Mammon and the Archer
Old Anthony Rockwall, retired manufacturer and proprietor of Rockwall’s Eureka Soap, looked out the library window of his Fifth Avenue mansion and grinned. His neighbour to the right—the aristocratic clubman, G. Van Schuylight Suffolk-Jones—came out to his waiting motorcar, wrinkling a contumelious nostril, as usual, at the Italian renaissance sculpture of the soap palace’s front elevation.
-“Stuck-up old statuette of nothing doing!” commented the ex-Soap King. “The Eden Musee’ll get that old frozen Nesselrode yet if he don’t watch out. I’ll have this house painted red, white, and blue next summer and see if that’ll make his Dutch nose turn up any higher.”
+“Stuck-up old statuette of nothing doing!” commented the ex-Soap King. “The Eden Musée’ll get that old frozen Nesselrode yet if he don’t watch out. I’ll have this house painted red, white, and blue next summer and see if that’ll make his Dutch nose turn up any higher.”
And then Anthony Rockwall, who never cared for bells, went to the door of his library and shouted “Mike!” in the same voice that had once chipped off pieces of the welkin on the Kansas prairies.
“Tell my son,” said Anthony to the answering menial, “to come in here before he leaves the house.”
When young Rockwall entered the library the old man laid aside his newspaper, looked at him with a kindly grimness on his big, smooth, ruddy countenance, rumpled his mop of white hair with one hand and rattled the keys in his pocket with the other.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/new-york-by-camp-fire-light.xhtml b/src/epub/text/new-york-by-camp-fire-light.xhtml index 87c8a11..3aa30c9 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/new-york-by-camp-fire-light.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/new-york-by-camp-fire-light.xhtml @@ -30,7 +30,7 @@Bud ceased his reminiscences. And then someone asked him what he considered the most striking and prominent trait of New Yorkers.
“The most visible and peculiar trait of New York folks,” answered Bud, “is New York. Most of ’em has New York on the brain. They have heard of other places, such as Waco, and Paris, and Hot Springs, and London; but they don’t believe in ’em. They think that town is all Merino. Now to show you how much they care for their village I’ll tell you about one of ’em that strayed out as far as the Triangle B while I was working there.
“This New Yorker come out there looking for a job on the ranch. He said he was a good horseback rider, and there was pieces of tanbark hanging on his clothes yet from his riding school.
-“Well, for a while they put him to keeping books in the ranch store, for he was a devil at figures. But he got tired of that, and asked for something more in the line of activity. The boys on the ranch liked him all right, but he made us tired shouting New York all the time. Every night he’d tell us about East River and J. P. Morgan and the Eden Musee and Hetty Green and Central Park till we used to throw tin plates and branding irons at him.
+“Well, for a while they put him to keeping books in the ranch store, for he was a devil at figures. But he got tired of that, and asked for something more in the line of activity. The boys on the ranch liked him all right, but he made us tired shouting New York all the time. Every night he’d tell us about East River and J. P. Morgan and the Eden Musée and Hetty Green and Central Park till we used to throw tin plates and branding irons at him.
“One day this chap gets on a pitching pony, and the pony kind of sidled up his back and went to eating grass while the New Yorker was coming down.
“He come down on his head on a chunk of mesquite wood, and he didn’t show any designs toward getting up again. We laid him out in a tent, and he begun to look pretty dead. So Gideon Peas saddles up and burns the wind for old Doc Sleeper’s residence in Dogtown, thirty miles away.
“The doctor comes over and he investigates the patient.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/seats-of-the-haughty.xhtml b/src/epub/text/seats-of-the-haughty.xhtml index 72b3496..9a66fdb 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/seats-of-the-haughty.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/seats-of-the-haughty.xhtml @@ -42,7 +42,7 @@“We stopped in San Antonio long enough for Solly to buy some clothes, and eight rounds of drinks for the guests and employees of the Menger Hotel, and order four Mexican saddles with silver trimmings and white Angora suaderos to be shipped down to the ranch. From there we made a big jump to St. Louis. We got there in time for dinner; and I put our thumbprints on the register of the most expensive hotel in the city.
“ ‘Now,’ says I to Solly, with a wink at myself, ‘here’s the first dinner-station we’ve struck where we can get a real good plate of beans.’ And while he was up in his room trying to draw water out of the gas-pipe, I got one finger in the buttonhole of the head waiter’s Tuxedo, drew him apart, inserted a two-dollar bill, and closed him up again.
“ ‘Frankoyse,’ says I, ‘I have a pal here for dinner that’s been subsisting for years on cereals and short stogies. You see the chef and order a dinner for us such as you serve to Dave Francis and the general passenger agent of the Iron Mountain when they eat here. We’ve got more than Bernhardt’s tent full of money; and we want the nose-bags crammed with all the Chief Deveries de cuisine. Object is no expense. Now, show us.’
-“At six o’clock me and Solly sat down to dinner. Spread! There’s nothing been seen like it since the Cambon snack. It was all served at once. The chef called it dinnay à la poker. It’s a famous thing among the gormands of the West. The dinner comes in threes of a kind. There was guinea-fowls, guinea-pigs, and Guinness’s stout; roast veal, mock turtle soup, and chicken pate; shad-roe, caviar, and tapioca; canvasback duck, canvasback ham, and cottontail rabbit; Philadelphia capon, fried snails, and sloe-gin—and so on, in threes. The idea was that you eat nearly all you can of them, and then the waiter takes away the discard and gives you pears to fill on.
+“At six o’clock me and Solly sat down to dinner. Spread! There’s nothing been seen like it since the Cambon snack. It was all served at once. The chef called it dinnay à la poker. It’s a famous thing among the gormands of the West. The dinner comes in threes of a kind. There was guinea-fowls, guinea-pigs, and Guinness’s stout; roast veal, mock turtle soup, and chicken pâté; shad-roe, caviar, and tapioca; canvasback duck, canvasback ham, and cottontail rabbit; Philadelphia capon, fried snails, and sloe-gin—and so on, in threes. The idea was that you eat nearly all you can of them, and then the waiter takes away the discard and gives you pears to fill on.
“I was sure Solly would be tickled to death with these hands, after the bobtail flushes he’d been eating on the ranch; and I was a little anxious that he should, for I didn’t remember his having honoured my efforts with a smile since we left Atascosa City.
“We were in the main dining-room, and there was a fine-dressed crowd there, all talking loud and enjoyable about the two St. Louis topics, the water supply and the colour line. They mix the two subjects so fast that strangers often think they are discussing watercolours; and that has given the old town something of a rep as an art centre. And over in the corner was a fine brass band playing; and now, thinks I, Solly will become conscious of the spiritual oats of life nourishing and exhilarating his system. But nong, mong frang.
“He gazed across the table at me. There was four square yards of it, looking like the path of a cyclone that has wandered through a stock-kard, a poultry-farm, a vegetable-garden, and an Irish linen mill. Solly gets up and comes around to me.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-assessor-of-success.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-assessor-of-success.xhtml index f585645..80be6d0 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-assessor-of-success.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-assessor-of-success.xhtml @@ -36,10 +36,10 @@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.
“Why, no,” said Morley, who seldom held conversation with anyone. “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?”
“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—”
-“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.”
+“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, François.”
“If yez t’inks it’s on de bum,” said the waiter, “Oi’ll—”
Morley lifted his hand in protest—slightly martyred protest.
-“It will do,” he said, magnanimously. “And now, green Chartreuse, frappe and a demitasse.”
+“It will do,” he said, magnanimously. “And now, green Chartreuse, frappé and a demitasse.”
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.
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.
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.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-caballeros-way.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-caballeros-way.xhtml index a513470..f0701c2 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-caballeros-way.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-caballeros-way.xhtml @@ -70,7 +70,7 @@The Kid kissed her affectionately.
“Not if the court knows itself do I let a lady stake my horse for me,” said he. “But if you’ll run in, chica, and throw a pot of coffee together while I attend to the caballo, I’ll be a good deal obliged.”
Besides his marksmanship the Kid had another attribute for which he admired himself greatly. He was muy caballero, as the Mexicans express it, where the ladies were concerned. For them he had always gentle words and consideration. He could not have spoken a harsh word to a woman. He might ruthlessly slay their husbands and brothers, but he could not have laid the weight of a finger in anger upon a woman. Wherefore many of that interesting division of humanity who had come under the spell of his politeness declared their disbelief in the stories circulated about Mr. Kid. One shouldn’t believe everything one heard, they said. When confronted by their indignant menfolk with proof of the caballero’s deeds of infamy, they said maybe he had been driven to it, and that he knew how to treat a lady, anyhow.
-Considering this extremely courteous idiosyncrasy of the Kid and the pride he took in it, one can perceive that the solution of the problem that was presented to him by what he saw and heard from his hiding-glace in the pear that afternoon (at least as to one of the actors) must have been obscured by difficulties. And yet one could not think of the Kid overlooking little matters of that kind.
+Considering this extremely courteous idiosyncrasy of the Kid and the pride he took in it, one can perceive that the solution of the problem that was presented to him by what he saw and heard from his hiding-place in the pear that afternoon (at least as to one of the actors) must have been obscured by difficulties. And yet one could not think of the Kid overlooking little matters of that kind.
At the end of the short twilight they gathered around a supper of frijoles, goat steaks, canned peaches, and coffee, by the light of a lantern in the jacal. Afterward, the ancestor, his flock corralled, smoked a cigarette and became a mummy in a grey blanket. Tonia washed the few dishes while the Kid dried them with the flour-sacking towel. Her eyes shone; she chatted volubly of the inconsequent happenings of her small world since the Kid’s last visit; it was as all his other homecomings had been.
Then outside Tonia swung in a grass hammock with her guitar and sang sad canciones de amor.
“Do you love me just the same, old girl?” asked the Kid, hunting for his cigarette papers.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-country-of-elusion.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-country-of-elusion.xhtml index dfed680..c79d6e8 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-country-of-elusion.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-country-of-elusion.xhtml @@ -11,7 +11,7 @@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 unmappable trail into that mooted country, Bohemia.
Grainger, subeditor of Doc’s Magazine, closed his roll-top desk, put on his hat, walked into the hall, punched the “down” button, and waited for the elevator.
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.
-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.
+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 exposé. Consequently his mind was in a whirl of icebergs, Maupassant, and trichinosis.
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.
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.
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, Mr. Grainger was to come up immediately.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-elusive-tenderloin.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-elusive-tenderloin.xhtml index 4a2621f..46f2882 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-elusive-tenderloin.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-elusive-tenderloin.xhtml @@ -11,7 +11,7 @@There is no Tenderloin. There never was. That is, none that you could run a tapeline around. The word really implies a condition or a quality—much as you would say “reprehensibility” or “cold feet.”
Metes and bounds have been assigned to it. I know. Realists have prated of “from Fourteenth to Forty-second,” and “as far west as” etc., but the larger meaning of the word remains with me.
Confirmation of my interpretation of the famous slaughterhouse noun-adjective came to me from Bill Jeremy, a friend out of the West. Bill lives in a town on the edge of the prairie-dog country. At times Bill yearns to maintain the tradition that “ginger shall be hot i’ the mouth.” He brought his last yearning to New York. And it devolved upon me. You know what that means.
-I took Bill to see the cavity that has been drilled in the city’s tooth, soon to be filled with the new gold subway; and the Eden Musee, and the Flatiron and the crack in the front windowpane of Russell Sage’s house, and the old man that threw the stone that did it when he was a boy—and I asked Bill what he thought of New York.
+I took Bill to see the cavity that has been drilled in the city’s tooth, soon to be filled with the new gold subway; and the Eden Musée, and the Flatiron and the crack in the front windowpane of Russell Sage’s house, and the old man that threw the stone that did it when he was a boy—and I asked Bill what he thought of New York.
“You may mean well,” said Bill, with gentle reproach, “but you’ve got in a groove. You thought I was underwear buyer for the Blue-Front Dry Goods Emporium of Pine Knob, NC, didn’t you? Or the junior partner of Slowcoach & Green, of Geegeewocomee, State of Goobers, come on for the fall stock of jeans, lingerie, and whetstones? Don’t treat me like a business friend.
“Do you suppose the wild, insensate longing I feel for metropolitan gayety is going to be satisfied by waxworks and razorback architecture? Now you get out the old envelope with the itinerary on it, and cross out the Brooklyn Bridge and the cab that Morgan rides home in and the remaining objects of interest, for I am going it alone. The Tenderloin, well done, is what I shall admire for to see.”
Bill Jeremy has a way of doing as he says he will. So I did not urge upon him the bridge, or Carnegie Hall or the great Tomb—wonders that the unselfish New Yorker reserves, unseen, for his friends.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-memento.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-memento.xhtml index b409fd0..ea1fab8 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-memento.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-memento.xhtml @@ -8,7 +8,7 @@The Memento
-Miss Lynnette D’Armande turned her back on Broadway. This was but tit for tat, because Broadway had often done the same thing to Miss D’Armande. Still, the “tats” seemed to have it, for the ex-leading lady of the “Reaping the Whirlwind” company had everything to ask of Broadway, while there was no vice-versâ.
+Miss Lynnette D’Armande turned her back on Broadway. This was but tit for tat, because Broadway had often done the same thing to Miss D’Armande. Still, the “tats” seemed to have it, for the ex-leading lady of the “Reaping the Whirlwind” company had everything to ask of Broadway, while there was no vice-versa.
So Miss Lynnette D’Armande turned the back of her chair to her window that overlooked Broadway, and sat down to stitch in time the lisle-thread heel of a black silk stocking. The tumult and glitter of the roaring Broadway beneath her window had no charm for her; what she greatly desired was the stifling air of a dressing-room on that fairyland street and the roar of an audience gathered in that capricious quarter. In the meantime, those stockings must not be neglected. Silk does wear out so, but—after all, isn’t it just the only goods there is?
The Hotel Thalia looks on Broadway as Marathon looks on the sea. It stands like a gloomy cliff above the whirlpool where the tides of two great thoroughfares clash. Here the player-bands gather at the end of their wanderings, to loosen the buskin and dust the sock. Thick in the streets around it are booking-offices, theatres, agents, schools, and the lobster-palaces to which those thorny paths lead.
Wandering through the eccentric halls of the dim and fusty Thalia, you seem to have found yourself in some great ark or caravan about to sail, or fly, or roll away on wheels. About the house lingers a sense of unrest, of expectation, of transientness, even of anxiety and apprehension. The halls are a labyrinth. Without a guide, you wander like a lost soul in a Sam Loyd puzzle.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-phonograph-and-the-graft.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-phonograph-and-the-graft.xhtml index bb2183a..76a9b32 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-phonograph-and-the-graft.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-phonograph-and-the-graft.xhtml @@ -14,7 +14,7 @@“Henry and me met at Texarkana, and figured out this phonograph scheme. He had $360 which came to him out of a land allotment in the reservation. I had run down from Little Rock on account of a distressful scene I had witnessed on the street there. A man stood on a box and passed around some gold watches, screw case, stem-winders, Elgin movement, very elegant. Twenty bucks they cost you over the counter. At three dollars the crowd fought for the tickers. The man happened to find a valise full of them handy, and he passed them out like putting hot biscuits on a plate. The backs were hard to unscrew, but the crowd put its ear to the case, and they ticked mollifying and agreeable. Three of these watches were genuine tickers; the rest were only kickers. Hey? Why, empty cases with one of them horny black bugs that fly around electric lights in ’em. Them bugs kick off minutes and seconds industrious and beautiful. So, this man I was speaking of cleaned up $288; and then he went away, because he knew that when it came time to wind watches in Little Rock an entomologist would be needed, and he wasn’t one.
“So, as I say, Henry had $360, and I had $288. The idea of introducing the phonograph to South America was Henry’s; but I took to it freely, being fond of machinery of all kinds.
“ ‘The Latin races,’ says Henry, explaining easy in the idioms he learned at college, ‘are peculiarly adapted to be victims of the phonograph. They have the artistic temperament. They yearn for music and color and gaiety. They give wampum to the hand-organ man and the four-legged chicken in the tent when they’re months behind with the grocery and the breadfruit tree.’
-“ ‘Then,’ says I, ‘we’ll export canned music to the Latins; but I’m mindful of Mr. Julius Caesar’s account of ’em where he says: “Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est”; which is the same as to say, “We will need all of our gall in devising means to tree them parties.” ’
+“ ‘Then,’ says I, ‘we’ll export canned music to the Latins; but I’m mindful of Mr. Julius Caesar’s account of ’em where he says: “Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est”; which is the same as to say, “We will need all of our gall in devising means to tree them parties.” ’
“I hated to make a show of education; but I was disinclined to be overdone in syntax by a mere Indian, a member of a race to which we owe nothing except the land on which the United States is situated.
“We bought a fine phonograph in Texarkana—one of the best make—and half a trunkful of records. We packed up, and took the T. and P. for New Orleans. From that celebrated centre of molasses and disfranchised coon songs we took a steamer for South America.
“We landed at Solitas, forty miles up the coast from here. ’Twas a palatable enough place to look at. The houses were clean and white; and to look at ’em stuck around among the scenery they reminded you of hard-boiled eggs served with lettuce. There was a block of skyscraper mountains in the suburbs; and they kept pretty quiet, like they had crept up there and were watching the town. And the sea was remarking ‘Sh-sh-sh’ on the beach; and now and then a ripe coconut would drop kerblip in the sand; and that was all there was doing. Yes, I judge that town was considerably on the quiet. I judge that after Gabriel quits blowing his horn, and the car starts, with Philadelphia swinging to the last strap, and Pine Gully, Arkansas, hanging onto the rear step, this town of Solitas will wake up and ask if anybody spoke.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-proem.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-proem.xhtml index b1c83fe..f0499bc 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-proem.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-proem.xhtml @@ -31,7 +31,7 @@Of the legion of men who had been at her feet it was said that but one was so fortunate as to engage her fancy. To President Miraflores, the brilliant but unstable ruler of Anchuria, she yielded the key to her resolute heart. How, then, do we find her (as the Coralians would have told you) the wife of Frank Goodwin, and happily living a life of dull and dreamy inaction?
The underlying threads reach far, stretching across the sea. Following them out it will be made plain why “Shorty” O’Day, of the Columbia Detective Agency, resigned his position. And, for a lighter pastime, it shall be a duty and a pleasing sport to wander with Momus beneath the tropic stars where Melpomene once stalked austere. Now to cause laughter to echo from those lavish jungles and frowning crags where formerly rang the cries of pirates’ victims; to lay aside pike and cutlass and attack with quip and jollity; to draw one saving titter of mirth from the rusty casque of Romance—this were pleasant to do in the shade of the lemon-trees on that coast that is curved like lips set for smiling.
For there are yet tales of the Spanish Main. That segment of continent washed by the tempestuous Caribbean, and presenting to the sea a formidable border of tropical jungle topped by the overweening Cordilleras, is still begirt by mystery and romance. In past times buccaneers and revolutionists roused the echoes of its cliffs, and the condor wheeled perpetually above where, in the green groves, they made food for him with their matchlocks and toledos. Taken and retaken by sea rovers, by adverse powers and by sudden uprising of rebellious factions, the historic 300 miles of adventurous coast has scarcely known for hundreds of years whom rightly to call its master. Pizarro, Balboa, Sir Francis Drake, and Bolivar did what they could to make it a part of Christendom. Sir John Morgan, Lafitte and other eminent swashbucklers bombarded and pounded it in the name of Abaddon.
-The game still goes on. The guns of the rovers are silenced; but the tintype man, the enlarged photograph brigand, the kodaking tourist and the scouts of the gentle brigade of fakirs have found it out, and carry on the work. The hucksters of Germany, France, and Sicily now bag its small change across their counters. Gentleman adventurers throng the waiting-rooms of its rulers with proposals for railways and concessions. The little opéra-bouffe nations play at government and intrigue until some day a big, silent gunboat glides into the offing and warns them not to break their toys. And with these changes comes also the small adventurer, with empty pockets to fill, light of heart, busy-brained—the modern fairy prince, bearing an alarm clock with which, more surely than by the sentimental kiss, to awaken the beautiful tropics from their centuries’ sleep. Generally he wears a shamrock, which he matches pridefully against the extravagant palms; and it is he who has driven Melpomene to the wings, and set Comedy to dancing before the footlights of the Southern Cross.
+The game still goes on. The guns of the rovers are silenced; but the tintype man, the enlarged photograph brigand, the kodaking tourist and the scouts of the gentle brigade of fakirs have found it out, and carry on the work. The hucksters of Germany, France, and Sicily now bag its small change across their counters. Gentleman adventurers throng the waiting-rooms of its rulers with proposals for railways and concessions. The little opéra-bouffe nations play at government and intrigue until some day a big, silent gunboat glides into the offing and warns them not to break their toys. And with these changes comes also the small adventurer, with empty pockets to fill, light of heart, busy-brained—the modern fairy prince, bearing an alarm clock with which, more surely than by the sentimental kiss, to awaken the beautiful tropics from their centuries’ sleep. Generally he wears a shamrock, which he matches pridefully against the extravagant palms; and it is he who has driven Melpomene to the wings, and set Comedy to dancing before the footlights of the Southern Cross.
So, there is a little tale to tell of many things. Perhaps to the promiscuous ear of the Walrus it shall come with most avail; for in it there are indeed shoes and ships and sealing-wax and cabbage-palms and presidents instead of kings.
Add to these a little love and counterplotting, and scatter everywhere throughout the maze a trail of tropical dollars—dollars warmed no more by the torrid sun than by the hot palms of the scouts of Fortune—and, after all, here seems to be Life, itself, with talk enough to weary the most garrulous of Walruses.
“You first scour the kettles,” said Mr. Jack, leaning toward him excitedly, “to cook the beans in the morning, and you lie down on a blanket and keep quite still. Then they come out and dance for you. You would go out and dance with them but you are chained every night to the centre pole of the hut. You believe the mountains dance, don’t you, Charlie?”
“I contradict no traveller’s tales,” said Grandemont, with a smile.
Mr. Jack laughed loudly. He dropped his voice to a confidential whisper.
-“You are a fool to believe it,” he went on. “They don’t really dance. It’s the fever in your head. It’s the hard work and the bad water that does it. You are sick for weeks and there is no medicine. The fever comes on every evening, and then you are as strong as two men. One night the compania are lying drunk with mescal. They have brought back sacks of silver dollars from a ride, and they drink to celebrate. In the night you file the chain in two and go down the mountain. You walk for miles—hundreds of them. By and by the mountains are all gone, and you come to the prairies. They do not dance at night; they are merciful, and you sleep. Then you come to the river, and it says things to you. You follow it down, down, but you can’t find what you are looking for.”
+“You are a fool to believe it,” he went on. “They don’t really dance. It’s the fever in your head. It’s the hard work and the bad water that does it. You are sick for weeks and there is no medicine. The fever comes on every evening, and then you are as strong as two men. One night the compañia are lying drunk with mescal. They have brought back sacks of silver dollars from a ride, and they drink to celebrate. In the night you file the chain in two and go down the mountain. You walk for miles—hundreds of them. By and by the mountains are all gone, and you come to the prairies. They do not dance at night; they are merciful, and you sleep. Then you come to the river, and it says things to you. You follow it down, down, but you can’t find what you are looking for.”
Mr. Jack leaned back in his chair, and his eyes slowly closed. The food and wine had steeped him in a deep calm. The tense strain had been smoothed from his face. The languor of repletion was claiming him. Drowsily he spoke again.
“It’s bad manners—I know—to go to sleep—at table—but—that was—such a good dinner—Grande, old fellow.”
Grande! The owner of the name started and set down his glass. How should this wretched tatterdemalion whom he had invited, Caliph-like, to sit at his feet know his name?
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-vitagraphoscope.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-vitagraphoscope.xhtml index 81c59ac..4fb7dd8 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-vitagraphoscope.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-vitagraphoscope.xhtml @@ -8,7 +8,7 @@The Vitagraphoscope
-Vaudeville is intrinsically episodic and discontinuous. Its audiences do not demand dénoûements. Sufficient unto each “turn” is the evil thereof. No one cares how many romances the singing comédienne may have had if she can capably sustain the limelight and a high note or two. The audiences reck not if the performing dogs get to the pound the moment they have jumped through their last hoop. They do not desire bulletins about the possible injuries received by the comic bicyclist who retires headfirst from the stage in a crash of (property) chinaware. Neither do they consider that their seat coupons entitle them to be instructed whether or no there is a sentiment between the lady solo banjoist and the Irish monologist.
+Vaudeville is intrinsically episodic and discontinuous. Its audiences do not demand dénoûements. Sufficient unto each “turn” is the evil thereof. No one cares how many romances the singing comedienne may have had if she can capably sustain the limelight and a high note or two. The audiences reck not if the performing dogs get to the pound the moment they have jumped through their last hoop. They do not desire bulletins about the possible injuries received by the comic bicyclist who retires headfirst from the stage in a crash of (property) chinaware. Neither do they consider that their seat coupons entitle them to be instructed whether or no there is a sentiment between the lady solo banjoist and the Irish monologist.
Therefore let us have no lifting of the curtain upon a tableau of the united lovers, backgrounded by defeated villainy and derogated by the comic, osculating maid and butler, thrown in as a sop to the Cerberi of the fifty-cent seats.
But our programme ends with a brief “turn” or two; and then to the exits. Whoever sits the show out may find, if he will, the slender thread that binds together, though ever so slightly, the story that, perhaps, only the Walrus will understand.
Extracts from a letter from the first vice-president of the Republic Insurance Company, of New York City, to Frank Goodwin, of Coralio, Republic of Anchuria.