[Cometh The Hour Epub Free 34
Vilma Steiert
Harry Hope's is a Raines-Law hotel of the period, a cheapginmill of the five-cent whiskey, last-resort variety situated onthe downtown West Side of New York. The building, owned by Hope, isa narrow five-story structure of the tenement type, the secondfloor a flat occupied by the proprietor. The renting of rooms onthe upper floors, under the Raines-Law loopholes, makes theestablishment legally a hotel and gives it the privilege of servingliquor in the back room of the bar after closing hours and onSundays, provided a meal is served with the booze, thus making aback room legally a hotel restaurant. This food provision wasgenerally circumvented by putting a property sandwich in the middleof each table, an old desiccated ruin of dust-laden bread andmummified ham or cheese which only the drunkest yokel from thesticks ever regarded as anything but a noisome table decoration.But at Harry Hope's, Hope being a former minor Tammanyite and stillpossessing friends, this food technicality is ignored asirrelevant, except during the fleeting alarms of reform agitation.Even Hope's back room is not a separate room, but simply the rearof the barroom divided from the bar by drawing a dirty blackcurtain across the room.
SCENE--The back room and a section of the bar of Harry Hope'ssaloon on an early morning in summer, 1912. The right wall of theback room is a dirty black curtain which separates it from the bar.At rear, this curtain is drawn back from the wall so the bartendercan get in and out. The back room is crammed with round tables andchairs placed so close together that it is a difficult squeeze topass between them. In the middle of the rear wall is a door openingon a hallway. In the left corner, built out into the room, is thetoilet with a sign "This is it" on the door. Against the middle ofthe left wall is a nickel-in-the-slot phonograph. Two windows, soglazed with grime one cannot see through them, are in the leftwall, looking out on a backyard. The walls and ceiling once werewhite, but it was a long time ago, and they are now so splotched,peeled, stained and dusty that their color can best be described asdirty. The floor, with iron spittoons placed here and there, iscovered with sawdust. Lighting comes from single wall brackets, twoat left and two at rear.
There are three rows of tables, from front to back. Three arein the front line. The one at left-front has four chairs; the oneat center-front, four; the one at right-front, five. At rear of,and half between, front tables one and two is a table of the secondrow with five chairs. A table, similarly placed at rear of fronttables two and three, also has five chairs. The third row oftables, four chairs to one and six to the other, is against therear wall on either side of the door.
At right of this dividing curtain is a section of thebarroom, with the end of the bar seen at rear, a door to the hallat left of it. At front is a table with four chairs. Light comesfrom the street windows off right, the gray subdued light of earlymorning in a narrow street. In the back room, Larry Slade and HugoKalmar are at the table at left-front, Hugo in a chair facingright, Larry at rear of table facing front, with an empty chairbetween them. A fourth chair is at right of table, facing left.Hugo is a small man in his late fifties. He has a head much too bigfor his body, a high forehead, crinkly long black hair streakedwith gray, a square face with a pug nose, a walrus mustache, blackeyes which peer nearsightedly from behind thick-lensedspectacles, tiny hands and feet. He is dressed in threadbare blackclothes and his white shirt is frayed at collar and cuffs, buteverything about him is fastidiously clean. Even his flowingWindsor tie is neatly tied. There is a foreign atmosphere abouthim, the stamp of an alien radical, a strong resemblance to thetype Anarchist as portrayed, bomb in hand, in newspaper cartoons.He is asleep now, bent forward in his chair, his arms folded on thetable, his head resting sideways on his arms.
Larry Slade is sixty. He is tall, raw-boned, with coarsestraight white hair, worn long and raggedly cut. He has a gauntIrish face with a big nose, high cheekbones, a lantern jaw with aweek's stubble of beard, a mystic's meditative pale-blue eyes witha gleam of sharp sardonic humor in them. As slovenly as Hugo isneat, his clothes are dirty and much slept in. His gray flannelshirt, open at the neck, has the appearance of having never beenwashed. From the way he methodically scratches himself with hislong-fingered, hairy hands, he is lousy and reconciled to being so.He is the only occupant of the room who is not asleep. He stares infront of him, an expression of tired tolerance giving his face thequality of a pitying but weary old priest's.
Joe Mott is a Negro, about fifty years old, brown-skinned,stocky, wearing a light suit that had once been flashily sporty butis now about to fall apart. His pointed tan buttoned shoes, fadedpink shirt and bright tie belong to the same vintage. Still, hemanages to preserve an atmosphere of nattiness and there is nothingdirty about his appearance. His face is only mildly negroid intype. The nose is thin and his lips are not noticeably thick. Hishair is crinkly and he is beginning to get bald. A scar from aknife slash runs from his left cheekbone to jaw. His face would behard and tough if it were not for its good nature and lazy humor.He is asleep, his nodding head supported by his left hand.
Piet Wetjoen, the Boer, is in his fifties, a huge man with abald head and a long grizzled beard. He is slovenly dressed in adirty shapeless patched suit, spotted by food. A Dutch farmer type,his once great muscular strength has been debauched intoflaccid tallow. But despite his blubbery mouth and sodden bloodshotblue eyes, there is still a suggestion of old authority lurking inhim like a memory of the drowned. He is hunched forward, bothelbows on the table, his hands on each side of his head forsupport.
James Cameron ("Jimmy Tomorrow") is about the same size andage as Hugo, a small man. Like Hugo, he wears threadbare black, andeverything about him is clean. But the resemblance ceases there.Jimmy has a face like an old well-bred, gentle bloodhound's, withfolds of flesh hanging from each side of his mouth, and big brownfriendly guileless eyes, more bloodshot than any bloodhound's everwere. He has mouse-colored thinning hair, a little bulbous nose,buck teeth in a small rabbit mouth. But his forehead is fine, hiseyes are intelligent and there once was a competent ability in him.His speech is educated, with the ghost of a Scotch rhythm in it.His manners are those of a gentleman. There is a quality about himof a prim, Victorian old maid, and at the same time of a likable,affectionate boy who has never grown up. He sleeps, chin on chest,hands folded in his lap.
Cecil Lewis ("The Captain") is as obviously English asYorkshire pudding and just as obviously the former army officer. Heis going on sixty. His hair and military mustache are white, hiseyes bright blue, his complexion that of a turkey. His lean figureis still erect and square-shouldered. He is stripped to the waist,his coat, shirt, undershirt, collar and tie crushed up into apillow on the table in front of him, his head sideways on thispillow, facing front, his arms dangling toward the floor. On hislower left shoulder is the big ragged scar of an old wound.
Both McGloin and Mosher are big paunchy men. McGloin has hisold occupation of policeman stamped all over him. He is in hisfifties, sandy-haired, bullet-headed, jowly, with protruding earsand little round eyes. His face must once have been brutal andgreedy, but time and whiskey have melted it down into agood-humored, parasite's characterlessness. He wears old clothesand is slovenly. He is slumped sideways on his chair, his headdrooping jerkily toward one shoulder.
Ed Mosher is going on sixty. He has a round kewpie's face--akewpie who is an unshaven habitual drunkard. He looks like anenlarged, elderly, bald edition of the village fat boy--a sly fatboy, congenitally indolent, a practical joker, a born grafter andcon merchant. But amusing and essentially harmless, even in hismost enterprising days, because always too lazy to carrycrookedness beyond petty swindling. The influence of his old circuscareer is apparent in his get-up. His worn clothes are flashy; hewears phony rings and a heavy brass watch-chain (not connected to awatch). Like McGloin, he is slovenly. His head is thrown back, hisbig mouth open.
Harry Hope is sixty, white-haired, so thin the description"bag of bones" was made for him. He has the face of an old familyhorse, prone to tantrums, with balkiness always smoldering in itswall eyes, waiting for any excuse to shy and pretend to take thebit in its teeth. Hope is one of those men whom everyone likes onsight, a softhearted slob, without malice, feeling superior to noone, a sinner among sinners, a born easy mark for every appeal. Heattempts to hide his defenselessness behind a testy truculentmanner, but this has never fooled anyone. He is a little deaf, butnot half as deaf as he sometimes pretends. His sight is failing butis not as bad as he complains it is. He wearsfive-and-ten-cent-store spectacles which are so out of alignmentthat one eye at times peers half over one glass while the other eyelooks half under the other. He has badly fitting store teeth, whichclick like castanets when he begins to fume. He is dressed in anold coat from one suit and pants from another.
In a chair facing right at the table in the second line,between the first two tables, front, sits Willie Oban, his head onhis left arm outstretched along the table edge. He is in his latethirties, of average height, thin. His haggard, dissipated face hasa small nose, a pointed chin, blue eyes with colorless lashes andbrows. His blond hair, badly in need of a cut, clings in a limppart to his skull. His eyelids flutter continually as if any lightwere too strong for his eyes. The clothes he wears belong on ascarecrow. They seem constructed of an inferior grade of dirtyblotting paper. His shoes are even more disreputable, wrecks ofimitation leather, one laced with twine, the other with a bit ofwire. He has no socks, and his bare feet show through holes in thesoles, with his big toes sticking out of the uppers. He keepsmuttering and twitching in his sleep.
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