Strictly Business
More Stories of the Four Milllion
by O Henry
CONTENTS
I. STRICTLY BUSINESS
II. THE GOLD THAT GLITTERED
III. BABES IN THE JUNGLE
IV. THE DAY RESURGENT
V. THE FIFTH WHEEL
VI. THE POET AND THE PEASANT
VII. THE ROBE OF PEACE
VIII. THE GIRL AND THE GRAFT
IX. THE CALL OF THE TAME
X. THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY
XI. THE THING'S THE PLAY
XII. A RAMBLE IN APHASIA
XIII. A MUNICIPAL REPORT
XIV. PSYCHE AND THE PSKYSCRAPER
XV. A BIRD OF BAGDAD
XVI. COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON
XVII. A NIGHT IN NEW ARABIA
XVIII. THE GIRL AND THE HABIT
XIX. PROOF OF THE PUDDING
XX. PAST ONE AT RODNEY'S
XXI. THE VENTURERS
XXII. THE DUEL
XXIII. "WHAT YOU WANT"
I
STRICTLY BUSINESS
I suppose you know all about the stage and stage people. You've
been touched with and by actors, and you read the newspaper
criticisms and the jokes in the weeklies about the Rialto and the
chorus girls and the long-haired tragedians. And I suppose that a
condensed list of your ideas about the mysterious stageland would
boil down to something like this:
Leading ladies have five husbands, paste diamonds, and figures no
better than your own (madam) if they weren't padded. Chorus
girls are inseparable from peroxide, Panhards and Pittsburg. All
shows walk back to New York on tan oxford and railroad ties.
Irreproachable actresses reserve the comic-landlady part for their
mothers on Broadway and their step-aunts on the road. Kyrle
Bellew's real name is Boyle O'Kelley. The ravings of John
McCullough in the phonograph were stolen from the first sale of
the Ellen Terry memoirs. Joe Weber is funnier than E. H. Sothern;
but Henry Miller is getting older than he was.
All theatrical people on leaving the theatre at night drink
champagne and eat lobsters until noon the next day. After all, the
moving pictures have got the whole bunch pounded to a pulp.
Now, few of us know the real life of the stage people. If we did,
the profession might be more overcrowded than it is. We look
askance at the players with an eye full of patronizing superiority--
and we go home and practise all sorts of elocution and gestures in
front of our looking glasses.
Latterly there has been much talk of the actor people in a new
light. It seems to have been divulged that instead of being
motoring bacchanalias and diamond-hungry _loreleis_ they are
businesslike folk, students and ascetics with childer and homes
and libraries, owning real estate, and conducting their private
affairs in as orderly and unsensational a manner as any of us good
citizens who are bound to the chariot wheels of the gas, rent, coal,
ice, and wardmen.
Whether the old or the new report of the sock-and-buskiners be the
true one is a surmise that has no place here. I offer you merely this
little story of two strollers; and for proof of its truth I can show you
only the dark patch above the cast-iron of the stage-entrance door
of Keetor's old vaudeville theatre made there by the petulant push
of gloved hands too impatient to finger the clumsy thumb-latch--
and where I last saw Cherry whisking through like a swallow into
her nest, on time to the minute, as usual, to dress for her act.
The vaudeville team of Hart & Cherry was an inspiration. But
Hart had been roaming through the Eastern and Western circuits
for four years with a mixed-up act comprising a monologue, three
lightning changes with songs, a couple of imitations of celebrated
imitators, and a buck-and-wing dance that had drawn a glance of
approval from the bass-viol player in more than one house--than
which no performer ever received more satisfactory evidence of
good work.
The greatest treat an actor can have is to witness the pitiful
performance with which all other actors desecrate the stage. In
order to give himself this pleausre he will often forsake the
sunniest Broadway corner between Thirty-fourth and Forty-fourth
to attend a matin'ee offering by his less gifted brothers. Once
during the lifetime of a minstrel joke one comes to scoff and
remains to go through with that most difficult exercise of Thespian
muscles--the audible contact of the palm of one hand against the
palm of the other.
One afternoon Bob Hart presented his solvent, serious, well-known
vaudevillian face at the box-office window of a rival attraction and
got his d. h. coupon for an orchestra seat.
A, B, C, and D glowed successively on the announcement spaces
and passed into oblivion, each plunging Mr. Hart deeper into
gloom. Others of the audience shrieked, squirmed, whistled, and
applauded; but Bob Hart, "All the Mustard and a Whole Show in
Himself," sat with his face as long and his hands as far apart as a
boy holding a hank of yarn for his grandmother to wind into a ball.
But when H came on, "The Mustard" suddenly sat up straight. H
was the happy alphabetical prognosticator of Winona Cherry, in
Character Songs and Impersonations. There were scarcely more
than two bites to Cherry; but she delivered the merchandise tied
with a pink cord and charged to the old man's account. She first
showed you a deliciously dewy and ginghamy country girl with a
basket of property daisies who informed you ingenuously that
there were other things to be learned at the old log school-house
besides cipherin' and nouns, especially "When the Teach-er Kept
Me in." Vanishing, with a quick flirt of gingham apron-strings,
she reappeared in considerably less than a "trice" as a fluffy
"Parisienne"--so near does Art bring the old red mill to the Moulin
Rouge. And then--
But you know the rest. And so did Bob Hart; but he saw
somebody else. he thought he saw that Cherry was the only
professional on the short order stage that he had seen who seemed
exactly to fit the part of "Helen Grimes" in the sketch he had
written and kept tucked away in the tray of his trunk. Of course
Bob Hart, as well as every other normal actor, grocer, newspaper
man, professor, curb broker, and farmer, has a play tucked away
somewhere. They tuck 'em in trays of trunks, trunks of trees,
desks, haymows, pigeonholes, inside pockets, safe-deposit vaults,
handboxes, and coal cellars, waiting for Mr. Frohman to call.
They belong among the fifty-seven different kinds.
But Bob Hart's sketch was not destined to end in a pickle jar. He
called it "Mice Will Play." He had kept it quiet and hidden away
ever since he wrote it, waiting to find a partner who fitted his
conception of "Helen Grimes." And here was "Helen" herself,
with all the innocent abandon, the youth, the sprightliness, and the
flawless stage art that his critical taste demanded.
After the act was over Hart found the manager in the box office,
and got Cherry's address. At five the next afternoon he called at
the musty old house in the West Forties and sent up his
professional card.
By daylight, in a secular shirtwaist and plain _voile_ skirt, with
her hair curbed and her Sister of Charity eyes, Winona Cherry
might have been playing the part of Prudence Wise, the deacon's
daughter, in the great (unwritten) New England drama not yet
entitled anything.
"I know your act, Mr. Hart," she said after she had looked over his
card carefully. "What did you wish to see me about?"
"I saw you work last night," said Hart. "I've written a sketch that
I've been saving up. It's for two; and I think you can do the other
part. I thought I'd see you about it."
"Come in the parlor," said Miss Cherry. "I've been wishing for
something of the sort. I think I'd like to act instead of doing
turns."
Bob Hart drew his cherished "Mice Will Play" from his pocket,
and read it to her.
"Read it again, please," said Miss Cherry.
And then she pointed out to him clearly how it could be improved
by introducing a messenger instead of a telephone call, and cutting
the dialogue just before the climax while they were struggling with
the pistol, and by completely changing the lines and business of
Helen Grimes at the point where her jealousy overcomes her. Hart
yielded to all her strictures without argument. She had at once put
her finger on the sketch's weaker points. That was her woman's
intuition that he had lacked. At the end of their talk Hart was
willing to stake the judgment, experience, and savings of his four
years of vaudeville that "Mice Will Play" would blossom into a
perennial flower in the garden of the circuits. Miss Cherry was
slower to decide. After many puckerings of her smooth young
brow and tappings on her small, white teeth with the end of a lead
pencil she gave out her dictum.
"Mr. Hart," said she, "I believe your sketch is going to win out.
That Grimes part fits me like a shrinkable flannel after its first trip
to a handless hand laundry. I can make it stand out like the
colonel of the Forty-fourth Regiment at a Little Mothers' Bazaar.
And I've seen you work. I know what you can do with the other
part. But business is business. How much do you get a week for
the stunt you do now?"
"Two hundred," answered Hart.
"I get one hundred for mine," said Cherry. "That's about the
natural discount for a woman. But I live on it and put a few
simoleons every week under the loose brick in the old kitchen
hearth. The stage is all right. I love it; but there's something else I
love better--that's a little country home, some day, with Plymouth
Rock chickens and six ducks wandering around the yard.
"Now, let me tell you, Mr. Hart, I am STRICTLY BUSINESS. If
you want me to play the opposite part in your sketch, I'll do it.
And I believe we can make it go. And there's something else I
want to say: There's no nonsense in my make-up; I'm _on the
level_, and I'm on the stage for what it pays me, just as other girls
work in stores and offices. I'm going to save my money to keep
me when I'm past doing my stunts. No Old Ladies' Home or
Retreat for Imprudent Actresses for me.
"If you want to make this a business partnership, Mr. Hart, with all
nonsense cut out of it, I'm in on it. I know something about
vaudeville teams in general; but this would have to be one in
particular. I want you to know that I'm on the stage for what I can
cart away from it every pay-day in a little manila envelope with
nicotine stains on it, where the cashier has licked the flap. It's
kind of a hobby of mine to want to cravenette myself for plenty of
rainy days in the future. I want you to know just how I am. I don't
know what an all-night restaurant looks like; I drink only weak
tea; I never spoke to a man at a stage entrance in my life, and I've
got money in five savings banks."
"Miss Cherry," said Bob Hart in his smooth, serious tones, "you're
in on your own terms. I've got 'strictly business' pasted in my hat
and stenciled on my make-up box. When I dream of nights I
always see a five-room bungalow on the north shore of Long
Island, with a Jap cooking clam broth and duckling in the kitchen,
and me with the title deeds to the place in my pongee coat pocket,
swinging in a hammock on the side porch, reading Stanleys
'Explorations into Africa.' And nobody else around. You never
was interested in Africa, was you, Miss Cherry?"
"Not any," said Cherry. "What I'm going to do with my money is
to bank it. You can get four per cent. on deposits. Even at the
salary I've been earning, I've figured out that in ten years I'd have
an income of about $50 a month just from the interest alone.
Well, I might invest some of the principal in a little business--say,
trimming hats or a beauty parlor, and make more."
"Well," said Hart, "You've got the proper idea all right, all right,
anyhow. There are mighty few actors that amount to anything at
all who couldn't fix themselves for the wet days to come if they'd
save their money instead of blowing it. I'm glad you've got the
correct business idea of it, Miss Cherry. I think the same way; and
I believe this sketch will more than double what both of us earn
now when we get it shaped up."
The subsequent history of "Mice Will Play" is the history of all
successful writings for the stage. Hart & Cherry cut it, pieced it,
remodeled it, performed surgical operations on the dialogue and
business, changed the lines, restored 'em, added more, cut 'em out,
renamed it, gave it back the old name, rewrote it, substituted a
dagger for the pistol, restored the pistol--put the sketch through all
the known processes of condensation and improvement.
They rehearsed it by the old-fashioned boardinghouse clock in the
rarely used parlor until its warning click at five minutes to the hour
would occur every time exactly half a second before the click of
the unloaded revolver that Helen Grimes used in rehearsing the
thrilling climax of the sketch.
Yes, that was a thriller and a piece of excellent work. In the act a
real 32-caliber revolver was used loaded with a real cartridge.
Helen Grimes, who is a Western girl of decidedly Buffalo Billish
skill and daring, is tempestuously in love with Frank Desmond, the
private secretary and confidential prospective son-in-law of her
father, "Arapahoe" Grimes, quarter-million-dollar cattle king,
owning a ranch that, judging by the scenery, is in either the Bad
Lands or Amagensett, L. I. Desmond (in private life Mr. Bob
Hart) wears puttees and Meadow Brook Hunt riding trousers, and
gives his address as New York, leaving you to wonder why he
comes to the Bad Lands or Amagansett (as the case may be) and at
the same time to conjecture mildly why a cattleman should want
puttees about his ranch with a secretary in 'em.
Well, anyhow, you know as well as I do that we all like that kind
of play, whether we admit it or not--something along in between
"Bluebeard, Jr.," and "Cymbeline" played in the Russian.
There were only two parts and a half in "Mice Will Play." Hart
and Cherry were the two, of course; and the half was a minor part
always played by a stage hand, who merely came in once in a
Tuxedo coat and a panic to announce that the house was
surrounded by Indians, and to turn down the gas fire in the grate
by the manager's orders.
There was another girl in the sketch--a Fifth Avenue society
swelless--who was visiting the ranch and who had sirened Jack
Valentine when he was a wealthy club-man on lower Third
Avenue before he lost his money. This girl appeared on the stage
only in the photographic state--Jack had her Sarony stuck up on
the mantel of the Amagan--of the Bad Lands droring room. Helen
was jealous, of course.
And now for the thriller. Old "Arapahoe" Grimes dies of angina
pectoris one night--so Helen informs us in a stage-ferryboat
whisper over the footlights--while only his secretary was present.
And that same day he was known to have had $647,000 in cash in
his (ranch) library just received for the sale of a drove of beeves in
the East (that accounts for the price we pay for steak!). The cash
disappears at the same time. Jack Valentine was the only person
with the ranchman when he made his (alleged) croak.
"Gawd knows I love him; but if he has done this deed--" you sabe,
don't you? And then there are some mean things said about the
Fifth Avenue Girl--who doesn't come on the stage--and can we
blame her, with the vaudeville trust holding down prices until one
actually must be buttoned in the back by a call boy, maids cost so
much?
But, wait. Here's the climax. Helen Grimes, chaparralish as she
can be, is goaded beyond imprudence. She convinces herself that
Jack Valentine is not only a falsetto, but a financier. To lose at
one fell swoop $647,000 and a lover in riding trousers with angles
in the sides like the variations on the chart of a typhoid-fever
patient is enough to make any perfect lady mad. So, then!
They stand in the (ranch) library, which is furnished with mounted
elk heads (didn't the Elks have a fish fry in Amagensett once?),
and the d'enouement begins. I know of no more interesting time in
the run of a play unless it be when the prologue ends.
Helen thinks Jack has taken the money. Who else was there to
take it? The box-office manager was at the front on his job; the
orchestra hadn't left their seats; and no man could get past "Old
Jimmy," the stage door-man, unless he could show a Skye terrier
or an automobile as a guarantee of eligibility.
Goaded beyond imprudence (as before said), Helen says to Jack
Valentine: "Robber and thief--and worse yet, stealer of trusting
hearts, this should be your fate!"
With that out she whips, of course, the trusty 32-caliber.
"But I will be merciful," goes on Helen. "You shall live--that will
be your punishment. I will show you how easily I could have sent
you to the death that you deserve. There is _her_ picture on the
mantel. I will send through her more beautiful face the bullet that
should have pierced your craven heart."
And she does it. And there's no fake blank cartridges or assistants
pulling strings. Helen fires. The bullet--the actual bullet--goes
through the face of the photograph--and then strikes the hidden
spring of the sliding panel in the wall--and lo! the panel slides, and
there is the missing $647,000 in convincing stacks of currency and
bags of gold. It's great. You know how it is. Cherry practised for
two months at a target on the roof of her boarding house. It took
good shooting. In the sketch she had to hit a brass disk only three
inches in diameter, covered by wall paper in the panel; and she
had to stand in exactly the same spot every night, and the photo
had to be in exactly the same spot, and she had to shoot steady and
true every time.
Of course old "Arapahoe" had tucked the funds away there in the
secret place; and, of course, Jack hadn't taken anything except his
salary (which really might have come under the head of "obtaining
money under"; but that is neither here nor there); and, of course,
the New York girl was really engaged to a concrete house
contractor in the Bronx; and, necessarily, Jack and Helen ended in
a half-Nelson--and there you are.
After Hart and Cherry had gotten "Mice Will Play" flawless, they
had a try-out at a vaudeville house that accommodates. The sketch
was a house wrecker. It was one of those rare strokes of talent that
inundates a theatre from the roof down. The gallery wept; and the
orchestra seats, being dressed for it, swam in tears.
After the show the booking agents signed blank checks and
pressed fountain pens upon Hart and Cherry. Five hundred dollars
a week was what it panned out.
That night at 11:30 Bob Hart took off his hat and bade Cherry
good night at her boarding-house door.
"Mr. Hart," said she thoughtfully, "come inside just a few minutes.
We've got our chance now to make good and make money. What
we want to do is to cut expenses every cent we can, and save all
we can."
"Right," said Bob. "It's business with me. You've got your
scheme for banking yours; and I dream every night of that
bungalow with the Jap cook and nobody around to raise trouble.
Anything to enlarge the net receipts will engage my attention."
"Come inside just a few minutes," repeated Cherry, deeply
thoughtful. "I've got a proposition to make to you that will reduce
our expenses a lot and help you work out your own future and help
me work out mine--and all on business principles."
"Mice Will Play" had a tremendously successful run in New York
for ten weeks--rather neat for a vaudeville sketch--and then it
started on the circuits. Without following it, it may be said that it
was a solid drawing card for two years without a sign of abated
popularity.
Sam Packard, manager of one of Keetor's New York houses, said
of Hart & Cherry:
"As square and high-toned a little team as ever came over the
circuit. It's a pleasure to read their names on the booking list.
Quiet, hard workers, no Johnny and Mabel nonsense, on the job to
the minute, straight home after their act, and each of 'em as
gentlemanlike as a lady. I don't expect to handle any attractions
that give me less trouble or more respect for the profession."
And now, after so much cracking of a nutshell, here is the kernel
of the story:
At the end of its second season "Mice Will Play" came back to
New York for another run at the roof gardens and summer
theatres. There was never any trouble in booking it at the top-
notch price. Bob Hart had his bungalow nearly paid for, and
Cherry had so many savings-deposit bank books that she had
begun to buy sectional bookcases on the instalment plan to hold
them.
I tell you these things to assure you, even if you can't believe it,
that many, very many of the stage people are workers with abiding
ambitions--just the same as the man who wants to be president, or
the grocery clerk who wants a home in Flatbush, or a lady who is
anxious to flop out of the Count-pan into the Prince-fire. And I
hope I may be allowed to say, without chipping into the
contribution basket, that they often move in a mysterious way their
wonders to perform.
But, listen.
At the first performance of "Mice Will Play" in New York at the
Westphalia (no hams alluded to) Theatre, Winona Cherry was
nervous. When she fired at the photograph of the Eastern beauty
on the mantel, the bullet, instead of penetrating the photo and then
striking the disk, went into the lower left side of Bob Hart's neck.
Not expecting to get it there, Hart collapsed neatly, while Cherry
fainted in a most artistic manner.
The audience, surmising that they viewed a comedy instead of a
tragedy in which the principals were married or reconciled,
applauded with great enjoyment. The Cool Head, who always
graces such occasions, rang the curtain down, and two platoons of
scene shifters respectively and more or less respectfully removed
Hart & Cherry from the stage. The next turn went on, and all went
as merry as an alimony bell.
The stage hands found a young doctor at the stage entrance who
was waiting for a patient with a decoction of Am. B'ty roses. The
doctor examined Hart carefully and laughed heartily.
"No headlines for you, Old Sport," was his diagnosis. "If it had
been two inches to the left it would have undermined the carotid
artery as far as the Red Front Drug Store in Flatbush and Back
Again. As it is, you just get the property man to bind it up with a
flounce torn from any one of the girls' Valenciennes and go home
and get it dressed by the parlor-floor practitioner on your block,
and you'll be all right. Excuse me; I've got a serious case outside
to look after."
After that, Bob Hart looked up and felt better. And then to where
he lay came Vincente, the Tramp Juggler, great in his line.
Vincente, a solemn man from Brattleboro, Vt., named Sam Griggs
at home, sent toys and maple sugar home to two small daughters
from every town he played. Vincente had moved on the same
circuits with Hart & Cherry, and was their peripatetic friend.
"Bob," said Vincente in his serious way, "I'm glad it's no worse.
The little lady is wild about you."
"Who?" asked Hart.
"Cherry," said the juggler. "We didn't know how bad you were
hurt; and we kept her away. It's taking the manager and three girls
to hold her."
"It was an accident, of course," said Hart. "Cherry's all right. She
wasn't feeling in good trim or she couldn't have done it. There's no
hard feelings. She's strictly business. The doctor says I'll be on
the job again in three days. Don't let her worry."
"Man," said Sam Griggs severely, puckering his old, smooth, lined
face, "are you a chess automaton or a human pincushion? Cherry's
crying her heart out for you--calling 'Bob, Bob,' every second, with
them holding her hands and keeping her from coming to you."
"What's the matter with her?" asked Hart, with wide-open eyes.
"The sketch'll go on again in three days. I'm not hurt bad, the
doctor says. She won't lose out half a week's salary. I know it was
an accident. What's the matter with her?"
"You seem to be blind, or a sort of a fool," said Vincente. "The
girl loves you and is almost mad about your hurt. What's the
matter with _you_? Is she nothing to you? I wish you could hear
her call you."
"Loves me?" asked Bob Hart, rising from the stack of scenery on
which he lay. "Cherry loves me? Why, it's impossible."
"I wish you could see her and hear her," said Griggs.
"But, man," said Bob Hart, sitting up, "it's impossible. It's
impossible, I tell you. I never dreamed of such a thing."
"No human being," said the Tramp Juggler, "could mistake it.
She's wild for love of you. How have you been so blind?"
"But, my God," said Bob Hart, rising to his feet, "it's _too late_.
It's too late, I tell you, Sam; _it's too late_. It can't be. You must
be wrong. It's _impossible_. There's some mistake.
"She's crying for you," said the Tramp Juggler. "For love of you
she's fighting three, and calling your name so loud they don't dare
to raise the curtain. Wake up, man."
"For love of me?" said Bob Hart with staring eyes. "Don't I tell
you it's too late? It's too late, man. Why, _Cherry and I have been
married two years!_"
II
THE GOLD THAT GLITTERED
A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It
bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your
conscience. Therefore let us have the moral first and be done with
it. All is not gold that glitters, but it is a wise child that keeps the
stopper in his bottle of testing acid.
Where Broadway skirts the corner of the square presided over by
George the Veracious is the Little Rialto. Here stand the actors of
that quarter, and this is their shibboleth: "'Nit,' says I to Frohman,
'you can't touch me for a kopeck less than two-fifty per,' and out I
walks."
Westward and southward from the Thespian glare are one or two
streets where a Spanish-American colony has huddled for a little
tropical warmth in the nipping North. The centre of life in this
precinct is "El Refugio," a caf'e and restaurant that caters to the
volatile exiles from the South. Up from Chili, Bolivia, Colombia,
the rolling republics of Central America and the ireful islands of
the Western Indies flit the cloaked and sombreroed se~nores, who
are scattered like burning lava by the political eruptions of their
several countries.
Hither they come to lay counterplots, to bide their time, to solicit
funds, to enlist filibusterers, to smuggle out arms and
ammunitions, to play the game at long taw. In El Refugio, they
find the atmosphere in which they thrive.
In the restaurant of El Refugio are served compounds delightful to
the palate of the man from Capricorn or Cancer. Altruism must
halt the story thus long. On, diner, weary of the culinary
subterfuges of the Gallic chef, hie thee to El Refugio! There only
will you find a fish--bluefish, shad or pompano from the Gulf--
baked after the Spanish method. Tomatoes give it color,
individuality and soul; chili colorado bestows upon it zest,
originality and fervor; unknown herbs furnish piquancy and
mystery, and--but its crowning glory deserves a new sentence.
Around it, above it, beneath it, in its vicinity--but never in it--
hovers an ethereal aura, an effluvium so rarefied and ddelicate that
only the Society for Psychical Research could note its origin. Do
not say that garlic is in the fish at El Refugio. It is not otherwise
than as if the spirit of Garlic, flitting past, has wafted one kiss that
lingers in the parsley-crowned dish as haunting as those kisses in
life, "by hopeless fancy feigned on lips that are for others." And
then, when Conchito, the waiter, brings you a plate of brown
frijoles and carafe of wine that has never stood still between
Oporto and El Refugio--ah, Dios!
One day a Hamburg-American liner deposited upon Pier No. 55
Gen. Perrico Ximenes Villablanca Falcon, a passenger from
Cartagena. The General was between a claybank and bay in
complexion, had a 42-inch waist and stood 5 feet 4 with his Du
Barry heels. He had the mustache of a shooting-gallery proprietor,
he wore the full dress of a Texas congressman and had the
important aspect of an uninstructed delegate.
Gen. Falcon had enough English under his hat to enable him to
inquire his way to the street in which El Refugio stood. When he
reached that neighborhood he saw a sign before a respectable red-
brick house that read, "Hotel Espa~nol." In the window was a
card in Spanish, "Aqui se habla Espa~nol." The General entered,
sure of a congenial port.
In the cozy office was Mrs. O'Brien, the proprietress. She had
blond--oh, unimpeachably blond hair. For the rest she was
amiability, and ran largely to inches around. Gen. Falcon brushed
the floor with his broad-brimmed hat, and emitted a quantity of
Spanish, the syllables sounding like firecrackers gently popping
their way down the string of a bunch.
"Spanish or Dago?" asked Mrs. O'Brien, pleasantly.
"I am a Colombian, madam," said the General, proudly. "I speak
the Spanish. The advisment in your window say the Spanish he is
spoken here. How is that?"
"Well, you've been speaking it, ain't you?" said the madam. "I'm
sure I can't."
At the Hotel Espa~nol General Falcon engaged rooms and
established himself. At dusk he sauntered out upon the streets to
view the wonders of this roaring city of the North. As he walked
he thought of the wonderful golden hair of Mme. O'Brien. "It is
here," said the General to himself, no doubt in his own language,
"that one shall find the most beautiful se~noras in the world. I
have not in my Colombia viewed among our beauties one so fair.
But no! It is not for the General Falcon to think of beauty. It is
my country that claims my devotion."
At the corner of Broadway and the Little Rialto the General
became involved. The street cars bewildered him, and the fender
of one upset him against a pushcart laden with oranges. A cab
driver missed him an inch with a hub, and poured barbarous
execrations upon his head. He scrambled to the sidewalk and
skipped again in terror when the whistle of a peanut-roaster puffed
a hot scream in his ear. V'algame Dios! What devil's city is this?"
As the General fluttered out of the streamers of passers like a
wounded snipe he was marked simultaneously as game by two
hunters. One was "Bully" McGuire, whose system of sport
required the use of a strong arm and the misuse of an eight-inch
piece of lead pipe. The other Nimrod of the asphalt was "Spider"
Kelley, a sportsman with more refined methods.
In pouncing upon their self-evident prey, Mr. Kelley was a shade
the quicker. His elbow fended accurately the onslaught of Mr.
McGuire.
"G'wan!" he commanded harshly. "I saw it first." McGuire slunk
away, awed by superior intelligence.
"Pardon me," said Mr. Kelley, to the General, "but you got balled
up in the shuffle, didn't you? Let me assist you." He picked up
the General's hat and brushed the dust from it.
The ways of Mr. Kelley could not but succeed. The General,
bewildered and dismayed by the resounding streets, welcomed his
deliverer as a caballero with a most disinterested heart.
"I have a desire," said the General, "to return to the hotel of
O'Brien, in which I am stop. Caramba! se~nor, there is a loudness
and rapidness of going and coming in the city of this Nueva
York."
Mr. Kelley's politeness would not suffer the distinguished
Colombian to brave the dangers of the return unaccompanied. At
the door of the Hotel Espa~nol they paused. A little lower down
on the opposite side of the street shone the modest illuminated
sign of El Refugio. Mr. Kelley, to whom few streets were
unfamiliar, knew the place exteriorly as a "Dago joint." All
foreigners, Mr. Kelley classed under the two heads of "Dagoes"
and Frenchmen. He proposed to the General that they repair
thither and substantiate their acquaintance with a liquid
foundation.
An hour later found General Falcon and Mr. Kelley seated at a
table in the conspirator's corner of El Refugio. Bottles and glasses
were between them. For the tenth time the General confided the
secret of his mission to the Estados Unidos. He was here, he
declared, to purchase arms--2,000 stands of Winchester rifles--for
the Colombian revolutionists. He had drafts in his pocket drawn
by the Cartagena Bank on its New York correspondent for
$25,000. At other tables other revolutionists were shouting their
political secrets to their fellow-plotters; but none was as loud as
the General. He pounded the table; he hallooed for some wine; he
roared to his friend that his errand was a secret one, and not to be
hinted at to a living soul. Mr. Kelley himself was stirred to
sympathetic enthusiasm. He grasped the General's hand across the
table.
"Monseer," he said, earnestly, "I don't know where this country of
yours is, but I'm for it. I guess it must be a branch of the United
States, though, for the poetry guys and the schoolmarms call us
Columbia, too, sometimes. It's a lucky thing for you that you
butted into me to-night. I'm the only man in New York that can
get this gun deal through for you. The Secretary of War of the
United States is me best friend. He's in the city now, and I'll see
him for you to-morrow. In the meantime, monseer, you keep them
drafts tight in your inside pocket. I'll call for you to-morrow, and
take you to see him. Say! that ain't the District of Columbia you're
talking about, is it?" concluded Mr. Kelley, with a sudden qualm.
"You can't capture that with no 2,000 guns--it's been tried with
more."
"No, no, no!" exclaimed the General. "It is the Republic of
Colombia--it is a g-r-reat republic on the top side of America of
the South. Yes. Yes."
"All right," said Mr. Kelley, reassured. "Now suppose we trek
along home and go by-by. I'll write to the Secretary to-night and
make a date with him. It's a ticklish job to get guns out of New
York. McClusky himself can't do it."
They parted at the door of the Hotel Espa~nol. The General rolled
his eyes at the moon and sighed.
"It is a great country, your Nueva York," he said. "Truly the cars
in the streets devastate one, and the engine that cooks the nuts
terribly makes a squeak in the ear. But, ah, Se~nor Kelley--the
se~noras with hair of much goldness, and admirable fatness--they
are magnificas! Muy magnificas!"
Kelley went to the nearest telephone booth and called up
McCrary's caf'e, far up on Broadway. He asked for Jimmy Dunn.
"Is that Jimmy Dunn?" asked Kelley.
"Yes," came the answer.
"You're a liar," sang back Kelley, joyfully. "Your'e the Secretary
of War. Wait there till I come up. I've got the finest thing down
here in the way of a fish you ever baited for. It's a Colorado-
maduro, with a gold band around it and free coupons enough to
buy a red hall lamp and a statuette of Psyche rubbering in the
brook. I'll be up on the next car."
Jimmy Dunn was an A. M. of Crookdom. He was an artist in the
confidence line. He never saw a bludgeon in his life; and he
scorned knockout drops. In fact, he would have set nothing before
an intended victim but the purest of drinks, if it had been possible
to procure such a thing in New York. It was the ambition of
"Spider" Kelley to elevate himself into Jimmy's class.
These two gentlemen held a conference that night at McCrary's.
Kelley explained.
"He's as easy as a gumshoe. He's from the Island of Colombia,
where there's a strike, or a feud, or something going on, and
they've sent him up here to buy 2,000 Winchesters to arbitrate the
thing with. He showed me two drafts for $10,000 each, and one
for $5,000 on a bank here. 'S truth, Jimmy, I felt real mad with
him because he didn't have it in thousand-dollar bills, and hand it
to me on a silver waiter. Now, we've got to wait till he goes to the
bank and gets the money for us."
They talked it over for two hours, and then Dunn said; "Bring him
to No. __ Broadway, at four o'clock to-morrow afternoon."
In due time Kelley called at the Hotel Espa~nol for the General.
He found the wily warrior engaged in delectable conversation with
Mrs. O'Brien.
"The Secretary of War is waitin' for us," said Kelley.
The General tore himself away with an effort.
"Ay, se~nor," he said, with a sigh, "duty makes a call. But,
se~nor, the se~noras of your Estados Unidos--how beauties! For
exemplification, take you la Madame O'Brien--que magnifica!
She is one goddess--one Juno--what you call one ox-eyed Juno."
Now Mr. Kelley was a wit; and better men have been shriveled by
the fire of their own imagination.
"Sure!" he said with a grin; "but you mean a peroxide Juno, don't
you?"
Mrs. O'Brien heard, and lifted an auriferous head. Her
businesslike eye rested for an instant upon the disappearing form
of Mr. Kelley. Except in street cars one should never be
unnecessarily rude to a lady.
When the gallant Colombian and his escort arrived at the
Broadway address, they were held in an anteroom for half an hour,
and then admitted into a well-equipped office where a
distinguished looking man, with a smooth face, wrote at a desk.
General Falcon was presented to the Secretary of War of the
United States, and his mission made known by his old friend, Mr.
Kelley.
"Ah--Colombia!" said the Secretary, significantly, when he was
made to understand; "I'm afraid there will be a little difficutly in
that case. The President and I differ in our sympathies there. He
prefers the established government, while I--" the secretary gave
the General a mysterious but encouraging smile. "You, of course,
know, General Falcon, that since the Tammany war, an act of
Congress has been passed requiring all manufactured arms and
ammunition exported from this country to pass through the War
Department. Now, if I can do anything for you I will be glad to do
so to oblige my old friend, Mr. Kelley. But it must be in absolute
secrecy, as the President, as I have said, does not regard favorably
the efforts of your revolutionary party in Colombia. I will have my
orderly bring a list of the available arms now in the warehouse."
The Secretary struck a bell, and an orderly with the letters A. D. T.
on his cap stepped promptly into the room.
"Bring me Schedule B of the small arms inventory," said the
Secretary.
The orderly quickly returned with a printed paper. The Secretary
studied it closely.
"I find," he said, "that in Warehouse 9, of Government stores, there
is shipment of 2,000 stands of Winchester rifles that were ordered
by the Sultan of Morocco, who forgot to send the cash with his
order. Our rule is that legal-tender must be paid down at the time
of purchase. My dear Kelley, your friend, General Falcon, shall
have this lot of arms, if he desires it, at the manufacturer's price.
And you will forgive me, I am sure, if I curtail our interview. I am
expecting the Japanese Minister and Charles Murphy every
moment!"
As one result of this interview, the General was deeply grateful to
his esteemed friend, Mr. Kelley. As another, the nimble Secretary
of War was extremely busy during the next two days buying empty
rifle cases and filling them with bricks, which were then stored in
a warehouse rented for that purpose. As still another, when the
General returned to the Hotel Espa~nol, Mrs. O'Brien went up to
him, plucked a thread from his lapel, and said:
"Say, se~nor, I don't want to 'butt in,' but what does that monkey-
faced, cat-eyed, rubber-necked tin horn tough want with you?"
"Sangre de mi vida!" exclaimed the General. "Impossible it is that
you speak of my good friend, Se~nor kelley."
"Come into the summer garden," said Mrs. O'Brien. "I want to
have a talk with you."
Let us suppose that an hour has elapsed.
"And you say," said the General, "that for the sum of $18,000 can
be purchased the furnishment of the house and the lease of one
year with this garden so lovely--so resembling unto the patios of
my cara Colombia?"
"And dirt cheap at that," sighed the lady.
"Ah, Dios!" breathed General Falcon. "What to me is war and
politics? This spot is one paradise. My country it have other
brave heroes to continue the fighting. What to me should be glory
and the shooting of mans? Ah! no. It is here I have found one
angel. Let us buy the Hotel Espa~nol and you shall be mine, and
the money shall not be waste on guns."
Mrs. O'Brien rested her blond pompadour against the shoulder of
the Colombian patriot.
"Oh, se~nor," she sighed, happily, "ain't you terrible!"
Two days later was the time appointed for the delivery of the arms
to the General. The boxes of supposed rifles were stacked in the
rented warehouse, and the Secretary of War sat upon them, waiting
for his friend Kelley to fetch the victim.
Mr. Kelley hurried, at the hour, to the Hotel Espa~nol. He found
the General behind the desk adding up accounts.
"I have decide," said the General, "to buy not guns. I have to-day
buy the insides of this hotel, and there shall be marrying of the
General Perrico Ximenes Villablanca Falcon with la Madame
O'Brien."
Mr. Kelley almost strangled.
"Say, you old bald-headed bottle of shoe polish," he spluttered,
"you're a swindler--that's what you are! You've bought a boarding
house with money belonging to your infernal country, wherever it
is."
"Ah," said the General, footing up a column, "that is what you call
politics. War and revolution they are not nice. Yes. It is not best
that one shall always follow Minerva. No. It is of quite desirable
to keep hotels and be with that Juno--that ox-eyed Juno. Ah! what
hair of the gold it is that she have!"
Mr. Kelley choked again.
"Ah, Senor Kelley!" said the General, feelingly and finally, "is it
that you have never eaten of the corned beef hash that Madame
O'Brien she make?"
III
BABES IN THE JUNGLE
Montague Silver, the finest street man and art grafter in the West,
says to me once in Little Rock: "If you ever lose your mind, Billy,
and get too old to do honest swindling among grown men, go to
New York. In the West a sucker is born every minute; but in New
York they appear in chunks of roe--you can't count 'em!"
Two years afterward I found that I couldn't remember the names of
the Russian admirals, and I noticed some gray hairs over my left
ear; so I knew the time had arrived for me to take Silver's advice.
I struck New York about noon one day, and took a walk up
Broadway. And I run against Silver himself, all encompassed up
in a spacious kind of haberdashery, leaning against a hotel and
rubbing the half-moons on his nails with a silk handkerchief.
"Paresis or superannuated?" I asks him.
"Hello, Billy," says Silver; "I'm glad to see you. Yes, it seemed to
me that the West was accumulating a little too much wiseness.
I've been saving New York for dessert. I know it's a low-down
trick to take things from these people. They only know this and
that and pass to and fro and think ever and anon. I'd hate for my
mother to know I was skinning these weak-minded ones. She
raised me better."
"Is there a crush already in the waiting rooms of the old doctor that
does skin grafting?" I asks.
"Well, no," says Silver; "you needn't back Epidermis to win to-
day. I've only been here a month. But I'm ready to begin; and the
members of Willie Manhattan's Sunday School class, each of
whom has volunteered to contribute a portion of cuticle toward
this rehabilitation, may as well send their photos to the _Evening
Daily_.
"I've been studying the town," says Silver, "and reading the papers
every day, and I know it as well as the cat in the City Hall knows
an O'Sullivan. People here lie down on the floor and scream and
kick when you are the least bit slow about taking money from
them. Come up in my room and I'll tell you. We'll work the town
together, Billy, for the sake of old times."
Silver takes me up in a hotel. He has a quantity of irrelevant
objects lying about.
"There's more ways of getting money from these metropolitan
hayseeds," says Silver, "than there is of cooking rice in Charleston,
S. C. They'll bite at anything. The brains of most of 'em
commute. The wiser they are in intelligence the less perception of
cognizance they have. Why, didin't a man the other day sell J. P.
Morgan an oil portrait of Rockefeller, Jr., for Andrea del Sarto's
celebrated painting of the young Saint John!
"You see that bundle of printed stuff in the corner, Billy? That's
gold mining stock. I started out one day to sell that, but I quit it in
two hours. Why? Got arrested for blocking the street. People
fought to buy it. I sold the policeman a block of it on the way to
the station-house, and then I took it off the market. I don't want
people to give me their money. I want some little consideration
connected with the transaction to keep my pride from being hurt. I
want 'em to guess the missing letter in Chic-go, or draw to a pair
of nines before they pay me a cent of money.
"Now there's another little scheme that worked so easy I had to
quit it. You see that bottle of blue ink on the table? I tattooed an
anchor on the back of my hand and went to a bank and told 'em I
was Admiral Dewey's nephew. They offered to cash my draft on
him for a thousand, but I didn't know my uncle's first name. It
shows, though, what an easy town it is. As for burglars, they won't
go in a house now unless there's a hot supper ready and a few
college students to wait on 'em. They're slugging citizens all over
the upper part of the city and I guess, taking the town from end to
end, it's a plain case of assault and Battery."
"Monty," says I, when Silver had slacked, up, "you may have
Manhattan correctly discriminated in your perorative, but I doubt
it. I've only been in town two hours, but it don't dawn upon me
that it's ours with a cherry in it. There ain't enough rus in urbe
about it to suit me. I'd be a good deal much better satisfied if the
citizens had a straw or more in their hair, and run more to
velveteen vests and buckeye watch charms. They don't look easy
to me."
"You've got it, Billy," says Silver. "All emigrants have it. New
York's bigger than Little Rock or Europe, and it frightens a
foreigner. You'll be all right. I tell you I feel like slapping the
people here because they don't send me all their money in laundry
baskets, with germicide sprinkled over it. I hate to go down on the
street to get it. Who wears the diamonds in this town? Why,
Winnie, the Wiretapper's wife, and Bella, the Buncosteerer's bride.
New Yorkers can be worked easier than a blue rose on a tidy. The
only thing that bothers me is I know I'll break the cigars in my vest
pocket when I get my clothes all full of twenties."
"I hope you are right, Monty," says I; "but I wish all the same I had
been satisfied with a small business in Little Rock. The crop of
farmers is never so short out there but what you can get a few of
'em to sign a petition for a new post office that you can discount
for $200 at the county bank. The people hear appear to possess
instincts of self-preservation and illiberality. I fear me that we are
not cultured enough to tackle this game."
"Don't worry," says Silver. "I've got this Jayville-near-Tarrytown
correctly estimated as sure as North River is the Hudson and East
River ain't a river. Why, there are people living in four blocks of
Broadway who never saw any kind of a building except a
skyscraper in their lives! A good, live hustling Western man ought
to get conspicuous enough here inside of three months to incur
either Jerome's clemency or Lawson's displeasure."
"Hyperbole aside," says I, "do you know of any immediate system
of buncoing the community out of a dollar or two except by
applying to the Salvation Army or having a fit on Miss Helen
Gould's doorsteps?"
"Dozens of 'em," says Silver. "How much capital have you got,
Billy?"
"A thousand," I told him.
"I've got $1,200," says he. "We'll pool and do a big piece of
business. There's so many ways we can make a million that I don't
know how to begin."
The next morning Silver meets me at the hotel and he is all
sonorous and stirred with a kind of silent joy.
"We're to meet J. P. Morgan this afternoon," says he. "A man I
know in the hotel wants to introduce us. He's a friend of his. He
says he likes to meet people from the West."
"That sounds nice and plausible," says I. "I'd like to know Mr.
Morgan."
"It won't hurt us a bit," says Silver, "to get acquainted with a few
finance kings. I kind of like the social way New York has with
strangers."
The man Silver knew was named Klein. At three o'clock Klein
brought his Wall Street friend to see us in Silver's room. "Mr.
Morgan" looked some like his pictures, and he had a Turkish towel
wrapped around his left foot, and he walked with a cane.
"Mr. Silver and Mr. Pescud," says Klein. "It sounds superfluous,"
says he, "to mention the name of the greatest financial--"
"Cut it out, Klein," says Mr. Morgan. "I'm glad to know you
gents; I take great interest in the West. Klein tells me you're from
Little Rock. I think I've a railroad or two out there somewhere. If
either of you guys would like to deal a hand or two of stud poker I-
-"
"Now, Pierpont," cuts in Klein, "you forget!"
"Excuse me, gents!" says Morgan; "since I've had the gout so bad I
sometimes play a social game of cards at my house. Neither of
you never knew One-eyed Peters, did you, while you was around
Little Rock? He lived in Seattle, New Mexico."
Before we could answer, Mr. Morgan hammers on the floor with
his can and begins to walk up and down, swearing in a loud tone
of voice.
"They have been pounding your stocks to-day on the Street,
Pierpont?" asks Klein, smiling.
"Stocks! No!" roars Mr. Morgan. "It's that picture I sent an agent
to Europe to buy. I just thought about it. He cabled me to-day
that it ain't to be found in all Italy. I'd pay $50,000 to-morrow for
that picture--yes, $75,000. I give the agent a la carte in purchasing
it. I cannot understand why the art galleries will allow a De
Vinchy to--"
"Why, Mr. Morgan," says klein; "I thought you owned all of the
De Vinchy paintings."
"What is the picture like, Mr. Morgan?" asks Silver. "It must be as
big as the side of the Flatiron Building."
"I'm afraid your art education is on the bum, Mr. Silver," says
Morgan. "The picture is 27 inches by 42; and it is called 'Love's
Idle Hour.' It represents a number of cloak models doing the two-
step on the bank of a purple river. The cablegram said it might
have been brought to this country. My collection will never be
complete without that picture. Well, so long, gents; us financiers
must keep early hours."
Mr. Morgan and Klein went away together in a cab. Me and
Silver talked about how simple and unsuspecting great people was;
and Silver said what a shame it would be to try to rob a man like
Mr. Morgan; and I said I thought it would be rather imprudent,
myself. Klein proposes a stroll after dinner; and me and him and
Silver walks down toward Seventh Avenue to see the sights. Klein
sees a pair of cuff links that instigate his admiration in a pawnshop
window, and we all go in while he buys 'em.
After we got back to the hotel and Klein had gone, Silver jumps at
me and waves his hands.
"Did you see it?" says he. "Did you see it, Billy?"
"What?" I asks.
"Why, that picture that Morgan wants. It's hanging in that
pawnshop, behind the desk. I didn't say anything because Klein
was there. It's the article sure as you live. The girls are as natural
as paint can make them, all measuring 36 and 25 and 42 skirts, if
they had any skirts, and they're doing a buck-and-wing on the
bank of a river with the blues. What did Mr. Morgan say he'd give
for it? Oh, don't make me tell you. They can't know what it is in
that pawnshop."
When the pawnshop opened the next morning me and Silver was
standing there as anxious as if we wanted to soak our Sunday suit
to buy a drink. We sauntered inside, and began to look at watch-
chains.
"That's a violent specimen of a chromo you've got up there,"
remarked Silver, casual, to the pawnbroker. "But I kind of enthuse
over the girl with the shoulderblades and red bunting. Would an
offer of $2.25 for it cause you to knock over any fragile articles of
your stock in hurrying it off the nail?"
The pawnbroker smiles and goes on showing us plate watch-
chains.
"That picture," says he, "was pledged a year ago by an Italian
gentleman. I loaned him $500 on it. It is called 'Love's Idle Hour,'
and it is by Leonardo de Vinchy. Two days ago the legal time
expired, and it became an unredeemed pledge. Here is a style of
chain that is worn a great deal now."
At the end of half an hour me and Silver paid the pawnbroker
$2,000 and walked out with the picture. Silver got into a cab with
it and started for Morgan's office. I goes to the hotel and waits for
him. In two hours Silver comes back.
"Did you see Mr. Morgan?" I asks. "How much did he pay you for
it?"
Silver sits down and fools with a tassel on the table cover.
"I never exactly saw Mr. Morgan," he says, "because Mr. Morgan's
been in Europe for a month. But what's worrying me, Billy, is
this: The department stores have all got that same picture on sale,
framed, for $3.48. And they charge $3.50 for the frame alone--
that's what I can't understand."
IV
THE DAY RESURGENT
I can see the artist bite the end of his pencil and frown when it
comes to drawing his Easter picture; for his legitimate pictorial
conceptions of figures pertinent to the festival are but four in
number.
First comes Easter, pagan goddess of spring. Here his fancy may
have free play. A beautiful maiden with decorative hair and the
proper number of toes will fill the bill. Miss Clarice St. Vavasour,
the well-known model, will pose for it in the "Lethergogallagher,"
or whatever it was that Trilby called it.
Second--the melancholy lady with upturned eyes in a framework
of lilies. This is magazine-covery, but reliable.
Third--Miss Manhattan in the Fifth Avenue Easter Sunday parade.
Fourth--Maggie Murphy with a new red feather in her old straw
hat, happy and self-conscious, in the Grand Street turnout.
Of course, the rabbits do not count. Nor the Easter eggs, since the
higher criticism has hard-boiled them.
The limited field of its pictorial possibilities proves that Easter, of
all our festival days, is the most vague and shifting in our
conception. It belongs to all religions, although the pagans
invented it. Going back still further to the first spring, we can see
Eve choosing with pride a new green leaf from the tree _ficus
carica_.
Now, the object of this critical and learned preamble is to set forth
the theorem that Easter is neither a date, a season, a festival, a
holiday nor an occasion. What it is you shall find out if you
follow in the footsteps of Danny McCree.
Easter Sunday dawned as it should, bright and early, in its place
on the calendar between Saturday and Monday. At 5:24 the sun
rose, and at 10:30 Danny followed its example. He went into the
kitchen and washed his face at the sink. His mother was frying
bacon. She looked at his hard, smooth, knowing countenance as
he juggled with the round cake of soap, and thought of his father
when she first saw him stopping a hot grounder between second
and third twenty-two years before on a vacant lot in Harlem, where
the La Paloma apartment house now stands. In the front room of
the flat Danny's father sat by an open window smoking his pipe,
with his dishevelled gray hair tossed about by the breeze. He still
clung to his pipe, although his sight had been taken from him two
years before by a precocious blast of giant powder that went off
without permission. Very few blind men care for smoking, for the
reason that they cannot see the smoke. Now, could you enjoy
having the news read to you from an evening newspaper unless
you could see the colors of the headlines?
"'Tis Easter Day," said Mrs. McCree.
"Scramble mine," said Danny.
After breakfast he dressed himself in the Sabbath morning
costume of the Canal Street importing house dray chauffeur--frock
coat, striped trousers, patent leathers, gilded trace chain across
front of vest, and wing collar, rolled-brim derby and butterfly bow
from Schonstein's (between Fourteenth Street and Tony's fruit
stand) Saturday night sale.
"You'll be goin' out this day, of course, Danny," said old man
McCree, a little wistfully. "'Tis a kind of holiday, they say. Well,
it's fine spring weather. I can feel it in the air."
"Why should I not be going out?" demanded Danny in his
grumpiest chest tones. "Should I stay in? Am I as good as a
horse? One day of rest my team has a week. Who earns the
money for the rent and the breakfast you've just eat, I'd like to
know? Answer me that!"
"All right, lad," said the old man. "I'm not complainin'. While me
two eyes was good there was nothin' better to my mind than a
Sunday out. There's a smell of turf and burnin' brush comin' in the
windy. I have me tobaccy. A good fine day and rist to ye, lad.
Times I wish your mother had larned to read, so I might hear the
rest about the hippopotamus--but let that be."
"Now, what is this foolishness he talks of hippopotamuses?" asked
Danny of his mother, as he passed through the kitchen. "Have you
been taking him to the Zoo? And for what?"
"I have not," said Mrs. McCree. "He sets by the windy all day.
'Tis little recreation a blind man among the poor gets at all. I'm
thinkin' they wander in their minds at times. One day he talks of
grease without stoppin' for the most of an hour. I looks to see if
there's lard burnin' in the fryin' pan. There is not. He says I do not
understand. 'Tis weary days, Sundays, and holidays and all, for a
blind man, Danny. There was no better nor stronger than him
when he had his two eyes. 'Tis a fine day, son. Injoy yeself ag'inst
the morning. There will be cold supper at six."
"Have you heard any talk of a hippopotamus?" asked Danny of
Mike, the janitor, as he went out the door downstairs.
"I have not," said Mike, pulling his shirtsleeves higher. "But 'tis
the only subject in the animal, natural and illegal lists of outrages
that I've not been compained to about these two days. See the
landlord. Or else move out if ye like. Have ye hippopotamuses in
the lease? No, then?"
"It was the old man who spoke of it," said Danny. "Likely there's
nothing in it."
Danny walked up the street to the Avenue and then struck
northward into the heart of the district where Easter--modern
Easter, in new, bright raiment--leads the pascal march. Out of
towering brown churches came the blithe music of anthems from
the choirs. The broad sidewalks were moving parterres of living
flowers--so it seemed when your eye looked upon the Ester girl.
Gentlemen, frock-coated, silk-hatted, gardeniaed, sustained the
background of the tradition. Children carried lilies in their hands.
The windows of the brownstone mansions were packed with the
most opulent creations of flora, the sister of the Lady of the Lilies.
Around a corner, white-gloved, pink-gilled and tightly buttoned,
walked Corrigan, the cop, shield to the curb. Danny knew him.
"Why, Corrigan," he asked, "is Easter? I know it comes the first
you're full after the moon rises on the seventeenth of March--but
why? Is it a proper and religious ceremony, or does the Governor
appoint it out of politics?"
"'Tis an annual celebration," said Corrigan, with the judicial air of
the Third Deputy Police Commissioner, "peculiar to New York. It
extends up to Harlem. Sometimes they has the reserves out at One
Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street. In my opinion 'tis not political."
"Thanks," said Danny. "And say--did you ever hear a man
complain of hippopotamuses? When not specially in drink, I
mean."
"Nothing larger than sea turtles," said Corrigan, reflecting, "and
there was wood alcohol in that."
Danny wandered. The double, heavy incumbency of enjoying
simultaneously a Sunday and a festival day was his.
The sorrows of the hand-toiler fit him easily. They are worn so
often that they hang with the picturesque lines of the best tailor-
made garments. That is why well-fed artists of pencil and pen find
in the griefs of the common people their most striking models.
But when the Philistine would disport himself, the grimness of
Melpomene, herself, attends upon his capers. Therefore, Danny
set his jaw hard at Easter, and took his pleasure sadly.
The family entrance of Dugan's caf'e was feasible; so Danny
yielded to the vernal season as far as a glass of bock. Seated in a
dark, linoleumed, humid back room, his heart and mind still
groped after the mysterious meaning of the springtime jubilee.
"Say, Tim," he said to the waiter, "why do they have Easter?"
"Skiddoo!" said Tim, closing a sophisticated eye. "Is that a new
one? All right. Tony Pastor's for you last night, I guess. I give it
up. What's the answer--two apples or a yard and a half?"
From Dugan's Danny turned back eastward. The April sun seemed
to stir in him a vague feeling that he could not construe. He made
a wrong diagnosis and decided that it was Katy Conlon.
A block from her house on Avenue A he met her going to church.
They pumped hands on the corner.
"Gee! but you look dumpish and dressed up," said Katy. "What's
wrong? Come away with me to church and be cheerful."
"What's doing at church?" asked Danny.
"Why, it's Easter Sunday. Silly! I waited till after eleven expectin'
you might come around to go."
"What does this Easter stand for, Katy," asked Danny gloomily.
"Nobody seems to know."
"Nobody as blind as you," said Katy with spirit. "You haven't
even looked at my new hat. And skirt. Why, it's when all the girls
put on new spring clothes. Silly! Are you coming to church with
me?"
"I will," said Danny. "If this Easter is pulled off there, they ought
to be able to give some excuse for it. Not that the hat ain't a
beauty. The green roses are great."
At church the preacher did some expounding with no pounding.
He spoke rapidly, for he was in a hurry to get home to his early
Sabbath dinner; but he knew his business. There was one word
that controlled his theme--resurrection. Not a new creation; but a
new life arising out of the old. The congregation had heard it
often before. But there was a wonderful hat, a combination of
sweet peas and lavender, in the sixth pew from the pulpit. It
attracted much attention.
After church Danny lingered on a corner while Katy waited, with
pique in her sky-blue eyes.
"Are you coming along to the house?" she asked. "But don't mind
me. I'll get there all right. You seem to be studyin' a lot about
something. All right. Will I see you at any time specially, Mr.
McCree?"
"I'll be around Wednesday night as usual," said Danny, turning
and crossing the street.
Katy walked away with the green roses dangling indignantly.
Danny stopped two blocks away. He stood still with his hands in
his pockets, at the curb on the corner. His face was that of a
graven image. Deep in his soul something stirred so small, so fine,
so keen and leavening that his hard fibres did not recognize it. It
was something more tender than the April day, more subtle than
the call of the senses, purer and deeper-rooted than the love of
woman--for had he not turned away from green roses and eyes that
had kept him chained for a year? And Danny did not know what it
was. The preacher, who was in a hurry to go to his dinner, had
told him, but Danny had had no libretto with which to follow the
drowsy intonation. But the preacher spoke the truth.
Suddenly Danny slapped his leg and gave forth a hoarse yell of
delight.
"Hippopotamus!" he shouted to an elevated road pillar. "Well,
how is that for a bum guess? Why, blast my skylights! I know
what he was driving at now.
"Hippopotamus! Wouldn't that send you to the Bronx! It's been a
year since he heard it; and he didn't miss it so very far. We quit at
469 B. C., and this comes next. Well, a wooden man wouldn't
have guessed what he was trying to get out of him."
Danny caught a crosstown car and went up to the rear flat that his
labor supported.
Old man McCree was still sitting by the window. His extinct pipe
lay on the sill.
"Will that be you, lad?" he asked.
Danny flared into the rage of a strong man who is surprised at the
outset of committing a good deed.
"Who pays the rent and buys the food that is eaten in this house?"
he snapped, viciously. "Have I no right to come in?"
"Ye're a faithful lad," said old man McCree, with a sigh. "Is it
evening yet?"
Danny reached up on a shelf and took down a thick book labeled
in gilt letters, "The History of Greece." Dust was on it half an inch
thick. He laid it on the table and found a place in it marked by a
strip of paper. And then he gave a short roar at the top of his
voice, and said:
"Was it the hippopotamus you wanted to be read to about then?"
"Did I hear ye open the book?" said old man McCree. "Many and
weary be the months since my lad has read it to me. I dinno; but I
took a great likings to them Greeks. Ye left off at a place. 'Tis a
fine day outside, lad. Be out and take rest from your work. I have
gotten used to me chair by the windy and me pipe."
"Pel-Peloponnesus was the place where we left off, and not
hippopotamus," said Danny. "The war began there. It kept
something doing for thirty years. The headlines says that a guy
named Philip of Macedon, in 338 B. C., got to be boss of Greece
by getting the decision at the battle of Cher-Cheronaea. I'll read
it."
With his hand to his ear, rapt in the Peloponnesian War, old man
McCree sat for an hour, listening.
Then he got up and felt his way to the door of the kitchen. Mrs.
McCree was slicing cold meat. She looked up. Tears were
running from old man McCree's eyes.
"Do you hear our lad readin' to me?" he said. "There is none finer
in the land. My two eyes have come back to me again."
After supper he said to Danny: "'Tis a happy day, this Easter.
And now ye will be off to see Katy in the evening. Well enough."
"Who pays the rent and buys the food that is eaten in this house?"
said Danny, angrily. "Have I no right to stay in it? After supper
there is yet to come the reading of the battle of Corinth, 146 B. C.,
when the kingdom, as they say, became an in-integral portion of
the Roman Empire. Am I nothing in this house?"
V
THE FIFTH WHEEL
The ranks of the Bed Line moved closer together; for it was cold.
They were alluvial deposit of the stream of life lodged in the delta
of Fifth Avenue and Broadway. The Bed Liners stamped their
freezing feet, looked at the empty benches in Madison Square
whence Jack Frost had evicted them, and muttered to one another
in a confusion of tongues. The Flatiron Building, with its impious,
cloud-piercing architecture looming mistily above them on the
opposite delta, might well have stood for the tower of Babel,
whence these polyglot idlers had been called by the winged
walking delegate of the Lord.
Standing on a pine box a head higher than his flock of goats, the
Preacher exhorted whatever transient and shifting audience the
north wind doled out to him. It was a slave market. Fifteen cents
bought you a man. You deeded him to Morpheus; and the
recording angel gave you credit.
The preacher was incredibly earnest and unwearied. he had
looked over the list of things one may do for one's fellow man, and
had assumed for himself the task of putting to bed all who might
apply at his soap box on the nights of Wednesday and Sunday.
That left but five nights for other philanthropists to handle; and
had they done their part as well, this wicked city might have
become a vast Arcadian dormitory where all might snooze and
snore the happy hours away, letting problem plays and the rent
man and business go to the deuce.
The hour of eight was but a little while past; sightseers in a small,
dark mass of pay ore were gathered in the shadow of General
Worth's monument. Now and then, shyly, ostentatiously,
carelessly, or with conscientious exactness one would step forward
and bestow upon the Preacher small bills or silver. Then a
lieutenant of Scandinavian coloring and enthusiasm would march
away to a lodging house with a squad of the redeemed. All the
while the Preacher exhorted the crowd in terms beautifully devoid
of eloquence--splendid with the deadly, accusative monotony of
truth. Before the picture of the Bed Liners fades you must hear
one phrase of the Preacher's--the one that formed his theme that
night. It is worthy of being stenciled on all the white ribbons in
the world.
_"No man ever learned to be a drunkard on five-cent whisky."_
Think of it, tippler. It covers the ground from the sprouting rye to
the Potter's Field.
A clean-profiled, erect young man in the rear rank of the bedless
emulated the terrapin, drawing his head far down into the shell of
his coat collar. It was a well-cut tweed coat; and the trousers still
showed signs of having flattened themselves beneath the
compelling goose. But, conscientiously, I must warn the milliner's
apprentice who reads this, expecting a Reginald Montressor in
straits, to peruse no further. The young man was no other than
Thomas McQuade, ex-coachman, discharged for drunkenness one
month before, and now reduced to the grimy ranks of the one-
night bed seekers.
If you live in smaller New York you must know the Van Smuythe
family carriage, drawn by the two 1,500-pound, 100 to 1-shot
bays. The carriage is shaped like a bath-tub. In each end of it
reclines an old lady Van Smuythe holding a black sunshade the
size of a New Year's Eve feather tickler. Before his downfall
Thomas McQuade drove the Van Smuythe bays and was himself
driven by Annie, the Van Smuythe lady's maid. But it is one of
the saddest things about romance that a tight shoe or an empty
commissary or an aching tooth will make a temporary heretic of
any Cupid-worshiper. And Thomas's physical troubles were not
few. Therefore, his soul was less vexed with thoughts of his lost
lady's maid than it was by the fancied presence of certain non-
existent things that his racked nerves almost convinced him were
flying, dancing, crawling, and wriggling on the asphalt and in the
air above and around the dismal campus of the Bed Line army.
Nearly four weeks of straight whisky and a diet limited to
crackers, bologna, and pickles often guarantees a psycho-
zoological sequel. Thus desperate, freezing, angry, beset by
phantoms as he was, he felt the need of human sympathy and
intercourse.
The Bed Liner standing at his right was a young man of about his
own age, shabby but neat.
"What's the diagnosis of your case, Freddy?" asked Thomas, with
the freemasonic familiarity of the damned--"Booze? That's mine.
You don't look like a panhandler. Neither am I. A month ago I
was pushing the lines over the backs of the finest team of
Percheron buffaloes that ever made their mile down Fifth Avenue
in 2.85. And look at me now! Say; how do you come to be at this
bed bargain-counter rummage sale."
The other young man seemed to welcome the advances of the airy
ex-coachman.
"No," said he, "mine isn't exactly a case of drink. Unless we allow
that Cupid is a bartender. I married unwisely, according to the
opinion of my unforgiving relatives. I've been out of work for a
year because I don't know how to work; and I've been sick in
Bellevue and other hospitals for months. My wife and kid had to
go back to her mother. I was turned out of the hospital yesterday.
And I haven't a cent. That's my tale of woe."
"Tough luck," said Thomas. "A man alone can pull through all
right. But I hate to see the women and kids get the worst of it."
Just then there hummed up Fifth Avenue a motor car so splendid,
so red, so smoothly running, so craftily demolishing the speed
regulations that it drew the attention even of the listless Bed
Liners. Suspended and pinioned on its left side was an extra tire.
When opposite the unfortunate company the fastenings of this tire
became loosed. It fell to the asphalt, bounded and rolled rapidly in
the wake of the flying car.
Thomas McQuade, scenting an opportunity, darted from his place
among the Preacher's goats. In thirty seconds he had caught the
rolling tire, swung it over his shoulder, and was trotting smartly
after the car. On both sides of the avenue people were shouting,
whistling, and waving canes at the red car, pointing to the
enterprising Thomas coming up with the lost tire.
One dollar, Thomas had estimated, was the smallest guerdon that
so grand an automobilist could offer for the service he had
rendered, and save his pride.
Two blocks away the car had stopped. There was a little, brown,
muffled chauffeur driving, and an imposing gentleman wearing a
magnificent sealskin coat and a silk hat on a rear seat.
Thomas proffered the captured tire with his best ex-coachman
manner and a look in the brighter of his reddened eyes that was
meant to be suggestive to the extent of a silver coin or two and
receptive up to higher denominations.
But the look was not so construed. The sealskinned gentleman
received the tire, placed it inside the car, gazed intently at the ex-
coachman, and muttered to himself inscrutable words.
"Strange--strange!" said he. "Once or twice even I, myself, have
fancied that the Chaldean Chiroscope has availed. Could it be
possible?"
Then he addressed less mysterious words to the waiting and
hopeful Thomas.
"Sir, I thank you for your kind rescue of my tire. And I would ask
you, if I may, a question. Do you know the family of Van
Smuythes living in Washington Square North?"
"Oughtn't I to?" replied Thomas. "I lived there. Wish I did yet."
The sealskinned gentleman opened a door of the car.
"Step in please," he said. "You have been expected."
Thomas McQuade obeyed with surprise but without hesitation. A
seat in a motor car seemed better than standing room in the Bed
Line. But after the lap-robe had been tucked about him and the
auto had sped on its course, the peculiarity of the invitation
lingered in his mind.
"Maybe the guy hasn't got any change," was his diagnosis. "Lots
of these swell rounders don't lug about any ready money. Guess
he'll dump me out when he gets to some joint where he can get
cash on his mug. Anyhow, it's a cinch that I've got that open-air
bed convention beat to a finish."
Submerged in his greatcoat, the mysterious automobilist seemed,
himself, to marvel at the surprises of life. "Wonderful! amazing!
strange!" he repeated to himself constantly.
When the car had well entered the crosstown Seventies, it swung
eastward a half block and stopped before a row of high-stooped,
brownstone-front houses.
"Be kind enough to enter my house with me," said the sealskinned
gentleman when they had alighted. "He's going to dig up, sure,"
reflected Thomas, following him inside.
There was a dim light in the hall. His host conducted him through
a door to the left, closing it after him and leaving them in absolute
darkness. Suddenly a luminous globe, strangely decorated, shone
faintly in the centre of an immense room that seemed to Thomas
more splendidly appointed than any he had ever seen on the stage
or read of in fairy tales.
The walls were hidden by gorgeous red hangings embroidered with
fantastic gold figures. At the rear end of the room were draped
porti`eres of dull gold spangled with silver crescents and stars.
The furniture was of the costliest and rarest styles. The ex-
coachman's feet sank into rugs as fleecy and deep as snowdrifts.
There were three or four oddly shaped stands or tables covered
with black velvet drapery.
Thomas McQuade took in the splendors of this palatial apartment
with one eye. With the other he looked for his imposing
conductor--to find that he had disappeared.
"B'gee!" muttered Thomas, "this listens like a spook shop.
Shouldn't wonder if it ain't one of these Moravian Nights'
adventures that you read about. Wonder what became of the furry
guy."
Suddenly a stuffed owl that stood on an ebony perch near the
illuminated globe slowly raised his wings and emitted from his
eyes a brilliant electric glow.
With a fright-born imprecation, Thomas seized a bronze statuette
of Hebe from a cabinet near by and hurled it with all his might at
the terrifying and impossible fowl. The owl and his perch went
over with a crash. With the sound there was a click, and the room
was flooded with light from a dozen frosted globes along the walls
and ceiling. The gold porti`eres parted and closed, and the
mysterious automobilist entered the room. He was tall and wore
evening dress of perfect cut and accurate taste. A Vandyke beard
of glossy, golden brown, rather long and wavy hair, smoothly
parted, and large, magnetic, orientally occult eyes gave him a most
impressive and striking appearance. If you can conceive a Russian
Grand Duke in a Rajah's throneroom advancing to greet a visiting
Emperor, you will gather something of the majesty of his manner.
But Thomas McQuade was too near his _d t's_ to be mindful of
his _p's_ and _q's_. When he viewed this silken, polished, and
somewhat terrifying host he thought vaguely of dentists.
"Say, doc," said he resentfully, "that's a hot bird you keep on tap. I
hope I didn't break anything. But I've nearly got the williwalloos,
and when he threw them 32-candle-power-lamps of his on me, I
took a snap-shot at him with that little brass Flatiron Girl that
stood on the sideboard."
"That is merely a mechanical toy," said the gentleman with a wave
of his hand. "May I ask you to be seated while I explain why I
brought you to my house. Perhaps you would not understand nor
be in sympathy with the psychological prompting that caused me
to do so. So I will come to the point at once by venturing to refer
to your admission that you know the Van Smuythe family, of
Washington Square North."
"Any silver missing," asked Thomas tartly. "Any joolry displaced?
Of course I know 'em. Any of the old ladies' sunshades
disappeared? Well, I know 'em. And then what?"
The Grand Duke rubbed his white hands together softly.
"Wonderful!" he murmured. "Wonderful! Shall I come to believe
in the Chaldean Chiroscope myself? Let me assure you," he
continued, "that there is nothing for you to fear. Instead, I think I
can promise you that very good fortune awaits you. We will see."
"Do they want me back?" asked Thomas, with something of his
old professional pride in his voice. "I'll promise to cut out the
booze and do the right thing if they'll try me again. But how did
you get wise, doc? B'gee, it's the swellest employment agency I
was ever in, with its flashlight owls and so forth."
With an indulgent smile the gracious host begged to be excused
for two minutes. He went out to the sidewalk and gave an order to
the chauffeur, who still waited with the car. Returning to the
mysterious apartment, he sat by his guest and began to entertain
him so well by his witty and genial converse that the poor Bed
Liner almost forgot the cold streets from which he had been so
recently and so singularly rescued. A servant brought some tender
cold fowl and tea biscuits and a glass of miraculous wine; and
Thomas felt the glamour of Arabia envelop him. Thus half an
hour sped quickly; and then the honk of the returned motor car at
the door suddenly drew the Grand Duke to his feet, with another
soft petition for a brief absence.
Two women, well muffled against the cold, were admitted at the
front door and suavely conducted by the master of the house down
the hall through another door to the left and into a smaller room,
which was screened and segregated from the larger front room by
heavy, double porti`eres. here the furnishings were even more
elegant and exquisitely tasteful than in the other. On a gold-inlaid
rosewood table were scattered sheets of white paper and a queer,
triangular instrument or toy, apparently of gold, standing on little
wheels.
The taller woman threw back her black veil and loosened her
cloak. She was fifty, with a wrinkled and sad face. The other,
young and plump, took a chair a little distance away and to the
rear as a servant or an attendant might have done.
"You sent for me, Professor Cherubusco," said the elder woman,
wearily. "I hope you have something more definite than usual to
say. I've about lost the little faith I had in your art. I would not
have responded to your call this evening if my sister had not
insisted upon it."
"Madam," said the professor, with his princeliest smile, "the true
Art cannot fail. To find the true psychic and potential branch
sometimes requires time. We have not succeeded, I admint, with
the cards, the crystal, the stars, the magic formulae of Zarazin, nor
the Oracle of Po. But we have at last discovered the true psychic
route. The Chaldean Chiroscope has been successful in our
search."
The professor's voice had a ring that seemed to proclaim his belief
in his own words. The elderly lady looked at him with a little
more interest.
"Why, there was no sense in those words that it wrote with my
hands on it," she said. "What do you mean?"
"The words were these," said Professor Cherubusco, rising to his
full magnificent height: _"By the fifth wheel of the chariot he
shall come."_
"I haven't seen many chariots," said the lady, "but I never saw one
with five wheels."
"Progress," said the professor--"progress in science and mechanics
has accomplished it--though, to be exact, we may speak of it only
as an extra tire. Progress in occult art has advanced in proportion.
Madam, I repeat that the Chaldean Chiroscope has succeeded. I
can not only answer the question that you have propounded, but I
can produce before your eyes the proof thereof."
And now the lady was disturbed both in her disbelief and in her
poise.
"O professor!" she cried anxiously--"When?--where? Has he been
found? Do not keep me in suspense."
"I beg you will excuse me for a very few minutes," said Professor
Cherubusco, "and I think I can demonstrate to you the efficacy of
the true Art."
Thomas was contentedly munching the last crumbs of the bread
and fowl when the enchanter appeared suddenly at his side.
"Are you willing to return to your old home if you are assured of a
welcome and restoration to favor?" he asked, with his courteous,
royal smile.
"Do I look bughouse?" answered Thomas. "Enough of the
footback life for me. But will they have me again? The old lady is
as fixed in her ways as a nut on a new axle."
"My dear young man," said the other, "she has been searching for
you everywhere."
"Great!" said Thomas. "I'm on the job. That team of dropsical
domedaries they call horses is a handicap for a first-class
coachman like myself; but I'll take the job back, sure, doc. They're
good people to be with."
And now a change came o'er the suave countenance of the Caliph
of Bagdad. He looked keenly and suspiciously at the ex-
coachman.
"May I ask what your name is?" he said shortly.
"You've been looking for me," said Thomas, "and don't know my
name? You're a funny kind of sleuth. You must be one of the
Central Office gumshoers. I'm Thomas McQuade, of course; and
I've been chauffeur of the Van Smuythe elephant team for a year.
They fired me a month ago for--well, doc, you saw what I did to
your old owl. I went broke on booze, and when I saw the tire drop
off your whiz wagon I was standing in that squad of hoboes at the
Worth monument waiting for a free bed. Now, what's the prize for
the best answer to all this?"
To his intense surprise Thomas felt himself lifted by the collar and
dragged, without a word of explanation, to the front door. This
was opened, and he was kicked forcibly down the steps with one
heavy, disillusionizing, humiliating impact of the stupendous
Arabian's shoe.
As soon as the ex-coachman had recovered his feet and his wits he
hastened as fast as he could eastward toward Broadway.
"Crazy guy," was his estimate of the mysterious automobilist.
"Just wanted to have some fun kiddin', I guess. He might have
dug up a dollar, anyhow. Now I've got to hurry up and get back to
that gang of bum bed hunters before they all get preached to
sleep."
When Thomas reached the end of his two-mile walk he found the
ranks of the homeless reduced to a squad of perhaps eight or ten.
He took the proper place of a newcomer at the left end of the rear
rank. In a file in front of him was the young man who had spoken
to him of hospitals and something of a wife and child.
"Sorry to see you back again," said the young man, turning to
speak to him. "I hoped you had struck something better than this."
"Me?" said Thomas. "Oh, I just took a run around the block to
keep warm! I see the public ain't lending to the Lord very fast to-
night."
"In this kind of weather," said the young man, "charity avails itself
of the proverb, and both begins and ends at home."
And the Preacher and his vehement lieutenant struck up a last
hymn of petition to Providence and man. Those of the Bed Liners
whose windpipes still registered above 32 degrees hopelessly and
tunelessly joined in.
In the middle of the second verse Thomas saw a sturdy girl with
wind-tossed drapery battling against the breeze and coming
straight toward him from the opposite sidewalk. "Annie!" he
yelled, and ran toward her.
"You fool, you fool!" she cried, weeping and laughing, and
hanging upon his neck, "why did you do it?"
"The Stuff," explained Thomas briefly. "You know. But
subsequently nit. Not a drop." He led her to the curb. "How did
you happen to see me?"
"I came to find you," said Annie, holding tight to his sleeve. "Oh,
you big fool! Professor Cherubusco told us that we might find you
here."
"Professor Ch-- Dont' know the guy. What saloon does he work
in?"
"He's a clairvoyant, Thomas; the greatest in the world. He found
you with the Chaldean telescope, he said."
"He's a liar," said Thomas. "I never had it. He never saw me have
anybody's telescope."
"And he said you came in a chariot with five wheels or
something."
"Annie," said Thoms solicitously, "you're giving me the wheels
now. If I had a chariot I'd have gone to bed in it long ago. And
without any singing and preaching for a nightcap, either."
"Listen, you big fool. The Missis says she'll take you back. I
begged her to. But you must behave. And you can go up to the
house to-night; and your old room over the stable is ready."
"Great!" said Thomas earnestly. "You are It, Annie. But when did
these stunts happen?"
"To-night at Professor Cherubusco's. He sent his automobile for
the Missis, and she took me along. I've been there with her
before."
"What's the professor's line?"
"He's a clairvoyant and a witch. The Missis consults him. He
knows everything. But he hasn't done the Missis any good yet,
though she's paid him hundreds of dollars. But he told us that the
stars told him we could find you here."
"What's the old lady want this cherry-buster to do?"
"That's a family secret," said Annie. "And now you've asked
enough questions. Come on home, you big fool."
They had moved but a little way up the street when Thomas
stopped.
"Got any dough with you, Annie?" he asked.
Annie looked at him sharply.
"Oh, I know what that look means," said Thomas. "You're wrong.
Not another drop. But there's a guy that was standing next to me
in the bed line over there that's in bad shape. He's the right kind,
and he's got wives or kids or something, and he's on the sick list.
No booze. If you could dig up half a dollar for him so he could get
a decent bed I'd like it."
Annie's fingers began to wiggle in her purse.
"Sure, I've got money," said she. "Lots of it. Twelve dollars."
And then she added, with woman's ineradicable suspicion of
vicarious benevolence: "Bring him here and let me see him first."
Thomas went on his mission. The wan Bed Liner came readily
enough. As the two drew near, Annie looked up from her purse
and screamed:
"Mr. Walter-- Oh--Mr. Walter!:
"Is that you, Annie?" said the young man meekly.
"Oh, Mr. Walter!--and the Missis hunting high and low for you!"
"Does mother want to see me?" he asked, with a flush coming out
on his pale cheek.
"She's been hunting for you high and low. Sure, she wants to see
you. She wants you to come home. She's tried police and
morgues and lawyers and advertising and detectives and rewards
and everything. And then she took up clearvoyants. You'll go
right home, won't you, Mr. Walter?"
"Gladly, if she wants me," said the young man. "Three years is a
long time. I suppose I'll have to walk up, though, unless the street
cars are giving free rides. I used to walk and beat that old plug
team of bays we used to drive to the carriage. Have they got them
yet?"
"They have," said Thomas, feelingly. "And they'll have 'em ten
years from now. The life of the royal elephantibus truckhorseibus
is one hundred and forty-nine years. I'm the coachman. Just got
my reappointment five minutes ago. Let's all ride up in a surface
car--that is--er--if Annie will pay the fares."
On the Broadway car Annie handed each one of the prodigals a
nickel to pay the conductor.
"Seems to me you are mighty reckless the way you throw large
sums of money around," said Thomas sarcastically.
"In that purse," said Annie decidedly, "is exactly $11.85. I shall
take every cent of it to-morrow and give it to professor
Cherubusco, the greatest man in the world."
"Well," said Thomas, "I guess he must be a pretty fly guy to pipe
off things the way he does. I'm glad his spooks told him where
you could find me. If you'll give me his address, some day I'll go
up there, myself, and shake his hand."
Presently Thomas moved tentatively in his seat, and thoughtfully
felt an abrasion or two on his knees and his elbows.
"Say, Annie," said he confidentially, maybe it's one of the last
dreams of booze, but I've a kind of a recollection of riding in
authomobile with a swell guy that took me to a house full of eagles
and arc lights. He fed me on biscuits and hot air, and then kicked
me down the front steps. If it was the _d t's_, why am I so sore?"
"Shut up, you fool," said Annie.
"If I could find that funny guy's house, said Thomas, in
conclusion, "I'd go up there some day and punch his nose for him."
VI
THE POET AND THE PEASANT
The other day a poet friend of mine, who has lived in close
communion with nature all his life, wrote a poem and took it to an
editor.
It was a living pastoral, full of the genuine breath of the fields, the
song of birds, and the pleasant chatter of trickling streams.
When the poet called again to see about it, with hopes of a
beefsteak dinner in his heart, it was handed back to him with the
comment:
"Too artificial."
Several of us met over spaghetti and Dutchess County chianti, and
swallowed indignation with slippery forkfuls.
And there we dug a pit for the editor. With us was Conant, a well-
arrived writer of fiction--a man who had trod on asphalt all his life,
and who had never looked upon bucolic scenes except with
sensations of disgust from the windows of express trains.
Conant wrote a poem and called it "The Doe and the Brook." It
was a fine specimen of the kind of work you would expect from a
poet who had strayed with Amaryllis only as far as the florist's
windows, and whose sole ornithological discussion had been
carried on with a waiter. Conant signed this poem, and we sent it
to the same editor.
But this has very little to do with the story.
Just as the editor was reading the first line of the poem, on the next
morning, a being stumbled off the West Shore ferryboat, and loped
slowly up Forty-second Street.
The invader was a young man with light blue eyes, a hanging lip
and hair the exact color of the little orphan's (afterward discovered
to be the earl's daughter) in one of Mr. Blaney's plays. His
trousers were corduroy, his coat short-sleeved, with buttons in the
middle of his back. One bootleg was outside the corduroys. You
looked expectantly, though in vain, at his straw hat for ear holes,
its shape inaugurating the suspicion that it had been ravaged from
a former equine possessor. In his hand was a valise--description of
it is an impossible task; a Boston man would not have carried his
lunch and law books to his office in it. And above one ear, in his
hair, was a wisp of hay--the rustic's letter of credit, his badge of
innocence, the last clinging touch of the Garden of Eden lingering
to shame the gold-brick men.
Knowingly, smilingly, the city crowds passed him by. They saw
the raw stranger stand in the gutter and stretch his neck at the tall
buildings. At this they ceased to smile, and even to look at him. It
had been done so often. A few glanced at the antique valise to see
what Coney "attraction" or brand of chewing gum he might be
thus dinning into his memory. But for the most part he was
ignored. Even the newsboys looked bored when he scampered like
a circus clown out of the way of cabs and street cars.
At Eighth Avenue stood "Bunco Harry," with his dyed mustache
and shiny, good-natured eyes. Harry was too good an artist not to
be pained at the sight of an actor overdoing his part. He edged up
to the countryman, who had stopped to open his mouth at a
jewelry store window, and shook his head.
"Too thick, pal," he said, critically--"too thick by a couple of
inches. I don't know what your lay is; but you've got the properties
too thick. That hay, now--why, they don't even allow that on
Proctor's circuit any more."
"I don't understand you, mister," said the green one. "I'm not
lookin' for any circus. I've just run down from Ulster County to
look at the town, bein' that the hayin's over with. Gosh! but it's a
whopper. I thought Poughkeepsie was some punkins; but this here
town is five times as big."
"Oh, well," said "Bunco Harry," raising his eyebrows, "I didn't
mean to butt in. You don't have to tell. I thought you ought to
tone down a little, so I tried to put you wise. Wish you success at
your graft, whatever it is. Come and have a drink, anyhow."
"I wouldn't mind having a glass of lager beer," acknowledged the
other.
They went to a caf'e frequented by men with smooth faces and
shifty eyes, and sat at their drinks.
"I'm glad I come across you, mister," said Haylocks. "How'd you
like to play a game or two of seven-up? I've got the keerds."
He fished them out of Noah's valise--a rare, inimitable deck,
greasy with bacon suppers and grimy with the soil of cornfields.
"Bunco Harry" laughed loud and briefly.
"Not for me, sport," he said, firmly. "I don't go against that make-
up of yours for a cent. But I still say you've overdone it. The
Reubs haven't dressed like that since '79. I doubt if you could
work Brooklyn for a key-winding watch with that layout."
"Oh, you needn't think I ain't got the money," boasted Haylocks.
He drew forth a tightly rolled mass of bills as large as a teacup,
and laid it on the table.
"Got that for my share of grandmother's farm," he announced.
"There's $950 in that roll. Thought I'd come to the city and look
around for a likely business to go into."
"Bunco Harry" took up the roll of money and looked at it with
almost respect in his smiling eyes.
"I've seen worse," he said, critically. "But you'll never do it in
them clothes. You want to get light tan shoes and a black suit and
a straw hat with a colored band, and talk a good deal about
Pittsburg and freight differentials, and drink sherry for breakfast in
order to work off phony stuff like that."
"What's his line?" asked two or three shifty-eyed men of "Bunco
Harry" after Haylocks had gathered up his impugned money and
departed.
"The queer, I guess," said Harry. "Or else he's one of Jerome's
men. Or some guy with a new graft. He's too much hayseed.
Maybe that his--I wonder now--oh, no, it couldn't have been real
money."
Haylocks wandered on. Thirst probably assailed him again, for he
dived into a dark groggery on a side street and bought beer. At
first sight of him their eyes brightened; but when his insistent and
exaggerated rusticity became apparent their expressions changed
to wary suspicion.
Haylocks swung his valise across the bar.
"Keep that a while for me, mister," he said, chewing at the end of a
virulent claybank cigar. "I'll be back after I knock around a spell.
And keep your eye on it, for there's $950 inside of it, though
maybe you wouldn't think so to look at me."
Somewhere outside a phonograph struck up a band piece, and
Haylocks was off for it, his coat-tail buttons flopping in the middle
of his back.
"Divvy, Mike," said the men hanging upon the bar, winking
openly at one another.
"Honest, now," said the bartender, kicking the valise to one side.
"You don't think I'd fall to that, do you? Anybody can see he ain't
no jay. One of McAdoo's come-on squad, I guess. He's a shine if
he made himself up. There ain't no parts of the country now where
they dress like that since they run rural free delivery to Providence,
Rhode Island. If he's got nine-fifty in that valise it's a ninety-eight
cent Waterbury that's stopped at ten minutes to ten."
When Haylocks had exhausted the resources of Mr. Edison to
amuse he returned for his valise. And then down Broadway he
gallivanted, culling the sights with his eager blue eyes. But still
and evermore Broadway rejected him with curt glances and
sardonic smiles. He was the oldest of the "gags" that the city must
endure. He was so flagrantly impossible, so ultra rustic, so
exaggerated beyond the most freakish products of the barnyard,
the hayfield and the vaudeville stage, that he excited only
weariness and suspicion. And the wisp of hay in his hair was so
genuine, so fresh and redolent of the meadows, so clamorously
rural that even a shellgame man would have put up his peas and
folded his table at the sight of it.
Haylocks seated himself upon a flight of stone steps and once
more exhumed his roll of yellow-backs from the valise. The outer
one, a twenty, he shucked off and beckoned to a newsboy.
"Son," said he, "run somewhere and get this changed for me. I'm
mighty nigh out of chicken feed. I guess you'll get a nickel if
you'll hurry up."
A hurt look appeared through the dirt on the newsy's face.
"Aw, watchert'ink! G'wan and get yer funny bill changed yerself.
Dey ain't no farm clothes yer got on. G'wan wit yer stage money."
On a corner lounged a keen-eyed steerer for a gambling-house. He
was Haylocks, and his expression suddenly grew cold and
virtuous.
"Mister," said the rural one. "I've heard of places in this here town
where a fellow could have a good game of old sledge or peg a card
at keno. I got $950 in this valise, and I come down from old
Ulster to see the sights. Know where a fellow could get action on
about $9 or $10? I'm goin' to have some sport, and then maybe I'll
buy out a business of some kind."
The steerer looked pained, and investigated a white speck on his
left forefinger nail.
"Cheese it, old man," he murmured, reproachfully. "The Central
Office must be bughouse to send you out looking like such a gillie.
You couldn't get within two blocks of a sidewalk crap game in
them Tony Pastor props. The recent Mr. Scotty from Death Valley
has got you beat a crosstown block in the way of Elizabethan
scenery and mechanical accessories. Let it be skiddoo for yours.
Nay, I know of no gilded halls where one may bet a patrol wagon
on the ace."
Rebuffed once again by the great city that is so swift to detect
artificialities, Haylocks sat upon the curb and presented his
thoughts to hold a conference.
"It's my clothes," said he; "durned if it ain't. They think I'm a
hayseed and won't have nothin' to do with me. Nobody never
made fun of this hat in Ulster County. I guess if you want folks to
notice you in New York you must dress up like they do."
So Haylocks went shopping in the bazaars where men spake
through their noses and rubbed their hands and ran the tape line
ecstatically over the buldge in his inside pocket where reposed a
red nubbin of corn with an even number of rows. And messengers
bearing parcels and boxes streamed to his hotel on Broadway
within the lights of Long Acre.
At 9 o'clock in the evening one descended to the sidewalk whom
Ulster County would have foresworn. Bright tan were his shoes;
his hat the latest block. His light gray trousers were deeply
creased; a gay blue silk handkerchief flapped from the breast
pocket of his elegant English walking coat. His collar might have
graced a laundry window; his blond hair was trimmed close; the
wisp of hay was gone.
For an instant he stood, resplendent, with the leisurely air of a
boulevardier concocting in his mind the route for his evening
pleasures. And then he turned down the gay, bright street with the
easy and graceful tread of a millionaire.
But in the instant that he had paused the wisest and keenest eyes in
the city had enveloped him in their field of vision. A stout man
with gray eyes picked two of his friends with a lift of his eyebrows
from the row of loungers in front of the hotel.
"The juiciest jay I've seen in six months," said the man with gray
eyes. "Come along."
It was half-past eleven when a man galloped into the West Forty-
seventh Street Police Station with the story of his wrongs.
"Nine hundred and fifty dollars," he gasped, "all my share of
grandmother's farm."
The desk seargeant wrung from him the name Jabez Bulltongue, of
Locust Valley farm, Ulster County, and then bagan to take
descriptions of the strong-arm gentlemen.
When Conant went to see the editor about the fate of his poem, he
was received over the head of the office boy into the inner office
that is decorated with the statuettes by Rodin and J. G. Brown.
"When I read the first line of 'The Doe and the Brook,'" said the
editor, "I knew it to be the work of one whose life has been heart to
heart with Nature. The finished art of the line did not blind me to
that fact. To use a somewhat homely comparison, it was as if a
wild, free child of the woods and fields were to don the garb of
fashion and walk down Broadway. Beneath the apparel the man
would show."
"Thanks," said Conant. "I suppose the check will be round on
Thursday, as usual."
The morals of this story have somehow gotten mixed. You can
take your choice of "Stay on the Farm" or "Don't Write Poetry."
VII
THE ROBE OF PEACE
Mysteries follow one another so closely in a great city that the
reading public and the friends of Johnny Bellchambers have
ceased to marvel at his sudden and unexplained disappearance
nearly a year ago. This particular mystery has now been cleared
up, but the solution is so strange and incredible to the mind of the
average man that only a select few who were in close touch with
Bellchambers will give it full credence.
Johnny Bellchambers, as is well known, belonged to the
intrinsically inner circle of the _'elite_. Without any of the
ostentation of the fashionable ones who endeavor to attract notice
by eccentric display of wealth and show he still was _au fait_ in
everything that gave deserved lustre to his high position in the
ranks of society.
Especially did he shine in the matter of dress. In this he was the
despair of imitators. Always correct, exquisitely groomed, and
possessed of an unlimited wardrobe, he was conceded to be the
best-dressed man in New York, and, therefore, in America. There
was not a tailor in Gotham who would not have deemed it a
precious boon to have been granted the privilege of making
Bellchambers' clothes without a cent of pay. As he wore them,
they would have been a priceless advertisement. Trousers were his
special passion. Here nothing but perfection would he notice. He
would have worn a patch as quickly as he would have overlooked
a wrinkle. He kept a man in his apartments always busy pressing
his ample supply. His friends said that three hours was the limit of
time that he would wear these garments without exchanging.
Bellchambers disappeared very suddenly. For three days his
absence brought no alarm to his friends, and then they began to
operate the usual methods of inquiry. All of them failed. He had
left absolutely no trace behind. Then the search for a motive was
instituted, but none was found. He had no enemies, he had no
debts, there was no woman. There were several thousand dollars
in his bank to his credit. He had never showed any tendency
toward mental eccentricity; in fact, he was of a particularly calm
and well-balanced temperament. Every means of tracing the
vanished man was made use of, but without avail. It was one of
those cases--more numerous in late years--where men seem to
have gone out like the flame of a candle, leaving not even a trail of
smoke as a witness.
In May, Tom Eyres and Lancelot Gilliam, two of Bellchambers'
old friends, went for a little run on the other side. While pottering
around in Italy and Switzerland, they happened, one day, to hear of
a monastery in the Swiss Alps that promised something outside of
the ordinary tourist-beguiling attractions. The monastery was
almost inaccessible to the average sightseer, being on an extremely
rugged and precipitous spur of the mountains. The attractions it
possessed but did not advertise were, first, an exclusive and divine
cordial made by the monks that was said to far surpass benedictine
and chartreuse. Next a huge brass bell so purely and accurately
cast that it had not ceased sounding since it was first rung three
hundred years ago. Finally, it was asserted that no Englishman
had ever set foot within its walls. Eyres and Gilliam decided that
these three reports called for investigation.
It took them two days with the aid of two guides to reach the
monastery of St. Gondrau. It stood upon a frozen, wind-swept
crag with the snow piled about it in treacherous, drifting masses.
They were hospitably received by the brothers whose duty it was
to entertain the infrequent guest. They drank of the precious
cordial, finding it rarely potent and reviving. They listened to the
great, ever-echoing bell, and learned that they were pioneer
travelers, in those gray stone walls, over the Englishman whose
restless feet have trodden nearly every corner of the earth.
At three o'clock on the afternoon they arrived, the two young
Gothamites stood with good Brother Cristofer in the great, cold
hallway of the monastery to watch the monks march past on their
way to the refectory. They came slowly, pacing by twos, with their
heads bowed, treading noiselessly with sandaled feet upon the
rough stone flags. As the procession slowly filed past, Eyres
suddenly gripped Gilliam by the arm. "Look," he whispered,
eagerly, "at the one just opposite you now--the one on this side,
with his hand at his waist--if that isn't Johnny Bellchambers then I
never saw him!"
Gilliam saw and recognized the lost glass of fashion.
"What the deuce," said he, wonderingly, "is old Bell doing here?
Tommy, it surely can't be he! Never heard of Bell having a turn
for the religious. Fact is, I've heard him say things when a four-in-
hand didn't seem to tie up just right that would bring him up for
court-martial before any church."
"It's Bell, without a doubt," said Eyres, firmly, "or I'm pretty badly
in need of an oculist. But think of Johnny Bellchambers, the
Royal High Chancellor of swell togs and the Mahatma of pink
teas, up here in cold storage doing penance in a snuff-colored
bathrobe! I can't get it straight in my mind. Let's ask the jolly old
boy that's doing honors."
Brother Cristofer was appealed to for information. By that time
the monks had passed into the refectory. He could not tell to
which one they referred. Bellchambers? Ah, the brothers of St.
Gondrau abandoned their worldly names when they took the vows.
Did the gentlemen wish to speak with one of the brothers? If they
would come to the refectory and indicate the one they wished to
see, the reverend abbot in authority would, doubtless, permit it.
Eyres and Gilliam went into the dining hall and pointed out to
Brother Cristofer the man they had seen. Yes, it was Johnny
Bellchambers. They saw his face plainly now, as he sat among the
dingy brothers, never looking up, eating broth from a coarse,
brown bowl.
Permission to speak to one of the brothers was granted to the two
travelers by the abbot, and they waited in a reception room for him
to come. When he did come, treading softly in his sandals, both
Eyres and Gilliam looked at him in perplexity and astonishment.
It was Johnny Bellchambers, but he had a different look. Upon his
smooth-shaven face was an expression of ineffable peace, of
rapturous attainment, of perfect and complete happiness. His form
was proudly erect, his eyes shone with a serene and gracious light.
He was as neat and well-groomed as in the old New York days, but
how differently was he clad! Now he seemed clothed in but a
single garment--a long robe of rough brown cloth, gathered by a
cord at the waist, and falling in straight, loose folds nearly to his
feet. He shook hands with his visitors with his old ease and grace
of manner. If there was any embarrassment in that meeting it was
not manifested by Johnny Bellchambers. The room had no seats;
they stood to converse.
"Glad to see you, old man," said Eyres, somewhat awkwardly.
"Wasn't expecting to find you up here. Not a bad idea though,
after all. Society's an awful sham. Must be a relief to shake the
giddy whirl and retire to--er--contemplation and--er--prayer and
hymns, and those things.
"Oh, cut that, Tommy," said Bellchambers, cheerfully. "Don't be
afraid that I'll pass around the plate. I go through these thing-um-
bobs with the rest of these old boys because they are the rules. I'm
Brother Ambrose here, you know. I'm given just ten minutes to
talk to you fellows. That's rather a new design in waistcoats you
have on, isn't it, Gilliam? Are they wearing those things on
Broadway now?"
"It's the same old Johnny," said Gilliam, joyfully. "What the devil-
-I mean why-- Oh, confound it! what did you do it for, old man?"
"Peel the bathrobe," pleaded Eyres, almost tearfully, "and go back
with us. The old crowd'll go wild to see you. This isn't in your
line, Bell. I know half a dozen girls that wore the willow on the
quiet when you shook us in that unaccountable way. Hand in your
resignation, or get a dispensation, or whatever you have to do to
get a release from this ice factory. You'll get catarrh here, Johnny-
-and-- My God! you haven't any socks on!"
Bellchambers looked down at his sandaled feet and smiled.
"You fellows don't understand," he said, soothingly. "It's nice of
you to want me to go back, but the old life will never know me
again. I have reached here the goal of all my ambitions. I am
entirely happy and contented. Here I shall remain for the
remainder of my days. You see this robe that I wear?"
Bellchambers caressingly touched the straight-hanging garment:
"At last I have found something that will not bag at the knees. I
have attained--"
At that moment the deep boom of the great brass bell reverberated
through the monastery. It must have been a summons to
immediate devotions, for Brother Ambrose bowed his head, turned
and left the chamber without another word. A slight wave of his
hand as he passed through the stone doorway seemed to say a
farewell to his old friends. They left the monastery without seeing
him again.
And this is the story that Tommy Eyres and Lancelot Gilliam
brought back with them from their latest European tour.
VIII
THE GIRL AND THE GRAFT
The other day I ran across my old friend Ferguson Pogue. Pogue is
a conscientious grafter of the highest type. His headquarters is the
Western Hemisphere, and his line of business is anything from
speculating in town lots on the Great Staked Plains to selling
wooden toys in Connecticut, made by hydraulic pressure from
nutmegs ground to a pulp.
Now and then when Pogue has made a good haul he comes to New
York for a rest. He says the jug of wine and loaf of bread and
Thou in the wilderness business is about as much rest and pleasure
to him as sliding down the bumps at Coney would be to President
Taft. "Give me," says Pogue, "a big city for my vacation.
Especially New York. I'm not much fond of New Yorkers, and
Manhattan is about the only place on the globe where I don't find
any."
While in the metropolis Pogue can always be found at one of two
places. One is a little second-hand bookshop on Fourth Avenue,
where he reads books about his hobbies, Mahometanism and
taxidermy. I found him at the other--his hall bedroom in
Eighteenth Street--where he sat in his stocking feet trying to pluck
"The Banks of the Wabash" out of a small zither. Four years he
has practised this tune without arriving near enough to cast the
longest trout line to the water's edge. On the dresser lay a blued-
steel Colt's forty-five and a tight roll of tens and twenties large
enough around to belong to the spring rattlesnake-story class. A
chambermaid with a room-cleaning air fluttered nearby in the hall,
unable to enter or to flee, scandalized by the stocking feet, aghast
at the Colt's, yet powerless, with her metropolitan instincts, to
remove herself beyond the magic influence of the yellow-hued roll.
I sat on his trunk while Ferguson Pogue talked. No one could be
franker or more candid in his conversation. Beside his expression
the cry of Henry James for lacteal nourishment at the age of one
month would have seemed like a Chaldean cryptogram. He told
me stories of his profession with pride, for he considered it an art.
And I was curious enough to ask him whether he had known any
women who followed it.
"Ladies?" said Pogue, with Western chivalry. "Well, not to any
great extent. They don't amount to much in special lines of graft,
because they're all so busy in general lines. What? Why, they
have to. Who's got the money in the world? The men. Did you
ever know a man to give a woman a dollar without any
consideration? A man will shell out his dust to another man free
and easy and gratis. But if he drops a penny in one of the
machines run by the Madam Eve's Daughters' Amalgamated
Association and the pineapple chewing gum don't fall out when he
pulls the lever you can hear him kick to the superintendent four
blocks away. Man is the hardest proposition a woman has to go
up against. He's the low-grade one, and she has to work overtime
to make him pay. Two times out of five she's salted. She can't put
in crushers and costly machinery. He'd notice 'em and be onto the
game. They have to pan out what they get, and it hurts their tender
hands. Some of 'em are natural sluice troughs and can carry out
$1,000 to the ton. The dry-eyed ones have to depend on signed
letters, false hair, sympathy, the kangaroo walk, cowhide whips,
ability to cook, sentimental juries, conversational powers, silk
underskirts, ancestry, rouge, anonymous letters, violet sachet
powders, witnesses, revolvers, pneumatic forms, carbolic acid,
moonlight, cold cream and the evening newspapers."
"You are outrageous, Ferg," I said. "Surely there is none of this
'graft' as you call it, in a perfect and harmonious matrimonial
union!"
"Well," said Pogue, "nothing that would justify you every time in
calling Police Headquarters and ordering out the reserves and a
vaudeville manager on a dead run. But it's this way: Suppose
you're a Fifth Avenue millionaire, soaring high, on the right side of
copper and cappers.
"You come home at night and bring a $9,000,000 diamond brooch
to the lady who's staked your for a claim. You hand it over. She
says, 'Oh, George!' and looks to see if it's backed. She comes up
and kisses you. You've waited for it. You get it. All right. It's
graft.
"But I'm telling you about Artemisia Blye. She was from Kansas
and she suggested corn in all of its phases. Her hair was as yellow
as the silk; her form was as tall and graceful as a stalk in the low
grounds during a wet summer; her eyes were as big and startling as
bunions, and green was her favorite color.
"On my last trip into the cool recesses of your sequestered city I
met a human named Vaucross. He was worth--that is, he had a
million. He told me he was in business on the street. 'A sidewalk
merchant?' says I, sarcastic. 'Exactly,' says he, 'Senior partner of a
paving concern.'
"I kind of took to him. For this reason, I met him on Broadway
one night when I was out of heart, luck, tobacco and place. He
was all silk hat, diamonds and front. He was all front. If you had
gone behind him you would have only looked yourself in the face.
I looked like a cross between Count Tolstoy and a June lobster. I
was out of luck. I had--but let me lay my eyes on that dealer
again.
"Vaucross stopped and talked to me a few minutes and then he
took me to a high-toned restaurant to eat dinner. There was music,
and then some Beethoven, and Bordelaise sauce, and cussing in
French, and frangipangi, and some hauteur and cigarettes. When I
am flush I know them places.
"I declare, I must have looked as bad as a magazine artist sitting
there without any money and my hair all rumpled like I was
booked to read a chapter from 'Elsie's School Days' at a Brooklyn
Bohemian smoker. But Vaucross treated me like a bear hunter's
guide. He wasn't afraid of hurting the waiter's feelings.
"'Mr. Pogue,' he explains to me, 'I am using you.'
"'Go on,' says I; 'I hope you don't wake up.'
"And then he tells me, you know, the kind of man he was. He was
a New Yorker. His whole ambition was to be noticed. He wanted
to be conspicuous. He wanted people to point him out and bow to
him, and tell others who he was. He said it had been the desire of
his life always. He didn't have but a million, so he couldn't attract
attention by spending money. He said he tried to get into public
notice one time by planting a little public square on the east side
with garlic for free use of the poor; but Carnegie heard of it, and
covered it over at once with a library in the Gaelic language.
Three times he had jumped in the way of automibiles; but the only
result was five broken ribs and a notice in the papers that an
unknown man, five feet ten, with four amalgam-filled teeth,
supposed to be the last of the famous Red Leary gang had been run
over.
"'Ever try the reporters,' I asked him.
"'Last month,' says Mr. Vaucross, 'my expenditure for lunches to
reporters was $124.80.'
"'Get anything out of that?' I asks.
"'That reminds me,' says he; 'add $8.50 for perpsin. Yes, I got
indigestion.'
"'How am I supposed to push along your scramble for prominence?'
I inquires. 'Contrast?'
"'Something of that sort to-night,' says Vaucross. 'It grieves me;
but I am forced to resort to eccentricity.' And here he drops his
napkin in his soup and rises up and bows to a gent who is
devastating a potato under a palm across the room.
"'The Police Commissioner,' says my climber, gratified. 'Friend',
says I, in a hurry, 'have ambitions but don't kick a rung out of your
ladder. When you use me as a stepping stone to salute the police
you spoil my appetite on the grounds that I may be degraded and
incriminated. Be thoughtful.'
"At the Quaker City squab en casserole the idea about Artemisia
Blye comes to me.
"'Suppose I can manage to get you in the papers,' says I--'a column
or two every day in all of 'em and your picture in most of 'em for a
week. How much would it be worth to you?'
"'Ten thousand dollars,' says Vaucross, warm in a minute. 'But no
murder,' says he; 'and I won't wear pink pants at a cotillon.'
"'I wouldn't ask you to,' says I. 'This is honorable, stylish and
uneffiminate. Tell the waiter to bring a demi tasse and some other
beans, and I will disclose to you the opus moderandi.'
"We closed the deal an hour later in the rococo rouge et noise
room. I telegraphed that night to Miss Artemisia in Salina. She
took a couple of photographs and an autograph letter to an elder in
the Fourth Presbyterian Church in the morning, and got some
transportation and $80. She stopped in Topeka long enough to
trade a flashlight interior and a valentine to the vice-president of a
trust company for a mileage book and a package of five-dollar
notes with $250 scrawled on the band.
"The fifth evening after she got my wire she was waiting, all
d'ecollet'ee and dressed up, for me and Vaucross to take her to
dinner in one of these New York feminine apartment houses where
a man can't get in unless he plays bezique and smokes depilatory
powder cigarettes.
"'She's a stunner,' says Vaucross when he saw her. 'They'll give
her a two-column cut sure.'
"This was the scheme the three of us concocted. It was business
straight through. Vaucross was to rush Miss Blye with all the style
and display and emotion he could for a month. Of course, that
amounted to nothing as far as his ambitions were concerned. The
sight of a man in a white tie and patent leather pumps pouring
greenbacks through the large end of a cornucopia to purchase
nutriment and heartsease for tall, willowy blondes in New York is
as common a sight as blue turtles in delirium tremens. But he was
to write her love letters--the worst kind of love letters, such as your
wife publishes after you are dead--every day. At the end of the
month he was to drop her, and she would bring suit for $100,000
for breach of promise.
"Miss Artemisia was to get $10,000. If she won the suit that was
all; and if she lost she was to get it anyhow. There was a signed
contract to that effect.
"Sometimes they had me out with 'em, but not often. I couldn't
keep up to their style. She used to pull out his notes and criticize
them like bills of lading.
"'Say, you!' she'd say. 'What do you call this--letter to a Hardware
Merchant from His Nephew on Learning that His Aunt Has
Nettlerash? You Eastern duffers know as much about writing love
letters as a Kansas grasshopper does about tugboats. "My dear
Miss Blye!"--wouldn't that put pink icing and a little red sugar bird
on your bridal cake? How long do you expect to hold an audience
in a court-room with that kind of stuff? You want to get down to
business, and call me "Tweedlums Babe" and "Honeysuckle," and
sing yourself "Mama's Own Big Bad Puggy Wuggy Boy" if you
want any limelight to concentrate upon your sparse gray hairs. Get
sappy.'
"After that Vaucross dipped his pen in the indelible tabasco. His
notes read like something or other in the original. I could see a
jury sitting up, and women tearing one another's hats to hear 'em
read. And I could see piling up for Mr. Vaucross as much
notoriousness as Archbishop Crammer or the Brooklyn Bridge or
cheese-on-salad ever enjoyed. He seemed mighty pleased at the
prospects.
"They agreed on a night; and I stood on Fifth Avenue outside a
solemn restaurant and watched 'em. A process-server walked in
and handed Vaucross the papers at this table. Everybody looked at
'em; and he looked as proud as Cicero. I went back to my room
and lit a five-cent cigar, for I knew the $10,000 was as good as
ours.
"About two hours later somebody knocked at my door. There stood
Vaucross and Miss Artemisia, and she was clinging--yes, sir,
clinging--to his arm. And they tells me they'd been out and got
married. And they articulated some trivial cadences about love
and such. And they laid down a bundle on the table and said
'Good night' and left.
"And that's why I say," concluded Ferguson Pogue, "that a woman is
too busy occupied with her natural vocation and instinct of graft
such as is given her for self-preservation and amusement to make
any great success in special lines."
"What was in the bundle they left?" I asked, with my usual
curiosity.
"Why," said Ferguson, "there was a scalper's railroad ticket as far
as Kansas City and two pairs of Mr. Vaucross's old pants."
IX
THE CALL OF THE TAME
When the inauguration was accomplished--the proceedings were made
smooth by the presence of the Rough Riders--it is well known that
a herd of those competent and loyal ex-warrriors paid a visit
to the big city. The newspaper reporters dug out of their trunks
the old broad-brimmed hats and leather belts that they wear to
North Beach fish fries, and mixed with the visitors. No damage
was done beyond the employment of the wonderful plural "tenderfeet"
in each of the scribe's stories. The Westerners mildly
contemplated the skyscrapers as high as the third story, yawned at
Broadway, hunched down in the big chairs in hotel corridors, and
altogether looked as bored and dejected as a member of Ye
Ancient and Honorable Artillery separated during a sham battle
from his valet.
Out of this sightseeing delegations of good King Teddy's
Gentlemen of the Royal Bear-hounds dropped one Greenbrier Nye,
of Pin Feather, Ariz.
The daily cyclone of Sixth Avenue's rush hour swept him away
from the company of his pardners true. The dust from a thousand
rustling skirts filled his eyes. The mighty roar of trains rushing
across the sky deafened him. The lightning-flash of twice ten
hundred beaming eyes confused his vision.
The storm was so sudden and tremendous that Greenbrier's first
impulse was to lie down and grab a root. And then he remembered
that the disturbance was human, and not elemental; and he backed
out of it with a grin into a doorway.
The reporters had written that but for the widebrimmed hats the
West was not visible upon these gauchos of the North. Heaven
sharpen their eyes! The suit of black diagonal, wrinkled in
impossible places; the bright blue four-in-hand, factory tied; the
low, turned-down collar, pattern of the days of Seymour and Blair,
white glazed as the letters on the window of the open-day-and-
night-except-Sunday restaurants; the out-curve at the knees from
the saddle grip; the peculiar spread of the half-closed right thumb
and fingers from the stiff hold upon the circling lasso; the deeply
absorbed weather tan that the hottest sun of Cape May can never
equal; the seldom-winking blue eyes that unconsciously divided
the rushing crowds into fours, as though they were being counted
out of a corral; the segregated loneliness and solemnity of
expression, as of an Emperor or of one whose horizons have not
intruded upon him nearer than a day's ride--these brands of the
West were set upon Greenbrier Nye. Oh, yes; he wore a
broadbrimmed hat, gentle reader--just like those the Madison
Square Post Office mail carriers wear when they go up to Bronx
Park on Sunday afternoons.
Suddenly Greenbrier Nye jumped into the drifting herd of
metropolitan cattle, seized upon a man, dragged him out of the
stream and gave him a buffet upon his collarbone that sent him
reeling against a wall.
The victim recovered his hat, with the angry look of a New Yorker
who has suffered an outrage and intends to write to the Trib. about
it. But he looked at his assailant, and knew that the blow was in
consideration of love and affection after the manner of the West,
which greets its friends with contumely and uproar and pounding
fists, and receives its enemies in decorum and order, such as the
judicious placing of the welcoming bullet demands.
"God in the mountains!" cried Greenbrier, holding fast to the
foreleg of his cull. "Can this be Longhorn Merritt?"
The other man was--oh, look on Broadway any day for the pattern-
-business man--latest rolled-brim derby--good barber, business,
digestion and tailor.
"Greenbrier Nye!" he exclaimed, grasping the hand that had
smitten him. "My dear fellow! So glad to see you! How did you
come to--oh, to be sure--the inaugural ceremonies--I remember
you joined the Rough Riders. You must come and have luncheon
with me, of course."
Greenbrier pinned him sadly but firmly to the wall with a hand the
size, shape and color of a McClellan saddle.
"Longy," he said, in a melancholy voice that disturbed traffic,
"what have they been doing to you? You act just like a citizen.
They done made you into an inmate of the city directory. You
never made no such Johnny Branch execration of yourself as that
out on the Gila. 'Come and have lunching with me!' You never
defined grub by any such terms of reproach in them days."
"I've been living in New York seven years," said Merritt. "It's
been eight since we punched cows together in Old Man Garcia's
outfit. Well, let's go to a caf'e, anyhow. It sounds good to hear it
called 'grub' again."
They picked their way through the crowd to a hotel, and drifted, as
by a natural law, to the bar.
"Speak up," invited Greenbrier.
"A dry Martini," said Merritt.
"Oh, Lord!" cried Greenbrier; "and yet me and you once saw the
same pink Gila monsters crawling up the walls of the same hotel in
Ca~non Diablo! A dry--but let that pass. Whiskey straight--and
they're on you."
Merritt smiled, and paid.
They lunched in a small extension of the dining room that
connected with the caf'e. Merritt dexterously diverted his friend's
choice, that hovered over ham and eggs, to a pur'ee of celery, a
salmon cutlet, a partridge pie and a desirable salad.
"On the day," said Greenbrier, grieved and thunderous, "when I
can't hold but one drink before eating when I meet a friend I ain't
seen in eight years at a 2 by 4 table in a thirty-cent town at 1
o'clock on the third day of the week, I want nine broncos to kick
me forty times over a 640-acre section of land. Get them
statistics?"
"Right, old man," laughed Merritt. "Waiter, bring an absinthe
frapp'e and--what's yours, Greenbrier?"
"Whiskey straight," mourned Nye. "Out of the neck of a bottle you
used to take it, Longy--straight out of the neck of a bottle on a
galloping pony--Arizona redeye, not this ab--oh, what's the use?
They're on you."
Merritt slipped the wine card under his glass.
"All right. I suppose you think I'm spoiled by the city. I'm as good
a Westerner as you are, Greenbrier; but, somehow, I can't make up
my mind to go back out there. New York is comfortable--
comfortable. I make a good living, and I live it. No more wet
blankets and riding herd in snowstorms, and bacon and cold
coffee, and blowouts once in six months for me. I reckon I'll hang
out here in the future. We'll take in the theatre to-night,
Greenbrier, and after that we'll dine at--"
"I'll tell you what you are. Merritt," said Greenbrier, laying one
elbow in his salad and the other in his butter. "You are a
concentrated, effete, unconditional, short-sleeved, gotch-eared
Miss Sally Walker. God made you perpendicular and suitable to
ride straddle and use cuss words in the original. Wherefore you
have suffered his handiwork to elapse by removing yourself to
New York and putting on little shoes tied with strings, and making
faces when you talk. I've seen you rope and tie a steer in 42 1/2.
If you was to see one now you'd write to the Police Commissioner
about it. And these flapdoodle drinks that you inoculate your
system with--these little essences of cowslip with acorns in 'em,
and paregoric flip--they ain't anyways in assent with the cordiality
of manhood. I hate to see you this way."
"Well, Mr. Greenbrier," said Merritt, with apology in his tone, "in
a way you are right. Sometimes I do feel like I was being raised on
the bottle. But, I tell you, New York is comfortable--comfortable.
There's something about it--the sights and the crowds, and the way
it changes every day, and the very air of it that seems to tie a one-
mile-long stake rope around a man's neck, with the other end
fastened somewhere about Thirty-fourth Street. I don't know what
it is."
"God knows," said Greenbrier sadly, "and I know. The East has
gobbled you up. You was venison, and now you're veal. You put
me in mind of a japonica in a window. You've been signed, sealed
and diskivered. Requiescat in hoc signo. You make me thirsty."
"A green chartreuse here," said Merritt to the waiter.
"Whiskey straight," sighed Greenbrier, "and they're on you, you
renegade of the round-ups."
"Guilty, with an application for mercy," said Merritt. "You don't
know how it is, Greenbrier. It's so comfortable here that--"
"Please loan me your smelling salts," pleaded Greenbrier. "If I
hadn't seen you once bluff three bluffers from Mazatzal City with
an empty gun in Phoenix--"
Greenbrier's voice died away in pure grief.
"Cigars!" he called harshly to the waiter, to hide his emotion.
"A pack of Turkish cigarettes for mine," said Merritt.
"They're on you," chanted Greenbrier, struggling to conceal his
contempt.
At seven they dined in the Where-to-Dine-Well column.
That evening a galaxy had assembled there. Bright shone the
lights o'er fair women and br--let it go, anyhow--brave men. The
orchestra played charmingly. Hardly had a tip from a diner been
placed in its hands by a waiter when it would burst forth into
soniferousness. The more beer you contributed to it the more
Meyerbeer it gave you. Which is reciprocity.
Merritt put forth exertions on the dinner. Greenbrier was his old
friend, and he liked him. He persuaded him to drink a cocktail.
"I take the horehound tea," said Greenbrier, "for old times' sake.
But I'd prefer whiskey straight. They're on you."
"Right!" said Merritt. "Now, run your eye down that bill of fare
and see if it seems to hitch on any of these items."
"Lay me on my lava bed!" said Greenbrier, with bulging eyes. "All
these specimens of nutriment in the grub wagon! What's this?
Horse with the heaves? I pass. But look along! Here's truck for
twenty roundups all spelled out in different directions. Wait till I
see."
The viands ordered, Merritt turned to the wine list.
"This Medoc isn't bad," he suggested.
"You're the doc," said Greenbrier. "I'd rather have whiskey
straight. It's on you."
Greenbrier looked around the room. The waiter brought things
and took dishes away. He was observing. He saw a New York
restaurant crowd enjoying itself.
"How was the range when you left the Gila?" asked Merritt.
"Fine," said Greenbrier. "You see that lady in the red speckled silk
at that table. Well, she could warm over her beans at my campfire.
Yes, the range was good. She looks as nice as a white mustang I
see once on Black River."
When the coffee came, Greenbrier put one foot on the seat of the
chair next to him.
"You said it was a comfortable town, Longy," he said, meditatively.
"Yes, it's a comfortable town. It's different from the plains in
a blue norther. What did you call that mess in the crock with the
handle, Longy? Oh, yes, squabs in a cash roll. They're worth the
roll. That white mustang had just such a way of turning his head
and shaking his mane--look at her, Longy. If I thought I could
sell out my ranch at a fair price, I believe I'd--
"Gyar--song!" he suddenly cried, in a voice that paralyzed every
knife and fork in the restaurant.
The waiter dived toward the table.
"Two more of them cocktail drinks," ordered Greenbrier.
Merritt looked at him and smiled significantly.
"They're on me," said Greenbrier, blowing a puff of smoke to the
ceiling.
X
THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY
The poet Longfellow--or was it Confucius, the inventor of
wisdom?--remarked:
"Life is real, life is earnest;
And things are not what they seem."
As mathematics are--or is: thanks, old subscriber!--the only just
rule by which questions of life can be measured, let us, by all
means, adjust our theme to the straight edge and the balanced
column of the great goddess Two-and-Two-Makes-Four. Figures--
unassailable sums in addition--shall be set over against whatever
oposing element there may be.
A mathematician, after scanning the above two lines of poetry,
would say: "Ahem! young gentlemen, if we assume that X plus--
that is, that life is real--then things (all of which life includes) are
real. Anything that is real is what it seems. Then if we consider
the proposition that 'things are not what they seem,' why--"
But this is heresy, and not poesy. We woo the sweet nymph
Algebra; we would conduct you into the presence of the elusive,
seductive, pursued, satisfying, mysterious X.
Not long before the beginning of this century, Septimus
Kinsolving, an old New Yorker, invented an idea. He originated
the discovery that bread is made from flour and not from wheat
futures. Perceiving that the flour crop was short, and that the
Stock Exchange was having no perceptible effect on the growing
wheat, Mr. Kinsolving cornered the flour market.
The result was that when you or my landlady (before the war she
never had to turn her hand to anything; Southerners accomodated)
bought a five-cent load of bread you laid down an additional two
cents, which went to Mr. Kinsolving as a testimonial to his
perspicacity.
A second result was that Mr. Kinsolving quit the game with
$2,000,000 prof--er--rake-off.
Mr. Kinsolving's son Dan was at college when the mathematical
experiment in breadstuffs was made. Dan came home during
vacation, and found the old gentleman in a red dressing-gown
reading "Little Dorrit" on the porch of his estimable red brick
mansion in Washington Square. He had retired from business
with enough extra two-cent pieces from bread buyers to reach, if
laid side by side, fifteen times around the earth and lap as far as
the public debt of Paraguay.
Dan shook hands with his father, and hurried over to Greenwich
Village to see his old high-school friend, Kenwitz. Dan had
always admired Kenwitz. Kenwitz was pale, curly-haired, intense,
serious, mathematical, studious, altruistic, socialistic, and the
natural foe of oligarchies. Kenwitz had foregone college, and was
learning watch-making in his father's jewelry store. Dan was
smiling, jovial, easy-tempered and tolerant alike of kings and
ragpickers. The two foregathered joyously, being opposites. And
then Dan went back to college, and Kenwitz to his mainsprings--
and to his private library in the rear of the jewelry shop.
Four years later Dan came back to Washington Square with the
accumulations of B. A. and two years of Europe thick upon him.
He took a filial look at Septimus Kinsolving's elaborate tombstone
in Greenwood and a tedious excursion through typewritten
documents with the family lawyer; and then, feeling himself a
lonely and hopeless millionaire, hurried down to the old jewelry
store across Sixth Avenue.
Kenwitz unscrewed a magnifying glass from his eye, routed out
his parent from a dingy rear room, and abandoned the interior of
watches for outdoors. He went with Dan, and they sat on a bench
in Washington Square. Dan had not changed much; he was
stalwart, and had a dignity that was inclined to relax into a grin.
Kenwitz was more serious, more intense, more learned,
philosophical and socialistic.
"I know about it now," said Dan, finally. "I pumped it out of the
eminent legal lights that turned over to me poor old dad's
collections of bonds and boodle. It amounts to $2,000,000, Ken.
And I am told that he squeezed it out of the chaps that pay their
pennies for loaves of bread at little bakeries around the corner.
You've studied economics, Dan, and you know all about monopolies,
and the masses, and octopuses, and the rights of laboring people.
I never thought about those things before. Football and trying
to be white to my fellowman were about the extent of my college
curriculum.
"But since I came back and found out how dad made his money
I've been thinking. I'd like awfully well to pay back those chaps
who had to give up too much money for bread. I know it would
buck the line of my income for a good many yards; but I'd like to
make it square with 'em. Is there any way it can be done, old
Ways and Means?"
Kenwitz's big black eyes glowed fierily. His thin, intellectual face
took on almost a sardonic cast. He caught Dan's arm with the grip
of a friend and a judge.
"You can't do it!" he said, emphatically. "One of the chief
punishments of you men of ill-gotten wealth is that when you do
repent you find that you have lost the power to make reparation or
restitution. I admire your good intentions, Dan, but you can't do
anything. Those people were robbed of their precious pennies. It's
too late to remedy the evil. You can't pay them back"
"Of course," said Dan, lighting his pipe, "we couldn't hunt up
every one of the duffers and hand 'em back the right change.
There's an awful lot of 'em buying bread all the time. Funny taste
they have--I never cared for bread especially, except for a toasted
cracker with the Roquefort. But we might find a few of 'em and
chuck some of dad's cash back where it came from I'd feel better
if I could. It seems tough for people to be held up for a soggy
thing like bread. One wouldn't mind standing a rise in broiled
lobsters or deviled crabs. Get to work and think, Ken. I want to
pay back all that money I can."
"There are plenty of charities," said Kenwitz, mechanically.
"Easy enough," said Dan, in a cloud of smoke. "I suppose I could
give the city a park, or endow an asparagus bed in a hospital. But
I don't want Paul to get away with the proceeds of the gold brick
we sold Peter. It's the bread shorts I want to cover, Ken."
The thin fingers of Kenwitz moved rapidly.
"Do you know how much money it would take to pay back the
losses of consumers during that corner in flour?" he asked.
"I do not." said Dan, stoutly. "My lawyer tells me that I have two
millions."
"If you had a hundred millions," said Kenwitz, vehemently, "you
couldn't repair a thousandth part of the damage that has been done.
You cannot conceive of the accumulated evils produced by
misapplied wealth. Each penny that was wrung from the lean
purses of the poor reacted a thousandfold to their harm. You do
not understand. You do not see how hopeless is your desire to
make restitution. Not in a single instance can it be done."
"Back up, philosopher!" said Dan. "The penny has no sorrow that
the dollar cannot heal."
"Not in one instance," repeated Kenwitz. "I will give you one, and
let us see. Thomas Boyne had a little bakery over there in Varick
Street. He sold bread to the poorest people. When the price of
flour went up he had to raise the price of bread. His customers
were too poor to pay it, Boyne's business failed and he lost his
$1,000 capital--all he had in the world."
Dan Kinsolving struck the park bench a mighty blow with his fist.
"I accept the instance," he cried. "Take me to Boyne. I will repay
his thousand dollars and buy him a new bakery."
"Write your check," said Kenwitz, without moving, "and then
begin to write checks in payment of the train of consequences.
Draw the next one for $50,000. Boyne went insane after his
failure and set fire to the building from which he was about to be
evicted. The loss amounted to that much. Boyne died in an
asylum."
"Stick to the instance," said Dan. "I haven't noticed any insurance
companies on my charity list."
"Draw your next check for $100,000," went on Kenwitz. "Boyne's
son fell into bad way after the bakery closed, and was accused of
murder. he was acquitted last week after a three years' legal battle,
and the state draws upon taxpayers for that much expense."
"Back to the bakery!" exclaimed Dan, impatiently. "The
Government doesn't need to stand in the bread line."
"The last item of the instance is--come and I will show you," said
Kenwitz, rising.
The Socialistic watchmaker was happy. He was a millionaire-
baiter by nature and a pessimist by trade. Kenwitz would assure
you in one breath that money was but evil and corruption, and that
your brand-new watch needed cleaning and a new ratchet-wheel.
He conducted Kinsolving southward out of the square and into
ragged, poverty-haunted Varick Street. Up the narrow stairway of
a squalid brick tenement he led the penitent offspring of the
Octupus. He knocked on a door, and a clear voice called to them
to enter.
In that almost bare room a young woman sat sewing at a machine.
She nodded to Kenwitz as to a familiar acquaintance. One little
stream of sunlight through the dingy window burnished her heavy
hair to the color of an ancient Tuscan's shield. She flashed a
rippling smile at Kenwitz and a look of somewhat flustered
inquiry.
Kinsolving stood regarding her clear and pathetic beauty in heart-
throbbing silence. Thus they came into the presence of the last
item of the Instance.
"How many this week, Miss Mary?" asked the watchmaker. A
mountain of coarse gray shirts lay upon the floor.
"Nearly thirty dozen," said the young woman cheerfully. "I've
made almost $4. I'm improving, Mr. Kenwitz. I hardly know what
to do with so much money." Her eyes turned, brightly soft, in the
direction of Dan. A little pink spot came out on her round, pale
cheek.
Kenwitz chuckled like a diabolic raven.
"Miss Boyne," he said, "let me present Mr. Kinsolving, the son of
the man who put bread up five years ago. He thinks he would like
to do something to aid those who where inconvenienced by that
act."
The smile left the young woman's face. She rose and pointed her
forefinger toward the door. This time she looked Kinsolving
straight in the eye, but it was not a look that gave delight.
The two men went down Varick Street. Kenwitz, letting all his
pessimism and rancor and hatred of the Octopus come to the
surface, gibed at the moneyed side of his friend in an acrid torrent
of words. Dan appeared to be listening, and then turned to
Kenwitz and shook hands with him warmly.
"I'm obliged to you, Ken, old man," he said, vaguely--"a thousand
times obliged."
"Mein Gott! you are crazy!" cried the watchmaker, dropping his
spectacles for the first time in years.
Two months afterward Kenwitz went into a large bakery on lower
Broadway with a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses that he had
mended for the proprietor.
A lady was giving an order to a clerk as Kenwitz passed her.
"These loaves are ten cents," said the clerk.
"I always get them at eight cents uptown," said the lady. "You
need not fill the order. I will drive by there on my way home."
The voice was familiar. The watchmaker paused.
"Mr. Kenwitz!" cried the lady, heartily. "How do you do?"
Kenwitz was trying to train his socialistic and economic
comprehension on her wonderful fur boa and the carriage waiting
outside.
"Why, Miss Boyne!" he began.
"Mrs. Kinsolving," she corrected. "Dan and I were married a
month ago."
XI
THE THING'S THE PLAY
Being acquainted with a newspaper reporter who had a couple of
free passes, I got to see the performance a few nights ago at one of
the popular vaudeville houses.
One of the numbers was a violin solo by a striking-looking man
not much past forty, but with very gray thick hair. Not being
afflicted with a taste for music, I let the system of noises drift past
my ears while I regarded the man.
"There was a story about that chap a month or two ago," said the
reporter. "They gave me the assignment. It was to run a column
and was to be on the extremely light and joking order. The old
man seems to like the funny touch I give to local happenings. Oh,
yes, I'm working on a farce comedy now. Well, I went down to the
house and got all the details; but I certainly fell down on that job.
I went back and turned in a comic write-up of an east side funeral
instead. Why? Oh, I couldn't seem to get hold of it with my funny
hooks, somehow. Maybe you could make a one-act tragedy out of
it for a curtain-raiser. I'll give you the details."
After the performance my friend, the reporter, recited to me the
facts over W"urzburger.
"I see no reason," said I, when he had concluded, "why that
shouldn't make a rattling good funny story. Those three people
couldn't have acted in a more absurd and preposterous manner if
they had been real actors in a real theatre. I'm really afraid that all
the stage is a world, anyhow, and all the players men and women.
'The thing's the play,' is the way I quote Mr. Shakespeare."
"Try it," said the reporter.
"I will," said I; and I did, to show him how he could have made a
humorous column of it for his paper.
There stands a house near Abingdon Square. On the ground floor
there has been for twenty-five years a little store where toys and
notions and stationery are sold.
One night twenty years ago there was a wedding in the rooms
above the store. The Widow Mayo owned the house and store.
Her daughter Helen was married to Frank Barry. John Delaney
was best man. Helen was eighteen, and her picture had been
printed in a morning paper next to the headlines of a "Wholesale
Female Murderess" story from Butte, Mont. But after your eye
and intelligence had rejected the connection, you seized your
magnifying glass and read beneath the portrait her description as
one of a series of Prominent Beauties and Belles of the lower west
side.
Frank Barry and John Delaney were "prominent" young beaux of
the same side, and bosom friends, whom you expected to turn
upon each other every time the curtain went up. One who pays his
money for orchestra seats and fiction expects this. That is the first
funny idea that has turned up in the story yet. Both had made a
great race for Helen's hand. When Frank won, John shook his
hand and congratulated him--honestly, he did.
After the ceremony Helen ran upstairs to put on her hat. She was
getting married in a traveling dress. She and Frank were going to
Old Point Comfort for a week. Downstairs the usual horde of
gibbering cave-dwellers were waiting with their hands full of old
Congress gaiters and paper bags of hominy.
Then there was a rattle of the fire-escape, and into her room jumps
the mad and infatuated John Delaney, with a damp curl drooping
upon his forehead, and made violent and reprehensible love to his
lost one, entreating her to flee or fly with him to the Riviera, or the
Bronx, or any old place where there are Italian skies and _dolce far
niente_.
It would have carried Blaney off his feet to see Helen repulse him.
With blazing and scornful eyes she fairly withered him by
demanding whatever he meant by speaking to respectable people
that way.
In a few moments she had him going. The manliness that had
possessed him departed. He bowed low, and said something about
"irresistible impulse" and "forever carry in his heart the memory
of"--and she suggested that he catch the first fire-escape going
down.
"I will away," said John Delaney, "to the furthermost parts of the
earth. I cannot remain near you and know that you are another's. I
will to Africa, and there amid other scenes strive to for--"
"For goodness sake, get out," said Helen. "Somebody might come
in."
He knelt upon one knee, and she extended him one white hand that
he might give it a farewell kiss.
Girls, was this choice boon of the great little god Cupid ever
vouchsafed you--to have the fellow you want hard and fast, and
have the one you don't want come with a damp curl on his
forehead and kneel to you and babble of Africa and love which, in
spite of everything, shall forever bloom, an amaranth, in his heart?
To know your power, and to feel the sweet security of your own
happy state; to send the unlucky one, broken-hearted, to foreign
climes, while you congratulate yourself as he presses his last kiss
upon your knuckles, that your nails are well manicured--say, girls,
it's galluptious--don't ever let it get by you.
And then, of course--how did you guess it?--the door opened and
in stalked the bridegroom, jealous of slow-tying bonnet strings.
The farewell kiss was imprinted upon Helen's hand, and out of the
window and down the fire-escape sprang John Delaney, Africa
bound.
A little slow music, if you please--faint violin, just a breath in the
clarinet and a touch of the 'cello. Imagine the scene. Frank,
white-hot, with the cry of a man wounded to death bursting from
him. Helen, rushing and clinging to him, trying to explain. He
catches her wrists and tears them from his shoulders--once, twice,
thrice he sways her this way and that--the stage manager will show
you how--and throws her from him to the floor a huddled, crushed,
moaning thing. Never, he cries, will he look upon her face again,
and rushes from the house through the staring groups of
astonished guests.
And, now because it is the Thing instead of the Play, the audience
must stroll out into the real lobby of the world and marry, die,
grow gray, rich, poor, happy or sad during the intermission of
twenty years which must precede the rising of the curtain again.
Mrs. Barry inherited the shop and the house. At thirty-eight she
could have bested many an eighteen-year-old at a beauty show on
points and general results. Only a few people remembered her
wedding comedy, but she made of it no secret. She did not pack it
in lavender or moth balls, nor did she sell it to a magazine.
One day a middle-aged money-making lawyer, who bought his
legal cap and ink of her, asked her across the counter to marry
him.
"I'm really much obliged to you," said Helen, cheerfully, "but I
married another man twenty years ago. he was more a goose than
a man, but I think I love him yet. I have never seen him since
about half an hour after the ceremony. Was it copying ink that
you wanted or just writing fluid?"
The lawyer bowed over the counter with old-time grace and left a
respectful kiss on the back of her hand. Helen sighed. Parting
salutes, however romantic, may be overdone. Here she was at
thirty-eight, beautiful and admired; and all that she seemed to have
got from her lovers were approaches and adieus. Worse still, in
the last one she had lost a customer, too.
Business languished, and she hung out a Room to Let card. Two
large rooms on the third floor were prepared for desirable tenants.
Roomers came, and went regretfully, for the house of Mrs. Barry
was the abode of neatness, comfort and taste.
One day came Ramonti, the violinist, and engaged the front room
above. The discord and clatter uptown offended his nice ear; so a
friend had sent him to this oasis in the desert of noise.
Ramonti, with his still youthful face, his dark eyebrows, his short,
pointed, foreign, brown beard, his distinguished head of gray hair,
and his artist's temperament--revealed in his light, gay and
sympathetic manner--was a welcome tenant in the old house near
Abingdon Square.
Helen lived on the floor above the store. The architecture of it was
singular and quaint. The hall was large and almost square. Up
one side of it, and then across the end of it ascended an open
stairway to the floor above. This hall space she had furnished as a
sitting room and office combined. There she kept her desk and
wrote her business letters; and there she sat of evenings by a warm
fire and a bright red light and sewed or read. Ramonti found the
atmosphere so agreeable that he spent much time there, describing
to Mrs. Barry the wonders of Paris, where he had studied with a
particularly notorious and noisy fiddler.
Next comes lodger No. 2, a handsome, melancholy man in the
early 40's, with a brown, mysterious beard, and strangely pleading,
haunting eyes. He, too, found the society of Helen a desirable
thing. With the eyes of Romeo and Othello's tongue, he charmed
her with tales of distant climes and wooed her by respectful
innuendo.
From the first Helen felt a marvelous and compelling thrill in the
presence of this man. His voice somehow took her swiftly back to
the days of her youth's romance. This feeling grew, and she gave
way to it, and it led her to an instinctive belief that he had been a
factor in that romance. And then with a woman's reasoning (oh,
yes, they do, sometimes) she leaped over common syllogism and
theory, and logic, and was sure that her husband had come back to
her. For she saw in his eyes love, which no woman can mistake,
and a thousand tons of regret and remorse, which aroused pity,
which is perilously near to love requited, which is the _sine qua
non_ in the house that Jack built.
But she made no sign. A husband who steps around the corner for
twenty years and then drops in again should not expect to find his
slippers laid out too conveniently near nor a match ready lighted
for his cigar. There must be expiation, explanation, and possibly
execration. A little purgatory, and then, maybe, if he were
properly humble, he might be trusted with a harp and crown. And
so she made no sign that she knew or suspected.
And my friend, the reporter, could see nothing funny in this! Sent
out on an assignment to write up a roaring, hilarious, brilliant
joshing story of--but I will not knock a brother--let us go on with
the story.
One evening Ramonti stopped in Helen's hall-office-reception-
room and told his love with the tenderness and ardor of the
enraptured artist. His words were a bright flame of the divine fire
that glows in the heart of a man who is a dreamer and doer
combined.
"But before you give me an answer," he went on, before she could
accuse him of suddenness, "I must tell you that 'Ramonti' is the
only name I have to offer you. My manager gave me that. I do not
know who I am or where I came from. My first recollection is of
opening my eyes in a hospital. I was a young man, and I had been
there for weeks. My life before that is a blank to me. They told
me that I was found lying in the street with a wound on my head
and was brought there in an ambulance. They thought I must have
fallen and struck my head upon the stones. There was nothing to
show who I was. I have never been able to remember. After I was
discharged from the hospital, I took up the violin. I have had
success. Mrs. Barry--I do not know your name except that--I love
you; the first time I saw you I realized that you were the one
woman in the world for me--and"--oh, a lot of stuff like that.
Helen felt young again. First a wave of pride and a sweet little
thrill of vanity went all over her; and then she looked Ramonti in
the eyes, and a tremendous throb went through her heart. She
hadn't expected that throb. It took her by surprise. The musician
had become a big factor in her life, and she hadn't been aware of
it.
"Mr. Ramonti," she said sorrowfully (this was not on the stage,
remember; it was in the old home near Abingdon Square), "I'm
awfully sorry, but I'm a married woman."
And then she told him the sad story of her life, as a heroine must
do, sooner or later, either to a theatrical manager or to a reporter.
Ramonti took her hand, bowed low and kissed it, and went up to
his room.
Helen sat down and looked mournfully at her hand. Well she
might. Three suitors had kissed it, mounted their red roan steeds
and ridden away.
In an hour entered the mysterious stranger with the haunting eyes.
Helen was in the willow rocker, knitting a useless thing in cotton-
wool. He ricocheted from the stairs and stopped for a chat.
Sitting across the table from her, he also poured out his narrative
of love. And then he said: "Helen, do you not remember me? I
think I have seen it in your eyes. Can you forgive the past and
remember the love that has lasted for twenty years? I wronged you
deeply--I was afraid to come back to you--but my love
overpowered my reason. Can you, will you, forgive me?"
Helen stood up. The mysterious stranger held one of her hands in
a strong and trembling clasp.
There she stood, and I pity the stage that it has not acquired a
scene like that and her emotions to portray.
For she stood with a divided heart. The fresh, unforgettable,
virginal love for her bridegroom was hers; the treasured, sacred,
honored memory of her first choice filled half her soul. She leaned
to that pure feeling. Honor and faith and sweet, abiding romance
bound her to it. But the other half of her heart and soul was filled
with something else--a later, fuller, nearer influence. And so the
old fought against the new.
And while she hesitated, from the room above came the soft,
racking, petitionary music of a violin. The hag, music, bewitches
some of the noblest. The daws may peck upon one's sleeve
without injury, but whoever wears his heart upon his tympanum
gets it not far from the neck.
This music and the musician caller her, and at her side honor and
the old love held her back.
"Forgive me," he pleaded.
"Twenty years is a long time to remain away from the one you say
you love," she declared, with a purgatorial touch.
"How could I tell?" he begged. "I will conceal nothing from you.
That night when he left I followed him. I was mad with jealousy.
On a dark street I struck him down. he did not rise. I examined
him. His head had struck a stone. I did not intend to kill him.
I was mad with love and jealousy. I hid near by and saw an
ambulance take him away. Although you married him, Helen--"
"_Who are you?_" cried the woman, with wide-open eyes,
snatching her hand away.
"Don't you remember me, Helen--the one who has always loved
you best? I am John Delaney. If you can forgive--"
But she was gone, leaping, stumbling, hurrying, flying up the
stairs toward the music and him who had forgotten, but who had
known her for his in each of his two existences, and as she
climbed up she sobbed, cried and sang: "Frank! Frank! Frank!"
Three mortals thus juggling with years as though they were billiard
balls, and my friend, the reporter, couldn't see anything funny in it!
XII
A RAMBLE IN APHASIA
My wife and I parted on that morning in precisely our usual
manner. She left her second cup of tea to follow me to the front
door. There she plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint
(the universal act of woman to proclaim ownership) and bade me
to take care of my cold. I had no cold. Next came her kiss of
parting--the lever kiss of domesticity flavored with Young Hyson.
There was no fear of the extemporaneous, of variety spicing her
infinite custom. With the deft touch of long malpractice, she
dabbed awry my well-set scarf pin; and then, as I closed the door, I
heard her morning slippers pattering back to her cooling tea.
When I set out I had no thought or premonition of what was to
occur. The attack came suddenly.
For many weeks I had been toiling, almost night and day, at a
famous railroad law case that I won triumphantly but a few days
previously. In fact, I had been digging away at the law almost
without cessation for many years. Once or twice good Doctor
Volney, my friend and physician, had warned me.
"If you don't slacken up, Belford," he said, "you'll go suddenly to
pieces. Either your nerves or your brain will give way. Tell me,
does a week pass in which you do not read in the papers of a case
of aphasia--of some man lost, wandering nameless, with his past
and his identity blotted out--and all from that little brain clot
made by overwork or worry?"
"I always thought," said I, "that the clot in those instances was
really to be found on the brains of the newspaper reporters."
Doctor Volney shook his head.
"The disease exists," he said. "You need a change or a rest.
Court-room, office and home--there is the only route you travel.
For recreation you--read law books. Better take warning in time."
"On Thursday nights," I said, defensively, "my wife and I play
cribbage. On Sundays she reads to me the weekly letter from her
mother. That law books are not a recreation remains yet to be
established."
That morning as I walked I was thinking of Doctor Volney's words.
I was feeling as well as I usually did--possibly in better
spirits than usual.
I woke with stiff and cramped muscles from having slept long on
the incommodious seat of a day coach. I leaned my head against
the seat and tried to think. After a long time I said to myself:
"I must have a name of some sort." I searched my pockets. Not
a card; not a letter; not a paper or monogram could I find.
But I found in my coat pocket nearly $3,000 in bills of large
denomination. "I must be some one, of course," I repeated to
myself, and began again to consider.
The car was well crowded with men, among whom, I told myself,
there must have been some common interest, for they intermingled
freely, and seemed in the best good humor and spirits. One of
them--a stout, spectacled gentleman enveloped in a decided odor
of cinnamon and aloes--took the vacant half of my seat with a
friendly nod, and unfolded a newspaper. In the intervals between
his periods of reading, we conversed, as travelers will, on current
affairs. I found myself able to sustain the conversation on such
subjects with credit, at least to my memory. By and by my
companion said:
"You are one of us, of course. Fine lot of men the West sends in
this time. I'm glad they held the convention in New York; I've
never been East before. My name's R. P. Bolder--Bolder & Son,
of Hickory Grove, Missouri."
Though unprepared, I rose to the emergency, as men will when put
to it. Now must I hold a christening, and be at once babe, parson
and parent. My senses came to the rescue of my slower brain.
The insistent odor of drugs from my compainion supplied one
idea; a glance at his newspaper, where my eye met a conspicuous
advertisement, assisted me further.
"My name," said I, glibly, "is Edward Pinkhammer. I am a
druggist, and my home is in Cornopolis, Kansas."
"I knew you were a druggist," said my fellow traveler, affably. "I
saw the callous spot on your right forefinger where the handle of
the pestle rubs. Of course, you are a delegate to our National
Convention."
"Are all these men druggists?" I asked, wonderingly.
"They are. This car came through from the West. And they're
your old-time druggists, too--none of your patent tablet-and-
granule pharmashootists that use slot machines instead of a
prescription desk. We percolate our own paregoric and roll our
own pills, and we ain't above handling a few garden seeds in the
spring, and carrying a side line of confectionery and shoes. I tell
you Hampinker, I've got an idea to spring on this convention--new
ideas is what they want. Now, you know the shelf bottles of tartar
emetic and Rochelle salt Ant. et Pot. Tart. and Sod. et Pot. Tart.--
one's poison, you know, and the other's harmless. It's easy to
mistake one label for the other. Where do druggists mostly keep
'em? Why, as far apart as possible, on different shelves. That's
wrong. I say keep 'em side by side, so when you want one you can
always compare it with the other and avoid mistakes. Do you
catch the idea?"
"It seems to me a very good one," I said.
"All right! When I spring it on the convention you back it up.
We'll make some of these Eastern orange-phosphate-and-massage-
cream professors that think they're the only lozenges in the market
look like hypodermic tablets."
"If I can be of any aid," I said, warming, "the two bottles of--er--"
"Tartrate of antimony and potash, and tartrate of soda and potash."
"Shall henceforth sit side by side," I concluded, firmly.
"Now, there's another thing," said Mr. Bolder. "For an excipient
in manipulating a pill mass which do you prefer--the magnesia
carbonate or the pulverised glycerrhiza radix?"
"The--er--magnesia," I said. It was easier to say than the other
word.
Mr. Bolder glanced at me distrustfully through his spectacles.
"Give me the glycerrhiza," said he. "Magnesia cakes."
"Here's another one of these fake aphasia cases," he said,
presently, handing me his newspaper, and laying his finger upon
an article. "I don't believe in 'em. I put nine out of ten of 'em
down as frauds. A man gets sick of his business and his folks and
wants to have a good time. He skips out somewhere, and when
they find him he pretends to have lost his memory--don't know his
own name, and won't even recognize the strawberry mark on his
wife's left shoulder. Aphasia! Tut! Why can't they stay at home
and forget?"
I took the paper and read, after the pungent headlines, the
following:
"DENVER, June 12.--Elwyn C. Belford, a prominent lawyer, is
mysteriously missing from his home since three days ago, and all
efforts to locate him have been in vain. Mr. Bellford is a well-
known citizen of the highest standing, and has enjoyed a large and
lucrative law practice. He is married and owns a fine home and
the most extensive private library in the State. On the day of his
disappearance, he drew quite a large sum of money from his bank.
No one can be found who saw him after he left the bank. Mr. Bellford
was a man of singularly quiet and domestic tastes, and seemed to find
his happiness in his home and profession. If any clue at all exists
to his strange disappearance, it my be found in the fact that
for some months he has been deeply absorbed in an important law case
in connection with the Q. Y. and Z. Railroad Company. It is feared
that overwork may have affected his mind. Every effort is being made
to discover the whereabouts of the missing man."
"It seems to me you are not altogether uncynical, Mr. Bolder,"
I said, after I had read the despatch. "This has the sound, to me,
of a genuine case. Why should this man, prosperous, happily
married, and respected, choose suddenly to abandon everything?
I know that these lapses of memory do occur, and that men do find
themselves adrift without a name, a history or a home."
"Oh, gammon and jalap!" said Mr. Bolder. "It's larks they're after.
There's too much education nowadays. Men know about aphasia,
and they use it for an excuse. The women are wise, too. When it's
all over they look you in the eye, as scientific as you please, and
say: 'He hypnotized me.'"
Thus Mr. Bolder diverted, but did not aid, me with his comments
and philosophy.
We arrived in New York about ten at night. I rode in a cab to a
hotel, and I wrote my name "Edward Pinkhammer" in the register.
As I did so I felt pervade me a splendid, wild, intoxicating
buoyancy--a sense of unlimited freedom, of newly attained
possibilities. I was just born into the world. The old fetters--
whatever they had been--were stricken from my hands and feet.
The future lay before me a clear road such as an infant enters,
and I could set out upon it equipped with a man's learning
and experience.
I thought the hotel clerk looked at me five seconds too long. I had
no baggage.
"The Druggists' Convention," I said. "My trunk has somehow
failed to arrive." I drew out a roll of money.
"Ah!" said he, showing an auriferous tooth, "we have quite a number
of the Western delegates stopping here." He struck a bell
for the boy.
I endeavored to give color to my r^ole.
"There is an important movement on foot among us Westerners," I
said, "in regard to a recommendation to the convention that the
bottles containing the tartrate of antimoney and potash, and the
tartrate of sodium and potash be kept in a contiguous position on
the shelf."
"Gentleman to three-fourteen," said the clerk, hastily. I was
whisked away to my room.
The next day I bought a trunk and clothing, and began to live
the life of Edward Pinkhammer. I did not tax my brain with
endeavors to solve problems of the past.
It was a piquant and sparkling cup that the great island city held
up to my lips. I drank of it gratefully. The keys of Manhattan
belong to him who is able to bear them. You must be either the
city's guest or its victim.
The following few days were as gold and silver. Edward
Pinkhammer, yet counting back to his birth by hours only, knew
the rare joy of having come upon so diverting a world full-fledged
and unrestrained. I sat entranced on the magic carpets provided in
theatres and roof-gardens, that transported one into strange and
delightful lands full of frolicsome music, pretty girls and grotesque
drolly extravagant parodies upon human kind. I went here and
there at my own dear will, bound by no limits of space, time or
comportment. I dined in weird cabarets, at weirder _tables
d'h^ote_ to the sound of Hungarian music and the wild shouts of
mercurial artists and sculptors. Or, again, where the night life
quivers in the electric glare like a kinetoscopic picture, and the
millinery of the world, and its jewels, and the ones whom they
adorn, and the men who make all three possible are met for good
cheer and the spectacular effect. And among all these scenes that I
have mentioned I learned one thing that I never knew before. And
that is that the key to liberty is not in the hands of License, but
Convention holds it. Comity has a toll-gate at which you must
pay, or you may not enter the land of Freedom. In all the glitter,
the seeming disorder, the parade, the abandon, I saw this law,
unobtrusive, yet like iron, prevail. Therefore, in Manhattan you
must obey these unwritten laws, and then you will be freest of the
free. If you decline to be bound by them, you put on shackles.
Sometimes, as my mood urged me, I would seek the stately, softly
murmuring palm rooms, redolent with high-born life and delicate
restraint, in which to dine. Again I would go down to the
waterways in steamers packed with vociferous, bedecked,
unchecked love-making clerks and shop-girls to their crude
pleasures on the island shores. And there was always Broadway--
glistening, opulent, wily, varying, desirable Broadway--growing
upon one like an opium habit.
One afternoon as I entered my hotel a stout man with a big nose
and a black mustache blocked my way in the corridor. When I
would have passed around him, he greet me with offensive
familiarity.
"Hello, Bellford!" he cried, loudly. "What the deuce are you doing
in New York? Didn't know anything could drag you away from
that old book den of yours. Is Mrs. B. along or is this a little
business run alone, eh?"
"You have made a mistake, sir," I said, coldly, releasing my hand
from his grasp. "My name is Pinkhammer. You will excuse me."
The man dropped to one side, apparently astonished. As I walked
to the clerk's desk I heard him call to a bell boy and say something
about telegraph blanks.
"You will give me my bill," I said to the clerk, "and have my
baggage brought down in half an hour. I do not care to remain
where I am annoyed by confidence men."
I moved that afternoon to another hotel, a sedate, old-fashioned
one on lower Fifth Avenue.
There was a restaurant a little way off Broadway where one could
be served almost _al fresco_ in a tropic array of screening flora.
Quiet and luxury and a perfect service made it an ideal place in
which to take luncheon or refreshment. One afternoon I was there
picking my way to a table among the ferns when I felt my sleeve
caught.
"Mr. Bellford!" exclaimed an amazingly sweet voice.
I turned quickly to see a lady seated alone--a lady of about thirty,
with exceedingly handsome eyes, who looked at me as though I
had been her very dear friend.
"You were about to pass me," she said, accusingly. "Don't tell me
you do not know me. Why should we not shake hands--at least
once in fifteen years?"
I shook hands with her at once. I took a chair opposite her at the
table. I summoned with my eyebrows a hovering waiter. The lady
was philandering with an orange ice. I ordered a _cr`eme de
menthe_. Her hair was reddish bronze. You could not look at it,
because you could not look away from her eyes. But you were
conscious of it as you are conscious of sunset while you look into
the profundities of a wood at twilight.
"Are you sure you know me?" I asked.
"No," she said, smiling. "I was never sure of that."
"What would you think," I said, a little anxiously, "if I were
to tell you that my name is Edward Pinkhammer, from Cornopolis,
Kansas?"
"What would I think?" she repeated, with a merry glance. "Why,
that you had not brought Mrs. Bellford to New York with you, of
course. I do wish you had. I would have liked to see Marian."
Her voice lowered slightly--"You haven't changed much, Elwyn."
I felt her wonderful eyes searching mine and my face more closely.
"Yes, you have," she amended, and there was a soft, exultant note
in her latest tones; "I see it now. You haven't forgotten. You
haven't forgotten for a year or a day or an hour. I told you you
never could."
I poked my straw anxiously in the _cr`eme de menthe_.
"I'm sure I beg your pardon," I said, a little uneasy at her gaze.
"But that is just the trouble. I have forgotten. I've forgotten
everything."
She flouted my denial. She laughed deliciously at something she
seemed to see in my face.
"I've heard of you at times," she went on. "You're quite a big
lawyer out West--Denver, isn't it, or Los Angeles? Marian must be
very proud of you. You knew, I suppose, that I married six months
after you did. You may have seen it in the papers. The flowers
alone cost two thousand dollars."
She had mentioned fifteen years. Fifteen years is a long time.
"Would it be too late," I asked, somewhat timorously, "to offer you
congratulations?"
"Not if you dare do it," she answered, with such fine intrepidity
that I was silent, and began to crease patterns on the cloth with
my thumb nail.
"Tell me one thing," she said, leaning toward me rather eagerly--
"a thing I have wanted to know for many years--just from a woman's
curiosity, of course--have you ever dared since that night to touch,
smell or look at white roses--at white roses wet with rain and
dew?"
I took a sip of _cr`eme de menthe_.
"It would be useless, I suppose," I said, with a sigh, "for me to
repeat that I have no recollection at all about these things. My
memory is completely at fault. I need not say how much I regret
it."
The lady rested her arms upon the table, and again her eyes
disdained my words and went traveling by their own route direct
to my soul. She laughed softly, with a strange quality in the
sound--it was a laugh of happiness--yes, and of content--and of
misery. I tried to look away from her.
"You lie, Elwyn Bellford," she breathed, blissfully. "Oh, I know
you lie!"
I gazed dully into the ferns.
"My name is Edward Pinkhammer," I said. "I came with the
delegates to the Druggists' National Convention. There is a
movement on foot for arranging a new position for the bottles of
tartrate of antimony and tartrate of potash, in which, very likely,
you would take little interest."
A shining landau stopped before the entrance. The lady rose. I
took her hand, and bowed.
"I am deeply sorry," I said to her, "that I cannot remember. I could
explain, but fear you would not understand. You will not concede
Pinkhammer; and I really cannot at all conceive of the--the roses
and other things."
"Good-by, Mr. Bellford," she said, with her happy, sorrowful
smile, as she stepped into her carriage.
I attended the theatre that night. When I returned to my hotel,
a quiet man in dark clothes, who seemed interested in rubbing his
finger nails with a silk handkerchief, appeared, magically, at my
side.
"Mr. Pinkhammer," he said, giving the bulk of his attention to his
forefinger, "may I request you to step aside with me for a little
conversation? There is a room here."
"Certainly," I answered.
He conducted me into a small, private parlor. A lady and a
gentleman were there. The lady, I surmised, would have been
unusually good-looking had her features not been clouded by an
expression of keen worry and fatigue. She was of a style of figure
and possessed coloring and features that were agreeable to my
fancy. She was in a traveling dress; she fixed upon me an earnest
look of extreme anxiety, and pressed an unsteady hand to her
bosom. I think she would have started forward, but the gentleman
arrested her movement with an authoritative motion of his hand.
He then came, himself, to meet me. He was a man of forty, a little
gray about the temples, and with a strong, thoughtful face.
"Bellford, old man," he said, cordially, "I'm glad to see you again.
Of course we know everything is all right. I warned you, you
know, that you were overdoing it. Now, you'll go back with us,
and be yourself again in no time."
I smiled ironically.
"I havae been 'Bellforded' so often," I said, "that it has lost its
edge. Still, in the end, it may grow wearisome. Would you be
willing at all to entertain the hypothesis that my name is Edward
Pinkhammer, and that I never saw you before in my life?"
Before the man could reply a wailing cry came from the woman.
She sprang past his detaining arm. "Elwyn!" she sobbed, and cast
herself upon me, and clung tight. "Elwyn," she cried again, "don't
break my heart. I am your wife--call my name once--just once. I
could see you dead rather than this way."
I unwound her arms respectfully, but firmly.
"Madam," I said, severely, "pardon me if I suggest that you accept
a resemblance too precipitately. It is a pity," I went on, with an
amused laugh, as the thought occurred to me, "that this Bellford
and I could not be kept side by side upon the same shelf like
tartrates of sodium and antimony for purposes of identification.
In order to understand the allusion," I concluded airily, "it may
be necessary for you to keep an eye on the proceedings of the
Druggists' National Convention."
The lady turned to her companion, and grasped his arm.
"What is it, Doctor Volney? Oh, what is it?" she moaned.
"Go to your room for a while," I heard him say. "I will remain and
talk with him. His mind? No, I think not--only a portion of the
brain. Yes, I am sure he will recover. Go to your room and leave
me with him."
The lady disappeared. The man in dark clothes also went outside,
still manicuring himself in a thoughtful way. I think he waited
in the hall.
"I would like to talk with you a while, Mr. Pinkhammer, if I may,"
said the gentleman who remained.
"Very well, if you care to," I replied, "and will excuse me if I take
it comfortably; I am rather tired." I stretched myself upon a couch
by a window and lit a cigar. He drew a chair nearby.
"Let us speak to the point," he said, soothingly. "Your name is not
Pinkhammer."
"I know that as well as you do," I said, coolly. "But a man
must have a name of some sort. I can assure you that I do not
extravagantly admire the name of Pinkhammer. But when one
christens one's self suddenly, the fine names do not seem to
suggest themselves. But, suppose it had been Scheringhausen
or Scroggins! I think I did very well with Pinkhammer."
"Your name," said the other man, seriously, "is Elwyn C. Bellford.
You are one of the first lawyers in Denver. You are suffering from
an attack of aphasia, which has caused you to forget your identity.
The cause of it was over-application to your profession, and,
perhaps, a life too bare of natural recreation and pleasures. The
lady who has just left the room is your wife."
"She is what I would call a fine-looking woman," I said, after a
judicial pause. "I particularly admire the shade of brown in her
hair."
"She is a wife to be proud of. Since your disappearance, nearly
two weeks ago, she has scarcely closed her eyes. We learned that
you were in New York through a telegram sent by Isidore Newman,
a traveling man from Denver. He said that he had met you in a
hotel here, and that you did not recognize him."
"I think I remember the occasion," I said. "The fellow called me
'Bellford,' if I am not mistaken. But don't you think it about time,
now, for you to introduce yourself?"
"I am Robert Volney--Doctor Volney. I have been your close friend
for twenty years, and your physician for fifteen. I came with
Mrs. Bellford to trace you as soon as we got the telegram. Try,
Elwyn, old man--try to remember!"
"What's the use to try?" I asked, with a little frown. "You say you
are a physician. Is aphasia curable? When a man loses his memory
does it return slowly, or suddenly?"
"Sometimes gradually and imperfectly; sometimes as suddenly as
it went."
"Will you undertake the treatment of my case, Doctor Volney?" I
asked.
"Old friend," said he, "I'll do everything in my power, and wil have
done everything that science can do to cure you."
"Very well," said I. "Then you will consider that I am your patient.
Everything is in confidence now--professional confidence."
"Of course," said Doctor Volney.
I got up from the couch. Some one had set a vase of white roses
on the centre table--a cluster of white roses, freshly sprinkled and
fragrant. I threw them far out of the window, and then laid myself
upon the couch again.
"It will be best, Bobby," I said, "to have this cure happen suddenly.
I'm rather tired of it all, anyway. You may go now and bring Marian
in. But, oh, Doc," I said, with a sigh, as I kicked him on the shin
--"good old Doc--it was glorious!"
XIII
A MUNICIPAL REPORT
The cities are full of pride,
Challenging each to each--
This from her mountainside,
That from her burthened beach.
R. KIPLING.
Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville,
Tennessee! There are justthree big cities in the United States
that are "story cities"--New York, of course, New Orleans, and,
best of the lot, San Francisco. --FRANK NORRIS.
East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians.
Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants
of a State. They are the Southerners of the West. Now, Chicagoans
are no less loyal to their city; but when you ask them why, they
stammer and speak of lake fish and the new Odd Fellows Building.
But Californians go into detail.
Of course they have, in the climate, an argument that is good for
half an hour while you are thinking of your coal bills and heavy
underwear. But as soon as they come to mistake your silence for
conviction, madness comes upon them, and they picture the city of
the Golden Gate as the Bagdad of the New World. So far, as a
matter of opinion, no refutation is necessary. But, dear cousins
all (from Adam and Eve descended), it is a rash one who will lay
his finger on the map and say: "In this town there can be no
romance--what could happen here?" Yes, it is a bold and a rash
deed to challenge in one sentence history, romance, and Rand
and McNally.
NASHVILLE--A city, port of delivery, and the capital of the
State of Tennessee, is on the Cumberland River and on the
N. C. & St. L. and the L. & N. railroads. This city is regarded
as the most important educational centre in the South.
I stepped off the train at 8 P.M. Having searched the thesaurus in
vain for adjectives, I must, as a substitution, hie me to comparison
in the form of a recipe.
Take a London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts; gas leaks 20 parts;
dewdrops gathered in a brick yard at sunrise, 25 parts; odor of
honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix.
The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a Nashville
drizzle. It is not so fragrant as a moth-ball nor as thick as
pea-soup; but 'tis enough--'twill serve.
I went to a hotel in a tumbril. It required strong self-suppression
for me to keep from climbing to the top of it and giving an imitation
of Sidney Carton. The vehicle was drawn by beasts of a bygone
era and driven by something dark and emancipated.
I was sleepy and tired, so when I got to the hotel I hurriedly paid
it the fifty cents it demanded (with approximate lagniappe, I assure
you). I knew its habits; and I did not want to hear it prate about
its old "marster" or anything that happened "befo' de wah."
The hotel was one of the kind described as 'renovated." That
means $20,000 worth of new marble pillars, tiling, electric lights
and brass cuspidors in the lobby, and a new L. & N. time table and
a lithograph of Lookout Mountain in each one of the great rooms
above. The management was without reproach, the attention full
of exquisite Southern courtesy, the service as slow as the progress
of a snail and as good-humored as Rip Van Winkle. The food was
worth traveling a thousand miles for. There is no other hotel in
the world where you can get such chicken livers _en brochette_.
At dinner I asked a Negro waiter if there was anything doing in
town. He pondered gravely for a minute, and then replied: "Well,
boss, I don't really reckon there's anything at all doin' after
sundown."
Sundown had been accomplished; it had been drowned in the drizzle
long before. So that spectacle was denied me. But I went forth
upon the streets in the drizzle to see what might be there.
It is built on undulating grounds; and the streets are lighted
by electricity at a cost of $32,470 per annum.
As I left the hotel there was a race riot. Down upon me charged a
company of freedmen, or Arabs, or Zulus, armed with--no, I saw with
relief that they were not rifles, but whips. And I saw dimly a
caravan of black, clumsy vehicles; and at the reassuring shouts,
"Kyar you anywhere in the town, boss, fuh fifty cents," I reasoned
that I was merely a "fare" instead of a victim.
I walked through long streets, all leading uphill. I wondered how
those streets ever came down again. Perhaps they didn't until they
were "graded." On a few of the "main streets" I saw lights in
stores here and there; saw street cars go by conveying worthy
burghers hither and yon; saw people pass engaged in the art of
conversation, and heard a burst of semi-lively laughter issuing
from a soda-water and ice-cream parlor. The streets other than
"main" seemed to have enticed upon their borders houses consecrated
to peace and domesticity. In many of them lights shone behind
discreetly drawn window shades; in a few pianos tinkled orderly
and irreproachable music. There was, indeed, little "doing."
I wished I had come before sundown. So I returned to my hotel.
In November, 1864, the Confederate General Hood advanced against
Nashville, where he shut up a National force under General Thomas.
The latter then sallied forth and defeated the Confederates in a
terrible conflict.
All my life I have heard of, admired, and witnessed the fine
marksmanship of the South in its peaceful conflicts in the tobacco-
chewing regions. But in my hotel a surprise awaited me. There
were twelve bright, new, imposing, capacious brass cuspidors in
the great lobby, tall enough to be called urns and so wide-mouthed
that the crack pitcher of a lady baseball team should have been
able to throw a ball into one of them at five paces distant. But,
although a terrible battle had raged and was still raging, the enemy
had not suffered. Bright, new, imposing, capacious, untouched,
they stood. But, shades of Jefferson Brick! the tile floor--the
beautiful tile floor! I could not avoid thinking of the battle of
Nashville, and trying to draw, as is my foolish habit, some
deductions about hereditary marksmanship.
Here I first saw Major (by misplaced courtesy) Wentworth
Caswell. I knew him for a type the moment my eyes suffered from
the sight of him. A rat has no geographical habitat. My old
friend, A. Tennyson, said, as he so well said almost everything:
Prophet, curse me the blabbing lip,
And curse me the British vermin, the rat.
Let us regard the word "British" as interchangeable _ad lib_. A rat
is a rat.
This man was hunting about the hotel lobby like a starved dog that
had forgotten where he had buried a bone. He had a face of great
acreage, red, pulpy, and with a kind of sleepy massiveness like
that of Buddha. He possessed one single virtue--he was very
smoothly shaven. The mark of the beast is not indelible upon a
man until he goes about with a stubble. I think that if he had not
used his razor that day I would have repulsed his advances, and the
criminal calendar of the world would have been spared the
addition of one murder.
I happened to be standing within five feet of a cuspidor when
Major Caswell opened fire upon it. I had been observant enough
to percieve that the attacking force was using Gatlings instead of
squirrel rifles; so I side-stepped so promptly that the major seized
the opportunity to apologize to a noncombatant. He had the
blabbing lip. In four minutes he had become my friend and had
dragged me to the bar.
I desire to interpolate here that I am a Southerner. But I am not
one by profession or trade. I eschew the string tie, the slouch hat,
the Prince Albert, the number of bales of cotton destroyed by
Sherman, and plug chewing. When the orchestra plays Dixie I do
not cheer. I slide a little lower on the leather-cornered seat and,
well, order another W"urzburger and wish that Longstreet had--but
what's the use?
Major Caswell banged the bar with his fist, and the first gun at
Fort Sumter re-echoed. When he fired the last one at Appomattox
I began to hope. But then he began on family trees, and
demonstrated that Adam was only a third cousin of a collateral
branch of the Caswell family. Genealogy disposed of, he took up,
to my distaste, his private family matters. He spoke of his wife,
traced her descent back to Eve, and profanely denied any possible
rumor that she may have had relations in the land of Nod.
By this time I was beginning to suspect that he was trying to
obscure by noise the fact that he had ordered the drinks, on the
chance that I would be bewildered into paying for them. But when
they were down he crashed a silver dollar loudly upon the bar.
Then, of course, another serving was obligatory. And when I had
paid for that I took leave of him brusquely; for I wanted no more
of him. But before I had obtained my release he had prated loudly
of an income that his wife received, and showed a handful of silver
money.
When I got my key at the desk the clerk said to me courteously:
"If that man Caswell has annoyed you, and if you would like to
make a complaint, we will have him ejected. He is a nuisance, a
loafer, and without any known means of support, although he
seems to have some money most the time. But we don't seem to
be able to hit upon any means of throwing him out legally."
"Why, no," said I, after some reflection; "I don't see my way clear
to making a complaint. But I would like to place myself on record
as asserting that I do not care for his company. Your town," I
continued, "seems to be a quiet one. What manner of entertainment,
adventure, or excitement have you to offer to the stranger within
your gates?"
"Well, sir," said the clerk, "there will be a show here next
Thursday. It is--I'll look it up and have the announcement sent up
to your room with the ice water. Good night."
After I went up to my room I looked out the window. It was only
about ten o'clock, but I looked upon a silent town. The drizzle
continued, spangled with dim lights, as far apart as currants in a
cake sold at the Ladies' Exchange.
"A quiet place," I said to myself, as my first shoe struck the ceiling
of the occupant of the room beneath mine. "Nothing of the life here
that gives color and variety to the cities in the East and West.
Just a good, ordinary, humdrum, business town."
Nashville occupies a foremost place among the manufacturing
centres of the country. It is the fifth boot and shoe market
in the United States, the largest candy and cracker manufacturing
city in the South, and does an enormous wholesale drygoods,
grocery, and drug business.
I must tell you how I came to be in Nashville, and I assure you the
digression brings as much tedium to me as it does to you. I was
traveling elsewhere on my own business, but I had a commission
from a Northern literary magazine to stop over there and establish
a personal connection between the publication and one of its
contributors, Azalea Adair.
Adair (there was no clue to the personality except the handwriting)
had sent in some essays (lost art!) and poems that had made the
editors swear approvingly over their one o'clock luncheon. So
they had commissioned me to round up said Adair and corner by
contract his or her output at two cents a word before some other
publisher offered her ten or twenty.
At nine o'clock the next morning, after my chicken livers _en
brochette_ (try them if you can find that hotel), I strayed out into
the drizzle, which was still on for an unlimited run. At the first
corner, I came upon Uncle Caesar. He was a stalwart Negro, older
than the pyramids, with gray wool and a face that reminded me of
Brutus, and a second afterwards of the late King Cettiwayo. He
wore the most remarkable coat that I ever had seen or expect to
see. It reached to his ankles an had once been a Confederate gray
in colors. But rain and sun and age had so variegated it that
Joseph's coat, beside it, would have faded to a pale monochrome. I
must linger with that coat, for it has to do with the story--the story
that is so long in coming, because you can hardly expect anything
to happen in Nashville.
Once it must have been the military coat of an officer. The cape of
it had vanished, but all adown its front it had been frogged and
tasseled magnificently. But now the frogs and tassles were gone.
In their stead had been patiently stitched (I surmised by some
surviving "black mammy") new frogs made of cunningly twisted
common hempen twine. This twine was frayed and disheveled. It
must have been added to the coat as a substitute for vanished
splendors, with tasteless but painstaking devotion, for it followed
faithfully the curves of the long-missing frogs. And, to complete
the comedy and pathos of the garment, all its buttons were gone
save one. The second button from the top alone remained. The
coat was fastened by other twine strings tied through the
buttonholes and other holes rudely pierced in the opposite side.
There was never such a weird garment so fantastically bedecked
and of so many mottled hues. The lone button was the size of a
half-dollar, made of yellow horn and sewed on with coarse twine.
This Negro stood by a carriage so old that Ham himself might
have started a hack line with it after he left the ark with the two
animals hitched to it. As I approached he threw open the door,
drew out a feather duster, waved it without using it, and said in
deep, rumbling tones:
"Step right in, suh; ain't a speck of dust in it--jus' got back from a
funeral, suh."
I inferred that on such gala occasions carriages were given an extra
cleaning. I looked up and down the street and perceived that there
was little choice among the vehicles for hire that lined the curb.
I looked in my memorandum book for the address of Azalea Adair.
"I want to go to 861 Jessamine Street," I said, and was about to
step into the hack. But for an instant the thick, long, gorilla-like
arm of the old Negro barred me. On his massive and saturnine
face a look of sudden suspicion and enmity flashed for a moment.
Then, with quickly returning conviction, he asked blandishingly:
"What are you gwine there for, boss?"
"What is it to you?" I asked, a little sharply.
"Nothin', suh, jus' nothin'. Only it's a lonesome kind of part of
town and few folks ever has business out there. Step right in. The
seats is clean--jes' got back from a funeral, suh."
A mile and a half it must have been to our journey's end. I could
hear nothing but the fearful rattle of the ancient hack over the
uneven brick paving; I could smell nothing but the drizzle, now
further flavored with coal smoke and something like a mixture of
tar and oleander blossoms. All I could see through the streaming
windows were two rows of dim houses.
The city has an area of 10 square miles; 181 miles of streets,
of which 137 miles are paved; a system of waterworks that cost
$2,000,000, with 77 miles of mains.
Eight-sixty-one Jessamine Street was a decayed mansion. Thirty
yards back from the street it stood, outmerged in a splendid grove
of trees and untrimmed shrubbery. A row of box bushes overflowed
and almost hid the paling fence from sight; the gate was kept
closed by a rope noose that encircled the gate post and the first
paling of the gate. But when you got inside you saw that 861
was a shell, a shadow, a ghost of former grandeur and excellence.
But in the story, I have not yet got inside.
When the hack had ceased from rattling and the weary quadrupeds
came to a rest I handed my jehu his fifty cents with an additional
quarter, feeling a glow of conscious generosity, as I did so. He
refused it.
"It's two dollars, suh," he said.
"How's that?" I asked. "I plainly heard you call out at the hotel:
'Fifty cents to any part of the town.'"
"It's two dollars, suh," he repeated obstinately. "It's a long ways
from the hotel."
"It is within the city limits and well within them." I argued.
"Don't think that you have picked up a greenhorn Yankee. Do you
see those hills over there?" I went on, pointing toward the
east (I could not see them, myself, for the drizzle); "well, I was
born and raised on their other side. You old fool nigger, can't
you tell people from other people when you see 'em?"
The grim face of King Cettiwayo softened. "Is you from the
South, suh? I reckon it was them shoes of yourn fooled me. They
is somethin' sharp in the toes for a Southern gen'lman to wear."
"Then the charge is fifty cents, I suppose?" said I inexorably.
His former expression, a mingling of cupidity and hostility,
returned, remained ten seconds, and vanished.
"Boss," he said, "fifty cents is right; but I _needs_ two dollars,
suh; I'm _obleeged_ to have two dollars. I ain't _demandin'_ it
now, suh; after I know whar you's from; I'm jus' sayin' that I _has_
to have two dollars to-night, and business mighty po'."
Peace and confidence settled upon his heavy features. He had
been luckier than he had hoped. Instead of having picked up a
greenhorn, ignorant of rates, he had come upon an inheritance.
"You confounded old rascal," I said, reaching down to my pocket,
"you ought to be turned over to the police."
For the first time I saw him smile. He knew; _he knew_. HE
KNEW.
I gave him two one-dollar bills. As I handed them over I noticed
that one of them had seen parlous times. Its upper right-hand
corner was missing, and it had been torn through the middle, but
joined again. A strip of blue tissue paper, pasted over the split,
preserved its negotiability.
Enough of the African bandit for the present: I left him happy,
lifted the rope and opened a creaky gate.
The house, as I said, was a shell. A paint brush had not touched it
in twenty years. I could not see why a strong wind should not
have bowled it over like a house of cards until I looked again at the
trees that hugged it close--the trees that saw the battle of Nashville
and still drew their protecting branches around it against storm and
enemy and cold.
Azalea Adair, fifty years old, white-haired, a descendant of the
cavaliers, as thin and frail as the house she lived in, robed in the
cheapest and cleanest dress I ever saw, with an air as simple as a
queen's, received me.
The reception room seemed a mile square, because there was nothing
in it except some rows of books, on unpainted white-pine bookshelves,
a cracked marble-top table, a rag rug, a hairless horsehair sofa
and two or three chairs. Yes, there was a picture on the wall,
a colored crayon drawing of a cluster of pansies. I looked around
for the portrait of Andrew Jackson and the pinecone hanging basket
but they were not there.
Azalea Adair and I had conversation, a little of which will be
repeated to you. She was a product of the old South, gently
nurtured in the sheltered life. Her learning was not broad, but was
deep and of splendid originality in its somewhat narrow scope.
She had been educated at home, and her knowledge of the world
was derived from inference and by inspiration. Of such is the
precious, small group of essayists made. Whle she talked to me I
kept brushing my fingers, trying, unconsciously, to rid them
guiltily of the absent dust from the half-calf backs of Lamb,
Chaucer, Hazlitt, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne and Hood. She was
exquisite, she was a valuable discovery. Nearly everybody
nowadays knows too much--oh, so much too much--of real life.
I could perceive clearly that Azalea Adair was very poor. A house
and a dress she had, not much else, I fancied. So, divided between
my duty to the magazine and my loyalty to the poets and essayists
who fought Thomas in the valley of the Cumberland, I listened to
her voice, which was like a harpsichord's, and found that I could
not speak of contracts. In the presence of the nine Muses and the
three Graces one hesitated to lower the topic to two cents. There
would have to be another colloquy after I had regained my
commercialism. But I spoke of my mission, and three o'clock of
the next afternoon was set for the discussion of the business
proposition.
"Your town," I said, as I began to make ready to depart (which is
the time for smooth generalities), "seems to be a quiet, sedate
place. A home town, I should say, where few things out of the
ordinary ever happen."
It carries on an extensive trade in stoves and hollow ware with
the West and South, and its flouring mills have a daily capacity
of more than 2,000 barrels.
Azalea Adair seemed to reflect.
"I have never thought of it that way," she said, with a kind of
sincere intensity that seemed to belong to her. "Isn't it in the
still, quiet places that things do happen? I fancy that when God
began to create the earth on the first Monday morning one could
have leaned out one's window and heard the drops of mud splashing
from His trowel as He built up the everlasting hills. What did the
noisiest project in the world--I mean the building of the Tower of
Bable--result in finally? A page and a half of Esperanto in the
_North American Review_."
"Of course," said I platitudinously, "human nature is the same
everywhere; but there is more color--er--more drama and
movement and--er--romance in some cities than in others."
"On the surface," said Azalea Adair. "I have traveled many times
around the world in a golden airship wafted on two wings--print
and dreams. I have seen (on one of my imaginary tours) the Sultan
of Turkey bowstring with his own hands one of his wives who had
uncovered her face in public. I have seen a man in Nashville tear
up his theatre tickets because his wife was going out with her face
covered--with rice powder. In San Francisco's Chinatown I saw
the slave girl Sing Yee dipped slowly, inch by inch, in boiling
almond oil to make her swear she would never see her American
lover again. She gave in when the boiling oil had reached three
inches above her knee. At a euchre party in East Nashville the
other night I saw Kitty Morgan cut dead by seven of her schoolmates
and lifelong friends because she had married a house painter. The
boiling oil was sizzling as high as her heart; but I wish you could
have seen the fine little smile that she carried from table to
table. Oh, yes, it is a humdrum town. Just a few miles of red
brick houses and mud and lumber yards."
Some one knocked hollowly at the back of the house. Azalea Adair
breathed a soft apology and went to investigate the sound. She
came back in three minutes with brightened eyes, a faint flush
on her cheeks, and ten years lifted from her shoulders.
"You must have a cup of tea before you go," she said, "and a sugar
cake."
She reached and shook a little iron bell. In shuffled a small Negro
girl about twelve, barefoot, not very tidy, glowering at me with
thumb in mouth and bulging eyes.
Azlea Adair opened a tiny, worn purse and drew out a dollar bill, a
dollar bill with the upper right-hand corner missing, torn in two
pieces, and pasted together again with a strip of blue tissue paper.
It was one of the bills I had given the piratical Negro--there was
no doubt about it.
"Go up to Mr. Baker's store on the corner, Impy," she said,
handing the girl the dollar bill, "and get a quarter of a pound of
tea--the kind he always sends me--and ten cents worth of sugar
cakes. Now, hurry. The supply of tea in the house happens to be
exhausted," she explained to me.
Impy left by the back way. Before the scrape of her hard, bare feet
had died away on the back porch, a wild shriek--I was sure it was
hers--filled the hollow house. Then the deep, gruff tones of an
angry man's voice mingled with the girl's further squeals and
unintelligible words.
Azalea Adair rose without surprise or emotion and disappeared.
For two minutes I heard the hoarse rumble of the man's voice; then
someting like an oath and a slight scuffle, and she returned calmly
to her chair.
"This is a roomy house," she said, "and I have a tenant for part of
it. I am sorry to have to rescind my invitation to tea. It was
impossible to get the kind I always use at the store. Perhaps to-
morrow, Mr. Baker will be able to supply me."
I was sure that Impy had not had time to leave the house. I
inquired concerning street-car lines and took my leave. After
I was well on my way I remembered that I had not learned Azalea
Adair's name. But to-morrow would do.
That same day I started in on the course of iniquity that this
uneventful city forced upon me. I was in the town only two days,
but in that time I managed to lie shamelessly by telegraph, and to
be an accomplice--after the fact, if that is the correct legal
term--to a murder.
As I rounded the corner nearest my hotel the Afrite coachman of
the ploychromatic, nonpareil coat seized me, swung open the
dungeony door of his peripatetic sarcophagus, flirted his feather
duster and began his ritual: "Step right in, boss. Carriage is
clean--jus' got back from a funeral. Fifty cents to any--"
And then he knew me and grinned broadly. "'Scuse me, boss; you
is de gen'l'man what rid out with me dis mawnin'. Thank you
kindly, suh."
"I am going out to 861 again to-morrow afternoon at three," said I,
"and if you will be here, I'll let you drive me. So you know Miss
Adair?" I concluded, thinking of my dollar bill.
"I belonged to her father, Judge Adair, suh," he replied.
"I judge that she is pretty poor," I said. "She hasn't much money
to speak of, has she?"
For an instant I looked again at the fierce countenance of King
Cettiwayo, and then he changed back to an extortionate old Negro
hack driver.
"She ain't gwine to starve, suh," he said slowly. "She has reso'ces,
suh; she has reso'ces."
"I shall pay you fifty cents for the trip," said I.
"Dat is puffeckly correct, suh," he answered humbly. "I jus' _had_
to have dat two dollars dis mawnin', boss."
I went to the hotel and lied by electricity. I wired the magazine:
"A. Adair holds out for eight cents a word."
The answer that came back was: "Give it to her quick you duffer."
Just before dinner "Major" Wentworth Caswell bore down upon
me with the greetings of a long-lost friend. I have seen few men
whom I have so instantaneously hated, and of whom it was so
difficult to be rid. I was standing at the bar when he invaded me;
therefore I could not wave the white ribbon in his face. I would
have paid gladly for the drinks, hoping, thereby, to escape another;
but he was one of those despicable, roaring, advertising bibbers
who must have brass bands and fireworks attend upon every cent
that they waste in their follies.
With an air of producing millions he drew two one-dollar bills
from a pocket and dashed one of them upon the bar. I looked once
more at the dollar bill with the upper right-hand corner missing,
torn through the middle, and patched with a strip of blue tissue
paper. It was my dollar bill again. It could have been no other.
I went up to my room. The drizzle and the monotony of a dreary,
eventless Southern town had made me tired and listless. I
remember that just before I went to bed I mentally disposed of
the mysterious dollar bill (which might have formed the clew to
a tremendously fine detective story of San Francisco) by saying
to myself sleepily: "Seems as if a lot of people here own stock
in the Hack-Driver's Trust. Pays dividends promptly, too.
Wonder if--" Then I fell asleep.
King Cettiwayo was at his post the next day, and rattled my bones
over the stones out to 861. He was to wait and rattle me back
again when I was ready.
Azalea Adair looked paler and cleaner and frailer than she had
looked on the day before. After she had signed the contract at
eight cents per word she grew still paler and began to slip out of
her chair. Whitout much trouble I managed to get her up on the
antediluvian horsehair sofa and then I ran out to the sidewalk and
yelled to the coffee-colored Pirate to bring a doctor. With a
wisdom that I had not expected in him, he abandoned his team and
struck off up the street afoot, realizing the value of speed. In
ten minutes he returned with a grave, gray-haired and capable man
of medicine. In a few words (worth much less than eight cents each)
I explained to him my presence in the hollow house of mystery. He
bowed with stately understanding, and turned to the old Negro.
"Uncle Caesar," he said calmly, "Run up to my house and ask Miss
Lucy to give you a cream pitcher full of fresh milk and half
a tumbler of port wine. And hurry back. Don't drive--run. I
want you to get back sometime this week."
It occurred to me that Dr. Merriman also felt a distrust as to the
speeding powers of the land-pirate's steeds. After Uncle Caesar
was gone, lumberingly, but swiftly, up the street, the doctor looked
me over with great politeness and as much careful calculation until
he had decided that I might do.
"It is only a case of insufficient nutrition," he said. "In other
words, the result of poverty, pride, and starvation. Mrs. Caswell
has many devoted friends who would be glad to aid her, but she
will accept nothing except from that old Negro, Uncle Caesar, who
was once owned by her family."
"Mrs. Caswell!" said I, in surprise. And then I looked at the
contract and saw that she had signed it "Azalea Adair Caswell."
"I thought she was Miss Adair," I said.
"Married to a drunken, worthless loafer, sir," said the doctor.
"It is said that he robs her even of the small sums that her old
servant contributes toward her support."
When the milk and wine had been brought the doctor soon revived
Azalea Adair. She sat up and talked of the beauty of the autumn
leaves that were then in season, and their height of color. She
referred lightly to her fainting seizure as the outcome of an old
palpitation of the heart. Impy fanned her as she lay on the sofa.
The doctor was due elsewhere, and I followed him to the door. I
told him that it was within my power and intentions to make a
reasonable advance of money to Azalea Adair on future
contributions to the magazine, and he seemed pleased.
"By the way," he said, "perhaps you would like to know that you
have had royalty for a coachman. Old Caesar's grandfather was a
king in Congo. Caesar himself has royal ways, as you may have
observed."
As the doctor was moving off I heard Uncle Caesar's voice inside:
"Did he get bofe of dem two dollars from you, Mis' Zalea?"
"Yes, Caesar," I heard Azalea Adair answer weakly. And then I
went in and concluded business negotiations with our contributor.
I assumed the responsibility of advancing fifty dollars, putting
it as a necessary formality in binding our bargain. And then
Uncle Caesar drove me back to the hotel.
Here ends all of the story as far as I can testify as a witness. The
rest must be only bare statements of facts.
At about six o'clock I went out for a stroll. Uncle Caesar was at
his corner. He threw open the door of his carriage, flourished his
duster and began his depressing formula: "Step right in, suh.
Fifty cents to anywhere in the city--hack's puffickly clean, suh----
jus' got back from a funeral--"
And then he recognized me. I think his eyesight was getting bad.
His coat had taken on a few more faded shades of color, the twine
strings were more frayed and ragged, the last remaining button--
the button of yellow horn--was gone. A motley descendant of
kings was Uncle Caesar!
About two hours later I saw an excited crowd besieging the front
of a drug store. In a desert where nothing happens this was
manna; so I edged my way inside. On an extemporized couch of
empty boxes and chairs was stretched the mortal corporeality of
Major Wentworth Caswell. A doctor was testing him for the
immortal ingredient. His decision was that it was conspicuous
by its absence.
The erstwhile Major had been found dead on a dark street and
brought by curious and ennuied citizens to the drug store. The
late human being had been engaged in terrific battle--the details
showed that. Loafer and reprobate though he had been, he had
been also a warrior. But he had lost. His hands were yet clinched
so tightly that his fingers would not be opened. The gentle
citizens who had know him stood about and searched their vocabularies
to find some good words, if it were possible, to speak of him.
One kind-looking man said, after much thought: "When 'Cas' was about
fo'teen he was one of the best spellers in school."
While I stood there the fingers of the right hand of "the man that
was" which hung down the side of a white pine box, relaxed, and
dropped something at my feet. I covered it with one foot quietly,
and a little later on I picked it up and pocketed it. I reasoned
that in his last struggle his hand must have seized that object
unwittingly and held it in a death grip.
At the hotel that night the main topic of conversation, with the
possible exceptions of politics and prohibition, was the demise of
Major Caswell. I heard one man say to a group of listeners:
"In my opinion, gentlemen, Caswell was murdered by somme of these
no-account niggers for his money. He had fifty dollars this
afternoon which he showed to several gentlemen in the hotel. When
he was found the money was not on his person."
I left the city the next morning at nine, and as the train was
crossing the bridge over the Cumberland River I took out of my
pocket a yellow horn overcoat button the size of a fifty-cent piece,
with frayed ends of coarse twine hanging from it, and cast it out
of the window into the slow, muddy waters below.
_I wonder what's doing in Buffalo!_
XIV
PSYCHE AND THE PSKYSCRAPER
If you are a philosopher you can do this thing: you can go to the
top of a high building, look down upon your fellow-men 300 feet
below, and despise them as insects. Like the irresponsible black
waterbugs on summer ponds, they crawl and circle and hustle
about idiotically without aim or purpose. They do not even move
with the admirable intelligence of ants, for ants always know when
they are going home. The ant is of a lowly station, but he will
often reach home and get his slippers on while you are left at your
elevated station.
Man, then, to the housetopped philosopher, appears to be but a
creeping, contemptible beetle. Brokers, poets, millionaires,
bootblacks, beauties, hod-carriers and politicians become little
black specks dodging bigger black specks in streets no wider than
your thumb.
From this high view the city itself becomes degraded to an
unintelligible mass of distorted buildings and impossible
perspectives; the revered ocean is a duck pond; the earth
itself a lost golf ball. All the minutiae of life are gone.
The philosopher gazes into the infinite heavens above him,
and allows his soul to expand to the influence of his new
view. He feels that he is the heir to Eternity and the child
of Time. Space, too, should be his by the right of his immortal
heritage, and he thrills at the thought that some day his
kind shall traverse theose mysterious aerial roads between planet
and planet. The tiny world beneath his feet upon which this
towering structure of steel rests as a speck of dust upon a
Himalayan mountain--it is but one of a countless number of such
whirling atoms. What are the ambitions, the achievements, the
paltry conquests and loves of those restless black insects below
compared with the serene and awful immensity of the universe that
lies above and around their insignificant city?
It is guaranteed that the philosopher will have these thoughts.
They have been expressly compiled from the philosophies of the
world and set down with the proper interrogation point at the end
of them to represent the invariable musings of deep thinkers on
high places. And when the philosopher takes the elevator down
his mind is broader, his heart is at peace, and his conception
of the cosmogony of creation is as wide as the buckle of Orion's
summer belt.
But if your name happened to be Daisy, and you worked in an Eighth
Avenue candy store and lived in a little cold hall bedroom, five
feet by eight, and earned $6 per week, and ate ten-cent lunches
and were nineteen years old, and got up at 6:30 and worked till 9,
and never had studied philosophy, maybe things wouldn't look
that way to you from the top of a skyscraper.
Two sighed for the hand of Daisy, the unphilosophical. One was
Joe, who kept the smallest store in New York. It was about the
size of a tool-box of the D. P. W., and was stuck like a swallow's
nest against a corner of a down-town skyscraper. Its stock
consisted of fruit, candies, newspapers, song books, cigarettes, and
lemonade in season. When stern winter shook his congealed locks
and Joe had to move himself and the fruit inside, there was exactly
room in the store for the proprietor, his wares, a stove the size
of a vinegar cruet, and one customer.
Joe was not of the nation that keeps us forever in a furore with
fugues and fruit. He was a capable American youth who was
laying by money, and wanted Daisy to help him spend it. Three
times he had asked her.
"I got money saved up, Daisy," was his love song; "and you know
how bad I want you. That store of mine ain't very big, but--"
"Oh, ain't it?" would be the antiphony of the unphilosophical one.
"Why, I heard Wanamaker's was trying to get you to sublet part of
your floor space to them for next year."
Daisy passed Joe's corner every morning and evening.
"Hello, Two-by-Four!" was her usual greeting. "Seems to me your
store looks emptier. You must have sold a pack of chewing gum."
Ain't much room in here, sure," Joe would answer, with his slow
grin, "except for you, Daise. Me and the store are waitin' for you
whenever you'll take us. Don't you think you might before long?"
"Store!"--a fine scorn was expressed by Daisy's uptilted nose--
"sardine box! Waitin' for me, you say? Gee! you'd have to throw
out about a hundred pounds of candy before I could get inside of
it, Joe."
"I wouldn't mind an even swap like that," said Joe, complimentary.
Daisy's existence was limited in every way. She had to walk
sideways between the counter and the shelves in the candy store.
In her own hall bedroom coziness had been carried close to
cohesiveness. The walls were so near to one another that the paper
on them made a perfect Babel of noise. She could light the gas
with one hand and close the door with the other without taking her
eyes off the reflection of her brown pompadour in the mirror. She
had Joe's picture in a gilt frame on the dresser, and sometimes--but
her next thought would always be of Joe's funny little store tacked
like a soap box to the corner of that great building, and away
would go her sentiment in a breeze of laughter.
Daisy's other suitor followed Joe by several months. He came to
board in the house where she lived. His name was Dabster, and he
was a philosopher. Though young, attainments stood out upon
him like continental labels on a Passaic (N. J.) suit-case.
Knowledge he had kidnapped from cyclopedias and handbooks of
useful information; but as for wisdom, when she passed he was left
sniffling in the road without so much as the number of her motor
car. He could and would tell you the proportion of water and
muscle-making properties of peas and veal, the shortest verse in
the Bible, the number of pounds of shingle nails required to fasten
256 shingles laid four inches to the weather, the population of
Kankakee, Ill., the theories of Spinoza, the name of Mr. H. McKay
Twombly's second hall footman, the length of the Hoosac Tunnel,
the best time to set a hen, the salary of the railway post-office
messenger between Driftwood and Red Bank Furnace, Pa., and the
number of bones in the foreleg of a cat.
The weight of learning was no handicap to Dabster. His statistics
were the sprigs of parsley with which he garnished the feast of
small talk that he would set before you if he conceived that to be
your taste. And again he used them as breastworks in foraging at
the boardinghouse. Firing at you a volley of figures concerning
the weight of a lineal foot of bar-iron 5 x 2 3/4 inches, and the
average annual rainfall at Fort Snelling, Minn., he would transfix
with his fork the best piece of chicken on the dish while you were
trying to rally sufficiently to ask him weakly why does a hen cross
the road.
Thus, brightly armed, and further equipped with a measure of good
looks, of a hair-oily, shopping-district-at-three-in-the-afternoon
kind, it seems that Joe, of the Lilliputian emporium, had a rival
worthy of his steel.
But Joe carried no steel. There wouldn't have been room in his
store to draw it if he had.
One Saturday afternoon, about four o'clock, Daisy and Mr. Dabster
stopped before Joe's booth. Dabster wore a silk hat, and--well,
Daisy was a woman, and that hat had no chance to get back in its
box until Joe had seen it. A stick of pineapple chewing gum was
the ostensible object of the call. Joe supplied it through the open
side of his store. He did not pale or falter at sight of the hat.
"Mr. Dabster's going to take me on top of the building to observe
the view," said Daisy, after she had introduced her admirers. "I
never was on a skyscraper. I guess it must be awfully nice and
funny up there."
"H'm!" said Joe.
"The panorama," said Mr. Dabster, "exposed to the gaze from the top
of a lofty building is not only sublime, but instructive. Miss
Daisy has a decided pleasure in store for her."
"It's windy up there, too, as well as here," said Joe. "Are you
dressed warm enough, Daise?"
"Sure thing! I'm all lined," said Daisy, smiling slyly at his clouded
brow. "You look just like a mummy in a case, Joe. Ain't you just
put in an invoice of a pint of peanuts or another apple? Your stock
looks awful over-stocked."
Daisy giggled at her favorite joke; and Joe had to smile with her.
"Your quarters are somewhat limited, Mr.--er--er," remarked
Dabster, "in comparison with the size of this building. I
understand the area of its side to be about 340 by 100 feet.
That would make you occupy a proportionate space as if half of
Beloochistan were placed upon a territory as large as the United
States east of the Rocky Mountains, with the Province of Ontario
and Belgium added."
"Is that so, sport?" said Joe, genially. "You are Weisenheimer on
figures, all right. How many square pounds of baled hay do you
think a jackass could eat if he stopped brayin' long enough to keep
still a minute and five eighths?"
A few minutes later Daisy and Mr. Dabster stepped from an elevator
to the top floor of the skyscraper. Then up a short, steep stairway
and out upon the roof. Dabster led her to the parapet so she could
look down at the black dots moving in the street below.
"What are they?" she asked, trembling. She had never before been
on a height like this before.
And then Dabster must needs play the philosopher on the tower,
and conduct her soul forth to meet the immensity of space.
"Bipeds," he said, solemnly. "See what they become even at the
small elevation of 340 feet--mere crawling insects going to and fro
at random."
"Oh, they ain't anything of the kind," exclaimed Daisy, suddenly--
"they're folks! I saw an automobile. Oh, gee! are we that high
up?"
"Walk over this way," said Dabster.
He showed her the great city lying like an orderly array of toys far
below, starred here and there, early as it was, by the first beacon
lights of the winter afternoon. And then the bay and sea to the
south and east vanishing mysteriously into the sky.
"I don't like it," declared Daisy, with troubled blue eyes. "Say we
go down."
But the philosopher was not to be denied his opportunity. He would
let her behold the grandeur of his mind, the half-nelson he had
on the infinite, and the memory he had for statistics. And then
she would nevermore be content to buy chewing gum aat the
smallest store in New York. And so he began to prate of the
smallness of human affairs, and how that even so slight a removal
from earth made man and his works look like one tenth part of a
dollar thrice computed. And that one should consider the sidereal
system and the maxims of Epictetus and be comforted.
"You don't carry me with you," said Daisy. "Say, I think it's awful
to be up so high that folks look like fleas. One of them we saw
might have been Joe. Why, Jiminy! we might as well be in New
Jersey! Say, I'm afraid up here!"
The philosopher smiled fatuously.
"The earth," said he, "is itself only as a grain of wheat in space.
Look up there."
Daisy gazed upward apprehensively. The short day was spent and
the stars were coming out above.
"Yonder star," said Dabster, "is Venus, the evening star. She is
66,000,000 miles from the sun."
"Fudge!" said Daisy, with a brief flash of spirit, "where do you
think I come from--Brooklyn? Susie Price, in our store--her
brother sent her a ticket to go to San Francisco--that's only three
thousand miles."
The philosopher smiled indulgently.
"Our world," he said, "is 91,000,000 miles from the sun. There
are eighteen stars of the first magnitude that are 211,000 times
further from us than the sun is. If one of them should be
extinguished it would be three years before we would see its light
go out. There are six thousand stars of the sixth magnitude. It
takes thirty-six years for the light of one of them to reach the
earth. With an eighteen-foot telescope we can see 43,000,000
stars, including those of the thirteenth magnitude, whose light
takes 2,700 years to reach us. Each of these stars--"
"You're lyin'," cried Daisy, angrily. "You're tryin' to scare me.
And you have; I want to go down!"
She stamped her foot.
"Arcturus--" began the philosopher, soothingly, but he was
interrupted by a demonstration out of the vastness of the nature
that he was endeavoring to portray with his memory instead of his
heart. For to the heart-expounder of nature the stars were set in
the firmament expressly to give soft light to lovers wandering
happily beneath them; and if you stand tiptoe some September night
with your sweetheart on your arm you can almost touch them with
your hand. Three years for their light to reach us, indeed!
Out of the west leaped a meteor, lighting the roof of the skyscraper
almost to midday. Its fiery parabola was limned against the sky
toward the east. It hissed as it went, and Daisy screamed.
"Take me down," she cried, vehemently, "you--you mental arithmetic!"
Dabster got her to the elevator, and inside of it. She was wild-
eyed, and she shuddered when the express made its debilitating
drop.
Outside the revolving door of the skyscraper the philosopher lost
her. She vanished; and he stood, bewildered, without figures or
statistics to aid him.
Joe had a lull in trade, and by squirming among his stock succeeded
in lighting a cigarette and getting one cold foot against the
attenuated stove.
The door was burst open, and Daisy, laughing, crying, scattering
fruit and candies, tumbled into his arms.
"Oh, Joe, I've been up on the skyscraper. Ain't it cozy and warm
and homelike in here! I'm ready for you, Joe, whenever you want
me."
XV
A BIRD OF BAGDAD
Without a doubt much of the spirit and genius of the Caliph Harun
Al Rashid descended to the Margrave August Michael von Paulsen
Quigg.
Quigg's restaurant is in Fourth Avenue--that street that the city
seems to have forgotten in its growth. Fourth Avenue--born and
bred in the Bowery--staggers northward full of good resolutions.
Where it crosses Fourteenth Street it struts for a brief moment
proudly in the glare of the museums and cheap theatres. It may yet
become a fit mate for its high-born sister boulevard to the west, or
its roaring, polyglot, broad-waisted cousin to the east. It passes
Union Square; and here the hoofs of the dray horses seem to thunder
in unison, recalling the tread of marching hosts--Hooray! But now
come the silent and terrible mountains--buildings square as forts,
high as the clouds, shutting out the sky, where thousands of slaves
bend over desks all day. On the ground floors are only little fruit
shops and laundries and book shops, where you see copies of
"Littell's Living Age" and G. W. M. Reynold's novels in the windows.
And next--poor Fourth Avenue!--the street glides into a mediaeval
solitude. On each side are shops devoted to "Antiques."
Let us say it is night. Men in rusty armor stand in the windows
and menace the hurrying cars with raised, rusty iron gauntlets.
Hauberks and helms, blunderbusses, Cromwellian breastplates,
matchlocks, creeses, and the swords and daggers of an army of
dead-and-gone gallants gleam dully in the ghostly light. Here
and there from a corner saloon (lit with Jack-o'-lanterns or
phosphorus), stagger forth shuddering, home-bound citizens,
nerved by the tankards within to their fearsome journey adown
that eldrich avenue lined with the bloodstained weapons of the
fighting dead. What street could live inclosed by these mortuary
relics, and trod by these spectral citizens in whose sunken hearts
scarce one good whoop or tra-la-la remained?
Not Fourth Avenue. Not after the tinsel but enlivening glories of
the Little Rialto--not after the echoing drum-beats of Union Square.
There need be no tears, ladies and gentlemen; 'tis but the suicide
of a street. With a shriek and a crash Fourth Avenue dives headlong
into the tunnel at Thirty-fourth and is never seen again.
Near the sad scene of the thoroughfare's dissolution stood the
modest restaurant of Quigg. It stands there yet if you care to view
its crumbling red-brick front, its show window heaped with oranges,
tomatoes, layer cakes, pies, canned asparagus--its papier-m^ach'e
lobster and two Maltese kittens asleep on a bunch of lettuce--if you
care to sit at one of the little tables upon whose cloth has been
traced in the yellowest of coffee stains the trail of the Japanese
advance--to sit there with one eye on your umbrella and the other
upon the bogus bottle from which you drop the counterfeit sauce
foisted upon us by the cursed charlatan who assumes to be our dear
old lord and friend, the "Nobleman in India."
Quigg's title came through his mother. One of her ancestors was a
Margravine of Saxony. His father was a Tammany brave. On account
of the dilution of his heredity he found that he could neither
become a reigning potentate nor get a job in the City Hall. So he
opened a restaurant. He was a man full of thought and reading.
The business gave him a living, though he gave it little attention.
One side of his house bequeathed to him a poetic and romantic
adventure. The other have him the restless spirit that made him
seek adventure. By day he was Quigg, the restaurateur. By night
he was the Margrave--the Caliph--the Prince of Bohemia--going about
the city in search of the odd, the mysterious, the inexplicable,
the recondite.
One night at 9, at which hour the restaurant closed, Quigg set forth
upon his quest. There was a mingling of the foreign, the military
and the artistic in his appearance as he buttoned his coat high up
under his short-trimmed brown and gray beard and turned westward
toward the more central life conduits of the city. In his pocket
he had stored an assortment of cards, written upon, without which
he never stirred out of doors. Each of those cards was good at
his own restaurant for its face value. Some called simply for a
bowl of soup or sandwiches and coffee; others entitled their bearer
to one, two, three or more days of full meals; a few were for single
regular meals; a very few were, in effect, meal tickets good for a
week.
Of riches and power Margrave Quigg had none; but he had a Caliph's
heart--it may be forgiven him if his head fell short of the
measure of Harun Al Rashid's. Perhaps some of the gold pieces in
Bagdad had put less warmth and hope into the complainants among
the bazaars than had Quigg's beef stew among the fishermen and
one-eyed calenders of Manhattan.
Continuing his progress in search of romance to divert him, or
of distress that he might aid, Quigg became aware of a fast-
gathering crowd that whooped and fought and eddied at a corner
of Broadway and the crosstown street that he was traversing.
Hurrying to the spot he beheld a young man of an exceedingly
melancholy and preoccupied demeanor engaged in the pastime of
casting silver money from his pockets in the middle of the
street. With each motion of the generous one's hand the crowd
huddled upon the falling largesse with yells of joy. Traffic
was suspended. A policman in the centre of the mob stooped
often to the ground as he urged the blockaders to move on.
The Margrave saw at a glance that here was food for his hunger
after knowledge concerning abnormal working of the human heart.
He made his way swiftly to the young man's side and took his arm.
"Come with me at once," he said, in the low but commanding voice
that his waiters had learned to fear.
"Pinched," remarked the young man, looking up at him with
expressionless eyes. "Pinched by a painless dentist. Take me
away, flatty, and give me gas. Some lay eggs and some lay none.
When is a hen?"
Still deeply seized by some inward grief, but tractable, he allowed
Quigg to lead him away and down the street to a little park.
There, seated on a bench, he upon whom a corner of the great
Caliph's mantle has descended, spake with kindness and discretion,
seeking to know what evil had come upon the other, disturbing
his soul and driving him to such ill-considered and ruinous waste
of his substance and stores.
"I was doing the Monte Cristo act as adapted by Pompton, N. J.,
wasn't I?" asked the young man.
"You were throwing small coins into the street for the people to
scramble after," said the Margrave.
"That's it. You buy all the beer you can hold, and then you throw
chicken feed to-- Oh, curse that word chicken, and hens, feathers,
roosters, eggs, and everything connected with it!"
"Young sir," said the Margrave kindly, but with dignity, "though I
do not ask your confidence, I invite it. I know the world and I
know humanity. Man is my study, though I do not eye him as the
scientist eyes a beetle or as the philanthropist gazes at the objects
of his bounty--through a veil of theory and ignorance. It is my
pleasure and distraction to interest myself in the peculiar and
complicated misfortunes that life in a great city visits upon my
fellow-men. You may be familiar with the history of that glorious
and immortal ruler, the Caliph Harun Al Rashid, whose wise and
beneficent excursions among his people in the city of Bagdad
secured him the privilege of relieving so much of their distress.
In my humble way I walk in his footsteps. I seek for romance and
adventure in city streets--not in ruined castles or in crumbling
palaces. To me the greatest marvels of magic are those that take
place in men's hearts when acted upon by the furious and diverse
forces of a crowded population. In your strange behavior this
evening I fancy a story lurks. I read in your act something deeper
than the wanton wastefulness of a spendthrift. I observe in your
countenance the certain traces of consuming grief or despair. I
repeat--I invite your confidence. I am not without some power to
alleviate and advise. Will you not trust me?"
"Gee, how you talk!" exclaimed the young man, a gleam of admiration
supplanting for a moment the dull sadness of his eyes. "You've got
the Astor Library skinned to a synopsis of preceding chapters.
I mind that old Turk you speak of. I read 'The Arabian Nights'
when I was a kid. He was a kind of Bill Devery and Charlie
Schwab rolled into one. But, say, you might wave enchanted
dishrags and make copper bottles smoke up coon giants all night
without ever touching me. My case won't yield to that kind
of treatment."
"If I could hear your story," said the Margrave, with his lofty,
serious smile.
"I'll spiel it in about nine words," said the young man, with a
deep sigh, "but I don't think you can help me any. Unless you're
a peach at guessing it's back to the Bosphorous for you on your
magic linoleum."
THE STORY OF THE YOUNG MAN AND THE HARNESS MAKER'S RIDDLE
"I work in Hildebrant's saddle and harness shop down in Grant
Street. I've worked there five years. I get $18 a week. That's
enough to marry on, ain't it? Well, I'm not going to get married.
Old Hildebrant is one of these funny Dutchmen--you know the
kind--always getting off bum jokes. He's got about a million
riddles and things that he faked from Rogers Brothers' great-
grandfather. Bill Watson works there, too. Me and Bill have to
stand for them chestnuts day after day. Why do we do it? Well,
jobs ain't to be picked off every Anheuser bush-- And then there's
Laura.
"What? The old man's daughter. Comes in the shop every day.
About nineteen, and the picture of the blonde that sits on the
palisades of the Rhine and charms the clam-diggers into the surf.
Hair the color of straw matting, and eyes as black and shiny as the
best harness blacking--think of that!
"Me? well, it's either me or Bill Watson. She treats us both equal.
Bill is all to the psychopathic about her; and me?--well, you saw
me plating the roadbed of the Great Maroon Way with silver to-
night. That was on account of Laura. I was spiflicated, Your
Highness, and I wot not of what I wouldst.
"How? Why, old Hildebrandt say to me and Bill this afternoon:
'Boys, one riddle have I for you gehabt haben. A young man who
cannot riddles antworten, he is not so good by business for ein
family to provide--is not that--hein?' And he hands us a riddle--
a conundrum, some calls it--and he chuckles interiorly and gives
both of us till to-morrow morning to work out the answer to it.
And he says whichever of us guesses the repartee end of it goes to
his house o' Wednesday night to his daughter's birthday party.
And it means Laura for whichever of us goes, for she's naturally
aching for a husband, and it's either me or Bill Watson, for old
Hildebrant likes us both, and wants her to marry somebody that'll
carry on the business after he's stitched his last pair of traces.
"The riddle? Why, it was this: 'What kind of a hen lays the
longest? Think of that! What kind of a hen lays the longest?
Ain't it like a Dutchman to risk a man's happiness on a fool
proposition like that? Now, what's the use? What I don't know
about hens would fill several incubators. You say you're giving
imitations of the old Arab guy that gave away--libraries in Bagdad.
Well, now, can you whistle up a fairy that'll solve this hen query,
or not?"
When the young man ceased the Margrave arose and paced to and
fro by the park bench for several minutes. Finally he sat again,
and said, in grave and impressive tones:
"I must confess, sir, that during the eight years that I have spent
in search of adventure and in relieving distress I have never
encountered a more interesting or a more perplexing case. I fear
that I have overlooked hens in my researches and observations. As
to their habits, their times and manner of laying, their many
varieties and cross-breedings, their span of life, their--"
"Oh, don't make an Ibsen drama of it!" interrupted the young man,
flippantly. "Riddles--especially old Hildebrant's riddles--don't
have to be worked out seriously. They are light themes such as
Sim Ford and Harry Thurston Peck like to handle. But, somehow,
I can't strike just the answer. Bill Watson may, and he may not.
To-morrow will tell. Well, Your Majesty, I'm glad anyhow that
you butted in and whiled the time away. I guess Mr. Al Rashid
himself would have bounced back if one of his constituents had
conducted him up against this riddle. I'll say good night. Peace
fo' yours, and what-you-may-call-its of Allah."
The Margrave, still with a gloomy air, held out his hand.
"I cannot exppress my regret," he said, sadly. "Never before have
I found myself unable to assist in some way. 'What kind of a hen
lays the longest? It is a baffling problem. There is a hen, I
believe, called the Plymouth Rock that--"
"Cut it out," said the young man. "The Caliph trade is a mighty
serious one. I don't suppose you'd even see anything funny in a
preacher's defense of John D. Rockefeller. Well, good night, Your
Nibs."
From habit the Margrave began to fumble in his pockets. He drew
forth a card and handed it to the young man.
"Do me the favor to accept this, anyhow," he said. "The time may
come when it might be of use to you."
"Thanks!" said the young man, pocketing it carelessly. "My name
is Simmons."
* * * * * *
Shame to him who would hint that the reader's interest shall
altogether pursue the Margrave August Michael von Paulsen
Quigg. I am indeed astray if my hand fail in keeping the way
where my peruser's heart would follow. Then let us, on the
morrow, peep quickly in at the door of Hildebrant, harness maker.
Hildebrant's 200 pounds reposed on a bench, silverbuckling a raw
leather martingale.
Bill Watson came in first.
"Vell," said Hildebrant, shaking all over with the vile conceit of
the joke-maker, "haf you guessed him? 'Vat kind of a hen lays der
longest?'"
"Er--why, I think so," said Bill, rubbing a servile chin. "I think so,
Mr. Hildebrant--the one that lives the longest-- Is that right?"
"Nein!" said Hildebrant, shaking his head violently. "You haf not
guessed der answer."
Bill passed on and donned a bed-tick apron and bachelorhood.
In came the young man of the Arabian Night's fiasco--pale,
melancholy, hopeless.
"Vell," said Hildebrant, "haf you guessed him? 'Vat kind of a hen
lays der longest?'"
Simmons regarded him with dull savagery in his eye. Should he
curse this mountain of pernicious humor--curse him and die?
Why should-- But there was Laura.
Dogged, speechless, he thrust his hands into his coat pockets and
stood. His hand encountered the strange touch of the Margrave's
card. He drew it out and looked at it, as men about to be hanged
look at a crawling fly. There was written on it in Quigg's bold,
round hand: "Good for one roast chicken to bearer."
Simmons looked up with a flashing eye.
"A dead one!" said he.
"Goot!" roared Hildebrant, rocking the table with giant glee. "Dot
is right! You gome at mine house at 8 o'clock to der party."
XVI
COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON
There are no more Christmas stories to write. Fiction is exhausted;
and newspaper items, the next best, are manufactured by clever
young journalists who have married early and have an engagingly
pessimistic view of life. Therefore, for seasonable diversion, we
are reduced to very questionable sources--facts and philosophy.
We will begin with--whichever you choose to call it.
Children are pestilential little animals with which we have to cope
under a bewildering variety of conditions. Especially when
childish sorrows overwhelm them are we put to our wits' end. We
exhaust our paltry store of consolation; and then beat them,
sobbing, to sleep. Then we grovel in the dust of a million years,
and ask God why. Thus we call out of the rat-trap. As for the
children, no one understands them except old maids, hunchbacks,
and shepherd dogs.
Now comes the facts in the case of the Rag-Doll, the Tatterdemalion,
and the Twenty-fifth of December.
On the tenth of that month the Child of the Millionaire lost her
rag-doll. There were many servants in the Millionaire's palace on
the Hudson, and these ransacked the house and grounds, but without
finding the lost treasure. The child was a girl of five, and one
of those perverse little beasts that often wound the sensibilities
of wealthy parents by fixing their affections upon some vulgar,
inexpensive toy instead of upon diamond-studded automobiles and
pony phaetons.
The Child grieved sorely and truly, a thing inexplicable to the
Millionaire, to whom the rag-doll market was about as interesting
as Bay State Gas; and to the Lady, the Child's mother, who was all
form--that is, nearly all, as you shall see.
The Child cried inconsolably, and grew hollow-eyed, knock-kneed,
spindling, and corykilverty in many other respects. The Millionaire
smiled and tapped his coffers confidently. The pick of the output
of the French and German toymakers was rushed by special delivery
to the mansion; but Rachel refused to be comforted. She was weeping
for her rag child, and was for a high protective tariff against all
foreign foolishness. Then doctors with the finest bedside manners
and stop-watches were called in. One by one they chattered futilely
about peptomanganate of iron and sea voyages and hypophosphites
until their stop-watches showed that Bill Rendered was under the
wire for show or place. Then, as men, they advised that the
rag-doll be found as soon as possible and restored to its mourning
parent. The Child sniffed at therapeutics, chewed a thumb, and
wailed for her Betsy. And all this time cablegrams were coming
from Santa Claus saying that he would soon be here and enjoining us
to show a true Christian spirit and let up on the pool-rooms and
tontine policies and platoon systems long enough to give him a
welcome. Everywhere the spirit of Christmas was diffusing itself.
The banks were refusing loans, the pawn-brokers had doubled their
gang of helpers, people bumped your shins on the streets with red
sleds, Thomas and Jeremiah bubbled before you on the bars while you
waited on one foot, holly-wreaths of hospitality were hung in windows
of the stores, they who had 'em were getting their furs. You hardly
knew which was the best bet in balls--three, high, moth, or snow.
It was no time at which to lose the rag-doll or your heart.
If Doctor Watson's investigating friend had been called in to
solve this mysterious disappearance he might have observed on the
Millionaire's wall a copy of "The Vampire." That would have
quickly suggested, by induction, "A rag and a bone and a hank of
hair." "Flip," a Scotch terrier, next to the rag-doll in the Child's
heart, frisked through the halls. The hank of hair! Aha! X, the
unfound quantity, represented the rag-doll. But, the bone? Well,
when dogs find bones they--Done! It were an easy and a fruitful
task to examine Flip's forefeet. Look, Watson! Earth--dried earth
between the toes. Of course, the dog--but Sherlock was not there.
Therefore it devolves. But topography and architecture must
intervene.
The Millionaire's palace occupied a lordly space. In front of it
was a lawn close-mowed as a South Ireland man's face two days after
a shave. At one side of it, and fronting on another street was
a pleasuance trimmed to a leaf, and the garage and stables. The
Scotch pup had ravished the rag-doll from the nursery, dragged it
to a corner of the lawn, dug a hole, and buried it after the manner
of careless undertakers. There you have the mystery solved, and
no checks to write for the hypodermical wizard of fi'-pun notes to
toss to the sergeant. Then let's get down to the heart of the thing,
tiresome readers--the Christmas heart of the thing.
Fuzzy was drunk--not riotously or helplessly or loquaciously, as
you or I might get, but decently, appropriately, and inoffensively,
as becomes a gentleman down on his luck.
Fuzzy was a soldier of misfortune. The road, the haystack, the
park bench, the kitchen door, the bitter round of eleemosynary
beds-with-shower-bath-attachment, the petty pickings and ignobly
garnered largesse of great cities--these formed the chapters of his
history.
Fuzzy walked toward the river, down the street that bounded one
side of the Millionaire's house and grounds. He saw a leg of
Betsy, the lost rag-doll, protruding, like the clue to a Lilliputian
murder mystery, from its untimely grave in a corner of the fence.
He dragged forth the maltreated infant, tucked it under his arm,
and went on his way crooning a road song of his brethrren that no
doll that has been brought up to the sheltered life should hear.
Well for Betsy that she had no ears. And well that she had no eyes
save unseeing circles of black; for the faces of Fuzzy and the
Scotch terrier were those of brothers, and the heart of no rag-doll
could withstand twice to become the prey of such fearsome
monsters.
Though you may not know it, Grogan's saloon stands near the river
and near the foot of the street down which Fuzzy traveled. In
Grogan's, Christmas cheer was already rampant.
Fuzzy entered with his doll. He fancied that as a mummer at the
feast of Saturn he might earn a few drops from the wassail cup.
He set Betsy on the bar and addressed her loudly and humorously,
seasoning his speech with exaggerated compliments and endearments,
as one entertaining his lady friend. The loafers and bibbers
around caught the farce of it, and roared. The bartender gave
Fuzzy a drink. Oh, many of us carry rag-dolls.
"One for the lady?" suggested Fuzzy impudently, and tucked another
contribution to Art beneath his waistcoat.
He began to see possibilities in Betsy. His first-night had been
a success. Visions of a vaudeville circuit about town dawned upon
him.
In a group near the stove sat "Pigeon" McCarthy, Black Riley, and
"One-ear" Mike, well and unfavorably known in the tough shoestring
district that blackened the left bank of the river. They passed
a newspaper back and forth among themselves. The item that each
solid and blunt forefinger pointed out was an advertisement headed
"One Hundred Dollars Reward." To earn it one must return the
rag-doll lost, strayed, or stolen from the Millionaire's mansion.
It seemed that grief still ravaged, unchecked, in the bosom of
the too faithful Child. Flip, the terrier, capered and shook his
absurd whisker before her, powerless to distract. She wailed
for her Betsy in the faces of walking, talking, mama-ing, and
eye-closing French Mabelles and Violettes. The advertisement
was a last resort.
Black Riley came from behind the stove and approached Fuzzy in
his one-sided parabolic way.
The Christmas mummer, flushed with success, had tucked Betsy under
his arm, and was about to depart to the filling of impromptu dates
elsewhere.
"Say, 'Bo," said Black Riley to him, "where did you cop out dat
doll?"
"This doll?" asked Fuzzy, touching Betsy with his forefinger to be
sure that she was the one referred to. his doll was presented to
me by the Emperor of Beloochistan. I have seven hundred others in
my country home in Newport. This doll--"
"Cheese the funny business," said Riley. "You swiped it or picked
it up at de house on de hill where--but never mind dat. You want
to take fifty cents for de rags, and take it quick. Me brother's
kid at home might be wantin' to play wid it. Hey--what?"
He produced the coin.
Fuzzy laughed a gurgling, insolent, alcoholic laugh in his face.
Go to the office of Sarah Bernhardt's manager and propose to him
that she be released from a night's performance to entertain
the Tackytown Lyceum and Literary Coterie. You will hear the
duplicate of Fuzzy's laugh.
Black Riley gauged Fuzzy quickly with his blueberry eye as a
wrestler does. His hand was itching to play the Roman and wrest
the rag Sabine from the extemporaneous merry-andrew who was
entertaining an angel unaware. But he refrained. Fuzzy was fat
and solid and big. Three inches of well-nourished corporeity,
defended from the winter winds by dingy linen, intervened between
his vest and trousers. Countless small, circular wrinkles
running around his coat-sleeves and knees guaranteed the quality
of his bone and muscle. His small, blue eyes, bathed in the
moisture of altruism and wooziness, looked upon you kindly, yet
without abashment. He was whiskerly, whiskyly, fleshily
formidable. So, Black Riley temporized.
"Wot'll you take for it, den?" he asked.
"Money," said Fuzzy, with husky firmness, "cannot buy her."
He was intoxicated with the artist's first sweet cup of attainment.
To set a faded-blue, earth-stained rag-doll on a bar, to hold mimic
converse with it, and to find his heart leaping with the sense of
plaudits earned and his throat scorching with free libations poured
in his honor--could base coin buy him from such achievements? You
will perceive that Fuzzy had the temperament.
Fuzzy walked out with the gait of a trained sea-lion in search of
other caf'es to conquer.
Though the dusk of twilight was hardly yet apparent, lights were
beginning to spangle the city like pop-corn bursting in a deep
skillet. Christmas Eve, impatiently expected, was peeping over
the brink of the hour. Millions had prepared for its celebration.
Towns would be painted red. You, yourself, have heard the horns
and dodged the capers of the Saturnalians.
"Pigeon" McCarthy, Black Riley, and "One-ear" Mike held a hasty
converse outside Grogan's. They were narrow-chested, pallid
striplings, not fighters in the open, but more dangerous in their
ways of warfare than the most terrible of Turks. Fuzzy, in a
pitched battle, could have eaten the three of them. In a go-as-you-
please encounter he was already doomed.
They overtook him just as he and Betsy were entering Costigan's
Casino. They deflected him, and shoved the newspaper under his
nose. Fuzzy could read--and more.
"Boys," said he, "you are certainly damn true friends. Give me a
week to think it over."
The soul of a real artist is quenched with difficulty.
The boys carefully pointed out to him that advertisements were
soulless, and that the deficiencies of the day might not be supplied
by the morrow.
"A cool hundred," said Fuzzy thoughtfully and mushily.
"Booys," said he, "you are true friends. I'll go up and claim the
reward. The show business is not what it used to be."
Night was falling more surely. The three tagged at his sides to
the foot of the rise on which stood the Millionaire's house. There
Fuzzy turned upon them acrimoniously.
"You are a pack of putty-faced beagle-hounds," he roared. "Go
away."
They went away--a little way.
In "Pigeon" McCarthy's pocket was a section of one-inch gas-pipe
eight inches long. In one end of it and in the middle of it was
a lead plug. One-half of it was packed tight with solder. Black
Riley carried a slung-shot, being a conventional thug. "One-ear"
Mike relied upon a pair of brass knucks--an heirloom in the
family.
"Why fetch and carry," said Black Riley, "when some one will do
it for ye? Let him bring it out to us. Hey--what?"
"We can chuck him in the river," said "Pigeon" McCarthy, "with a
stone tied to his feet."
"Youse guys make me tired," said "One-ear" Mike sadly. "Ain't
progress ever appealed to none of yez? Sprinkle a little gasoline
on 'im, and drop 'im on the Drive--well?"
Fuzzy entered the Millionaire's gate and zigzagged toward the
softly glowing entrance of the mansion. The three goblins came up
to the gate and lingered--one on each side of it, one beyond the
roadway. They fingered their cold metal and leather, confident.
Fuzzy rang the door-bell, smiling foolishly and dreamily. An
atavistic instrinct prompted him to reach for the button of his right
glove. But he wore no gloves; so his left hand dropped, embarrassed.
The particular menial whose duty it was to open doors to silks and
laces shied at first sight of Fuzzy. But a second glance took in
his passport, his card of admission, his surety of welcome--the lost
rag-doll of the daughter of the house dangling under his arm.
Fuzzy was admitted into a great hall, dim with the glow from
unseen lights. The hireling went away and returned with a maid
and the Child. The doll was restored to the mourning one. She
clasped her lost darling to her breast; and then, with the
inordinate selfishness and candor of childhood, stamped her foot
and whined hatred and fear of the odious being who had rescued her
from the depths of sorrow and despair. Fuzzy wriggled himself
into an ingratiatory attitude and essayed the idiotic smile and
blattering small talk that is supposed to charm the budding
intellect of the young. The Child bawled, and was dragged away,
hugging her Betsy close.
There came the Secretary, pale, poised, polished, gliding in
pumps, and worshipping pomp and ceremony. He counted out into
Fuzzy's hand ten ten-dollar bills; then dropped his eye upon
the door, transferred it to James, its custodian, indicated the
obnoxious earner of the reward with the other, and allowed his
pumps to waft him away to secretarial regions.
James gathered Fuzzy with his own commanding optic and swept him
as far as the front door.
When the money touched fuzzy's dingy palm his first instinct was
to take to his heels; but a second thought restrained him from that
blunder of etiquette. It was his; it had been given him. It--and,
oh, what an elysium it opened to the gaze of his mind's eye! He
had tumbled to the foot of the ladder; he was hungry, homeless,
friendless, ragged, cold, drifting; and he held in his hand the key
to a paradise of the mud-honey that he craved. The fairy doll had
waved a wand with her rag-stuffed hand; and now wherever he might go
the enchanted palaces with shining foot-rests and magic red fluids
in gleaming glassware would be open to him.
He followed James to the door.
He paused there as the flunky drew open the great mahogany portal
for him to pass into the vestibule.
Beyond the wrought-iron gates in the dark highway Black Riley and his
two pals casually strolled, fingering under their coats the inevitably
fatal weapons that were to make the reward of the rag-doll theirs.
Fuzzy stopped at the Millionaire's door and bethought himself.
Like little sprigs of mistletoe on a dead tree, certain living green
thoughts and memories began to decorate his confused mind. He was
quite drunk, mind you, and the present was beginning to fade. Those
wreaths aand festoons of holly with their scarlet berries making
the great hall gay--where had he seen such things before? Somewhere
he had known polished floors and odors of fresh flowers in winter,
and--and some one was singing a song in the house that he thought
he had heard before. Some one singing and playing a harp. Of course,
it was Christmas--Fuzzy though he must have been pretty drunk to have
overlooked that.
And then he went out of the present, and there came back to him
out of some impossible, vanished, and irrevocable past a little,
pure-white, transient, forgotten ghost--the spirit of _nobless
oblige_. Upon a gentleman certain things devolve.
James opened the outer door. A stream of light went down the
graveled walk to the iron gate. Black Riley, McCarthy, and
"One-ear" Mike saw, and carelessly drew their sinister cordon closer
about the gate.
With a more imperious gesture than James's master had ever used
or could ever use, Fuzzy compelled the menial to close the door.
Upon a gentleman certain things devolve. Especially at the
Christmas season.
"It is cust--customary," he said to James, the flustered, "when
a gentleman calls on Christmas Eve to pass the compliments of the
season with the lady of the house. You und'stand? I shall not
move shtep till I pass compl'ments season with lady the house.
Und'stand?"
There was an argument. James lost. Fuzzy raised his voice and
sent it through the house unpleasantly. I did not say he was a
gentleman. He was simply a tramp being visited by a ghost.
A sterling silver bell rang. James went back to answer it, leaving
Fuzzy in the hall. James explained somewhere to some one.
Then he came and conducted Fuzzy into the library.
The lady entered a moment later. She was more beautiful and holy
than any picture that Fuzzy had seen. She smiled, and said
something about a doll. Fuzzy didn't understand that; he
remembered nothing about a doll.
A footman brought in two small glasses of sparkling wine on a
stamped sterling-silver waiter. The Lady took one. The other was
handed to Fuzzy.
As his fingers closed on the slender glass stem his disabilities
dropped from him for one brief moment. He straightened himself;
and Time, so disobliging to most of us, turned backward to
accomodate Fuzzy.
Forgotten Christmas ghosts whiter than the false beards of the
most opulent Kris Kringle were rising in the fumes of Grogan's
whisky. What had the Millionaire's mansion to do with a long,
wainscoted Virginia hall, where the riders were grouped around a
silver punch-bowl, drinking the ancient toast of the House? And
why should the patter of the cab horses' hoofs on the frozen street
be in any wise related to the sound of the saddled hunters stamping
under the shelter of the west veranda? And what had Fuzzy to do
with any of it?
The Lady, looking at him over her glass, let her condescending
smile fade away like a false dawn. Her eyes turned serious. She
saw something beneath the rags and Scotch terrier whiskers that
she did not understand. But it did not matter.
Fuzzy lifted his glass and smiled vacantly.
"P-pardon, lady," he said, "but couldn't leave without exchangin'
comp'ments sheason with lady th' house. 'Gainst princ'ples
gen'leman do sho."
And then he began the ancient salutation that was a tradition in the
House when men wore lace ruffles and powder.
"The blessings of another year--"
Fuzzy's memory failed him. The Lady prompted:
"--Be upon this hearth."
"--The guest--" stammered Fuzzy.
"--And upon her who--" continued the Lady, with a leading smile.
"Oh, cut it out," said Fuzzy, ill-manneredly. "I can't remember.
Drink hearty."
Fuzzy had shot his arrow. They drank. The Lady smiled again the
smile of her caste. James enveloped and re-conducted him toward
the front door. The harp music still softly drifted through the
house.
Outside, Black Riley breathed on his cold hands and hugged the
gate.
"I wonder," said the Lady to herself, musing, "who--but there were
so many who came. I wonder whether memory is a curse or a blessing
to them after they have fallen so low."
Fuzzy and his escort were nearly at the door. The Lady called:
"James!"
James stalked back obsequiously, leaving Fuzzy waiting unsteadily,
with his brief spark of the divine fire gone.
Outside, Black Riley stamped his cold feet and got a firmer grip
on his section of gas-pipe.
"You will conduct this gentleman," said the lady, "Downstairs.
Then tell Louis to get out the Mercedes and take him to whatever
place he wishes to go."
XVII
A NIGHT IN NEW ARABIA
The great city of Bagdad-on-the-Subway is caliph-ridden. Its
palaces, bazaars, khans, and byways are thronged with Al Rashids
in divers disguises, seeking diversion and victims for their
unbridled generosity. You can scarcely find a poor beggar whom
they are willing to let enjoy his spoils unsuccored, nor a wrecked
unfortunate upon whom they will not reshower the means of fresh
misfortune. You will hardly find anywhere a hungry one who has
not had the opportunity to tighten his belt in gift libraries, nor
a poor pundit who has not blushed at the holiday basket of celery-
crowned turkey forced resoundingly through his door by the
eleemosynary press.
So then, fearfully through the Harun-haunted streets creep the
one-eyed calenders, the Little Hunchback and the Barber's Sixth
Brother, hoping to escape the ministrations of the roving horde
of caliphoid sultans.
Entertainment for many Arabian nights might be had from the
histories of those who have escaped the largesse of the army of
Commanders of the Faithful. Until dawn you might sit on the
enchanted rug and listen to such stories as are told of the powerful
genie Roc-Ef-El-Er who sent the Forty Thieves to soak up the oil
plant of Ali Baba; of the good Caliph Kar-Neg-Ghe, who gave
away palaces; of the Seven Voyages of Sailbad, the Sinner, who
frequented wooden excursion steamers among the islands; of the
Fisherman and the Bottle; of the Barmecides' Boarding house; of
Aladdin's rise to wealth by means of his Wonderful Gasmeter.
But now, there being ten sultans to one Sheherazade, she is held too
valuable to be in fear of the bowstring. In consequence the art of
narrative languishes. And, as the lesser caliphs are hunting the
happy poor and the resigned unfortunate from cover to cover in order
to heap upon them strange mercies and mysterious benefits, too often
comes the report from Arabian headquarters that the captive refused
"to talk."
This reticence, then, in the actors who perform the sad comedies of
their philanthropy-scourged world, must, in a degree, account for
the shortcomings of this painfully gleaned tale, which shall be
called
THE STORY OF THE CALIPH WHO ALLEVIATED HIS CONSCIENCE
Old Jacob Spraggins mixed for himself some Scotch and lithia water
at his $1,200 oak sideboard. Inspiration must have resulted from
its imbibition, for immediately afterward he struck the quartered
oak soundly with his fist and shouted to the empty dining room:
"By the coke ovens of hell, it must be that ten thousand dollars!
If I can get that squared, it'll do the trick."
Thus, by the commonest artifice of the trade, having gained your
interest, the action of the story will now be suspended, leaving you
grumpily to consider a sort of dull biography beginning fifteen
years before.
When old Jacob was young Jacob he was a breaker boy in a Pennsylvania
coal mine. I don't know what a breaker boy is; but his occupation
seems to be standing by a coal dump with a wan look and a dinner-pail
to have his picture taken for magazine articles. Anyhow, Jacob was
one. But, instead of dying of overwork at nine, and leaving his
helpless parents and brothers at the mercy of the union strikers'
reserve fund, he hitched up his galluses, put a dollar or two in a
side proposition now and then, and at forty-five was worth
$20,000,000.
There now! it's over. Hardly had time to yawn, did you? I've seen
biographies that--but let us dissemble.
I want you to consider Jacob Spraggins, Esq., after he had arrived
at the seventh stage of his career. The stages meant are, first,
humble origin; second, deserved promotion; third, stockholder;
fourth, capitalist; fifth, trust magnate; sixth, rich malefactor;
seventh, caliph; eighth, _x_. The eighth stage shall be left to
the higher mathematics.
At fifty-five Jacob retired from active business. The income of a
czar was still rolling in on him from coal, iron, real estate, oil,
railroads, manufactories, and corporations, but none of it touched
Jacob's hands in a raw state. It was a sterilized increment,
carefully cleaned and dusted and fumigated until it arrived at its
ultimate stage of untainted, spotless checks in the white fingers of
his private secretary. Jacob built a three-million-dollar palace on
a corner lot fronting on Nabob Avenue, city of New Bagdad, and
began to feel the mantle of the late H. A. Rashid descending upon
him. Eventually Jacob slipped the mantle under his collar, tied it
in a neat four-in-hand, and became a licensed harrier of our
Mesopotamian proletariat.
When a man's income becomes so large that the butcher actually
sends him the kind of steak he orders, he begins to think about his
soul's salvation. Now, the various stages or classes of rich men
must not be forgotten. The capitalist can tell you to a dollar the
amount of his wealth. The trust magnate "estimates" it. The rich
malefactor hands you a cigar and denies that he has bought the P.
D. & Q. The caliph merely smiles and talks about Hammerstein and
the musical lasses. There is a record of tremendous altercation
at breakfast in a "Where-to-Dine-Well" tavern between a magnate
and his wife, the rift within the loot being that the wife calculated
their fortune at a figure $3,000,000 higher than did her future
_divorc'e_. Oh, well, I, myself, heard a similar quarrel between a
man and his wife because he found fifty cents less in his pockets
than he thought he had. After all, we are all human--Count Tolstoi,
R. Fitzsimmons, Peter Pan, and the rest of us.
Don't lose heart because the story seems to be degenerating into a
sort of moral essay for intellectual readers.
There will be dialogue and stage business pretty soon.
When Jacob first began to compare the eyes of needles with the
camels in the Zoo he decided upon organized charity. He had his
secretary send a check for one million to the Universal Benevolent
Association of the Globe. You may have looked down through a
grating in front of a decayed warehouse for a nickel that you had
dropped through. But that is neither here nor there. The
Association acknowledged receipt of his favor of the 24th ult. with
enclosure as stated. Separated by a double line, but still mighty
close to the matter under the caption of "Oddities of the Day's
News" in an evening paper, Jacob Spraggins read that one "Jasper
Spargyous" had "donated $100,000 to the U. B. A. of G." A camel
may have a stomach for each day in the week; but I dare not venture
to accord him whiskers, for fear of the Great Displeasure at
Washington; but if he have whiskers, surely not one of them will
seem to have been inserted in the eye of a needle by that effort of
that rich man to enter the K. of H. The right is reserved to reject
any and all bids; signed, S. Peter, secretary and gatekeeper.
Next, Jacob selected the best endowed college he could scare up
and presented it with a $200,000 laboratory. The college did not
maintain a scientific course, but it accepted the money and built
an elaborate lavatory instead, which was no diversion of funds so
far as Jacob ever discovered.
The faculty met and invited Jacob to come over and take his A B C
degree. Before sending the invitation they smiled, cut out the C,
added the proper punctuation marks, and all was well.
While walking on the campus before being capped and gowned,
Jacob saw two professors strolling nearby. Their voices, long
adapted to indoor acoustics, undesignedly reached his ear.
"There goes the latest _chevalier d'industrie_," said one of them,
"to buy a sleeping powder from us. He gets his degree to-morrow."
"_In foro conscientai_," said the other. "Let's 'eave 'arf a brick
at 'im."
Jacob ignored the Latin, but the brick pleasantry was not too hard
for him. There was no mandragora in the honorary draught of
learning that he had bought. That was before the passage of the
Pure Food and Drugs Act.
Jacob wearied of philanthropy on a large scale.
"If I could see folks made happier," he said to himself--"If I could
see 'em myself and hear 'em express their gratitude for what I done
for 'em it would make me feel better. This donatin' funds to
institutions and societies is about as satisfactory as dropping
money into a broken slot machine."
So Jacob followed his nose, which led him through unswept streets
to the homes of the poorest.
"The very thing!" said Jacob. "I will charter two river steamboats,
pack them full of these unfortunate children and--say ten thousand
dolls and drums and a thousand freezers of ice cream, and give
them a delightful outing up the Sound. The sea breezes on that
trip ought to blow the taint off some of this money that keeps
coming in faster than I can work it off my mind."
Jacob must have leaked some of his benevolent intentions, for an
immense person with a bald face and a mouth that looked as if it
ought to have a "Drop Letters Here" sign over it hooked a finger
around him and set him in a space between a barber's pole and a
stack of ash cans. Words came out of the post-office slit--smooth,
husky words with gloves on 'em, but sounding as if they might turn
to bare knuckles any moment.
"Say, Sport, do you know where you are at? Well, dis is Mike
O'Grady's district you're buttin' into--see? Mike's got de stomach-
ache privilege for every kid in dis neighborhood--see? And if
dere's any picnics or red balloons to be dealt out here, Mike's
money pays for 'em--see? Don't you butt in, or something'll be
handed to you. Youse d--- settlers and reformers with your social
ologies and your millionaire detectives have got dis district in a
hell of a fix, anyhow. With your college students and professors
rough-housing de soda-water stands and dem rubber-neck coaches
fillin' de streets, de folks down here are 'fraid to go out of de
houses. Now, you leave 'em to Mike. Dey belongs to him, and he
knows how to handle 'em. Keep on your own side of de town. Are
you some wiser now, uncle, or do you want to scrap wit' Mike
O'Grady for de Santa Claus belt in dis district?"
Clearly, that spot in the moral vineyard was preempted. So Caliph
Spraggins menaced no more the people in the bazaars of the East
Side. To keep down his growing surplus he doubled his donations
to organized charity, presented the Y. M. C. A. of his native town
with a $10,000 collection of butterflies, and sent a check to the
famine sufferers in China big enough to buy new emerald eyes and
diamond-filled teeth for all their gods. But none of these
charitable acts seemed to bring peace to the caliph's heart. He
tried to get a personal note into his benefactions by tipping
bellboys and waiters $10 and $20 bills. He got well snickered at
and derided for that by the minions who accept with respect
gratuities commensurate to the service performed. He sought out
an ambitious and talented but poor young woman, and bought for
her the star part in a new comedy. He might have gotten rid of
$50,000 more of his cumbersome money in this philanthropy if he
had not neglected to write letters to her. But she lost the suit
for lack of evidence, while his capital still kept piling up, and
his _optikos needleorum camelibus_--or rich man's disease--was
unrelieved.
In Caliph Spraggins's $3,000,000 home lived his sister Henrietta,
who used to cook for the coal miners in a twenty-five-cent eating
house in Coketown, Pa., and who now would have offered John
Mitchell only two fingers of her hand to shake. And his daughter
Celia, nineteen, back from boarding-school and from being polished
off by private instructors in the restaurant languages and those
'etudes and things.
Celia is the heroine. Lest the artist's delineation of her charms
on this very page humbug your fancy, take from me her authorized
description. She was a nice-looking, awkward, loud, rather
bashful, brown-haired girl, with a sallow complexion, bright eyes,
and a perpetual smile. She had a wholesome, Spraggins-inherited
love for plain food, loose clothing, and the society of the lower
classes. She had too much health and youth to feel the burden of
wealth. She had a wide mouth that kept the peppermint-pepsin
tablets rattling like hail from the slot-machine wherever she went,
and she could whistle hornpipes. Keep this picture in mind; and
let the artist do his worst.
Celia looked out of her window one day and gave her heart to the
grocer's young man. The receiver thereof was at that moment
engaged in conceding immortality to his horse and calling down
upon him the ultimate fate of the wicked; so he did not notice the
transfer. A horse should stand still when you are lifting a crate
of strictly new-laid eggs out of the wagon.
Young lady reader, you would have liked that grocer's young man
yourself. But you wouldn't have given him your heart, because
you are saving it for a riding-master, or a shoe-manufacturer with
a torpid liver, or something quiet but rich in gray tweeds at Palm
Beach. Oh, I know about it. So I am glad the grocer's young man
was for Celia, and not for you.
The grocer's young man was slim and straight and as confident
and easy in his movements as the man in the back of the magazines
who wears the new frictionless roller suspenders. He wore a
gray bicycle cap on the back of his head, and his hair was
straw-colored and curly, and his sunburned face looked like one
that smiled a good deal when he was not preaching the doctrine of
everlasting punishment to delivery-wagon horses. He slung
imported A1 fancy groceries about as though they were only the
stuff he delivered at boarding-houses; and when he picked up his
whip, your mind instantly recalled Mr. Tacktt and his air with
the buttonless foils.
Tradesmen delivered their goods at a side gate at the rear of
the house. The grocer's wagon came about ten in the morning.
For three days Celia watched the driver when he came, finding
something new each time to admire in the lofty and almost
contemptuous way he had of tossing around the choicest gifts of
Pomona, Ceres, and the canning factories. Then she consulted
Annette.
To be explicit, Annette McCorkle, the second housemaid who
deserves a paragraph herself. Annette Fletcherized large numbers
of romantic novels which she obtained at a free public library
branch (donated by one of the biggest caliphs in the business).
She was Celia's sidekicker and chum, though Aunt Henrietta didn't
know it, you may hazard a bean or two.
"Oh, canary-bird seed!" exclaimed Annette. "Ain't it a corkin'
situation? You a heiress, and fallin' in love with him on sight!
He's a sweet boy, too, and above his business. But he ain't
susceptible like the common run of grocer's assistants. He never
pays no attention to me."
"He will to me," said Celia.
"Riches--" began Annette, unsheathing the not unjustifiable
feminine sting.
"Oh, you're not so beautiful," said Celia, with her wide, disarming
smile. "Neither am I; but he sha'n't know that there's any money
mixed up with my looks, such as they are. That's fair. Now, I
want you to lend me one of your caps and an apron, Annette."
"Oh, marshmallows!" cried Annette. "I see. Ain't it lovely? It's
just like 'Lurline, the Left-Handed; or, A Buttonhole Maker's
Wrongs.' I'll bet he'll turn out to be a count."
There was a long hallway (or "passageway," as they call it in the
land of the Colonels) with one side latticed, running along the rear
of the house. The grocer's young man went through this to deliver
his goods. One morning he passed a girl in there with shining
eyes, sallow complexion, and wide, smiling mouth, wearing a maid's
cap and apron. But as he was cumbered with a basket of Early
Drumhead lettuce and Trophy tomatoes and three bunches of asparagus
and six bottles of the most expensive Queen olives, he saw no more
than that she was one of the maids.
But on his way out he came up behind her, and she was whistling
"Fisher's Hornpipe" so loudly and clearly that all the piccolos in
the world should have disjointed themselves and crept into their
cases for shame.
The grocer's young man stopped and pushed back his cap until it
hung on his collar button behind.
"That's out o' sight, Kid," said he.
"My name is Celia, if you please," said the whistler, dazzling him
with a three-inch smile.
That's all right. I'm Thomas McLeod. What part of the house do
you work in?"
"I'm the--the second parlor maid."
"Do you know the 'Falling Waters'?"
"No," said Celia, "we don't know anybody. We got rich too quick--that
is, Mr. Spraggins did."
"I'll make you acquainted," said Thomas McLeod. "It's a strathspey--
the first cousin to a hornpipe."
If Celia's whistling put the piccolos out of commission, Thomas
McLeod's surely made the biggest flutes hunt their holes. He
could actually whistle _bass_.
When he stopped Celia was ready to jump into his delivery wagon
and ride with him clear to the end of the pier and on to the ferry-
boat of the Charon line.
"I'll be around to-morrow at 10:15," said Thomas, "with some
spinach and a case of carbonic."
"I'll practice that what-you-may-call-it," said Celia. "I can whistle
a fine second."
The processes of courtship are personal, and do not belong to general
literature. They should be chronicled in detail only in advertisements
of iron tonics and in the secret by-laws of the Woman's Auxiliary of
the Ancient Order of the Rat Trap. But genteel writing may contain
a description of certain stages of its progress without intruding upon
the province of the X-ray or of park policemen.
A day came when Thomas McLeod and Celia lingered at the end
of the latticed "passage."
"Sixteen a week isn't much," said Thomas, letting his cap rest on
his shoulder blades.
Celia looked through the lattice-work and whistled a dead march.
Shopping with Aunt Henrietta the day before, she had paid that much
for a dozen handkerchiefs.
"Maybe I'll get a raise next month," said Thomas. "I'll be around
to-morrow at the same time with a bag of flour and the laundry
soap."
"All right," said Celia. "Annette's married cousin pays only $20 a
month for a flat in the Bronx."
Never for a moment did she count on the Spraggins money. She knew
Aunt Henrietta's invincible pride of caste and pa's mightiness
as a Colossus of cash, and she understood that if she chose Thomas
she and her grocer's young man might go whistle for a living.
Another day came, Thomas violating the dignity of Nabob Avenue
with "The Devil's Dream," whistled keenly between his teeth.
"Raised to eighteen a week yesterday," he said. "Been pricing flats
around Morningside. You want to start untying those apron strings
and unpinning that cap, old girl."
"Oh, Tommy!" said Celia, with her broadest smile. "Won't that be
enough? I got Betty to show me how to make a cottage pudding. I
guess we could call it a flat pudding if we wanted to."
"And tell no lie," said Thomas.
"And I can sweep and polish and dust--of course, a parlor maid
learns that. And we cold whistle duets of evenings."
"The old man said he'd raise me to twenty at Christmas if Bryan
couldn't think of any harder name to call a Republican than a
'postponer,'" said the grocer's young man.
"I can sew," said Celia; "and I know that you must make the gas
company's man show his badge when he comes to look at the meter;
and I know how to put up quince jam and window curtains."
"Bully! you're all right, Cele. Yes, I believe we can pull it off on
eighteen."
As he was jumping into the wagon the second parlor maid braved
discovery by running swiftly to the gate.
"And, oh, Tommy, I forgot," she called, softly. "I believe I could
make your neckties."
"Forget it," said Thomas decisively.
"And another thing," she continued. "Sliced cucumbers at night will
drive away cockroaches."
"And sleep, too, you bet," said Mr. McLeod. "Yes, I believe if I
have a delivery to make on the West Side this afternoon I'll look in
at a furniture store I know over there."
It was just as the wagon dashed away that old Jacob Spraggins struck
the sideboard with his fist and made the mysterious remark about
ten thousand dollars that you perhaps remember. Which justifies
the reflection that some stories, as well as life, and puppies
thrown into wells, move around in circles. Painfully but briefly
we must shed light on Jacob's words.
The foundation of his fortune was made when he was twenty. A poor
coal-digger (ever hear of a rich one?) had saved a dollar or two
and bought a small tract of land on a hillside on which he tried
to raise corn. Not a nubbin. Jacob, whose nose was a divining-rod,
told him there was a vein of coal beneath. he bought the land from
the miner for $125 and sold it a month afterward for $10,000.
Luckily the miner had enough left of his sale money to drink himself
into a black coat opening in the back, as soon as he heard the news.
And so, for forty years afterward, we find Jacob illuminated with
the sudden thought that if he could make restitution of this sum of
money to the heirs or assigns of the unlucky miner, respite and
Nepenthe might be his.
And now must come swift action, for we have here some four thousand
words and not a tear shed and never a pistol, joke, safe, nor bottle
cracked.
Old Jacob hired a dozen private detectives to find the heirs, if any
existed, of the old miner, Hugh McLeod.
Get the point? Of course I know as well as you do that Thomas is
going to be the heir. I might have concealed the name; but why
always hold back you mystery till the end? I say, let it come near
the middle so people can stop reading there if they want to.
After the detectives had trailed false clues about three thousand
dollars--I mean miles--they cornered Thomas at the grocery and
got his confession that Hugh McLeod had been his grandfather,
and that there were no other heirs. They arranged a meeting for
him and old Jacob one morning in one of their offices.
Jacob liked the young man very much. He liked the way he looked
straight at him when he talked, and the way he threw his bicycle
cap over the top of a rose-colored vase on the centre-table.
There was a slight flaw in Jacob's system of restitution. He did
not consider that the act, to be perfect, should include confession.
So he represented himself to be the agent of the purchaser of the
land who had sent him to refund the sale price for the ease of his
conscience.
"Well, sir," said Thomas, "this sounds to me like an illustrated
post-card from South Boston with 'We're having a good time here'
written on it. I don't know the game. Is this ten thousand dollars
money, or do I have to save so many coupons to get it?"
Old Jacob counted out to him twenty five-hundred-dollar bills.
That was better, he thought, than a check. Thomas put them
thoughtfully into his pocket.
"Grandfather's best thanks," he said, "to the party who sends it."
Jacob talked on, asking him about his work, how he spent his
leisure time, and what his ambitions were. The more he saw and
heard of Thomas, the better he liked him. He had not met many
young men in Bagdad so frank and wholesome.
"I would like to have you visit my house," he said. "I might help
you in investing or laying out your money. I am a very wealthy
man. I have a daughter about grown, and I would like for you to
know her. There are not many young men I would care to have call
on her."
"I'm obliged," said Thomas. "I'm not much at making calls. It's
generally the side entrance for mine. And, besides, I'm engaged to
a girl that has the Delaware peach crop killed in the blossom.
She's a parlor maid in a house where I deliver goods. She won't be
working there much longer, though. Say, don't forget to give your
friend my grandfather's best regards. You'll excuse me now; my
wagon's outside with a lot of green stuff that's got to be delivered.
See you again, sir."
At eleven Thomas delivered some bunches of parsley and lettuce
at the Spraggins mansion. Thomas was only twenty-two; so, as he
came back, he took out the handful of five-hundred-dollar bills
and waved them carelessly. Annette took a pair of eyes as big as
creamed onion to the cook.
"I told you he was a count," she said, after relating. "He never
would carry on with me."
"But you say he showed money," said the cook.
"Hundreds of thousands," said Annette. "Carried around loose in
his pockets. And he never would look at me."
"It was paid to me to-day," Thomas was explaining to Celia outside.
"It came from my grandfather's estate. Say, Cele, what's the use
of waiting now? I'm going to quit the job to-night. Why can't we
get married next week?"
"Tommy," said Celia. "I'm no parlor maid. I've been fooling you.
I'm Miss Spraggins--Celia Spraggins. The newspapers say I'll be
worth forty million dollars some day."
Thomas pulled his cap down straight on his head for the first time
since we have known him.
"I suppose then," said he, "I suppose then you'll not be marrying
me next week. But you _can_ whistle."
"No," said Celia, "I'll not be marrying you next week. My father
would never let me marry a grocer's clerk. But I'll marry you
to-night, Tommy, if you say so."
Old Jacob Spraggins came home at 9:30 P. M., in his motor car.
The make of it you will have to surmise sorrowfully; I am giving
you unsubsidized fiction; had it been a street car I could have told
you its voltage and the number of wheels it had. Jacob called for
his daughter; he had bought a ruby necklace for her, and wanted to
hear her say what a kind, thoughtful, dear old dad he was.
There was a brief search in the house for her, and then came
Annette, glowing with the pure flame of truth and loyalty well
mixed with envy and histrionics.
"Oh, sir," said she, wondering if she should kneel, "Miss Celia's
just this minute running away out of the side gate with a young
man to be married. I couldn't stop her, sir. They went in a cab."
"What young man?" roared old Jacob.
"A millionaire, if you please, sir--a rich nobleman in disguise. He
carries his money with him, and the red peppers and the onions was
only to blind us, sir. He never did seem to take to me."
Jacob rushed out in time to catch his car. The chauffeur had been
delayed by trying to light a cigarette in the wind.
"Here, Gaston, or Mike, or whatever you call yourself, scoot around
the corner quicker than blazes and see if you can see a cab. If you
do, run it down."
There was a cab in sight a block away. Gaston, or Mike, with his
eyes half shut and his mind on his cigarette, picked up the trail,
neatly crowded the cab to the curb and pocketed it.
"What t'ell you doin'?" yelled the cabman.
"Pa!" shrieked Celia.
"Grandfather's remorseful friend's agent!" said Thomas. "Wonder
what's on his conscience now."
"A thousand thunders," said Gaston, or Mike. "I have no other
match."
"Young man," said old Jacob, severely, "how about that parlor
maid you were engaged to?"
A couple of years afterward old Jacob went into the office of his
private secretary.
"The Amalgamated Missionary Society solicits a contribution of
$30,000 toward the conversion of the Koreans," said the secretary.
"Pass 'em up," said Jacob.
"The University of Plumville writes that its yearly endowment
fund of $50,000 that you bestowed upon it is past due."
"Tell 'em it's been cut out."
"The Scientific Society of Clam Cove, Long Island, asks for
$10,000 to buy alcohol to preserve specimens."
"Waste basket."
"The Society for Providing Healthful Recreation for Working Girls
wants $20,000 from you to lay out a golf course."
"Tell 'em to see an undertaker."
"Cut 'em all out," went on Jacob. "I've quit being a good thing. I
need every dollar I can scrape or save. I want you to write to the
directors of every company that I'm interested in and recommend a
10 per cent. cut in salaries. And say--I noticed half a cake of soap
lying in a corner of the hall as I came in. I want you to speak to
the scrubwoman about waste. I've got no money to throw away. And
say--we've got vinegar pretty well in hand, haven't we?'
"The Globe Spice & Seasons Company," said secretary, "controls
the market at present."
"Raise vinegar two cents a gallon. Notify all our branches."
Suddenly Jacob Spraggin's plump red face relaxed into a pulpy
grin. He walked over to the secretary's desk and showed a small
red mark on his thick forefinger.
"Bit it," he said, "darned if he didn't, and he ain't had the tooth
three weeks--Jaky McLeod, my Celia's kid. He'll be worth a hundred
millions by the time he's twenty-one if I can pile it up for him."
As he was leaving, old Jacob turned at the door, and said:
"Better make that vinegar raise three cents instead of two. I'll be
back in an hour and sign the letters."
The true history of the Caliph Harun Al Rashid relates that toward
the end of his reign he wearied of philanthropy, and caused to be
beheaded all his former favorites and companions of his "Arabian
Nights" rambles. Happy are we in these days of enlightenment,
when the only death warrant the caliphs can serve on us is in the
form of a tradesman's bill.
XVIII
THE GIRL AND THE HABIT
HABIT--a tendency or aptitude acquired by custom or frequent
repitition.
The critics have assailed every source of inspiration save one.
To that one we are driven for our moral theme. When we levied
upon the masters of old they gleefully dug up the parallels to our
columns. When we strove to set forth real life they reproached us
for trying to imitate Henry George, George Washington, Washington
Irving, and Irving Bacheller. We wrote of the West and the East,
and they accused us of both Jesse and Henry James. We wrote from
our heart--and they said something about a disordered liver. We
took a text from Matthew or--er-yes, Deuteronomy, but the preachers
were hammering away at the inspiration idea before we could get
into type. So, driven to the wall, we go for our subject-matter
to the reliable, old, moral, unassailable vade mecum--the
unabridged dictionary.
Miss Merriam was cashier at Hinkle's. Hinkle's is one of the big
downtown restaurants. It is in what the papers call the "financial
district." Each day from 12 o'clock to 2 Hinkle's was full of
hungry customers--messenger boys, stenographers, brokers, owners
of mining stock, promoters, inventors with patents pending--and
also people with money.
The cashiership at Hinkle's was no sinecure. Hinkle egged and
toasted and griddle-caked and coffeed a good many customers; and
he lunched (as good a word as "dined") many more. It might be
said that Hinkle's breakfast crowd was a contingent, but his
luncheon patronage amounted to a horde.
Miss Merriam sat on a stool at a desk inclosed on three sides by
a strong, high fencing of woven brass wire. Through an arched
opening at the bottom you thrust your waiter's check and the
money, while your heart went pit-pat.
For Miss Merriam was lovely and capable. She could take 45 cents
out of a $2 bill and refuse an offer of marriage before you could
--Next!--lost your chance--please don't shove. She could keep cool
and collected while she collected your check, give you the correct
change, win your heart, indicate the toothpick stand, and rate you
to a quarter of a cent better than Bradstreet could to a thousand
in less time than it takes to pepper an egg with one of Hinkle's
casters.
There is an old and dignified allusion to the "fierce light that
beats upon a throne." The light that beats upon the young lady
cashier's cage is also something fierce. The other fellow is
responsible for the slang.
Every male patron of Hinkle's, from A. D. T. boys up to the
curbstone brokers, adored Miss Merriam. When they paid their
checks they wooed her with every wile known to Cupid's art.
Between the meshes of the brass railing went smiles, winks,
compliments, tender vows, invitations to dinner, sighs, languishing
looks and merry banter that was wafted pointedly back by the
gifted Miss Merriam.
There is no coign of vantage more effective than the position of
young lady cashier. She sits there, easily queen of the court of
commerce; she is duchess of dollars and devoirs, countess of
compliment; and coin, leading lady of love and luncheon. You
take from her a smile and a Canadian dime, and you go your way
uncomplaining. You count the cheery word or two that she tosses
you as misers count their treasures; and you pocket the change
for a five uncomputed. Perhaps the brass-bound inaccessibility
multiplies her charms--anyhow, she is a shirt-waisted angel,
immaculate, trim, manicured, seductive, bright-eyed, ready, alert--
Psyche, Circe, and Ate in one, separating you from your circulating
medium after your sirloin medium.
The young men who broke bread at Hinkle's never settled with the
cashier without an exchange of badinage and open compliment.
Many of them went to greater lengths and dropped promissory hints
of theatre tickets and chocolate. The older spoke plainly of
orange blossoms, generally withering the tentative petals by
after-allusions to Harlem flats. One broker, who had been
squeezed by copper proposed to Miss Merriam more regularly than
he ate.
During a brisk luncheon hour Miss Merriam's conversation, while
she took money for checks, would run something like this:
"Good morning, Mr. Haskins--sir?--it's natural, thank you--don't be
quite so fresh. . . Hello, Johnny--ten, fifteen, twenty--chase along
now or they'll take the letters off your cap. . . Beg pardon--count
it again, please--Oh, don't mention it. . . Vaudeville?--thanks; not
on your moving picture--I was to see Carter in Hedda Gabler on
Wednesday night with Mr. Simmons. . . 'Scuse me, I thought that was
a quarter. . . Twenty-five and seventy-five's a dollar--got that
ham-and-cabbage habit yet. I see, Billy. . . Who are you addressing?
--say--you'll get all that's coming to you in a minute. . .
Oh, fudge! Mr. Bassett--you're always fooling--no--? Well, maybe
I'll marry you some day--three, four and sixty-five is five. . .
Kindly keep them remarks to yourself, if you please. . . Ten cents?
--'scuse me; the check calls for seventy--well, maybe it is a one
instead of a seven. . . Oh, do you like it that way, Mr. Saunders?--
some prefer a pomp; but they say this Cleo de Merody does suit
refined features. . . and ten is fifty. . . Hike along there, buddy;
don't take this for a Coney Island ticket booth. . . Huh?--why,
Macy's--don't it fit nice? Oh, no, it isn't too cool--these light-
weight fabrics is all the go this season. . . Come again, please--
that's the third time you've tried to--what?--forget it--that lead
quarter is an old friend of mine. . . Sixty-five?--must have had
your salary raised, Mr. Wilson. . . I seen you on Sixth Avenue
Tuesday afternoon, Mr. De Forest--swell?--oh, my!--who is she? . . .
What's the matter with it?--why, this ain't South America. . . Yes,
I like the mixed best--Friday?--awfully sorry, but I take my jiu-
jitsu lesson on Friday--Thursday, then. . . Thanks--that's sixteen
times I've been told that this morning--I guess I must be
beautiful. . . Cut that out, please--who do you think I am? . . .
Why, Mr. Westbrook--do you really think so?--the idea!--one--eighty
and twenty's a dollar--thank you ever so much, but I don't ever go
automobile riding with gentlemen--your aunt?--well, that's
different--perhaps. . . Please don't get fresh--your check was
fifteen cents, I believe--kindly step aside and let. . . Hello,
Ben--coming around Thursday evening?--there's a gentleman going
to send around a box of chocolates, and . . . forty and sixty is
a dollar, and one is two . . ."
About the middle of one afternoon the dizzy goddess Vertigo--whose
other name is Fortune--suddenly smote an old, wealthy and eccentric
banker while he was walking past Hinkle's, on his way to a street
car. A wealthy and eccentric banker who rides in street cars
is--move up, please; there are others.
A Samaritan, A Pharisee, a man and a policeman who were first on
the spot lifter Banker McRamsey and carried him into Hinkle's
restaurant. When the aged but indestructible banker opened his
eyes he saw a beautikful vision bending over him with a pitiful,
tender smile, bathing his forehead with beef tea and chafing his
hands with something frapp'e out of a chafing-dish. Mr. McRamsey
sighed, lost a vest button, gazed with deep gratitude upon his
fair preserveress, and then recovered consciousness.
To the Seaside Library all who are anticipating a romance! Banker
McRamsey had an aged and respected wife, and his sentiments
toward Miss Merriam were fatherly. He talked to her for half an
hour with interest--not the kind that went with his talks during
business hours. The next day he brought Mrs. McRamsey down to
see her. The old couple were childless--they had only a married
daughter living in Brooklyn.
To make a short story shorter, the beautiful cashier won the hearts
of the good old couple. They came to Hinkle's again and again;
they invited her to their old-fashioned but splendid home in one of
the East Seventies. Miss Merriam's winning loveliness, her sweet
frankness and impulsive heart took them by storm. They said a
hundred times that Miss Merriam reminded them so much of their
lost daughter. The Brooklyn matron, n'ee Ramsey, had the figure
of Buddha and a face like the ideal of an art photographer. Miss
Merriam was a combination of curves, smiles, rose leaves, pearls,
satin and hair-tonic posters. Enough of the fatuity of parents.
A month after the worthy couple became acquainted with Miss
Merriam, she stood before Hinkle one afternoon and resigned her
cashiership.
"They're going to adopt me," she told the bereft restaurateur.
"They're funny old people, but regular dears. And the swell home
they have got! Say, Hinkle, there isn't any use of talking--I'm on
the `a la carte to wear brown duds and goggles in a whiz wagon, or
marry a duke at least. Still, I somehow hate to break out of the old
cage. I've been cashiering so long I feel funny doing anything else.
I'll miss joshing the fellows awfully when they line up to pay for
the buckwheats and. But I can't let this chance slide. And they're
awfully good, Hinkle; I know I'll have a swell time. You owe me
nine-sixty-two and a half for the week. Cut out the half if it hurts
you, Hinkle."
And they did. Miss Merriam became Miss Rosa McRamsey. And she
graced the transition. Beauty is only skin-deep, but the nerves
lie very near to the skin. Nerve--but just here will you oblige
by perusing again the quotation with which this story begins?
The McRamseys poured out money like domestic champagne to polish
their adopted one. Milliners, dancing masters and private tutors
got it. Miss--er--McRamsey was grateful, loving, and tried to
forget Hinkle's. To give ample credit to the adaptability of the
American girl, Hinkle's did fade from her memory and speech most
of the time.
Not every one will remember when the Earl of Hitesbury came to
East Seventy---Street, America. He was only a fair-to-medium earl,
without debts, and he created little excitement. But you will
surely remember the evening when the Daughters of Benevolence
haled their bazaar in the W---f-A---a Hotel. For you were there,
and you wrote a note to Fannie on the hotel paper, and mailed it,
just to show her that--you did not? Very well; that was the evening
the baby was sick, of course.
At the bazaar the McRamseys were prominent. Miss Mer--er--McRamsey
was exquisitely beautiful. The Earl of Hitesbury had been very
attentive to her since he dropped in to have a look at America.
At the charity bazaar the affair was supposed to be going to be
pulled off to a finish. An earl is as good as a duke. Better.
His standing may be lower, but his outstanding accounts are also
lower.
Our ex-young-lady-cashier was assigned to a booth. She was
expected to sell worthless articles to nobs and snobs at exorbitant
prices. The proceeds of the bazaar were to be used for giving the
poor children of the slums a Christmas din---Say! did you ever
wonder where they get the other 364?
Miss McRamsey--beautiful, palpitating, excited, charming, radiant--
fluttered about in her booth. An imitation brass network, with a
little arched opening, fenced her in.
Along came the Earl, assured, delicate, accurate, admiring--admiring
greatly, and faced the open wicket.
"You look chawming, you know--'pon my word you do--my deah," he said,
beguilingly.
"Cut that joshing out," she said, coolly and briskly. "Who do you
think you are talking to? Your check, please. Oh, Lordy!--"
Patrons of the bazaar became aware of a commotion and pressed around
a certain booth. The Earl of Hitesbury stood near by pulling a pale
blond and puzzled whisker.
"Miss McRamsey has fainted," some one explained.
XIX
PROOF OF THE PUDDING
Spring winked a vitreous optic at Editor Westbrook of the _Minerva
Magazine_, and deflected him from his course. He had lunched in
his favorite corner of a Broadway hotel, and was returning to his
office when his feet became entangled in the lure of the vernal
coquette. Which is by way of saying that he turned eastward in
Twenty-sixth Street, safely forded the spring freshet of vehicles
in Fifth Avenue, and meandered along the walks of budding
Madison Square.
The lenient air and the settings of the little park almost formed
a pastoral; the color motif was green--the presiding shade at the
creation of man and vegetation.
The callow grass between the walks was the color of verdigris, a
poisonous green, reminiscent of the horde of derelict humans that
had breathed upon the soil during the summer and autumn. The
bursting tree buds looked strangely familiar to those who had
botanized among the garnishings of the fish course of a forty-cent
dinner. The sky above was of that pale aquamarine tint that
ballroom poets rhyme with "true" and "Sue' and "coo." The one
natural and frank color visible was the ostensible green of the
newly painted benches--a shade between the color of a pickled
cucumber and that of a last year's fast-black cravenette raincoat.
But, to the city-bred eye of Editor Westbrook, the landscape
appeared a masterpiece.
And now, whether you are of those who rush in, or of the gentle
concourse that fears to tread, you must follow in a brief invasion
of the editor's mind.
Editor Westbrook's spirit was contented and serene. The April
number of the _Minerva_ had sold its entire edition before the
tenth day of the month--a newsdealer in Keokuk had written that
he could have sold fifty copies more if he had 'em. The owners of
the magazine had raised his (the editor's) salary; he had just
installed in his home a jewel of a recently imported cook who was
afraid of policemen; and the morning papers had published in full
a speech he had made at a publishers' banquet. Also there were
echoing in his mind the jubilant notes of a splendid song that his
charming young wife had sung to him before he left his up-town
apartment that morning. She was taking enthusiastic interest in
her music of late, practising early and diligently. When he had
complimented her on the improvement in her voice she had fairly
hugged him for joy at his praise. He felt, too, the benign, tonic
medicament of the trained nurse, Spring, tripping softly adown the
wards of the convalescent city.
While Editor Westbrook was sauntering between the rows of park
benches (already filling with vagrants and the guardians of lawless
childhood) he felt his sleeve grasped and held. Suspecting that he
was about to be panhandled, he turned a cold and unprofitable face,
and saw that his captor was--Dawe--Shackleford Dawe, dingy, almost
ragged, the genteel scracely visible in him through the deeper
lines of the shabby.
While the editor is pulling himself out of his surprise, a flashlight
biography of Dawe is offered.
He was a fiction writer, and one of Westbrook's old acquaintances.
At one time they might have called each other old friends. Dawe
had some money in those days, and lived in a decent apartment
house near Westbrook's. The two families often went to theatres
and dinners together. Mrs. Dawe and Mrs. Westbrook became "dearest"
friends. Then one day a little tentacle of the octopus, just
to amuse itself, ingurgitated Dawe's capital, and he moved to the
Gramercy Park neighborhood where one, for a few groats per week,
may sit upon one's trunk under eight-branched chandeliers and
opposite Carrara marble mantels and watch the mice play upon the
floor. Dawe thought to live by writing fiction. Now and then
he sold a story. He submitted many to Westbrook. The _Minerva_
printed one or two of them; the rest were returned. Westbrook
sent a careful and conscientious personal letter with each rejected
manuscript, pointing out in detail his reasons for considering it
unavailable. Editor Westbrook had his own clear conception of what
constituted good fiction. So had Dawe. Mrs. Dawe was mainly
concerned about the constituents of the scanty dishes of food that
she managed to scrape together. One day Dawe had been spouting to
her about the excellencies of certain French writers. At dinner
they sat down to a dish that a hungry schoolboy could have
encompassed at a gulp. Dawe commented.
"It's Maupassant hash," said Mrs. Dawe. "It may not be art, but I
do wish you would do a five-course Marion Crawford serial with an
Ella Wheeler Wilcox sonnet for dessert. I'm hungry."
As far as this from success was Shackleford Dawe when he plucked
Editor Westbrook's sleeve in Madison Square. That was the first
time the editor had seen Dawe in several months.
"Why, Shack, is this you?" said Westbrook, somewhat awkwardly, for
the form of his phrase seemed to touch upon the other's changed
appearance.
"Sit down for a minute," said Dawe, tugging at his sleeve. "This
is my office. I can't come to yours, looking as I do. Oh, sit
down--you won't be disgraced. Those half-plucked birds on the
other benches will take you for a swell porch-climber. They won't
know you are only an editor."
"Smoke, Shack?" said Editor Westbrook, sinking cautiously upon
the virulent green bench. He always yielded gracefully when he
did yield.
Dawe snapped at the cigar as a kingfisher darts at a sunperch, or
a girl pecks at a chocolate cream.
"I have just--" began the editor.
"Oh, I know; don't finish," said Dawe. "Give me a match. You
have just ten minutes to spare. How did you manage to get past
my office-boy and invade my sanctum? There he goes now, throwing
his club at a dog that couldn't read the 'Keep off the Grass'
signs."
"How goes the writing?" asked the editor.
"Look at me," said Dawe, "for your answer. Now don't put on that
embarrassed, friendly-but-honest look and ask me why I don't get a
job as a wine agent or a cab driver. I'm in the fight to a finish.
I know I can write good fiction and I'll force you fellows to admit
it yet. I'll make you change the spelling of 'regrets' to
'c-h-e-q-u-e' before I'm done with you."
Editor Westbrook gazed through his nose-glasses with a sweetly
sorrowful, omniscient, sympathetic, skeptical expression--the
copyrighted expression of the editor beleagured by the unavailable
contributor.
"Have you read the last story I sent you--'The Alarum of the Soul'?"
asked Dawe.
"Carefully. I hesitated over that story, Shack, really I did. It
had some good points. I was writing you a letter to send with it
when it goes back to you. I regret--"
"Never mind the regrets," said Dawe, grimly. "There's neither
salve nor sting in 'em any more. What I want to know is _why_.
Come now; out with the good points first."
"The story," said Westbrook, deliberately, after a suppressed sigh,
"is written around an almost original plot. Characterization--the
best you have done. Construction--almost as good, except for a few
weak joints which might be strengthened by a few changes and touches.
It was a good story, except--"
"I can write English, can't I?" interrupted Dawe.
"I have always told you," said the editor, "that you had a style."
"Then the trouble is--"
"Same old thing," said Editor Westbrook. "You work up to your
climax like an artist. And then you turn yourself into a
photographer. I don't know what form of obstinate madness
possesses you, but that is what you do with everything that you
write. No, I will retract the comparison with the photographer.
Now and then photography, in spite of its impossible perspective,
manages to record a fleeting glimpse of truth. But you spoil every
d'enouement by those flat, drab, obliterating strokes of your brush
that I have so often complained of. If you would rise to the
literary pinnacle of your dramatic senses, and paint them in the
high colors that art requires, the postman would leave fewer bulky,
self-addressed envelopes at your door."
"Oh, fiddles and footlights!" cried Dawe, derisively. "You've got
that old sawmill drama kink in your brain yet. When the man with
the black mustache kidnaps golden-haired Bessie you are bound to
have the mother kneel and raise her hands in the spotlight and say:
'May high heaven witness that I will rest neither night nor day till
the heartless villain that has stolen me child feels the weight of
another's vengeance!'"
Editor Westbrook conceded a smile of impervious complacency.
"I think," said he, "that in real life the woman would express
herself in those words or in very similar ones."
"Not in a six hundred nights' run anywhere but on the stage," said
Dawe hotly. "I'll tell you what she'd say in real life. She'd say:
'What! Bessie led away by a strange man? Good Lord! It's one
trouble after another! Get my other hat, I must hurry around to the
police-station. Why wasn't somebody looking after her, I'd like to
know? For God's sake, get out of my way or I'll never get ready.
Not that hat--the brown one with the velvet bows. Bessie must
have been crazy; she's usually shy of strangers. Is that too much
powder? Lordy! How I'm upset!'
"That's the way she'd talk," continued Dawe. "People in real life
don't fly into heroics and blank verse at emotional crises. They
simply can't do it. If they talk at all on such occasions they draw
from the same vocabulary that they use every day, and muddle up
their words and ideas a little more, that's all."
"Shack," said Editor Westbrook impressively, "did you ever pick up
the mangled and lifeless form of a child from under the fender of
a street car, and carry it in your arms and lay it down before the
distracted mother? Did you ever do that and listen to the words of
grief and despair as they flowed spontaneously from her lips?"
"I never did," said Dawe. "Did you?"
"Well, no," said Editor Westbrook, with a slight frown. "But I can
well imagine what she would say."
"So can I," said Dawe.
And now the fitting time had come for Editor Westbrook to play the
oracle and silence his opinionated contributor. It was not for an
unarrived fictionist to dictate words to be uttered by the heroes
and heroines of the _Minerva Magazine_, contrary to the theories
of the editor thereof.
"My dear Shack," said he, "if I know anything of life I know that
every sudden, deep and tragic emotion in the human heart calls
forth an apposite, concordant, conformable and proportionate
expression of feeling. How much of this inevitable accord between
expression and feeling should be attributed to nature, and how
much to the influence of art, it would be difficult to say. The
sublimely terrible roar of the lioness that has been deprived of her
cubs is dramatically as far above her customary whine and purr as
the kingly and transcendent utterances of Lear are above the level
of his senile vaporings. But it is also true that all men and women
have what may be called a sub-conscious dramatic sense that is
awakened by a sufficiently deep and powerful emotion--a sense
unconsciously acquired from literature and the stage that prompts
them to express those emotions in language befitting their
importance and histrionic value."
"And in the name of the seven sacred saddle-blankets of Sagittarius,
where did the stage and literature get the stunt?" asked Dawe.
"From life," answered the editor, triumphantly.
The story writer rose from the bench and gesticulated eloquently
but dumbly. He was beggared for words with which to formulate
adequately his dissent.
On a bench nearby a frowzy loafer opened his red eyes and perceived
that his moral support was due a downtrodden brother.
"Punch him one, Jack," he called hoarsely to Dawe. "W'at's he
come makin' a noise like a penny arcade for amongst gen'lemen
that comes in the square to set and think?"
Editor Westbrook looked at his watch with an affected show of
leisure.
"Tell me," asked Dawe, with truculent anxiety, "what especial faults
in 'The Alarum of the Soul' caused you to throw it down?"
"When Gabriel Murray," said Westbrook, "goes to his telephone and is
told that his fianc'ee has been shot by a burglar, he says--I do not
recall the exact words, but--"
"I do," said Dawe. "He says: 'Damn Central; she always cuts me off.'
(And then to his friend) 'Say, Tommy, does a thirty-two bullet make
a big hole? It's kind of hard luck, ain't it? Could you get me a
drink from the sideboard, Tommy? No; straight; nothing on the side.'"
"And again," continued the editor, without pausing for argument,
"when Berenice opens the letter from her husband informing her that
he has fled with the manicure girl, her words are--let me see--"
"She says," interposed the author: "'Well, what do you think of
that!'"
"Absurdly inappropriate words," said Westbrook, "presenting an
anti-climax--plunging the story into hopeless bathos. Worse yet;
they mirror life falsely. No human being ever uttered banal
colloquialisms when confronted by sudden tragedy."
"Wrong," said Dawe, closing his unshaven jaws doggedly. "I say no
man or woman ever spouts 'high-falutin' talk when they go up against
a real climax. They talk naturally and a little worse."
The editor rose from the bench with his air of indulgence and
inside information.
"Say, Westbrook," said Dawe, pinning him by the lapel, "would you
have accepted 'The Alarum of the Soul' if you had believed that the
actions and words of the characters were true to life in the parts
of the story that we discussed?"
"It is very likely that I would, if I believed that way," said the
editor. "But I have explained to you that I do not."
"If I could prove to you that I am right?"
"I'm sorry, Shack, but I'm afraid I haven't time to argue any further
just now."
"I don't want to argue," said Dave. "I want to demonstrate to you
from life itself that my view is the correct one."
"How could you do that?" asked Westbrook, in a surprised tone.
"Listen," said the writer, seriously. "I have thought of a way. It is
important to me that my theory of true-to-life fiction be recognized
as correct by the magazines. I've fought for it for three years, and
I'm down to my last dollar, with two months' rent due."
"I have applied the opposite of your theory," said the editor, "in
selecting the fiction for the _Minerva Magazine_. The circulation
has gone up from ninety thousand to--"
"Four hundred thousand," said Dawe. "Whereas it should have been
boosted to a million."
"You said something to me just now about demonstrating your pet
theory."
"I will. If you'll give me about half an hour of your time I'll
prove to you that I am right. I'll prove it by Louise."
"Your wife!" exclaimed Westbrook. "How?"
"Well, not exactly by her, but _with_ her," said Dawe. "Now, you
know how devoted and loving Louse has always been. She thinks I'm
the only genuine preparation on the market that bears the old
doctor's signature. She's been fonder and more faithful than ever,
since I've been cast for the neglected genius part."
"Indeed, she is a charming and admirable life companion," agreed
the editor. "I remember what inseparable friends she and Mrs.
Westbrook once were. We are both lucky chaps, Shack, to have
such wives. You must bring Mrs. Dawe up some evening soon, and
we'll have one of those informal chafing-dish suppers that we used
to enjoy so much."
"Later," said Dawe. "When I get another shirt. And now I'll tell
you my scheme. When I was about to leave home after breakfast--
if you can call tea and oatmeal breakfast--Louise told me she was
going to visit her aunt in Eighty-ninth Street. She said she would
return at three o'clock. She is always on time to a minute. It is
now--"
Dawe glanced toward the editor's watch pocket.
"Twenty-seven minutes to three," said Westbrook, scanning his
time-piece.
"We have just enough time," said Dawe. "We will go to my flat at
once. I will write a note, address it to her and leave it on the table
where she will see it as she enters the door. You and I will be in
the dining-room concealed by the porti`eres. In that note I'll say
that I have fled from her forever with an affinity who understands
the need of my artistic soul as she never did. When she reads it we
will observe her actions and hear her words. Then we will know which
theory is the correct one--yours or mine."
"Oh, never!" exclaimed the editor, shaking his head. "That would be
inexcusably cruel. I could not consent to have Mrs. Dawe's feelings
played upon in such a manner."
"Brace up," said the writer. "I guess I think as much of her as you
do. It's for her benefit as well as mine. I've got to get a market
for my stories in some way. It won't hurt Louise. She's healthy and
sound. Her heart goes as strong as a ninety-eight-cent watch. It'll
last for only a minute, and then I'll step out and explain to her.
You really owe it to me to give me the chance, Westbrook."
Editor Westbrook at length yielded, though but half willingly. And in
the half of him that consented lurked the vivisectionist that is in
all of us. Let him who has not used the scalpel rise and stand in his
place. Pity 'tis that there are not enough rabbits and guinea-pigs
to go around.
The two experimenters in Art left the Square and hurried eastward
and then to that south until they arrived in the Gramercy
neighborhood. Within its high iron railings the little park had
put on its smart coat of vernal green, and was admiring itself in
its fountain mirror. Outside the railings the hollow square of
crumbling houses, shells of a bygone gentry, leaned as if in
ghostly gossip over the forgotten doings of the vanished quality.
_Sic transit gloria urbis_.
A block or two north of the Park, Dawe steered the editor again
eastward, then, after covering a short distance, into a lofty but
narrow flathouse burdened with a floridly over-decorated fa,cade.
To the fifth story they toiled, and Dawe, panting, pushed his
latch-key into the door of one of the front flats.
When the door opened Editor Westbrook saw, with feelings of pity,
how meanly and meagerly the rooms were furnished.
"Get a chair, if you can find one," said Dawe, "while I hunt up pen
and ink. Hello, what's this? Here's a note from Louise. She must
have left it there when she went out this morning."
He picked up an envelope that lay on the centre-table and tore it
open. He began to read the letter that he drew out of it; and once
having begun it aloud he so read it through to the end. These are
the words that Editor Westbrook heard:
"Dear Shackleford:
"By the time you get this I will be about a hundred miles away
and still a-going. I've got a place in the chorus of the Occidental
Opera Co., and we start on the road to-day at twelve o'clock. I
didn't want to starve to death, and so I decided to make my own
living. I'm not coming back. Mrs. Westbrook is going with me.
She said she was tired of living with a combination phonograph,
iceberg and dictionary, and she's not coming back, either. We've
been practising the songs and dances for two months on the quiet.
I hope you will be successful, and get along all right! Good-bye.
"Louise."
Dawe dropped the letter, covered his face with his trembling hands,
and cried out in a deep, vibrating voice:
_"My God, why hast thou given me this cup to drink? Since she is
false, then let Thy Heaven's fairest gifts, faith and love, become
the jesting by-words of traitors and fiends!"_
Editor Westbrook's glasses fell to the floor. The fingers of one
hand fumbled with a button on his coat as he blurted between his
pale lips:
_"Say, Shack, ain't that a hell of a note? Wouldn't that knock you
off your perch, Shack? Ain't it hell, now, Shack--ain't it?"_
XX
PAST ONE AT ROONEY'S
Only on the lower East Side of New York do the houses of Capulet
and Montagu survive. There they do not fight by the book of
arithmetic. If you but bite your thumb at an upholder of your
opposing house you have work cut out for your steel. On Broadway
you may drag your man along a dozen blocks by his nose, and he
will only bawl for the watch; but in the domain of the East Side
Tybalts and Mercutios you must observe the niceties of deportment
to the wink of any eyelash and to an inch of elbow room at the
bar when its patrons include foes of your house and kin.
So, when Eddie McManus, known to the Capulets as Cork McManus,
drifted into Dutch Mike's for a stein of beer, and came upon
a bunch of Montagus making merry with the suds, he began to
observe the strictest parliamentary rules. Courtesy forbade his
leaving the saloon with his thirst unslaked; caution steered him
to a place at the bar where the mirror supplied the cognizance of
the enemy's movements that his indifferent gaze seemed to disdain;
experience whispered to him that the finger of trouble would be
busy among the chattering steins at Dutch Mike's that night.
Close by his side drew Brick Cleary, his Mercutio, companion of
his perambulations. Thus they stood, four of the Mulberry Hill
Gang and two fo the Dry Dock Gang, minding their P's and Q's so
solicitously that Dutch Mike kept one eye on his customers and
the other on an open space beneath his bar in which it was his
custom to seek safety whenever the ominous politeness of the rival
associations congealed into the shapes of bullets and cold steel.
But we have not to do with the wars of the Mulberry Hills and the
Dry Docks. We must to Rooney's, where, on the most blighted dead
branch of the tree of life, a little pale orchid shall bloom.
Overstrained etiquette at last gave way. It is not known who first
overstepped the bounds of punctilio; but the consequences were
immediate. Buck Malone, of the Mulberry Hills, with a Dewey-like
swiftness, got an eight-inch gun swung round from his hurricane
deck. But McManus's simile must be the torpedo. He glided in
under the guns and slipped a scant three inches of knife blade
between the ribs of the Mulberry Hill cruiser. Meanwhile Brick
Cleary, a devotee to strategy, had skimmed across the lunch counter
and thrown the switch of the electrics, leaving the combat to be
waged by the light of gunfire alone. Dutch Mike crawled from his
haven and ran into the street crying for the watch instead of for
a Shakespeare to immortalize the Cimmerian shindy.
The cop came, and found a prostrate, bleeding Montagu supported by
three distrait and reticent followers of the House. Faithful to
the ethics of the gangs, no one knew whence the hurt came. There
was no Capulet to be seen.
"Raus mit der interrogatories," said Buck Malone to the officer.
"Sure I know who done it. I always manages to get a bird's eye
view of any guy that comes up an' makes a show case for a hardware
store out of me. No. I'm not telling you his name. I'll settle
with um meself. Wow--ouch! Easy, boys! Yes, I'll attend to his
case meself. I'm not making any complaint."
At midnight McManus strolled around a pile of lumber near an East
Side dock, and lingered in the vicinity of a certain water plug.
Brick Cleary drifted casually to the trysting place ten minutes
later. "He'll maybe not croak," said Brick; "and he won't tell, of
course. But Dutch Mike did. He told the police he was tired of
having his place shot up. It's unhandy just now, because Tim
Corrigan's in Europe for a week's end with Kings. He'll be back
on the _Kaiser Williams_ next Friday. You'll have to duck out of
sight till then. Tim'll fix it up all right for us when he comes
back."
This goes to explain why Cork McManus went into Rooney's one
night and there looked upon the bright, stranger face of Romance
for the first time in his precarious career.
Until Tim Corrigan should return from his jaunt among Kings and
Princes and hold up his big white finger in private offices, it was
unsafe for Cork in any of the old haunts of his gang. So he lay,
perdu, in the high rear room of a Capulet, reading pink sporting
sheets and cursing the slow paddle wheels of the _Kaiser
Wilhelm_.
It was on Thursday evening that Cork's seclusion became intolerable
to him. Never a hart panted for water fountain as he did for the
cool touch of a drifting stein, for the firm security of a foot-
rail in the hollow of his shoe and the quiet, hearty challenges
of friendship and repartee along and across the shining bars. But
he must avoid the district where he was known. The cops were
looking for him everywhere, for news was scarce, and the newspapers
were harping again on the failure of the police to suppress the
gangs. If they got him before Corrigan came back, the big white
finger could not be uplifted; it would be too late then. But
Corrigan would be home the next day, so he felt sure there would
be small danger in a little excursion that night among the crass
pleasures that represented life to him.
At half-past twelve McManus stood in a darkish cross-town street
looking up at the name "Rooney's," picked out by incandescent
lights against a signboard over a second-story window. He had
heard of the place as a tough "hang-out"; with its frequenters
and its locality he was unfamiliar. Guided by certain unerring
indications common to all such resorts, he ascended the stairs
and entered the large room over the caf'e.
Here were some twenty or thirty tables, at this time about half-
filled with Rooney's guests. Waiters served drinks. At one end
a human pianola with drugged eyes hammered the keys with automatic
and furious unprecision. At merciful intervals a waiter would
roar or squeak a song--songs full of "Mr. Jonsons" and "babes"
and "coons"--historical word guaranties of the genuineness of
African melodies composed by red waistcoated young gentlemen,
natives of the cotton fields and rice swamps of West Twenty-
eighth Street.
For one brief moment you must admire Rooney with me as he
receives, seats, manipulates, and chaffs his guests. He is
twenty-nine. He has Wellington's nose, Dante's chin, the
cheek-bones of an Iroquois, the smile of Talleyrand, Corbett's
foot work, and the pose of an eleven-year-old East Side Central
Park Queen of the May. He is assisted by a lieutenant known as
Frank, a pudgy, easy chap, swell-dressed, who goes among the
tables seeing that dull care does not intrude. Now, what is
there about Rooney's to inspire all this pother? It is more
respectable by daylight; stout ladies with children and mittens
and bundles and unpedigreed dogs drop up of afternoons for a
stein and a chat. Even by gaslight the diversions are
melancholy i' the mouth--drink and rag-time, and an occasional
surprise when the waiter swabs the suds from under your sticky
glass. There is an answer. Transmigration! The soul of Sir
Walter Raleigh has traveled from beneath his slashed doublet
to a kindred home under Rooney's visible plaid waistcoat.
Rooney's is twenty years ahead of the times. Rooney has
removed the embargo. Rooney has spread his cloak upon the
soggy crossing of public opinion, and any Elizabeth who
treads upon it is as much a queen as another. Attend to the
revelation of the secret. In Rooney's ladies may smoke!
McManus sat down at a vacant table. He paid for the glass of beer
that he ordered, tilted his narrow-brimmed derby to the back of his
brick-dust head, twined his feet among the rungs of his chair, and
heaved a sigh of contentment from the breathing spaces of his
innermost soul; for this mud honey was clarified sweetness to his
taste. The sham gaiety, the hectic glow of counterfeit hospitality,
the self-conscious, joyless laughter, the wine-born warmth, the
loud music retrieving the hour from frequent whiles of awful and
corroding silence, the presence of well-clothed and frank-eyed
beneficiaries of Rooney's removal of the restrictions laid upon the
weed, the familiar blended odors of soaked lemon peel, flat beer,
and _peau d'Espagne_--all these were manna to Cork McManus, hungry
for his week in the desert of the Capulet's high rear room.
A girl, alone, entered Rooney's, glanced around with leisurely
swiftness, and sat opposite McManus at his table. Her eyes rested
upon him for two seconds in the look with which woman reconnoitres
all men whom she for the first time confronts. In that space of
time she will decide upon one of two things--either to scream for
the police, or that she may marry him later on.
Her brief inspection concluded, the girl laid on the table a worn
red morocco shopping bag with the inevitable top-gallant sail of
frayed lace handkerchief flying from a corner of it. After she had
ordered a small beer from the immediate waiter she took from her
bag a box of cigarettes and lighted one with slightly exaggerated
ease of manner. Then she looked again in the eyes of Cork McManus
and smiled.
Instantly the doom of each was sealed.
The unqualified desire of a man to buy clothes and build fires for
a woman for a whole lifetime at first sight of her is not uncommon
among that humble portion of humanity that does not care for
Bradstreet or coats-of-arms or Shaw's plays. Love at first sight has
occurred a time or two in high life; but, as a rule, the extempore
mania is to be found among unsophisticated cratures such as the
dove, the blue-tailed dingbat, and the ten-dollar-a-week clerk.
Poets, subscribers to all fiction magazines, and schatchens, take
notice.
With the exchange of the mysterious magnetic current came to each
of them the instant desire to lie, pretend, dazzle and deceive,
which is the worst thing about the hypocritical disorder known as
love.
"Have another beer?" suggested Cork. In his circle the phrase was
considered to be a card, accompanied by a letter of introduction
and references.
"No, thanks," said the girl, raising her eyebrows and choosing her
conventional words carefully. "I--merely dropped in for--a slight
refreshment." The cigarette between her fingers seemed to require
explanation. "My aunt is a Russian lady," she concluded, "and we
often have a post perannual cigarette after dinner at home."
"Cheese it!" said Cork, whom society airs oppressed. "Your
fingers are as yellow as mine."
"Say," said the girl, blazing upon him with low-voiced indignation,
"what do you think I am? Say, who do you think you are talking to?
What?"
She was pretty to look at. Her eyes were big, brown, intrepid and
bright. Uner her flat sailor hat, planted jauntily on one side,
her crinkly, tawny hair parted and was drawn back. low and massy,
in a thick, pendant knot behind. The roundness of girlhood still
lingered in her chin and neck, but her cheeks and fingers were
thinning slightly. She looked upon the world with defiance,
suspicion, and sullen wonder. Her smart, short tan coat was soiled
and expensive. Two inches below her black dress dropped the lowest
flounce of a heliotrope silk underskirt.
"Beg your pardon," said Cork, looking at her admiringly. "I didn't
mean anything. Sure, it's no harm to smoke, Maudy."
"Rooney's," said the girl, softened at once by his amends, "is the
only place I know where a lady can smoke. Maybe it ain't a nice
habit, but aunty lets us at home. And my name ain't Maudy, if you
please; it's Ruby Delamere."
"That's a swell handle," said Cork approvingly. "Mine's McManus
--Cor--er--Eddie McManus."
"Oh, you can't help that," laughed Ruby. "Don't apologize."
Cork looked seriously at the big clock on Rooney's wall. The girl's
ubiquitous eyes took in the movement.
"I know it's late," she said, reaching for her bag; "but you know
how you want a smoke when you want one. Ain't Rooney's all right?
I never saw anything wrong here. This is twice I've been in.
I work in a bookbindery on Third Avenue. A lot of us girls have
been working overtime three nights a week. They won't let you
smoke there, of course. I just dropped in here on my way home for
a puff. Ain't it all right in here? If it ain't, I won't come
any more."
"It's a little bit late for you to be out alone anywhere," said Cork.
"I'm not wise to this particular joint; but anyhow you don't want to
have your picture taken in it for a present to your Sunday School
teacher. Have one more beer, and then say I take you home."
"But I don't know you," said the girl, with fine scrupulosity. "I
don't accept the company of gentlemen I ain't acquainted with. My
aunt never would allow that."
"Why," said Cork McManus, pulling his ear, "I'm the latest thing in
suitings with side vents and bell skirt when it comes to escortin'
a lady. You bet you'll find me all right, Ruby. And I'll give you
a tip as to who I am. My governor is one of the hottest cross-buns
of the Wall Street push. Morgan's cab horse casts a shoe every
time the old man sticks his head out the window. Me! Well, I'm in
trainin' down the Street. The old man's goin' to put a seat on the
Stock Exchange in my stockin' my next birthday. But it all sounds
like a lemon to me. What I like is golf and yachtin' and--er--well,
say a corkin' fast ten-round bout between welter-weights with
walkin' gloves."
"I guess you can walk to the door with me," said the girl
hesitatingly, but with a certain pleased flutter. "Still I never
heard anything extra good about Wall Street brokers, or sport who
go to prize fights, either. Ain't you got any other
recommendations?"
"I think you're the swellest looker I've had my lamps on in little
old New York," said Cork impressively.
"That'll be about enough of that, now. Ain't you the kidder!"
She modified her chiding words by a deep, long, beaming, smile-
embellished look at her cavalier. "We'll drink our beer before
we go, ha?"
A waiter sang. The tobacco smoke grew denser, drifting and rising
in spirals, waves, tilted layers, cumulus clouds, cataracts and
suspended fogs like some fifth element created from the ribs of
the ancient four. Laughter and chat grew louder, stimulated by
Rooney's liquids and Rooney's gallant hospitality to Lady
Nicotine.
One o'clock struck. Down-stairs there was a sound of closing and
locking doors. Frank pulled down the green shades of the front
windows carefully. Rooney went below in the dark hall and stood
at the front door, his cigarette cached in the hollow of his hand.
Thenceforth whoever might seek admittance must present a
countenance familiar to Rooney's hawk's eye--the countenance of a
true sport.
Cork McManus and the bookbindery girl conversed absorbedly, with
their elbows on the table. Their glasses of beer were pushed
to one side, scarcely touched, with the foam on them sunken to a
thin white scum. Since the stroke of one the stale pleasures of
Rooney's had become renovated and spiced; not by any addition to
the list of distractions, but because from that moment the sweets
became stolen ones. The flattest glass of beer acquired the tang
of illegality; the mildest claret punch struck a knockout blow at
law and order; the harmless and genial company became outlaws,
defying authority and rule. For after the stroke of one in such
places as Rooney's, where neither bed nor board is to be had, drink
may not be set before the thirsty of the city of the four million.
It is the law.
"Say," said Cork McManus, almost covering the table with his
eloquent chest and elbows, "was that dead straight about you
workin' in the bookbindery and livin' at home--and just happenin'
in here--and--and all that spiel you gave me?"
"Sure it was," answered the girl with spirit. "Why, what do you
think? Do you suppose I'd lie to you? Go down to the shop and
ask 'em. I handed it to you on the level."
"On the dead level?" said Cork. "That's the way I want it;
because--"
"Because what?"
"I throw up my hands," said Cork. "You've got me goin'. You're
the girl I've been lookin' for. Will you keep company with me,
Ruby?"
"Would you like me to--Eddie?"
"Surest thing. But I wanted a straight story about--about yourself,
you know. When a fellow had a girl--a steady girl--she's got to be
all right, you know. She's got to be straight goods."
"You'll find I'll be straight goods, Eddie."
"Of course you will. I believe what you told me. But you can't
blame me for wantin' to find out. You don't see many girls smokin'
cigarettes in places like Rooney's after midnight that are like you."
The girl flushed a little and lowered her eyes. "I see that now," she
said meekly. "I didn't know how bad it looked. But I won't do it
any more. And I'll go straight home every night and stay there.
And I'll give up cigarettes if you say so, Eddie--I'll cut 'em out
from this minute on."
Cork's air became judicial, proprietary, condemnatory, yet sympathetic.
"A lady can smoke," he decided, slowly, "at times and places . Why?
Because it's bein' a lady that helps her pull it off."
"I'm going to quit. There's nothing to it," said the girl. She flicked
the stub of her cigarette to the floor.
"At times and places," repeated Cork. "When I call round for you
of evenin's we'll hunt out a dark bench in Stuyvesant Square and
have a puff or two. But no more Rooney's at one o'clock--see?"
"Eddie, do you really like me?" The girl searchd his hard but
frank features eagerly with anxious eyes.
"On the dead level."
"When are you coming to see me--where I live?"
"Thursday--day after to-morrow evenin'. That suit you?"
"Fine. I'll be ready for you. Come about seven. Walk to the door
with me to-night and I'll show you where I live. Don't forget, now.
And don't you go to see any other girls before then, mister! I bet
you will, though."
"On the dead level," said Cork, "you make 'em all look like rag-
dolls to me. Honest, you do. I know when I'm suited. On the
dead level, I do."
Against the front door down-stairs repeated heavy blows were
delivered. The loud crashes resounded in the room above. Only a
trip-hammer or a policeman's foot could have been the author of
those sounds. Rooney jumped like a bullfrog to a corner of the
room, turned off the electric lights and hurried swiftly below.
The room was left utterly dark except for the winking red glow of
cigars and cigarettes. A second volley of crashes came up from
the assaulted door. A little, rustling, murmuring panic moved
among the besieged guests. Frank, cool, smooth, reassuring, could
be seen in the rosy glow of the burning tobacco, going from table
to table.
"All keep still!" was his caution. "Don't talk or make any noise!
Everything will be all right. Now, don't feel the slightest alarm.
We'll take care of you all."
Ruby felt across the table until Cork's firm hand closed upon hers.
"Are you afraid, Eddie?" she whispered. "Are you afraid you'll get
a free ride?"
"Nothin' doin' in the teeth-chatterin' line," said Cork. "I guess
Rooney's been slow with his envelope. Don't you worry, girly; I'll
look out for you all right."
Yet Mr. McManus's ease was only skin- and muscle-deep. With the
police looking everywhere for Buck Malone's assailant, and with
Corrigan still on the ocean wave, he felt that to be caught in a
police raid would mean an ended career for him. He wished he had
remained in the high rear room of the true Capulet reading the
pink extras.
Rooney seemed to have opened the front door below and engaged the
police in conference in the dark hall. The wordless low growl of
their voices came up the stairway. Frank made a wireless news
station of himself at the upper door. Suddenly he closed the door,
hurried to the extreme rear of the room and lighted a dim gas jet.
"This way, everybody!" he called sharply. "In a hurry; but no
noise, please!"
The guests crowded in confusion to the rear. Rooney's lieutenant
swung open a panel in the wall, overlooking the back yard,
revealing a ladder already placed for the escape.
"Down and out, everybody!" he commanded. "Ladies first! Less
talking, please! Don't crowd! There's no danger."
Among the last, Cork and Ruby waited their turn at the open panel.
Suddenly she swept him aside and clung to his arm fiercely.
"Before we go out," she whispered in his ear--"before anything
happens, tell me again, Eddie, do you l--do you really like me?"
"On the dead level," said Cork, holding her close with one arm,
"when it comes to you, I'm all in."
When they turned they found they were lost and in darkness. The
last of the fleeing customers had descended. Half way across the
yard they bore the ladder, stumbling, giggling, hurrying to place
it against adjoining low building over the roof of which their only
route to safety.
"We may as well sit down," said Cork grimly. "Maybe Rooney will
stand the cops off, anyhow."
They sat at a table; and their hands came together again.
A number of men then entered the dark room, feeling their way about.
One of them, Rooney himself, found the switch and turned on the
electric light. The other man was a cop of the old regime--a big cop,
a thick cop, a fuming, abrupt cop--not a pretty cop. He went up to
the pair at the table and sneered familiarly at the girl.
"What are youse doin' in here?" he asked.
"Dropped in for a smoke," said Cork mildly.
"Had any drinks?"
"Not later than one o'clock."
"Get out--quick!" ordered the cop. Then, "Sit down!" he
countermanded.
He took off Cork's hat roughly and scrutinized him shrewdly.
"Your name's McManus."
"Bad guess," said Cork. "It's Peterson."
"Cork McManus, or something like that," said the cop. "You put a
knife into a man in Dutch Mike's saloon a week ago."
"Aw, forget it!" said Cork, who perceived a shade of doubt in the
officer's tones. "You've got my mug mixed with somebody else's."
"Have I? Well, you'll come to the station with me, anyhow, and be
looked over. The description fits you all right." The cop twisted
his fingers under Cork's collar. "Come on!" he ordered roughly.
Cork glanced at Ruby. She was pale, and her thin nostrils
quivered. Her quick eye danced from one man's face to the other
as they spoke or moved. What hard luck! Cork was thinking--
Corrigan on the briny; and Ruby met and lost almost within an
hour! Somebody at the police station would recognize him,
without a doubt. Hard luck!
But suddenly the girl sprang up and hurled herself with both arms
extended against the cop. His hold on Cork's collar was loosened
and he stumbled back two or three paces.
"Don't go so fast, Maguire!" she cried in shrill fury. "Keep your
hands off my man! You know me, and you know I'm givin' you
good advice. Don't you touch him again! He's not the guy you are
lookin' for--I'll stand for that."
"See here, Fanny," said the Cop, red and angry, "I'll take you, too,
if you don't look out! How do you know this ain't the man I want?
What are you doing in here with him?"
"How do I know?" said the girl, flaming red and white by turns.
"Because I've known him a year. He's mine. Oughtn't I to know?
And what am I doin' here with him? That's easy."
She stooped low and reached down somewhere into a swirl of flirted
draperies, heliotrope and black. An elastic snapped, she threw
on the table toward Cork a folded wad of bills. The money slowly
straightened itself with little leisurely jerks.
"Take that, Jimmy, and let's go," said the girl. "I'm declarin'
the usual dividends, Maguire," she said to the officer. "You had
your usual five-dollar graft at the usual corner at ten."
"A lie!" said the cop, turning purple. "You go on my beat again
and I'll arrest you every time I see you."
"No, you won't," said the girl. "And I'll tell you why. Witnesses
saw me give you the money to-night, and last week, too. I've been
getting fixed for you."
Cork put the wad of money carefuly into his pocket, and said: "Come
on, Fanny; let's have some chop suey before we go home."
"Clear out, quick, both of you, or I'll--"
The cop's bluster trailed away into inconsequentiality.
At the corner of the street the two halted. Cork handed back the
money without a word. The girl took it and slipped it slowly into
her hand-bag. Her expression was the same she had worn when she
entered Rooney's that night--she looked upon the world with defiance,
suspicion and sullen wonder.
"I guess I might as well say good-bye here," she said dully. "You
won't want to see me again, of course. Will you--shake hands--
Mr. McManus."
"I mightn't have got wise if you hadn't give the snap away," said
Cork. "Why did you do it?"
"You'd have been pinched if I hadn't. That's why. Ain't that
reason enough?" Then she began to cry. "Honest, Eddie, I was
goin' to be the best girl in the world. I hated to be what I am;
I hated men; I was ready almost to die when I saw you. And you
seemed different from everybody else. And when I found you liked
me, too, why, I thought I'd make you believe I was good, and I was
goin' to be good. When you asked to come to my house and see me,
why, I'd have died rather than do anything wrong after that. But
what's the use of talking about it? I'll say good-by, if you will,
Mr. McManus."
Cork was pulling at his ear. "I knifed Malone," said he. "I was
the one the cop wanted."
"Oh, that's all right," said the girl listlessly. "It didn't make
any difference about that."
"That was all hot air about Wall Street. I don't do nothin' but hang
out with a tough gang on the East Side."
"That was all right, too," repeated the girl. "It didn't make any
difference."
Cork straightened himself, and pulled his hat down low. "I could get
a job at O'Brien's," he said aloud, but to himself.
"Good-by," said the girl.
"Come on," said Cork, taking her arm. "I know a place."
Two blocks away he turned with her up the steps of a red brick house
facing a little park.
"What house is this?" she asked, drawing back. "Why are you going
in there?"
A street lamp shone brightly in front. There was a brass nameplate
at one side of the closed front doors. Cork drew her firmly up the
steps. "Read that," said he.
She looked at the name on the plate, and gave a cry between a moan
and a scream. "No, no, no, Eddie! Oh, my God, no! I won't let you
do that--not now! Let me go! You shan't do that! You can't--you
mus'n't! Not after you know! No, no! Come away quick! Oh, my God!
Please, Eddie, come!"
Half fainting, she reeled, and was caught in the bend of his arm.
Cork's right hand felt for the electric button and pressed it long.
Another cop--how quickly they scent trouble when trouble is on the
wing!--came along, saw them, and ran up the steps. "Here! What are
you doing with that girl?" he called gruffly.
"She'll be all right in a minute," said Cork. "It's a straight deal."
"Reverend Jeremiah Jones," read the cop from the door-plate with true
detective cunning.
"Correct," said Cork. "On the dead level, we're goin' to get married."
XXI
THE VENTURERS
Let the story wreck itself on the spreading rails of the _Non Sequitur_
Limited, if it will; first you must take your seat in the observation
car "_Raison d'^etre_" for one moment. It is for no longer than to
consider a brief essay on the subject--let us call it: "What's Around
the Corner."
_Omne mundus in duas partes divisum est_--men who wear rubbers and pay
poll-taxes, and men who discover new continents. There are no more
continents to discover; but by the time overshoes are out of date and
the poll has developed into an income tax, the other half will be
paralleling the canals of Mars with radium railways.
Fortune, Chance, and Adventure are given as synonymous in the
dictionaries. To the knowing each has a different meaning.
Fortune is a prize to be won. Adventure is the road to it. Chance
is what may lurk in the shadows at the roadside. The face of
Fortune is radiant and alluring; that of Adventure is flushed and
heroic. The face of Chance is the beautiful countenance--perfect
because vague and dream-born--that we see in our tea-cups at
breakfast while we growl over our chops and toast.
The VENTURER is one who keeps his eye on the hedgerows and wayside
groves and meadows while he travels the road to Fortune. That is
the difference between him and the Adventurer. Eating the forbidden
fruit was the best record ever made by a Venturer. Trying to prove
that it happened is the highest work of the Adventuresome. To be
either is disturbing to the cosmogony of creation. So, as bracket-
sawed and city-directoried citizens, let us light our pipes, chide
the children and the cat, arrange ourselves in the willow rocker
under the flickering gas jet at the coolest window and scan this
little tale of two modern followers of Chance.
"Did you ever hear that story about the man from the West?" asked
Billinger, in the little dark-oak room to your left as you penetrate
the interior of the Powhatan Club.
"Doubtless," said John Reginald Forster, rising and leaving the
room.
Forster got his straw hat (straws will be in and maybe out again
long before this is printed) from the checkroom boy, and walked
out of the air (as Hamlet says). Billinger was used to having his
stories insulted and would not mind. Forster was in his favorite
mood and wanted to go away from anywhere. A man, in order to get
on good terms with himself, must have his opinions corroborated
and his moods matched by some one else. (I had written that
"somebody"; but an A. D. T. boy who once took a telegram for me
pointed out that I could save money by using the compound word.
This is a vice versa case).
Forster's favorite mood was that of greatly desiring to be a follower
of Chance. He was a Venturer by nature, but convention, birth,
tradition and the narrowing influences of the tribe of Manhattan
had denied him full privilege. He had trodden all the main-traveled
thoroughfares and many of the side roads that are supposed to relieve
the tedium of life. But none had sufficed. The reason was that he
knew what was to be found at the end of every street. He knew from
experience and logic almost precisely to what end each digression
from routine must lead. He found a depressing monotony in all the
variations that the music of his sphere had grafted upon the tune
of life. He had not learned that, although the world was made round,
the circle has been squared, and that it's true interest is to be
in "What's Around the Corner."
Forster walked abroad aimlessly from the Powhatan, trying not to tax
either his judgment or his desire as to what streets he traveled.
He would have been glad to lose his way if it were possible; but he
had no hope of that. Adventure and Fortune move at your beck and
call in the Greater City; but Chance is oriental. She is a veiled
lady in a sedan chair, protected by a special traffic squad of
dragonians. Crosstown, uptown, and downtown you may move without
seeing her.
At the end of an hour's stroll, Forster stood on a corner of a broad,
smooth avenue, looking disconsolately across it at a picturesque old
hotel softly but brilliantly lit. Disconsolately, because he knew
that he must dine; and dining in that hotel was no venture. It was
one of his favorite caravansaries, and so silent and swift would be
the service and so delicately choice the food, that he regretted the
hunger that must be appeased by the "dead perfection" of the place's
cuisine. Even the music there seemed to be always playing _da capo_.
Fancy came to him that he would dine at some cheap, even dubious,
restaurant lower down in the city, where the erratic chefs from
all countries of the world spread their national cookery for the
omnivorous American. Something might happen there out of the
routine--he might come upon a subject without a predicate, a road
without an end, a question without an answer, a cause without an
effect, a gulf stream in life's salt ocean. He had not dressed
for evening; he wore a dark business suit that would not be
questioned even where the waiters served the spaghetti in their
shirt sleeves.
So John Reginald Forster began to search his clothes for money;
because the more cheaply you dine, the more surely must you pay.
All of the thirteen pockets, large and small, of his business suit
he explored carefully and found not a penny. His bank book showed
a balance of five figures to his credit in the Old Ironsides Trust
Company, but--
Forster became aware of a man nearby at his left hand who was really
regarding him with some amusement. he looked like any business man
of thirty or so, neatly dressed and standing in the attitude of one
waiting for a street car. But there was no car line on that avenue.
So his proximity and unconcealed curiosity seemed to Forster to
partake of the nature of a personal intrusion. But, as he was a
consistent seeker after "What's Around the Corner," instead of
manifesting resentment he only turned a half-embarrassed smile upon
the other's grin of amusement.
"All in?" asked the intruder, drawing nearer.
"Seems so," said Forster. "Now, I thought there was a dollar in--"
"Oh, I know," said the other man, with a laugh. "But there wasn't.
I've just been through the same process myself, as I was coming
around the corner. I found in an upper vest pocket--I don't know
how they got there--exactly two pennies. You know what kind of a
dinner exactly two pennies will buy!"
"You haven't dined, then?" asked Forster.
"I have not. But I would like to. Now, I'll make you a proposition.
You look like a man who would take up one. Your clothes look neat
and respectable. Excuse personalities. I think mine will pass the
scrutiny of a head waiter, also. Suppose we go over to that hotel
and dine together. We will choose from the menu like millionaires
--or, if you prefer, like gentlemen in moderate circumstances dining
extravagantly for once. When we have finished we will match with my
two pennies to see which of us will stand the brunt of the house's
displeasure and vengeance. My name is Ives. I think we have lived
in the same station of life--before our money took wings."
"You're on," said Forster, joyfully.
Here was a venture at least within the borders of the mysterious
country of Change--anyhow, it promised something better than the
stale infestivity of a table d'h^ote.
The two were soon seated at a corner table in the hotel dining
room. Ives chucked one of his pennies across the table to Forster.
"Match for which of us gives the order," he said.
Forster lost.
Ives laughed and began to name liquids and viands to the waiter
with the absorbed but calm deliberation of one who was to the menu
born. Forster, listening, gave his admiring approval of the order.
"I am a man," said Ives, during the oysters, "Who has made a
lifetime search after the to-be-continued-in-our-next. I am not
like the ordinary adventurer who strikes for a coveted prize. Nor
yet am I like a gambler who knows he is either to win or lose a
certain set stake. What I want is to encounter an adventure to which
I can predict no conclusion. It is the breath of existence to me to
dare Fate in its blindest manifestations. The world has come to run
so much by rote and gravitation that you can enter upon hardly any
footpath of chance in which you do not find signboards informing
you of what you may expect at its end. I am like the clerk in the
Circumlocution Office who always complained bitterly when any one
came in to ask information. 'He wanted to _know_, you know!' was
the kick he made to his fellow-clerks. Well, I don't want to know,
I don't want to reason, I don't want to guess--I want to bet my hand
without seeing it."
"I understand," said Forster delightedly. "I've often wanted the
way I feel put into words. You've done it. I want to take chances
on what's coming. Suppose we have a bottle of Moselle with the
next course."
"Agreed," said Ives. "I'm glad you catch my idea. It will increase
the animosity of the house toward the loser. If it does not weary
you, we will pursue the theme. Only a few times have I met a true
venturer--one who does not ask a schedule and map from Fate when he
begins a journey. But, as the world becomes more civilized and wiser,
the more difficult it is to come upon an adventure the end of which
you cannot foresee. In the Elizabethan days you could assault the
watch, wring knockers from doors and have a jolly set-to with the
blades in any convenient angle of a wall and 'get away with it.'
Nowadays, if you speak disrespectfully to a policeman, all that is
left to the most romantic fancy is to conjecture in what particular
police station he will land you."
"I know--I know," said Forster, nodding approval.
"I returned to New York to-day," continued Ives, "from a three years'
ramble around the globe. Things are not much better abroad than they
are at home. The whole world seems to be overrun by conclusions. The
only thing that interests me greatly is a premise. I've tried shooting
big game in Africa. I know what an express rifle will do at so many
yards; and when an elephant or a rhinoceros falls to the bullet, I
enjoy it about as much as I did when I was kept in after school to do
a sum in long division on the blackboard."
"I know--I know," said Forster.
"There might be something in aeroplanes," went on Ives, reflectively.
"I've tried ballooning; but it seems to be merely a cut-and-dried
affair of wind and ballast."
"Women," suggested Forster, with a smile.
"Three months ago," said Ives. "I was pottering around in one of
the bazaars in Constantinople. I noticed a lady, veiled, of course,
but with a pair of especially fine eyes visible, who was examining
some amber and pearl ornaments at one of the booths. With her was
an attendant--a big Nubian, as black as coal. After a while the
attendant drew nearer to me by degrees and slipped a scrap of paper
into my hand. I looked at it when I got a chance. On it was
scrawled hastily in pencil: 'The arched gate of the Nghtingale
Garden at nine to-night.' Does that appear to you to be an
interesting premise, Mr. Forster?"
"I made inquiries and learned that the Nightingale Garden was the
property of an old Turk--a grand vizier, or something of the sort.
Of course I prospected for the arched gate and was there at nine.
The same Nubian attendant opened the gate promptly on time, and
I went inside and sat on a bench by a perfumed fountain with the
veiled lady. We had quite an extended chat. She was Myrtle
Thompson, a lady journalist, who was writing up the Turkish
harems for a Chicago newspaper. She said she noticed the New
York cut of my clothes in the bazaar and wondered if I couldn't
work something into the metropolitan papers about it."
"I see," said Forster. "I see."
"I've canoed through Canada," said Ives, "down many rapids and
over many falls. But I didn't seem to get what I wanted out of
it because I knew there were only two possible outcomes--I would
either go to the bottom or arrive at the sea level. I've played
all games at cards; but the mathematicians have spoiled that sport
by computing the percentages. I've made acquaintances on trains,
I've answered advertisements, I've rung strange door-bells, I've
taken every chance that presented itself; but there has always
been the conventional ending--the logical conclusion to the
premise."
"I know," repeated Forster. "I've felt it all. But I've had few
chances to take my chance at chances. Is there any life so devoid
of impossibilities as life in this city? There seems to be a myriad
of opportunities for testing the undeterminable; but not one in a
thousand fails to land you where you expected it to stop. I wish
the subways and street cars disappointed one as seldom."
"The sun has risen," said Ives, "on the Arabian nights. There are
no more caliphs. The fisherman's vase is turned to a vacuum bottle,
warranted to keep any genie boiling or frozen for forty-eight hours.
Life moves by rote. Science has killed adventure. There are no
more opportunities such as Columbus and the man who ate the first
oyster had. The only certain thing is that there is nothing
uncertain."
"Well," said Forster, "my experience has been the limited one of a
city man. I haven't seen the world as you have; but it seems that
we view it with the same opinion. But, I tell you I am grateful for
even this little venture of ours into the borders of the haphazard.
There may be at least one breathless moment when the bill for the
dinner is presented. Perhaps, after all, the pilgrims who traveled
without scrip or purse found a keener taste to life than did the
knights of the Round Table who rode abroad with a retinue and King
Arthur's certified checks in the lining of their helmets. And now,
if you've finished your coffee, suppose we match one of your
insufficient coins for the impending blow of Fate. What have I
up?"
"Heads," called Ives.
"Heads it is," said Forster, lifting his hand. "I lose. We forgot
to agree upon a plan for the winner to escape. I suggest that when
the waiter comes you make a remark about telephoning to a friend.
I will hold the fort and the dinner check long enough for you to get
your hat and be off. I thank you for an evening out of the ordinary,
Mr. Ives, and wish we might have others."
"If my memory is not at fault," said Ives, laughing, "the nearest
police station is in MacDougal Street. I have enjoyed the dinner,
too, let me assure you."
Forster crooked his finger for the waiter. Victor, with a locomotive
effort that seemed to owe more to pneumatics than to pedestrianism,
glided to the table and laid the card, face downward, by the loser's
cup. Forster took it up and added the figures with deliberate care.
Ives leaned back comfortably in his chair.
"Escuse me," said Forster; "but I though you were going to ring
Grimes about that theatre party for Thursday night. Had you forgotten
about it?"
"Oh," said Ives, settling himself more comfortably, "I can do that
later on. Get me a glass of water, waiter."
"Want to be in at the death, do you?" asked Forster.
"I hope you don't object," said Ives, pleadingly. "Never in my life
have I seen a gentleman arrested in a public restaurant for swindling
it out of a dinner."
"All right," said Forster, calmly. "You are entitled to see a
Christian die in the arena as your _pousse-caf'e_."
Victor came with the glass of water and remained, with the disengaged
air of an inexorable collector.
Forster hesitated for fifteen seconds, and then took a pencil from
his pocket and scribbled his name on the dinner check. The waiter
bowed and took it away.
"The fact is," said Forster, with a little embarrassed laugh, "I doubt
whether I'm what they call a 'game sport,' which means the same as a
'soldier of Fortune.' I'll have to make a confession. I've been
dining at this hotel two or three times a week for more than a year.
I always sign my checks." And then, with a note of appreciation in
his voice: "It was first-rate of you to stay to see me through with it
when you knew I had no money, and that you might be scooped in, too."
"I guess I'll confess, too," said Ives, with a grin. "I own the hotel.
I don't run it, of course, but I always keep a suite on the third floor
for my use when I happen to stray into town."
He called a waiter and said: "I s Mr. Gilmore still behind the desk?
All right. Tell him that Mr. Ives is here, and ask him to have my
rooms made ready and aired."
"Another venture cut short by the inevitable," said Forster. "Is
there a conundrum without an answer in the next number? But let's
hold to our subject just for a minute or two, if you will. It isn't
often that I meet a man who understands the flaws I pick in existence.
I am engaged to be married a month from to-day."
"I reserve comment," said Ives.
"Right; I am going to add to the assertion. I am devotedly fond of
the lady; but I can't decide whether to show up at the church or
make a sneak for Alaska. It's the same idea, you know, that we were
discussing--it does for a fellow as far as possibilities are
concerned. Everybody knows the routine--you get a kiss flavored
with Ceylon tea after breakfast; you go to the office; you come back
home and dress for dinner--theatre twice a week--bills--moping
around most evenings trying to make conversation--a little quarrel
occasionally--maybe sometimes a big one, and a separation--or else
a settling down into a middle-aged contentment, which is worst
of all."
"I know," said Ives, nodding wisely.
"It's the dead certainty of the thing," went on Forster, "that keeps
me in doubt. There'll nevermore be anything around the corner."
"Nothing after the 'Little Church,'" said Ives. "I know."
"Understand," said Forster, "that I am in no doubt as to my feelings
toward the lady. I may say that I love her truly and deeply. But
there is something in the current that runs through my veins that
cries out against any form of the calculable. I do not know what
I want; but I know that I want it. I'm talking like an idiot, I
suppose, but I'm sure of what I mean."
"I understand you," said Ives, with a slow smile. "Well, I think I
will be going up to my rooms now. If you would dine with me here one
evening soon, Mr. Forster, I'd be glad."
"Thursday?" suggested Forster.
"At seven, if it's convenient," answered Ives.
"Seven goes," assented Forster.
At halft-past eight Ives got into a cab and was driven to a number
in one of the correct West Seventies. His card admitted him to the
reception room of an old-fashioned house into which the spirits of
Fortune, Chance and Adventure had never dared to enter. On the
walls were the Whistler etchings, the steel engravings by Oh-what's-
his-name?, the still-life paintings of the grapes and garden truck
with the watermelon seeds spilled on the table as natural as life,
and the Greuze head. It was a household. There was even brass
andirons. On a table was an album, half-morocco, with oxidized-
silver protections on the corners of the lids. A clock on the mantel
ticked loudly, with a warning click at five minutes to nine. Ives
looked at it curiously, remembering a time-piece in his grandmother's
home that gave such a warning.
And then down the stairs and into the room came Mary Marsden. She
was twenty-four, and I leave her to your imagination. But I must
say this much--youth and health and simplicity and courage and
greenish-violet eyes are beautiful, and she had all these. She gave
Ives her hand with the sweet cordiality of an old friendship.
"You can't think what a pleasure it is," she said, "to have you drop
in once every three years or so."
For half an hour they talked. I confess that I cannot repeat the
conversation. You will find it in books in the circulating library.
When that part of it was over, Mary said:
"And did you find what you wanted while you were abroad?"
"What I wanted?" said Ives.
"Yes. You know you were always queer. Even as a boy you wouldn't
play marbles or baseball or any game with rules. You wanted to dive
in water where you didn't know whether it was ten inches or ten feet
deep. And when you grew up you were just the same. We've often
talked about your peculiar ways."
"I suppose I am an incorrigible," said Ives. "I am opposed to the
doctrine of predestination, to the rule of three, gravitation,
taxation, and everything of the kind. Life has always seemed to
me something like a serial story would be if they printed above
each instalment a synopsis of _succeeding_ chapters."
Mary laughed merrily.
"Bob Ames told us once," she said, "of a funny thing you did. It
was when you and he were on a train in the South, and you got off
at a town where you hadn't intended to stop just because the
brakeman hung up a sign in the end of the car with the name of the
next station on it."
"I remember," said Ives. "That 'next station' has been the thing
I've always tried to get away from."
"I know it," said Mary. "And you've been very foolish. I hope you
didn't find what you wanted not to find, or get off at the station
where there wasn't any, or whatever it was you expected wouldn't
happen to you during the three years you've been away."
"There was something I wanted before I went away," said Ives.
Mary looked in his eyes clearly, with a slight, but perfectly sweet
smile.
"There was," she said. "You wanted me. And you could have had me,
as you very well know."
Without replying, Ives let his gaze wander slowly about the room.
There had been no change in it since last he had been in it, three
years before. He vividly recalled the thoughts that had been in his
mind then. The contents of that room were as fixed in their way, as
the everlasting hills. No change would ever come there except the
inevitable ones wrought by time and decay. That silver-mounted album
would occupy that corner of that table, those pictures would hang on
the walls, those chairs be found in their same places every morn and
noon and night while the household hung together. The brass andirons
were monuments to order and stability. Herre and there were relics
of a hundred years ago which were still living mementos and would be
for many years to come. One going from and coming back to that house
would never need to forecast or doubt. He would find what he left,
and leave what he found. The veiled lady, Chance, would never lift
her hand to the knocker on the outer door.
And before him sat the lady who belonged in the room. Cool and sweet
and unchangeable she was. She offered no surprises. If one should
pass his life with her, though she might grow white-haired and
wrinkled, he would never perceive the change. Three years he had been
away from her, and she was still waiting for him as established and
constant as the house itself. He was sure that she had once cared for
him. It was the knowledge that she would always do so that had driven
him away. Thus his thoughts ran.
"I am going to be married soon," said Mary.
On the next Thursday afternoon Forster came hurriedly to Ive's hotel.
"Old man," said he, "we'll have to put that dinner off for a year or
so; I'm going abroad. The steamer sails at four. That was a great
talk we had the other night, and it decided me. I'm going to knock
around the world and get rid of that incubus that has been weighing
on both you and me--the terrible dread of knowing what's going to
happen. I've done one thing that hurts my conscience a little; but
I know it's best for both of us. I've written to the lady to whom
I was engaged and explained everything--told her plainly why I was
leaving--that the monotony of matrimony would never do for me. Don't
you think I was right?"
"It is not for me to say," answered Ives. "Go ahead and shoot
elephants if you think it will bring the element of chance into your
life. We've got to decide these things for ourselves. But I tell you
one thing, Forster, I've found the way. I've found out the biggest
hazard in the world--a game of chance that never is concluded, a
venture that may end in the highest heaven or the blackest pit. It
will keep a man on edge until the clods fall on his coffin, because
he will never know--not until his last day, and not then will he
know. It is a voayge without a rudder or compass, and you must
be captain and crew and keep watch, every day and night, yourself,
with no one to relieve you. I have found the VENTURE. Don't bother
yourself about leaving Mary Marsden, Forster. I married her
yesterday at noon."
XXII
THE DUEL
The gods, lying beside their nectar on 'Lympus and peeping over the
edge of the cliff, perceive a difference in cities. Although it
would seem that to their vision towns must appear as large or small
ant-hills without special characteristics, yet it is not so.
Studying the habits of ants frm so great a height should be but a
mild diversion when coupled with the soft drink that mythology tells
us is their only solace. But doubtless they have amused themselves
by the comparison of villages and towns; and it will be no news to
them (nor, perhaps, to many mortals), that in one particularity
New York stands unique among the cities of the world. This shall be
the theme of a little story addressed to the man who sits smoking
with his Sabbath-slippered feet on another chair, and to the woman
who snatches the paper for a moment while boiling greens or a
narcotized baby leaves her free. With these I love to sit upon the
ground and tell sad stories of the death of Kings.
New York City is inhabited by 4,000,000 mysterious strangers; thus
beating Bird Centre by three millions and half a dozen nine's. They
came here in various ways and for many reasons--Hendrik Hudson, the
art schools, green goods, the stork, the annual dressmakers'
convention, the Pennsylvania Railroad, love of money, the stage,
cheap excursion rates, brains, personal column ads., heavy walking
shoes, ambition, freight trains--all these have had a hand in making
up the population.
But every man Jack when he first sets foot on the stones of Manhattan
has got to fight. He has got to fight at once until either he or his
adversary wins. There is no resting between rounds, for there are no
rounds. It is slugging from the first. It is a fight to a finish.
Your opponent is the City. You must do battle with it from the time
the ferry-boat lands you on the island until either it is yours or
it has conquered you. It is the same whether you have a million in
your pocket or only the price of a week's lodging.
The battle is to decide whether you shall become a New Yorker or
turn the rankest outlander and Philistine. You must be one or the
other. You cannot remain neutral. You must be for or against--
lover or enemy--bosom friend or outcast. And, oh, the city is a
general in the ring. Not only by blows does it seek to subdue you.
It woos you to its heart with the subtlety of a siren. It is a
combination of Delilah, green Chartreuse, Beethoven, chloral and
John L. in his best days.
In other cities you may wander and abide as a stranger man as long
as you please. You may live in Chicago until your hair whitens,
and be a citizen and still prate of beans if Boston mothered you,
and without rebuke. You may become a civic pillar in any other
town but Knickerbocker's, and all the time publicly sneering at
its buildings, comparing them with the architecture of Colonel
Telfair's residence in Jackson, Miss., whence you hail, and you
will not be set upon. But in New York you must be either a New
Yorker or an invader of a modern Troy, concealed in the wooden
horse of your conceited provincialism. And this dreary preamble
is only to introduce to you the unimportant figures of William
and Jack.
They came out of the West together, where they had been friends.
They came to dig their fortunes out of the big city.
Father Knickerbocker met them at the ferry, giving one a right-
hander on the nose and the other an upper-cut with his left, just
to let them know that the fight was on.
William was for business; Jack was for Art. Both were young and
ambitious; so they countered and clinched. I think they were from
Nebraska or possibly Missouri or Minnesota. Anyhow, they were out
for success and scraps and scads, and they tackled the city like
two Lochinvars with brass knucks and a pull at the City Hall.
Four years afterward William and Jack met at luncheon. The business
man blew in like a March wind, hurled his silk hat at a waiter,
dropped into the chair that was pushed under him, seized the bill
of fare, and had ordered as far as cheese before the artist had time
to do more than nod. After the nod a humorous smile came into
his eyes.
"Billy," he said, "you're done for. The city has gobbled you up.
It has taken you and cut you to its pattern and stamped you with
its brand. You are so nearly like ten thousand men I have seen
to-day that you couldn't be picked out from them if it weren't for
your laundry marks."
"Camembert," finished William. "What's that? Oh, you've still
got your hammer out for New York, have you? Well, little old
Noisyville-on-the-Subway is good enough for me. It's giving me
mine. And, say, I used to think the West was the whole round
world--only slightly flattened at the poles whenever Bryan ran.
I used to yell myself hoarse about the free expense, and hang my
hat on the horizon, and say cutting things in the grocery to little
soap drummers from the East. But I'd never seen New York, then,
Jack. Me for it from the rathskellers up. Sixth Avenue is the West
to me now. Have you heard this fellow Crusoe sing? The desert isle
for him, I say, but my wife made me go. Give me May Irwin or E. S.
Willard any time."
"Poor Billy," said the artist, delicately fingering a cigarette.
"You remember, when we were on our way to the East how we talked
about this great, wonderful city, and how we meant to conquer it
and never let it get the best of us? We were going to be just the
same fellows we had always been, and never let it master us. It
has downed you, old man. You have changed from a maverick into a
butterick."
"Don't see exactly what you are driving at," said William. "I don't
wear an alpaca coat with blue trousers and a seersucker vest on
dress occasions, like I used to do at home. You talk about being
cut to a pattern--well, ain't the pattern all right? When you're in
Rome you've got to do as the Dagoes do. This town seems to me to
have other alleged metropolises skinned to flag stations. According
to the railroad schedule I've got in mind, Chicago and Saint Jo and
Paris, France, are asterisk stops--which means you wave a red flag
and get on every other Tuesday. I like this little suburb of
Tarrytown-on-the-Hudson. There's something or somebody doing all
the time. I'm clearing $8,000 a year selling automatic pumps, and
I'm living like kings-up. Why, yesterday, I was introduced to
John W. Gates. I took an auto ride with a wine agent's sister.
I saw two men run over by a street car, and I seen Edna May play
in the evening. Talk about the West, why, the other night I woke
everybody up in the hotel hollaring. I dreamed I was walking on a
board sidewalk in Oshkosh. What have you got against this town,
Jack? There's only one thing in it that I don't care for, and
that's a ferryboat."
The artist gazed dreamily at the cartridge paper on the wall. "This
town," said he, "is a leech. It drains the blood of the country.
Whoever comes to it accepts a challenge to a duel. Abandoning the
figure of the leech, it is a juggernaut, a Moloch, a monster to which
the innocence, the genius, and the beauty of the land must pay
tribute. Hand to hand every newcomer must struggle with the
leviathan. You've lost, Billy. It shall never conquer me. I hate
it as one hates sin or pestilence or--the color work in a ten-cent
magazine. I despise its very vastness and power. It has the poorest
millionaires, the littlest great men, the lowest skyscrapers, the
dolefulest pleasures of any town I ever saw. It has caught you, old
man, but I will never run beside its chariot wheels. It glosses
itself as the Chinaman glosses his collars. Give me the domestic
finish. I could stand a town ruled by wealth or one ruled by an
aristocracy; but this is one controlled by its lowest ingredients.
Claiming culture, it is the crudest; asseverating its pre-eminence,
it is the basest; denying all outside values and virtue, it is the
narrowest. Give me the pure and the open heart of the West country.
I would go back there to-morrow if I could."
"Don't you like this _filet mgnon_?" said William. "Shucks, now,
what's the use to knock the town! It's the greatest ever. I
couldn't sell one automatic pump between Harrisburg and Tommy
O'Keefe's saloon, in Sacramento, where I sell twenty here. And
have you seen Sara Bernardt in 'Andrew Mack' yet?"
"The town's got you, Billy," said Jack.
"All right," said William. "I'm going to buy a cottage on Lake
Ronkonkoma next summer."
At midnight Jack raised his window and sat close to it. He caught
his breath at what he saw, though he had seen and felt it a hundred
times.
Far below and around lay the city like a ragged purple dream. The
irregular houses were like the broken exteriors of cliffs lining deep
gulches and winding streams. Some were mountainous; some lay in
long, desert ca~nons. Such was the background of the wonderful,
cruel, enchanting, bewildering, fatal, great city. But into this
background were cut myriads of brilliant parallelograms and circles
and squares through which glowed many colored lights. And out of the
violet and purple depths ascended like the city's soul sounds and
odors and thrills that make up the civic body. There arose the breath
of gaiety unrestrained, of love, of hate, of all the passions that man
can know. There below him lay all things, good or bad, that can be
brought from the four corners of the earth to instruct, please,
thrill, enrich, despoil, elevate, cast down, nurture or kill. Thus
the flavor of it came up to him and went into his blood.
There was a knock on his door. A telegram had come for him. It came
from the West, and these were its words:
"Come back and the answer will be yes.
"DOLLY."
He kept the boy waiting ten minutes, and then wrote the reply:
"Impossible to leave here at present." Then he sat at the window
again and let the city put its cup of mandragora to his lips again.
After all it isn't a story; but I wanted to know which one of the
heroes won the battle against the city. So I went to a very learned
friend and laid the case before him. What he said was: "Please
don't bother me; I have Christmas presents to buy."
So there it rests; and you will have to decide for yourself.
XXIII
"WHAT YOU WANT"
Night had fallen on that great and beautiful city known as Bagdad-
on-the-Subway. And with the night came the enchanted glamour
that belongs not to Arabia alone. In different masquerade the
streets, bazaars and walled houses of the occidental city of
romance were filled with the same kind of folk that so much
interested our interesting old friend, the late Mr. H. A. Rashid.
They wore clothes eleven hundred years nearer to the latest styles
than H. A. saw in old Bagdad; but they were about the same people
underneath. With the eye of faith, you could have seen the
Little Hunchback, Sinbad the Sailor, Fitbad the Tailor, the
Beautiful Persian, the one-eyed Calenders, Ali Baba and Forty
Robbers on every block, and the Barber and his Six Brothers, and
all the old Arabian gang easily.
But let us revenue to our lamb chops.
Old Tom Crowley was a caliph. He had $42,000,000 in preferred stocks
and bonds with solid gold edges. In these times, to be called a
caliph you must have money. The old-style caliph business as
conducted by Mr. Rashid is not safe. If you hold up a person nowadays
in a bazaar or a Turkish bath or a side street, and inquire into his
private and personal affairs, the police court'll get you.
Old Tom was tired of clubs, theatres, dinners, friends, music, money
and everything. That's what makes a caliph--you must get to despise
everything that money can buy, and then go out and try to want
something that you can't pay for.
"I'll take a little trot around town all by myself," thought old Tom,
"and try if I can stir up anything new. Let's see--it seems I've
read about a king or a Cardiff giant or something in old times who
used to go about with false whiskers on, making Persian dates with
folks he hadn't been introduced to. That don't listen like a bad
idea. I certainly have got a case of humdrumness and fatigue on
for the ones I do know. That old Cardiff used to pick up cases of
trouble as he ran upon 'em and give 'em gold--sequins, I think it
was--and make 'em marry or got 'em good Government jobs. Now,
I'd like something of that sort. My money is as good as his was
even if the magazines do ask me every month where I got it. Yes,
I guess I'll do a little Cardiff business to-night, and see how it
goes."
Plainly dressed, old Tom Crowley left his Madison Avenue palace,
and walked westward and then south. As he stepped to the sidewalk,
Fate, who holds the ends of the strings in the central offices of
all the enchanted cities pulled a thread, and a young man twenty
blocks away looked at a wall clock, and then put on his coat.
James Turner worked in one of those little hat-cleaning
establishments on Sixth Avenue in which a fire alarms rings when
you push the door open, and where they clean your hat while you
wait--two days. James stood all day at an electric machine that
turned hats around faster than the best brands of champagne ever
could have done. Overlooking your mild impertinence in feeling a
curiosity about the personal appearance of a stranger, I will give
you a modified description of him. Weight, 118; complexion, hair
and brain, light; height, five feet six; age, about twenty-three;
dressed in a $10 suit of greenish-blue serge; pockets containing
two keys and sixty-three cents in change.
But do not misconjecture because this description sounds like a
General Alarm that James was either lost or a dead one.
_Allons!_
James stood all day at his work. His feet were tender and
extremely susceptible to impositions being put upon or below
them. All day long they burned and smarted, causing him much
suffering and inconvenience. But he was earning twelve dollars
per week, which he needed to support his feet whether his feet
would support him or not.
James Turner had his own conception of what happiness was, just
as you and I have ours. Your delight is to gad about the world in
yachts and motor-cars and to hurl ducats at wild fowl. Mine is to
smoke a pipe at evenfall and watch a badger, a rattlesnake, and an
owl go into their common prairie home one by one.
James Turner's idea of bliss was different; but it was his. He
would go directly to his boarding-house when his day's work was
done. After his supper of small steak, Bessemer potatoes, stooed
(not stewed) apples and infusion of chicory, he would ascend to
his fifth-floor-back hall room. Then he would take off his shoes
and socks, place the soles of his burning feet against the cold bars
of his iron bed, and read Clark Russell's sea yarns. The delicious
relief of the cool metal applied to his smarting soles was his
nightly joy. His favorite novels never palled upon him; the sea
and the adventures of its navigators were his sole intellectual
passion. No millionaire was ever happier than James Turner
taking his ease.
When James left the hat-cleaning shop he walked three blocks out
of his way home to look over the goods of a second-hand
bookstall. On the sidewalk stands he had more than once picked
up a paper-covered volume of Clark Russell at half price.
While he was bending with a scholarly stoop over the marked-down
miscellany of cast-off literature, old Tom the caliph sauntered by.
His discerning eye, made keen by twenty years' experience in the
manufacture of laundry soap (save the wrappers!) recognized
instantly the poor and discerning scholar, a worthy object of his
caliphanous mood. He descended the two shallow stone steps that
led from the sidewalk, and addressed without hesitation the object
of his designed munificence. His first words were no worse than
salutatory and tentative.
James Turner looked up coldly, with "Sartor Resartus" in one hand
and "A Mad Marriage" in the other.
"Beat it," said he. "I don't want to buy any coat hangers or town
lots in Hankipoo, New Jersey. Run along, now, and play with your
Teddy bear."
"Young man," said the caliph, ignoring the flippancy of the hat
cleaner, "I observe that you are of a studious disposition. Learning
is one of the finest things in the world. I never had any of it worth
mentioning, but I admire to see it in others. I come from the West,
where we imagine nothing but facts. Maybe I couldn't understand
the poetry and allusions in them books you are picking over, but I
like to see somebody else seem to know what they mean. I'm worth
about $40,000,000, and I'm getting richer every day. I made the
height of it manufacturing Aunt Patty's Silver Soap. I invented
the art of making it. I experimented for three years before I got
just the right quantity of chloride of sodium solution and caustic
potash mixture to curdle properly. And after I had taken some
$9,000,000 out of the soap business I made the rest in corn and
wheat futures. Now, you seem to have the literary and scholarly
turn of character; and I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll pay for your
education at the finest college in the world. I'll pay the expense
of your rummaging over Europe and the art galleries, and finally set
you up in a good business. You needn't make it soap if you have any
objections. I see by your clothes and frazzled necktie that you are
mighty poor; and you can't afford to turn down the offer. Well,
when do you want to begin?"
The hat cleaner turned upon old Tom the eye of the Big City, which
is an eye expressive of cold and justifiable suspicion, of judgment
suspended as high as Haman was hung, of self-preservation, of
challenge, curiosity, defiance, cynicism, and, strange as you may
think it, of a childlike yearning for friendliness and fellowship
that must be hidden when one walks among the "stranger bands."
For in New Bagdad one, in order to survive, must suspect whosoever
sits, dwells, drinks, rides, walks or sleeps in the adjacent chair,
house, booth, seat, path or room.
"Say, Mike," said James Turner, "what's your line, anyway--shoe
laces? I'm not buying anything. You better put an egg in your
shoe and beat it before incidents occur to you. You can't work off
any fountain pens, gold spectacles you found on the street, or trust
company certificate house clearings on me. Say, do I look like I'd
climbed down one of them missing fire-escapes at Helicon Hall?
What's vitiating you, anyhow?"
"Son," said the caliph, in his most Harunish tones, "as I said, I'm
worth $40,000,000. I don't want to have it all put in my coffin
when I die. I want to do some good with it. I seen you handling
over these here volumes of literature, and I thought I'd keep you.
I've give the missionary societies $2,000,000, but what did I get
out of it? Nothing but a receipt from the secretary. Now, you are
just the kind of young man I'd like to take up and see what money
could make of him."
Volumes of Clark Russell were hard to find that evening at the Old
Book Shop. And James Turner's smarting and aching feet did not
tend to improve his temper. Humble hat cleaner though he was, he
had a spirit equal to any caliph's.
"Say, you old faker," he said, angrily, "be on your way. I don't
know what your game is, unless you want change for a bogus
$40,000,000 bill. Well, I don't carry that much around with me.
But I do carry a pretty fair left-handed punch that you'll get if
you don't move on."
"You are a blamed impudent little gutter pup," said the caliph.
Then James delivered his self-praised punch; old Tom seized him
by the collar and kicked him thrice; the hat cleaner rallied and
clinched; two bookstands were overturned, and the books sent
flying. A copy came up, took an arm of each, and marched them
to the nearest station house. "Fighting and disorderly conduct,"
said the cop to the sergeant.
"Three hundred dollars bail," said the sergeant at once,
asseveratingly and inquiringly.
"Sixty-three cents," said James Turner with a harsh laugh.
The caliph searched his pockets and collected small bills and change
amounting to four dollars.
"I am worth," he said, "forty million dollars, but--"
"Lock 'em up," ordered the sergeant.
In his cell, James Turner laid himself on his cot, ruminating. "Maybe
he's got the money, and maybe he ain't. But if he has or he ain't,
what does he want to go 'round butting into other folks's business for?
When a man knows what he wants, and can get it, it's the same as
$40,000,000 to him."
Then an idea came to him that brought a pleased look to his face.
He removed his socks, drew his cot close to the door, stretched
himself out luxuriously, and placed his tortured feet against the
cold bars of the cell door. Something hard and bulky under the
blankets of his cot gave one shoulder discomfort. He reached under,
and drew out a paper-covered volume by Clark Russell called
"A Sailor's Sweetheart." He gave a great sigh of contentment.
Presently, to his cell came the doorman and said:
"Say, kid, that old gazabo that was pinched with you for scrapping
seems to have been the goods after all. He 'phoned to his friends,
and he's out at the desk now with a roll of yellowbacks as big as a
Pullman car pillow. He wants to bail you, and for you to come out
and see him."
"Tell him I ain't in," said James Turner.