Authors: Dan Simmons
The title was
MAGGIE: A Girl of the Streets
, the volumes looked crude enough—to James’s professional gaze—to be self-published, and the author’s name was Johnston Smith.
Finally, near the southwestern end of the line on the trolley James was then on, he dared to sit in the empty seat in front of the “reading man”, turned toward him, and cleared his throat loudly. The man did not lower the book.
“I beg your pardon,” James said at last and the man started—he’d obviously been dozing—and lowered the book.
“I’ve noticed quite a few gentlemen on public transportation this evening reading precisely the volume you are,” James said, “and I hope you don’t think me impertinent if I ask why it’s so popular in Chicago.”
The man smiled broadly, showing nicotine-stained or missing teeth which suggested that the thick and uncomfortable-looking suit he had on was his
only
suit. “I’ve been waitin’ for someone to ask,” said the man. “Truth is, I haven’t read a word of this idiotic book. A fellow pays me—and some twenty or so other lads—to just ride around on the trains and trolleys from seven a.m. ’til the transits close down at one a.m. I think the fellow thinks that if other folks see us readin’ this book, they’ll rush out an’ buy one for their own selves. Problem is, the only other people I’ve seen readin’ this here book are other coves like me who’ve been paid to do so. Or to pretend we are.”
“How long have you and the other . . . ah . . . readers been so employed?” asked James.
“Three weeks now, with never so much as a question about the book. Until you come along, that is. I think our guy is runnin’ out of cash though. I’m afraid that by this time next week, I’ll have to find honest work.”
“Is it the author, Mr. Johnston Smith, who is paying you for this . . . advertising effort?” asked James.
“It’s the author all right, but his name ain’t Johnston nor Smith. He’s a young-lookin’ cove, no more’n twenty-one or twenty-two at the oldest with shoes more worn than ours is . . . and his real name is Stephen Crane.”
“Well, it’s an interesting way to promote one’s novel,” said James, wondering if such a stunt might work for him in the more literary crowds of London. But, no . . . the literary crowds in London did not use transit designed for the masses save for railway carriages, and no British man or woman would start a conversation with a stranger in the carriage. It simply was not done.
“You know,” said the man with the book now closed and on his lap, “I’ve read me a book or two in my day, and this
MAGGIE
thing ain’t even a real book.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean,” said the man, “that it’s only about forty pages long, and that with wide white margins on each side and a bunch of empty white pages in front ’n’ back.”
“A short story bound as a book,” mused James.
The man shrugged. “All I know is I got one more lousy hour to prop this thing up before the trolleys shut down and I can go home to sleep. My arms are killing me from holdin’ this trash up to my nose all day and night, but this Crane fellow checks up on us almost every day. The lot of us’ve compared notes and, if the book ain’t raised right or your eyes ain’t open, you get canned on the spot. And there ain’t many jobs these days where a man gets paid two dollars a day for just sitting on his ass.”
James shook his head as if in sympathy.
The trolley came to a stop in a dark part of town and the driver and conductor got out to swing it around. The end of the line evidently.
James decided to stretch his legs for a moment.
“You’re not getting out here, are you?” asked the paid book man.
“Just for a second,” said James.
But as soon as he was out in the muggy air, he saw, half a block away, under the only street lamp working on that block, the flash of baldness, the glimpse of a frock coat and old-fashioned high collar, and the white-worm movement of the long strangler’s fingers before the darkness swallowed the man up again.
Forgetting about the trolley, James began walking quickly after the apparition.
* * *
Beyond that last, weak street lamp, there was not only deep darkness but a sudden end to the tenements and shacks that had lined each side of the street. It was as if James had followed Professor Moriarty all the way out of Chicago and they were on the dark prairie together.
But then the smell struck James. The smell and the sense of hundreds if not thousands of massive but unseen animal hooves, the stench and the atavistic certainty that one is being stared at in the darkness by countless unseen eyes. The street ended in a T and straight ahead through the staggering stench James could make out a great, dark, occasionally moving mass of living, breathing, staring, and excreting organisms. Cattle.
He’d reached the Chicago stockyards. Not a single street light or building’s lighted window pierced the darkness to either side. Far out in the filled corrals there was a gas lamp or two, but they were too far away to shed any light on his immediate surroundings. James saw the strangely dark glistening of horns far out there.
James chose to turn left and walked boldly into the breathing darkness in that direction.
* * *
It took a minute or two for him to realize that there was no sidewalk, no paved street under his shoes. Just gravel and dirt. At least it was not mud of the sort he was sure filled the cattle pens to his right. He could hear the squelching as sleeping cattle moved fitfully or others shoved their way through the mass to a feeding trough.
James also realized that he felt . . . different. The apathy and anger of the day had drained away with his bold searching out of Moriarty in the dangerous Chicago neighborhoods. He’d caught no more glimpse of the bald head and long, white fingers since he’d come to this black collision of crumbling city warehouses and the huge stockyards, but he hadn’t really expected to find—much less confront—the mastermind of crime.
Henry James realized it was as if he was outside himself, above himself, watching himself (here where it was too dark even to read the hands of his watch without striking a match). Before this night, he’d been struggling to be a playwright; now he was both actor and audience, watching himself as he
acted
. Not “performed”, but
acted
, as in carrying out a physical and purposeful (and somewhat daring) action.
If this is how a character in some lesser writer’s novel feels . . . I
like
it
, thought James.
It was hard for him to believe at this moment that a little more than a month and a half ago, he’d been ready to drown himself in the Seine. For what? Sagging book sales?
James almost laughed aloud as he strode along in the night. As much as he still disliked Sherlock Holmes for a myriad of valid reasons, he now realized that the detective—whether real or fictional—had been Henry James, Jr.’s, savior. This strange night in this strange city, James felt younger, stronger—more alive—than any time he could remember, at least since his childhood. And he deeply suspected that the life and energy he’d felt as a boy was merely his lunar reflection of the sunlight of older brother William’s wild energy and spirit.
Drastic engagement
. These were the words that now echoed through James’s mind. Not merely a reinvigorated engagement with the stuff of daily life, but an engagement with the dangers and dramas outside any life he’d ever allowed himself to imagine, much less live. For the first time he understood how his brother Wilkie could have suffered such terrible wounds, seen such horrible things—one of the two men carrying Wilkie along the dunes on a stretcher the day after the night battle at Fort Wagner had his head blown to pieces, the spatterings of brains and white bits of skull falling all over Wilkie as the stretcher fell to the ground—yet Wilkie, only partially recovered, had eventually gone back to the war. As had James’s brother Bob after losing half his regiment in a different battle.
Drastic engagement
. James suddenly understood why such moments
were
life to Sherlock Holmes and why the detective had to resort to injections of cocaine or morphine or heroin to get through the dull, backwater days of the quotidian between dangerous cases.
It might have been Moriarty he’d glimpsed from the trolley a half hour earlier, but probably not. It didn’t matter that much to James at that moment.
And then he saw motion. Dark shapes moving toward him. Vertical forms outside the wooden fences of the corrals. Men.
James’s eyes had adapted well enough to the dark—the backs of the warehouses to his left had no lit windows or outside lamps—that he could see that the forms were of four men and that all of them carried clubs, truncheons.
He stopped.
Lifting his gentleman’s stick into both soft hands, James wished that it was Holmes’s sword-cane.
Should he run? James realized that he had more dread of being dragged down from behind on the run, like one of these cattle at a rodeo, than of facing whoever or whatever was striding toward him so quickly in the darkness.
The four assailants—James had no delusions that they could be anything else and whether they worked for Moriarty or not was academic and irrelevant to everything now (he’d never know)—had fanned out and were less than ten feet from him when a voice boomed from a dark alley to his left.
“YOU THERE! STOP! DON’T MOVE!!”
The shield was raised on a powerful dark lantern and a beam of light stabbed out from the distant alley to illuminate Henry James—his cane held at port-arms across his chest—and four thugs in patched and filthy stockyard clothing. What James had imagined were truncheons
were
truncheons . . . knobbed, stained, deadly.
“FREEZE!” bellowed the God-voice again. James had already obeyed and did not move a muscle, while his four assailants exploded into motion, two vaulting over the corral fence to shove their way into the dark mass of cattle, the other two loping back along the fence into the darkness from whence they’d come.
The light shifted away from them to hold on the squinting James as the figure with the God-voice came closer. Then the beam lowered.
A Chicago policeman. Not one of Burnham’s flashy Columbian Guardsmen for the Fair, but a real Chicago policeman. James took in the double row of brass buttons, the soft cap, the oversized star on the short but burly man’s left chest, the narrowed eyes, and the luxurious mustache.
James felt some relief that the policeman had shown up when he did, but he’d not been frightened.
James had not been frightened
, even as the four thugs closed on him. He did not understand it. Nor did he understand himself at the moment.
No matter. He realized that he was giving the suspicious police officer a silly smile. James composed himself as best he could.
The now half-shielded beam from the dark lantern moved up and down James, from his soft, expensive black Italian-made shoes and dusty spats to his expensive jacket, waistcoat, collar, cravat, and stickpin.
“What are you doing out here at the stockyards, sir?” said the policeman in a human-leveled voice. “Those men would have robbed you of everything . . . most probably including your life, sir.”
James fought down the strange impulse to grin at the wonderful policeman with his wonderful Irish accent and his wonderful waxed mustache and even at his wonderful short, black, heavy wooden truncheon, which Holmes had told him was called a “billy club” in America.
James tried to reply, but the master of the modern endless sentence could manage only ragged fragments. “I was . . . I wanted . . . to see Chicago . . . got off the elevated train . . . then the trolleys . . . got out to walk . . . suddenly it was all . . . darkness.”
The police officer realized that he was dealing with an idiot and spoke now in a slow, reassuring, nursery-teacher’s voice. “Yes, sir. But this . . . is no place . . . for you . . . sir.”
James nodded his agreement and he realized, to his horror, that he
was
grinning now.
He’d not been afraid
.
“Where are you staying, sir?”
It took a few seconds for the meaning of the officer’s question to sink in. “Oh, at the . . . no, not the Great Northern this time . . . no . . . on Cameron’s . . . on Senator Don Cameron’s . . . yacht.”
The police officer squinted at him. James realized that the Irishman was handsome enough, save for a nose that looked like a squashed red potato. He bit the inside of his cheek to stop himself from laughing.
“Where is this yacht, sir?”
“Anchored off the Grand Pier of the White City,” said James. He was in charge of his nouns, verbs, and syntax again. (In truth, he hadn’t missed them much. He realized that he’d trade the whole lot for just more of what he was feeling right now.)
“May I ask your name, sir?
“Henry James, Jr.,” James said at once. Then, wondering at his reply, he hurried to correct it. “Just Henry James now. My father—Henry James, Sr.—died about eleven years ago.”
“How did you get ashore from this senator’s yacht, Mr. James?” “The City Pier. There’s a boatman from the yacht in a steam launch. I told him to wait for me.”
The policeman turned his lantern on an inexpensive watch in his palm. “It’s after midnight, sir.”
James did not know what to say to this revelation. He suddenly doubted if his boatman had waited all these hours. Perhaps all his friends presumed him lost. Or dead.
“Come, Mr. James,” said the policeman, putting a gentle arm on James’s shoulder and turning them back toward the dark alley from which he’d so magically emerged. “I’ll see you back to the right trolley stop, sir. The trolleys and the new “L” quit running in less than an hour, now. Even on a Saturday night. You’ll need to go straight back to the pier with no more sightseeing.”
Not minding at all the friendly arm on his shoulders, James walked with the Irishman back toward the lighted parts of the city.
O
n the Sunday before Monday’s May-first official Opening Day of the Fair, Henry Cabot Lodge’s guests had broken into various groups to find their day’s entertainment. During the time Henry James was with anyone exploring the quiescent but soon-to-erupt fairgrounds, he stayed with Henry Adams who was staying close to Lizzie and Don Cameron. But sometime in the afternoon, Adams had wandered off alone again. He’d spent most of the previous day alone as well. Everyone had agreed to meet back on the pier at seven to take the large motor launch back to the yacht. They were going up the lake to be guests at a gala given by the 68-year-old re-elected Mayor Carter Henry Harrison. Even young Helen Hay had been seduced by the old populist’s energy, candor, and charm upon first meeting him earlier that day.