Irvin S. Cobb

“ Just such a man is this present man Hemburg. As, shoving his pencil, he carves the very giblets out of the last sheet of the belated typewritten manuscript lying under his hand, the sunlight, slanting in at a west window behind him, falls over his shoulders in a streaked flood, making his reddened face seem redder than ever—as red as hearth paint—and turning his ears a bright, clear, pinkish colour, as though they might be two little memorial panes set there in dedication to the wasted life and the frittered talents of their owner. ”

“ The car bearing our friends passed a mansion, the handsomest upon the street. Out from its high-columned portals into the hot sunshine staggered a young man whose lips were very red and whose moustache was very black, with great hollows beneath his eyes and white patches at his temples—a young man dressed in correct evening attire, who, pausing for a moment, struck his open hand to his forehead with a gesture indicative of intense despair—you somehow opined he had lost all at the gaming table—then reeled from sight down a winding driveway. ”

“ No, Anneburg, favoured among the haunts of men, was to be honoured with the actual presence of the regulars, peerlessly captained by that short and wily premier of all baseball premiers, so young in years yet so old in wisdom, Swifty Megrue; and bearing with him in its train such deathless fixtures of the Temple of Fame as Long Leaf Pinderson, the Greatest Living Pitcher, he who, though barely out of his teens, already had made spitball a cherished household word in every American home ”

“ Naturally she had no way of knowing, when she broke the glad news, that Solly thought of Coney’s inhospitable sands and treacherous seas; that Miriam thought of the fearsome Catskill cow; that their mother, whose whole life had been bounded by two Ghettos—one in the Old World and one in the New, and who knew no other life—thought of a great variety of things; and that the children, ranging from the twins downward, would have done some thinking, too, had they been of suitable age thus to indulge their juvenile intellects. ”

“ Miss Sleybells said so. But what matters misery if its victims mistake it for happiness?
But since Mrs. Finkelstein never by act or sign or look betrayed her feelings, whatsoever they may have been, it is not for me or for you to assume that she harboured resentment. She was a daughter of a tribe bitted and bridled to silent endurance; of a people girthed and saddled through the centuries to the uncomplaining bearing of their burdens.
Meantime Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass was by no means slack in well-doing. ”

“ Osay had finished a light but apparently satisfying meal and the audience was tailing away when Gash Tuttle, who happened to be the rearmost of the departing patrons, felt a detaining touch on his arm. He turned to confront a man in his shirtsleeves—a large man with a pock-marked face, a drooping moustache and a tiger-claw watch charm on his vest. It was the same man who, but a minute before, had delivered a short yet flattering discourse touching the early life and manners and habits of the consumer of serpents—in short, the manager of the show and presumably its owner. ”

“ But when anywhere in these United States you speak of a fan, be you a Harlem cliff-swallow or a Bangtown jay, you mean such a one as J. Henry Birdseye. You know him, I know him, everybody knows him. So much being conceded, we get down to our knitting.
Springtime had come: ’twas early April. The robin, which is a harbinger in the North and a potpie in the South, had winged his way from Gulfport, Mississippi, to Central Park, New York, and, stepping stiffly on his frost-bitten toes, was regretting he had been in such a hurry about it. ”

“ Such a ship might be likened to a small, compact town set afloat, with all the social ramifications of a small town and with all of a small town’s curiosity regarding the private affairs of the neighbours. Ashore gossip flies swiftly enough, goodness only knows; at sea it flits from point to point, as if on the wings of the swallow. What one knows every one else knows, and knows it very soon too. ”

“ Then, guided by habit, a thing which often sleeps but rarely dies, he headed westward. He walked as close to the building line as he could squeeze himself, so as to be out of the main channels of sidewalk travel. When he came to Fifth Avenue he mechanically turned north, shrinking aside from contact with the swarms of well-dressed, quick-paced men and women who passed him, bound in the opposite direction. From the asphalt beyond the curbing arose a clamour of wheels and hoofs and feet which dinned unpleasantly in his ears, creating a subconscious sense of irritation. ”

“ Out of the far wings came a figure of a man, crossing the narrowed space to halt midway of the stage, close up to the tin gutter where the tipless prongs of many gas-jet footlights stood up like the tines in a garden rake. Verba’s hand tightened on Offutt’s arm, dragging him farther back into the shadows, and Verba’s voice spoke, with a soft, tense caution, in Offutt’s ear: “Lord! Lord!” Verba almost breathed the words out. “‘Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your——’ Look yonder, Offutt! It’s him!” ”

“ Opportunity, despite a current impression, does not knock once at every man’s door. Belief in the proverb to that effect has spelled many a man’s undoing. He [375] has besat him indoors awaiting the sound of her knuckles upon the panels when he should have been ranging afield with his eye peeled. As a seasoned travelling man Mr. Birdseye knew opportunity for what she is—a coy bird and hard to find—and knew that to get her you must go gunning for her. ”

“ Thereafter for a period James Williams, so far as the processes of justice were concerned, ceased to be a regular human being and became a small and inconspicuous grain in the whirring hopper of the law. He was as one pepper-corn in a crowded bin—one atom among a multitude of similar atoms. Yet the law from time to time took due cognisance of this mote’s existence.
For example, on the morning of the eighteenth a closed van conveyed him to the Tombs. For further example, an assistant district attorney, in about a month, introduced Clabby and Hartigan before the July grand jury. ”

“ A new generation was growing up, coming into manhood and womanhood. An old generation was thinning out and dying off. The Gaunt House was no longer the best hotel in the city. It was the second best and, before very long, was to be the third best. Tall business houses—six, seven, eight, nine stories tall—shouldered up close to it; and they dwarfed it, making it seem squatty and insignificant, whereas before it had loomed massive and monument-high, dominating the corner and the rest of the block. ”

“ The Babel-babble that distinguishes a big liner’s departure was approaching its climax of acute hysteria, when two well-dressed, youngish men joined the wormlike column of eleventh-hour passengers mounting a portable bridge labelled First Cabin which hyphenated the strip of dark water between ship and shore. They were almost the last persons to join the line, coming in such haste along the dock that the dock captain on duty at the foot of the canvas-sided gangway let them pass without question. ”

“ The pitched front of the balcony suggested a deformed upper jaw, biting down on darkness. Its stucco facings, shining dimly, like a row of teeth, added to the illusion. At the bottom of the pit, or the family circle, or whatever it was they called it at the Cosmos Theatre, where the light was somewhat better, the backs of the seats showed bumpily beneath the white cloths that covered them, like lines of graves in a pauper burying ground after a snowstorm.
A third of the way back, in this potter’s field of dead-and-gone laughter, a man was hunched in a despondent posture. ”

“ They were like birds, which, being freed, cannot use their wings because they have never used them, but only flutter about distractedly, seeking to return to the old confines within the bars of the prison and the familiar perches of its constricted bounds. Distance—free, limitless and far-extending—daunts those other birdlings as it daunted these two small human ones. It was so strange an experience to them to be thrust into the real out-of-doors. And to most of us whatever is strange is uncomfortable—until we get accustomed to it. ”

“ In the little community there are no nobodies. Anybody is somebody. But where the multitude is close-packed, nearly anybody is everybody and nearly everybody is anybody. The greater the number within a given space, the fewer are there available for purposes of pomp, prominence and publicity. A few stand out above the ruck; the rest make up the unconsidered mass—mute, inglorious and, except briefly in the census figures, unsung. And Chester K. Pilkins yearned to stand out. ”

“ It was too late to save anything from the wreckage; the hour for salvaging had gone by. A clerk’s voice, over the wire, conveyed back the melancholy tidings. A bomb had burst in Wall Street that morning. The East Side merger scheme had been blown into smithereens by a sensational story appearing in The Clarion, and the fragments still were falling in a clattering shower on the floor of the stock exchange. As for Pearl Street trolley common, that had gone clear through to the basement. ”

“ I shall go to prison for one year, perhaps two or possibly three years; and when I come out I shall write a novel about prison life that will make my name live after me, for I shall know my facts at first hand—I shall have the local colour of a prison in my grip as no other man has ever had it who had my powers as a writer. ”

“ When a man’s figure develops convex lines where there used to be concavities, that man is getting on; and the Major plainly was getting on pretty fast. His eyes, which remained dignifiedly and defiantly scornful of all the world, and of all the world might think and might say, nevertheless were filmed over the least bit, so that they lost something of their icy blue keenness. His face, though, with the jaws sinking in upon the shrunken gums and the brows growing shaggier, was as much of a mask as it had ever been.
What was true of Major Foxmaster was seemingly not true of her who followed him. ”

“ The ship no longer nuzzled up alongside the dock like a great sucking pig under the flanks of an even greater mother-sow; she appeared to stand still while the dock seemed to be slipping away from her rearward; but the man who looked out into the darkness was familiar enough with that illusion. With his manacled hands crossed upon his waistcoat and the cigar hanging unlighted between his lips, he watched until the liner had turned and was swinging down stream, heading for the mouth of the river and the bay. ”

“ Foxman, quite at his ease, was sitting in Mr. Blake’s private office, while Mr. Blake read through the galley proofs of Singlebury’s story to which the caller had invited his attention.
The gentleman’s face, as he read on, gave no index to the feelings of the gentleman. Anyhow, Mr. Blake’s face was more of a manifest than an index; its expression summed up conclusions rather than surmises. As a veteran player—and a highly successful one—in the biggest and most chancy game in the world, Mr. Blake was fortunate in having what lesser gamesters call a poker face. ”

“ Blake. Being a newspaper man, I am not a wealthy man. I have an ambition to become wealthy. I look to you to aid me in the accomplishment of that desire. You stand in a fair way to make a great deal of money, though you already have a great deal. I stand in the position not only of being able to prevent you from making that money, but of being able to make a great deal of trouble for you, besides. ”

“ The place looked dead and smelled dead and was dead. The air was heavy-laden with bone-yard scents—rot and corrosion and rust and dust. With the taints of moulded leather and gangrened metal, of worm-gnawed woodwork and moth-eaten fabrics, arose also from beneath their feet that other stench which inevitably is begotten of neglect and lonesomeness within any spot inclosed by walls and a roof, provided sun and wind and human usage are excluded from it long enough. Offutt sniffed [228] and, over Verba’s shoulder, looked about him. ”

“ He fought himself free of the smothering folds of dusty tarpaulin and turned to flee headlong into the darkness. He took three flying steps and tripped over the guy rope of the next tent. As he fell with stunning violence into the protecting shadows he heard pursuit roll over the platform past Osay, thud on the earth, clatter on by him and die away in the distance to the accompaniment of cheers, whoops and the bloodthirsty threats of the despoiled countryman.
If one has never stolen a ride on a freight train the task presents difficulties and dangers. ”

“ In fair weather as in foul, in blistering midsummer and blizzardy midwinter, daytime and nighttime, she followed him. If she lost the trail she waited in all patience until he reappeared. She seemed tireless and hungerless. Wet or cold or heat seemed not to affect her. In her grim pursuit of him her spirit rose triumphant above the calls of the flesh. At midnight, after a long vigil outside the Kenilworth, she moved behind him with the same swift, noiseless, floating motion that marked her in the morning. ”