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<head>
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<title>Chapter 8</title>
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<title>A Comedy in Rubber</title>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-8" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>A COMEDY IN RUBBER</h2>
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<section id="a-comedy-in-rubber" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
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<h2 epub:type="title">A Comedy in Rubber</h2>
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<p>One may hope, in spite of the metaphorists, to avoid the breath of the deadly upas tree; one may, by great good fortune, succeed in blacking the eye of the basilisk; one might even dodge the attentions of Cerberus and Argus, but no man, alive or dead, can escape the gaze of the Rubberer.</p>
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<p>New York is the Caoutchouc City. There are many, of course, who go their ways, making money, without turning to the right or the left, but there is a tribe abroad wonderfully composed, like the Martians, solely of eyes and means of locomotion.</p>
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<p>These devotees of curiosity swarm, like flies, in a moment in a struggling, breathless circle about the scene of an unusual occurrence. If a workman opens a manhole, if a street car runs over a man from North Tarrytown, if a little boy drops an egg on his way home from the grocery, if a casual house or two drops into the subway, if a lady loses a nickel through a hole in the lisle thread, if the police drag a telephone and a racing chart forth from an Ibsen Society reading-room, if Senator Depew or Mr. Chuck Connors walks out to take the air—if any of these incidents or accidents takes place, you will see the mad, irresistible rush of the “rubber” tribe to the spot.</p>
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<p>These devotees of curiosity swarm, like flies, in a moment in a struggling, breathless circle about the scene of an unusual occurrence. If a workman opens a manhole, if a street car runs over a man from North Tarrytown, if a little boy drops an egg on his way home from the grocery, if a casual house or two drops into the subway, if a lady loses a nickel through a hole in the lisle thread, if the police drag a telephone and a racing chart forth from an Ibsen Society reading-room, if Senator Depew or <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Chuck Connors walks out to take the air—if any of these incidents or accidents takes place, you will see the mad, irresistible rush of the “rubber” tribe to the spot.</p>
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<p>The importance of the event does not count. They gaze with equal interest and absorption at a chorus girl or at a man painting a liver pill sign. They will form as deep a cordon around a man with a club-foot as they will around a balked automobile. They have the furor rubberendi. They are optical gluttons, feasting and fattening on the misfortunes of their fellow beings. They gloat and pore and glare and squint and stare with their fishy eyes like goggle-eyed perch at the book baited with calamity.</p>
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<p>It would seem that Cupid would find these ocular vampires too cold game for his calorific shafts, but have we not yet to discover an immune even among the Protozoa? Yes, beautiful Romance descended upon two of this tribe, and love came into their hearts as they crowded about the prostrate form of a man who had been run over by a brewery wagon.</p>
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<p>William Pry was the first on the spot. He was an expert at such gatherings. With an expression of intense happiness on his features, he stood over the victim of the accident, listening to his groans as if to the sweetest music. When the crowd of spectators had swelled to a closely packed circle William saw a violent commotion in the crowd opposite him. Men were hurled aside like ninepins by the impact of some moving body that clove them like the rush of a tornado. With elbows, umbrella, hat-pin, tongue, and fingernails doing their duty, Violet Seymour forced her way through the mob of onlookers to the first row. Strong men who even had been able to secure a seat on the 5.30 Harlem express staggered back like children as she bucked centre. Two large lady spectators who had seen the Duke of Roxburgh married and had often blocked traffic on Twenty-third Street fell back into the second row with ripped shirtwaists when Violet had finished with them. William Pry loved her at first sight.</p>
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<head>
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<title>Chapter 3</title>
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<title>A Lickpenny Lover</title>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-3" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>A LICKPENNY LOVER</h2>
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<section id="a-lickpenny-lover" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
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<h2 epub:type="title">A Lickpenny Lover</h2>
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<p>There, were 3,000 girls in the Biggest Store. Masie was one of them. She was eighteen and a saleslady in the gents’ gloves. Here she became versed in two varieties of human beings—the kind of gents who buy their gloves in department stores and the kind of women who buy gloves for unfortunate gents. Besides this wide knowledge of the human species, Masie had acquired other information. She had listened to the promulgated wisdom of the 2,999 other girls and had stored it in a brain that was as secretive and wary as that of a Maltese cat. Perhaps nature, foreseeing that she would lack wise counsellors, had mingled the saving ingredient of shrewdness along with her beauty, as she has endowed the silver fox of the priceless fur above the other animals with cunning.</p>
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<p>For Masie was beautiful. She was a deep-tinted blonde, with the calm poise of a lady who cooks butter cakes in a window. She stood behind her counter in the Biggest Store; and as you closed your hand over the tape-line for your glove measure you thought of Hebe; and as you looked again you wondered how she had come by Minerva’s eyes.</p>
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<p>When the floorwalker was not looking Masie chewed tutti frutti; when he was looking she gazed up as if at the clouds and smiled wistfully.</p>
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<p>Carter strolled across to the glove counter in order to shoot a few minutes on the wing. His need for gloves was genuine; he had forgotten to bring a pair with him. But his action hardly calls for apology, because he had never heard of glove-counter flirtations.</p>
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<p>As he neared the vicinity of his fate he hesitated, suddenly conscious of this unknown phase of Cupid’s less worthy profession.</p>
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<p>Three or four cheap fellows, sonorously garbed, were leaning over the counters, wrestling with the mediatorial hand-coverings, while giggling girls played vivacious seconds to their lead upon the strident string of coquetry. Carter would have retreated, but he had gone too far. Masie confronted him behind her counter with a questioning look in eyes as coldly, beautifully, warmly blue as the glint of summer sunshine on an iceberg drifting in Southern seas.</p>
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<p>And then Irving Carter, painter, millionaire, etc., felt a warm flush rise to his aristocratically pale face. But not from diffidence. The blush was intellectual in origin. He knew in a moment that he stood in the ranks of the ready-made youths who wooed the giggling girls at other counters. Himself leaned against the oaken trysting place of a cockney Cupid with a desire in his heart for the favor of a glove salesgirl. He was no more than Bill and Jack and Mickey. And then he felt a sudden tolerance for them, and an elating, courageous contempt for the conventions upon which he had fed, and an unhesitating determination to have this perfect creature for his own.</p>
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<p>And then Irving Carter, painter, millionaire, <abbr>etc.</abbr>, felt a warm flush rise to his aristocratically pale face. But not from diffidence. The blush was intellectual in origin. He knew in a moment that he stood in the ranks of the ready-made youths who wooed the giggling girls at other counters. Himself leaned against the oaken trysting place of a cockney Cupid with a desire in his heart for the favor of a glove salesgirl. He was no more than Bill and Jack and Mickey. And then he felt a sudden tolerance for them, and an elating, courageous contempt for the conventions upon which he had fed, and an unhesitating determination to have this perfect creature for his own.</p>
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<p>When the gloves were paid for and wrapped Carter lingered for a moment. The dimples at the corners of Masie’s damask mouth deepened. All gentlemen who bought gloves lingered in just that way. She curved an arm, showing like Psyche’s through her shirt-waist sleeve, and rested an elbow upon the show-case edge.</p>
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<p>Carter had never before encountered a situation of which he had not been perfect master. But now he stood far more awkward than Bill or Jack or Mickey. He had no chance of meeting this beautiful girl socially. His mind struggled to recall the nature and habits of shopgirls as he had read or heard of them. Somehow he had received the idea that they sometimes did not insist too strictly upon the regular channels of introduction. His heart beat loudly at the thought of proposing an unconventional meeting with this lovely and virginal being. But the tumult in his heart gave him courage.</p>
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<p>After a few friendly and well-received remarks on general subjects, he laid his card by her hand on the counter.</p>
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<head>
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<title>Chapter 23</title>
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<title>A Philistine in Bohemia</title>
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<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-23" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>A PHILISTINE IN BOHEMIA</h2>
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<section id="a-philistine-in-bohemia" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
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<h2 epub:type="title">A Philistine in Bohemia</h2>
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<p>George Washington, with his right arm upraised, sits his iron horse at the lower corner of Union Square, forever signaling the Broadway cars to stop as they round the curve into Fourteenth Street. But the cars buzz on, heedless, as they do at the beck of a private citizen, and the great General must feel, unless his nerves are iron, that rapid transit gloria mundi.</p>
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<p>Should the General raise his left hand as he has raised his right it would point to a quarter of the city that forms a haven for the oppressed and suppressed of foreign lands. In the cause of national or personal freedom they have found a refuge here, and the patriot who made it for them sits his steed, overlooking their district, while he listens through his left ear to vaudeville that caricatures the posterity of his protégés. Italy, Poland, the former Spanish possessions and the polyglot tribes of Austria-Hungary have spilled here a thick lather of their effervescent sons. In the eccentric cafés and lodging-houses of the vicinity they hover over their native wines and political secrets. The colony changes with much frequency. Faces disappear from the haunts to be replaced by others. Whither do these uneasy birds flit? For half of the answer observe carefully the suave foreign air and foreign courtesy of the next waiter who serves your table d’hôte. For the other half, perhaps if the barber shops had tongues (and who will dispute it?) they could tell their share.</p>
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<p>Titles are as plentiful as finger rings among these transitory exiles. For lack of proper exploitation a stock of title goods large enough to supply the trade of upper Fifth Avenue is here condemned to a mere pushcart traffic. The new-world landlords who entertain these offshoots of nobility are not dazzled by coronets and crests. They have doughnuts to sell instead of daughters. With them it is a serious matter of trading in flour and sugar instead of pearl powder and bonbons.</p>
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<p>These assertions are deemed fitting as an introduction to the tale, which is of plebeians and contains no one with even the ghost of a title.</p>
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<p>Katy Dempsey’s mother kept a furnished-room house in this oasis of the aliens. The business was not profitable. If the two scraped together enough to meet the landlord’s agent on rent day and negotiate for the ingredients of a daily Irish stew they called it success. Often the stew lacked both meat and potatoes. Sometimes it became as bad as consommé with music.</p>
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<p>In this mouldy old house Katy waxed plump and pert and wholesome and as beautiful and freckled as a tiger lily. She was the good fairy who was guilty of placing the damp clean towels and cracked pitchers of freshly laundered Croton in the lodgers’ rooms.</p>
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<p>You are informed (by virtue of the privileges of astronomical discovery) that the star lodger’s name was Mr. Brunelli. His wearing a yellow tie and paying his rent promptly distinguished him from the other lodgers. His raiment was splendid, his complexion olive, his mustache fierce, his manners a prince’s, his rings and pins as magnificent as those of a traveling dentist.</p>
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<p>He had breakfast served in his room, and he ate it in a red dressing gown with green tassels. He left the house at noon and returned at midnight. Those were mysterious hours, but there was nothing mysterious about Mrs. Dempsey’s lodgers except the things that were not mysterious. One of Mr. Kipling’s poems is addressed to “Ye who hold the unwritten clue to all save all unwritten things.” The same “readers” are invited to tackle the foregoing assertion.</p>
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<p>Mr. Brunelli, being impressionable and a Latin, fell to conjugating the verb “amare,” with Katy in the objective case, though not because of antipathy. She talked it over with her mother.</p>
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<p>You are informed (by virtue of the privileges of astronomical discovery) that the star lodger’s name was <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Brunelli. His wearing a yellow tie and paying his rent promptly distinguished him from the other lodgers. His raiment was splendid, his complexion olive, his mustache fierce, his manners a prince’s, his rings and pins as magnificent as those of a traveling dentist.</p>
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<p>He had breakfast served in his room, and he ate it in a red dressing gown with green tassels. He left the house at noon and returned at midnight. Those were mysterious hours, but there was nothing mysterious about <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Dempsey’s lodgers except the things that were not mysterious. One of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kipling’s poems is addressed to “Ye who hold the unwritten clue to all save all unwritten things.” The same “readers” are invited to tackle the foregoing assertion.</p>
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<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Brunelli, being impressionable and a Latin, fell to conjugating the verb “amare,” with Katy in the objective case, though not because of antipathy. She talked it over with her mother.</p>
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<p>“Sure, I like him,” said Katy. “He’s more politeness than twinty candidates for Alderman, and lie makes me feel like a queen whin he walks at me side. But what is he, I dinno? I’ve me suspicions. The marnin’ll coom whin he’ll throt out the picture av his baronial halls and ax to have the week’s rint hung up in the ice chist along wid all the rist of ’em.”</p>
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<p>“ ’Tis thrue,” admitted Mrs. Dempsey, “that he seems to be a sort iv a Dago, and too coolchured in his spache for a rale gentleman. But ye may be misjudgin’ him. Ye should niver suspect any wan of bein’ of noble descint that pays cash and pathronizes the laundry rig’lar.”</p>
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<p>“He’s the same thricks of spakin’ and blarneyin’ wid his hands,” sighed Katy, “as the Frinch nobleman at Mrs. Toole’s that ran away wid Mr. Toole’s Sunday pants and left the photograph of the Bastile, his grandfather’s chat-taw, as security for tin weeks’ rint.”</p>
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<p>Mr. Brunelli continued his calorific wooing. Katy continued to hesitate. One day he asked her out to dine and she felt that a dénouement was in the air. While they are on their way, with Katy in her best muslin, you must take as an entr’acte a brief peep at New York’s Bohemia.</p>
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<p>“ ’Tis thrue,” admitted <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Dempsey, “that he seems to be a sort <span epub:type="z3998:roman">iv</span> a Dago, and too coolchured in his spache for a rale gentleman. But ye may be misjudgin’ him. Ye should niver suspect any wan of bein’ of noble descint that pays cash and pathronizes the laundry rig’lar.”</p>
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<p>“He’s the same thricks of spakin’ and blarneyin’ wid his hands,” sighed Katy, “as the Frinch nobleman at <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Toole’s that ran away wid <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Toole’s Sunday pants and left the photograph of the Bastile, his grandfather’s chat-taw, as security for tin weeks’ rint.”</p>
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<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Brunelli continued his calorific wooing. Katy continued to hesitate. One day he asked her out to dine and she felt that a dénouement was in the air. While they are on their way, with Katy in her best muslin, you must take as an entr’acte a brief peep at New York’s Bohemia.</p>
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<p>‘Tonio’s restaurant is in Bohemia. The very location of it is secret. If you wish to know where it is ask the first person you meet. He will tell you in a whisper. ‘Tonio discountenances custom; he keeps his house-front black and forbidding; he gives you a pretty bad dinner; he locks his door at the dining hour; but he knows spaghetti as the boarding-house knows cold veal; and—he has deposited many dollars in a certain Banco di—something with many gold vowels in the name on its windows.</p>
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<p>To this restaurant Mr. Brunelli conducted Katy. The house was dark and the shades were lowered; but Mr. Brunelli touched an electric button by the basement door, and they were admitted.</p>
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<p>To this restaurant <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Brunelli conducted Katy. The house was dark and the shades were lowered; but <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Brunelli touched an electric button by the basement door, and they were admitted.</p>
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<p>Along a long, dark, narrow hallway they went and then through a shining and spotless kitchen that opened directly upon a back yard.</p>
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<p>The walls of houses hemmed three sides of the yard; a high, board fence, surrounded by cats, the other. A wash of clothes was suspended high upon a line stretched from diagonal corners. Those were property clothes, and were never taken in by ‘Tonio. They were there that wits with defective pronunciation might make puns in connection with the ragout.</p>
|
||||
<p>A dozen and a half little tables set upon the bare ground were crowded with Bohemia-hunters, who flocked there because ‘Tonio pretended not to want them and pretended to give them a good dinner. There was a sprinkling of real Bohemians present who came for a change because they were tired of the real Bohemia, and a smart shower of the men who originate the bright sayings of Congressmen and the little nephew of the well-known general passenger agent of the Evansville and Terre Haute Railroad Company.</p>
|
||||
@ -32,20 +32,20 @@
|
||||
<p>“How so?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The dinner costs you 40 cents; you give 10 cents to the waiter, and it makes you feel like 30 cents.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Most of the diners were confirmed table d’hôters—gastronomic adventurers, forever seeking the El Dorado of a good claret, and consistently coming to grief in California.</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Brunelli escorted Katy to a little table embowered with shrubbery in tubs, and asked her to excuse him for a while.</p>
|
||||
<p>Katy sat, enchanted by a scene so brilliant to her. The grand ladies, in splendid dresses and plumes and sparkling rings; the fine gentlemen who laughed so loudly, the cries of “Garsong!” and “We, monseer,” and “Hello, Mame!” that distinguish Bohemia; the lively chatter, the cigarette smoke, the interchange of bright smiles and eye-glances—all this display and magnificence overpowered the daughter of Mrs. Dempsey and held her motionless.</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Brunelli stepped into the yard and seemed to spread his smile and bow over the entire company. And everywhere there was a great clapping of hands and a few cries of “Bravo!” and “ ‘Tonio! ‘Tonio!” whatever those words might mean. Ladies waved their napkins at him, gentlemen almost twisted their necks off, trying to catch his nod.</p>
|
||||
<p>When the ovation was concluded Mr. Brunelli, with a final bow, stepped nimbly into the kitchen and flung off his coat and waistcoat.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Brunelli escorted Katy to a little table embowered with shrubbery in tubs, and asked her to excuse him for a while.</p>
|
||||
<p>Katy sat, enchanted by a scene so brilliant to her. The grand ladies, in splendid dresses and plumes and sparkling rings; the fine gentlemen who laughed so loudly, the cries of “Garsong!” and “We, monseer,” and “Hello, Mame!” that distinguish Bohemia; the lively chatter, the cigarette smoke, the interchange of bright smiles and eye-glances—all this display and magnificence overpowered the daughter of <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Dempsey and held her motionless.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Brunelli stepped into the yard and seemed to spread his smile and bow over the entire company. And everywhere there was a great clapping of hands and a few cries of “Bravo!” and “ ‘Tonio! ‘Tonio!” whatever those words might mean. Ladies waved their napkins at him, gentlemen almost twisted their necks off, trying to catch his nod.</p>
|
||||
<p>When the ovation was concluded <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Brunelli, with a final bow, stepped nimbly into the kitchen and flung off his coat and waistcoat.</p>
|
||||
<p>Flaherty, the nimblest “garsong” among the waiters, had been assigned to the special service of Katy. She was a little faint from hunger, for the Irish stew on the Dempsey table had been particularly weak that day. Delicious odors from unknown dishes tantalized her. And Flaherty began to bring to her table course after course of ambrosial food that the gods might have pronounced excellent.</p>
|
||||
<p>But even in the midst of her Lucullian repast Katy laid down her knife and fork. Her heart sank as lead, and a tear fell upon her filet mignon. Her haunting suspicions of the star lodger arose again, fourfold. Thus courted and admired and smiled upon by that fashionable and gracious assembly, what else could Mr. Brunelli be but one of those dazzling titled patricians, glorious of name but shy of rent money, concerning whom experience had made her wise? With a sense of his ineligibility growing within her there was mingled a torturing conviction that his personality was becoming more pleasing to her day by day. And why had he left her to dine alone?</p>
|
||||
<p>But even in the midst of her Lucullian repast Katy laid down her knife and fork. Her heart sank as lead, and a tear fell upon her filet mignon. Her haunting suspicions of the star lodger arose again, fourfold. Thus courted and admired and smiled upon by that fashionable and gracious assembly, what else could <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Brunelli be but one of those dazzling titled patricians, glorious of name but shy of rent money, concerning whom experience had made her wise? With a sense of his ineligibility growing within her there was mingled a torturing conviction that his personality was becoming more pleasing to her day by day. And why had he left her to dine alone?</p>
|
||||
<p>But here he was coming again, now coatless, his snowy shirt-sleeves rolled high above his Jeffriesonian elbows, a white yachting cap perched upon his jetty curls.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Tonio! ‘Tonio!” shouted many, and “The spaghetti! The spaghetti!” shouted the rest.</p>
|
||||
<p>Never at ‘Tonio’s did a waiter dare to serve a dish of spaghetti until ‘Tonio came to test it, to prove the sauce and add the needful dash of seasoning that gave it perfection.</p>
|
||||
<p>From table to table moved ‘Tonio, like a prince in his palace, greeting his guests. White, jewelled hands signalled him from every side.</p>
|
||||
<p>A glass of wine with this one and that, smiles for all, a jest and repartee for any that might challenge—truly few princes could be so agreeable a host! And what artist could ask for further appreciation of his handiwork? Katy did not know that the proudest consummation of a New Yorker’s ambition is to shake hands with a spaghetti chef or to receive a nod from a Broadway head-waiter.</p>
|
||||
<p>At last the company thinned, leaving but a few couples and quartettes lingering over new wine and old stories. And then came Mr. Brunelli to Katy’s secluded table, and drew a chair close to hers.</p>
|
||||
<p>At last the company thinned, leaving but a few couples and quartettes lingering over new wine and old stories. And then came <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Brunelli to Katy’s secluded table, and drew a chair close to hers.</p>
|
||||
<p>Katy smiled at him dreamily. She was eating the last spoonful of a raspberry roll with Burgundy sauce.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You have seen!” said Mr. Brunelli, laying one hand upon his collar bone. “I am Antonio Brunelli! Yes; I am the great ‘Tonio! You have not suspect that! I loave you, Katy, and you shall marry with me. Is it not so? Call me ‘Antonio,’ and say that you will be mine.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You have seen!” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Brunelli, laying one hand upon his collar bone. “I am Antonio Brunelli! Yes; I am the great ‘Tonio! You have not suspect that! I loave you, Katy, and you shall marry with me. Is it not so? Call me ‘Antonio,’ and say that you will be mine.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Katy’s head drooped to the shoulder that was now freed from all suspicion of having received the knightly accolade.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, Andy,” she sighed, “this is great! Sure, I’ll marry wid ye. But why didn’t ye tell me ye was the cook? I was near turnin’ ye down for bein’ one of thim foreign counts!”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
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|
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<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 17</title>
|
||||
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|
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<section id="chapter-17" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE EASTER OF THE SOUL</h2>
|
||||
<p>It is hardly likely that a goddess may die. Then Eastre, the old Saxon goddess of spring, must be laughing in her muslin sleeve at people who believe that Easter, her namesake, exists only along certain strips of Fifth Avenue pavement after church service.</p>
|
||||
<p>Aye! It belongs to the world. The ptarmigan in Chilkoot Pass discards his winter white feathers for brown; the Patagonian Beau Brummell oils his chignon and clubs him another sweetheart to drag to his skull-strewn flat. And down in Chrystie Street—</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. “Tiger” McQuirk arose with a feeling of disquiet that he did not understand. With a practised foot he rolled three of his younger brothers like logs out of his way as they lay sleeping on the floor. Before a foot-square looking glass hung by the window he stood and shaved himself. If that may seem to you a task too slight to be thus impressively chronicled, I bear with you; you do not know of the areas to be accomplished in traversing the cheek and chin of Mr. McQuirk.</p>
|
||||
<p>McQuirk, senior, had gone to work long before. The big son of the house was idle. He was a marble-cutter, and the marble-cutters were out on a strike.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What ails ye?” asked his mother, looking at him curiously; “are ye not feeling well the morning, maybe now?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“He’s thinking along of Annie Maria Doyle,” impudently explained younger brother Tim, ten years old.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Tiger” reached over the hand of a champion and swept the small McQuirk from his chair.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I feel fine,” said he, “beyond a touch of the I-don’t-know-what-you-call-its. I feel like there was going to be earthquakes or music or a trifle of chills and fever or maybe a picnic. I don’t know how I feel. I feel like knocking the face off a policeman, or else maybe like playing Coney Island straight across the board from pop-corn to the elephant houdahs.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s the spring in yer bones,” said Mrs. McQuirk. “It’s the sap risin’. Time was when I couldn’t keep me feet still nor me head cool when the earthworms began to crawl out in the dew of the mornin’. ’Tis a bit of tea will do ye good, made from pipsissewa and gentian bark at the druggist’s.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Back up!” said Mr. McQuirk, impatiently. “There’s no spring in sight. There’s snow yet on the shed in Donovan’s backyard. And yesterday they puts open cars on the Sixth Avenue lines, and the janitors have quit ordering coal. And that means six weeks more of winter, by all the signs that be.”</p>
|
||||
<p>After breakfast Mr. McQuirk spent fifteen minutes before the corrugated mirror, subjugating his hair and arranging his green-and-purple ascot with its amethyst tombstone pin—eloquent of his chosen calling.</p>
|
||||
<p>Since the strike had been called it was this particular striker’s habit to hie himself each morning to the corner saloon of Flaherty Brothers, and there establish himself upon the sidewalk, with one foot resting on the bootblack’s stand, observing the panorama of the street until the pace of time brought twelve o’clock and the dinner hour. And Mr. “Tiger” McQuirk, with his athletic seventy inches, well trained in sport and battle; his smooth, pale, solid, amiable face—blue where the razor had travelled; his carefully considered clothes and air of capability, was himself a spectacle not displeasing to the eye.</p>
|
||||
<p>But on this morning Mr. McQuirk did not hasten immediately to his post of leisure and observation. Something unusual that he could not quite grasp was in the air. Something disturbed his thoughts, ruffled his senses, made him at once languid, irritable, elated, dissastisfied and sportive. He was no diagnostician, and he did not know that Lent was breaking up physiologically in his system.</p>
|
||||
<p>Mrs. McQuirk had spoken of spring. Sceptically Tiger looked about him for signs. Few they were. The organ-grinders were at work; but they were always precocious harbingers. It was near enough spring for them to go penny-hunting when the skating ball dropped at the park. In the milliners’ windows Easter hats, grave, gay and jubilant, blossomed. There were green patches among the sidewalk debris of the grocers. On a third-story window-sill the first elbow cushion of the season—old gold stripes on a crimson ground—supported the kimonoed arms of a pensive brunette. The wind blew cold from the East River, but the sparrows were flying to the eaves with straws. A second-hand store, combining foresight with faith, had set out an ice-chest and baseball goods.</p>
|
||||
<p>And then “Tiger’s” eye, discrediting these signs, fell upon one that bore a bud of promise. From a bright, new lithograph the head of Capricornus confronted him, betokening the forward and heady brew.</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. McQuirk entered the saloon and called for his glass of bock. He threw his nickel on the bar, raised the glass, set it down without tasting it and strolled toward the door.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Wot’s the matter, Lord Bolinbroke?” inquired the sarcastic bartender; “want a chiny vase or a gold-lined épergne to drink it out of—hey?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say,” said Mr. McQuirk, wheeling and shooting out a horizontal hand and a forty-five-degree chin, “you know your place only when it comes for givin’ titles. I’ve changed me mind about drinkin—see? You got your money, ain’t you? Wait till you get stung before you get the droop to your lip, will you?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Thus Mr. Quirk added mutability of desires to the strange humors that had taken possession of him.</p>
|
||||
<p>Leaving the saloon, he walked away twenty steps and leaned in the open doorway of Lutz, the barber. He and Lutz were friends, masking their sentiments behind abuse and bludgeons of repartee.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Irish loafer,” roared Lutz, “how do you do? So, not yet haf der bolicemans or der catcher of dogs done deir duty!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hello, Dutch,” said Mr. McQuirk. “Can’t get your mind off of frankfurters, can you?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Bah!” exclaimed the German, coming and leaning in the door. “I haf a soul above frankfurters to-day. Dere is springtime in der air. I can feel it coming in ofer der mud of der streets and das ice in der river. Soon will dere be bicnics in der islands, mit kegs of beer under der trees.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say,” said Mr. McQuirk, setting his hat on one side, “is everybody kiddin’ me about gentle Spring? There ain’t any more spring in the air than there is in a horsehair sofa in a Second Avenue furnished room. For me the winter underwear yet and the buckwheat cakes.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You haf no boetry,” said Lutz. “True, it is yedt cold, und in der city we haf not many of der signs; but dere are dree kinds of beoble dot should always feel der approach of spring first—dey are boets, lovers and poor vidows.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. McQuirk went on his way, still possessed by the strange perturbation that he did not understand. Something was lacking to his comfort, and it made him half angry because he did not know what it was.</p>
|
||||
<p>Two blocks away he came upon a foe, one Conover, whom he was bound in honor to engage in combat.</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. McQuirk made the attack with the characteristic suddenness and fierceness that had gained for him the endearing sobriquet of “Tiger.” The defence of Mr. Conover was so prompt and admirable that the conflict was protracted until the onlookers unselfishly gave the warning cry of “Cheese it—the cop!” The principals escaped easily by running through the nearest open doors into the communicating backyards at the rear of the houses.</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. McQuirk emerged into another street. He stood by a lamp-post for a few minutes engaged in thought and then he turned and plunged into a small notion and news shop. A red-haired young woman, eating gum-drops, came and looked freezingly at him across the ice-bound steppes of the counter.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say, lady,” he said, “have you got a song book with this in it. Let’s see how it leads off—</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p class="noindent">“ ‘When the springtime comes we’ll wander in the dale, love,<br/> And whisper of those days of yore—’<br/></p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>“I’m having a friend,” explained Mr. McQuirk, “laid up with a broken leg, and he sent me after it. He’s a devil for songs and poetry when he can’t get out to drink.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“We have not,” replied the young woman, with unconcealed contempt. “But there is a new song out that begins this way:</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p class="noindent">“ ‘Let us sit together in the old arm-chair;<br/> And while the firelight flickers we’ll be comfortable there.’ ”<br/></p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>There will be no profit in following Mr. “Tiger” McQuirk through his further vagaries of that day until he comes to stand knocking at the door of Annie Maria Doyle. The goddess Eastre, it seems, had guided his footsteps aright at last.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Is that you now, Jimmy McQuirk?” she cried, smiling through the opened door (Annie Maria had never accepted the “Tiger”). “Well, whatever!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Come out in the hall,” said Mr. McQuirk. “I want to ask yer opinion of the weather—on the level.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Are you crazy, sure?” said Annie Maria.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am,” said the “Tiger.” “They’ve been telling me all day there was spring in the air. Were they liars? Or am I?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Dear me!” said Annie Maria—“haven’t you noticed it? I can almost smell the violets. And the green grass. Of course, there ain’t any yet—it’s just a kind of feeling, you know.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“That’s what I’m getting at,” said Mr. McQuirk. “I’ve had it. I didn’t recognize it at first. I thought maybe it was en-wee, contracted the other day when I stepped above Fourteenth Street. But the katzenjammer I’ve got don’t spell violets. It spells yer own name, Annie Maria, and it’s you I want. I go to work next Monday, and I make four dollars a day. Spiel up, old girl—do we make a team?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Jimmy,” sighed Annie Maria, suddenly disappearing in his overcoat, “don’t you see that spring is all over the world right this minute?”</p>
|
||||
<p>But you yourself remember how that day ended. Beginning with so fine a promise of vernal things, late in the afternoon the air chilled and an inch of snow fell—even so late in March. On Fifth Avenue the ladies drew their winter furs close about them. Only in the florists’ windows could be perceived any signs of the morning smile of the coming goddess Eastre.</p>
|
||||
<p>At six o’clock Herr Lutz began to close his shop. He heard a well-known shout: “Hello, Dutch!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Tiger” McQuirk, in his shirt-sleeves, with his hat on the back of his head, stood outside in the whirling snow, puffing at a black cigar.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Donnerwetter!” shouted Lutz, “der vinter, he has gome back again yet!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yer a liar, Dutch,” called back Mr. McQuirk, with friendly geniality, “it’s springtime, by the watch.”</p>
|
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</section>
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<head>
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<title>Chapter 6</title>
|
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<section id="chapter-6" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>THE HARBINGER</h2>
|
||||
<p>Long before the springtide is felt in the dull bosom of the yokel does the city man know that the grass-green goddess is upon her throne. He sits at his breakfast eggs and toast, begirt by stone walls, opens his morning paper and sees journalism leave vernalism at the post.</p>
|
||||
<p>For, whereas, spring’s couriers were once the evidence of our finer senses, now the Associated Press does the trick.</p>
|
||||
<p>The warble of the first robin in Hackensack, the stirring of the maple sap in Bennington, the budding of the pussy willows along Main Street in Syracuse, the first chirp of the bluebird, the swan song of the Blue Point, the annual tornado in St. Louis, the plaint of the peach pessimist from Pompton, N. J., the regular visit of the tame wild goose with a broken leg to the pond near Bilgewater Junction, the base attempt of the Drug Trust to boost the price of quinine foiled in the House by Congressman Jinks, the first tall poplar struck by lightning and the usual stunned picknickers who had taken refuge, the first crack of the ice jam in the Allegheny River, the finding of a violet in its mossy bed by the correspondent at Round Corners—these are the advance signs of the burgeoning season that are wired into the wise city, while the farmer sees nothing but winter upon his dreary fields.</p>
|
||||
<p>But these be mere externals. The true harbinger is the heart. When Strephon seeks his Chloe and Mike his Maggie, then only is spring arrived and the newspaper report of the five-foot rattler killed in Squire Pettigrew’s pasture confirmed.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ere the first violet blew, Mr. Peters, Mr. Ragsdale and Mr. Kidd sat together on a bench in Union Square and conspired. Mr. Peters was the D’Artagnan of the loafers there. He was the dingiest, the laziest, the sorriest brown blot against the green background of any bench in the park. But just then he was the most important of the trio.</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Peters had a wife. This had not heretofore affected his standing with Ragsy and Kidd. But to-day it invested him with a peculiar interest. His friends, having escaped matrimony, had shown a disposition to deride Mr. Peters for his venture on that troubled sea. But at last they had been forced to acknowledge that either he had been gifted with a large foresight or that he was one of Fortune’s lucky sons.</p>
|
||||
<p>For, Mrs. Peters had a dollar. A whole dollar bill, good and receivable by the Government for customs, taxes and all public dues. How to get possession of that dollar was the question up for discussion by the three musty musketeers.</p>
|
||||
<p>“How do you know it was a dollar?” asked Ragsy, the immensity of the sum inclining him to scepticism.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The coalman seen her have it,” said Mr. Peters. “She went out and done some washing yesterday. And look what she give me for breakfast—the heel of a loaf and a cup of coffee, and her with a dollar!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s fierce,” said Ragsy.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say we go up and punch ‘er and stick a towel in ‘er mouth and cop the coin” suggested Kidd, viciously. “Y’ ain’t afraid of a woman, are you?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“She might holler and have us pinched,” demurred Ragsy. “I don’t believe in slugging no woman in a houseful of people.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Gent’men,” said Mr. Peters, severely, through his russet stubble, “remember that you are speaking of my wife. A man who would lift his hand to a lady except in the way of—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Maguire,” said Ragsy, pointedly, “has got his bock beer sign out. If we had a dollar we could—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hush up!” said Mr. Peters, licking his lips. “We got to get that case note somehow, boys. Ain’t what’s a man’s wife’s his? Leave it to me. I’ll go over to the house and get it. Wait here for me.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve seen ’em give up quick, and tell you where it’s hid if you kick ’em in the ribs,” said Kidd.</p>
|
||||
<p>“No man would kick a woman,” said Peters, virtuously. “A little choking—just a touch on the windpipe—that gets away with ’em—and no marks left. Wait for me. I’ll bring back that dollar, boys.”</p>
|
||||
<p>High up in a tenement-house between Second Avenue and the river lived the Peterses in a back room so gloomy that the landlord blushed to take the rent for it. Mrs. Peters worked at sundry times, doing odd jobs of scrubbing and washing. Mr. Peters had a pure, unbroken record of five years without having earned a penny. And yet they clung together, sharing each other’s hatred and misery, being creatures of habit. Of habit, the power that keeps the earth from flying to pieces; though there is some silly theory of gravitation.</p>
|
||||
<p>Mrs. Peters reposed her 200 pounds on the safer of the two chairs and gazed stolidly out the one window at the brick wall opposite. Her eyes were red and damp. The furniture could have been carried away on a pushcart, but no pushcart man would have removed it as a gift.</p>
|
||||
<p>The door opened to admit Mr. Peters. His fox-terrier eyes expressed a wish. His wife’s diagnosis located correctly the seat of it, but misread it hunger instead of thirst.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’ll get nothing more to eat till night,” she said, looking out of the window again. “Take your hound-dog’s face out of the room.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Peters’s eye calculated the distance between them. By taking her by surprise it might be possible to spring upon her, overthrow her, and apply the throttling tactics of which he had boasted to his waiting comrades. True, it had been only a boast; never yet had he dared to lay violent hands upon her; but with the thoughts of the delicious, cool bock or Culmbacher bracing his nerves, he was near to upsetting his own theories of the treatment due by a gentleman to a lady. But, with his loafer’s love for the more artistic and less strenuous way, he chose diplomacy first, the high card in the game—the assumed attitude of success already attained.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You have a dollar,” he said, loftily, but significantly in the tone that goes with the lighting of a cigar—when the properties are at hand.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have,” said Mrs. Peters, producing the bill from her bosom and crackling it, teasingly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am offered a position in a—in a tea store,” said Mr. Peters. “I am to begin work to-morrow. But it will be necessary for me to buy a pair of—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You are a liar,” said Mrs. Peters, reinterring the note. “No tea store, nor no A B C store, nor no junk shop would have you. I rubbed the skin off both me hands washin’ jumpers and overalls to make that dollar. Do you think it come out of them suds to buy the kind you put into you? Skiddoo! Get your mind off of money.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Evidently the poses of Talleyrand were not worth one hundred cents on that dollar. But diplomacy is dexterous. The artistic temperament of Mr. Peters lifted him by the straps of his congress gaiters and set him on new ground. He called up a look of desperate melancholy to his eyes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Clara,” he said, hollowly, “to struggle further is useless. You have always misunderstood me. Heaven knows I have striven with all my might to keep my head above the waves of misfortune, but—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Cut out the rainbow of hope and that stuff about walkin’ one by one through the narrow isles of Spain,” said Mrs. Peters, with a sigh. “I’ve heard it so often. There’s an ounce bottle of carbolic on the shelf behind the empty coffee can. Drink hearty.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Peters reflected. What next! The old expedients had failed. The two musty musketeers were awaiting him hard by the ruined château—that is to say, on a park bench with rickety cast-iron legs. His honor was at stake. He had engaged to storm the castle single-handed and bring back the treasure that was to furnish them wassail and solace. And all that stood between him and the coveted dollar was his wife, once a little girl whom he could—aha!—why not again? Once with soft words he could, as they say, twist her around his little finger. Why not again? Not for years had he tried it. Grim poverty and mutual hatred had killed all that. But Ragsy and Kidd were waiting for him to bring the dollar!</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Peters took a surreptitiously keen look at his wife. Her formless bulk overflowed the chair. She kept her eyes fixed out the window in a strange kind of trance. Her eyes showed that she had been recently weeping.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I wonder,” said Mr. Peters to himself, “if there’d be anything in it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The window was open upon its outlook of brick walls and drab, barren back yards. Except for the mildness of the air that entered it might have been midwinter yet in the city that turns such a frowning face to besieging spring. But spring doesn’t come with the thunder of cannon. She is a sapper and a miner, and you must capitulate.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ll try it,” said Mr. Peters to himself, making a wry face.</p>
|
||||
<p>He went up to his wife and put his arm across her shoulders.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Clara, darling,” he said in tones that shouldn’t have fooled a baby seal, “why should we have hard words? Ain’t you my own tootsum wootsum?”</p>
|
||||
<p>A black mark against you, Mr. Peters, in the sacred ledger of Cupid. Charges of attempted graft are filed against you, and of forgery and utterance of two of Love’s holiest of appellations.</p>
|
||||
<p>But the miracle of spring was wrought. Into the back room over the back alley between the black walls had crept the Harbinger. It was ridiculous, and yet—Well, it is a rat trap, and you, madam and sir and all of us, are in it.</p>
|
||||
<p>Red and fat and crying like Niobe or Niagara, Mrs. Peters threw her arms around her lord and dissolved upon him. Mr. Peters would have striven to extricate the dollar bill from its deposit vault, but his arms were bound to his sides.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Do you love me, James?” asked Mrs. Peters.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Madly,” said James, “but—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You are ill!” exclaimed Mrs. Peters. “Why are you so pale and tired looking?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I feel weak,” said Mr. Peters. “I—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, wait; I know what it is. Wait, James. I’ll be back in a minute.”</p>
|
||||
<p>With a parting hug that revived in Mr. Peters recollections of the Terrible Turk, his wife hurried out of the room and down the stairs.</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Peters hitched his thumbs under his suspenders.</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right,” he confided to the ceiling. “I’ve got her going. I hadn’t any idea the old girl was soft any more under the foolish rib. Well, sir; ain’t I the Claude Melnotte of the lower East Side? What? It’s a 100 to 1 shot that I get the dollar. I wonder what she went out for. I guess she’s gone to tell Mrs. Muldoon on the second floor, that we’re reconciled. I’ll remember this. Soft soap! And Ragsy was talking about slugging her!”</p>
|
||||
<p>Mrs. Peters came back with a bottle of sarsaparilla.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m glad I happened to have that dollar,” she said. “You’re all run down, honey.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Peters had a tablespoonful of the stuff inserted into him. Then Mrs. Peters sat on his lap and murmured:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Call me tootsum wootsums again, James.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He sat still, held there by his materialized goddess of spring.</p>
|
||||
<p>Spring had come.</p>
|
||||
<p>On the bench in Union Square Mr. Ragsdale and Mr. Kidd squirmed, tongue-parched, awaiting D’Artagnan and his dollar.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I wish I had choked her at first,” said Mr. Peters to himself.</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
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|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 4</title>
|
||||
<title>Dougherty’s Eye-Opener</title>
|
||||
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<section id="chapter-4" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>DOUGHERTY’S EYE-OPENER</h2>
|
||||
<section id="doughertys-eye-opener" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Dougherty’s Eye-Opener</h2>
|
||||
<p>Big Jim Dougherty was a sport. He belonged to that race of men. In Manhattan it is a distinct race. They are the Caribs of the North—strong, artful, self-sufficient, clannish, honorable within the laws of their race, holding in lenient contempt neighboring tribes who bow to the measure of Society’s tapeline. I refer, of course, to the titled nobility of sportdom. There is a class which bears as a qualifying adjective the substantive belonging to a wind instrument made of a cheap and base metal. But the tin mines of Cornwall never produced the material for manufacturing descriptive nomenclature for “Big Jim” Dougherty.</p>
|
||||
<p>The habitat of the sport is the lobby or the outside corner of certain hotels and combination restaurants and cafés. They are mostly men of different sizes, running from small to large; but they are unanimous in the possession of a recently shaven, blue-black cheek and chin and dark overcoats (in season) with black velvet collars.</p>
|
||||
<p>Of the domestic life of the sport little is known. It has been said that Cupid and Hymen sometimes take a hand in the game and copper the queen of hearts to lose. Daring theorists have averred—not content with simply saying—that a sport often contracts a spouse, and even incurs descendants. Sometimes he sits in the game of politics; and then at chowder picnics there is a revelation of a Mrs. Sport and little Sports in glazed hats with tin pails.</p>
|
||||
<p>Of the domestic life of the sport little is known. It has been said that Cupid and Hymen sometimes take a hand in the game and copper the queen of hearts to lose. Daring theorists have averred—not content with simply saying—that a sport often contracts a spouse, and even incurs descendants. Sometimes he sits in the game of politics; and then at chowder picnics there is a revelation of a <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Sport and little Sports in glazed hats with tin pails.</p>
|
||||
<p>But mostly the sport is Oriental. He believes his women-folk should not be too patent. Somewhere behind grilles or flower-ornamented fire escapes they await him. There, no doubt, they tread on rugs from Teheran and are diverted by the bulbul and play upon the dulcimer and feed upon sweetmeats. But away from his home the sport is an integer. He does not, as men of other races in Manhattan do, become the convoy in his unoccupied hours of fluttering laces and high heels that tick off delectably the happy seconds of the evening parade. He herds with his own race at corners, and delivers a commentary in his Carib lingo upon the passing show.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Big Jim” Dougherty had a wife, but he did not wear a button portrait of her upon his lapel. He had a home in one of those brown-stone, iron-railed streets on the west side that look like a recently excavated bowling alley of Pompeii.</p>
|
||||
<p>To this home of his Mr. Dougherty repaired each night when the hour was so late as to promise no further diversion in the arch domains of sport. By that time the occupant of the monogamistic harem would be in dreamland, the bulbul silenced and the hour propitious for slumber.</p>
|
||||
<p>To this home of his <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Dougherty repaired each night when the hour was so late as to promise no further diversion in the arch domains of sport. By that time the occupant of the monogamistic harem would be in dreamland, the bulbul silenced and the hour propitious for slumber.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Big Jim” always arose at twelve, meridian, for breakfast, and soon afterward he would return to the rendezvous of his “crowd.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He was always vaguely conscious that there was a Mrs. Dougherty. He would have received without denial the charge that the quiet, neat, comfortable little woman across the table at home was his wife. In fact, he remembered pretty well that they had been married for nearly four years. She would often tell him about the cute tricks of Spot, the canary, and the light-haired lady that lived in the window of the flat across the street.</p>
|
||||
<p>He was always vaguely conscious that there was a <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Dougherty. He would have received without denial the charge that the quiet, neat, comfortable little woman across the table at home was his wife. In fact, he remembered pretty well that they had been married for nearly four years. She would often tell him about the cute tricks of Spot, the canary, and the light-haired lady that lived in the window of the flat across the street.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Big Jim” Dougherty even listened to this conversation of hers sometimes. He knew that she would have a nice dinner ready for him every evening at seven when he came for it. She sometimes went to matinées, and she had a talking machine with six dozen records. Once when her Uncle Amos blew in on a wind from up-state, she went with him to the Eden Musée. Surely these things were diversions enough for any woman.</p>
|
||||
<p>One afternoon Mr. Dougherty finished his breakfast, put on his hat and got away fairly for the door. When his hand was on the knob be heard his wife’s voice.</p>
|
||||
<p>One afternoon <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Dougherty finished his breakfast, put on his hat and got away fairly for the door. When his hand was on the knob be heard his wife’s voice.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Jim,” she said, firmly, “I wish you would take me out to dinner this evening. It has been three years since you have been outside the door with me.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Big Jim” was astounded. She had never asked anything like this before. It had the flavour of a totally new proposition. But he was a game sport.</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right,” he said. “You be ready when I come at seven. None of this ‘wait two minutes till I primp an hour or two’ kind of business, now, Dele.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ll be ready,” said his wife, calmly.</p>
|
||||
<p>At seven she descended the stone steps in the Pompeian bowling alley at the side of “Big Jim” Dougherty. She wore a dinner gown made of a stuff that the spiders must have woven, and of a color that a twilight sky must have contributed. A light coat with many admirably unnecessary capes and adorably inutile ribbons floated downward from her shoulders. Fine feathers do make fine birds; and the only reproach in the saying is for the man who refuses to give up his earnings to the ostrich-tip industry.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Big Jim” Dougherty was troubled. There was a being at his side whom he did not know. He thought of the sober-hued plumage that this bird of paradise was accustomed to wear in her cage, and this winged revelation puzzled him. In some way she reminded him of the Delia Cullen that he had married four years before. Shyly and rather awkwardly he stalked at her right hand.</p>
|
||||
<p>“After dinner I’ll take you back home, Dele,” said Mr. Dougherty, “and then I’ll drop back up to Seltzer’s with the boys. You can have swell chuck to-night if you want it. I made a winning on Anaconda yesterday; so you can go as far as you like.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Dougherty had intended to make the outing with his unwonted wife an inconspicuous one. Uxoriousness was a weakness that the precepts of the Caribs did not countenance. If any of his friends of the track, the billiard cloth or the square circle had wives they had never complained of the fact in public. There were a number of table d’hôte places on the cross streets near the broad and shining way; and to one of these he had purposed to escort her, so that the bushel might not be removed from the light of his domesticity.</p>
|
||||
<p>But while on the way Mr. Dougherty altered those intentions. He had been casting stealthy glances at his attractive companion and he was seized with the conviction that she was no selling plater. He resolved to parade with his wife past Seltzer’s café, where at this time a number of his tribe would be gathered to view the daily evening procession. Yes; and he would take her to dine at Hoogley’s, the swellest slow-lunch warehouse on the line, he said to himself.</p>
|
||||
<p>The congregation of smooth-faced tribal gentlemen were on watch at Seltzer’s. As Mr. Dougherty and his reorganized Delia passed they stared, momentarily petrified, and then removed their hats—a performance as unusual to them as was the astonishing innovation presented to their gaze by “Big Jim”. On the latter gentleman’s impassive face there appeared a slight flicker of triumph—a faint flicker, no more to be observed than the expression called there by the draft of little casino to a four-card spade flush.</p>
|
||||
<p>“After dinner I’ll take you back home, Dele,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Dougherty, “and then I’ll drop back up to Seltzer’s with the boys. You can have swell chuck to-night if you want it. I made a winning on Anaconda yesterday; so you can go as far as you like.”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Dougherty had intended to make the outing with his unwonted wife an inconspicuous one. Uxoriousness was a weakness that the precepts of the Caribs did not countenance. If any of his friends of the track, the billiard cloth or the square circle had wives they had never complained of the fact in public. There were a number of table d’hôte places on the cross streets near the broad and shining way; and to one of these he had purposed to escort her, so that the bushel might not be removed from the light of his domesticity.</p>
|
||||
<p>But while on the way <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Dougherty altered those intentions. He had been casting stealthy glances at his attractive companion and he was seized with the conviction that she was no selling plater. He resolved to parade with his wife past Seltzer’s café, where at this time a number of his tribe would be gathered to view the daily evening procession. Yes; and he would take her to dine at Hoogley’s, the swellest slow-lunch warehouse on the line, he said to himself.</p>
|
||||
<p>The congregation of smooth-faced tribal gentlemen were on watch at Seltzer’s. As <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Dougherty and his reorganized Delia passed they stared, momentarily petrified, and then removed their hats—a performance as unusual to them as was the astonishing innovation presented to their gaze by “Big Jim.” On the latter gentleman’s impassive face there appeared a slight flicker of triumph—a faint flicker, no more to be observed than the expression called there by the draft of little casino to a four-card spade flush.</p>
|
||||
<p>Hoogley’s was animated. Electric lights shone as, indeed, they were expected to do. And the napery, the glassware and the flowers also meritoriously performed the spectacular duties required of them. The guests were numerous, well-dressed and gay.</p>
|
||||
<p>A waiter—not necessarily obsequious—conducted “Big Jim” Dougherty and his wife to a table.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Play that menu straight across for what you like, Dele,” said “Big Jim.” “It’s you for a trough of the gilded oats to-night. It strikes me that maybe we’ve been sticking too fast to home fodder.”</p>
|
||||
@ -35,12 +35,12 @@
|
||||
<p>She was beaming with the innocent excitement that woman derives from the exercise of her gregariousness. She was talking to him about a hundred things with animation and delight. And as the meal progressed her cheeks, colorless from a life indoors, took on a delicate flush. “Big Jim” looked around the room and saw that none of the women there had her charm. And then he thought of the three years she had suffered immurement, uncomplaining, and a flush of shame warmed him, for he carried fair play as an item in his creed.</p>
|
||||
<p>But when the Honorable Patrick Corrigan, leader in Dougherty’s district and a friend of his, saw them and came over to the table, matters got to the three-quarter stretch. The Honorable Patrick was a gallant man, both in deeds and words. As for the Blarney stone, his previous actions toward it must have been pronounced. Heavy damages for breach of promise could surely have been obtained had the Blarney stone seen fit to sue the Honorable Patrick.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Jimmy, old man!” he called; he clapped Dougherty on the back; he shone like a midday sun upon Delia.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Honorable Mr. Corrigan—Mrs. Dougherty,” said “Big Jim.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Honorable <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Corrigan—<abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Dougherty,” said “Big Jim.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The Honorable Patrick became a fountain of entertainment and admiration. The waiter had to fetch a third chair for him; he made another at the table, and the wineglasses were refilled.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You selfish old rascal!” he exclaimed, shaking an arch finger at “Big Jim,” “to have kept Mrs. Dougherty a secret from us.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You selfish old rascal!” he exclaimed, shaking an arch finger at “Big Jim,” “to have kept <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Dougherty a secret from us.”</p>
|
||||
<p>And then “Big Jim” Dougherty, who was no talker, sat dumb, and saw the wife who had dined every evening for three years at home, blossom like a fairy flower. Quick, witty, charming, full of light and ready talk, she received the experienced attack of the Honorable Patrick on the field of repartee and surprised, vanquished, delighted him. She unfolded her long-closed petals and around her the room became a garden. They tried to include “Big Jim” in the conversation, but he was without a vocabulary.</p>
|
||||
<p>And then a stray bunch of politicians and good fellows who lived for sport came into the room. They saw “Big Jim” and the leader, and over they came and were made acquainted with Mrs. Dougherty. And in a few minutes she was holding a salon. Half a dozen men surrounded her, courtiers all, and six found her capable of charming. “Big Jim” sat, grim, and kept saying to himself: “Three years, three years!”</p>
|
||||
<p>The dinner came to an end. The Honorable Patrick reached for Mrs. Dougherty’s cloak; but that was a matter of action instead of words, and Dougherty’s big hand got it first by two seconds.</p>
|
||||
<p>And then a stray bunch of politicians and good fellows who lived for sport came into the room. They saw “Big Jim” and the leader, and over they came and were made acquainted with <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Dougherty. And in a few minutes she was holding a salon. Half a dozen men surrounded her, courtiers all, and six found her capable of charming. “Big Jim” sat, grim, and kept saying to himself: “Three years, three years!”</p>
|
||||
<p>The dinner came to an end. The Honorable Patrick reached for <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Dougherty’s cloak; but that was a matter of action instead of words, and Dougherty’s big hand got it first by two seconds.</p>
|
||||
<p>While the farewells were being said at the door the Honorable Patrick smote Dougherty mightily between the shoulders.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Jimmy, me boy,” he declared, in a giant whisper, “the madam is a jewel of the first water. Ye’re a lucky dog.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Big Jim” walked homeward with his wife. She seemed quite as pleased with the lights and show windows in the streets as with the admiration of the men in Hoogley’s. As they passed Seltzer’s they heard the sound of many voices in the café. The boys would be starting the drinks around now and discussing past performances.</p>
|
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|
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|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 22</title>
|
||||
<title>Extradited from Bohemia</title>
|
||||
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|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-22" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>EXTRADITED FROM BOHEMIA</h2>
|
||||
<section id="extradited-from-bohemia" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Extradited from Bohemia</h2>
|
||||
<p>From near the village of Harmony, at the foot of the Green Mountains, came Miss Medora Martin to New York with her color-box and easel.</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss Medora resembled the rose which the autumnal frosts had spared the longest of all her sister blossoms. In Harmony, when she started alone to the wicked city to study art, they said she was a mad, reckless, headstrong girl. In New York, when she first took her seat at a West Side boardinghouse table, the boarders asked: “Who is the nice-looking old maid?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Medora took heart, a cheap hall bedroom and two art lessons a week from Professor Angelini, a retired barber who had studied his profession in a Harlem dancing academy. There was no one to set her right, for here in the big city they do it unto all of us. How many of us are badly shaved daily and taught the two-step imperfectly by ex-pupils of Bastien Le Page and Gérôme? The most pathetic sight in New York—except the manners of the rush-hour crowds—is the dreary march of the hopeless army of Mediocrity. Here Art is no benignant goddess, but a Circe who turns her wooers into mewing Toms and Tabbies who linger about the doorsteps of her abode, unmindful of the flying brickbats and boot-jacks of the critics. Some of us creep back to our native villages to the skim-milk of “I told you so”; but most of us prefer to remain in the cold courtyard of our mistress’s temple, snatching the scraps that fall from her divine table d’hôte. But some of us grow weary at last of the fruitless service. And then there are two fates open to us. We can get a job driving a grocer’s wagon, or we can get swallowed up in the Vortex of Bohemia. The latter sounds good; but the former really pans out better. For, when the grocer pays us off we can rent a dress suit and—the capitalized system of humor describes it best—Get Bohemia On the Run.</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss Medora chose the Vortex and thereby furnishes us with our little story.</p>
|
||||
<p>Professor Angelini praised her sketches excessively. Once when she had made a neat study of a horse-chestnut tree in the park he declared she would become a second Rosa Bonheur. Again—a great artist has his moods—he would say cruel and cutting things. For example, Medora had spent an afternoon patiently sketching the statue and the architecture at Columbus Circle. Tossing it aside with a sneer, the professor informed her that Giotto had once drawn a perfect circle with one sweep of his hand.</p>
|
||||
<p>One day it rained, the weekly remittance from Harmony was overdue, Medora had a headache, the professor had tried to borrow two dollars from her, her art dealer had sent back all her water-colors unsold, and—Mr. Binkley asked her out to dinner.</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Binkley was the gay boy of the boarding-house. He was forty-nine, and owned a fishstall in a downtown market. But after six o’clock he wore an evening suit and whooped things up connected with the beaux arts. The young men said he was an “Indian.” He was supposed to be an accomplished habitué of the inner circles of Bohemia. It was no secret that he had once loaned $10 to a young man who had had a drawing printed in <i>Puck</i>. Often has one thus obtained his entrée into the charmed circle, while the other obtained both his entrée and roast.</p>
|
||||
<p>The other boarders enviously regarded Medora as she left at Mr. Binkley’s side at nine o’clock. She was as sweet as a cluster of dried autumn grasses in her pale blue—oh—er—that very thin stuff—in her pale blue Comstockized silk waist and box-pleated voile skirt, with a soft pink glow on her thin cheeks and the tiniest bit of rouge powder on her face, with her handkerchief and room key in her brown walrus, pebble-grain hand-bag.</p>
|
||||
<p>And Mr. Binkley looked imposing and dashing with his red face and gray mustache, and his tight dress coat, that made the back of his neck roll up just like a successful novelist’s.</p>
|
||||
<p>One day it rained, the weekly remittance from Harmony was overdue, Medora had a headache, the professor had tried to borrow two dollars from her, her art dealer had sent back all her water-colors unsold, and—<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Binkley asked her out to dinner.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Binkley was the gay boy of the boarding-house. He was forty-nine, and owned a fishstall in a downtown market. But after six o’clock he wore an evening suit and whooped things up connected with the beaux arts. The young men said he was an “Indian.” He was supposed to be an accomplished habitué of the inner circles of Bohemia. It was no secret that he had once loaned $10 to a young man who had had a drawing printed in <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Puck</i>. Often has one thus obtained his entrée into the charmed circle, while the other obtained both his entrée and roast.</p>
|
||||
<p>The other boarders enviously regarded Medora as she left at <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Binkley’s side at nine o’clock. She was as sweet as a cluster of dried autumn grasses in her pale blue—oh—er—that very thin stuff—in her pale blue Comstockized silk waist and box-pleated voile skirt, with a soft pink glow on her thin cheeks and the tiniest bit of rouge powder on her face, with her handkerchief and room key in her brown walrus, pebble-grain hand-bag.</p>
|
||||
<p>And <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Binkley looked imposing and dashing with his red face and gray mustache, and his tight dress coat, that made the back of his neck roll up just like a successful novelist’s.</p>
|
||||
<p>They drove in a cab to the Café Terence, just off the most glittering part of Broadway, which, as every one knows, is one of the most popular and widely patronized, jealously exclusive Bohemian resorts in the city.</p>
|
||||
<p>Down between the rows of little tables tripped Medora, of the Green Mountains, after her escort. Thrice in a lifetime may woman walk upon clouds—once when she trippeth to the altar, once when she first enters Bohemian halls, the last when she marches back across her first garden with the dead hen of her neighbor in her hand.</p>
|
||||
<p>There was a table set, with three or four about it. A waiter buzzed around it like a bee, and silver and glass shone upon it. And, preliminary to the meal, as the prehistoric granite strata heralded the protozoa, the bread of Gaul, compounded after the formula of the recipe for the eternal hills, was there set forth to the hand and tooth of a long-suffering city, while the gods lay beside their nectar and home-made biscuits and smiled, and the dentists leaped for joy in their gold-leafy dens.</p>
|
||||
<p>The eye of Binkley fixed a young man at his table with the Bohemian gleam, which is a compound of the look of the Basilisk, the shine of a bubble of Würzburger, the inspiration of genius and the pleading of a panhandler.</p>
|
||||
<p>The young man sprang to his feet. “Hello, Bink, old boy!” he shouted. “Don’t tell me you were going to pass our table. Join us—unless you’ve another crowd on hand.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Don’t mind, old chap,” said Binkley, of the fish-stall. “You know how I like to butt up against the fine arts. Mr. Vandyke—Mr. Madder—er—Miss Martin, one of the elect also in art—er—”</p>
|
||||
<p>The introduction went around. There were also Miss Elise and Miss ‘Toinette. Perhaps they were models, for they chattered of the St. Regis decorations and Henry James—and they did it not badly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Don’t mind, old chap,” said Binkley, of the fish-stall. “You know how I like to butt up against the fine arts. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Vandyke—<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Madder—er—Miss Martin, one of the elect also in art—er—”</p>
|
||||
<p>The introduction went around. There were also Miss Elise and Miss ‘Toinette. Perhaps they were models, for they chattered of the <abbr>St.</abbr> Regis decorations and Henry James—and they did it not badly.</p>
|
||||
<p>Medora sat in transport. Music—wild, intoxicating music made by troubadours direct from a rear basement room in Elysium—set her thoughts to dancing. Here was a world never before penetrated by her warmest imagination or any of the lines controlled by Harriman. With the Green Mountains’ external calm upon her she sat, her soul flaming in her with the fire of Andalusia. The tables were filled with Bohemia. The room was full of the fragrance of flowers—both mille and cauli. Questions and corks popped; laughter and silver rang; champagne flashed in the pail, wit flashed in the pan.</p>
|
||||
<p>Vandyke ruffled his long, black locks, disarranged his careless tie and leaned over to Madder.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say, Maddy,” he whispered, feelingly, “sometimes I’m tempted to pay this Philistine his ten dollars and get rid of him.”</p>
|
||||
@ -32,21 +32,21 @@
|
||||
<p>Medora ate strange viands and drank elderberry wine that they poured in her glass. It was just the color of that in the Vermont home. The waiter poured something in another glass that seemed to be boiling, but when she tasted it it was not hot. She had never felt so light-hearted before. She thought lovingly of the Green Mountain farm and its fauna. She leaned, smiling, to Miss Elise.</p>
|
||||
<p>“If I were at home,” she said, beamingly, “I could show you the cutest little calf!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Nothing for you in the White Lane,” said Miss Elise. “Why don’t you pad?”</p>
|
||||
<p>The orchestra played a wailing waltz that Medora had learned from the hand-organs. She followed the air with nodding head in a sweet soprano hum. Madder looked across the table at her, and wondered in what strange waters Binkley had caught her in his seine. She smiled at him, and they raised glasses and drank of the wine that boiled when it was cold. Binkley had abandoned art and was prating of the unusual spring catch of shad. Miss Elise arranged the palette-and-maul-stick tie pin of Mr. Vandyke. A Philistine at some distant table was maundering volubly either about Jerome or Gérôme. A famous actress was discoursing excitably about monogrammed hosiery. A hose clerk from a department store was loudly proclaiming his opinions of the drama. A writer was abusing Dickens. A magazine editor and a photographer were drinking a dry brand at a reserved table. A 36–25-42 young lady was saying to an eminent sculptor: “Fudge for your Prax Italys! Bring one of your Venus Anno Dominis down to Cohen’s and see how quick she’d be turned down for a cloak model. Back to the quarries with your Greeks and Dagos!”</p>
|
||||
<p>The orchestra played a wailing waltz that Medora had learned from the hand-organs. She followed the air with nodding head in a sweet soprano hum. Madder looked across the table at her, and wondered in what strange waters Binkley had caught her in his seine. She smiled at him, and they raised glasses and drank of the wine that boiled when it was cold. Binkley had abandoned art and was prating of the unusual spring catch of shad. Miss Elise arranged the palette-and-maul-stick tie pin of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Vandyke. A Philistine at some distant table was maundering volubly either about Jerome or Gérôme. A famous actress was discoursing excitably about monogrammed hosiery. A hose clerk from a department store was loudly proclaiming his opinions of the drama. A writer was abusing Dickens. A magazine editor and a photographer were drinking a dry brand at a reserved table. A 36–25-42 young lady was saying to an eminent sculptor: “Fudge for your Prax Italys! Bring one of your Venus Anno Dominis down to Cohen’s and see how quick she’d be turned down for a cloak model. Back to the quarries with your Greeks and Dagos!”</p>
|
||||
<p>Thus went Bohemia.</p>
|
||||
<p>At eleven Mr. Binkley took Medora to the boarding-house and left her, with a society bow, at the foot of the hall stairs. She went up to her room and lit the gas.</p>
|
||||
<p>At eleven <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Binkley took Medora to the boarding-house and left her, with a society bow, at the foot of the hall stairs. She went up to her room and lit the gas.</p>
|
||||
<p>And then, as suddenly as the dreadful genie arose in vapor from the copper vase of the fisherman, arose in that room the formidable shape of the New England Conscience. The terrible thing that Medora had done was revealed to her in its full enormity. She had sat in the presence of the ungodly and looked upon the wine both when it was red and effervescent.</p>
|
||||
<p>At midnight she wrote this letter:</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p class="noindent">“<span class="smallcaps">Mr. Beriah Hoskins</span>, Harmony, Vermont.</p>
|
||||
<p class="noindent">“Dear Sir: Henceforth, consider me as dead to you forever. I have loved you too well to blight your career by bringing into it my guilty and sin-stained life. I have succumbed to the insidious wiles of this wicked world and have been drawn into the vortex of Bohemia. There is scarcely any depth of glittering iniquity that I have not sounded. It is hopeless to combat my decision. There is no rising from the depths to which I have sunk. Endeavor to forget me. I am lost forever in the fair but brutal maze of awful Bohemia. Farewell.</p>
|
||||
<p class="ind10">“<span class="smallcaps">Once Your Medora</span>.”<br/></p>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:letter">
|
||||
<p epub:type="se:letter.dateline">“<span epub:type="z3998:recipient"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Beriah Hoskins</span>, Harmony, Vermont.</p>
|
||||
<p>“<span epub:type="salutation">Dear Sir</span>: Henceforth, consider me as dead to you forever. I have loved you too well to blight your career by bringing into it my guilty and sin-stained life. I have succumbed to the insidious wiles of this wicked world and have been drawn into the vortex of Bohemia. There is scarcely any depth of glittering iniquity that I have not sounded. It is hopeless to combat my decision. There is no rising from the depths to which I have sunk. Endeavor to forget me. I am lost forever in the fair but brutal maze of awful Bohemia. Farewell.</p>
|
||||
<p class="signature">Once Your Medora.”</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>On the next day Medora formed her resolutions. Beelzebub, flung from heaven, was no more cast down. Between her and the apple blossoms of Harmony there was a fixed gulf. Flaming cherubim warded her from the gates of her lost paradise. In one evening, by the aid of Binkley and Mumm, Bohemia had gathered her into its awful midst.</p>
|
||||
<p>There remained to her but one thing—a life of brilliant, but irremediable error. Vermont was a shrine that she never would dare to approach again. But she would not sink—there were great and compelling ones in history upon whom she would model her meteoric career—Camille, Lola Montez, Royal Mary, Zaza—such a name as one of these would that of Medora Martin be to future generations.</p>
|
||||
<p>For two days Medora kept her room. On the third she opened a magazine at the portrait of the King of Belgium, and laughed sardonically. If that far-famed breaker of women’s hearts should cross her path, he would have to bow before her cold and imperious beauty. She would not spare the old or the young. All America—all Europe should do homage to her sinister, but compelling charm.</p>
|
||||
<p>As yet she could not bear to think of the life she had once desired—a peaceful one in the shadow of the Green Mountains with Beriah at her side, and orders for expensive oil paintings coming in by each mail from New York. Her one fatal misstep had shattered that dream.</p>
|
||||
<p>On the fourth day Medora powdered her face and rouged her lips. Once she had seen Carter in “Zaza.” She stood before the mirror in a reckless attitude and cried: “<i>Zut! zut!</i>” She rhymed it with “nut,” but with the lawless word Harmony seemed to pass away forever. The Vortex had her. She belonged to Bohemia for evermore. And never would Beriah—</p>
|
||||
<p>On the fourth day Medora powdered her face and rouged her lips. Once she had seen Carter in “Zaza.” She stood before the mirror in a reckless attitude and cried: “<i xml:lang="fr">Zut! zut!</i>” She rhymed it with “nut,” but with the lawless word Harmony seemed to pass away forever. The Vortex had her. She belonged to Bohemia for evermore. And never would Beriah—</p>
|
||||
<p>The door opened and Beriah walked in.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Dory,” said he, “what’s all that chalk and pink stuff on your face, honey?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Medora extended an arm.</p>
|
@ -1,14 +1,14 @@
|
||||
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
|
||||
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:epub="http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops" epub:prefix="z3998: http://www.daisy.org/z3998/2012/vocab/structure/, se: https://standardebooks.org/vocab/1.0" xml:lang="en-US">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 24</title>
|
||||
<title>From Each According to His Ability</title>
|
||||
<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
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|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-24" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS ABILITY</h2>
|
||||
<p>Vuyning left his club, cursing it softly, without any particular anger. From ten in the morning until eleven it had bored him immeasurably. Kirk with his fish story, Brooks with his Porto Rico cigars, old Morrison with his anecdote about the widow, Hepburn with his invariable luck at billiards—all these afflictions had been repeated without change of bill or scenery. Besides these morning evils Miss Allison had refused him again on the night before. But that was a chronic trouble. Five times she had laughed at his offer to make her Mrs. Vuyning. He intended to ask her again the next Wednesday evening.</p>
|
||||
<section id="from-each-according-to-his-ability" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">From Each According to His Ability</h2>
|
||||
<p>Vuyning left his club, cursing it softly, without any particular anger. From ten in the morning until eleven it had bored him immeasurably. Kirk with his fish story, Brooks with his Porto Rico cigars, old Morrison with his anecdote about the widow, Hepburn with his invariable luck at billiards—all these afflictions had been repeated without change of bill or scenery. Besides these morning evils Miss Allison had refused him again on the night before. But that was a chronic trouble. Five times she had laughed at his offer to make her <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Vuyning. He intended to ask her again the next Wednesday evening.</p>
|
||||
<p>Vuyning walked along Forty-fourth Street to Broadway, and then drifted down the great sluice that washes out the dust of the gold-mines of Gotham. He wore a morning suit of light gray, low, dull kid shoes, a plain, finely woven straw hat, and his visible linen was the most delicate possible shade of heliotrope. His necktie was the blue-gray of a November sky, and its knot was plainly the outcome of a lordly carelessness combined with an accurate conception of the most recent dictum of fashion.</p>
|
||||
<p>Now, to write of a man’s haberdashery is a worse thing than to write a historical novel “around” Paul Jones, or to pen a testimonial to a hay-fever cure.</p>
|
||||
<p>Therefore, let it be known that the description of Vuyning’s apparel is germane to the movements of the story, and not to make room for the new fall stock of goods.</p>
|
||||
@ -41,7 +41,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Man,” said Vuyning, revelling, “did you ever hear the tale Kirk tells about the six-pound trout and the old fisherman?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Seems not,” said Emerson, politely. “I’d like to.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“But you won’t,” said Vuyning. “I’ve heard it scores of times. That’s why I won’t tell you. I was just thinking how much better this is than a club. Now, shall we go to my tailor?”</p>
|
||||
<p></p>
|
||||
<hr/>
|
||||
<p>“Boys, and elderly gents,” said Vuyning, five days later at his club, standing up against the window where his coterie was gathered, and keeping out the breeze, “a friend of mine from the West will dine at our table this evening.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Will he ask if we have heard the latest from Denver?” said a member, squirming in his chair.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Will he mention the new twenty-three-story Masonic Temple, in Quincy, Ill.?” inquired another, dropping his nose-glasses.</p>
|
||||
@ -54,10 +54,10 @@
|
||||
<p>And then, with a sweep of his white, unringed hands, he dismissed Melpomene, and forthwith Diana and Amaryllis footed it before the mind’s eyes of the clubmen.</p>
|
||||
<p>The savannas of the continent spread before them. The wind, humming through a hundred leagues of sage brush and mesquite, closed their ears to the city’s staccato noises. He told them of camps, of ranches marooned in a sea of fragrant prairie blossoms, of gallops in the stilly night that Apollo would have forsaken his daytime steeds to enjoy; he read them the great, rough epic of the cattle and the hills that have not been spoiled by the hand of man, the mason. His words were a telescope to the city men, whose eyes had looked upon Youngstown, O., and whose tongues had called it “West.”</p>
|
||||
<p>In fact, Emerson had them “going.”</p>
|
||||
<p></p>
|
||||
<hr/>
|
||||
<p>The next morning at ten he met Vuyning, by appointment, at a Forty-second Street café.</p>
|
||||
<p>Emerson was to leave for the West that day. He wore a suit of dark cheviot that looked to have been draped upon him by an ancient Grecian tailor who was a few thousand years ahead of the styles.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mr. Vuyning,” said he, with the clear, ingenuous smile of the successful “crook,” “it’s up to me to go the limit for you any time I can do so. You’re the real thing; and if I can ever return the favor, you bet your life I’ll do it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Vuyning,” said he, with the clear, ingenuous smile of the successful “crook,” “it’s up to me to go the limit for you any time I can do so. You’re the real thing; and if I can ever return the favor, you bet your life I’ll do it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“What was that cow-puncher’s name?” asked Vuyning, “who used to catch a mustang by the nose and mane, and throw him till he put the bridle on?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Bates,” said Emerson.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Thanks,” said Vuyning. “I thought it was Yates. Oh, about that toggery business—I’d forgotten that.”</p>
|
@ -1,13 +1,13 @@
|
||||
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
|
||||
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|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 5</title>
|
||||
<title>“Little Speck in Garnered Fruit”</title>
|
||||
<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-5" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>“LITTLE SPECK IN GARNERED FRUIT”</h2>
|
||||
<section id="little-speck-in-garnered-fruit" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">“Little Speck in Garnered Fruit”</h2>
|
||||
<p>The honeymoon was at its full. There was a flat with the reddest of new carpets, tasselled portières and six steins with pewter lids arranged on a ledge above the wainscoting of the dining-room. The wonder of it was yet upon them. Neither of them had ever seen a yellow primrose by the river’s brim; but if such a sight had met their eyes at that time it would have seemed like—well, whatever the poet expected the right kind of people to see in it besides a primrose.</p>
|
||||
<p>The bride sat in the rocker with her feet resting upon the world. She was wrapt in rosy dreams and a kimono of the same hue. She wondered what the people in Greenland and Tasmania and Beloochistan were saying one to another about her marriage to Kid McGarry. Not that it made any difference. There was no welter-weight from London to the Southern Cross that could stand up four hours—no; four rounds—with her bridegroom. And he had been hers for three weeks; and the crook of her little finger could sway him more than the fist of any 142-pounder in the world.</p>
|
||||
<p>Love, when it is ours, is the other name for self-abnegation and sacrifice. When it belongs to people across the airshaft it means arrogance and self-conceit.</p>
|
||||
@ -49,7 +49,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Denver Dick had graced his game with his own presence that night. He led the rush that was intended to sweep away the smaller body of raiders, But when he saw the Kid his manner became personal. Being in the heavyweight class he cast himself joyfully upon his slighter enemy, and they rolled down a flight of stairs in each other’s arms. On the landing they separated and arose, and then the Kid was able to use some of his professional tactics, which had been useless to him while in the excited clutch of a 200-pound sporting gentleman who was about to lose $20,000 worth of paraphernalia.</p>
|
||||
<p>After vanquishing his adversary the Kid hurried upstairs and through the gambling-room into a smaller apartment connecting by an arched doorway.</p>
|
||||
<p>Here was a long table set with choicest chinaware and silver, and lavishly furnished with food of that expensive and spectacular sort of which the devotees of sport are supposed to be fond. Here again was to be perceived the liberal and florid taste of the gentleman with the urban cognomenal prefix.</p>
|
||||
<p>A No. 10 patent leather shoe protruded a few of its inches outside the tablecloth along the floor. The Kid seized this and plucked forth a black man in a white tie and the garb of a servitor.</p>
|
||||
<p>A <abbr>No.</abbr> 10 patent leather shoe protruded a few of its inches outside the tablecloth along the floor. The Kid seized this and plucked forth a black man in a white tie and the garb of a servitor.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Get up!” commanded the Kid. “Are you in charge of this free lunch?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes, sah, I was. Has they done pinched us ag’in, boss?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Looks that way. Listen to me. Are there any peaches in this layout? If there ain’t I’ll have to throw up the sponge.”</p>
|
@ -1,14 +1,14 @@
|
||||
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
|
||||
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|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 13</title>
|
||||
<title>Nemesis and the Candy Man</title>
|
||||
<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-13" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>NEMESIS AND THE CANDY MAN</h2>
|
||||
<p>“We sail at eight in the morning on the <i>Celtic</i>,” said Honoria, plucking a loose thread from her lace sleeve.</p>
|
||||
<section id="nemesis-and-the-candy-man" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Nemesis and the Candy Man</h2>
|
||||
<p>“We sail at eight in the morning on the <i epub:type="se:name.vessel.ship">Celtic</i>,” said Honoria, plucking a loose thread from her lace sleeve.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I heard so,” said young Ives, dropping his hat, and muffing it as he tried to catch it, “and I came around to wish you a pleasant voyage.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Of course you heard it,” said Honoria, coldly sweet, “since we have had no opportunity of informing you ourselves.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Ives looked at her pleadingly, but with little hope.</p>
|
||||
@ -21,8 +21,12 @@
|
||||
<p>She took a small portfolio from the drawer of a writing desk and from the portfolio a slip of flimsy paper one-quarter of an inch by two inches in size.</p>
|
||||
<p>“This,” said Honoria, inflexibly, “was wrapped about the first one we opened.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It was a year ago,” apologized Ives, as he held out his hand for it,</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p class="noindent">“As long as skies above are blue<br/> To you, my love, I will be true.”<br/></p>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:verse">
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<span>“As long as skies above are blue</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>To you, my love, I will be true.”</span>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>This he read from the slip of flimsy paper.</p>
|
||||
<p>“We were to have sailed a fortnight ago,” said Honoria, gossipingly. “It has been such a warm summer. The town is quite deserted. There is nowhere to go. Yet I am told that one or two of the roof gardens are amusing. The singing—and the dancing—on one or two seem to have met with approval.”</p>
|
||||
@ -31,17 +35,21 @@
|
||||
<p>He reached for the paper bag in Honoria’s lap, took out one of the square, wrapped confections and slowly unrolled it.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sara Chillingworth’s father,” said Honoria, “has given her an automobile.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Read that,” said Ives, handing over the slip that had been wrapped around the square of candy.</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p class="noindent">“Life teaches us—how to live,<br/> Love teaches us—to forgive.”<br/></p>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:verse">
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<span>“Life teaches us—how to live,</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>Love teaches us—to forgive.”</span>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>Honoria’s checks turned pink.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Honoria!” cried Ives, starting up from his chair.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Miss Clinton,” corrected Honoria, rising like Venus from the bead on the surf. “I warned you not to speak that name again.” ’</p>
|
||||
<p>“Honoria,” repeated Ives, “you must hear me. I know I do not deserve your forgiveness, but I must have it. There is a madness that possesses one sometimes for which his better nature is not responsible. I throw everything else but you to the winds. I strike off the chains that have bound me. I renounce the siren that lured me from you. Let the bought verse of that street peddler plead for me. It is you only whom I can love. Let your love forgive, and I swear to you that mine will be true ‘as long as skies above are blue.’ ”</p>
|
||||
<p></p>
|
||||
<hr/>
|
||||
<p>On the west side, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, an alley cuts the block in the middle. It perishes in a little court in the centre of the block. The district is theatrical; the inhabitants, the bubbling froth of half a dozen nations. The atmosphere is Bohemian, the language polyglot, the locality precarious.</p>
|
||||
<p>In the court at the rear of the alley lived the candy man. At seven o’clock he pushed his cart into the narrow entrance, rested it upon the irregular stone slats and sat upon one of the handles to cool himself. There was a great draught of cool wind through the alley.</p>
|
||||
<p>There was a window above the spot where he always stopped his pushcart. In the cool of the afternoon, Mlle. Adèle, drawing card of the Aërial Roof Garden, sat at the window and took the air. Generally her ponderous mass of dark auburn hair was down, that the breeze might have the felicity of aiding Sidonie, the maid, in drying and airing it. About her shoulders—the point of her that the photographers always made the most of—was loosely draped a heliotrope scarf. Her arms to the elbow were bare—there were no sculptors there to rave over them—but even the stolid bricks in the walls of the alley should not have been so insensate as to disapprove. While she sat thus Félice, another maid, anointed and bathed the small feet that twinkled and so charmed the nightly Aërial audiences.</p>
|
||||
<p>There was a window above the spot where he always stopped his pushcart. In the cool of the afternoon, <abbr>Mlle.</abbr> Adèle, drawing card of the Aërial Roof Garden, sat at the window and took the air. Generally her ponderous mass of dark auburn hair was down, that the breeze might have the felicity of aiding Sidonie, the maid, in drying and airing it. About her shoulders—the point of her that the photographers always made the most of—was loosely draped a heliotrope scarf. Her arms to the elbow were bare—there were no sculptors there to rave over them—but even the stolid bricks in the walls of the alley should not have been so insensate as to disapprove. While she sat thus Félice, another maid, anointed and bathed the small feet that twinkled and so charmed the nightly Aërial audiences.</p>
|
||||
<p>Gradually Mademoiselle began to notice the candy man stopping to mop his brow and cool himself beneath her window. In the hands of her maids she was deprived for the time of her vocation—the charming and binding to her chariot of man. To lose time was displeasing to Mademoiselle. Here was the candy man—no fit game for her darts, truly—but of the sex upon which she had been born to make war.</p>
|
||||
<p>After casting upon him looks of unseeing coldness for a dozen times, one afternoon she suddenly thawed and poured down upon him a smile that put to shame the sweets upon his cart.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Candy man,” she said, cooingly, while Sidonie followed her impulsive dive, brushing the heavy auburn hair, “don’t you think I am beautiful?”</p>
|
@ -1,17 +1,17 @@
|
||||
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|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 9</title>
|
||||
<title>One Thousand Dollars</title>
|
||||
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<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-9" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS</h2>
|
||||
<section id="one-thousand-dollars" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">One Thousand Dollars</h2>
|
||||
<p>“One thousand dollars,” repeated Lawyer Tolman, solemnly and severely, “and here is the money.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Young Gillian gave a decidedly amused laugh as he fingered the thin package of new fifty-dollar notes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s such a confoundedly awkward amount,” he explained, genially, to the lawyer. “If it had been ten thousand a fellow might wind up with a lot of fireworks and do himself credit. Even fifty dollars would have been less trouble.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You heard the reading of your uncle’s will,” continued Lawyer Tolman, professionally dry in his tones. “I do not know if you paid much attention to its details. I must remind you of one. You are required to render to us an account of the manner of expenditure of this $1,000 as soon as you have disposed of it. The will stipulates that. I trust that you will so far comply with the late Mr. Gillian’s wishes.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You heard the reading of your uncle’s will,” continued Lawyer Tolman, professionally dry in his tones. “I do not know if you paid much attention to its details. I must remind you of one. You are required to render to us an account of the manner of expenditure of this $1,000 as soon as you have disposed of it. The will stipulates that. I trust that you will so far comply with the late <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Gillian’s wishes.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You may depend upon it,” said the young man.% politely, “in spite of the extra expense it will entail. I may have to engage a secretary. I was never good at accounts.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Gillian went to his club. There he hunted out one whom he called Old Bryson.</p>
|
||||
<p>Old Bryson was calm and forty and sequestered. He was in a corner reading a book, and when he saw Gillian approaching he sighed, laid down his book and took off his glasses.</p>
|
||||
@ -31,7 +31,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Thanks,” said Gillian, rising, “I thought I could depend upon you, Old Bryson. You’ve hit on the very scheme. I wanted to chuck the money in a lump, for I’ve got to turn in an account for it, and I hate itemizing.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Gillian phoned for a cab and said to the driver:</p>
|
||||
<p>“The stage entrance of the Columbine Theatre.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss Lotta Lauriere was assisting nature with a powder puff, almost ready for her call at a crowded matinée, when her dresser mentioned the name of Mr. Gillian.</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss Lotta Lauriere was assisting nature with a powder puff, almost ready for her call at a crowded matinée, when her dresser mentioned the name of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Gillian.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Let it in,” said Miss Lauriere. “Now, what is it, Bobby? I’m going on in two minutes.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Rabbit-foot your right ear a little,” suggested Gillian, critically. “That’s better. It won’t take two minutes for me. What do you say to a little thing in the pendant line? I can stand three ciphers with a figure one in front of ’em.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, just as you say,” carolled Miss Lauriere. “My right glove, Adams. Say, Bobby, did you see that necklace Della Stacey had on the other night? Twenty-two hundred dollars it cost at Tiffany’s. But, of course—pull my sash a little to the left, Adams.”</p>
|
||||
@ -47,10 +47,10 @@
|
||||
<p>“I guess you are all right,” said the pencil dealer, “to ride in a cab by daylight. Take a look at that, if you like.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He drew a small book from his coat pocket and held it out. Gillian opened it and saw that it was a bank deposit book. It showed a balance of $1,785 to the blind man’s credit.</p>
|
||||
<p>Gillian returned the book and got into the cab.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I forgot something,” he said. “You may drive to the law offices of Tolman & Sharp, at–––– Broadway.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I forgot something,” he said. “You may drive to the law offices of Tolman & Sharp, at ⸻ Broadway.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Lawyer Tolman looked at him hostilely and inquiringly through his gold-rimmed glasses.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I beg your pardon,” said Gillian, cheerfully, “but may I ask you a question? It is not an impertinent one, I hope. Was Miss Hayden left anything by my uncle’s will besides the ring and the $10?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Nothing,” said Mr. Tolman.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Nothing,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tolman.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I thank you very much, sir,” said Gillian, and on he went to his cab. He gave the driver the address of his late uncle’s home.</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss Hayden was writing letters in the library. She was small and slender and clothed in black. But you would have noticed her eyes. Gillian drifted in with his air of regarding the world as inconsequent.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve just come from old Tolman’s,” he explained. “They’ve been going over the papers down there. They found a—Gillian searched his memory for a legal term—they found an amendment or a post-script or something to the will. It seemed that the old boy loosened up a little on second thoughts and willed you a thousand dollars. I was driving up this way and Tolman asked me to bring you the money. Here it is. You’d better count it to see if it’s right.” Gillian laid the money beside her hand on the desk.</p>
|
||||
@ -64,14 +64,14 @@
|
||||
<p>Gillian made out his account of his expenditure of the thousand dollars in these words:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Paid by the black sheep, Robert Gillian, $1,000 on account of the eternal happiness, owed by Heaven to the best and dearest woman on earth.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Gillian slipped his writing into an envelope, bowed and went his way.</p>
|
||||
<p>His cab stopped again at the offices of Tolman & Sharp.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have expended the thousand dollars,” he said cheerily, to Tolman of the gold glasses, “and I have come to render account of it, as I agreed. There is quite a feeling of summer in the air—do you not think so, Mr. Tolman?” He tossed a white envelope on the lawyer’s table. “You will find there a memorandum, sir, of the <i>modus operandi</i> of the vanishing of the dollars.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Without touching the envelope, Mr. Tolman went to a door and called his partner, Sharp. Together they explored the caverns of an immense safe. Forth they dragged, as trophy of their search a big envelope sealed with wax. This they forcibly invaded, and wagged their venerable heads together over its contents. Then Tolman became spokesman.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mr. Gillian,” he said, formally, “there was a codicil to your uncle’s will. It was intrusted to us privately, with instructions that it be not opened until you had furnished us with a full account of your handling of the $1,000 bequest in the will. As you have fulfilled the conditions, my partner and I have read the codicil. I do not wish to encumber your understanding with its legal phraseology, but I will acquaint you with the spirit of its contents.</p>
|
||||
<p>“In the event that your disposition of the $1,000 demonstrates that you possess any of the qualifications that deserve reward, much benefit will accrue to you. Mr. Sharp and I are named as the judges, and I assure you that we will do our duty strictly according to justice—with liberality. We are not at all unfavorably disposed toward you, Mr. Gillian. But let us return to the letter of the codicil. If your disposal of the money in question has been prudent, wise, or unselfish, it is in our power to hand you over bonds to the value of $50,000, which have been placed in our hands for that purpose. But if—as our client, the late Mr. Gillian, explicitly provides—you have used this money as you have money in the past, I quote the late Mr. Gillian—in reprehensible dissipation among disreputable associates—the $50,000 is to be paid to Miriam Hayden, ward of the late Mr. Gillian, without delay. Now, Mr. Gillian, Mr. Sharp and I will examine your account in regard to the $1,000. You submit it in writing, I believe. I hope you will repose confidence in our decision.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Tolman reached for the envelope. Gillian was a little the quicker in taking it up. He tore the account and its cover leisurely into strips and dropped them into his pocket.</p>
|
||||
<p>His cab stopped again at the offices of Tolman & Sharp.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have expended the thousand dollars,” he said cheerily, to Tolman of the gold glasses, “and I have come to render account of it, as I agreed. There is quite a feeling of summer in the air—do you not think so, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tolman?” He tossed a white envelope on the lawyer’s table. “You will find there a memorandum, sir, of the modus operandi of the vanishing of the dollars.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Without touching the envelope, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tolman went to a door and called his partner, Sharp. Together they explored the caverns of an immense safe. Forth they dragged, as trophy of their search a big envelope sealed with wax. This they forcibly invaded, and wagged their venerable heads together over its contents. Then Tolman became spokesman.</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Gillian,” he said, formally, “there was a codicil to your uncle’s will. It was intrusted to us privately, with instructions that it be not opened until you had furnished us with a full account of your handling of the $1,000 bequest in the will. As you have fulfilled the conditions, my partner and I have read the codicil. I do not wish to encumber your understanding with its legal phraseology, but I will acquaint you with the spirit of its contents.</p>
|
||||
<p>“In the event that your disposition of the $1,000 demonstrates that you possess any of the qualifications that deserve reward, much benefit will accrue to you. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Sharp and I are named as the judges, and I assure you that we will do our duty strictly according to justice—with liberality. We are not at all unfavorably disposed toward you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Gillian. But let us return to the letter of the codicil. If your disposal of the money in question has been prudent, wise, or unselfish, it is in our power to hand you over bonds to the value of $50,000, which have been placed in our hands for that purpose. But if—as our client, the late <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Gillian, explicitly provides—you have used this money as you have money in the past, I quote the late <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Gillian—in reprehensible dissipation among disreputable associates—the $50,000 is to be paid to Miriam Hayden, ward of the late <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Gillian, without delay. Now, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Gillian, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Sharp and I will examine your account in regard to the $1,000. You submit it in writing, I believe. I hope you will repose confidence in our decision.”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tolman reached for the envelope. Gillian was a little the quicker in taking it up. He tore the account and its cover leisurely into strips and dropped them into his pocket.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s all right,” he said, smilingly. “There isn’t a bit of need to bother you with this. I don’t suppose you’d understand these itemized bets, anyway. I lost the thousand dollars on the races. Good-day to you, gentlemen.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Tolman & Sharp shook their heads mournfully at each other when Gillian left, for they heard him whistling gayly in the hallway as he waited for the elevator.</p>
|
||||
<p>Tolman & Sharp shook their heads mournfully at each other when Gillian left, for they heard him whistling gayly in the hallway as he waited for the elevator.</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
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|
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|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 15</title>
|
||||
<title>Roses, Ruses and Romance</title>
|
||||
<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
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<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-15" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>ROSES, RUSES AND ROMANCE</h2>
|
||||
<section id="roses-ruses-and-romance" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Roses, Ruses and Romance</h2>
|
||||
<p>Ravenel—Ravenel, the traveller, artist and poet, threw his magazine to the floor. Sammy Brown, broker’s clerk, who sat by the window, jumped.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What is it, Ravvy?” he asked. “The critics been hammering your stock down?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Romance is dead,” said Ravenel, lightly. When Ravenel spoke lightly he was generally serious. He picked up the magazine and fluttered its leaves.</p>
|
||||
@ -19,9 +19,25 @@
|
||||
<p>“That would be a good guess in Wall Street or in a campaign for the presidency of a woman’s club,” said Ravenel, quietly. “Now, there is a poem—if you will allow me to call it that—of my own in this number of the magazine.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Read it to me,” said Sammy, watching a cloud of pipe-smoke he had just blown out the window.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ravenel was no greater than Achilles. No one is. There is bound to be a spot. The Somebody-or-Other must take hold of us somewhere when she dips us in the Something-or-Other that makes us invulnerable. He read aloud this verse in the magazine:</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p class="ind2">THE FOUR ROSES</p>
|
||||
<p class="noindent">“One rose I twined within your hair—<br/> <span class="ind2">(White rose, that spake of worth);</span><br/> And one you placed upon your breast—<br/> <span class="ind2">(Red rose, love’s seal of birth).</span><br/> You plucked another from its stem—<br/> <span class="ind2">(Tea rose, that means for aye);</span><br/> And one you gave—that bore for me<br/> <span class="ind2">The thorns of memory.”</span><br/></p>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="verse">
|
||||
<header>The Four Roses</header>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<span>“One rose I twined within your hair—</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>(White rose, that spake of worth);</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>And one you placed upon your breast—</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>(Red rose, love’s seal of birth).</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>You plucked another from its stem—</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>(Tea rose, that means for aye);</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>And one you gave—that bore for me</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>The thorns of memory.”</span>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>“That’s a crackerjack,” said Sammy, admiringly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“There are five more verses,” said Ravenel, patiently sardonic. “One naturally pauses at the end of each. Of course—”</p>
|
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|
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|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 14</title>
|
||||
<title>Squaring the Circle</title>
|
||||
<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-14" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>SQUARING THE CIRCLE</h2>
|
||||
<section id="squaring-the-circle" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Squaring the Circle</h2>
|
||||
<p>At the hazard of wearying you this tale of vehement emotions must be prefaced by a discourse on geometry.</p>
|
||||
<p>Nature moves in circles; Art in straight lines. The natural is rounded; the artificial is made up of angles. A man lost in the snow wanders, in spite of himself, in perfect circles; the city man’s feet, denaturalized by rectangular streets and floors, carry him ever away from himself.</p>
|
||||
<p>The round eyes of childhood typify innocence; the narrowed line of the flirt’s optic proves the invasion of art. The horizontal mouth is the mark of determined cunning; who has not read Nature’s most spontaneous lyric in lips rounded for the candid kiss?</p>
|
||||
<p>Beauty is Nature in perfection; circularity is its chief attribute. Behold the full moon, the enchanting golf ball, the domes of splendid temples, the huckleberry pie, the wedding ring, the circus ring, the ring for the waiter, and the “round” of drinks.</p>
|
||||
<p>On the other hand, straight lines show that Nature has been deflected. Imagine Venus’s girdle transformed into a “straight front”!</p>
|
||||
<p>When we begin to move in straight lines and turn sharp corners our natures begin to change. The consequence is that Nature, being more adaptive than Art, tries to conform to its sterner regulations. The result is often a rather curious product—for instance: A prize chrysanthemum, wood alcohol whiskey, a Republican Missouri, cauliflower <i>au gratin</i>, and a New Yorker.</p>
|
||||
<p>When we begin to move in straight lines and turn sharp corners our natures begin to change. The consequence is that Nature, being more adaptive than Art, tries to conform to its sterner regulations. The result is often a rather curious product—for instance: A prize chrysanthemum, wood alcohol whiskey, a Republican Missouri, cauliflower au gratin, and a New Yorker.</p>
|
||||
<p>Nature is lost quickest in a big city. The cause is geometrical, not moral. The straight lines of its streets and architecture, the rectangularity of its laws and social customs, the undeviating pavements, the hard, severe, depressing, uncompromising rules of all its ways—even of its recreation and sports—coldly exhibit a sneering defiance of the curved line of Nature.</p>
|
||||
<p>Wherefore, it may be said that the big city has demonstrated the problem of squaring the circle. And it may be added that this mathematical introduction precedes an account of the fate of a Kentucky feud that was imported to the city that has a habit of making its importations conform to its angles.</p>
|
||||
<p>The feud began in the Cumberland Mountains between the Folwell and the Harkness families. The first victim of the homespun vendetta was a ‘possum dog belonging to Bill Harkness. The Harkness family evened up this dire loss by laying out the chief of the Folwell clan. The Folwells were prompt at repartee. They oiled up their squirrel rifles and made it feasible for Bill Harkness to follow his dog to a land where the ‘possums come down when treed without the stroke of an ax.</p>
|
||||
<p>The feud flourished for forty years. Harknesses were shot at the plough, through their lamp-lit cabin windows, coming from camp-meeting, asleep, in duello, sober and otherwise, singly and in family groups, prepared and unprepared. Folwells had the branches of their family tree lopped off in similar ways, as the traditions of their country prescribed and authorized.</p>
|
||||
<p>By and by the pruning left but a single member of each family. And then Cal Harkness, probably reasoning that further pursuance of the controversy would give a too decided personal flavour to the feud, suddenly disappeared from the relieved Cumberlands, baulking the avenging hand of Sam, the ultimate opposing Folwell.</p>
|
||||
<p>A year afterward Sam Folwell learned that his hereditary, unsuppressed enemy was living in New York City. Sam turned over the big iron wash-pot in the yard, scraped off some of the soot, which he mixed with lard and shined his boots with the compound. He put on his store clothes of butternut dyed black, a white shirt and collar, and packed a carpet-sack with Spartan <i>lingerie</i>. He took his squirrel rifle from its hooks, but put it back again with a sigh. However ethical and plausible the habit might be in the Cumberlands, perhaps New York would not swallow his pose of hunting squirrels among the skyscrapers along Broadway. An ancient but reliable Colt’s revolver that he resurrected from a bureau drawer seemed to proclaim itself the pink of weapons for metropolitan adventure and vengeance. This and a hunting-knife in a leather sheath, Sam packed in the carpet-sack. As he started, muleback, for the lowland railroad station the last Folwell turned in his saddle and looked grimly at the little cluster of white-pine slabs in the clump of cedars that marked the Folwell burying-ground.</p>
|
||||
<p>A year afterward Sam Folwell learned that his hereditary, unsuppressed enemy was living in New York City. Sam turned over the big iron wash-pot in the yard, scraped off some of the soot, which he mixed with lard and shined his boots with the compound. He put on his store clothes of butternut dyed black, a white shirt and collar, and packed a carpet-sack with Spartan lingerie. He took his squirrel rifle from its hooks, but put it back again with a sigh. However ethical and plausible the habit might be in the Cumberlands, perhaps New York would not swallow his pose of hunting squirrels among the skyscrapers along Broadway. An ancient but reliable Colt’s revolver that he resurrected from a bureau drawer seemed to proclaim itself the pink of weapons for metropolitan adventure and vengeance. This and a hunting-knife in a leather sheath, Sam packed in the carpet-sack. As he started, muleback, for the lowland railroad station the last Folwell turned in his saddle and looked grimly at the little cluster of white-pine slabs in the clump of cedars that marked the Folwell burying-ground.</p>
|
||||
<p>Sam Folwell arrived in New York in the night. Still moving and living in the free circles of nature, he did not perceive the formidable, pitiless, restless, fierce angles of the great city waiting in the dark to close about the rotundity of his heart and brain and mould him to the form of its millions of re-shaped victims. A cabby picked him out of the whirl, as Sam himself had often picked a nut from a bed of wind-tossed autumn leaves, and whisked him away to a hotel commensurate to his boots and carpet-sack.</p>
|
||||
<p>On the next morning the last of the Folwells made his sortie into the city that sheltered the last Harkness. The Colt was thrust beneath his coat and secured by a narrow leather belt; the hunting-knife hung between his shoulder-blades, with the haft an inch below his coat collar. He knew this much—that Cal Harkness drove an express wagon somewhere in that town, and that he, Sam Folwell, had come to kill him. And as he stepped upon the sidewalk the red came into his eye and the feud-hate into his heart.</p>
|
||||
<p>The clamor of the central avenues drew him thitherward. He had half expected to see Cal coming down the street in his shirt-sleeves, with a jug and a whip in his hand, just as he would have seen him in Frankfort or Laurel City. But an hour went by and Cal did not appear. Perhaps he was waiting in ambush, to shoot him from a door or a window. Sam kept a sharp eye on doors and windows for a while.</p>
|
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||||
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<head>
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<title>Chapter 16</title>
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<title>The City of Dreadful Night</title>
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<section id="chapter-16" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT</h2>
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<p>“During the recent warmed-over spell,” said my friend Carney, driver of express wagon No. 8,606, “a good many opportunities was had of observing human nature through peekaboo waists.</p>
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<p>“The Park Commissioner and the Commissioner of Polis and the Forestry Commission gets together and agrees to let the people sleep in the parks until the Weather Bureau gets the thermometer down again to a living basis. So they draws up open-air resolutions and has them O.K.’d by the Secretary of Agriculture, Mr. Comstock and the Village Improvement Mosquito Exterminating Society of South Orange, N. J.</p>
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<section id="the-city-of-dreadful-night" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
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<h2 epub:type="title">The City of Dreadful Night</h2>
|
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<p>“During the recent warmed-over spell,” said my friend Carney, driver of express wagon <abbr>No.</abbr> 8,606, “a good many opportunities was had of observing human nature through peekaboo waists.</p>
|
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<p>“The Park Commissioner and the Commissioner of Polis and the Forestry Commission gets together and agrees to let the people sleep in the parks until the Weather Bureau gets the thermometer down again to a living basis. So they draws up open-air resolutions and has them O.K.’d by the Secretary of Agriculture, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Comstock and the Village Improvement Mosquito Exterminating Society of South Orange, N. J.</p>
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<p>“When the proclamation was made opening up to the people by special grant the public parks that belong to ’em, there was a general exodus into Central Park by the communities existing along its borders. In ten minutes after sundown you’d have thought that there was an undress rehearsal of a potato famine in Ireland and a Kishineff massacre. They come by families, gangs, clambake societies, clans, clubs and tribes from all sides to enjoy a cool sleep on the grass. Them that didn’t have oil stoves brought along plenty of blankets, so as not to be upset with the cold and discomforts of sleeping outdoors. By building fires of the shade trees and huddling together in the bridle paths, and burrowing under the grass where the ground was soft enough, the likes of 5,000 head of people successfully battled against the night air in Central Park alone.</p>
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<p>“Ye know I live in the elegant furnished apartment house called the Beersheba Flats, over against the elevated portion of the New York Central Railroad.</p>
|
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<p>“When the order come to the flats that all hands must turn out and sleep in the park, according to the instructions of the consulting committee of the City Club and the Murphy Draying, Returfing and Sodding Company, there was a look of a couple of fires and an eviction all over the place.</p>
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@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
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<p>“ ‘A-playing of my flute into the airshaft, says Patsey Rourke, ‘and a-perspiring in me own windy to the joyful noise of the passing trains and the smell of liver and onions and a-reading of the latest murder in the smoke of the cooking is well enough for me,’ says he. ‘What is this herding us in grass for, not to mention the crawling things with legs that walk up the trousers of us, and the Jersey snipes that peck at us, masquerading under the name and denomination of mosquitoes. What is it all for Carney, and the rint going on just the same over at the flats?’</p>
|
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<p>“”Tis the great annual Municipal Free Night Outing Lawn Party,’ says I, ‘given by the polis, Hetty Green and the Drug Trust. During the heated season they hold a week of it in the principal parks. ’Tis a scheme to reach that portion of the people that’s not worth taking up to North Beach for a fish fry.’</p>
|
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<p>“ ‘I can’t sleep on the ground,’ says Patsey, ‘wid any benefit. I have the hay fever and the rheumatism, and me ear is full of ants.’</p>
|
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<p>“Well, the night goes on, and the ex-tenants of the Flats groans and stumbles around in the dark, trying to find rest and recreation in the forest. The children is screaming with the coldness, and the janitor makes hot tea for ’em and keeps the fires going with the signboards that point to the Tavern and the Casino. The tenants try to lay down on the grass by families in the dark, but you’re lucky if you can sleep next to a man from the same floor or believing in the same religion. Now and then a Murpby, accidental, rolls over on the grass of a Rosenstein, or a Cohen tries to crawl under the O’Grady bush, and then there’s a feeling of noses and somebody is rolled down the hill to the driveway and stays there. There is some hair-pulling among the women folks, and everybody spanks the nearest howling kid to him by the sense of feeling only, regardless of its parentage and ownership. ’Tis hard to keep up the social distinctions in the dark that flourish by daylight in the Beersheba Flats. Mrs. Rafferty, that despises the asphalt that a Dago treads on, wakes up in the morning with her feet in the bosom of Antonio Spizzinelli. And Mike O’Dowd, that always threw peddlers downstairs as fast as he came upon ’em, has to unwind old Isaacstein’s whiskers from around his neck, and wake up the whole gang at daylight. But here and there some few got acquainted and overlooked the discomforts of the elements. There was five engagements to be married announced at the flats the next morning.</p>
|
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<p>“Well, the night goes on, and the ex-tenants of the Flats groans and stumbles around in the dark, trying to find rest and recreation in the forest. The children is screaming with the coldness, and the janitor makes hot tea for ’em and keeps the fires going with the signboards that point to the Tavern and the Casino. The tenants try to lay down on the grass by families in the dark, but you’re lucky if you can sleep next to a man from the same floor or believing in the same religion. Now and then a Murpby, accidental, rolls over on the grass of a Rosenstein, or a Cohen tries to crawl under the O’Grady bush, and then there’s a feeling of noses and somebody is rolled down the hill to the driveway and stays there. There is some hair-pulling among the women folks, and everybody spanks the nearest howling kid to him by the sense of feeling only, regardless of its parentage and ownership. ’Tis hard to keep up the social distinctions in the dark that flourish by daylight in the Beersheba Flats. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Rafferty, that despises the asphalt that a Dago treads on, wakes up in the morning with her feet in the bosom of Antonio Spizzinelli. And Mike O’Dowd, that always threw peddlers downstairs as fast as he came upon ’em, has to unwind old Isaacstein’s whiskers from around his neck, and wake up the whole gang at daylight. But here and there some few got acquainted and overlooked the discomforts of the elements. There was five engagements to be married announced at the flats the next morning.</p>
|
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<p>“About midnight I gets up and wrings the dew out of my hair, and goes to the side of the driveway and sits down. At one side of the park I could see the lights in the streets and houses; and I was thinking how happy them folks was who could chase the duck and smoke their pipes at their windows, and keep cool and pleasant like nature intended for ’em to.</p>
|
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<p>“Just then an automobile stops by me, and a fine-looking, well-dressed man steps out.</p>
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<p>“ ‘Me man,’ says he, ‘can you tell me why all these people are lying around on the grass in the park? I thought it was against the rules.’</p>
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<head>
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<title>Chapter 21</title>
|
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<title>The Clarion Call</title>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-21" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>THE CLARION CALL</h2>
|
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<section id="the-clarion-call" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
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<h2 epub:type="title">The Clarion Call</h2>
|
||||
<p>Half of this story can be found in the records of the Police Department; the other half belongs behind the business counter of a newspaper office.</p>
|
||||
<p>One afternoon two weeks after Millionaire Norcross was found in his apartment murdered by a burglar, the murderer, while strolling serenely down Broadway ran plump against Detective Barney Woods.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Is that you, Johnny Kernan?” asked Woods, who had been near-sighted in public for five years.</p>
|
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@ -40,12 +40,12 @@
|
||||
<p>And then, as Kernan’s ready finger kept the button and the waiter working, his weak point—a tremendous vanity and arrogant egotism, began to show itself. He recounted story after story of his successful plunderings, ingenious plots and infamous transgressions until Woods, with all his familiarity with evil-doers, felt growing within him a cold abhorrence toward the utterly vicious man who had once been his benefactor.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m disposed of, of course,” said Woods, at length. “But I advise you to keep under cover for a spell. The newspapers may take up this Norcross affair. There has been an epidemic of burglaries and manslaughter in town this summer.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The word sent Kernan into a high glow of sullen and vindictive rage.</p>
|
||||
<p>“To h––––l with the newspapers,” he growled. “What do they spell but brag and blow and boodle in box-car letters? Suppose they do take up a case—what does it amount to? The police are easy enough to fool; but what do the newspapers do? They send a lot of pin-head reporters around to the scene; and they make for the nearest saloon and have beer while they take photos of the bartender’s oldest daughter in evening dress, to print as the fiancée of the young man in the tenth story, who thought he heard a noise below on the night of the murder. That’s about as near as the newspapers ever come to running down Mr. Burglar.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, I don’t know,” said Woods, reflecting. “Some of the papers have done good work in that line. There’s the <i>Morning Mars</i>, for instance. It warmed up two or three trails, and got the man after the police had let ’em get cold.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ll show you,” said Kernan, rising, and expanding his chest. “I’ll show you what I think of newspapers in general, and your <i>Morning Mars</i> in particular.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“To h––––l with the newspapers,” he growled. “What do they spell but brag and blow and boodle in box-car letters? Suppose they do take up a case—what does it amount to? The police are easy enough to fool; but what do the newspapers do? They send a lot of pin-head reporters around to the scene; and they make for the nearest saloon and have beer while they take photos of the bartender’s oldest daughter in evening dress, to print as the fiancée of the young man in the tenth story, who thought he heard a noise below on the night of the murder. That’s about as near as the newspapers ever come to running down <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Burglar.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, I don’t know,” said Woods, reflecting. “Some of the papers have done good work in that line. There’s the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Morning Mars</i>, for instance. It warmed up two or three trails, and got the man after the police had let ’em get cold.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ll show you,” said Kernan, rising, and expanding his chest. “I’ll show you what I think of newspapers in general, and your <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Morning Mars</i> in particular.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Three feet from their table was the telephone booth. Kernan went inside and sat at the instrument, leaving the door open. He found a number in the book, took down the receiver and made his demand upon Central. Woods sat still, looking at the sneering, cold, vigilant face waiting close to the transmitter, and listened to the words that came from the thin, truculent lips curved into a contemptuous smile.</p>
|
||||
<p>“That the <i>Morning Mars</i>? … I want to speak to the managing editor … Why, tell him it’s some one who wants to talk to him about the Norcross murder.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You the editor? … All right … I am the man who killed old Norcross … Wait! Hold the wire; I’m not the usual crank … Oh, there isn’t the slightest danger. I’ve just been discussing it with a detective friend of mine. I killed the old man at 2:30 <span class="smallcaps">a. m.</span> two weeks ago to-morrow … Have a drink with you? Now, hadn’t you better leave that kind of talk to your funny man? Can’t you tell whether a man’s guying you or whether you’re being offered the biggest scoop your dull dishrag of a paper ever had? … Well, that’s so; it’s a bobtail scoop—but you can hardly expect me to ‘phone in my name and address … Why? Oh, because I heard you make a specialty of solving mysterious crimes that stump the police … No, that’s not all. I want to tell you that your rotten, lying, penny sheet is of no more use in tracking an intelligent murderer or highwayman than a blind poodle would be … What? … Oh, no, this isn’t a rival newspaper office; you’re getting it straight. I did the Norcross job, and I’ve got the jewels in my suit case at—‘the name of the hotel could not be learned’—you recognize that phrase, don’t you? I thought so. You’ve used it often enough. Kind of rattles you, doesn’t it, to have the mysterious villain call up your great, big, all-powerful organ of right and justice and good government and tell you what a helpless old gas-bag you are? … Cut that out; you’re not that big a fool—no, you don’t think I’m a fraud. I can tell it by your voice … Now, listen, and I’ll give you a pointer that will prove it to you. Of course you’ve had this murder case worked over by your staff of bright young blockheads. Half of the second button on old Mrs. Norcross’s nightgown is broken off. I saw it when I took the garnet ring off her finger. I thought it was a ruby … Stop that! it won’t work.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“That the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Morning Mars</i>? … I want to speak to the managing editor … Why, tell him it’s some one who wants to talk to him about the Norcross murder.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You the editor? … All right … I am the man who killed old Norcross … Wait! Hold the wire; I’m not the usual crank … Oh, there isn’t the slightest danger. I’ve just been discussing it with a detective friend of mine. I killed the old man at 2:30 <abbr class="time">a.m.</abbr> two weeks ago to-morrow … Have a drink with you? Now, hadn’t you better leave that kind of talk to your funny man? Can’t you tell whether a man’s guying you or whether you’re being offered the biggest scoop your dull dishrag of a paper ever had? … Well, that’s so; it’s a bobtail scoop—but you can hardly expect me to ‘phone in my name and address … Why? Oh, because I heard you make a specialty of solving mysterious crimes that stump the police … No, that’s not all. I want to tell you that your rotten, lying, penny sheet is of no more use in tracking an intelligent murderer or highwayman than a blind poodle would be … What? … Oh, no, this isn’t a rival newspaper office; you’re getting it straight. I did the Norcross job, and I’ve got the jewels in my suit case at—‘the name of the hotel could not be learned’—you recognize that phrase, don’t you? I thought so. You’ve used it often enough. Kind of rattles you, doesn’t it, to have the mysterious villain call up your great, big, all-powerful organ of right and justice and good government and tell you what a helpless old gas-bag you are? … Cut that out; you’re not that big a fool—no, you don’t think I’m a fraud. I can tell it by your voice … Now, listen, and I’ll give you a pointer that will prove it to you. Of course you’ve had this murder case worked over by your staff of bright young blockheads. Half of the second button on old <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Norcross’s nightgown is broken off. I saw it when I took the garnet ring off her finger. I thought it was a ruby … Stop that! it won’t work.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Kernan turned to Woods with a diabolic smile.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve got him going. He believes me now. He didn’t quite cover the transmitter with his hand when he told somebody to call up Central on another ‘phone and get our number. I’ll give him just one more dig, and then we’ll make a ‘get-away.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hello! … Yes. I’m here yet. You didn’t think I’d run from such a little subsidized, turncoat rag of a newspaper, did you? … Have me inside of forty-eight hours? Say, will you quit being funny? Now, you let grown men alone and attend to your business of hunting up divorce cases and street-car accidents and printing the filth and scandal that you make your living by. Good-by, old boy—sorry I haven’t time to call on you. I’d feel perfectly safe in your sanctum asinorum. Tra-la!”</p>
|
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@ -56,14 +56,14 @@
|
||||
<p>“I wonder if it’s possible,” he said to himself, “I won-der if it’s pos-si-ble!”</p>
|
||||
<p>And then outside the café the comparative stillness of the early morning was punctured by faint, uncertain cries that seemed mere fireflies of sound, some growing louder, some fainter, waxing and waning amid the rumble of milk wagons and infrequent cars. Shrill cries they were when near—well-known cries that conveyed many meanings to the ears of those of the slumbering millions of the great city who waked to hear them. Cries that bore upon their significant, small volume the weight of a world’s woe and laughter and delight and stress. To some, cowering beneath the protection of a night’s ephemeral cover, they brought news of the hideous, bright day; to others, wrapped in happy sleep, they announced a morning that would dawn blacker than sable night. To many of the rich they brought a besom to sweep away what had been theirs while the stars shone; to the poor they brought—another day.</p>
|
||||
<p>All over the city the cries were starting up, keen and sonorous, heralding the chances that the slipping of one cogwheel in the machinery of time had made; apportioning to the sleepers while they lay at the mercy of fate, the vengeance, profit, grief, reward and doom that the new figure in the calendar had brought them. Shrill and yet plaintive were the cries, as if the young voices grieved that so much evil and so little good was in their irresponsible hands. Thus echoed in the streets of the helpless city the transmission of the latest decrees of the gods, the cries of the newsboys—the Clarion Call of the Press.</p>
|
||||
<p>Woods flipped a dime to the waiter, and said: “Get me a <i>Morning Mars</i>.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Woods flipped a dime to the waiter, and said: “Get me a <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Morning Mars</i>.”</p>
|
||||
<p>When the paper came he glanced at its first page, and then tore a leaf out of his memorandum book and began to write on it with the little gold pencil.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What’s the news?” yawned Kernan.</p>
|
||||
<p>Woods flipped over to him the piece of writing:</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p class="noindent">“The New York <i>Morning Mars</i>:</p>
|
||||
<p epub:type="z3998:recipient">“The New York <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Morning Mars</i>:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Please pay to the order of John Kernan the one thousand dollars reward coming to me for his arrest and conviction.</p>
|
||||
<p class="ind10">“<span class="smallcaps">Barnard Woods</span>.”<br/></p>
|
||||
<p class="signature">“Barnard Woods.”</p>
|
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</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>“I kind of thought they would do that,” said Woods, “when you were jollying them so hard. Now, Johnny, you’ll come to the police station with me.”</p>
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<head>
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<title>Chapter 2</title>
|
||||
<title>The Complete Life of John Hopkins</title>
|
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<h2>THE COMPLETE LIFE OF JOHN HOPKINS</h2>
|
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<section id="the-complete-life-of-john-hopkins" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
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<h2 epub:type="title">The Complete Life of John Hopkins</h2>
|
||||
<p>There is a saying that no man has tasted the full flavour of life until he has known poverty, love and war. The justness of this reflection commends it to the lover of condensed philosophy. The three conditions embrace about all there is in life worth knowing. A surface thinker might deem that wealth should be added to the list. Not so. When a poor man finds a long-hidden quarter-dollar that has slipped through a rip into his vest lining, he sounds the pleasure of life with a deeper plummet than any millionaire can hope to cast.</p>
|
||||
<p>It seems that the wise executive power that rules life has thought best to drill man in these three conditions; and none may escape all three. In rural places the terms do not mean so much. Poverty is less pinching; love is temperate; war shrinks to contests about boundary lines and the neighbors’ hens. It is in the cities that our epigram gains in truth and vigor; and it has remained for one John Hopkins to crowd the experience into a rather small space of time.</p>
|
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<p>The Hopkins flat was like a thousand others. There was a rubber plant in one window; a flea-bitten terrier sat in the other, wondering when he was to have his day.</p>
|
||||
<p>John Hopkins was like a thousand others. He worked at $20 per week in a nine-story, red-brick building at either Insurance, Buckle’s Hoisting Engines, Chiropody, Loans, Pulleys, Boas Renovated, Waltz Guaranteed in Five Lessons, or Artificial Limbs. It is not for us to wring Mr. Hopkins’s avocation from these outward signs that be.</p>
|
||||
<p>Mrs. Hopkins was like a thousand others. The auriferous tooth, the sedentary disposition, the Sunday afternoon wanderlust, the draught upon the delicatessen store for home-made comforts, the furor for department store marked-down sales, the feeling of superiority to the lady in the third-floor front who wore genuine ostrich tips and had two names over her bell, the mucilaginous hours during which she remained glued to the window sill, the vigilant avoidance of the instalment man, the tireless patronage of the acoustics of the dumb-waiter shaft—all the attributes of the Gotham flat-dweller were hers.</p>
|
||||
<p>John Hopkins was like a thousand others. He worked at $20 per week in a nine-story, red-brick building at either Insurance, Buckle’s Hoisting Engines, Chiropody, Loans, Pulleys, Boas Renovated, Waltz Guaranteed in Five Lessons, or Artificial Limbs. It is not for us to wring <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Hopkins’s avocation from these outward signs that be.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Hopkins was like a thousand others. The auriferous tooth, the sedentary disposition, the Sunday afternoon wanderlust, the draught upon the delicatessen store for home-made comforts, the furor for department store marked-down sales, the feeling of superiority to the lady in the third-floor front who wore genuine ostrich tips and had two names over her bell, the mucilaginous hours during which she remained glued to the window sill, the vigilant avoidance of the instalment man, the tireless patronage of the acoustics of the dumb-waiter shaft—all the attributes of the Gotham flat-dweller were hers.</p>
|
||||
<p>One moment yet of sententiousness and the story moves.</p>
|
||||
<p>In the Big City large and sudden things happen. You round a corner and thrust the rib of your umbrella into the eye of your old friend from Kootenai Falls. You stroll out to pluck a Sweet William in the park—and lo! bandits attack you—you are ambulanced to the hospital—you marry your nurse; are divorced—get squeezed while short on U. P.S. and D. O. W. N. S.—stand in the bread line—marry an heiress, take out your laundry and pay your club dues—seemingly all in the wink of an eye. You travel the streets, and a finger beckons to you, a handkerchief is dropped for you, a brick is dropped upon you, the elevator cable or your bank breaks, a table d’hôte or your wife disagrees with you, and Fate tosses you about like cork crumbs in wine opened by an un-feed waiter. The City is a sprightly youngster, and you are red paint upon its toy, and you get licked off.</p>
|
||||
<p>John Hopkins sat, after a compressed dinner, in his glove-fitting straight-front flat. He sat upon a hornblende couch and gazed, with satiated eyes, at Art Brought Home to the People in the shape of “The Storm” tacked against the wall. Mrs. Hopkins discoursed droningly of the dinner smells from the flat across the hall. The flea-bitten terrier gave Hopkins a look of disgust, and showed a man-hating tooth.</p>
|
||||
<p>In the Big City large and sudden things happen. You round a corner and thrust the rib of your umbrella into the eye of your old friend from Kootenai Falls. You stroll out to pluck a Sweet William in the park—and lo! bandits attack you—you are ambulanced to the hospital—you marry your nurse; are divorced—get squeezed while short on U. <abbr>P.S.</abbr> and D. O. W. N. S.—stand in the bread line—marry an heiress, take out your laundry and pay your club dues—seemingly all in the wink of an eye. You travel the streets, and a finger beckons to you, a handkerchief is dropped for you, a brick is dropped upon you, the elevator cable or your bank breaks, a table d’hôte or your wife disagrees with you, and Fate tosses you about like cork crumbs in wine opened by an un-feed waiter. The City is a sprightly youngster, and you are red paint upon its toy, and you get licked off.</p>
|
||||
<p>John Hopkins sat, after a compressed dinner, in his glove-fitting straight-front flat. He sat upon a hornblende couch and gazed, with satiated eyes, at Art Brought Home to the People in the shape of “The Storm” tacked against the wall. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Hopkins discoursed droningly of the dinner smells from the flat across the hall. The flea-bitten terrier gave Hopkins a look of disgust, and showed a man-hating tooth.</p>
|
||||
<p>Here was neither poverty, love, nor war; but upon such barren stems may be grafted those essentials of a complete life.</p>
|
||||
<p>John Hopkins sought to inject a few raisins of conversation into the tasteless dough of existence. “Putting a new elevator in at the office,” he said, discarding the nominative noun, “and the boss has turned out his whiskers.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You don’t mean it!” commented Mrs. Hopkins.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mr. Whipples,” continued John, “wore his new spring suit down to-day. I liked it fine It’s a gray with—” He stopped, suddenly stricken by a need that made itself known to him. “I believe I’ll walk down to the corner and get a five-cent cigar,” he concluded.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You don’t mean it!” commented <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Hopkins.</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Whipples,” continued John, “wore his new spring suit down to-day. I liked it fine It’s a gray with—” He stopped, suddenly stricken by a need that made itself known to him. “I believe I’ll walk down to the corner and get a five-cent cigar,” he concluded.</p>
|
||||
<p>John Hopkins took his hat and picked his way down the musty halls and stairs of the flat-house.</p>
|
||||
<p>The evening air was mild, and the streets shrill with the careless cries of children playing games controlled by mysterious rhythms and phrases. Their elders held the doorways and steps with leisurely pipe and gossip. Paradoxically, the fire-escapes supported lovers in couples who made no attempt to fly the mounting conflagration they were there to fan.</p>
|
||||
<p>The corner cigar store aimed at by John Hopkins was kept by a man named Freshmayer, who looked upon the earth as a sterile promontory.</p>
|
||||
@ -35,10 +35,10 @@
|
||||
<p>Ten minutes and the auto turned into the open carriage entrance of a noble mansion of brown stone, and stood still. The chauffeur leaped out, and said:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Come quick. The lady, she will explain. It is the great honor you will have, monsieur. Ah, that milady could call upon Armand to do this thing! But, no, I am only one chauffeur.”</p>
|
||||
<p>With vehement gestures the chauffeur conducted Hopkins into the house. He was ushered into a small but luxurious reception chamber. A lady, young, and possessing the beauty of visions, rose from a chair. In her eyes smouldered a becoming anger. Her high-arched, threadlike brows were ruffled into a delicious frown.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Milady,” said the chauffeur, bowing low, “I have the honor to relate to you that I went to the house of Monsieur Long and found him to be not at home. As I came back I see this gentleman in combat against—how you say—greatest odds. He is fighting with five—ten—thirty men—gendarmes, <i>aussi</i>. Yes, milady, he what you call ‘swat’ one—three—eight policemans. If that Monsieur Long is out I say to myself this gentleman he will serve milady so well, and I bring him here.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Milady,” said the chauffeur, bowing low, “I have the honor to relate to you that I went to the house of Monsieur Long and found him to be not at home. As I came back I see this gentleman in combat against—how you say—greatest odds. He is fighting with five—ten—thirty men—gendarmes, <i xml:lang="fr">aussi</i>. Yes, milady, he what you call ‘swat’ one—three—eight policemans. If that Monsieur Long is out I say to myself this gentleman he will serve milady so well, and I bring him here.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Very well, Armand,” said the lady, “you may go.” She turned to Hopkins.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I sent my chauffeur,” she said, “to bring my cousin, Walter Long. There is a man in this house who has treated me with insult and abuse. I have complained to my aunt, and she laughs at me. Armand says you are brave. In these prosaic days men who are both brave and chivalrous are few. May I count upon your assistance?”</p>
|
||||
<p>John Hopkins thrust the remains of his cigar into his coat pocket. He looked upon this winning creature and felt his first thrill of romance. It was a knightly love, and contained no disloyalty to the flat with the flea-bitten terrier and the lady of his choice. He had married her after a picnic of the Lady Label Stickers’ Union, Lodge No. 2, on a dare and a bet of new hats and chowder all around with his friend, Billy McManus. This angel who was begging him to come to her rescue was something too heavenly for chowder, and as for hats—golden, jewelled crowns for her!</p>
|
||||
<p>John Hopkins thrust the remains of his cigar into his coat pocket. He looked upon this winning creature and felt his first thrill of romance. It was a knightly love, and contained no disloyalty to the flat with the flea-bitten terrier and the lady of his choice. He had married her after a picnic of the Lady Label Stickers’ Union, Lodge <abbr>No.</abbr> 2, on a dare and a bet of new hats and chowder all around with his friend, Billy McManus. This angel who was begging him to come to her rescue was something too heavenly for chowder, and as for hats—golden, jewelled crowns for her!</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say,” said John Hopkins, “just show me the guy that you’ve got the grouch at. I’ve neglected my talents as a scrapper heretofore, but this is my busy night.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“He is in there,” said the lady, pointing to a closed door. “Come. Are you sure that you do not falter or fear?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Me?” said John Hopkins. “Just give me one of those roses in the bunch you are wearing, will you?”</p>
|
||||
@ -48,15 +48,15 @@
|
||||
<p>“Beware, Ralph Branscombe,” cried the lady, who had followed, “what you do to the gallant man who has tried to protect me.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The young man shoved John Hopkins gently out the door and then closed it.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Bess,” he said calmly, “I wish you would quit reading historical novels. How in the world did that fellow get in here?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Armand brought him,” said the young lady. “I think you are awfully mean not to let me have that St. Bernard. I sent Armand for Walter. I was so angry with you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Armand brought him,” said the young lady. “I think you are awfully mean not to let me have that <abbr>St.</abbr> Bernard. I sent Armand for Walter. I was so angry with you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Be sensible, Bess,” said the young man, taking her arm. “That dog isn’t safe. He has bitten two or three people around the kennels. Come now, let’s go tell auntie we are in good humor again.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Arm in arm, they moved away.</p>
|
||||
<p>John Hopkins walked to his flat. The janitor’s five-year-old daughter was playing on the steps. Hopkins gave her a nice, red rose and walked upstairs.</p>
|
||||
<p>Mrs. Hopkins was philandering with curl-papers.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Hopkins was philandering with curl-papers.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Get your cigar?” she asked, disinterestedly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sure,” said Hopkins, “and I knocked around a while outside. It’s a nice night.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He sat upon the hornblende sofa, took out the stump of his cigar, lighted it, and gazed at the graceful figures in “The Storm” on the opposite wall.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I was telling you,” said he, “about Mr. Whipple’s suit. It’s a gray, with an invisible check, and it looks fine.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I was telling you,” said he, “about <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Whipple’s suit. It’s a gray, with an invisible check, and it looks fine.”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
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|
||||
<title>Chapter 10</title>
|
||||
<title>The Defeat of the City</title>
|
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|
||||
<h2>THE DEFEAT OF THE CITY</h2>
|
||||
<section id="the-defeat-of-the-city" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Defeat of the City</h2>
|
||||
<p>Robert Walmsley’s descent upon the city resulted in a Kilkenny struggle. He came out of the fight victor by a fortune and a reputation. On the other hand, he was swallowed up by the city. The city gave him what he demanded and then branded him with its brand. It remodelled, cut, trimmed and stamped him to the pattern it approves. It opened its social gates to him and shut him in on a close-cropped, formal lawn with the select herd of ruminants. In dress, habits, manners, provincialism, routine and narrowness he acquired that charming insolence, that irritating completeness, that sophisticated crassness, that overbalanced poise that makes the Manhattan gentleman so delightfully small in his greatness.</p>
|
||||
<p>One of the up-state rural counties pointed with pride to the successful young metropolitan lawyer as a product of its soil. Six years earlier this county had removed the wheat straw from between its huckleberry-stained teeth and emitted a derisive and bucolic laugh as old man Walmsley’s freckle-faced “Bob” abandoned the certain three-per-diem meals of the one-horse farm for the discontinuous quick lunch counters of the three-ringed metropolis. At the end of the six years no murder trial, coaching party, automobile accident or cotillion was complete in which the name of Robert Walmsley did not figure. Tailors waylaid him in the street to get a new wrinkle from the cut of his unwrinkled trousers. Hyphenated fellows in the clubs and members of the oldest subpœnaed families were glad to clap him on the back and allow him three letters of his name.</p>
|
||||
<p>But the Matterhorn of Robert Walmsley’s success was not scaled until he married Alicia Van Der Pool. I cite the Matterhorn, for just so high and cool and white and inaccessible was this daughter of the old burghers. The social Alps that ranged about her over whose bleak passes a thousand climbers struggled—reached only to her knees. She towered in her own atmosphere, serene, chaste, prideful, wading in no fountains, dining no monkeys, breeding no dogs for bench shows. She was a Van Der Pool. Fountains were made to play for her; monkeys were made for other people’s ancestors; dogs, she understood, were created to be companions of blind persons and objectionable characters who smoked pipes.</p>
|
||||
@ -19,7 +19,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“I will write to her myself,” answered Alicia, with a faint foreshadowing of enthusiasm. “Félice shall pack my trunks at once. Seven, I think, will be enough. I do not suppose that your mother entertains a great deal. Does she give many house parties?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Robert arose, and as attorney for rural places filed a demurrer against six of the seven trunks. He endeavored to define, picture, elucidate, set forth and describe a farm. His own words sounded strange in his ears. He had not realized how thoroughly urbsidized he had become.</p>
|
||||
<p>A week passed and found them landed at the little country station five hours out from the city. A grinning, stentorian, sarcastic youth driving a mule to a spring wagon hailed Robert savagely.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hallo, Mr. Walmsley. Found your way back at last, have you? Sorry I couldn’t bring in the automobile for you, but dad’s bull-tonguing the ten-acre clover patch with it to-day. Guess you’ll excuse my not wearing a dress suit over to meet you—it ain’t six o’clock yet, you know.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hallo, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Walmsley. Found your way back at last, have you? Sorry I couldn’t bring in the automobile for you, but dad’s bull-tonguing the ten-acre clover patch with it to-day. Guess you’ll excuse my not wearing a dress suit over to meet you—it ain’t six o’clock yet, you know.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m glad to see you, Tom,” said Robert, grasping his brother’s hand. “Yes, I’ve found my way at last. You’ve a right to say ‘at last.’ It’s been over two years since the last time. But it will be oftener after this, my boy.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Alicia, cool in the summer heat as an Arctic wraith, white as a Norse snow maiden in her flimsy muslin and fluttering lace parasol, came round the corner of the station; and Tom was stripped of his assurance. He became chiefly eyesight clothed in blue jeans, and on the homeward drive to the mule alone did he confide in language the inwardness of his thoughts.</p>
|
||||
<p>They drove homeward. The low sun dropped a spendthrift flood of gold upon the fortunate fields of wheat. The cities were far away. The road lay curling around wood and dale and hill like a ribbon lost from the robe of careless summer. The wind followed like a whinnying colt in the track of Phœbus’s steeds.</p>
|
||||
@ -27,7 +27,7 @@
|
||||
<p>The old voices of the soil spoke to him. Leaf and bud and blossom conversed with him in the old vocabulary of his careless youth—the inanimate things, the familiar stones and rails, the gates and furrows and roofs and turns of the road had an eloquence, too, and a power in the transformation. The country had smiled and he had felt the breath of it, and his heart was drawn as if in a moment back to his old love. The city was far away.</p>
|
||||
<p>This rural atavism, then, seized Robert Walmsley and possessed him. A queer thing he noticed in connection with it was that Alicia, sitting at his side, suddenly seemed to him a stranger. She did not belong to this recurrent phase. Never before had she seemed so remote, so colorless and high—so intangible and unreal. And yet he had never admired her more than when she sat there by him in the rickety spring wagon, chiming no more with his mood and with her environment than the Matterhorn chimes with a peasant’s cabbage garden.</p>
|
||||
<p>That night when the greetings and the supper were over, the entire family, including Buff, the yellow dog, bestrewed itself upon the front porch. Alicia, not haughty but silent, sat in the shadow dressed in an exquisite pale-gray tea gown. Robert’s mother discoursed to her happily concerning marmalade and lumbago. Tom sat on the top step; Sisters Millie and Pam on the lowest step to catch the lightning bugs. Mother had the willow rocker. Father sat in the big armchair with one of its arms gone. Buff sprawled in the middle of the porch in everybody’s way. The twilight pixies and pucks stole forth unseen and plunged other poignant shafts of memory into the heart of Robert. A rural madness entered his soul. The city was far away.</p>
|
||||
<p>Father sat without his pipe, writhing in his heavy boots, a sacrifice to rigid courtesy. Robert shouted: “No, you don’t!” He fetched the pipe and lit it; he seized the old gentleman’s boots and tore them off. The last one slipped suddenly, and Mr. Robert Walmsley, of Washington Square, tumbled off the porch backward with Buff on top of him, howling fearfully. Tom laughed sarcastically.</p>
|
||||
<p>Father sat without his pipe, writhing in his heavy boots, a sacrifice to rigid courtesy. Robert shouted: “No, you don’t!” He fetched the pipe and lit it; he seized the old gentleman’s boots and tore them off. The last one slipped suddenly, and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Robert Walmsley, of Washington Square, tumbled off the porch backward with Buff on top of him, howling fearfully. Tom laughed sarcastically.</p>
|
||||
<p>Robert tore off his coat and vest and hurled them into a lilac bush.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Come out here, you landlubber,” he cried to Tom, “and I’ll put grass seed on your back. I think you called me a ‘dude’ a while ago. Come along and cut your capers.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Tom understood the invitation and accepted it with delight. Three times they wrestled on the grass, “side holds,” even as the giants of the mat. And twice was Tom forced to bite grass at the hands of the distinguished lawyer. Dishevelled, panting, each still boasting of his own prowess, they stumbled back to the porch. Millie cast a pert reflection upon the qualities of a city brother. In an instant Robert had secured a horrid katydid in his fingers and bore down upon her. Screaming wildly, she fled up the lane, pursued by the avenging glass of form. A quarter of a mile and they returned, she full of apology to the victorious “dude.” The rustic mania possessed him unabatedly.</p>
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<head>
|
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<title>The Easter of the Soul</title>
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|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Easter of the Soul</h2>
|
||||
<p>It is hardly likely that a goddess may die. Then Eastre, the old Saxon goddess of spring, must be laughing in her muslin sleeve at people who believe that Easter, her namesake, exists only along certain strips of Fifth Avenue pavement after church service.</p>
|
||||
<p>Aye! It belongs to the world. The ptarmigan in Chilkoot Pass discards his winter white feathers for brown; the Patagonian Beau Brummell oils his chignon and clubs him another sweetheart to drag to his skull-strewn flat. And down in Chrystie Street—</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> “Tiger” McQuirk arose with a feeling of disquiet that he did not understand. With a practised foot he rolled three of his younger brothers like logs out of his way as they lay sleeping on the floor. Before a foot-square looking glass hung by the window he stood and shaved himself. If that may seem to you a task too slight to be thus impressively chronicled, I bear with you; you do not know of the areas to be accomplished in traversing the cheek and chin of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McQuirk.</p>
|
||||
<p>McQuirk, senior, had gone to work long before. The big son of the house was idle. He was a marble-cutter, and the marble-cutters were out on a strike.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What ails ye?” asked his mother, looking at him curiously; “are ye not feeling well the morning, maybe now?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“He’s thinking along of Annie Maria Doyle,” impudently explained younger brother Tim, ten years old.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Tiger” reached over the hand of a champion and swept the small McQuirk from his chair.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I feel fine,” said he, “beyond a touch of the I-don’t-know-what-you-call-its. I feel like there was going to be earthquakes or music or a trifle of chills and fever or maybe a picnic. I don’t know how I feel. I feel like knocking the face off a policeman, or else maybe like playing Coney Island straight across the board from pop-corn to the elephant houdahs.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s the spring in yer bones,” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McQuirk. “It’s the sap risin’. Time was when I couldn’t keep me feet still nor me head cool when the earthworms began to crawl out in the dew of the mornin’. ’Tis a bit of tea will do ye good, made from pipsissewa and gentian bark at the druggist’s.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Back up!” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McQuirk, impatiently. “There’s no spring in sight. There’s snow yet on the shed in Donovan’s backyard. And yesterday they puts open cars on the Sixth Avenue lines, and the janitors have quit ordering coal. And that means six weeks more of winter, by all the signs that be.”</p>
|
||||
<p>After breakfast <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McQuirk spent fifteen minutes before the corrugated mirror, subjugating his hair and arranging his green-and-purple ascot with its amethyst tombstone pin—eloquent of his chosen calling.</p>
|
||||
<p>Since the strike had been called it was this particular striker’s habit to hie himself each morning to the corner saloon of Flaherty Brothers, and there establish himself upon the sidewalk, with one foot resting on the bootblack’s stand, observing the panorama of the street until the pace of time brought twelve o’clock and the dinner hour. And <abbr>Mr.</abbr> “Tiger” McQuirk, with his athletic seventy inches, well trained in sport and battle; his smooth, pale, solid, amiable face—blue where the razor had travelled; his carefully considered clothes and air of capability, was himself a spectacle not displeasing to the eye.</p>
|
||||
<p>But on this morning <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McQuirk did not hasten immediately to his post of leisure and observation. Something unusual that he could not quite grasp was in the air. Something disturbed his thoughts, ruffled his senses, made him at once languid, irritable, elated, dissastisfied and sportive. He was no diagnostician, and he did not know that Lent was breaking up physiologically in his system.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McQuirk had spoken of spring. Sceptically Tiger looked about him for signs. Few they were. The organ-grinders were at work; but they were always precocious harbingers. It was near enough spring for them to go penny-hunting when the skating ball dropped at the park. In the milliners’ windows Easter hats, grave, gay and jubilant, blossomed. There were green patches among the sidewalk debris of the grocers. On a third-story window-sill the first elbow cushion of the season—old gold stripes on a crimson ground—supported the kimonoed arms of a pensive brunette. The wind blew cold from the East River, but the sparrows were flying to the eaves with straws. A second-hand store, combining foresight with faith, had set out an ice-chest and baseball goods.</p>
|
||||
<p>And then “Tiger’s” eye, discrediting these signs, fell upon one that bore a bud of promise. From a bright, new lithograph the head of Capricornus confronted him, betokening the forward and heady brew.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> McQuirk entered the saloon and called for his glass of bock. He threw his nickel on the bar, raised the glass, set it down without tasting it and strolled toward the door.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Wot’s the matter, Lord Bolinbroke?” inquired the sarcastic bartender; “want a chiny vase or a gold-lined épergne to drink it out of—hey?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McQuirk, wheeling and shooting out a horizontal hand and a forty-five-degree chin, “you know your place only when it comes for givin’ titles. I’ve changed me mind about drinkin—see? You got your money, ain’t you? Wait till you get stung before you get the droop to your lip, will you?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Thus <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Quirk added mutability of desires to the strange humors that had taken possession of him.</p>
|
||||
<p>Leaving the saloon, he walked away twenty steps and leaned in the open doorway of Lutz, the barber. He and Lutz were friends, masking their sentiments behind abuse and bludgeons of repartee.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Irish loafer,” roared Lutz, “how do you do? So, not yet haf der bolicemans or der catcher of dogs done deir duty!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hello, Dutch,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McQuirk. “Can’t get your mind off of frankfurters, can you?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Bah!” exclaimed the German, coming and leaning in the door. “I haf a soul above frankfurters to-day. Dere is springtime in der air. I can feel it coming in ofer der mud of der streets and das ice in der river. Soon will dere be bicnics in der islands, mit kegs of beer under der trees.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McQuirk, setting his hat on one side, “is everybody kiddin’ me about gentle Spring? There ain’t any more spring in the air than there is in a horsehair sofa in a Second Avenue furnished room. For me the winter underwear yet and the buckwheat cakes.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You haf no boetry,” said Lutz. “True, it is yedt cold, und in der city we haf not many of der signs; but dere are dree kinds of beoble dot should always feel der approach of spring first—dey are boets, lovers and poor vidows.”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> McQuirk went on his way, still possessed by the strange perturbation that he did not understand. Something was lacking to his comfort, and it made him half angry because he did not know what it was.</p>
|
||||
<p>Two blocks away he came upon a foe, one Conover, whom he was bound in honor to engage in combat.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> McQuirk made the attack with the characteristic suddenness and fierceness that had gained for him the endearing sobriquet of “Tiger.” The defence of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Conover was so prompt and admirable that the conflict was protracted until the onlookers unselfishly gave the warning cry of “Cheese it—the cop!” The principals escaped easily by running through the nearest open doors into the communicating backyards at the rear of the houses.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> McQuirk emerged into another street. He stood by a lamp-post for a few minutes engaged in thought and then he turned and plunged into a small notion and news shop. A red-haired young woman, eating gum-drops, came and looked freezingly at him across the ice-bound steppes of the counter.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say, lady,” he said, “have you got a song book with this in it. Let’s see how it leads off—</p>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:song">
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<span>“ ‘When the springtime comes we’ll wander in the dale, love,</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>And whisper of those days of yore—’</span>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>“I’m having a friend,” explained <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McQuirk, “laid up with a broken leg, and he sent me after it. He’s a devil for songs and poetry when he can’t get out to drink.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“We have not,” replied the young woman, with unconcealed contempt. “But there is a new song out that begins this way:</p>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:song">
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<span>“ ‘Let us sit together in the old arm-chair;</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>And while the firelight flickers we’ll be comfortable there.’ ”</span>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>There will be no profit in following <abbr>Mr.</abbr> “Tiger” McQuirk through his further vagaries of that day until he comes to stand knocking at the door of Annie Maria Doyle. The goddess Eastre, it seems, had guided his footsteps aright at last.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Is that you now, Jimmy McQuirk?” she cried, smiling through the opened door (Annie Maria had never accepted the “Tiger”). “Well, whatever!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Come out in the hall,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McQuirk. “I want to ask yer opinion of the weather—on the level.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Are you crazy, sure?” said Annie Maria.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am,” said the “Tiger.” “They’ve been telling me all day there was spring in the air. Were they liars? Or am I?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Dear me!” said Annie Maria—“haven’t you noticed it? I can almost smell the violets. And the green grass. Of course, there ain’t any yet—it’s just a kind of feeling, you know.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“That’s what I’m getting at,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McQuirk. “I’ve had it. I didn’t recognize it at first. I thought maybe it was en-wee, contracted the other day when I stepped above Fourteenth Street. But the katzenjammer I’ve got don’t spell violets. It spells yer own name, Annie Maria, and it’s you I want. I go to work next Monday, and I make four dollars a day. Spiel up, old girl—do we make a team?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Jimmy,” sighed Annie Maria, suddenly disappearing in his overcoat, “don’t you see that spring is all over the world right this minute?”</p>
|
||||
<p>But you yourself remember how that day ended. Beginning with so fine a promise of vernal things, late in the afternoon the air chilled and an inch of snow fell—even so late in March. On Fifth Avenue the ladies drew their winter furs close about them. Only in the florists’ windows could be perceived any signs of the morning smile of the coming goddess Eastre.</p>
|
||||
<p>At six o’clock Herr Lutz began to close his shop. He heard a well-known shout: “Hello, Dutch!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Tiger” McQuirk, in his shirt-sleeves, with his hat on the back of his head, stood outside in the whirling snow, puffing at a black cigar.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Donnerwetter!” shouted Lutz, “der vinter, he has gome back again yet!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yer a liar, Dutch,” called back <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McQuirk, with friendly geniality, “it’s springtime, by the watch.”</p>
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<title>Chapter 18</title>
|
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<title>The Fool-Killer</title>
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<section id="chapter-18" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>THE FOOL-KILLER</h2>
|
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<section id="the-fool-killer" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
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<h2 epub:type="title">The Fool-Killer</h2>
|
||||
<p>Down South whenever any one perpetrates some particularly monumental piece of foolishness everybody says: “Send for Jesse Holmes.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Jesse Holmes is the Fool-Killer. Of course he is a myth, like Santa Claus and Jack Frost and General Prosperity and all those concrete conceptions that are supposed to represent an idea that Nature has failed to embody. The wisest of the Southrons cannot tell you whence comes the Fool-Killer’s name; but few and happy are the households from the Roanoke to the Rio Grande in which the name of Jesse Holmes has not been pronounced or invoked. Always with a smile, and often with a tear, is he summoned to his official duty. A busy man is Jesse Holmes.</p>
|
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<p>I remember the clear picture of him that hung on the walls of my fancy during my barefoot days when I was dodging his oft-threatened devoirs. To me he was a terrible old man, in gray clothes, with a long, ragged, gray beard, and reddish, fierce eyes. I looked to see him come stumping up the road in a cloud of dust, with a white oak staff in his hand and his shoes tied with leather thongs. I may yet—</p>
|
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<p>But this is a story, not a sequel.</p>
|
||||
<p>I have taken notice with regret, that few stories worth reading have been written that did not contain drink of some sort. Down go the fluids, from Arizona Dick’s three fingers of red pizen to the inefficacious Oolong that nerves Lionel Montressor to repartee in the “Dotty Dialogues.” So, in such good company I may introduce an absinthe drip—one absinthe drip, dripped through a silver dripper, orderly, opalescent, cool, green-eyed—deceptive.</p>
|
||||
<p>Kerner was a fool. Besides that, he was an artist and my good friend. Now, if there is one thing on earth utterly despicable to another, it is an artist in the eyes of an author whose story he has illustrated. Just try it once. Write a story about a mining camp in Idaho. Sell it. Spend the money, and then, six months later, borrow a quarter (or a dime), and buy the magazine containing it. You find a full-page wash drawing of your hero, Black Bill, the cowboy. Somewhere in your story you employed the word “horse.” Aha! the artist has grasped the idea. Black Bill has on the regulation trousers of the M. F. H. of the Westchester County Hunt. He carries a parlor rifle, and wears a monocle. In the distance is a section of Forty-second Street during a search for a lost gas-pipe, and the Taj Mahal, the famous mausoleum in India.</p>
|
||||
<p>Enough! I hated Kerner, and one day I met him and we became friends. He was young and gloriously melancholy because his spirits were so high and life had so much in store for him. Yes, he was almost riotously sad. That was his youth. When a man begins to be hilarious in a sorrowful way you can bet a million that he is dyeing his hair. Kerner’s hair was plentiful and carefully matted as an artist’s thatch should be. He was a cigaretteur, and he audited his dinners with red wine. But, most of all, he was a fool. And, wisely, I envied him, and listened patiently while he knocked Velasquez and Tintoretto. Once he told me that he liked a story of mine that he had come across in an anthology. He described it to me, and I was sorry that Mr. Fitz-James O’Brien was dead and could not learn of the eulogy of his work. But mostly Kerner made few breaks and was a consistent fool.</p>
|
||||
<p>Enough! I hated Kerner, and one day I met him and we became friends. He was young and gloriously melancholy because his spirits were so high and life had so much in store for him. Yes, he was almost riotously sad. That was his youth. When a man begins to be hilarious in a sorrowful way you can bet a million that he is dyeing his hair. Kerner’s hair was plentiful and carefully matted as an artist’s thatch should be. He was a cigaretteur, and he audited his dinners with red wine. But, most of all, he was a fool. And, wisely, I envied him, and listened patiently while he knocked Velasquez and Tintoretto. Once he told me that he liked a story of mine that he had come across in an anthology. He described it to me, and I was sorry that <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Fitz-James O’Brien was dead and could not learn of the eulogy of his work. But mostly Kerner made few breaks and was a consistent fool.</p>
|
||||
<p>I’d better explain what I mean by that. There was a girl. Now, a girl, as far as I am concerned, is a thing that belongs in a seminary or an album; but I conceded the existence of the animal in order to retain Kerner’s friendship. He showed me her picture in a locket—she was a blonde or a brunette—I have forgotten which. She worked in a factory for eight dollars a week. Lest factories quote this wage by way of vindication, I will add that the girl had worked for five years to reach that supreme elevation of remuneration, beginning at $1.50 per week.</p>
|
||||
<p>Kerner’s father was worth a couple of millions He was willing to stand for art, but he drew the line at the factory girl. So Kerner disinherited his father and walked out to a cheap studio and lived on sausages for breakfast and on Farroni for dinner. Farroni had the artistic soul and a line of credit for painters and poets, nicely adjusted. Sometimes Kerner sold a picture and bought some new tapestry, a ring and a dozen silk cravats, and paid Farroni two dollars on account.</p>
|
||||
<p>One evening Kerner had me to dinner with himself and the factory girl. They were to be married as soon as Kerner could slosh paint profitably. As for the ex-father’s two millions—pouf!</p>
|
||||
@ -59,7 +59,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“You are Jesse Holmes, the Fool-Killer,” I said, solemnly, “and you are going to kill my friend Kerner. I don’t know who rang you up, but if you do kill him I’ll see that you get pinched for it. That is,” I added, despairingly, “if I can get a cop to see you. They have a poor eye for mortals, and I think it would take the whole force to round up a myth murderer.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well,” said the Fool-Killer, briskly, “I must be going. You had better go home and sleep it off. Good-night.”</p>
|
||||
<p>At this I was moved by a sudden fear for Kerner to a softer and more pleading mood. I leaned against the gray man’s sleeve and besought him:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Good Mr. Fool-Killer, please don’t kill little Kerner. Why can’t you go back South and kill Congressmen and clay-eaters and let us alone? Why don’t you go up on Fifth Avenue and kill millionaires that keep their money locked up and won’t let young fools marry because one of ’em lives on the wrong street? Come and have a drink, Jesse. Will you never get on to your job?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Good <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Fool-Killer, please don’t kill little Kerner. Why can’t you go back South and kill Congressmen and clay-eaters and let us alone? Why don’t you go up on Fifth Avenue and kill millionaires that keep their money locked up and won’t let young fools marry because one of ’em lives on the wrong street? Come and have a drink, Jesse. Will you never get on to your job?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Do you know this girl that your friend has made himself a fool about?” asked the Fool-Killer.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have the honor,” said I, “and that’s why I called Kerner a fool. He is a fool because he has waited so long before marrying her. He is a fool because he has been waiting in the hopes of getting the consent of some absurd two-million-dollar-fool parent or something of the sort.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Maybe,” said the Fool-Killer—“maybe I—I might have looked at it differently. Would you mind going back to the restaurant and bringing your friend Kerner here?”</p>
|
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<title>The Harbinger</title>
|
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<section id="the-harbinger" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
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<h2 epub:type="title">The Harbinger</h2>
|
||||
<p>Long before the springtide is felt in the dull bosom of the yokel does the city man know that the grass-green goddess is upon her throne. He sits at his breakfast eggs and toast, begirt by stone walls, opens his morning paper and sees journalism leave vernalism at the post.</p>
|
||||
<p>For, whereas, spring’s couriers were once the evidence of our finer senses, now the Associated Press does the trick.</p>
|
||||
<p>The warble of the first robin in Hackensack, the stirring of the maple sap in Bennington, the budding of the pussy willows along Main Street in Syracuse, the first chirp of the bluebird, the swan song of the Blue Point, the annual tornado in <abbr>St.</abbr> Louis, the plaint of the peach pessimist from Pompton, N. J., the regular visit of the tame wild goose with a broken leg to the pond near Bilgewater Junction, the base attempt of the Drug Trust to boost the price of quinine foiled in the House by Congressman Jinks, the first tall poplar struck by lightning and the usual stunned picknickers who had taken refuge, the first crack of the ice jam in the Allegheny River, the finding of a violet in its mossy bed by the correspondent at Round Corners—these are the advance signs of the burgeoning season that are wired into the wise city, while the farmer sees nothing but winter upon his dreary fields.</p>
|
||||
<p>But these be mere externals. The true harbinger is the heart. When Strephon seeks his Chloe and Mike his Maggie, then only is spring arrived and the newspaper report of the five-foot rattler killed in Squire Pettigrew’s pasture confirmed.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ere the first violet blew, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ragsdale and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kidd sat together on a bench in Union Square and conspired. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters was the D’Artagnan of the loafers there. He was the dingiest, the laziest, the sorriest brown blot against the green background of any bench in the park. But just then he was the most important of the trio.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters had a wife. This had not heretofore affected his standing with Ragsy and Kidd. But to-day it invested him with a peculiar interest. His friends, having escaped matrimony, had shown a disposition to deride <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters for his venture on that troubled sea. But at last they had been forced to acknowledge that either he had been gifted with a large foresight or that he was one of Fortune’s lucky sons.</p>
|
||||
<p>For, <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Peters had a dollar. A whole dollar bill, good and receivable by the Government for customs, taxes and all public dues. How to get possession of that dollar was the question up for discussion by the three musty musketeers.</p>
|
||||
<p>“How do you know it was a dollar?” asked Ragsy, the immensity of the sum inclining him to scepticism.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The coalman seen her have it,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters. “She went out and done some washing yesterday. And look what she give me for breakfast—the heel of a loaf and a cup of coffee, and her with a dollar!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s fierce,” said Ragsy.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say we go up and punch ‘er and stick a towel in ‘er mouth and cop the coin” suggested Kidd, viciously. “Y’ ain’t afraid of a woman, are you?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“She might holler and have us pinched,” demurred Ragsy. “I don’t believe in slugging no woman in a houseful of people.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Gent’men,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters, severely, through his russet stubble, “remember that you are speaking of my wife. A man who would lift his hand to a lady except in the way of—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Maguire,” said Ragsy, pointedly, “has got his bock beer sign out. If we had a dollar we could—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hush up!” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters, licking his lips. “We got to get that case note somehow, boys. Ain’t what’s a man’s wife’s his? Leave it to me. I’ll go over to the house and get it. Wait here for me.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve seen ’em give up quick, and tell you where it’s hid if you kick ’em in the ribs,” said Kidd.</p>
|
||||
<p>“No man would kick a woman,” said Peters, virtuously. “A little choking—just a touch on the windpipe—that gets away with ’em—and no marks left. Wait for me. I’ll bring back that dollar, boys.”</p>
|
||||
<p>High up in a tenement-house between Second Avenue and the river lived the Peterses in a back room so gloomy that the landlord blushed to take the rent for it. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Peters worked at sundry times, doing odd jobs of scrubbing and washing. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters had a pure, unbroken record of five years without having earned a penny. And yet they clung together, sharing each other’s hatred and misery, being creatures of habit. Of habit, the power that keeps the earth from flying to pieces; though there is some silly theory of gravitation.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Peters reposed her 200 pounds on the safer of the two chairs and gazed stolidly out the one window at the brick wall opposite. Her eyes were red and damp. The furniture could have been carried away on a pushcart, but no pushcart man would have removed it as a gift.</p>
|
||||
<p>The door opened to admit <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters. His fox-terrier eyes expressed a wish. His wife’s diagnosis located correctly the seat of it, but misread it hunger instead of thirst.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’ll get nothing more to eat till night,” she said, looking out of the window again. “Take your hound-dog’s face out of the room.”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters’s eye calculated the distance between them. By taking her by surprise it might be possible to spring upon her, overthrow her, and apply the throttling tactics of which he had boasted to his waiting comrades. True, it had been only a boast; never yet had he dared to lay violent hands upon her; but with the thoughts of the delicious, cool bock or Culmbacher bracing his nerves, he was near to upsetting his own theories of the treatment due by a gentleman to a lady. But, with his loafer’s love for the more artistic and less strenuous way, he chose diplomacy first, the high card in the game—the assumed attitude of success already attained.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You have a dollar,” he said, loftily, but significantly in the tone that goes with the lighting of a cigar—when the properties are at hand.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have,” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Peters, producing the bill from her bosom and crackling it, teasingly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am offered a position in a—in a tea store,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters. “I am to begin work to-morrow. But it will be necessary for me to buy a pair of—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You are a liar,” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Peters, reinterring the note. “No tea store, nor no A B C store, nor no junk shop would have you. I rubbed the skin off both me hands washin’ jumpers and overalls to make that dollar. Do you think it come out of them suds to buy the kind you put into you? Skiddoo! Get your mind off of money.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Evidently the poses of Talleyrand were not worth one hundred cents on that dollar. But diplomacy is dexterous. The artistic temperament of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters lifted him by the straps of his congress gaiters and set him on new ground. He called up a look of desperate melancholy to his eyes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Clara,” he said, hollowly, “to struggle further is useless. You have always misunderstood me. Heaven knows I have striven with all my might to keep my head above the waves of misfortune, but—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Cut out the rainbow of hope and that stuff about walkin’ one by one through the narrow isles of Spain,” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Peters, with a sigh. “I’ve heard it so often. There’s an ounce bottle of carbolic on the shelf behind the empty coffee can. Drink hearty.”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters reflected. What next! The old expedients had failed. The two musty musketeers were awaiting him hard by the ruined château—that is to say, on a park bench with rickety cast-iron legs. His honor was at stake. He had engaged to storm the castle single-handed and bring back the treasure that was to furnish them wassail and solace. And all that stood between him and the coveted dollar was his wife, once a little girl whom he could—aha!—why not again? Once with soft words he could, as they say, twist her around his little finger. Why not again? Not for years had he tried it. Grim poverty and mutual hatred had killed all that. But Ragsy and Kidd were waiting for him to bring the dollar!</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters took a surreptitiously keen look at his wife. Her formless bulk overflowed the chair. She kept her eyes fixed out the window in a strange kind of trance. Her eyes showed that she had been recently weeping.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I wonder,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters to himself, “if there’d be anything in it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The window was open upon its outlook of brick walls and drab, barren back yards. Except for the mildness of the air that entered it might have been midwinter yet in the city that turns such a frowning face to besieging spring. But spring doesn’t come with the thunder of cannon. She is a sapper and a miner, and you must capitulate.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ll try it,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters to himself, making a wry face.</p>
|
||||
<p>He went up to his wife and put his arm across her shoulders.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Clara, darling,” he said in tones that shouldn’t have fooled a baby seal, “why should we have hard words? Ain’t you my own tootsum wootsum?”</p>
|
||||
<p>A black mark against you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters, in the sacred ledger of Cupid. Charges of attempted graft are filed against you, and of forgery and utterance of two of Love’s holiest of appellations.</p>
|
||||
<p>But the miracle of spring was wrought. Into the back room over the back alley between the black walls had crept the Harbinger. It was ridiculous, and yet—Well, it is a rat trap, and you, madam and sir and all of us, are in it.</p>
|
||||
<p>Red and fat and crying like Niobe or Niagara, <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Peters threw her arms around her lord and dissolved upon him. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters would have striven to extricate the dollar bill from its deposit vault, but his arms were bound to his sides.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Do you love me, James?” asked <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Peters.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Madly,” said James, “but—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You are ill!” exclaimed <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Peters. “Why are you so pale and tired looking?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I feel weak,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters. “I—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, wait; I know what it is. Wait, James. I’ll be back in a minute.”</p>
|
||||
<p>With a parting hug that revived in <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters recollections of the Terrible Turk, his wife hurried out of the room and down the stairs.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters hitched his thumbs under his suspenders.</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right,” he confided to the ceiling. “I’ve got her going. I hadn’t any idea the old girl was soft any more under the foolish rib. Well, sir; ain’t I the Claude Melnotte of the lower East Side? What? It’s a 100 to 1 shot that I get the dollar. I wonder what she went out for. I guess she’s gone to tell <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Muldoon on the second floor, that we’re reconciled. I’ll remember this. Soft soap! And Ragsy was talking about slugging her!”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Peters came back with a bottle of sarsaparilla.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m glad I happened to have that dollar,” she said. “You’re all run down, honey.”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters had a tablespoonful of the stuff inserted into him. Then <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Peters sat on his lap and murmured:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Call me tootsum wootsums again, James.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He sat still, held there by his materialized goddess of spring.</p>
|
||||
<p>Spring had come.</p>
|
||||
<p>On the bench in Union Square <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ragsdale and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kidd squirmed, tongue-parched, awaiting D’Artagnan and his dollar.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I wish I had choked her at first,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters to himself.</p>
|
||||
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<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 25</title>
|
||||
<title>The Memento</title>
|
||||
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<section id="chapter-25" epub:type="chapter">
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||||
<h2>THE MEMENTO</h2>
|
||||
<section id="the-memento" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Memento</h2>
|
||||
<p>Miss Lynnette D’Armande turned her back on Broadway. This was but tit for tat, because Broadway had often done the same thing to Miss D’Armande. Still, the “tats” seemed to have it, for the ex-leading lady of the “Reaping the Whirlwind” company had everything to ask of Broadway, while there was no vice-versâ.</p>
|
||||
<p>So Miss Lynnette D’Armande turned the back of her chair to her window that overlooked Broadway, and sat down to stitch in time the lisle-thread heel of a black silk stocking. The tumult and glitter of the roaring Broadway beneath her window had no charm for her; what she greatly desired was the stifling air of a dressing-room on that fairyland street and the roar of an audience gathered in that capricious quarter. In the meantime, those stockings must not be neglected. Silk does wear out so, but—after all, isn’t it just the only goods there is?</p>
|
||||
<p>The Hotel Thalia looks on Broadway as Marathon looks on the sea. It stands like a gloomy cliff above the whirlpool where the tides of two great thoroughfares clash. Here the player-bands gather at the end of their wanderings, to loosen the buskin and dust the sock. Thick in the streets around it are booking-offices, theatres, agents, schools, and the lobster-palaces to which those thorny paths lead.</p>
|
||||
<p>Wandering through the eccentric halls of the dim and fusty Thalia, you seem to have found yourself in some great ark or caravan about to sail, or fly, or roll away on wheels. About the house lingers a sense of unrest, of expectation, of transientness, even of anxiety and apprehension. The halls are a labyrinth. Without a guide, you wander like a lost soul in a Sam Loyd puzzle.</p>
|
||||
<p>Turning any corner, a dressing-sack or a <i>cul-de-sac</i> may bring you up short. You meet alarming tragedians stalking in bath-robes in search of rumored bathrooms. From hundreds of rooms come the buzz of talk, scraps of new and old songs, and the ready laughter of the convened players.</p>
|
||||
<p>Turning any corner, a dressing-sack or a cul-de-sac may bring you up short. You meet alarming tragedians stalking in bath-robes in search of rumored bathrooms. From hundreds of rooms come the buzz of talk, scraps of new and old songs, and the ready laughter of the convened players.</p>
|
||||
<p>Summer has come; their companies have disbanded, and they take their rest in their favorite caravansary, while they besiege the managers for engagements for the coming season.</p>
|
||||
<p>At this hour of the afternoon the day’s work of tramping the rounds of the agents’ offices is over. Past you, as you ramble distractedly through the mossy halls, flit audible visions of houris, with veiled, starry eyes, flying tag-ends of things and a swish of silk, bequeathing to the dull hallways an odor of gaiety and a memory of <i>frangipanni</i>. Serious young comedians, with versatile Adam’s apples, gather in doorways and talk of Booth. Far-reaching from somewhere comes the smell of ham and red cabbage, and the crash of dishes on the American plan.</p>
|
||||
<p>At this hour of the afternoon the day’s work of tramping the rounds of the agents’ offices is over. Past you, as you ramble distractedly through the mossy halls, flit audible visions of houris, with veiled, starry eyes, flying tag-ends of things and a swish of silk, bequeathing to the dull hallways an odor of gaiety and a memory of frangipanni. Serious young comedians, with versatile Adam’s apples, gather in doorways and talk of Booth. Far-reaching from somewhere comes the smell of ham and red cabbage, and the crash of dishes on the American plan.</p>
|
||||
<p>The indeterminate hum of life in the Thalia is enlivened by the discreet popping—at reasonable and salubrious intervals—of beer-bottle corks. Thus punctuated, life in the genial hostel scans easily—the comma being the favorite mark, semicolons frowned upon, and periods barred.</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss D’Armande’s room was a small one. There was room for her rocker between the dresser and the wash-stand if it were placed longitudinally. On the dresser were its usual accoutrements, plus the ex-leading lady’s collected souvenirs of road engagements and photographs of her dearest and best professional friends.</p>
|
||||
<p>At one of these photographs she looked twice or thrice as she darned, and smiled friendlily.</p>
|
||||
@ -31,7 +31,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“I’ve got the hall-room two flights up above yours,” said Rosalie, “but I came straight to see you before going up. I didn’t know you were here till they told me.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve been in since the last of April,” said Lynnette. “And I’m going on the road with a ‘Fatal Inheritance’ company. We open next week in Elizabeth. I thought you’d quit the stage, Lee. Tell me about yourself.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Rosalie settled herself with a skilful wriggle on the top of Miss D’Armande’s wardrobe trunk, and leaned her head against the papered wall. From long habit, thus can peripatetic leading ladies and their sisters make themselves as comfortable as though the deepest armchairs embraced them.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m going to tell you, Lynn,” she said, with a strangely sardonic and yet carelessly resigned look on her youthful face. “And then to-morrow I’ll strike the old Broadway trail again, and wear some more paint off the chairs in the agents’ offices. If anybody had told me any time in the last three months up to four o’clock this afternoon that I’d ever listen to that ‘Leave-your-name-and-address’ rot of the booking bunch again, I’d have given ’em the real Mrs. Fiske laugh. Loan me a handkerchief, Lynn. Gee! but those Long Island trains are fierce. I’ve got enough soft-coal cinders on my face to go on and play <i>Topsy</i> without using the cork. And, speaking of corks—got anything to drink, Lynn?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m going to tell you, Lynn,” she said, with a strangely sardonic and yet carelessly resigned look on her youthful face. “And then to-morrow I’ll strike the old Broadway trail again, and wear some more paint off the chairs in the agents’ offices. If anybody had told me any time in the last three months up to four o’clock this afternoon that I’d ever listen to that ‘Leave-your-name-and-address’ rot of the booking bunch again, I’d have given ’em the real <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Fiske laugh. Loan me a handkerchief, Lynn. Gee! but those Long Island trains are fierce. I’ve got enough soft-coal cinders on my face to go on and play Topsy without using the cork. And, speaking of corks—got anything to drink, Lynn?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss D’Armande opened a door of the wash-stand and took out a bottle.</p>
|
||||
<p>“There’s nearly a pint of Manhattan. There’s a cluster of carnations in the drinking glass, but—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, pass the bottle. Save the glass for company. Thanks! That hits the spot. The same to you. My first drink in three months!</p>
|
||||
@ -49,11 +49,11 @@
|
||||
<p>“I’ll spare you the particulars; but in less than a month Arthur and I were engaged. He preached at a little one-night stand of a Methodist church. There was to be a parsonage the size of a lunch-wagon, and hens and honeysuckles when we were married. Arthur used to preach to me a good deal about Heaven, but he never could get my mind quite off those honeysuckles and hens.</p>
|
||||
<p>“No; I didn’t tell him I’d been on the stage. I hated the business and all that went with it; I’d cut it out forever, and I didn’t see any use of stirring things up. I was a good girl, and I didn’t have anything to confess, except being an elocutionist, and that was about all the strain my conscience would stand.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, I tell you, Lynn, I was happy. I sang in the choir and attended the sewing society, and recited that ‘Annie Laurie’ thing with the whistling stunt in it, ‘in a manner bordering upon the professional,’ as the weekly village paper reported it. And Arthur and I went rowing, and walking in the woods, and clamming, and that poky little village seemed to me the best place in the world. I’d have been happy to live there always, too, if—</p>
|
||||
<p>“But one morning old Mrs. Gurley, the widow lady, got gossipy while I was helping her string beans on the back porch, and began to gush information, as folks who rent out their rooms usually do. Mr. Lyle was her idea of a saint on earth—as he was mine, too. She went over all his virtues and graces, and wound up by telling me that Arthur had had an extremely romantic love-affair, not long before, that had ended unhappily. She didn’t seem to be on to the details, but she knew that he had been hit pretty hard. He was paler and thinner, she said, and he had some kind of a remembrance or keepsake of the lady in a little rosewood box that he kept locked in his desk drawer in his study.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But one morning old <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Gurley, the widow lady, got gossipy while I was helping her string beans on the back porch, and began to gush information, as folks who rent out their rooms usually do. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Lyle was her idea of a saint on earth—as he was mine, too. She went over all his virtues and graces, and wound up by telling me that Arthur had had an extremely romantic love-affair, not long before, that had ended unhappily. She didn’t seem to be on to the details, but she knew that he had been hit pretty hard. He was paler and thinner, she said, and he had some kind of a remembrance or keepsake of the lady in a little rosewood box that he kept locked in his desk drawer in his study.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Several times,’ says she, ‘I’ve seen him gloomerin’ over that box of evenings, and he always locks it up right away if anybody comes into the room.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, you can imagine how long it was before I got Arthur by the wrist and led him down stage and hissed in his ear.</p>
|
||||
<p>“That same afternoon we were lazying around in a boat among the water-lilies at the edge of the bay.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Arthur,’ says I, ‘you never told me you’d had another love-affair. But Mrs. Gurley did,’ I went on, to let him know I knew. I hate to hear a man lie.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Arthur,’ says I, ‘you never told me you’d had another love-affair. But <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Gurley did,’ I went on, to let him know I knew. I hate to hear a man lie.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Before you came,’ says he, looking me frankly in the eye, ‘there was a previous affection—a strong one. Since you know of it, I will be perfectly candid with you.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I am waiting,’ says I.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘My dear Ida,’ says Arthur—of course I went by my real name, while I was in Soundport—‘this former affection was a spiritual one, in fact. Although the lady aroused my deepest sentiments, and was, as I thought, my ideal woman, I never met her, and never spoke to her. It was an ideal love. My love for you, while no less ideal, is different. You wouldn’t let that come between us.’</p>
|
||||
@ -77,14 +77,14 @@
|
||||
<p>“And it did, Lynn—if you can understand it. That ideal love was a new one on me, but it struck me as being the most beautiful and glorious thing I’d ever heard of. Think of a man loving a woman he’d never even spoken to, and being faithful just to what his mind and heart pictured her! Oh, it sounded great to me. The men I’d always known come at you with either diamonds, knock-out-drops or a raise of salary—and their ideals!—well, we’ll say no more.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes, it made me think more of Arthur than I did before. I couldn’t be jealous of that far-away divinity that he used to worship, for I was going to have him myself. And I began to look upon him as a saint on earth, just as old lady Gurley did.</p>
|
||||
<p>“About four o’clock this afternoon a man came to the house for Arthur to go and see somebody that was sick among his church bunch. Old lady Gurley was taking her afternoon snore on a couch, so that left me pretty much alone.</p>
|
||||
<p>“In passing by Arthur’s study I looked in, and saw his bunch of keys hanging in the drawer of his desk, where he’d forgotten ’em. Well, I guess we’re all to the Mrs. Bluebeard now and then, ain’t we, Lynn? I made up my mind I’d have a look at that memento he kept so secret. Not that I cared what it was—it was just curiosity.</p>
|
||||
<p>“In passing by Arthur’s study I looked in, and saw his bunch of keys hanging in the drawer of his desk, where he’d forgotten ’em. Well, I guess we’re all to the <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Bluebeard now and then, ain’t we, Lynn? I made up my mind I’d have a look at that memento he kept so secret. Not that I cared what it was—it was just curiosity.</p>
|
||||
<p>“While I was opening the drawer I imagined one or two things it might be. I thought it might be a dried rosebud she’d dropped down to him from a balcony, or maybe a picture of her he’d cut out of a magazine, she being so high up in the world.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I opened the drawer, and there was the rosewood casket about the size of a gent’s collar box. I found the little key in the bunch that fitted it, and unlocked it and raised the lid.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I took one look at that memento, and then I went to my room and packed my trunk. I threw a few things into my grip, gave my hair a flirt or two with a side-comb, put on my hat, and went in and gave the old lady’s foot a kick. I’d tried awfully hard to use proper and correct language while I was there for Arthur’s sake, and I had the habit down pat, but it left me then.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Stop sawing gourds,’ says I, ‘and sit up and take notice. The ghost’s about to walk. I’m going away from here, and I owe you eight dollars. The expressman will call for my trunk.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“I handed her the money.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Dear me, Miss Crosby!’ says she. ‘Is anything wrong? I thought you were pleased here. Dear me, young women are so hard to understand, and so different from what you expect ’em to be.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You’re damn right,’ says I. ‘Some of ’em are. But you can’t say that about men. <i>When you know one man you know ’em all!</i> That settles the human-race question.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You’re damn right,’ says I. ‘Some of ’em are. But you can’t say that about men. <em>When you know one man you know ’em all!</em> That settles the human-race question.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“And then I caught the four-thirty-eight, soft-coal unlimited; and here I am.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You didn’t tell me what was in the box, Lee,” said Miss D’armande, anxiously.</p>
|
||||
<p>“One of those yellow silk garters that I used to kick off my leg into the audience during that old vaudeville swing act of mine. Is there any of the cocktail left, Lynn?”</p>
|
@ -1,15 +1,15 @@
|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 12</title>
|
||||
<title>The Plutonian Fire</title>
|
||||
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|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-12" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE PLUTONIAN FIRE</h2>
|
||||
<section id="the-plutonian-fire" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Plutonian Fire</h2>
|
||||
<p>There are a few editor men with whom I am privileged to come in contact. It has not been long since it was their habit to come in contact with me. There is a difference.</p>
|
||||
<p>They tell me that with a large number of the manuscripts that are submitted to them come advices (in the way of a boost) from the author asseverating that the incidents in the story are true. The destination of such contributions depends wholly upon the question of the enclosure of stamps. Some are returned, the rest are thrown on the floor in a corner on top of a pair of gum shoes, an overturned statuette of the Winged Victory, and a pile of old magazines containing a picture of the editor in the act of reading the latest copy of <i>Le Petit Journal</i>, right side up—you can tell by the illustrations. It is only a legend that there are waste baskets in editors’ offices.</p>
|
||||
<p>They tell me that with a large number of the manuscripts that are submitted to them come advices (in the way of a boost) from the author asseverating that the incidents in the story are true. The destination of such contributions depends wholly upon the question of the enclosure of stamps. Some are returned, the rest are thrown on the floor in a corner on top of a pair of gum shoes, an overturned statuette of the Winged Victory, and a pile of old magazines containing a picture of the editor in the act of reading the latest copy of <i epub:type="se:name.publication.journal">Le Petit Journal</i>, right side up—you can tell by the illustrations. It is only a legend that there are waste baskets in editors’ offices.</p>
|
||||
<p>Thus is truth held in disrepute. But in time truth and science and nature will adapt themselves to art. Things will happen logically, and the villain be discomfited instead of being elected to the board of directors. But in the meantime fiction must not only be divorced from fact, but must pay alimony and be awarded custody of the press despatches.</p>
|
||||
<p>This preamble is to warn you off the grade crossing of a true story. Being that, it shall be told simply, with conjunctions substituted for adjectives wherever possible, and whatever evidences of style may appear in it shall be due to the linotype man. It is a story of the literary life in a great city, and it should be of interest to every author within a 20-mile radius of Gosport, Ind., whose desk holds a MS. story beginning thus: “While the cheers following his nomination were still ringing through the old court-house, Harwood broke away from the congratulating handclasps of his henchmen and hurried to Judge Creswell’s house to find Ida.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Pettit came up out of Alabama to write fiction. The Southern papers had printed eight of his stories under an editorial caption identifying the author as the son of “the gallant Major Pettingill Pettit, our former County Attorney and hero of the battle of Lookout Mountain.”</p>
|
||||
@ -37,7 +37,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“All right, Old Hoss,” he said, cheerily, “make cigar-lighters of it. What’s the difference? I’m going to take her to lunch at Claremont to-day.”</p>
|
||||
<p>There was about a month of it. And then Pettit came to me bearing an invisible mitten, with the fortitude of a dish-rag. He talked of the grave and South America and prussic acid; and I lost an afternoon getting him straight. I took him out and saw that large and curative doses of whiskey were administered to him. I warned you this was a true story—‘ware your white ribbons if only follow this tale. For two weeks I fed him whiskey and Omar, and read to him regularly every evening the column in the evening paper that reveals the secrets of female beauty. I recommend the treatment.</p>
|
||||
<p>After Pettit was cured he wrote more stories. He recovered his old-time facility and did work just short of good enough. Then the curtain rose on the third act.</p>
|
||||
<p>A little, dark-eyed, silent girl from New Hampshire, who was studying applied design, fell deeply in love with him. She was the intense sort, but externally <i>glacé</i>, such as New England sometimes fools us with. Pettit liked her mildly, and took her about a good deal. She worshipped him, and now and then bored him.</p>
|
||||
<p>A little, dark-eyed, silent girl from New Hampshire, who was studying applied design, fell deeply in love with him. She was the intense sort, but externally glacé, such as New England sometimes fools us with. Pettit liked her mildly, and took her about a good deal. She worshipped him, and now and then bored him.</p>
|
||||
<p>There came a climax when she tried to jump out of a window, and he had to save her by some perfunctary, unmeant wooing. Even I was shaken by the depths of the absorbing affection she showed. Home, friends, traditions, creeds went up like thistle-down in the scale against her love. It was really discomposing.</p>
|
||||
<p>One night again Pettit sauntered in, yawning. As he had told me before, he said he felt that he could do a great story, and as before I hunted him to his room and saw him open his inkstand. At one o’clock the sheets of paper slid under my door.</p>
|
||||
<p>I read that story, and I jumped up, late as it was, with a whoop of joy. Old Pettit had done it. Just as though it lay there, red and bleeding, a woman’s heart was written into the lines. You couldn’t see the joining, but art, exquisite art, and pulsing nature had been combined into a love story that took you by the throat like the quinsy. I broke into Pettit’s room and beat him on the back and called him names—names high up in the galaxy of the immortals that we admired. And Pettit yawned and begged to be allowed to sleep.</p>
|
@ -1,13 +1,13 @@
|
||||
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|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 20</title>
|
||||
<title>The Rathskeller and the Rose</title>
|
||||
<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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<section id="chapter-20" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE RATHSKELLER AND THE ROSE</h2>
|
||||
<section id="the-rathskeller-and-the-rose" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Rathskeller and the Rose</h2>
|
||||
<p>Miss Posie Carrington had earned her success. She began life handicapped by the family name of “Boggs,” in the small town known as Cranberry Corners. At the age of eighteen she had acquired the name of “Carrington” and a position in the chorus of a metropolitan burlesque company. Thence upward she had ascended by the legitimate and delectable steps of “broiler,” member of the famous “Dickey-bird” octette, in the successful musical comedy, “Fudge and Fellows,” leader of the potato-bug dance in “Fol-de-Rol,” and at length to the part of the maid “ ‘Toinette” in “The King’s Bath-Robe,” which captured the critics and gave her her chance. And when we come to consider Miss Carrington she is in the heydey of flattery, fame and fizz; and that astute manager, Herr Timothy Goldstein, has her signature to iron-clad papers that she will star the coming season in Dyde Rich’s new play, “Paresis by Gaslight.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Promptly there came to Herr Timothy a capable twentieth-century young character actor by the name of Highsmith, who besought engagement as “Sol Haytosser,” the comic and chief male character part in “Paresis by Gaslight.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“My boy,” said Goldstein, “take the part if you can get it. Miss Carrington won’t listen to any of my suggestions. She has turned down half a dozen of the best imitators of the rural dub in the city. She declares she won’t set a foot on the stage unless ‘Haytosser’ is the best that can be raked up. She was raised in a village, you know, and when a Broadway orchid sticks a straw in his hair and tries to call himself a clover blossom she’s on, all right. I asked her, in a sarcastic vein, if she thought Denman Thompson would make any kind of a show in the part. ‘Oh, no,’ says she. ‘I don’t want him or John Drew or Jim Corbett or any of these swell actors that don’t know a turnip from a turnstile. I want the real article.’ So, my boy, if you want to play ‘Sol Haytosser’ you will have to convince Miss Carrington. Luck be with you.”</p>
|
||||
@ -21,8 +21,8 @@
|
||||
<p>“How’re ye, Miss Posie?” he said in accents not to be doubted. “Don’t ye remember me—Bill Summers—the Summerses that lived back of the blacksmith shop? I reckon I’ve growed up some since ye left Cranberry Corners.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Liza Perry ‘lowed I might see ye in the city while I was here. You know ‘Liza married Benny Stanfield, and she says—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ah, say!” interrupted Miss Carrington, brightly, “Lize Perry is never married—what! Oh, the freckles of her!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Married in June,” grinned the gossip, “and livin’ in the old Tatum Place. Ham Riley perfessed religion; old Mrs. Blithers sold her place to Cap’n Spooner; the youngest Waters girl run away with a music teacher; the court-house burned up last March; your uncle Wiley was elected constable; Matilda Hoskins died from runnin’ a needle in her hand, and Tom Beedle is courtin’ Sallie Lathrop—they say he don’t miss a night but what he’s settin’ on their porch.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The wall-eyed thing!” exclaimed Miss Carrington, with asperity. “Why, Tom Beedle once—say, you folks, excuse me a while—this is an old friend of mine—Mr.—what was it? Yes, Mr. Summers—Mr. Goldstein, Mr. Ricketts, Mr.— Oh, what’s yours? ‘Johnny”ll do—come on over here and tell me some more.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Married in June,” grinned the gossip, “and livin’ in the old Tatum Place. Ham Riley perfessed religion; old <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blithers sold her place to Cap’n Spooner; the youngest Waters girl run away with a music teacher; the court-house burned up last March; your uncle Wiley was elected constable; Matilda Hoskins died from runnin’ a needle in her hand, and Tom Beedle is courtin’ Sallie Lathrop—they say he don’t miss a night but what he’s settin’ on their porch.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The wall-eyed thing!” exclaimed Miss Carrington, with asperity. “Why, Tom Beedle once—say, you folks, excuse me a while—this is an old friend of mine—<abbr>Mr.</abbr>—what was it? Yes, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Summers—<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Goldstein, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ricketts, <abbr>Mr.</abbr>— Oh, what’s yours? ‘Johnny”ll do—come on over here and tell me some more.”</p>
|
||||
<p>She swept him to an isolated table in a corner. Herr Goldstein shrugged his fat shoulders and beckoned to the waiter. The newspaper man brightened a little and mentioned absinthe. The youth with parted hair was plunged into melancholy. The guests of the rathskeller laughed, clinked glasses and enjoyed the comedy that Posie Carrington was treating them to after her regular performance. A few cynical ones whispered “press agent” ’ and smiled wisely.</p>
|
||||
<p>Posie Carrington laid her dimpled and desirable chin upon her hands, and forgot her audience—a faculty that had won her laurels for her.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I don’t seem to recollect any Bill Summers,” she said, thoughtfully gazing straight into the innocent blue eyes of the rustic young man. “But I know the Summerses, all right. I guess there ain’t many changes in the old town. You see any of my folks lately?”</p>
|
||||
@ -36,16 +36,16 @@
|
||||
<p>“When I was comin’ away,” concluded “Bill,” “I pulled this off’n the bush by the front steps. I thought maybe I might see you in the city, and I knowed you’d like somethin’ from the old home.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He took from his coat pocket a rose—a drooping, yellow, velvet, odorous rose, that hung its head in the foul atmosphere of that tainted rathskeller like a virgin bowing before the hot breath of the lions in a Roman arena.</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss Carrington’s penetrating but musical laugh rose above the orchestra’s rendering of “Bluebells.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, say!” she cried, with glee, “ain’t those poky places the limit? I just know that two hours at Cranberry Corners would give me the horrors now. Well, I’m awful glad to have seen you, Mr. Summers. Guess I’ll bustle around to the hotel now and get my beauty sleep.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, say!” she cried, with glee, “ain’t those poky places the limit? I just know that two hours at Cranberry Corners would give me the horrors now. Well, I’m awful glad to have seen you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Summers. Guess I’ll bustle around to the hotel now and get my beauty sleep.”</p>
|
||||
<p>She thrust the yellow rose into the bosom of her wonderful, dainty, silken garments, stood up and nodded imperiously at Herr Goldstein.</p>
|
||||
<p>Her three companions and “Bill Summers” attended her to her cab. When her flounces and streamers were all safely tucked inside she dazzled them with au revoirs from her shining eyes and teeth.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Come around to the hotel and see me, Bill, before you leave the city,” she called as the glittering cab rolled away.</p>
|
||||
<p>Highsmith, still in his make-up, went with Herr Goldstein to a café booth.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Bright idea, eh?” asked the smiling actor. “Ought to land ‘Sol Haytosser’ for me, don’t you think? The little lady never once tumbled.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I didn’t hear your conversation,” said Goldstein, “but your make-up and acting was O. K. Here’s to your success. You’d better call on Miss Carrington early to-morrow and strike her for the part. I don’t see how she can keep from being satisfied with your exhibition of ability.”</p>
|
||||
<p>At 11.45 <span class="smallcaps">a. m.</span> on the next day Highsmith, handsome, dressed in the latest mode, confident, with a fuchsia in his button-hole, sent up his card to Miss Carrington in her select apartment hotel.</p>
|
||||
<p>At 11:45 <abbr class="time">a.m.</abbr> on the next day Highsmith, handsome, dressed in the latest mode, confident, with a fuchsia in his button-hole, sent up his card to Miss Carrington in her select apartment hotel.</p>
|
||||
<p>He was shown up and received by the actress’s French maid.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am sorree,” said Mlle. Hortense, “but I am to say this to all. It is with great regret. Mees Carrington have cancelled all engagements on the stage and have returned to live in that—how you call that town? Cranberry Cornaire!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am sorree,” said <abbr>Mlle.</abbr> Hortense, “but I am to say this to all. It is with great regret. Mees Carrington have cancelled all engagements on the stage and have returned to live in that—how you call that town? Cranberry Cornaire!”</p>
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<title>Chapter 11</title>
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<title>The Shocks of Doom</title>
|
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<section id="chapter-11" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>THE SHOCKS OF DOOM</h2>
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<section id="the-shocks-of-doom" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
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<h2 epub:type="title">The Shocks of Doom</h2>
|
||||
<p>There is an aristocracy of the public parks and even of the vagabonds who use them for their private apartments. Vallance felt rather than knew this, but when he stepped down out of his world into chaos his feet brought him directly to Madison Square.</p>
|
||||
<p>Raw and astringent as a schoolgirl—of the old order—young May breathed austerely among the budding trees. Vallance buttoned his coat, lighted his last cigarette and took his seat upon a bench. For three minutes he mildly regretted the last hundred of his last thousand that it had cost him when the bicycle cop put an end to his last automobile ride. Then he felt in every pocket and found not a single penny. He had given up his apartment that morning. His furniture had gone toward certain debts. His clothes, save what were upon him, had descended to his man-servant for back wages. As he sat there was not in the whole city for him a bed or a broiled lobster or a street-car fare or a carnation for buttonhole unless he should obtain them by sponging on his friends or by false pretenses. Therefore he had chosen the park.</p>
|
||||
<p>And all this was because an uncle had disinherited him, and cut down his allowance from liberality to nothing. And all that was because his nephew had disobeyed him concerning a certain girl, who comes not into this story—therefore, all readers who brush their hair toward its roots may be warned to read no further. There was another nephew, of a different branch, who had once been the prospective heir and favorite. Being without grace or hope, he had long ago disappeared in the mire. Now dragnets were out for him; he was to be rehabilitated and restored. And so Vallance fell grandly as Lucifer to the lowest pit, joining the tattered ghosts in the little park.</p>
|
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@ -31,7 +31,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“That’s right,” said Ide. “Stay with me, Dawson—that’s a good fellow. Walk around with me awhile. I never went to pieces like this before, and I’ve had a good many hard knocks. Do you think you could hustle something in the way of a little lunch, old man? I’m afraid my nerve’s too far gone to try any panhandling.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Vallance led his companion up almost deserted Fifth Avenue, and then westward along the Thirties toward Broadway. “Wait here a few minutes,” he said, leaving Ide in a quiet and shadowed spot. He entered a familiar hotel, and strolled toward the bar quite in his old assured way.</p>
|
||||
<p>“There’s a poor devil outside, Jimmy,” he said to the bartender, “who says he’s hungry and looks it. You know what they do when you give them money. Fix up a sandwich or two for him; and I’ll see that he doesn’t throw it away.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Certainly, Mr. Vallance,” said the bartender. “They ain’t all fakes. Don’t like to see anybody go hungry.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Certainly, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Vallance,” said the bartender. “They ain’t all fakes. Don’t like to see anybody go hungry.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He folded a liberal supply of the free lunch into a napkin. Vallance went with it and joined his companion. Ide pounced upon the food ravenously. “I haven’t had any free lunch as good as this in a year,” he said. “Aren’t you going to eat any, Dawson?</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m not hungry—thanks,” said Vallance.</p>
|
||||
<p>“We’ll go back to the Square,” said Ide. “The cops won’t bother us there. I’ll roll up the rest of this ham and stuff for our breakfast. I won’t eat any more; I’m afraid I’ll get sick. Suppose I’d die of cramps or something to-night, and never get to touch that money again! It’s eleven hours yet till time to see that lawyer. You won’t leave me, will you, Dawson? I’m afraid something might happen. You haven’t any place to go, have you?”</p>
|
||||
@ -44,12 +44,12 @@
|
||||
<p>At ten o’clock on the next day the two stood at the door of Lawyer Mead’s office in Ann Street.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ide’s nerves fluttered worse than ever when the hour approached; and Vallance could not decide to leave him a possible prey to the dangers he dreaded.</p>
|
||||
<p>When they entered the office, Lawyer Mead looked at them wonderingly. He and Vallance were old friends. After his greeting, he turned to Ide, who stood with white face and trembling limbs before the expected crisis.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I sent a second letter to your address last night, Mr. Ide,” he said. “I learned this morning that you were not there to receive it. It will inform you that Mr. Paulding has reconsidered his offer to take you back into favor. He has decided not to do so, and desires you to understand that no change will be made in the relations existing between you and him.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I sent a second letter to your address last night, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ide,” he said. “I learned this morning that you were not there to receive it. It will inform you that <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Paulding has reconsidered his offer to take you back into favor. He has decided not to do so, and desires you to understand that no change will be made in the relations existing between you and him.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Ide’s trembling suddenly ceased. The color came back to his face, and he straightened his back. His jaw went forward half an inch, and a gleam came into his eye. He pushed back his battered hat with one hand, and extended the other, with levelled fingers, toward the lawyer. He took a long breath and then laughed sardonically.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Tell old Paulding he may go to the devil,” he said, loudly and clearly, and turned and walked out of the office with a firm and lively step.</p>
|
||||
<p>Lawyer Mead turned on his heel to Vallance and smiled.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am glad you came in,” he said, genially. “Your uncle wants you to return home at once. He is reconciled to the situation that led to his hasty action, and desires to say that all will be as—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hey, Adams!” cried Lawyer Mead, breaking his sentence, and calling to his clerk. “Bring a glass of water—Mr. Vallance has fainted.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hey, Adams!” cried Lawyer Mead, breaking his sentence, and calling to his clerk. “Bring a glass of water—<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Vallance has fainted.”</p>
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<head>
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<title>Chapter 1</title>
|
||||
<title>The Voice of the City</title>
|
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<section id="chapter-1" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>THE VOICE OF THE CITY</h2>
|
||||
<section id="the-voice-of-the-city" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Voice of the City</h2>
|
||||
<p>Twenty-five years ago the school children used to chant their lessons. The manner of their delivery was a singsong recitative between the utterance of an Episcopal minister and the drone of a tired sawmill. I mean no disrespect. We must have lumber and sawdust.</p>
|
||||
<p>I remember one beautiful and instructive little lyric that emanated from the physiology class. The most striking line of it was this:</p>
|
||||
<p>“The shin-bone is the long-est bone in the hu-man bod-y.”</p>
|
||||
@ -15,7 +15,7 @@
|
||||
<p>The other day I became confused. I needed a ray of light. I turned back to those school days for aid. But in all the nasal harmonies we whined forth from those hard benches I could not recall one that treated of the voice of agglomerated mankind.</p>
|
||||
<p>In other words, of the composite vocal message of massed humanity.</p>
|
||||
<p>In other words, of the Voice of a Big City.</p>
|
||||
<p>Now, the individual voice is not lacking. We can understand the song of the poet, the ripple of the brook, the meaning of the man who wants $5 until next Monday, the inscriptions on the tombs of the Pharaohs, the language of flowers, the “step lively” of the conductor, and the prelude of the milk cans at 4 <span class="smallcaps">a. m.</span> Certain large-eared ones even assert that they are wise to the vibrations of the tympanum produced by concussion of the air emanating from Mr. H. James. But who can comprehend the meaning of the voice of the city?</p>
|
||||
<p>Now, the individual voice is not lacking. We can understand the song of the poet, the ripple of the brook, the meaning of the man who wants $5 until next Monday, the inscriptions on the tombs of the Pharaohs, the language of flowers, the “step lively” of the conductor, and the prelude of the milk cans at 4 <abbr class="time">a.m.</abbr> Certain large-eared ones even assert that they are wise to the vibrations of the tympanum produced by concussion of the air emanating from <abbr>Mr.</abbr> H. James. But who can comprehend the meaning of the voice of the city?</p>
|
||||
<p>I went out for to see.</p>
|
||||
<p>First, I asked Aurelia. She wore white Swiss and a hat with flowers on it, and ribbons and ends of things fluttered here and there.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Tell me,” I said, stammeringly, for I have no voice of my own, “what does this big—er—enormous—er—whopping city say? It must have a voice of some kind. Does it ever speak to you? How do you interpret its meaning? It is a tremendous mass, but it must have a key.”</p>
|
||||
@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“All cities,” said Aurelia, judicially, “say the same thing. When they get through saying it there is an echo from Philadelphia. So, they are unanimous.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Here are 4,000,000 people,” said I, scholastically, “compressed upon an island, which is mostly lamb surrounded by Wall Street water. The conjunction of so many units into so small a space must result in an identity—or, or rather a homogeneity that finds its oral expression through a common channel. It is, as you might say, a consensus of translation, concentrating in a crystallized, general idea which reveals itself in what may be termed the Voice of the City. Can you tell me what it is?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Aurelia smiled wonderfully. She sat on the high stoop. A spray of insolent ivy bobbed against her right ear. A ray of impudent moonlight flickered upon her nose. But I was adamant, nickel-plated.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I must go and find out,” I said, “what is the Voice of this City. Other cities have voices. It is an assignment. I must have it. New York,” I continued, in a rising tone, “had better not hand me a cigar and say: ‘Old man, I can’t talk for publication.’ No other city acts in that way. Chicago says, unhesitatingly, ‘I will;’ I Philadelphia says, ‘I should;’ New Orleans says, ‘I used to;’ Louisville says, ‘Don’t care if I do;’ St. Louis says, ‘Excuse me;’ Pittsburg says, ‘Smoke up.’ Now, New York—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I must go and find out,” I said, “what is the Voice of this City. Other cities have voices. It is an assignment. I must have it. New York,” I continued, in a rising tone, “had better not hand me a cigar and say: ‘Old man, I can’t talk for publication.’ No other city acts in that way. Chicago says, unhesitatingly, ‘I will;’ I Philadelphia says, ‘I should;’ New Orleans says, ‘I used to;’ Louisville says, ‘Don’t care if I do;’ <abbr>St.</abbr> Louis says, ‘Excuse me;’ Pittsburg says, ‘Smoke up.’ Now, New York—”</p>
|
||||
<p>Aurelia smiled.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Very well,” said I, “I must go elsewhere and find out.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I went into a palace, tile-floored, cherub-ceilinged and square with the cop. I put my foot on the brass rail and said to Billy Magnus, the best bartender in the diocese:</p>
|
||||
@ -39,7 +39,7 @@
|
||||
<p>The cop melted into the darkness of the side street. In ten minutes he had returned.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Married last Tuesday,” he said, half gruffly. “You know how they are. She comes to that corner at nine every night for a—comes to say ‘hello!’ I generally manage to be there. Say, what was it you asked me a bit ago—what’s doing in the city? Oh, there’s a roof-garden or two just opened, twelve blocks up.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I crossed a crow’s-foot of street-car tracks, and skirted the edge of an umbrageous park. An artificial Diana, gilded, heroic, poised, wind-ruled, on the tower, shimmered in the clear light of her namesake in the sky. Along came my poet, hurrying, hatted, haired, emitting dactyls, spondees and dactylis. I seized him.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Bill,” said I (in the magazine he is Cleon), “give me a lift. I am on an assignment to find out the Voice of the city. You see, it’s a special order. Ordinarily a symposium comprising the views of Henry Clews, John L. Sullivan, Edwin Markham, May Irwin and Charles Schwab would be about all. But this is a different matter. We want a broad, poetic, mystic vocalization of the city’s soul and meaning. You are the very chap to give me a hint. Some years ago a man got at the Niagara Falls and gave us its pitch. The note was about two feet below the lowest G on the piano. Now, you can’t put New York into a note unless it’s better indorsed than that. But give me an idea of what it would say if it should speak. It is bound to be a mighty and far-reaching utterance. To arrive at it we must take the tremendous crash of the chords of the day’s traffic, the laughter and music of the night, the solemn tones of Dr. Parkhurst, the rag-time, the weeping, the stealthy hum of cab-wheels, the shout of the press agent, the tinkle of fountains on the roof gardens, the hullabaloo of the strawberry vender and the covers of <i>Everybody’s Magazine</i>, the whispers of the lovers in the parks—all these sounds must go into your Voice—not combined, but mixed, and of the mixture an essence made; and of the essence an extract—an audible extract, of which one drop shall form the thing we seek.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Bill,” said I (in the magazine he is Cleon), “give me a lift. I am on an assignment to find out the Voice of the city. You see, it’s a special order. Ordinarily a symposium comprising the views of Henry Clews, John L. Sullivan, Edwin Markham, May Irwin and Charles Schwab would be about all. But this is a different matter. We want a broad, poetic, mystic vocalization of the city’s soul and meaning. You are the very chap to give me a hint. Some years ago a man got at the Niagara Falls and gave us its pitch. The note was about two feet below the lowest G on the piano. Now, you can’t put New York into a note unless it’s better indorsed than that. But give me an idea of what it would say if it should speak. It is bound to be a mighty and far-reaching utterance. To arrive at it we must take the tremendous crash of the chords of the day’s traffic, the laughter and music of the night, the solemn tones of <abbr>Dr.</abbr> Parkhurst, the rag-time, the weeping, the stealthy hum of cab-wheels, the shout of the press agent, the tinkle of fountains on the roof gardens, the hullabaloo of the strawberry vender and the covers of <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Everybody’s Magazine</i>, the whispers of the lovers in the parks—all these sounds must go into your Voice—not combined, but mixed, and of the mixture an essence made; and of the essence an extract—an audible extract, of which one drop shall form the thing we seek.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Do you remember,” asked the poet, with a chuckle, “that California girl we met at Stiver’s studio last week? Well, I’m on my way to see her. She repeated that poem of mine, ‘The Tribute of Spring,’ word for word. She’s the smartest proposition in this town just at present. Say, how does this confounded tie look? I spoiled four before I got one to set right.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“And the Voice that I asked you about?” I inquired.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, she doesn’t sing,” said Cleon. “But you ought to hear her recite my ‘Angel of the Inshore Wind.’ ”</p>
|
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<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 19</title>
|
||||
<title>Transients in Arcadia</title>
|
||||
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-19" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>TRANSIENTS IN ARCADIA</h2>
|
||||
<section id="transients-in-arcadia" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Transients in Arcadia</h2>
|
||||
<p>There is a hotel on Broadway that has escaped discovery by the summer-resort promoters. It is deep and wide and cool. Its rooms are finished in dark oak of a low temperature. Home-made breezes and deep-green shrubbery give it the delights without the inconveniences of the Adirondacks. One can mount its broad staircases or glide dreamily upward in its aërial elevators, attended by guides in brass buttons, with a serene joy that Alpine climbers have never attained. There is a chef in its kitchen who will prepare for you brook trout better than the White Mountains ever served, sea food that would turn Old Point Comfort—“by Gad, sah!”—green with envy, and Maine venison that would melt the official heart of a game warden.</p>
|
||||
<p>A few have found out this oasis in the July desert of Manhattan. During that month you will see the hotel’s reduced array of guests scattered luxuriously about in the cool twilight of its lofty dining-room, gazing at one another across the snowy waste of unoccupied tables, silently congratulatory.</p>
|
||||
<p>Superfluous, watchful, pneumatically moving waiters hover near, supplying every want before it is expressed. The temperature is perpetual April. The ceiling is painted in water colors to counterfeit a summer sky across which delicate clouds drift and do not vanish as those of nature do to our regret.</p>
|
||||
<p>The pleasing, distant roar of Broadway is transformed in the imagination of the happy guests to the noise of a waterfall filling the woods with its restful sound. At every strange footstep the guests turn an anxious ear, fearful lest their retreat be discovered and invaded by the restless pleasure-seekers who are forever hounding nature to her deepest lairs.</p>
|
||||
<p>Thus in the depopulated caravansary the little band of connoisseurs jealously hide themselves during the heated season, enjoying to the uttermost the delights of mountain and seashore that art and skill have gathered and served to them.</p>
|
||||
<p>In this July came to the hotel one whose card that she sent to the clerk for her name to be registered read “Mme. Héloise D’Arcy Beaumont.”</p>
|
||||
<p>In this July came to the hotel one whose card that she sent to the clerk for her name to be registered read “<abbr>Mme.</abbr> Héloise D’Arcy Beaumont.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Madame Beaumont was a guest such as the Hotel Lotus loved. She possessed the fine air of the élite, tempered and sweetened by a cordial graciousness that made the hotel employees her slaves. Bell-boys fought for the honor of answering her ring; the clerks, but for the question of ownership, would have deeded to her the hotel and its contents; the other guests regarded her as the final touch of feminine exclusiveness and beauty that rendered the entourage perfect.</p>
|
||||
<p>This super-excellent guest rarely left the hotel. Her habits were consonant with the customs of the discriminating patrons of the Hotel Lotus. To enjoy that delectable hostelry one must forego the city as though it were leagues away. By night a brief excursion to the nearby roofs is in order; but during the torrid day one remains in the umbrageous fastnesses of the Lotus as a trout hangs poised in the pellucid sanctuaries of his favorite pool.</p>
|
||||
<p>Though alone in the Hotel Lotus, Madame Beaumont preserved the state of a queen whose loneliness was of position only. She breakfasted at ten, a cool, sweet, leisurely, delicate being who glowed softly in the dimness like a jasmine flower in the dusk.</p>
|
||||
<p>But at dinner was Madame’s glory at its height. She wore a gown as beautiful and immaterial as the mist from an unseen cataract in a mountain gorge. The nomenclature of this gown is beyond the guess of the scribe. Always pale-red roses reposed against its lace-garnished front. It was a gown that the head-waiter viewed with respect and met at the door. You thought of Paris when you saw it, and maybe of mysterious countesses, and certainly of Versailles and rapiers and Mrs. Fiske and rouge-et-noir. There was an untraceable rumor in the Hotel Lotus that Madame was a cosmopolite, and that she was pulling with her slender white hands certain strings between the nations in the favor of Russia. Being a citizeness of the world’s smoothest roads it was small wonder that she was quick to recognize in the refined purlieus of the Hotel Lotus the most desirable spot in America for a restful sojourn during the heat of mid-summer.</p>
|
||||
<p>But at dinner was Madame’s glory at its height. She wore a gown as beautiful and immaterial as the mist from an unseen cataract in a mountain gorge. The nomenclature of this gown is beyond the guess of the scribe. Always pale-red roses reposed against its lace-garnished front. It was a gown that the head-waiter viewed with respect and met at the door. You thought of Paris when you saw it, and maybe of mysterious countesses, and certainly of Versailles and rapiers and <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Fiske and rouge-et-noir. There was an untraceable rumor in the Hotel Lotus that Madame was a cosmopolite, and that she was pulling with her slender white hands certain strings between the nations in the favor of Russia. Being a citizeness of the world’s smoothest roads it was small wonder that she was quick to recognize in the refined purlieus of the Hotel Lotus the most desirable spot in America for a restful sojourn during the heat of mid-summer.</p>
|
||||
<p>On the third day of Madame Beaumont’s residence in the hotel a young man entered and registered himself as a guest. His clothing—to speak of his points in approved order—was quietly in the mode; his features good and regular; his expression that of a poised and sophisticated man of the world. He informed the clerk that he would remain three or four days, inquired concerning the sailing of European steamships, and sank into the blissful inanition of the nonpareil hotel with the contented air of a traveller in his favorite inn.</p>
|
||||
<p>The young man—not to question the veracity of the register—was Harold Farrington. He drifted into the exclusive and calm current of life in the Lotus so tactfully and silently that not a ripple alarmed his fellow-seekers after rest. He ate in the Lotus and of its patronym, and was lulled into blissful peace with the other fortunate mariners. In one day he acquired his table and his waiter and the fear lest the panting chasers after repose that kept Broadway warm should pounce upon and destroy this contiguous but covert haven.</p>
|
||||
<p>After dinner on the next day after the arrival of Harold Farrington Madame Beaumont dropped her handkerchief in passing out. Mr. Farrington recovered and returned it without the effusiveness of a seeker after acquaintance.</p>
|
||||
<p>After dinner on the next day after the arrival of Harold Farrington Madame Beaumont dropped her handkerchief in passing out. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Farrington recovered and returned it without the effusiveness of a seeker after acquaintance.</p>
|
||||
<p>Perhaps there was a mystic freemasonry between the discriminating guests of the Lotus. Perhaps they were drawn one to another by the fact of their common good fortune in discovering the acme of summer resorts in a Broadway hotel. Words delicate in courtesy and tentative in departure from formality passed between the two. And, as if in the expedient atmosphere of a real summer resort, an acquaintance grew, flowered and fructified on the spot as does the mystic plant of the conjuror. For a few moments they stood on a balcony upon which the corridor ended, and tossed the feathery ball of conversation.</p>
|
||||
<p>“One tires of the old resorts,” said Madame Beaumont, with a faint but sweet smile. “What is the use to fly to the mountains or the seashore to escape noise and dust when the very people that make both follow us there?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Even on the ocean,” remarked Farrington, sadly, “the Philistines be upon you. The most exclusive steamers are getting to be scarcely more than ferry boats. Heaven help us when the summer resorter discovers that the Lotus is further away from Broadway than Thousand Islands or Mackinac.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I hope our secret will be safe for a week, anyhow,” said Madame, with a sigh and a smile. “I do not know where I would go if they should descend upon the dear Lotus. I know of but one place so delightful in summer, and that is the castle of Count Polinski, in the Ural Mountains.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I hear that Baden-Baden and Cannes are almost deserted this season,” said Farrington. “Year by year the old resorts fall in disrepute. Perhaps many others, like ourselves, are seeking out the quiet nooks that are overlooked by the majority.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I promise myself three days more of this delicious rest,” said Madame Beaumont. “On Monday the <i>Cedric</i> sails.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I promise myself three days more of this delicious rest,” said Madame Beaumont. “On Monday the <i epub:type="se:name.vessel.ship">Cedric</i> sails.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Harold Farrington’s eyes proclaimed his regret. “I too must leave on Monday,” he said, “but I do not go abroad.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Madame Beaumont shrugged one round shoulder in a foreign gesture.</p>
|
||||
<p>“One cannot hide here forever, charming though it may be. The château has been in preparation for me longer than a month. Those house parties that one must give—what a nuisance! But I shall never forget my week in the Hotel Lotus.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Nor shall I,” said Farrington in a low voice, “and I shall never <i>forgive</i> the <i>Cedric</i>.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Nor shall I,” said Farrington in a low voice, “and I shall never <em>forgive</em> the <i epub:type="se:name.vessel.ship">Cedric</i>.”</p>
|
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<p>On Sunday evening, three days afterward, the two sat at a little table on the same balcony. A discreet waiter brought ices and small glasses of claret cup.</p>
|
||||
<p>Madame Beaumont wore the same beautiful evening gown that she had worn each day at dinner. She seemed thoughtful. Near her hand on the table lay a small chatelaine purse. After she had eaten her ice she opened the purse and took out a one-dollar bill.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mr. Farrington,” she said, with the smile that had won the Hotel Lotus, “I want to tell you something. I’m going to leave before breakfast in the morning, because I’ve got to go back to my work. I’m behind the hosiery counter at Casey’s Mammoth Store, and my vacation’s up at eight o’clock to-morrow. That paper-dollar is the last cent I’ll see till I draw my eight dollars salary next Saturday night. You’re a real gentleman, and you’ve been good to me, and I wanted to tell you before I went.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve been saving up out of my wages for a year just for this vacation. I wanted to spend one week like a lady if I never do another one. I wanted to get up when I please instead of having to crawl out at seven every morning; and I wanted to live on the best and be waited on and ring bells for things just like rich folks do. Now I’ve done it, and I’ve had the happiest time I ever expect to have in my life. I’m going back to my work and my little hall bedroom satisfied for another year. I wanted to tell you about it, Mr. Farrington, because I—I thought you kind of liked me, and I—I liked you. But, oh, I couldn’t help deceiving you up till now, for it was all just like a fairy tale to me. So I talked about Europe and the things I’ve read about in other countries, and made you think I was a great lady.</p>
|
||||
<p>“This dress I’ve got on—it’s the only one I have that’s fit to wear—I bought from O’Dowd & Levinsky on the instalment plan.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Seventy-five dollars is the price, and it was made to measure. I paid $10 down, and they’re to collect $1 a week till it’s paid for. That’ll be about all I have to say, Mr. Farrington, except that my name is Mamie Siviter instead of Madame Beaumont, and I thank you for your attentions. This dollar will pay the instalment due on the dress to-morrow. I guess I’ll go up to my room now.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Farrington,” she said, with the smile that had won the Hotel Lotus, “I want to tell you something. I’m going to leave before breakfast in the morning, because I’ve got to go back to my work. I’m behind the hosiery counter at Casey’s Mammoth Store, and my vacation’s up at eight o’clock to-morrow. That paper-dollar is the last cent I’ll see till I draw my eight dollars salary next Saturday night. You’re a real gentleman, and you’ve been good to me, and I wanted to tell you before I went.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve been saving up out of my wages for a year just for this vacation. I wanted to spend one week like a lady if I never do another one. I wanted to get up when I please instead of having to crawl out at seven every morning; and I wanted to live on the best and be waited on and ring bells for things just like rich folks do. Now I’ve done it, and I’ve had the happiest time I ever expect to have in my life. I’m going back to my work and my little hall bedroom satisfied for another year. I wanted to tell you about it, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Farrington, because I—I thought you kind of liked me, and I—I liked you. But, oh, I couldn’t help deceiving you up till now, for it was all just like a fairy tale to me. So I talked about Europe and the things I’ve read about in other countries, and made you think I was a great lady.</p>
|
||||
<p>“This dress I’ve got on—it’s the only one I have that’s fit to wear—I bought from O’Dowd & Levinsky on the instalment plan.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Seventy-five dollars is the price, and it was made to measure. I paid $10 down, and they’re to collect $1 a week till it’s paid for. That’ll be about all I have to say, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Farrington, except that my name is Mamie Siviter instead of Madame Beaumont, and I thank you for your attentions. This dollar will pay the instalment due on the dress to-morrow. I guess I’ll go up to my room now.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Harold Farrington listened to the recital of the Lotus’s loveliest guest with an impassive countenance. When she had concluded he drew a small book like a checkbook from his coat pocket. He wrote upon a blank form in this with a stub of pencil, tore out the leaf, tossed it over to his companion and took up the paper dollar.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve got to go to work, too, in the morning,” he said, “and I might as well begin now. There’s a receipt for the dollar instalment. I’ve been a collector for O’Dowd & Levinsky for three years. Funny, ain’t it, that you and me both had the same idea about spending our vacation? I’ve always wanted to put up at a swell hotel, and I saved up out of my twenty per, and did it. Say, Mame, how about a trip to Coney Saturday night on the boat—what?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve got to go to work, too, in the morning,” he said, “and I might as well begin now. There’s a receipt for the dollar instalment. I’ve been a collector for O’Dowd & Levinsky for three years. Funny, ain’t it, that you and me both had the same idea about spending our vacation? I’ve always wanted to put up at a swell hotel, and I saved up out of my twenty per, and did it. Say, Mame, how about a trip to Coney Saturday night on the boat—what?”</p>
|
||||
<p>The face of the pseudo Madame Héloise D’Arcy Beaumont beamed.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, you bet I’ll go, Mr. Farrington. The store closes at twelve on Saturdays. I guess Coney’ll be all right even if we did spend a week with the swells.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, you bet I’ll go, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Farrington. The store closes at twelve on Saturdays. I guess Coney’ll be all right even if we did spend a week with the swells.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Below the balcony the sweltering city growled and buzzed in the July night. Inside the Hotel Lotus the tempered, cool shadows reigned, and the solicitous waiter single-footed near the low windows, ready at a nod to serve Madame and her escort.</p>
|
||||
<p>At the door of the elevator Farrington took his leave, and Madame Beaumont made her last ascent. But before they reached the noiseless cage he said: “Just forget that ‘Harold Farrington,’ will you?—McManus is the name—James McManus. Some call me Jimmy.”</p>
|
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<p>“Good-night, Jimmy,” said Madame.</p>
|
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<head>
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<title>Chapter 7</title>
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<title>While the Auto Waits</title>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-7" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>WHILE THE AUTO WAITS</h2>
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<section id="while-the-auto-waits" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
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<h2 epub:type="title">While the Auto Waits</h2>
|
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<p>Promptly at the beginning of twilight, came again to that quiet corner of that quiet, small park the girl in gray. She sat upon a bench and read a book, for there was yet to come a half hour in which print could be accomplished.</p>
|
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<p>To repeat: Her dress was gray, and plain enough to mask its impeccancy of style and fit. A large-meshed veil imprisoned her turban hat and a face that shone through it with a calm and unconscious beauty. She had come there at the same hour on the day previous, and on the day before that; and there was one who knew it.</p>
|
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<p>The young man who knew it hovered near, relying upon burnt sacrifices to the great joss, Luck. His piety was rewarded, for, in turning a page, her book slipped from her fingers and bounded from the bench a full yard away.</p>
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@ -20,27 +20,27 @@
|
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<p>“I earnestly beg your pardon,” pleaded the young ran. His expression of satisfaction had changed to one of penitence and humility. “It was my fault, you know—I mean, there are girls in parks, you know—that is, of course, you don’t know, but—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Abandon the subject, if you please. Of course I know. Now, tell me about these people passing and crowding, each way, along these paths. Where are they going? Why do they hurry so? Are they happy?”</p>
|
||||
<p>The young man had promptly abandoned his air of coquetry. His cue was now for a waiting part; he could not guess the rôle he would be expected to play.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It <i>is</i> interesting to watch them,” he replied, postulating her mood. “It is the wonderful drama of life. Some are going to supper and some to—er—other places. One wonders what their histories are.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I do not,” said the girl; “I am not so inquisitive. I come here to sit because here, only, can I be near the great, common, throbbing heart of humanity. My part in life is cast where its beats are never felt. Can you surmise why I spoke to you, Mr.—?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It <em>is</em> interesting to watch them,” he replied, postulating her mood. “It is the wonderful drama of life. Some are going to supper and some to—er—other places. One wonders what their histories are.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I do not,” said the girl; “I am not so inquisitive. I come here to sit because here, only, can I be near the great, common, throbbing heart of humanity. My part in life is cast where its beats are never felt. Can you surmise why I spoke to you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr>—?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Parkenstacker,” supplied the young man. Then he looked eager and hopeful.</p>
|
||||
<p>“No,” said the girl, holding up a slender finger, and smiling slightly. “You would recognize it immediately. It is impossible to keep one’s name out of print. Or even one’s portrait. This veil and this hat of my maid furnish me with an <i>incog</i>. You should have seen the chauffeur stare at it when he thought I did not see. Candidly, there are five or six names that belong in the holy of holies, and mine, by the accident of birth, is one of them. I spoke to you, Mr. Stackenpot—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“No,” said the girl, holding up a slender finger, and smiling slightly. “You would recognize it immediately. It is impossible to keep one’s name out of print. Or even one’s portrait. This veil and this hat of my maid furnish me with an incog. You should have seen the chauffeur stare at it when he thought I did not see. Candidly, there are five or six names that belong in the holy of holies, and mine, by the accident of birth, is one of them. I spoke to you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Stackenpot—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Parkenstacker,” corrected the young man, modestly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“—Mr. Parkenstacker, because I wanted to talk, for once, with a natural man—one unspoiled by the despicable gloss of wealth and supposed social superiority. Oh! you do not know how weary I am of it—money, money, money! And of the men who surround me, dancing like little marionettes all cut by the same pattern. I am sick of pleasure, of jewels, of travel, of society, of luxuries of all kinds.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“—<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Parkenstacker, because I wanted to talk, for once, with a natural man—one unspoiled by the despicable gloss of wealth and supposed social superiority. Oh! you do not know how weary I am of it—money, money, money! And of the men who surround me, dancing like little marionettes all cut by the same pattern. I am sick of pleasure, of jewels, of travel, of society, of luxuries of all kinds.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I always had an idea,” ventured the young man, hesitatingly, “that money must be a pretty good thing.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“A competence is to be desired. But when you have so many millions that—!” She concluded the sentence with a gesture of despair. “It is the monotony of it,” she continued, “that palls. Drives, dinners, theatres, balls, suppers, with the gilding of superfluous wealth over it all. Sometimes the very tinkle of the ice in my champagne glass nearly drives me mad.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Parkenstacker looked ingenuously interested.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Parkenstacker looked ingenuously interested.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have always liked,” he said, “to read and hear about the ways of wealthy and fashionable folks. I suppose I am a bit of a snob. But I like to have my information accurate. Now, I had formed the opinion that champagne is cooled in the bottle and not by placing ice in the glass.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The girl gave a musical laugh of genuine amusement.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You should know,” she explained, in an indulgent tone, “that we of the non-useful class depend for our amusement upon departure from precedent. Just now it is a fad to put ice in champagne. The idea was originated by a visiting Prince of Tartary while dining at the Waldorf. It will soon give way to some other whim. Just as at a dinner party this week on Madison Avenue a green kid glove was laid by the plate of each guest to be put on and used while eating olives.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I see,” admitted the young man, humbly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“These special diversions of the inner circle do not become familiar to the common public.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sometimes,” continued the girl, acknowledging his confession of error by a slight bow, “I have thought that if I ever should love a man it would be one of lowly station. One who is a worker and not a drone. But, doubtless, the claims of caste and wealth will prove stronger than my inclination. Just now I am besieged by two. One is a Grand Duke of a German principality. I think he has, or has had, a wife, somewhere, driven mad by his intemperance and cruelty. The other is an English Marquis, so cold and mercenary that I even prefer the diabolism of the Duke. What is it that impels me to tell you these things, Mr. Packenstacker?</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sometimes,” continued the girl, acknowledging his confession of error by a slight bow, “I have thought that if I ever should love a man it would be one of lowly station. One who is a worker and not a drone. But, doubtless, the claims of caste and wealth will prove stronger than my inclination. Just now I am besieged by two. One is a Grand Duke of a German principality. I think he has, or has had, a wife, somewhere, driven mad by his intemperance and cruelty. The other is an English Marquis, so cold and mercenary that I even prefer the diabolism of the Duke. What is it that impels me to tell you these things, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Packenstacker?</p>
|
||||
<p>“Parkenstacker,” breathed the young man. “Indeed, you cannot know how much I appreciate your confidences.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The girl contemplated him with the calm, impersonal regard that befitted the difference in their stations.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What is your line of business, Mr. Parkenstacker?” she asked.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What is your line of business, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Parkenstacker?” she asked.</p>
|
||||
<p>“A very humble one. But I hope to rise in the world. Were you really in earnest when you said that you could love a man of lowly position?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Indeed I was. But I said ‘might.’ There is the Grand Duke and the Marquis, you know. Yes; no calling could be too humble were the man what I would wish him to be.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I work,” declared Mr. Parkenstacker, “in a restaurant.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I work,” declared <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Parkenstacker, “in a restaurant.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The girl shrank slightly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Not as a waiter?” she said, a little imploringly. “Labor is noble, but personal attendance, you know—valets and—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am not a waiter. I am cashier in”—on the street they faced that bounded the opposite side of the park was the brilliant electric sign “RESTAURANT”—“I am cashier in that restaurant you see there.”</p>
|
||||
@ -50,7 +50,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“I do not know. Perhaps—but the whim may not seize me again. I must go quickly now. There is a dinner, and a box at the play—and, oh! the same old round. Perhaps you noticed an automobile at the upper corner of the park as you came. One with a white body.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“And red running gear?” asked the young man, knitting his brows reflectively.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes. I always come in that. Pierre waits for me there. He supposes me to be shopping in the department store across the square. Conceive of the bondage of the life wherein we must deceive even our chauffeurs. Good-night.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“But it is dark now,” said Mr. Parkenstacker, “and the park is full of rude men. May I not walk—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“But it is dark now,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Parkenstacker, “and the park is full of rude men. May I not walk—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“If you have the slightest regard for my wishes,” said the girl, firmly, “you will remain at this bench for ten minutes after I have left. I do not mean to accuse you, but you are probably aware that autos generally bear the monogram of their owner. Again, good-night.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Swift and stately she moved away through the dusk. The young man watched her graceful form as she reached the pavement at the park’s edge, and turned up along it toward the corner where stood the automobile. Then he treacherously and unhesitatingly began to dodge and skim among the park trees and shrubbery in a course parallel to her route, keeping her well in sight.</p>
|
||||
<p>When she reached the corner she turned her head to glance at the motor car, and then passed it, continuing on across the street. Sheltered behind a convenient standing cab, the young man followed her movements closely with his eyes. Passing down the sidewalk of the street opposite the park, she entered the restaurant with the blazing sign. The place was one of those frankly glaring establishments, all white paint and glass, where one may dine cheaply and conspicuously. The girl penetrated the restaurant to some retreat at its rear, whence she quickly emerged without her hat and veil.</p>
|
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|
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<a href="text/imprint.xhtml">Imprint</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/chapter-1.xhtml"><span epub:type="z3998:roman">I</span>: CHAPTER_TITLE</a>
|
||||
<a href="text/a-comedy-in-rubber.xhtml">A Comedy in Rubber</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/a-lickpenny-lover.xhtml">A Lickpenny Lover</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/a-philistine-in-bohemia.xhtml">A Philistine in Bohemia</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/doughertys-eye-opener.xhtml">Dougherty’s Eye-Opener</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/extradited-from-bohemia.xhtml">Extradited from Bohemia</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/from-each-according-to-his-ability.xhtml">From Each According to His Ability</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/little-speck-in-garnered-fruit.xhtml">“Little Speck in Garnered Fruit”</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/nemesis-and-the-candy-man.xhtml">Nemesis and the Candy Man</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/one-thousand-dollars.xhtml">One Thousand Dollars</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/roses-ruses-and-romance.xhtml">Roses, Ruses and Romance</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/squaring-the-circle.xhtml">Squaring the Circle</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/the-city-of-dreadful-night.xhtml">The City of Dreadful Night</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/the-clarion-call.xhtml">The Clarion Call</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/the-complete-life-of-john-hopkins.xhtml">The Complete Life of John Hopkins</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/the-defeat-of-the-city.xhtml">The Defeat of the City</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/the-easter-of-the-soul.xhtml">The Easter of the Soul</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/the-fool-killer.xhtml">The Fool-Killer</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/the-harbinger.xhtml">The Harbinger</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/the-memento.xhtml">The Memento</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/the-plutonian-fire.xhtml">The Plutonian Fire</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/the-rathskeller-and-the-rose.xhtml">The Rathskeller and the Rose</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/the-shocks-of-doom.xhtml">The Shocks of Doom</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/the-voice-of-the-city.xhtml">The Voice of the City</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/transients-in-arcadia.xhtml">Transients in Arcadia</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/while-the-auto-waits.xhtml">While the Auto Waits</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/colophon.xhtml">Colophon</a>
|
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@ -34,7 +106,7 @@
|
||||
<a href="text/imprint.xhtml" epub:type="frontmatter imprint">Imprint</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/chapter-1.xhtml" epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">WORK_TITLE</a>
|
||||
<a href="text/a-comedy-in-rubber.xhtml" epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">The Voice of the City</a>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li>
|
||||
<a href="text/colophon.xhtml" epub:type="backmatter colophon">Colophon</a>
|
||||
|
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Reference in New Issue
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