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Title: Strictly Business

Author: O. Henry

Release Date: April, 2000 [eBook #2141]
[Most recently updated: October 4, 2021]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

Produced by: anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteers and Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D.

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRICTLY BUSINESS ***




Strictly Business

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 ROONEY’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
bacchanalians 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. Bob 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 pleasure he will often forsake the sunniest
Broadway corner between Thirty-fourth and Forty-fourth to attend a
matinée 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 Stanley’s ‘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 Amagansett,
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
dénouement 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 café 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 señores, 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 delicate 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 a 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 a 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 Español.” In the window was a card in Spanish, “Aqui se
habla Español.” 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 advisement 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 Español 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 señoras 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. “Válgame 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! señor, 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
Español 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 Español. 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, Señor Kelley—the señoras 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
café, 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. “You’re 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 Español 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, señor,” he said, with a sigh, “duty makes a call. But, señor, the
señoras 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 difficulty 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 money 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 Español, Mrs. O’Brien went up to him, plucked a thread from
his lapel, and said:

“Say, señor, 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, Señor 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
Español 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, señor,” 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 Español. 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, didn’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 here 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 cane
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 shoulder-blades 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 complained 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 Easter 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 time
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 café 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-Cheronoea. 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
portières 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
portières 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 throne-room 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
portières. 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 admit, with the cards, the
crystal, the stars, the magic formulæ 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
dromedaries 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–––– Don’t 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 clearvoyant 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 an automobile
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 café 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 shell-game 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 saw
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 bulge 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 sergeant wrung from him the name Jabez Bulltongue, of Locust
Valley farm, Ulster County, and then began 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 _élite_. 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 especial 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 the
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 book-shop 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 you 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 automobiles; 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 pepsin. 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
uneffeminate. 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
décolletée 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 sign 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 Cranmer 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 his 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 that 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-warriors 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 wide-brimmed 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 broad-brimmed 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 collar-bone 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 café, 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 Cañon
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 café. Merritt dexterously diverted his friend’s choice, that
hovered over ham and eggs, to a purée 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 frappé
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 42½. 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 round-ups 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 opposing 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 accommodated) bought a
five-cent loaf 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 fellow-man 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 of 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 ways 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 Octopus. 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 the Würzburger.

“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 syllogisms 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 called 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 level 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, Bellford,” 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 awoke 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 companion 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. Bellford, 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
may 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 rôle.

“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 antimony 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’hôte_ 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 _crème 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 _crème 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 _crème 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 have 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.

He led her to the door.

“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 will 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 I 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 just three 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 perceive
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
Würzburger 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 Cæsar. 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 and 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 water-works 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’l’man 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 is 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. While 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 Babel—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.

Azalea 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 something
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
polychromatic, 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. Without
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 Cæsar,” 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 Cæsar 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 Cæsar, 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 Cæsar’s grandfather was a king in
Congo. Cæsar himself has royal ways, as you may have observed.”

As the doctor was moving off I heard Uncle Cæsar’s voice inside: “Did
he get bofe of dem two dollars from you, Mis’ Zalea?”

“Yes, Cæsar,” 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 Cæsar 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 Cæsar 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 Cæsar!

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
wedged 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 known 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 some 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 those 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 × 2¾ 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 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 at 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-mâché 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 gave 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 policeman 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 Bosphorus 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 says 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 express 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, silver-buckling 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 pleasaunce
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 or 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 brethren 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. Why, this 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
cafés 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.

“Boys,” 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
instinct 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
and 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
thought 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 _noblesse 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 accommodate
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 Gas-meter.

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 _divorcé_. 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 conscientiæ_,” 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 études 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. Tackett 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
side-kicker 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 could 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 your 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 Spraggins’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 repetition.


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-a-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 the 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 compliments 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 chocolates. The older men 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,
it ain’t money—what?—Columbian half?—well, 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 lifted Banker McRamsey and carried him into Hinkle’s restaurant.
When the aged but indestructible banker opened his eyes he saw a
beautiful vision bending over him with a pitiful, tender smile, bathing
his forehead with beef tea and chafing his hands with something frappé
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, née 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 à 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 held 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.

Miss McRamsey whirled around.

“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
scarcely 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 dénouement 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 fiancée 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 Dawe. “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 Louise 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 portières. In that note I’ll say that I
have fled from her forever with an affinity who understands the needs
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 the 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 façade. 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 of 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 café.

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. Johnsons” 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 poise 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 creatures 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. Under 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 sports 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 searched 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 an
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 régime—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 carefully 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’être_” 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 Chance—anyhow, it promised something better than the stale
infestivity of a table d’hôte.

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 Nightingale 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.

“Excuse me,” said Forster; “but I thought 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-café_.”

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: “Is 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 half-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 were 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. Here 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 voyage 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 from 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 hollering. 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 mignon_?” 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
Bernhardt 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 cañons. 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 alarm 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 cop 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.




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