Bohemian days; three American tales

Front matter

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT

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Preface

So far from the first tale in this book being of political motive, it was written among the subjects of it, and read to several of them in 1864. Perhaps the only souvenir of refugee and “skcdaddler” life abroad during the war ever published, its preservation may one day be useful in the socialistic archives of the South, to whose posterity slavery will seem almost a mythical thing. With as little bias in the second tale, I have etched the young Northern truant abroad during the secession. The closing tale, more recently written, in the midst of constant toil and travel, is an attempt to recall an old suburb, now nearly erased and illegible by the extension of a great city, and may be considered a home American picture about contemporary with the European tales.

Contents

SHORT NOVELS.

CHORDS.

Bohemia 9

II. Raising The Wind

The million five hundred thousand folks in Paris, who went about their pleasures that October night, knew little of the sorrows of the Southern Colony.

Pisgah dropped in at the Chateau des Fleurs to beg * The great Cemetery of Paris.

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a paltry loan from some ancient favorite. The time had been, when, after a nightly debauch, he had placed two hundred francs in her morning’s coffee-cup. It was mournful now to mark his premature gray hairs, as, resting his soiled, faded coat-sleeve upon her manteau de velour , he saw the scorn of his poverty in the bright eyes which had smiled upon him, and made his request so humbly and so feverishly.

“ Give me back, Feefine,” he faltered, “ only that fifty francs I once tied in a gold band about your spaniel’s neck. I am poor, my dear — that will not move you, I know, but I am going to Germany to play at the banks ; if I win, I swear to pay you back ten francs for one !”

There was never a lorette who did not love to gamble. She stopped a passing gentleman and borrowed the money ; the other saw it transferred to Pisgah, with an expression of contempt, and, turning to a friend, called him aloud a withering name.

Poor Pisgah ! he would have drawn his bowie-knife once, and defied even the emperor to stand between the man and himself after such an appellation. He would have esteemed it a favor now to be what he was named, and only lifted his creased beaver gratefully, and hobbled nervously away, and stopping near by at a cafe drank a great glass of absinthe, with almost a prayerful heart.

At Mr. Simp’s hotel in the Rue Monsieur Le Prince much business was transacted after dark. Monsieurs Freckle and Plade were engaged in smuggling away certain relics of furniture and wearing apparel.

Mr. Simp already owed his landlord fifteen months’

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rent, for which the only security was his diminishing effects.

If the mole-eyed concierge should suspect foul play with these, Simp would be turned out of doors immediately and the property confiscated.

Singly and in packages the collateral made its exit. A half-dozen regal chemises made to order at fifty francs apiece ; a musical clock picked up at Genoa for twelve louis ; a patent boot-jack and an ebony billiard cue ; a Paduan violin ; two statuettes of more fidelity than modesty, to be sold pound for pound at the current value of bronze ; divers pipes — articles of which Mr. Simp had earned the title of connoisseur, by investing several hundred dollars annually — a guttapercha self-adjusting dog-muzzle, the dog attached to which had been seized by H. M. Napoleon III. in lieu of taxes, etc., etc.

Everything passed out successfully except one pair of pantaloons which protruded from Freckle’s vest, and that unfortunate person at once fell under suspicion of theft. All went in the manner stated to Mr. Lees’ chamber, he being the only colonist who did not hazard the loss of his room, chiefly because nobody else would rent it, and in part because his landlady, having swindled him for six or eight years, had compunctions as to ejecting him.

Thence in the morning, true to his aristocratic instincts, Mr. Simp departed in a voiture for the central bureau of the Mont de Piete,* in the Rue Blanc Manteau. His face had become familiar there of late. He carried his articles up from the curb, while the * The government pawnbroking shop.

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cocker grinned and winked behind, and taking his turn in the throng of widows, orphans, ouvriers, and profligates and unfortunates of all loose conditions, Simp was a subject of much unenviable remark. He came away with quite an armful of large yellow certificates, and the articles were registered to Monsieur Simp, a French subject ; for with such passports went all his compatriots.

Andy Plade spent twenty-four hours, meanwhile, at the Grand Hotel, enacting the time-honored part of all things to all men.

He differed from the other colonists, in that they were weak — he was bad. He spoke several languages intelligibly, and knew much of many things — art, finances, geography — just those matters on which newly arrived Americans desire information. His address was even fascinating. One suspected him to be a leech, but pardoned the motive for the manner. He called himself a broken man. The war had blighted his fair fortunes. For a time he had held on hopefully, but now meant to breast the current no longer. His time was at the service of anybody. Would monsieur like to see the city ? He knew its every cleft and den. So he had lived in Paris five years — in the same manner, elsewhere, all his life.

A few men heard his story and helped him — one Northern man had given him employment ; his gratitude was defalcation.

To-day he has sounded Hugenot ; but that man of sentiment alluded to the business habits of his ancestry, and intimated that he did not lend.

“ Ou-ah cause, Andy,” he says, with a flourish, “ is

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now negotiating a loan. When ou-ah beloved country is reduced to such straits, that she must borow from strangers, I cannot think of relieving private indL gence. ’ ’

Later in the day, however, Mr. Plade made the acquaintance of an ingenuous youth from Pennsylvania, and obtaining a hundred francs, for one day only, sent it straightway to Mr. Auburn Risque.

A second meeting was held at Lees’ the third day noon, when the originator of the “ system” sat icily grim behind a table whereon eleven hundred francs reposed ; and the whole colony, crowding breathlessly around, was amazed to note how little the space taken up by so great a sum.

They opened a crevice that Lees might be gladdened with the sight of the gold ; for to-day that invalid was unusually dispirited, and could not quit his bed.

“ We are down very low, old Simp,” said Pisgah, smilingly, “ when either the possession or the loss of that amount can be an event in our lives.”

‘‘You will laugh that it was so, a week hence,” answered Auburn Risque — “ when you lunch at Peters’ while awaiting my third check for a thousand dollars apiece. ’ ’

‘‘I don’t believe in the system,” growled Lees, opening a cold draft from his melancholy eyes ; ‘‘ I don’t feel that I shall ever spend a sou of the winnings. No more will any of you. There will be no winnings to spend. Auburn Risque will lose. He always does.”

“ If you were standing by at the play I should,” cried Risque, while the pock-marks in his face were

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2 5 like the thawings of ice. “ You would croak like an old raven, and I should forget my reckoning.”

“ Come now, Lees,” cried all the others ; “ you , must not see bad omen for the Colony;” and they said, in undertone, that Lees had come to be quite a bore. ,

They were all doubtful, nevertheless. Their crisis could not be exaggerated. Their interest was almost devout. , Three thousand miles from relief ; two seas between, one of water and one of fire ; at home, conscription, captivity, death : the calamity of Southerners abroad would merit all sympathy, if it had not been induced by waste, and unredeemed by either fortitude or regret.

The unhappy Freckle, whose luckless admiration of the rest had been his ruin, felt that a sonorous prayer, such as his old father used to make in the Methodist meeting-house, would be a good thing wherewith to freight Auburn Risque for his voyage. When men stake everything on a chance, it is natural to look up to somebody who governs chances ; but Andy Plade, in his loud, bad way, proposed a huge toast, which they took with a cheer, and quite confused Hugenot, who had a sentiment apropos.

Then they escorted Auburn Risque to the Chemin de fer du Nord,* and packed him away in a third-class carriage, wringing his hand as if he were their only hope and friend in the world.

* Northern Railway Station,

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III. Death In Expatriation

It was a weary day for the Southern Colony. They strolled about town — to the Masque, the Jardin des Plantes, the Champ des Mars, the Marche aux Chevaux, and finally to Freckle’s place, and essayed -a lugubrious hour at whist.

“It is poor fun, Pisgah,” said Mr. Simp, at last, “if we remember that afternoon at poker when you won eight thousand francs and I lost six thousand.’’

The conversation forever returned to Spa and Baden- Baden, and many wagers were made upon the amount of money which Risque would gain — first day — second day — first week, and so forth.

At last they resolved to send to Lees’ chamber for the roulette-board, and pass the evening in experiment. They drew Jacks for the party who should fetch it, and Freckle, always unfortunate, was pronounced the man. He went cheerfully, thinking it quite an honor to serve the Colony in any capacity — for Freckle, representing a disaffected State, had fallen under suspicion of lukewarm loyalty, and was most anxious to clear up any such imputation.

His head was full of odd remembrances as he crossed the Place St. Sulpice : his plain old father at the old border home, close and hard-handed, who went afield with his own negroes, and made his sons take the plough-handles, and marched them all before him every Sunday to the plank church, and led the singing him-

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2 7 self with an ancient tuning-fork, and took up the collection in a black velvet bag fastened to a pole.

He had foreseen the war, and sent his son abroad to avoid it. He had given Freckle sufficient money to travel for five years, and told him in the same sentence to guard his farthings and say his prayers. Freckle could see the old man now, with a tear poised on his tangled eyelashes, asking a farewell benediction from the front portico, upon himself departing, while every woolly-head was uncovered, and the whole assembled “ property” had groaned “ Amen” together.

That was patriarchal life ; what was this ? Freckle thought this much finer and higher. He had not asked himself if it was better. He was rather ashamed of his father now, and anxious to be a dashing gentleman, like Plade or Pisgah.

Why did he play whist so badly ? How chanced it that, having dwelt eighteen months in Paris, he could speak no French ? His only grisette had both robbed him and been false to him. He knew that the Colony tolerated him, merely. Was he indeed verdant, as they had said — obtuse, stupid, lacking wit ?

After all, he repeated to himself, what had the Colony done for him ? He had not now twenty francs to his name, and was a thousand francs in debt ; he had essayed to study medicine, but balked at the first lesson. Yet, though these suggestions, rather than convictions, occurred to him, they stirred no latent ambition. If he had ever known one high resolution, the Southern Colony had pulled it up, and sown the place with salt.

So he reached Master Lees’ tenement ; it was a long

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ascent, and toward the last stages perilous ; the stairs had a fashion of curving round unexpectedly and bending against jambs and blank walls. He was quite out of breath when he staggered against Lees’ door and burst it open.

The light fell almost glaringly upon the bare, contracted chamber ; for this was next to the sky and close up to the clouds, and the window looked toward the west, where the sun, sinking majestically, was throwing its brightest smiles upon Paris, as it bade adieu.

And there, upon his tossed, neglected bed, in the full blaze of the sunset, his sharp, sallow jaws dropped upon his neck, his cheeks colorless and concave, his great eyes open wide and his hair unsmoothed, Master Lees lay dead, with the roulette table upon his breast !

When Freckle had raised himself from the platform at the base of the first flight of stairs, down which he had fallen in his fright, he hastened to his own chamber and gave the Colony notice of the depletion of its number.

A deep gloom, as may be surmised, fell upon all. Lees had been no great favorite of late, and it had been the trite remark for a year that he was looking like death ; but at this juncture the tidings came ominously enough. One member, at least, of the Southern Colony would never share the winnings of Auburn Risque, and now that they referred to his forebodings of the morning, it was recalled that with his own demise, he had prophesied the failure of “ the system. ’ *

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His end seemed to each young exile a personal admonition ; they had known him strong and spirited, and with them he had grown poor and unhappy. Poverty is a warning that talks like the wind, and we do not heed it ; but death raps at our door with bony knuckles, so that we grow pale and think.

They shuddered, though they were hardened young men, so unfeeling, even after this reprimand, that they would have left the corpse of their companion to go unhonored to its grave ; separately they wished to do so — in community they were ashamed ; and Pisgah had half a hope that somebody would demur when he said, awkwardly :

“ The Colony must attend the funeral, I suppose. God knows which of us will take the next turn.”

Freckle cried out, however, that he should go, if he were to be buried alive in the same tomb, and on this occasion only he appeared in the light of an influential spirit.

IV. The Desperate Chance

During all this time Mr. Auburn Risque, packed away in the omnibus train, with a cheap cigar between his lips, and a face like a refrigerator, was scudding over the rolling provinces of France, thinking as little of the sunshine, and the harvesters of flax, and the turning leaves of the woods, and the chateaux overawing the thatched little villages, as if the train were his mail-coach, and France were Arkansas, and he were lashing the rump of the “ off” horse, as he had done for the better part of his life.

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Risque’s uncle had been a great Mississippi jobber ; he took U. S. postal contracts for all the unknown world ; route of the first class, six horses and daily ; route of the second class, semi-weekly and four horses ; third class, two horses and weekly ; fourth class, one horse, one saddle, and one small boy.

The young Auburn had been born in the stable, and had taken at once to the road. His uncle found it convenient to put him to work. He can never be faithfully said to have learned to walk ; and recalls, as the first incident of his life, a man who carried a baby and two bcwie knives, teaching him to play old sledge on the cushions of a Washita stage.

Thenceforward he was a man of one idea. He held it to be one of the decrees, that he was to grow rich by gaming. As he went, by day or night, in rain or fog or burning sun, by the margins of turgid south-western rivers, where his “ leaders” shied at the alligators asleep in the stage-road ; through dreary pine woods, where the owls hooted at silence ; over red, reedy, slimy causeways ; in cane-breaks and bayous ; past villages where civilization looked westward with a dirk between its teeth, and cracked its horsewhip ; past rich plantations where the negroes sang afield, and the planter in the house-porch took off his hat to bow — here, there, always, everywhere, with his cold, hard, pock-marked face, thin lips and spotted eye, Auburn Risque sat brooding behind the reins, computing, calculating, overreaching, waiting for his destiny to wrestle with Chance and bind it down while its pockets were picked.

His whole life might have been called a game of

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3 * cards. He carried a deck forever next his heart. Sometimes he gambled with other vehicles — stocks, shares, currency — but the cards were still his mainstay, and he was well acquainted with every known or obsolete game. There was no trick, nor fraud, nor waggery which he had not at his fingers-ends.

It was his favorite theory that there was method in what seemed chance ; principles underlying luck ; measures for infinity ; clues to all combinations.

Given one pack of cards, one man to shuffle, one to cut, one to deal, and fair play, and it was yet possible to know just how many times in a given number of games each card would fall to each man.

Given a roulette circle of one hundred numbered spaces and a blindfolded man to spin the ball ; it could be counted just how many times in one thousand said ball would come to rest upon any one number.

No searcher for perpetual motion, no blind believer in alchemy, clung to his one idea closer than Auburn Risque. He had shut all themes, affections, interests, from his mind. He neither loved nor hated any living being. He was penurious in his expenditures — never in his wagers. He would stake upon anything in nature — a trot, an election, a battle, a murder.

“ Will you play picquet for one sou the game, one hundred and fifty points ?” says a soldier near by.

He accepts at once ; the afternoon passes to night, and the lamps in the roof are lighted. The cards flicker upon the seat ; the boors gather round to watch ; they pass the French frontier, and see from their windows the forges of Belgium, throwing fire upon the river Meuse. Still, hour after hour, though their eyes

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are weary, and all the folks are gone or sleeping, the cards fall, fall, fall, till there comes a jar and a stop, and the guard cries, “ Cologne !”

“You have won,” says the soldier, laying down his money. “ Good-night. ”

The Rhine is a fine stream, though our German friends will build mock-castles upon it, and insist that it is the only real river in the world.

Auburn Risque pays no more regard to it than though he were treading the cedars and sands of New Jersey or North Carolina. He speaks with a Franco- Russian, who has lost in play ten thousand francs a month for three successive years, and while they discuss chances, expedients and experiences, the Sieberngebierge drifts by, they pass St. Goar and Bingen, and the wonderful Rhine has been only a time, nothing of a scene, as they stop abreast Biberich, and, rowed ashore in a flagboat, make at once for the railway.

At noon, on the third day, Mr. Risque having engaged a frugal bed at a little distance from Wisbaden, enters the grand saloon of the Kursaal, and turning to the right, sees before him a perspective, to which not all the marvels of art or nature afford comparison : a snug little room, with a table of green baize in the centre of the floor, and about the table sundry folks of various ages and degrees, before each a heap of glittering coins, and in the midst of all a something which moves forever, with a hurtle and a hum — the roulette.

Mark them ! the weak, the profligate, the daring. There is old age, watching the play, with its voice like a baby’s cry ; and the paper whereon it keeps

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tremulous tally swimming upon eyes of perpetual twilight.

The boy ventures his first gold piece with the resolve that, win or lose, he will stake no more. He wins, and lies. At his side stands beautiful Sin, forgetting its guilt and coquetry for its avarice. The pale defaulter from over the sea hazards like one whose treasure is a burden upon his neck, and the roue — blank, emotionless, remorseless — doubling at every loss, walks penniless away to dinner with a better appetite than he who saves a nation or dies for a truth.

The daintily dressed coupeurs are in their chairs, eyeless, but omniscient ; the ball goes heedlessly, slaying or anointing where it stays, and the gold as it is raked up clinks and glistens, as if it struck men’s hearts and found them as hard and sounding.

Mr. Risque advanced to the end of the table, and stood motionless a little while, drinking it all into his passionless eyes, which, like sponges, absorbed whatever they saw, but nothing revealed. At last his right hand dropped softly to his vest pocket, as though it had some interest in deceiving his left hand.

Apparently unconscious of the act, the right hand next slid over the table edge, and silently deposited a five-franc piece upon the black compartment.

“ Whiz-z-z-z” started the ball from the fingers of the coupeurs — “ click” dropped the ball into a black department of the board ; “ clink ! tingle !” cried the money, changing hands ; but not a word said Auburn Risque, standing like a stalagmite with his eyes upon ten francs.

“ Whiz-z-z !” — “ click !” “ click !” “ tingle !”

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Did he see the fifteen francs at all, half trancelike, half corpse-like, as he stood, waiting for the third revolution, and waiting again, and again, and again ?

His five francs have grown to be a hundred ; his cold hand falls freezingly upon them ; five francs replace the hundred he took away — “ Whizz !” goes the ball ; “ click !” stops the ball ; the coupeur seizes Mr. Risque’s five francs, and Mr. Risque walks away like a somnambulist.

V. Buried In The Common Ditch

It would have been a strange scene for an American public, the street corridor of the lofty house near the church of Saint Sulpice, on the funeral afternoon.

The coffin lay upon a draped table, and festoons of crape threw phantom shadows upon the soiled velvet covering. Each passing pedestrian and cabman took off his hat a moment. The Southern Colony were in the landlady’s bureau enjoying a lunch and liquor, and precisely at three o’clock they came down stairs, not more dilapidated than usual, while at the same moment the municipal hearse drove up, attended by one cocker and two croquemorts *

The hearse was a cheap charity affair, furnished by the Maire of the arrondissement, though it was sprucely painted and decked with funeral cloth. The driver wore a huge black chapeau, a white cotton cravat, * Literally, “parasites of death.”

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and thigh-boots, which, standing up stiffly as he sat, seemed to engulf him to the ears.

When the croquemorts , in a business way, lifted the velvet from the coffin, it was seen to be constructed of strips of deal merely, unpainted, and not thicker than a Malaga raisin box.

There was some fear that it would fall apart of its own fragility, but the chief croquemort explained politely that such accidents never happened.

“ We have entombed four of them to-day,” he said ; ” see how nicely we shall lift the fifth one.”

There was, indeed, a certain sleight whereby he slung it across his shoulder, but no reason in the world for tossing it upon the hearse with a slam. They covered its nakedness with velvet, and the cocher , having taken a cigar from his pocket, and looking much as if he would like to smoke, put it back again sadly, cracked his whip, and the cortege went on. The croquemorts kept a little way ahead, sauntering upon the sidewalk, and their cloaks and oil-cloth hats protected them from a drizzling rain, which now came down, to the grief of the mourners, walking in the middle of the street behind the body. They were seven in number, Messrs. Plade, Pisgah and Simp, going together, and apparently a trifle the worse for the lunch ; Freckle followed singly, having been told to keep at a distance to render the display more imposing ; the landlady and her niece went arm in arm after, and behind them trode a little old hunchback gentleman, neatly clothed, and bearing in his hand a black, wooden cross, considerably higher than himself, on which was painted, in white letters, this inscription :

3 6

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CHRISTOPHER LEES,

CAROLINA DU NORD,

ETATS CONFEDERE AMERIQUE.

AGE YINGT-QUATRE.

A wreath of yellow immortelles, tied to the crosspiece, was interwoven with these spangled letters :

and the solemn air of the old man seemed to evidence that they were not meaningless.

The hunchback was Lees’ principal creditor. He kept a small restaurant, where the deceased had been supplied for two years, and his books showed indebtedness of twenty-eight hundred francs, not a sou of which he should ever receive. He could ill afford to lose the money, and had known, indeed, that he should never be paid, a year previous to the demise. But the friendlessness of the stranger had touched his heart* Twice every day he sent up a basket of food, which was always returned empty, and every Sunday climbed the long stairway with a bottle of the best wine — but never once said, “ Pay my bill.”

Here he was at the last chapter of exile, still bearing his creditor’s cross.

“Give the young man’s friends a lunch,” he had said to the landlady : “ I will make it right ;’’ — and in the cortege he was probably the only honest mourner.

Not we, who know Frenchmen by caricature merely, as volatile, fickle, deceitful, full of artifice, should sit in judgment upon them. He has the least heart of all

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who thinks that there is not some heart everywhere ! The charity which tarrieth long and suffereth much wrong, has been that of the Parisians of the Latin Quarter, during the American war.

Along all the route the folks lifted their hats as the hearse passed by, and so, through slush and mist and rain, the little company kept straight toward the barriers, and turned at last into the great gate of the cemetery of Mt. Parnasse.

They do not deck the cities of the dead abroad as our great sepulchres are adorned.

Pere la Chaise is famed rather for itr inmates than its tombs, and Mont Parnasse and Monte Martre, the remaining places of interment, are even forbidding to the mind and the eye.

A gate-keeper, in semi-military dress, sounded a loud bell as the hearse rolled over the curb, and when they had taken an aisle to the left, with maple trees on either side, and vistas of mean-looking vaults, a corpulent priest, wearing a cape and a white apron, and attended by a civil assistant of most villainous physiognomy, met the cortege and escorted it to its destination.

This was the fosse commune — in plain English, the common trench — an open lot adjacent to the cemetery, appropriated to bodies interred at public expense, and presenting to the eye a spectacle which, considered either with regard to its quaintness or its dreariness, stood alone and unrivalled.

Nearest the street the ground had long been occupied, trench parallel with trench, filled to the surface level, sodded green, and each grave marked by a wooden cross. There was a double layer of bodies

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beneath, lying side by side ; no margin could of course be given at the surface ; the thickly planted crosses, therefore, looked, at a little distance, like a great waste of heath or bramble, broken now and then by a dwarf cedar, and hung to the full with flowers and tokens. The width of the trenches was that of the added height of two full-grown men, and the length a half mile perhaps ; a narrow passage-way separated them, so that, however undistinguishable they appeared, each grave could be indentified and visited.

Close observation might have found much to cheer this waste of flesh, this economy of space ; but to this little approaching company the scene was of a kind to make death more terrible by association.