[Waifs] Semanticate
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<head>
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<title>Chapter 11</title>
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<title>A Little Talk About Mobs</title>
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<section id="chapter-11" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>A LITTLE TALK ABOUT MOBS</h2>
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<section id="a-little-talk-about-mobs" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
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<h2 epub:type="title">A Little Talk About Mobs</h2>
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<p>“I see,” remarked the tall gentleman in the frock coat and black slouch hat, “that another street car motorman in your city has narrowly excaped lynching at the hands of an infuriated mob by lighting a cigar and walking a couple of blocks down the street.”</p>
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<p>“Do you think they would have lynched him?” asked the New Yorker, in the next seat of the ferry station, who was also waiting for the boat.</p>
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<p>“Not until after the election,” said the tall man, cutting a corner off his plug of tobacco. “I’ve been in your city long enough to know something about your mobs. The motorman’s mob is about the least dangerous of them all, except the National Guard and the Dressmakers’ Convention.</p>
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<p>“Then why do they become infuriated and make threats of lynching?” asked the New Yorker.</p>
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<p>“To assure the motorman,” answered the tall man, “that he is safe. If they really wanted to do him up they would go into the houses and drop bricks on him from the third-story windows.”</p>
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<p>“New Yorkers are not cowards,” said the other man, a little stiffly.</p>
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<p>“Not one at a time,” agreed the tall man, promptly. “You’ve got a fine lot of single-handed scrappers in your town. I’d rather fight three of you than one; and I’d go up against all the Gas Trust’s victims in a bunch before I’d pass two citizens on a dark corner, with my watch chain showing. When you get rounded up in a bunch you lose your nerve. Get you in crowds and you’re easy. Ask the ‘L’ road guards and George B. Cortelyou and the tintype booths at Coney Island. Divided you stand, united you fall. <i>E pluribus nihil</i>. Whenever one of your mobs surrounds a man and begins to holler, ‘Lynch him!’ he says to himself, “Oh, dear, I suppose I must look pale to please the boys, but I will, forsooth, let my life insurance premium lapse to-morrow. This is a sure tip for me to play Methuselah straight across the board in the next handicap.’</p>
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<p>“Not one at a time,” agreed the tall man, promptly. “You’ve got a fine lot of single-handed scrappers in your town. I’d rather fight three of you than one; and I’d go up against all the Gas Trust’s victims in a bunch before I’d pass two citizens on a dark corner, with my watch chain showing. When you get rounded up in a bunch you lose your nerve. Get you in crowds and you’re easy. Ask the ‘L’ road guards and George B. Cortelyou and the tintype booths at Coney Island. Divided you stand, united you fall. <i xml:lang="la">E pluribus nihil</i>. Whenever one of your mobs surrounds a man and begins to holler, ‘Lynch him!’ he says to himself, “Oh, dear, I suppose I must look pale to please the boys, but I will, forsooth, let my life insurance premium lapse to-morrow. This is a sure tip for me to play Methuselah straight across the board in the next handicap.’</p>
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<p>“I can imagine the tortured feelings of a prisoner in the hands of New York policemen when an infuriated mob demands that he be turned over to them for lynching. ‘For God’s sake, officers,’ cries the distracted wretch, ‘have ye hearts of stone, that ye will not let them wrest me from ye?’</p>
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<p>“ ‘Sorry, Jimmy,’ says one of the policemen, ‘but it won’t do. There’s three of us—me and Darrel and the plain-clothes man; and there’s only sivin thousand of the mob. How’d we explain it at the office if they took ye? Jist chase the infuriated aggregation around the corner, Darrel, and we’ll be movin’ along to the station.’ ”</p>
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<p>“Some of our gatherings of excited citizens have not been so harmless,” said the New Yorker, with a faint note of civic pride.</p>
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<head>
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<title>Chapter 4</title>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-4" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>OUT OF NAZARETH</h2>
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<p>Okochee, in Georgia, had a boom, and J. Pinkney Bloom came out of it with a “wad.” Okochee came out of it with a half-million-dollar debt, a two and a half per cent. city property tax, and a city council that showed a propensity for traveling the back streets of the town. These things came about through a fatal resemblance of the river Cooloosa to the Hudson, as set forth and expounded by a Northern tourist. Okochee felt that New York should not be allowed to consider itself the only alligator in the swamp, so to speak. And then that harmless, but persistent, individual so numerous in the South—the man who is always clamoring for more cotton mills, and is ready to take a dollar’s worth of stock, provided he can borrow the dollar—that man added his deadly work to the tourist’s innocent praise, and Okochee fell.</p>
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<p>The Cooloosa River winds through a range of small mountains, passes Okochee and then blends its waters trippingly, as fall the mellifluous Indian syllables, with the Chattahoochee.</p>
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<p>Okochee rose, as it were, from its sunny seat on the post-office stoop, hitched up its suspender, and threw a granite dam two hundred and forty feet long and sixty feet high across the Cooloosa one mile above the town. Thereupon, a dimpling, sparkling lake backed up twenty miles among the little mountains. Thus in the great game of municipal rivalry did Okochee match that famous drawing card, the Hudson. It was conceded that nowhere could the Palisades be judged superior in the way of scenery and grandeur. Following the picture card was played the ace of commercial importance. Fourteen thousand horsepower would this dam furnish. Cotton mills, factories, and manufacturing plants would rise up as the green corn after a shower. The spindle and the flywheel and turbine would sing the shrewd glory of Okochee. Along the picturesque heights above the lake would rise in beauty the costly villas and the splendid summer residences of capital. The naphtha launch of the millionaire would spit among the romantic coves; the verdured hills would take formal shapes of terrace, lawn, and park. Money would be spent like water in Okochee, and water would be turned into money.</p>
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<p>The fate of the good town is quickly told. Capital decided not to invest. Of all the great things promised, the scenery alone came to fulfilment. The wooded peaks, the impressive promontories of solemn granite, the beautiful green slants of bank and ravine did all they could to reconcile Okochee to the delinquency of miserly gold. The sunsets gilded the dreamy draws and coves with a minting that should charm away heart-burning. Okochee, true to the instinct of its blood and clime, was lulled by the spell. It climbed out of the arena, loosed its suspender, sat down again on the post-office stoop, and took a chew. It consoled itself by drawling sarcasms at the city council which was not to blame, causing the fathers, as has been said, to seek back streets and figure perspiringly on the sinking fund and the appropriation for interest due.</p>
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<p>The youth of Okochee—they who were to carry into the rosy future the burden of the debt—accepted failure with youth’s uncalculating joy. For, here was sport, aquatic and nautical, added to the meagre round of life’s pleasures. In yachting caps and flowing neckties they pervaded the lake to its limits. Girls wore silk waists embroidered with anchors in blue and pink. The trousers of the young men widened at the bottom, and their hands were proudly calloused by the oft-plied oar. Fishermen were under the spell of a deep and tolerant joy. Sailboats and rowboats furrowed the lenient waves, popcorn and ice-cream booths sprang up about the little wooden pier. Two small excursion steamboats were built, and plied the delectable waters. Okochee philosophically gave up the hope of eating turtle soup with a gold spoon, and settled back, not ill content, to its regular diet of lotus and fried hominy. And out of this slow wreck of great expectations rose up J. Pinkney Bloom with his “wad” and his prosperous, cheery smile.</p>
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<p>Needless to say J. Pinkney was no product of Georgia soil. He came out of that flushed and capable region known as the “North.” He called himself a “promoter”; his enemies had spoken of him as a “grafter”; Okochee took a middle course, and held him to be no better nor no worse than a “Yank.”</p>
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<p>Far up the lake—eighteen miles above the town—the eye of this cheerful camp-follower of booms had spied out a graft. He purchased there a precipitous tract of five hundred acres at forty-five cents per acre; and this he laid out and subdivided as the city of Skyland—the Queen City of the Switzerland of the South. Streets and avenues were surveyed; parks designed; corners of central squares reserved for the “proposed” opera house, board of trade, lyceum, market, public schools, and “Exposition Hall.” The price of lots ranged from five to five hundred dollars. Positively, no lot would be priced higher than five hundred dollars.</p>
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<p>While the boom was growing in Okochee, J. Pinkney’s circulars, maps, and prospectuses were flying through the mails to every part of the country. Investors sent in their money by post, and the Skyland Real Estate Company (J. Pinkney Bloom) returned to each a deed, duly placed on record, to the best lot, at the price, on hand that day. All this time the catamount screeched upon the reserved lot of the Skyland Board of Trade, the opossum swung by his tail over the site of the exposition hall, and the owl hooted a melancholy recitative to his audience of young squirrels in opera house square. Later, when the money was coming in fast, J. Pinkney caused to be erected in the coming city half a dozen cheap box houses, and persuaded a contingent of indigent natives to occupy them, thereby assuming the role of “population” in subsequent prospectuses, which became, accordingly, more seductive and remunerative.</p>
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<p>So, when the dream faded and Okochee dropped back to digging bait and nursing its two and a half per cent. tax, J. Pinkney Bloom (unloving of checks and drafts and the cold interrogatories of bankers) strapped about his fifty-two-inch waist a soft leather belt containing eight thousand dollars in big bills, and said that all was very good.</p>
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<p>One last trip he was making to Skyland before departing to other salad fields. Skyland was a regular post-office, and the steamboat, <i>Dixie Belle</i>, under contract, delivered the mail bag (generally empty) twice a week. There was a little business there to be settled—the postmaster was to be paid off for his light but lonely services, and the “inhabitants” had to be furnished with another month’s homely rations, as per agreement. And then Skyland would know J. Pinkney Bloom no more. The owners of these precipitous, barren, useless lots might come and view the scene of their invested credulity, or they might leave them to their fit tenants, the wild hog and the browsing deer. The work of the Skyland Real Estate Company was finished.</p>
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<p>The little steamboat <i>Dixie Belle</i> was about to shove off on her regular up-the-lake trip, when a rickety hired carriage rattled up to the pier, and a tall, elderly gentleman, in black, stepped out, signaling courteously but vivaciously for the boat to wait. Time was of the least importance in the schedule of the <i>Dixie Belle</i>; Captain MacFarland gave the order, and the boat received its ultimate two passengers. For, upon the arm of the tall, elderly gentleman, as he crossed the gangway, was a little elderly lady, with a gray curl depending quaintly forward of her left ear.</p>
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<p>Captain MacFarland was at the wheel; therefore it seemed to J. Pinkney Bloom, who was the only other passenger, that it should be his to play the part of host to the boat’s new guests, who were, doubtless, on a scenery-viewing expedition. He stepped forward, with that translucent, child-candid smile upon his fresh, pink countenance, with that air of unaffected sincerity that was redeemed from bluffness only by its exquisite calculation, with that promptitude and masterly decision of manner that so well suited his calling—with all his stock in trade well to the front; he stepped forward to receive Colonel and Mrs. Peyton Blaylock. With the grace of a grand marshal or a wedding usher, he escorted the two passengers to a side of the upper deck, from which the scenery was supposed to present itself to the observer in increased quantity and quality. There, in comfortable steamer chairs, they sat and began to piece together the random lines that were to form an intelligent paragraph in the big history of little events.</p>
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<p>“Our home, sir,” said Colonel Blaylock, removing his wide-brimmed, rather shapeless black felt hat, “is in Holly Springs—Holly Springs, Georgia. I am very proud to make your acquaintance, Mr. Bloom. Mrs. Blaylock and myself have just arrived in Okochee this morning, sir, on business—business of importance in connection with the recent rapid march of progress in this section of our state.”</p>
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<p>The Colonel smoothed back, with a sweeping gesture, his long, smooth, locks. His dark eyes, still fiery under the heavy black brows, seemed inappropriate to the face of a business man. He looked rather to be an old courtier handed down from the reign of Charles, and re-attired in a modern suit of fine, but raveling and seam-worn, broadcloth.</p>
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<p>“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Bloom, in his heartiest prospectus voice, “things have been whizzing around Okochee. Biggest industrial revival and waking up to natural resources Georgia ever had. Did you happen to squeeze in on the ground floor in any of the gilt-edged grafts, Colonel?”</p>
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<p>“Well, sir,” said the Colonel, hesitating in courteous doubt, “if I understand your question, I may say that I took the opportunity to make an investment that I believe will prove quite advantageous—yes, sir, I believe it will result in both pecuniary profit and agreeable occupation.”</p>
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<p>“Colonel Blaylock,” said the little elderly lady, shaking her gray curl and smiling indulgent explanation at J. Pinkney Bloom, “is so devoted to businesss. He has such a talent for financiering and markets and investments and those kind of things. I think myself extremely fortunate in having secured him for a partner on life’s journey—I am so unversed in those formidable but very useful branches of learning.”</p>
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<p>Colonel Blaylock rose and made a bow—a bow that belonged with silk stockings and lace ruffles and velvet.</p>
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<p>“Practical affairs,” he said, with a wave of his hand toward the promoter, “are, if I may use the comparison, the garden walks upon which we tread through life, viewing upon either side of us the flowers which brighten that journey. It is my pleasure to be able to lay out a walk or two. Mrs. Blaylock, sir, is one of those fortunate higher spirits whose mission it is to make the flowers grow. Perhaps, Mr. Bloom, you have perused the lines of Lorella, the Southern poetess. That is the name above which Mrs. Blaylock has contributed to the press of the South for many years.”</p>
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<p>“Unfortunately,” said Mr. Bloom, with a sense of the loss clearly written upon his frank face, “I’m like the Colonel—in the walk-making business myself—and I haven’t had time to even take a sniff at the flowers. Poetry is a line I never dealt in. It must be nice, though—quite nice.”</p>
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<p>“It is the region,” smiled Mrs. Blaylock, “in which my soul dwells. My shawl, Peyton, if you please—the breeze comes a little chilly from yon verdured hills.”</p>
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<p>The Colonel drew from the tail pocket of his coat a small shawl of knitted silk and laid it solicitously about the shoulders of the lady. Mrs. Blaylock sighed contentedly, and turned her expressive eyes—still as clear and unworldly as a child’s—upon the steep slopes that were slowly slipping past. Very fair and stately they looked in the clear morning air. They seemed to speak in familiar terms to the responsive spirit of Lorella. “My native hills!” she murmured, dreamily. “See how the foliage drinks the sunlight from the hollows and dells.”</p>
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<p>“Mrs. Blaylock’s maiden days,” said the Colonel, interpreting her mood to J. Pinkney Bloom, “were spent among the mountains of northern Georgia. Mountain air and mountain scenery recall to her those days. Holly Springs, where we have lived for twenty years, is low and flat. I fear that she may have suffered in health and spirits by so long a residence there. That is one portent reason for the change we are making. My dear, can you not recall those lines you wrote—entitled, I think, ‘The Georgia Hills’—the poem that was so extensively copied by the Southern press and praised so highly by the Atlanta critics?”</p>
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<p>Mrs. Blaylock turned a glance of speaking tenderness upon the Colonel, fingered for a moment the silvery curl that drooped upon her bosom, then looked again toward the mountains. Without preliminary or affectation or demurral she began, in rather thrilling and more deeply pitched tones to recite these lines:</p>
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<p class="poem">“The Georgia hills, the Georgia hills!—<br/> Oh, heart, why dost thou pine?<br/> Are not these sheltered lowlands fair<br/> With mead and bloom and vine?<br/> Ah! as the slow-paced river here<br/> Broods on its natal rills<br/> My spirit drifts, in longing sweet,<br/> Back to the Georgia hills.<br/></p>
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<p class="poem">“And through the close-drawn, curtained night<br/> I steal on sleep’s slow wings<br/> Back to my heart’s ease—slopes of pine—<br/> Where end my wanderings.<br/> Oh, heaven seems nearer from their tops—<br/> And farther earthly ills—<br/> Even in dreams, if I may but<br/> Dream of my Georgia hills.<br/></p>
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<p class="poem">The grass upon their orchard sides<br/> Is a fine couch to me;<br/> The common note of each small bird<br/> Passes all minstrelsy.<br/> It would not seem so dread a thing<br/> If, when the Reaper wills,<br/> He might come there and take my hand<br/> Up in the Georgia hills.”<br/></p>
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<br/>
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<p>“That’s great stuff, ma’am,” said J. Pinkney Bloom, enthusiastically, when the poetess had concluded. “I wish I had looked up poetry more than I have. I was raised in the pine hills myself.”</p>
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<p>“The mountains ever call to their children,” murmured Mrs. Blaylock. “I feel that life will take on the rosy hue of hope again in among these beautiful hills. Peyton—a little taste of the currant wine, if you will be so good. The journey, though delightful in the extreme, slightly fatigues me.” Colonel Blaylock again visited the depths of his prolific coat, and produced a tightly corked, rough, black bottle. Mr. Bloom was on his feet in an instant.</p>
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<p>“Let me bring a glass, ma’am. You come along, Colonel—there’s a little table we can bring, too. Maybe we can scare up some fruit or a cup of tea on board. I’ll ask Mac.”</p>
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<p>Mrs. Blaylock reclined at ease. Few royal ladies have held their royal prerogative with the serene grace of the petted Southern woman. The Colonel, with an air as gallant and assiduous as in the days of his courtship, and J. Pinkney Bloom, with a ponderous agility half professional and half directed by some resurrected, unnamed, long-forgotten sentiment, formed a diversified but attentive court. The currant wine—wine home made from the Holly Springs fruit—went round, and then J. Pinkney began to hear something of Holly Springs life.</p>
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<p>It seemed (from the conversation of the Blaylocks) that the Springs was decadent. A third of the population had moved away. Business—and the Colonel was an authority on business—had dwindled to nothing. After carefully studying the field of opportunities open to capital he had sold his little property there for eight hundred dollars and invested it in one of the enterprises opened up by the book in Okochee.</p>
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<p>“Might I inquire, sir,” said Mr. Bloom, “in what particular line of business you inserted your coin? I know that town as well as I know the regulations for illegal use of the mails. I might give you a hunch as to whether you can make the game go or not.”</p>
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<p>J. Pinkney, somehow, had a kindly feeling toward these unsophisticated representatives of by-gone days. They were so simple, impractical, and unsuspecting. He was glad that he happened not to have a gold brick or a block of that western Bad Boy Silver Mine stock along with him. He would have disliked to unload on people he liked so well as he did these; but there are some temptations toe enticing to be resisted.</p>
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<p>“No, sir,” said Colonel Blaylock, pausing to arrange the queen’s wrap. “I did not invest in Okochee. I have made an exhaustive study of business conditions, and I regard old settled towns as unfavorable fields in which to place capital that is limited in amount. Some months ago, through the kindness of a friend, there came into my hands a map and description of this new town of Skyland that has been built upon the lake. The description was so pleasing, the future of the town set forth in such convincing arguments, and its increasing prosperity portrayed in such an attractive style that I decided to take advantage of the opportunity it offered. I carefully selected a lot in the centre of the business district, although its price was the highest in the schedule—five hundred dollars—and made the purchase at once.”</p>
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<p>“Are you the man—I mean, did you pay five hundred dollars for a lot in Skyland” asked J. Pinkney Bloom.</p>
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<p>“I did, sir,” answered the Colonel, with the air of a modest millionaire explaining his success; “a lot most excellently situated on the same square with the opera house, and only two squares from the board of trade. I consider the purchase a most fortuitous one. It is my intention to erect a small building upon it at once, and open a modest book and stationery store. During past years I have met with many pecuniary reverses, and I now find it necessary to engage in some commercial occupation that will furnish me with a livelihood. The book and stationery business, though an humble one, seems to me not inapt nor altogether uncongenial. I am a graduate of the University of Virginia; and Mrs. Blaylock’s really wonderful acquaintance with belles-lettres and poetic literature should go far toward insuring success. Of course, Mrs. Blaylock would not personally serve behind the counter. With the nearly three hundred dollars I have remaining I can manage the building of a house, by giving a lien on the lot. I have an old friend in Atlanta who is a partner in a large book store, and he has agreed to furnish me with a stock of goods on credit, on extremely easy terms. I am pleased to hope, sir, that Mrs. Blaylock’s health and happiness will be increased by the change of locality. Already I fancy I can perceive the return of those roses that were once the hope and despair of Georgia cavaliers.”</p>
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<p>Again followed that wonderful bow, as the Colonel lightly touched the pale cheek of the poetess. Mrs. Blaylock, blushing like a girl, shook her curl and gave the Colonel an arch, reproving tap. Secret of eternal youth—where art thou? Every second the answer comes—“Here, here, here.” Listen to thine own heartbeats, O weary seeker after external miracles.</p>
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<p>“Those years,” said Mrs. Blaylock, “in Holly Springs were long, long, long. But now is the promised land in sight. Skyland!—a lovely name.”</p>
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<p>“Doubtless,” said the Colonel, “we shall be able to secure comfortable accommodations at some modest hotel at reasonable rates. Our trunks are in Okochee, to be forwarded when we shall have made permanent arrangements.”</p>
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<p>J. Pinkney Bloom excused himself, went forward, and stood by the captain at the wheel.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mac,” said he, “do you remember my telling you once that I sold one of those five-hundred-dollar lots in Skyland?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Seems I do,” grinned Captain MacFarland.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m not a coward, as a general rule,” went on the promoter, “but I always said that if I ever met the sucker that bought that lot I’d run like a turkey. Now, you see that old babe-in-the-wood over there? Well, he’s the boy that drew the prize. That was the only five-hundred-dollar lot that went. The rest ranged from ten dollars to two hundred. His wife writes poetry. She’s invented one about the high grounds of Georgia, that’s way up in G. They’re going to Skyland to open a book store.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well,” said MacFarland, with another grin, “it’s a good thing you are along, J. P.; you can show ’em around town until they begin to feel at home.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“He’s got three hundred dollars left to build a house and store with,” went on J. Pinkney, as if he were talking to himself. “And he thinks there’s an open house up there.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Captain MacFarland released the wheel long enough to give his leg a roguish slap.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You old fat rascal!” he chuckled, with a wink.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mac, you’re a fool,” said J. Pinkney Bloom, coldly. He went back and joined the Blaylocks, where he sat, less talkative, with that straight furrow between his brows that always stood as a signal of schemes being shaped within.</p>
|
||||
<p>“There’s a good many swindles connected with these booms,” he said presently. “What if this Skyland should turn out to be one—that is, suppose business should be sort of dull there, and no special sale for books?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“My dear sir,” said Colonel Blaylock, resting his hand upon the back of his wife’s chair, “three times I have been reduced to almost penury by the duplicity of others, but I have not yet lost faith in humanity. If I have been deceived again, still we may glean health and content, if not worldly profit. I am aware that there are dishonest schemers in the world who set traps for the unwary, but even they are not altogether bad. My dear, can you recall those verses entitled ‘He Giveth the Increase,’ that you composed for the choir of our church in Holly Springs?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“That was four years ago,” said Mrs. Blaylock; “perhaps I can repeat a verse or two.</p>
|
||||
<p class="poem">“The lily springs from the rotting mould;<br/> Pearls from the deep sea slime;<br/> Good will come out of Nazareth<br/> All in God’s own time.<br/></p>
|
||||
<p class="poem">“To the hardest heart the softening grace<br/> Cometh, at last, to bless;<br/> Guiding it right to help and cheer<br/> And succor in distress.<br/></p>
|
||||
<p>“I cannot remember the rest. The lines were not ambitious. They were written to the music composed by a dear friend.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s a fine rhyme, just the same,” declared Mr. Bloom. “It seems to ring the bell, all right. I guess I gather the sense of it. It means that the rankest kind of a phony will give you the best end of it once in a while.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Bloom strayed thoughtfully back to the captain, and stood meditating.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ought to be in sight of the spires and gilded domes of Skyland now in a few minutes,” chirruped MacFarland, shaking with enjoyment.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Go to the devil,” said Mr. Bloom, still pensive.</p>
|
||||
<p>And now, upon the left bank, they caught a glimpse of a white village, high up on the hills, smothered among green trees. That was Cold Branch—no boom town, but the slow growth of many years. Cold Branch lay on the edge of the grape and corn lands. The big country road ran just back of the heights. Cold Branch had nothing in common with the frisky ambition of Okochee with its impertinent lake.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mac,” said J. Pinkney suddenly, “I want you to stop at Cold Branch. There’s a landing there that they made to use sometimes when the river was up.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Can’t,” said the captain, grinning more broadly. “I’ve got the United States mails on board. Right to-day this boat’s in the government service. Do you want to have the poor old captain keelhauled by Uncle Sam? And the great city of Skyland, all disconsolate, waiting for its mail? I’m ashamed of your extravagance, J. P.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mac,” almost whispered J. Pinkney, in his danger-line voice, “I looked into the engine room of the <i>Dixie Belle</i> a while ago. Don’t you know of somebody that needs a new boiler? Cement and black Japan can’t hide flaws from me. And then, those shares of building and loan that you traded for repairs—they were all yours, of course. I hate to mention these things, but—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, come now, J. P.,” said the captain. “You know I was just fooling. I’ll put you off at Cold Branch, if you say so.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The other passengers get off there, too,” said Mr. Bloom.</p>
|
||||
<p>Further conversation was held, and in ten minutes the <i>Dixie Belle</i> turned her nose toward a little, cranky wooden pier on the left bank, and the captain, relinquishing the wheel to a roustabout, came to the passenger deck and made the remarkable announcement: “All out for Skyland.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The Blaylocks and J. Pinkney Bloom disembarked, and the <i>Dixie Belle</i> proceeded on her way up the lake. Guided by the indefatigable promoter, they slowly climbed the steep hillside, pausing often to rest and admire the view. Finally they entered the village of Cold Branch. Warmly both the Colonel and his wife praised it for its homelike and peaceful beauty. Mr. Bloom conducted them to a two-story building on a shady street that bore the legend, “Pine-top Inn.” Here he took his leave, receiving the cordial thanks of the two for his attentions, the Colonel remarking that he thought they would spend the remainder of the day in rest, and take a look at his purchase on the morrow.</p>
|
||||
<p>J. Pinkney Bloom walked down Cold Branch’s main street. He did not know this town, but he knew towns, and his feet did not falter. Presently he saw a sign over a door: “Frank E. Cooly, Attorney-at-Law and Notary Public.” A young man was Mr. Cooly, and awaiting business.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Get your hat, son,” said Mr. Bloom, in his breezy way, “and a blank deed, and come along. It’s a job for you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Now,” he continued, when Mr. Cooly had responded with alacrity, “is there a bookstore in town?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“One,” said the lawyer. “Henry Williams’s.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Get there,” said Mr. Bloom. “We’re going to buy it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Henry Williams was behind his counter. His store was a small one, containing a mixture of books, stationery, and fancy rubbish. Adjoining it was Henry’s home—a decent cottage, vine-embowered and cosy. Henry was lank and soporific, and not inclined to rush his business.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I want to buy your house and store,” said Mr. Bloom. “I haven’t got time to dicker—name your price.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s worth eight hundred,” said Henry, too much dazed to ask more than its value.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Shut that door,” said Mr. Bloom to the lawyer. Then he tore off his coat and vest, and began to unbutton his shirt.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Wanter fight about it, do yer?” said Henry Williams, jumping up and cracking his heels together twice. “All right, hunky—sail in and cut yer capers.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Keep your clothes on,” said Mr. Bloom. “I’m only going down to the bank.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He drew eight one-hundred-dollar bills from his money belt and planked them down on the counter. Mr. Cooly showed signs of future promise, for he already had the deed spread out, and was reaching across the counter for the ink bottle. Never before or since was such quick action had in Cold Branch.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Your name, please?” asked the lawyer.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Make it out to Peyton Blaylock,” said Mr. Bloom. “God knows how to spell it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Within thirty minutes Henry Williams was out of business, and Mr. Bloom stood on the brick sidewalk with Mr. Cooly, who held in his hand the signed and attested deed.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’ll find the party at the Pinetop Inn,” said J. Pinkney Bloom. “Get it recorded, and take it down and give it to him. He’ll ask you a hell’s mint of questions; so here’s ten dollars for the trouble you’ll have in not being able to answer ’em. Never run much to poetry, did you, young man?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well,” said the really talented Cooly, who even yet retained his right mind, “now and then.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Dig into it,” said Mr. Bloom, “it’ll pay you. Never heard a poem, now, that run something like this, did you?—</p>
|
||||
<p class="poem">A good thing out of Nazareth<br/> Comes up sometimes, I guess,<br/> On hand, all right, to help and cheer<br/> A sucker in distress.”<br/></p>
|
||||
<p>“I believe not,” said Mr. Cooly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s a hymn,” said J. Pinkney Bloom. “Now, show me the way to a livery stable, son, for I’m going to hit the dirt road back to Okochee.”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
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|
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||||
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|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 5</title>
|
||||
<title>Confessions of a Humorist</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-5" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>CONFESSIONS OF A HUMORIST</h2>
|
||||
<section id="confessions-of-a-humorist" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Confessions of a Humorist</h2>
|
||||
<p>There was a painless stage of incubation that lasted twenty-five years, and then it broke out on me, and people said I was It.</p>
|
||||
<p>But they called it humor instead of measles.</p>
|
||||
<p>The employees in the store bought a silver inkstand for the senior partner on his fiftieth birthday. We crowded into his private office to present it. I had been selected for spokesman, and I made a little speech that I had been preparing for a week.</p>
|
||||
@ -31,7 +31,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“I am a little tired,” I admitted. So we went to the woods.</p>
|
||||
<p>But I soon got the swing of it. Within a month I was turning out copy as regular as shipments of hardware.</p>
|
||||
<p>And I had success. My column in the weekly made some stir, and I was referred to in a gossipy way by the critics as something fresh in the line of humorists. I augmented my income considerably by contributing to other publications.</p>
|
||||
<p>I picked up the tricks of the trade. I could take a funny idea and make a two-line joke of it, earning a dollar. With false whiskers on, it would serve up cold as a quatrain, doubling its producing value. By turning the skirt and adding a ruffle of rhyme you would hardly recognize it as <i>vers de societe</i> with neatly shod feet and a fashion-plate illustration.</p>
|
||||
<p>I picked up the tricks of the trade. I could take a funny idea and make a two-line joke of it, earning a dollar. With false whiskers on, it would serve up cold as a quatrain, doubling its producing value. By turning the skirt and adding a ruffle of rhyme you would hardly recognize it as vers de societe with neatly shod feet and a fashion-plate illustration.</p>
|
||||
<p>I began to save up money, and we had new carpets, and a parlor organ. My townspeople began to look upon me as a citizen of some consequence instead of the merry trifler I had been when I clerked in the hardware store.</p>
|
||||
<p>After five or six months the spontaniety seemed to depart from my humor. Quips and droll sayings no longer fell carelessly from my lips. I was sometimes hard run for material. I found myself listening to catch available ideas from the conversation of my friends. Sometimes I chewed my pencil and gazed at the wall paper for hours trying to build up some gay little bubble of unstudied fun.</p>
|
||||
<p>And then I became a harpy, a Moloch, a Jonah, a vampire, to my acquaintances. Anxious, haggard, greedy, I stood among them like a veritable killjoy. Let a bright saying, a witty comparison, a piquant phrase fall from their lips and I was after it like a hound springing upon a bone. I dared not trust my memory; but, turning aside guiltily and meanly, I would make a note of it in my ever-present memorandum book or upon my cuff for my own future use.</p>
|
||||
@ -40,7 +40,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Nearly every one began to avoid me. I even forgot how to smile, not even paying that much for the sayings I appropriated.</p>
|
||||
<p>No persons, places, times, or subjects were exempt from my plundering in search of material. Even in church my demoralized fancy went hunting among the solemn aisles and pillars for spoil.</p>
|
||||
<p>Did the minister give out the long-meter doxology, at once I began: “Doxology—sockdology—sockdolager—meter—meet her.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The sermon ran through my mental sieve, its precepts filtering unheeded, could I but glean a suggestion of a pun or a <i>bon mot</i>. The solemnest anthems of the choir were but an accompaniment to my thoughts as I conceived new changes to ring upon the ancient comicalities concerning the jealousies of soprano, tenor, and basso.</p>
|
||||
<p>The sermon ran through my mental sieve, its precepts filtering unheeded, could I but glean a suggestion of a pun or a bon mot. The solemnest anthems of the choir were but an accompaniment to my thoughts as I conceived new changes to ring upon the ancient comicalities concerning the jealousies of soprano, tenor, and basso.</p>
|
||||
<p>My own home became a hunting ground. My wife is a singularly feminine creature, candid, sympathetic, and impulsive. Once her conversation was my delight, and her ideas a source of unfailing pleasure. Now I worked her. She was a gold mine of those amusing but lovable inconsistencies that distinguish the female mind.</p>
|
||||
<p>I began to market those pearls of unwisdom and humor that should have enriched only the sacred precincts of home. With devilish cunning I encouraged her to talk. Unsuspecting, she laid her heart bare. Upon the cold, conspicuous, common, printed page I offered it to the public gaze.</p>
|
||||
<p>A literary Judas, I kissed her and betrayed her. For pieces of silver I dressed her sweet confidences in the pantalettes and frills of folly and made them dance in the market place.</p>
|
||||
@ -68,20 +68,22 @@
|
||||
<p>I went home with feelings of delirious joy, mingled with a certain amount of doubt. I was dreading to tell my wife about it. But I walked on air. To give up the writing of humorous stuff, once more to enjoy the apples of life, instead of squeezing them to a pulp for a few drops of hard cider to make the pubic feel funny—what a boon that would be!</p>
|
||||
<p>At the supper table Louisa handed me some letters that had come during my absence. Several of them contained rejected manuscript. Ever since I first began going to Heffelbower’s my stuff had been coming back with alarming frequency. Lately I had been dashing off my jokes and articles with the greatest fluency. Previously I had labored like a bricklayer, slowly and with agony.</p>
|
||||
<p>Presently I opened a letter from the editor of the weekly with which I had a regular contract. The checks for that weekly article were still our main dependence. The letter ran thus:</p>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<p class="letter">DEAR SIR:</p>
|
||||
<p class="letter">As you are aware, our contract for the year expires with the present month. While regretting the necessity for so doing, we must say that we do not care to renew same for the coming year. We were quite pleased with your style of humor, which seems to have delighted quite a large proportion of our readers. But for the past two months we have noticed a decided falling off in its quality. Your earlier work showed a spontaneous, easy, natural flow of fun and wit. Of late it is labored, studied, and unconvincing, giving painful evidence of hard toil and drudging mechanism.</p>
|
||||
<p class="letter">Again regretting that we do not consider your contributions available any longer, we are, yours sincerely,</p>
|
||||
<p class="letter">THE EDITOR.</p>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<p>I handed this letter to my wife. After she had read it her face grew extremely long, and there were tears in her eyes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The mean old thing!” she exclaimed indignantly. “I’m sure your pieces are just as good as they ever were. And it doesn’t take you half as long to write them as it did.” And then, I suppose, Louisa thought of the checks that would cease coming. “Oh, John,” she wailed, “what will you do now?”</p>
|
||||
<p>For an answer I got up and began to do a polka step around the supper table. I am sure Louisa thought the trouble had driven me mad; and I think the children hoped it had, for they tore after me, yelling with glee and emulating my steps. I was now something like their old playmate as of yore.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The theatre for us to-night!” I shouted; “nothing less. And a late, wild, disreputable supper for all of us at the Palace Restaurant. Lumpty-diddle-de-dee-de-dum!”</p>
|
||||
<p>And then I explained my glee by declaring that I was now a partner in a prosperous undertaking establishment, and that written jokes might go hide their heads in sackcloth and ashes for all me.</p>
|
||||
<p>With the editor’s letter in her hand to justify the deed I had done, my wife could advance no objections save a few mild ones based on the feminine inability to appreciate a good thing such as the little back room of Peter Hef—no, of Heffelbower & Co’s. undertaking establishment.</p>
|
||||
<p>In conclusion, I will say that to-day you will find no man in our town as well liked, as jovial, and full of merry sayings as I. My jokes are again noised about and quoted; once more I take pleasure in my wife’s confidential chatter without a mercenary thought, while Guy and Viola play at my feet distributing gems of childish humor without fear of the ghastly tormentor who used to dog their steps, notebook in hand.</p>
|
||||
<p>Our business has prospered finely. I keep the books and look after the shop, while Peter attends to outside matters. He says that my levity and high spirits would simply turn any funeral into a regular Irish wake.</p>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:letter">
|
||||
<p epub:type="salutation">Dear Sir:</p>
|
||||
<p>As you are aware, our contract for the year expires with the present month. While regretting the necessity for so doing, we must say that we do not care to renew same for the coming year. We were quite pleased with your style of humor, which seems to have delighted quite a large proportion of our readers. But for the past two months we have noticed a decided falling off in its quality. Your earlier work showed a spontaneous, easy, natural flow of fun and wit. Of late it is labored, studied, and unconvincing, giving painful evidence of hard toil and drudging mechanism.</p>
|
||||
<p>Again regretting that we do not consider your contributions available any longer, we are, yours sincerely,</p>
|
||||
<p class="signature">The Editor.</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p>I handed this letter to my wife. After she had read it her face grew extremely long, and there were tears in her eyes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The mean old thing!” she exclaimed indignantly. “I’m sure your pieces are just as good as they ever were. And it doesn’t take you half as long to write them as it did.” And then, I suppose, Louisa thought of the checks that would cease coming. “Oh, John,” she wailed, “what will you do now?”</p>
|
||||
<p>For an answer I got up and began to do a polka step around the supper table. I am sure Louisa thought the trouble had driven me mad; and I think the children hoped it had, for they tore after me, yelling with glee and emulating my steps. I was now something like their old playmate as of yore.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The theatre for us to-night!” I shouted; “nothing less. And a late, wild, disreputable supper for all of us at the Palace Restaurant. Lumpty-diddle-de-dee-de-dum!”</p>
|
||||
<p>And then I explained my glee by declaring that I was now a partner in a prosperous undertaking establishment, and that written jokes might go hide their heads in sackcloth and ashes for all me.</p>
|
||||
<p>With the editor’s letter in her hand to justify the deed I had done, my wife could advance no objections save a few mild ones based on the feminine inability to appreciate a good thing such as the little back room of Peter Hef—no, of Heffelbower & Co’s. undertaking establishment.</p>
|
||||
<p>In conclusion, I will say that to-day you will find no man in our town as well liked, as jovial, and full of merry sayings as I. My jokes are again noised about and quoted; once more I take pleasure in my wife’s confidential chatter without a mercenary thought, while Guy and Viola play at my feet distributing gems of childish humor without fear of the ghastly tormentor who used to dog their steps, notebook in hand.</p>
|
||||
<p>Our business has prospered finely. I keep the books and look after the shop, while Peter attends to outside matters. He says that my levity and high spirits would simply turn any funeral into a regular Irish wake.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
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<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 7</title>
|
||||
<title>Hearts and Hands</title>
|
||||
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<section id="chapter-7" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>HEARTS AND HANDS</h2>
|
||||
<section id="hearts-and-hands" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Hearts and Hands</h2>
|
||||
<p>At Denver there was an influx of passengers into the coaches on the eastbound B. & M. express. In one coach there sat a very pretty young woman dressed in elegant taste and surrounded by all the luxurious comforts of an experienced traveler. Among the newcomers were two young men, one of handsome presence with a bold, frank countenance and manner; the other a ruffled, glum-faced person, heavily built and roughly dressed. The two were handcuffed together.</p>
|
||||
<p>As they passed down the aisle of the coach the only vacant seat offered was a reversed one facing the attractive young woman. Here the linked couple seated themselves. The young woman’s glance fell upon them with a distant, swift disinterest; then with a lovely smile brightening her countenance and a tender pink tingeing her rounded cheeks, she held out a little gray-gloved hand. When she spoke her voice, full, sweet, and deliberate, proclaimed that its owner was accustomed to speak and be heard.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, Mr. Easton, if you <i>will</i> make me speak first, I suppose I must. Don’t you ever recognize old friends when you meet them in the West?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Easton, if you <em>will</em> make me speak first, I suppose I must. Don’t you ever recognize old friends when you meet them in the West?”</p>
|
||||
<p>The younger man roused himself sharply at the sound of her voice, seemed to struggle with a slight embarrassment which he threw off instantly, and then clasped her fingers with his left hand.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s Miss Fairchild,” he said, with a smile. “I’ll ask you to excuse the other hand; it’s otherwise engaged just at present.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He slightly raised his right hand, bound at the wrist by the shining “bracelet” to the left one of his companion. The glad look in the girl’s eyes slowly changed to a bewildered horror. The glow faded from her cheeks. Her lips parted in a vague, relaxing distress. Easton, with a little laugh, as if amused, was about to speak again when the other forestalled him. The glum-faced man had been watching the girl’s countenance with veiled glances from his keen, shrewd eyes.</p>
|
||||
@ -19,11 +19,11 @@
|
||||
<p>“My dear Miss Fairchild,” said Easton, calmly, “I had to do something. Money has a way of taking wings unto itself, and you know it takes money to keep step with our crowd in Washington. I saw this opening in the West, and—well, a marshalship isn’t quite as high a position as that of ambassador, but—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The ambassador,” said the girl, warmly, “doesn’t call any more. He needn’t ever have done so. You ought to know that. And so now you are one of these dashing Western heroes, and you ride and shoot and go into all kinds of dangers. That’s different from the Washington life. You have been missed from the old crowd.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The girl’s eyes, fascinated, went back, widening a little, to rest upon the glittering handcuffs.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Don’t you worry about them, miss,” said the other man. “All marshals handcuff themselves to their prisoners to keep them from getting away. Mr. Easton knows his business.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Don’t you worry about them, miss,” said the other man. “All marshals handcuff themselves to their prisoners to keep them from getting away. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Easton knows his business.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Will we see you again soon in Washington?” asked the girl.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Not soon, I think,” said Easton. “My butterfly days are over, I fear.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I love the West,” said the girl irrelevantly. Her eyes were shining softly. She looked away out the car window. She began to speak truly and simply without the gloss of style and manner: “Mamma and I spent the summer in Denver. She went home a week ago because father was slightly ill. I could live and be happy in the West. I think the air here agrees with me. Money isn’t everything. But people always misunderstand things and remain stupid—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say, Mr. Marshal,” growled the glum-faced man. “This isn’t quite fair. I’m needing a drink, and haven’t had a smoke all day. Haven’t you talked long enough? Take me in the smoker now, won’t you? I’m half dead for a pipe.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Marshal,” growled the glum-faced man. “This isn’t quite fair. I’m needing a drink, and haven’t had a smoke all day. Haven’t you talked long enough? Take me in the smoker now, won’t you? I’m half dead for a pipe.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The bound travelers rose to their feet, Easton with the same slow smile on his face.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I can’t deny a petition for tobacco,” he said, lightly. “It’s the one friend of the unfortunate. Good-bye, Miss Fairchild. Duty calls, you know.” He held out his hand for a farewell.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s too bad you are not going East,” she said, reclothing herself with manner and style. “But you must go on to Leavenworth, I suppose?”</p>
|
||||
@ -31,7 +31,7 @@
|
||||
<p>The two men sidled down the aisle into the smoker.</p>
|
||||
<p>The two passengers in a seat near by had heard most of the conversation. Said one of them: “That marshal’s a good sort of chap. Some of these Western fellows are all right.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Pretty young to hold an office like that, isn’t he?” asked the other.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Young!” exclaimed the first speaker, “why—Oh! didn’t you catch on? Say—did you ever know an officer to handcuff a prisoner to his <i>right</i> hand?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Young!” exclaimed the first speaker, “why—Oh! didn’t you catch on? Say—did you ever know an officer to handcuff a prisoner to his <em>right</em> hand?”</p>
|
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<h2 epub:type="title">Out of Nazareth</h2>
|
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<p>Okochee, in Georgia, had a boom, and J. Pinkney Bloom came out of it with a “wad.” Okochee came out of it with a half-million-dollar debt, a two and a half per cent. city property tax, and a city council that showed a propensity for traveling the back streets of the town. These things came about through a fatal resemblance of the river Cooloosa to the Hudson, as set forth and expounded by a Northern tourist. Okochee felt that New York should not be allowed to consider itself the only alligator in the swamp, so to speak. And then that harmless, but persistent, individual so numerous in the South—the man who is always clamoring for more cotton mills, and is ready to take a dollar’s worth of stock, provided he can borrow the dollar—that man added his deadly work to the tourist’s innocent praise, and Okochee fell.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Cooloosa River winds through a range of small mountains, passes Okochee and then blends its waters trippingly, as fall the mellifluous Indian syllables, with the Chattahoochee.</p>
|
||||
<p>Okochee rose, as it were, from its sunny seat on the post-office stoop, hitched up its suspender, and threw a granite dam two hundred and forty feet long and sixty feet high across the Cooloosa one mile above the town. Thereupon, a dimpling, sparkling lake backed up twenty miles among the little mountains. Thus in the great game of municipal rivalry did Okochee match that famous drawing card, the Hudson. It was conceded that nowhere could the Palisades be judged superior in the way of scenery and grandeur. Following the picture card was played the ace of commercial importance. Fourteen thousand horsepower would this dam furnish. Cotton mills, factories, and manufacturing plants would rise up as the green corn after a shower. The spindle and the flywheel and turbine would sing the shrewd glory of Okochee. Along the picturesque heights above the lake would rise in beauty the costly villas and the splendid summer residences of capital. The naphtha launch of the millionaire would spit among the romantic coves; the verdured hills would take formal shapes of terrace, lawn, and park. Money would be spent like water in Okochee, and water would be turned into money.</p>
|
||||
<p>The fate of the good town is quickly told. Capital decided not to invest. Of all the great things promised, the scenery alone came to fulfilment. The wooded peaks, the impressive promontories of solemn granite, the beautiful green slants of bank and ravine did all they could to reconcile Okochee to the delinquency of miserly gold. The sunsets gilded the dreamy draws and coves with a minting that should charm away heart-burning. Okochee, true to the instinct of its blood and clime, was lulled by the spell. It climbed out of the arena, loosed its suspender, sat down again on the post-office stoop, and took a chew. It consoled itself by drawling sarcasms at the city council which was not to blame, causing the fathers, as has been said, to seek back streets and figure perspiringly on the sinking fund and the appropriation for interest due.</p>
|
||||
<p>The youth of Okochee—they who were to carry into the rosy future the burden of the debt—accepted failure with youth’s uncalculating joy. For, here was sport, aquatic and nautical, added to the meagre round of life’s pleasures. In yachting caps and flowing neckties they pervaded the lake to its limits. Girls wore silk waists embroidered with anchors in blue and pink. The trousers of the young men widened at the bottom, and their hands were proudly calloused by the oft-plied oar. Fishermen were under the spell of a deep and tolerant joy. Sailboats and rowboats furrowed the lenient waves, popcorn and ice-cream booths sprang up about the little wooden pier. Two small excursion steamboats were built, and plied the delectable waters. Okochee philosophically gave up the hope of eating turtle soup with a gold spoon, and settled back, not ill content, to its regular diet of lotus and fried hominy. And out of this slow wreck of great expectations rose up J. Pinkney Bloom with his “wad” and his prosperous, cheery smile.</p>
|
||||
<p>Needless to say J. Pinkney was no product of Georgia soil. He came out of that flushed and capable region known as the “North.” He called himself a “promoter”; his enemies had spoken of him as a “grafter”; Okochee took a middle course, and held him to be no better nor no worse than a “Yank.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Far up the lake—eighteen miles above the town—the eye of this cheerful camp-follower of booms had spied out a graft. He purchased there a precipitous tract of five hundred acres at forty-five cents per acre; and this he laid out and subdivided as the city of Skyland—the Queen City of the Switzerland of the South. Streets and avenues were surveyed; parks designed; corners of central squares reserved for the “proposed” opera house, board of trade, lyceum, market, public schools, and “Exposition Hall.” The price of lots ranged from five to five hundred dollars. Positively, no lot would be priced higher than five hundred dollars.</p>
|
||||
<p>While the boom was growing in Okochee, J. Pinkney’s circulars, maps, and prospectuses were flying through the mails to every part of the country. Investors sent in their money by post, and the Skyland Real Estate Company (J. Pinkney Bloom) returned to each a deed, duly placed on record, to the best lot, at the price, on hand that day. All this time the catamount screeched upon the reserved lot of the Skyland Board of Trade, the opossum swung by his tail over the site of the exposition hall, and the owl hooted a melancholy recitative to his audience of young squirrels in opera house square. Later, when the money was coming in fast, J. Pinkney caused to be erected in the coming city half a dozen cheap box houses, and persuaded a contingent of indigent natives to occupy them, thereby assuming the role of “population” in subsequent prospectuses, which became, accordingly, more seductive and remunerative.</p>
|
||||
<p>So, when the dream faded and Okochee dropped back to digging bait and nursing its two and a half per cent. tax, J. Pinkney Bloom (unloving of checks and drafts and the cold interrogatories of bankers) strapped about his fifty-two-inch waist a soft leather belt containing eight thousand dollars in big bills, and said that all was very good.</p>
|
||||
<p>One last trip he was making to Skyland before departing to other salad fields. Skyland was a regular post-office, and the steamboat, <i epub:type="se:vessel.ship">Dixie Belle</i>, under contract, delivered the mail bag (generally empty) twice a week. There was a little business there to be settled—the postmaster was to be paid off for his light but lonely services, and the “inhabitants” had to be furnished with another month’s homely rations, as per agreement. And then Skyland would know J. Pinkney Bloom no more. The owners of these precipitous, barren, useless lots might come and view the scene of their invested credulity, or they might leave them to their fit tenants, the wild hog and the browsing deer. The work of the Skyland Real Estate Company was finished.</p>
|
||||
<p>The little steamboat <i epub:type="se:vessel.ship">Dixie Belle</i> was about to shove off on her regular up-the-lake trip, when a rickety hired carriage rattled up to the pier, and a tall, elderly gentleman, in black, stepped out, signaling courteously but vivaciously for the boat to wait. Time was of the least importance in the schedule of the <i epub:type="se:vessel.ship">Dixie Belle</i>; Captain MacFarland gave the order, and the boat received its ultimate two passengers. For, upon the arm of the tall, elderly gentleman, as he crossed the gangway, was a little elderly lady, with a gray curl depending quaintly forward of her left ear.</p>
|
||||
<p>Captain MacFarland was at the wheel; therefore it seemed to J. Pinkney Bloom, who was the only other passenger, that it should be his to play the part of host to the boat’s new guests, who were, doubtless, on a scenery-viewing expedition. He stepped forward, with that translucent, child-candid smile upon his fresh, pink countenance, with that air of unaffected sincerity that was redeemed from bluffness only by its exquisite calculation, with that promptitude and masterly decision of manner that so well suited his calling—with all his stock in trade well to the front; he stepped forward to receive Colonel and <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Peyton Blaylock. With the grace of a grand marshal or a wedding usher, he escorted the two passengers to a side of the upper deck, from which the scenery was supposed to present itself to the observer in increased quantity and quality. There, in comfortable steamer chairs, they sat and began to piece together the random lines that were to form an intelligent paragraph in the big history of little events.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Our home, sir,” said Colonel Blaylock, removing his wide-brimmed, rather shapeless black felt hat, “is in Holly Springs—Holly Springs, Georgia. I am very proud to make your acquaintance, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blaylock and myself have just arrived in Okochee this morning, sir, on business—business of importance in connection with the recent rapid march of progress in this section of our state.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The Colonel smoothed back, with a sweeping gesture, his long, smooth, locks. His dark eyes, still fiery under the heavy black brows, seemed inappropriate to the face of a business man. He looked rather to be an old courtier handed down from the reign of Charles, and re-attired in a modern suit of fine, but raveling and seam-worn, broadcloth.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes, sir,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom, in his heartiest prospectus voice, “things have been whizzing around Okochee. Biggest industrial revival and waking up to natural resources Georgia ever had. Did you happen to squeeze in on the ground floor in any of the gilt-edged grafts, Colonel?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, sir,” said the Colonel, hesitating in courteous doubt, “if I understand your question, I may say that I took the opportunity to make an investment that I believe will prove quite advantageous—yes, sir, I believe it will result in both pecuniary profit and agreeable occupation.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Colonel Blaylock,” said the little elderly lady, shaking her gray curl and smiling indulgent explanation at J. Pinkney Bloom, “is so devoted to businesss. He has such a talent for financiering and markets and investments and those kind of things. I think myself extremely fortunate in having secured him for a partner on life’s journey—I am so unversed in those formidable but very useful branches of learning.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Colonel Blaylock rose and made a bow—a bow that belonged with silk stockings and lace ruffles and velvet.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Practical affairs,” he said, with a wave of his hand toward the promoter, “are, if I may use the comparison, the garden walks upon which we tread through life, viewing upon either side of us the flowers which brighten that journey. It is my pleasure to be able to lay out a walk or two. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blaylock, sir, is one of those fortunate higher spirits whose mission it is to make the flowers grow. Perhaps, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom, you have perused the lines of Lorella, the Southern poetess. That is the name above which <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blaylock has contributed to the press of the South for many years.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Unfortunately,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom, with a sense of the loss clearly written upon his frank face, “I’m like the Colonel—in the walk-making business myself—and I haven’t had time to even take a sniff at the flowers. Poetry is a line I never dealt in. It must be nice, though—quite nice.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It is the region,” smiled <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blaylock, “in which my soul dwells. My shawl, Peyton, if you please—the breeze comes a little chilly from yon verdured hills.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The Colonel drew from the tail pocket of his coat a small shawl of knitted silk and laid it solicitously about the shoulders of the lady. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blaylock sighed contentedly, and turned her expressive eyes—still as clear and unworldly as a child’s—upon the steep slopes that were slowly slipping past. Very fair and stately they looked in the clear morning air. They seemed to speak in familiar terms to the responsive spirit of Lorella. “My native hills!” she murmured, dreamily. “See how the foliage drinks the sunlight from the hollows and dells.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blaylock’s maiden days,” said the Colonel, interpreting her mood to J. Pinkney Bloom, “were spent among the mountains of northern Georgia. Mountain air and mountain scenery recall to her those days. Holly Springs, where we have lived for twenty years, is low and flat. I fear that she may have suffered in health and spirits by so long a residence there. That is one portent reason for the change we are making. My dear, can you not recall those lines you wrote—entitled, I think, ‘The Georgia Hills’—the poem that was so extensively copied by the Southern press and praised so highly by the Atlanta critics?”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blaylock turned a glance of speaking tenderness upon the Colonel, fingered for a moment the silvery curl that drooped upon her bosom, then looked again toward the mountains. Without preliminary or affectation or demurral she began, in rather thrilling and more deeply pitched tones to recite these lines:</p>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:poem">
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<span>“The Georgia hills, the Georgia hills!—</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span class="i1">Oh, heart, why dost thou pine?</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>Are not these sheltered lowlands fair</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span class="i1">With mead and bloom and vine?</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>Ah! as the slow-paced river here</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span class="i1">Broods on its natal rills</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>My spirit drifts, in longing sweet,</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span class="i1">Back to the Georgia hills.</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<span>“And through the close-drawn, curtained night</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span class="i1">I steal on sleep’s slow wings</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>Back to my heart’s ease—slopes of pine—</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span class="i1">Where end my wanderings.</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>Oh, heaven seems nearer from their tops—</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span class="i1">And farther earthly ills—</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>Even in dreams, if I may but</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span class="i1">Dream of my Georgia hills.</span>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<span>The grass upon their orchard sides</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span class="i1">Is a fine couch to me;</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>The common note of each small bird</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span class="i1">Passes all minstrelsy.</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>It would not seem so dread a thing</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span class="i1">If, when the Reaper wills,</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>He might come there and take my hand</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span class="i1">Up in the Georgia hills.”</span>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p>“That’s great stuff, ma’am,” said J. Pinkney Bloom, enthusiastically, when the poetess had concluded. “I wish I had looked up poetry more than I have. I was raised in the pine hills myself.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The mountains ever call to their children,” murmured <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blaylock. “I feel that life will take on the rosy hue of hope again in among these beautiful hills. Peyton—a little taste of the currant wine, if you will be so good. The journey, though delightful in the extreme, slightly fatigues me.” Colonel Blaylock again visited the depths of his prolific coat, and produced a tightly corked, rough, black bottle. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom was on his feet in an instant.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Let me bring a glass, ma’am. You come along, Colonel—there’s a little table we can bring, too. Maybe we can scare up some fruit or a cup of tea on board. I’ll ask Mac.”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blaylock reclined at ease. Few royal ladies have held their royal prerogative with the serene grace of the petted Southern woman. The Colonel, with an air as gallant and assiduous as in the days of his courtship, and J. Pinkney Bloom, with a ponderous agility half professional and half directed by some resurrected, unnamed, long-forgotten sentiment, formed a diversified but attentive court. The currant wine—wine home made from the Holly Springs fruit—went round, and then J. Pinkney began to hear something of Holly Springs life.</p>
|
||||
<p>It seemed (from the conversation of the Blaylocks) that the Springs was decadent. A third of the population had moved away. Business—and the Colonel was an authority on business—had dwindled to nothing. After carefully studying the field of opportunities open to capital he had sold his little property there for eight hundred dollars and invested it in one of the enterprises opened up by the book in Okochee.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Might I inquire, sir,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom, “in what particular line of business you inserted your coin? I know that town as well as I know the regulations for illegal use of the mails. I might give you a hunch as to whether you can make the game go or not.”</p>
|
||||
<p>J. Pinkney, somehow, had a kindly feeling toward these unsophisticated representatives of by-gone days. They were so simple, impractical, and unsuspecting. He was glad that he happened not to have a gold brick or a block of that western Bad Boy Silver Mine stock along with him. He would have disliked to unload on people he liked so well as he did these; but there are some temptations toe enticing to be resisted.</p>
|
||||
<p>“No, sir,” said Colonel Blaylock, pausing to arrange the queen’s wrap. “I did not invest in Okochee. I have made an exhaustive study of business conditions, and I regard old settled towns as unfavorable fields in which to place capital that is limited in amount. Some months ago, through the kindness of a friend, there came into my hands a map and description of this new town of Skyland that has been built upon the lake. The description was so pleasing, the future of the town set forth in such convincing arguments, and its increasing prosperity portrayed in such an attractive style that I decided to take advantage of the opportunity it offered. I carefully selected a lot in the centre of the business district, although its price was the highest in the schedule—five hundred dollars—and made the purchase at once.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Are you the man—I mean, did you pay five hundred dollars for a lot in Skyland” asked J. Pinkney Bloom.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I did, sir,” answered the Colonel, with the air of a modest millionaire explaining his success; “a lot most excellently situated on the same square with the opera house, and only two squares from the board of trade. I consider the purchase a most fortuitous one. It is my intention to erect a small building upon it at once, and open a modest book and stationery store. During past years I have met with many pecuniary reverses, and I now find it necessary to engage in some commercial occupation that will furnish me with a livelihood. The book and stationery business, though an humble one, seems to me not inapt nor altogether uncongenial. I am a graduate of the University of Virginia; and <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blaylock’s really wonderful acquaintance with belles-lettres and poetic literature should go far toward insuring success. Of course, <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blaylock would not personally serve behind the counter. With the nearly three hundred dollars I have remaining I can manage the building of a house, by giving a lien on the lot. I have an old friend in Atlanta who is a partner in a large book store, and he has agreed to furnish me with a stock of goods on credit, on extremely easy terms. I am pleased to hope, sir, that <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blaylock’s health and happiness will be increased by the change of locality. Already I fancy I can perceive the return of those roses that were once the hope and despair of Georgia cavaliers.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Again followed that wonderful bow, as the Colonel lightly touched the pale cheek of the poetess. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blaylock, blushing like a girl, shook her curl and gave the Colonel an arch, reproving tap. Secret of eternal youth—where art thou? Every second the answer comes—“Here, here, here.” Listen to thine own heartbeats, O weary seeker after external miracles.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Those years,” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blaylock, “in Holly Springs were long, long, long. But now is the promised land in sight. Skyland!—a lovely name.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Doubtless,” said the Colonel, “we shall be able to secure comfortable accommodations at some modest hotel at reasonable rates. Our trunks are in Okochee, to be forwarded when we shall have made permanent arrangements.”</p>
|
||||
<p>J. Pinkney Bloom excused himself, went forward, and stood by the captain at the wheel.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mac,” said he, “do you remember my telling you once that I sold one of those five-hundred-dollar lots in Skyland?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Seems I do,” grinned Captain MacFarland.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m not a coward, as a general rule,” went on the promoter, “but I always said that if I ever met the sucker that bought that lot I’d run like a turkey. Now, you see that old babe-in-the-wood over there? Well, he’s the boy that drew the prize. That was the only five-hundred-dollar lot that went. The rest ranged from ten dollars to two hundred. His wife writes poetry. She’s invented one about the high grounds of Georgia, that’s way up in G. They’re going to Skyland to open a book store.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well,” said MacFarland, with another grin, “it’s a good thing you are along, J. P.; you can show ’em around town until they begin to feel at home.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“He’s got three hundred dollars left to build a house and store with,” went on J. Pinkney, as if he were talking to himself. “And he thinks there’s an open house up there.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Captain MacFarland released the wheel long enough to give his leg a roguish slap.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You old fat rascal!” he chuckled, with a wink.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mac, you’re a fool,” said J. Pinkney Bloom, coldly. He went back and joined the Blaylocks, where he sat, less talkative, with that straight furrow between his brows that always stood as a signal of schemes being shaped within.</p>
|
||||
<p>“There’s a good many swindles connected with these booms,” he said presently. “What if this Skyland should turn out to be one—that is, suppose business should be sort of dull there, and no special sale for books?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“My dear sir,” said Colonel Blaylock, resting his hand upon the back of his wife’s chair, “three times I have been reduced to almost penury by the duplicity of others, but I have not yet lost faith in humanity. If I have been deceived again, still we may glean health and content, if not worldly profit. I am aware that there are dishonest schemers in the world who set traps for the unwary, but even they are not altogether bad. My dear, can you recall those verses entitled ‘He Giveth the Increase,’ that you composed for the choir of our church in Holly Springs?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“That was four years ago,” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blaylock; “perhaps I can repeat a verse or two.</p>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:poem">
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<span>“The lily springs from the rotting mould;</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span class="i1">Pearls from the deep sea slime;</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>Good will come out of Nazareth</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span class="i1">All in God’s own time.</span>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<span>“To the hardest heart the softening grace</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span class="i1">Cometh, at last, to bless;</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>Guiding it right to help and cheer</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span class="i1">And succor in distress.</span>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>“I cannot remember the rest. The lines were not ambitious. They were written to the music composed by a dear friend.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s a fine rhyme, just the same,” declared <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom. “It seems to ring the bell, all right. I guess I gather the sense of it. It means that the rankest kind of a phony will give you the best end of it once in a while.”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom strayed thoughtfully back to the captain, and stood meditating.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ought to be in sight of the spires and gilded domes of Skyland now in a few minutes,” chirruped MacFarland, shaking with enjoyment.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Go to the devil,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom, still pensive.</p>
|
||||
<p>And now, upon the left bank, they caught a glimpse of a white village, high up on the hills, smothered among green trees. That was Cold Branch—no boom town, but the slow growth of many years. Cold Branch lay on the edge of the grape and corn lands. The big country road ran just back of the heights. Cold Branch had nothing in common with the frisky ambition of Okochee with its impertinent lake.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mac,” said J. Pinkney suddenly, “I want you to stop at Cold Branch. There’s a landing there that they made to use sometimes when the river was up.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Can’t,” said the captain, grinning more broadly. “I’ve got the United States mails on board. Right to-day this boat’s in the government service. Do you want to have the poor old captain keelhauled by Uncle Sam? And the great city of Skyland, all disconsolate, waiting for its mail? I’m ashamed of your extravagance, J. P.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mac,” almost whispered J. Pinkney, in his danger-line voice, “I looked into the engine room of the <i epub:type="se:vessel.ship">Dixie Belle</i> a while ago. Don’t you know of somebody that needs a new boiler? Cement and black Japan can’t hide flaws from me. And then, those shares of building and loan that you traded for repairs—they were all yours, of course. I hate to mention these things, but—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, come now, J. P.,” said the captain. “You know I was just fooling. I’ll put you off at Cold Branch, if you say so.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The other passengers get off there, too,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom.</p>
|
||||
<p>Further conversation was held, and in ten minutes the <i epub:type="se:vessel.ship">Dixie Belle</i> turned her nose toward a little, cranky wooden pier on the left bank, and the captain, relinquishing the wheel to a roustabout, came to the passenger deck and made the remarkable announcement: “All out for Skyland.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The Blaylocks and J. Pinkney Bloom disembarked, and the <i epub:type="se:vessel.ship">Dixie Belle</i> proceeded on her way up the lake. Guided by the indefatigable promoter, they slowly climbed the steep hillside, pausing often to rest and admire the view. Finally they entered the village of Cold Branch. Warmly both the Colonel and his wife praised it for its homelike and peaceful beauty. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom conducted them to a two-story building on a shady street that bore the legend, “Pine-top Inn.” Here he took his leave, receiving the cordial thanks of the two for his attentions, the Colonel remarking that he thought they would spend the remainder of the day in rest, and take a look at his purchase on the morrow.</p>
|
||||
<p>J. Pinkney Bloom walked down Cold Branch’s main street. He did not know this town, but he knew towns, and his feet did not falter. Presently he saw a sign over a door: “Frank E. Cooly, Attorney-at-Law and Notary Public.” A young man was <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Cooly, and awaiting business.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Get your hat, son,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom, in his breezy way, “and a blank deed, and come along. It’s a job for you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Now,” he continued, when <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Cooly had responded with alacrity, “is there a bookstore in town?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“One,” said the lawyer. “Henry Williams’s.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Get there,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom. “We’re going to buy it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Henry Williams was behind his counter. His store was a small one, containing a mixture of books, stationery, and fancy rubbish. Adjoining it was Henry’s home—a decent cottage, vine-embowered and cosy. Henry was lank and soporific, and not inclined to rush his business.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I want to buy your house and store,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom. “I haven’t got time to dicker—name your price.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s worth eight hundred,” said Henry, too much dazed to ask more than its value.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Shut that door,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom to the lawyer. Then he tore off his coat and vest, and began to unbutton his shirt.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Wanter fight about it, do yer?” said Henry Williams, jumping up and cracking his heels together twice. “All right, hunky—sail in and cut yer capers.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Keep your clothes on,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom. “I’m only going down to the bank.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He drew eight one-hundred-dollar bills from his money belt and planked them down on the counter. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Cooly showed signs of future promise, for he already had the deed spread out, and was reaching across the counter for the ink bottle. Never before or since was such quick action had in Cold Branch.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Your name, please?” asked the lawyer.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Make it out to Peyton Blaylock,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom. “God knows how to spell it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Within thirty minutes Henry Williams was out of business, and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom stood on the brick sidewalk with <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Cooly, who held in his hand the signed and attested deed.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’ll find the party at the Pinetop Inn,” said J. Pinkney Bloom. “Get it recorded, and take it down and give it to him. He’ll ask you a hell’s mint of questions; so here’s ten dollars for the trouble you’ll have in not being able to answer ’em. Never run much to poetry, did you, young man?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well,” said the really talented Cooly, who even yet retained his right mind, “now and then.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Dig into it,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom, “it’ll pay you. Never heard a poem, now, that run something like this, did you?—</p>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:poem">
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<span>A good thing out of Nazareth</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span class="i1">Comes up sometimes, I guess,</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>On hand, all right, to help and cheer</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span class="i1">A sucker in distress.”</span>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>“I believe not,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Cooly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s a hymn,” said J. Pinkney Bloom. “Now, show me the way to a livery stable, son, for I’m going to hit the dirt road back to Okochee.”</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
@ -1,16 +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 2</title>
|
||||
<title>Round the Circle</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-2" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>ROUND THE CIRCLE</h2>
|
||||
<p class="intro">[This story is especially interesting as an early treatment (1902) of the theme afterward developed with a surer hand in The Pendulum.]</p>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<p>“Find yo’ shirt all right, Sam?” asked Mrs. Webber, from her chair under the live-oak, where she was comfortably seated with a paper-back volume for company.</p>
|
||||
<section id="round-the-circle" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Round the Circle</h2>
|
||||
<p>“Find yo’ shirt all right, Sam?” asked <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Webber, from her chair under the live-oak, where she was comfortably seated with a paper-back volume for company.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It balances perfeckly, Marthy,” answered Sam, with a suspicious pleasantness in his tone. “At first I was about ter be a little reckless and kick ‘cause ther buttons was all off, but since I diskiver that the button holes is all busted out, why, I wouldn’t go so fur as to say the buttons is any loss to speak of.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, well,” said his wife, carelessly, “put on your necktie—that’ll keep it together.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Sam Webber’s sheep ranch was situated in the loneliest part of the country between the Nueces and the Frio. The ranch house—a two-room box structure—was on the rise of a gently swelling hill in the midst of a wilderness of high chaparral. In front of it was a small clearing where stood the sheep pens, shearing shed, and wool house. Only a few feet back of it began the thorny jungle.</p>
|
||||
@ -19,7 +17,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Well, ef I must say it, Sam,” she drawled, “you look jest like one of them hayseeds in the picture papers, ‘stead of a free and independent sheepman of the State o’ Texas.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Sam climbed awkwardly into the saddle.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’re the one ought to be ‘shamed to say so,” he replied hotly. “ ‘Stead of ‘tendin’ to a man’s clothes you’re al’ays setting around a-readin’ them billy-by-dam yaller-back novils.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, shet up and ride along,” said Mrs. Webber, with a little jerk at the handles of her chair; “you always fussin’ ‘bout my readin’. I do a-plenty; and I’ll read when I wanter. I live in the bresh here like a varmint, never seein’ nor hearin’ nothin’, and what other ‘musement kin I have? Not in listenin’ to you talk, for it’s complain, complain, one day after another. Oh, go on, Sam, and leave me in peace.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, shet up and ride along,” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Webber, with a little jerk at the handles of her chair; “you always fussin’ ‘bout my readin’. I do a-plenty; and I’ll read when I wanter. I live in the bresh here like a varmint, never seein’ nor hearin’ nothin’, and what other ‘musement kin I have? Not in listenin’ to you talk, for it’s complain, complain, one day after another. Oh, go on, Sam, and leave me in peace.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Sam gave his pony a squeeze with his knees and “shoved” down the wagon trail that connected his ranch with the old, open Government road. It was eight o’clock, and already beginning to be very warm. He should have started three hours earlier. Chapman ranch was only eighteen miles away, but there was a road for only three miles of the distance. He had ridden over there once with one of the Half-Moon cowpunchers, and he had the direction well-defined in his mind.</p>
|
||||
<p>Sam turned off the old Government road at the split mesquite, and struck down the arroyo of the Quintanilla. Here was a narrow stretch of smiling valley, upholstered with a rich mat of green, curly mesquite grass; and Mexico consumed those few miles quickly with his long, easy lope. Again, upon reaching Wild Duck Waterhole, must he abandon well-defined ways. He turned now to his right up a little hill, pebble-covered, upon which grew only the tenacious and thorny prickly pear and chaparral. At the summit of this he paused to take his last general view of the landscape for, from now on, he must wind through brakes and thickets of chaparral, pear, and mesquite, for the most part seeing scarcely farther than twenty yards in any direction, choosing his way by the prairie-dweller’s instinct, guided only by an occasional glimpse of a far distant hilltop, a peculiarly shaped knot of trees, or the position of the sun.</p>
|
||||
<p>Sam rode down the sloping hill and plunged into the great pear flat that lies between the Quintanilla and the Piedra.</p>
|
||||
@ -32,7 +30,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Ef I ever speaks another hard word to ther little gal,” muttered Sam, “or fails in the love and affection that’s coming to her in the deal, I hopes a wildcat’ll t’ar me to pieces.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He knew what he would do. He would write to Garcia & Jones, his San Antonio merchants where he bought his supplies and sold his wool, and have them send down a big box of novels and reading matter for Marthy. Things were going to be different. He wondered whether a little piano could be placed in one of the rooms of the ranch house without the family having to move out of doors.</p>
|
||||
<p>In nowise calculated to allay his self-reproach was the thought that Marthy and Randy would have to pass the night alone. In spite of their bickerings, when night came Marthy was wont to dismiss her fears of the country, and rest her head upon Sam’s strong arm with a sigh of peaceful content and dependence. And were her fears so groundless? Sam thought of roving, marauding Mexicans, of stealthy cougars that sometimes invaded the ranches, of rattlesnakes, centipedes, and a dozen possible dangers. Marthy would be frantic with fear. Randy would cry, and call for dada to come.</p>
|
||||
<p>Still the interminable succession of stretches of brush, cactus, and mesquite. Hollow after hollow, slope after slope—all exactly alike—all familiar by constant repetition, and yet all strange and new. If he could only arrive <i>somewhere</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>Still the interminable succession of stretches of brush, cactus, and mesquite. Hollow after hollow, slope after slope—all exactly alike—all familiar by constant repetition, and yet all strange and new. If he could only arrive <em>somewhere</em>.</p>
|
||||
<p>The straight line is Art. Nature moves in circles. A straightforward man is more an artificial product than a diplomatist is. Men lost in the snow travel in exact circles until they sink, exhausted, as their footprints have attested. Also, travellers in philosophy and other mental processes frequently wind up at their starting-point.</p>
|
||||
<p>It was when Sam Webber was fullest of contrition and good resolves that Mexico, with a heavy sigh, subsided from his regular, brisk trot into a slow complacent walk. They were winding up an easy slope covered with brush ten or twelve feet high.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I say now, Mex,” demurred Sam, “this here won’t do. I know you’re plumb tired out, but we got ter git along. Oh, Lordy, ain’t there no mo’ houses in the world!” He gave Mexico a smart kick with his heels.</p>
|
||||
@ -1,13 +1,13 @@
|
||||
<?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 8</title>
|
||||
<title>The Cactus</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-8" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE CACTUS</h2>
|
||||
<section id="the-cactus" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Cactus</h2>
|
||||
<p>The most notable thing about Time is that it is so purely relative. A large amount of reminiscence is, by common consent, conceded to the drowning man; and it is not past belief that one may review an entire courtship while removing one’s gloves.</p>
|
||||
<p>That is what Trysdale was doing, standing by a table in his bachelor apartments. On the table stood a singular-looking green plant in a red earthen jar. The plant was one of the species of cacti, and was provided with long, tentacular leaves that perpetually swayed with the slightest breeze with a peculiar beckoning motion.</p>
|
||||
<p>Trysdale’s friend, the brother of the bride, stood at a sideboard complaining at being allowed to drink alone. Both men were in evening dress. White favors like stars upon their coats shone through the gloom of the apartment.</p>
|
||||
@ -1,13 +1,13 @@
|
||||
<?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 9</title>
|
||||
<title>The Detective Detector</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-9" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE DETECTIVE DETECTOR</h2>
|
||||
<section id="the-detective-detector" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Detective Detector</h2>
|
||||
<p>I was walking in Central Park with Avery Knight, the great New York burglar, highwayman, and murderer.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But, my dear Knight,” said I, “it sounds incredible. You have undoubtedly performed some of the most wonderful feats in your profession known to modern crime. You have committed some marvellous deeds under the very noses of the police—you have boldly entered the homes of millionaires and held them up with an empty gun while you made free with their silver and jewels; you have sandbagged citizens in the glare of Broadway’s electric lights; you have killed and robbed with superb openness and absolute impunity—but when you boast that within forty-eight hours after committing a murder you can run down and actually bring me face to face with the detective assigned to apprehend you, I must beg leave to express my doubts—remember, you are in New York.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Avery Knight smiled indulgently.</p>
|
||||
@ -1,15 +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 10</title>
|
||||
<title>The Dog and the Playlet</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-10" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE DOG AND THE PLAYLET</h2>
|
||||
<section id="the-dog-and-the-playlet" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Dog and the Playlet</h2>
|
||||
<p class="intro">[This story has been rewritten and published in “Strictly Business” under the title, The Proof of the Pudding.]</p>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<p>Usually it is a cold day in July when you can stroll up Broadway in that month and get a story out of the drama. I found one a few breathless, parboiling days ago, and it seems to decide a serious question in art.</p>
|
||||
<p>There was not a soul left in the city except Hollis and me—and two or three million sunworshippers who remained at desks and counters. The elect had fled to seashore, lake, and mountain, and had already begun to draw for additional funds. Every evening Hollis and I prowled about the deserted town searching for coolness in empty cafes, dining-rooms, and roofgardens. We knew to the tenth part of a revolution the speed of every electric fan in Gotham, and we followed the swiftest as they varied. Hollis’s fiancee. Miss Loris Sherman, had been in the Adirondacks, at Lower Saranac Lake, for a month. In another week he would join her party there. In the meantime, he cursed the city cheerfully and optimistically, and sought my society because I suffered him to show me her photograph during the black coffee every time we dined together.</p>
|
||||
<p>My revenge was to read to him my one-act play.</p>
|
||||
@ -20,7 +19,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Ever been tried on the stage?” asked Hollis.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Not exactly,” I answered. “I read half of it the other day to a fellow whose brother knows Robert Edeson; but he had to catch a train before I finished.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Go on,” said Hollis, sliding back in his chair like a good fellow. “I’m no stage carpenter, but I’ll tell you what I think of it from a first-row balcony standpoint. I’m a theatre bug during the season, and I can size up a fake play almost as quick as the gallery can. Flag the waiter once more, and then go ahead as hard as you like with it. I’ll be the dog.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I read my little play lovingly, and, I fear, not without some elocution. There was one scene in it that I believed in greatly. The comedy swiftly rises into thrilling and unexpectedly developed drama. Capt. Marchmont suddenly becomes cognizant that his wife is an unscrupulous adventuress, who has deceived him from the day of their first meeting. The rapid and mortal duel between them from that moment—she with her magnificent lies and siren charm, winding about him like a serpent, trying to recover her lost ground; he with his man’s agony and scorn and lost faith, trying to tear her from his heart. That scene I always thought was a crackerjack. When Capt. Marchmont discovers her duplicity by reading on a blotter in a mirror the impression of a note that she has written to the Count, he raises his hand to heaven and exclaims: “O God, who created woman while Adam slept, and gave her to him for a companion, take back Thy gift and return instead the sleep, though it last forever!”</p>
|
||||
<p>I read my little play lovingly, and, I fear, not without some elocution. There was one scene in it that I believed in greatly. The comedy swiftly rises into thrilling and unexpectedly developed drama. <abbr>Capt.</abbr> Marchmont suddenly becomes cognizant that his wife is an unscrupulous adventuress, who has deceived him from the day of their first meeting. The rapid and mortal duel between them from that moment—she with her magnificent lies and siren charm, winding about him like a serpent, trying to recover her lost ground; he with his man’s agony and scorn and lost faith, trying to tear her from his heart. That scene I always thought was a crackerjack. When <abbr>Capt.</abbr> Marchmont discovers her duplicity by reading on a blotter in a mirror the impression of a note that she has written to the Count, he raises his hand to heaven and exclaims: “O God, who created woman while Adam slept, and gave her to him for a companion, take back Thy gift and return instead the sleep, though it last forever!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Rot,” said Hollis, rudely, when I had given those lines with proper emphasis.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I beg your pardon!” I said, as sweetly as I could.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Come now,” went on Hollis, “don’t be an idiot. You know very well that nobody spouts any stuff like that these days. That sketch went along all right until you rang in the skyrockets. Cut out that right-arm exercise and the Adam and Eve stunt, and make your captain talk as you or I or Bill Jones would.”</p>
|
||||
@ -1,21 +1,21 @@
|
||||
<?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 1</title>
|
||||
<title>The Red Roses of Tonia</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-1" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE RED ROSES OF TONIA</h2>
|
||||
<section id="the-red-roses-of-tonia" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Red Roses of Tonia</h2>
|
||||
<p>A trestle burned down on the International Railroad. The south-bound from San Antonio was cut off for the next forty-eight hours. On that train was Tonia Weaver’s Easter hat.</p>
|
||||
<p>Espirition, the Mexican, who had been sent forty miles in a buckboard from the Espinosa Ranch to fetch it, returned with a shrugging shoulder and hands empty except for a cigarette. At the small station, Nopal, he had learned of the delayed train and, having no commands to wait, turned his ponies toward the ranch again.</p>
|
||||
<p>Now, if one supposes that Easter, the Goddess of Spring, cares any more for the after-church parade on Fifth Avenue than she does for her loyal outfit of subjects that assemble at the meeting-house at Cactus, Tex., a mistake has been made. The wives and daughters of the ranchmen of the Frio country put forth Easter blossoms of new hats and gowns as faithfully as is done anywhere, and the Southwest is, for one day, a mingling of prickly pear, Paris, and paradise. And now it was Good Friday, and Tonia Weaver’s Easter hat blushed unseen in the desert air of an impotent express car, beyond the burned trestle. On Saturday noon the Rogers girls, from the Shoestring Ranch, and Ella Reeves, from the Anchor-O, and Mrs. Bennet and Ida, from Green Valley, would convene at the Espinosa and pick up Tonia. With their Easter hats and frocks carefully wrapped and bundled against the dust, the fair aggregation would then merrily jog the ten miles to Cactus, where on the morrow they would array themselves, subjugate man, do homage to Easter, and cause jealous agitation among the lilies of the field.</p>
|
||||
<p>Now, if one supposes that Easter, the Goddess of Spring, cares any more for the after-church parade on Fifth Avenue than she does for her loyal outfit of subjects that assemble at the meeting-house at Cactus, Tex., a mistake has been made. The wives and daughters of the ranchmen of the Frio country put forth Easter blossoms of new hats and gowns as faithfully as is done anywhere, and the Southwest is, for one day, a mingling of prickly pear, Paris, and paradise. And now it was Good Friday, and Tonia Weaver’s Easter hat blushed unseen in the desert air of an impotent express car, beyond the burned trestle. On Saturday noon the Rogers girls, from the Shoestring Ranch, and Ella Reeves, from the Anchor-O, and <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Bennet and Ida, from Green Valley, would convene at the Espinosa and pick up Tonia. With their Easter hats and frocks carefully wrapped and bundled against the dust, the fair aggregation would then merrily jog the ten miles to Cactus, where on the morrow they would array themselves, subjugate man, do homage to Easter, and cause jealous agitation among the lilies of the field.</p>
|
||||
<p>Tonia sat on the steps of the Espinosa ranch house flicking gloomily with a quirt at a tuft of curly mesquite. She displayed a frown and a contumelious lip, and endeavored to radiate an aura of disagreeableness and tragedy.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I hate railroads,” she announced positively. “And men. Men pretend to run them. Can you give any excuse why a trestle should burn? Ida Bennet’s hat is to be trimmed with violets. I shall not go one step toward Cactus without a new hat. If I were a man I would get one.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Two men listened uneasily to this disparagement of their kind. One was Wells Pearson, foreman of the Mucho Calor cattle ranch. The other was Thompson Burrows, the prosperous sheepman from the Quintana Valley. Both thought Tonia Weaver adorable, especially when she railed at railroads and menaced men. Either would have given up his epidermis to make for her an Easter hat more cheerfully than the ostrich gives up his tip or the aigrette lays down its life. Neither possessed the ingenuity to conceive a means of supplying the sad deficiency against the coming Sabbath. Pearson’s deep brown face and sunburned light hair gave him the appearance of a schoolboy seized by one of youth’s profound and insolvable melancholies. Tonia’s plight grieved him through and through. Thompson Burrows was the more skilled and pliable. He hailed from somewhere in the East originally; and he wore neckties and shoes, and was made dumb by woman’s presence.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The big water-hole on Sandy Creek,” said Pearson, scarcely hoping to make a hit, “was filled up by that last rain.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh! Was it?” said Tonia sharply. “Thank you for the information. I suppose a new hat is nothing to you, Mr. Pearson. I suppose you think a woman ought to wear an old Stetson five years without a change, as you do. If your old water-hole could have put out the fire on that trestle you might have some reason to talk about it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh! Was it?” said Tonia sharply. “Thank you for the information. I suppose a new hat is nothing to you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Pearson. I suppose you think a woman ought to wear an old Stetson five years without a change, as you do. If your old water-hole could have put out the fire on that trestle you might have some reason to talk about it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am deeply sorry,” said Burrows, warned by Pearson’s fate, “that you failed to receive your hat, Miss Weaver—deeply sorry, indeed. If there was anything I could do—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Don’t bother,” interrupted Tonia, with sweet sarcasm. “If there was anything you could do, you’d be doing it, of course. There isn’t.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Tonia paused. A sudden sparkle of hope had come into her eye. Her frown smoothed away. She had an inspiration.</p>
|
||||
@ -26,7 +26,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Well, Miss Tonia,” said Pearson, reaching for his hat, as guileful as a sleeping babe. “I reckon I’ll be trotting along back to Mucho Calor. There’s some cutting out to be done on Dry Branch first thing in the morning; and me and Road Runner has got to be on hand. It’s too bad your hat got sidetracked. Maybe they’ll get that trestle mended yet in time for Easter.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I must be riding, too, Miss Tonia,” announced Burrows, looking at his watch. “I declare, it’s nearly five o’clock! I must be out at my lambing camp in time to help pen those crazy ewes.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Tonia’s suitors seemed to have been smitten with a need for haste. They bade her a ceremonious farewell, and then shook each other’s hands with the elaborate and solemn courtesy of the Southwesterner.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hope I’ll see you again soon, Mr. Pearson,” said Burrows.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hope I’ll see you again soon, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Pearson,” said Burrows.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Same here,” said the cowman, with the serious face of one whose friend goes upon a whaling voyage. “Be gratified to see you ride over to Mucho Calor any time you strike that section of the range.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Pearson mounted Road Runner, the soundest cow-pony on the Frio, and let him pitch for a minute, as he always did on being mounted, even at the end of a day’s travel.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What kind of a hat was that, Miss Tonia,” he called, “that you ordered from San Antone? I can’t help but be sorry about that hat.”</p>
|
||||
@ -38,7 +38,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Tonia hung up her quirt and went into the sitting-room.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m mighty sorry, daughter, that you didn’t get your hat,” said her mother.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, don’t worry, mother,” said Tonia, coolly. “I’ll have a new hat, all right, in time to-morrow.”</p>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<hr/>
|
||||
<p>When Burrows reached the end of the strip of prairie he pulled his sorrel to the right and let him pick his way daintily across a sacuista flat through which ran the ragged, dry bed of an arroyo. Then up a gravelly hill, matted with bush, the hoarse scrambled, and at length emerged, with a snort of satisfaction into a stretch of high, level prairie, grassy and dotted with the lighter green of mesquites in their fresh spring foliage. Always to the right Burrows bore, until in a little while he struck the old Indian trail that followed the Nueces southward, and that passed, twenty-eight miles to the southeast, through Lone Elm.</p>
|
||||
<p>Here Burrows urged the sorrel into a steady lope. As he settled himself in the saddle for a long ride he heard the drumming of hoofs, the hollow “thwack” of chaparral against wooden stirrups, the whoop of a Comanche; and Wells Pearson burst out of the brush at the right of the trail like a precocious yellow chick from a dark green Easter egg.</p>
|
||||
<p>Except in the presence of awing femininity melancholy found no place in Pearson’s bosom. In Tonia’s presence his voice was as soft as a summer bullfrog’s in his reedy nest. Now, at his gleesome yawp, rabbits, a mile away, ducked their ears, and sensitive plants closed their fearful fronds.</p>
|
||||
@ -1,13 +1,13 @@
|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 3</title>
|
||||
<title>The Rubber Plant’s Story</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-3" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE RUBBER PLANT’S STORY</h2>
|
||||
<section id="the-rubber-plants-story" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Rubber Plant’s Story</h2>
|
||||
<p>We rubber plants form the connecting link between the vegetable kingdom and the decorations of a Waldorf-Astoria scene in a Third Avenue theatre. I haven’t looked up our family tree, but I believe we were raised by grafting a gum overshoe on to a 30-cent table d’hote stalk of asparagus. You take a white bulldog with a Bourke Cockran air of independence about him and a rubber plant and there you have the fauna and flora of a flat. What the shamrock is to Ireland the rubber plant is to the dweller in flats and furnished rooms. We get moved from one place to another so quickly that the only way we can get our picture taken is with a kinetoscope. We are the vagrant vine and the flitting fig tree. You know the proverb: “Where the rubber plant sits in the window the moving van draws up to the door.”</p>
|
||||
<p>We are the city equivalent to the woodbine and the honeysuckle. No other vegetable except the Pittsburg stogie can withstand as much handling as we can. When the family to which we belong moves into a flat they set us in the front window and we become lares and penates, fly-paper and the peripatetic emblem of “Home Sweet Home.” We aren’t as green as we look. I guess we are about what you would call the soubrettes of the conservatory. You try sitting in the front window of a $40 flat in Manhattan and looking out into the street all day, and back into the flat at night, and see whether you get wise or not—hey? Talk about the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden—say! suppose there had been a rubber plant there when Eve—but I was going to tell you a story.</p>
|
||||
<p>The first thing I can remember I had only three leaves and belonged to a member of the pony ballet. I was kept in a sunny window, and was generally watered with seltzer and lemon. I had plenty of fun in those days. I got cross-eyed trying to watch the numbers of the automobiles in the street and the dates on the labels inside at the same time.</p>
|
||||
@ -17,7 +17,7 @@
|
||||
<p>When the couple broke up they left me with the rest of their goods at a second-hand store. I was put out in front for sale along with the jobbiest lot you ever heard of being lumped into one bargain. Think of this little cornucopia of wonders, all for $1.89: Henry James’s works, six talking machine records, one pair of tennis shoes, two bottles of horse radish, and a rubber plant—that was me!</p>
|
||||
<p>One afternoon a girl came along and stopped to look at me. She had dark hair and eyes, and she looked slim, and sad around the mouth.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, oh!” she says to herself. “I never thought to see one up here.”</p>
|
||||
<p>She pulls out a little purse about as thick as one of my leaves and fingers over some small silver in it. Old Koen, always on the lockout, is ready, rubbing his hands. This girl proceeds to turn down Mr. James and the other commodities. Rubber plants or nothing is the burden of her song. And at last Koen and she come together at 39 cents, and away she goes with me in her arms.</p>
|
||||
<p>She pulls out a little purse about as thick as one of my leaves and fingers over some small silver in it. Old Koen, always on the lockout, is ready, rubbing his hands. This girl proceeds to turn down <abbr>Mr.</abbr> James and the other commodities. Rubber plants or nothing is the burden of her song. And at last Koen and she come together at 39 cents, and away she goes with me in her arms.</p>
|
||||
<p>She was a nice girl, but not my style. Too quiet and sober looking. Thinks I to myself: “I’ll just about land on the fire-escape of a tenement, six stories up. And I’ll spend the next six months looking at clothes on the line.”</p>
|
||||
<p>But she carried me to a nice little room only three flights up in quite a decent street. And she put me in the window, of course. And then she went to work and cooked dinner for herself. And what do you suppose she had? Bread and tea and a little dab of jam! Nothing else. Not a single lobster, nor so much as one bottle of champagne. The Carruthers comedy team had both every evening, except now and then when they took a notion for pig’s knuckle and kraut.</p>
|
||||
<p>After she had finished her dinner my new owner came to the window and leaned down close to my leaves and cried softly to herself for a while. It made me feel funny. I never knew anybody to cry that way over a rubber plant before. Of course, I’ve seen a few of ’em turn on the tears for what they could get out of it, but she seemed to be crying just for the pure enjoyment of it. She touched my leaves like she loved ’em, and she bent down her head and kissed each one of ’em. I guess I’m about the toughest specimen of a peripatetic orchid on earth, but I tell you it made me feel sort of queer. Home never was like that to me before. Generally I used to get chewed by poodles and have shirt-waists hung on me to dry, and get watered with coffee grounds and peroxide of hydrogen.</p>
|
||||
@ -1,24 +1,19 @@
|
||||
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|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 12</title>
|
||||
<title>The Snow Man</title>
|
||||
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<section id="chapter-12" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE SNOW MAN</h2>
|
||||
<p class="intro">EDITORIAL NOTE.—<i>Before the fatal illness of William Sydney Porter (known through his literary work as “O. Henry”) this American master of short-story writing had begun for Hampton’s Magazine the story printed below. Illness crept upon him rapidly and he was compelled to give up writing about at the point where the girl enters the story.</i></p>
|
||||
<p class="intro">
|
||||
<i>When he realized that he could do no more (it was his lifelong habit to write with a pencil, never dictating to a stenographer), O. Henry told in detail the remainder of The Snow Man to Harris Merton Lyon, whom he had often spoken of as one of the most effective short-story writers of the present time. Mr. Porter had delineated all of the characters, leaving only the rounding out of the plot in the final pages to Mr. Lyon.</i>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<section id="the-snow-man" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Snow Man</h2>
|
||||
<p>Housed and windowpaned from it, the greatest wonder to little children is the snow. To men, it is something like a crucible in which their world melts into a white star ten million miles away. The man who can stand the test is a Snow Man; and this is his reading by Fahrenheit, Reaumur, or Moses’s carven tablets of stone.</p>
|
||||
<p>Night had fluttered a sable pinion above the canyon of Big Lost River, and I urged my horse toward the Bay Horse Ranch because the snow was deepening. The flakes were as large as an hour’s circular tatting by Miss Wilkins’s ablest spinster, betokening a heavy snowfall and less entertainment and more adventure than the completion of the tatting could promise. I knew Ross Curtis of the Bay Horse, and that I would be welcome as a snow-bound pilgrim, both for hospitality’s sake and because Ross had few chances to confide in living creatures who did not neigh, bellow, bleat, yelp, or howl during his discourse.</p>
|
||||
<p>The ranch house was just within the jaws of the canyon where its builder may have fatuously fancied that the timbered and rocky walls on both sides would have protected it from the wintry Colorado winds; but I feared the drift. Even now through the endless, bottomless rift in the hills—the speaking tube of the four winds—came roaring the voice of the proprietor to the little room on the top floor.</p>
|
||||
<p>At my “hello,” a ranch hand came from an outer building and received my thankful horse. In another minute, Ross and I sat by a stove in the dining-room of the four-room ranch house, while the big, simple welcome of the household lay at my disposal. Fanned by the whizzing norther, the fine, dry snow was sifted and bolted through the cracks and knotholes of the logs. The cook room, without a separating door, appended.</p>
|
||||
<p>In there I could see a short, sturdy, leisurely and weather-beaten man moving with professional sureness about his red-hot stove. His face was stolid and unreadable—something like that of a great thinker, or of one who had no thoughts to conceal. I thought his eye seemed unwarrantably superior to the elements and to the man, but quickly attributed that to the characteristic self-importance of a petty chef. “Camp cook” was the niche that I gave him in the Hall of Types; and he fitted it as an apple fits a dumpling.</p>
|
||||
<p>Cold it was in spite of the glowing stove; and Ross and I sat and talked, shuddering frequently, half from nerves and half from the freezing draughts. So he brought the bottle and the cook brought boiling water, and we made prodigious hot toddies against the attacks of Boreas. We clinked glasses often. They sounded like icicles dropping from the eaves, or like the tinkle of a thousand prisms on a Louis XIV chandelier that I once heard at a boarder’s dance in the parlor of a ten-a-week boarding-house in Gramercy Square. <i>Sic transit</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>Cold it was in spite of the glowing stove; and Ross and I sat and talked, shuddering frequently, half from nerves and half from the freezing draughts. So he brought the bottle and the cook brought boiling water, and we made prodigious hot toddies against the attacks of Boreas. We clinked glasses often. They sounded like icicles dropping from the eaves, or like the tinkle of a thousand prisms on a Louis <span epub:type="z3998:roman">XIV</span> chandelier that I once heard at a boarder’s dance in the parlor of a ten-a-week boarding-house in Gramercy Square. Sic transit.</p>
|
||||
<p>Silence in the terrible beauty of the snow and of the Sphinx and of the stars; but they who believe that all things, from a without-wine table d’hote to the crucifixion, may be interpreted through music, might have found a nocturne or a symphony to express the isolation of that blotted-out world. The clink of glass and bottle, the aeolian chorus of the wind in the house crannies, its deeper trombone through the canyon below, and the Wagnerian crash of the cook’s pots and pans, united in a fit, discordant melody, I thought. No less welcome an accompaniment was the sizzling of broiling ham and venison cutlet indorsed by the solvent fumes of true Java, bringing rich promises of comfort to our yearning souls.</p>
|
||||
<p>The cook brought the smoking supper to the table. He nodded to me democratically as he cast the heavy plates around as though he were pitching quoits or hurling the discus. I looked at him with some appraisement and curiosity and much conciliation. There was no prophet to tell us when that drifting evil outside might cease to fall; and it is well, when snow-bound, to stand somewhere within the radius of the cook’s favorable consideration. But I could read neither favor nor disapproval in the face and manner of our pot-wrestler.</p>
|
||||
<p>He was about five feet nine inches, and two hundred pounds of commonplace, bull-necked, pink-faced, callous calm. He wore brown duck trousers too tight and too short, and a blue flannel shirt with sleeves rolled above his elbows. There was a sort of grim, steady scowl on his features that looked to me as though he had fixed it there purposely as a protection against the weakness of an inherent amiability that, he fancied, were better concealed. And then I let supper usurp his brief occupancy of my thoughts.</p>
|
||||
@ -47,11 +42,11 @@
|
||||
<p>We drew the latch, and in stumbled Etienne Girod (as he afterward named himself). But just then he was no more than a worm struggling for life, enveloped in a killing white chrysalis.</p>
|
||||
<p>We dug down through snow, overcoats, mufflers, and waterproofs, and dragged forth a living thing with a Van Dyck beard and marvellous diamond rings. We put it through the approved curriculum of snow-rubbing, hot milk, and teaspoonful doses of whiskey, working him up to a graduating class entitled to a diploma of three fingers of rye in half a glassful of hot water. One of the ranch boys had already come from the quarters at Ross’s bugle-like yell and kicked the stranger’s staggering pony to some sheltered corral where beasts were entertained.</p>
|
||||
<p>Let a paragraphic biography of Girod intervene.</p>
|
||||
<p>Etienne was an opera singer originally, we gathered; but adversity and the snow had made him <i>non compos vocis</i>. The adversity consisted of the stranded San Salvador Opera Company, a period of hotel second-story work, and then a career as a professional palmist, jumping from town to town. For, like other professional palmists, every time he worked the Heart Line too strongly he immediately moved along the Line of Least Resistance. Though Etienne did not confide this to us, we surmised that he had moved out into the dusk about twenty minutes ahead of a constable, and had thus encountered the snow. In his most sacred blue language he dilated upon the subject of snow; for Etienne was Paris-born and loved the snow with the same passion that an orchid does.</p>
|
||||
<p>Etienne was an opera singer originally, we gathered; but adversity and the snow had made him <i xml:lang="la">non compos vocis</i>. The adversity consisted of the stranded San Salvador Opera Company, a period of hotel second-story work, and then a career as a professional palmist, jumping from town to town. For, like other professional palmists, every time he worked the Heart Line too strongly he immediately moved along the Line of Least Resistance. Though Etienne did not confide this to us, we surmised that he had moved out into the dusk about twenty minutes ahead of a constable, and had thus encountered the snow. In his most sacred blue language he dilated upon the subject of snow; for Etienne was Paris-born and loved the snow with the same passion that an orchid does.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mee-ser-rhable!” commented Etienne, and took another three fingers.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Complete, cast-iron, pussy-footed, blank … blank!” said Ross, and followed suit.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Rotten,” said I.</p>
|
||||
<p>The cook said nothing. He stood in the door weighing our outburst; and insistently from behind that frozen visage I got two messages (via the M. A. M wireless). One was that George considered our vituperation against the snow childish; the other was that George did not love Dagoes. Inasmuch as Etienne was a Frenchman, I concluded I had the message wrong. So I queried the other: “Bright eyes, you don’t really mean Dagoes, do you?” and over the wireless came three deathly, psychic taps: “Yes.” Then I reflected that to George all foreigners were probably “Dagoes.” I had once known another camp cook who had thought Mons., Sig., and Millie (Trans-Mississippi for Mlle.) were Italian given names; this cook used to marvel therefore at the paucity of Neo-Roman precognomens, and therefore why not—</p>
|
||||
<p>The cook said nothing. He stood in the door weighing our outburst; and insistently from behind that frozen visage I got two messages (via the M. A. M wireless). One was that George considered our vituperation against the snow childish; the other was that George did not love Dagoes. Inasmuch as Etienne was a Frenchman, I concluded I had the message wrong. So I queried the other: “Bright eyes, you don’t really mean Dagoes, do you?” and over the wireless came three deathly, psychic taps: “Yes.” Then I reflected that to George all foreigners were probably “Dagoes.” I had once known another camp cook who had thought Mons., Sig., and Millie (Trans-Mississippi for <abbr>Mlle.</abbr>) were Italian given names; this cook used to marvel therefore at the paucity of Neo-Roman precognomens, and therefore why not—</p>
|
||||
<p>I have said that snow is a test of men. For one day, two days, Etienne stood at the window, Fletcherizing his finger nails and shrieking and moaning at the monotony. To me, Etienne was just about as unbearable as the snow; and so, seeking relief, I went out on the second day to look at my horse, slipped on a stone, broke my collarbone, and thereafter underwent not the snow test, but the test of flat-on-the-back. A test that comes once too often for any man to stand.</p>
|
||||
<p>However, I bore up cheerfully. I was now merely a spectator, and from my couch in the big room I could lie and watch the human interplay with that detached, impassive, impersonal feeling which French writers tell us is so valuable to the litterateur, and American writers to the faro-dealer.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I shall go crazy in this abominable, mee-ser-rhable place!” was Etienne’s constant prediction.</p>
|
||||
@ -67,7 +62,7 @@
|
||||
<p>The cook reached out his hand into the darkness alongside the jamb. With careful precision he prodded something. Then he made one careful step into the snow. His back muscles bulged a little under the arms as he stooped and lightly lifted a burden. Another step inside the door, which he shut methodically behind him, and he dumped the burden at a safe distance from the fire.</p>
|
||||
<p>He stood up and fixed us with a solemn eye. None of us moved under that Orphic suspense until,</p>
|
||||
<p>“A woman,” remarked George.</p>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<hr/>
|
||||
<p>Miss Willie Adams was her name. Vocation, school-teacher. Present avocation, getting lost in the snow. Age, yum-yum (the Persian for twenty). Take to the woods if you would describe Miss Adams. A willow for grace; a hickory for fibre; a birch for the clear whiteness of her skin; for eyes, the blue sky seen through treetops; the silk in cocoons for her hair; her voice, the murmur of the evening June wind in the leaves; her mouth, the berries of the wintergreen; fingers as light as ferns; her toe as small as a deer track. General impression upon the dazed beholder—you could not see the forest for the trees.</p>
|
||||
<p>Psychology, with a capital P and the foot of a lynx, at this juncture stalks into the ranch house. Three men, a cook, a pretty young woman—all snowbound. Count me out of it, as I did not count, anyway. I never did, with women. Count the cook out, if you like. But note the effect upon Ross and Etienne Girod.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ross dumped Mark Twain in a trunk and locked the trunk. Also, he discarded the Pittsburg scandals. Also, he shaved off a three days’ beard.</p>
|
||||
@ -98,7 +93,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“I have been revolving it in my head,” said George.</p>
|
||||
<p>He brought the coffee pot forward heavily. Then bravely the big platter of pork and beans. Then somberly the potatoes. Then profoundly the biscuits. “I have been revolving it in my mind. There ain’t no use waitin’ any longer for Swengalley. Might as well eat now.”</p>
|
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<p>From my excellent vantage-point on the couch I watched the progress of that meal. Ross, muddled, glowering, disappointed; Etienne, eternally blandishing, attentive, ogling; Miss Adams, nervous, picking at her food, hesitant about answering questions, almost hysterical; now and then the solid, flitting shadow of the cook, passing behind their backs like a Dreadnaught in a fog.</p>
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<p>I used to own a clock which gurgled in its throat three minutes before it struck the hour. I know, therefore, the slow freight of Anticipation. For I have awakened at three in the morning, heard the clock gurgle, and waited those three minutes for the three strokes I knew were to come. <i>Alors</i>. In Ross’s ranch house that night the slow freight of Climax whistled in the distance.</p>
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<p>I used to own a clock which gurgled in its throat three minutes before it struck the hour. I know, therefore, the slow freight of Anticipation. For I have awakened at three in the morning, heard the clock gurgle, and waited those three minutes for the three strokes I knew were to come. <i xml:lang="fr">Alors</i>. In Ross’s ranch house that night the slow freight of Climax whistled in the distance.</p>
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<p>Etienne began it after supper. Miss Adams had suddenly displayed a lively interest in the kitchen layout and I could see her in there, chatting brightly at George—not with him—the while he ducked his head and rattled his pans.</p>
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<p>“My fren’,” said Etienne, exhaling a large cloud from his cigarette and patting Ross lightly on the shoulder with a bediamonded hand which, hung limp from a yard or more of bony arm, “I see I mus’ be frank with you. Firs’, because we are rivals; second, because you take these matters so serious. I—I am Frenchman. I love the women”—he threw back his curls, bared his yellow teeth, and blew an unsavory kiss toward the kitchen. “It is, I suppose, a trait of my nation. All Frenchmen love the women—pretty women. Now, look: Here I am!” He spread out his arms. “Cold outside! I detes’ the col-l-l! Snow! I abominate the mees-ser-rhable snow! Two men! This—” pointing to me—“an’ this!” Pointing to’ Ross. “I am distracted! For two whole days I stan’ at the window an’ tear my ‘air! I am nervous, upset, pr-r-ro-foun’ly distress inside my ‘ead! An’ suddenly—be’old! A woman, a nice, pretty, charming, innocen’ young woman! I, naturally, rejoice. I become myself again—gay, light-‘earted, ‘appy. I address myself to mademoiselle; it passes the time. That, m’sieu’, is wot the women are for—pass the time! Entertainment—like the music, like the wine!</p>
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<p>“They appeal to the mood, the caprice, the temperamen’. To play with thees woman, follow her through her humor, pursue her—ah! that is the mos’ delightful way to sen’ the hours about their business.”</p>
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@ -126,7 +121,7 @@
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<p>As I passed slowly in his review, I saw in my mind’s eye the algebraic equation of Snow, the equals sign, and the answer in the man before me.</p>
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<p>“Snow is my last name,” said George. He swung into the saddle and they started cautiously out into the darkening swirl of fresh new currency just issuing from the Snowdrop Mint. The girl, to keep her place, clung happily to the sturdy figure of the camp cook.</p>
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<p>I brought three things away from Ross Curtis’s ranch house—yes, four. One was the appreciation of snow, which I have so humbly tried here to render; (2) was a collarbone, of which I am extra careful; (3) was a memory of what it is to eat very extremely bad food for a week; and (4) was the cause of (3) a little note delivered at the end of the week and hand-painted in blue pencil on a sheet of meat paper.</p>
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<p>“I cannot come back there to that there job. Mrs. Snow say no, George. I been revolvin’ it in my mind; considerin’ circumstances she’s right.”</p>
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<p>“I cannot come back there to that there job. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Snow say no, George. I been revolvin’ it in my mind; considerin’ circumstances she’s right.”</p>
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<head>
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<title>Chapter 6</title>
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<title>The Sparrows in Madison Square</title>
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<section id="chapter-6" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>THE SPARROWS IN MADISON SQUARE</h2>
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<p>The young man in straitened circumstances who comes to New York City to enter literature has but one thing to do, provided he has studied carefully his field in advance. He must go straight to Madison Square, write an article about the sparrows there, and sell it to the <i>Sun</i> for $15.</p>
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<p>I cannot recall either a novel or a story dealing with the popular theme of the young writer from the provinces who comes to the metropolis to win fame and fortune with his pen in which the hero does not get his start that way. It does seem strange that some author, in casting about for startlingly original plots, has not hit upon the idea of having his hero write about the bluebirds in Union Square and sell it to the <i>Herald</i>. But a search through the files of metropolitan fiction counts up overwhelmingly for the sparrows and the old Garden Square, and the <i>Sun</i> always writes the check.</p>
|
||||
<p>Of course it is easy to understand why this first city venture of the budding author is always successful. He is primed by necessity to a superlative effort; mid the iron and stone and marble of the roaring city he has found this spot of singing birds and green grass and trees; every tender sentiment in his nature is baffling with the sweet pain of homesickness; his genius is aroused as it never may be again; the birds chirp, the tree branches sway, the noise of wheels is forgotten; he writes with his soul in his pen—and he sells it to the <i>Sun</i> for $15.</p>
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<section id="the-sparrows-in-madison-square" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
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<h2 epub:type="title">The Sparrows in Madison Square</h2>
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<p>The young man in straitened circumstances who comes to New York City to enter literature has but one thing to do, provided he has studied carefully his field in advance. He must go straight to Madison Square, write an article about the sparrows there, and sell it to the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Sun</i> for $15.</p>
|
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<p>I cannot recall either a novel or a story dealing with the popular theme of the young writer from the provinces who comes to the metropolis to win fame and fortune with his pen in which the hero does not get his start that way. It does seem strange that some author, in casting about for startlingly original plots, has not hit upon the idea of having his hero write about the bluebirds in Union Square and sell it to the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Herald</i>. But a search through the files of metropolitan fiction counts up overwhelmingly for the sparrows and the old Garden Square, and the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Sun</i> always writes the check.</p>
|
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<p>Of course it is easy to understand why this first city venture of the budding author is always successful. He is primed by necessity to a superlative effort; mid the iron and stone and marble of the roaring city he has found this spot of singing birds and green grass and trees; every tender sentiment in his nature is baffling with the sweet pain of homesickness; his genius is aroused as it never may be again; the birds chirp, the tree branches sway, the noise of wheels is forgotten; he writes with his soul in his pen—and he sells it to the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Sun</i> for $15.</p>
|
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<p>I had read of this custom during many years before I came to New York. When my friends were using their strongest arguments to dissuade me from coming, I only smiled serenely. They did not know of that sparrow graft I had up my sleeve.</p>
|
||||
<p>When I arrived in New York, and the car took me straight from the ferry up Twenty-third Street to Madison Square, I could hear that $15 check rustling in my inside pocket.</p>
|
||||
<p>I obtained lodging at an unhyphenated hostelry, and the next morning I was on a bench in Madison Square almost by the time the sparrows were awake. Their melodious chirping, the benignant spring foliage of the noble trees and the clean, fragrant grass reminded me so potently of the old farm I had left that tears almost came into my eyes.</p>
|
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<p>Then, all in a moment, I felt my inspiration. The brave, piercing notes of those cheerful small birds formed a keynote to a wonderful, light, fanciful song of hope and joy and altruism. Like myself, they were creatures with hearts pitched to the tune of woods and fields; as I was, so were they captives by circumstance in the discordant, dull city—yet with how much grace and glee they bore the restraint!</p>
|
||||
<p>And then the early morning people began to pass through the square to their work—sullen people, with sidelong glances and glum faces, hurrying, hurrying, hurrying. And I got my theme cut out clear from the bird notes, and wrought it into a lesson, and a poem, and a carnival dance, and a lullaby; and then translated it all into prose and began to write.</p>
|
||||
<p>For two hours my pencil traveled over my pad with scarcely a rest. Then I went to the little room I had rented for two days, and there I cut it to half, and then mailed it, white-hot, to the <i>Sun</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>For two hours my pencil traveled over my pad with scarcely a rest. Then I went to the little room I had rented for two days, and there I cut it to half, and then mailed it, white-hot, to the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Sun</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>The next morning I was up by daylight and spent two cents of my capital for a paper. If the word “sparrow” was in it I was unable to find it. I took it up to my room and spread it out on the bed and went over it, column by column. Something was wrong.</p>
|
||||
<p>Three hours afterward the postman brought me a large envelope containing my MS. and a piece of inexpensive paper, about 3 inches by 4—I suppose some of you have seen them—upon which was written in violet ink, “With the <i>Sun’s</i> thanks.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Three hours afterward the postman brought me a large envelope containing my MS. and a piece of inexpensive paper, about 3 inches by 4—I suppose some of you have seen them—upon which was written in violet ink, “With the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Sun’s</i> thanks.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I went over to the square and sat upon a bench. No; I did not think it necessary to eat any breakfast that morning. The confounded pests of sparrows were making the square hideous with their idiotic “cheep, cheep.” I never saw birds so persistently noisy, impudent, and disagreeable in all my life.</p>
|
||||
<p>By this time, according to all traditions, I should have been standing in the office of the editor of the <i>Sun</i>. That personage—a tall, grave, white-haired man—would strike a silver bell as he grasped my hand and wiped a suspicious moisture from his glasses.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mr. McChesney,” he would be saying when a subordinate appeared, “this is Mr. Henry, the young man who sent in that exquisite gem about the sparrows in Madison Square. You may give him a desk at once. Your salary, sir, will be $80 a week, to begin with.”</p>
|
||||
<p>By this time, according to all traditions, I should have been standing in the office of the editor of the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Sun</i>. That personage—a tall, grave, white-haired man—would strike a silver bell as he grasped my hand and wiped a suspicious moisture from his glasses.</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> McChesney,” he would be saying when a subordinate appeared, “this is <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Henry, the young man who sent in that exquisite gem about the sparrows in Madison Square. You may give him a desk at once. Your salary, sir, will be $80 a week, to begin with.”</p>
|
||||
<p>This was what I had been led to expect by all writers who have evolved romances of literary New York.</p>
|
||||
<p>Something was decidedly wrong with tradition. I could not assume the blame, so I fixed it upon the sparrows. I began to hate them with intensity and heat.</p>
|
||||
<p>At that moment an individual wearing an excess of whiskers, two hats, and a pestilential air slid into the seat beside me.</p>
|
||||
@ -38,7 +38,7 @@
|
||||
<p>I drew forth my manuscript story of the sparrows, and offered it for burnt sacrifice. There were old planks, splinters, and chips for our fire. My frowsy friend produced from some interior of his frayed clothing half a loaf of bread, pepper, and salt.</p>
|
||||
<p>In ten minutes each of us was holding a sparrow spitted upon a stick over the leaping flames.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say,” said my fellow bivouacker, “this ain’t so bad when a fellow’s hungry. It reminds me of when I struck New York first—about fifteen years ago. I come in from the West to see if I could get a job on a newspaper. I hit the Madison Square Park the first mornin’ after, and was sitting around on the benches. I noticed the sparrows chirpin’, and the grass and trees so nice and green that I thought I was back in the country again. Then I got some papers out of my pocket, and—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I know,” I interrupted. “You sent it to the <i>Sun</i> and got $15.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I know,” I interrupted. “You sent it to the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Sun</i> and got $15.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say,” said my friend, suspiciously, “you seem to know a good deal. Where was you? I went to sleep on the bench there, in the sun, and somebody touched me for every cent I had—$15.”</p>
|
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</section>
|
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</body>
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