EAGLES
Gesta Romanorum
Long live Britannia!
Long live Roma!
Ballad of Reading Gaol
The View
Leer
St. Mark
Luke 17:37
"And they answered and said unto him, Where, Lord? And he said unto them,
Wheresoever the body is, thither will the eagles be gathered
together."
Prov.10:9
"He that walketh uprightly walketh surely: but he that perverteth his ways shall be known."
"Somewhere in his lush, magenta prose Oscar Wilde speaks of the
tendency of nature to imitate art—a phenomenon often observed by persons
who keep their eyes open."---H. L. Mencken
Chess: "Eagles" "Gesta Romanorum" "Ballad of Reading Gaol" "The View" "Leer" "St. Mark"
H. L. Mencken – A Girl From Red Lion P. A.
Somewhere in his lush, magenta prose Oscar Wilde speaks of the
tendency of nature to imitate art—a phenomenon often observed by persons
who keep their eyes open. I first became aware of it, not through the
pages of Wilde, but at the hands of an old-time hack-driver named
Peebles, who flourished in Baltimore in the days of this history.
Peebles was a Scotsman of a generally unfriendly and retiring character,
but nevertheless he was something of a public figure in the town.
Perhaps that was partly due to the fact that he had served twelve years
in the Maryland Penitentiary for killing his wife, but I think he owed
much more of his eminence to his adamantine rectitude in money matters,
so rare in his profession. The very cops, indeed, regarded him as an
honest man, and said so freely. They knew about his blanket refusal to
take more than three or four times the legal fare from drunks, they knew
how many lost watches, wallets, stick-pins and walking-sticks he turned
in every year, and they admired as Christians, though deploring as
cops, his absolute refusal to work for them in the capacity of
stool-pigeon.
Moreover, he was industrious as well as honest, and it was the common
belief that he had money in five banks. He appeared on the hack-stand
in front of the old Eutaw House every evening at nine o’clock, and put
in the next five or six hours shuttling merrymakers and sociologists to
and from the red-light districts. When this trade began to languish he
drove to Union Station, and there kept watch until his two old horses
fell asleep. Most of the strangers who got off the early morning trains
wanted to go to the nearest hotel, which was only two blocks away, so
there was not a great deal of money in their patronage, but unlike the
other hackers Peebles never resorted to the device of driving them
swiftly in the wrong direction and then working back by a circuitous
route.
A little after dawn one morning in the early Autumn of 1903, just as
his off horse began to snore gently, a milk-train got in from lower
Pennsylvania, and out of it issued a rosy-cheeked young woman carrying a
pasteboard suitcase and a pink parasol. Squired up from the train-level
by a car-greaser with an eye for country beauty, she emerged into the
sunlight shyly and ran her eye down the line of hacks. The other drivers
seemed to scare her, and no wonder, for they were all grasping men
whose evil propensities glowed from them like heat from a stove. But
when she saw Peebles her feminine intuition must have told her that he
could be trusted, for she shook off the car-greaser without further ado,
and came up to the Peebles hack with a pretty show of confidence.
“Say, mister,” she said, “how much will you charge to take me to a
house of ill fame?” In telling of it afterward Peebles probably
exaggerated his astonishment a bit, but certainly he must have suffered
something rationally describable as a shock. He laid great stress upon
her air of blooming innocence, almost like that of a cavorting lamb. He
said her two cheeks glowed like apples, and that she smelled like a load
of hay. By his own account he stared at her for a full minute without
answering her question, with a wild stream of confused surmises racing
through his mind. What imaginable business could a creature so obviously
guileless have in the sort of establishment she had mentioned? Could it
be that her tongue had slipped—that she actually meant an employment
office, the Y.W.C.A., or what not? Peebles, as he later elaborated the
story, insisted that he had cross-examined her at length, and that she
had not only reiterated her question in precise terms, but explained
that she was fully determined to abandon herself to sin and looked
forward confidently to dying in the gutter. But in his first version he
reported simply that he had stared at her dumbly until his amazement
began to wear off, and then motioned to her to climb into his back.
After all, he was a common carrier, and obliged by law to haul all
comers, regardless of their private projects and intentions. If he
yielded anything to his Caledonian moral sense it took the form of
choosing her destination with some prudence. He might have dumped her
into one of the third-rate bagnios that crowded a street not three
blocks from Union Station, and then gone on about his business. Instead,
he drove half way across town to the high-toned studio of Miss Nellie
d’Alembert, at that time one of the leaders of her profession in
Baltimore, and a woman who, though she lacked the polish of Vassar, had
sound sense, a pawky humor, and progressive ideas.
I had become, only a little while before, city editor of the Herald,
and in that capacity received frequently confidential communications
from her. She was, in fact, the source of a great many useful news tips.
She knew everything about everyone that no one was supposed to know,
and had accurate advance information, in particular, about Page 1
divorces, for nearly all the big law firms of the town used her
facilities for the manufacture of evidence. There were no Walter
Winchells in that era, and the city editors of the land had to depend on
volunteers for inside stuff. Such volunteers were moved (a) by a sense
of public duty gracefully performed, and (b) by an enlightened desire to
keep on the good side of newspapers. Not infrequently they cashed in on
this last. I well remember the night when two visiting Congressmen from
Washington got into a debate in Miss Nellie’s music-room, and one of
them dented the skull of the other with a spittoon. At my suggestion the
other city editors of Baltimore joined me in straining journalistic
ethics far enough to remove the accident to Mt. Vernon place, the most
respectable neighborhood in town, and to lay the fracture to a fall on
the ice.
My chance leadership in this public work made Miss Nellie my
partisan, and now and then she gave me a nice tip and forgot to include
the other city editors. Thus I was alert when she called up during the
early afternoon of Peebles’ strange adventure, and told me that
something swell was on ice. She explained that it was not really what
you could call important news, but simply a sort of human-interest
story, so I asked Percy Heath to go to see her, for though he was now my
successor as Sunday editor, he still did an occasional news story, and I
knew what kind he enjoyed especially. He called up in half an hour, and
asked me to join him. “If you don’t hear it yourself,” he said, “you
will say I am pulling a fake.”
When I got to Miss Nellie’s house I found her sitting with Percy in a
basement room that she used as a sort of office, and at once she
plunged into the story.
“I’ll tell you first,” she began, “before you see the poor thing
herself. When Peebles yanked the bell this morning I was sound asleep,
and so was all the girls, and Sadie the coon had gone home. I stuck my
head out of the window, and there was Peebles on the front steps. I
said: ‘Get the hell away from here! What do you mean by bringing in a
drunk at this time of the morning? Don’t you know us poor working people
gotta get some rest?’ But he hollered back that he didn’t have no drunk
A GIRL FROM RED LION, P.A. 467 in his hack, but something he didn’t
know what to make of, and needed my help on, so I slipped on my kimono
and went down to the door, and by that time he had the girl out of the
hack, and before I could say ‘scat’ he had shoved her in the parlor; and
she was unloading what she had to say.
“Well, to make a long story short, she said she come from somewheres
near a burg they call Red Lion, P.A., and lived on a farm. She said her
father was one of them old rubes with whiskers they call Dunkards, and
very strict. She said she had a beau in York, P.A., of the name of
Elmer, and whenever he could get away he would come out to the farm and
set in the parlor with her, and they would do a little hugging and
kissing. She said Elmer was educated and a great reader, and he would
bring her books that he got from his brother, who was a train butcher on
the Northern Central, and him and her would read them. She said the
books was all about love, and that most of them was sad: Her and Elmer
would talk about them while they set in the parlor, and the more they
talked about them the sadder they would get, and sometimes she would
have to cry.
“Well, to make a long story short, this went on once a week or so,
and night before last Elmer come down from York with some more books,
and they set in the parlor, and talked about love. Her old man usually
stuck his nose in the door now and then, to see that there wasn’t no
foolishness, but night before last he had a bilious attack and went to
bed early, so her and Elmer had it all to theirself in the parlor. So
they quit talking about the books, and Elmer began to love her up, and
in a little while they was hugging and kissing to beat the band. Well,
to make a long story short, Elmer went too far, and when she come to
herself and kicked him out she realized she had lost her honest name.
“She laid awake all night thinking about it, and the more she thought
about it the more scared she got. In every one of the books her and
Elmer read there was something on the subject, and all of the books said
the same thing. When a girl lost her honest name there was nothing for
her to do except to run away from home and lead a life of shame. No girl
that she ever read about ever done anything else. They all rushed off
to the nearest city, started this life of shame, and then took to booze
and dope and died in the gutter. Their family never knew what had became
of them. Maybe they landed finally in a medical college, or maybe the
Salvation Army buried them, but their people never heard no more of
them, and their name was rubbed out of the family Bible. Sometimes their
beau tried to find them, but he never could do it, and in the end he
usually married the judge’s homely daughter, and moved into the big
house when the judge died.
“Well, to make a long story short, this poor girl lay awake all night
thinking of such sad things, and when she got up at four thirty A.M.
and went out to milk the cows her eyes was so full of tears that she
could hardly find their spigots. Her father, who was still bilious, give
her hell, and told her she was getting her just punishment for setting
up until ten and eleven o’clock at night, when all decent people ought
to be in bed. So she began to suspect that he may have snuck down during
the evening, and caught her, and was getting ready to turn her out of
the house and wash his hands of her, and maybe even curse her. So she
decided to have it over and done with as soon as possible, and last
night, the minute he hit the hay again, she hoofed in to York, P.A., and
caught the milk-train for Baltimore, and that is how Peebles found her
at Union Station and brought her here. When I asked her what in hell she
wanted all she had to say was ‘Ain’t this a house of ill fame?’, and it
took me an hour or two to pump her story out of her. So now I have got
her upstairs tinder lock and key, and as soon as I can get word to
Peebles I’ll tell him to take her back to Union Station, and start her
back for Red Lion, P.A. Can you beat it?”
Percy and I, of course, demanded to see the girl, and presently Miss
Nellie fetched her in. She was by no means the bucolic Lillian Russell
that Peebles’ tall tales afterward made her out, but she was certainly
far from unappetizing. Despite her loss of sleep, the dreadful gnawings
of her conscience and the menace of an appalling retribution, her cheeks
were still rosy, and there remained a considerable sparkle in her
troubled blue eyes. I never heard her name, but it was plain that she
was of four-square Pennsylvania Dutch stock, and as sturdy as the cows
she serviced. She had on her Sunday clothes, and appeared to be somewhat
uncomfortable in them, but Miss Nellie set her at ease, and soon she
was retelling her story to two strange and, in her sight, probably
highly dubious men. We listened without interrupting her, and when she
finished Percy was the first to speak.
“My dear young lady,” he said, “you have been grossly misinformed. I
don’t know what these works of fiction are that you and Elmer read, but
they are as far out of date as Joe Miller’s Jest-Book. The stuff that
seems to be in them would make even a newspaper editorial writer cough
and scratch himself. It may be true that, in the remote era when they
appear to have been written, the penalty of a slight and venial slip was
as drastic as you say, but I assure you that it is no longer the case.
The world is much more humane than it used to be, and much more
rational. Just as it no longer burns men for heresy or women for
witchcraft, so it has ceased to condemn girls to lives of shame and
death in the gutter for the trivial dereliction you acknowledge. If
there were time I’d get you some of the more recent books, and point out
passages showing how moral principles have changed. The only thing that
is frowned on now seems to be getting caught. Otherwise, justice is
virtually silent on the subject.
“Inasmuch as your story indicates that no one knows of your crime
save your beau, who, if he has learned of your disappearance, is
probably scared half to death, I advise you to go home, make some
plausible excuse to your pa for lighting out, and resume your care of
his cows. At the proper opportunity take your beau to the pastor, and
join him in indissoluble love. It is the safe, respectable and hygienic
course. Everyone agrees that it is moral, even moralists. Meanwhile,
don’t forget to thank Miss Nellie. She might have helped you down the
prim-rose way; instead, she has restored you to virtue and happiness, no
worse for an interesting experience.”
The girl, of course, took in only a small part of this, for Percy’s
voluptuous style and vocabulary were beyond the grasp of a simple
milkmaid. But Miss Nellie, who understood English much better than she
spoke it translated freely, and in a little while the troubled look
departed from those blue eyes, and large tears of joy welled from them.
Miss Nellie shed a couple herself, and so did all the ladies of the
resident faculty, for they had drifted downstairs during the interview,
sleepy but curious. The practical Miss Nellie inevitably thought of
money, and it turned out that the trip down by milk-train and Peebles’
lawful freight of $1 had about exhausted the poor girl’s savings, and
she had only some odd change left. Percy threw in a dollar and I threw
in a dollar, and Miss Nellie not only threw in a third, but ordered one
of the ladies to go to the kitchen and prepare a box-lunch for the
return to Red Lion.
Sadie the coon had not yet come to work, but Peebles presently bobbed
up without being sent for, and toward the end of the afternoon he
started off for Union Station with his most amazing passenger, now as
full of innocent jubilation as a martyr saved at the stake. As I have
said, he embellished the story considerably during the days following,
especially in the direction of touching up the girl’s pulchritude. The
cops, because of their general confidence in him, swallowed his
exaggerations, and I heard more than one of them lament that they had
missed the chance to handle the case professionally. Percy, in his later
years, made two or three attempts to put it into a movie scenario, but
the Hays office always vetoed it.
How the girl managed to account to her father for her mysterious
flight and quick return I don’t know, for she was never heard from
afterward. She promised to send Miss Nellie a picture postcard of Red
Lion, showing the new hall of the Knights of Pythias, but if it was ever
actually mailed it must have been misaddressed, for it never arrived.
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