FullReads

But it was one o’clock before Charley got away. Out of the brilliantly lighted rooms he walked, stunned with grief, and a little heavy with the wine and punch he had drunk, for in his preoccupation of mind he had forgotten to be as cautious as usual. Following an impulse, he took a car and went directly downtown, and then made his way to Huckleberry Street. He stopped at a saloon door and asked if they could tell him where Mr. Vail’s rooms were.

“The blissed man as wint about like a saint? Shore and I can,” said the boozy Irishman. “It’s right ferninst where yer afther stan’in, up the stairs on the corner of Granefield Coort–over there, bedad.”

Seeing a light in the rooms indicated by the man, Charley crossed over, passed through a sorrowful-looking crowd at the door, and went up the stairs. He found the negro woman who kept the rooms for Vail standing talking to an Irish woman. Both the women were deeply pitted with smallpox.

He inquired if they could tell him how Mr. Vail was.

“O honey, he’s done dead sence three o’clock,” said the black woman, sitting down in a chair and beginning to wipe her eyes on her apron. “This Misses Mcgroarty’s jist done tole me this minute.”

The Irish woman came round in front of Mr. Vanderhuyn and looked inquisitively at him a moment, and then said, “Faix, mister, and is yer name Charley?”

“Why do you ask?” said Vanderhuyn.

“Because I thought, mebbe, you might be after him, the gentleman. It’s me husband, Pat Mcgroarty, as is a nurruss in the horsepital, and a good one as iver ye seed, and it’s Pat as has been a-tellin’ me about that blissed saint of a man, as how in his delairyum he kept a-talkin’ to Charley all the time, and Pat said as he seemed to have something on his mind he wanted to say to Charley. An’ whin I see yer face, sich a gintleman’s face as ye’ve got, too, I says shure that must be Charley.”

“What did he say?” asked Vanderhuyn.

“Shure, and Pat said it wasn’t much he could gether, for he was in a awful delairyum, ye know, but he would keep a-sayin’, ‘Charley, Charley, God and Huckleberry Street want you.’ Pat says he’d say it so awful as would make him shiver, that God and Huckleberry Street wanted Charley. Shure it must a bin the delairyum, you know, that made him mix up things loike, and put God and Huckleberry Street together, when its more loike the divil would seem more proper to go with Huckleberry Street, ye know. But if yer name’s Charley, and yer loike the loikes of him as is dead, shure Huckleberry Street is after wantin’ of you, bad enough.”

“My name’s Charley, but I’m not a bit like him, though, I’m sorry to say, my good woman. Tell your husband to come and see me–there’s my number.”

Charley went out, and the men at the door whispered, “That must be the rich man as give him all the money.” He took the last car uptown, and he who had been two hours before in that brilliant company at the Hasheesh was now one of ten people riding in a street car. Of his fellow-passengers six were drunken men and two were low women of the town; one of them had no bonnet, and lacked a penny of enough to pay her fare, but the conductor mercifully let her ride, remarking to Vanderhuyn, who stood on the platform, that “the poor devil has a hard life any how.” Said I not a minute ago, that the antipodes live not around the world, but around the street corner? Antipodes ride in the same street car.

As the car was passing Mott Street, a passenger, half drunk, came out, turned his haggard face a moment toward the face of Charley Vanderhuyn, and then, with an exclamation of startled recognition, leaped from the car and hurried away in the darkness. It was not till the car had gone three blocks farther that Vanderhuyn guessed, from the golden hair, that this was Perdue, the brilliant “Baron Bertram” of the early days of the Hasheesh Club.