THE NEWNORTHLAND

EDITORIAL NOTE

This remarkable narrative of Arctic exploration is itself a remarkable confirmation of the wisdom of that tireless hunt for NEWS which has become second nature to the newspaper man, and while distinctively a mark of his calling, has attached to his profession the opprobrium of “yellowness.” The appropriation of this color—so intimately associated in nature with the golden illumination of the noon, the royal charm of lilies, and the enduring lure of gold—to designate an irresponsible and shameless sensationalism has never been adequately explained. The “yellowness” of the live journalist, turning with an instinctive scent to follow to its end every new trail of incident, sniffing in each passing rumor the presence of hidden and serviceable scandal, and ruthlessly breaking through the sham obstruction of modesty to snatch the culprit or to free the victim, cannot certainly be referred to the torpor marked by the jaundice of the invalid, nor to the weakness of the last stages of an emaciating fever. Perhaps if the reproach is to be made, or can be made, intelligible,

the yellow color finds its subtle analogue in a mustard plaster.

That popular cataplasm has a dignified and ancient history, and is gratefully recorded in literature for nearly two thousand years as a contrarient of value, allaying hidden aches through the excoriation of the uninjured and painless surfaces. The 8process seems to involve an injustice in principle, but it is, in spite of abstractions, a beneficent practice. The “yellowness” of newspapers may amaze modesty, startle discretion, and afflict innocence, but it cures interior disorders, and the unpleasantness of an ulcerated or inflamed skin should be condoned or forgotten for the benefit of a regulated stomach or a renovated joint.

However, this all en passant, as only remotely, and yet diffidently, related to the manner of my obtaining the circumstances and facts of the following adventure. I have attributed my success to the pertinacity of instinct and the olfactory sense of mischief. It is true. Without one or the other—though the combination of both rendered failure impossible—I might not now be in the enviable position of proclaiming a “beat” on my professional rivals which no amount of editorial venom, aspersion, contempt and innuendo will ever obliterate from the annals of journalism, as unprecedented.

I am indeed afflicted at moments with a sort of discomfiture over my own modesty in not having ransacked to better advantage the commercial possibilities of my tenacity and acumen. Incredible and hypnotizing as is this story of Mr. Alfred Erickson, as a foil to its romantic daring and its transcendent interest, the brief relation of the episode—and its development—that led to its publication, has a delightful thrill of excitement, and an up-to-date volubility, so to speak, of incident, that frames the story in the most exhilarating contrasts.

An office boy, a temporary expedient for a messenger and page, Jack Riddles, mercurial, vagarious, and quick-witted, a sandy haired, long-limbed, peaked-nosed and weazel-eyed creation, with flattened cheeks, whose jackets were always 9short, and whose trousers despised any intimacy with the tops of his shoes, got me the story.

Jack is destined for great things in our metropolitan annals. In the mission of the Progressive party, with its millennial attachments, Jack and his sort would be progressively eliminated. Crime exists for detection, and detection is Life at its nth power for such as he. Jack is endowed with a rare intuition of ways and means when the center of a reportorial mystery is to be perforated, and the process of “getting there” to him is as inevitable as the first half of the alphabet. Riddle’s only counterpart was Octavius Guy, alias Gooseberry, Lawyer Bruff’s boy in Wilkie Collin’s story of the Moonstone.

He began his exploit on the top of a Fifth Avenue ’bus, and it was about the middle of September, 1912. Jack has a Hogarthian sense for the multitudinous, the psychological, the junction of circumstance and expression in revealing a plot or betraying a criminal. To hang over the railing of a Fifth Avenue ’bus and watch the crowds, the motor cars, each vibratory shock, as the behemoth shivers and plunges, bringing your interpretative eye unexpectedly into a new relation with the faces of that ceremonious throng, was intoxication for Jack. It evoked exuberantly the passion of espionage. There was indeed concealment here, in the packed and methodical progression of people and people, and yet more people. Yet with an average dumbness or dullness, or just the homogeneous stare of business, or the vapid contentment of contiguity to riches and fashion, Jack caught glimpses, direct, profound, of dismay or discontent; of the pallid, revolting grimace of suffering, the snarl of envy, or the deeper placidity of crime.

They were rare, but Jack watched for them; his precocity ran that way and he was rewarded. It 10used up his dimes, it widened the solutions of continuity in his nether garments and brought his feet more familiarly in contact with the hard flagging. Some supersensual instinct urged him. The succeeding story attests the splendor of the revelation he uncovered. Jack may have been about eighteen years of age.

It was opposite the Public Library, just below Forty-second Street on Fifth Avenue and on the west side of that thoroughfare that Jack’s eyes, after a long stop which held up an endless phalanx of automobiles, fell upon a man and woman who conveyed to his thought a hint of crime. The woman was beautiful too, a Spanish siren, full in form, with developed curves that yielded so slightly to the sway of her tight fitting mauve dress as to start the conjecture that she did not belong to the more rarified types of Venuses. A light feather boa, deliciously pearly gray in tone, heightened the carnation of her cheeks. These in turn yielded to the orbed splendor of her eyes, and that to the wealth of black hair darkly globed underneath a maroon velvet turban-like cap, in whose folds twinkled a firmament of greenish stars. Jack literally devoured her radiance, so near was he to her as she descended with her companion the last terrace to the sidewalk between the amorphous lions of the Public Library.

The man with her was inordinately, insolently handsome, dark and tall, dressed a little beyond the form of reticence, as was the woman. Herein perhaps lurked the confession of their mutual depravity to Jack, an untutored psychologist; to all besides it appealed as a momentary sensation, to some as barely an infringement of good taste.

The man wore a light fedora hat that suited the bravado of his curled and graceful moustache, the ovate outlines of his face, his liquid, voluptuous 11eyes, the sensuous thickness of his lips. Observation stopped short at his face where he intended it should. Its arrest was made imperative by a blue and ormolu tie, relieved against a softly-tinted yellow shirt, carrying a horseshoe of demantoid garnets in a wreath of little diamonds. His feet were encased in tan gaiters, a permissible distraction. For an instant only the spectator was rewarded with an appreciation of their admirable tournure. Otherwise he was in black, relieved by the white lining at the lapels of his coat, and he carried a cane in his gloved hand.

It was a few instants after Jack’s ravished eyes had fastened on this entrancing couple, that the cane was raised sharply in the air to descend abruptly on the woman’s head. The attack involved the man’s slight retreat—a backward gesture—and his turning aside, whereby his profile cut keenly across the sunlit stone behind him, and Jack was shocked into a delighted recognition of the same profile in a print in the show window of Krauschaar’s gallery. He remembered the title; it was “Mephistopheles, A Modern Guise of an Old Offender”; a smiling, swarthy beau at the feet of a remonstrating and beautiful ingenue.

The explosion was evidently the climax of an altercation. Jack recalled the previous animated demeanor of the couple. Explanatory reflections were cut short by the velocity of the woman’s defense. She flung herself on the man, caught his arms with her outstretched hands, and kicked him viciously. Infuriated, he tore himself away, raised the cane and the next moment would have inflicted a harsher insult on the defiant Amazon, into whose face, so Jack thought, had sprung a tigerish fury, when, from the stupified and expectant crowd before them, half shrinking and half jubilant, shot a tall figure, whose interposition transfixed both contestants.

12This meteoric stranger was remarkable for his broad shoulders, and a peculiar taper in his frame downward to his feet, that made him figuratively a human top, the impression of any actual deformity arising from his immense chest, on which, by a connection scarcely deserving consideration as a neck, sat his squat, contracted head. Prodigious whiskers covered his face, invading his high cheeks almost to the outer limits of his sunken eyes.

This hirsute prodigality contrasted with his cropped cranium and his closely shaven lips. The latter were long and thin-compressed, they seemed to separate his chin from the rest of his face by a red seam. His forehead was low and his head was covered with a steamer-tourist’s cap. His clothes were of plaid.

As he rushed between the wranglers he caught each by the shoulder, and he pushed them apart. He had turned toward the avenue, facing the wondering throng, and Jack heard him speak quickly and sharply, but in a guttural, obscured way that suggested something that was not English or, if it was, it was hopelessly incoherent to Jack’s ears from its imperfect articulation.

The man and woman seemed stunned into immobility, and then obeying his gesture, followed him on the sidewalk, jostled and pressed by the crowd which at first, inquisitive but timorous, had recoiled a little from the enigmatical encounter and then, almost obstreperous and decidedly interested engulfed the trio, who however pushed their way through, energetically piloted by the stranger. How quickly a drama evolves!

All three had almost simultaneously stepped into the little scenario, and yet by the illusion of an assumed sequence the last actor seemed a novelty, related as unexpected, to the other two, as more familiar and apparent. None of the three spoke, 13nor did they heed the interruption of the spectators who tardily parted to let them pass. The moment Forty-second Street was reached the leader turned toward Sixth Avenue. Jack standing on the roof of the ’bus, which slowly swung off into the restored movement northward as the obstruction somewhere ahead disappeared, saw them enter an automobile opposite the northern entrance to the library and dash westward.

Jack did not argue the matter with himself. He had no compunctions. He jumped straight for the to him (as perhaps to anyone) tangible certainty that he had struck a trail of iniquity. But how to follow it? His ruminations were cut short by the loud honk of an automobile and there, returning to Fifth Avenue at Fiftieth Street, he saw the yellow limousine which contained the suspects wheeling into the procession and, forced by the unrelieved pressure to relax its impatience, moving with the limping concourse at the same pace.

Jack watched it eagerly. His eyes never left it. It swayed a little to the right and to the left as the driver, probably under threats or persuasion, endeavored to insert his vehicle into the chance spaces that opened before him. This irregular and tentative progress brought the automobile at length directly alongside of the ’bus which had on it the Nemesis of its (the automobile’s) occupants. It was underneath Jack’s very eyes; he could have dropped on its roof almost unnoticed. Jack’s heart beat with trip-hammer throbs, and his mind rehearsed the possibilities of murder, arson, burglary, brigandage, kidnapping, etc., gathering headway in that uncanny conference going on there below under that burnished but impenetrable roof. But he was exulting too with the steel-clad certainty of having a “case,” and that a little intensive use of his wits would promote him from the 14office floor to a reserved seat in the Reporters’ Sanctum.

A jolt, a lurching swing, the vituperative shriek of an ungreased axle, and the ’bus followed a meandering lane that brought it into an unimpeded headway. Jack sprang to his feet and watched behind him the still imprisoned limousine—it too shot ahead; noiselessly as a speeding bird it overtook the ’bus and then with a graceful curve, almost as if in mockery of his impotence, it vanished into east Fifty-eighth Street.

Jack had a message for the Director of the Metropolitan Art Museum. It was from myself in response to an inquiry as to what space we could afford for a description of a new Morgan exhibit. Jack was a safe messenger, unmistakably accurate, but we always discounted his celerity, because of his preferences for a ride on a Fifth avenue ’bus and the little delinquencies of delay his observational powers tempted him to perpetrate. He was an hour later than the most generous allowance of time would justify. Jack was to bring back “copy” for the next day’s issue. I lectured him. He was sullenly respectful, indifferently contrite, and showed a taciturn preoccupation that impressed my reportorial instinct as significant.

As a matter of fact the missing hour was used in traversing Fifty-eighth Street. The fruit of Jack’s search was diminutive but it was conclusive. On the pavement in front of No. — east Fifty-eighth Street, Jack picked up a microscopic green glass star. He knew where it belonged—the spangled turban on top of the massed hair of that afternoon’s debutante; debutante to Jack’s official criticism.

This minute betrayal had dropped from her hat, from nowhere else, and the belligerent cane of her escort had dislodged it. It had lain somewhere in the folds and creases of the soft velvet, to fall just 15there, unsuspectedly at the entrance of her retreat—a frail enamel bead releasing to the world a marvelous secret. For Jack Riddles intended to watch that house; he would enter it; if it concealed some half consummated plot of SIN, if indeed the plot was over, its victims disposed of, and the conspirators were there enjoying the harvest of their guilt, he would know it, and—the eventuality of failure never entered his head. He felt, in every fibre, a certainty of wrong-doing, something shadowy, perhaps darkly cruel in these people. His prescience was involuntary; he never explained it, he never himself understood it.

Jack lived in Brooklyn, with his wifeless father. That night as he left the office he dropped a postal at a lamp post and took a car north. He was following the trail. A little transposed I submit Jack’s story as he gave it to me the next morning.

He came to the office a little late, and knocked at my door. On entering I saw instantly that he was in an advanced stage of nervous excitement. He was pale, and a fluttering involuntary movement of his hands, one over the other, as he stood before me, with a glitter in his peculiarly shaped and small eyes betrayed his mental agitation. He was quite wet, had probably been drenched, and the first symptoms of a chill showed that precautions were necessary to avert a possible collapse. I told him to sit down, opened a cellarette, which had its professional and commercial uses, and poured out a rather stiff jorum of the best whisky I owned.

As he swallowed in a gulping manner the proffered contents of the glass, he was rather a ludicrous and yet pitiful and heart-moving object. His disordered hair, shabby clothes and a certain forlorn wistfulness in his glance upward to me, combined with his lean and disjointed anatomy gave him an expression that was at once tender and 16laughable. Only a Cruikshank could have done it justice. His spirits revived, animal heat reasserted itself, and back with it, as if it had stood somewhere aside until invited to return, came boastingly his invincible pugnacity and confidence.

“Mr. Link,” his speech was customarily hesitating with a deprecatory manner as if forestalling interruption or correction, and impeded by a slight stutter, but now, in the tide and torrent of his thoughts, under the sway of the elation over his first bit of detective work, it was rapid but coherent, and oddly picturesque. “Mr. Link, I’ve nipped a pretty piece of mischief in the bud—seems so to me. Of course I’m just on the trail, and fetching up to the big game that I think is in sight, barring the trees—may take more work than I think. But the proposition is as clear as glass that there’s a crooked game being pulled off at — east Fifty-eighth Street, and I’m convinced that ‘the deceits of the world, the flesh and the devil,’ as it goes in the prayer book, are behind it. Now here’s the evidence—not much you may say, but I’ll hang up my reputation on it—you know, Mr. Link, I have a little hereabouts at finding out things, and I’m just convinced it—won’t drop.

“I was on the ’bus, stalled just below Forty-second Street, opposite the Library. I saw a couple of people, a man and a woman, coming down the steps to the street. The woman—Well, I couldn’t begin to tell you how stunning she was. Beauty was just all over her, thick too, from her feet to her head. I remember now the thought struck me as I looked at her that she’d make a brass man turn round to see her when she’d passed. And the goods on her were as sweet and gay as herself—a picture, Mr. Link, a real picture, if ever a woman made one. The man was with her, good-looking and cruel; neat, too, and Hell painted on him so 17plain it would make an angel throw a fit—if an angel could, supposin’.

“Now Mr. Link I hadn’t looked that long,” Jack snapped his fingers, “before I felt, sir, that they were rotten, not four flushers, but the real bad, like those the Sunday School man told us of, who ‘build a town with blood, and establish a city by iniquity.’” The pause Jack interpolated here was as oracular as the quotation. I did him a great injustice to seem indifferent and impatient. Really I felt the thrill of an inevitable sensation approaching, and—I saw beyond it hypnotizing copy. Jack desiderated encouragement, approval—I looked at the clock over my desk and yawned. Surely it was deliberate malice.

“Like that, sir!” Jack clapped his hands loudly; the ruse broke through my affectation, and startled me into attention that he was keen enough to see was as intense as he wished it to be.

“Like that, sir, they hit out at each other, and there was a fight on! Then a husky— Well, a—white-hope you might have called him—bounced in; they knew him, he knew them, and the three chased off in an automobile. I lost ’em, found ’em, and tracked ’em down east Fifty-eighth Street. She had green stars in her hat—things you could hardly see—but they shone! I found one on a doorstep—and last night I watched the house!”

The typical story teller who at such a juncture lights a cigar, finishes an unsmoked pipe, empties a glass of grog, or rises with unconcealed surprise over his neglect to fulfill an engagement elsewhere, could not have surpassed the self-control with which Jack, for the same purpose, intimated his own retirement. He rose, crushing in his thin fingers his poor bleached blue cap, his small sparkling eyes raised to the clock, which a moment before I had 18invoked so heartlessly to aid the hypocrisy of my assumed exemption from common weaknesses.

“I think, Mr. Link, it’s time for me to see Mr. Force.” Mr. Force was an assistant in the press-room.