The Furnished Room
Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itlf is a certain vast bulk of the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side. Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients forever--transients in abode, transients in heart and mind. They sing "Home, Sweet Home" in ragtime; they carry their lares et penates in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree.
Hence the hous of this district, having had a thousand dwellers, should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but it would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the wake of all the vagrant guests.
One evening after dark a young man prowled among the crumbling red mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth he rested his lean hand-baggage upon the step and wiped the dust from his hatband and forehead. The bell sounded faint and far away in some remote, hollow depths.
To the door of this, the twelfth hou who bell he had rung, came a houkeeper who made him think of an unwholesome, surfeited worm that had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy with edible lodgers.
He asked if there was a room to let.
"Come in," said the houkeeper. Her voice came from her throat; her throat emed lined with fur. "I have the third floor back, vacant since a week back. Should you wish to look at it?"
The young man followed her up the stairs. A faint light from no particular source mitigated the shadows of the halls. They trod noilessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn. It emed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to the stairca and was viscid under the foot like organic matter. At each turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the wall. Perhaps plants had once been t within them. If so they had died in that foul and tainted air. It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished pit below.
"This is the room," said the houkeeper, from her furry throat. "It's a nice room. It ain't often vacant. I had some most elegant people in it last summer--no trouble at all, and paid in advance to the minute. The water's at the end of the hall. Sprowls and Mooney kept it three months. They done a vaudeville sketch. Miss B'retta Sprowls--you may have heard of her--Oh, that was just the stage nam
es -- right there over the dresr is where the marriage certificate hung, framed. The gas is here, and you e there is plenty of clot room. It's a room everybody likes. It never stays idle long."
"Do you have many theatrical people rooming here?" asked the young man.
"They comes and goes. A good proportion of my lodgers is connected with the theatres. Yes, sir, this is the theatrical district. Actor people never stays long anywhere. I get my share. Yes, they comes and they goes."
He engaged the room, paying for a week in advance. He was tired, he said, and would take posssion at once. He counted out the money. The room had been made ready, she said, even to towels and water. As the houkeeper moved away he put, for the thousandth time, the question that he carried at the end of his tongue.
"A young girl--Miss Vashner--Miss Eloi Vashner--do you remember such a one among your lodgers? She would be singing on the stage, most likely. A fair girl, of medium height and slender, with reddish, gold hair and a dark mole near her left eyebrow."
"No, I don't remember the name. Them stage people has names they change as often as their rooms. They comes and they goes. No, I don't call that one to mind."
No. Always no. Five months of cealess interrogation and the inevitable negative. So much time spent by day in questioning managers, agents, schools and chorus; by night among the audiences of theatres from all-star casts down to music halls so low that he dreaded to find what he most hoped for. He who had loved her best had tried to find her. He was sure that since her disappearance from home this great, water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its upper granules of to-day buried to-morrow in ooze and slime.
The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of pudo-hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the specious smile of a demirep. The sophistical comfort came in reflected gleams from the decayed furniture, the ragged brocade upholstery of a couch and two chairs, a foot-wide cheap pier glass between the two windows, from one or two gilt picture frames and a brass bedstead in a corner.
The guest reclined, inert, upon a chair, while the room, confud in speech as though it were an apartment in Babel, tried to discour to him of its divers tenantry.
A polychromatic rug like some brilliant-flowered rectangular, tropical islet lay surrounded by a billowy
a of soiled matting. Upon the gay-papered wall were tho pictures that pursue the homeless one from hou to hou--The Huguenot Lovers, The First Quarrel, The Wedding Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel's chastely vere outline was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it was some desolate flotsam cast aside by the room's marooned when a lucky sail had borne them to a fresh port--a trifling va or two, pictures of actress, a medicine bottle, some stray cards out of a deck.
One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the little signs left by the furnished room's procession of guests developed a significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of the dresr told that lovely woman had marched in the throng. Tiny finger prints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to
feel their way to sun and air. A splattered stain, raying like the shadow of a bursting bomb, witnesd where a hurled glass or bottle had splintered with its contents against the wall. Across the pier glass had been scrawled with a diamond in staggering letters the name "Marie." It emed that the succession of dwellers in the furnished room had turned in fury--perhaps tempted beyond forbearance by its garish coldness--and wreaked upon it their passions. The furniture was chipped and bruid; the couch, distorted by bursting springs, emed a horrible monster that had been slain
during the stress of some grotesque convulsion.
Some more potent upheaval had cloven a great slice from the marble mantel. Each plank in the floor owned its particular cant and shriek as from a parate and individual agony. It emed incredible that all this malice and injury had been wrought upon the room by tho who had called it for a time their home; and yet it may have been the cheated home instinct surviving blindly, the rentful rage at fal houhold gods that had kindled their wrath. A hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.
The young tenant in the chair allowed the thoughts to file, soft- shod, through his mind, while there drifted into the room furnished sounds and furnished scents. He heard in one room a tittering and incontinent, slack laughter; in others the monologue of a scold, the rattling of dice, a lullaby, and one crying dully; above him a banjo tinkled with spirit. Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains roared intermittently;
a cat yowled mirably upon a back fence. And he breathed the breath of the hou--a dank savour rather than a smell --a cold, musty effluvium as from underground vaults mingled with the reeking exhalations of linoleum and mildewed and rotten woodwork. Then, suddenly, as he rested there, the
room was filled with the strong, sweet odour of mignonette. It came as upon a single buffet of wind with such sureness and fragrance and emphasis that it almost emed a living visitant. And the man cried aloud: "What, dear?" as if he had been called, and sprang up and faced about. The rich odour clung to him and wrapped him around. He reached out his arms for it, all his ns for the time confud and commingled. How could one be peremptorily called by an odour? Surely it must have been a sound. But, was it not the sound that had touched, that had caresd him?
"She has been in this room," he cried, and he sprang to wrest from it a token, for he knew he would recognize the smallest thing that had belonged to her or that she had touched. This enveloping scent of mignonette, the odour that she had loved and made her own--whence came it?
The room had been but carelessly t in order. Scattered upon the flimsy dresr scarf were half a dozen hairpins--tho discreet, indistinguishable friends of womankind, feminine of gender, infinite of mood and uncommunicative of ten. The he ignored, conscious of their triumphant lack of identity. Ransacking the drawers of the dresr he came upon a discarded, tiny, ragged handkerchief. He presd it to his face. It was racy and insolent with heliotrope; he hurled it to the floor. In another drawer he found odd buttons, a theatre programme, a pawnbroker's card, two lost marshmallows, a book on the divination of dreams. In the last was a woman's
black satin hair bow, which halted him, poid between ice and fire. But the black satin hairbow also is femininity's demure, impersonal, common ornament, and tells no tales.
And then he traverd the room like a hound on the scent, skimming the walls, considering the corners of the bulging matting on his hands and knees, rummaging mantel and tables, the curtains and hangings, the drunken cabinet in the corner, for a visible sign, unable to perceive that she was there beside, around, against, within, above him, clinging to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly through the finer ns that even his grosr ones became cognisant of the call. Once again he answered loudly: "Yes, dear!" and turned, wild-eyed, to gaze on vacancy, for he could not yet discern form and colour and love and outstretched arms in the odour of mignonette.
Oh, God! whence that odour, and since when have odours had a voice to call? Thus he groped.
He burrowed in crevices and corners, and found corks and cigarettes. The he pasd in passive contempt. But once he found in a fold of the matting a half-smoked cigar, and this he ground beneath his heel with a green and trenchant oath. He sifted the room from end to end. He found dreary and ignoble small records of many a peripatetic tenant; but of her whom he sought, and who may have lodged there, and who spirit emed to hover there, he found no trace.
And then he thought of the houkeeper.
He ran from the haunted room downstairs and to a door that showed a crack of light. She came out to his knock. He smothered his excitement as best he could.
"Will you tell me, madam," he besought her, "who occupied the room I have before I came?"
"Yes, sir. I can tell you again. 'Twas Sprowls and Mooney, as I said. Miss B'retta Sprowls it was in the theatres, but Missis Mooney she was. My hou is well known for respectability. The marriage certificate hung, framed, on a nail over--"
"What kind of a lady was Miss Sprowls--in looks, I mean?"
Why, black-haired, sir, short, and stout, with a comical face. They left a week ago Tuesday."
"And before they occupied it?"
"Why, there was a single gentleman connected with the draying business. He left owing me a week. Before him was Missis Crowder and her two children, that stayed four months; and back of them was old Mr. Doyle, who sons paid for him. He kept the room six months. That goes back a year, sir, and further I do not remember."
He thanked her and crept back to his room. The room was dead. The esnce that had vivified it was gone. The perfume of mignonette had departed. In its place was the old, stale odour of mouldy hou furniture, of atmosphere in storage.
The ebbing of his hope drained his faith. He sat staring at the yellow, singing gaslight. Soon he walked to the bed and began to tear the sheets into strips. With the blade of his knife he drove them tightly into every crevice around windows and door. When all was snug and taut he turned out the light, turned the gas full on again and laid himlf gratefully upon the bed.
* * * * * * *
It was Mrs. McCool's night to go with the can for beer. So she fetched it and sat with Mrs. Purdy in one of tho subterranean retreats where hou-keepers foregather and the worm dieth ldom.
"I rented out my third floor, back, this evening," said Mrs. Purdy, across a fine circle of foam. "A young man took it. He went up to bed two hours ago."
"Now, did ye, Mrs. Purdy, ma'am?" said Mrs. McCool, with inten admiration. "You do be a wonder for rentin' rooms of that kind. And did ye tell him, then?" she concluded in a husky whisper, laden with mystery.
"Rooms," said Mrs. Purdy, in her furriest tones, "are furnished for to rent. I did not tell him, Mrs. McCool."
"'Tis right ye are, ma'am; 'tis by renting rooms we kape alive. Ye have the rale n for business, ma'am. There be many people will rayjict the rentin' of a room if they be tould a suicide has been after dyin' in the bed of it."
"As you say, we has our living to be making," remarked Mrs. Purdy.
"Yis, ma'am; 'tis true. 'Tis just one wake ago this day I helped ye lay out the third floor, back.
A pretty slip of a colleen she was to be killin' herlf wid the gas--a swate little face she had, Mrs. Purdy, ma'am."
"She'd a-been called handsome, as you say," said Mrs. Purdy, asnting but critical, "but for that mole she had a-growin' by her left eyebrow. Do fill up your glass again, Mrs. McCool."
在纽约西区南部的红砖房那一带地方，绝大多数居民都如时光一样动荡不定、迁移不停、来去匆匆。正因为无家可归，他们也可以说有上百个家。他们不时从这间客房搬到另一间客房，永远都是那么变幻无常——在居家上如此，在情感和理智上也无二致。他们用爵士乐曲调唱着流行曲“家，甜美的家”；
全部家当用硬纸盒一拎就走；缠缘于阔边帽上的装饰就是他们的葡萄藤；拐杖就是他们的无花果树。这一带有成百上千这种住客，这一带的房子可以述说的故事自然也是成百上千。当然，它们大多干瘪乏味；不过，要说在这么多漂泊过客掀起的余波中找不出一两个鬼魂，那才是怪事哩。一天傍晚擦黑以后，有个青年男子在这些崩塌失修的红砖大房中间转悠寻觅，挨门挨户按铃。在第十二家门前，他把空当当的手提行李放在台阶上，然后揩去帽沿和额头上的灰尘。门铃声很弱，好像传至遥远、空旷的房屋深处。这是他按响的第十二家门铃。铃声响过，女房东应声出来开门。她的模样使他想起一只讨厌的、吃得过多的蛆虫。它已经把果仁吃得只剩空壳，现在正想寻找可以充饥的房客来填充空间。年轻人问有没有房间出租。“进来吧，”房东说。她的声音从喉头挤出，嘎声嘎气，好像喉咙上绷
