[Lamp] [Editorial] Modernize hyphenation and spelling
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<p>Harlem.</p>
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<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Fink had dropped into <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Cassidy’s flat one flight below.</p>
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<p>“Ain’t it a beaut?” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Cassidy.</p>
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<p>She turned her face proudly for her friend <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Fink to see. One eye was nearly closed, with a great, greenish-purple bruise around it. Her lip was cut and bleeding a little and there were red finger-marks on each side of her neck.</p>
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<p>She turned her face proudly for her friend <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Fink to see. One eye was nearly closed, with a great, greenish-purple bruise around it. Her lip was cut and bleeding a little and there were red fingermarks on each side of her neck.</p>
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<p>“My husband wouldn’t ever think of doing that to me,” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Fink, concealing her envy.</p>
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<p>“I wouldn’t have a man,” declared <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Cassidy, “that didn’t beat me up at least once a week. Shows he thinks something of you. Say! but that last dose Jack gave me wasn’t no homeopathic one. I can see stars yet. But he’ll be the sweetest man in town for the rest of the week to make up for it. This eye is good for theater tickets and a silk shirt waist at the very least.”</p>
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<p>“I should hope,” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Fink, assuming complacency, “that <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Fink is too much of a gentleman ever to raise his hand against me.”</p>
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<p>“But what does he beat you for?” inquired <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Fink, with wide-open eyes.</p>
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<p>“Silly!” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Cassidy, indulgently. “Why, because he’s full. It’s generally on Saturday nights.”</p>
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<p>“But what cause do you give him?” persisted the seeker after knowledge.</p>
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<p>“Why, didn’t I marry him? Jack comes in tanked up; and I’m here, ain’t I? Who else has he got a right to beat? I’d just like to catch him once beating anybody else! Sometimes it’s because supper ain’t ready; and sometimes it’s because it is. Jack ain’t particular about causes. He just lushes till he remembers he’s married, and then he makes for home and does me up. Saturday nights I just move the furniture with sharp corners out of the way, so I won’t cut my head when he gets his work in. He’s got a left swing that jars you! Sometimes I take the count in the first round; but when I feel like having a good time during the week or want some new rags I come up again for more punishment. That’s what I done last night. Jack knows I’ve been wanting a black silk waist for a month, and I didn’t think just one black eye would bring it. Tell you what, Mag, I’ll bet you the ice cream he brings it to-night.”</p>
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<p>“Why, didn’t I marry him? Jack comes in tanked up; and I’m here, ain’t I? Who else has he got a right to beat? I’d just like to catch him once beating anybody else! Sometimes it’s because supper ain’t ready; and sometimes it’s because it is. Jack ain’t particular about causes. He just lushes till he remembers he’s married, and then he makes for home and does me up. Saturday nights I just move the furniture with sharp corners out of the way, so I won’t cut my head when he gets his work in. He’s got a left swing that jars you! Sometimes I take the count in the first round; but when I feel like having a good time during the week or want some new rags I come up again for more punishment. That’s what I done last night. Jack knows I’ve been wanting a black silk waist for a month, and I didn’t think just one black eye would bring it. Tell you what, Mag, I’ll bet you the ice cream he brings it tonight.”</p>
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<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Fink was thinking deeply.</p>
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<p>“My Mart,” she said, “never hit me a lick in his life. It’s just like you said, Mame; he comes in grouchy and ain’t got a word to say. He never takes me out anywhere. He’s a chair-warmer at home for fair. He buys me things, but he looks so glum about it that I never appreciate ’em.”</p>
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<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Cassidy slipped an arm around her chum. “You poor thing!” she said. “But everybody can’t have a husband like Jack. Marriage wouldn’t be no failure if they was all like him. These discontented wives you hear about—what they need is a man to come home and kick their slats in once a week, and then make it up in kisses, and chocolate creams. That’d give ’em some interest in life. What I want is a masterful man that slugs you when he’s jagged and hugs you when he ain’t jagged. Preserve me from the man that ain’t got the sand to do neither!”</p>
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<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Fink sighed.</p>
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<p>The hallways were suddenly filled with sound. The door flew open at the kick of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Cassidy. His arms were occupied with bundles. Mame flew and hung about his neck. Her sound eye sparkled with the love light that shines in the eye of the Maori maid when she recovers consciousness in the hut of the wooer who has stunned and dragged her there.</p>
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<p>“Hello, old girl!” shouted <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Cassidy. He shed his bundles and lifted her off her feet in a mighty hug. “I got tickets for Barnum & Bailey’s, and if you’ll bust the string of one of them bundles I guess you’ll find that silk waist—why, good evening, <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Fink—I didn’t see you at first. How’s old Mart coming along?”</p>
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<p>“He’s very well, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Cassidy—thanks,” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Fink. “I must be going along up now. Mart’ll be home for supper soon. I’ll bring you down that pattern you wanted to-morrow, Mame.”</p>
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<p>“He’s very well, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Cassidy—thanks,” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Fink. “I must be going along up now. Mart’ll be home for supper soon. I’ll bring you down that pattern you wanted tomorrow, Mame.”</p>
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<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Fink went up to her flat and had a little cry. It was a meaningless cry, the kind of cry that only a woman knows about, a cry from no particular cause, altogether an absurd cry; the most transient and the most hopeless cry in the repertory of grief. Why had Martin never thrashed her? He was as big and strong as Jack Cassidy. Did he not care for her at all? He never quarrelled; he came home and lounged about, silent, glum, idle. He was a fairly good provider, but he ignored the spices of life.</p>
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<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Fink’s ship of dreams was becalmed. Her captain ranged between plum duff and his hammock. If only he would shiver his timbers or stamp his foot on the quarter-deck now and then! And she had thought to sail so merrily, touching at ports in the Delectable Isles! But now, to vary the figure, she was ready to throw up the sponge, tired out, without a scratch to show for all those tame rounds with her sparring partner. For one moment she almost hated Mame—Mame, with her cuts and bruises, her salve of presents and kisses; her stormy voyage with her fighting, brutal, loving mate.</p>
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<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Fink’s ship of dreams was becalmed. Her captain ranged between plum duff and his hammock. If only he would shiver his timbers or stamp his foot on the quarterdeck now and then! And she had thought to sail so merrily, touching at ports in the Delectable Isles! But now, to vary the figure, she was ready to throw up the sponge, tired out, without a scratch to show for all those tame rounds with her sparring partner. For one moment she almost hated Mame—Mame, with her cuts and bruises, her salve of presents and kisses; her stormy voyage with her fighting, brutal, loving mate.</p>
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<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Fink came home at 7. He was permeated with the curse of domesticity. Beyond the portals of his cozy home he cared not to roam, to roam. He was the man who had caught the street car, the anaconda that had swallowed its prey, the tree that lay as it had fallen.</p>
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<p>“Like the supper, Mart?” asked <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Fink, who had striven over it.</p>
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<p>“M-m-m-yep,” grunted <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Fink.</p>
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<p>It was an unusual thing for Carson Chalmers to play the Caliph. But on that night he felt the inefficacy of conventional antidotes to melancholy. Something wanton and egregious, something high-flavored and Arabian, he must have to lighten his mood.</p>
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<p>On the half hour Phillips had finished his duties as slave of the lamp. The waiters from the restaurant below had whisked aloft the delectable dinner. The dining table, laid for two, glowed cheerily in the glow of the pink-shaded candles.</p>
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<p>And now Phillips, as though he ushered a cardinal—or held in charge a burglar—wafted in the shivering guest who had been haled from the line of mendicant lodgers.</p>
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<p>It is a common thing to call such men wrecks; if the comparison be used here it is the specific one of a derelict come to grief through fire. Even yet some flickering combustion illuminated the drifting hulk. His face and hands had been recently washed—a rite insisted upon by Phillips as a memorial to the slaughtered conventions. In the candle-light he stood, a flaw in the decorous fittings of the apartment. His face was a sickly white, covered almost to the eyes with a stubble the shade of a red Irish setter’s coat. Phillips’s comb had failed to control the pale brown hair, long matted and conformed to the contour of a constantly worn hat. His eyes were full of a hopeless, tricky defiance like that seen in a cur’s that is cornered by his tormentors. His shabby coat was buttoned high, but a quarter inch of redeeming collar showed above it. His manner was singularly free from embarrassment when Chalmers rose from his chair across the round dining table.</p>
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<p>It is a common thing to call such men wrecks; if the comparison be used here it is the specific one of a derelict come to grief through fire. Even yet some flickering combustion illuminated the drifting hulk. His face and hands had been recently washed—a rite insisted upon by Phillips as a memorial to the slaughtered conventions. In the candlelight he stood, a flaw in the decorous fittings of the apartment. His face was a sickly white, covered almost to the eyes with a stubble the shade of a red Irish setter’s coat. Phillips’s comb had failed to control the pale brown hair, long matted and conformed to the contour of a constantly worn hat. His eyes were full of a hopeless, tricky defiance like that seen in a cur’s that is cornered by his tormentors. His shabby coat was buttoned high, but a quarter inch of redeeming collar showed above it. His manner was singularly free from embarrassment when Chalmers rose from his chair across the round dining table.</p>
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<p>“If you will oblige me,” said the host, “I will be glad to have your company at dinner.”</p>
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<p>“My name is Plumer,” said the highway guest, in harsh and aggressive tones. “If you’re like me, you like to know the name of the party you’re dining with.”</p>
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<p>“I was going on to say,” continued Chalmers somewhat hastily, “that mine is Chalmers. Will you sit opposite?”</p>
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<p>Plumer, of the ruffled plumes, bent his knee for Phillips to slide the chair beneath him. He had an air of having sat at attended boards before. Phillips set out the anchovies and olives.</p>
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<p>“Good!” barked Plumer; “going to be in courses, is it? All right, my jovial ruler of Bagdad. I’m your Scheherezade all the way to the toothpicks. You’re the first Caliph with a genuine Oriental flavor I’ve struck since frost. What luck! And I was forty-third in line. I finished counting, just as your welcome emissary arrived to bid me to the feast. I had about as much chance of getting a bed to-night as I have of being the next President. How will you have the sad story of my life, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Al Raschid—a chapter with each course or the whole edition with the cigars and coffee?”</p>
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<p>“Good!” barked Plumer; “going to be in courses, is it? All right, my jovial ruler of Bagdad. I’m your Scheherezade all the way to the toothpicks. You’re the first Caliph with a genuine Oriental flavor I’ve struck since frost. What luck! And I was forty-third in line. I finished counting, just as your welcome emissary arrived to bid me to the feast. I had about as much chance of getting a bed tonight as I have of being the next President. How will you have the sad story of my life, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Al Raschid—a chapter with each course or the whole edition with the cigars and coffee?”</p>
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<p>“The situation does not seem a novel one to you,” said Chalmers with a smile.</p>
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<p>“By the chin whiskers of the prophet—no!” answered the guest. “New York’s as full of cheap Haroun al Raschids as Bagdad is of fleas. I’ve been held up for my story with a loaded meal pointed at my head twenty times. Catch anybody in New York giving you something for nothing! They spell curiosity and charity with the same set of building blocks. Lots of ’em will stake you to a dime and chop-suey; and a few of ’em will play Caliph to the tune of a top sirloin; but every one of ’em will stand over you till they screw your autobiography out of you with foot notes, appendix and unpublished fragments. Oh, I know what to do when I see victuals coming toward me in little old Bagdad-on-the-Subway. I strike the asphalt three times with my forehead and get ready to spiel yarns for my supper. I claim descent from the late Tommy Tucker, who was forced to hand out vocal harmony for his pre-digested wheaterina and spoopju.”</p>
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<p>“By the chin whiskers of the prophet—no!” answered the guest. “New York’s as full of cheap Haroun al Raschids as Bagdad is of fleas. I’ve been held up for my story with a loaded meal pointed at my head twenty times. Catch anybody in New York giving you something for nothing! They spell curiosity and charity with the same set of building blocks. Lots of ’em will stake you to a dime and chop-suey; and a few of ’em will play Caliph to the tune of a top sirloin; but every one of ’em will stand over you till they screw your autobiography out of you with foot notes, appendix and unpublished fragments. Oh, I know what to do when I see victuals coming toward me in little old Bagdad-on-the-Subway. I strike the asphalt three times with my forehead and get ready to spiel yarns for my supper. I claim descent from the late Tommy Tucker, who was forced to hand out vocal harmony for his predigested wheaterina and spoopju.”</p>
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<p>“I do not ask your story,” said Chalmers. “I tell you frankly that it was a sudden whim that prompted me to send for some stranger to dine with me. I assure you you will not suffer through any curiosity of mine.”</p>
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<p>“Oh, fudge!” exclaimed the guest, enthusiastically tackling his soup; “I don’t mind it a bit. I’m a regular Oriental magazine with a red cover and the leaves cut when the Caliph walks abroad. In fact, we fellows in the bed line have a sort of union rate for things of this sort. Somebody’s always stopping and wanting to know what brought us down so low in the world. For a sandwich and a glass of beer I tell ’em that drink did it. For corned beef and cabbage and a cup of coffee I give ’em the hard-hearted-landlord—six-months-in-the-hospital-lost-job story. A sirloin steak and a quarter for a bed gets the Wall Street tragedy of the swept-away fortune and the gradual descent. This is the first spread of this kind I’ve stumbled against. I haven’t got a story to fit it. I’ll tell you what, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Chalmers, I’m going to tell you the truth for this, if you’ll listen to it. It’ll be harder for you to believe than the made-up ones.”</p>
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<p>“Oh, fudge!” exclaimed the guest, enthusiastically tackling his soup; “I don’t mind it a bit. I’m a regular Oriental magazine with a red cover and the leaves cut when the Caliph walks abroad. In fact, we fellows in the bed line have a sort of union rate for things of this sort. Somebody’s always stopping and wanting to know what brought us down so low in the world. For a sandwich and a glass of beer I tell ’em that drink did it. For corned beef and cabbage and a cup of coffee I give ’em the hardhearted-landlord—six-months-in-the-hospital-lost-job story. A sirloin steak and a quarter for a bed gets the Wall Street tragedy of the swept-away fortune and the gradual descent. This is the first spread of this kind I’ve stumbled against. I haven’t got a story to fit it. I’ll tell you what, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Chalmers, I’m going to tell you the truth for this, if you’ll listen to it. It’ll be harder for you to believe than the made-up ones.”</p>
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<p>An hour later the Arabian guest lay back with a sigh of satisfaction while Phillips brought the coffee and cigars and cleared the table.</p>
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<p>“Did you ever hear of Sherrard Plumer?” he asked, with a strange smile.</p>
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<p>“I remember the name,” said Chalmers. “He was a painter, I think, of a good deal of prominence a few years ago.”</p>
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<p>“Funny thing,” answered Plumer, grimly. “Never quite understood it myself. For a while I swam like a cork. I broke into the swell crowd and got commissions right and left. The newspapers called me a fashionable painter. Then the funny things began to happen. Whenever I finished a picture people would come to see it, and whisper and look queerly at one another.”</p>
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<p>“I soon found out what the trouble was. I had a knack of bringing out in the face of a portrait the hidden character of the original. I don’t know how I did it—I painted what I saw—but I know it did me. Some of my sitters were fearfully enraged and refused their pictures. I painted the portrait of a very beautiful and popular society dame. When it was finished her husband looked at it with a peculiar expression on his face, and the next week he sued for divorce.”</p>
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<p>“I remember one case of a prominent banker who sat to me. While I had his portrait on exhibition in my studio an acquaintance of his came in to look at it. ‘Bless me,’ says he, ‘does he really look like that?” I told him it was considered a faithful likeness. ‘I never noticed that expression about his eyes before,’ said he; ‘I think I’ll drop downtown and change my bank account.’ He did drop down, but the bank account was gone and so was <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Banker.</p>
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<p>“It wasn’t long till they put me out of business. People don’t want their secret meannesses shown up in a picture. They can smile and twist their own faces and deceive you, but the picture can’t. I couldn’t get an order for another picture, and I had to give up. I worked as a newspaper artist for a while, and then for a lithographer, but my work with them got me into the same trouble. If I drew from a photograph my drawing showed up characteristics and expressions that you couldn’t find in the photo, but I guess they were in the original, all right. The customers raised lively rows, especially the women, and I never could hold a job long. So I began to rest my weary head upon the breast of Old Booze for comfort. And pretty soon I was in the free-bed line and doing oral fiction for hand-outs among the food bazaars. Does the truthful statement weary thee, O Caliph? I can turn on the Wall Street disaster stop if you prefer, but that requires a tear, and I’m afraid I can’t hustle one up after that good dinner.”</p>
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<p>“It wasn’t long till they put me out of business. People don’t want their secret meannesses shown up in a picture. They can smile and twist their own faces and deceive you, but the picture can’t. I couldn’t get an order for another picture, and I had to give up. I worked as a newspaper artist for a while, and then for a lithographer, but my work with them got me into the same trouble. If I drew from a photograph my drawing showed up characteristics and expressions that you couldn’t find in the photo, but I guess they were in the original, all right. The customers raised lively rows, especially the women, and I never could hold a job long. So I began to rest my weary head upon the breast of Old Booze for comfort. And pretty soon I was in the free-bed line and doing oral fiction for handouts among the food bazaars. Does the truthful statement weary thee, O Caliph? I can turn on the Wall Street disaster stop if you prefer, but that requires a tear, and I’m afraid I can’t hustle one up after that good dinner.”</p>
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<p>“No, no,” said Chalmers, earnestly, “you interest me very much. Did all of your portraits reveal some unpleasant trait, or were there some that did not suffer from the ordeal of your peculiar brush?”</p>
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<p>“Some? Yes,” said Plumer. “Children generally, a good many women and a sufficient number of men. All people aren’t bad, you know. When they were all right the pictures were all right. As I said, I don’t explain it, but I’m telling you facts.”</p>
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<p>On Chalmers’s writing-table lay the photograph that he had received that day in the foreign mail. Ten minutes later he had Plumer at work making a sketch from it in pastels. At the end of an hour the artist rose and stretched wearily.</p>
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<p>“It’s done,” he yawned. “You’ll excuse me for being so long. I got interested in the job. Lordy! but I’m tired. No bed last night, you know. Guess it’ll have to be good night now, O Commander of the Faithful!”</p>
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<p>Chalmers went as far as the door with him and slipped some bills into his hand.</p>
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<p>“Oh! I’ll take ’em,” said Plumer. “All that’s included in the fall. Thanks. And for the very good dinner. I shall sleep on feathers to-night and dream of Bagdad. I hope it won’t turn out to be a dream in the morning. Farewell, most excellent Caliph!”</p>
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<p>“Oh! I’ll take ’em,” said Plumer. “All that’s included in the fall. Thanks. And for the very good dinner. I shall sleep on feathers tonight and dream of Bagdad. I hope it won’t turn out to be a dream in the morning. Farewell, most excellent Caliph!”</p>
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<p>Again Chalmers paced restlessly upon his rug. But his beat lay as far from the table whereon lay the pastel sketch as the room would permit. Twice, thrice, he tried to approach it, but failed. He could see the dun and gold and brown of the colors, but there was a wall about it built by his fears that kept him at a distance. He sat down and tried to calm himself. He sprang up and rang for Phillips.</p>
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<p>“There is a young artist in this building,” he said. “—a <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Reineman—do you know which is his apartment?”</p>
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<p>“Top floor, front, sir,” said Phillips.</p>
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<p>“Mamma was thinking of going back week after next,” said Miss Mary with a lovely frown.</p>
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<p>“But when you think of it,” said Gaines, “there are lots of jolly places in town in the summer. The roof gardens, you know, and the—er—the roof gardens.”</p>
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<p>Deepest blue was the lake that day—the day when they had the mock tournament, and the men rode clumsy farm horses around in a glade in the woods and caught curtain rings on the end of a lance. Such fun!</p>
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<p>Cool and dry as the finest wine came the breath of the shadowed forest. The valley below was a vision seen through an opal haze. A white mist from hidden falls blurred the green of a hand’s breadth of tree tops half-way down the gorge. Youth made merry hand-in-hand with young summer. Nothing on Broadway like that.</p>
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<p>Cool and dry as the finest wine came the breath of the shadowed forest. The valley below was a vision seen through an opal haze. A white mist from hidden falls blurred the green of a hand’s breadth of tree tops halfway down the gorge. Youth made merry hand-in-hand with young summer. Nothing on Broadway like that.</p>
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<p>The villagers gathered to see the city folks pursue their mad drollery. The woods rang with the laughter of pixies and naiads and sprites. Gaines caught most of the rings. His was the privilege to crown the queen of the tournament. He was the conquering knight—as far as the rings went. On his arm he wore a white scarf. Compton wore light blue. She had declared her preference for blue, but she wore white that day.</p>
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<p>Gaines looked about for the queen to crown her. He heard her merry laugh, as if from the clouds. She had slipped away and climbed Chimney Rock, a little granite bluff, and stood there, a white fairy among the laurels, fifty feet above their heads.</p>
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<p>Instantly he and Compton accepted the implied challenge. The bluff was easily mounted at the rear, but the front offered small hold to hand or foot. Each man quickly selected his route and began to climb, A crevice, a bush, a slight projection, a vine or tree branch—all of these were aids that counted in the race. It was all foolery—there was no stake; but there was youth in it, cross reader, and light hearts, and something else that Miss Clay writes so charmingly about.</p>
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<p>“There’s no reward,” interrupted the sergeant, shortly. “The man’s not wanted. And neither are ye. So, get out. Ye are frindly with um, and ye would be selling um. Out with ye quick, or I’ll give ye a start.”</p>
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<p>Murray gazed at the officer with serene and virtuous dignity.</p>
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<p>“I would be simply doing my duty as a citizen and gentleman,” he said, severely, “if I could assist the law in laying hold of one of its offenders.”</p>
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<p>Murray hurried back to the bench in the park. He folded his arms and shrank within his clothes to his ghost-like presentment.</p>
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<p>Murray hurried back to the bench in the park. He folded his arms and shrank within his clothes to his ghostlike presentment.</p>
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<p>Ten minutes afterward the Captain arrived at the rendezvous, windy and thunderous as a dog-day in Kansas. His collar had been torn away; his straw hat had been twisted and battered; his shirt with ox-blood stripes split to the waist. And from head to knee he was drenched with some vile and ignoble greasy fluid that loudly proclaimed to the nose its component leaven of garlic and kitchen stuff.</p>
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<p>“For Heaven’s sake, Captain,” sniffed Murray, “I doubt that I would have waited for you if I had suspected you were so desperate as to resort to swill barrels. I”—</p>
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<p>“Cheese it,” said the Captain, harshly. “I’m not hogging it yet. It’s all on the outside. I went around on Essex and proposed marriage to that Catrina that’s got the fruit shop there. Now, that business could be built up. She’s a peach as far as a Dago could be. I thought I had that senoreena mashed sure last week. But look what she done to me! I guess I got too fresh. Well there’s another scheme queered.”</p>
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<p>“Cheese it,” said the Captain, harshly. “I’m not hogging it yet. It’s all on the outside. I went around on Essex and proposed marriage to that Catrina that’s got the fruit shop there. Now, that business could be built up. She’s a peach as far as a Dago could be. I thought I had that señoreena mashed sure last week. But look what she done to me! I guess I got too fresh. Well there’s another scheme queered.”</p>
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<p>“You don’t mean to say,” said Murray, with infinite contempt, “that you would have married that woman to help yourself out of your disgraceful troubles!”</p>
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<p>“Me?” said the Captain. “I’d marry the Empress of China for one bowl of chop suey. I’d commit murder for a plate of beef stew. I’d steal a wafer from a waif. I’d be a Mormon for a bowl of chowder.”</p>
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<p>“I think,” said Murray, resting his head on his hands, “that I would play Judas for the price of one drink of whiskey. For thirty pieces of silver I would”—</p>
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<p>An illuminated clock above the trees retailed the information that it lacked the half hour of twelve. Both men rose from the bench and moved away together as if seized by the same idea. They left the park, struck through a narrow cross street, and came into Broadway, at this hour as dark, echoing and de-peopled as a byway in Pompeii.</p>
|
||||
<p>Northward they turned; and a policeman who glanced at their unkempt and slinking figures withheld the attention and suspicion that he would have granted them at any other hour and place. For on every street in that part of the city other unkempt and slinking figures were shuffling and hurrying toward a converging point—a point that is marked by no monument save that groove on the pavement worn by tens of thousands of waiting feet.</p>
|
||||
<p>At Ninth street a tall man wearing an opera hat alighted from a Broadway car and turned his face westward. But he saw Murray, pounced upon him and dragged him under a street light. The Captain lumbered slowly to the corner, like a wounded bear, and waited, growling.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Jerry!” cried the hatted one. “How fortunate! I was to begin a search for you to-morrow. The old gentleman has capitulated. You’re to be restored to favor. Congratulate you. Come to the office in the morning and get all the money you want. I’ve liberal instructions in that respect.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Jerry!” cried the hatted one. “How fortunate! I was to begin a search for you tomorrow. The old gentleman has capitulated. You’re to be restored to favor. Congratulate you. Come to the office in the morning and get all the money you want. I’ve liberal instructions in that respect.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“And the little matrimonial arrangement?” said Murray, with his head turned sidewise.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why.—er—well, of course, your uncle understands—expects that the engagement between you and Miss Vanderhurst shall be”—</p>
|
||||
<p>“Good night,” said Murray, moving away.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -9,11 +9,11 @@
|
||||
<section id="brickdust-row" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Brickdust Row</h2>
|
||||
<p>Blinker was displeased. A man of less culture and poise and wealth would have sworn. But Blinker always remembered that he was a gentleman—a thing that no gentleman should do. So he merely looked bored and sardonic while he rode in a hansom to the center of disturbance, which was the Broadway office of Lawyer Oldport, who was agent for the Blinker estate.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I don’t see,” said Blinker, “why I should be always signing confounded papers. I am packed, and was to have left for the North Woods this morning. Now I must wait until to-morrow morning. I hate night trains. My best razors are, of course, at the bottom of some unidentifiable trunk. It is a plot to drive me to bay rum and a monologueing, thumb-handed barber. Give me a pen that doesn’t scratch. I hate pens that scratch.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sit down,” said double-chinned, gray Lawyer Oldport. “The worst has not been told you. Oh, the hardships of the rich! The papers are not yet ready to sign. They will be laid before you to-morrow at eleven. You will miss another day. Twice shall the barber tweak the helpless nose of a Blinker. Be thankful that your sorrows do not embrace a haircut.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I don’t see,” said Blinker, “why I should be always signing confounded papers. I am packed, and was to have left for the North Woods this morning. Now I must wait until tomorrow morning. I hate night trains. My best razors are, of course, at the bottom of some unidentifiable trunk. It is a plot to drive me to bay rum and a monologueing, thumb-handed barber. Give me a pen that doesn’t scratch. I hate pens that scratch.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sit down,” said double-chinned, gray Lawyer Oldport. “The worst has not been told you. Oh, the hardships of the rich! The papers are not yet ready to sign. They will be laid before you tomorrow at eleven. You will miss another day. Twice shall the barber tweak the helpless nose of a Blinker. Be thankful that your sorrows do not embrace a haircut.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“If,” said Blinker, rising, “the act did not involve more signing of papers I would take my business out of your hands at once. Give me a cigar, please.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“If,” said Lawyer Oldport, “I had cared to see an old friend’s son gulped down at one mouthful by sharks I would have ordered you to take it away long ago. Now, let’s quit fooling, Alexander. Besides the grinding task of signing your name some thirty times to-morrow, I must impose upon you the consideration of a matter of business—of business, and I may say humanity or right. I spoke to you about this five years ago, but you would not listen—you were in a hurry for a coaching trip, I think. The subject has come up again. The property—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, property!” interrupted Blinker. “Dear <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Oldport, I think you mentioned to-morrow. Let’s have it all at one dose to-morrow—signatures and property and snappy rubber bands and that smelly sealing-wax and all. Have luncheon with me? Well, I’ll try to remember to drop in at eleven to-morrow. Morning.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“If,” said Lawyer Oldport, “I had cared to see an old friend’s son gulped down at one mouthful by sharks I would have ordered you to take it away long ago. Now, let’s quit fooling, Alexander. Besides the grinding task of signing your name some thirty times tomorrow, I must impose upon you the consideration of a matter of business—of business, and I may say humanity or right. I spoke to you about this five years ago, but you would not listen—you were in a hurry for a coaching trip, I think. The subject has come up again. The property—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, property!” interrupted Blinker. “Dear <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Oldport, I think you mentioned tomorrow. Let’s have it all at one dose tomorrow—signatures and property and snappy rubber bands and that smelly sealing-wax and all. Have luncheon with me? Well, I’ll try to remember to drop in at eleven tomorrow. Morning.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The Blinker wealth was in lands, tenements and hereditaments, as the legal phrase goes. Lawyer Oldport had once taken Alexander in his little pulmonary gasoline runabout to see the many buildings and rows of buildings that he owned in the city. For Alexander was sole heir. They had amused Blinker very much. The houses looked so incapable of producing the big sums of money that Lawyer Oldport kept piling up in banks for him to spend.</p>
|
||||
<p>In the evening Blinker went to one of his clubs, intending to dine. Nobody was there except some old fogies playing whist who spoke to him with grave politeness and glared at him with savage contempt. Everybody was out of town. But here he was kept in like a schoolboy to write his name over and over on pieces of paper. His wounds were deep.</p>
|
||||
<p>Blinker turned his back on the fogies, and said to the club steward who had come forward with some nonsense about cold fresh salmon roe:</p>
|
||||
@ -30,18 +30,18 @@
|
||||
<p>“Me?” She turned upon him wide-open eyes full of bantering surprise. “Why, what a question! Can’t you see that I’m riding a bicycle in the park?” Her drollery took the form of impertinence.</p>
|
||||
<p>“And I am laying brick on a tall factory chimney,” said Blinker. “Mayn’t we see Coney together? I’m all alone and I’ve never been there before.” “It depends,” said the girl, “on how nicely you behave. I’ll consider your application until we get there.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Blinker took pains to provide against the rejection of his application. He strove to please. To adopt the metaphor of his nonsensical phrase, he laid brick upon brick on the tall chimney of his devoirs until, at length, the structure was stable and complete. The manners of the best society come around finally to simplicity; and as the girl’s way was that naturally, they were on a mutual plane of communication from the beginning.</p>
|
||||
<p>He learned that she was twenty, and her name was Florence; that she trimmed hats in a millinery shop; that she lived in a furnished room with her best chum Ella, who was cashier in a shoe store; and that a glass of milk from the bottle on the window-sill and an egg that boils itself while you twist up your hair makes a breakfast good enough for any one. Florence laughed when she heard “Blinker.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He learned that she was twenty, and her name was Florence; that she trimmed hats in a millinery shop; that she lived in a furnished room with her best chum Ella, who was cashier in a shoe store; and that a glass of milk from the bottle on the windowsill and an egg that boils itself while you twist up your hair makes a breakfast good enough for any one. Florence laughed when she heard “Blinker.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well,” she said. “It certainly shows that you have imagination. It gives the ‘Smiths’ a chance for a little rest, anyhow.”</p>
|
||||
<p>They landed at Coney, and were dashed on the crest of a great human wave of mad pleasure-seekers into the walks and avenues of Fairyland gone into vaudeville.</p>
|
||||
<p>With a curious eye, a critical mind and a fairly withheld judgment Blinker considered the temples, pagodas and kiosks of popularized delights. Hoi polloi trampled, hustled and crowded him. Basket parties bumped him; sticky children tumbled, howling, under his feet, candying his clothes. Insolent youths strolling among the booths with hard-won canes under one arm and easily won girls on the other, blew defiant smoke from cheap cigars into his face. The publicity gentlemen with megaphones, each before his own stupendous attraction, roared like Niagara in his ears. Music of all kinds that could be tortured from brass, reed, hide or string, fought in the air to gain space for its vibrations against its competitors. But what held Blinker in awful fascination was the mob, the multitude, the proletariat shrieking, struggling, hurrying, panting, hurling itself in incontinent frenzy, with unabashed abandon, into the ridiculous sham palaces of trumpery and tinsel pleasures, The vulgarity of it, its brutal overriding of all the tenets of repression and taste that were held by his caste, repelled him strongly.</p>
|
||||
<p>In the midst of his disgust he turned and looked down at Florence by his side. She was ready with her quick smile and upturned, happy eyes, as bright and clear as the water in trout pools. The eyes were saying that they had the right to be shining and happy, for was their owner not with her (for the present) Man, her Gentleman Friend and holder of the keys to the enchanted city of fun?</p>
|
||||
<p>Blinker did not read her look accurately, but by some miracle he suddenly saw Coney aright.</p>
|
||||
<p>He no longer saw a mass of vulgarians seeking gross joys. He now looked clearly upon a hundred thousand true idealists. Their offenses were wiped out. Counterfeit and false though the garish joys of these spangled temples were, he perceived that deep under the gilt surface they offered saving and apposite balm and satisfaction to the restless human heart. Here, at least, was the husk of Romance, the empty but shining casque of Chivalry, the breath-catching though safe-guarded dip and flight of Adventure, the magic carpet that transports you to the realms of fairyland, though its journey be through but a few poor yards of space. He no longer saw a rabble, but his brothers seeking the ideal. There was no magic of poesy here or of art; but the glamour of their imagination turned yellow calico into cloth of gold and the megaphones into the silver trumpets of joy’s heralds.</p>
|
||||
<p>He no longer saw a mass of vulgarians seeking gross joys. He now looked clearly upon a hundred thousand true idealists. Their offenses were wiped out. Counterfeit and false though the garish joys of these spangled temples were, he perceived that deep under the gilt surface they offered saving and apposite balm and satisfaction to the restless human heart. Here, at least, was the husk of Romance, the empty but shining casque of Chivalry, the breath-catching though safeguarded dip and flight of Adventure, the magic carpet that transports you to the realms of fairyland, though its journey be through but a few poor yards of space. He no longer saw a rabble, but his brothers seeking the ideal. There was no magic of poesy here or of art; but the glamour of their imagination turned yellow calico into cloth of gold and the megaphones into the silver trumpets of joy’s heralds.</p>
|
||||
<p>Almost humbled, Blinker rolled up the shirt sleeves of his mind and joined the idealists.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You are the lady doctor,” he said to Florence. “How shall we go about doing this jolly conglomeration of fairy tales, incorporated?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“We will begin there,” said the Princess, pointing to a fun pagoda on the edge of the sea, “and we will take them all in, one by one.”</p>
|
||||
<p>They caught the eight o’clock returning boat and sat, filled with pleasant fatigue, against the rail in the bow, listening to the Italians’ fiddle and harp. Blinker had thrown off all care. The North Woods seemed to him an uninhabitable wilderness. What a fuss he had made over signing his name—pooh! he could sign it a hundred times. And her name was as pretty as she was—“Florence,” he said it to himself a great many times.</p>
|
||||
<p>As the boat was nearing its pier in the North River a two-funnelled, drab, foreign-looking sea-going steamer was dropping down toward the bay. The boat turned its nose in toward its slip. The steamer veered as if to seek midstream, and then yawed, seemed to increase its speed and struck the Coney boat on the side near the stern, cutting into it with a terrifying shock and crash.</p>
|
||||
<p>As the boat was nearing its pier in the North River a two-funnelled, drab, foreign-looking seagoing steamer was dropping down toward the bay. The boat turned its nose in toward its slip. The steamer veered as if to seek midstream, and then yawed, seemed to increase its speed and struck the Coney boat on the side near the stern, cutting into it with a terrifying shock and crash.</p>
|
||||
<p>While the six hundred passengers on the boat were mostly tumbling about the decks in a shrieking panic the captain was shouting at the steamer that it should not back off and leave the rent exposed for the water to enter. But the steamer tore its way out like a savage sawfish and cleaved its heartless way, full speed ahead.</p>
|
||||
<p>The boat began to sink at its stern, but moved slowly toward the slip. The passengers were a frantic mob, unpleasant to behold.</p>
|
||||
<p>Blinker held Florence tightly until the boat had righted itself. She made no sound or sign of fear. He stood on a camp stool, ripped off the slats above his head and pulled down a number of the life preservers. He began to buckle one around Florence. The rotten canvas split and the fraudulent granulated cork came pouring out in a stream. Florence caught a handful of it and laughed gleefully.</p>
|
||||
@ -78,7 +78,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“I gave you a thousand dollars last, week,” he cried under his breath, “and she meets them in your very doors. There is something wrong; there is something wrong.”</p>
|
||||
<p>At eleven the next day Blinker signed his name thirty times with a new pen provided by Lawyer Oldport.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Now let me go to the woods,” he said surlily.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You are not looking well,” said Lawyer Oldport. “The trip will do you good. But listen, if you will, to that little matter of business of which I spoke to you yesterday, and also five years ago. There are some buildings, fifteen in number, of which there are new five-year leases to be signed. Your father contemplated a change in the lease provisions, but never made it. He intended that the parlors of these houses should not be sub-let, but that the tenants should be allowed to use them for reception rooms. These houses are in the shopping district, and are mainly tenanted by young working girls. As it is they are forced to seek companionship outside. This row of red brick—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You are not looking well,” said Lawyer Oldport. “The trip will do you good. But listen, if you will, to that little matter of business of which I spoke to you yesterday, and also five years ago. There are some buildings, fifteen in number, of which there are new five-year leases to be signed. Your father contemplated a change in the lease provisions, but never made it. He intended that the parlors of these houses should not be sublet, but that the tenants should be allowed to use them for reception rooms. These houses are in the shopping district, and are mainly tenanted by young working girls. As it is they are forced to seek companionship outside. This row of red brick—”</p>
|
||||
<p>Blinker interrupted him with a loud, discordant laugh.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Brickdust Row for an even hundred,” he cried. “And I own it. Have I guessed right?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The tenants have some such name for it,” said Lawyer Oldport.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -10,7 +10,7 @@
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Elsie in New York</h2>
|
||||
<p>No, bumptious reader, this story is not a continuation of the Elsie series. But if your Elsie had lived over here in our big city there might have been a chapter in her books not very different from this.</p>
|
||||
<p>Especially for the vagrant feet of youth are the roads of Manhattan beset “with pitfall and with gin.” But the civic guardians of the young have made themselves acquainted with the snares of the wicked, and most of the dangerous paths are patrolled by their agents, who seek to turn straying ones away from the peril that menaces them. And this will tell you how they guided my Elsie safely through all peril to the goal that she was seeking.</p>
|
||||
<p>Elsie’s father had been a cutter for Fox & Otter, cloaks and furs, on lower Broadway. He was an old man, with a slow and limping gait, so a pot-hunter of a newly licensed chauffeur ran him down one day when livelier game was scarce. They took the old man home, where he lay on his bed for a year and then died, leaving $2.50 in cash and a letter from <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Otter offering to do anything he could to help his faithful old employee. The old cutter regarded this letter as a valuable legacy to his daughter, and he put it into her hands with pride as the shears of the dread Cleaner and Repairer snipped off his thread of life.</p>
|
||||
<p>Elsie’s father had been a cutter for Fox & Otter, cloaks and furs, on lower Broadway. He was an old man, with a slow and limping gait, so a pothunter of a newly licensed chauffeur ran him down one day when livelier game was scarce. They took the old man home, where he lay on his bed for a year and then died, leaving $2.50 in cash and a letter from <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Otter offering to do anything he could to help his faithful old employee. The old cutter regarded this letter as a valuable legacy to his daughter, and he put it into her hands with pride as the shears of the dread Cleaner and Repairer snipped off his thread of life.</p>
|
||||
<p>That was the landlord’s cue; and forth he came and did his part in the great eviction scene. There was no snowstorm ready for Elsie to steal out into, drawing her little red woollen shawl about her shoulders, but she went out, regardless of the unities. And as for the red shawl—back to Blaney with it! Elsie’s fall tan coat was cheap, but it had the style and fit of the best at Fox & Otter’s. And her lucky stars had given her good looks, and eyes as blue and innocent as the new shade of note paper, and she had $1 left of the $2.50. And the letter from <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Otter. Keep your eye on the letter from <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Otter. That is the clue. I desire that everything be made plain as we go. Detective stories are so plentiful now that they do not sell.</p>
|
||||
<p>And so we find Elsie, thus equipped, starting out in the world to seek her fortune. One trouble about the letter from <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Otter was that it did not bear the new address of the firm, which had moved about a month before. But Elsie thought she could find it. She had heard that policemen, when politely addressed, or thumbscrewed by an investigation committee, will give up information and addresses. So she boarded a downtown car at One Hundred and Seventy-seventh street and rode south to Forty-second, which she thought must surely be the end of the island. There she stood against the wall undecided, for the city’s roar and dash was new to her. Up where she had lived was rural New York, so far out that the milkmen awaken you in the morning by the squeaking of pumps instead of the rattling of cans.</p>
|
||||
<p>A kind-faced, sunburned young man in a soft-brimmed hat went past Elsie into the Grand Central Depot. That was Hank Ross, of the Sunflower Ranch, in Idaho, on his way home from a visit to the East. Hank’s heart was heavy, for the Sunflower Ranch was a lonesome place, lacking the presence of a woman. He had hoped to find one during his visit who would congenially share his prosperity and home, but the girls of Gotham had not pleased his fancy. But, as he passed in, he noted, with a jumping of his pulses, the sweet, ingenuous face of Elsie and her pose of doubt and loneliness. With true and honest Western impulse he said to himself that here was his mate. He could love her, he knew; and he would surround her with so much comfort, and cherish her so carefully that she would be happy, and make two sunflowers grow on the ranch where there grew but one before.</p>
|
||||
@ -52,7 +52,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Yes,” said Elsie; “I must have work.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Now don’t do it,” said the girl. “I’m chairman of our Scab Committee. There’s 400 of us girls locked out just because we demanded 50 cents a week raise in wages, and ice water, and for the foreman to shave off his mustache. You’re too nice a looking girl to be a scab. Wouldn’t you please help us along by trying to find a job somewhere else, or would you’se rather have your face pushed in?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ll try somewhere else,” said Elsie.</p>
|
||||
<p>She walked aimlessly eastward on Broadway, and there her heart leaped to see the sign, “Fox & Otter,” stretching entirely across the front of a tall building. It was as though an unseen guide had led her to it through the by-ways of her fruitless search for work.</p>
|
||||
<p>She walked aimlessly eastward on Broadway, and there her heart leaped to see the sign, “Fox & Otter,” stretching entirely across the front of a tall building. It was as though an unseen guide had led her to it through the byways of her fruitless search for work.</p>
|
||||
<p>She hurried into the store and sent in to <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Otter by a clerk her name and the letter he had written her father. She was shown directly into his private office.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Otter arose from his desk as Elsie entered and took both hands with a hearty smile of welcome. He was a slightly corpulent man of nearly middle age, a little bald, gold spectacled, polite, well dressed, radiating.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, well, and so this is Beatty’s little daughter! Your father was one of our most efficient and valued employees. He left nothing? Well, well. I hope we have not forgotten his faithful services. I am sure there is a vacancy now among our models. Oh, it is easy work—nothing easier.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -17,7 +17,7 @@
|
||||
<p>On the sidewalk, twenty steps from the clergyman’s door, a pale-faced, fat man huskily enveloped him with a raised, red fist and the voice of a bell buoy, demanding payment of an old score.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, Bergman, man,” sang Morley, dulcetly, “is this you? I was just on my way up to your place to settle up. That remittance from my aunt arrived only this morning. Wrong address was the trouble. Come up to the corner and I’ll square up. Glad to see you. Saves me a walk.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Four drinks placated the emotional Bergman. There was an air about Morley when he was backed by money in hand that would have stayed off a call loan at Rothschilds’. When he was penniless his bluff was pitched half a tone lower, but few are competent to detect the difference in the notes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You gum to mine blace and bay me to-morrow, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morley,” said Bergman. “Oxcuse me dat I dun you on der street. But I haf not seen you in dree mont’. Pros’t!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You gum to mine blace and bay me tomorrow, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morley,” said Bergman. “Oxcuse me dat I dun you on der street. But I haf not seen you in dree mont’. Pros’t!”</p>
|
||||
<p>Morley walked away with a crooked smile on his pale, smooth face. The credulous, drink-softened German amused him. He would have to avoid Twenty-ninth street in the future. He had not been aware that Bergman ever went home by that route.</p>
|
||||
<p>At the door of a darkened house two squares to the north Morley knocked with a peculiar sequence of raps. The door opened to the length of a six-inch chain, and the pompous, important black face of an African guardian imposed itself in the opening. Morley was admitted.</p>
|
||||
<p>In a third-story room, in an atmosphere opaque with smoke, he hung for ten minutes above a roulette wheel. Then downstairs he crept, and was out-sped by the important negro, jingling in his pocket the 40 cents in silver that remained to him of his five-dollar capital. At the corner he lingered, undecided.</p>
|
||||
@ -33,13 +33,13 @@
|
||||
<p>He settled the wrapped bottle carefully in the child’s arms and escorted him to the corner. In his own pocket he dropped the 85 cents accruing to him by virtue of his chemical knowledge.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Look out for the cars, sonny,” he said, cheerfully, to his small victim.</p>
|
||||
<p>Two street cars suddenly swooped in opposite directions upon the youngster. Morley dashed between them and pinned the infantile messenger by the neck, holding him in safety. Then from the corner of his street he sent him on his way, swindled, happy, and sticky with vile, cheap candy from the Italian’s fruit stand.</p>
|
||||
<p>Morley went to a restaurant and ordered a sirloin and a pint of inexpensive Chateau Breuille. He laughed noiselessly, but so genuinely that the waiter ventured to premise that good news had come his way.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, no,” said Morley, who seldom held conversation with any one. “It is not that. It is something else that amuses me. Do you know what three divisions of people are easiest to over-reach in transactions of all kinds?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Morley went to a restaurant and ordered a sirloin and a pint of inexpensive Château Breuille. He laughed noiselessly, but so genuinely that the waiter ventured to premise that good news had come his way.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, no,” said Morley, who seldom held conversation with any one. “It is not that. It is something else that amuses me. Do you know what three divisions of people are easiest to overreach in transactions of all kinds?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sure,” said the waiter, calculating the size of the tip promised by the careful knot of Morley’s tie; “there’s the buyers from the dry goods stores in the South during August, and honeymooners from Staten Island, and”—</p>
|
||||
<p>“Wrong!” said Morley, chuckling happily. “The answer is just—men, women and children. The world—well, say New York and as far as summer boarders can swim out from Long Island—is full of greenhorns. Two minutes longer on the broiler would have made this steak fit to be eaten by a gentleman, Francois.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“If yez t’inks it’s on de bum,” said the waiter, “Oi’ll”—</p>
|
||||
<p>Morley lifted his hand in protest—slightly martyred protest.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It will do,” he said, magnanimously. “And now, green Chartreuse, frappe and a demi-tasse.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It will do,” he said, magnanimously. “And now, green Chartreuse, frappe and a demitasse.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Morley went out leisurely and stood on a corner where two tradeful arteries of the city cross. With a solitary dime in his pocket, he stood on the curb watching with confident, cynical, smiling eyes the tides of people that flowed past him. Into that stream he must cast his net and draw fish for his further sustenance and need. Good Izaak Walton had not the half of his self-reliance and bait-lore.</p>
|
||||
<p>A joyful party of four—two women and two men—fell upon him with cries of delight. There was a dinner party on—where had he been for a fortnight past?—what luck to thus run upon him! They surrounded and engulfed him—he must join them—tra la la—and the rest.</p>
|
||||
<p>One with a white hat plume curving to the shoulder touched his sleeve, and cast at the others a triumphant look that said: “See what I can do with him?” and added her queen’s command to the invitations.</p>
|
||||
@ -51,11 +51,11 @@
|
||||
<p>“I do not, sir,” said Morley, half closing his eyes to veil the joy in them. “You had better apply to the police.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The police!” said the old man. “I ain’t done nothin’ to call in the police about. I just come down to see Ben. He lives in a five-story house, he writes me. If you know anybody by that name and could”—</p>
|
||||
<p>“I told you I did not,” said Morley, coldly. “I know no one by the name of Smithers, and I advise you to”—</p>
|
||||
<p>“Smothers not Smithers,” interrupted the old man hopefully. “A heavy-set man, sandy complected, about twenty-nine, two front teeth out, about five foot”—</p>
|
||||
<p>“Smothers not Smithers,” interrupted the old man hopefully. “A heavyset man, sandy complected, about twenty-nine, two front teeth out, about five foot”—</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, ‘Smothers!’ ” exclaimed Morley. “Sol Smothers? Why, he lives in the next house to me. I thought you said ‘Smithers.’ ”</p>
|
||||
<p>Morley looked at his watch. You must have a watch. You can do it for a dollar. Better go hungry than forego a gunmetal or the ninety-eight-cent one that the railroads—according to these watchmakers—are run by.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The Bishop of Long Island,” said Morley, “was to meet me here at 8 to dine with me at the Kingfishers’ Club. But I can’t leave the father of my friend Sol Smothers alone on the street. By <abbr>St.</abbr> Swithin, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Smothers, we Wall street men have to work! Tired is no name for it! I was about to step across to the other corner and have a glass of ginger ale with a dash of sherry when you approached me. You must let me take you to Sol’s house, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Smothers. But, before we take the car I hope you will join me in”—</p>
|
||||
<p>An hour later Morley seated himself on the end of a quiet bench in Madison Square, with a twenty-five-cent cigar between his lips and $140 in deeply creased bills in his inside pocket. Content, light-hearted, ironical, keenly philosophic, he watched the moon drifting in and out amidst a maze of flying clouds. An old, ragged man with a low-bowed head sat at the other end of the bench.</p>
|
||||
<p>An hour later Morley seated himself on the end of a quiet bench in Madison Square, with a twenty-five-cent cigar between his lips and $140 in deeply creased bills in his inside pocket. Content, lighthearted, ironical, keenly philosophic, he watched the moon drifting in and out amidst a maze of flying clouds. An old, ragged man with a low-bowed head sat at the other end of the bench.</p>
|
||||
<p>Presently the old man stirred and looked at his bench companion. In Morley’s appearance he seemed to recognize something superior to the usual nightly occupants of the benches.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Kind sir,” he whined, “if you could spare a dime or even a few pennies to one who”—</p>
|
||||
<p>Morley cut short his stereotyped appeal by throwing him a dollar.</p>
|
||||
@ -64,11 +64,11 @@
|
||||
<p>“God has blessed you,” said the old man. “It is only work that I have known. And now I can get no more.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I must go home,” said Morley, rising and buttoning his coat. “I stopped here only for a smoke. I hope you may find work.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“May your kindness be rewarded this night,” said the old man.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh,” said Morley, “you have your wish already. I am satisfied. I think good luck follows me like a dog. I am for yonder bright hotel across the square for the night. And what a moon that is lighting up the city to-night. I think no one enjoys the moonlight and such little things as I do. Well, a good-night to you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh,” said Morley, “you have your wish already. I am satisfied. I think good luck follows me like a dog. I am for yonder bright hotel across the square for the night. And what a moon that is lighting up the city tonight. I think no one enjoys the moonlight and such little things as I do. Well, a good night to you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Morley walked to the corner where he would cross to his hotel. He blew slow streams of smoke from his cigar heavenward. A policeman passing saluted to his benign nod. What a fine moon it was.</p>
|
||||
<p>The clock struck nine as a girl just entering womanhood stopped on the corner waiting for the approaching car. She was hurrying as if homeward from employment or delay. Her eyes were clear and pure, she was dressed in simple white, she looked eagerly for the car and neither to the right nor the left.</p>
|
||||
<p>Morley knew her. Eight years before he had sat on the same bench with her at school. There had been no sentiment between them—nothing but the friendship of innocent days.</p>
|
||||
<p>But he turned down the side street to a quiet spot and laid his suddenly burning face against the cool iron of a lamp-post, and said dully:</p>
|
||||
<p>But he turned down the side street to a quiet spot and laid his suddenly burning face against the cool iron of a lamppost, and said dully:</p>
|
||||
<p>“God! I wish I could die.”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
|
||||
<p>It cannot be denied that men and women have looked upon one another for the first time and become instantly enamored. It is a risky process, this love at first sight, before she has seen him in Bradstreet or he has seen her in curl papers. But these things do happen; and one instance must form a theme for this story—though not, thank Heaven, to the overshadowing of more vital and important subjects, such as drink, policemen, horses and earldoms.</p>
|
||||
<p>During a certain war a troop calling itself the Gentle Riders rode into history and one or two ambuscades. The Gentle Riders were recruited from the aristocracy of the wild men of the West and the wild men of the aristocracy of the East. In khaki there is little telling them one from another, so they became good friends and comrades all around.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ellsworth Remsen, whose old Knickerbocker descent atoned for his modest rating at only ten millions, ate his canned beef gayly by the campfires of the Gentle Riders. The war was a great lark to him, so that he scarcely regretted polo and planked shad.</p>
|
||||
<p>One of the troopers was a well set up, affable, cool young man, who called himself O’Roon. To this young man Remsen took an especial liking. The two rode side by side during the famous mooted up-hill charge that was disputed so hotly at the time by the Spaniards and afterward by the Democrats.</p>
|
||||
<p>One of the troopers was a well set up, affable, cool young man, who called himself O’Roon. To this young man Remsen took an especial liking. The two rode side by side during the famous mooted uphill charge that was disputed so hotly at the time by the Spaniards and afterward by the Democrats.</p>
|
||||
<p>After the war Remsen came back to his polo and shad. One day a well set up, affable, cool young man disturbed him at his club, and he and O’Roon were soon pounding each other and exchanging opprobrious epithets after the manner of long-lost friends. O’Roon looked seedy and out of luck and perfectly contented. But it seemed that his content was only apparent.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Get me a job, Remsen,” he said. “I’ve just handed a barber my last shilling.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“No trouble at all,” said Remsen. “I know a lot of men who have banks and stores and things downtown. Any particular line you fancy?”</p>
|
||||
@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“I’m stewed, Remsen,” said O’Roon to his friend. “Why do they build hotels that go round and round like catherine wheels? They’ll take away my shield and break me. I can think and talk con-con-consec-sec-secutively, but I s-s-stammer with my feet. I’ve got to go on duty in three hours. The jig is up, Remsen. The jig is up, I tell you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Look at me,” said Remsen, who was his smiling self, pointing to his own face; “whom do you see here?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Goo’ fellow,” said O’Roon, dizzily, “Goo’ old Remsen.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Not so,” said Remsen. “You see Mounted Policeman O’Roon. Look at your face—no; you can’t do that without a glass—but look at mine, and think of yours. How much alike are we? As two French table d’hote dinners. With your badge, on your horse, in your uniform, will I charm nurse-maids and prevent the grass from growing under people’s feet in the Park this day. I will have your badge and your honor, besides having the jolliest lark I’ve been blessed with since we licked Spain.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Not so,” said Remsen. “You see Mounted Policeman O’Roon. Look at your face—no; you can’t do that without a glass—but look at mine, and think of yours. How much alike are we? As two French table d’hôte dinners. With your badge, on your horse, in your uniform, will I charm nursemaids and prevent the grass from growing under people’s feet in the Park this day. I will have your badge and your honor, besides having the jolliest lark I’ve been blessed with since we licked Spain.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Promptly on time the counterfeit presentment of Mounted Policeman O’Roon single-footed into the Park on his chestnut steed. In a uniform two men who are unlike will look alike; two who somewhat resemble each other in feature and figure will appear as twin brothers. So Remsen trotted down the bridle paths, enjoying himself hugely, so few real pleasures do ten-millionaires have.</p>
|
||||
<p>Along the driveway in the early morning spun a victoria drawn by a pair of fiery bays. There was something foreign about the affair, for the Park is rarely used in the morning except by unimportant people who love to be healthy, poor and wise. In the vehicle sat an old gentleman with snowy side-whiskers and a Scotch plaid cap which could not be worn while driving except by a personage. At his side sat the lady of Remsen’s heart—the lady who looked like pomegranate blossoms and the gibbous moon.</p>
|
||||
<p>Remsen met them coming. At the instant of their passing her eyes looked into his, and but for the ever coward’s heart of a true lover he could have sworn that she flushed a faint pink. He trotted on for twenty yards, and then wheeled his horse at the sound of runaway hoofs. The bays had bolted.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -18,9 +18,9 @@
|
||||
<p>Old Zizzbaum had the eye of an osprey, the memory of an elephant and a mind that unfolded from him in three movements like the puzzle of the carpenter’s rule. He rolled to the front like a brunette polar bear, and shook Platt’s hand.</p>
|
||||
<p>“And how is the good <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Navarro in Texas?” he said. “The trip was too long for him this year, so? We welcome <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Platt instead.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“A bull’s eye,” said Platt, “and I’d give forty acres of unirrigated Pecos County land to know how you did it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I knew,” grinned Zizzbaum, “just as I know that the rainfall in El Paso for the year was 28.5 inches, or an increase of 15 inches, and that therefore Navarro & Platt will buy a $15,000 stock of suits this spring instead of $10,000, as in a dry year. But that will be to-morrow. There is first a cigar in my private office that will remove from your mouth the taste of the ones you smuggle across the Rio Grande and like—because they are smuggled.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I knew,” grinned Zizzbaum, “just as I know that the rainfall in El Paso for the year was 28.5 inches, or an increase of 15 inches, and that therefore Navarro & Platt will buy a $15,000 stock of suits this spring instead of $10,000, as in a dry year. But that will be tomorrow. There is first a cigar in my private office that will remove from your mouth the taste of the ones you smuggle across the Rio Grande and like—because they are smuggled.”</p>
|
||||
<p>It was late in the afternoon and business for the day had ended, Zizzbaum left Platt with a half-smoked cigar, and came out of the private office to Son, who was arranging his diamond scarfpin before a mirror, ready to leave.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Abey,” he said, “you will have to take <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Platt around to-night and show him things. They are customers for ten years. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Navarro and I we played chess every moment of spare time when he came. That is good, but <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Platt is a young man and this is his first visit to New York. He should amuse easily.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Abey,” he said, “you will have to take <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Platt around tonight and show him things. They are customers for ten years. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Navarro and I we played chess every moment of spare time when he came. That is good, but <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Platt is a young man and this is his first visit to New York. He should amuse easily.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right,” said Abey, screwing the guard tightly on his pin. “I’ll take him on. After he’s seen the Flatiron and the head waiter at the Hotel Astor and heard the phonograph play ‘Under the Old Apple Tree’ it’ll be half past ten, and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Texas will be ready to roll up in his blanket. I’ve got a supper engagement at 11:30, but he’ll be all to the <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Winslow before then.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The next morning at 10 Platt walked into the store ready to do business. He had a bunch of hyacinths pinned on his lapel. Zizzbaum himself waited on him. Navarro & Platt were good customers, and never failed to take their discount for cash.</p>
|
||||
<p>“And what did you think of our little town?” asked Zizzbaum, with the fatuous smile of the Manhattanite.</p>
|
||||
@ -34,7 +34,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Now, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Platt,” said Zizzbaum, “I want you to see these princess gowns in the light shades. They will be the thing in your climate. This first, if you please, Miss Asher.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Swiftly in and out of the dressing-room the prize model flew, each time wearing a new costume and looking more stunning with every change. She posed with absolute self-possession before the stricken buyer, who stood, tongue-tied and motionless, while Zizzbaum orated oilily of the styles. On the model’s face was her faint, impersonal professional smile that seemed to cover something like weariness or contempt.</p>
|
||||
<p>When the display was over Platt seemed to hesitate. Zizzbaum was a little anxious, thinking that his customer might be inclined to try elsewhere. But Platt was only looking over in his mind the best building sites in Cactus City, trying to select one on which to build a house for his wife-to-be—who was just then in the dressing-room taking off an evening gown of lavender and tulle.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Take your time, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Platt,” said Zizzbaum. “Think it over to-night. You won’t find anybody else meet our prices on goods like these. I’m afraid you’re having a dull time in New York, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Platt. A young man like you—of course, you miss the society of the ladies. Wouldn’t you like a nice young lady to take out to dinner this evening? Miss Asher, now, is a very nice young lady; she will make it agreeable for you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Take your time, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Platt,” said Zizzbaum. “Think it over tonight. You won’t find anybody else meet our prices on goods like these. I’m afraid you’re having a dull time in New York, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Platt. A young man like you—of course, you miss the society of the ladies. Wouldn’t you like a nice young lady to take out to dinner this evening? Miss Asher, now, is a very nice young lady; she will make it agreeable for you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, she doesn’t know me,” said Platt, wonderingly. “She doesn’t know anything about me. Would she go? I’m not acquainted with her.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Would she go?” repeated Zizzbaum, with uplifted eyebrows. “Sure, she would go. I will introduce you. Sure, she would go.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He called Miss Asher loudly.</p>
|
||||
@ -54,7 +54,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“A cocktail, of course.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I thought it was some kind of tea you ordered. This is liquor. You can’t drink this. What is your first name?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“To my intimate friends,” said Miss Asher, freezingly, “it is ‘Helen.’ ”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Listen, Helen,” said Platt, leaning over the table. “For many years every time the spring flowers blossomed out on the prairies I got to thinking of somebody that I’d never seen or heard of. I knew it was you the minute I saw you yesterday. I’m going back home to-morrow, and you’re going with me. I know it, for I saw it in your eyes when you first looked at me. You needn’t kick, for you’ve got to fall into line. Here’s a little trick I picked out for you on my way over.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Listen, Helen,” said Platt, leaning over the table. “For many years every time the spring flowers blossomed out on the prairies I got to thinking of somebody that I’d never seen or heard of. I knew it was you the minute I saw you yesterday. I’m going back home tomorrow, and you’re going with me. I know it, for I saw it in your eyes when you first looked at me. You needn’t kick, for you’ve got to fall into line. Here’s a little trick I picked out for you on my way over.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He flicked a two-carat diamond solitaire ring across the table. Miss Asher flipped it back to him with her fork.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Don’t get fresh,” she said, severely.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m worth a hundred thousand dollars,” said Platt. “I’ll build you the finest house in West Texas.”</p>
|
||||
@ -68,26 +68,26 @@
|
||||
<p>“They all make plays,” said Miss Asher. “But I must say that you’ve got ’em beat in one respect. They generally talk diamonds, while you’ve actually dug one up.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“How long have you been working, Helen?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Got my name pat, haven’t you? I’ve been supporting myself for eight years. I was a cash girl and a wrapper and then a shop girl until I was grown, and then I got to be a suit model. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Texas Man, don’t you think a little wine would make this dinner a little less dry?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’re not going to drink wine any more, dear. It’s awful to think how—I’ll come to the store to-morrow and get you. I want you to pick out an automobile before we leave. That’s all we need to buy here.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’re not going to drink wine any more, dear. It’s awful to think how—I’ll come to the store tomorrow and get you. I want you to pick out an automobile before we leave. That’s all we need to buy here.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, cut that out. If you knew how sick I am of hearing such talk.”</p>
|
||||
<p>After the dinner they walked down Broadway and came upon Diana’s little wooded park. The trees caught Platt’s eye at once, and he must turn along under the winding walk beneath them. The lights shone upon two bright tears in the model’s eyes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I don’t like that,” said Platt. “What’s the matter?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Don’t you mind,” said Miss Asher. “Well, it’s because—well, I didn’t think you were that kind when I first saw you. But you are all like. And now will you take me home, or will I have to call a cop?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Platt took her to the door of her boarding-house. They stood for a minute in the vestibule. She looked at him with such scorn in her eyes that even his heart of oak began to waver. His arm was half way around her waist, when she struck him a stinging blow on the face with her open hand.</p>
|
||||
<p>Platt took her to the door of her boardinghouse. They stood for a minute in the vestibule. She looked at him with such scorn in her eyes that even his heart of oak began to waver. His arm was half way around her waist, when she struck him a stinging blow on the face with her open hand.</p>
|
||||
<p>As he stepped back a ring fell from somewhere and bounded on the tiled floor. Platt groped for it and found it.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Now, take your useless diamond and go, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Buyer,” she said.</p>
|
||||
<p>“This was the other one—the wedding ring,” said the Texan, holding the smooth gold band on the palm of his hand.</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss Asher’s eyes blazed upon him in the half darkness.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Was that what you meant?—did you”—</p>
|
||||
<p>Somebody opened the door from inside the house.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Good-night,” said Platt. “I’ll see you at the store to-morrow.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Good night,” said Platt. “I’ll see you at the store tomorrow.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss Asher ran up to her room and shook the school teacher until she sat up in bed ready to scream “Fire!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Where is it?” she cried.</p>
|
||||
<p>“That’s what I want to know,” said the model. “You’ve studied geography, Emma, and you ought to know. Where is a town called Cac—Cac—Carac—Caracas City, I think, they called it?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“How dare you wake me up for that?” said the school teacher. “Caracas is in Venezuela, of course.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“What’s it like?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, it’s principally earthquakes and negroes and monkeys and malarial fever and volcanoes.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I don’t care,” said Miss Asher, blithely; “I’m going there to-morrow.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I don’t care,” said Miss Asher, blithely; “I’m going there tomorrow.”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -8,7 +8,7 @@
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-count-and-the-wedding-guest" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Count and the Wedding Guest</h2>
|
||||
<p>One evening when Andy Donovan went to dinner at his Second Avenue boarding-house, <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Scott introduced him to a new boarder, a young lady, Miss Conway. Miss Conway was small and unobtrusive. She wore a plain, snuffy-brown dress, and bestowed her interest, which seemed languid, upon her plate. She lifted her diffident eyelids and shot one perspicuous, judicial glance at <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Donovan, politely murmured his name, and returned to her mutton. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Donovan bowed with the grace and beaming smile that were rapidly winning for him social, business and political advancement, and erased the snuffy-brown one from the tablets of his consideration.</p>
|
||||
<p>One evening when Andy Donovan went to dinner at his Second Avenue boardinghouse, <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Scott introduced him to a new boarder, a young lady, Miss Conway. Miss Conway was small and unobtrusive. She wore a plain, snuffy-brown dress, and bestowed her interest, which seemed languid, upon her plate. She lifted her diffident eyelids and shot one perspicuous, judicial glance at <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Donovan, politely murmured his name, and returned to her mutton. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Donovan bowed with the grace and beaming smile that were rapidly winning for him social, business and political advancement, and erased the snuffy-brown one from the tablets of his consideration.</p>
|
||||
<p>Two weeks later Andy was sitting on the front steps enjoying his cigar. There was a soft rustle behind and above him, and Andy turned his head—and had his head turned.</p>
|
||||
<p>Just coming out the door was Miss Conway. She wore a night-black dress of crêpe de—crêpe de—oh, this thin black goods. Her hat was black, and from it drooped and fluttered an ebon veil, filmy as a spider’s web. She stood on the top step and drew on black silk gloves. Not a speck of white or a spot of color about her dress anywhere. Her rich golden hair was drawn, with scarcely a ripple, into a shining, smooth knot low on her neck. Her face was plain rather than pretty, but it was now illuminated and made almost beautiful by her large gray eyes that gazed above the houses across the street into the sky with an expression of the most appealing sadness and melancholy.</p>
|
||||
<p>Gather the idea, girls—all black, you know, with the preference for crêpe de—oh, crêpe de Chine—that’s it. All black, and that sad, faraway look, and the hair shining under the black veil (you have to be a blonde, of course), and try to look as if, although your young life had been blighted just as it was about to give a hop-skip-and-a-jump over the threshold of life, a walk in the park might do you good, and be sure to happen out the door at the right moment, and—oh, it’ll fetch ’em every time. But it’s fierce, now, how cynical I am, ain’t it?—to talk about mourning costumes this way.</p>
|
||||
@ -26,7 +26,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Thanks, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Donovan. I’d be pleased to accept of your escort if you think the company of one whose heart is filled with gloom could be anyways agreeable to you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Through the open gates of the iron-railed, old, downtown park, where the elect once took the air, they strolled, and found a quiet bench.</p>
|
||||
<p>There is this difference between the grief of youth and that of old age: youth’s burden is lightened by as much of it as another shares; old age may give and give, but the sorrow remains the same.</p>
|
||||
<p>“He was my fiance,” confided Miss Conway, at the end of an hour. “We were going to be married next spring. I don’t want you to think that I am stringing you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Donovan, but he was a real Count. He had an estate and a castle in Italy. Count Fernando Mazzini was his name. I never saw the beat of him for elegance. Papa objected, of course, and once we eloped, but papa overtook us, and took us back. I thought sure papa and Fernando would fight a duel. Papa has a livery business—in P’kipsee, you know.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“He was my fiancé,” confided Miss Conway, at the end of an hour. “We were going to be married next spring. I don’t want you to think that I am stringing you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Donovan, but he was a real Count. He had an estate and a castle in Italy. Count Fernando Mazzini was his name. I never saw the beat of him for elegance. Papa objected, of course, and once we eloped, but papa overtook us, and took us back. I thought sure papa and Fernando would fight a duel. Papa has a livery business—in P’kipsee, you know.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Finally, papa came ’round, all right, and said we might be married next spring. Fernando showed him proofs of his title and wealth, and then went over to Italy to get the castle fixed up for us. Papa’s very proud, and when Fernando wanted to give me several thousand dollars for my trousseau he called him down something awful. He wouldn’t even let me take a ring or any presents from him. And when Fernando sailed I came to the city and got a position as cashier in a candy store.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Three days ago I got a letter from Italy, forwarded from P’kipsee, saying that Fernando had been killed in a gondola accident.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“That is why I am in mourning. My heart, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Donovan, will remain forever in his grave. I guess I am poor company, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Donovan, but I cannot take any interest in no one. I should not care to keep you from gayety and your friends who can smile and entertain you. Perhaps you would prefer to walk back to the house?”</p>
|
||||
@ -35,13 +35,13 @@
|
||||
<p>“I’ve got his picture here in my locket,” said Miss Conway, after wiping her eyes with her handkerchief. “I never showed it to anybody; but I will to you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Donovan, because I believe you to be a true friend.”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Donovan gazed long and with much interest at the photograph in the locket that Miss Conway opened for him. The face of Count Mazzini was one to command interest. It was a smooth, intelligent, bright, almost a handsome face—the face of a strong, cheerful man who might well be a leader among his fellows.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have a larger one, framed, in my room,” said Miss Conway. “When we return I will show you that. They are all I have to remind me of Fernando. But he ever will be present in my heart, that’s a sure thing.”</p>
|
||||
<p>A subtle task confronted <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Donovan—that of supplanting the unfortunate Count in the heart of Miss Conway. This his admiration for her determined him to do. But the magnitude of the undertaking did not seem to weigh upon his spirits. The sympathetic but cheerful friend was the rôle he essayed; and he played it so successfully that the next half-hour found them conversing pensively across two plates of ice-cream, though yet there was no diminution of the sadness in Miss Conway’s large gray eyes.</p>
|
||||
<p>A subtle task confronted <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Donovan—that of supplanting the unfortunate Count in the heart of Miss Conway. This his admiration for her determined him to do. But the magnitude of the undertaking did not seem to weigh upon his spirits. The sympathetic but cheerful friend was the role he essayed; and he played it so successfully that the next half-hour found them conversing pensively across two plates of ice-cream, though yet there was no diminution of the sadness in Miss Conway’s large gray eyes.</p>
|
||||
<p>Before they parted in the hall that evening she ran upstairs and brought down the framed photograph wrapped lovingly in a white silk scarf. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Donovan surveyed it with inscrutable eyes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“He gave me this the night he left for Italy,” said Miss Conway. “I had the one for the locket made from this.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“A fine-looking man,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Donovan, heartily. “How would it suit you, Miss Conway, to give me the pleasure of your company to Coney next Sunday afternoon?”</p>
|
||||
<p>A month later they announced their engagement to <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Scott and the other boarders. Miss Conway continued to wear black.</p>
|
||||
<p>A week after the announcement the two sat on the same bench in the downtown park, while the fluttering leaves of the trees made a dim kinetoscopic picture of them in the moonlight. But Donovan had worn a look of abstracted gloom all day. He was so silent to-night that love’s lips could not keep back any longer the questions that love’s heart propounded.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What’s the matter, Andy, you are so solemn and grouchy to-night?”</p>
|
||||
<p>A week after the announcement the two sat on the same bench in the downtown park, while the fluttering leaves of the trees made a dim kinetoscopic picture of them in the moonlight. But Donovan had worn a look of abstracted gloom all day. He was so silent tonight that love’s lips could not keep back any longer the questions that love’s heart propounded.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What’s the matter, Andy, you are so solemn and grouchy tonight?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Nothing, Maggie.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I know better. Can’t I tell? You never acted this way before. What is it?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s nothing much, Maggie.”</p>
|
||||
@ -49,8 +49,8 @@
|
||||
<p>“I’ll tell you then,” said Andy, wisely, “but I guess you won’t understand it exactly. You’ve heard of Mike Sullivan, haven’t you? ‘Big Mike’ Sullivan, everybody calls him.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“No, I haven’t,” said Maggie. “And I don’t want to, if he makes you act like this. Who is he?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“He’s the biggest man in New York,” said Andy, almost reverently. “He can about do anything he wants to with Tammany or any other old thing in the political line. He’s a mile high and as broad as East River. You say anything against Big Mike, and you’ll have a million men on your collarbone in about two seconds. Why, he made a visit over to the old country awhile back, and the kings took to their holes like rabbits.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, Big Mike’s a friend of mine. I ain’t more than deuce-high in the district as far as influence goes, but Mike’s as good a friend to a little man, or a poor man as he is to a big one. I met him to-day on the Bowery, and what do you think he does? Comes up and shakes hands. ‘Andy,’ says he, ‘I’ve been keeping cases on you. You’ve been putting in some good licks over on your side of the street, and I’m proud of you. What’ll you take to drink?” He takes a cigar, and I take a highball. I told him I was going to get married in two weeks. ‘Andy,’ says he, ‘send me an invitation, so I’ll keep in mind of it, and I’ll come to the wedding.’ That’s what Big Mike says to me; and he always does what he says.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You don’t understand it, Maggie, but I’d have one of my hands cut off to have Big Mike Sullivan at our wedding. It would be the proudest day of my life. When he goes to a man’s wedding, there’s a guy being married that’s made for life. Now, that’s why I’m maybe looking sore to-night.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, Big Mike’s a friend of mine. I ain’t more than deuce-high in the district as far as influence goes, but Mike’s as good a friend to a little man, or a poor man as he is to a big one. I met him today on the Bowery, and what do you think he does? Comes up and shakes hands. ‘Andy,’ says he, ‘I’ve been keeping cases on you. You’ve been putting in some good licks over on your side of the street, and I’m proud of you. What’ll you take to drink?” He takes a cigar, and I take a highball. I told him I was going to get married in two weeks. ‘Andy,’ says he, ‘send me an invitation, so I’ll keep in mind of it, and I’ll come to the wedding.’ That’s what Big Mike says to me; and he always does what he says.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You don’t understand it, Maggie, but I’d have one of my hands cut off to have Big Mike Sullivan at our wedding. It would be the proudest day of my life. When he goes to a man’s wedding, there’s a guy being married that’s made for life. Now, that’s why I’m maybe looking sore tonight.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why don’t you invite him, then, if he’s so much to the mustard?” said Maggie, lightly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“There’s a reason why I can’t,” said Andy, sadly. “There’s a reason why he mustn’t be there. Don’t ask me what it is, for I can’t tell you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, I don’t care,” said Maggie. “It’s something about politics, of course. But it’s no reason why you can’t smile at me.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -9,9 +9,9 @@
|
||||
<section id="the-country-of-elusion" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Country of Elusion</h2>
|
||||
<p>The cunning writer will choose an indefinable subject, for he can then set down his theory of what it is; and next, at length, his conception of what it is not—and lo! his paper is covered. Therefore let us follow the prolix and unmapable trail into that mooted country, Bohemia.</p>
|
||||
<p>Grainger, sub-editor of <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Doc’s Magazine</i>, closed his roll-top desk, put on his hat, walked into the hall, punched the “down” button, and waited for the elevator.</p>
|
||||
<p>Grainger, subeditor of <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Doc’s Magazine</i>, closed his roll-top desk, put on his hat, walked into the hall, punched the “down” button, and waited for the elevator.</p>
|
||||
<p>Grainger’s day had been trying. The chief had tried to ruin the magazine a dozen times by going against Grainger’s ideas for running it. A lady whose grandfather had fought with McClellan had brought a portfolio of poems in person.</p>
|
||||
<p>Grainger was curator of the Lion’s House of the magazine. That day he had “lunched” an Arctic explorer, a short-story writer, and the famous conductor of a slaughter-house expose. Consequently his mind was in a whirl of icebergs, Maupassant, and trichinosis.</p>
|
||||
<p>Grainger was curator of the Lion’s House of the magazine. That day he had “lunched” an Arctic explorer, a short-story writer, and the famous conductor of a slaughterhouse expose. Consequently his mind was in a whirl of icebergs, Maupassant, and trichinosis.</p>
|
||||
<p>But there was a surcease and a recourse; there was Bohemia. He would seek distraction there; and, let’s see—he would call by for Mary Adrian.</p>
|
||||
<p>Half an hour later he threaded his way like a Brazilian orchid-hunter through the palm forest in the tiled entrance hall of the “Idealia” apartment-house. One day the christeners of apartment-houses and the cognominators of sleeping-cars will meet, and there will be some jealous and sanguinary knifing.</p>
|
||||
<p>The clerk breathed Grainger’s name so languidly into the house telephone that it seemed it must surely drop, from sheer inertia, down to the janitor’s regions. But, at length, it soared dilatorily up to Miss Adrian’s ear. Certainly, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Grainger was to come up immediately.</p>
|
||||
@ -20,7 +20,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Grainger escaped the meringue. As he waited his spirits sank still lower. The atmosphere of the room was as vapid as a zephyr wandering over a Vesuvian lava-bed. Relics of some feast lay about the room, scattered in places where even a prowling cat would have been surprised to find them. A straggling cluster of deep red roses in a marmalade jar bowed their heads over tobacco ashes and unwashed goblets. A chafing-dish stood on the piano; a leaf of sheet music supported a stack of sandwiches in a chair.</p>
|
||||
<p>Mary came in, dressed and radiant. Her gown was of that thin, black fabric whose name through the change of a single vowel seems to summon visions ranging between the extremes of man’s experience. Spelled with an “ê” it belongs to Gallic witchery and diaphanous dreams; with an “a” it drapes lamentation and woe.</p>
|
||||
<p>That evening they went to the Café André. And, as people would confide to you in a whisper that André’s was the only truly Bohemian restaurant in town, it may be well to follow them.</p>
|
||||
<p>André began his professional career as a waiter in a Bowery ten-cent eating-house. Had you seen him there you would have called him tough—to yourself. Not aloud, for he would have “soaked” you as quickly as he would have soaked his thumb in your coffee. He saved money and started a basement table d’hote in Eighth (or Ninth) Street. One afternoon André drank too much absinthe. He announced to his startled family that he was the Grand Llama of Thibet, therefore requiring an empty audience hall in which to be worshiped. He moved all the tables and chairs from the restaurant into the back yard, wrapped a red table-cloth around himself, and sat on a step-ladder for a throne. When the diners began to arrive, madame, in a flurry of despair, laid cloths and ushered them, trembling, outside. Between the tables clothes-lines were stretched, bearing the family wash. A party of Bohemia hunters greeted the artistic innovation with shrieks and acclamations of delight. That week’s washing was not taken in for two years. When André came to his senses he had the menu printed on stiffly starched cuffs, and served the ices in little wooden tubs. Next he took down his sign and darkened the front of the house. When you went there to dine you fumbled for an electric button and pressed it. A lookout slid open a panel in the door, looked at you suspiciously, and asked if you were acquainted with Senator Herodotus Q. McMilligan, of the Chickasaw Nation. If you were, you were admitted and allowed to dine. If you were not, you were admitted and allowed to dine. There you have one of the abiding principles of Bohemia. When André had accumulated $20,000 he moved up-town, near Broadway, in the fierce light that beats upon the thrown-down. There we find him and leave him, with customers in pearls and automobile veils, striving to catch his excellently graduated nod of recognition.</p>
|
||||
<p>André began his professional career as a waiter in a Bowery ten-cent eating-house. Had you seen him there you would have called him tough—to yourself. Not aloud, for he would have “soaked” you as quickly as he would have soaked his thumb in your coffee. He saved money and started a basement table d’hôte in Eighth (or Ninth) Street. One afternoon André drank too much absinthe. He announced to his startled family that he was the Grand Llama of Tibet, therefore requiring an empty audience hall in which to be worshiped. He moved all the tables and chairs from the restaurant into the back yard, wrapped a red tablecloth around himself, and sat on a stepladder for a throne. When the diners began to arrive, madame, in a flurry of despair, laid cloths and ushered them, trembling, outside. Between the tables clotheslines were stretched, bearing the family wash. A party of Bohemia hunters greeted the artistic innovation with shrieks and acclamations of delight. That week’s washing was not taken in for two years. When André came to his senses he had the menu printed on stiffly starched cuffs, and served the ices in little wooden tubs. Next he took down his sign and darkened the front of the house. When you went there to dine you fumbled for an electric button and pressed it. A lookout slid open a panel in the door, looked at you suspiciously, and asked if you were acquainted with Senator Herodotus Q. McMilligan, of the Chickasaw Nation. If you were, you were admitted and allowed to dine. If you were not, you were admitted and allowed to dine. There you have one of the abiding principles of Bohemia. When André had accumulated $20,000 he moved uptown, near Broadway, in the fierce light that beats upon the thrown-down. There we find him and leave him, with customers in pearls and automobile veils, striving to catch his excellently graduated nod of recognition.</p>
|
||||
<p>There is a large round table in the northeast corner of André’s at which six can sit. To this table Grainger and Mary Adrian made their way. Kappelman and Reeves were already there. And Miss Tooker, who designed the May cover for the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Ladies’ Notathome Magazine</i>. And <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Pothunter, who never drank anything but black and white highballs, being in mourning for her husband, who—oh, I’ve forgotten what he did—died, like as not.</p>
|
||||
<p>Spaghetti-weary reader, wouldst take one penny-in-the-slot peep into the fair land of Bohemia? Then look; and when you think you have seen it you have not. And it is neither thimbleriggery nor astigmatism.</p>
|
||||
<p>The walls of the Café André were covered with original sketches by the artists who furnished much of the color and sound of the place. Fair woman furnished the theme for the bulk of the drawings. When you say “sirens and siphons” you come near to estimating the alliterative atmosphere of André’s.</p>
|
||||
@ -33,9 +33,9 @@
|
||||
<p>As the dinner waned, hands reached for the pepper cruet rather than for the shaker of Attic salt. Miss Tooker, with an elbow to business, leaned across the table toward Grainger, upsetting her glass of wine.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Now while you are fed and in good humor,” she said, “I want to make a suggestion to you about a new cover.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“A good idea,” said Grainger, mopping the tablecloth with his napkin. “I’ll speak to the waiter about it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Kappelman, the painter, was the cut-up. As a piece of delicate Athenian wit he got up from his chair and waltzed down the room with a waiter. That dependent, no doubt an honest, pachydermatous, worthy, tax-paying, art-despising biped, released himself from the unequal encounter, carried his professional smile back to the dumb-waiter and dropped it down the shaft to eternal oblivion. Reeves began to make Keats turn in his grave. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Pothunter told the story of the man who met the widow on the train. Miss Adrian hummed what is still called a chanson in the cafés of Bridgeport. Grainger edited each individual effort with his assistant editor’s smile, which meant: “Great! but you’ll have to send them in through the regular channels. If I were the chief now—but you know how it is.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Kappelman, the painter, was the cut-up. As a piece of delicate Athenian wit he got up from his chair and waltzed down the room with a waiter. That dependent, no doubt an honest, pachydermatous, worthy, taxpaying, art-despising biped, released himself from the unequal encounter, carried his professional smile back to the dumbwaiter and dropped it down the shaft to eternal oblivion. Reeves began to make Keats turn in his grave. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Pothunter told the story of the man who met the widow on the train. Miss Adrian hummed what is still called a chanson in the cafés of Bridgeport. Grainger edited each individual effort with his assistant editor’s smile, which meant: “Great! but you’ll have to send them in through the regular channels. If I were the chief now—but you know how it is.”</p>
|
||||
<p>And soon the head waiter bowed before them, desolated to relate that the closing hour had already become chronologically historical; so out all trooped into the starry midnight, filling the street with gay laughter, to be barked at by hopeful cabmen and enviously eyed by the dull inhabitants of an uninspired world.</p>
|
||||
<p>Grainger left Mary at the elevator in the trackless palm forest of the Idealia. After he had gone she came down again carrying a small hand-bag, ‘phoned for a cab, drove to the Grand Central Station, boarded a 12.55 commuter’s train, rode four hours with her burnt-umber head bobbing against the red-plush back of the seat, and landed during a fresh, stinging, glorious sunrise at a deserted station, the size of a peach crate, called Crocusville.</p>
|
||||
<p>Grainger left Mary at the elevator in the trackless palm forest of the Idealia. After he had gone she came down again carrying a small handbag, ‘phoned for a cab, drove to the Grand Central Station, boarded a 12.55 commuter’s train, rode four hours with her burnt-umber head bobbing against the red-plush back of the seat, and landed during a fresh, stinging, glorious sunrise at a deserted station, the size of a peach crate, called Crocusville.</p>
|
||||
<p>She walked a mile and clicked the latch of a gate. A bare, brown cottage stood twenty yards back; an old man with a pearl-white, Calvinistic face and clothes dyed blacker than a raven in a coal-mine was washing his hands in a tin basin on the front porch.</p>
|
||||
<p>“How are you, father?” said Mary timidly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am as well as Providence permits, Mary Ann. You will find your mother in the kitchen.”</p>
|
||||
@ -47,13 +47,13 @@
|
||||
<p>“It is my custom,” said the old man, “on the Sabbath day to read aloud from the great work entitled the ‘Apology for Authorized and Set Forms of Liturgy,’ by the ecclesiastical philosopher and revered theologian, Jeremy Taylor.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I know it,” said Mary blissfully, folding her hands.</p>
|
||||
<p>For two hours the numbers of the great Jeremy rolled forth like the notes of an oratorio played on the violoncello. Mary sat gloating in the new sensation of racking physical discomfort that the wooden chair brought her. Perhaps there is no happiness in life so perfect as the martyr’s. Jeremy’s minor chords soothed her like the music of a tom-tom. “Why, oh why,” she said to herself, “does some one not write words to it?”</p>
|
||||
<p>At eleven they went to church in Crocusville. The back of the pine bench on which she sat had a penitential forward tilt that would have brought <abbr>St.</abbr> Simeon down, in jealousy, from his pillar. The preacher singled her out, and thundered upon her vicarious head the damnation of the world. At each side of her an adamant parent held her rigidly to the bar of judgment. An ant crawled upon her neck, but she dared not move. She lowered her eyes before the congregation—a hundred-eyed Cerberus that watched the gates through which her sins were fast thrusting her. Her soul was filled with a delirious, almost a fanatic joy. For she was out of the clutch of the tyrant, Freedom. Dogma and creed pinioned her with beneficent cruelty, as steel braces bind the feet of a crippled child. She was hedged, adjured, shackled, shored up, strait-jacketed, silenced, ordered. When they came out the minister stopped to greet them. Mary could only hang her head and answer “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” to his questions. When she saw that the other women carried their hymn-books at their waists with their left hands, she blushed and moved hers there, too, from her right.</p>
|
||||
<p>At eleven they went to church in Crocusville. The back of the pine bench on which she sat had a penitential forward tilt that would have brought <abbr>St.</abbr> Simeon down, in jealousy, from his pillar. The preacher singled her out, and thundered upon her vicarious head the damnation of the world. At each side of her an adamant parent held her rigidly to the bar of judgment. An ant crawled upon her neck, but she dared not move. She lowered her eyes before the congregation—a hundred-eyed Cerberus that watched the gates through which her sins were fast thrusting her. Her soul was filled with a delirious, almost a fanatic joy. For she was out of the clutch of the tyrant, Freedom. Dogma and creed pinioned her with beneficent cruelty, as steel braces bind the feet of a crippled child. She was hedged, adjured, shackled, shored up, strait-jacketed, silenced, ordered. When they came out the minister stopped to greet them. Mary could only hang her head and answer “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” to his questions. When she saw that the other women carried their hymnbooks at their waists with their left hands, she blushed and moved hers there, too, from her right.</p>
|
||||
<p>She took the three-o’clock train back to the city. At nine she sat at the round table for dinner in the Café André. Nearly the same crowd was there.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Where have you been to-day?” asked <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Pothunter. “I ‘phoned to you at twelve.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Where have you been today?” asked <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Pothunter. “I ‘phoned to you at twelve.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have been away in Bohemia,” answered Mary, with a mystic smile.</p>
|
||||
<p>There! Mary has given it away. She has spoiled my climax. For I was to have told you that Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills. It is a hillside that you turn your head to peer at from the windows of the Through Express.</p>
|
||||
<p>At exactly half past eleven Kappelman, deceived by a new softness and slowness of riposte and parry in Mary Adrian, tried to kiss her. Instantly she slapped his face with such strength and cold fury that he shrank down, sobered, with the flaming red print of a hand across his leering features. And all sounds ceased, as when the shadows of great wings come upon a flock of chattering sparrows. One had broken the paramount law of sham-Bohemia—the law of “Laisser faire.” The shock came not from the blow delivered, but from the blow received. With the effect of a schoolmaster entering the play-room of his pupils was that blow administered. Women pulled down their sleeves and laid prim hands against their ruffled side locks. Men looked at their watches. There was nothing of the effect of a brawl about it; it was purely the still panic produced by the sound of the ax of the fly cop, Conscience hammering at the gambling-house doors of the Heart.</p>
|
||||
<p>With their punctilious putting on of cloaks, with their exaggerated pretense of not having seen or heard, with their stammering exchange of unaccustomed formalities, with their false show of a light-hearted exit I must take leave of my Bohemian party. Mary has robbed me of my climax; and she may go.</p>
|
||||
<p>At exactly half past eleven Kappelman, deceived by a new softness and slowness of riposte and parry in Mary Adrian, tried to kiss her. Instantly she slapped his face with such strength and cold fury that he shrank down, sobered, with the flaming red print of a hand across his leering features. And all sounds ceased, as when the shadows of great wings come upon a flock of chattering sparrows. One had broken the paramount law of sham-Bohemia—the law of “Laisser faire.” The shock came not from the blow delivered, but from the blow received. With the effect of a schoolmaster entering the playroom of his pupils was that blow administered. Women pulled down their sleeves and laid prim hands against their ruffled side locks. Men looked at their watches. There was nothing of the effect of a brawl about it; it was purely the still panic produced by the sound of the ax of the fly cop, Conscience hammering at the gambling-house doors of the Heart.</p>
|
||||
<p>With their punctilious putting on of cloaks, with their exaggerated pretense of not having seen or heard, with their stammering exchange of unaccustomed formalities, with their false show of a lighthearted exit I must take leave of my Bohemian party. Mary has robbed me of my climax; and she may go.</p>
|
||||
<p>But I am not defeated. Somewhere there exists a great vault miles broad and miles long—more capacious than the champagne caves of France. In that vault are stored the anticlimaxes that should have been tagged to all the stories that have been told in the world. I shall cheat that vault of one deposit.</p>
|
||||
<p>Minnie Brown, with her aunt, came from Crocusville down to the city to see the sights. And because she had escorted me to fishless trout streams and exhibited to me open-plumbed waterfalls and broken my camera while I Julyed in her village, I must escort her to the hives containing the synthetic clover honey of town.</p>
|
||||
<p>Especially did the custom-made Bohemia charm her. The spaghetti wound its tendrils about her heart; the free red wine drowned her belief in the existence of commercialism in the world; she was dared and enchanted by the rugose wit that can be churned out of California claret.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -13,7 +13,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Up Sixth avenue, with the tripping, scurrying, chattering, bright-eyed, homing tide came the Girl from Sieber-Mason’s. The Man from Nome looked and saw, first, that she was supremely beautiful after his own conception of beauty; and next, that she moved with exactly the steady grace of a dog sled on a level crust of snow. His third sensation was an instantaneous conviction that he desired her greatly for his own. This quickly do men from Nome make up their minds. Besides, he was going back to the North in a short time, and to act quickly was no less necessary.</p>
|
||||
<p>A thousand girls from the great department store of Sieber-Mason flowed along the sidewalk, making navigation dangerous to men whose feminine field of vision for three years has been chiefly limited to Siwash and Chilkat squaws. But the Man from Nome, loyal to her who had resurrected his long cached heart, plunged into the stream of pulchritude and followed her.</p>
|
||||
<p>Down Twenty-third street she glided swiftly, looking to neither side; no more flirtatious than the bronze Diana above the Garden. Her fine brown hair was neatly braided; her neat waist and unwrinkled black skirt were eloquent of the double virtues—taste and economy. Ten yards behind followed the smitten Man from Nome.</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss Claribel Colby, the Girl from Sieber-Mason’s, belonged to that sad company of mariners known as Jersey commuters. She walked into the waiting-room of the ferry, and up the stairs, and by a marvellous swift, little run, caught the ferry-boat that was just going out. The Man from Nome closed up his ten yards in three jumps and gained the deck close beside her.</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss Claribel Colby, the Girl from Sieber-Mason’s, belonged to that sad company of mariners known as Jersey commuters. She walked into the waiting-room of the ferry, and up the stairs, and by a marvellous swift, little run, caught the ferryboat that was just going out. The Man from Nome closed up his ten yards in three jumps and gained the deck close beside her.</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss Colby chose a rather lonely seat on the outside of the upper-cabin. The night was not cold, and she desired to be away from the curious eyes and tedious voices of the passengers. Besides, she was extremely weary and drooping from lack of sleep. On the previous night she had graced the annual ball and oyster fry of the West Side Wholesale Fish Dealers’ Assistants’ Social Club <abbr>No.</abbr> 2, thus reducing her usual time of sleep to only three hours.</p>
|
||||
<p>And the day had been uncommonly troublous. Customers had been inordinately trying; the buyer in her department had scolded her roundly for letting her stock run down; her best friend, Mamie Tuthill, had snubbed her by going to lunch with that Dockery girl.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Girl from Sieber-Mason’s was in that relaxed, softened mood that often comes to the independent feminine wage-earner. It is a mood most propitious for the man who would woo her. Then she has yearnings to be set in some home and heart; to be comforted, and to hide behind some strong arm and rest, rest. But Miss Claribel Colby was also very sleepy.</p>
|
||||
@ -21,14 +21,14 @@
|
||||
<p>“Lady,” said the Man from Nome, respectfully, “excuse me for speaking to you, but I—I—I saw you on the street, and—and—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, gee!” remarked the Girl from Sieber-Mason’s, glancing up with the most capable coolness. “Ain’t there any way to ever get rid of you mashers? I’ve tried everything from eating onions to using hatpins. Be on your way, Freddie.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m not one of that kind, lady,” said the Man from Nome—“honest, I’m not. As I say, I saw you on the street, and I wanted to know you so bad I couldn’t help followin’ after you. I was afraid I wouldn’t ever see you again in this big town unless I spoke; and that’s why I done so.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss Colby looked once shrewdly at him in the dim light on the ferry-boat. No; he did not have the perfidious smirk or the brazen swagger of the lady-killer. Sincerity and modesty shone through his boreal tan. It seemed to her that it might be good to hear a little of what he had to say.</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss Colby looked once shrewdly at him in the dim light on the ferryboat. No; he did not have the perfidious smirk or the brazen swagger of the lady-killer. Sincerity and modesty shone through his boreal tan. It seemed to her that it might be good to hear a little of what he had to say.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You may sit down,” she said, laying her hand over a yawn with ostentatious politness; “and—mind—don’t get fresh or I’ll call the steward.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The Man from Nome sat by her side. He admired her greatly. He more than admired her. She had exactly the looks he had tried so long in vain to find in a woman. Could she ever come to like him? Well, that was to be seen. He must do all in his power to stake his claim, anyhow.</p>
|
||||
<p>“My name’s Blayden,” said he—“Henry Blayden.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Are you real sure it ain’t Jones?” asked the girl, leaning toward him, with delicious, knowing raillery.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m down from Nome,” he went on with anxious seriousness. “I scraped together a pretty good lot of dust up there, and brought it down with me.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, say!” she rippled, pursuing persiflage with engaging lightness, “then you must be on the White Wings force. I thought I’d seen you somewhere.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You didn’t see me on the street to-day when I saw you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You didn’t see me on the street today when I saw you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I never look at fellows on the street.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, I looked at you; and I never looked at anything before that I thought was half as pretty.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Shall I keep the change?”</p>
|
||||
@ -39,7 +39,7 @@
|
||||
<p>The head of the Girl from Sieber-Mason’s slid over gently and rested upon his shoulder. Sweet sleep had won her, and she was dreaming rapturously of the Wholesale Fish Dealers’ Assistants’ ball.</p>
|
||||
<p>The gentleman from Nome kept his arms to himself. He did not suspect sleep, and yet he was too wise to attribute the movement to surrender. He was greatly and blissfully thrilled, but he ended by regarding the head upon his shoulder as an encouraging preliminary, merely advanced as a harbinger of his success, and not to be taken advantage of.</p>
|
||||
<p>One small speck of alloy discounted the gold of his satisfaction. Had he spoken too freely of his wealth? He wanted to be liked for himself.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I want to say, Miss,” he said, “that you can count on me. They know me in the Klondike from Juneau to Circle City and down the whole length of the Yukon. Many a night I’ve laid in the snow up there where I worked like a slave for three years, and wondered if I’d ever have anybody to like me. I didn’t want all that dust just myself. I thought I’d meet just the right one some time, and I done it to-day. Money’s a mighty good thing to have, but to have the love of the one you like best is better still. If you was ever to marry a man, Miss, which would you rather he’d have?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I want to say, Miss,” he said, “that you can count on me. They know me in the Klondike from Juneau to Circle City and down the whole length of the Yukon. Many a night I’ve laid in the snow up there where I worked like a slave for three years, and wondered if I’d ever have anybody to like me. I didn’t want all that dust just myself. I thought I’d meet just the right one some time, and I done it today. Money’s a mighty good thing to have, but to have the love of the one you like best is better still. If you was ever to marry a man, Miss, which would you rather he’d have?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Cash!”</p>
|
||||
<p>The word came sharply and loudly from Miss Colby’s lips, giving evidence that in her dreams she was now behind her counter in the great department store of Sieber-Mason.</p>
|
||||
<p>Her head suddenly bobbed over sideways. She awoke, sat straight, and rubbed her eyes. The Man from Nome was gone.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -10,7 +10,7 @@
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Foreign Policy of Company 99</h2>
|
||||
<p>John Byrnes, hose-cart driver of Engine Company <abbr>No.</abbr> 99, was afflicted with what his comrades called Japanitis.</p>
|
||||
<p>Byrnes had a war map spread permanently upon a table in the second story of the engine-house, and he could explain to you at any hour of the day or night the exact positions, conditions and intentions of both the Russian and Japanese armies. He had little clusters of pins stuck in the map which represented the opposing forces, and these he moved about from day to day in conformity with the war news in the daily papers.</p>
|
||||
<p>Wherever the Japs won a victory John Byrnes would shift his pins, and then he would execute a war dance of delight, and the other firemen would hear him yell: “Go it, you blamed little, sawed-off, huckleberry-eyed, monkey-faced hot tamales! Eat ’em up, you little sleight-o’-hand, bow-legged bull terriers—give ’em another of them Yalu looloos, and you’ll eat rice in <abbr>St.</abbr> Petersburg. Talk about your Russians—say, wouldn’t they give you a painsky when it comes to a scrapovitch?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Wherever the Japs won a victory John Byrnes would shift his pins, and then he would execute a war dance of delight, and the other firemen would hear him yell: “Go it, you blamed little, sawed-off, huckleberry-eyed, monkey-faced hot tamales! Eat ’em up, you little sleight-o’-hand, bowlegged bull terriers—give ’em another of them Yalu looloos, and you’ll eat rice in <abbr>St.</abbr> Petersburg. Talk about your Russians—say, wouldn’t they give you a painsky when it comes to a scrapovitch?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Not even on the fair island of Nippon was there a more enthusiastic champion of the Mikado’s men. Supporters of the Russian cause did well to keep clear of Engine-House <abbr>No.</abbr> 99.</p>
|
||||
<p>Sometimes all thoughts of the Japs left John Byrnes’s head. That was when the alarm of fire had sounded and he was strapped in his driver’s seat on the swaying cart, guiding Erebus and Joe, the finest team in the whole department—according to the crew of 99.</p>
|
||||
<p>Of all the codes adopted by man for regulating his actions toward his fellow-mortals, the greatest are these—the code of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, the Constitution of the United States and the unwritten rules of the New York Fire Department. The Round Table methods are no longer practicable since the invention of street cars and breach-of-promise suits, and our Constitution is being found more and more unconstitutional every day, so the code of our firemen must be considered in the lead, with the Golden Rule and Jeffries’s new punch trying for place and show.</p>
|
||||
@ -29,11 +29,11 @@
|
||||
<p>“Somebody go around and get Sloviski,” suggested the engine driver, “and let’s see what nation is responsible for this conglomeration of hair and head noises.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Sloviski kept a delicatessen store around the corner on Third avenue, and was reputed to be a linguist.</p>
|
||||
<p>One of the men fetched him—a fat, cringing man, with a discursive eye and the odors of many kinds of meats upon him.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Take a whirl at this importation with your jaw-breakers, Sloviski,” requested Mike Dowling. “We can’t quite figure out whether he’s from the Hackensack bottoms or Hongkong-on-the-Ganges.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Take a whirl at this importation with your jawbreakers, Sloviski,” requested Mike Dowling. “We can’t quite figure out whether he’s from the Hackensack bottoms or Hongkong-on-the-Ganges.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Sloviski addressed the stranger in several dialects that ranged in rhythm and cadence from the sounds produced by a tonsilitis gargle to the opening of a can of tomatoes with a pair of scissors. The immigrant replied in accents resembling the uncorking of a bottle of ginger ale.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have you his name,” reported Sloviski. “You shall not pronounce it. Writing of it in paper is better.” They gave him paper, and he wrote, “Demetre Svangvsk.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Looks like short hand,” said the desk man.</p>
|
||||
<p>“He speaks some language,” continued the interpreter, wiping his forehead, “of Austria and mixed with a little Turkish. And, den, he have some Magyar words and a Polish or two, and many like the Roumanian, but not without talk of one tribe in Bessarabia. I do not him quite understand.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“He speaks some language,” continued the interpreter, wiping his forehead, “of Austria and mixed with a little Turkish. And, den, he have some Magyar words and a Polish or two, and many like the Romanian, but not without talk of one tribe in Bessarabia. I do not him quite understand.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Would you call him a Dago or a Polocker, or what?” asked Mike, frowning at the polyglot description.</p>
|
||||
<p>“He is a”—answered Sloviski—“he is a—I dink he come from—I dink he is a fool,” he concluded, impatient at his linguistic failure, “and if you pleases I will go back at mine delicatessen.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Whatever he is, he’s a bird,” said Mike Dowling; “and you want to watch him fly.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -28,7 +28,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“I’m no Annie admirer!” said the “Kid,” dropping a cigarette ash on his polished toe, and wiping it off on Tony’s shoulder. “But I want to teach Liz a lesson. She thinks I belong to her. She’s been bragging that I daren’t speak to another girl. Liz is all right—in some ways. She’s drinking a little too much lately. And she uses language that a lady oughtn’t.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’re engaged, ain’t you?” asked Burke.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sure. We’ll get married next year, maybe.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I saw you make her drink her first glass of beer,” said Burke. “That was two years ago, when she used to came down to the corner of Chrystie bare-headed to meet you after supper. She was a quiet sort of a kid then, and couldn’t speak without blushing.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I saw you make her drink her first glass of beer,” said Burke. “That was two years ago, when she used to came down to the corner of Chrystie bareheaded to meet you after supper. She was a quiet sort of a kid then, and couldn’t speak without blushing.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“She’s a little spitfire, sometimes, now,” said the Kid. “I hate jealousy. That’s why I’m going to the dance with Annie. It’ll teach her some sense.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, you better look a little out,” were Burke’s last words. “If Liz was my girl and I was to sneak out to a dance coupled up with an Annie, I’d want a suit of chain armor on under my gladsome rags, all right.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Through the land of the stork-vulture wandered Liz. Her black eyes searched the passing crowds fierily but vaguely. Now and then she hummed bars of foolish little songs. Between times she set her small, white teeth together, and spake crisp words that the east side has added to language.</p>
|
||||
@ -36,15 +36,15 @@
|
||||
<p>The “Family Entrance” of the Blue Jay Café received her. At a table she sat, and punched the button with the air of milady ringing for her carriage. The waiter came with his large-chinned, low-voiced manner of respectful familiarity. Liz smoothed her silken skirt with a satisfied wriggle. She made the most of it. Here she could order and be waited upon. It was all that her world offered her of the prerogative of woman.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Whiskey, Tommy,” she said as her sisters further uptown murmur, “Champagne, James.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sure, Miss Lizzie. What’ll the chaser be?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Seltzer. And say, Tommy, has the Kid been around to-day?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, no, Miss Lizzie, I haven’t saw him to-day.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Fluently came the “Miss Lizzie,” for the Kid was known to be one who required rigid upholdment of the dignity of his fiancee.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Seltzer. And say, Tommy, has the Kid been around today?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, no, Miss Lizzie, I haven’t saw him today.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Fluently came the “Miss Lizzie,” for the Kid was known to be one who required rigid upholdment of the dignity of his fiancée.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m lookin’ for ‘m,” said Liz, after the chaser had sputtered under her nose. “It’s got to me that he says he’ll take Annie Karlson to the dance. Let him. The pink-eyed white rat! I’m lookin’ for ‘m. You know me, Tommy. Two years me and the Kid’s been engaged. Look at that ring. Five hundred, he said it cost. Let him take her to the dance. What’ll I do? I’ll cut his heart out. Another whiskey, Tommy.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I wouldn’t listen to no such reports, Miss Lizzie,” said the waiter smoothly, from the narrow opening above his chin. “Kid Mullaly’s not the guy to throw a lady like you down. Seltzer on the side?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Two years,” repeated Liz, softening a little to sentiment under the magic of the distiller’s art. “I always used to play out on the street of evenin’s ‘cause there was nothin’ doin’ for me at home. For a long time I just sat on doorsteps and looked at the lights and the people goin’ by. And then the Kid came along one evenin’ and sized me up, and I was mashed on the spot for fair. The first drink he made me take I cried all night at home, and got a lickin’ for makin’ a noise. And now—say, Tommy, you ever see this Annie Karlson? If it wasn’t for peroxide the chloroform limit would have put her out long ago. Oh, I’m lookin’ for ‘m. You tell the Kid if he comes in. Me? I’ll cut his heart out. Leave it to me. Another whiskey, Tommy.”</p>
|
||||
<p>A little unsteadily, but with watchful and brilliant eyes, Liz walked up the avenue. On the doorstep of a brick tenement a curly-haired child sat, puzzling over the convolutions of a tangled string. Liz flopped down beside her, with a crooked, shifting smile on her flushed face. But her eyes had grown clear and artless of a sudden.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Let me show you how to make a cat’s-cradle, kid,” she said, tucking her green silk skirt under her rusty shoes.</p>
|
||||
<p>And while they sat there the lights were being turned on for the dance in the hall of the Small Hours Social Club. It was the bi-monthly dance, a dress affair in which the members took great pride and bestirred themselves huskily to further and adorn.</p>
|
||||
<p>And while they sat there the lights were being turned on for the dance in the hall of the Small Hours Social Club. It was the bimonthly dance, a dress affair in which the members took great pride and bestirred themselves huskily to further and adorn.</p>
|
||||
<p>At 9 o’clock the President, Kid Mullaly, paced upon the floor with a lady on his arm. As the Loreley’s was her hair golden. Her “yes” was softened to a “yah,” but its quality of assent was patent to the most Milesian ears. She stepped upon her own train and blushed, and—she smiled into the eyes of Kid Mullaly.</p>
|
||||
<p>And then, as the two stood in the middle of the waxed floor, the thing happened to prevent which many lamps are burning nightly in many studies and libraries.</p>
|
||||
<p>Out from the circle of spectators in the hall leaped Fate in a green silk skirt, under the <i>nom de guerre</i> of “Liz.” Her eyes were hard and blacker than jet. She did not scream or waver. Most unwomanly, she cried out one oath—the Kid’s own favorite oath—and in his own deep voice; and then while the Small Hours Social Club went frantically to pieces, she made good her boast to Tommy, the waiter—made good as far as the length of her knife blade and the strength of her arm permitted.</p>
|
||||
@ -60,10 +60,10 @@
|
||||
<p>“Case <abbr>No.</abbr> 99,852,743.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Up stepped a plain-clothes man—there were lots of ’em there, dressed exactly like preachers and hustling us spirits around just like cops do on earth—and by the arm he dragged—whom, do you think? Why, Liz!</p>
|
||||
<p>The court officer took her inside and closed the door. I went up to <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Fly-Cop and inquired about the case.</p>
|
||||
<p>“A very sad one,” says he, laying the points of his manicured fingers together. “An utterly incorrigible girl. I am Special Terrestrial Officer the Reverend Jones. The case was assigned to me. The girl murdered her fiance and committed suicide. She had no defense. My report to the court relates the facts in detail, all of which are substantiated by reliable witnesses. The wages of sin is death. Praise the Lord.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“A very sad one,” says he, laying the points of his manicured fingers together. “An utterly incorrigible girl. I am Special Terrestrial Officer the Reverend Jones. The case was assigned to me. The girl murdered her fiancé and committed suicide. She had no defense. My report to the court relates the facts in detail, all of which are substantiated by reliable witnesses. The wages of sin is death. Praise the Lord.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The court officer opened the door and stepped out.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Poor girl,” said Special Terrestrial Officer the Reverend Jones, with a tear in his eye. “It was one of the saddest cases that I ever met with. Of course she was”—</p>
|
||||
<p>“Discharged,” said the court officer. “Come here, Jonesy. First thing you know you’ll be switched to the pot-pie squad. How would you like to be on the missionary force in the South Sea Islands—hey? Now, you quit making these false arrests, or you’ll be transferred—see? The guilty party you’ve got to look for in this case is a red-haired, unshaven, untidy man, sitting by the window reading, in his stocking feet, while his children play in the streets. Get a move on you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Discharged,” said the court officer. “Come here, Jonesy. First thing you know you’ll be switched to the potpie squad. How would you like to be on the missionary force in the South Sea Islands—hey? Now, you quit making these false arrests, or you’ll be transferred—see? The guilty party you’ve got to look for in this case is a red-haired, unshaven, untidy man, sitting by the window reading, in his stocking feet, while his children play in the streets. Get a move on you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Now, wasn’t that a silly dream?</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -10,15 +10,15 @@
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Last Leaf</h2>
|
||||
<p>In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called “places.” These “places” make strange angles and curves. One street crosses itself a time or two. An artist once discovered a valuable possibility in this street. Suppose a collector with a bill for paints, paper and canvas should, in traversing this route, suddenly meet himself coming back, without a cent having been paid on account!</p>
|
||||
<p>So, to quaint old Greenwich Village the art people soon came prowling, hunting for north windows and eighteenth-century gables and Dutch attics and low rents. Then they imported some pewter mugs and a chafing dish or two from Sixth avenue, and became a “colony.”</p>
|
||||
<p>At the top of a squatty, three-story brick Sue and Johnsy had their studio. “Johnsy” was familiar for Joanna. One was from Maine; the other from California. They had met at the table d’hote of an Eighth street “Delmonico’s,” and found their tastes in art, chicory salad and bishop sleeves so congenial that the joint studio resulted.</p>
|
||||
<p>At the top of a squatty, three-story brick Sue and Johnsy had their studio. “Johnsy” was familiar for Joanna. One was from Maine; the other from California. They had met at the table d’hôte of an Eighth street “Delmonico’s,” and found their tastes in art, chicory salad and bishop sleeves so congenial that the joint studio resulted.</p>
|
||||
<p>That was in May. In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony, touching one here and there with his icy fingers. Over on the east side this ravager strode boldly, smiting his victims by scores, but his feet trod slowly through the maze of the narrow and moss-grown “places.”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric old gentleman. A mite of a little woman with blood thinned by California zephyrs was hardly fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old duffer. But Johnsy he smote; and she lay, scarcely moving, on her painted iron bedstead, looking through the small Dutch window-panes at the blank side of the next brick house.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric old gentleman. A mite of a little woman with blood thinned by California zephyrs was hardly fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old duffer. But Johnsy he smote; and she lay, scarcely moving, on her painted iron bedstead, looking through the small Dutch windowpanes at the blank side of the next brick house.</p>
|
||||
<p>One morning the busy doctor invited Sue into the hallway with a shaggy, gray eyebrow.</p>
|
||||
<p>“She has one chance in—let us say, ten,” he said, as he shook down the mercury in his clinical thermometer. “And that chance is for her to want to live. This way people have of lining-up on the side of the undertaker makes the entire pharmacopeia look silly. Your little lady has made up her mind that she’s not going to get well. Has she anything on her mind?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“She—she wanted to paint the Bay of Naples some day,” said Sue.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Paint?—bosh! Has she anything on her mind worth thinking about twice—a man, for instance?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“A man?” said Sue, with a jew’s-harp twang in her voice. “Is a man worth—but, no, doctor; there is nothing of the kind.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, it is the weakness, then,” said the doctor. “I will do all that science, so far as it may filter through my efforts, can accomplish. But whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent. from the curative power of medicines. If you will get her to ask one question about the new winter styles in cloak sleeves I will promise you a one-in-five chance for her, instead of one in ten.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“A man?” said Sue, with a jew’sharp twang in her voice. “Is a man worth—but, no, doctor; there is nothing of the kind.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, it is the weakness, then,” said the doctor. “I will do all that science, so far as it may filter through my efforts, can accomplish. But whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 percent from the curative power of medicines. If you will get her to ask one question about the new winter styles in cloak sleeves I will promise you a one-in-five chance for her, instead of one in ten.”</p>
|
||||
<p>After the doctor had gone Sue went into the workroom and cried a Japanese napkin to a pulp. Then she swaggered into Johnsy’s room with her drawing board, whistling ragtime.</p>
|
||||
<p>Johnsy lay, scarcely making a ripple under the bedclothes, with her face toward the window. Sue stopped whistling, thinking she was asleep.</p>
|
||||
<p>She arranged her board and began a pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate a magazine story. Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature.</p>
|
||||
@ -32,23 +32,23 @@
|
||||
<p>“Leaves. On the ivy vine. When the last one falls I must go, too. I’ve known that for three days. Didn’t the doctor tell you?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, I never heard of such nonsense,” complained Sue, with magnificent scorn. “What have old ivy leaves to do with your getting well? And you used to love that vine so, you naughty girl. Don’t be a goosey. Why, the doctor told me this morning that your chances for getting well real soon were—let’s see exactly what he said—he said the chances were ten to one! Why, that’s almost as good a chance as we have in New York when we ride on the street cars or walk past a new building. Try to take some broth now, and let Sudie go back to her drawing, so she can sell the editor man with it, and buy port wine for her sick child, and pork chops for her greedy self.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You needn’t get any more wine,” said Johnsy, keeping her eyes fixed out the window. “There goes another. No, I don’t want any broth. That leaves just four. I want to see the last one fall before it gets dark. Then I’ll go, too.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Johnsy, dear,” said Sue, bending over her, “will you promise me to keep your eyes closed, and not look out the window until I am done working? I must hand those drawings in by to-morrow. I need the light, or I would draw the shade down.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Johnsy, dear,” said Sue, bending over her, “will you promise me to keep your eyes closed, and not look out the window until I am done working? I must hand those drawings in by tomorrow. I need the light, or I would draw the shade down.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Couldn’t you draw in the other room?” asked Johnsy, coldly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’d rather be here by you,” said Sue. “Besides I don’t want you to keep looking at those silly ivy leaves.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Tell me as soon as you have finished,” said Johnsy, closing her eyes, and lying white and still as a fallen statue, “because I want to see the last one fall. I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of thinking. I want to turn loose my hold on everything, and go sailing down, down, just like one of those poor, tired leaves.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Try to sleep,” said Sue. “I must call Behrman up to be my model for the old hermit miner. I’ll not be gone a minute. Don’t try to move ‘till I come back.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Old Behrman was a painter who lived on the ground floor beneath them. He was past sixty and had a Michael Angelo’s Moses beard curling down from the head of a satyr along the body of an imp. Behrman was a failure in art. Forty years he had wielded the brush without getting near enough to touch the hem of his Mistress’s robe. He had been always about to paint a masterpiece, but had never yet begun it. For several years he had painted nothing except now and then a daub in the line of commerce or advertising. He earned a little by serving as a model to those young artists in the colony who could not pay the price of a professional. He drank gin to excess, and still talked of his coming masterpiece. For the rest he was a fierce little old man, who scoffed terribly at softness in any one, and who regarded himself as especial mastiff-in-waiting to protect the two young artists in the studio above.</p>
|
||||
<p>Old Behrman was a painter who lived on the ground floor beneath them. He was past sixty and had a Michaelangelo’s Moses beard curling down from the head of a satyr along the body of an imp. Behrman was a failure in art. Forty years he had wielded the brush without getting near enough to touch the hem of his Mistress’s robe. He had been always about to paint a masterpiece, but had never yet begun it. For several years he had painted nothing except now and then a daub in the line of commerce or advertising. He earned a little by serving as a model to those young artists in the colony who could not pay the price of a professional. He drank gin to excess, and still talked of his coming masterpiece. For the rest he was a fierce little old man, who scoffed terribly at softness in any one, and who regarded himself as especial mastiff-in-waiting to protect the two young artists in the studio above.</p>
|
||||
<p>Sue found Behrman smelling strongly of juniper berries in his dimly lighted den below. In one corner was a blank canvas on an easel that had been waiting there for twenty-five years to receive the first line of the masterpiece. She told him of Johnsy’s fancy, and how she feared she would, indeed, light and fragile as a leaf herself, float away when her slight hold upon the world grew weaker.</p>
|
||||
<p>Old Behrman, with his red eyes, plainly streaming, shouted his contempt and derision for such idiotic imaginings.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Vass!” he cried. “Is dere people in de world mit der foolishness to die because leafs dey drop off from a confounded vine? I haf not heard of such a thing. No, I will not bose as a model for your fool hermit-dunderhead. Vy do you allow dot silly pusiness to come in der prain of her? Ach, dot poor lettle Miss Johnsy.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“She is very ill and weak,” said Sue, “and the fever has left her mind morbid and full of strange fancies. Very well, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Behrman, if you do not care to pose for me, you needn’t. But I think you are a horrid old—old flibbertigibbet.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You are just like a woman!” yelled Behrman. “Who said I will not bose? Go on. I come mit you. For half an hour I haf peen trying to say dot I am ready to bose. Gott! dis is not any blace in which one so goot as Miss Yohnsy shall lie sick. Some day I vill baint a masterpiece, and ve shall all go away. Gott! yes.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Johnsy was sleeping when they went upstairs. Sue pulled the shade down to the window-sill, and motioned Behrman into the other room. In there they peered out the window fearfully at the ivy vine. Then they looked at each other for a moment without speaking. A persistent, cold rain was falling, mingled with snow. Behrman, in his old blue shirt, took his seat as the hermit-miner on an upturned kettle for a rock.</p>
|
||||
<p>Johnsy was sleeping when they went upstairs. Sue pulled the shade down to the windowsill, and motioned Behrman into the other room. In there they peered out the window fearfully at the ivy vine. Then they looked at each other for a moment without speaking. A persistent, cold rain was falling, mingled with snow. Behrman, in his old blue shirt, took his seat as the hermit-miner on an upturned kettle for a rock.</p>
|
||||
<p>When Sue awoke from an hour’s sleep the next morning she found Johnsy with dull, wide-open eyes staring at the drawn green shade.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Pull it up; I want to see,” she ordered, in a whisper.</p>
|
||||
<p>Wearily Sue obeyed.</p>
|
||||
<p>But, lo! after the beating rain and fierce gusts of wind that had endured through the livelong night, there yet stood out against the brick wall one ivy leaf. It was the last on the vine. Still dark green near its stem, but with its serrated edges tinted with the yellow of dissolution and decay, it hung bravely from a branch some twenty feet above the ground.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It is the last one,” said Johnsy. “I thought it would surely fall during the night. I heard the wind. It will fall to-day, and I shall die at the same time.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It is the last one,” said Johnsy. “I thought it would surely fall during the night. I heard the wind. It will fall today, and I shall die at the same time.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Dear, dear!” said Sue, leaning her worn face down to the pillow, “think of me, if you won’t think of yourself. What would I do?”</p>
|
||||
<p>But Johnsy did not answer. The lonesomest thing in all the world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey. The fancy seemed to possess her more strongly as one by one the ties that bound her to friendship and to earth were loosed.</p>
|
||||
<p>The day wore away, and even through the twilight they could see the lone ivy leaf clinging to its stem against the wall. And then, with the coming of the night the north wind was again loosed, while the rain still beat against the windows and pattered down from the low Dutch eaves.</p>
|
||||
@ -59,10 +59,10 @@
|
||||
<p>An hour later she said.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sudie, some day I hope to paint the Bay of Naples.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The doctor came in the afternoon, and Sue had an excuse to go into the hallway as he left.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Even chances,” said the doctor, taking Sue’s thin, shaking hand in his. “With good nursing you’ll win. And now I must see another case I have downstairs. Behrman, his name is—some kind of an artist, I believe. Pneumonia, too. He is an old, weak man, and the attack is acute. There is no hope for him; but he goes to the hospital to-day to be made more comfortable.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Even chances,” said the doctor, taking Sue’s thin, shaking hand in his. “With good nursing you’ll win. And now I must see another case I have downstairs. Behrman, his name is—some kind of an artist, I believe. Pneumonia, too. He is an old, weak man, and the attack is acute. There is no hope for him; but he goes to the hospital today to be made more comfortable.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The next day the doctor said to Sue: “She’s out of danger. You’ve won. Nutrition and care now—that’s all.”</p>
|
||||
<p>And that afternoon Sue came to the bed where Johnsy lay, contentedly knitting a very blue and very useless woolen shoulder scarf, and put one arm around her, pillows and all.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have something to tell you, white mouse,” she said. “<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Behrman died of pneumonia to-day in the hospital. He was ill only two days. The janitor found him on the morning of the first day in his room downstairs helpless with pain. His shoes and clothing were wet through and icy cold. They couldn’t imagine where he had been on such a dreadful night. And then they found a lantern, still lighted, and a ladder that had been dragged from its place, and some scattered brushes, and a palette with green and yellow colors mixed on it, and—look out the window, dear, at the last ivy leaf on the wall. Didn’t you wonder why it never fluttered or moved when the wind blew? Ah, darling, it’s Behrman’s masterpiece—he painted it there the night that the last leaf fell.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have something to tell you, white mouse,” she said. “<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Behrman died of pneumonia today in the hospital. He was ill only two days. The janitor found him on the morning of the first day in his room downstairs helpless with pain. His shoes and clothing were wet through and icy cold. They couldn’t imagine where he had been on such a dreadful night. And then they found a lantern, still lighted, and a ladder that had been dragged from its place, and some scattered brushes, and a palette with green and yellow colors mixed on it, and—look out the window, dear, at the last ivy leaf on the wall. Didn’t you wonder why it never fluttered or moved when the wind blew? Ah, darling, it’s Behrman’s masterpiece—he painted it there the night that the last leaf fell.”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -9,23 +9,23 @@
|
||||
<section id="the-lost-blend" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Lost Blend</h2>
|
||||
<p>Since the bar has been blessed by the clergy, and cocktails open the dinners of the elect, one may speak of the saloon. Teetotalers need not listen, if they choose; there is always the slot restaurant, where a dime dropped into the cold bouillon aperture will bring forth a dry Martini.</p>
|
||||
<p>Con Lantry worked on the sober side of the bar in Kenealy’s café. You and I stood, one-legged like geese, on the other side and went into voluntary liquidation with our week’s wages. Opposite danced Con, clean, temperate, clear-headed, polite, white-jacketed, punctual, trustworthy, young, responsible, and took our money.</p>
|
||||
<p>Con Lantry worked on the sober side of the bar in Kenealy’s café. You and I stood, one-legged like geese, on the other side and went into voluntary liquidation with our week’s wages. Opposite danced Con, clean, temperate, clearheaded, polite, white-jacketed, punctual, trustworthy, young, responsible, and took our money.</p>
|
||||
<p>The saloon (whether blessed or cursed) stood in one of those little “places” which are parallelograms instead of streets, and inhabited by laundries, decayed Knickerbocker families and Bohemians who have nothing to do with either.</p>
|
||||
<p>Over the café lived Kenealy and his family. His daughter Katherine had eyes of dark Irish—but why should you be told? Be content with your Geraldine or your Eliza Ann. For Con dreamed of her; and when she called softly at the foot of the back stairs for the pitcher of beer for dinner, his heart went up and down like a milk punch in the shaker. Orderly and fit are the rules of Romance; and if you hurl the last shilling of your fortune upon the bar for whiskey, the bartender shall take it, and marry his boss’s daughter, and good will grow out of it.</p>
|
||||
<p>But not so Con. For in the presence of woman he was tongue-tied and scarlet. He who would quell with his eye the sonorous youth whom the claret punch made loquacious, or smash with lemon squeezer the obstreperous, or hurl gutterward the cantankerous without a wrinkle coming to his white lawn tie, when he stood before woman he was voiceless, incoherent, stuttering, buried beneath a hot avalanche of bashfulness and misery. What then was he before Katherine? A trembler, with no word to say for himself, a stone without blarney, the dumbest lover that ever babbled of the weather in the presence of his divinity.</p>
|
||||
<p>There came to Kenealy’s two sunburned men, Riley and McQuirk. They had conference with Kenealy; and then they took possession of a back room which they filled with bottles and siphons and jugs and druggist’s measuring glasses. All the appurtenances and liquids of a saloon were there, but they dispensed no drinks. All day long the two sweltered in there pouring and mixing unknown brews and decoctions from the liquors in their store. Riley had the education, and he figured on reams of paper, reducing gallons to ounces and quarts to fluid drams. McQuirk, a morose man with a red eye, dashed each unsuccessful completed mixture into the waste pipes with curses gentle, husky and deep. They labored heavily and untiringly to achieve some mysterious solution like two alchemists striving to resolve gold from the elements.</p>
|
||||
<p>Into this back room one evening when his watch was done sauntered Con. His professional curiosity had been stirred by these occult bartenders at whose bar none drank, and who daily drew upon Kenealy’s store of liquors to follow their consuming and fruitless experiments.</p>
|
||||
<p>Down the back stairs came Katherine with her smile like sunrise on Gweebarra Bay.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Good evening, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Lantry,” says she. “And what is the news to-day, if you please?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Good evening, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Lantry,” says she. “And what is the news today, if you please?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It looks like r-rain,” stammered the shy one, backing to the wall.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It couldn’t do better,” said Katherine. “I’m thinking there’s nothing the worse off for a little water.” In the back room Riley and McQuirk toiled like bearded witches over their strange compounds. From fifty bottles they drew liquids carefully measured after Riley’s figures, and shook the whole together in a great glass vessel. Then McQuirk would dash it out, with gloomy profanity, and they would begin again.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sit down,” said Riley to Con, “and I’ll tell you.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Last summer me and Tim concludes that an American bar in this nation of Nicaragua would pay. There was a town on the coast where there’s nothing to eat but quinine and nothing to drink but rum. The natives and foreigners lay down with chills and get up with fevers; and a good mixed drink is nature’s remedy for all such tropical inconveniences.</p>
|
||||
<p>“So we lays in a fine stock of wet goods in New York, and bar fixtures and glassware, and we sails for that Santa Palma town on a lime steamer. On the way me and Tim sees flying fish and plays seven-up with the captain and steward, and already begins to feel like the high-ball kings of the tropics of Capricorn.</p>
|
||||
<p>“So we lays in a fine stock of wet goods in New York, and bar fixtures and glassware, and we sails for that Santa Palma town on a lime steamer. On the way me and Tim sees flying fish and plays seven-up with the captain and steward, and already begins to feel like the highball kings of the tropics of Capricorn.</p>
|
||||
<p>“When we gets in five hours of the country that we was going to introduce to long drinks and short change the captain calls us over to the starboard binnacle and recollects a few things.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I forgot to tell you, boys,’ says he, ‘that Nicaragua slapped an import duty of 48 per cent. ad valorem on all bottled goods last month. The President took a bottle of Cincinnati hair tonic by mistake for tobasco sauce, and he’s getting even. Barrelled goods is free.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Sorry you didn’t mention it sooner,’ says we. And we bought two forty-two gallon casks from the captain, and opened every bottle we had and dumped the stuff all together in the casks. That 48 per cent. would have ruined us; so we took the chances on making that $1,200 cocktail rather than throw the stuff away.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, when we landed we tapped one of the barrels. The mixture was something heartrending. It was the color of a plate of Bowery pea soup, and it tasted like one of those coffee substitutes your aunt makes you take for the heart trouble you get by picking losers. We gave a nigger four fingers of it to try it, and he lay under a cocoanut tree three days beating the sand with his heels and refused to sign a testimonial.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I forgot to tell you, boys,’ says he, ‘that Nicaragua slapped an import duty of 48 percent ad valorem on all bottled goods last month. The President took a bottle of Cincinnati hair tonic by mistake for tobasco sauce, and he’s getting even. Barrelled goods is free.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Sorry you didn’t mention it sooner,’ says we. And we bought two forty-two gallon casks from the captain, and opened every bottle we had and dumped the stuff all together in the casks. That 48 percent would have ruined us; so we took the chances on making that $1,200 cocktail rather than throw the stuff away.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, when we landed we tapped one of the barrels. The mixture was something heartrending. It was the color of a plate of Bowery pea soup, and it tasted like one of those coffee substitutes your aunt makes you take for the heart trouble you get by picking losers. We gave a nigger four fingers of it to try it, and he lay under a coconut tree three days beating the sand with his heels and refused to sign a testimonial.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But the other barrel! Say, bartender, did you ever put on a straw hat with a yellow band around it and go up in a balloon with a pretty girl with $8,000,000 in your pocket all at the same time? That’s what thirty drops of it would make you feel like. With two fingers of it inside you you would bury your face in your hands and cry because there wasn’t anything more worth while around for you to lick than little Jim Jeffries. Yes, sir, the stuff in that second barrel was distilled elixir of battle, money and high life. It was the color of gold and as clear as glass, and it shone after dark like the sunshine was still in it. A thousand years from now you’ll get a drink like that across the bar.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, we started up business with that one line of drinks, and it was enough. The piebald gentry of that country stuck to it like a hive of bees. If that barrel had lasted that country would have become the greatest on earth. When we opened up of mornings we had a line of Generals and Colonels and ex-Presidents and revolutionists a block long waiting to be served. We started in at 50 cents silver a drink. The last ten gallons went easy at $5 a gulp. It was wonderful stuff. It gave a man courage and ambition and nerve to do anything; at the same time he didn’t care whether his money was tainted or fresh from the Ice Trust. When that barrel was half gone Nicaragua had repudiated the National debt, removed the duty on cigarettes and was about to declare war on the United States and England.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ’Twas by accident we discovered this king of drinks, and ’twill be by good luck if we strike it again. For ten months we’ve been trying. Small lots at a time, we’ve mixed barrels of all the harmful ingredients known to the profession of drinking. Ye could have stocked ten bars with the whiskies, brandies, cordials, bitters, gins and wines me and Tim have wasted. A glorious drink like that to be denied to the world! ’Tis a sorrow and a loss of money. The United States as a nation would welcome a drink of that sort, and pay for it.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -18,17 +18,17 @@
|
||||
<p>Boston construed herself to the poetic Raggles in an erratic and singular way. It seemed to him that he had drunk cold tea and that the city was a white, cold cloth that had been bound tightly around his brow to spur him to some unknown but tremendous mental effort. And, after all, he came to shovel snow for a livelihood; and the cloth, becoming wet, tightened its knots and could not be removed.</p>
|
||||
<p>Indefinite and unintelligible ideas, you will say; but your disapprobation should be tempered with gratitude, for these are poets’ fancies—and suppose you had come upon them in verse!</p>
|
||||
<p>One day Raggles came and laid siege to the heart of the great city of Manhattan. She was the greatest of all; and he wanted to learn her note in the scale; to taste and appraise and classify and solve and label her and arrange her with the other cities that had given him up the secret of their individuality. And here we cease to be Raggles’s translator and become his chronicler.</p>
|
||||
<p>Raggles landed from a ferry-boat one morning and walked into the core of the town with the blasée air of a cosmopolite. He was dressed with care to play the rôle of an “unidentified man.” No country, race, class, clique, union, party clan or bowling association could have claimed him. His clothing, which had been donated to him piece-meal by citizens of different height, but same number of inches around the heart, was not yet as uncomfortable to his figure as those speciments of raiment, self-measured, that are railroaded to you by transcontinental tailors with a suit case, suspenders, silk handkerchief and pearl studs as a bonus. Without money—as a poet should be—but with the ardor of an astronomer discovering a new star in the chorus of the milky way, or a man who has seen ink suddenly flow from his fountain pen, Raggles wandered into the great city.</p>
|
||||
<p>Raggles landed from a ferryboat one morning and walked into the core of the town with the blasée air of a cosmopolite. He was dressed with care to play the role of an “unidentified man.” No country, race, class, clique, union, party clan or bowling association could have claimed him. His clothing, which had been donated to him piecemeal by citizens of different height, but same number of inches around the heart, was not yet as uncomfortable to his figure as those speciments of raiment, self-measured, that are railroaded to you by transcontinental tailors with a suit case, suspenders, silk handkerchief and pearl studs as a bonus. Without money—as a poet should be—but with the ardor of an astronomer discovering a new star in the chorus of the milky way, or a man who has seen ink suddenly flow from his fountain pen, Raggles wandered into the great city.</p>
|
||||
<p>Late in the afternoon he drew out of the roar and commotion with a look of dumb terror on his countenance. He was defeated, puzzled, discomfited, frightened. Other cities had been to him as long primer to read; as country maidens quickly to fathom; as send-price-of-subscription-with-answer rebuses to solve; as oyster cocktails to swallow; but here was one as cold, glittering, serene, impossible as a four-carat diamond in a window to a lover outside fingering damply in his pocket his ribbon-counter salary.</p>
|
||||
<p>The greetings of the other cities he had known—their homespun kindliness, their human gamut of rough charity, friendly curses, garrulous curiosity and easily estimated credulity or indifference. This city of Manhattan gave him no clue; it was walled against him. Like a river of adamant it flowed past him in the streets. Never an eye was turned upon him; no voice spoke to him. His heart yearned for the clap of Pittsburg’s sooty hand on his shoulder; for Chicago’s menacing but social yawp in his ear; for the pale and eleemosynary stare through the Bostonian eyeglass—even for the precipitate but unmalicious boot-toe of Louisville or <abbr>St.</abbr> Louis.</p>
|
||||
<p>On Broadway Raggles, successful suitor of many cities, stood, bashful, like any country swain. For the first time he experienced the poignant humiliation of being ignored. And when he tried to reduce this brilliant, swiftly changing, ice-cold city to a formula he failed utterly. Poet though he was, it offered him no color similes, no points of comparison, no flaw in its polished facets, no handle by which he could hold it up and view its shape and structure, as he familiarly and often contemptuously had done with other towns. The houses were interminable ramparts loopholed for defense; the people were bright but bloodless spectres passing in sinister and selfish array.</p>
|
||||
<p>The thing that weighed heaviest on Raggles’s soul and clogged his poet’s fancy was the spirit of absolute egotism that seemed to saturate the people as toys are saturated with paint. Each one that he considered appeared a monster of abominable and insolent conceit. Humanity was gone from them; they were toddling idols of stone and varnish, worshipping themselves and greedy for though oblivious of worship from their fellow graven images. Frozen, cruel, implacable, impervious, cut to an identical pattern, they hurried on their ways like statues brought by some miracles to motion, while soul and feeling lay unaroused in the reluctant marble.</p>
|
||||
<p>Gradually Raggles became conscious of certain types. One was an elderly gentleman with a snow-white, short beard, pink, unwrinkled face and stony, sharp blue eyes, attired in the fashion of a gilded youth, who seemed to personify the city’s wealth, ripeness and frigid unconcern. Another type was a woman, tall, beautiful, clear as a steel engraving, goddess-like, calm, clothed like the princesses of old, with eyes as coldly blue as the reflection of sunlight on a glacier. And another was a by-product of this town of marionettes—a broad, swaggering, grim, threateningly sedate fellow, with a jowl as large as a harvested wheat field, the complexion of a baptized infant and the knuckles of a prize-fighter. This type leaned against cigar signs and viewed the world with frappéd contumely.</p>
|
||||
<p>Gradually Raggles became conscious of certain types. One was an elderly gentleman with a snow-white, short beard, pink, unwrinkled face and stony, sharp blue eyes, attired in the fashion of a gilded youth, who seemed to personify the city’s wealth, ripeness and frigid unconcern. Another type was a woman, tall, beautiful, clear as a steel engraving, goddess-like, calm, clothed like the princesses of old, with eyes as coldly blue as the reflection of sunlight on a glacier. And another was a byproduct of this town of marionettes—a broad, swaggering, grim, threateningly sedate fellow, with a jowl as large as a harvested wheat field, the complexion of a baptized infant and the knuckles of a prizefighter. This type leaned against cigar signs and viewed the world with frappéd contumely.</p>
|
||||
<p>A poet is a sensitive creature, and Raggles soon shrivelled in the bleak embrace of the undecipherable. The chill, sphinx-like, ironical, illegible, unnatural, ruthless expression of the city left him downcast and bewildered. Had it no heart? Better the woodpile, the scolding of vinegar-faced housewives at back doors, the kindly spleen of bartenders behind provincial free-lunch counters, the amiable truculence of rural constables, the kicks, arrests and happy-go-lucky chances of the other vulgar, loud, crude cities than this freezing heartlessness.</p>
|
||||
<p>Raggles summoned his courage and sought alms from the populace. Unheeding, regardless, they passed on without the wink of an eyelash to testify that they were conscious of his existence. And then he said to himself that this fair but pitiless city of Manhattan was without a soul; that its inhabitants were manikins moved by wires and springs, and that he was alone in a great wilderness.</p>
|
||||
<p>Raggles started to cross the street. There was a blast, a roar, a hissing and a crash as something struck him and hurled him over and over six yards from where he had been. As he was coming down like the stick of a rocket the earth and all the cities thereof turned to a fractured dream.</p>
|
||||
<p>Raggles opened his eyes. First an odor made itself known to him—an odor of the earliest spring flowers of Paradise. And then a hand soft as a falling petal touched his brow. Bending over him was the woman clothed like the princess of old, with blue eyes, now soft and humid with human sympathy. Under his head on the pavement were silks and furs. With Raggles’s hat in his hand and with his face pinker than ever from a vehement burst of oratory against reckless driving, stood the elderly gentleman who personified the city’s wealth and ripeness. From a nearby café hurried the by-product with the vast jowl and baby complexion, bearing a glass full of a crimson fluid that suggested delightful possibilities.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Drink dis, sport,” said the by-product, holding the glass to Raggles’s lips.</p>
|
||||
<p>Raggles opened his eyes. First an odor made itself known to him—an odor of the earliest spring flowers of Paradise. And then a hand soft as a falling petal touched his brow. Bending over him was the woman clothed like the princess of old, with blue eyes, now soft and humid with human sympathy. Under his head on the pavement were silks and furs. With Raggles’s hat in his hand and with his face pinker than ever from a vehement burst of oratory against reckless driving, stood the elderly gentleman who personified the city’s wealth and ripeness. From a nearby café hurried the byproduct with the vast jowl and baby complexion, bearing a glass full of a crimson fluid that suggested delightful possibilities.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Drink dis, sport,” said the byproduct, holding the glass to Raggles’s lips.</p>
|
||||
<p>Hundreds of people huddled around in a moment, their faces wearing the deepest concern. Two flattering and gorgeous policemen got into the circle and pressed back the overplus of Samaritans. An old lady in a black shawl spoke loudly of camphor; a newsboy slipped one of his papers beneath Raggles’s elbow, where it lay on the muddy pavement. A brisk young man with a notebook was asking for names.</p>
|
||||
<p>A bell clanged importantly, and the ambulance cleaned a lane through the crowd. A cool surgeon slipped into the midst of affairs.</p>
|
||||
<p>“How do you feel, old man?” asked the surgeon, stooping easily to his task. The princess of silks and satins wiped a red drop or two from Raggles’s brow with a fragrant cobweb.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -11,24 +11,24 @@
|
||||
<p>“Eighty-first street—let ’em out, please,” yelled the shepherd in blue.</p>
|
||||
<p>A flock of citizen sheep scrambled out and another flock scrambled aboard. Ding-ding! The cattle cars of the Manhattan Elevated rattled away, and John Perkins drifted down the stairway of the station with the released flock.</p>
|
||||
<p>John walked slowly toward his flat. Slowly, because in the lexicon of his daily life there was no such word as “perhaps.” There are no surprises awaiting a man who has been married two years and lives in a flat. As he walked John Perkins prophesied to himself with gloomy and downtrodden cynicism the foregone conclusions of the monotonous day.</p>
|
||||
<p>Katy would meet him at the door with a kiss flavored with cold cream and butter-scotch. He would remove his coat, sit upon a macadamized lounge and read, in the evening paper, of Russians and Japs slaughtered by the deadly linotype. For dinner there would be pot roast, a salad flavored with a dressing warranted not to crack or injure the leather, stewed rhubarb and the bottle of strawberry marmalade blushing at the certificate of chemical purity on its label. After dinner Katy would show him the new patch in her crazy quilt that the iceman had cut for her off the end of his four-in-hand. At half-past seven they would spread newspapers over the furniture to catch the pieces of plastering that fell when the fat man in the flat overhead began to take his physical culture exercises. Exactly at eight Hickey & Mooney, of the vaudeville team (unbooked) in the flat across the hall, would yield to the gentle influence of delirium tremens and begin to overturn chairs under the delusion that Hammerstein was pursuing them with a five-hundred-dollar-a-week contract. Then the gent at the window across the air-shaft would get out his flute; the nightly gas leak would steal forth to frolic in the highways; the dumbwaiter would slip off its trolley; the janitor would drive <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Zanowitski’s five children once more across the Yalu, the lady with the champagne shoes and the Skye terrier would trip downstairs and paste her Thursday name over her bell and letter-box—and the evening routine of the Frogmore flats would be under way.</p>
|
||||
<p>Katy would meet him at the door with a kiss flavored with cold cream and butterscotch. He would remove his coat, sit upon a macadamized lounge and read, in the evening paper, of Russians and Japs slaughtered by the deadly linotype. For dinner there would be pot roast, a salad flavored with a dressing warranted not to crack or injure the leather, stewed rhubarb and the bottle of strawberry marmalade blushing at the certificate of chemical purity on its label. After dinner Katy would show him the new patch in her crazy quilt that the iceman had cut for her off the end of his four-in-hand. At half-past seven they would spread newspapers over the furniture to catch the pieces of plastering that fell when the fat man in the flat overhead began to take his physical culture exercises. Exactly at eight Hickey & Mooney, of the vaudeville team (unbooked) in the flat across the hall, would yield to the gentle influence of delirium tremens and begin to overturn chairs under the delusion that Hammerstein was pursuing them with a five-hundred-dollar-a-week contract. Then the gent at the window across the air-shaft would get out his flute; the nightly gas leak would steal forth to frolic in the highways; the dumbwaiter would slip off its trolley; the janitor would drive <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Zanowitski’s five children once more across the Yalu, the lady with the champagne shoes and the Skye terrier would trip downstairs and paste her Thursday name over her bell and letter-box—and the evening routine of the Frogmore flats would be under way.</p>
|
||||
<p>John Perkins knew these things would happen. And he knew that at a quarter past eight he would summon his nerve and reach for his hat, and that his wife would deliver this speech in a querulous tone:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Now, where are you going, I’d like to know, John Perkins?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Thought I’d drop up to McCloskey’s,” he would answer, “and play a game or two of pool with the fellows.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Of late such had been John Perkins’s habit. At ten or eleven he would return. Sometimes Katy would be asleep; sometimes waiting up, ready to melt in the crucible of her ire a little more gold plating from the wrought steel chains of matrimony. For these things Cupid will have to answer when he stands at the bar of justice with his victims from the Frogmore flats.</p>
|
||||
<p>To-night John Perkins encountered a tremendous upheaval of the commonplace when he reached his door. No Katy was there with her affectionate, confectionate kiss. The three rooms seemed in portentous disorder. All about lay her things in confusion. Shoes in the middle of the floor, curling tongs, hair bows, kimonos, powder box, jumbled together on dresser and chairs—this was not Katy’s way. With a sinking heart John saw the comb with a curling cloud of her brown hair among its teeth. Some unusual hurry and perturbation must have possessed her, for she always carefully placed these combings in the little blue vase on the mantel to be some day formed into the coveted feminine “rat.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Tonight John Perkins encountered a tremendous upheaval of the commonplace when he reached his door. No Katy was there with her affectionate, confectionate kiss. The three rooms seemed in portentous disorder. All about lay her things in confusion. Shoes in the middle of the floor, curling tongs, hair bows, kimonos, powder box, jumbled together on dresser and chairs—this was not Katy’s way. With a sinking heart John saw the comb with a curling cloud of her brown hair among its teeth. Some unusual hurry and perturbation must have possessed her, for she always carefully placed these combings in the little blue vase on the mantel to be some day formed into the coveted feminine “rat.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Hanging conspicuously to the gas jet by a string was a folded paper. John seized it. It was a note from his wife running thus:</p>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="letter">
|
||||
<p><span epub:type="salutation">Dear John</span>: I just had a telegram saying mother is very sick. I am going to take the 4.30 train. Brother Sam is going to meet me at the depot there. There is cold mutton in the ice box. I hope it isn’t her quinzy again. Pay the milkman 50 cents. She had it bad last spring. Don’t forget to write to the company about the gas meter, and your good socks are in the top drawer. I will write to-morrow.</p>
|
||||
<p><span epub:type="salutation">Dear John</span>: I just had a telegram saying mother is very sick. I am going to take the 4.30 train. Brother Sam is going to meet me at the depot there. There is cold mutton in the ice box. I hope it isn’t her quinzy again. Pay the milkman 50 cents. She had it bad last spring. Don’t forget to write to the company about the gas meter, and your good socks are in the top drawer. I will write tomorrow.</p>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<span epub:type="valediction">Hastily,</span>
|
||||
<span class="signature">KATY.</span>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>Never during their two years of matrimony had he and Katy been separated for a night. John read the note over and over in a dumbfounded way. Here was a break in a routine that had never varied, and it left him dazed.</p>
|
||||
<p>There on the back of a chair hung, pathetically empty and formless, the red wrapper with black dots that she always wore while getting the meals. Her week-day clothes had been tossed here and there in her haste. A little paper bag of her favorite butter-scotch lay with its string yet unwound. A daily paper sprawled on the floor, gaping rectangularly where a railroad time-table had been clipped from it. Everything in the room spoke of a loss, of an essence gone, of its soul and life departed. John Perkins stood among the dead remains with a queer feeling of desolation in his heart.</p>
|
||||
<p>There on the back of a chair hung, pathetically empty and formless, the red wrapper with black dots that she always wore while getting the meals. Her weekday clothes had been tossed here and there in her haste. A little paper bag of her favorite butterscotch lay with its string yet unwound. A daily paper sprawled on the floor, gaping rectangularly where a railroad timetable had been clipped from it. Everything in the room spoke of a loss, of an essence gone, of its soul and life departed. John Perkins stood among the dead remains with a queer feeling of desolation in his heart.</p>
|
||||
<p>He began to set the rooms tidy as well as he could. When he touched her clothes a thrill of something like terror went through him. He had never thought what existence would be without Katy. She had become so thoroughly annealed into his life that she was like the air he breathed—necessary but scarcely noticed. Now, without warning, she was gone, vanished, as completely absent as if she had never existed. Of course it would be only for a few days, or at most a week or two, but it seemed to him as if the very hand of death had pointed a finger at his secure and uneventful home.</p>
|
||||
<p>John dragged the cold mutton from the ice-box, made coffee and sat down to a lonely meal face to face with the strawberry marmalade’s shameless certificate of purity. Bright among withdrawn blessings now appeared to him the ghosts of pot roasts and the salad with tan polish dressing. His home was dismantled. A quinzied mother-in-law had knocked his lares and penates sky-high. After his solitary meal John sat at a front window.</p>
|
||||
<p>John dragged the cold mutton from the icebox, made coffee and sat down to a lonely meal face to face with the strawberry marmalade’s shameless certificate of purity. Bright among withdrawn blessings now appeared to him the ghosts of pot roasts and the salad with tan polish dressing. His home was dismantled. A quinzied mother-in-law had knocked his lares and penates sky-high. After his solitary meal John sat at a front window.</p>
|
||||
<p>He did not care to smoke. Outside the city roared to him to come join in its dance of folly and pleasure. The night was his. He might go forth unquestioned and thrum the strings of jollity as free as any gay bachelor there. He might carouse and wander and have his fling until dawn if he liked; and there would be no wrathful Katy waiting for him, bearing the chalice that held the dregs of his joy. He might play pool at McCloskey’s with his roistering friends until Aurora dimmed the electric bulbs if he chose. The hymeneal strings that had curbed him always when the Frogmore flats had palled upon him were loosened. Katy was gone.</p>
|
||||
<p>John Perkins was not accustomed to analyzing his emotions. But as he sat in his Katy-bereft 10×12 parlor he hit unerringly upon the keynote of his discomfort. He knew now that Katy was necessary to his happiness. His feeling for her, lulled into unconsciousness by the dull round of domesticity, had been sharply stirred by the loss of her presence. Has it not been dinned into us by proverb and sermon and fable that we never prize the music till the sweet-voiced bird has flown—or in other no less florid and true utterances?</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m a double-dyed dub,” mused John Perkins, “the way I’ve been treating Katy. Off every night playing pool and bumming with the boys instead of staying home with her. The poor girl here all alone with nothing to amuse her, and me acting that way! John Perkins, you’re the worst kind of a shine. I’m going to make it up for the little girl. I’ll take her out and let her see some amusement. And I’ll cut out the McCloskey gang right from this minute.”</p>
|
||||
@ -36,7 +36,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Near the right hand of John Perkins stood a chair. On the back of it stood Katy’s blue shirtwaist. It still retained something of her contour. Midway of the sleeves were fine, individual wrinkles made by the movements of her arms in working for his comfort and pleasure. A delicate but impelling odor of bluebells came from it. John took it and looked long and soberly at the unresponsive grenadine. Katy had never been unresponsive. Tears:—yes, tears—came into John Perkins’s eyes. When she came back things would be different. He would make up for all his neglect. What was life without her?</p>
|
||||
<p>The door opened. Katy walked in carrying a little hand satchel. John stared at her stupidly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“My! I’m glad to get back,” said Katy. “Ma wasn’t sick to amount to anything. Sam was at the depot, and said she just had a little spell, and got all right soon after they telegraphed. So I took the next train back. I’m just dying for a cup of coffee.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Nobody heard the click and rattle of the cog-wheels as the third-floor front of the Frogmore flats buzzed its machinery back into the Order of Things. A band slipped, a spring was touched, the gear was adjusted and the wheels revolve in their old orbit.</p>
|
||||
<p>Nobody heard the click and rattle of the cogwheels as the third-floor front of the Frogmore flats buzzed its machinery back into the Order of Things. A band slipped, a spring was touched, the gear was adjusted and the wheels revolve in their old orbit.</p>
|
||||
<p>John Perkins looked at the clock. It was 8.15. He reached for his hat and walked to the door.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Now, where are you going, I’d like to know, John Perkins?” asked Katy, in a querulous tone.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Thought I’d drop up to McCloskey’s,” said John, “and play a game or two of pool with the fellows.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -10,7 +10,7 @@
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Purple Dress</h2>
|
||||
<p>We are to consider the shade known as purple. It is a color justly in repute among the sons and daughters of man. Emperors claim it for their especial dye. Good fellows everywhere seek to bring their noses to the genial hue that follows the commingling of the red and blue. We say of princes that they are born to the purple; and no doubt they are, for the colic tinges their faces with the royal tint equally with the snub-nosed countenance of a woodchopper’s brat. All women love it—when it is the fashion.</p>
|
||||
<p>And now purple is being worn. You notice it on the streets. Of course other colors are quite stylish as well—in fact, I saw a lovely thing the other day in olive green albatross, with a triple-lapped flounce skirt trimmed with insert squares of silk, and a draped fichu of lace opening over a shirred vest and double puff sleeves with a lace band holding two gathered frills—but you see lots of purple too. Oh, yes, you do; just take a walk down Twenty-third street any afternoon.</p>
|
||||
<p>Therefore Maida—the girl with the big brown eyes and cinnamon-colored hair in the Bee-Hive Store—said to Grace—the girl with the rhinestone brooch and peppermint-pepsin flavor to her speech—“I’m going to have a purple dress—a tailor-made purple dress—for Thanksgiving.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Therefore Maida—the girl with the big brown eyes and cinnamon-colored hair in the Beehive Store—said to Grace—the girl with the rhinestone brooch and peppermint-pepsin flavor to her speech—“I’m going to have a purple dress—a tailor-made purple dress—for Thanksgiving.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, are you,” said Grace, putting away some 7½ gloves into the 6¾ box. “Well, it’s me for red. You see more red on Fifth avenue. And the men all seem to like it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I like purple best,” said Maida. “And old Schlegel has promised to make it for $8. It’s going to be lovely. I’m going to have a plaited skirt and a blouse coat trimmed with a band of galloon under a white cloth collar with two rows of—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sly boots!” said Grace with an educated wink.</p>
|
||||
@ -21,11 +21,11 @@
|
||||
<p>“I don’t care,” said Maida. “I prefer purple, and them that don’t like it can just take the other side of the street.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Which suggests the thought that after all, the followers of purple may be subject to slight delusions. Danger is near when a maiden thinks she can wear purple regardless of complexions and opinions; and when Emperors think their purple robes will wear forever.</p>
|
||||
<p>Maida had saved $18 after eight months of economy; and this had bought the goods for the purple dress and paid Schlegel $4 on the making of it. On the day before Thanksgiving she would have just enough to pay the remaining $4. And then for a holiday in a new dress—can earth offer anything more enchanting?</p>
|
||||
<p>Old Bachman, the proprietor of the Bee-Hive Store, always gave a Thanksgiving dinner to his employees. On every one of the subsequent 364 days, excusing Sundays, he would remind them of the joys of the past banquet and the hopes of the coming ones, thus inciting them to increased enthusiasm in work. The dinner was given in the store on one of the long tables in the middle of the room. They tacked wrapping paper over the front windows; and the turkeys and other good things were brought in the back way from the restaurant on the corner. You will perceive that the Bee-Hive was not a fashionable department store, with escalators and pompadours. It was almost small enough to be called an emporium; and you could actually go in there and get waited on and walk out again. And always at the Thanksgiving dinners <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ramsay—</p>
|
||||
<p>Old Bachman, the proprietor of the Beehive Store, always gave a Thanksgiving dinner to his employees. On every one of the subsequent 364 days, excusing Sundays, he would remind them of the joys of the past banquet and the hopes of the coming ones, thus inciting them to increased enthusiasm in work. The dinner was given in the store on one of the long tables in the middle of the room. They tacked wrapping paper over the front windows; and the turkeys and other good things were brought in the back way from the restaurant on the corner. You will perceive that the Beehive was not a fashionable department store, with escalators and pompadours. It was almost small enough to be called an emporium; and you could actually go in there and get waited on and walk out again. And always at the Thanksgiving dinners <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ramsay—</p>
|
||||
<p>Oh, bother! I should have mentioned <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ramsay first of all. He is more important than purple or green, or even the red cranberry sauce.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ramsay was the head clerk; and as far as I am concerned I am for him. He never pinched the girls’ arms when he passed them in dark corners of the store; and when he told them stories when business was dull and the girls giggled and said: “Oh, pshaw!” it wasn’t G. Bernard they meant at all. Besides being a gentleman, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ramsay was queer and original in other ways. He was a health crank, and believed that people should never eat anything that was good for them. He was violently opposed to anybody being comfortable, and coming in out of snow storms, or wearing overshoes, or taking medicine, or coddling themselves in any way. Every one of the ten girls in the store had little pork-chop-and-fried-onion dreams every night of becoming <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Ramsay. For, next year old Bachman was going to take him in for a partner. And each one of them knew that if she should catch him she would knock those cranky health notions of his sky high before the wedding cake indigestion was over.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ramsay was master of ceremonies at the dinners. Always they had two Italians in to play a violin and harp and had a little dance in the store.</p>
|
||||
<p>And here were two dresses being conceived to charm Ramsay—one purple and the other red. Of course, the other eight girls were going to have dresses too, but they didn’t count. Very likely they’d wear some shirt-waist-and-black-skirt-affairs—nothing as resplendent as purple or red.</p>
|
||||
<p>And here were two dresses being conceived to charm Ramsay—one purple and the other red. Of course, the other eight girls were going to have dresses too, but they didn’t count. Very likely they’d wear some shirtwaist-and-black-skirt-affairs—nothing as resplendent as purple or red.</p>
|
||||
<p>Grace had saved her money, too. She was going to buy her dress ready-made. Oh, what’s the use of bothering with a tailor—when you’ve got a figger it’s easy to get a fit—the ready-made are intended for a perfect figger—except I have to have ’em all taken in at the waist—the average figger is so large waisted.</p>
|
||||
<p>The night before Thanksgiving came. Maida hurried home, keen and bright with the thoughts of the blessed morrow. Her thoughts were of purple, but they were white themselves—the joyous enthusiasm of the young for the pleasures that youth must have or wither. She knew purple would become her, and—for the thousandth time she tried to assure herself that it was purple <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ramsay said he liked and not red. She was going home first to get the $4 wrapped in a piece of tissue paper in the bottom drawer of her dresser, and then she was going to pay Schlegel and take the dress home herself.</p>
|
||||
<p>Grace lived in the same house. She occupied the hall room above Maida’s.</p>
|
||||
@ -47,7 +47,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Gott!” cried Schlegel, angrily. “For what do you look so glum? Take him away. He is ready. Pay me some time. Haf I not seen you pass mine shop every day in two years? If I make clothes is it that I do not know how to read beoples because? You will pay me some time when you can. Take him away. He is made goot; and if you look bretty in him all right. So. Pay me when you can.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Maida breathed a millionth part of the thanks in her heart, and hurried away with her dress. As she left the shop a smart dash of rain struck upon her face. She smiled and did not feel it.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ladies who shop in carriages, you do not understand. Girls whose wardrobes are charged to the old man’s account, you cannot begin to comprehend—you could not understand why Maida did not feel the cold dash of the Thanksgiving rain.</p>
|
||||
<p>At five o’clock she went out upon the street wearing her purple dress. The rain had increased, and it beat down upon her in a steady, wind-blown pour. People were scurrying home and to cars with close-held umbrellas and tight buttoned raincoats. Many of them turned their heads to marvel at this beautiful, serene, happy-eyed girl in the purple dress walking through the storm as though she were strolling in a garden under summer skies.</p>
|
||||
<p>At five o’clock she went out upon the street wearing her purple dress. The rain had increased, and it beat down upon her in a steady, windblown pour. People were scurrying home and to cars with close-held umbrellas and tight buttoned raincoats. Many of them turned their heads to marvel at this beautiful, serene, happy-eyed girl in the purple dress walking through the storm as though she were strolling in a garden under summer skies.</p>
|
||||
<p>I say you do not understand it, ladies of the full purse and varied wardrobe. You do not know what it is to live with a perpetual longing for pretty things—to starve eight months in order to bring a purple dress and a holiday together. What difference if it rained, hailed, blew, snowed, cycloned?</p>
|
||||
<p>Maida had no umbrella nor overshoes. She had her purple dress and she walked abroad. Let the elements do their worst. A starved heart must have one crumb during a year. The rain ran down and dripped from her fingers.</p>
|
||||
<p>Some one turned a corner and blocked her way. She looked up into <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ramsay’s eyes, sparkling with admiration and interest.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
|
||||
<p>This document is intended to strike somewhere between a temperance lecture and the “Bartender’s Guide.” Relative to the latter, drink shall swell the theme and be set forth in abundance. Agreeably to the former, not an elbow shall be crooked.</p>
|
||||
<p>Bob Babbitt was “off the stuff.” Which means—as you will discover by referring to the unabridged dictionary of Bohemia—that he had “cut out the booze;” that he was “on the water wagon.” The reason for Bob’s sudden attitude of hostility toward the “demon rum”—as the white ribboners miscall whiskey (see the “Bartender’s Guide”), should be of interest to reformers and saloon-keepers.</p>
|
||||
<p>There is always hope for a man who, when sober, will not concede or acknowledge that he was ever drunk. But when a man will say (in the apt words of the phrase-distiller), “I had a beautiful skate on last night,” you will have to put stuff in his coffee as well as pray for him.</p>
|
||||
<p>One evening on his way home Babbitt dropped in at the Broadway bar that he liked best. Always there were three or four fellows there from the downtown offices whom he knew. And then there would be high-balls and stories, and he would hurry home to dinner a little late but feeling good, and a little sorry for the poor Standard Oil Company. On this evening as he entered he heard some one say: “Babbitt was in last night as full as a boiled owl.”</p>
|
||||
<p>One evening on his way home Babbitt dropped in at the Broadway bar that he liked best. Always there were three or four fellows there from the downtown offices whom he knew. And then there would be highballs and stories, and he would hurry home to dinner a little late but feeling good, and a little sorry for the poor Standard Oil Company. On this evening as he entered he heard some one say: “Babbitt was in last night as full as a boiled owl.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Babbitt walked to the bar, and saw in the mirror that his face was as white as chalk. For the first time he had looked Truth in the eyes. Others had lied to him; he had dissembled with himself. He was a drunkard, and had not known it. What he had fondly imagined was a pleasant exhilaration had been maudlin intoxication. His fancied wit had been drivel; his gay humors nothing but the noisy vagaries of a sot. But, never again!</p>
|
||||
<p>“A glass of seltzer,” he said to the bartender.</p>
|
||||
<p>A little silence fell upon the group of his cronies, who had been expecting him to join them.</p>
|
||||
@ -22,10 +22,10 @@
|
||||
<p>It began away up in Sullivan County, where so many rivers and so much trouble begins—or begin; how would you say that? It was July, and Jessie was a summer boarder at the Mountain Squint Hotel, and Bob, who was just out of college, saw her one day—and they were married in September. That’s the tabloid novel—one swallow of water, and it’s gone.</p>
|
||||
<p>But those July days!</p>
|
||||
<p>Let the exclamation point expound it, for I shall not. For particulars you might read up on “Romeo and Juliet,” and Abraham Lincoln’s thrilling sonnet about “You can fool some of the people,” &c., and Darwin’s works.</p>
|
||||
<p>But one thing I must tell you about. Both of them were mad over Omar’s Rubaiyat. They knew every verse of the old bluffer by heart—not consecutively, but picking ’em out here and there as you fork the mushrooms in a fifty-cent steak à la Bordelaise. Sullivan County is full of rocks and trees; and Jessie used to sit on them, and—please be good—used to sit on the rocks; and Bob had a way of standing behind her with his hands over her shoulders holding her hands, and his face close to hers, and they would repeat over and over their favorite verses of the old tent-maker. They saw only the poetry and philosophy of the lines then—indeed, they agreed that the Wine was only an image, and that what was meant to be celebrated was some divinity, or maybe Love or Life. However, at that time neither of them had tasted the stuff that goes with a sixty-cent table d’hote.</p>
|
||||
<p>But one thing I must tell you about. Both of them were mad over Omar’s Rubaiyat. They knew every verse of the old bluffer by heart—not consecutively, but picking ’em out here and there as you fork the mushrooms in a fifty-cent steak à la Bordelaise. Sullivan County is full of rocks and trees; and Jessie used to sit on them, and—please be good—used to sit on the rocks; and Bob had a way of standing behind her with his hands over her shoulders holding her hands, and his face close to hers, and they would repeat over and over their favorite verses of the old tentmaker. They saw only the poetry and philosophy of the lines then—indeed, they agreed that the Wine was only an image, and that what was meant to be celebrated was some divinity, or maybe Love or Life. However, at that time neither of them had tasted the stuff that goes with a sixty-cent table d’hôte.</p>
|
||||
<p>Where was I? Oh, they married and came to New York. Bob showed his college diploma, and accepted a position filling inkstands in a lawyer’s office at $15 a week. At the end of two years he had worked up to $50, and gotten his first taste of Bohemia—the kind that won’t stand the borax and formaldehyde tests.</p>
|
||||
<p>They had two furnished rooms and a little kitchen. To Jess, accustomed to the mild but beautiful savor of a country town, the dreggy Bohemia was sugar and spice. She hung fish seines on the walls of her rooms, and bought a rakish-looking sideboard, and learned to play the banjo. Twice or thrice a week they dined at French or Italian tables d’hote in a cloud of smoke, and brag and unshorn hair. Jess learned to drink a cocktail in order to get the cherry. At home she smoked a cigarette after dinner. She learned to pronounce Chianti, and leave her olive stones for the waiter to pick up. Once she essayed to say la, la, la! in a crowd but got only as far as the second one. They met one or two couples while dining out and became friendly with them. The sideboard was stocked with Scotch and rye and a liqueur. They had their new friends in to dinner and all were laughing at nothing by 1 A. M. Some plastering fell in the room below them, for which Bob had to pay $4.50. Thus they footed it merrily on the ragged frontiers of the country that has no boundary lines or government.</p>
|
||||
<p>And soon Bob fell in with his cronies and learned to keep his foot on the little rail six inches above the floor for an hour or so every afternoon before he went home. Drink always rubbed him the right way, and he would reach his rooms as jolly as a sandboy. Jessie would meet him at the door, and generally they would dance some insane kind of a rigadoon about the floor by way of greeting. Once when Bob’s feet became confused and he tumbled headlong over a foot-stool Jessie laughed so heartily and long that he had to throw all the couch pillows at her to make her hush.</p>
|
||||
<p>They had two furnished rooms and a little kitchen. To Jess, accustomed to the mild but beautiful savor of a country town, the dreggy Bohemia was sugar and spice. She hung fish seines on the walls of her rooms, and bought a rakish-looking sideboard, and learned to play the banjo. Twice or thrice a week they dined at French or Italian tables d’hôte in a cloud of smoke, and brag and unshorn hair. Jess learned to drink a cocktail in order to get the cherry. At home she smoked a cigarette after dinner. She learned to pronounce Chianti, and leave her olive stones for the waiter to pick up. Once she essayed to say la, la, la! in a crowd but got only as far as the second one. They met one or two couples while dining out and became friendly with them. The sideboard was stocked with Scotch and rye and a liqueur. They had their new friends in to dinner and all were laughing at nothing by 1 A. M. Some plastering fell in the room below them, for which Bob had to pay $4.50. Thus they footed it merrily on the ragged frontiers of the country that has no boundary lines or government.</p>
|
||||
<p>And soon Bob fell in with his cronies and learned to keep his foot on the little rail six inches above the floor for an hour or so every afternoon before he went home. Drink always rubbed him the right way, and he would reach his rooms as jolly as a sandboy. Jessie would meet him at the door, and generally they would dance some insane kind of a rigadoon about the floor by way of greeting. Once when Bob’s feet became confused and he tumbled headlong over a footstool Jessie laughed so heartily and long that he had to throw all the couch pillows at her to make her hush.</p>
|
||||
<p>In such wise life was speeding for them on the day when Bob Babbitt first felt the power that the giftie gi’ed him.</p>
|
||||
<p>But let us get back to our lamb and mint sauce.</p>
|
||||
<p>When Bob got home that evening he found Jessie in a long apron cutting up a lobster for the Newburg. Usually when Bob came in mellow from his hour at the bar his welcome was hilarious, though somewhat tinctured with Scotch smoke.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -12,7 +12,7 @@
|
||||
<p>At any rate, Ikey toiled and snipped and basted and pressed and patched and sponged all day in the steamy fetor of a tailor-shop. But when work was done Ikey hitched his wagon to such stars as his firmament let shine.</p>
|
||||
<p>It was Saturday night, and the boss laid twelve begrimed and begrudged dollars in his hand. Ikey dabbled discreetly in water, donned coat, hat and collar with its frazzled tie and chalcedony pin, and set forth in pursuit of his ideals.</p>
|
||||
<p>For each of us, when our day’s work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.</p>
|
||||
<p>Behold Ikey as he ambles up the street beneath the roaring “El” between the rows of reeking sweat-shops. Pallid, stooping, insignificant, squalid, doomed to exist forever in penury of body and mind, yet, as he swings his cheap cane and projects the noisome inhalations from his cigarette you perceive that he nurtures in his narrow bosom the bacillus of society.</p>
|
||||
<p>Behold Ikey as he ambles up the street beneath the roaring “El” between the rows of reeking sweatshops. Pallid, stooping, insignificant, squalid, doomed to exist forever in penury of body and mind, yet, as he swings his cheap cane and projects the noisome inhalations from his cigarette you perceive that he nurtures in his narrow bosom the bacillus of society.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ikey’s legs carried him to and into that famous place of entertainment known as the Café Maginnis—famous because it was the rendezvous of Billy McMahan, the greatest man, the most wonderful man, Ikey thought, that the world had ever produced.</p>
|
||||
<p>Billy McMahan was the district leader. Upon him the Tiger purred, and his hand held manna to scatter. Now, as Ikey entered, McMahan stood, flushed and triumphant and mighty, the centre of a huzzaing concourse of his lieutenants and constituents. It seems there had been an election; a signal victory had been won; the city had been swept back into line by a resistless besom of ballots.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ikey slunk along the bar and gazed, breath-quickened, at his idol.</p>
|
||||
@ -34,7 +34,7 @@
|
||||
<hr/>
|
||||
<p>Billy McMahan had a wife, and upon her visiting cards was engraved the name “<abbr>Mrs.</abbr> William Darragh McMahan.” And there was a certain vexation attendant upon these cards; for, small as they were, there were houses in which they could not be inserted. Billy McMahan was a dictator in politics, a four-walled tower in business, a mogul, dreaded, loved and obeyed among his own people. He was growing rich; the daily papers had a dozen men on his trail to chronicle his every word of wisdom; he had been honored in caricature holding the Tiger cringing in leash.</p>
|
||||
<p>But the heart of Billy was sometimes sore within him. There was a race of men from which he stood apart but that he viewed with the eye of Moses looking over into the promised land. He, too, had ideals, even as had Ikey Snigglefritz; and sometimes, hopeless of attaining them, his own solid success was as dust and ashes in his mouth. And <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> William Darragh McMahan wore a look of discontent upon her plump but pretty face, and the very rustle of her silks seemed a sigh.</p>
|
||||
<p>There was a brave and conspicuous assemblage in the dining saloon of a noted hostelry where Fashion loves to display her charms. At one table sat Billy McMahan and his wife. Mostly silent they were, but the accessories they enjoyed little needed the indorsement of speech. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McMahan’s diamonds were outshone by few in the room. The waiter bore the costliest brands of wine to their table. In evening dress, with an expression of gloom upon his smooth and massive countenance, you would look in vain for a more striking figure than Billy’s.</p>
|
||||
<p>There was a brave and conspicuous assemblage in the dining saloon of a noted hostelry where Fashion loves to display her charms. At one table sat Billy McMahan and his wife. Mostly silent they were, but the accessories they enjoyed little needed the endorsement of speech. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McMahan’s diamonds were outshone by few in the room. The waiter bore the costliest brands of wine to their table. In evening dress, with an expression of gloom upon his smooth and massive countenance, you would look in vain for a more striking figure than Billy’s.</p>
|
||||
<p>Four tables away sat alone a tall, slender man, about thirty, with thoughtful, melancholy eyes, a Van Dyke beard and peculiarly white, thin hands. He was dining on filet mignon, dry toast and apollinaris. That man was Cortlandt Van Duyckink, a man worth eighty millions, who inherited and held a sacred seat in the exclusive inner circle of society.</p>
|
||||
<p>Billy McMahan spoke to no one around him, because he knew no one. Van Duyckink kept his eyes on his plate because he knew that every one present was hungry to catch his. He could bestow knighthood and prestige by a nod, and he was chary of creating a too extensive nobility.</p>
|
||||
<p>And then Billy McMahan conceived and accomplished the most startling and audacious act of his life. He rose deliberately and walked over to Cortlandt Van Duyckink’s table and held out his hand.</p>
|
||||
@ -44,14 +44,14 @@
|
||||
<p>Billy walked back to his seat. His shoulder was tingling from the accolade bestowed by royalty. A hundred eyes were now turned upon him in envy and new admiration. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> William Darragh McMahan trembled with ecstasy, so that her diamonds smote the eye almost with pain. And now it was apparent that at many tables there were those who suddenly remembered that they enjoyed <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McMahan’s acquaintance. He saw smiles and bows about him. He became enveloped in the aura of dizzy greatness. His campaign coolness deserted him.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Wine for that gang!” he commanded the waiter, pointing with his finger. “Wine over there. Wine to those three gents by that green bush. Tell ’em it’s on me. D––––n it! Wine for everybody!”</p>
|
||||
<p>The waiter ventured to whisper that it was perhaps inexpedient to carry out the order, in consideration of the dignity of the house and its custom.</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right,” said Billy, “if it’s against the rules. I wonder if ’twould do to send my friend Van Duyckink a bottle? No? Well, it’ll flow all right at the caffy to-night, just the same. It’ll be rubber boots for anybody who comes in there any time up to 2 A. M.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right,” said Billy, “if it’s against the rules. I wonder if ’twould do to send my friend Van Duyckink a bottle? No? Well, it’ll flow all right at the caffy tonight, just the same. It’ll be rubber boots for anybody who comes in there any time up to 2 A. M.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Billy McMahan was happy.</p>
|
||||
<p>He had shaken the hand of Cortlandt Van Duyckink.</p>
|
||||
<hr/>
|
||||
<p>The big pale-gray auto with its shining metal work looked out of place moving slowly among the push carts and trash-heaps on the lower east side. So did Cortlandt Van Duyckink, with his aristocratic face and white, thin hands, as he steered carefully between the groups of ragged, scurrying youngsters in the streets. And so did Miss Constance Schuyler, with her dim, ascetic beauty, seated at his side.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, Cortlandt,” she breathed, “isn’t it sad that human beings have to live in such wretchedness and poverty? And you—how noble it is of you to think of them, to give your time and money to improve their condition!”</p>
|
||||
<p>Van Duyckink turned his solemn eyes upon her.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It is little,” he said, sadly, “that I can do. The question is a large one, and belongs to society. But even individual effort is not thrown away. Look, Constance! On this street I have arranged to build soup kitchens, where no one who is hungry will be turned away. And down this other street are the old buildings that I shall cause to be torn down and there erect others in place of those death-traps of fire and disease.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It is little,” he said, sadly, “that I can do. The question is a large one, and belongs to society. But even individual effort is not thrown away. Look, Constance! On this street I have arranged to build soup kitchens, where no one who is hungry will be turned away. And down this other street are the old buildings that I shall cause to be torn down and there erect others in place of those deathtraps of fire and disease.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Down Delancey slowly crept the pale-gray auto. Away from it toddled coveys of wondering, tangle-haired, barefooted, unwashed children. It stopped before a crazy brick structure, foul and awry.</p>
|
||||
<p>Van Duyckink alighted to examine at a better perspective one of the leaning walls. Down the steps of the building came a young man who seemed to epitomize its degradation, squalor and infelicity—a narrow-chested, pale, unsavory young man, puffing at a cigarette.</p>
|
||||
<p>Obeying a sudden impulse, Van Duyckink stepped out and warmly grasped the hand of what seemed to him a living rebuke.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -19,33 +19,33 @@
|
||||
<p>“What’s that?” I had to ask.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’ll never know till their millennium comes,” says the fiver.</p>
|
||||
<p>Just then a two-dollar bill behind me with a George Washington head, spoke up to the fiver:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Aw, cut out yer kicks. Ain’t lisle thread good enough for yer? If you was under all cotton like I’ve been to-day, and choked up with factory dust till the lady with the cornucopia on me sneezed half a dozen times, you’d have some reason to complain.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Aw, cut out yer kicks. Ain’t lisle thread good enough for yer? If you was under all cotton like I’ve been today, and choked up with factory dust till the lady with the cornucopia on me sneezed half a dozen times, you’d have some reason to complain.”</p>
|
||||
<p>That was the next day after I arrived in New York. I came in a $500 package of tens to a Brooklyn bank from one of its Pennsylvania correspondents—and I haven’t made the acquaintance of any of the five and two spot’s friends’ pocketbooks yet. Silk for mine, every time.</p>
|
||||
<p>I was lucky money. I kept on the move. Sometimes I changed hands twenty times a day. I saw the inside of every business; I fought for my owner’s every pleasure. It seemed that on Saturday nights I never missed being slapped down on a bar. Tens were always slapped down, while ones and twos were slid over to the bartenders folded. I got in the habit of looking for mine, and I managed to soak in a little straight or some spilled Martini or Manhattan whenever I could. Once I got tied up in a great greasy roll of bills in a pushcart peddler’s jeans. I thought I never would get in circulation again, for the future department store owner lived on eight cents’ worth of dog meat and onions a day. But this peddler got into trouble one day on account of having his cart too near a crossing, and I was rescued. I always will feel grateful to the cop that got me. He changed me at a cigar store near the Bowery that was running a crap game in the back room. So it was the Captain of the precinct, after all, that did me the best turn, when he got his. He blew me for wine the next evening in a Broadway restaurant; and I really felt as glad to get back again as an Astor does when he sees the lights of Charing Cross.</p>
|
||||
<p>A tainted ten certainly does get action on Broadway. I was alimony once, and got folded in a little dogskin purse among a lot of dimes. They were bragging about the busy times there were in Ossining whenever three girls got hold of one of them during the ice cream season. But it’s Slow Moving Vehicles Keep to the Right for the little Bok tips when you think of the way we bison plasters refuse to stick to anything during the rush lobster hour.</p>
|
||||
<p>The first I ever heard of tainted money was one night when a good thing with a Van to his name threw me over with some other bills to buy a stack of blues.</p>
|
||||
<p>About midnight a big, easy-going man with a fat face like a monk’s and the eye of a janitor with his wages raised took me and a lot of other notes and rolled us into what is termed a “wad” among the money tainters.</p>
|
||||
<p>About midnight a big, easygoing man with a fat face like a monk’s and the eye of a janitor with his wages raised took me and a lot of other notes and rolled us into what is termed a “wad” among the money tainters.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ticket me for five hundred,” said he to the banker, “and look out for everything, Charlie. I’m going out for a stroll in the glen before the moonlight fades from the brow of the cliff. If anybody finds the roof in their way there’s $60,000 wrapped in a comic supplement in the upper left-hand corner of the safe. Be bold; everywhere be bold, but be not bowled over. ‘Night.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I found myself between two $20 gold certificates. One of ’em says to me:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, old shorthorn, you’re in luck to-night. You’ll see something of life. Old Jack’s going to make the Tenderloin look like a hamburg steak.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, old shorthorn, you’re in luck tonight. You’ll see something of life. Old Jack’s going to make the Tenderloin look like a hamburg steak.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Explain,” says I. “I’m used to joints, but I don’t care for filet mignon with the kind of sauce you serve.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Xcuse me,” said the twenty. “Old Jack is the proprietor of this gambling house. He’s going on a whiz to-night because he offered $50,000 to a church and it refused to accept it because they said his money was tainted.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Xcuse me,” said the twenty. “Old Jack is the proprietor of this gambling house. He’s going on a whiz tonight because he offered $50,000 to a church and it refused to accept it because they said his money was tainted.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“What is a church?” I asked.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, I forgot,” says the twenty, “that I was talking to a tenner. Of course you don’t know. You’re too much to put into the contribution basket, and not enough to buy anything at a bazaar. A church is—a large building in which penwipers and tidies are sold at $20 each.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I don’t care much about chinning with gold certificates. There’s a streak of yellow in ’em. All is not gold that’s quitters.</p>
|
||||
<p>Old Jack certainly was a gild-edged sport. When it came his time to loosen up he never referred the waiter to an actuary.</p>
|
||||
<p>By and by it got around that he was smiting the rock in the wilderness; and all along Broadway things with cold noses and hot gullets fell in on our trail. The third Jungle Book was there waiting for somebody to put covers on it. Old Jack’s money may have had a taint to it, but all the same he had orders for his Camembert piling up on him every minute. First his friends rallied round him; and then the fellows that his friends knew by sight; and then a few of his enemies buried the hatchet; and finally he was buying souvenirs for so many Neapolitan fisher maidens and butterfly octettes that the head waiters were ‘phoning all over town for Julian Mitchell to please come around and get them into some kind of order.</p>
|
||||
<p>At last we floated into an uptown café that I knew by heart. When the hod-carriers’ union in jackets and aprons saw us coming the chief goal kicker called out: “Six—eleven—forty-two—nineteen—twelve” to his men, and they put on nose guards till it was clear whether we meant Port Arthur or Portsmouth. But old Jack wasn’t working for the furniture and glass factories that night. He sat down quiet and sang “Ramble” in a half-hearted way. His feelings had been hurt, so the twenty told me, because his offer to the church had been refused.</p>
|
||||
<p>At last we floated into an uptown café that I knew by heart. When the hod-carriers’ union in jackets and aprons saw us coming the chief goal kicker called out: “Six—eleven—forty-two—nineteen—twelve” to his men, and they put on nose guards till it was clear whether we meant Port Arthur or Portsmouth. But old Jack wasn’t working for the furniture and glass factories that night. He sat down quiet and sang “Ramble” in a halfhearted way. His feelings had been hurt, so the twenty told me, because his offer to the church had been refused.</p>
|
||||
<p>But the wassail went on; and Brady himself couldn’t have hammered the thirst mob into a better imitation of the real penchant for the stuff that you screw out of a bottle with a napkin.</p>
|
||||
<p>Old Jack paid the twenty above me for a round, leaving me on the outside of his roll. He laid the roll on the table and sent for the proprietor.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mike,” says he, “here’s money that the good people have refused. Will it buy of your wares in the name of the devil? They say it’s tainted.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I will,” says Mike, “and I’ll put it in the drawer next to the bills that was paid to the parson’s daughter for kisses at the church fair to build a new parsonage for the parson’s daughter to live in.”</p>
|
||||
<p>At 1 o’clock when the hod-carriers were making ready to close up the front and keep the inside open, a woman slips in the door of the restaurant and comes up to Old Jack’s table. You’ve seen the kind—black shawl, creepy hair, ragged skirt, white face, eyes a cross between Gabriel’s and a sick kitten’s—the kind of woman that’s always on the lookout for an automobile or the mendicancy squad—and she stands there without a word and looks at the money.</p>
|
||||
<p>Old Jack gets up, peels me off the roll and hands me to her with a bow.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Madam,” says he, just like actors I’ve heard, “here is a tainted bill. I am a gambler. This bill came to me to-night from a gentleman’s son. Where he got it I do not know. If you will do me the favor to accept it, it is yours.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Madam,” says he, just like actors I’ve heard, “here is a tainted bill. I am a gambler. This bill came to me tonight from a gentleman’s son. Where he got it I do not know. If you will do me the favor to accept it, it is yours.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The woman took me with a trembling hand.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sir,” said she, “I counted thousands of this issue of bills into packages when they were virgin from the presses. I was a clerk in the Treasury Department. There was an official to whom I owed my position. You say they are tainted now. If you only knew—but I won’t say any more. Thank you with all my heart, sir—thank you—thank you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Where do you suppose that woman carried me almost at a run? To a bakery. Away from Old Jack and a sizzling good time to a bakery. And I get changed, and she does a Sheridan-twenty-miles-away with a dozen rolls and a section of jelly cake as big as a turbine water-wheel. Of course I lost sight of her then, for I was snowed up in the bakery, wondering whether I’d get changed at the drug store the next day in an alum deal or paid over to the cement works.</p>
|
||||
<p>Where do you suppose that woman carried me almost at a run? To a bakery. Away from Old Jack and a sizzling good time to a bakery. And I get changed, and she does a Sheridan-twenty-miles-away with a dozen rolls and a section of jelly cake as big as a turbine waterwheel. Of course I lost sight of her then, for I was snowed up in the bakery, wondering whether I’d get changed at the drug store the next day in an alum deal or paid over to the cement works.</p>
|
||||
<p>A week afterward I butted up against one of the one-dollar bills the baker had given the woman for change.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hallo, E35039669,” says I, “weren’t you in the change for me in a bakery last Saturday night?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yep,” says the solitaire in his free and easy style.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -10,8 +10,8 @@
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Trimmed Lamp</h2>
|
||||
<p>Of course there are two sides to the question. Let us look at the other. We often hear “shop-girls” spoken of. No such persons exist. There are girls who work in shops. They make their living that way. But why turn their occupation into an adjective? Let us be fair. We do not refer to the girls who live on Fifth Avenue as “marriage-girls.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Lou and Nancy were chums. They came to the big city to find work because there was not enough to eat at their homes to go around. Nancy was nineteen; Lou was twenty. Both were pretty, active, country girls who had no ambition to go on the stage.</p>
|
||||
<p>The little cherub that sits up aloft guided them to a cheap and respectable boarding-house. Both found positions and became wage-earners. They remained chums. It is at the end of six months that I would beg you to step forward and be introduced to them. Meddlesome Reader: My Lady friends, Miss Nancy and Miss Lou. While you are shaking hands please take notice—cautiously—of their attire. Yes, cautiously; for they are as quick to resent a stare as a lady in a box at the horse show is.</p>
|
||||
<p>Lou is a piece-work ironer in a hand laundry. She is clothed in a badly-fitting purple dress, and her hat plume is four inches too long; but her ermine muff and scarf cost $25, and its fellow beasts will be ticketed in the windows at $7.98 before the season is over. Her cheeks are pink, and her light blue eyes bright. Contentment radiates from her.</p>
|
||||
<p>The little cherub that sits up aloft guided them to a cheap and respectable boardinghouse. Both found positions and became wage-earners. They remained chums. It is at the end of six months that I would beg you to step forward and be introduced to them. Meddlesome Reader: My Lady friends, Miss Nancy and Miss Lou. While you are shaking hands please take notice—cautiously—of their attire. Yes, cautiously; for they are as quick to resent a stare as a lady in a box at the horse show is.</p>
|
||||
<p>Lou is a piecework ironer in a hand laundry. She is clothed in a badly-fitting purple dress, and her hat plume is four inches too long; but her ermine muff and scarf cost $25, and its fellow beasts will be ticketed in the windows at $7.98 before the season is over. Her cheeks are pink, and her light blue eyes bright. Contentment radiates from her.</p>
|
||||
<p>Nancy you would call a shop-girl—because you have the habit. There is no type; but a perverse generation is always seeking a type; so this is what the type should be. She has the high-ratted pompadour, and the exaggerated straight-front. Her skirt is shoddy, but has the correct flare. No furs protect her against the bitter spring air, but she wears her short broadcloth jacket as jauntily as though it were Persian lamb! On her face and in her eyes, remorseless type-seeker, is the typical shop-girl expression. It is a look of silent but contemptuous revolt against cheated womanhood; of sad prophecy of the vengeance to come. When she laughs her loudest the look is still there. The same look can be seen in the eyes of Russian peasants; and those of us left will see it some day on Gabriel’s face when he comes to blow us up. It is a look that should wither and abash man; but he has been known to smirk at it and offer flowers—with a string tied to them.</p>
|
||||
<p>Now lift your hat and come away, while you receive Lou’s cheery “See you again,” and the sardonic, sweet smile of Nancy that seems, somehow, to miss you and go fluttering like a white moth up over the housetops to the stars.</p>
|
||||
<p>The two waited on the corner for Dan. Dan was Lou’s steady company. Faithful? Well, he was on hand when Mary would have had to hire a dozen subpoena servers to find her lamb.</p>
|
||||
@ -36,18 +36,18 @@
|
||||
<p>I do not suppose that many look upon a great department store as an educational institution. But the one in which Nancy worked was something like that to her. She was surrounded by beautiful things that breathed of taste and refinement. If you live in an atmosphere of luxury, luxury is yours whether your money pays for it, or another’s.</p>
|
||||
<p>The people she served were mostly women whose dress, manners, and position in the social world were quoted as criterions. From them Nancy began to take toll—the best from each according to her view.</p>
|
||||
<p>From one she would copy and practice a gesture, from another an eloquent lifting of an eyebrow, from others, a manner of walking, of carrying a purse, of smiling, of greeting a friend, of addressing “inferiors in station.” From her best beloved model, <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Van Alstyne Fisher, she made requisition for that excellent thing, a soft, low voice as clear as silver and as perfect in articulation as the notes of a thrush. Suffused in the aura of this high social refinement and good breeding, it was impossible for her to escape a deeper effect of it. As good habits are said to be better than good principles, so, perhaps, good manners are better than good habits. The teachings of your parents may not keep alive your New England conscience; but if you sit on a straight-back chair and repeat the words “prisms and pilgrims” forty times the devil will flee from you. And when Nancy spoke in the Van Alstyne Fisher tones she felt the thrill of noblesse oblige to her very bones.</p>
|
||||
<p>There was another source of learning in the great departmental school. Whenever you see three or four shop-girls gather in a bunch and jingle their wire bracelets as an accompaniment to apparently frivolous conversation, do not think that they are there for the purpose of criticizing the way Ethel does her back hair. The meeting may lack the dignity of the deliberative bodies of man; but it has all the importance of the occasion on which Eve and her first daughter first put their heads together to make Adam understand his proper place in the household. It is Woman’s Conference for Common Defense and Exchange of Strategical Theories of Attack and Repulse upon and against the World, which is a Stage, and Man, its Audience who Persists in Throwing Bouquets Thereupon. Woman, the most helpless of the young of any animal—with the fawn’s grace but without its fleetness; with the bird’s beauty but without its power of flight; with the honey-bee’s burden of sweetness but without its—Oh, let’s drop that simile—some of us may have been stung.</p>
|
||||
<p>There was another source of learning in the great departmental school. Whenever you see three or four shop-girls gather in a bunch and jingle their wire bracelets as an accompaniment to apparently frivolous conversation, do not think that they are there for the purpose of criticizing the way Ethel does her back hair. The meeting may lack the dignity of the deliberative bodies of man; but it has all the importance of the occasion on which Eve and her first daughter first put their heads together to make Adam understand his proper place in the household. It is Woman’s Conference for Common Defense and Exchange of Strategical Theories of Attack and Repulse upon and against the World, which is a Stage, and Man, its Audience who Persists in Throwing Bouquets Thereupon. Woman, the most helpless of the young of any animal—with the fawn’s grace but without its fleetness; with the bird’s beauty but without its power of flight; with the honeybee’s burden of sweetness but without its—Oh, let’s drop that simile—some of us may have been stung.</p>
|
||||
<p>During this council of war they pass weapons one to another, and exchange stratagems that each has devised and formulated out of the tactics of life.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I says to ’im,” says Sadie, “ain’t you the fresh thing! Who do you suppose I am, to be addressing such a remark to me? And what do you think he says back to me?”</p>
|
||||
<p>The heads, brown, black, flaxen, red, and yellow bob together; the answer is given; and the parry to the thrust is decided upon, to be used by each thereafter in passages-at-arms with the common enemy, man.</p>
|
||||
<p>Thus Nancy learned the art of defense; and to women successful defense means victory.</p>
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<p>The curriculum of a department store is a wide one. Perhaps no other college could have fitted her as well for her life’s ambition—the drawing of a matrimonial prize.</p>
|
||||
<p>Her station in the store was a favored one. The music room was near enough for her to hear and become familiar with the works of the best composers—at least to acquire the familiarity that passed for appreciation in the social world in which she was vaguely trying to set a tentative and aspiring foot. She absorbed the educating influence of art wares, of costly and dainty fabrics, of adornments that are almost culture to women.</p>
|
||||
<p>The other girls soon became aware of Nancy’s ambition. “Here comes your millionaire, Nancy,” they would call to her whenever any man who looked the rôle approached her counter. It got to be a habit of men, who were hanging about while their women folk were shopping, to stroll over to the handkerchief counter and dawdle over the cambric squares. Nancy’s imitation high-bred air and genuine dainty beauty was what attracted. Many men thus came to display their graces before her. Some of them may have been millionaires; others were certainly no more than their sedulous apes. Nancy learned to discriminate. There was a window at the end of the handkerchief counter; and she could see the rows of vehicles waiting for the shoppers in the street below. She looked and perceived that automobiles differ as well as do their owners.</p>
|
||||
<p>The other girls soon became aware of Nancy’s ambition. “Here comes your millionaire, Nancy,” they would call to her whenever any man who looked the role approached her counter. It got to be a habit of men, who were hanging about while their women folk were shopping, to stroll over to the handkerchief counter and dawdle over the cambric squares. Nancy’s imitation high-bred air and genuine dainty beauty was what attracted. Many men thus came to display their graces before her. Some of them may have been millionaires; others were certainly no more than their sedulous apes. Nancy learned to discriminate. There was a window at the end of the handkerchief counter; and she could see the rows of vehicles waiting for the shoppers in the street below. She looked and perceived that automobiles differ as well as do their owners.</p>
|
||||
<p>Once a fascinating gentleman bought four dozen handkerchiefs, and wooed her across the counter with a King Cophetua air. When he had gone one of the girls said:</p>
|
||||
<p>“What’s wrong, Nance, that you didn’t warm up to that fellow. He looks the swell article, all right, to me.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Him?” said Nancy, with her coolest, sweetest, most impersonal, Van Alstyne Fisher smile; “not for mine. I saw him drive up outside. A 12 H. P. machine and an Irish chauffeur! And you saw what kind of handkerchiefs he bought—silk! And he’s got dactylis on him. Give me the real thing or nothing, if you please.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Two of the most “refined” women in the store—a forelady and a cashier—had a few “swell gentlemen friends” with whom they now and then dined. Once they included Nancy in an invitation. The dinner took place in a spectacular café whose tables are engaged for New Year’s eve a year in advance. There were two “gentlemen friends”—one without any hair on his head—high living ungrew it; and we can prove it—the other a young man whose worth and sophistication he impressed upon you in two convincing ways—he swore that all the wine was corked; and he wore diamond cuff buttons. This young man perceived irresistible excellencies in Nancy. His taste ran to shop-girls; and here was one that added the voice and manners of his high social world to the franker charms of her own caste. So, on the following day, he appeared in the store and made her a serious proposal of marriage over a box of hem-stitched, grass-bleached Irish linens. Nancy declined. A brown pompadour ten feet away had been using her eyes and ears. When the rejected suitor had gone she heaped carboys of upbraidings and horror upon Nancy’s head.</p>
|
||||
<p>Two of the most “refined” women in the store—a forelady and a cashier—had a few “swell gentlemen friends” with whom they now and then dined. Once they included Nancy in an invitation. The dinner took place in a spectacular café whose tables are engaged for New Year’s eve a year in advance. There were two “gentlemen friends”—one without any hair on his head—high living ungrew it; and we can prove it—the other a young man whose worth and sophistication he impressed upon you in two convincing ways—he swore that all the wine was corked; and he wore diamond cuff buttons. This young man perceived irresistible excellencies in Nancy. His taste ran to shop-girls; and here was one that added the voice and manners of his high social world to the franker charms of her own caste. So, on the following day, he appeared in the store and made her a serious proposal of marriage over a box of hemstitched, grass-bleached Irish linens. Nancy declined. A brown pompadour ten feet away had been using her eyes and ears. When the rejected suitor had gone she heaped carboys of upbraidings and horror upon Nancy’s head.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What a terrible little fool you are! That fellow’s a millionaire—he’s a nephew of old Van Skittles himself. And he was talking on the level, too. Have you gone crazy, Nance?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Have I?” said Nancy. “I didn’t take him, did I? He isn’t a millionaire so hard that you could notice it, anyhow. His family only allows him $20,000 a year to spend. The bald-headed fellow was guying him about it the other night at supper.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The brown pompadour came nearer and narrowed her eyes.</p>
|
||||
@ -90,7 +90,7 @@
|
||||
<p>For the first time Nancy quailed before a man. She laid her hand that trembled slightly on Dan’s sleeve.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’ve no right to say such a thing to me, Dan—as if I had anything to do with it!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I didn’t mean it that way,” said Dan, softening. He fumbled in his vest pocket.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve got the tickets for the show to-night,” he said, with a gallant show of lightness. “If you—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve got the tickets for the show tonight,” he said, with a gallant show of lightness. “If you—”</p>
|
||||
<p>Nancy admired pluck whenever she saw it.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ll go with you, Dan,” she said.</p>
|
||||
<p>Three months went by before Nancy saw Lou again.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -12,10 +12,10 @@
|
||||
<p>The big city east of the cranberry bogs has made Thanksgiving Day an institution. The last Thursday in November is the only day in the year on which it recognizes the part of America lying across the ferries. It is the one day that is purely American. Yes, a day of celebration, exclusively American.</p>
|
||||
<p>And now for the story which is to prove to you that we have traditions on this side of the ocean that are becoming older at a much rapider rate than those of England are—thanks to our git-up and enterprise.</p>
|
||||
<p>Stuffy Pete took his seat on the third bench to the right as you enter Union Square from the east, at the walk opposite the fountain. Every Thanksgiving Day for nine years he had taken his seat there promptly at 1 o’clock. For every time he had done so things had happened to him—Charles Dickensy things that swelled his waistcoat above his heart, and equally on the other side.</p>
|
||||
<p>But to-day Stuffy Pete’s appearance at the annual trysting place seemed to have been rather the result of habit than of the yearly hunger which, as the philanthropists seem to think, afflicts the poor at such extended intervals.</p>
|
||||
<p>But today Stuffy Pete’s appearance at the annual trysting place seemed to have been rather the result of habit than of the yearly hunger which, as the philanthropists seem to think, afflicts the poor at such extended intervals.</p>
|
||||
<p>Certainly Pete was not hungry. He had just come from a feast that had left him of his powers barely those of respiration and locomotion. His eyes were like two pale gooseberries firmly imbedded in a swollen and gravy-smeared mask of putty. His breath came in short wheezes; a senatorial roll of adipose tissue denied a fashionable set to his upturned coat collar. Buttons that had been sewed upon his clothes by kind Salvation fingers a week before flew like popcorn, strewing the earth around him. Ragged he was, with a split shirt front open to the wishbone; but the November breeze, carrying fine snowflakes, brought him only a grateful coolness. For Stuffy Pete was overcharged with the caloric produced by a super-bountiful dinner, beginning with oysters and ending with plum pudding, and including (it seemed to him) all the roast turkey and baked potatoes and chicken salad and squash pie and ice cream in the world. Wherefore he sat, gorged, and gazed upon the world with after-dinner contempt.</p>
|
||||
<p>The meal had been an unexpected one. He was passing a red brick mansion near the beginning of Fifth avenue, in which lived two old ladies of ancient family and a reverence for traditions. They even denied the existence of New York, and believed that Thanksgiving Day was declared solely for Washington Square. One of their traditional habits was to station a servant at the postern gate with orders to admit the first hungry wayfarer that came along after the hour of noon had struck, and banquet him to a finish. Stuffy Pete happened to pass by on his way to the park, and the seneschals gathered him in and upheld the custom of the castle.</p>
|
||||
<p>After Stuffy Pete had gazed straight before him for ten minutes he was conscious of a desire for a more varied field of vision. With a tremendous effort he moved his head slowly to the left. And then his eyes bulged out fearfully, and his breath ceased, and the rough-shod ends of his short legs wriggled and rustled on the gravel.</p>
|
||||
<p>After Stuffy Pete had gazed straight before him for ten minutes he was conscious of a desire for a more varied field of vision. With a tremendous effort he moved his head slowly to the left. And then his eyes bulged out fearfully, and his breath ceased, and the roughshod ends of his short legs wriggled and rustled on the gravel.</p>
|
||||
<p>For the Old Gentleman was coming across Fourth avenue toward his bench.</p>
|
||||
<p>Every Thanksgiving Day for nine years the Old Gentleman had come there and found Stuffy Pete on his bench. That was a thing that the Old Gentleman was trying to make a tradition of. Every Thanksgiving Day for nine years he had found Stuffy there, and had led him to a restaurant and watched him eat a big dinner. They do those things in England unconsciously. But this is a young country, and nine years is not so bad. The Old Gentleman was a staunch American patriot, and considered himself a pioneer in American tradition. In order to become picturesque we must keep on doing one thing for a long time without ever letting it get away from us. Something like collecting the weekly dimes in industrial insurance. Or cleaning the streets.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Old Gentleman moved, straight and stately, toward the Institution that he was rearing. Truly, the annual feeding of Stuffy Pete was nothing national in its character, such as the Magna Charta or jam for breakfast was in England. But it was a step. It was almost feudal. It showed, at least, that a Custom was not impossible to New Y—ahem!—America.</p>
|
||||
@ -28,9 +28,9 @@
|
||||
<p>Stuffy Pete looked up at him for a half minute, stewing and helpless in his own self-pity. The Old Gentleman’s eyes were bright with the giving-pleasure. His face was getting more lined each year, but his little black necktie was in as jaunty a bow as ever, and the linen was beautiful and white, and his gray mustache was curled carefully at the ends. And then Stuffy made a noise that sounded like peas bubbling in a pot. Speech was intended; and as the Old Gentleman had heard the sounds nine times before, he rightly construed them into Stuffy’s old formula of acceptance.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Thankee, sir. I’ll go with ye, and much obliged. I’m very hungry, sir.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The coma of repletion had not prevented from entering Stuffy’s mind the conviction that he was the basis of an Institution. His Thanksgiving appetite was not his own; it belonged by all the sacred rights of established custom, if not, by the actual Statute of Limitations, to this kind old gentleman who bad preempted it. True, America is free; but in order to establish tradition some one must be a repetend—a repeating decimal. The heroes are not all heroes of steel and gold. See one here that wielded only weapons of iron, badly silvered, and tin.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Old Gentleman led his annual protege southward to the restaurant, and to the table where the feast had always occurred. They were recognized.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Old Gentleman led his annual protégé southward to the restaurant, and to the table where the feast had always occurred. They were recognized.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Here comes de old guy,” said a waiter, “dat blows dat same bum to a meal every Thanksgiving.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The Old Gentleman sat across the table glowing like a smoked pearl at his corner-stone of future ancient Tradition. The waiters heaped the table with holiday food—and Stuffy, with a sigh that was mistaken for hunger’s expression, raised knife and fork and carved for himself a crown of imperishable bay.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Old Gentleman sat across the table glowing like a smoked pearl at his cornerstone of future ancient Tradition. The waiters heaped the table with holiday food—and Stuffy, with a sigh that was mistaken for hunger’s expression, raised knife and fork and carved for himself a crown of imperishable bay.</p>
|
||||
<p>No more valiant hero ever fought his way through the ranks of an enemy. Turkey, chops, soups, vegetables, pies, disappeared before him as fast as they could be served. Gorged nearly to the uttermost when he entered the restaurant, the smell of food had almost caused him to lose his honor as a gentleman, but he rallied like a true knight. He saw the look of beneficent happiness on the Old Gentleman’s face—a happier look than even the fuchsias and the ornithoptera amphrisius had ever brought to it—and he had not the heart to see it wane.</p>
|
||||
<p>In an hour Stuffy leaned back with a battle won. “Thankee kindly, sir,” he puffed like a leaky steam pipe; “thankee kindly for a hearty meal.” Then he arose heavily with glazed eyes and started toward the kitchen. A waiter turned him about like a top, and pointed him toward the door. The Old Gentleman carefully counted out $1.30 in silver change, leaving three nickels for the waiter.</p>
|
||||
<p>They parted as they did each year at the door, the Old Gentleman going south, Stuffy north.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -8,7 +8,7 @@
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="vanity-and-some-sables" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Vanity and Some Sables</h2>
|
||||
<p>When “Kid” Brady was sent to the rope by Molly McKeever’s blue-black eyes he withdrew from the Stovepipe Gang. So much for the power of a colleen’s blanderin’ tongue and stubborn true-heartedness. If you are a man who read this, may such an influence be sent you before 2 o’clock to-morrow; if you are a woman, may your Pomeranian greet you this morning with a cold nose—a sign of doghealth and your happiness.</p>
|
||||
<p>When “Kid” Brady was sent to the rope by Molly McKeever’s blue-black eyes he withdrew from the Stovepipe Gang. So much for the power of a colleen’s blanderin’ tongue and stubborn true-heartedness. If you are a man who read this, may such an influence be sent you before 2 o’clock tomorrow; if you are a woman, may your Pomeranian greet you this morning with a cold nose—a sign of doghealth and your happiness.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Stovepipe Gang borrowed its name from a sub-district of the city called the “Stovepipe,” which is a narrow and natural extension of the familiar district known as “Hell’s Kitchen.” The “Stovepipe” strip of town runs along Eleventh and Twelfth avenues on the river, and bends a hard and sooty elbow around little, lost homeless DeWitt Clinton park. Consider that a stovepipe is an important factor in any kitchen and the situation is analyzed. The chefs in “Hell’s Kitchen” are many, and the “Stovepipe” gang, wears the cordon blue.</p>
|
||||
<p>The members of this unchartered but widely known brotherhood appeared to pass their time on street corners arrayed like the lilies of the conservatory and busy with nail files and penknives. Thus displayed as a guarantee of good faith, they carried on an innocuous conversation in a 200-word vocabulary, to the casual observer as innocent and immaterial as that heard in clubs seven blocks to the east.</p>
|
||||
<p>But off exhibition the “Stovepipes” were not mere street corner ornaments addicted to posing and manicuring. Their serious occupation was the separating of citizens from their coin and valuables. Preferably this was done by weird and singular tricks without noise or bloodshed; but whenever the citizen honored by their attentions refused to impoverish himself gracefully his objections came to be spread finally upon some police station blotter or hospital register.</p>
|
||||
@ -58,7 +58,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Molly, with anguish in her face, hung upon the Kid’s arm.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, Kiddy, you’ve broke my heart,” she said. “I was so proud of you—and now they’ll do you—and where’s our happiness gone?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Go home,” said the Kid, wildly. “Come on, Ransom—take the furs. Let’s get away from here. Wait a minute—I’ve a good mind to—no, I’ll be d–––– if I can do it—run along, Moll—I’m ready, Ransom.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Around the corner of a lumber-yard came Policeman Kohen on his way to his beat along the river. The detective signed to him for assistance. Kohen joined the group. Ransom explained.</p>
|
||||
<p>Around the corner of a lumberyard came Policeman Kohen on his way to his beat along the river. The detective signed to him for assistance. Kohen joined the group. Ransom explained.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sure,” said Kohen. “I hear about those saples dat vas stole. You say you have dem here?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Policeman Kohen took the end of Molly’s late scarf in his hands and looked at it closely.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Once,” he said, “I sold furs in Sixth avenue. Yes, dese are saples. Dey come from Alaska. Dis scarf is vort $12 and dis muff—”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
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