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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-1" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2 epub:type="title">“The Rose of Dixie”</h2>
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<p>When <i>The Rose of Dixie</i> magazine was started by a stock company in Toombs City, Georgia, there was never but one candidate for its chief editorial position in the minds of its owners. Col. Aquila Telfair was the man for the place. By all the rights of learning, family, reputation, and Southern traditions, he was its foreordained, fit, and logical editor. So, a committee of the patriotic Georgia citizens who had subscribed the founding fund of $100,000 called upon Colonel Telfair at his residence, Cedar Heights, fearful lest the enterprise and the South should suffer by his possible refusal.</p>
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<p>The colonel received them in his great library, where he spent most of his days. The library had descended to him from his father. It contained ten thousand volumes, some of which had been published as late as the year 1861. When the deputation arrived, Colonel Telfair was seated at his massive white-pine centre-table, reading Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy.” He arose and shook hands punctiliously with each member of the committee. If you were familiar with <i>The Rose of Dixie</i> you will remember the colonel’s portrait, which appeared in it from time to time. You could not forget the long, carefully brushed white hair; the hooked, high-bridged nose, slightly twisted to the left; the keen eyes under the still black eyebrows; the classic mouth beneath the drooping white mustache, slightly frazzled at the ends.</p>
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<p>When <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rose of Dixie</i> magazine was started by a stock company in Toombs City, Georgia, there was never but one candidate for its chief editorial position in the minds of its owners. Col. Aquila Telfair was the man for the place. By all the rights of learning, family, reputation, and Southern traditions, he was its foreordained, fit, and logical editor. So, a committee of the patriotic Georgia citizens who had subscribed the founding fund of $100,000 called upon Colonel Telfair at his residence, Cedar Heights, fearful lest the enterprise and the South should suffer by his possible refusal.</p>
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<p>The colonel received them in his great library, where he spent most of his days. The library had descended to him from his father. It contained ten thousand volumes, some of which had been published as late as the year 1861. When the deputation arrived, Colonel Telfair was seated at his massive white-pine centre-table, reading Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy.” He arose and shook hands punctiliously with each member of the committee. If you were familiar with <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rose of Dixie</i> you will remember the colonel’s portrait, which appeared in it from time to time. You could not forget the long, carefully brushed white hair; the hooked, high-bridged nose, slightly twisted to the left; the keen eyes under the still black eyebrows; the classic mouth beneath the drooping white mustache, slightly frazzled at the ends.</p>
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<p>The committee solicitously offered him the position of managing editor, humbly presenting an outline of the field that the publication was designed to cover and mentioning a comfortable salary. The colonel’s lands were growing poorer each year and were much cut up by red gullies. Besides, the honor was not one to be refused.</p>
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<p>In a forty-minute speech of acceptance, Colonel Telfair gave an outline of English literature from Chaucer to Macaulay, re-fought the battle of Chancellorsville, and said that, God helping him, he would so conduct <i>The Rose of Dixie</i> that its fragrance and beauty would permeate the entire world, hurling back into the teeth of the Northern minions their belief that no genius or good could exist in the brains and hearts of the people whose property they had destroyed and whose rights they had curtailed.</p>
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<p>Offices for the magazine were partitioned off and furnished in the second floor of the First National Bank building; and it was for the colonel to cause <i>The Rose of Dixie</i> to blossom and flourish or to wilt in the balmy air of the land of flowers.</p>
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<p>In a forty-minute speech of acceptance, Colonel Telfair gave an outline of English literature from Chaucer to Macaulay, re-fought the battle of Chancellorsville, and said that, God helping him, he would so conduct <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rose of Dixie</i> that its fragrance and beauty would permeate the entire world, hurling back into the teeth of the Northern minions their belief that no genius or good could exist in the brains and hearts of the people whose property they had destroyed and whose rights they had curtailed.</p>
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<p>Offices for the magazine were partitioned off and furnished in the second floor of the First National Bank building; and it was for the colonel to cause <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rose of Dixie</i> to blossom and flourish or to wilt in the balmy air of the land of flowers.</p>
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<p>The staff of assistants and contributors that Editor-Colonel Telfair drew about him was a peach. It was a whole crate of Georgia peaches. The first assistant editor, Tolliver Lee Fairfax, had had a father killed during Pickett’s charge. The second assistant, Keats Unthank, was the nephew of one of Morgan’s Raiders. The book reviewer, Jackson Rockingham, had been the youngest soldier in the Confederate army, having appeared on the field of battle with a sword in one hand and a milk-bottle in the other. The art editor, Roncesvalles Sykes, was a third cousin to a nephew of Jefferson Davis. Miss Lavinia Terhune, the colonel’s stenographer and typewriter, had an aunt who had once been kissed by Stonewall Jackson. Tommy Webster, the head office-boy, got his job by having recited Father Ryan’s poems, complete, at the commencement exercises of the Toombs City High School. The girls who wrapped and addressed the magazines were members of old Southern families in Reduced Circumstances. The cashier was a scrub named Hawkins, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who had recommendations and a bond from a guarantee company filed with the owners. Even Georgia stock companies sometimes realize that it takes live ones to bury the dead.</p>
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<p>Well, sir, if you believe me, <i>The Rose of Dixie</i> blossomed five times before anybody heard of it except the people who buy their hooks and eyes in Toombs City. Then Hawkins climbed off his stool and told on ’em to the stock company. Even in Ann Arbor he had been used to having his business propositions heard of at least as far away as Detroit. So an advertising manager was engaged—Beauregard Fitzhugh Banks—a young man in a lavender necktie, whose grandfather had been the Exalted High Pillow-slip of the Kuklux Klan.</p>
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<p>In spite of which <i>The Rose of Dixie</i> kept coming out every month. Although in every issue it ran photos of either the Taj Mahal or the Luxembourg Gardens, or Carmencita or La Follette, a certain number of people bought it and subscribed for it. As a boom for it, Editor-Colonel Telfair ran three different views of Andrew Jackson’s old home, “The Hermitage,” a full-page engraving of the second battle of Manassas, entitled “Lee to the Rear!” and a five-thousand-word biography of Belle Boyd in the same number. The subscription list that month advanced 118. Also there were poems in the same issue by Leonina Vashti Haricot (pen-name), related to the Haricots of Charleston, South Carolina, and Bill Thompson, nephew of one of the stockholders. And an article from a special society correspondent describing a tea-party given by the swell Boston and English set, where a lot of tea was spilled overboard by some of the guests masquerading as Indians.</p>
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<p>One day a person whose breath would easily cloud a mirror, he was so much alive, entered the office of <i>The Rose of Dixie</i>. He was a man about the size of a real-estate agent, with a self-tied tie and a manner that he must have borrowed conjointly from W. J. Bryan, Hackenschmidt, and Hetty Green. He was shown into the editor-colonel’s <i>pons asinorum</i>. Colonel Telfair rose and began a Prince Albert bow.</p>
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<p>Well, sir, if you believe me, <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rose of Dixie</i> blossomed five times before anybody heard of it except the people who buy their hooks and eyes in Toombs City. Then Hawkins climbed off his stool and told on ’em to the stock company. Even in Ann Arbor he had been used to having his business propositions heard of at least as far away as Detroit. So an advertising manager was engaged—Beauregard Fitzhugh Banks—a young man in a lavender necktie, whose grandfather had been the Exalted High Pillow-slip of the Kuklux Klan.</p>
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<p>In spite of which <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rose of Dixie</i> kept coming out every month. Although in every issue it ran photos of either the Taj Mahal or the Luxembourg Gardens, or Carmencita or La Follette, a certain number of people bought it and subscribed for it. As a boom for it, Editor-Colonel Telfair ran three different views of Andrew Jackson’s old home, “The Hermitage,” a full-page engraving of the second battle of Manassas, entitled “Lee to the Rear!” and a five-thousand-word biography of Belle Boyd in the same number. The subscription list that month advanced 118. Also there were poems in the same issue by Leonina Vashti Haricot (pen-name), related to the Haricots of Charleston, South Carolina, and Bill Thompson, nephew of one of the stockholders. And an article from a special society correspondent describing a tea-party given by the swell Boston and English set, where a lot of tea was spilled overboard by some of the guests masquerading as Indians.</p>
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<p>One day a person whose breath would easily cloud a mirror, he was so much alive, entered the office of <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rose of Dixie</i>. He was a man about the size of a real-estate agent, with a self-tied tie and a manner that he must have borrowed conjointly from W. J. Bryan, Hackenschmidt, and Hetty Green. He was shown into the editor-colonel’s pons asinorum. Colonel Telfair rose and began a Prince Albert bow.</p>
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<p>“I’m Thacker,” said the intruder, taking the editor’s chair—“T. T. Thacker, of New York.”</p>
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<p>He dribbled hastily upon the colonel’s desk some cards, a bulky manila envelope, and a letter from the owners of <i>The Rose of Dixie</i>. This letter introduced <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Thacker, and politely requested Colonel Telfair to give him a conference and whatever information about the magazine he might desire.</p>
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<p>“I’ve been corresponding with the secretary of the magazine owners for some time,” said Thacker, briskly. “I’m a practical magazine man myself, and a circulation booster as good as any, if I do say it. I’ll guarantee an increase of anywhere from ten thousand to a hundred thousand a year for any publication that isn’t printed in a dead language. I’ve had my eye on <i>The Rose of Dixie</i> ever since it started. I know every end of the business from editing to setting up the classified ads. Now, I’ve come down here to put a good bunch of money in the magazine, if I can see my way clear. It ought to be made to pay. The secretary tells me it’s losing money. I don’t see why a magazine in the South, if it’s properly handled, shouldn’t get a good circulation in the North, too.”</p>
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<p>He dribbled hastily upon the colonel’s desk some cards, a bulky manila envelope, and a letter from the owners of <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rose of Dixie</i>. This letter introduced <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Thacker, and politely requested Colonel Telfair to give him a conference and whatever information about the magazine he might desire.</p>
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<p>“I’ve been corresponding with the secretary of the magazine owners for some time,” said Thacker, briskly. “I’m a practical magazine man myself, and a circulation booster as good as any, if I do say it. I’ll guarantee an increase of anywhere from ten thousand to a hundred thousand a year for any publication that isn’t printed in a dead language. I’ve had my eye on <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rose of Dixie</i> ever since it started. I know every end of the business from editing to setting up the classified ads. Now, I’ve come down here to put a good bunch of money in the magazine, if I can see my way clear. It ought to be made to pay. The secretary tells me it’s losing money. I don’t see why a magazine in the South, if it’s properly handled, shouldn’t get a good circulation in the North, too.”</p>
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<p>Colonel Telfair leaned back in his chair and polished his gold-rimmed glasses.</p>
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<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Thacker,” said he, courteously but firmly, “<i>The Rose of Dixie</i> is a publication devoted to the fostering and the voicing of Southern genius. Its watchword, which you may have seen on the cover, is ‘Of, For, and By the South.’ ”</p>
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<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Thacker,” said he, courteously but firmly, “<i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rose of Dixie</i> is a publication devoted to the fostering and the voicing of Southern genius. Its watchword, which you may have seen on the cover, is ‘Of, For, and By the South.’ ”</p>
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<p>“But you wouldn’t object to a Northern circulation, would you?” asked Thacker.</p>
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<p>“I suppose,” said the editor-colonel, “that it is customary to open the circulation lists to all. I do not know. I have nothing to do with the business affairs of the magazine. I was called upon to assume editorial control of it, and I have devoted to its conduct such poor literary talents as I may possess and whatever store of erudition I may have acquired.”</p>
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<p>“Sure,” said Thacker. “But a dollar is a dollar anywhere, North, South, or West—whether you’re buying codfish, goober peas, or Rocky Ford cantaloupes. Now, I’ve been looking over your November number. I see one here on your desk. You don’t mind running over it with me?</p>
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@ -32,35 +32,77 @@
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<p>“All right,” said Thacker. “I read the poem, but I couldn’t tell whether it was about the depot of the battle of Bull Run. Now, here’s a short story called ‘Rosies’ Temptation,’ by Fosdyke Piggott. It’s rotten. What is a Piggott, anyway?”</p>
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<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Piggott,” said the editor, “is a brother of the principal stockholder of the magazine.”</p>
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<p>“All’s right with the world—Piggott passes,” said Thacker. “Well this article on Arctic exploration and the one on tarpon fishing might go. But how about this write-up of the Atlanta, New Orleans, Nashville, and Savannah breweries? It seems to consist mainly of statistics about their output and the quality of their beer. What’s the chip over the bug?”</p>
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<p>“If I understand your figurative language,” answered Colonel Telfair, “it is this: the article you refer to was handed to me by the owners of the magazine with instructions to publish it. The literary quality of it did not appeal to me. But, in a measure, I feel impelled to conform, in certain matters, to the wishes of the gentlemen who are interested in the financial side of <i>The Rose</i>.”</p>
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<p>“If I understand your figurative language,” answered Colonel Telfair, “it is this: the article you refer to was handed to me by the owners of the magazine with instructions to publish it. The literary quality of it did not appeal to me. But, in a measure, I feel impelled to conform, in certain matters, to the wishes of the gentlemen who are interested in the financial side of <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rose</i>.”</p>
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<p>“I see,” said Thacker. “Next we have two pages of selections from ‘Lalla Rookh,’ by Thomas Moore. Now, what Federal prison did Moore escape from, or what’s the name of the F.F.<span epub:type="z3998:roman">V</span>. family that he carries as a handicap?”</p>
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<p>“Moore was an Irish poet who died in 1852,” said Colonel Telfair, pityingly. “He is a classic. I have been thinking of reprinting his translation of Anacreon serially in the magazine.”</p>
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<p>“Look out for the copyright laws,” said Thacker, flippantly. Who’s Bessie Belleclair, who contributes the essay on the newly completed water-works plant in Milledgeville?”</p>
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<p>“The name, sir,” said Colonel Telfair, “is the <i>nom de guerre</i> of Miss Elvira Simpkins. I have not the honor of knowing the lady; but her contribution was sent to us by Congressman Brower, of her native state. Congressman Brower’s mother was related to the Polks of Tennessee.</p>
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<p>“The name, sir,” said Colonel Telfair, “is the nom de guerre of Miss Elvira Simpkins. I have not the honor of knowing the lady; but her contribution was sent to us by Congressman Brower, of her native state. Congressman Brower’s mother was related to the Polks of Tennessee.</p>
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<p>“Now, see here, Colonel,” said Thacker, throwing down the magazine, “this won’t do. You can’t successfully run a magazine for one particular section of the country. You’ve got to make a universal appeal. Look how the Northern publications have catered to the South and encouraged the Southern writers. And you’ve got to go far and wide for your contributors. You’ve got to buy stuff according to its quality without any regard to the pedigree of the author. Now, I’ll bet a quart of ink that this Southern parlor organ you’ve been running has never played a note that originated above Mason & Hamlin’s line. Am I right?”</p>
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<p>“I have carefully and conscientiously rejected all contributions from that section of the country—if I understand your figurative language aright,” replied the colonel.</p>
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<p>“All right. Now I’ll show you something.”</p>
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<p>Thacker reached for his thick manila envelope and dumped a mass of typewritten manuscript on the editors desk.</p>
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<p>“Here’s some truck,” said he, “that I paid cash for, and brought along with me.”</p>
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<p>One by one he folded back the manuscripts and showed their first pages to the colonel.</p>
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<p>Here are four short stories by four of the highest priced authors in the United States—three of ’em living in New York, and one commuting. There’s a special article on Vienna-bred society by Tom Vampson. Here’s an Italian serial by Captain Jack—no—it’s the other Crawford. Here are three separate exposés of city governments by Sniffings, and here’s a dandy entitled ‘What Women Carry in Dress-Suit Cases’—a Chicago newspaper woman hired herself out for five years as a lady’s maid to get that information. And here’s a Synopsis of Preceding Chapters of Hall Caine’s new serial to appear next June. And here’s a couple of pounds of <i>vers de société</i> that I got at a rate from the clever magazines. That’s the stuff that people everywhere want. And now here’s a write-up with photographs at the ages of four, twelve, twenty-two, and thirty of George B. McClellan. It’s a prognostication. He’s bound to be elected Mayor of New York. It’ll make a big hit all over the country. He—”</p>
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<p>Here are four short stories by four of the highest priced authors in the United States—three of ’em living in New York, and one commuting. There’s a special article on Vienna-bred society by Tom Vampson. Here’s an Italian serial by Captain Jack—no—it’s the other Crawford. Here are three separate exposés of city governments by Sniffings, and here’s a dandy entitled ‘What Women Carry in Dress-Suit Cases’—a Chicago newspaper woman hired herself out for five years as a lady’s maid to get that information. And here’s a Synopsis of Preceding Chapters of Hall Caine’s new serial to appear next June. And here’s a couple of pounds of vers de société that I got at a rate from the clever magazines. That’s the stuff that people everywhere want. And now here’s a write-up with photographs at the ages of four, twelve, twenty-two, and thirty of George B. McClellan. It’s a prognostication. He’s bound to be elected Mayor of New York. It’ll make a big hit all over the country. He—”</p>
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<p>“I beg your pardon,” said Colonel Telfair, stiffening in his chair. “What was the name?”</p>
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<p>“Oh, I see,” said Thacker, with half a grin. Yes, he’s a son of the General. We’ll pass that manuscript up. But, if you’ll excuse me, Colonel, it’s a magazine we’re trying to make go off—not the first gun at Fort Sumter. Now, here’s a thing that’s bound to get next to you. It’s an original poem by James Whitcomb Riley. J. W. himself. You know what that means to a magazine. I won’t tell you what I had to pay for that poem; but I’ll tell you this—Riley can make more money writing with a fountain-pen than you or I can with one that lets the ink run. I’ll read you the last two stanzas:<br/></p>
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<blockquote>
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<blockquote>
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<p class="noindent">“ ‘Pa lays around ‘n’ loafs all day,<br/> <span class="ind1">‘N’ reads and makes us leave him be.</span><br/> He lets me do just like I please,<br/> <span class="ind1">‘N’ when I’m bad he laughs at me,</span><br/> ‘N’ when I holler loud ‘n’ say<br/> <span class="ind1">Bad words ‘n’ then begin to tease</span><br/> The cat, ‘n’ pa just smiles, ma’s mad<br/> <span class="ind1">‘N’ gives me Jesse crost her knees.</span><br/> <span class="ind2">I always wondered why that wuz—</span><br/> <span class="ind2">I guess it’s cause</span><br/> <span class="ind5">Pa never does.</span></p>
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<p class="noindent">“”N’ after all the lights are out<br/> <span class="ind1">I’m sorry ‘bout it; so I creep</span><br/> Out of my trundle bed to ma’s<br/> <span class="ind1">‘N’ say I love her a whole heap,</span><br/> ‘N’ kiss her, ‘n’ I hug her tight.<br/> <span class="ind1">‘N’ it’s too dark to see her eyes,</span><br/> But every time I do I know<br/> <span class="ind1">She cries ‘n’ cries ‘n’ cries ‘n’ cries.</span><br/> <span class="ind2">I always wondered why that wuz—</span><br/> <span class="ind2">I guess it’s ‘cause</span><br/> <span class="ind5">Pa never does.’</span><br/></p>
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</blockquote>
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<blockquote epub:type="z3998:poem">
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<p>
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<span>“ ‘Pa lays around ‘n’ loafs all day,<span>
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<br/>
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<span class="i1">‘N’ reads and makes us leave him be.</span>
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<br/>
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<span>He lets me do just like I please,</span>
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<br/>
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<span class="i1">‘N’ when I’m bad he laughs at me,</span>
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<br/>
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<span>‘N’ when I holler loud ‘n’ say</span>
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<br/>
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<span class="i1">Bad words ‘n’ then begin to tease</span>
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<br/>
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<span>The cat, ‘n’ pa just smiles, ma’s mad</span>
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<br/>
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<span class="i1">‘N’ gives me Jesse crost her knees.</span>
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<br/>
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<span class="i2">I always wondered why that wuz—</span>
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<br/>
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<span class="i2">I guess it’s cause</span>
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<br/>
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<span class="i3">Pa never does.</span>
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</p>
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<p>
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<span>“ ‘ ‘N’ after all the lights are out</span>
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<br/>
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<span class="i1">I’m sorry ‘bout it; so I creep</span>
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<br/>
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<span>Out of my trundle bed to ma’s</span>
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<br/>
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<span class="i1">‘N’ say I love her a whole heap,</span>
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<br/>
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<span>‘N’ kiss her, ‘n’ I hug her tight.</span>
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<br/>
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<span class="i1">‘N’ it’s too dark to see her eyes,</span>
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<br/>
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<span>But every time I do I know<span>
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<br/>
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<span class="i1">She cries ‘n’ cries ‘n’ cries ‘n’ cries.</span>
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<br/>
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<span class="i2">I always wondered why that wuz—</span>
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<br/>
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<span class="i2">I guess it’s ‘cause</span>
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<br/>
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<span class="i3">Pa never does.’</span>
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</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>“That’s the stuff,” continued Thacker. “What do you think of that?”</p>
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<p>“I am not unfamiliar with the works of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Riley,” said the colonel, deliberately. “I believe he lives in Indiana. For the last ten years I have been somewhat of a literary recluse, and am familiar with nearly all the books in the Cedar Heights library. I am also of the opinion that a magazine should contain a certain amount of poetry. Many of the sweetest singers of the South have already contributed to the pages of <i>The Rose of Dixie</i>. I, myself, have thought of translating from the original for publication in its pages the works of the great Italian poet Tasso. Have you ever drunk from the fountain of this immortal poet’s lines, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Thacker?”</p>
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<p>“I am not unfamiliar with the works of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Riley,” said the colonel, deliberately. “I believe he lives in Indiana. For the last ten years I have been somewhat of a literary recluse, and am familiar with nearly all the books in the Cedar Heights library. I am also of the opinion that a magazine should contain a certain amount of poetry. Many of the sweetest singers of the South have already contributed to the pages of <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rose of Dixie</i>. I, myself, have thought of translating from the original for publication in its pages the works of the great Italian poet Tasso. Have you ever drunk from the fountain of this immortal poet’s lines, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Thacker?”</p>
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<p>“Not even a demi-Tasso,” said Thacker. Now, let’s come to the point, Colonel Telfair. I’ve already invested some money in this as a flyer. That bunch of manuscripts cost me $4,000. My object was to try a number of them in the next issue—I believe you make up less than a month ahead—and see what effect it has on the circulation. I believe that by printing the best stuff we can get in the North, South, East, or West we can make the magazine go. You have there the letter from the owning company asking you to co-operate with me in the plan. Let’s chuck out some of this slush that you’ve been publishing just because the writers are related to the Skoopdoodles of Skoopdoodle County. Are you with me?”</p>
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<p>“As long as I continue to be the editor of The Rose,” said Colonel Telfair, with dignity, “I shall be its editor. But I desire also to conform to the wishes of its owners if I can do so conscientiously.”</p>
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<p>“That’s the talk,” said Thacker, briskly. “Now, how much of this stuff I’ve brought can we get into the January number? We want to begin right away.”</p>
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<p>“There is yet space in the January number,” said the editor, “for about eight thousand words, roughly estimated.”</p>
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<p>“Great!” said Thacker. “It isn’t much, but it’ll give the readers some change from goobers, governors, and Gettysburg. I’ll leave the selection of the stuff I brought to fill the space to you, as it’s all good. I’ve got to run back to New York, and I’ll be down again in a couple of weeks.”</p>
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<p>Colonel Telfair slowly swung his eye-glasses by their broad, black ribbon.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The space in the January number that I referred to,” said he, measuredly, “has been held open purposely, pending a decision that I have not yet made. A short time ago a contribution was submitted to <i>The Rose of Dixie</i> that is one of the most remarkable literary efforts that has ever come under my observation. None but a master mind and talent could have produced it. It would just fill the space that I have reserved for its possible use.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The space in the January number that I referred to,” said he, measuredly, “has been held open purposely, pending a decision that I have not yet made. A short time ago a contribution was submitted to <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rose of Dixie</i> that is one of the most remarkable literary efforts that has ever come under my observation. None but a master mind and talent could have produced it. It would just fill the space that I have reserved for its possible use.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Thacker looked anxious.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What kind of stuff is it?” he asked. “Eight thousand words sounds suspicious. The oldest families must have been collaborating. Is there going to be another secession?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The author of the article,” continued the colonel, ignoring Thacker’s allusions, “is a writer of some reputation. He has also distinguished himself in other ways. I do not feel at liberty to reveal to you his name—at least not until I have decided whether or not to accept his contribution.”</p>
|
||||
@ -68,11 +110,11 @@
|
||||
<p>“You are disposed to be facetious,” said Colonel Telfair, calmly. “The article is from the pen of a thinker, a philosopher, a lover of mankind, a student, and a rhetorician of high degree.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It must have been written by a syndicate,” said Thacker. “But, honestly, Colonel, you want to go slow. I don’t know of any eight-thousand-word single doses of written matter that are read by anybody these days, except Supreme Court briefs and reports of murder trials. You haven’t by any accident gotten hold of a copy of one of Daniel Webster’s speeches, have you?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Colonel Telfair swung a little in his chair and looked steadily from under his bushy eyebrows at the magazine promoter.</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Thacker,” he said, gravely, “I am willing to segregate the somewhat crude expression of your sense of humor from the solicitude that your business investments undoubtedly have conferred upon you. But I must ask you to cease your jibes and derogatory comments upon the South and the Southern people. They, sir, will not be tolerated in the office of <i>The Rose of Dixie</i> for one moment. And before you proceed with more of your covert insinuations that I, the editor of this magazine, am not a competent judge of the merits of the matter submitted to its consideration, I beg that you will first present some evidence or proof that you are my superior in any way, shape, or form relative to the question in hand.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Thacker,” he said, gravely, “I am willing to segregate the somewhat crude expression of your sense of humor from the solicitude that your business investments undoubtedly have conferred upon you. But I must ask you to cease your jibes and derogatory comments upon the South and the Southern people. They, sir, will not be tolerated in the office of <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rose of Dixie</i> for one moment. And before you proceed with more of your covert insinuations that I, the editor of this magazine, am not a competent judge of the merits of the matter submitted to its consideration, I beg that you will first present some evidence or proof that you are my superior in any way, shape, or form relative to the question in hand.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, come, Colonel,” said Thacker, good-naturedly. “I didn’t do anything like that to you. It sounds like an indictment by the fourth assistant attorney-general. Let’s get back to business. What’s this 8,000 to 1 shot about?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The article,” said Colonel Telfair, acknowledging the apology by a slight bow, “covers a wide area of knowledge. It takes up theories and questions that have puzzled the world for centuries, and disposes of them logically and concisely. One by one it holds up to view the evils of the world, points out the way of eradicating them, and then conscientiously and in detail commends the good. There is hardly a phase of human life that it does not discuss wisely, calmly, and equitably. The great policies of governments, the duties of private citizens, the obligations of home life, law, ethics, morality—all these important subjects are handled with a calm wisdom and confidence that I must confess has captured my admiration.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It must be a crackerjack,” said Thacker, impressed.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It is a great contribution to the world’s wisdom,” said the colonel. “The only doubt remaining in my mind as to the tremendous advantage it would be to us to give it publication in <i>The Rose of Dixie</i> is that I have not yet sufficient information about the author to give his work publicity in our magazine.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It is a great contribution to the world’s wisdom,” said the colonel. “The only doubt remaining in my mind as to the tremendous advantage it would be to us to give it publication in <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rose of Dixie</i> is that I have not yet sufficient information about the author to give his work publicity in our magazine.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I thought you said he is a distinguished man,” said Thacker.</p>
|
||||
<p>“He is,” replied the colonel, “both in literary and in other more diversified and extraneous fields. But I am extremely careful about the matter that I accept for publication. My contributors are people of unquestionable repute and connections, which fact can be verified at any time. As I said, I am holding this article until I can acquire more information about its author. I do not know whether I will publish it or not. If I decide against it, I shall be much pleased, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Thacker, to substitute the matter that you are leaving with me in its place.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Thacker was somewhat at sea.</p>
|
||||
@ -83,7 +125,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“No, sir,” said Colonel Telfair. “I am speaking of mentality and literature, not of the less worthy intricacies of trade.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, what’s the trouble about running the article,” asked Thacker, a little impatiently, “if the man’s well known and has got the stuff?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Colonel Telfair sighed.</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Thacker,” said he, “for once I have been tempted. Nothing has yet appeared in <i>The Rose of Dixie</i> that has not been from the pen of one of its sons or daughters. I know little about the author of this article except that he has acquired prominence in a section of the country that has always been inimical to my heart and mind. But I recognize his genius; and, as I have told you, I have instituted an investigation of his personality. Perhaps it will be futile. But I shall pursue the inquiry. Until that is finished, I must leave open the question of filling the vacant space in our January number.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Thacker,” said he, “for once I have been tempted. Nothing has yet appeared in <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rose of Dixie</i> that has not been from the pen of one of its sons or daughters. I know little about the author of this article except that he has acquired prominence in a section of the country that has always been inimical to my heart and mind. But I recognize his genius; and, as I have told you, I have instituted an investigation of his personality. Perhaps it will be futile. But I shall pursue the inquiry. Until that is finished, I must leave open the question of filling the vacant space in our January number.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Thacker arose to leave.</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right, Colonel,” he said, as cordially as he could. “You use your own judgment. If you’ve really got a scoop or something that will make ’em sit up, run it instead of my stuff. I’ll drop in again in about two weeks. Good luck!”</p>
|
||||
<p>Colonel Telfair and the magazine promoter shook hands.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -10,7 +10,7 @@
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Moment of Victory</h2>
|
||||
<p>Ben Granger is a war veteran aged twenty-nine—which should enable you to guess the war. He is also principal merchant and postmaster of Cadiz, a little town over which the breezes from the Gulf of Mexico perpetually blow.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ben helped to hurl the Don from his stronghold in the Greater Antilles; and then, hiking across half the world, he marched as a corporal-usher up and down the blazing tropic aisles of the open-air college in which the Filipino was schooled. Now, with his bayonet beaten into a cheese-slicer, he rallies his corporal’s guard of cronies in the shade of his well-whittled porch, instead of in the matted jungles of Mindanao. Always have his interest and choice been for deeds rather than for words; but the consideration and digestion of motives is not beyond him, as this story, which is his, will attest.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What is it,” he asked me one moonlit eve, as we sat among his boxes and barrels, “that generally makes men go through dangers, and fire, and trouble, and starvation, and battle, and such recourses? What does a man do it for? Why does he try to outdo his fellow-humans, and be braver and stronger and more daring and showy than even his best friends are? What’s his game? What does he expect to get out of it? He don’t do it just for the fresh air and exercise. What would you say, now, Bill, that an ordinary man expects, generally speaking, for his efforts along the line of ambition and extraordinary hustling in the marketplaces, forums, shooting-galleries, lyceums, battle-fields, links, cinder-paths, and arenas of the civilized and <i>vice versa</i> places of the world?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“What is it,” he asked me one moonlit eve, as we sat among his boxes and barrels, “that generally makes men go through dangers, and fire, and trouble, and starvation, and battle, and such recourses? What does a man do it for? Why does he try to outdo his fellow-humans, and be braver and stronger and more daring and showy than even his best friends are? What’s his game? What does he expect to get out of it? He don’t do it just for the fresh air and exercise. What would you say, now, Bill, that an ordinary man expects, generally speaking, for his efforts along the line of ambition and extraordinary hustling in the marketplaces, forums, shooting-galleries, lyceums, battle-fields, links, cinder-paths, and arenas of the civilized and vice versa places of the world?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, Ben,” said I, with judicial seriousness, “I think we might safely limit the number of motives of a man who seeks fame to three—to ambition, which is a desire for popular applause; to avarice, which looks to the material side of success; and to love of some woman whom he either possesses or desires to possess.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Ben pondered over my words while a mocking-bird on the top of a mesquite by the porch trilled a dozen bars.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I reckon,” said he, “that your diagnosis about covers the case according to the rules laid down in the copy-books and historical readers. But what I had in my mind was the case of Willie Robbins, a person I used to know. I’ll tell you about him before I close up the store, if you don’t mind listening.</p>
|
||||
@ -24,22 +24,22 @@
|
||||
<p>“Willie Robbins and me happened to be up in our—cloak-room, I believe we called it—when Myra Allison skipped through the hall on her way down-stairs from the girls’ room. Willie was standing before the mirror, deeply interested in smoothing down the blond grass-plot on his head, which seemed to give him lots of trouble. Myra was always full of life and devilment. She stopped and stuck her head in our door. She certainly was good-looking. But I knew how Joe Granberry stood with her. So did Willie; but he kept on ba-a-a-ing after her and following her around. He had a system of persistence that didn’t coincide with pale hair and light eyes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Hello, Willie!’ says Myra. ‘What are you doing to yourself in the glass?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I’m trying to look fly,’ says Willie.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Well, you never could <i>be</i> fly,’ says Myra, with her special laugh, which was the provokingest sound I ever heard except the rattle of an empty canteen against my saddle-horn.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Well, you never could <em>be</em> fly,’ says Myra, with her special laugh, which was the provokingest sound I ever heard except the rattle of an empty canteen against my saddle-horn.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I looked around at Willie after Myra had gone. He had a kind of a lily-white look on him which seemed to show that her remark had, as you might say, disrupted his soul. I never noticed anything in what she said that sounded particularly destructive to a man’s ideas of self-consciousness; but he was set back to an extent you could scarcely imagine.</p>
|
||||
<p>“After we went down-stairs with our clean collars on, Willie never went near Myra again that night. After all, he seemed to be a diluted kind of a skim-milk sort of a chap, and I never wondered that Joe Granberry beat him out.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The next day the battleship <i>Maine</i> was blown up, and then pretty soon somebody—I reckon it was Joe Bailey, or Ben Tillman, or maybe the Government—declared war against Spain.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The next day the battleship <i epub:type="se:name.vessel.ship">Maine</i> was blown up, and then pretty soon somebody—I reckon it was Joe Bailey, or Ben Tillman, or maybe the Government—declared war against Spain.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, everybody south of Mason & Hamlin’s line knew that the North by itself couldn’t whip a whole country the size of Spain. So the Yankees commenced to holler for help, and the Johnny Rebs answered the call. ‘We’re coming, Father William, a hundred thousand strong—and then some,’ was the way they sang it. And the old party lines drawn by Sherman’s march and the Kuklux and nine-cent cotton and the Jim Crow street-car ordinances faded away. We became one undivided. country, with no North, very little East, a good-sized chunk of West, and a South that loomed up as big as the first foreign label on a new eight-dollar suit-case.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Of course the dogs of war weren’t a complete pack without a yelp from the San Augustine Rifles, Company D, of the Fourteenth Texas Regiment. Our company was among the first to land in Cuba and strike terror into the hearts of the foe. I’m not going to give you a history of the war, I’m just dragging it in to fill out my story about Willie Robbins, just as the Republican party dragged it in to help out the election in 1898.</p>
|
||||
<p>“If anybody ever had heroitis, it was that Willie Robbins. From the minute he set foot on the soil of the tyrants of Castile he seemed to engulf danger as a cat laps up cream. He certainly astonished every man in our company, from the captain up. You’d have expected him to gravitate naturally to the job of an orderly to the colonel, or typewriter in the commissary—but not any. He created the part of the flaxen-haired boy hero who lives and gets back home with the goods, instead of dying with an important despatch in his hands at his colonel’s feet.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Our company got into a section of Cuban scenery where one of the messiest and most unsung portions of the campaign occurred. We were out every day capering around in the bushes, and having little skirmishes with the Spanish troops that looked more like kind of tired-out feuds than anything else. The war was a joke to us, and of no interest to them. We never could see it any other way than as a howling farce-comedy that the San Augustine Rifles were actually fighting to uphold the Stars and Stripes. And the blamed little señors didn’t get enough pay to make them care whether they were patriots or traitors. Now and then somebody would get killed. It seemed like a waste of life to me. I was at Coney Island when I went to New York once, and one of them down-hill skidding apparatuses they call ‘roller-coasters’ flew the track and killed a man in a brown sack-suit. Whenever the Spaniards shot one of our men, it struck me as just about as unnecessary and regrettable as that was.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But I’m dropping Willie Robbins out of the conversation.</p>
|
||||
<p>“He was out for bloodshed, laurels, ambition, medals, recommendations, and all other forms of military glory. And he didn’t seem to be afraid of any of the recognized forms of military danger, such as Spaniards, cannon-balls, canned beef, gunpowder, or nepotism. He went forth with his pallid hair and china-blue eyes and ate up Spaniards like you would sardines <i>à la canopy</i>. Wars and rumbles of wars never flustered him. He would stand guard-duty, mosquitoes, hardtack, treat, and fire with equally perfect unanimity. No blondes in history ever come in comparison distance of him except the Jack of Diamonds and Queen Catherine of Russia.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I remember, one time, a little <i>caballard</i> of Spanish men sauntered out from behind a patch of sugar-cane and shot Bob Turner, the first sergeant of our company, while we were eating dinner. As required by the army regulations, we fellows went through the usual tactics of falling into line, saluting the enemy, and loading and firing, kneeling.</p>
|
||||
<p>“He was out for bloodshed, laurels, ambition, medals, recommendations, and all other forms of military glory. And he didn’t seem to be afraid of any of the recognized forms of military danger, such as Spaniards, cannon-balls, canned beef, gunpowder, or nepotism. He went forth with his pallid hair and china-blue eyes and ate up Spaniards like you would sardines <i xml:lang="fr">à la canopy</i>. Wars and rumbles of wars never flustered him. He would stand guard-duty, mosquitoes, hardtack, treat, and fire with equally perfect unanimity. No blondes in history ever come in comparison distance of him except the Jack of Diamonds and Queen Catherine of Russia.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I remember, one time, a little <i xml:lang="es">caballard</i> of Spanish men sauntered out from behind a patch of sugar-cane and shot Bob Turner, the first sergeant of our company, while we were eating dinner. As required by the army regulations, we fellows went through the usual tactics of falling into line, saluting the enemy, and loading and firing, kneeling.</p>
|
||||
<p>“That wasn’t the Texas way of scrapping; but, being a very important addendum and annex to the regular army, the San Augustine Rifles had to conform to the red-tape system of getting even.</p>
|
||||
<p>“By the time we had got out our ‘Upton’s Tactics,’ turned to page fifty-seven, said ‘one—two—three—one—two—three’ a couple of times, and got blank cartridges into our Springfields, the Spanish outfit had smiled repeatedly, rolled and lit cigarettes by squads, and walked away contemptuously.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I went straight to Captain Floyd, and says to him: ‘Sam, I don’t think this war is a straight game. You know as well as I do that Bob Turner was one of the whitest fellows that ever threw a leg over a saddle, and now these wirepullers in Washington have fixed his clock. He’s politically and ostensibly dead. It ain’t fair. Why should they keep this thing up? If they want Spain licked, why don’t they turn the San Augustine Rifles and Joe Seely’s ranger company and a car-load of West Texas deputy-sheriffs onto these Spaniards, and let us exonerate them from the face of the earth? I never did,’ says I, ‘care much about fighting by the Lord Chesterfield ring rules. I’m going to hand in my resignation and go home if anybody else I am personally acquainted with gets hurt in this war. If you can get somebody in my place, Sam,’ says I, ‘I’ll quit the first of next week. I don’t want to work in an army that don’t give its help a chance. Never mind my wages,’ says I; ‘let the Secretary of the Treasury keep ’em.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Well, Ben,’ says the captain to me, ‘your allegations and estimations of the tactics of war, government, patriotism, guard-mounting, and democracy are all right. But I’ve looked into the system of international arbitration and the ethics of justifiable slaughter a little closer, maybe, than you have. Now, you can hand in your resignation the first of next week if you are so minded. But if you do,’ says Sam, ‘I’ll order a corporal’s guard to take you over by that limestone bluff on the creek and shoot enough lead into you to ballast a submarine air-ship. I’m captain of this company, and I’ve swore allegiance to the Amalgamated States regardless of sectional, secessional, and Congressional differences. Have you got any smoking-tobacco?’ winds up Sam. ‘Mine got wet when I swum the creek this morning.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“The reason I drag all this <i>non ex parte</i> evidence in is because Willie Robbins was standing there listening to us. I was a second sergeant and he was a private then, but among us Texans and Westerners there never was as much tactics and subordination as there was in the regular army. We never called our captain anything but ‘Sam’ except when there was a lot of major-generals and admirals around, so as to preserve the discipline.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The reason I drag all this <i xml:lang="la">non ex parte</i> evidence in is because Willie Robbins was standing there listening to us. I was a second sergeant and he was a private then, but among us Texans and Westerners there never was as much tactics and subordination as there was in the regular army. We never called our captain anything but ‘Sam’ except when there was a lot of major-generals and admirals around, so as to preserve the discipline.</p>
|
||||
<p>“And says Willie Robbins to me, in a sharp construction of voice much unbecoming to his light hair and previous record:</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You ought to be shot, Ben, for emitting any such sentiments. A man that won’t fight for his country is worse than a horse-thief. If I was the cap, I’d put you in the guard-house for thirty days on round steak and tamales. War,’ says Willie, ‘is great and glorious. I didn’t know you were a coward.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I’m not,’ says I. ‘If I was, I’d knock some of the pallidness off of your marble brow. I’m lenient with you,’ I says, ‘just as I am with the Spaniards, because you have always reminded me of something with mushrooms on the side. Why, you little Lady of Shalott,’ says I, ‘you underdone leader of cotillions, you glassy fashion and moulded form, you white-pine soldier made in the Cisalpine Alps in Germany for the late New-Year trade, do you know of whom you are talking to? We’ve been in the same social circle,’ says I, ‘and I’ve put up with you because you seemed so meek and self-un-satisfying. I don’t understand why you have so sudden taken a personal interest in chivalrousness and murder. Your nature’s undergone a complete revelation. Now, how is it?’</p>
|
||||
@ -57,10 +57,10 @@
|
||||
<p>“Well, without itemizing his deeds, Willie sure made good as a hero. He simply spent most of his time on his knees begging our captain to send him on forlorn hopes and dangerous scouting expeditions. In every fight he was the first man to mix it at close quarters with the Don Alfonsos. He got three or four bullets planted in various parts of his autonomy. Once he went off with a detail of eight men and captured a whole company of Spanish. He kept Captain Floyd busy writing out recommendations of his bravery to send in to headquarters; and he began to accumulate medals for all kinds of things—heroism and target-shooting and valor and tactics and uninsubordination, and all the little accomplishments that look good to the third assistant secretaries of the War Department.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Finally, Cap Floyd got promoted to be a major-general, or a knight commander of the main herd, or something like that. He pounded around on a white horse, all desecrated up with gold-leaf and hen-feathers and a Good Templar’s hat, and wasn’t allowed by the regulations to speak to us. And Willie Robbins was made captain of our company.</p>
|
||||
<p>“And maybe he didn’t go after the wreath of fame then! As far as I could see it was him that ended the war. He got eighteen of us boys—friends of his, too—killed in battles that he stirred up himself, and that didn’t seem to me necessary at all. One night he took twelve of us and waded through a little rill about a hundred and ninety yards wide, and climbed a couple of mountains, and sneaked through a mile of neglected shrubbery and a couple of rock-quarries and into a rye-straw village, and captured a Spanish general named, as they said, Benny Veedus. Benny seemed to me hardly worth the trouble, being a blackish man without shoes or cuffs, and anxious to surrender and throw himself on the commissary of his foe.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But that job gave Willie the big boost he wanted. The San Augustine <i>News</i> and the Galveston, <abbr>St.</abbr> Louis, New York, and Kansas City papers printed his picture and columns of stuff about him. Old San Augustine simply went crazy over its ‘gallant son.’ The <i>News</i> had an editorial tearfully begging the Government to call off the regular army and the national guard, and let Willie carry on the rest of the war single-handed. It said that a refusal to do so would be regarded as a proof that the Northern jealousy of the South was still as rampant as ever.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But that job gave Willie the big boost he wanted. The San Augustine <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">News</i> and the Galveston, <abbr>St.</abbr> Louis, New York, and Kansas City papers printed his picture and columns of stuff about him. Old San Augustine simply went crazy over its ‘gallant son.’ The <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">News</i> had an editorial tearfully begging the Government to call off the regular army and the national guard, and let Willie carry on the rest of the war single-handed. It said that a refusal to do so would be regarded as a proof that the Northern jealousy of the South was still as rampant as ever.</p>
|
||||
<p>“If the war hadn’t ended pretty soon, I don’t know to what heights of gold braid and encomiums Willie would have climbed; but it did. There was a secession of hostilities just three days after he was appointed a colonel, and got in three more medals by registered mail, and shot two Spaniards while they were drinking lemonade in an ambuscade.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Our company went back to San Augustine when the war was over. There wasn’t anywhere else for it to go. And what do you think? The old town notified us in print, by wire cable, special delivery, and a nigger named Saul sent on a gray mule to San Antone, that they was going to give us the biggest blow-out, complimentary, alimentary, and elementary, that ever disturbed the kildees on the sand-flats outside of the immediate contiguity of the city.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I say ‘we,’ but it was all meant for ex-Private, Captain <i>de facto</i>, and Colonel-elect Willie Robbins. The town was crazy about him. They notified us that the reception they were going to put up would make the Mardi Gras in New Orleans look like an afternoon tea in Bury <abbr>St.</abbr> Edmunds with a curate’s aunt.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I say ‘we,’ but it was all meant for ex-Private, Captain de facto, and Colonel-elect Willie Robbins. The town was crazy about him. They notified us that the reception they were going to put up would make the Mardi Gras in New Orleans look like an afternoon tea in Bury <abbr>St.</abbr> Edmunds with a curate’s aunt.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, the San Augustine Rifles got back home on schedule time. Everybody was at the depot giving forth Roosevelt-Democrat—they used to be called Rebel—yells. There was two brass-bands, and the mayor, and schoolgirls in white frightening the street-car horses by throwing Cherokee roses in the streets, and—well, maybe you’ve seen a celebration by a town that was inland and out of water.</p>
|
||||
<p>“They wanted Brevet-Colonel Willie to get into a carriage and be drawn by prominent citizens and some of the city aldermen to the armory, but he stuck to his company and marched at the head of it up Sam Houston Avenue. The buildings on both sides was covered with flags and audiences, and everybody hollered ‘Robbins!’ or ‘Hello, Willie!’ as we marched up in files of fours. I never saw a illustriouser-looking human in my life than Willie was. He had at least seven or eight medals and diplomas and decorations on the breast of his khaki coat; he was sunburnt the color of a saddle, and he certainly done himself proud.</p>
|
||||
<p>“They told us at the depot that the courthouse was to be illuminated at half-past seven, and there would be speeches and chili-con-carne at the Palace Hotel. Miss Delphine Thompson was to read an original poem by James Whitcomb Ryan, and Constable Hooker had promised us a salute of nine guns from Chicago that he had arrested that day.</p>
|
||||
@ -71,7 +71,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Halt and give the countersign,’ says I to Willie. ‘Don’t you know this dugout? It’s the bird’s-nest that Joe Granberry built before he married Myra Allison. What you going there for?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“But Willie already had the gate open. He walked up the brick walk to the steps, and I went with him. Myra was sitting in a rocking-chair on the porch, sewing. Her hair was smoothed back kind of hasty and tied in a knot. I never noticed till then that she had freckles. Joe was at one side of the porch, in his shirt-sleeves, with no collar on, and no signs of a shave, trying to scrape out a hole among the brickbats and tin cans to plant a little fruit-tree in. He looked up but never said a word, and neither did Myra.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Willie was sure dandy-looking in his uniform, with medals strung on his breast and his new gold-handled sword. You’d never have taken him for the little white-headed snipe that the girls used to order about and make fun of. He just stood there for a minute, looking at Myra with a peculiar little smile on his face; and then he says to her, slow, and kind of holding on to his words with his teeth:</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ’<i>Oh, I don’t know! Maybe I could if I tried!</i>’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ’<em>Oh, I don’t know! Maybe I could if I tried!</em>’</p>
|
||||
<p>“That was all that was said. Willie raised his hat, and we walked away.</p>
|
||||
<p>“And, somehow, when he said that, I remembered, all of a sudden, the night of that dance and Willie brushing his hair before the looking-glass, and Myra sticking her head in the door to guy him.</p>
|
||||
<p>“When we got back to Sam Houston Avenue, Willie says:</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -16,13 +16,14 @@
|
||||
<p>In any case, your reward is certain. The village men, in passing, stop to congratulate you, as your neighbor on weaker planes of life stops to admire and praise the begonias in your front yard. Your particular brown maid lingers, with fluttering bosom, casting soft tiger’s eyes at the evidence of your love for her. You chew betel-nut and listen, content, to the intermittent soft drip from the ends of the severed neck arteries. And you show your teeth and grunt like a water-buffalo—which is as near as you can come to laughing—at the thought that the cold, acephalous body of your door ornament is being spotted by wheeling vultures in the Mindanaoan wilds.</p>
|
||||
<p>Truly, the life of the merry head-hunter captivated me. He had reduced art and philosophy to a simple code. To take your adversary’s head, to basket it at the portal of your castle, to see it lying there, a dead thing, with its cunning and stratagems and power gone—Is there a better way to foil his plots, to refute his arguments, to establish your superiority over his skill and wisdom?</p>
|
||||
<p>The ship that brought me home was captained by an erratic Swede, who changed his course and deposited me, with genuine compassion, in a small town on the Pacific coast of one of the Central American republics, a few hundred miles south of the port to which he had engaged to convey me. But I was wearied of movement and exotic fancies; so I leaped contentedly upon the firm sands of the village of Mojada, telling myself I should be sure to find there the rest that I craved. After all, far better to linger there (I thought), lulled by the sedative plash of the waves and the rustling of palm-fronds, than to sit upon the horsehair sofa of my parental home in the East, and there, cast down by currant wine and cake, and scourged by fatuous relatives, drivel into the ears of gaping neighbors sad stories of the death of colonial governors.</p>
|
||||
<hr/>
|
||||
<p>When I first saw Chloe Greene she was standing, all in white, in the doorway of her father’s tile-roofed ‘dobe house. She was polishing a silver cup with a cloth, and she looked like a pearl laid against black velvet. She turned on me a flatteringly protracted but a wiltingly disapproving gaze, and then went inside, humming a light song to indicate the value she placed upon my existence.</p>
|
||||
<p>Small wonder: for <abbr>Dr.</abbr> Stamford (the most disreputable professional man between Juneau and Valparaiso) and I were zigzagging along the turfy street, tunelessly singing the words of “Auld Lang Syne” to the air of “Muzzer’s Little Coal-Black Coon.” We had come from the ice factory, which was Mojada’s palace of wickedness, where we had been playing billiards and opening black bottles, white with frost, that we dragged with strings out of old Sandoval’s ice-cold vats.</p>
|
||||
<p>I turned in sudden rage to <abbr>Dr.</abbr> Stamford, as sober as the verger of a cathedral. In a moment I had become aware that we were swine cast before a pearl.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You beast,” I said, “this is half your doing. And the other half is the fault of this cursed country. I’d better have gone back to Sleepy-town and died in a wild orgy of currant wine and buns than to have had this happen.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Stamford filled the empty street with his roaring laughter.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You too!” he cried. “And all as quick as the popping of a cork. Well, she does seem to strike agreeably upon the retina. But don’t burn your fingers. All Mojada will tell you that Louis Devoe is the man.</p>
|
||||
<p>“We will see about that,” said I. “And, perhaps, whether he is <i>a</i> man as well as <i>the</i> man.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“We will see about that,” said I. “And, perhaps, whether he is <em>a</em> man as well as <em>the</em> man.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I lost no time in meeting Louis Devoe. That was easily accomplished, for the foreign colony in Mojada numbered scarce a dozen; and they gathered daily at a half-decent hotel kept by a Turk, where they managed to patch together the fluttering rags of country and civilization that were left them. I sought Devoe before I did my pearl of the doorway, because I had learned a little of the game of war, and knew better than to strike for a prize before testing the strength of the enemy.</p>
|
||||
<p>A sort of cold dismay—something akin to fear—filled me when I had estimated him. I found a man so perfectly poised, so charming, so deeply learned in the world’s rituals, so full of tact, courtesy, and hospitality, so endowed with grace and ease and a kind of careless, haughty power that I almost overstepped the bounds in probing him, in turning him on the spit to find the weak point that I so craved for him to have. But I left him whole—I had to make bitter acknowledgment to myself that Louis Devoe was a gentleman worthy of my best blows; and I swore to give him them. He was a great merchant of the country, a wealthy importer and exporter. All day he sat in a fastidiously appointed office, surrounded by works of art and evidences of his high culture, directing through glass doors and windows the affairs of his house.</p>
|
||||
<p>In person he was slender and hardly tall. His small, well-shaped head was covered with thick, brown hair, trimmed short, and he wore a thick, brown beard also cut close and to a fine point. His manners were a pattern.</p>
|
||||
@ -65,7 +66,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“I say it’s tough,” said I, “to drop into the vernacular, that Miss Greene should be deprived of the food she desires—a simple thing like kalsomine-pudding. Perhaps,” I continued, solicitously, “some pickled walnuts or a fricassee of Hungarian butternuts would do as well.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Every one looked at me with a slight exhibition of curiosity.</p>
|
||||
<p>Louis Devoe arose and made his adieus. I watched him until he had sauntered slowly and grandiosely to the corner, around which he turned to reach his great warehouse and store. Chloe made her excuses, and went inside for a few minutes to attend to some detail affecting the seven-o’clock dinner. She was a passed mistress in housekeeping. I had tasted her puddings and bread with beatitude.</p>
|
||||
<p>When all had gone, I turned casually and saw a basket made of plaited green withes hanging by a nail outside the door-jamb. With a rush that made my hot temples throb there came vividly to my mind recollections of the head-hunters—<i>those grim, flinty, relentless little men, never seen, but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle terror of their concealed presence … From time to time, as vanity or ennui or love or jealousy or ambition may move him, one creeps forth with his snickersnee and takes up the silent trail … Back he comes, triumphant, bearing the severed, gory head of his victim … His particular brown or white maid lingers, with fluttering bosom, casting soft tiger’s eyes at the evidence of his love for her</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>When all had gone, I turned casually and saw a basket made of plaited green withes hanging by a nail outside the door-jamb. With a rush that made my hot temples throb there came vividly to my mind recollections of the head-hunters—<em>those grim, flinty, relentless little men, never seen, but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle terror of their concealed presence … From time to time, as vanity or ennui or love or jealousy or ambition may move him, one creeps forth with his snickersnee and takes up the silent trail … Back he comes, triumphant, bearing the severed, gory head of his victim … His particular brown or white maid lingers, with fluttering bosom, casting soft tiger’s eyes at the evidence of his love for her</em>.</p>
|
||||
<p>I stole softly from the house and returned to my hut. From its supporting nails in the wall I took a machete as heavy as a butcher’s cleaver and sharper than a safety-razor. And then I chuckled softly to myself, and set out to the fastidiously appointed private office of Monsieur Louis Devoe, usurper to the hand of the Pearl of the Pacific.</p>
|
||||
<p>He was never slow at thinking; he gave one look at my face and another at the weapon in my hand as I entered his door, and then he seemed to fade from my sight. I ran to the back door, kicked it open, and saw him running like a deer up the road toward the wood that began two hundred yards away. I was after him, with a shout. I remember hearing children and women screaming, and seeing them flying from the road.</p>
|
||||
<p>He was fleet, but I was stronger. A mile, and I had almost come up with him. He doubled cunningly and dashed into a brake that extended into a small cañon. I crashed through this after him, and in five minutes had him cornered in an angle of insurmountable cliffs. There his instinct of self-preservation steadied him, as it will steady even animals at bay. He turned to me, quite calm, with a ghastly smile.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -9,8 +9,8 @@
|
||||
<section id="chapter-12" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">No Story</h2>
|
||||
<p>To avoid having this book hurled into corner of the room by the suspicious reader, I will assert in time that this is not a newspaper story. You will encounter no shirt-sleeved, omniscient city editor, no prodigy “cub” reporter just off the farm, no scoop, no story—no anything.</p>
|
||||
<p>But if you will concede me the setting of the first scene in the reporters’ room of the <i>Morning Beacon</i>, I will repay the favor by keeping strictly my promises set forth above.</p>
|
||||
<p>I was doing space-work on the <i>Beacon</i>, hoping to be put on a salary. Some one had cleared with a rake or a shovel a small space for me at the end of a long table piled high with exchanges, <i>Congressional Records</i>, and old files. There I did my work. I wrote whatever the city whispered or roared or chuckled to me on my diligent wanderings about its streets. My income was not regular.</p>
|
||||
<p>But if you will concede me the setting of the first scene in the reporters’ room of the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Morning Beacon</i>, I will repay the favor by keeping strictly my promises set forth above.</p>
|
||||
<p>I was doing space-work on the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Beacon</i>, hoping to be put on a salary. Some one had cleared with a rake or a shovel a small space for me at the end of a long table piled high with exchanges, <i epub:type="se:name.publication.journal">Congressional Records</i>, and old files. There I did my work. I wrote whatever the city whispered or roared or chuckled to me on my diligent wanderings about its streets. My income was not regular.</p>
|
||||
<p>One day Tripp came in and leaned on my table. Tripp was something in the mechanical department—I think he had something to do with the pictures, for he smelled of photographers’ supplies, and his hands were always stained and cut up with acids. He was about twenty-five and looked forty. Half of his face was covered with short, curly red whiskers that looked like a door-mat with the “welcome” left off. He was pale and unhealthy and miserable and fawning, and an assiduous borrower of sums ranging from twenty-five cents to a dollar. One dollar was his limit. He knew the extent of his credit as well as the Chemical National Bank knows the amount of H<span class="xsmall">2</span>O that collateral will show on analysis. When he sat on my table he held one hand with the other to keep both from shaking. Whiskey. He had a spurious air of lightness and bravado about him that deceived no one, but was useful in his borrowing because it was so pitifully and perceptibly assumed.</p>
|
||||
<p>This day I had coaxed from the cashier five shining silver dollars as a grumbling advance on a story that the Sunday editor had reluctantly accepted. So if I was not feeling at peace with the world, at least an armistice had been declared; and I was beginning with ardor to write a description of the Brooklyn Bridge by moonlight.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, Tripp,” said I, looking up at him rather impatiently, “how goes it?” He was looking to-day more miserable, more cringing and haggard and downtrodden than I had ever seen him. He was at that stage of misery where he drew your pity so fully that you longed to kick him.</p>
|
||||
@ -20,7 +20,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“I don’t want to borrow any,” said Tripp, and I breathed again. “I thought you’d like to get put onto a good story,” he went on. “I’ve got a rattling fine one for you. You ought to make it run a column at least. It’ll make a dandy if you work it up right. It’ll probably cost you a dollar or two to get the stuff. I don’t want anything out of it myself.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I became placated. The proposition showed that Tripp appreciated past favors, although he did not return them. If he had been wise enough to strike me for a quarter then he would have got it.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What is the story?” I asked, poising my pencil with a finely calculated editorial air.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ll tell you,” said Tripp. “It’s a girl. A beauty. One of the howlingest Amsden’s Junes you ever saw. Rosebuds covered with dew—violets in their mossy bed—and truck like that. She’s lived on Long Island twenty years and never saw New York City before. I ran against her on Thirty-fourth Street. She’d just got in on the East River ferry. I tell you, she’s a beauty that would take the hydrogen out of all the peroxides in the world. She stopped me on the street and asked me where she could find George Brown. Asked me where she could find <i>George Brown in New York City!</i> What do you think of that?</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ll tell you,” said Tripp. “It’s a girl. A beauty. One of the howlingest Amsden’s Junes you ever saw. Rosebuds covered with dew—violets in their mossy bed—and truck like that. She’s lived on Long Island twenty years and never saw New York City before. I ran against her on Thirty-fourth Street. She’d just got in on the East River ferry. I tell you, she’s a beauty that would take the hydrogen out of all the peroxides in the world. She stopped me on the street and asked me where she could find George Brown. Asked me where she could find “George Brown in New York City!” What do you think of that?</p>
|
||||
<p>“I talked to her, and found that she was going to marry a young farmer named Dodd—Hiram Dodd—next week. But it seems that George Brown still holds the championship in her youthful fancy. George had greased his cowhide boots some years ago, and came to the city to make his fortune. But he forgot to remember to show up again at Greenburg, and Hiram got in as second-best choice. But when it comes to the scratch Ada—her name’s Ada Lowery—saddles a nag and rides eight miles to the railroad station and catches the 6.45 <span class="smallcaps"><abbr class="time">a.m.</abbr></span> train for the city. Looking for George, you know—you understand about women—George wasn’t there, so she wanted him.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, you know, I couldn’t leave her loose in Wolftown-on-the-Hudson. I suppose she thought the first person she inquired of would say: ‘George Brown?—why, yes—lemme see—he’s a short man with light-blue eyes, ain’t he? Oh yes—you’ll find George on One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, right next to the grocery. He’s bill-clerk in a saddle-and-harness store.’ That’s about how innocent and beautiful she is. You know those little Long Island water-front villages like Greenburg—a couple of duck-farms for sport, and clams and about nine summer visitors for industries. That’s the kind of a place she comes from. But, say—you ought to see her!</p>
|
||||
<p>“What could I do? I don’t know what money looks like in the morning. And she’d paid her last cent of pocket-money for her railroad ticket except a quarter, which she had squandered on gum-drops. She was eating them out of a paper bag. I took her to a boarding-house on Thirty-second Street where I used to live, and hocked her. She’s in soak for a dollar. That’s old Mother McGinnis’ price per day. I’ll show you the house.”</p>
|
||||
@ -42,7 +42,7 @@
|
||||
<p>In the dim parlor a girl sat at the cracked marble centre-table weeping comfortably and eating gum-drops. She was a flawless beauty. Crying had only made her brilliant eyes brighter. When she crunched a gum-drop you thought only of the poetry of motion and envied the senseless confection. Eve at the age of five minutes must have been a ringer for Miss Ada Lowery at nineteen or twenty. I was introduced, and a gum-drop suffered neglect while she conveyed to me a naïve interest, such as a puppy dog (a prize winner) might bestow upon a crawling beetle or a frog.</p>
|
||||
<p>Tripp took his stand by the table, with the fingers of one hand spread upon it, as an attorney or a master of ceremonies might have stood. But he looked the master of nothing. His faded coat was buttoned high, as if it sought to be charitable to deficiencies of tie and linen.</p>
|
||||
<p>I thought of a Scotch terrier at the sight of his shifty eyes in the glade between his tangled hair and beard. For one ignoble moment I felt ashamed of having been introduced as his friend in the presence of so much beauty in distress. But evidently Tripp meant to conduct the ceremonies, whatever they might be. I thought I detected in his actions and pose an intention of foisting the situation upon me as material for a newspaper story, in a lingering hope of extracting from me his whiskey dollar.</p>
|
||||
<p>“My friend” (I shuddered), “<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Chalmers,” said Tripp, “will tell you, Miss Lowery, the same that I did. He’s a reporter, and he can hand out the talk better than I can. That’s why I brought him with me.” (O Tripp, wasn’t it the <i>silver</i>-tongued orator you wanted?) “He’s wise to a lot of things, and he’ll tell you now what’s best to do.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“My friend” (I shuddered), “<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Chalmers,” said Tripp, “will tell you, Miss Lowery, the same that I did. He’s a reporter, and he can hand out the talk better than I can. That’s why I brought him with me.” (O Tripp, wasn’t it the <em>silver</em>-tongued orator you wanted?) “He’s wise to a lot of things, and he’ll tell you now what’s best to do.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I stood on one foot, as it were, as I sat in my rickety chair.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why—er—Miss Lowery,” I began, secretly enraged at Tripp’s awkward opening, “I am at your service, of course, but—er—as I haven’t been apprized of the circumstances of the case, I—er—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh,” said Miss Lowery, beaming for a moment, “it ain’t as bad as that—there ain’t any circumstances. It’s the first time I’ve ever been in New York except once when I was five years old, and I had no idea it was such a big town. And I met <abbr>Mr.</abbr>—<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Snip on the street and asked him about a friend of mine, and he brought me here and asked me to wait.”</p>
|
||||
@ -57,7 +57,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“I guess I’m a terrible hayseed,” she said between her little gulps and sighs, “but I can’t help it. G—George Brown and I were sweethearts since he was eight and I was five. When he was nineteen—that was four years ago—he left Greenburg and went to the city. He said he was going to be a policeman or a railroad president or something. And then he was coming back for me. But I never heard from him any more. And I—I—liked him.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Another flow of tears seemed imminent, but Tripp hurled himself into the crevasse and dammed it. Confound him, I could see his game. He was trying to make a story of it for his sordid ends and profit.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Go on, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Chalmers,” said he, “and tell the lady what’s the proper caper. That’s what I told her—you’d hand it to her straight. Spiel up.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I coughed, and tried to feel less wrathful toward Tripp. I saw my duty. Cunningly I had been inveigled, but I was securely trapped. Tripp’s first dictum to me had been just and correct. The young lady must be sent back to Greenburg that day. She must be argued with, convinced, assured, instructed, ticketed, and returned without delay. I hated Hiram and despised George; but duty must be done. <i>Noblesse oblige</i> and only five silver dollars are not strictly romantic compatibles, but sometimes they can be made to jibe. It was mine to be Sir Oracle, and then pay the freight. So I assumed an air that mingled Solomon’s with that of the general passenger agent of the Long Island Railroad.</p>
|
||||
<p>I coughed, and tried to feel less wrathful toward Tripp. I saw my duty. Cunningly I had been inveigled, but I was securely trapped. Tripp’s first dictum to me had been just and correct. The young lady must be sent back to Greenburg that day. She must be argued with, convinced, assured, instructed, ticketed, and returned without delay. I hated Hiram and despised George; but duty must be done. Noblesse oblige and only five silver dollars are not strictly romantic compatibles, but sometimes they can be made to jibe. It was mine to be Sir Oracle, and then pay the freight. So I assumed an air that mingled Solomon’s with that of the general passenger agent of the Long Island Railroad.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Miss Lowery,” said I, as impressively as I could, “life is rather a queer proposition, after all.” There was a familiar sound to these words after I had spoken them, and I hoped Miss Lowery had never heard <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Cohan’s song. “Those whom we first love we seldom wed. Our earlier romances, tinged with the magic radiance of youth, often fail to materialize.” The last three words sounded somewhat trite when they struck the air. “But those fondly cherished dreams,” I went on, “may cast a pleasant afterglow on our future lives, however impracticable and vague they may have been. But life is full of realities as well as visions and dreams. One cannot live on memories. May I ask, Miss Lowery, if you think you could pass a happy—that is, a contented and harmonious life with <abbr>Mr.</abbr>—er—Dodd—if in other ways than romantic recollections he seems to—er—fill the bill, as I might say?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, Hi’s all right,” answered Miss Lowery. “Yes, I could get along with him fine. He’s promised me an automobile and a motor-boat. But somehow, when it got so close to the time I was to marry him, I couldn’t help wishing—well, just thinking about George. Something must have happened to him or he’d have written. On the day he left, he and me got a hammer and a chisel and cut a dime into two pieces. I took one piece and he took the other, and we promised to be true to each other and always keep the pieces till we saw each other again. I’ve got mine at home now in a ring-box in the top drawer of my dresser. I guess I was silly to come up here looking for him. I never realized what a big place it is.”</p>
|
||||
<p>And then Tripp joined in with a little grating laugh that he had, still trying to drag in a little story or drama to earn the miserable dollar that he craved.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“I should say,” said the student of human nature with unpardonable hesitation, “that you was, say, in the contracting business—or maybe worked in a store—or was a sign-painter. You stopped in the park to finish your cigar, and thought you’d get a little free monologue out of me. Still, you might be a plasterer or a lawyer—it’s getting kind of dark, you see. And your wife won’t let you smoke at home.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I frowned gloomily.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But, judging again,” went on the reader of men, “I’d say you ain’t got a wife.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“No,” said I, rising restlessly. “No, no, no, I ain’t. But I <i>will</i> have, by the arrows of Cupid! That is, if—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“No,” said I, rising restlessly. “No, no, no, I ain’t. But I <em>will</em> have, by the arrows of Cupid! That is, if—”</p>
|
||||
<p>My voice must have trailed away and muffled itself in uncertainty and despair.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I see you have a story yourself,” said the dusty vagrant—impudently, it seemed to me. “Suppose you take your dime back and spin your yarn for me. I’m interested myself in the ups and downs of unfortunate ones who spend their evenings in the park.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Somehow, that amused me. I looked at the frowsy derelict with more interest. I did have a story. Why not tell it to him? I had told none of my friends. I had always been a reserved and bottled-up man. It was psychical timidity or sensitiveness—perhaps both. And I smiled to myself in wonder when I felt an impulse to confide in this stranger and vagabond.</p>
|
||||
@ -33,7 +33,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Mack,” said I, “I’ll tell you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Do you want the dime back in advance?” said he.</p>
|
||||
<p>I handed him a dollar.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The dime,” said I, “was the price of listening to <i>your</i> story.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The dime,” said I, “was the price of listening to <em>your</em> story.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Right on the point of the jaw,” said he. “Go on.”</p>
|
||||
<p>And then, incredible as it may seem to the lovers in the world who confide their sorrows only to the night wind and the gibbous moon, I laid bare my secret to that wreck of all things that you would have supposed to be in sympathy with love.</p>
|
||||
<p>I told him of the days and weeks and months that I had spent in adoring Mildred Telfair. I spoke of my despair, my grievous days and wakeful nights, my dwindling hopes and distress of mind. I even pictured to this night-prowler her beauty and dignity, the great sway she had in society, and the magnificence of her life as the elder daughter of an ancient race whose pride overbalanced the dollars of the city’s millionaires.</p>
|
||||
@ -78,12 +78,12 @@
|
||||
<p>“I’ll show him!” I finally said, aloud. “I’ll show him that I can fight Reddy Burns, too—even knowing who he is.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I hurried to a telephone-booth and rang up the Telfair residence.</p>
|
||||
<p>A soft, sweet voice answered. Didn’t I know that voice? My hand holding the receiver shook.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Is that <i>you</i>?” said I, employing the foolish words that form the vocabulary of every talker through the telephone.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Is that <em>you</em>?” said I, employing the foolish words that form the vocabulary of every talker through the telephone.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes, this is I,” came back the answer in the low, clear-cut tones that are an inheritance of the Telfairs. “Who is it, please?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s me,” said I, less ungrammatically than egotistically. “It’s me, and I’ve got a few things that I want to say to you right now and immediately and straight to the point.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“<i>Dear</i> me,” said the voice. “Oh, it’s you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Arden!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“<em>Dear</em> me,” said the voice. “Oh, it’s you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Arden!”</p>
|
||||
<p>I wondered if any accent on the first word was intended; Mildred was fine at saying things that you had to study out afterward.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes,” said I. “I hope so. And now to come down to brass tacks.” I thought that rather a vernacularism, if there is such a word, as soon as I had said it; but I didn’t stop to apologize. “You know, of course, that I love you, and that I have been in that idiotic state for a long time. I don’t want any more foolishness about it—that is, I mean I want an answer from you right now. Will you marry me or not? Hold the wire, please. Keep out, Central. Hello, hello! Will you, or will you <i>not</i>?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes,” said I. “I hope so. And now to come down to brass tacks.” I thought that rather a vernacularism, if there is such a word, as soon as I had said it; but I didn’t stop to apologize. “You know, of course, that I love you, and that I have been in that idiotic state for a long time. I don’t want any more foolishness about it—that is, I mean I want an answer from you right now. Will you marry me or not? Hold the wire, please. Keep out, Central. Hello, hello! Will you, or will you <em>not</em>?”</p>
|
||||
<p>That was just the uppercut for Reddy Burns’ chin. The answer came back:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, Phil, dear, of course I will! I didn’t know that you—that is, you never said—oh, come up to the house, please—I can’t say what I want to over the ‘phone. You are so importunate. But please come up to the house, won’t you?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Would I?</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -18,18 +18,16 @@
|
||||
<p>During my acquaintance with him in the City of Diurnal Night I had never known his views on life, romance, literature, and ethics. We had browsed, during our meetings, on local topics, and then parted, after Chateau Margaux, Irish stew, flannel-cakes, cottage-pudding, and coffee (hey, there!—with milk separate). Now I was to get more of his ideas. By way of facts, he told me that business had picked up since the party conventions, and that he was going to get off at Coketown.</p>
|
||||
<h4>II</h4>
|
||||
<p>“Say,” said Pescud, stirring his discarded book with the toe of his right shoe, “did you ever read one of these best-sellers? I mean the kind where the hero is an American swell—sometimes even from Chicago—who falls in love with a royal princess from Europe who is travelling under an alias, and follows her to her father’s kingdom or principality? I guess you have. They’re all alike. Sometimes this going-away masher is a Washington newspaper correspondent, and sometimes he is a Van Something from New York, or a Chicago wheat-broker worthy fifty millions. But he’s always ready to break into the king row of any foreign country that sends over their queens and princesses to try the new plush seats on the Big Four or the B. and O. There doesn’t seem to be any other reason in the book for their being here.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, this fellow chases the royal chair-warmer home, as I said, and finds out who she is. He meets her on the <i>corso</i> or the <i>strasse</i> one evening and gives us ten pages of conversation. She reminds him of the difference in their stations, and that gives him a chance to ring in three solid pages about America’s uncrowned sovereigns. If you’d take his remarks and set ’em to music, and then take the music away from ’em, they’d sound exactly like one of George Cohan’s songs.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, this fellow chases the royal chair-warmer home, as I said, and finds out who she is. He meets her on the <i xml:lang="de">corso</i> or the <i xml:lang="de">strasse</i> one evening and gives us ten pages of conversation. She reminds him of the difference in their stations, and that gives him a chance to ring in three solid pages about America’s uncrowned sovereigns. If you’d take his remarks and set ’em to music, and then take the music away from ’em, they’d sound exactly like one of George Cohan’s songs.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, you know how it runs on, if you’ve read any of ’em—he slaps the king’s Swiss body-guards around like everything whenever they get in his way. He’s a great fencer, too. Now, I’ve known of some Chicago men who were pretty notorious fences, but I never heard of any fencers coming from there. He stands on the first landing of the royal staircase in Castle Schutzenfestenstein with a gleaming rapier in his hand, and makes a Baltimore broil of six platoons of traitors who come to massacre the said king. And then he has to fight duels with a couple of chancellors, and foil a plot by four Austrian archdukes to seize the kingdom for a gasoline-station.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But the great scene is when his rival for the princess’ hand, Count Feodor, attacks him between the portcullis and the ruined chapel, armed with a mitrailleuse, a yataghan, and a couple of Siberian bloodhounds. This scene is what runs the best-seller into the twenty-ninth edition before the publisher has had time to draw a check for the advance royalties.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The American hero shucks his coat and throws it over the heads of the bloodhounds, gives the mitrailleuse a slap with his mitt, says ‘Yah!’ to the yataghan, and lands in Kid McCoy’s best style on the count’s left eye. Of course, we have a neat little prize-fight right then and there. The count—in order to make the go possible—seems to be an expert at the art of self-defence, himself; and here we have the Corbett-Sullivan fight done over into literature. The book ends with the broker and the princess doing a John Cecil Clay cover under the linden-trees on the Gorgonzola Walk. That winds up the love-story plenty good enough. But I notice that the book dodges the final issue. Even a best-seller has sense enough to shy at either leaving a Chicago grain broker on the throne of Lobsterpotsdam or bringing over a real princess to eat fish and potato salad in an Italian chalet on Michigan Avenue. What do you think about ’em?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why,” said I, “I hardly know, John. There’s a saying: ‘Love levels all ranks,’ you know.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes,” said Pescud, “but these kind of love-stories are rank—on the level. I know something about literature, even if I am in plate-glass. These kind of books are wrong, and yet I never go into a train but what they pile ’em up on me. No good can come out of an international clinch between the Old-World aristocracy and one of us fresh Americans. When people in real life marry, they generally hunt up somebody in their own station. A fellow usually picks out a girl that went to the same high-school and belonged to the same singing-society that he did. When young millionaires fall in love, they always select the chorus-girl that likes the same kind of sauce on the lobster that he does. Washington newspaper correspondents always many widow ladies ten years older than themselves who keep boarding-houses. No, sir, you can’t make a novel sound right to me when it makes one of C. D. Gibson’s bright young men go abroad and turn kingdoms upside down just because he’s a Taft American and took a course at a gymnasium. And listen how they talk, too!”</p>
|
||||
<p>Pescud picked up the best-seller and hunted his page.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Listen at this,” said he. “Trevelyan is chinning with the Princess Alwyna at the back end of the tulip-garden. This is how it goes:<br/></p>
|
||||
<p>“Listen at this,” said he. “Trevelyan is chinning with the Princess Alwyna at the back end of the tulip-garden. This is how it goes:</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Say not so, dearest and sweetest of earth’s fairest flowers. Would I aspire? You are a star set high above me in a royal heaven; I am only—myself. Yet I am a man, and I have a heart to do and dare. I have no title save that of an uncrowned sovereign; but I have an arm and a sword that yet might free Schutzenfestenstein from the plots of traitors.’<br/></p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Say not so, dearest and sweetest of earth’s fairest flowers. Would I aspire? You are a star set high above me in a royal heaven; I am only—myself. Yet I am a man, and I have a heart to do and dare. I have no title save that of an uncrowned sovereign; but I have an arm and a sword that yet might free Schutzenfestenstein from the plots of traitors.’</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>“Think of a Chicago man packing a sword, and talking about freeing anything that sounded as much like canned pork as that! He’d be much more likely to fight to have an import duty put on it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I think I understand you, John,” said I. “You want fiction-writers to be consistent with their scenes and characters. They shouldn’t mix Turkish pashas with Vermont farmers, or English dukes with Long Island clam-diggers, or Italian countesses with Montana cowboys, or Cincinnati brewery agents with the rajahs of India.”</p>
|
||||
@ -70,7 +68,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘The Allyns,’ says she, ‘have lived in Elmcroft for a hundred years. We are a proud family. Look at that mansion. It has fifty rooms. See the pillars and porches and balconies. The ceilings in the reception-rooms and the ball-room are twenty-eight feet high. My father is a lineal descendant of belted earls.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I belted one of ’em once in the Duquesne Hotel, in Pittsburgh,’ says I, ‘and he didn’t offer to resent it. He was there dividing his attentions between Monongahela whiskey and heiresses, and he got fresh.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Of course,’ she goes on, ‘my father wouldn’t allow a drummer to set his foot in Elmcroft. If he knew that I was talking to one over the fence he would lock me in my room.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Would <i>you</i> let me come there?’ says I. ‘Would <i>you</i> talk to me if I was to call? For,’ I goes on, ‘if you said I might come and see you, the earls might be belted or suspendered, or pinned up with safety-pins, as far as I am concerned.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Would <em>you</em> let me come there?’ says I. ‘Would <em>you</em> talk to me if I was to call? For,’ I goes on, ‘if you said I might come and see you, the earls might be belted or suspendered, or pinned up with safety-pins, as far as I am concerned.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I must not talk to you,’ she says, ‘because we have not been introduced. It is not exactly proper. So I will say good-bye, <abbr>Mr.</abbr>—’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Say the name,’ says I. ‘You haven’t forgotten it.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Pescud,’ says she, a little mad.</p>
|
||||
@ -100,7 +98,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘It’s going to be a fine evening,’ says I.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘He’s coming,’ says she. ‘He’s going to tell you, this time, the story about the old negro and the green watermelons. It always comes after the one about the Yankees and the game rooster. There was another time,’ she goes on, ‘that you nearly got left—it was at Pulaski City.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Yes,’ says I, ‘I remember. My foot slipped as I was jumping on the step, and I nearly tumbled off.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I know,’ says she. ‘And—and I—<i>I was afraid you had, John A. I was afraid you had.</i>’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I know,’ says she. ‘And—and I—<em>I was afraid you had, John A. I was afraid you had.</em>’</p>
|
||||
<p>“And then she skips into the house through one of the big windows.”</p>
|
||||
<h4>IV</h4>
|
||||
<p>“Coketown!” droned the porter, making his way through the slowing car.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -23,7 +23,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“No, you don’t,” said North, emphatically. “You don’t spring that old one on me. I know you know better. Man, you ought to have gone up with us this summer. The Prestons are there, and Tom Volney and the Monroes and Lulu Stanford and the Miss Kennedy and her aunt that you liked so well.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I never liked Miss Kennedy’s aunt,” I said.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I didn’t say you did,” said North. “We are having the greatest time we’ve ever had. The pickerel and trout are so ravenous that I believe they would swallow your hook with a Montana copper-mine prospectus fastened on it. And we’ve a couple of electric launches; and I’ll tell you what we do every night or two—we tow a rowboat behind each one with a big phonograph and a boy to change the discs in ’em. On the water, and twenty yards behind you, they are not so bad. And there are passably good roads through the woods where we go motoring. I shipped two cars up there. And the Pinecliff Inn is only three miles away. You know the Pinecliff. Some good people are there this season, and we run over to the dances twice a week. Can’t you go back with me for a week, old man?”</p>
|
||||
<p>I laughed. “Northy,” said I—“if I may be so familiar with a millionaire, because I hate both the names Spencer and Grenville—your invitation is meant kindly, but—the city in the summer-time for me. Here, while the <i>bourgeoisie</i> is away, I can live as Nero lived—barring, thank heaven, the fiddling—while the city burns at ninety in the shade. The tropics and the zones wait upon me like handmaidens. I sit under Florida palms and eat pomegranates while Boreas himself, electrically conjured up, blows upon me his Arctic breath. As for trout, you know, yourself, that Jean, at Maurice’s, cooks them better than any one else in the world.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I laughed. “Northy,” said I—“if I may be so familiar with a millionaire, because I hate both the names Spencer and Grenville—your invitation is meant kindly, but—the city in the summer-time for me. Here, while the bourgeoisie is away, I can live as Nero lived—barring, thank heaven, the fiddling—while the city burns at ninety in the shade. The tropics and the zones wait upon me like handmaidens. I sit under Florida palms and eat pomegranates while Boreas himself, electrically conjured up, blows upon me his Arctic breath. As for trout, you know, yourself, that Jean, at Maurice’s, cooks them better than any one else in the world.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Be advised,” said North. “My chef has pinched the blue ribbon from the lot. He lays some slices of bacon inside the trout, wraps it all in corn-husks—the husks of green corn, you know—buries them in hot ashes and covers them with live coals. We build fires on the bank of the lake and have fish suppers.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I know,” said I. “And the servants bring down tables and chairs and damask cloths, and you eat with silver forks. I know the kind of camps that you millionaires have. And there are champagne pails set about, disgracing the wild flowers, and, no doubt, Madame Tetrazzini to sing in the boat pavilion after the trout.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh no,” said North, concernedly, “we were never as bad as that. We did have a variety troupe up from the city three or four nights, but they weren’t stars by as far as light can travel in the same length of time. I always like a few home comforts even when I’m roughing it. But don’t tell me you prefer to stay in the city during summer. I don’t believe it. If you do, why did you spend your summers there for the last four years, even sneaking away from town on a night train, and refusing to tell your friends where this Arcadian village was?”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -8,8 +8,8 @@
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-16" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">A Poor Rule</h2>
|
||||
<p>I have always maintained, and asserted time to time, that woman is no mystery; that man can foretell, construe, subdue, comprehend, and interpret her. That she is a mystery has been foisted by herself upon credulous mankind. Whether I am right or wrong we shall see. As “Harper’s Drawer” used to say in bygone years: “The following good story is told of Miss––––, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> ––––, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> ––––, and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> ––––.”</p>
|
||||
<p>We shall have to omit “Bishop <span epub:type="z3998:roman">X</span>” and “the <abbr>Rev.</abbr> ––––,” for they do not belong.</p>
|
||||
<p>I have always maintained, and asserted time to time, that woman is no mystery; that man can foretell, construe, subdue, comprehend, and interpret her. That she is a mystery has been foisted by herself upon credulous mankind. Whether I am right or wrong we shall see. As “Harper’s Drawer” used to say in bygone years: “The following good story is told of Miss ⸻, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> ⸻, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> ⸻, and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> ⸻.”</p>
|
||||
<p>We shall have to omit “Bishop X” and “the <abbr>Rev.</abbr> ⸻,” for they do not belong.</p>
|
||||
<p>In those days Paloma was a new town on the line of the Southern Pacific. A reporter would have called it a “mushroom” town; but it was not. Paloma was, first and last, of the toadstool variety.</p>
|
||||
<p>The train stopped there at noon for the engine to drink and for the passengers both to drink and to dine. There was a new yellow-pine hotel, also a wool warehouse, and perhaps three dozen box residences. The rest was composed of tents, cow ponies, “black-waxy” mud, and mesquite-trees, all bound round by a horizon. Paloma was an about-to-be city. The houses represented faith; the tents hope; the twice-a-day train, by which you might leave, creditably sustained the rôle of charity.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Parisian Restaurant occupied the muddiest spot in the town while it rained, and the warmest when it shone. It was operated, owned, and perpetrated by a citizen known as Old Man Hinkle, who had come out of Indiana to make his fortune in this land of condensed milk and sorghum.</p>
|
||||
@ -18,7 +18,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Ileen Hinkle!</p>
|
||||
<p>The spelling is correct, for I have seen her write it. No doubt she had been named by ear; but she so splendidly bore the orthography that Tom Moore himself (had he seen her) would have endorsed the phonography.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ileen was the daughter of the house, and the first Lady Cashier to invade the territory south of an east-and-west line drawn through Galveston and Del Rio. She sat on a high stool in a rough pine grand-stand—or was it a temple?—under the shelter at the door of the kitchen. There was a barbed-wire protection in front of her, with a little arch under which you passed your money. Heaven knows why the barbed wire; for every man who dined Parisianly there would have died in her service. Her duties were light; each meal was a dollar; you put it under the arch, and she took it.</p>
|
||||
<p>I set out with the intent to describe Ileen Hinkle to you. Instead, I must refer you to the volume by Edmund Burke entitled: <i>A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful</i>. It is an exhaustive treatise, dealing first with the primitive conceptions of beauty—roundness and smoothness, I think they are, according to Burke. It is well said. Rotundity is a patent charm; as for smoothness—the more new wrinkles a woman acquires, the smoother she becomes.</p>
|
||||
<p>I set out with the intent to describe Ileen Hinkle to you. Instead, I must refer you to the volume by Edmund Burke entitled: <i epub:type="se:name.publication.book">A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful</i>. It is an exhaustive treatise, dealing first with the primitive conceptions of beauty—roundness and smoothness, I think they are, according to Burke. It is well said. Rotundity is a patent charm; as for smoothness—the more new wrinkles a woman acquires, the smoother she becomes.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ileen was a strictly vegetable compound, guaranteed under the Pure Ambrosia and Balm-of-Gilead Act of the year of the fall of Adam. She was a fruit-stand blonde—strawberries, peaches, cherries, <abbr class="eoc">etc.</abbr> Her eyes were wide apart, and she possessed the calm that precedes a storm that never comes. But it seems to me that words (at any rate per) are wasted in an effort to describe the beautiful. Like fancy, “It is engendered in the eyes.” There are three kinds of beauties—I was foreordained to be homiletic; I can never stick to a story.</p>
|
||||
<p>The first is the freckle-faced, snub-nosed girl whom you like. The second is Maud Adams. The third is, or are, the ladies in Bouguereau’s paintings. Ileen Hinkle was the fourth. She was the mayoress of Spotless Town. There were a thousand golden apples coming to her as Helen of the Troy laundries.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Parisian Restaurant was within a radius. Even from beyond its circumference men rode in to Paloma to win her smiles. They got them. One meal—one smile—one dollar. But, with all her impartiality, Ileen seemed to favor three of her admirers above the rest. According to the rules of politeness, I will mention myself last.</p>
|
||||
@ -32,7 +32,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Jacks and I were regular boarders at the restaurant, of course.</p>
|
||||
<p>The front room of the Hinkle House was as neat a little parlor as there was in the black-waxy country. It was all willow rocking-chairs, and home-knit tidies, and albums, and conch shells in a row. And a little upright piano in one corner.</p>
|
||||
<p>Here Jacks and Bud and I—or sometimes one or two of us, according to our good-luck—used to sit of evenings when the tide of trade was over, and “visit” Miss Hinkle.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ileen was a girl of ideas. She was destined for higher things (if there can be anything higher) than taking in dollars all day through a barbed-wire wicket. She had read and listened and thought. Her looks would have formed a career for a less ambitious girl; but, rising superior to mere beauty, she must establish something in the nature of a <i>salon</i>—the only one in Paloma.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ileen was a girl of ideas. She was destined for higher things (if there can be anything higher) than taking in dollars all day through a barbed-wire wicket. She had read and listened and thought. Her looks would have formed a career for a less ambitious girl; but, rising superior to mere beauty, she must establish something in the nature of a salon—the only one in Paloma.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Don’t you think that Shakespeare was a great writer?” she would ask, with such a pretty little knit of her arched brows that the late Ignatius Donnelly, himself, had he seen it, could scarcely have saved his Bacon.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ileen was of the opinion, also, that Boston is more cultured than Chicago; that Rosa Bonheur was one of the greatest of women painters; that Westerners are more spontaneous and open-hearted than Easterners; that London must be a very foggy city, and that California must be quite lovely in the springtime. And of many other opinions indicating a keeping up with the world’s best thought.</p>
|
||||
<p>These, however, were but gleaned from hearsay and evidence: Ileen had theories of her own. One, in particular, she disseminated to us untiringly. Flattery she detested. Frankness and honesty of speech and action, she declared, were the chief mental ornaments of man and woman. If ever she could like any one, it would be for those qualities.</p>
|
||||
@ -44,7 +44,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Why—ah, Miss Ileen, beauty, as you might say, ain’t everything. Not sayin’ that you haven’t your share of good looks, I always admired more than anything else about you the nice, kind way you treat your ma and pa. Any one what’s good to their parents and is a kind of home-body don’t specially need to be too pretty.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Ileen gave him one of her sweetest smiles. “Thank you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Cunningham,” she said. “I consider that one of the finest compliments I’ve had in a long time. I’d so much rather hear you say that than to hear you talk about my eyes and hair. I’m glad you believe me when I say I don’t like flattery.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Our cue was there for us. Bud had made a good guess. You couldn’t lose Jacks. He chimed in next.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sure thing, Miss Ileen,” he said; “the good-lookers don’t always win out. Now, you ain’t bad looking, of course—but that’s nix-cum-rous. I knew a girl once in Dubuque with a face like a cocoanut, who could skin the cat twice on a horizontal bar without changing hands. Now, a girl might have the California peach crop mashed to a marmalade and not be able to do that. I’ve seen—er—worse lookers than <i>you</i>, Miss Ileen; but what I like about you is the business way you’ve got of doing things. Cool and wise—that’s the winning way for a girl. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Hinkle told me the other day you’d never taken in a lead silver dollar or a plugged one since you’ve been on the job. Now, that’s the stuff for a girl—that’s what catches me.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sure thing, Miss Ileen,” he said; “the good-lookers don’t always win out. Now, you ain’t bad looking, of course—but that’s nix-cum-rous. I knew a girl once in Dubuque with a face like a cocoanut, who could skin the cat twice on a horizontal bar without changing hands. Now, a girl might have the California peach crop mashed to a marmalade and not be able to do that. I’ve seen—er—worse lookers than <em>you</em>, Miss Ileen; but what I like about you is the business way you’ve got of doing things. Cool and wise—that’s the winning way for a girl. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Hinkle told me the other day you’d never taken in a lead silver dollar or a plugged one since you’ve been on the job. Now, that’s the stuff for a girl—that’s what catches me.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Jacks got his smile, too.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Thank you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Jacks,” said Ileen. “If you only knew how I appreciate any one’s being candid and not a flatterer! I get so tired of people telling me I’m pretty. I think it is the loveliest thing to have friends who tell you the truth.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Then I thought I saw an expectant look on Ileen’s face as she glanced toward me. I had a wild, sudden impulse to dare fate, and tell her of all the beautiful handiwork of the Great Artificer she was the most exquisite—that she was a flawless pearl gleaming pure and serene in a setting of black mud and emerald prairies—that she was—a—a corker; and as for mine, I cared not if she were as cruel as a serpent’s tooth to her fond parents, or if she couldn’t tell a plugged dollar from a bridle buckle, if I might sing, chant, praise, glorify, and worship her peerless and wonderful beauty.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -30,7 +30,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Hetty addressed her in the punctiliously formal tone of one who intends to be cheerfully familiar with you in the second round.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Beg pardon,” she said, “for butting into what’s not my business, but if you peel them potatoes you lose out. They’re new Bermudas. You want to scrape ’em. Lemme show you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>She took a potato and the knife, and began to demonstrate.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, thank you,” breathed the artist. “I didn’t know. And I <i>did</i> hate to see the thick peeling go; it seemed such a waste. But I thought they always had to be peeled. When you’ve got only potatoes to eat, the peelings count, you know.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, thank you,” breathed the artist. “I didn’t know. And I <em>did</em> hate to see the thick peeling go; it seemed such a waste. But I thought they always had to be peeled. When you’ve got only potatoes to eat, the peelings count, you know.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say, kid,” said Hetty, staying her knife, “you ain’t up against it, too, are you?”</p>
|
||||
<p>The miniature artist smiled starvedly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I suppose I am. Art—or, at least, the way I interpret it—doesn’t seem to be much in demand. I have only these potatoes for my dinner. But they aren’t so bad boiled and hot, with a little butter and salt.”</p>
|
||||
@ -49,12 +49,12 @@
|
||||
<p>“Go on and tell me, honey,” she said. “I know now that it ain’t art that’s worrying you. You met him on a ferry-boat, didn’t you? Go on, Cecilia, kid, and tell your—your Aunt Hetty about it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>But youth and melancholy must first spend the surplus of sighs and tears that waft and float the barque of romance to its harbor in the delectable isles. Presently, through the stringy tendons that formed the bars of the confessional, the penitent—or was it the glorified communicant of the sacred flame—told her story without art or illumination.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It was only three days ago. I was coming back on the ferry from Jersey City. Old <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Schrum, an art dealer, told me of a rich man in Newark who wanted a miniature of his daughter painted. I went to see him and showed him some of my work. When I told him the price would be fifty dollars he laughed at me like a hyena. He said an enlarged crayon twenty times the size would cost him only eight dollars.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I had just enough money to buy my ferry ticket back to New York. I felt as if I didn’t want to live another day. I must have looked as I felt, for I saw <i>him</i> on the row of seats opposite me, looking at me as if he understood. He was nice-looking, but oh, above everything else, he looked kind. When one is tired or unhappy or hopeless, kindness counts more than anything else.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I had just enough money to buy my ferry ticket back to New York. I felt as if I didn’t want to live another day. I must have looked as I felt, for I saw <em>him</em> on the row of seats opposite me, looking at me as if he understood. He was nice-looking, but oh, above everything else, he looked kind. When one is tired or unhappy or hopeless, kindness counts more than anything else.</p>
|
||||
<p>“When I got so miserable that I couldn’t fight against it any longer, I got up and walked slowly out the rear door of the ferry-boat cabin. No one was there, and I slipped quickly over the rail and dropped into the water. Oh, friend Hetty, it was cold, cold!</p>
|
||||
<p>“For just one moment I wished I was back in the old Vallambrosa, starving and hoping. And then I got numb, and didn’t care. And then I felt that somebody else was in the water close by me, holding me up. <i>He</i> had followed me, and jumped in to save me.</p>
|
||||
<p>“For just one moment I wished I was back in the old Vallambrosa, starving and hoping. And then I got numb, and didn’t care. And then I felt that somebody else was in the water close by me, holding me up. <em>He</em> had followed me, and jumped in to save me.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Somebody threw a thing like a big, white doughnut at us, and he made me put my arms through the hole. Then the ferry-boat backed, and they pulled us on board. Oh, Hetty, I was so ashamed of my wickedness in trying to drown myself; and, besides, my hair had all tumbled down and was sopping wet, and I was such a sight.</p>
|
||||
<p>“And then some men in blue clothes came around; and he gave them his card, and I heard him tell them he had seen me drop my purse on the edge of the boat outside the rail, and in leaning over to get it I had fallen overboard. And then I remembered having read in the papers that people who try to kill themselves are locked up in cells with people who try to kill other people, and I was afraid.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But some ladies on the boat took me downstairs to the furnace-room and got me nearly dry and did up my hair. When the boat landed, <i>he</i> came and put me in a cab. He was all dripping himself, but laughed as if he thought it was all a joke. He begged me, but I wouldn’t tell him my name nor where I lived, I was so ashamed.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“But some ladies on the boat took me downstairs to the furnace-room and got me nearly dry and did up my hair. When the boat landed, <em>he</em> came and put me in a cab. He was all dripping himself, but laughed as if he thought it was all a joke. He begged me, but I wouldn’t tell him my name nor where I lived, I was so ashamed.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You were a fool, child,” said Hetty, kindly. “Wait till I turn the light up a bit. I wish to Heaven we had an onion.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Then he raised his hat,” went on Cecilia, “and said: ‘Very well. But I’ll find you, anyhow. I’m going to claim my rights of salvage.’ Then he gave money to the cab-driver and told him to take me where I wanted to go, and walked away. What is ‘salvage,’ Hetty?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The edge of a piece of goods that ain’t hemmed,” said the shop-girl. “You must have looked pretty well frazzled out to the little hero boy.”</p>
|
||||
@ -68,7 +68,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“First, he looked kind,” said Cecilia. “I’m sure he was rich; but that matters so little. When he drew out his bill-folder to pay the cab-man you couldn’t help seeing hundreds and thousands of dollars in it. And I looked over the cab doors and saw him leave the ferry station in a motor-car; and the chauffeur gave him his bearskin to put on, for he was sopping wet. And it was only three days ago.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“What a fool!” said Hetty, shortly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, the chauffeur wasn’t wet,” breathed Cecilia. “And he drove the car away very nicely.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I mean <i>you</i>,” said Hetty. “For not giving him your address.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I mean <em>you</em>,” said Hetty. “For not giving him your address.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I never give my address to chauffeurs,” said Cecilia, haughtily.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I wish we had one,” said Hetty, disconsolately.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What for?”</p>
|
||||
@ -76,12 +76,12 @@
|
||||
<p>Hetty took a pitcher and started to the sink at the end of the hall.</p>
|
||||
<p>A young man came down the stairs from above just as she was opposite the lower step. He was decently dressed, but pale and haggard. His eyes were dull with the stress of some burden of physical or mental woe. In his hand he bore an onion—a pink, smooth, solid, shining onion as large around as a ninety-eight-cent alarm-clock.</p>
|
||||
<p>Hetty stopped. So did the young man. There was something Joan of Arc-ish, Herculean, and Una-ish in the look and pose of the shop-lady—she had cast off the rôles of Job and Little-Red-Riding-Hood. The young man stopped at the foot of the stairs and coughed distractedly. He felt marooned, held up, attacked, assailed, levied upon, sacked, assessed, panhandled, browbeaten, though he knew not why. It was the look in Hetty’s eyes that did it. In them he saw the Jolly Roger fly to the masthead and an able seaman with a dirk between his teeth scurry up the ratlines and nail it there. But as yet he did not know that the cargo he carried was the thing that had caused him to be so nearly blown out of the water without even a parley.</p>
|
||||
<p>“<i>Beg</i> your pardon,” said Hetty, as sweetly as her dilute acetic acid tones permitted, “but did you find that onion on the stairs? There was a hole in the paper bag; and I’ve just come out to look for it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“<em>Beg</em> your pardon,” said Hetty, as sweetly as her dilute acetic acid tones permitted, “but did you find that onion on the stairs? There was a hole in the paper bag; and I’ve just come out to look for it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The young man coughed for half a minute. The interval may have given him the courage to defend his own property. Also, he clutched his pungent prize greedily, and, with a show of spirit, faced his grim waylayer.</p>
|
||||
<p>“No,” he said huskily, “I didn’t find it on the stairs. It was given to me by Jack Bevens, on the top floor. If you don’t believe it, ask him. I’ll wait until you do.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I know about Bevens,” said Hetty, sourly. “He writes books and things up there for the paper-and-rags man. We can hear the postman guy him all over the house when he brings them thick envelopes back. Say—do you live in the Vallambrosa?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I do not,” said the young man. “I come to see Bevens sometimes. He’s my friend. I live two blocks west.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“What are you going to do with the onion?—<i>begging</i> your pardon,” said Hetty.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What are you going to do with the onion?—<em>begging</em> your pardon,” said Hetty.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m going to eat it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Raw?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes: as soon as I get home.”</p>
|
||||
@ -90,7 +90,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“No,” he confessed; “there’s not another scrap of anything in my diggings to eat. I think old Jack is pretty hard up for grub in his shack, too. He hated to give up the onion, but I worried him into parting with it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Man,” said Hetty, fixing him with her world-sapient eyes, and laying a bony but impressive finger on his sleeve, “you’ve known trouble, too, haven’t you?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Lots,” said the onion owner, promptly. “But this onion is my own property, honestly come by. If you will excuse me, I must be going.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Listen,” said Hetty, paling a little with anxiety. “Raw onion is a mighty poor diet. And so is a beef-stew without one. Now, if you’re Jack Bevens’ friend, I guess you’re nearly right. There’s a little lady—a friend of mine—in my room there at the end of the hall. Both of us are out of luck; and we had just potatoes and meat between us. They’re stewing now. But it ain’t got any soul. There’s something lacking to it. There’s certain things in life that are naturally intended to fit and belong together. One is pink cheese-cloth and green roses, and one is ham and eggs, and one is Irish and trouble. And the other one is beef and potatoes <i>with</i> onions. And still another one is people who are up against it and other people in the same fix.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Listen,” said Hetty, paling a little with anxiety. “Raw onion is a mighty poor diet. And so is a beef-stew without one. Now, if you’re Jack Bevens’ friend, I guess you’re nearly right. There’s a little lady—a friend of mine—in my room there at the end of the hall. Both of us are out of luck; and we had just potatoes and meat between us. They’re stewing now. But it ain’t got any soul. There’s something lacking to it. There’s certain things in life that are naturally intended to fit and belong together. One is pink cheese-cloth and green roses, and one is ham and eggs, and one is Irish and trouble. And the other one is beef and potatoes <em>with</em> onions. And still another one is people who are up against it and other people in the same fix.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The young man went into a protracted paroxysm of coughing. With one hand he hugged his onion to his bosom.</p>
|
||||
<p>“No doubt; no doubt,” said he, at length. “But, as I said, I must be going, because—”</p>
|
||||
<p>Hetty clutched his sleeve firmly.</p>
|
||||
@ -114,7 +114,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“I am not working at anything just now.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Then why,” said Hetty, with her voice set on its sharpest edge, “do you lean out of windows and give orders to chauffeurs in green automobiles in the street below?”</p>
|
||||
<p>The young man flushed, and his dull eyes began to sparkle.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Because, madam,” said he, in <i>accelerando</i> tones, “I pay the chauffeur’s wages and I own the automobile—and also this onion—this onion, madam.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Because, madam,” said he, in accelerando tones, “I pay the chauffeur’s wages and I own the automobile—and also this onion—this onion, madam.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He flourished the onion within an inch of Hetty’s nose. The shop-lady did not retreat a hair’s-breadth.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Then why do you eat onions,” she said, with biting contempt, “and nothing else?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I never said I did,” retorted the young man, heatedly. “I said I had nothing else to eat where I live. I am not a delicatessen store-keeper.”</p>
|
||||
@ -131,7 +131,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Then Hetty’s infrequent, grim, melancholy smile showed itself. She took the young man’s arm and pointed with her other hand to the door of her room.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Little Brother,” she said, “go in there. The little fool you fished out of the river is there waiting for you. Go on in. I’ll give you three minutes before I come. Potatoes is in there, waiting. Go on in, Onions.”</p>
|
||||
<p>After he had tapped at the door and entered, Hetty began to peel and wash the onion at the sink. She gave a gray look at the gray roofs outside, and the smile on her face vanished by little jerks and twitches.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But it’s us,” she said, grimly, to herself, “it’s <i>us</i> that furnished the beef.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“But it’s us,” she said, grimly, to herself, “it’s <em>us</em> that furnished the beef.”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -25,7 +25,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘It is,’ says he. ‘Sometimes—so I have been told—one sees no human being pass for weeks at a time. I’ve been here only a month. I bought the ranch from an old settler who wanted to move farther west.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘It suits me,’ says I. ‘Quiet and retirement are good for a man sometimes. And I need a job. I can tend bar, salt mines, lecture, float stock, do a little middle-weight slugging, and play the piano.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Can you herd sheep?’ asks the little ranchman.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Do you mean <i>have</i> I heard sheep?’ says I.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Do you mean <em>have</em> I heard sheep?’ says I.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Can you herd ’em—take charge of a flock of ’em?’ says he.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Oh,’ says I, ‘now I understand. You mean chase ’em around and bark at ’em like collie dogs. Well, I might,’ says I. ‘I’ve never exactly done any sheep-herding, but I’ve often seen ’em from car windows masticating daisies, and they don’t look dangerous.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I’m short a herder,’ says the ranchman. ‘You never can depend on the Mexicans. I’ve only got two flocks. You may take out my bunch of muttons—there are only eight hundred of ’em—in the morning, if you like. The pay is twelve dollars a month and your rations furnished. You camp in a tent on the prairie with your sheep. You do your own cooking, but wood and water are brought to your camp. It’s an easy job.’</p>
|
||||
@ -55,7 +55,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Stop,’ says Ogden, getting out of his chair and looking pretty vicious. ‘Do you mean to insinuate—’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Nothing,’ says I; ‘no insinuations. I’m stating a hypodermical case. I say, if Black Bill had come down here and bought a sheep-ranch and hired me to Little-Boy-Blue ’em and treated me square and friendly, as you’ve done, he’d never have anything to fear from me. A man is a man, regardless of any complications he may have with sheep or railroad trains. Now you know where I stand.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ogden looks black as camp-coffee for nine seconds, and then he laughs, amused.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You’ll do, Saint Clair,’ says he. ‘If I <i>was</i> Black Bill I wouldn’t be afraid to trust you. Let’s have a game or two of seven-up to-night. That is, if you don’t mind playing with a train-robber.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You’ll do, Saint Clair,’ says he. ‘If I <em>was</em> Black Bill I wouldn’t be afraid to trust you. Let’s have a game or two of seven-up to-night. That is, if you don’t mind playing with a train-robber.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I’ve told you,’ says I, ‘my oral sentiments, and there’s no strings to ’em.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“While I was shuffling after the first hand, I asks Ogden, as if the idea was a kind of a casualty, where he was from.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Oh,’ says he, ‘from the Mississippi Valley.’</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -97,7 +97,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“You might have noticed that I would, long ago,” said Nevada. “And I’m rather stuck on the snow-storm idea, myself. I surely would hate one of these flowery church noon-weddings. Gilbert, I didn’t know you had grit enough to propose it this way. Let’s shock ’em—it’s our funeral, ain’t it?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You bet!” said Gilbert. “Where did I hear that expression?” he added to himself. “Wait a minute, Nevada; I want to do a little ‘phoning.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He shut himself in a little dressing-room, and called upon the lightnings of the heavens—condensed into unromantic numbers and districts.</p>
|
||||
<p>“That you, Jack? You confounded sleepyhead! Yes, wake up; this is me—or I—oh, bother the difference in grammar! I’m going to be married right away. Yes! Wake up your sister—don’t answer me back; bring her along, too—you <i>must</i>! Remind Agnes of the time I saved her from drowning in Lake Ronkonkoma—I know it’s caddish to refer to it, but she must come with you. Yes. Nevada is here, waiting. We’ve been engaged quite a while. Some opposition among the relatives, you know, and we have to pull it off this way. We’re waiting here for you. Don’t let Agnes out-talk you—bring her! You will? Good old boy! I’ll order a carriage to call for you, double-quick time. Confound you, Jack, you’re all right!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“That you, Jack? You confounded sleepyhead! Yes, wake up; this is me—or I—oh, bother the difference in grammar! I’m going to be married right away. Yes! Wake up your sister—don’t answer me back; bring her along, too—you <em>must</em>! Remind Agnes of the time I saved her from drowning in Lake Ronkonkoma—I know it’s caddish to refer to it, but she must come with you. Yes. Nevada is here, waiting. We’ve been engaged quite a while. Some opposition among the relatives, you know, and we have to pull it off this way. We’re waiting here for you. Don’t let Agnes out-talk you—bring her! You will? Good old boy! I’ll order a carriage to call for you, double-quick time. Confound you, Jack, you’re all right!”</p>
|
||||
<p>Gilbert returned to the room where Nevada waited.</p>
|
||||
<p>“My old friend, Jack Peyton, and his sister were to have been here at a quarter to twelve,” he explained; “but Jack is so confoundedly slow. I’ve just ‘phoned them to hurry. They’ll be here in a few minutes. I’m the happiest man in the world, Nevada! What did you do with the letter I sent you to-day?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve got it cinched here,” said Nevada, pulling it out from beneath her opera-cloak.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -12,7 +12,7 @@
|
||||
<p>You follow the Broadway trail down until you pass the Crosstown Line, the Bread Line, and the Dead Line, and come to the Big Cañons of the Moneygrubber Tribe. Then you turn to the left, to the right, dodge a push-cart and the tongue of a two-ton four-horse dray and hop, skip, and jump to a granite ledge on the side of a twenty-one-story synthetic mountain of stone and iron. In the twelfth story is the office of Carteret & Carteret. The factory where they make the mill supplies and leather belting is in Brooklyn. Those commodities—to say nothing of Brooklyn—not being of interest to you, let us hold the incidents within the confines of a one-act, one-scene play, thereby lessening the toil of the reader and the expenditure of the publisher. So, if you have the courage to face four pages of type and Carteret & Carteret’s office boy, Percival, you shall sit on a varnished chair in the inner office and peep at the little comedy of the Old Nigger Man, the Hunting-Case Watch, and the Open-Faced Question—mostly borrowed from the late <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Frank Stockton, as you will conclude.</p>
|
||||
<p>First, biography (but pared to the quick) must intervene. I am for the inverted sugar-coated quinine pill—the bitter on the outside.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Carterets were, or was (Columbia College professors please rule), an old Virginia family. Long time ago the gentlemen of the family had worn lace ruffles and carried tinless foils and owned plantations and had slaves to burn. But the war had greatly reduced their holdings. (Of course you can perceive at once that this flavor has been shoplifted from <abbr>Mr.</abbr> F. Hopkinson Smith, in spite of the “et” after “Carter.”) Well, anyhow:</p>
|
||||
<p>In digging up the Carteret history I shall not take you farther back than the year 1620. The two original American Carterets came over in that year, but by different means of transportation. One brother, named John, came in the <i>Mayflower</i> and became a Pilgrim Father. You’ve seen his picture on the covers of the Thanksgiving magazines, hunting turkeys in the deep snow with a blunderbuss. Blandford Carteret, the other brother, crossed the pond in his own brigantine, landed on the Virginia coast, and became an F. F. <span epub:type="z3998:roman">V</span>. John became distinguished for piety and shrewdness in business; Blandford for his pride, juleps; marksmanship, and vast slave-cultivated plantations.</p>
|
||||
<p>In digging up the Carteret history I shall not take you farther back than the year 1620. The two original American Carterets came over in that year, but by different means of transportation. One brother, named John, came in the <i epub:type="se:name.vessel.ship">Mayflower</i> and became a Pilgrim Father. You’ve seen his picture on the covers of the Thanksgiving magazines, hunting turkeys in the deep snow with a blunderbuss. Blandford Carteret, the other brother, crossed the pond in his own brigantine, landed on the Virginia coast, and became an F. F. <span epub:type="z3998:roman">V</span>. John became distinguished for piety and shrewdness in business; Blandford for his pride, juleps; marksmanship, and vast slave-cultivated plantations.</p>
|
||||
<p>Then came the Civil War. (I must condense this historical interpolation.) Stonewall Jackson was shot; Lee surrendered; Grant toured the world; cotton went to nine cents; Old Crow whiskey and Jim Crow cars were invented; the Seventy-ninth Massachusetts Volunteers returned to the Ninety-seventh Alabama Zouaves the battle flag of Lundy’s Lane which they bought at a second-hand store in Chelsea, kept by a man named Skzchnzski; Georgia sent the President a sixty-pound watermelon—and that brings us up to the time when the story begins. My! but that was sparring for an opening! I really must brush op on my Aristotle.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Yankee Carterets went into business in New York long before the war. Their house, as far as Leather Belting and Mill Supplies was concerned, was as musty and arrogant and solid as one of those old East India tea-importing concerns that you read about in Dickens. There were some rumors of a war behind its counters, but not enough to affect the business.</p>
|
||||
<p>During and after the war, Blandford Carteret, F.F.<span epub:type="z3998:roman">V</span>., lost his plantations, juleps, marksmanship, and life. He bequeathed little more than his pride to his surviving family. So it came to pass that Blandford Carteret, the Fifth, aged fifteen, was invited by the leather-and-mill-supplies branch of that name to come North and learn business instead of hunting foxes and boasting of the glory of his fathers on the reduced acres of his impoverished family. The boy jumped at the chance; and, at the age of twenty-five, sat in the office of the firm equal partner with John, the Fifth, of the blunderbuss-and-turkey branch. Here the story begins again.</p>
|
||||
@ -39,7 +39,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Blandford agreed heartily. Percival was summoned, and told to usher the “colored gentleman” in.</p>
|
||||
<p>Uncle Jake stepped inside the private office cautiously. He was a little old man, as black as soot, wrinkled and bald except for a fringe of white wool, cut decorously short, that ran over his ears and around his head. There was nothing of the stage “uncle” about him: his black suit nearly fitted him; his shoes shone, and his straw hat was banded with a gaudy ribbon. In his right hand he carried something carefully concealed by his closed fingers.</p>
|
||||
<p>Uncle Jake stopped a few steps from the door. Two young men sat in their revolving desk-chairs ten feet apart and looked at him in friendly silence. His gaze slowly shifted many times from one to the other. He felt sure that he was in the presence of one, at least, of the revered family among whose fortunes his life had begun and was to end.</p>
|
||||
<p>One had the pleasing but haughty Carteret air; the other had the unmistakable straight, long family nose. Both had the keen black eyes, horizontal brows, and thin, smiling lips that had distinguished both the Carteret of the <i>Mayflower</i> and him of the brigantine. Old Jake had thought that he could have picked out his young master instantly from a thousand Northerners; but he found himself in difficulties. The best he could do was to use strategy.</p>
|
||||
<p>One had the pleasing but haughty Carteret air; the other had the unmistakable straight, long family nose. Both had the keen black eyes, horizontal brows, and thin, smiling lips that had distinguished both the Carteret of the <i epub:type="se:name.vessel.ship">Mayflower</i> and him of the brigantine. Old Jake had thought that he could have picked out his young master instantly from a thousand Northerners; but he found himself in difficulties. The best he could do was to use strategy.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Howdy, Marse Blandford—howdy, suh?” he said, looking midway between the two young men.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Howdy, Uncle Jake?” they both answered pleasantly and in unison. “Sit down. Have you brought the watch?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Uncle Jake chose a hard-bottom chair at a respectful distance, sat on the edge of it, and laid his hat carefully on the floor. The watch in its buckskin case he gripped tightly. He had not risked his life on the battle-field to rescue that watch from his “old marster’s” foes to hand it over again to the enemy without a struggle.</p>
|
||||
@ -81,7 +81,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“You are on the stage, Miss De Ormond,” went on Black-Tie. “You have had, doubtless, many admirers, and perhaps other proposals. You must remember, too, that we were a party of merrymakers on that occasion. There were a good many corks pulled. That the proposal of marriage was made to you by my cousin we cannot deny. But hasn’t it been your experience that, by common consent, such things lose their seriousness when viewed in the next day’s sunlight? Isn’t there something of a ‘code’ among good ‘sports’—I use the word in its best sense—that wipes out each day the follies of the evening previous?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh yes,” said Miss De Ormond. “I know that very well. And I’ve always played up to it. But as you seem to be conducting the case—with the silent consent of the defendant—I’ll tell you something more. I’ve got letters from him repeating the proposal. And they’re signed, too.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I understand,” said Black-Tie gravely. “What’s your price for the letters?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m not a cheap one,” said Miss De Ormond. “But I had decided to make you a rate. You both belong to a swell family. Well, if I <i>am</i> on the stage nobody can say a word against me truthfully. And the money is only a secondary consideration. It isn’t the money I was after. I—I believed him—and—and I liked him.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m not a cheap one,” said Miss De Ormond. “But I had decided to make you a rate. You both belong to a swell family. Well, if I <em>am</em> on the stage nobody can say a word against me truthfully. And the money is only a secondary consideration. It isn’t the money I was after. I—I believed him—and—and I liked him.”</p>
|
||||
<p>She cast a soft, entrancing glance at Blue-Tie from under her long eyelashes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“And the price?” went on Black-Tie, inexorably.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ten thousand dollars,” said the lady, sweetly.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -45,10 +45,12 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I conquered ’em, spectacularly,’ goes on King Shane, ‘and then I went at ’em with economical politics, law, sleight-of-hand, and a kind of New England ethics and parsimony. Every Sunday, or as near as I can guess at it, I preach to ’em in the council-house (I’m the council) on the law of supply and demand. I praise supply and knock demand. I use the same text every time. You wouldn’t think, W. D.,’ says Shane, ‘that I had poetry in me, would you?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Well,’ says I, ‘I wouldn’t know whether to call it poetry or not.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Tennyson,’ says Shane, ‘furnishes the poetic gospel I preach. I always considered him the boss poet. Here’s the way the text goes:<br/></p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p class="noindent">“ ‘ “For, not to admire, if a man could learn it, were more<br/> Than to walk all day like a Sultan of old in a garden of spice.”<br/></p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:poem">
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<span>“ ‘ “For, not to admire, if a man could learn it, were more</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>Than to walk all day like a Sultan of old in a garden of spice.”</span>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You see, I teach ’em to cut out demand—that supply is the main thing. I teach ’em not to desire anything beyond their simplest needs. A little mutton, a little cocoa, and a little fruit brought up from the coast—that’s all they want to make ’em happy. I’ve got ’em well trained. They make their own clothes and hats out of a vegetable fibre and straw, and they’re a contented lot. It’s a great thing,’ winds up Shane, ‘to have made a people happy by the incultivation of such simple institutions.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, the next day, with the King’s permission, I has the McClintock open up a couple of sacks of my goods in the little plaza of the village. The Indians swarmed around by the hundred and looked the bargain-counter over. I shook red blankets at ’em, flashed finger-rings and ear-bobs, tried pearl necklaces and side-combs on the women, and a line of red hosiery on the men. ’Twas no use. They looked on like hungry graven images, but I never made a sale. I asked McClintock what was the trouble. Mac yawned three or four times, rolled a cigarette, made one or two confidential side remarks to a mule, and then condescended to inform me that the people had no money.</p>
|
||||
@ -99,12 +101,13 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘They’ve got knives and hatchets,’ says Shane; ‘hurry!’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Take that roan mule,’ says I. ‘You and your law of supply! I’ll ride the dun, for he’s two knots per hour the faster. The roan has a stiff knee, but he may make it,’ says I. ‘If you’d included reciprocity in your political platform I might have given you the dun,’ says I.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Shane and McClintock and me mounted our mules and rode across the rawhide bridge just as the Peches reached the other side and began firing stones and long knives at us. We cut the thongs that held up our end of the bridge and headed for the coast.”</p>
|
||||
<hr/>
|
||||
<p>A tall, bulky policeman came into Finch’s shop at that moment and leaned an elbow on the showcase. Finch nodded at him friendly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I heard down at Casey’s,” said the cop, in rumbling, husky tones, “that there was going to be a picnic of the Hat-Cleaners’ Union over at Bergen Beach, Sunday. Is that right?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sure,” said Finch. “There’ll be a dandy time.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Gimme five tickets,” said the cop, throwing a five-dollar bill on the showcase.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why,” said Finch, “ain’t you going it a little too—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Go to h––––!” said the cop. “You got ’em to sell, ain’t you? Somebody’s got to buy ’em. Wish I could go along.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Go to h⸺s!” said the cop. “You got ’em to sell, ain’t you? Somebody’s got to buy ’em. Wish I could go along.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I was glad to See Finch so well thought of in his neighborhood.</p>
|
||||
<p>And then in came a wee girl of seven, with dirty face and pure blue eyes and a smutched and insufficient dress.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mamma says,” she recited shrilly, “that you must give me eighty cents for the grocer and nineteen for the milkman and five cents for me to buy hokey-pokey with—but she didn’t say that,” the elf concluded, with a hopeful but honest grin.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -13,14 +13,14 @@
|
||||
<p>But, going back from my theme a while—as lame pens must do—I was a fool of the sentimental sort. I saw May Martha Mangum, and was hers. She was eighteen, the color of the white ivory keys of a new piano, beautiful, and possessed by the exquisite solemnity and pathetic witchery of an unsophisticated angel doomed to live in a small, dull, Texas prairie-town. She had a spirit and charm that could have enabled her to pluck rubies like raspberries from the crown of Belgium or any other sporty kingdom, but she did not know it, and I did not paint the picture for her.</p>
|
||||
<p>You see, I wanted May Martha Mangum for to have and to hold. I wanted her to abide with me, and put my slippers and pipe away every day in places where they cannot be found of evenings.</p>
|
||||
<p>May Martha’s father was a man hidden behind whiskers and spectacles. He lived for bugs and butterflies and all insects that fly or crawl or buzz or get down your back or in the butter. He was an etymologist, or words to that effect. He spent his life seining the air for flying fish of the June-bug order, and then sticking pins through ’em and calling ’em names.</p>
|
||||
<p>He and May Martha were the whole family. He prized her highly as a fine specimen of the <i>racibus humanus</i> because she saw that he had food at times, and put his clothes on right side before, and kept his alcohol-bottles filled. Scientists, they say, are apt to be absent-minded.</p>
|
||||
<p>He and May Martha were the whole family. He prized her highly as a fine specimen of the <i xml:lang="la">racibus humanus</i> because she saw that he had food at times, and put his clothes on right side before, and kept his alcohol-bottles filled. Scientists, they say, are apt to be absent-minded.</p>
|
||||
<p>There was another besides myself who thought May Martha Mangum one to be desired. That was Goodloe Banks, a young man just home from college. He had all the attainments to be found in books—Latin, Greek, philosophy, and especially the higher branches of mathematics and logic.</p>
|
||||
<p>If it hadn’t been for his habit of pouring out this information and learning on every one that he addressed, I’d have liked him pretty well. But, even as it was, he and I were, you would have thought, great pals.</p>
|
||||
<p>We got together every time we could because each of us wanted to pump the other for whatever straws we could to find which way the wind blew from the heart of May Martha Mangum—rather a mixed metaphor; Goodloe Banks would never have been guilty of that. That is the way of rivals.</p>
|
||||
<p>You might say that Goodloe ran to books, manners, culture, rowing, intellect, and clothes. I would have put you in mind more of baseball and Friday-night debating societies—by way of culture—and maybe of a good horseback rider.</p>
|
||||
<p>But in our talks together, and in our visits and conversation with May Martha, neither Goodloe Banks nor I could find out which one of us she preferred. May Martha was a natural-born non-committal, and knew in her cradle how to keep people guessing.</p>
|
||||
<p>As I said, old man Mangum was absent-minded. After a long time he found out one day—a little butterfly must have told him—that two young men were trying to throw a net over the head of the young person, a daughter, or some such technical appendage, who looked after his comforts.</p>
|
||||
<p>I never knew scientists could rise to such occasions. Old Mangum orally labelled and classified Goodloe and myself easily among the lowest orders of the vertebrates; and in English, too, without going any further into Latin than the simple references to <i>Orgetorix, Rex Helvetii</i>—which is as far as I ever went, myself. And he told us that if he ever caught us around his house again he would add us to his collection.</p>
|
||||
<p>I never knew scientists could rise to such occasions. Old Mangum orally labelled and classified Goodloe and myself easily among the lowest orders of the vertebrates; and in English, too, without going any further into Latin than the simple references to <i xml:lang="la">Orgetorix, Rex Helvetii</i>—which is as far as I ever went, myself. And he told us that if he ever caught us around his house again he would add us to his collection.</p>
|
||||
<p>Goodloe Banks and I remained away five days, expecting the storm to subside. When we dared to call at the house again May Martha Mangum and her father were gone. Gone! The house they had rented was closed. Their little store of goods and chattels was gone also.</p>
|
||||
<p>And not a word of farewell to either of us from May Martha—not a white, fluttering note pinned to the hawthorn-bush; not a chalk-mark on the gate-post nor a post-card in the post-office to give us a clew.</p>
|
||||
<p>For two months Goodloe Banks and I—separately—tried every scheme we could think of to track the runaways. We used our friendship and influence with the ticket-agent, with livery-stable men, railroad conductors, and our one lone, lorn constable, but without results.</p>
|
||||
@ -28,7 +28,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Now, Goodloe Banks had a sarcastic way of displaying his own learning and putting me in the class that was reading “Poor Jane Ray, her bird is dead, she cannot play.” Well, I rather liked Goodloe, and I had a contempt for his college learning, and I was always regarded as good-natured, so I kept my temper. And I was trying to find out if he knew anything about May Martha, so I endured his society.</p>
|
||||
<p>In talking things over one afternoon he said to me:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Suppose you do find her, Ed, whereby would you profit? Miss Mangum has a mind. Perhaps it is yet uncultured, but she is destined for higher things than you could give her. I have talked with no one who seemed to appreciate more the enchantment of the ancient poets and writers and the modern cults that have assimilated and expended their philosophy of life. Don’t you think you are wasting your time looking for her?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“My idea,” said I, “of a happy home is an eight-room house in a grove of live-oaks by the side of a <i>charco</i> on a Texas prairie. A piano,” I went on, “with an automatic player in the sitting-room, three thousand head of cattle under fence for a starter, a buckboard and ponies always hitched at a post for ‘the missus’—and May Martha Mangum to spend the profits of the ranch as she pleases, and to abide with me, and put my slippers and pipe away every day in places where they cannot be found of evenings. That,” said I, “is what is to be; and a fig—a dried, Smyrna, dago-stand fig—for your curriculums, cults, and philosophy.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“My idea,” said I, “of a happy home is an eight-room house in a grove of live-oaks by the side of a charco on a Texas prairie. A piano,” I went on, “with an automatic player in the sitting-room, three thousand head of cattle under fence for a starter, a buckboard and ponies always hitched at a post for ‘the missus’—and May Martha Mangum to spend the profits of the ranch as she pleases, and to abide with me, and put my slippers and pipe away every day in places where they cannot be found of evenings. That,” said I, “is what is to be; and a fig—a dried, Smyrna, dago-stand fig—for your curriculums, cults, and philosophy.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“She is meant for higher things,” repeated Goodloe Banks.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Whatever she is meant for,” I answered, just now she is out of pocket. And I shall find her as soon as I can without aid of the colleges.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The game is blocked,” said Goodloe, putting down a domino; and we had the beer.</p>
|
||||
@ -53,7 +53,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“She is meant for higher things,” said Goodloe. “I shall find her myself. But, tell me how you went about discovering the spot where this unearthed increment was imprudently buried.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I told him in the smallest detail. I showed him the draughtsman’s sketch with the distances marked plainly upon it.</p>
|
||||
<p>After glancing over it in a masterly way, he leaned back in his chair and bestowed upon me an explosion of sardonic, superior, collegiate laughter.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, you <i>are</i> a fool, Jim,” he said, when he could speak.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, you <em>are</em> a fool, Jim,” he said, when he could speak.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s your play,” said I, patiently, fingering my double-six.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Twenty,” said Goodloe, making two crosses on the table with his chalk.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why am I a fool?” I asked. “Buried treasure has been found before in many places.”</p>
|
||||
@ -101,6 +101,7 @@
|
||||
<p>She straightened up and looked at me. For the first time since I knew her I saw her face—which was the color of the white keys of a new piano—turn pink. I walked toward her without a word. She let the gathered flowers trickle slowly from her hand to the grass.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I knew you would come, Jim,” she said clearly. “Father wouldn’t let me write, but I knew you would come.”</p>
|
||||
<p>What followed you may guess—there was my wagon and team just across the river.</p>
|
||||
<hr/>
|
||||
<p>I’ve often wondered what good too much education is to a man if he can’t use it for himself. If all the benefits of it are to go to others, where does it come in?</p>
|
||||
<p>For May Martha Mangum abides with me. There is an eight-room house in a live-oak grove, and a piano with an automatic player, and a good start toward the three thousand head of cattle is under fence.</p>
|
||||
<p>And when I ride home at night my pipe and slippers are put away in places where they cannot be found.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -20,17 +20,17 @@
|
||||
<p>Now you have the material allegations in the case. So, make way for Romance.</p>
|
||||
<p>Evidently the hermit expected a visitor. He carefully combed his long hair and parted his apostolic beard. When the ninety-eight-cent alarm-clock on a stone shelf announced the hour of five he picked up his gunny-sacking skirts, brushed them carefully, gathered an oaken staff, and strolled slowly into the thick woods that surrounded the hermitage.</p>
|
||||
<p>He had not long to wait. Up the faint pathway, slippery with its carpet of pine-needles, toiled Beatrix, youngest and fairest of the famous Trenholme sisters. She was all in blue from hat to canvas pumps, varying in tint from the shade of the tinkle of a bluebell at daybreak on a spring Saturday to the deep hue of a Monday morning at nine when the washerwoman has failed to show up.</p>
|
||||
<p>Beatrix dug her cerulean parasol deep into the pine-needles and sighed. The hermit, on the <i>q. t.</i>, removed a grass burr from the ankle of one sandalled foot with the big toe of his other one. She blued—and almost starched and ironed him—with her cobalt eyes.</p>
|
||||
<p>Beatrix dug her cerulean parasol deep into the pine-needles and sighed. The hermit, on the <abbr>q. t.</abbr>, removed a grass burr from the ankle of one sandalled foot with the big toe of his other one. She blued—and almost starched and ironed him—with her cobalt eyes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It must be so nice,” she said in little, tremulous gasps, “to be a hermit, and have ladies climb mountains to talk to you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The hermit folded his arms and leaned against a tree. Beatrix, with a sigh, settled down upon the mat of pine-needles like a bluebird upon her nest. The hermit followed suit; drawing his feet rather awkwardly under his gunny-sacking.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It must be nice to be a mountain,” said he, with ponderous lightness, “and have angels in blue climb up you instead of flying over you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mamma had neuralgia,” said Beatrix, “and went to bed, or I couldn’t have come. It’s dreadfully hot at that horrid old inn. But we hadn’t the money to go anywhere else this summer.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Last night,” said the hermit, “I climbed to the top of that big rock above us. I could see the lights of the inn and hear a strain or two of the music when the wind was right. I imagined you moving gracefully in the arms of others to the dreamy music of the waltz amid the fragrance of flowers. Think how lonely I must have been!”</p>
|
||||
<p>The youngest, handsomest, and poorest of the famous Trenholme sisters sighed.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You haven’t quite hit it,” she said, plaintively. “I was moving gracefully <i>at</i> the arms of another. Mamma had one of her periodical attacks of rheumatism in both elbows and shoulders, and I had to rub them for an hour with that horrid old liniment. I hope you didn’t think <i>that</i> smelled like flowers. You know, there were some West Point boys and a yacht load of young men from the city at last evening’s weekly dance. I’ve known mamma to sit by an open window for three hours with one-half of her registering 85 degrees and the other half frostbitten, and never sneeze once. But just let a bunch of ineligibles come around where I am, and she’ll begin to swell at the knuckles and shriek with pain. And I have to take her to her room and rub her arms. To see mamma dressed you’d be surprised to know the number of square inches of surface there are to her arms. I think it must be delightful to be a hermit. That—cassock—or gabardine, isn’t it?—that you wear is so becoming. Do you make it—or them—of course you must have changes—yourself? And what a blessed relief it must be to wear sandals instead of shoes! Think how we must suffer—no matter how small I buy my shoes they always pinch my toes. Oh, why can’t there be lady hermits, too!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You haven’t quite hit it,” she said, plaintively. “I was moving gracefully <em>at</em> the arms of another. Mamma had one of her periodical attacks of rheumatism in both elbows and shoulders, and I had to rub them for an hour with that horrid old liniment. I hope you didn’t think <em>that</em> smelled like flowers. You know, there were some West Point boys and a yacht load of young men from the city at last evening’s weekly dance. I’ve known mamma to sit by an open window for three hours with one-half of her registering 85 degrees and the other half frostbitten, and never sneeze once. But just let a bunch of ineligibles come around where I am, and she’ll begin to swell at the knuckles and shriek with pain. And I have to take her to her room and rub her arms. To see mamma dressed you’d be surprised to know the number of square inches of surface there are to her arms. I think it must be delightful to be a hermit. That—cassock—or gabardine, isn’t it?—that you wear is so becoming. Do you make it—or them—of course you must have changes—yourself? And what a blessed relief it must be to wear sandals instead of shoes! Think how we must suffer—no matter how small I buy my shoes they always pinch my toes. Oh, why can’t there be lady hermits, too!”</p>
|
||||
<p>The beautifulest and most adolescent Trenholme sister extended two slender blue ankles that ended in two enormous blue-silk bows that almost concealed two fairy Oxfords, also of one of the forty-seven shades of blue. The hermit, as if impelled by a kind of reflex-telepathic action, drew his bare toes farther beneath his gunny-sacking.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have heard about the romance of your life,” said Miss Trenholme, softly. “They have it printed on the back of the menu card at the inn. Was she very beautiful and charming?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“On the bills of fare!” muttered the hermit; “but what do I care for the world’s babble? Yes, she was of the highest and grandest type. Then,” he continued, “<i>then</i> I thought the world could never contain another equal to her. So I forsook it and repaired to this mountain fastness to spend the remainder of my life alone—to devote and dedicate my remaining years to her memory.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“On the bills of fare!” muttered the hermit; “but what do I care for the world’s babble? Yes, she was of the highest and grandest type. Then,” he continued, “<em>then</em> I thought the world could never contain another equal to her. So I forsook it and repaired to this mountain fastness to spend the remainder of my life alone—to devote and dedicate my remaining years to her memory.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s grand,” said Miss Trenholme, “absolutely grand. I think a hermit’s life is the ideal one. No bill-collectors calling, no dressing for dinner—how I’d like to be one! But there’s no such luck for me. If I don’t marry this season I honestly believe mamma will force me into settlement work or trimming hats. It isn’t because I’m getting old or ugly; but we haven’t enough money left to butt in at any of the swell places any more. And I don’t want to marry—unless it’s somebody I like. That’s why I’d like to be a hermit. Hermits don’t ever marry, do they?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hundreds of ’em,” said the hermit, “when they’ve found the right one.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“But they’re hermits,” said the youngest and beautifulest, “because they’ve lost the right one, aren’t they?”</p>
|
||||
@ -52,7 +52,7 @@
|
||||
<p>The hermit walked back to the hermitage. At the door stood Bob Binkley, his old friend and companion of the days before he had renounced the world—Bob, himself, arrayed like the orchids of the greenhouse in the summer man’s polychromatic garb—Bob, the millionaire, with his fat, firm, smooth, shrewd face, his diamond rings, sparkling fob-chain, and pleated bosom. He was two years older than the hermit, and looked five years younger.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’re Hamp Ellison, in spite of those whiskers and that going-away bathrobe,” he shouted. “I read about you on the bill of fare at the inn. They’ve run your biography in between the cheese and ‘Not Responsible for Coats and Umbrellas.’ What ‘d you do it for, Hamp? And ten years, too—gee whilikins!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’re just the same,” said the hermit. “Come in and sit down. Sit on that limestone rock over there; it’s softer than the granite.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I can’t understand it, old man,” said Binkley. “I can see how you could give up a woman for ten years, but not ten years for a woman. Of course I know why you did it. Everybody does. Edith Carr. She jilted four or five besides you. But you were the only one who took to a hole in the ground. The others had recourse to whiskey, the Klondike, politics, and that <i>similia similibus</i> cure. But, say—Hamp, Edith Carr was just about the finest woman in the world—high-toned and proud and noble, and playing her ideals to win at all kinds of odds. She certainly was a crackerjack.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I can’t understand it, old man,” said Binkley. “I can see how you could give up a woman for ten years, but not ten years for a woman. Of course I know why you did it. Everybody does. Edith Carr. She jilted four or five besides you. But you were the only one who took to a hole in the ground. The others had recourse to whiskey, the Klondike, politics, and that <i xml:lang="la">similia similibus</i> cure. But, say—Hamp, Edith Carr was just about the finest woman in the world—high-toned and proud and noble, and playing her ideals to win at all kinds of odds. She certainly was a crackerjack.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“After I renounced the world,” said the hermit, “I never heard of her again.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“She married me,” said Binkley.</p>
|
||||
<p>The hermit leaned against the wooden walls of his ante-cave and wriggled his toes.</p>
|
||||
@ -62,16 +62,17 @@
|
||||
<p>The hermit smiled behind his tangled beard. He was and always had been so superior to the crude and mercenary Binkley that even his vulgarities could not anger him. Moreover, his studies and meditations in his retreat had raised him far above the little vanities of the world. His little mountain-side had been almost an Olympus, over the edge of which he saw, smiling, the bolts hurled in the valleys of man below. Had his ten years of renunciation, of thought, of devotion to an ideal, of living scorn of a sordid world, been in vain? Up from the world had come to him the youngest and beautifulest—fairer than Edith—one and three-seventh times lovelier than the seven-years-served Rachel. So the hermit smiled in his beard.</p>
|
||||
<p>When Binkley had relieved the hermitage from the blot of his presence and the first faint star showed above the pines, the hermit got the can of baking-powder from his cupboard. He still smiled behind his beard.</p>
|
||||
<p>There was a slight rustle in the doorway. There stood Edith Carr, with all the added beauty and stateliness and noble bearing that ten years had brought her.</p>
|
||||
<p>She was never one to chatter. She looked at the hermit with her large, <i>thinking</i>, dark eyes. The hermit stood still, surprised into a pose as motionless as her own. Only his subconscious sense of the fitness of things caused him to turn the baking-powder can slowly in his hands until its red label was hidden against his bosom.</p>
|
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<p>“I am stopping at the inn,” said Edith, in low but clear tones. “I heard of you there. I told myself that I <i>must</i> see you. I want to ask your forgiveness. I sold my happiness for money. There were others to be provided for—but that does not excuse me. I just wanted to see you and ask your forgiveness. You have lived here ten years, they tell me, cherishing my memory! I was blind, Hampton. I could not see then that all the money in the world cannot weigh in the scales against a faithful heart. If—but it is too late now, of course.”</p>
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<p>She was never one to chatter. She looked at the hermit with her large, <em>thinking</em>, dark eyes. The hermit stood still, surprised into a pose as motionless as her own. Only his subconscious sense of the fitness of things caused him to turn the baking-powder can slowly in his hands until its red label was hidden against his bosom.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am stopping at the inn,” said Edith, in low but clear tones. “I heard of you there. I told myself that I <em>must</em> see you. I want to ask your forgiveness. I sold my happiness for money. There were others to be provided for—but that does not excuse me. I just wanted to see you and ask your forgiveness. You have lived here ten years, they tell me, cherishing my memory! I was blind, Hampton. I could not see then that all the money in the world cannot weigh in the scales against a faithful heart. If—but it is too late now, of course.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Her assertion was a question clothed as best it could be in a loving woman’s pride. But through the thin disguise the hermit saw easily that his lady had come back to him—if he chose. He had won a golden crown—if it pleased him to take it. The reward of his decade of faithfulness was ready for his hand—if he desired to stretch it forth.</p>
|
||||
<p>For the space of one minute the old enchantment shone upon him with a reflected radiance. And then by turns he felt the manly sensations of indignation at having been discarded, and of repugnance at having been—as it were—sought again. And last of all—how strange that it should have come at last!—the pale-blue vision of the beautifulest of the Trenholme sisters illuminated his mind’s eye and left him without a waver.</p>
|
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<p>“It is too late,” he said, in deep tones, pressing the baking-powder can against his heart.</p>
|
||||
<p>Once she turned after she had gone slowly twenty yards down the path. The hermit had begun to twist the lid off his can, but he hid it again under his sacking robe. He could see her great eyes shining sadly through the twilight; but he stood inflexible in the doorway of his shack and made no sign.</p>
|
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<hr/>
|
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<p>Just as the moon rose on Thursday evening the hermit was seized by the world-madness.</p>
|
||||
<p>Up from the inn, fainter than the horns of elf-land, came now and then a few bars of music played by the casino band. The Hudson was broadened by the night into an illimitable sea—those lights, dimly seen on its opposite shore, were not beacons for prosaic trolley-lines, but low-set stars millions of miles away. The waters in front of the inn were gay with fireflies—or were they motor-boats, smelling of gasoline and oil? Once the hermit had known these things and had sported with Amaryllis in the shade of the red-and-white-striped awnings. But for ten years he had turned a heedless ear to these far-off echoes of a frivolous world. But to-night there was something wrong.</p>
|
||||
<p>The casino band was playing a waltz—a waltz. What a fool he had been to tear deliberately ten years of his life from the calendar of existence for one who had given him up for the false joys that wealth—”<i>tum</i> ti <i>tum</i> ti <i>tum</i> ti”—how did that waltz go? But those years had not been sacrificed—had they not brought him the star and pearl of all the world, the youngest and beautifulest of—</p>
|
||||
<p>“But do <i>not</i> come on Thursday evening,” she had insisted. Perhaps by now she would be moving slowly and gracefully to the strains of that waltz, held closely by West-Pointers or city commuters, while he, who had read in her eyes things that had recompensed him for ten lost years of life, moped like some wild animal in its mountain den. Why should—”</p>
|
||||
<p>The casino band was playing a waltz—a waltz. What a fool he had been to tear deliberately ten years of his life from the calendar of existence for one who had given him up for the false joys that wealth—”<em>tum</em> ti <em>tum</em> ti <em>tum</em> ti”—how did that waltz go? But those years had not been sacrificed—had they not brought him the star and pearl of all the world, the youngest and beautifulest of—</p>
|
||||
<p>“But do <em>not</em> come on Thursday evening,” she had insisted. Perhaps by now she would be moving slowly and gracefully to the strains of that waltz, held closely by West-Pointers or city commuters, while he, who had read in her eyes things that had recompensed him for ten lost years of life, moped like some wild animal in its mountain den. Why should—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Damn it,” said the hermit, suddenly, “I’ll do it!”</p>
|
||||
<p>He threw down his Marcus Aurelius and threw off his gunny-sack toga. He dragged a dust-covered trunk from a corner of the cave, and with difficulty wrenched open its lid.</p>
|
||||
<p>Candles he had in plenty, and the cave was soon aglow. Clothes—ten years old in cut—scissors, razors, hats, shoes, all his discarded attire and belongings, were dragged ruthlessly from their renunciatory rest and strewn about in painful disorder.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -49,14 +49,16 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Hunky,’ he says, putting one hand on my shoulder and one on the statue’s, ‘I’m in the holy temple of my ancestors.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Well, if looks goes for anything,’ says I, ‘you’ve struck a twin. Stand side by side with buddy, and let’s see if there’s any difference.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“There wasn’t. You know an Indian can keep his face as still as an iron dog’s when he wants to, so when High Jack froze his features you couldn’t have told him from the other one.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘There’s some letters,’ says I, ‘on his nob’s pedestal, but I can’t make ’em out. The alphabet of this country seems to be composed of sometimes <i>a</i>, <i>e</i>, <i>i</i>, <i>o</i>, and <i>u</i>, but generally <i>z’s</i>, <i>l’s</i>, and <i>t’s</i>.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘There’s some letters,’ says I, ‘on his nob’s pedestal, but I can’t make ’em out. The alphabet of this country seems to be composed of sometimes <i xml:lang="grapheme">a</i>, <i xml:lang="grapheme">e</i>, <i xml:lang="grapheme">i</i>, <i xml:lang="grapheme">o</i>, and <i xml:lang="grapheme">u</i>, but generally <i xml:lang="grapheme">z’s</i>, <i xml:lang="grapheme">l’s</i>, and <i xml:lang="grapheme">t</i>’s.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“High Jack’s ethnology gets the upper hand of his rum for a minute, and he investigates the inscription.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Hunky,’ says he, ‘this is a statue of Tlotopaxl, one of the most powerful gods of the ancient Aztecs.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Glad to know him,’ says I, ‘but in his present condition he reminds me of the joke Shakespeare got off on Julius Cæsar. We might say about your friend:<br/></p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p class="noindent">“ ‘Imperious what’s-his-name, dead and turned to stone—<br/> No use to write or call him on the ‘phone.’<br/></p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:poem">
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<span>“ ‘Imperious what’s-his-name, dead and turned to stone—</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>No use to write or call him on the ‘phone.’<span/>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Hunky,’ says High Jack Snakefeeder, looking at me funny, ‘do you believe in reincarnation?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘It sounds to me,’ says I, ‘like either a clean-up of the slaughter-houses or a new kind of Boston pink. I don’t know.’</p>
|
||||
@ -83,7 +85,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“In a few minutes in comes the girl with the flower wreath. Danged if I wasn’t knocked a little silly when she got close, she looked so exactly much like Florence Blue Feather. ‘I wonder,’ says I to myself, ‘if she has been reincarcerated, too? If I could see,’ says I to myself, ‘whether she has a mole on her left—’ But the next minute I thought she looked one-eighth of a shade darker than Florence; but she looked good at that. And High Jack hadn’t drunk all the rum that had been drank.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The girl went up within ten feet of the bum idol, and got down and massaged her nose with the floor, like the rest did. Then she went nearer and laid the flower wreath on the block of stone at High Jack’s feet. Rummy as I was, I thought it was kind of nice of her to think of offering flowers instead of household and kitchen provisions. Even a stone god ought to appreciate a little sentiment like that on top of the fancy groceries they had piled up in front of him.</p>
|
||||
<p>“And then High Jack steps down from his pedestal, quiet, and mentions a few words that sounded just like the hieroglyphics carved on the walls of the ruin. The girl gives a little jump backward, and her eyes fly open as big as doughnuts; but she don’t beat it.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why didn’t she? I’ll tell you why I think why. It don’t seem to a girl so supernatural, unlikely, strange, and startling that a stone god should come to life for <i>her</i>. If he was to do it for one of them snub-nosed brown girls on the other side of the woods, now, it would be different—but <i>her</i>! I’ll bet she said to herself: ‘Well, goodness me! you’ve been a long time getting on your job. I’ve half a mind not to speak to you.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why didn’t she? I’ll tell you why I think why. It don’t seem to a girl so supernatural, unlikely, strange, and startling that a stone god should come to life for <em>her</em>. If he was to do it for one of them snub-nosed brown girls on the other side of the woods, now, it would be different—but <em>her</em>! I’ll bet she said to herself: ‘Well, goodness me! you’ve been a long time getting on your job. I’ve half a mind not to speak to you.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“But she and High Jack holds hands and walks away out of the temple together. By the time I’d had time to take another drink and enter upon the scene they was twenty yards away, going up the path in the woods that the girl had come down. With the natural scenery already in place, it was just like a play to watch ’em—she looking up at him, and him giving her back the best that an Indian can hand, out in the way of a goo-goo eye. But there wasn’t anything in that recarnification and revulsion to tintype for me.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Hey! Injun!’ I yells out to High Jack. ‘We’ve got a board-bill due in town, and you’re leaving me without a cent. Brace up and cut out the Neapolitan fisher-maiden, and let’s go back home.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“But on the two goes; without looking once back until, as you might say, the forest swallowed ’em up. And I never saw or heard of High Jack Snakefeeder from that day to this. I don’t know if the Cherokees came from the Aspics; but if they did, one of ’em went back.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
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