, by her side or by her father’s with a dizzy gloom. This, he said, was the best they could do then! And there wasn’t a trace of refinement, of intellect — even of thought.
And if Eleanor could not, truthfully, contend that there was any trace of thought in watching dazed-looking Indians playing with rattlesnakes, in having a megaphone bellow in your ear that for ten cents you could have your future husband’s name told, in watching innumerable dancers in a diffused blaze of light whirl with set faces to the sound of the most brazen band on earth on a floor that was so much the largest and slipperiest on earth that you couldn’t distinguish objects at its further end — if she couldn’t, in Coney Island, find anything uplifting, she could, when they were in the blue night of the steamer, going back, confess that it had made her contagiously happy to be with so many nice people who themselves were all so happy. It was true that at the Bowery Restaurant, where they had eaten a dinner that was quite better than anything they got at their hotel, served by waiters at least more cheerfully polite than any they had at their hotel, in a crowd that numbered three thousand, the night before a gentleman had gone mad and emptied his revolver, killing three people and escaping entirely. But she remembered that two years before the same thing had happened in the best café in Rome five minutes after she had left it — and poor, bright, luminous, happy Coney Island had been built in a day. And, as she put it, she had been going about with forty thousand people for four hours yet not a single unpleasant word had been uttered to her; it couldn’t, she triumphantly said, have happened anywhere in Europe. She couldn’t even imagine herself doing such a thing.
And where, she asked, when the steamer had put off, could they find anything more really beautiful than that scene! They were, in deep blackness, on a crowded deck, in air so fresh that it was more than comfortable for her father when she insisted on turning up his collar. They were upon smooth, dimpled water, and in the blue-black nothingness of the night, with the heads of the passengers, the funnels and rails silhouetted in a singular effect of silence, they saw the domes, the minarets, the towers, the fountains, existing in lines, in masses, in globes, in flames of fire, with below them a blaze of reflection streaking down the black waters. The stillness, the absolute beauty and the distance made her say:
“It’s taken New York to make that!”
Don groaned, and the voice of a young girl, with a burred, hard accent that she could already distinguish as of New England, uttered a long string of incomprehensible words. “One — two — nine — paper — seven — four — sumach — eighteen — eleven — ninety-one — orange....” And the voice, lowered and confidential, that Eleanor knew to be the girl’s lover’s, corrected her gently from time to time. They sat there in the beneficent coolness surrounded by lovers, and the sound of this little, idiotic ritual — for it was evidently some ritual — filled her with such satisfaction — it was all so appropriate a setting for love and satisfaction — that she half had it in her to add to her:” It’s taken New York to make that!” a rather heated: “And if it were all New York had done, it’s so ideal, for simple people, that New York would be justified of its existence.”
