by Frank Norris
Old Jerome put his chin in the air. “He was the son of a carpenter, nothing else. We all knew his people; you did, and I. His father built the bin where I store my corn, and some stalls in my brother’s barn in the next village. The son was a dreamer; any one could have told he would have perished in the end. The people were tired of him, a mild lunatic. That was all.” Mervius did not answer directly. “I have read this letter,” he said, “ this fisherman’s letter. The man who looks after my sheep lent me a copy. Peter was not always with the man, the carpenter’s son. One thing he has left out — one thing that I saw.”
“That you saw!” exclaimed old Jerome.
Mervius nodded.
“I saw this man once.”
“The carpenter’s son?”
“Yes, once, and I saw him smile. You notice this letter never makes record of him smiling.”
“I know.”
“I saw him smile.”
“As how?”
Mervius wrapped his lean, old arms under the folds of his blouse, and resting his elbows on his knees, looked into the fire. Jerome’s crow paced gravely in at the door and perched on his master’s knee. Jerome fed him bits of cheese dipped in wine.
“It was a long time ago,” said Mervius; “I was a lad. I remember I and my cousin Joanna — she was a little girl of seven then — used to run out to the cow stables early of the cold mornings and stand in the fodder on the floor of the stalls to warm our feet. I had heard my father tell of this man, this carpenter’s son. Did you ever hear,” he added, turning to old Jerome, “did you ever hear — when you were a boy — hear the older people speak of the ‘White Night’? At midnight it grew suddenly light, as though the sun had risen out of season. In fact there was a sun, or star — something. The chickens all came down from their roosts, the oxen lowed, the cocks crew, as though at daybreak. It was light for hours. Then towards four o’clock the light faded again. It happened in midwinter. Yes, they called it the ‘White Night.’ It was strange. You know the followers of this man claim that he was born on that night. My father knew some shepherds who told a strange story... however.
“For the children of our village — that is to say, my little cousin Joanna, my brother Simon, the potter’s little son, Septimus, a lad named Joseph, whose father was the olive presser of the district, and myself — the village bleach-green was the playground.
“This bleach-green was a great meadow by the brook, on the other side my father’s sheepfolds. It belonged to the fuller of the village. After weaving, the women used to bring here their webs of cloth to be whitened. Many a time I have seen the great squares and lengths of cloth covering the meadow, till you would have said the snow had fallen.
“It was like that on a holiday, when the five of us children were at our play along the banks of the little brook.
Across the brook was the road that led to the city, and back of us the bleach-green was one shimmer of white, great spreads and drifts of white cloth, billowing and rippling like shallow pools of milk, as the breeze stirred under them. They were weighted down at the corners with huge, round stones. It was a pretty sight. I have never forgotten that bleach-green.
“I remember that day we had found a bank of clay, and the potter’s son, Septimus, showed us how to model the stuff into pots and drinking-vessels, and afterwards even into the form of animals: dogs, fishes, and the lame cow that belonged to the widow at the end of the village. Simon made a wonderful beast, that he assured us was a lion, with twigs for legs, while I and Septimus patted and pinched our lump of clay to look like the great he-pig that had eaten a litter of puppies the week past — a horror that was yet the talk of all the village.
“Joanna — she was younger than all the rest of us — was fashioning little birds, clumsy, dauby little lumps of wet clay without much form. She was very proud of them, and set them in a row upon a stick, and called for us to look at them. As boys will, we made fun of her and her little, clumsy clay birds, because she was a girl, and Simon, my brother, said:
“‘Hoh, those aren’t like birds at all. More like bullfrogs. I’ll show you.’
“He and the rest of us took to making all manner of birds — pigeons, hawks, chickens, and the like. Septimus, the potter’s son, executed a veritable masterpiece, a sort of peacock with tail spread which was very like, and which he swore he would take to his fathers kiln to have baked. We all exclaimed over this marvel, and gathered about Septimus, praising him and his handiwork, and poor little Joanna and her foolish dauby lumps were forgotten. Then, of course, we all made peacocks, and set them in a row, and compared them with each other’s. Joanna sat apart looking at us through her tears, and trying to pretend that she did not care for clay peacocks, that the ridicule of a handful of empty-headed boys did not hurt her, and that her stupid little birds were quite as brave as ours.
Then she said, by and by, timid-like and half to herself, ‘I think my birds are pretty, too.’
“‘Hoh,’ says Septimus, ‘look at Joanna’s bullfrogs! Hoh! You are only a girl. What do you know? You don’t know anything. I think you had better go home. We don’t like to play with girls.’
“She was too brave to let us see her cry, but she got up, and was just about going home across the bleach-green — in the green aisles between the webs of cloth — when Simon said to me and to the others:
“‘ Look, quick, Mervius, here comes that man that father spoke about, the carpenter’s son who has made such a stir.’ And he pointed across the brook, down the road that runs from the city over towards the lake, the same lake where you say this Peter used to fish. Joanna stopped and looked where he pointed; so did we all. I saw the man, the carpenter’s son, whom Simon meant, and knew at once that it was he.” Old Jerome interrupted: “You had never seen him before. How did you know it was he?”
Mervius shook his head. “It was he. How could tell? I don’t know. I knew it was he.”
“What did he look like?” asked Jerome, interested.
Mervius paused. There was a silence. Jerome’s crow looked at the bright coals of the fire, his head on one side.
“Not at all extraordinary,” said Mervius at length. “ His face was that of a peasant, sun-browned, touched, perhaps, with a certain calmness. That was all. A face that was neither sad nor glad, calm merely, and not unusually or especially pleasing. He was dressed as you and I are now — as a peasant — and his hands were those of a worker. Only his head was bare.”
“Did he wear his beard?”
“No, that was afterward. He was younger when I saw him, about twenty-one maybe, and his face was smooth. There was nothing extraordinary about the man.”
“Yet you knew it was he.”
“Yes,” admitted Mervius, nodding his head. “Yes, I knew it was he. He came up slowly along the road near the brook where we children were sitting. He walked as any traveller along those roads might, not thoughtful nor abstracted, but minding his steps and looking here and there about the country. The prettier things, I noted, seemed to attract him, and I particularly remember his stopping to look at a cherry-tree in full bloom and smelling at its blossoms. Once, too, he stopped and thrust out of the way a twig that had fallen across a little ant heap. When he had come opposite us, he noticed us all standing there and looking at him quietly from across the brook, and he came down and stood on the other bank and asked us for a drink. There was a cup in an old bucket not far away that was kept there for those who worked on the bleach-green. I ran to fetch it, and when I had come back he, the carpenter’s son, had crossed the brook, and was sitting on the bank, and all the children were about him. He had little Joanna on his knee, and she had forgotten to cry. He drank out of the cup I gave him, and fell to asking us about what we had been doing. Then we all cried out together, and showed him our famous array of clay peacocks.”
“And you were that familiar with him?” said old Jerome.
“He seemed like another child to us,” answered Mervius. “We were all about him, on his shoulder
s, on his knees, in his arms, and Joanna in his lap — she had forgotten to cry.
“‘See, see my birds,’ she said. I tell you she had her arms around his neck. ‘See, they said they were not pretty. They are pretty, aren’t they, quite as pretty as theirs?’
“‘Prettier, prettier,’ he said. ‘Look now.’ He set our little clay birds before him in a row. First mine, then Simon’s, then those of Joseph and of Septimus, then one of little Joanna’s shapeless little lumps. He looked at them, and at last touched the one Joanna had made with his finger-tip, then — Did you ever see, when corn is popping, how the grain swells, swells, swells, then bursts forth into whiteness? So it was then. No sooner had that little bird of Joanna, that clod of dust, that poor bit of common clay, felt the touch of his finger than it awakened into life and became a live bird — and white, white as the sunshine, a beautiful little white bird that flew upward on the instant, with a tiny, glad note of song. We children shouted aloud, and Joanna danced and clapped her hands. And then it was that the carpenter’s son smiled. He looked at her as she looked up at that soaring white bird, and smiled, smiled just once, and then fell calm again.
“He rose to go, but we hung about him and clamored for him to stay.
“‘No,’ he said, as he kissed us all, ‘I must go, go up to the city.’ He crossed the brook, and looked back at us.
“‘ Can’t we go with you?’ we cried to him. He shook his head.
“‘Where I am going you cannot go. But,’ he added, ‘I am going to make a place for just such as you.’
“‘And you’ll come again? we cried.
“‘Yes, yes, I shall come again.’
“Then he went away, though often looking back and waving his hand at us. What we said after he had gone I don’t know. How we felt I cannot express. Long time and in silence we stood there watching, until his figure vanished around a bend in the road. Then we turned and went home across the bleach-green, through the green aisles between the webs of white cloth. We never told what had happened. That was just for ourselves alone. The same evening we heard of a great wonder that had been worked at a marriage in a town near by, water turned to wine, and a little later another, a man blind from his birth suddenly made to see. What did we care? He had not smiled upon those others, those people at the marriage, that crowd in the market-place. What did we care?”
Mervius stopped, and slipped his feet back into his sabots, and rose. He took the letter from Jerome, and put it in the pocket of his blouse.
“And you saw that?”
Mervius nodded, but old Jerome shook his head in the manner of one who is not willing to be convinced.
“He was a dreamer with unspeakable pretensions. Why, his people were laboring folk in one of the villages beyond the lake. His father was a carpenter and built my corn-bin. The son was a fanatic. His wits were turned.”
“But this thing I saw,” said Mervius at the door. “I saw it, who am speaking to you.”
Jerome put his chin in the air.
“....A dreamer...
We were well rid of him.
... But I was sorry when Peter went away... Mondays and Wednesdays he came, and his fish were always fresh.”
THE THIRD CIRCLE AND OTHER STORIES
CONTENTS
THE THIRD CIRCLE
THE HOUSE WITH THE BLINDS
LITTLE DRAMAS OF THE CURBSTONE
SHORTY STACK, PUGILIST
THE STRANGEST THING
A REVERSION TO TYPE
BOOM
THE DIS-ASSOCIATED CHARITIES
SON OF A SHEIK
A DEFENSE OF THE FLAG
TOPPAN
A CAGED LION
THIS ANIMAL OF A BULDY JONES
DYING FIRES
GRETTIR AT DRANGEY
THE GUEST OF HONOUR
INTRODUCTION BY WILL IRWIN
It used to be my duty, as sub editor of the old San Francisco Wave, to “put the paper to bed.” We were printing a Seattle edition in those days of the Alaskan gold rush; and the last form had to be locked up on Tuesday night, that we might reach the news stands by Friday. Working short-handed, as all small weeklies do, we were everlastingly late with copy or illustrations or advertisements; and that Tuesday usually stretched itself out into Wednesday. Most often, indeed, the foreman and I pounded the last quoin into place at four or five o’clock Wednesday morning and went home with the milk-wagons — to rise at noon and start next week’s paper going.
For Yelton, most patient and cheerful of foremen, those Tuesday night sessions meant steady work. I, for my part, had only to confer with him now and then on a “Caption” or to run over a late proof. In the heavy intervals of waiting, I killed time and gained instruction by reading the back files of the Wave, and especially that part of the files which preserved the early, prentice work of Frank Norris.
He was a hero to us all in those days, as he will ever remain a heroic memory — that unique product of our Western soil, killed, for some hidden purpose of the gods, before the time of full blossom. He had gone East but a year since to publish the earliest in his succession of rugged, virile novels— “Moran of the Lady Letty,” “McTeague,” “Blix,” “A Man’s Woman,” “The Octopus,” and “The Pit.” The East was just beginning to learn that he was great; we had known it long before. With a special interest, then, did I, his humble cub successor as sub editor and sole staff writer, follow that prentice work of his from the period of his first brief sketches, through the period of rough, brilliant short stories hewed out of our life in the Port of Adventures, to the period of that first serial which brought him into his own.
It was a surpassing study of the novelist in the making. J. O’Hara Cosgrave, owner, editor and burden-bearer of the Wave, was in his editing more an artist than a man of business. He loved “good stuff”; he could not bear to delete a distinctive piece of work just because the populace would not understand. Norris, then, had a free hand. Whatever his thought of that day, whatever he had seen with the eye of his flash or the eye of his imagination, he might write and print. You began to feel him in the files of the year 1895, by certain distinctive sketches and fragments. You traced his writing week by week until the sketches became “Little Stories of the Pavements.” Then longer stories, one every week, even such stories as “The Third Circle,” “Miracle Joyeaux,” and “The House with the Blinds”; then, finally, a novel, written feuilleton fashion week by week— “Moran of the Lady Letty.” A curious circumstance attended the publication of “Moran” in the Wave. I discovered it myself during those Tuesday night sessions over the files; and it illustrates how this work was done. He began it in the last weeks of 1897, turning it out and sending it straight to the printer as part of his daily stint. The Maine was blown up February 14, 1898. In the later chapters of “Moran,” he introduced the destruction of the Maine as an incident! It was this serial, brought to the attention of McClure’s Magazine, which finally drew Frank Norris East.
“The studio sketches of a great novelist,” Gellett Burgess has called these ventures and fragments. Burgess and I, when the Wave finally died of too much merit, stole into the building by night and took away one set of old files. A harmless theft of sentiment, we told ourselves; for by moral right they belonged to us, the sole survivors in San Francisco of those who had helped make the Wave. And, indeed, by this theft we saved them from the great fire of 1906. When we had them safe at home, we spent a night running over them, marveling again at those rough creations of blood and nerve which Norris had made out of that city which was the first love of his wakened intelligence, and in which, so wofully soon afterward, he died.
I think that I remember them all, even now; not one but a name or a phrase would bring back to mind. Most vividly, perhaps, remains a little column of four sketches called “Fragments.” One was a scene behind the barricades during the Commune — a gay flaneur of a soldier playing on a looted piano until a bullet caught him in the midst of a note. Another pictured an empty hotel room afte
r the guest had left. Only that; but I always remember it when I first enter my room in a hotel. A third was the nucleus for the description of the “Dental Parlors” in McTeague. A fourth, the most daring of all, showed a sodden workman coming home from his place of great machines. A fresh violet lay on the pavement. He, the primal brute in harness, picked it up. Dimly, the aesthetic sense woke in him. It gave him pleasure, a pleasure which called for some tribute. He put it between his great jaws and crushed it — the only way he knew.
Here collected are the longest and most important of his prentice products. Even without those shorter sketches whose interest is, after all, mainly technical, they are an incomparable study in the way a genius takes to find himself. It is as though we saw a complete collection of Rembrandt’s early sketches, say — full technique and co-ordination not yet developed, but all the basic force and vision there. Admirable in themselves, these rough-hewn tales, they are most interesting when compared with the later work which the world knows, and when taken as a melancholy indication of that power of growth which was in him and which must have led, if the masters of fate had only spared him, to the highest achievement in letters.
WILL IRWIN.
March, 1909.
THE THIRD CIRCLE
There are more things in San Francisco’s Chinatown than are dreamed of in Heaven and earth. In reality there are three parts of Chinatown — the part the guides show you, the part the guides don’t show you, and the part that no one ever hears of. It is with the latter part that this story has to do. There are a good many stories that might be written about this third circle of Chinatown, but believe me, they never will be written — at any rate not until the “town” has been, as it were, drained off from the city, as one might drain a noisome swamp, and we shall be able to see the strange, dreadful life that wallows down there in the lowest ooze of the place — wallows and grovels there in the mud and in the dark. If you don’t think this is true, ask some of the Chinese detectives (the regular squad are not to be relied on), ask them to tell you the story of the Lee On Ting affair, or ask them what was done to old Wong Sam, who thought he could break up the trade in slave girls, or why Mr. Clarence Lowney (he was a clergyman from Minnesota who believed in direct methods) is now a “dangerous” inmate of the State Asylum — ask them to tell you why Matsokura, the Japanese dentist, went back to his home lacking a face — ask them to tell you why the murderers of Little Pete will never be found, and ask them to tell you about the little slave girl, Sing Yee, or — no, on the second thought, don’t ask for that story.