A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago Part 33

This discourse is becoming a bit dolorous. But the subject rather requires an andante treatment. The city's press agents will tell you quite another story about the lake--about the "city's playground" and how conducive it is to healthful sport and joyous recreation. But, on the other hand, there is this other side, so to speak, of the lake. For the lake belongs to those familiar things that surprise people into uncomfortable silences.

One could as easily write about the sky in this vein, since the lake, like the sky, challenges the monotony of people's lives with another monotony--the monotony of nature that seems to engulf, obliterate, reduce to puny proportions the routine by which people live and which, fortunately, they delude themselves into admiring.

There is also the question of beauty. This is a delicate issue to introduce into one's daily reading and the reader's pardon is solicited with proper humiliation. And yet, there is a question of beauty, of soul states and aesthetic nuances involved in the consideration of the lake.

Beauty by one definition is the sensatory excitement stirred in people by the rhythm of line, the vibration of color, the play of motion and the surprise of idea. It is usually a saddening effect that beauty produces and perhaps this is because beauty is something like an illumination that while admirable in itself throws into pathetic evidence all the ugly and unbeautiful things of one's life.

In this somewhat involved aesthetic principle there is probably another hint at the causes of the sadness people show when they look at the lake.

Today the lake wears its autumn aspect. Out of the train window one sees a wedge of geese flying south or occasionally a lone bird circling like an endless note over the water. The waves look cold and their symmetrical crisscross makes one think of the chill, lonely nights that beckon outside the coziness of one's home windows.

On summer days the lake is sometimes like a huge lavender leaf veined with gold. Sometimes it becomes festive and wears the awning stripes of cloud and sun. Or it grows serene and reminds one of a superb domesticity--as it lies pointed like a grate, arched like a saucer or the back of a sleeping kitten.

But today its autumn is a bit depressing. It no longer lures toward strange adventure. Instead its grayness seems to say to one, "Stay away--stay away. Hide away in warm houses and warm overcoats. Men are little things--puny things."

It is when one leaves the city and goes to visit or to live in another place where there is no lake that the lake grows y alive in one's mind.

One becomes thirsty for it and dreams of it. One remembers it then as something that was almost an essential part of life, like a third dimension. In some way one a.s.sociates one's day dreams with the lake and falls into thinking that there is something unfinished, sterile about living with no lake at one's elbow.

In a short while, a month or so, the lake will become a stage for melodrama. The people riding on its edge will stare into mists. They will watch the huge mist shapes rolling back and forth over the hidden water.

The blue of the sky, the cold sun, the fog and the freezing water will become actors in a great play and the train windows will be little prosceniums inclosing the melodrama of winter.

SERGT. KUZICK'S WATERLOO

"Offhand," said Sergt. Kuzick of the first precinct, "offhand, I can't think of any stories for you. If you give me a little time, maybe I could think of one or two. What you want, I suppose, is some story as I know about from personal experience. Like the time, for instance, that the half-breed Indian busted out of the bridewell, where he was serving a six months' sentence, and snuck home and killed his wife and went back again to the bridewell, and they didn't find out who killed her until he got drunk a year later and told a bartender about it. That's the kind you want, ain't it?"

I said it was.

"Well," said Sergt. Kuzick, "I can't think of any offhand, like I said.

There was a building over on West Monroe Street once where we found three bodies in the bas.e.m.e.nt. They was all dead, but that wouldn't make a story hardly, because n.o.body ever found out who killed them. Let me think awhile."

Sergt. Kuzick thought.

"Do you remember the Leggett mystery?" he inquired doubtfully. "I guess that was before your time. I was only a patrolman then. Old Leggett had a tobacco jar made out of a human skull, and that's how they found out he killed his wife. It was her skull. It come out one evening when he brought his bride home. You know, he got married again after killin' the first one. And they was having a party and the new bride said she didn't want that skull around in her house. Old Leggett got mad and said he wouldn't part with that skull for love or money. So when he was to work one day she threw the skull into the ash can, and when old Leggett come home and saw the skull missing he swore like the devil and come down to the station to swear out a warrant for his wife's arrest, chargin' her with disorderly conduct. He carried on so that one of the boys got suspicious and went out to the house with him and they found the skull in the ash can, and old Leggett began to weep over it. So one of the boys asked him, naturally, whose skull it was. He said it wasn't a skull no more, but a tobacco jar.

And they asked him where he'd got it. And he begun to lie so hard that they tripped him up and finally he said it was his first wife's skull, and he was hung shortly afterward. You see, if you give me time I could remember something like that for a story.

"Offhand, though," sighed Sergt. Kuzick, "it's difficult. I ain't got it clear in my head what you want either. Of course I know it's got to be interestin' or the paper won't print it. But interestin' things is pretty hard to run into. I remember one night out to the old morgue. This was 'way back when I started on the force thirty years ago and more. And they was having trouble at the morgue owing to the stiffs vanishing and being mutilated. They thought maybe it was students carryin' them off to practice medicine on. But it wasn't, because they found old Pete--that was the colored janitor they had out there--he wasn't an African, but it turned out a Fiji Islander afterward. They found him dead in the morgue one day and it turned out he was a cannibal. Or, anyway, his folks had been cannibals in Fiji, and the old habit had come up in him so he couldn't help himself, and he was makin' a diet off the bodies in the morgue. But he struck one that was embalmed, and the poison in the body killed him. The papers didn't carry much on it on account of it not bein'

very important, but I always thought it was kind of interestin' at that.

That's about what you want, I suppose--some story or other like that.

Well, let's see.

"It's hard," sighed Sergt. Kuzick, after a pause, "to put your finger on a yarn offhand. I remember a lot of things now, come to think of it, like the case I was on where a fella named Zianow killed his wife by pouring little pieces of hot lead into her ear, and he would have escaped, but he sold the body to the old county hospital for practicin' purposes, and while they was monkeying with the skull they heard something rattle and when they investigated it was several pieces of lead inside rattling around. So they arrested Zianow and got him to confess the whole thing, and he was sent up for life, because it turned out his wife had stabbed him four times the week before he poured the lead into her while she slept, and frightened him so that he did it in self-defense, in a way.

"I understand in a general way what you want," murmured Sergt. Kuzick, "but so help me if I can think of a thing that you might call interestin'.

Most of the things we have to deal with is chiefly murders and suicides and highway robberies, like the time old Alderman McGuire, who is dead now, was held up by two bandits while going home from a night session of the council, and he hypnotized one bandit. Yes, sir, you may wonder at that, but you didn't know McGuire. He was a wonderful hypnotist, and he hypnotized the bandit, and just as the other one, who wasn't hypnotized, was searching his pockets McGuire said to the hypnotized bandit, 'You're a policeman, shoot this highwayman.' And the hypnotized one was the bandit who had the gun, and he turned around, as Alderman McGuire said, and shot the other, unhypnotized bandit and killed him. But when he reported the entire incident to the station--I was on duty that night--the captain wouldn't believe it, and tried to argue McGuire into saying it was a accident, and that the gun had gone off accidentally and killed the unhypnotized bandit. But the alderman stuck to his story, and it was true, because the hypnotized bandit told me privately all about it when I took him down to Joliet.

"I will try," said Sergt. Kuzick, "to think of something for you in about a week. I begin to get a pretty definite idea what you want, and I'll talk it over with old Jim, who used to travel beat with me. He's a great one for stories, old Jim is. A man tan hardly think of them offhand like. You give me a week." And the old sergeant sank into his wooden chair and gazed out of the dusty station window with a perplexed and baffled eye.

DEAD WARRIOR

Do you want to see the dead warriors come back, the fallen army come back, crawling out of its million coffins and walking back across the sea and across the prairie; the waxen face of youth come out of its million graves and its uniform hanging from its limp frame? Do you want to see the war dead, the young ones ripped to pieces in the trenches standing like tired beggars at your back door, dead hands and dead eyes and wailing softly: "I was so young. I died so soon. All of us from all the countries who died so soon, we grow lonely on the other side. Ah, my unlived days! My uneaten bread! My uncounted years! They lie in a little corner and n.o.body comes to them!"

It's a Jewish play called "The Dead Man" and every night in Glickman's Palace Theater on Blue Island Avenue a thousand men and women sit with staring eyes and watch this figure in its grave-clothes come dragging back like a tired beggar, come moaning back with the cry: "My unlived days! My uneaten bread! My uncounted years!"

He stands between Hamlet and Peer Gynt, this strangely motionless one who has thrown the west side into an uproar. There is no drama around him. He is a dead young man in uniform walking slowly, limply through three acts.

This is all one remembers--that his eyes were open and unseeing, that his arms hung like a scarecrow's and that the fingers of his hands were curled in and motionless.

They talk to him in the play. The scene is a Jewish village in Poland. The war has ended. Famine, disease and poverty remain. Refugees, dying ones, starving ones, huddle together in the dismantled synagogue. No one knows what has happened. The armies have pa.s.sed. Flame and blood brightened the sky for a time. Now the little village lies cut off from the world and its people clutch desperately to the hem of life. No news has come. Wanderers stagger down the torn roads with crazy tidings and the old men of the synagogue sit shivering over their prayer books. A world has been blown into fragments and this scene is one of the fragments.

Sholom Ash, who wrote this play, spent a time in villages abroad as a Jewish relief worker and he brought back this scene. A bedlam of despair, a merciless photograph that stares across the footlights for a half-hour.

The story begins. There is a village leader in whose veins the will to live still throbs. He exhorts the shivering ones. There will be a wedding.

He will give his daughter in marriage. There will be feasting. The dead are dead. The duty of the living ones is to live. Let the old women prepare food and the men will sing. Life will begin over and a new village will be built up.

But the daughter hangs back. She talks of the young man whom she married and who went away to war.

"He is dead, poor child," the father says.

"No, no, he isn't dead. I dreamed he was still alive," she answers.

But the festival starts. The starving ones sing in the broken synagogue.

There will be a wedding. Life will begin. But there is something in the ruined doorway. A uniform stands in the doorway. A dark, waxen-faced young man who seems asleep, whose arms hang limp, whose fingers curl in. He comes forward and stands, a terribly idle figure. He is the young man.

They greet him. His bride weeps with joy. His aged mother presses his hands and weeps and murmurs in a whisper: "Oh, how changed he is!" The synagogue shouts and cries its welcome. But the young man's eyes stare and it would seem almost that he is dead. Then he talks. His voice has a lifeless sound, his words are like a child reciting sleepily. There is a gruesome oddity about him. But an old man explains. "They come back like that," he says. "There is one who came back who shrieks all night. And another who cannot remember anything."

Yet how strangely he talks! Of a country from which he has come--on the other side, it lies. Hysterical questions arise. Is there food there, are there houses there, is there milk for children and synagogues in which to pray? There is everything one desires, he says. So the questions rise and the answers come--curious child answers. But why is he so pale and worn if the country whence he comes is so remarkable? Ah, because he was lonely.