The Escape of Mr. Trimm

“Well, I know this,” put in little Pinky Gilfoil, who was red-headed, red-freckled and red-tempered: “I'd give my right leg to pull off that Bullard story as a scoop. No, not my right leg—a reporter needs all the legs he's got; but I'd give my right arm and throw in an eye for good measure. It would be the making of a reporter in this town—he'd have 'em all eating out of his hand after that.” He licked his lips. Even the bare thought of the thing tasted pretty good to Pinky.

“Now you're whistling!” chimed Ike Webb. “The fellow who single-handed got that tale would have a job on this paper as long as he lived. The chief would just naturally have to hand him more money. In New York, though, he'd get a big cash bonus besides, an award they call it up there. I'd go anywhere and do anything and take any kind of a chance to land that story as an exclusive—yes, or any other big story.”

To all this the major, it appeared, had been listening, for now he spoke up in a pretty fair imitation of his old impressive manner:

“But, young gentlemen—pardon me—do you seriously think—any of you—that any honorarium, however large, should or could be sufficient temptation to induce one in your—in our profession—to give utterance in print to a matter that he had learned, let us say, in confidence? And suppose also that by printing it he brought suffering or disgrace upon innocent parties. Unless one felt that he was serving the best ends of society—unless one, in short, were actuated by the highest of human motives—could one afford to do such a thing? And, under any circumstances, could one violate a trust—could one violate the common obligation of a gentleman's rules of deportment–”

“Major,” broke in Ike Webb earnestly, “the way I look at it, a reporter can't afford too many of the luxuries you're mentioning. His duty, it seems to me, is to his paper first and the rest of the world afterward. His paper ought to be his mother and his father and all his family. If he gets a big scoop—no matter how he gets it or where he gets it—he ought to be able to figure out some way of getting it into print. It's not alone what he owes his paper—it's what he owes himself. Personally I wouldn't be interested for a minute in bringing the person that killed Rod Bullard to justice—that's not the point. He was a pretty shady person—Rod Bullard. By all accounts he got what was coming to him. It's the story itself that I'd want.”

“Say, listen here, major,” put in Pinky Gilfoil, suddenly possessed of a strengthening argument; “I reckon back yonder in the Civil War, when you all got the smoke of battle in your noses, you didn't stop to consider that you were about to make a large crop of widows and orphans and cause suffering to a whole slue of innocent people that'd never done you any harm! You didn't stop then, did you? I'll bet you didn't—you just sailed in! It was your duty—the right thing to do—and you just went and did it. 'War is hell!' Sherman said. Well, so is newspaper work hell—in a way. And smelling out a big story ought to be the same to a reporter that the smoke of battle is to a soldier. That's right—I'll leave it to any fellow here if that ain't right!” he wound up, forgetting in his enthusiasm to be grammatical.

It was an unfortunate simile to be making and Pinky should have known better, for at Pinky's last words the old major's mild eye widened and, expanding himself, he brought his chair legs down to the floor with a thump.

“Ah, yes!” he said, and his voice took on still more of its old ringing quality. “Speaking of battles, I am just reminded, young gentlemen, that tomorrow is the anniversary of the fall of Vicksburg. Though Northern-born, General Pemberton was a gallant officer—none of our own Southern leaders was more gallant—but it has always seemed to me that his defense of Vicksburg was marked by a series of the most lamentable and disastrous mistakes. If you care to listen, I will explain further.” And he squared himself forward, with one short, plump hand raised, ready to tick off his points against Pemberton upon his fingers.

By experience dearly bought at the expense of our ear-drums, the members of the Evening Press staff knew what that meant; for as you already know, the major's conversational specialty was the Civil War—it and its campaigns. Describing it, he made even war a commonplace and a tiresome topic. In his hands an account of the hardest fought battle became a tremendously uninteresting thing. He weeded out all the thrills and in their places planted hedges of dusty, deadly dry statistics. When the major started on the war it was time to be going. One by one the youngsters got up and slipped out. Presently the major, booming away like a bell buoy, became aware that his audience had dwindled. Only Ike Webb remained, and Ike was getting upon his feet and reaching for the peg where his coat swung.

“I'm sorry to leave you right in the middle of your story, major; but, honestly, I've got to be going,” apologized Ike. “Good night, and don't forget this, major”—Ike had halted at the door—“when a big story comes your way freeze to it with both hands and slam it across the plate as a scoop. Do that and you can give 'em all the laugh. Good night again—see you in the morning, major!”

He grinned to himself as he turned away. The major was a mighty decent, tender-hearted little old scout, a gentleman by birth and breeding, even if he was down and out and dog-poor. It was a shame that Devore kept him skittering round on little picayunish jobs—running errands, that was really what it was. Still, at that, the old major was no reporter and never would be. He wouldn't know a big story if he ran into it on the big road—it would have to burst right in his face before he recognized it. And even then the chances were that he wouldn't know what to do with it. It was enough to make a fellow grin.

Deserted by the last of his youthful compatriots—which was what he himself generally called them—the major lingered a moment in heavy thought. He glanced about the cluttered city room, now suddenly grown large and empty. This was the theater where his own little drama of unfitness and failure and private mortification had been staged and acted. It had run nearly a month now, and a month is a long run for a small tragedy in a newspaper office or anywhere else. He shook his head. He shook it as though he were trying to shake it clear of a job lot of old-fashioned, antiquated ideals—as though he were trying to make room for newer, more useful, more modern conceptions. Then he settled his aged and infirm slouch hat more firmly upon his round-domed skull, straightened his shoulders and stumped out.

At the second turning up the street from the office an observant onlooker might have noticed a small, an almost imperceptible change in the old man's bearing. There was not a sneaky bone in the major's body—he walked as he thought and as he talked, in straight lines; but before he turned the corner he glanced up and down the empty sidewalk in a quick, furtive fashion, and after he had swung into the side street a trifle of the steam seemed gone from his stiff-spined, hard-heeled gait. It ceased to be a strut; it became a plod.

The street he had now entered was a badly lighted street, with long stretches of murkiness between small patches of gas-lamped brilliance. By day the houses that walled it would have showed themselves as shabby and gone to seed—the sort of houses that second cousins move into after first families have moved out. Two-thirds of the way along the block the major turned in at a sagged gate. He traversed a short walk of seamed and decrepit flagging, where tufts of rank grass sprouted between the fractures in the limestone slabs, and mounted the front porch of a house that had cheap boarding house written all over it.

When the major opened the front door the tepid smell that gushed out to greet him was the smell of a cheap boarding house too, if you know what I mean—a spilt-kerosene, boiled-cabbage, dust-in-the-corners smell. Once upon a time the oilcloth upon the floor of the entry way had exhibited a vivid and violent pattern of green octagons upon a red and yellow background, but that had been in some far distant day of its youth and freshness. Now it was worn to a scaly, crumbly color of nothing at all, and it was frayed into fringes at the door and in places scuffed clear through, so that the knot-holes of the naked planking showed like staring eyes.

Standing just inside the hall, the major glanced down first at the floor and then up to where in a pendent nub a pinprick of light like a captive lightning-bug flickered up and down feebly as the air pumped through the pipe; and out of his chest the major fetched a small sigh. It was a sigh of resignation, but it had loneliness in it too. Well, it was a come-down, after all these peaceful and congenial years spent among the marble-columned, red-plushed glories of the old Gaunt House, to be living in this place.

The major had been here now almost a month. Very quietly, almost secretly, he had come hither when he found that by no amount of stretching could his pay as a reporter on the Evening Press be made to cover the cost of living as he had been accustomed to live prior to that disastrous day when the major waked up in the morning to find that all his inherited investments had vanished over night—and, vanishing so, had taken with them the small but sufficient income that had always been ample for his needs.

In that month the major had seen but one or two of his fellow lodgers, slouching forms that passed him by in the gloom of the half-lighted hallways or on the creaky stairs. His landlady he saw but once a week—on Saturday, which was settlement day. She was a forlorn, gray creature, half blind, and she felt her way about gropingly. By the droop in her spine and by the corners of her lips, permanently puckered from holding pins in her mouth, a close observer would have guessed that she had been a seamstress before her eyes gave out on her and she took to keeping lodgers. Of the character of the establishment the innocent old major knew nothing; he knew that it was cheap and that it was on a quiet by-street, and for his purposes that was sufficient.

He heaved another small sigh and passed slowly up the worn steps of the stairwell until he came to the top of the house. His room was on the attic floor, the middle room of the three that lined the bare hall on one side. The door-knob was broken off; only its iron center remained. His fingers slipped as he fumbled for a purchase upon the metal core; but finally, after two attempts, he gripped it and it turned, admitting him into the darkness of a stuffy interior. The major made haste to open the one small window before he lit the single gas jet. Its guttery flare exposed a bed, with a thin mattress and a skimpy cover, shoved close up under the sloping wall; a sprained chair on its last legs; an old horsehide trunk; a shaky washstand of cheap yellow pine, garnished forth with an ewer and a basin; a limp, frayed towel; and a minute segment of pale pink soap.

Major Stone was in the act of removing his coat when he became aware of a certain sound, occurring at quick intervals. In the posture of a plump and mature robin he cocked his head on one side to listen; and now he remembered that he had heard the same sound the night before, and the night before that. These times, though, he had heard it intermittently and dimly, as he tossed about half awake and half asleep, trying to accommodate his elderly bones to the irregularities of his hot and uncomfortable bed. But now he heard it more plainly, and at once he recognized it for what it was—the sound of a woman crying; a wrenching succession of deep, racking gulps, and in between them little moaning, panting breaths, as of utter exhaustion—a sound such as might be distilled from the very dregs of a grief too great to be borne.

He looked about him, his eyes and ears searching for further explanation of this. He had it. There was a door set in the cross-wall of his room—a door bolted and nailed up. It had a transom over it and against the dirty glass of the transom a light was reflected, and through the door and the transom the sound came. The person in trouble, whoever it might be, was in that next room—and that person was a woman and she was in dire distress. There was a compelling note in her sobbing.

Undecided, Major Stone stood a minute rubbing his nose pensively with a small forefinger; then the resolution to act fastened upon him. He slipped his coat back on, smoothed down his thin mane of reddish gray hair with his hands, stepped out into the hall and rapped delicately with a knuckled finger upon the door of the next room. There was no answer, so he rapped a little harder; and at that a sob checked itself and broke off chokingly in the throat that uttered it. From within a voice came. It was a shaken, tear-drained voice—flat and uncultivated.

“Who's there?” The major cleared his throat. “Is it a woman—or a man?” demanded the unseen speaker without waiting for an answer to the first question.

“It is a gentleman,” began the major—“a gentleman who–”

“Come on in!” she bade him—“the door ain't latched.”

And at that the major turned the knob and looked into a room that was practically a counterpart of his own, except that, instead of a trunk, a cheap imitation-leather suitcase stood upright on the floor, its sides bulging and strained from over-packing. Upon the bed, fully dressed, was stretched a woman—or, rather, a girl. Her head was just rising from the crumpled pillow and her eyes, red-rimmed and widely distended, stared full into his.

What she saw, as she sat up, was a short, elderly man with a solicitous, gentle face; the coat sleeves were turned back off his wrists and his linen shirt jutted out between the unfastened upper buttons and buttonholes of his waistcoat. What the major saw was a girl of perhaps twenty or maybe twenty-two—in her present state it was hard to guess—with hunched-in shoulders and dyed, stringy hair falling in a streaky disarray down over her face like unraveled hemp.

It was her face that told her story. Upon the drawn cheeks and the drooped, woful lips there was no dabbing of cosmetics now; the professional smile, painted, pitiable and betraying, was lacking from the characterless mouth, yet the major—sweet-minded, clean-living old man though he was—knew at a glance what manner of woman he had found here in this lodging house. It was the face of a woman who never intentionally does any evil and yet rarely gets a chance to do any good—a weak, indecisive, commonplace face; and every line in it was a line of least resistance.

That then was what these two saw in each other as they stared a moment across the intervening space. It was the girl who took the initiative.

“Are you one of the police?” Then instantly on the heels of the query: “No; I know better'n that—you ain't no police!”

Her voice was unmusical, vulgar and husky from much weeping. Magically, though, she had checked her sobbing to an occasional hard gulp that clicked down in her throat.

“No, ma'am,” said Major Stone, with a grave and respectful courtesy, “I am not connected with the police department. I am a professional man—associated at this time with the practice of journalism. I have the apartment or chamber adjoining yours and, accidentally overhearing a member of the opposite sex in seeming distress, I took it upon myself to offer any assistance that might lie within my power. If I am intruding I will withdraw.”

“No,” she said; “it ain't no intrusion. I wisht, please, sir, you'd come in jest a minute anyway. I feel like I jest got to talk to somebody a minute. I'm sorry, though, if I disturbed you by my cryin'—but I jest couldn't help it. Last night and the night before—that was the first night I come here—I cried all night purty near; but I kept my head in the bedclothes. But tonight, after it got dark up here and me layin' here all alone, I felt 's if I couldn't stand it no longer. Honest, I like to died! Right this minute I'm almost plum' distracted.”

The major advanced a step.

“I assure you I deeply regret to learn of your unhappiness,” he said. “If you desire it I will be only too glad to summon our worthy landlady, Miss—Miss–” he paused.

“Miss La Mode,” she said, divining—“Blanche La Mode—that's my name. I come from Indianapolis, Indiana. But please, mister, don't call that there woman. I don't want to see her. For a while I didn't think I wanted to see nobody, and yit I've known all along, from the very first, that sooner or later I'd jest naturally have to talk to somebody. I knew I'd jest have to!” she repeated with a kind of weak intensity. “And it might jest as well be you as anybody, I guess.”

She sat up on the side of the bed, dangling her feet, and subconsciously the major took in fuller details of her attire—the cheap white slippers with rickety, worn-down high heels; the sleazy stockings; the over-decorated skirt of shabby blue cloth; the soiled and rumpled waist of coarse lace, gaping away from the scrawny neck, where the fastenings had pulled awry. Looped about her throat and dangling down on her flat breast, where they heaved up and down with her breathing, was a double string of pearls that would have been worth ten thousand dollars had they been genuine pearls. A hand which was big-knuckled and thin held a small, moist wad of handkerchief. About her there was something unmistakably bucolic, and yet she was town-branded, too, flesh and soul. Major Stone bowed with the ceremonious detail that was a part of him.

“My name, ma'am, is Stone—Major Putnam Stone, at your service,” he told her.

“Yes, sir,” she said, seeming not to catch either his name or his title. “Well, mister, I'm goin' to tell you something that'll maybe surprise you. I ain't goin' to ast you not to tell anybody, 'cause I guess you will anyhow, sooner or later; and it don't make much difference if you do. But seems's if I can't hold in no longer. I guess maybe I'll feel easier in my own mind when I git it all told. Shet that door—jest close it—the lock is broke—and set down in that chair, please, sir.”

The major closed the latchless door and took the one tottery chair. The girl remained where she was, on the side of her bed, her slippered feet dangling, her eyes fixed on a spot where there was a three-cornered break in the dirty-gray plastering.

“You know about Rodney G. Bullard, the lawyer, don't you?—about him bein' found shot day before yistiddy evenin' in the mouth of that alley?” she asked.

“Yes, ma'am,” he said. “Though I was not personally acquainted with the man himself, I am familiar with the circumstances you mention.”

“Well,” she said, with a sort of jerk behind each word, “it was me that done it!”

“I beg your pardon,” he said, half doubting whether he had heard aright, “but what was it you said you did?”

“Shot him!” she answered—“I was the one that shot him—with this thing here.” She reached one hand under the pillow and drew out a short-barreled, stubby revolver and extended it to him. Mechanically he took it, and thereafter for a space he held it in his hands. The girl went straight on, pouring out her sentences with a driven, desperate eagerness.

“I didn't mean to do it, though—God knows I didn't mean to do it! He treated me mighty sorry—it was lowdown and mean all the way through, the way he done me—but I didn't mean him no real harm. I was only aimin' to skeer him into doin' the right thing by me. It was accidental-like—it really was, mister! In all my life I ain't never intentionally done nobody any harm. And yit it seems like somebody's forever and a day imposin' on me!” She quavered with the puny passion of her protest against the world that had bruised and beaten her as with rods.

Shocked, stunned, the major sat in a daze, making little clucking sounds in his throat. For once in his conversational life he couldn't think of the right words to say. He fumbled the short pistol in his hands.

“I'm goin' to tell you the whole story, jest like it was,” she went on in her flat drone; and the words she spoke seemed to come to him from a long way off. “That there Rodney Bullard he tricked me somethin' shameful. He come to the town where I was livin' to make a speech in a political race, and we got acquainted and he made up to me. I was workin' in a hotel there—one of the dinin' room help. That was two years ago this comin' September. Well, the next day, when he left, he got me to come 'long with him. He said he'd look after me. I liked him some then and he talked mighty big about what he was goin' to do for me; so I come with him. He told me that I could be his–” She hesitated.

“His amanuensis, perhaps,” suggested the old man.

“Which?” she said. “No; it wasn't that way—he didn't say nothin' about marryin' me and I didn't expect him to. He told me that I should be his girl—that was all; but he didn't keep his word—no, sir; right from the very first he broke his word to me! It wasn't more'n a month after I got here before he quit comin' to see me at all. Well, after that I stayed a spell longer at the house where I was livin' and then I went to another house—Vic Magner's. You know who she is, I reckin?”