by Don Marquis
CHAPTER XV
I made purty good time, and in a couple of days I was in Atlanta. Iknowed the doctor must of gone back into some branch of the medicinegame--the bottles told me that. I knowed it must be something that heneeded some special kind of bottles fur, too, or he wouldn't of had themshipped all that distance, but would of bought them nearer. I seen I wasa dern fool fur rushing off and not inquiring what kind of bottles, so Icould trace what he was into easier.
It's hard work looking fur a man in a good-sized town. I hung aroundhotel lobbies and places till I was tired of it, thinking he mightcome in. And I looked through all the office buildings and read all theadvertisements in the papers. Then the second day I was there the statefair started up and I went out to it.
I run acrost a couple I knowed out there the first thing--it was Wattyand the snake-charmer woman. Only she wasn't charming them now. Her andWatty had a Parisian Models' show. I ast Watty where Dolly was. He sayshe don't know, that Dolly has quit him. By which I guess he means he hasquit her. I ast where Reginald is, and the Human Ostrich. But fromthe way they answered my questions I seen I wasn't welcome none aroundthere. I suppose that Mrs. Ostrich and Watty had met up agin somewheres,and had jest natcherally run off with each other and left theirfamblies. Like as not she had left poor old Reginald with that idioticostrich feller to sell to strangers that didn't know his disposition. Ormebby by now Reginald was turned loose in the open country to shiftfur himself, among wild snakes that never had no human education norexperience; and what chancet would a friendly snake like Reginald havein a gang like that? Some women has jest simply got no conscience at allabout their husbands and famblies, and that there Mrs. Ostrich was oneof 'em.
Well, a feller can be a derned fool sometimes. Fur all my looking aroundI wasted a lot of time before I thought of going to the one natcheralplace--the freight depot of the road them bottles had been shipped by.I had lost a week coming down. But freight often loses more time thanthat. And it was at the freight depot that I found him.
Tickled? Well, yes! Both of us.
"Well, by George," says he, "you're good for sore eyes."
Before he told me how he happened not to of drownded or blowed away oranything he says we better fix up a bit. Which he meant I better. So hebuys me duds from head to heel, and we goes to a Turkish bath place andI puts 'em on. And then we goes and eats. Hearty.
"Now," he says, "Fido Cut-up, how did you find me?"*
I told him about the bottles.
"A dead loss, those bottles," he says. "I wanted some non-refillableones for a little scheme I had in mind, and I had to get them at acertain place--and now the scheme's up in the air and I can't use 'em."
The doctor had changed some in looks in the year or more that had passedsince I saw him floating away in that balloon. And not fur the better.He told me how he had blowed clean acrost Lake Erie in that thereballoon. And then when he got over land agin and went to pull thecord that lets the parachute loose it wouldn't work at first. He jestnatcherally drifted on into the midst of nowhere, he said--miles andmiles into Canada. When he lit the balloon had lost so much gas and wasflying so low that the parachute didn't open out quick enough to domuch floating. So he lit hard, and come near being knocked out fur good.But--
*AUTHOR'S NOTE--Can it be that Danny struggles vaguely to report some reference to FIDUS ACHATES?
that wasn't the worst of it, fur the exposure had crawled into his lungsby the time he found a house, and he got newmonia into them also, andlike to of died. Whilst I was laying sick he had been sick also, onlyhis'n lasted much longer.
But he tells me he has jest struck an idea fur a big scheme. No littleschemes go fur him any more, he says. He wants money. Real money.
"How you going to get it?" I asts him.
"Come along and I'll tell you," he says. "We'll take a walk, and I'llshow you how I got my idea."
We left the restaurant and went along the brag street of that town,which it is awful proud of, past where the stores stops and the housesbegins. We come to a fine-looking house on a corner--a swell place itwas, with lots of palms and ferns and plants setting on the verandahand showing through the windows. And stables back of it; and back ofthe stables a big yard with noises coming from it like they was circusanimals there. Which I found out later they really was, kept fur pets.You could tell the people that lived there had money.
"This," says Doctor Kirby, as we walked by, "is the house that Jacksonbuilt. Dr. Julius Jackson--OLD Doctor Jackson, the man with an idea! Theidea made all the money you smell around here."
"What idea?"
"The idea--the glorious humanitarian and philanthropic idea--of takingthe kinks and curls out of the hair of the Afro-American brother," saysDoctor Kirby, "at so much per kink."
This Doctor Jackson, he says, sells what he calls Anti-Curl to theniggers. It is to straighten out their hair so it will look like whitepeople's hair. They is millions and millions of niggers, and everynigger has millions and millions of kinks, and so Doctor Jackson hasgot rich at it. So rich he can afford to keep that there personal circusmenagerie in his back yard, for his little boy to play with, and manyother interesting things. He must be worth two, three million dollars,Doctor Kirby says, and still a-making it, with more niggers growing upall the time fur to have their hair unkinked. Especially mulattoesand yaller niggers. Doctor Kirby says thinking what a great idea thatAnti-Curl was give him his own great idea. They is a gold mine there, hesays, and Dr. Julius Jackson has only scratched a little off the top ofit, but HE is going to dig deeper.
"Why is it that the Afro-American brother buys Anti-Curl?" he asts.
"Why?" I asts.
"Because," he says, "he wants to be as much like a white man as hepossibly can. He strives to burst his birth's invidious bar, Danny.They talk about progress and education for the Afro-American brother, anduplift and advancement and industrial education and manual trainingand all that sort of thing. Especially we Northerners. But what theAfro-American brother thinks about and dreams about and longs for andprays to be--when he thinks at all--is to be white. Education, to hismind, is learning to talk like a white man. Progress means aping thewhite man. Religion is dying and going to heaven and being a WHITEangel--listen to his prayers and sermons and you'll find that out. He'lldo anything he can, or give anything he can get his Ethiopian grubhookson, for something that he thinks is going to make him more like a whiteman. Poor devil! Therefore the millions of Doctor Jackson Anti-Curl.
"All this Doctor Jackson Anti-Curl has discovered and thought out andacted upon. If he had gone just one step farther the Afro-Americanbrother would have hailed him as a greater man than Abraham Lincoln,or either of the Washingtons, George or Booker. It remains for me,Danny--for US--to carry the torch ahead--to take up the work where theimagination of Doctor Jackson Anti-Curl has laid it down."
"How?" asts I.
"WE'LL PUT UP AND SELL A PREPARATION TO TURN THE NEGROES WHITE!"
THAT was his great idea. He was more excited over it than I ever seenhim before about anything.
It sounded like so easy a way to get rich it made me wonder why no onehad ever done it before, if it could really be worked. I didn't believemuch it could be worked.
But Doctor Kirby, he says he has begun his experiments already, witharsenic. Arsenic, he says, will bleach anything. Only he is kind ofafraid of arsenic, too. If he could only get hold of something thatdidn't cost much, and that would whiten them up fur a little while, hesays, it wouldn't make no difference if they did get black agin. Thishere Anti-Curl stuff works like that--it takes the kinks out fur alittle while, and they come back agin. But that don't seem to hurt thesale none. It only calls fur MORE of Doctor Jackson's medicine.
The doctor takes me around to the place he boards at, and shows me anigger waiter he has been experimenting on. He had paid the nigger'sfine in a police court fur slashing another nigger some with a knife,and kept him from going into the chain-gang. So the nigger agreed hecould use his hide to try dif
ferent kinds of medicines on. He was avelvety-looking, chocolate-coloured kind of nigger to start with, andthe best Doctor Kirby had been able to do so fur was to make a fewlittle liver-coloured spots come onto him. But it was making the niggersick, and the doctor was afraid to go too fur with it, fur Sam might dieand we would be at the expense of another nigger. Peroxide of hiderginhadn't even phased him. Nor a lot of other things we tried onto him.
You never seen a nigger with his colour running into him so deep asSam's did. Sam, he was always apologizing about it, too. You could seeit made him feel real bad to think his colour was so stubborn. He feltlike it wasn't being polite to the doctor and me, Sam did, fur his skinto act that-a-way. He was a willing nigger, Sam was. The doctor, he sayshe will find out the right stuff if he has to start at the letter A andwork Sam through every drug in the hull blame alphabet down to Z.
Which he finally struck it. I don't exactly know what she had in her,but she was a mixture of some kind. The only trouble with her was shedidn't work equal and even--left Sam's face looking peeled and spotty inplaces. But still, in them spots, Sam was six shades lighter.The doctor says that is jest what he wants, that therepassing on-to-the-next-cage-we-have-the-spotted-girocutus-look, as hecalls it. The chocolate brown and the lighter spots side by side, hesays, made a regular Before and After out of Sam's face, and was thebest advertisement you could have.
Then we goes and has a talk with Doctor Jackson himself. Doctor Kirbyhas the idea mebby he will put some money into it. Doctor Jackson wassetting on his front veranda with his chair tilted back, and his feet,with red carpet slippers on 'em, was on the railing, and he was smokingone of these long black cigars that comes each one in a little glasstube all by itself. He looks Sam over very thoughtful, and he says:
"Yes, it will do the work well enough. I can see that. But will itsell?"
Doctor Kirby makes him quite a speech. I never hearn him make a betterone. Doctor Jackson he listens very calm, with his thumbs in thearmholes of his vest, and moving his eyebrows up and down like heenjoyed it. But he don't get excited none. Finally Doctor Kirby says hewill undertake to show that it will sell--me and him will take a tripdown into the black country ourselves and show what can be done with it,and take Sam along fur an object lesson.
Well, they was a lot of rag-chewing. Doctor Jackson don't warm up none,and he asts a million questions. Like how much it costs a bottle to makeit, and what was our idea how much it orter sell fur. He says finallyif we can sell a certain number of bottles in so long a time he will putsome money into it. Only, he says, they will be a stock company, and hewill have to have fifty-one per cent. of the stock, or he won't put nomoney into it. He says if things go well he will let Doctor Kirby bemanager of that company, and let him have some stock in it too, and hewill be president and treasurer of it himself.
Doctor Kirby, he didn't like that, and said so. Said HE was going toorganize that stock company, and control it himself. But Doctor Jacksonsaid he never put money into nothing he couldn't run. So it was settledwe would give the stuff a try-out and report to him. Before we went awayfrom there it looked to me like Doctor Kirby and me was going to workfur this here Doctor Jackson, instead of making all them there millionsfur ourselves. Which I didn't take much to that Anti-Curl man myself; hewas so cold-blooded like.
I didn't like the scheme itself any too well, neither. Not any way youcould look at it. In the first place it seemed like a mean trick on theniggers. Then I didn't much believe we could get away with it.
The more I looked him over the more I seen Doctor Kirby had changedconsiderable. When I first knowed him he liked to hear himself talkingand he liked to live free and easy and he liked to be running aroundthe country and all them things, more'n he liked to be making money.Of course, he wanted it; but that wasn't the ONLY thing he was into theSagraw game fur. If he had money, he was free with it and would helpmost any one out of a hole. But he wasn't thinking it and talking it allthe time then.
But now he was thinking money and dreaming money and talking of nothingbut how to get it. And planning to make it out of skinning them niggers.He didn't care a dern how he worked on their feelings to get it. Hedidn't even seem to care whether he killed Sam trying them drugs ontohim. He wanted MONEY, and he wanted it so bad he was ready and willingto take up with most any wild scheme to make it.
They was something about him now that didn't fit in much with the DoctorKirby I had knowed. It seemed like he had spells when he saw himself howhe had changed. He wasn't gay and joking all the time like he had beenbefore, neither. I guess the doctor was getting along toward fifty yearsold. I suppose he thought if he was ever going to get anything out ofhis gift of the gab he better settle down to something, and quit foolingaround, and do it right away. But it looked to me like he might neverturn the trick. Fur he was drinking right smart all the time. Drinkingmade him think a lot, and thinking was making him look old. He wasmore'n one year older than he had been a year ago.
He kept a quart bottle in his room now. The night after we had took Samto see Doctor Jackson we was setting in his room, and he was hitting itpurty hard.
"Danny," he says to me, after a while, like he was talking out loud tohimself too, "what did you think of Doctor Jackson?"
"I don't like him much," I says.
"Nor I," he says, frowning, and takes a drink. Then he says, after quitea few minutes of frowning and thinking, under his breath like: "He's ablame sight more decent than I am, for all of that."
"Why?" I asts him.
"Because Doctor Jackson," he says, "hasn't the least idea that he ISN'Tdecent, and getting his money in a decent way. While at one time Iwas--"
He breaks off and don't say what he was. I asts him. "I was going tosay a gentleman," he says, "but on reflection, I doubt if I was everanything but a cheap imitation. I never heard a man say that he wasa gentleman at one time, that I didn't doubt him. Also," he goes on,working himself into a better humour again with the sound of his ownvoice, "if I HAD ever been a gentleman at any time, enough of it wouldsurely have stuck to me to keep me out of partnership with a man whocheats niggers."
He takes another drink and says even twenty years of running around thecountry couldn't of took all the gentleman out of him like this, if hehad ever been one, fur you can break, you can scatter the vase if youwill, but the smell of the roses will stick round it still.
I seen now the kind of conversations he is always having with himselfwhen he gets jest so drunk and is thinking hard. Only this time ithappens to be out loud.
"What is a gentleman?" I asts him, thinking if he wasn't one it mighttake his mind off himself a little to tell me. "What MAKES one?"
"Authorities differ," says Doctor Kirby, slouching down in his chair,and grinning like he knowed a joke he wasn't going to tell no one. "Iheard Doctor Jackson describe himself that way the other day."
Well, speaking personal, I never had smelled none of roses. I wasn'tnothing but trash myself, so being a gentleman didn't bother me one wayor the other. The only reason I didn't want to see them niggers bunkedso very bad was only jest because it was such a low-down, ornery kind oftrick.
"It ain't too late," I says, "to pull out of this nigger scheme yet andget into something more honest."
"I don't know," he says thoughtful. "I think perhaps it IS too late."And he sets there looking like a man that is going over a good manyyears of life in his mind. Purty soon he says:
"As far as honesty goes--it isn't that so much, ODaniel-come-to-judgment! It's about as honest as most medicine games.It's--" He stopped and frowned agin.
"What is it?"
"It's their being NIGGERS," he says.
That made the difference fur me, too. I dunno how, nor why.
"I've tried nearly everything but blackmail," he says, "and I'llprobably be trying that by this time next year, if this scheme fails.But there's something about their being niggers that makes me sick ofthis thing already--just as the time has come to make the start. AndI don't know WHY it should, eith
er." He slipped another big slug ofwhiskey into him, and purty soon he asts me:
"Do you know what's the matter with me?"
I asts him what.
"I'm too decent to be a crook," he says, "and too crooked to be decent.You've got to be one thing or the other steady to make it pay."
Then he says:
"Did you ever hear of the descent to Avernus, Danny?"
"I might," I tells him, "and then agin I mightn't, but if I ever did, Idon't remember what she is. What is she?"
"It's the chute to the infernal regions," he says. "They say it'sgreased. But it isn't. It's really no easier sliding down than it isclimbing back."
Well, I seen this nigger scheme of our'n wasn't the only thing that wastroubling Doctor Kirby that night. It was thinking of all the schemeslike it in the years past he had went into, and how he had went into 'emlight-hearted and more'n half fur fun when he was a young man, andnow he wasn't fitten fur nothing else but them kind of schemes, and heknowed it. He was seeing himself how he had been changing, like anotherperson could of seen it. That's the main trouble with drinking to fergityourself. You fergit the wrong part of yourself.
I left him purty soon, and went along to bed. My room was next to his'n,and they was a door between, so the two could be rented together ifwanted, I suppose. I went to sleep and woke up agin with a start out ofa dream that had in it millions and millions and millions of niggers,every way you looked, and their mouths was all open red and their eyeswalled white, fit to scare you out of your shoes.
I hearn Doctor Kirby moving around in his room. But purty soon he setsdown and begins to talk to himself. Everything else was quiet. I waskind of worried about him, he had taken so much, and hoped he wouldn'tget a notion to go downtown that time o' night. So I thinks I will seehow he is acting, and steps over to the door between the rooms.
The key happened to be on my side, and I unlocked it. But she only opensa little ways, fur his wash stand was near to the hinge end of the door.
I looked through. He is setting by the table, looking at a woman'spicture that is propped up on it, and talking to himself. He has neverhearn me open the door, he is so interested. But somehow, he don't lookdrunk. He looks like he had fought his way up out of it, somehow--hisforehead was sweaty, and they was one intoxicated lock of hair stickingto it; but that was the only un-sober-looking thing about him. I guesshis legs would of been unsteady if he had of tried to walk, but hisintellects was uncomfortable and sober.
He is still keeping up that same old argument with himself, or with thepicture.
"It isn't any use," I hearn him say, looking at the picture.
Then he listened like he hearn it answering him. "Yes, you alwayssay just that--just that," he says. "And I don't know why I keep onlistening to you."
The way he talked, and harkened fur an answer, when they was nothingthere to answer, give me the creeps.
"You don't help me," he goes on, "you don't help me at all. You onlymake it harder. Yes, this thing is worse than the others. I know that.But I want money--and fool things like this HAVE sometimes made it. No,I won't give it up. No, there's no use making any more promises now. Iknow myself now. And you ought to know me by this time, too. Why can'tyou let me alone altogether? I should think, when you see what I am,you'd let me be.
"God help you! if you'd only stay away it wouldn't be so hard to go tohell!"