The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce — Volume 2: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians

THE MAN OUT OF THE NOSE

At the intersection of two certain streets in that part of San Francisco known by the rather loosely applied name of North Beach, is a vacant lot, which is rather more nearly level than is usually the case with lots, vacant or otherwise, in that region.  Immediately at the back of it, to the south, however, the ground slopes steeply upward, the acclivity broken by three terraces cut into the soft rock.  It is a place for goats and poor persons, several families of each class having occupied it jointly and amicably “from the foundation of the city.”  One of the humble habitations of the lowest terrace is noticeable for its rude resemblance to the human face, or rather to such a simulacrum of it as a boy might cut out of a hollowed pumpkin, meaning no offense to his race.  The eyes are two circular windows, the nose is a door, the mouth an aperture caused by removal of a board below.  There are no doorsteps.  As a face, this house is too large; as a dwelling, too small.  The blank, unmeaning stare of its lidless and browless eyes is uncanny.

Sometimes a man steps out of the nose, turns, passes the place where the right ear should be and making his way through the throng of children and goats obstructing the narrow walk between his neighbors’ doors and the edge of the terrace gains the street by descending a flight of rickety stairs.  Here he pauses to consult his watch and the stranger who happens to pass wonders why such a man as that can care what is the hour.  Longer observations would show that the time of day is an important element in the man’s movements, for it is at precisely two o’clock in the afternoon that he comes forth 365 times in every year.

Having satisfied himself that he has made no mistake in the hour he replaces the watch and walks rapidly southward up the street two squares, turns to the right and as he approaches the next corner fixes his eyes on an upper window in a three-story building across the way.  This is a somewhat dingy structure, originally of red brick and now gray.  It shows the touch of age and dust.  Built for a dwelling, it is now a factory.  I do not know what is made there; the things that are commonly made in a factory, I suppose.  I only know that at two o’clock in the afternoon of every day but Sunday it is full of activity and clatter; pulsations of some great engine shake it and there are recurrent screams of wood tormented by the saw.  At the window on which the man fixes an intensely expectant gaze nothing ever appears; the glass, in truth, has such a coating of dust that it has long ceased to be transparent.  The man looks at it without stopping; he merely keeps turning his head more and more backward as he leaves the building behind.  Passing along to the next corner, he turns to the left, goes round the block, and comes back till he reaches the point diagonally across the street from the factory—­point on his former course, which he then retraces, looking frequently backward over his right shoulder at the window while it is in sight.  For many years he has not been known to vary his route nor to introduce a single innovation into his action.  In a quarter of an hour he is again at the mouth of his dwelling, and a woman, who has for some time been standing in the nose, assists him to enter.  He is seen no more until two o’clock the next day.  The woman is his wife.  She supports herself and him by washing for the poor people among whom they live, at rates which destroy Chinese and domestic competition.

This man is about fifty-seven years of age, though he looks greatly older.  His hair is dead white.  He wears no beard, and is always newly shaven.  His hands are clean, his nails well kept.  In the matter of dress he is distinctly superior to his position, as indicated by his surroundings and the business of his wife.  He is, indeed, very neatly, if not quite fashionably, clad.  His silk hat has a date no earlier than the year before the last, and his boots, scrupulously polished, are innocent of patches.  I am told that the suit which he wears during his daily excursions of fifteen minutes is not the one that he wears at home.  Like everything else that he has, this is provided and kept in repair by the wife, and is renewed as frequently as her scanty means permit.

Thirty years ago John Hardshaw and his wife lived on Rincon Hill in one of the finest residences of that once aristocratic quarter.  He had once been a physician, but having inherited a considerable estate from his father concerned himself no more about the ailments of his fellow-creatures and found as much work as he cared for in managing his own affairs.  Both he and his wife were highly cultivated persons, and their house was frequented by a small set of such men and women as persons of their tastes would think worth knowing.  So far as these knew, Mr. and Mrs. Hardshaw lived happily together; certainly the wife was devoted to her handsome and accomplished husband and exceedingly proud of him.

Among their acquaintances were the Barwells—­man, wife and two young children—­of Sacramento.  Mr. Barwell was a civil and mining engineer, whose duties took him much from home and frequently to San Francisco.  On these occasions his wife commonly accompanied him and passed much of her time at the house of her friend, Mrs. Hardshaw, always with her two children, of whom Mrs. Hardshaw, childless herself, grew fond.  Unluckily, her husband grew equally fond of their mother—­a good deal fonder.  Still more unluckily, that attractive lady was less wise than weak.

At about three o’clock one autumn morning Officer No. 13 of the Sacramento police saw a man stealthily leaving the rear entrance of a gentleman’s residence and promptly arrested him.  The man—­who wore a slouch hat and shaggy overcoat—­offered the policeman one hundred, then five hundred, then one thousand dollars to be released.  As he had less than the first mentioned sum on his person the officer treated his proposal with virtuous contempt.  Before reaching the station the prisoner agreed to give him a check for ten thousand dollars and remain ironed in the willows along the river bank until it should be paid.  As this only provoked new derision he would say no more, merely giving an obviously fictitious name.  When he was searched at the station nothing of value was found on him but a miniature portrait of Mrs. Barwell—­the lady of the house at which he was caught.  The case was set with costly diamonds; and something in the quality of the man’s linen sent a pang of unavailing regret through the severely incorruptible bosom of Officer No. 13.  There was nothing about the prisoner’s clothing nor person to identify him and he was booked for burglary under the name that he had given, the honorable name of John K. Smith.  The K. was an inspiration upon which, doubtless, he greatly prided himself.

In the mean time the mysterious disappearance of John Hardshaw was agitating the gossips of Rincon Hill in San Francisco, and was even mentioned in one of the newspapers.  It did not occur to the lady whom that journal considerately described as his “widow,” to look for him in the city prison at Sacramento—­a town which he was not known ever to have visited.  As John K. Smith he was arraigned and, waiving examination, committed for trial.

About two weeks before the trial, Mrs. Hardshaw, accidentally learning that her husband was held in Sacramento under an assumed name on a charge of burglary, hastened to that city without daring to mention the matter to any one and presented herself at the prison, asking for an interview with her husband, John K. Smith.  Haggard and ill with anxiety, wearing a plain traveling wrap which covered her from neck to foot, and in which she had passed the night on the steamboat, too anxious to sleep, she hardly showed for what she was, but her manner pleaded for her more strongly than anything that she chose to say in evidence of her right to admittance.  She was permitted to see him alone.

What occurred during that distressing interview has never transpired; but later events prove that Hardshaw had found means to subdue her will to his own.  She left the prison, a broken-hearted woman, refusing to answer a single question, and returning to her desolate home renewed, in a half-hearted way, her inquiries for her missing husband.  A week later she was herself missing:  she had “gone back to the States”—­nobody knew any more than that.

On his trial the prisoner pleaded guilty—­“by advice of his counsel,” so his counsel said.  Nevertheless, the judge, in whose mind several unusual circumstances had created a doubt, insisted on the district attorney placing Officer No. 13 on the stand, and the deposition of Mrs. Barwell, who was too ill to attend, was read to the jury.  It was very brief:  she knew nothing of the matter except that the likeness of herself was her property, and had, she thought, been left on the parlor table when she had retired on the night of the arrest.  She had intended it as a present to her husband, then and still absent in Europe on business for a mining company.

This witness’s manner when making the deposition at her residence was afterward described by the district attorney as most extraordinary.  Twice she had refused to testify, and once, when the deposition lacked nothing but her signature, she had caught it from the clerk’s hands and torn it in pieces.  She had called her children to the bedside and embraced them with streaming eyes, then suddenly sending them from the room, she verified her statement by oath and signature, and fainted—­ “slick away,” said the district attorney.  It was at that time that her physician, arriving upon the scene, took in the situation at a glance and grasping the representative of the law by the collar chucked him into the street and kicked his assistant after him.  The insulted majesty of the law was not vindicated; the victim of the indignity did not even mention anything of all this in court.  He was ambitious to win his case, and the circumstances of the taking of that deposition were not such as would give it weight if related; and after all, the man on trial had committed an offense against the law’s majesty only less heinous than that of the irascible physician.

By suggestion of the judge the jury rendered a verdict of guilty; there was nothing else to do, and the prisoner was sentenced to the penitentiary for three years.  His counsel, who had objected to nothing and had made no plea for lenity—­had, in fact, hardly said a word—­wrung his client’s hand and left the room.  It was obvious to the whole bar that he had been engaged only to prevent the court from appointing counsel who might possibly insist on making a defense.

John Hardshaw served out his term at San Quentin, and when discharged was met at the prison gates by his wife, who had returned from “the States” to receive him.  It is thought they went straight to Europe; anyhow, a general power-of-attorney to a lawyer still living among us—­ from whom I have many of the facts of this simple history—­was executed in Paris.  This lawyer in a short time sold everything that Hardshaw owned in California, and for years nothing was heard of the unfortunate couple; though many to whose ears had come vague and inaccurate intimations of their strange story, and who had known them, recalled their personality with tenderness and their misfortunes with compassion.

Some years later they returned, both broken in fortune and spirits and he in health.  The purpose of their return I have not been able to ascertain.  For some time they lived, under the name of Johnson, in a respectable enough quarter south of Market Street, pretty well put, and were never seen away from the vicinity of their dwelling.  They must have had a little money left, for it is not known that the man had any occupation, the state of his health probably not permitting.  The woman’s devotion to her invalid husband was matter of remark among their neighbors; she seemed never absent from his side and always supporting and cheering him.  They would sit for hours on one of the benches in a little public park, she reading to him, his hand in hers, her light touch occasionally visiting his pale brow, her still beautiful eyes frequently lifted from the book to look into his as she made some comment on the text, or closed the volume to beguile his mood with talk of—­what?  Nobody ever overheard a conversation between these two.  The reader who has had the patience to follow their history to this point may possibly find a pleasure in conjecture:  there was probably something to be avoided.  The bearing of the man was one of profound dejection; indeed, the unsympathetic youth of the neighborhood, with that keen sense for visible characteristics which ever distinguishes the young male of our species, sometimes mentioned him among themselves by the name of Spoony Glum.

It occurred one day that John Hardshaw was possessed by the spirit of unrest.  God knows what led him whither he went, but he crossed Market Street and held his way northward over the hills, and downward into the region known as North Beach.  Turning aimlessly to the left he followed his toes along an unfamiliar street until he was opposite what for that period was a rather grand dwelling, and for this is a rather shabby factory.  Casting his eyes casually upward he saw at an open window what it had been better that he had not seen—­the face and figure of Elvira Barwell.  Their eyes met.  With a sharp exclamation, like the cry of a startled bird, the lady sprang to her feet and thrust her body half out of the window, clutching the casing on each side.  Arrested by the cry, the people in the street below looked up.  Hardshaw stood motionless, speechless, his eyes two flames.  “Take care!” shouted some one in the crowd, as the woman strained further and further forward, defying the silent, implacable law of gravitation, as once she had defied that other law which God thundered from Sinai.  The suddenness of her movements had tumbled a torrent of dark hair down her shoulders, and now it was blown about her cheeks, almost concealing her face.  A moment so, and then—!  A fearful cry rang through the street, as, losing her balance, she pitched headlong from the window, a confused and whirling mass of skirts, limbs, hair, and white face, and struck the pavement with a horrible sound and a force of impact that was felt a hundred feet away.  For a moment all eyes refused their office and turned from the sickening spectacle on the sidewalk.  Drawn again to that horror, they saw it strangely augmented.  A man, hatless, seated flat upon the paving stones, held the broken, bleeding body against his breast, kissing the mangled cheeks and streaming mouth through tangles of wet hair, his own features indistinguishably crimson with the blood that half-strangled him and ran in rills from his soaken beard.

The reporter’s task is nearly finished.  The Barwells had that very morning returned from a two years’ absence in Peru.  A week later the widower, now doubly desolate, since there could be no missing the significance of Hardshaw’s horrible demonstration, had sailed for I know not what distant port; he has never come back to stay.  Hardshaw—­as Johnson no longer—­passed a year in the Stockton asylum for the insane, where also, through the influence of pitying friends, his wife was admitted to care for him.  When he was discharged, not cured but harmless, they returned to the city; it would seem ever to have had some dreadful fascination for them.  For a time they lived near the Mission Dolores, in poverty only less abject than that which is their present lot; but it was too far away from the objective point of the man’s daily pilgrimage.  They could not afford car fare.  So that poor devil of an angel from Heaven—­wife to this convict and lunatic—­obtained, at a fair enough rental, the blank-faced shanty on the lower terrace of Goat Hill.  Thence to the structure that was a dwelling and is a factory the distance is not so great; it is, in fact, an agreeable walk, judging from the man’s eager and cheerful look as he takes it.  The return journey appears to be a trifle wearisome.