The Poor In Heart

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Title:     The Poor In Heart
Author: Perceval Gibbon [More Titles by Gibbon]

It was his habit of an evening to play the flute; and he was playing it faithfully, with the score propped up against a pile of books on his table, when the noises from the street reached him, and interrupted his music. With the silver-dotted flute in his hand he moved to the window and put aside the curtains to look out.

The flute is the instrument of mild men; and Robert Lucas had mildness for a chief quality. At the age of thirty-five, in the high noon of his manhood, he showed to the world a friendly, unenterprising face, neatly bearded, and generally a little vacant. The accident that gave him a Russian mother was his main qualification for the post he now held--that of representative of a firm of leather manufacturers in the Russian town of Tambov. He spoke Russian, he knew leather, and he could ignore the smells of a tanyard; these facts entitled him to a livelihood.

To right and left, as he looked forth, the cobbled street was dark; but opposite, in the silversmith's shop, there were lights, and, below, a small crowd had gathered. He watched wonderingly. He knew the silversmith well enough to nod as he passed his door--a young, laborious man with a rapt, uncertain face and a tumbled mane of black hair. There were also a little, grave wife and a fat, grave baby; and these, when they were visible, received separate and distinctive nods, and always returned them. The hide-sellers and tanners were, for the most part, crude and sportive persons with whom he could have nothing in common; they lived, apparently, on drink and uproar; and he had come to regard the silversmith and his family as vague friends. He pressed his face closer to the glass of the double casement to see more certainly.

The little shop seemed to be full of lights and people, and outside its door there was a press of folk. The murmur of voices was audible, though he could distinguish nothing that was said. But now and again there was laughter. It was the laughter that held him gazing and apprehensive; it had a harsher note than mirth. It seemed to him, too, that some of the men in the doorway were in uniform; he could see them only in outline, mere black silhouettes against the interior lights; but there was about them the ominous cut of the official, that Russian bird of ill-omen. And then, while yet he doubted, there sounded the very keynote of disaster. From somewhere within the silversmith's shop a woman screamed, sudden and startling.

"Now, now!" said Robert Lucas, at his window, grasping his flute nervously. And, as though in answer to his remonstrance, there was again that guttural, animal laughter. He frowned.

"I must see into this," he told himself very seriously.

He turned from the window. His pleasant room, with the bright lamp on the table and the music leaning beside it, seemed to advise him to proceed with caution. He and his life were not devised for situations in which women screamed on that tense note of anguish and terror; he had never done a violent thing in all his days. There was no clear purpose in his mind as he pulled open his door to go out--merely an ill-ease that forced him to go nearer to the cause of those screams. He had descended the stairs and was fumbling at the latch of the street-door before he realized that he was still holding the flute.

"Oh, bother!" he exclaimed, in extreme exasperation when the instrument proved too long for his pocket, and went out carrying it like some remarkable and ornate baton.

The small crowd before the silversmith's shop numbered, perhaps, a hundred people, and even before his eyes were acclimatized to the darkness he smelt sheepskin coats and tan-bark. He touched one big man on the arm and asked a question. The lights in the shop lit up the fellow's hairy face and loose grin as he turned to answer.

"Eh?" said the man. "Why, it's a Jew that the police are clearing out. Did you hear the Jewess squeal?"

"Yes, I heard," said Lucas, and moved away.

He was cut off from the door of the shop by the backs of the crowd, and passed along the street to get round them. Inside the lighted house the baby had begun to cry, but there was no more screaming. He had a sense that unless he hurried he might be too late for what was in preparation. The crowd seemed to be waiting for some culminating scene, with more than screams in it. A touch of nervous excitement came to fortify him, and he thrust in between two huge slaughterers, whose clothes reeked of the killing sheds.

"Make way!" he said breathlessly, as they turned on him.

One of them swore and would have shoved him back, and others looked round at the sound of strife. Lucas put up an uncertain hand to guard the blow. It, was the hand that held the flute, whose silver keys flashed in the lights from the shop.

"Ha!" grunted the slaughterer, arrested by that sight. He looked at Lucas doubtfully, his neat clothes, his general aspect of a superior. "Who are you?" he demanded.

"Make way!" repeated Lucas.

It seemed to confirm the slaughterer in his suspicion that this was a personage to be deferred to.

"Hi, there!" he bellowed helpfully. "Give room for his Excellency. Let his Excellency come through! Don't you see what he's got in his hand? Make way, will you?"

He bent his huge, unclean shoulder to the business of clearing a path, and drove through like a snow-plough. Lucas followed along the lane that he made, and came to the pavement close by the shop.

It was fortunate that events marched sharply from that point, and forced him to act without thinking. He had some vague notion of finding the officer in charge of the police and speaking to him. But before he could move to do so there was a fresh activity of the people within the bright windows; he saw something that had the look of a struggle. Voices babbled, and the crowd pressed closer; and suddenly, from the open doorway, two figures reeled forth, clutching and thrusting. One was in uniform, the other was a woman. For a couple of seconds they wrenched and fought, staged before the crowd on the lighted doorstep; and then the woman broke away and ran blindly towards the spot where Lucas stood. She had, he saw suddenly, a child in her arms that cried unceasingly.

The uniformed man who had tried to hold her came plunging after her; his face was creased in clownish and cruel smiles. Lucas saw the thing stupidly; his mind prompted him to nothing; he stood where he was, empty of resource. He was directly in the flying woman's path, and she rushed at him as to a refuge. He was the sole thing in that narrow arena of dread which she did not recognize as a figure of oppression; and she floundered to her knees at his-feet and held forth the terrified child to him in an agony of appeal. Her tormented and fearful face was upturned to him; he knew her for the Jewess, the wife of the silversmith.

"Father!" she breathed, in the pitiful idiom of that land of orphans.

"Ye-es," said Robert Lucas vaguely, and put a hand on her head.

Never before, in all the orderly level of his life, had a human being chosen him for champion and savior. He was aware of something within him that surged, some spate of force and potency in his blood; he stood upright with a start to confront the policeman who was on the woman's heels. The man was grinning still, fatuously and consciously, like a buffoon who knows he will be applauded; Lucas fronted his smiling security with a still fury that wiped the mirth from his face and left him gaping.

"Get back!" said Lucas. He spoke in a low tone, and the crowd jostled nearer to hear.

The policeman stared at him, amazed and uncomprehending.

"Sir," he stammered; "Excellency--this Jewess she----"

He stopped. Lucas was pointing at him with the flute across the bowed head of the woman, who crouched over her child at his feet.

"You shall report the matter to the Governor," said Lucas, in the same tone of icy anger. "And I will report it to the Minister."

He touched the woman. "Get up," he said. "Come with me."

He had to repeat it before she understood; she was numb with terror. She rose with difficulty to her feet, clasping the child, whose wail was now weak with exhaustion. The peering crowd made a ring of brute faces about them, full of menace and mystery, but the new power in him moved them to right and left at his gesture, and they gave him passage, with the woman behind him, across the road. The stupefied policeman watched them go, and then ran off to place the matter in the hands of his superior.

Lucas was at his door when the officer whom the policeman had fetched touched him on the elbow. He was a young man; if he had been older Lucas's difficulties might have been increased. He peered in the darkness, and was visible as a narrow, black-moustached face, with heavy eyebrows and a brutal mouth. The one thing that deterred him from brisk action was the fact that Lucas was a foreigner, whose rights and liabilities were therefore uncertain.

"This woman," he said, "is arrested."

Lucas was unlocking the door. He turned with his hand on the key, and the woman touched his arm. Perhaps that touch aided him to use big words. As a resident in Tambov he knew the officer by sight, and had always been a little daunted by his manner of power. In Russia one comes easily to fear the police. But now he was free of fear.

"You be careful," he said. "I saw what was being done."

With his left hand he pushed the door, and it swung open. He motioned the woman to enter, and nodded as he saw her cross the threshold.

The officer vented a click of impatience.

"I tell you----" he began, and moved forward a step. Lucas extended an arm and the hand that held the flute across his chest.

"Back!" he said. "You mustn't enter this house--you know that! You can go to the Governor, if you like, and I will go over his head. But you shall not touch that woman."

"She is arrested," said the officer obstinately, still studying his antagonist. "If you wish to aid her, you must go to the Bureau; but you cannot take her away like this."

"Eh?" Lucas swung round on him; the time was fertile in inspirations. "Can't I?!" he demanded threateningly. "But I have taken her, man. If you seize her now you must arrest me, too, and then--we shall see!"

"I must do my duty," persisted the other.

"Do it, then," said Lucas, standing square across the door. "Do it, and see if you can explain afterwards how you did it. I am not a woman who can be insulted with safety; my arrest will have to be explained to St. Petersburg, and you will have to pay for it. I saw how she was being handled, and how your duty was being done. I tell you, you're in danger. Be careful!"

"So?" replied the officer slowly. He turned to the folk who were the absorbed audience of this conference. "Move away, there," he commanded harshly. "This is none of your business. Off with you!"

They shifted back reluctantly, and he waited till he could speak unheard by them. Then he turned to Lucas again with a touch of the confidential in his manner.

"What do you want with her?" he asked.

"Want with her?" repeated Lucas, not immediately comprehending. Then, as the man's meaning reached him he trembled. "I don't want her," he cried. "I don't want her. You want her, not I; and you shan't have her. Do you understand? You shan't have her!"

"Shan't I?" retorted the officer, but there was indecision in his voice.

"No!" said Lucas.

There was a pause. Neither of them was sure of himself. The officer found himself in face of a situation which he could not gauge; and it would never do for a provincial police official to attract notice in remote St. Petersburg. For all he knew, this flimsy little man, who had snatched his Jewess from him, might be able to set in motion those mills which grind erring servants of the State into disgrace and ruin. He certainly had a large and authoritative way with him.

"Will you come to the Bureau, then, and speak with the chief?" he suggested. "You see, your action causes a difficulty."

"No, I won't," said Lucas flatly.

He also was in doubt. It seemed to him that he stood in a considerable peril, and he was aware that his mood of high temper was failing him. It needed an effort to maintain an assured and uncompromising front. Behind him, on the unlighted stairs, the woman breathed heavily. He summoned what he had of stubbornness to uphold him. The affair so far had gone valiantly; he meant that it should continue on the same plane.

He saw the officer hesitate frowningly, and quaked. In a moment the man might make up his mind and seize him; there was an urgent necessity for some action that should quell him. Like all weak men, he saw a resource in violence, and as the officer opened his lips to speak again he interrupted.

"No more!" he shouted. "You have heard what I had to say; that is enough. Now go!"

He pointed frantically with his flute, and the officer, at the sudden lifting of his arm, made a surprised movement, which Lucas misunderstood.

With a cry that was half terror and half ecstasy he smote, and the flute beat the officer's cap down over his eyes.

"Yei Bohu!" ejaculated the officer, falling back,

Lucas did not wait for him to thrust the cap away and recover himself. He had done his utmost, and the next step must rest with Providence. It was but two paces to the doorway. The officer was not quick enough to see his panic-stricken retirement. He recovered his sight only to see the slam of the door, which seemed to close in his face with a contemptuous and defiant emphasis. It was like a final fist shaken at him to drive home a warning. He shook his head despondently.

On the other side of the door Lucas, fighting with his loud breath, heard his slow footsteps on the cobbles as he departed. He waited, hardly daring to relax his mind to hope, till he heard the party of them drawing off. He was weak with unaccustomed emotions.

What struck him as marvelous was that the woman, whose face he had last seen as a writhen mask of fear, should appear in the light of his room with her calm restored, with nothing but some disorder of her hair and dress to betoken her troubles. Even the child in her arms, worn out with weeping perhaps, had fallen asleep. He stared at the pair of them vacantly. His lamp, his music, all the apparatus of his gentle and decorous existence were as he had left them; their familiar and prosaic quality made his adventure appear by contrast monstrous.

The Jewess was watching him. In her dark, serious way she had a certain striking beauty. Her grave eyes waited for him to look at her.

"What is it?" he said at last.

"If I might put the child down," she suggested timidly.

Lucas pointed to the double-doors of his bedroom. "My bed is in there," he answered. She lowered her head, as though in obedience to a command he had given, and carried the child out. Lucas watched her go, and then crossed the room to a cupboard which contained, among other things, a bottle of brandy.

While he was drinking she returned, pausing in the door to look back at the child. He noticed that she left the door partly open to hear it if it should wake, and somehow this struck him as particularly moving.

She came across the room to him, with her steadfast eyes on his face, and, without speaking, fell on her knees before him and put the edge of his coat to her lips.

Lucas stood while she did it; he hardly dared to move and interrupt that reverent and symbolic act of gratitude. But once again, as when on the pavement she had held the child to him in frantic appeal, the simple soul within him flamed into splendor, and he was in touch with great passions and mighty emotions. It is the mood of martyrs and heroes. He looked down to her dark eyes, bright with swimming tears, and helped her to her feet.

"You shall be safe here," he told her. "Nobody shall touch you here."

She believed it utterly; he was a champion sent straight from God; she had seen him conquering and irresistible. To fear now would be a blasphemy.

"I am quite safe," she agreed. "I am not afraid. To-morrow some of my people will come for me."

He nodded. "There is some food in the cupboard there," he told her. "Milk, too, if the child wants it. And nobody can come up the stairs without meeting me; and if they try, God help them!"

She half smiled at the idea. "They would never dare," she agreed confidently.

He would have been glad of his overcoat, but that was in his bedroom, and he dreaded the indelicacy of going there while she was present. So in the event he bade her a brief good-night, and found himself on the dark and chilly stairs without so much as a pillow or a blanket to make sleep possible. For lack of anything else in the shape of a weapon, he had brought his silver-keyed flute with him; if he were invaded in the small hours it might serve him again; it seemed to have a virtue for quelling police officials.

About three o'clock in the morning he awoke from an uneasy doze, chilled to the marrow, and was prompted to try if the flute would still make music. It would not. It is too much to ask of any instrument that has been used as an instrument of war. It had saved a Jewess and her child, magnified its owner into a man of action, and was thenceforth silent for ever.

"I must have hit that officer pretty hard," was the reflection of Robert Lucas.

The episode closed shortly before noon next day, when two elderly men of affairs came to fetch his guests away. They entered the room while he was entertaining the baby with a whistled selection from his repertoire of flute music, and he broke off short as they regarded him from the doorway. The Jewess looked up alertly as they entered.

They bowed to Lucas with a manner of servility in which there was an ironic suggestion, while their eyes examined him shrewdly. They were bearded, aquiline persons, soft-spoken and withal formidable. He had a notion that they found him amusing, but suppressed their amusement.

"Then it is you we have to thank," said the elder of them, when formal greetings had been exchanged, "for the safety of this girl and her child."

"I don't want any thanks," protested Lucas.

He could not tell them how the thanks he had already received transcended any words they could speak.

"It was a villainous thing," he went on. "I'm glad I could help. Er-- is the silversmith all, right?"

"Money was paid," answered the grey-haired Jew; "he is safe, therefore. But he spent the night in chains, while his wife was here with you."

He spoke with a pregnant gravity. The Jewess started up and addressed him in a tongue Lucas could not understand. He saw that she pointed to him and to the bedroom and to the stairs, and that she spoke with heat. The old Jew heard her intently.

"So!" he said, in his deep voice. "Then we have more to thank you for than we thought. You gave up your rooms, it seems?"

"It is nothing," said Lucas. "You see, a lady--well, I could hardly--"

"Yes, I see," agreed the old Jew. "I have to do with a noble spirit. And you do not want any thanks? So? But we Jews, we have more things to give than thanks, and better things."

"I don't want anything," Lucas answered him. "I'm glad everything's all right."

"You are very good," said the old man, "very good and generous. But some day, perhaps, you will have a need--and then you will find that our people do not forget."

The Jewess had nothing to take with her but her child. She bowed her head and murmured something as she passed out, and the baby laughed at him.

"Our people do not forget," repeated the old Jew, as he bowed himself forth.

"Well," said Lucas, half aloud, when he was once more alone in his room, "that's finished, anyhow."

It was the knell of his greater self, of the man he had contrived to be for a few hours. He sat in his chair, dimly realizing it, with vague and wordless regrets. Then, upon the table, he saw the flute, and rose to put it in the cupboard. It would never be useful again, but he did not want to throw it away.

The old dramas, which somehow came so close to reality with so little art--or because of so little art--had a way of straddling time like life itself. "Twenty years elapse between Acts II and III," the playbills said unblushingly, and the fact is that what most men sow at twenty they reap at forty; the twenty years do elapse between the acts. The curtain that goes down on Robert Lucas in his room at Tambov rises on Robert H. Lucas in New York, with the passage of time marked on him as clearly as on a clock. With grey in his beard and patches on his boots, and quarters in a boarding-house in Long Island City, he is still concerned with leather, but no longer prosperous. His work involves much calling on dealers and manufacturers, and their manner of receiving him has done nothing to harden his manner of diffidence and incompetence. His linen strives to be inconspicuous; his clothes do not inspire respect; the total effect of him is that of a man who has been at great pains to plant himself in a wrong environment. Tambov now is no more than a memory; it is less than an experience, for it has left the man unchanged. It is a thing he has seen--not a thing he has lived.

The accident that gave his name and the address of his boarding-house a place in the papers has no part in his story; he was an unimportant witness in the trial of a man whom he had seen in the street cutting blood-spots out of his clothing. He had bought a paper which mentioned him to read on the ferry as he returned home, and had been mildly thrilled to find that an artist had sketched him and immortalized him in his columns. And next morning came the letter.

"Guelder and Zorn" was the name engraved across the head of it, in a slender Italian script; it conveyed nothing to him. The body of the communication was typewritten, and stated that if Mr. Robert H. Lucas would present himself at the above address, the firm would be glad to serve him. Nothing more.

"Mean to say you haven't heard of Guelder and Zorn?" demanded the young man whose place at breakfast in the boarding-house was opposite to him, when he asked a question. "Say--d'you know what money is? Hard, round flat stuff--money? You do know that, eh? Well, Guelder and Zorn is the same thing."

Somebody laughed. Lucas looked round rather helplessly.

"They say," he explained, referring to the letter, "that they'll be glad to serve me."

"Then you might lend me a couple of million," suggested the young man opposite, with entire disbelief. "Them Jews would never miss it."

Lucas had the sense to drop the matter there. He put the letter in his pocket and went on with his breakfast, and listened with incredulous interest to the talk that went on about the wealth, the greatness, the magnificence and power of the financial house which professed itself anxious to be of use to him. He was sorry to have to leave the table before it came to an end.

It is characteristic of him that the letter aroused no wild hopes, nor even an acute curiosity. He came, in the course of the morning, to the offices of Messrs. Guelder and Zorn in much the same frame of mind he brought to his business efforts. They were near, but not in, Wall Street--a fact of some symbolic quality which he, of course, could not appreciate. He stood on the edge of the side-walk for some moments, looking up at the solid, responsible block of building which anchored their fortunes to earth, till some one jostled him into the gutter. Then he recollected himself and prepared to enter the money- mill.

A hall porter like a comic German heard his inquiry, scrutinized him with a withering glare, and jerked a thumb towards a door. He found himself in such an office as may have seen the first Rothschild make his first profits--a room austere as a chapel, rigidly confined to the needs of business. A screen, pierced by pigeon-holes, cut it in half. Experience has proved that no sum of money is too large to pass through a pigeon-hole.

"Veil?"

A whiskered, spectacled face, framed in the central pigeon-hole, with eyes magnified by the spectacles, regarded him sharply.

"Oh!" He recalled himself to his concerns with a jerk, and fumbled in his pockets. "I had a letter," he explained.

"Vere is de letter?"

He found it, after an exciting search, and passed it over. The whiskered face developed a hand to receive it.

"I don't know what it's about," explained Lucas.

"Perhaps your people have made a mistake in the name, or something."

"Our beoble," said the face in the pigeon-hole, with malignant emphasis, "do nod make mistagues!"

There was an interval while the letter was read, and Lucas stood and fidgeted, with a sense that he was intrusive and petty and undesired. "Yes," said the owner of the spectacles, at length. "You vait. I vill enguire."

He left his pigeon-hole unshuttered, and to Lucas, while he waited, it seemed that several men came to it and glanced at him forbiddingly. None spoke; they just looked as though in righteous indignation at his presence, with seventy-five cents in his pocket, in that high temple of finance. Then the whiskered and spectacled face fitted itself again into the aperture.

"So you are Mr. Robert H. Lugas, are you?" it inquired. "Den vere vas you in de year 1886?"

"Where was I?" repeated Lucas vaguely. "Let me see! 1886--yes! I was in Russia then--in Tambov."

"Yes." The other's regard was keen. "An' now tell me aboud de man dat lived obbosite to you in Tambov?"

"Do you mean the silversmith?" said Lucas. The other nodded. "Oh, him! He was a Jew. They expelled him."

"And his vife?"

"His wife! They expelled her too," he answered. "I never heard of her again."

"Vot vas de last you heard of her?"

"Oh, that!"

Lucas was staring at him vacantly. It did not occur to him that, by not answering promptly, he might give ground for doubt and suspicion. The question had re-illuminated in his mind--perhaps for the first time since the event which it touched--that night of twenty years before. He flavored again the heady and effervescent vintage of strong action, of crowded happenings and poignant emotions.

"Veil?" demanded the other.

"There was a police officer," began Lucas obediently; "his name was Semianoff;" and in bald, halting words he told the story. He told it absently, languidly, for no words within his reach could convey the thing as it dwelt in his memory, the warmth and color of it, its uplifting and transfiguring quality.

The man behind the pigeon-hole heard him intently.

"Yes," he said again, as Lucas finished. "You are de man. Ve do not reguire further broof, Mr. Lugas."

He produced a slip of paper and a pen which he laid on the ledge before his pigeon-hole.

"I am instrugted to say dat if you vill fill in and sign dis cheque, ve vill cash it."

"Eh?" Lucas was slow to understand.

"Ve vill cash it," repeated the other. "You fill it in--and sign it-- and I vill cash it now."

"But"--Lucas took the pen from him in mere obedience to his gesture-- "but--what for?"

"My instrugtions are to cash it--no more!"

Lucas stared at the tight-lipped, elderly face, like the face of a wise and distrustful gnome, and held the pen uncertainly above the cheque form.

"How much am I to write?" he asked.

"I haf no instrugtions about de amount," was the reply.

"But," cried Lucas, "I might write fifty thousand dollars!"

"My instrugtions are to cash de cheque ven you haf written it."

"Oh!" said Lucas.

He stared incredulously at the face for some moments and then wrote a cheque for the sum he had named--fifty thousand dollars. He was about to add his signature when something occurred to him.

"Is it because I went across the road to that little woman in Tambov?" he asked suddenly.

The whiskered face answered composedly: "No. It is because you went out of your rooms and slept on de stairs."

"Because"--he seemed puzzled--"but that is a thing--why, any gentleman would do it."

"Dose are my instrugtions," said the man behind the pigeon-hole.

"I see."

Lucas stood upright, the uncompleted cheque in his fingers. All surprise and excitement had vanished from his regard; he seemed taller and stronger than he had been a minute before. He had yet many calls to make, and, in the nature of things, many rebuffs to receive, before he went home to supper; and the money in his pocket totaled seventy-five cents. He needed new boots, new clothes, leisure, consideration, and a sight of his native land; in short, he needed fifty thousand dollars.

"You will cash this because I didn't fail to respect a helpless woman?" he asked, in level tones.

The whiskered cashier replied: "Yes. Because you gave up your room and kept watch on de stairs."

Lucas laughed gently. "That is not the way to deal with a gentleman," he said. "I will make your firm a present of fifty thousand dollars."

He showed the cheque he had written, with the figures clear and large. And then, with leisurely motions, he tore it across and again across.

"Much obliged," said Robert H. Lucas, and made for the door.

[The end]
Perceval Gibbon's short story: The Poor In Heart

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