Complete Works of Frank Norris

by Frank Norris

  I have a very good friend who is a sailing-master aboard the “Mary Baker,” a full-rigged wheat ship, a Cape Horner, and the most beautiful thing I ever remember to have seen. Occasionally I am invited to make a voyage with him as supercargo, an invitation which you may be sure I accept. Such an invitation came to me one day some four or five years ago, and I made the trip with him to Calcutta and return.

  The day before the “Mary Baker” cast off I had been aboard (she was lying in the stream off Meigg’s wharf) attending to the stowing of my baggage and the appointment of my stateroom. The yawl put me ashore at three in the afternoon, and I started home via the park I have been speaking about. On my way across the park I stopped in front of that fool Geodetic stone, wondering what it might be. And while I stood there puzzling about it, a nurse-maid came up and spoke to me.

  The story of “The House With the Blinds” begins here.

  The nurse-maid was most dreadfully drunk, her bonnet was awry, her face red and swollen, and one eye was blackened. She was not at all pleasant. In the baby carriage, which she dragged behind her, an overgrown infant yelled like a sabbath of witches.

  “Look here,” says she; “you’re a gemmleman, and I wantcher sh’d help me outen a fix. I’m in a fix, s’wat I am — a damn bad fix.”

  I got that fool stone between myself and this object, and listened to it pouring out an incoherent tirade against some man who had done it dirt, b’Gawd, and with whom it was incumbent I should fight, and she was in a fix, s’what she was, and could I, who was evidently a perfick gemmleman, oblige her with four bits? All this while the baby yelled till my ears sang again. Well, I gave her four bits to get rid of her, but she stuck to me yet the closer, and confided to me that she lived in that house over yonder, she did — the house with the blinds, and was nurse-maid there, so she was, b’Gawd. But at last I got away and fled in the direction of Stockton street. As I was going along, however, I reflected that the shrieking infant was somebody’s child, and no doubt popular in the house with the blinds. The parents ought to know that its nurse got drunk and into fixes. It was a duty — a dirty duty — for me to inform upon her.

  Much as I loathed to do so I turned towards the house with the blinds. It stood hard by the Russian Church, a huge white-painted affair, all the windows closely shuttered and a bit of stained glass in the front door — quite the most pretentious house in the row. I had got directly opposite, and was about to cross the street when, lo! around the corner, marching rapidly, and with blue coats flapping, buttons and buckles flashing, came a squad of three, seven, nine — ten policemen. They marched straight upon the house with the blinds.

  I am not brilliant nor adventurous, but I have been told that I am good, and I do strive to be respectable, and pay my taxes and pew rent. As a corollary to this, I loathed with, a loathing unutterable to be involved in a mess of any kind. The squad of policemen were about to enter the house with the blinds, and not for worlds would I have been found by them upon its steps. The nurse-girl might heave that shrieking infant over the cliff of Telegraph Hill, it were all one with me. So I shrank back upon the sidewalk and watched what followed.

  Fifty yards from the house the squad broke into a run, swarmed upon the front steps, and in a moment were thundering upon the front door till the stained glass leaped in its leads and shivered down upon their helmets. And then, just at this point, occurred an incident which, though it had no bearing upon or connection with this yarn, is quite queer enough to be set down. The shutters of one of the top-story windows opened slowly, like the gills of a breathing fish, the sash raised some six inches with a reluctant wail, and a hand groped forth into the open air. On the sill of the window was lying a gilded Indian-club, and while I watched, wondering, the hand closed upon it, drew it under the sash, the window dropped guillotine-fashion, and the shutters clapped to like the shutters of a cuckoo clock. Why was the Indian-club lying on the sill? Why, in Heaven’s name, was it gilded? Why did the owner of that mysterious groping hand, seize upon it at the first intimation of danger? I don’t know — I never will know. But I do know that the thing was eldritch and uncanny, ghostly even, in the glare of that cheerless afternoon’s sun, in that barren park, with the trade winds thrashing up from the seaward streets.

  Suddenly the door crashed in. The policemen vanished inside the house. Everything fell silent again. I waited for perhaps fifty seconds — waited, watching and listening, ready for anything that might happen, expecting I knew not what — everything.

  Not more than five minutes had elapsed when the policemen began to reappear. They came slowly, and well they might, for they carried with them the inert bodies of six gentlemen. When I say carried I mean it in its most literal sense, for never in all my life have I seen six gentlemen so completely, so thoroughly, so hopelessly and helplessly intoxicated. Well dressed they were, too, one of them even in full dress. Salvos of artillery could not have awakened that drunken half dozen, and I doubt if any one of them could even have been racked into consciousness.

  Three hacks appeared (note that the patrol-wagon was conspicuously absent), the six were loaded upon the cushions, the word was given and one by one the hacks rattled down Stockton street and disappeared in the direction of the city. The captain of the squad remained behind for a few moments, locked the outside doors in the deserted shuttered house, descended the steps, and went his way across the park, softly whistling a quickstep. In time he too vanished. The park, the rows of houses, the windflogged streets, resumed their normal quiet. The incident was closed.

  Or was it closed? Judge you now. Next day I was down upon the wharves, gripsack in hand, capped and clothed for a long sea voyage. The “Mary Baker’s” boat was not yet come ashore, but the beauty lay out there in the stream, flirting with a bustling tug that circled about her, coughing uneasily at intervals. Idle sailormen, ‘longshoremen and stevedores sat upon the stringpiece of the wharf, chewing slivers and spitting reflectively into the water. Across the intervening stretch of bay came the noises from the “Mary Baker’s” decks — noises that were small and distinct, as if heard through a telephone, the rattle of blocks, the straining of a windlass, the bos’n’s whistle, and once the noise of sawing. A white cruiser sat solidly in the waves over by Alcatraz, and while I took note of her the flag was suddenly broken out and I heard the strains of the ship’s band. The morning was fine. Tamalpais climbed out of the water like a rousing lion. In a few hours we would be off on a voyage to the underside of the earth. There was a note of gayety in the nimble air, and one felt that the world was young after all, and that it was good to be young with her.

  A bum-boat woman came down the wharf, corpulent and round, with a roll in her walk that shook first one fat cheek and then the other. She was peddling trinkets amongst the wharf-loungers — pocket combs, little round mirrors, shoestrings and collar-buttons. She knew them all, or at least was known to all of them, and in a few moments she was retailing to them the latest news of the town. Soon I caught a name or two, and on the instant was at some pains to listen. The bum-boat woman was telling the story of the house with the blinds:

  “Sax of um, an’ nobs ivry wan. But that bad wid bug-juice! Whoo! Niver have Oi seen the bate! An’ divil a wan as can remimber owt for two days by. Bory-eyed they were; struck dumb an’ deef an’ dead wid whiskey and bubble-wather. Not a manjack av um can tell the tale, but wan av um used his knife cruel bad. Now which wan was it? Howse the coort to find out?”

  It appeared that the house with the blinds was, or had been, a gambling house, and what I had seen had been a raid. Then the rest of the story came out, and the mysteries began to thicken. That same evening, after the arrest of the six inebriates, the house had been searched. The police had found evidences of a drunken debauch of a monumental character. But they had found more. In a closet under the stairs the dead body of a man, a well dressed fellow — beyond a doubt one of the party — knifed to death by dreadful slashes in his loins and at the base of his spine in true evil h
and-over-back fashion.

  Now this is the mystery of the house with the blinds.

  Beyond all doubt, one of the six drunken men had done the murder. Which one? How to find out? So completely were they drunk that not a single one of them could recall anything of the previous twelve hours. They had come out there with their friend the day before. They woke from their orgie to learn that one of them had worried him to his death by means of a short palm-broad dagger taken from a trophy of Persian arms that hung over a divan.

  Whose hand had done it? Which one of them was the murdered? I could fancy them — I think I can see them now — sitting there in their cells, each man apart, withdrawn from his fellow-reveler, and each looking furtively into his fellow’s face, asking himself, “Was it you? Was it you? or was it I? Which of us, in God’s name, has done this thing?”

  Well, it was never known. When I came back to San Francisco a year or so later I asked about the affair of the house with the blinds, and found that it had been shelved with the other mysterious crimes: The six men had actually been “discharged for the want of evidence.”

  But for a long time the thing harassed me. More than once since I have gone to that windy park, with its quivering flagstaff and Geodetic monument, and, sitting on a bench opposite the house, asked myself again and again the bootless questions. Why had the drunken nurse-maid mentioned the house to me in the first place? And why at that particular time? Why had she lied to me in telling me that she lived there? Why was that gilded Indian-club on the sill of the upper window? And whose — here’s a point — whose was the hand that drew it inside the house? And then, of course, last of all, the ever recurrent question, which one of those six inebriates should have stood upon the drop and worn the cap — which one of the company had knifed his friend and bundled him into that closet under the stairs? Had he done it during the night of the orgie, or before it? Was his friend drunk at the time, or sober? I never could answer these questions, and I suppose I shall never know the secret of “The House With the Blinds.”

  A Greek family lives there now, and rent the upper story to a man who blows the organ in the Russian Church, and to two Japanese, who have a photograph gallery on Stockton street. I wonder to what use they have put the little closet under the stairs?

  LITTLE DRAMAS OF THE CURBSTONE

  The first Little Drama had for backing the red brick wall of the clinic at the Medical Hospital, and the calcium light was the feeble glimmer of a new-lighted street lamp, though it was yet early in the evening and quite light. There were occasional sudden explosions of a northeast wind at the street corners, and at long intervals an empty cable-car trundled heavily past with a strident whirring of jostled glass windows. Nobody was in sight — the street was deserted. There was the pale red wall of the clinic, severe as that of a prison, the livid grey of the cement sidewalk, and above the faint greenish blue of a windy sky. A door in the wall of the hospital opened, and a woman and a young boy came out. They were dressed darkly, and at once their two black figures detached themselves violently against the pale blue of the background. They made the picture. All the faint tones of the wall and the sky and the grey-brown sidewalk focused immediately upon them. They came across the street to the corner upon which I stood, and the woman asked a direction. She was an old woman, and poorly dressed. The boy, I could see, was her son. Him I took notice of, for she led him to the steps of the nearest house and made him sit down upon the lowest one. She guided all his movements, and he seemed to be a mere figure of wax in her hands. She stood over him, looking at him critically, and muttering to herself. Then she turned to me, and her muttering rose to a shrill, articulate plaint:

  “Ah, these fool doctors — these dirty beasts of medical students! They impose upon us because we’re poor and rob us and tell us lies.”

  Upon this I asked her what her grievance was, but she would not answer definitely, putting her chin the air and nodding with half-shut eyes, as if she could say a lot about that if she chose.

  “Your son is sick?” said I.

  “Yes — or no — not sick; but he’s blind, and — and — he’s blind and he’s an idiot — born that way — blind and idiot.”

  Blind and an idiot! Blind and an idiot! Will you think of that for a moment, you with your full stomachs, you with your brains, you with your two sound eyes. Born blind and idiotic! Do you fancy the horror of that thing? Perhaps you cannot, nor perhaps could I myself have conceived of what it meant to be blind and an idiot had I not seen that woman’s son in front of the clinic, in the empty, windy street, where nothing stirred, and where there was nothing green. I looked at him as he sat there, tall, narrow, misshapen. His ready-made suit, seldom worn, but put on that day because of the weekly visit to the clinic, hung in stupid wrinkles and folds upon him. His cheap felt hat, clapped upon his head by his mother with as little unconcern as an extinguisher upon a candle, was wrong end foremost, so that the bow of the band came upon the right hand side. His hands were huge and white, and lay open and palm upward at his side, the fingers inertly lax, like those of a discarded glove, and his face ——

  When I looked at the face of him I know not what insane desire, born of an unconquerable disgust, came up in me to rush upon him and club him down to the pavement with my stick and batter in that face — that face of a blind idiot — and blot it out from the sight of the sun for good and all. It was impossible to feel pity for the wretch. I hated him because he was blind and an idiot. His eyes were filmy, like those of a fish, and he never blinked them. His mouth hung open.

  Blind and an idiot, absolute stagnation, life as unconscious as that of the jelly-fish, an excrescence, a parasitic fungus in the form of a man, a creature far below the brute. The last horror of the business was that he never moved; he sat there just as his mother had placed him, his motionless, filmy eyes fixed, his jaw dropped, his hands open at his sides, his hat on wrong side foremost. He would sit like that, I knew, for hours — for days, perhaps — would, if left to himself, die of starvation, without raising a finger. What was going on inside of that misshapen head — behind those fixed eyes?

  I had remembered the case by now. One of the students had told me of it. His mother brought him to the clinic occasionally, so that the lecturer might experiment upon his brain, stimulating it with electricity. “Heredity,” the student had commented, “father a degenerate, exhausted race, drank himself into a sanitarium.”

  While I was thinking all this the mother of the boy had gone on talking, her thin voice vibrant with complaining and vituperation. But indeed I could bear with it no longer, and went away. I left them behind me in the deserted, darkening street, the querulous, nagging woman and her blind, idiotic boy, and the last impression I have of the scene was her shrill voice ringing after me the oft-repeated words:

  “Ah, the dirty beasts of doctors — they robs us and impose on us and tell us lies because we’re poor!”

  * * * * *

  The second Little Drama was wrought out for me the next day. I was sitting in the bay window of the club watching the world go by, when my eye was caught by a little group on the curbstone directly opposite. An old woman, meanly dressed, and two little children, both girls, the eldest about ten, the youngest, say, six or seven. They had been coming slowly along, and the old woman had been leading the youngest child by the hand. Just as they came opposite to where I was sitting the younger child lurched away from the woman once or twice, dragging limply at her hand, then its knees wobbled and bent and the next moment it had collapsed upon the pavement. Some children will do this from sheer perversity and with intent to be carried. But it was not perversity on this child’s part. The poor old woman hauled the little girl up to her feet, but she collapsed again at once after a couple of steps and sat helplessly down upon the sidewalk, staring vaguely about, her thumb in her mouth. There was something wrong with the little child — one could see that at half a glance. Some complaint, some disease of the muscles, some weakness of the joints, that smote upon her
like this at inopportune moments. Again and again her old mother, with very painful exertion — she was old and weak herself — raised her to her feet, only that she might sink in a heap before she had moved a yard. The old woman’s bonnet fell off — a wretched, battered black bonnet, and the other little girl picked it up and held it while she looked on at her mother’s efforts with an indifference that could only have been born of familiarity. Twice the old woman tried to carry the little girl, but her strength was not equal to it; indeed, the effort of raising the heavy child to its feet was exhausting her. She looked helplessly at the street cars as they passed, but you could see she had not enough money to pay even three fares. Once more she set her little girl upon her feet, and helped her forward half a dozen steps. And so, little by little, with many pauses for rest and breath, the little group went down the street and passed out of view, the little child staggering and falling as if from drunkenness, her sister looking on gravely, holding the mother’s battered bonnet, and the mother herself, patient, half-exhausted, her grey hair blowing about her face, labouring on step by step, trying to appear indifferent to the crowd that passed by on either side, trying bravely to make light of the whole matter until she should reach home. As I watched them I thought of this woman’s husband, the father of this paralytic little girl, and somehow it was brought to me that none of them would ever see him again, but that he was alive for all that.

  * * * * *

  The third Little Drama was lively, and there was action in it, and speech, and a curious, baffling mystery. On a corner near a certain bank in this city there is affixed to the lamp post a call-box that the police use to ring up for the patrol wagon. When an arrest is made in the neighbourhood the offender is brought here, the wagon called for, and he is conveyed to the City Prison. On the afternoon of the day of the second Little Drama, as I came near to this corner, I was aware of a crowd gathered about the lamp post that held the call-box, and between the people’s heads and over their shoulders I could see the blue helmets of a couple of officers. I stopped and pushed up into the inner circle of the crowd. The two officers had in custody a young fellow of some eighteen or nineteen years. And I was surprised to find that he was as well dressed and as fine looking a lad as one would wish to see. I did not know what the charge was, I don’t know it now, — but the boy did not seem capable of any great meanness. As I got into the midst of the crowd, and while I was noting what was going forward, it struck me that the people about me were unusually silent — silent as people are who are interested and unusually observant. Then I saw why. The young fellow’s mother was there, and the Little Drama was enacting itself between her, her son, and the officers who had him in charge. One of these latter had the key to the call-box in his hand. He had not yet rung for the wagon. An altercation was going on between the mother and the son — she entreating him to come home, he steadily refusing.