“May the saints guard us,” cried Martha. “And what was that for?”
“Because they wanted them more than I did,” snarled Johnnie. “Don’t you see the game? I go into the Café Aguacate. The owner of the place says to himself, ‘Hello! Here’s that Yankee what they call Johnnie. He’s got no right here in Havana. Guess I’ll peach on him to the police. They’ll put him in Cabanas as a spy.’ Then he does a little more thinking, and finally he says, ‘No; I guess I won’t peach on him just this minute. First, I’ll take a small flier myself.’ So in he comes and looks me right in the eye and says, ‘Excuse me, but it will be a centene for the bread, a centene for the coffee, and eggs are at three centenes each. Besides, there will be a small matter of another gold piece for the waiter.’ I think this over. I think it over hard.—He’s clever anyhow.—When this cruel war is over, I’ll be after him.—I’m a nice secret agent of the United States government, I am. I come here to be too clever for all the Spanish police, and the first thing I do is get buncoed by a rotten little thimblerigger in a café. Oh, yes, I’m all right.”
“May the saints guard us!” cried Martha again. “I’m old enough to be your mother, or maybe your grandmother, and I’ve seen a lot; but it’s many a year since I laid eyes on such a ign’rant and wrong-headed little red Indian as ye are! Why didn’t ye take my advice and stay here in the house with decency and comfort? But he must be all for doing everything high and mighty. The Café Aguacate, if ye please. No plain food for his highness. He turns up his nose at codfish sal—”
“Thunder and lightnin’, are you going to ram that thing down my throat every two minutes? Are you?” And in truth she could see that one more reference to that illustrious viand would break the back of Johnnie’s gentle disposition as one breaks a twig on the knee. She shifted with Celtic ease. “Did ye bring the bread?” she asked.
He gazed at her for a moment and suddenly laughed. “I forgot to mention,” he informed her impressively, “that they did not take the trouble to give me either the bread, the coffee, or the eggs.”
“The powers!” cried Martha.
“But it’s all right. I stopped at a shop.” From his pockets, he brought a small loaf, some kind of German sausage, and a flask of Jamaica rum. “About all I could get. And they didn’t want to sell them, either. They expect presently they can exchange a box of sardines for a grand piano.”
“ ‘We are not blockaded by the Yankee warships; we are blockaded by our grocers,’ ” said Martha, quoting the epidemic Havana saying. But she did not delay long from the little loaf. She cut a slice from it and sat eagerly munching. Johnnie seemed more interested in the Jamaica rum. He looked up from his second glass, however, because he heard a peculiar sound. The old woman was weeping. “Hey, what’s this?” he demanded in distress, but with the manner of a man who thinks gruffness is the only thing that will make people feel better and cease. “What’s this, anyhow? What are you cryin’ for?”
“It’s the bread,” sobbed Martha. “It’s the—it’s—the br-e-a-ddd.”
“Huh? What’s the matter with it?”
“It’s so good, so g-good.” The rain of tears did not prevent her from continuing her unusual report. “Oh, it’s so good! This is the first in weeks. I didn’t know bread could be so l-like heaven.”
“Here,” said Johnnie seriously. “Take a little mouthful of this rum. It will do you good.”
“No; I only want the bub-bub-bread.”
“Well, take the bread, too.—There you are. Now you feel better.—By Jove, when I think of that Café Aguacate man! Fifty dollars gold! And then not to get anything, either. Say, after the war, I’m going there, and I’m just going to raze that place to the ground. You see! I’ll make him think he can charge ME fifteen dollars for an egg.—And then not give me the egg.”
V
Johnnie’s subsequent activity in Havana could truthfully be related in part to a certain temporary price of eggs. It is interesting to note how close that famous event got to his eye, so that, according to the law of perspective, it was as big as the Capitol of Washington, where centers the spirit of his nation. Around him, he felt a similar and ferocious expression of life which informed him too plainly that, if he was caught, he was doomed. Neither the garrison nor the citizens of Havana would tolerate any nonsense in regard to him if he was caught. He would have the steel screw against his neck in short order. And what was the main thing to bear him up against the desire to run away before his work was done? A certain temporary price of eggs! It not only hid the Capitol at Washington; it obscured the dangers in Havana.
Something was learned of the Santa Clara battery, because one morning an old lady in black, accompanied by a young man—evidently her son—visited a house which was to rent on the height, in the rear of the battery. The portero was too lazy and sleepy to show them over the premises, but he granted them permission to investigate for themselves. They spent most of their time on the flat parapeted roof of the house. At length they came down and said that the place did not suit them. The portero went to sleep again.
Johnnie was never discouraged by the thought that his operations would be of small benefit to the admiral commanding the fleet in adjacent waters, and to the general commanding the army which was not going to attack Havana from the land side. At that time it was all the world’s opinion that the army from Tampa would presently appear on the Cuban beach at some convenient point to the east or west of Havana. It turned out, of course, that the condition of the defenses of Havana was of not the slightest military importance to the United States, since the city was never attacked either by land or sea. But Johnnie could not foresee this. He continued to take his fancy risk, continued his majestic lie, with satisfaction, sometimes with delight, and with pride. And in the psychologic distance was old Martha, dancing with fear and shouting: “Oh, Johnnie, me son, what a born fool ye are!”
Sometimes she would address him thus: “And when ye learn all this, how are ye goin’ to get out with it?” She was contemptuous.
He would reply, as serious as a Cossack in his fatalism: “Oh, I’ll get out some way.”
His maneuvers in the vicinity of Regla and Guanabacoa were of a brilliant character. He haunted the sunny long grass in the manner of a jack rabbit. Sometimes he slept under a palm, dreaming of the American advance fighting its way along the military road to the foot of Spanish defenses. Even when awake, he often dreamed it and thought of the all-day crash and hot roar of an assault. Without consulting Washington, he had decided that Havana should be attacked from the southeast. An advance from the west could be contested right up to the bar of the Hotel Inglaterra, but when the first ridge in the southeast would be taken, the whole city with most of its defenses would lie under the American siege guns. And the approach to this position was as reasonable as is any approach toward the muzzles of magazine rifles. Johnnie viewed the grassy fields always as a prospective battleground, and one can see him lying there, filling the landscape with visions of slow-crawling black infantry columns, galloping batteries of artillery, streaks of faint blue smoke marking the modern firing lines, clouds of dust, a vision of ten thousand tragedies. And his ears heard the noises.
But he was no idle shepherd boy with a head haunted by somber and glorious fancies. On the contrary, he was much occupied with practical matters. Some months after the close of the war, he asked me: “Were you ever fired at from very near?” I explained some experiences which I had stupidly esteemed as having been rather near. “But did you ever have ’m fire a volley on you from close—very close—say, thirty feet?”
Highly scandalized, I answered, “No; in that case, I would not be the crowning feature of the Smithsonian Institute.”
“Well,” he said, “it’s a funny effect. You feel as if every hair on your head had been snatched out by the roots.” Questioned further, he said, “I walked right up on a Spanish outpost at daybreak once, and about twenty men let go at me. Thought I was a Cuban army, I suppose.”
&
nbsp; “What did you do?”
“I run.”
“Did they hit you, at all?”
“Naw.”
It had been arranged that some light ship of the squadron should rendezvous with him at a certain lonely spot on the coast on a certain day and hour and pick him up. He was to wave something white. His shirt was not white, but he waved it whenever he could see the signal-tops of a warship. It was a very tattered banner. After a ten-mile scramble through almost pathless thickets, he had very little on him which respectable men would call a shirt, and the less one says about his trousers the better. This naked savage, then, walked all day up and down a small bit of beach waving a brown rag. At night, he slept in the sand. At full daybreak he began to wave his rag; at noon he was waving his rag; at nightfall he donned his rag and strove to think of it as a shirt. Thus passed two days, and nothing had happened. Then he retraced a twenty-five-mile way to the house of old Martha. At first she took him to be one of Havana’s terrible beggars and cried, “And do you come here for alms? Look out, that I do not beg of you.” The one unchanged thing was his laugh of pure mockery. When she heard it, she dragged him through the door. He paid no heed to her ejaculations, but went straight to where he had hidden some gold. As he was untying a bit of string from the neck of a small bag, he said, “How is little Alfred?” “Recovered, thank Heaven.” He handed Martha a piece of gold. “Take this and buy what you can on the corner. I’m hungry.” Martha departed with expedition. Upon her return, she was beaming. She had foraged a thin chicken, a bunch of radishes, and two bottles of wine. Johnnie had finished the radishes and one bottle of wine when the chicken was still a long way from the table. He called stoutly for more, and so Martha passed again into the street with another gold piece. She bought more radishes, more wine, and some cheese. They had a grand feast, with Johnnie audibly wondering until a late hour why he had waved his rag in vain.
There was no end to his suspense, no end to his work. He knew everything. He was an animate guidebook. After he knew a thing once, he verified it in several different ways in order to make sure. He fitted himself for a useful career, like a young man in a college—with the difference that the shadow of the garrotte fell ever upon his way, and that he was occasionally shot at, and that he could not get enough to eat, and that his existence was apparently forgotten, and that he contracted the fever. But—
One cannot think of the terms in which to describe a futility so vast, so colossal. He had built a little boat, and the sea had receded and left him and his boat a thousand miles inland on the top of a mountain. The war-fate had left Havana out of its plan and thus isolated Johnnie and his several pounds of useful information. The war-fate left Havana to become the somewhat indignant victim of a peaceful occupation at the close of the conflict, and Johnnie’s data were worth as much as a carpenter’s lien on the north pole. He had suffered and labored for about as complete a bit of absolute nothing as one could invent. If the company which owned the sugar plantation had not generously continued his salary during the war, he would not have been able to pay his expenses on the amount allowed him by the government, which, by the way, was a more complete bit of absolute nothing than one could possibly invent.
VI
I met Johnnie in Havana in October, 1898. If I remember rightly, the U.S.S. Resolute and the U.S.S. Scorpion were in the harbor, but beyond these two terrible engines of destruction there were not as yet any of the more stern signs of the American success. Many Americans were to be seen in the streets of Havana, where they were not in any way molested. Among them was Johnnie in white duck and a straw hat, cool, complacent, and with eyes rather more steady than ever. I addressed him upon the subject of his supreme failure, but I could not perturb his philosophy. In reply he simply asked me to dinner. “Come to the Café Aguacate at 7:30 tonight,” he said. “I haven’t been there in a long time. We shall see if they cook as well as ever.” I turned up promptly and found Johnnie in a private room smoking a cigar in the presence of a waiter who was blue in the gills. “I’ve ordered the dinner,” he said cheerfully. “Now I want to see if you won’t be surprised how well they can do here in Havana.” I was surprised. I was dumbfounded. Rarely in the history of the world have two rational men sat down to such a dinner. It must have taxed the ability and endurance of the entire working force of the establishment to provide it. The variety of dishes was of course related to the markets of Havana, but the abundance and general profligacy was related only to Johnnie’s imagination. Neither of us had an appetite. Our fancies fled in confusion before this puzzling luxury. I looked at Johnnie as if he were a native of Tibet. I had thought him to be a most simple man, and here I found him reveling in food like a fat old senator of Rome’s decadence. And if the dinner itself put me to open-eyed amazement, the names of the wines finished everything. Apparently Johnnie had had but one standard, and that was the cost. If a wine had been very expensive, he had ordered it. I began to think him probably a maniac. At any rate, I was sure that we were both fools. Seeing my fixed stare, he spoke with affected languor: “I wish peacocks’ brains and melted pearls were to be had here in Havana. We’d have ’em.” Then he grinned. As a mere skirmisher I said, “In New York, we think we dine well; but really this, you know—well—Havana—”
Johnnie waved his hand pompously. “Oh, I know.”
Directly after coffee, Johnnie excused himself for a moment and left the room. When he returned he said briskly, “Well, are you ready to go?” As soon as we were in a cab and safely out of hearing of the Café Aguacate, Johnnie lay back and laughed long and joyously.
But I was very serious. “Look here, Johnnie,” I said to him solemnly, “when you invite me to dine with you, don’t you ever do that again. And I’ll tell you one thing—when you dine with me you will probably get the ordinary table d’hôte.” I was an older man.
“Oh, that’s all right,” he cried. And then he too grew serious. “Well, as far as I am concerned—as far as I am concerned,” he said, “the war is now over.”
June 24 and July 1, 1900
[New York Herald June 24, section 6, p. 10;
July 1, supplement, p. 3.]
* Wounds in the Rain.
THE CITY URCHIN AND THE CHASTE VILLAGERS*
After the brief encounters between the Hedge boy and Jimmie Trescott and the Hedge boy and Willie Dalzel, the neighborhood which contained the homes of the boys was, as far as child life is concerned, in a state resembling anarchy. This was owing to the signal overthrow and shameful retreat of the boy who had for several years led a certain little clan by the nose. The adherence of the little community did not go necessarily to the boy who could whip all the others, but it certainly could not go to a boy who had run away in a manner that made his shame patent to the whole world. Willie Dalzel found himself in a painful position. This tiny tribe which had followed him with such unwavering faith was now largely engaged in whistling and catcalling and hooting. He chased a number of them into the sanctity of their own yards, but from these coigns they continued to ridicule him.
But it must not be supposed that the fickle tribe went over in a body to the new light. They did nothing of the sort. They occupied themselves with avenging all which they had endured—gladly enough, too—for many months. As for the Hedge boy, he maintained a curious timid reserve, minding his own business with extreme care, and going to school with that deadly punctuality of which his mother was the genius. Jimmie Trescott suffered no adverse criticism from his fellows. He was entitled to be beaten by a boy who had made Willie Dalzel bellow like a bull-calf and run away. Indeed, he received some honors. He had confronted a very superior boy and received a bang in the eye which for a time was the wonder of the children, and he had not bellowed like a bull-calf. As a matter of fact, he was often invited to tell how it had felt, and this he did with some pride, claiming arrogantly that he had been superior to any particular pain.
Early in the episode he and the Hedge boy had patched up a treaty. Living next door to
each other, they could not fail to have each other often in sight. One afternoon they wandered together in the strange indefinite diplomacy of boyhood. As they drew close the new boy suddenly said, “Napple?”
“Yes,” said Jimmie, and the new boy bestowed upon him an apple. It was one of those green-coated winter apples which lie for many months in safe and dry places, and can at any time be brought forth for the persecution of the unwary and inexperienced. An older age would have fled from this apple, but to the unguided youth of Jimmie Trescott it was a thing to be possessed and cherished. Wherefore this apple was the emblem of something more than a truce, despite the fact that it tasted like wet Indian meal; and Jimmie looked at the Hedge boy out of one good eye and one bunged eye. The long-drawn animosities of men have no place in the life of a boy. The boy’s mind is flexible; he readjusts his position with an ease which is derived from the fact—simply—that he is not yet a man.
But there were other and more important matters. Johnnie Hedge’s exploits had brought him into such prominence among the schoolboys that it was necessary to settle a number of points once and for all. There was the usual number of boys in the school who were popularly known to be champions in their various classes. Among these Johnnie Hedge now had to thread his way, every boy taking it upon himself to feel anxious that Johnnie’s exact position should be soon established. His fame as a fighter had gone forth to the world, but there were other boys who had fame as fighters, and the world was extremely anxious to know where to place the newcomer. Various heroes were urged to attempt this classification. Usually it was not accounted a matter of supreme importance, but in this boy life it was essential.
The Complete Short Stories and Sketches of Stephen Crane Page 105