Irvin Cobb - Local Color

The chase was soon over. As the fleeing footpad turned the corner of Fiftieth Street and First Avenue he plunged headlong into the outspread arms of Policeman Otto Stein, who subdued him after a brief struggle. The tailor’s money was still clutched in his hand.

In the Headquarters Rogues’ Gallery the prisoner’s likeness was found; also his measurements were in the Bertillon Bureau, thus identifying him beyond doubt as James Williams, who had been convicted three years before as a pickpocket. Further inquiry developed the fact that Williams had been released that very day from Sing Sing.

On his trial for highway robbery, James Williams, as a confirmed and presumably an incorrigible offender, was given no mercy. He got a minimum of five years in state prison at hard labour.

This war, which started with the assassination of an archduke and his archduchess – a thing we are apt to forget about in the face of a tragedy a billion-fold greater – this war, which started thus and so, already has touched or is touching or yet will touch, at some angle and in some fashion, every one of us in every corner of the world. Some it has touched indirectly, by the oblique. Upon others, who are as numberless now as the sands on the shore, it has come with such brutal emphasis that it must seem to them – such of them as survive – that the whole incredible business was devised and set afoot for the one and the sole purpose of levelling them, their lives and their own small personal affairs in the bloodied red mire of this thing.

For example, let us take the case of Paul Gaston Michel Misereux, his orphaned sister Marie and his orphaned half-sister Helene. In the summer of 1914 they lived in a three-room flat in a five-story tenement house in East Thirteenth Street in New York, not far from the East River.

New York seemed a long, long way then from the town of Sarajevo wherein the egg of war was hatching. Indeed, to the three I have just named New York seemed a long way from most of the things which to their uncomplex natures stood for what was comfortable and domestic and satisfying. They were desperately homesick very often for the Paris where they had been born and reared, and from where they had emigrated two years before after the death of their father.

But that summer the homesickness was wearing off a little. The city, which at the moment of seeing its notched and fangy skyline as they came up the bay had appeared to them not as a gateway into a promised land but as a great sabre-toothed shark of a city lying in wait to grind them up between its jaws, and which for the first few months of their life here had been so cold, so inhospitable, so strange in all its ways, so terribly intent upon its own matters and so terribly disregardful of theirs, was beginning to be something more than a mere abiding place to them. To them it was beginning to be home. The lonesomeness was losing some of its smart. In another year or two more France would be the old country and America would be their country.

Paul fancied himself half an American already. He had taken out his first papers, which, as he figured it, made him part way a citizen. Before very long he would be all a citizen. Likewise, by the practice of a thousand petty economies common among the first generation of foreigners who settle here and most remarkably uncommon among their descendants, they were starting in a small frugal way to prosper. If New York had given them a stone when they came into it asking for bread, it was giving them now the bread, and the butter to go on the bread.

Paul Misereux was a pastry cook. He worked as assistant to a chief pastry cook in a basement kitchen under a big, medium-priced restaurant near Union Square. He was small and dumpy and unhandsome, with the dead-white face of a man cook. His skin, seen by daylight, had a queer glaze on it, like the surface of a well-fluxed, well-baked crockery. Once it had been a blistery red; that though was in the days of his apprenticeship to this trade. The constant heat of it had acted upon him as alcohol does upon the complexion of a man who gets drunk quickly – it made him deathly white at the last, but before that it made him red.

He was the chief breadwinner. Marie had a place as trimmer and saleswoman in a small millinery shop on lower Sixth Avenue. Helene, the half sister and youngest of the three, was the housekeeper. She was inclined to be frail and she had a persistent cough. She was not in the least pretty. For the matter of that, none of them had any provable claim upon beauty.

So far as looks went Marie was the pick of the lot. At least she had fine eyes and a trim round figure that showed to its best advantage in the close-fitting, smooth-fronted uniform of her employment – a black frock with white collar and cuffs.

That June, there was a balance showing on the happy side of their partnership ledger. Paul had his mind set upon some day owning a business of his own – a bakeshop, perhaps even a small café. For her part Marie meant to be a fashionable milliner in her own right. When Paul was the proprietor of the biggest restaurant on Broadway she would be Madame, the mistress and the owner of the smartest hat-shop along Fifth Avenue. Helene was content to go on keeping house for the other two. The limit of her present ambitions was to be rid of her cough. To marrying and to the rearing of families none of them gave thought yet; there would be time for such things in due season, after affluence had come. Meanwhile, they would dwell together and save and save and save. Deposited to their joint account in the savings bank, the nest-egg of their hopes grew at the rate of a few dollars each week, drawing interest besides; and there was meat in the pot when they felt the need of meat to stay them.

Over yonder in Sarajevo a stumpy Serbian man, with twisted ideas regarding his patriotic duties, loaded up an automatic pistol and waited for a certain carriage of state to pass a given point. The carriage did pass, and presently the man and the woman who rode in it were both of them dead – the first to fall in the war which as to date claimed so rich a toll of the manhood of this planet, and which, being the unslakable glutton that it is, continues to claim more and more with every day that passes. The echoes of those pistol shots ran round the world and round again.

A monarch on a throne in Germany exchanged telegrams with his beloved cousin in Russia, and with another revered and venerated cousin in England, and with a dear but distant kinsman of his in Belgium, and with a respected friend, not related to him by ties of blood or marriage, who chanced for the moment to be the president of a republic in France. A family quarrel started up. The quarrel having progressed to a point where the correspondents lost their affection for one another, they severally called upon the people who suffered them to be what they were to go out and settle the grudge according to a fashion which originated when Cain clouted Abel in the first trade-war of which there is record. Because every other war from that day to this has been a trade-war, too, the plan of settlement has remained the same that was employed by Cain when he made carrion of his brother. The tools of this fashionable industry have been altered and greatly improved, and for that civilisation is to be thanked; but the results do not in the least differ from the original forms.

The people obeyed their rulers’ calls. Looking back on it now it seems to us, who are onlookers, that there was no good and sufficient reason why they should have done this, but we know that obedience in such contingencies is a habit which has come down to them – and to us – from our remotest common ancestors, and it runs in our blood with the corpuscles of our blood. It is like a contagious miasma, which, being breathed into the body, afflicts all its victims with the same symptoms. So they put on the liveries designed for them by their lords against the coming of just such an occasion – shoddy-wools, or khakis, or red-and-blue fustians, as the case might be – and they went out, these men and these boys who were not yet men, to adjudicate the misunderstanding which had arisen as between the occupants of sundry palaces in sundry capital cities.