Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Local Color

Joel Bosler, still in a state of intellectual numbness, watched them as they passed down the street – the Major striding on ahead, the gliding woman ten paces behind him. He had witnessed the same sight perhaps thirty times before. In days to come he was to witness it hundreds of times more; but always he watched it and never grew weary of watching it. Nor did the eyes of the rest of the town weary of watching it.

And so the thing went on.

The years went by. Five of them went by. Ten of them went by. A new generation was growing up, coming into manhood and womanhood. An old generation was thinning out and dying off. The Gaunt House was no longer the best hotel in the city. It was the second best and, before very long, was to be the third best. Tall business houses – six, seven, eight, nine stories tall – shouldered up close to it; and they dwarfed it, making it seem squatty and insignificant, whereas before it had loomed massive and monument-high, dominating the corner and the rest of the block. Once the cobbled road before its doors had clinked to the heel-taps of smart carriage horses. Now it thundered clamorously beneath the broad iron-shod tires of dray and vans.

The old Gresham place, diagonally across the way, looked much as it had always looked; indeed, there was not much about it, exteriorly speaking, to undergo change. Maybe the green mould in the damp, slick walk at its northern side was a little bit greener and a little bit thicker; and maybe, in summer, the promenading snails were a trifle more numerous there. The iron gate, set in the middle breadth of the iron fence, lolled inward upon one rusted hinge, after the fashion of a broken wing. The close-drawn shades in the two lower front windows had faded from a tarnished silver colour to a dulled leaden colour; and one of them – the one on the right-hand side – had pulled away and awry from its fastenings above and was looped down, hanging at a skewed angle behind the dirtied and crusted panes, as though one of the coins had slipped halfway off the dead man’s eyelids. People persistently called it the old Gresham place, naming it so when they pointed it out to strangers and told them the tale of its veiled chatelaine and her earthly mission.

For, you know, Major Foxmaster’s shadow still followed after Major Foxmaster. Long before, these two had been accepted as verities; it might now be said of them that they had become institutional – inevitable fixtures, with orbits permanent and assured in the swing of community life. In the presence of this pair some took a degree of pride, bragging when away from home that they came from the town where so strange a sight might forever be seen, and when at home bringing visitors and chance acquaintances to this corner of the town in order to show it to these others.

Along with this morbid pride in a living tragedy ran a sort of undercurrent of sympathy for its actors. From the beginning there had been pity for the woman who, the better everlastingly to parade her shame, hid her face eternally from the light of day; and in possibly a more limited circle there had been abundant pity for the man as well. Settling down to watch the issue out, the town, from the outset, had respected the unbendable, unbreakable fortitude of the man, and respected, also, the indomitable persistency of the woman.

For a variety of very self-evident reasons no one had ever or would ever meddle in the personal affairs of Major Foxmaster. For reasons that were equally good, though perhaps not so easy to define in words, none meddled with her either. Street gamins feared to jeer her as she passed, without knowing exactly why they feared.

In these ten years the breaks in the strange relationship had been few and short. Once a year, on an average, the Major made short trips back to Virginia, presumably upon business pertaining to his estate and his investments. Such times the woman was not seen abroad. Once, in ’79, for a week, and once again, just following the great blizzard of ’81, she was missed for a few days; and people wondered whether she was ailing or housebound, or what. For those days the Major walked without his shadow. Then the swathed figure reappeared, tracking him about as before.

Time undeniably was working its changed with Major Foxmaster, as with his surroundings. He must be about sixty now; but, seeing him for the first time, you might have been pardoned for setting him down as a man of seventy or thereabouts – he looked it. His shoulders, which formerly he carried squared back so splendidly, were beginning to fold in upon the casing of his ribs. His hair used to be black, shot with white hairs; it was now white, shot with a few black hairs. His back had had a hollow in it; there was a curve in it yet, but the curve was outward instead of inward. When a man’s figure develops convex lines where there used to be concavities, that man is getting on; and the Major plainly was getting on pretty fast. His eyes, which remained dignifiedly and defiantly scornful of all the world, and of all the world might think and might say, nevertheless were filmed over the least bit, so that they lost something of their icy blue keenness. His face, though, with the jaws sinking in upon the shrunken gums and the brows growing shaggier, was as much of a mask as it had ever been.

What was true of Major Foxmaster was seemingly not true of her who followed him. Within the flapping shapelessness of her disguise her figure showed as straight and supple as in the beginning, and her noiseless step was as nimble and quick as ever it had been. And that was a mighty strange thing too. It was as though her shroud of wrappings, which kept the sunshine and the wind off her, kept off age too.

This very same thought came at length into Major Foxmaster’s head. It took lodgment there and sprouted, sending out roots into all the odd corners of his mind. It is not for me to tell why or how he got this notion, or exactly when. It is for me merely to narrate as briefly as may be the progress of the obsession and its consequences.

Another five years passed, and then three, making eight more on top of the first ten. Major Foxmaster was crowding seventy; he looked eighty. Men and women who had been children when he moved out from Virginia were themselves almost face to face with impending middle age and had children of their own growing up, who, in their turn, would hear the story of Major Foxmaster’s shadow and bear it forward into yet another generation. The stone copings above the Gaunt House door were sooty black with the accretions of decades; for this was a soft-coal town, and factories, with tall chimneys that constantly vomited out greasy black smoke, had crept up, taking the old hotel by flank and by rear. The broken shade in the right-hand lower front window of the old Gresham place, across the way, was gone altogether, having parted its rotted fabric from its decayed fastenings; so the bleak, bare face of the house winked with one dead eye and stared with the other.

The crotchety bay mare was long gone to the bone yard. Her hide was chair bottoms and her gristles were glue; and out on the trotting track wealthy young bloods of the town exercised her get and her skittish grand-get. The Major did not drive a harness nag any more – he had a palsy of the hands and a stoop of the spine; but in most regards he adhered to the old habits. He took his daily constitutionals – sometimes alone – except, of course, for the tagging black shape behind him – oftener with the octogenarian Sherwan; and of evenings he played his poker games at the Kenilworth Club, which, after the way of ultraconservative clubs, stood fast on its original site, even though the neighbourhood about it was so distressfully altered. His heels had quit ringing against the sidewalk; instead, his legs lifted tremulously and his feet felt for a purchase on the earth when he set them down.

His face was no longer chipped grey flint; it was a chalk-white, with deep lines in it. The gold-headed cane of ebony wood, which he carried always, had ceased to be an ornament to his gait and had become a necessary prop to his step. His jaws sagged in until there were deep recesses at the corners of his mouth; and there, in those little hollow places, the spittle would accumulate in tiny patches. Possibly, by reason of the bleary casts that had overspread them, his eyes – still the faithfully inscrutable peepholes of his brain – gave no betrayal of the racking thoughts behind them. They were racking thoughts too. The delusion was a mania now – a besetting mania, feeding on silence and isolation, colouring and tincturing all the processes of his intellect.

By years – so he reasoned it out with himself in every waking hour – by years, she who bided within that shuttered house over the way was his age, or near it. By rights, her draped form should be as shrunken and warped as his own. By rights, the face behind that thick black veil should be as old as his, and bleached, moreover, to a corpsey paleness. Yet the furtive glances he stole over his shoulder told him that the figure behind him moved as alertly erect as ever it had; that its movements had the same sure and silent swiftness.

So that, after a while, Major Foxmaster began to think things that no entirely sane man has any business thinking. He began to say to himself that now he had solved the secret which, all these years, had been kept from his ken. A curse had been put upon him – that was it; that must be it! Behind that veil was no face old and sunken and wasted as his was, but, instead, a young, plump face, with luminous grey eyes set in it, and a sweet, full mouth, and about it wavings of lustrous, rich brown hair – the face of the girl he once loved as she looked in the days before he quit loving her.

He held up his own hands before his watery eyes. They were trembly, wrinkled hands, gnarled in their knuckles, corded on their backs. They were the colour of scorched leather – the texture of it too. But hers must be the plump little white hands he remembered, with rosy-pink palms and bright, pointed nails. Before a long mirror in his dressing room he studied himself – studied his bowed back and his hunching shoulders and his shaky shanks – and all. Her figure, inside its flapping black draperies, was straight as an arrow; her head poised itself firmly upright on her shoulders. That much at least he knew; so if that much were true, why was not the rest of it true too?

It was not fair! According to his lights he had fought out the fight with only such weapons as Nature and his own will gave him; but the Supreme Handicapper had stacked the cards against him. He was bound to lose the long, long race. He could not last much longer. He could feel age tugging at every flabby muscle; infirmity was forever fingering his tissues, seeking the most vulnerable spot at which to strike in at him.

He would lie down and die. And not until then – not until the last rattle of breath had scaped out of his collapsing windpipe; not until she, still triumphantly active and alert and youthful, still cloaked and gloved and hooded, had followed his sapped, empty shell to the graveyard – would she surrender and shrivel into her rightful semblance, growing old and feeble in an hour or in a day. It was not fair – this conjury business! From the beginning he never had a chance to win. All the days of his manhood he had walked with a living nightmare. Why, in dying, should he be doomed to point the moral of a living ghost tale?

First he told himself it could not be true; that it was a hideous imagination born of his broodings. This was the fag-end of the nineteenth century in which he lived, when supernatural events did not happen. Then he told himself it must be true – the testimony before his eyes proved the fact of what he could not see. Then something happened which, as far as Major Foxmaster was concerned, settled the issue.

On a winter night, after rough weather, the Major came feebly out of the Kenilworth Club, groping his way and muttering to himself. This habit of muttering to himself was one that had come on him just lately.

There were patches of ice upon the sidewalk, and the wind, like a lazy housewife, had dusted the snow back into corners and under projections. Between the porticoes of the doorway his foot slipped on one of these little ice patches. He threw out his gloved left hand to catch at some support and his fingers closed on her black-clad arm, where she had drawn herself into the shelter and shadow of the door-arch to await his appearance.

For the first time in nearly fifty years he touched her.

He jerked his hand back and fled away at a staggering, crippling run; and, as he ran to hide himself within his rooms, in panting gulps he blasphemed the name of his Maker; for to his feel her flesh, through the thick cloth sleeve on her arm, had seemed to him to be as firm and plump as it had felt when he was twenty-two and she was twenty. The evidence was complete.

All through the next day he kept himself behind closed doors, wrestling with his torments; but in the evening old Sherwan came for him and he dressed himself. They started out together, a doddering, tottering twain; suggesting, when they halted for a moment to rest at the foot of the office stairs, a pair of grey locust husks from which age, spider-fashion, had sucked out all the rich juices of health and strength; suggesting, when they went on again, a pair of crawling sick beetles which, though sick, still could crawl a little.

Side by side they crossed the tarnished, shabby old lobby, with its clumpings of dingy grey pillars and its red-plush sofa seats, and, in the centre, its rotunda mounting to the roof, up floor by floor, in spiral rings that in perspective graduated smaller and smaller, like an inverted funnel; and side by side they issued forth from beneath the morguelike copings of the outer door and descended the Gaunt House steps – Major Foxmaster feeling ahead of him with his cane, and Judge Sherwan patting his left breast with his open hand – just as Policeman Joel Bosler, now dead and gone, had seen them do upon many another such evening as this. Promptly and inevitably befell another thing, then, which likewise the late deceased Bosler had witnessed times without number.

From the darker space beyond the corner lamp-post, out into the gassy yellow circle of radiance, appeared the straight, gliding black form, advancing on silent, padded feet and without visible effort, relentlessly to follow after them wheresoever they might choose to go.

So, then, at sight of the familiar apparition the icy shell of half a century thawed and broke to bits and was washed away in a freshet of agony; and to his one friend, for one moment, Major Foxmaster bared his wrung and tortured soul. He threw down his cane and threw up his arms.

“Sherwan,” he shrieked out, “I can’t stand it any longer – I can’t stand it! It’s killing me! I must look at the face – I must know!”

With a sudden frenzied energy he darted at the cloaked shape. It hesitated, shrinking back from his onward rush as though daunted; but he fixed his clutching fingers in the crêpe veil and tore it in twisted rags from the front of its wearer, and the light shone full on the face revealed beneath the close black hood of the bonnet. … He gave one blubbery, slobbered, hideous yell and fell flat at the base of the lamp-post.

Old Sherwan saw the face too. Swollen and strengthened with senile rage, he seized the figure by both its arms and shook it.

“You hussy! You wench! You Jezebel! You she-devil!” he howled at the top of his cracked voice, and rocked his prisoner to and fro. “What’s this? What does this mean, you hell spawn?”

A dart of pain nipped at his diseased heart then, and closed his throat. For a moment, without words, they struggled together. With a heave of her supple arms she broke his hold. She shoved him off from her and reared back on her heels, breathing hard – a full-blooded negress, with chalky popeyes and thick, purplish lips that curled away in a wide snarl from the white teeth, and a skin that was blacker than sin.

“Whut does hit mean?” she answered; and, through stress of fear and mounting hope and exultation, her voice rose to a camp-meeting shout:

“I tells you whut hit means: Hit means Ise Minnie Brownell, Ole Miss’ cook. Hit means Ole Miss is been daid ’mos’ fo’teen years – ever sence she taken down sick endurin’ de big blizzard. Hit means dat w’en she lay a-dyin’ she put de promise onto me to bury her in secret; an’ den to put on her clo’es an’ to foller, walkin’ behine dat man, daytime an’ nighttime, twell he died. Dat’s whut hit means!”

She sought to peer past him and her tone sharpened down, fine and keen:

“Is he daid? Oh, bless de good Lawd A’mighty! Is he daid? ’Cause, ef he’s daid, me an’ Hennery, w’ich is my lawful wedded husban’, we kin go back to Furginia an’ claim de prop’ty dat Ole Miss lef in trust to come to me w’en I kin prove he’s daid. Oh, look, please, suh, mister, and see ef he ain’t dead?”

Old Sherwan ran to the lamp-post and dropped down on both his knees, and shook his friend by the shoulders.

“Foxmaster!” he called. “Foxmaster, you’re free! You’re free! I tell you, you’re free! Foxmaster, look at me! Foxmaster, do you hear me? You’re free, I tell you!”

But the Major did not hear him. The Major was flat on his back, with his arms outstretched and the fingers of both his hands gripped in the rags of a black crêpe veil; and at the corners of his mouth the little patches of spittle bubbles were drying up. The Major would never hear anything again in this world.

CHAPTER V
THE EYES OF THE WORLD

If there were a hundred men in a crowd and Chester K. Pilkins was there he would be the hundredth man. I like that introduction. If I wrote a book about him I doubt whether I could sum up Mr. Pilkins’ personality more completely than already I have done in this the first sentence of this the first paragraph of my tale. Nevertheless, I shall try.

Card-indexing him, so to speak, filling in the dotted lines after the fashion pursued by a candidate for admission to Who’s Whosoever Can, we attain this result: Name? Chester K(irkham) Pilkins; born? certainly; parentage? one father and one mother; lives? only in a way of speaking; married? extensively so; business? better than it was during the panic but not so good as it might be; recreations? reading, writing, arithmetic and the comic supplements; clubs? Prospect Slope Pressing, Montauk Chess, Checkers and Whist, King’s County Civic Reform and Improvement; religion? twice on Sunday, rarely on week-days; politics? whatever is the rule; height? sub-average; weight? less than sub-average; hair? same as eyes; eyes? same as hair; complexion? variable, but inclining to be fair, and warmer in moments of embarrassment; special distinguishing characteristics? Oh, say, what’s the use?

This would apply to Chester K. Pilkins as once he was, not as now he is. For there has been a change. As will develop. But at the time when we begin our study of him Mr. Pilkins resided in a simple and unostentatious manner in Brooklyn, N. Y., on one of those streets which are named for semi-tropical flowering shrubs for the same reason that hunting dogs are named for Greek goddesses and race horses for United States senators and tramp steamers for estimable maiden ladies. In a small, neat house, almost entirely surrounded by rubber plants, he lived with his wife, Mrs. Gertrude Maud Pilkins. This phraseology is by deliberate intent. His wife did not live with him. He lived with her. To have referred to this lady as his better half would be dealing in improper fractions. At the very lowest computation possible, she was his better eight-tenths.

By profession he was an expert bookkeeper, in the employ of a firm doing a large bond and stock brokerage business on the sinful or Manhattan shore of the East River. The tragedy and the comedy, the sordid romance and the petty pathos of Wall Street rolled in an unheeded torrent over his head as he, submerged deep in the pages of his ledgers, sat all day long dotting his i’s and crossing his t’s, adding his columns and finding his totals. Sometimes of evenings he stayed on to do special accounting jobs for smaller concerns in need of his professional services.

Otherwise, when five o’clock came he took off his little green-baize apron, his green eyeshade and his black calico sleeve protectors, slipped on his detachable cuffs, his hat and his coat, took his umbrella in hand, and leaving New York and its wicked, wanton ways behind him, he joined with half a million other struggling human molecules in the evening bridge crush – that same bridge crush of which the metropolis is so justly ashamed and so properly proud – and was presently at home in Brooklyn, which is a peaceful country landscape, pastoral in all its instincts, but grown up quite thickly with brick and mortar. There he gave his evenings to the society of his wife, to the chess problems printed from time to time in the Eagle, and to reading his encyclopedia, which had been purchased on the instalment plan, at the rate of so much down, so much a week. It seemed probable that Mr. Pilkins would finish reading his encyclopedia before he finished paying for it, which is more than most of us can say, however literary our aims and aspirations. He liked to pick up a volume for half an hour or so immediately prior to his retiring. He said it rested him. He had got as far as the middle of the very interesting one named Gib to Jibe. Once in a while, though, the Pilkinses went out in society. That is to say, Mrs. Pilkins went, and took Mr. Pilkins with her.

I would not have you believe from all this that Mr. Pilkins entertained no views of his own on current topics. His convictions upon certain heads were most definite and settled, and on favourable occasions openly he voiced them. Among other things he believed that if somebody would only start up an old-time minstrel show, such as we used to see when we were boys, it would make a fortune; that the newspapers printed a pack of lies every day because they had to have something to fill up their columns; that there was a great deal of grafting going on and something should be done about it right away; that the winters were changing, because of the Gulf Stream or something, so you couldn’t depend on the climate any more; that owing to the high cost of living it was practically impossible to get a good sixty-cent table-d’hôte dinner nowadays; and that Mrs. Pilkins was in many respects a very unusual woman.

She was all of that. Get Gertrude Maud. She looms before us, large and full of figure, majestic of bearing and fair of face, her general aspect indeed a very general aspect. She was competent by inheritance and domineering by instinct. It was common talk in the circle in which Gertrude Maud moved, towing Chester behind her, that she had Bohemian leanings. True, she had never smoked a cigarette in all her blameless life, nor touched her lips to strong drink; nor yet had she patronised studio teas and attended the indoor anarchistic revels of the parlour-radicals established in the neighbourhood of Washington Square. Rather she betrayed her Bohemian trend by what she wore than by what she did.

She was addicted to festooning about her neck large polished beads of the more popular hard woods and upon her bosom plaquelike articles which apparently had originated with a skilled cabinetmaker and joiner. Her wrists and her forearms she adorned with art-work bracelets of hammered metals set with large muddy-looking stones – almost anything that would look well in a collection of geological specimens was, in the eyes of Gertrude Maud, jewelry. Her costumes of state, displayed in connection with these ornamentations culled from the vegetable and mineral kingdoms, were cut square in the neck and extended straight up and down, being ungirthed at the waistline but set off with red and blue edgings, after the style of fancy tea towels. As her woman friends often remarked in tones of admiration, she had never worn stays in her life, and yet just look what a figure she had! Sometimes, the weather being favourable, she wore sandals.

Excelling, as she did, in the social graces, Mrs. Pilkins was greatly in demand for neighbourhood parties. She was an amateur palmist of great note. At a suitable time in the course of the evening’s festivities she would possess herself of the left hand of some gentleman or lady present – usually a gentleman’s hand – and holding it palm upward, she would gently massage its surface and then begin uttering little gasping sounds betokening intense surprise and gratification.

“Do you know, really,” she would say when she had in part recovered, such being the regular formula, “I don’t believe in all my experience I hardly ever saw such an interesting hand?”

Peering close and ever closer she would trace out the past, the present and the future, seeing strange influences coming into the other’s life, and long journeys and dark strangers; and presently, with a startled cry, she would pounce upon the heart line, and then, believe me, she would find out things worth telling! And if the owner of the captive hand chanced to be a young man whose life was so exemplary as to be downright painful, he would endeavour by his air to convey the impression that the fence round the South Flatbush Young Ladies’ Seminary had been builded extra high and extra strong especially on his dangerous account. Hardly could the rest wait to have Mrs. Pilkins read their palms too. And while this went on, Mr. Pilkins would be hanging about on the outskirts of the group, feeling very null and void. Really his only excuse for being there at all was that Gertrude Maud needed some one to get her rubbers off and on and to bring her home.

Naturally, as one adept in the divination of the dearest characteristics of men and women, and also because she was a wife and subject to the common delusions of wives as a class, Mrs. Pilkins felt she knew Chester – felt she could read him like a book. This only goes to show how wrong a woman and a wife can be. For behind the mild and pinkish mask which he showed to her and to creation at large Chester Pilkins nursed unsuspected ambitions, undreamed-of dreams. He hankered with a hankering which was almost a pain to stand for once anyhow before the eyes of the world. Within him a secret fire seethed; he ached and glowed with it, and yet none knew of it. He would have died in his tracks before he voiced his burning desire to any human being, yet constantly it abode with him. He was tired – oh, so tired – of being merely one of the six millions. He craved to be one among the six millions. He peaked and he pined with it.

This longing is commoner probably among city dwellers than among those who live in the smaller settlements of men, and for that there is, as I believe, a good and sufficient reason. In the little community there are no nobodies. Anybody is somebody. But where the multitude is close-packed, nearly anybody is everybody and nearly everybody is anybody. The greater the number within a given space, the fewer are there available for purposes of pomp, prominence and publicity. A few stand out above the ruck; the rest make up the unconsidered mass – mute, inglorious and, except briefly in the census figures, unsung. And Chester K. Pilkins yearned to stand out.

Twice in his life he had thought he was about to attain conspicuousness and be pointed out by men as something other than Mrs. Chester K. Pilkins’ husband. They were narrow escapes, both of them. Because each was such a narrow escape, that made the disappointment all the greater. Once on a rainy, blowy evening, when the narrow gore of Nassau Street where it debouches into Park Row was a mushroom bed of wet, black umbrella tops and the bridge crush at the mouth of the Bridge took on an added frenzy, a taxicab, driven at most unlawful speed, bored through the fringes of the press, knocked a man galley west, and, never checking its gait, fled into the shelter of the L pillars toward Chatham Square and was gone from sight before more than six or eight spectators could get its license numbers wrong.

The man was Chester K. Pilkins. He was butted violently from behind as he fought his way across the asphalt, with his collar turned up against the wet gusts and his thoughts intent on getting a seat aboard the transpontine car. He never had gotten a seat aboard it yet, but there was no telling when he might. Immediately on being struck he was projected some yards through space in a galley-westerly direction, and when he struck he rolled over and over in the mud, greatly to the detriment of a neat black overcoat buttoning under a fly front, and with silk facings upon the lapels, then in its third season of service. Kind hands – very many of them – lifted him up from where he lay with a long scratch on his nose and a passing delusion within his brain that he had taken a long rough trip somewhere and was coming back by slow stages. Sympathetic persons, about equally divided in their opinion as to whether most of his bones were or were not broken, bore him with all gentleness into the drug store in the World Building, propped him against a show case, and packed about him in a dense mass, those good Samaritans in the front row calling upon those behind them to stand back, in heaven’s name, and give him a little air. There a kindly disposed bootblack brushed him off, and a soda-water clerk offered him malted milk with a dash of nerve tonic in it, and a policeman, using a stubby lead pencil, took down his name and address in a little red book, and a blithe young interne came on the tail of an ambulance with a kit of surgical tools in his hand, and presently departed, obviously disappointed to find there was no need of a capital operation to be performed forthwith upon the spot; and, altogether, the victim was made much of. A little later, somewhat shaken and sore but not materially damaged, he rode home – standing up and swaying in the aisle, as was customary – holding with one hand to a strap and with the other at intervals caressing his wounded nose.