[StrictlyBus] Semanticate
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<head>
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<title>Chapter 23</title>
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<title/>
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<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-23" epub:type="chapter">
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<section id="" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>“WHAT YOU WANT”</h2>
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<p>Night had fallen on that great and beautiful city known as Bagdad-on-the-Subway. And with the night came the enchanted glamour that belongs not to Arabia alone. In different masquerade the streets, bazaars and walled houses of the occidental city of romance were filled with the same kind of folk that so much interested our interesting old friend, the late Mr. H. A. Rashid. They wore clothes eleven hundred years nearer to the latest styles than H. A. saw in old Bagdad; but they were about the same people underneath. With the eye of faith, you could have seen the Little Hunchback, Sinbad the Sailor, Fitbad the Tailor, the Beautiful Persian, the one-eyed Calenders, Ali Baba and Forty Robbers on every block, and the Barber and his Six Brothers, and all the old Arabian gang easily.</p>
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<p>Night had fallen on that great and beautiful city known as Bagdad-on-the-Subway. And with the night came the enchanted glamour that belongs not to Arabia alone. In different masquerade the streets, bazaars and walled houses of the occidental city of romance were filled with the same kind of folk that so much interested our interesting old friend, the late <abbr>Mr.</abbr> H. A. Rashid. They wore clothes eleven hundred years nearer to the latest styles than H. A. saw in old Bagdad; but they were about the same people underneath. With the eye of faith, you could have seen the Little Hunchback, Sinbad the Sailor, Fitbad the Tailor, the Beautiful Persian, the one-eyed Calenders, Ali Baba and Forty Robbers on every block, and the Barber and his Six Brothers, and all the old Arabian gang easily.</p>
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<p>But let us revenue to our lamb chops.</p>
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<p>Old Tom Crowley was a caliph. He had $42,000,000 in preferred stocks and bonds with solid gold edges. In these times, to be called a caliph you must have money. The old-style caliph business as conducted by Mr. Rashid is not safe. If you hold up a person nowadays in a bazaar or a Turkish bath or a side street, and inquire into his private and personal affairs, the police court’ll get you.</p>
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<p>Old Tom Crowley was a caliph. He had $42,000,000 in preferred stocks and bonds with solid gold edges. In these times, to be called a caliph you must have money. The old-style caliph business as conducted by <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Rashid is not safe. If you hold up a person nowadays in a bazaar or a Turkish bath or a side street, and inquire into his private and personal affairs, the police court’ll get you.</p>
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<p>Old Tom was tired of clubs, theatres, dinners, friends, music, money and everything. That’s what makes a caliph—you must get to despise everything that money can buy, and then go out and try to want something that you can’t pay for.</p>
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<p>“I’ll take a little trot around town all by myself,” thought old Tom, “and try if I can stir up anything new. Let’s see—it seems I’ve read about a king or a Cardiff giant or something in old times who used to go about with false whiskers on, making Persian dates with folks he hadn’t been introduced to. That don’t listen like a bad idea. I certainly have got a case of humdrumness and fatigue on for the ones I do know. That old Cardiff used to pick up cases of trouble as he ran upon ’em and give ’em gold—sequins, I think it was—and make ’em marry or got ’em good Government jobs. Now, I’d like something of that sort. My money is as good as his was even if the magazines do ask me every month where I got it. Yes, I guess I’ll do a little Cardiff business to-night, and see how it goes.”</p>
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<p>Plainly dressed, old Tom Crowley left his Madison Avenue palace, and walked westward and then south. As he stepped to the sidewalk, Fate, who holds the ends of the strings in the central offices of all the enchanted cities pulled a thread, and a young man twenty blocks away looked at a wall clock, and then put on his coat.</p>
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<p>James Turner worked in one of those little hat-cleaning establishments on Sixth Avenue in which a fire alarm rings when you push the door open, and where they clean your hat while you wait—two days. James stood all day at an electric machine that turned hats around faster than the best brands of champagne ever could have done. Overlooking your mild impertinence in feeling a curiosity about the personal appearance of a stranger, I will give you a modified description of him. Weight, 118; complexion, hair and brain, light; height, five feet six; age, about twenty-three; dressed in a $10 suit of greenish-blue serge; pockets containing two keys and sixty-three cents in change.</p>
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<p>But do not misconjecture because this description sounds like a General Alarm that James was either lost or a dead one.</p>
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<p>
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<i>Allons!</i>
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</p>
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<i xml:lang="fr">Allons!</i>
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</p>
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<p>James stood all day at his work. His feet were tender and extremely susceptible to impositions being put upon or below them. All day long they burned and smarted, causing him much suffering and inconvenience. But he was earning twelve dollars per week, which he needed to support his feet whether his feet would support him or not.</p>
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<p>James Turner had his own conception of what happiness was, just as you and I have ours. Your delight is to gad about the world in yachts and motor-cars and to hurl ducats at wild fowl. Mine is to smoke a pipe at evenfall and watch a badger, a rattlesnake, and an owl go into their common prairie home one by one.</p>
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<p>James Turner’s idea of bliss was different; but it was his. He would go directly to his boarding-house when his day’s work was done. After his supper of small steak, Bessemer potatoes, stooed (not stewed) apples and infusion of chicory, he would ascend to his fifth-floor-back hall room. Then he would take off his shoes and socks, place the soles of his burning feet against the cold bars of his iron bed, and read Clark Russell’s sea yarns. The delicious relief of the cool metal applied to his smarting soles was his nightly joy. His favorite novels never palled upon him; the sea and the adventures of its navigators were his sole intellectual passion. No millionaire was ever happier than James Turner taking his ease.</p>
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<head>
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<title>Chapter 15</title>
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<title>A Bird of Bagdad</title>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-15" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>A BIRD OF BAGDAD</h2>
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<section id="a-bird-of-bagdad" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2 epub:type="title">A Bird of Bagdad</h2>
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<p>Without a doubt much of the spirit and genius of the Caliph Harun Al Rashid descended to the Margrave August Michael von Paulsen Quigg.</p>
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<p>Quigg’s restaurant is in Fourth Avenue—that street that the city seems to have forgotten in its growth. Fourth Avenue—born and bred in the Bowery—staggers northward full of good resolutions.</p>
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<p>Where it crosses Fourteenth Street it struts for a brief moment proudly in the glare of the museums and cheap theatres. It may yet become a fit mate for its high-born sister boulevard to the west, or its roaring, polyglot, broad-waisted cousin to the east. It passes Union Square; and here the hoofs of the dray horses seem to thunder in unison, recalling the tread of marching hosts—Hooray! But now come the silent and terrible mountains—buildings square as forts, high as the clouds, shutting out the sky, where thousands of slaves bend over desks all day. On the ground floors are only little fruit shops and laundries and book shops, where you see copies of “Littell’s Living Age” and G. W. M. Reynold’s novels in the windows. And next—poor Fourth Avenue!—the street glides into a mediaeval solitude. On each side are shops devoted to “Antiques.”</p>
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<p>“I’ll spiel it in about nine words,” said the young man, with a deep sigh, “but I don’t think you can help me any. Unless you’re a peach at guessing it’s back to the Bosphorus for you on your magic linoleum.”</p>
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<p>
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<b>THE STORY OF THE YOUNG MAN AND THE HARNESS MAKER’S RIDDLE</b>
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</p>
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</p>
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<p>“I work in Hildebrant’s saddle and harness shop down in Grant Street. I’ve worked there five years. I get $18 a week. That’s enough to marry on, ain’t it? Well, I’m not going to get married. Old Hildebrant is one of these funny Dutchmen—you know the kind—always getting off bum jokes. He’s got about a million riddles and things that he faked from Rogers Brothers’ great-grandfather. Bill Watson works there, too. Me and Bill have to stand for them chestnuts day after day. Why do we do it? Well, jobs ain’t to be picked off every Anheuser bush—And then there’s Laura.</p>
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<p>“What? The old man’s daughter. Comes in the shop every day. About nineteen, and the picture of the blonde that sits on the palisades of the Rhine and charms the clam-diggers into the surf. Hair the color of straw matting, and eyes as black and shiny as the best harness blacking—think of that!</p>
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<p>“Me? well, it’s either me or Bill Watson. She treats us both equal. Bill is all to the psychopathic about her; and me?—well, you saw me plating the roadbed of the Great Maroon Way with silver to-night. That was on account of Laura. I was spiflicated, Your Highness, and I wot not of what I wouldst.</p>
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<p>“The riddle? Why, it was this: ‘What kind of a hen lays the longest? Think of that! What kind of a hen lays the longest? Ain’t it like a Dutchman to risk a man’s happiness on a fool proposition like that? Now, what’s the use? What I don’t know about hens would fill several incubators. You say you’re giving imitations of the old Arab guy that gave away—libraries in Bagdad. Well, now, can you whistle up a fairy that’ll solve this hen query, or not?”</p>
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<p>When the young man ceased the Margrave arose and paced to and fro by the park bench for several minutes. Finally he sat again, and said, in grave and impressive tones:</p>
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<p>“I must confess, sir, that during the eight years that I have spent in search of adventure and in relieving distress I have never encountered a more interesting or a more perplexing case. I fear that I have overlooked hens in my researches and observations. As to their habits, their times and manner of laying, their many varieties and cross-breedings, their span of life, their—”</p>
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<p>“Oh, don’t make an Ibsen drama of it!” interrupted the young man, flippantly. “Riddles—especially old Hildebrant’s riddles—don’t have to be worked out seriously. They are light themes such as Sim Ford and Harry Thurston Peck like to handle. But, somehow, I can’t strike just the answer. Bill Watson may, and he may not. To-morrow will tell. Well, Your Majesty, I’m glad anyhow that you butted in and whiled the time away. I guess Mr. Al Rashid himself would have bounced back if one of his constituents had conducted him up against this riddle. I’ll say good night. Peace fo’ yours, and what-you-may-call-its of Allah.”</p>
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<p>“Oh, don’t make an Ibsen drama of it!” interrupted the young man, flippantly. “Riddles—especially old Hildebrant’s riddles—don’t have to be worked out seriously. They are light themes such as Sim Ford and Harry Thurston Peck like to handle. But, somehow, I can’t strike just the answer. Bill Watson may, and he may not. To-morrow will tell. Well, Your Majesty, I’m glad anyhow that you butted in and whiled the time away. I guess <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Al Rashid himself would have bounced back if one of his constituents had conducted him up against this riddle. I’ll say good night. Peace fo’ yours, and what-you-may-call-its of Allah.”</p>
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<p>The Margrave, still with a gloomy air, held out his hand.</p>
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<p>“I cannot express my regret,” he said, sadly. “Never before have I found myself unable to assist in some way. ‘What kind of a hen lays the longest? It is a baffling problem. There is a hen, I believe, called the Plymouth Rock that—”</p>
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<p>“Cut it out,” said the young man. “The Caliph trade is a mighty serious one. I don’t suppose you’d even see anything funny in a preacher’s defense of John D. Rockefeller. Well, good night, Your Nibs.”</p>
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<p>Hildebrant’s 200 pounds reposed on a bench, silver-buckling a raw leather martingale.</p>
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<p>Bill Watson came in first.</p>
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<p>“Vell,” said Hildebrant, shaking all over with the vile conceit of the joke-maker, “haf you guessed him? ‘Vat kind of a hen lays der longest?’ ”</p>
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<p>“Er—why, I think so,” said Bill, rubbing a servile chin. “I think so, Mr. Hildebrant—the one that lives the longest—Is that right?”</p>
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<p>“Er—why, I think so,” said Bill, rubbing a servile chin. “I think so, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Hildebrant—the one that lives the longest—Is that right?”</p>
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<p>“Nein!” said Hildebrant, shaking his head violently. “You haf not guessed der answer.”</p>
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<p>Bill passed on and donned a bed-tick apron and bachelorhood.</p>
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<p>In came the young man of the Arabian Night’s fiasco—pale, melancholy, hopeless.</p>
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<head>
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<title>Chapter 13</title>
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<title>A Municipal Report</title>
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<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-13" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>A MUNICIPAL REPORT</h2>
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<section id="a-municipal-report" epub:type="chapter">
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<header>
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<h2 epub:type="title">A Municipal Report</h2>
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<blockquote epub:type="epigraph poem">
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<p>
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<span>The cities are full of pride,</span>
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<br/>
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<span>Challenging each to each—</span>
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<br/>
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<span>This from her mountainside,</span>
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<br/>
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<span>That from her burthened beach.</span>
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</p>
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<cite>R. Kipling.</cite>
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</blockquote>
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</header>
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<blockquote>
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<p>The cities are full of pride,<br/>Challenging each to each—<br/>This from her mountainside,<br/>That from her burthened beach.<br/></p>
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<p>R. Kipling.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<blockquote>
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<p>Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee! There are just three big cities in the United States that are “story cities”—New York, of course, New Orleans, and, best of the lot, San Francisco.—<span class="smallcaps">Frank Norris</span>.</p>
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<p>Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee! There are just three big cities in the United States that are “story cities”—New York, of course, New Orleans, and, best of the lot, San Francisco.—<span class="signature">Frank Norris</span>.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State. They are the Southerners of the West. Now, Chicagoans are no less loyal to their city; but when you ask them why, they stammer and speak of lake fish and the new Odd Fellows Building. But Californians go into detail.</p>
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<p>Of course they have, in the climate, an argument that is good for half an hour while you are thinking of your coal bills and heavy underwear. But as soon as they come to mistake your silence for conviction, madness comes upon them, and they picture the city of the Golden Gate as the Bagdad of the New World. So far, as a matter of opinion, no refutation is necessary. But, dear cousins all (from Adam and Eve descended), it is a rash one who will lay his finger on the map and say: “In this town there can be no romance—what could happen here?” Yes, it is a bold and a rash deed to challenge in one sentence history, romance, and Rand and McNally.</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p><span class="smallcaps">Nashville</span>—A city, port of delivery, and the capital of the State of Tennessee, is on the Cumberland River and on the N. C. & St. L. and the L. & N. railroads. This city is regarded as the most important educational centre in the South.</p>
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<p><b>Nashville</b>—A city, port of delivery, and the capital of the State of Tennessee, is on the Cumberland River and on the N. C. & <abbr>St.</abbr> L. and the L. & N. railroads. This city is regarded as the most important educational centre in the South.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>I stepped off the train at 8 P.m. Having searched the thesaurus in vain for adjectives, I must, as a substitution, hie me to comparison in the form of a recipe.</p>
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<p>Take a London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts; gas leaks 20 parts; dewdrops gathered in a brick yard at sunrise, 25 parts; odor of honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix.</p>
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<p>The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a Nashville drizzle. It is not so fragrant as a moth-ball nor as thick as pea-soup; but ’tis enough—’twill serve.</p>
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<p>I went to a hotel in a tumbril. It required strong self-suppression for me to keep from climbing to the top of it and giving an imitation of Sidney Carton. The vehicle was drawn by beasts of a bygone era and driven by something dark and emancipated.</p>
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<p>I was sleepy and tired, so when I got to the hotel I hurriedly paid it the fifty cents it demanded (with approximate lagniappe, I assure you). I knew its habits; and I did not want to hear it prate about its old “marster” or anything that happened “befo’ de wah.”</p>
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<p>The hotel was one of the kind described as “renovated.” That means $20,000 worth of new marble pillars, tiling, electric lights and brass cuspidors in the lobby, and a new L. & N. time table and a lithograph of Lookout Mountain in each one of the great rooms above. The management was without reproach, the attention full of exquisite Southern courtesy, the service as slow as the progress of a snail and as good-humored as Rip Van Winkle. The food was worth traveling a thousand miles for. There is no other hotel in the world where you can get such chicken livers <i>en brochette</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>The hotel was one of the kind described as “renovated.” That means $20,000 worth of new marble pillars, tiling, electric lights and brass cuspidors in the lobby, and a new L. & N. time table and a lithograph of Lookout Mountain in each one of the great rooms above. The management was without reproach, the attention full of exquisite Southern courtesy, the service as slow as the progress of a snail and as good-humored as Rip Van Winkle. The food was worth traveling a thousand miles for. There is no other hotel in the world where you can get such chicken livers en brochette.</p>
|
||||
<p>At dinner I asked a Negro waiter if there was anything doing in town. He pondered gravely for a minute, and then replied: “Well, boss, I don’t really reckon there’s anything at all doin’ after sundown.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Sundown had been accomplished; it had been drowned in the drizzle long before. So that spectacle was denied me. But I went forth upon the streets in the drizzle to see what might be there.</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
@ -38,10 +48,14 @@
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>All my life I have heard of, admired, and witnessed the fine marksmanship of the South in its peaceful conflicts in the tobacco-chewing regions. But in my hotel a surprise awaited me. There were twelve bright, new, imposing, capacious brass cuspidors in the great lobby, tall enough to be called urns and so wide-mouthed that the crack pitcher of a lady baseball team should have been able to throw a ball into one of them at five paces distant. But, although a terrible battle had raged and was still raging, the enemy had not suffered. Bright, new, imposing, capacious, untouched, they stood. But, shades of Jefferson Brick! the tile floor—the beautiful tile floor! I could not avoid thinking of the battle of Nashville, and trying to draw, as is my foolish habit, some deductions about hereditary marksmanship.</p>
|
||||
<p>Here I first saw Major (by misplaced courtesy) Wentworth Caswell. I knew him for a type the moment my eyes suffered from the sight of him. A rat has no geographical habitat. My old friend, A. Tennyson, said, as he so well said almost everything:</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p>Prophet, curse me the blabbing lip,<br/> And curse me the British vermin, the rat.</p>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:poem z3998:nonfiction">
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<span>Prophet, curse me the blabbing lip,
|
||||
<br/></span>
|
||||
<span>And curse me the British vermin, the rat.</span>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>Let us regard the word “British” as interchangeable <i>ad lib</i>. A rat is a rat.</p>
|
||||
<p>Let us regard the word “British” as interchangeable ad lib. A rat is a rat.</p>
|
||||
<p>This man was hunting about the hotel lobby like a starved dog that had forgotten where he had buried a bone. He had a face of great acreage, red, pulpy, and with a kind of sleepy massiveness like that of Buddha. He possessed one single virtue—he was very smoothly shaven. The mark of the beast is not indelible upon a man until he goes about with a stubble. I think that if he had not used his razor that day I would have repulsed his advances, and the criminal calendar of the world would have been spared the addition of one murder.</p>
|
||||
<p>I happened to be standing within five feet of a cuspidor when Major Caswell opened fire upon it. I had been observant enough to perceive that the attacking force was using Gatlings instead of squirrel rifles; so I side-stepped so promptly that the major seized the opportunity to apologize to a noncombatant. He had the blabbing lip. In four minutes he had become my friend and had dragged me to the bar.</p>
|
||||
<p>I desire to interpolate here that I am a Southerner. But I am not one by profession or trade. I eschew the string tie, the slouch hat, the Prince Albert, the number of bales of cotton destroyed by Sherman, and plug chewing. When the orchestra plays Dixie I do not cheer. I slide a little lower on the leather-cornered seat and, well, order another Würzburger and wish that Longstreet had—but what’s the use?</p>
|
||||
@ -57,7 +71,7 @@
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>I must tell you how I came to be in Nashville, and I assure you the digression brings as much tedium to me as it does to you. I was traveling elsewhere on my own business, but I had a commission from a Northern literary magazine to stop over there and establish a personal connection between the publication and one of its contributors, Azalea Adair.</p>
|
||||
<p>Adair (there was no clue to the personality except the handwriting) had sent in some essays (lost art!) and poems that had made the editors swear approvingly over their one o’clock luncheon. So they had commissioned me to round up said Adair and corner by contract his or her output at two cents a word before some other publisher offered her ten or twenty.</p>
|
||||
<p>At nine o’clock the next morning, after my chicken livers <i>en brochette</i> (try them if you can find that hotel), I strayed out into the drizzle, which was still on for an unlimited run. At the first corner I came upon Uncle Caesar. He was a stalwart Negro, older than the pyramids, with gray wool and a face that reminded me of Brutus, and a second afterwards of the late King Cettiwayo. He wore the most remarkable coat that I ever had seen or expect to see. It reached to his ankles and had once been a Confederate gray in colors. But rain and sun and age had so variegated it that Joseph’s coat, beside it, would have faded to a pale monochrome. I must linger with that coat, for it has to do with the story—the story that is so long in coming, because you can hardly expect anything to happen in Nashville.</p>
|
||||
<p>At nine o’clock the next morning, after my chicken livers en brochette (try them if you can find that hotel), I strayed out into the drizzle, which was still on for an unlimited run. At the first corner I came upon Uncle Caesar. He was a stalwart Negro, older than the pyramids, with gray wool and a face that reminded me of Brutus, and a second afterwards of the late King Cettiwayo. He wore the most remarkable coat that I ever had seen or expect to see. It reached to his ankles and had once been a Confederate gray in colors. But rain and sun and age had so variegated it that Joseph’s coat, beside it, would have faded to a pale monochrome. I must linger with that coat, for it has to do with the story—the story that is so long in coming, because you can hardly expect anything to happen in Nashville.</p>
|
||||
<p>Once it must have been the military coat of an officer. The cape of it had vanished, but all adown its front it had been frogged and tasseled magnificently. But now the frogs and tassles were gone. In their stead had been patiently stitched (I surmised by some surviving “black mammy”) new frogs made of cunningly twisted common hempen twine. This twine was frayed and disheveled. It must have been added to the coat as a substitute for vanished splendors, with tasteless but painstaking devotion, for it followed faithfully the curves of the long-missing frogs. And, to complete the comedy and pathos of the garment, all its buttons were gone save one. The second button from the top alone remained. The coat was fastened by other twine strings tied through the buttonholes and other holes rudely pierced in the opposite side. There was never such a weird garment so fantastically bedecked and of so many mottled hues. The lone button was the size of a half-dollar, made of yellow horn and sewed on with coarse twine.</p>
|
||||
<p>This Negro stood by a carriage so old that Ham himself might have started a hack line with it after he left the ark with the two animals hitched to it. As I approached he threw open the door, drew out a feather duster, waved it without using it, and said in deep, rumbling tones:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Step right in, suh; ain’t a speck of dust in it—jus’ got back from a funeral, suh.”</p>
|
||||
@ -78,10 +92,10 @@
|
||||
<p>The grim face of King Cettiwayo softened. “Is you from the South, suh? I reckon it was them shoes of yourn fooled me. They is somethin’ sharp in the toes for a Southern gen’l’man to wear.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Then the charge is fifty cents, I suppose?” said I inexorably.</p>
|
||||
<p>His former expression, a mingling of cupidity and hostility, returned, remained ten seconds, and vanished.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Boss,” he said, “fifty cents is right; but I <i>needs</i> two dollars, suh; I’m <i>obleeged</i> to have two dollars. I ain’t <i>demandin’</i> it now, suh; after I know whar you’s from; I’m jus’ sayin’ that I <i>has</i> to have two dollars to-night, and business is mighty po’.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Boss,” he said, “fifty cents is right; but I <em>needs</em> two dollars, suh; I’m <em>obleeged</em> to have two dollars. I ain’t <em>demandin’</em> it now, suh; after I know whar you’s from; I’m jus’ sayin’ that I <em>has</em> to have two dollars to-night, and business is mighty po’.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Peace and confidence settled upon his heavy features. He had been luckier than he had hoped. Instead of having picked up a greenhorn, ignorant of rates, he had come upon an inheritance.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You confounded old rascal,” I said, reaching down to my pocket, “you ought to be turned over to the police.”</p>
|
||||
<p>For the first time I saw him smile. He knew; <i>he knew</i>. HE KNEW.</p>
|
||||
<p>For the first time I saw him smile. He knew; <em>he knew</em>. <b>He knew</b>.</p>
|
||||
<p>I gave him two one-dollar bills. As I handed them over I noticed that one of them had seen parlous times. Its upper right-hand corner was missing, and it had been torn through the middle, but joined again. A strip of blue tissue paper, pasted over the split, preserved its negotiability.</p>
|
||||
<p>Enough of the African bandit for the present: I left him happy, lifted the rope and opened a creaky gate.</p>
|
||||
<p>The house, as I said, was a shell. A paint brush had not touched it in twenty years. I could not see why a strong wind should not have bowled it over like a house of cards until I looked again at the trees that hugged it close—the trees that saw the battle of Nashville and still drew their protecting branches around it against storm and enemy and cold.</p>
|
||||
@ -94,17 +108,17 @@
|
||||
<p>It carries on an extensive trade in stoves and hollow ware with the West and South, and its flouring mills have a daily capacity of more than 2,000 barrels.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>Azalea Adair seemed to reflect.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have never thought of it that way,” she said, with a kind of sincere intensity that seemed to belong to her. “Isn’t it in the still, quiet places that things do happen? I fancy that when God began to create the earth on the first Monday morning one could have leaned out one’s window and heard the drops of mud splashing from His trowel as He built up the everlasting hills. What did the noisiest project in the world—I mean the building of the Tower of Babel—result in finally? A page and a half of Esperanto in the <i>North American Review</i>.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have never thought of it that way,” she said, with a kind of sincere intensity that seemed to belong to her. “Isn’t it in the still, quiet places that things do happen? I fancy that when God began to create the earth on the first Monday morning one could have leaned out one’s window and heard the drops of mud splashing from His trowel as He built up the everlasting hills. What did the noisiest project in the world—I mean the building of the Tower of Babel—result in finally? A page and a half of Esperanto in the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">North American Review</i>.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Of course,” said I platitudinously, “human nature is the same everywhere; but there is more color—er—more drama and movement and—er—romance in some cities than in others.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“On the surface,” said Azalea Adair. “I have traveled many times around the world in a golden airship wafted on two wings—print and dreams. I have seen (on one of my imaginary tours) the Sultan of Turkey bowstring with his own hands one of his wives who had uncovered her face in public. I have seen a man in Nashville tear up his theatre tickets because his wife was going out with her face covered—with rice powder. In San Francisco’s Chinatown I saw the slave girl Sing Yee dipped slowly, inch by inch, in boiling almond oil to make her swear she would never see her American lover again. She gave in when the boiling oil had reached three inches above her knee. At a euchre party in East Nashville the other night I saw Kitty Morgan cut dead by seven of her schoolmates and lifelong friends because she had married a house painter. The boiling oil was sizzling as high as her heart; but I wish you could have seen the fine little smile that she carried from table to table. Oh, yes, it is a humdrum town. Just a few miles of red brick houses and mud and lumber yards.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Some one knocked hollowly at the back of the house. Azalea Adair breathed a soft apology and went to investigate the sound. She came back in three minutes with brightened eyes, a faint flush on her cheeks, and ten years lifted from her shoulders.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You must have a cup of tea before you go,” she said, “and a sugar cake.”</p>
|
||||
<p>She reached and shook a little iron bell. In shuffled a small Negro girl about twelve, barefoot, not very tidy, glowering at me with thumb in mouth and bulging eyes.</p>
|
||||
<p>Azalea Adair opened a tiny, worn purse and drew out a dollar bill, a dollar bill with the upper right-hand corner missing, torn in two pieces, and pasted together again with a strip of blue tissue paper. It was one of the bills I had given the piratical Negro—there was no doubt about it.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Go up to Mr. Baker’s store on the corner, Impy,” she said, handing the girl the dollar bill, “and get a quarter of a pound of tea—the kind he always sends me—and ten cents worth of sugar cakes. Now, hurry. The supply of tea in the house happens to be exhausted,” she explained to me.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Go up to <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Baker’s store on the corner, Impy,” she said, handing the girl the dollar bill, “and get a quarter of a pound of tea—the kind he always sends me—and ten cents worth of sugar cakes. Now, hurry. The supply of tea in the house happens to be exhausted,” she explained to me.</p>
|
||||
<p>Impy left by the back way. Before the scrape of her hard, bare feet had died away on the back porch, a wild shriek—I was sure it was hers—filled the hollow house. Then the deep, gruff tones of an angry man’s voice mingled with the girl’s further squeals and unintelligible words.</p>
|
||||
<p>Azalea Adair rose without surprise or emotion and disappeared. For two minutes I heard the hoarse rumble of the man’s voice; then something like an oath and a slight scuffle, and she returned calmly to her chair.</p>
|
||||
<p>“This is a roomy house,” she said, “and I have a tenant for part of it. I am sorry to have to rescind my invitation to tea. It was impossible to get the kind I always use at the store. Perhaps to-morrow, Mr. Baker will be able to supply me.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“This is a roomy house,” she said, “and I have a tenant for part of it. I am sorry to have to rescind my invitation to tea. It was impossible to get the kind I always use at the store. Perhaps to-morrow, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Baker will be able to supply me.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I was sure that Impy had not had time to leave the house. I inquired concerning street-car lines and took my leave. After I was well on my way I remembered that I had not learned Azalea Adair’s name. But to-morrow would do.</p>
|
||||
<p>That same day I started in on the course of iniquity that this uneventful city forced upon me. I was in the town only two days, but in that time I managed to lie shamelessly by telegraph, and to be an accomplice—after the fact, if that is the correct legal term—to a murder.</p>
|
||||
<p>As I rounded the corner nearest my hotel the Afrite coachman of the polychromatic, nonpareil coat seized me, swung open the dungeony door of his peripatetic sarcophagus, flirted his feather duster and began his ritual: “Step right in, boss. Carriage is clean—jus’ got back from a funeral. Fifty cents to any—”</p>
|
||||
@ -115,7 +129,7 @@
|
||||
<p>For an instant I looked again at the fierce countenance of King Cettiwayo, and then he changed back to an extortionate old Negro hack driver.</p>
|
||||
<p>“She ain’t gwine to starve, suh,” he said slowly. “She has reso’ces, suh; she has reso’ces.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I shall pay you fifty cents for the trip,” said I.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Dat is puffeckly correct, suh,” he answered humbly. “I jus’ <i>had</i> to have dat two dollars dis mawnin’, boss.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Dat is puffeckly correct, suh,” he answered humbly. “I jus’ <em>had</em> to have dat two dollars dis mawnin’, boss.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I went to the hotel and lied by electricity. I wired the magazine: “A. Adair holds out for eight cents a word.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The answer that came back was: “Give it to her quick you duffer.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Just before dinner “Major” Wentworth Caswell bore down upon me with the greetings of a long-lost friend. I have seen few men whom I have so instantaneously hated, and of whom it was so difficult to be rid. I was standing at the bar when he invaded me; therefore I could not wave the white ribbon in his face. I would have paid gladly for the drinks, hoping, thereby, to escape another; but he was one of those despicable, roaring, advertising bibbers who must have brass bands and fireworks attend upon every cent that they waste in their follies.</p>
|
||||
@ -124,9 +138,9 @@
|
||||
<p>King Cettiwayo was at his post the next day, and rattled my bones over the stones out to 861. He was to wait and rattle me back again when I was ready.</p>
|
||||
<p>Azalea Adair looked paler and cleaner and frailer than she had looked on the day before. After she had signed the contract at eight cents per word she grew still paler and began to slip out of her chair. Without much trouble I managed to get her up on the antediluvian horsehair sofa and then I ran out to the sidewalk and yelled to the coffee-colored Pirate to bring a doctor. With a wisdom that I had not expected in him, he abandoned his team and struck off up the street afoot, realizing the value of speed. In ten minutes he returned with a grave, gray-haired and capable man of medicine. In a few words (worth much less than eight cents each) I explained to him my presence in the hollow house of mystery. He bowed with stately understanding, and turned to the old Negro.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Uncle Caesar,” he said calmly, “Run up to my house and ask Miss Lucy to give you a cream pitcher full of fresh milk and half a tumbler of port wine. And hurry back. Don’t drive—run. I want you to get back sometime this week.”</p>
|
||||
<p>It occurred to me that Dr. Merriman also felt a distrust as to the speeding powers of the land-pirate’s steeds. After Uncle Caesar was gone, lumberingly, but swiftly, up the street, the doctor looked me over with great politeness and as much careful calculation until he had decided that I might do.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It is only a case of insufficient nutrition,” he said. “In other words, the result of poverty, pride, and starvation. Mrs. Caswell has many devoted friends who would be glad to aid her, but she will accept nothing except from that old Negro, Uncle Caesar, who was once owned by her family.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mrs. Caswell!” said I, in surprise. And then I looked at the contract and saw that she had signed it “Azalea Adair Caswell.”</p>
|
||||
<p>It occurred to me that <abbr>Dr.</abbr> Merriman also felt a distrust as to the speeding powers of the land-pirate’s steeds. After Uncle Caesar was gone, lumberingly, but swiftly, up the street, the doctor looked me over with great politeness and as much careful calculation until he had decided that I might do.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It is only a case of insufficient nutrition,” he said. “In other words, the result of poverty, pride, and starvation. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Caswell has many devoted friends who would be glad to aid her, but she will accept nothing except from that old Negro, Uncle Caesar, who was once owned by her family.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Caswell!” said I, in surprise. And then I looked at the contract and saw that she had signed it “Azalea Adair Caswell.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I thought she was Miss Adair,” I said.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Married to a drunken, worthless loafer, sir,” said the doctor. “It is said that he robs her even of the small sums that her old servant contributes toward her support.”</p>
|
||||
<p>When the milk and wine had been brought the doctor soon revived Azalea Adair. She sat up and talked of the beauty of the autumn leaves that were then in season, and their height of color. She referred lightly to her fainting seizure as the outcome of an old palpitation of the heart. Impy fanned her as she lay on the sofa. The doctor was due elsewhere, and I followed him to the door. I told him that it was within my power and intentions to make a reasonable advance of money to Azalea Adair on future contributions to the magazine, and he seemed pleased.</p>
|
||||
@ -143,8 +157,8 @@
|
||||
<p>“In my opinion, gentlemen, Caswell was murdered by some of these no-account niggers for his money. He had fifty dollars this afternoon which he showed to several gentlemen in the hotel. When he was found the money was not on his person.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I left the city the next morning at nine, and as the train was crossing the bridge over the Cumberland River I took out of my pocket a yellow horn overcoat button the size of a fifty-cent piece, with frayed ends of coarse twine hanging from it, and cast it out of the window into the slow, muddy waters below.</p>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<i>I wonder what’s doing in Buffalo!</i>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
<em>I wonder what’s doing in Buffalo!</em>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
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||||
@ -1,13 +1,13 @@
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|
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<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 17</title>
|
||||
<title>A Night in New Arabia</title>
|
||||
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|
||||
<h2>A NIGHT IN NEW ARABIA</h2>
|
||||
<section id="a-night-in-new-arabia" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">A Night in New Arabia</h2>
|
||||
<p>The great city of Bagdad-on-the-Subway is caliph-ridden. Its palaces, bazaars, khans, and byways are thronged with Al Rashids in divers disguises, seeking diversion and victims for their unbridled generosity. You can scarcely find a poor beggar whom they are willing to let enjoy his spoils unsuccored, nor a wrecked unfortunate upon whom they will not reshower the means of fresh misfortune. You will hardly find anywhere a hungry one who has not had the opportunity to tighten his belt in gift libraries, nor a poor pundit who has not blushed at the holiday basket of celery-crowned turkey forced resoundingly through his door by the eleemosynary press.</p>
|
||||
<p>So then, fearfully through the Harun-haunted streets creep the one-eyed calenders, the Little Hunchback and the Barber’s Sixth Brother, hoping to escape the ministrations of the roving horde of caliphoid sultans.</p>
|
||||
<p>Entertainment for many Arabian nights might be had from the histories of those who have escaped the largesse of the army of Commanders of the Faithful. Until dawn you might sit on the enchanted rug and listen to such stories as are told of the powerful genie Roc-Ef-El-Er who sent the Forty Thieves to soak up the oil plant of Ali Baba; of the good Caliph Kar-Neg-Ghe, who gave away palaces; of the Seven Voyages of Sailbad, the Sinner, who frequented wooden excursion steamers among the islands; of the Fisherman and the Bottle; of the Barmecides’ Boarding house; of Aladdin’s rise to wealth by means of his Wonderful Gas-meter.</p>
|
||||
@ -15,23 +15,23 @@
|
||||
<p>This reticence, then, in the actors who perform the sad comedies of their philanthropy-scourged world, must, in a degree, account for the shortcomings of this painfully gleaned tale, which shall be called</p>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<b>THE STORY OF THE CALIPH WHO ALLEVIATED HIS CONSCIENCE</b>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
<p>Old Jacob Spraggins mixed for himself some Scotch and lithia water at his $1,200 oak sideboard. Inspiration must have resulted from its imbibition, for immediately afterward he struck the quartered oak soundly with his fist and shouted to the empty dining room:</p>
|
||||
<p>“By the coke ovens of hell, it must be that ten thousand dollars! If I can get that squared, it’ll do the trick.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Thus, by the commonest artifice of the trade, having gained your interest, the action of the story will now be suspended, leaving you grumpily to consider a sort of dull biography beginning fifteen years before.</p>
|
||||
<p>When old Jacob was young Jacob he was a breaker boy in a Pennsylvania coal mine. I don’t know what a breaker boy is; but his occupation seems to be standing by a coal dump with a wan look and a dinner-pail to have his picture taken for magazine articles. Anyhow, Jacob was one. But, instead of dying of overwork at nine, and leaving his helpless parents and brothers at the mercy of the union strikers’ reserve fund, he hitched up his galluses, put a dollar or two in a side proposition now and then, and at forty-five was worth $20,000,000.</p>
|
||||
<p>There now! it’s over. Hardly had time to yawn, did you? I’ve seen biographies that—but let us dissemble.</p>
|
||||
<p>I want you to consider Jacob Spraggins, Esq., after he had arrived at the seventh stage of his career. The stages meant are, first, humble origin; second, deserved promotion; third, stockholder; fourth, capitalist; fifth, trust magnate; sixth, rich malefactor; seventh, caliph; eighth, <i>x</i>. The eighth stage shall be left to the higher mathematics.</p>
|
||||
<p>I want you to consider Jacob Spraggins, <abbr>Esq.</abbr>, after he had arrived at the seventh stage of his career. The stages meant are, first, humble origin; second, deserved promotion; third, stockholder; fourth, capitalist; fifth, trust magnate; sixth, rich malefactor; seventh, caliph; eighth, <i epub:type="z3998:grapheme">x</i>. The eighth stage shall be left to the higher mathematics.</p>
|
||||
<p>At fifty-five Jacob retired from active business. The income of a czar was still rolling in on him from coal, iron, real estate, oil, railroads, manufactories, and corporations, but none of it touched Jacob’s hands in a raw state. It was a sterilized increment, carefully cleaned and dusted and fumigated until it arrived at its ultimate stage of untainted, spotless checks in the white fingers of his private secretary. Jacob built a three-million-dollar palace on a corner lot fronting on Nabob Avenue, city of New Bagdad, and began to feel the mantle of the late H. A. Rashid descending upon him. Eventually Jacob slipped the mantle under his collar, tied it in a neat four-in-hand, and became a licensed harrier of our Mesopotamian proletariat.</p>
|
||||
<p>When a man’s income becomes so large that the butcher actually sends him the kind of steak he orders, he begins to think about his soul’s salvation. Now, the various stages or classes of rich men must not be forgotten. The capitalist can tell you to a dollar the amount of his wealth. The trust magnate “estimates” it. The rich malefactor hands you a cigar and denies that he has bought the P. D. & Q. The caliph merely smiles and talks about Hammerstein and the musical lasses. There is a record of tremendous altercation at breakfast in a “Where-to-Dine-Well” tavern between a magnate and his wife, the rift within the loot being that the wife calculated their fortune at a figure $3,000,000 higher than did her future <i>divorcé</i>. Oh, well, I, myself, heard a similar quarrel between a man and his wife because he found fifty cents less in his pockets than he thought he had. After all, we are all human—Count Tolstoi, R. Fitzsimmons, Peter Pan, and the rest of us.</p>
|
||||
<p>When a man’s income becomes so large that the butcher actually sends him the kind of steak he orders, he begins to think about his soul’s salvation. Now, the various stages or classes of rich men must not be forgotten. The capitalist can tell you to a dollar the amount of his wealth. The trust magnate “estimates” it. The rich malefactor hands you a cigar and denies that he has bought the P. D. & Q. The caliph merely smiles and talks about Hammerstein and the musical lasses. There is a record of tremendous altercation at breakfast in a “Where-to-Dine-Well” tavern between a magnate and his wife, the rift within the loot being that the wife calculated their fortune at a figure $3,000,000 higher than did her future divorcé. Oh, well, I, myself, heard a similar quarrel between a man and his wife because he found fifty cents less in his pockets than he thought he had. After all, we are all human—Count Tolstoi, R. Fitzsimmons, Peter Pan, and the rest of us.</p>
|
||||
<p>Don’t lose heart because the story seems to be degenerating into a sort of moral essay for intellectual readers.</p>
|
||||
<p>There will be dialogue and stage business pretty soon.</p>
|
||||
<p>When Jacob first began to compare the eyes of needles with the camels in the Zoo he decided upon organized charity. He had his secretary send a check for one million to the Universal Benevolent Association of the Globe. You may have looked down through a grating in front of a decayed warehouse for a nickel that you had dropped through. But that is neither here nor there. The Association acknowledged receipt of his favor of the 24th ult. with enclosure as stated. Separated by a double line, but still mighty close to the matter under the caption of “Oddities of the Day’s News” in an evening paper, Jacob Spraggins read that one “Jasper Spargyous” had “donated $100,000 to the U. B. A. of G.” A camel may have a stomach for each day in the week; but I dare not venture to accord him whiskers, for fear of the Great Displeasure at Washington; but if he have whiskers, surely not one of them will seem to have been inserted in the eye of a needle by that effort of that rich man to enter the K. of H. The right is reserved to reject any and all bids; signed, S. Peter, secretary and gatekeeper.</p>
|
||||
<p>Next, Jacob selected the best endowed college he could scare up and presented it with a $200,000 laboratory. The college did not maintain a scientific course, but it accepted the money and built an elaborate lavatory instead, which was no diversion of funds so far as Jacob ever discovered.</p>
|
||||
<p>The faculty met and invited Jacob to come over and take his A B C degree. Before sending the invitation they smiled, cut out the C, added the proper punctuation marks, and all was well.</p>
|
||||
<p>While walking on the campus before being capped and gowned, Jacob saw two professors strolling nearby. Their voices, long adapted to indoor acoustics, undesignedly reached his ear.</p>
|
||||
<p>“There goes the latest <i>chevalier d’industrie</i>,” said one of them, “to buy a sleeping powder from us. He gets his degree to-morrow.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“<i>In foro conscientiae</i>,” said the other. “Let’s ‘eave ‘arf a brick at ’im.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“There goes the latest <i xml:lang="fr">chevalier d’industrie</i>,” said one of them, “to buy a sleeping powder from us. He gets his degree to-morrow.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“In foro conscientiae,” said the other. “Let’s ‘eave ‘arf a brick at ’im.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Jacob ignored the Latin, but the brick pleasantry was not too hard for him. There was no mandragora in the honorary draught of learning that he had bought. That was before the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act.</p>
|
||||
<p>Jacob wearied of philanthropy on a large scale.</p>
|
||||
<p>“If I could see folks made happier,” he said to himself—“If I could see ’em myself and hear ’em express their gratitude for what I done for ’em it would make me feel better. This donatin’ funds to institutions and societies is about as satisfactory as dropping money into a broken slot machine.”</p>
|
||||
@ -39,12 +39,12 @@
|
||||
<p>“The very thing!” said Jacob. “I will charter two river steamboats, pack them full of these unfortunate children and—say ten thousand dolls and drums and a thousand freezers of ice cream, and give them a delightful outing up the Sound. The sea breezes on that trip ought to blow the taint off some of this money that keeps coming in faster than I can work it off my mind.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Jacob must have leaked some of his benevolent intentions, for an immense person with a bald face and a mouth that looked as if it ought to have a “Drop Letters Here” sign over it hooked a finger around him and set him in a space between a barber’s pole and a stack of ash cans. Words came out of the post-office slit—smooth, husky words with gloves on ’em, but sounding as if they might turn to bare knuckles any moment.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say, Sport, do you know where you are at? Well, dis is Mike O’Grady’s district you’re buttin’ into—see? Mike’s got de stomach-ache privilege for every kid in dis neighborhood—see? And if dere’s any picnics or red balloons to be dealt out here, Mike’s money pays for ’em—see? Don’t you butt in, or something’ll be handed to you. Youse d⸺ settlers and reformers with your social ologies and your millionaire detectives have got dis district in a hell of a fix, anyhow. With your college students and professors rough-housing de soda-water stands and dem rubber-neck coaches fillin’ de streets, de folks down here are ‘fraid to go out of de houses. Now, you leave ’em to Mike. Dey belongs to him, and he knows how to handle ’em. Keep on your own side of de town. Are you some wiser now, uncle, or do you want to scrap wit’ Mike O’Grady for de Santa Claus belt in dis district?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Clearly, that spot in the moral vineyard was preempted. So Caliph Spraggins menaced no more the people in the bazaars of the East Side. To keep down his growing surplus he doubled his donations to organized charity, presented the Y. M. C. A. of his native town with a $10,000 collection of butterflies, and sent a check to the famine sufferers in China big enough to buy new emerald eyes and diamond-filled teeth for all their gods. But none of these charitable acts seemed to bring peace to the caliph’s heart. He tried to get a personal note into his benefactions by tipping bellboys and waiters $10 and $20 bills. He got well snickered at and derided for that by the minions who accept with respect gratuities commensurate to the service performed. He sought out an ambitious and talented but poor young woman, and bought for her the star part in a new comedy. He might have gotten rid of $50,000 more of his cumbersome money in this philanthropy if he had not neglected to write letters to her. But she lost the suit for lack of evidence, while his capital still kept piling up, and his <i>optikos needleorum camelibus</i>—or rich man’s disease—was unrelieved.</p>
|
||||
<p>Clearly, that spot in the moral vineyard was preempted. So Caliph Spraggins menaced no more the people in the bazaars of the East Side. To keep down his growing surplus he doubled his donations to organized charity, presented the Y. M. C. A. of his native town with a $10,000 collection of butterflies, and sent a check to the famine sufferers in China big enough to buy new emerald eyes and diamond-filled teeth for all their gods. But none of these charitable acts seemed to bring peace to the caliph’s heart. He tried to get a personal note into his benefactions by tipping bellboys and waiters $10 and $20 bills. He got well snickered at and derided for that by the minions who accept with respect gratuities commensurate to the service performed. He sought out an ambitious and talented but poor young woman, and bought for her the star part in a new comedy. He might have gotten rid of $50,000 more of his cumbersome money in this philanthropy if he had not neglected to write letters to her. But she lost the suit for lack of evidence, while his capital still kept piling up, and his <i xml:lang="la">optikos needleorum camelibus</i>—or rich man’s disease—was unrelieved.</p>
|
||||
<p>In Caliph Spraggins’s $3,000,000 home lived his sister Henrietta, who used to cook for the coal miners in a twenty-five-cent eating house in Coketown, Pa., and who now would have offered John Mitchell only two fingers of her hand to shake. And his daughter Celia, nineteen, back from boarding-school and from being polished off by private instructors in the restaurant languages and those études and things.</p>
|
||||
<p>Celia is the heroine. Lest the artist’s delineation of her charms on this very page humbug your fancy, take from me her authorized description. She was a nice-looking, awkward, loud, rather bashful, brown-haired girl, with a sallow complexion, bright eyes, and a perpetual smile. She had a wholesome, Spraggins-inherited love for plain food, loose clothing, and the society of the lower classes. She had too much health and youth to feel the burden of wealth. She had a wide mouth that kept the peppermint-pepsin tablets rattling like hail from the slot-machine wherever she went, and she could whistle hornpipes. Keep this picture in mind; and let the artist do his worst.</p>
|
||||
<p>Celia looked out of her window one day and gave her heart to the grocer’s young man. The receiver thereof was at that moment engaged in conceding immortality to his horse and calling down upon him the ultimate fate of the wicked; so he did not notice the transfer. A horse should stand still when you are lifting a crate of strictly new-laid eggs out of the wagon.</p>
|
||||
<p>Young lady reader, you would have liked that grocer’s young man yourself. But you wouldn’t have given him your heart, because you are saving it for a riding-master, or a shoe-manufacturer with a torpid liver, or something quiet but rich in gray tweeds at Palm Beach. Oh, I know about it. So I am glad the grocer’s young man was for Celia, and not for you.</p>
|
||||
<p>The grocer’s young man was slim and straight and as confident and easy in his movements as the man in the back of the magazines who wears the new frictionless roller suspenders. He wore a gray bicycle cap on the back of his head, and his hair was straw-colored and curly, and his sunburned face looked like one that smiled a good deal when he was not preaching the doctrine of everlasting punishment to delivery-wagon horses. He slung imported A1 fancy groceries about as though they were only the stuff he delivered at boarding-houses; and when he picked up his whip, your mind instantly recalled Mr. Tackett and his air with the buttonless foils.</p>
|
||||
<p>The grocer’s young man was slim and straight and as confident and easy in his movements as the man in the back of the magazines who wears the new frictionless roller suspenders. He wore a gray bicycle cap on the back of his head, and his hair was straw-colored and curly, and his sunburned face looked like one that smiled a good deal when he was not preaching the doctrine of everlasting punishment to delivery-wagon horses. He slung imported A1 fancy groceries about as though they were only the stuff he delivered at boarding-houses; and when he picked up his whip, your mind instantly recalled <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tackett and his air with the buttonless foils.</p>
|
||||
<p>Tradesmen delivered their goods at a side gate at the rear of the house. The grocer’s wagon came about ten in the morning. For three days Celia watched the driver when he came, finding something new each time to admire in the lofty and almost contemptuous way he had of tossing around the choicest gifts of Pomona, Ceres, and the canning factories. Then she consulted Annette.</p>
|
||||
<p>To be explicit, Annette McCorkle, the second housemaid who deserves a paragraph herself. Annette Fletcherized large numbers of romantic novels which she obtained at a free public library branch (donated by one of the biggest caliphs in the business). She was Celia’s side-kicker and chum, though Aunt Henrietta didn’t know it, you may hazard a bean or two.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, canary-bird seed!” exclaimed Annette. “Ain’t it a corkin’ situation? You a heiress, and fallin’ in love with him on sight! He’s a sweet boy, too, and above his business. But he ain’t susceptible like the common run of grocer’s assistants. He never pays no attention to me.”</p>
|
||||
@ -60,13 +60,13 @@
|
||||
<p>“That’s all right. I’m Thomas McLeod. What part of the house do you work in?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m the—the second parlor maid.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Do you know the ‘Falling Waters’?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“No,” said Celia, “we don’t know anybody. We got rich too quick—that is, Mr. Spraggins did.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“No,” said Celia, “we don’t know anybody. We got rich too quick—that is, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Spraggins did.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ll make you acquainted,” said Thomas McLeod. “It’s a strathspey—the first cousin to a hornpipe.”</p>
|
||||
<p>If Celia’s whistling put the piccolos out of commission, Thomas McLeod’s surely made the biggest flutes hunt their holes. He could actually whistle <i>bass</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>If Celia’s whistling put the piccolos out of commission, Thomas McLeod’s surely made the biggest flutes hunt their holes. He could actually whistle <em>bass</em>.</p>
|
||||
<p>When he stopped Celia was ready to jump into his delivery wagon and ride with him clear to the end of the pier and on to the ferry-boat of the Charon line.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ll be around to-morrow at 10:15,” said Thomas, “with some spinach and a case of carbonic.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ll practice that what-you-may-call-it,” said Celia. “I can whistle a fine second.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The processes of courtship are personal, and do not belong to general literature. They should be chronicled in detail only in advertisements of iron tonics and in the secret by-laws of the Woman’s Auxiliary of the Ancient Order of the Rat Trap. But genteel writing may contain a description of certain stages of its progress without intruding upon the province of the X-ray or of park policemen.</p>
|
||||
<p>The processes of courtship are personal, and do not belong to general literature. They should be chronicled in detail only in advertisements of iron tonics and in the secret by-laws of the Woman’s Auxiliary of the Ancient Order of the Rat Trap. But genteel writing may contain a description of certain stages of its progress without intruding upon the province of the <span epub:type="z3998:roman">X</span>-ray or of park policemen.</p>
|
||||
<p>A day came when Thomas McLeod and Celia lingered at the end of the latticed “passage.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sixteen a week isn’t much,” said Thomas, letting his cap rest on his shoulder blades.</p>
|
||||
<p>Celia looked through the lattice-work and whistled a dead march. Shopping with Aunt Henrietta the day before, she had paid that much for a dozen handkerchiefs.</p>
|
||||
@ -85,7 +85,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“And, oh, Tommy, I forgot,” she called, softly. “I believe I could make your neckties.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Forget it,” said Thomas decisively.</p>
|
||||
<p>“And another thing,” she continued. “Sliced cucumbers at night will drive away cockroaches.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“And sleep, too, you bet,” said Mr. McLeod. “Yes, I believe if I have a delivery to make on the West Side this afternoon I’ll look in at a furniture store I know over there.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“And sleep, too, you bet,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McLeod. “Yes, I believe if I have a delivery to make on the West Side this afternoon I’ll look in at a furniture store I know over there.”</p>
|
||||
<p>It was just as the wagon dashed away that old Jacob Spraggins struck the sideboard with his fist and made the mysterious remark about ten thousand dollars that you perhaps remember. Which justifies the reflection that some stories, as well as life, and puppies thrown into wells, move around in circles. Painfully but briefly we must shed light on Jacob’s words.</p>
|
||||
<p>The foundation of his fortune was made when he was twenty. A poor coal-digger (ever hear of a rich one?) had saved a dollar or two and bought a small tract of land on a hillside on which he tried to raise corn. Not a nubbin. Jacob, whose nose was a divining-rod, told him there was a vein of coal beneath. He bought the land from the miner for $125 and sold it a month afterward for $10,000. Luckily the miner had enough left of his sale money to drink himself into a black coat opening in the back, as soon as he heard the news.</p>
|
||||
<p>And so, for forty years afterward, we find Jacob illuminated with the sudden thought that if he could make restitution of this sum of money to the heirs or assigns of the unlucky miner, respite and Nepenthe might be his.</p>
|
||||
@ -109,9 +109,9 @@
|
||||
<p>“It was paid to me to-day,” Thomas was explaining to Celia outside. “It came from my grandfather’s estate. Say, Cele, what’s the use of waiting now? I’m going to quit the job to-night. Why can’t we get married next week?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Tommy,” said Celia. “I’m no parlor maid. I’ve been fooling you. I’m Miss Spraggins—Celia Spraggins. The newspapers say I’ll be worth forty million dollars some day.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Thomas pulled his cap down straight on his head for the first time since we have known him.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I suppose then,” said he, “I suppose then you’ll not be marrying me next week. But you <i>can</i> whistle.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I suppose then,” said he, “I suppose then you’ll not be marrying me next week. But you <em>can</em> whistle.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“No,” said Celia, “I’ll not be marrying you next week. My father would never let me marry a grocer’s clerk. But I’ll marry you to-night, Tommy, if you say so.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Old Jacob Spraggins came home at 9:30 P. M., in his motor car. The make of it you will have to surmise sorrowfully; I am giving you unsubsidized fiction; had it been a street car I could have told you its voltage and the number of wheels it had. Jacob called for his daughter; he had bought a ruby necklace for her, and wanted to hear her say what a kind, thoughtful, dear old dad he was.</p>
|
||||
<p>Old Jacob Spraggins came home at 9:30 <abbr class="time">a.m.</abbr>, in his motor car. The make of it you will have to surmise sorrowfully; I am giving you unsubsidized fiction; had it been a street car I could have told you its voltage and the number of wheels it had. Jacob called for his daughter; he had bought a ruby necklace for her, and wanted to hear her say what a kind, thoughtful, dear old dad he was.</p>
|
||||
<p>There was a brief search in the house for her, and then came Annette, glowing with the pure flame of truth and loyalty well mixed with envy and histrionics.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, sir,” said she, wondering if she should kneel, “Miss Celia’s just this minute running away out of the side gate with a young man to be married. I couldn’t stop her, sir. They went in a cab.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“What young man?” roared old Jacob.</p>
|
||||
@ -1,13 +1,13 @@
|
||||
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|
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|
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<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 12</title>
|
||||
<title>A Ramble in Aphasia</title>
|
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<section id="chapter-12" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>A RAMBLE IN APHASIA</h2>
|
||||
<section id="a-ramble-in-aphasia" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">A Ramble in Aphasia</h2>
|
||||
<p>My wife and I parted on that morning in precisely our usual manner. She left her second cup of tea to follow me to the front door. There she plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint (the universal act of woman to proclaim ownership) and bade me to take care of my cold. I had no cold. Next came her kiss of parting—the level kiss of domesticity flavored with Young Hyson. There was no fear of the extemporaneous, of variety spicing her infinite custom. With the deft touch of long malpractice, she dabbed awry my well-set scarf pin; and then, as I closed the door, I heard her morning slippers pattering back to her cooling tea.</p>
|
||||
<p>When I set out I had no thought or premonition of what was to occur. The attack came suddenly.</p>
|
||||
<p>For many weeks I had been toiling, almost night and day, at a famous railroad law case that I won triumphantly but a few days previously. In fact, I had been digging away at the law almost without cessation for many years. Once or twice good Doctor Volney, my friend and physician, had warned me.</p>
|
||||
@ -31,18 +31,18 @@
|
||||
<p>“If I can be of any aid,” I said, warming, “the two bottles of—er—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Tartrate of antimony and potash, and tartrate of soda and potash.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Shall henceforth sit side by side,” I concluded, firmly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Now, there’s another thing,” said Mr. Bolder. “For an excipient in manipulating a pill mass which do you prefer—the magnesia carbonate or the pulverised glycerrhiza radix?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Now, there’s another thing,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bolder. “For an excipient in manipulating a pill mass which do you prefer—the magnesia carbonate or the pulverised glycerrhiza radix?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The—er—magnesia,” I said. It was easier to say than the other word.</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Bolder glanced at me distrustfully through his spectacles.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bolder glanced at me distrustfully through his spectacles.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Give me the glycerrhiza,” said he. “Magnesia cakes.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Here’s another one of these fake aphasia cases,” he said, presently, handing me his newspaper, and laying his finger upon an article. “I don’t believe in ’em. I put nine out of ten of ’em down as frauds. A man gets sick of his business and his folks and wants to have a good time. He skips out somewhere, and when they find him he pretends to have lost his memory—don’t know his own name, and won’t even recognize the strawberry mark on his wife’s left shoulder. Aphasia! Tut! Why can’t they stay at home and forget?”</p>
|
||||
<p>I took the paper and read, after the pungent headlines, the following:</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p>“<span class="smallcaps">Denver</span>, June 12.—Elwyn C. Bellford, a prominent lawyer, is mysteriously missing from his home since three days ago, and all efforts to locate him have been in vain. Mr. Bellford is a well-known citizen of the highest standing, and has enjoyed a large and lucrative law practice. He is married and owns a fine home and the most extensive private library in the State. On the day of his disappearance, he drew quite a large sum of money from his bank. No one can be found who saw him after he left the bank. Mr. Bellford was a man of singularly quiet and domestic tastes, and seemed to find his happiness in his home and profession. If any clue at all exists to his strange disappearance, it may be found in the fact that for some months he has been deeply absorbed in an important law case in connection with the Q. Y. and Z. Railroad Company. It is feared that overwork may have affected his mind. Every effort is being made to discover the whereabouts of the missing man.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“<b>Denver</b>, June 12.—Elwyn C. Bellford, a prominent lawyer, is mysteriously missing from his home since three days ago, and all efforts to locate him have been in vain. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bellford is a well-known citizen of the highest standing, and has enjoyed a large and lucrative law practice. He is married and owns a fine home and the most extensive private library in the State. On the day of his disappearance, he drew quite a large sum of money from his bank. No one can be found who saw him after he left the bank. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bellford was a man of singularly quiet and domestic tastes, and seemed to find his happiness in his home and profession. If any clue at all exists to his strange disappearance, it may be found in the fact that for some months he has been deeply absorbed in an important law case in connection with the Q. Y. and Z. Railroad Company. It is feared that overwork may have affected his mind. Every effort is being made to discover the whereabouts of the missing man.”</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>“It seems to me you are not altogether uncynical, Mr. Bolder,” I said, after I had read the despatch. “This has the sound, to me, of a genuine case. Why should this man, prosperous, happily married, and respected, choose suddenly to abandon everything? I know that these lapses of memory do occur, and that men do find themselves adrift without a name, a history or a home.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, gammon and jalap!” said Mr. Bolder. “It’s larks they’re after. There’s too much education nowadays. Men know about aphasia, and they use it for an excuse. The women are wise, too. When it’s all over they look you in the eye, as scientific as you please, and say: ‘He hypnotized me.’ ”</p>
|
||||
<p>Thus Mr. Bolder diverted, but did not aid, me with his comments and philosophy.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It seems to me you are not altogether uncynical, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bolder,” I said, after I had read the despatch. “This has the sound, to me, of a genuine case. Why should this man, prosperous, happily married, and respected, choose suddenly to abandon everything? I know that these lapses of memory do occur, and that men do find themselves adrift without a name, a history or a home.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, gammon and jalap!” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bolder. “It’s larks they’re after. There’s too much education nowadays. Men know about aphasia, and they use it for an excuse. The women are wise, too. When it’s all over they look you in the eye, as scientific as you please, and say: ‘He hypnotized me.’ ”</p>
|
||||
<p>Thus <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bolder diverted, but did not aid, me with his comments and philosophy.</p>
|
||||
<p>We arrived in New York about ten at night. I rode in a cab to a hotel, and I wrote my name “Edward Pinkhammer” in the register. As I did so I felt pervade me a splendid, wild, intoxicating buoyancy—a sense of unlimited freedom, of newly attained possibilities. I was just born into the world. The old fetters—whatever they had been—were stricken from my hands and feet. The future lay before me a clear road such as an infant enters, and I could set out upon it equipped with a man’s learning and experience.</p>
|
||||
<p>I thought the hotel clerk looked at me five seconds too long. I had no baggage.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The Druggists’ Convention,” I said. “My trunk has somehow failed to arrive.” I drew out a roll of money.</p>
|
||||
@ -52,26 +52,26 @@
|
||||
<p>“Gentleman to three-fourteen,” said the clerk, hastily. I was whisked away to my room.</p>
|
||||
<p>The next day I bought a trunk and clothing, and began to live the life of Edward Pinkhammer. I did not tax my brain with endeavors to solve problems of the past.</p>
|
||||
<p>It was a piquant and sparkling cup that the great island city held up to my lips. I drank of it gratefully. The keys of Manhattan belong to him who is able to bear them. You must be either the city’s guest or its victim.</p>
|
||||
<p>The following few days were as gold and silver. Edward Pinkhammer, yet counting back to his birth by hours only, knew the rare joy of having come upon so diverting a world full-fledged and unrestrained. I sat entranced on the magic carpets provided in theatres and roof-gardens, that transported one into strange and delightful lands full of frolicsome music, pretty girls and grotesque drolly extravagant parodies upon human kind. I went here and there at my own dear will, bound by no limits of space, time or comportment. I dined in weird cabarets, at weirder <i>tables d’hôte</i> to the sound of Hungarian music and the wild shouts of mercurial artists and sculptors. Or, again, where the night life quivers in the electric glare like a kinetoscopic picture, and the millinery of the world, and its jewels, and the ones whom they adorn, and the men who make all three possible are met for good cheer and the spectacular effect. And among all these scenes that I have mentioned I learned one thing that I never knew before. And that is that the key to liberty is not in the hands of License, but Convention holds it. Comity has a toll-gate at which you must pay, or you may not enter the land of Freedom. In all the glitter, the seeming disorder, the parade, the abandon, I saw this law, unobtrusive, yet like iron, prevail. Therefore, in Manhattan you must obey these unwritten laws, and then you will be freest of the free. If you decline to be bound by them, you put on shackles.</p>
|
||||
<p>The following few days were as gold and silver. Edward Pinkhammer, yet counting back to his birth by hours only, knew the rare joy of having come upon so diverting a world full-fledged and unrestrained. I sat entranced on the magic carpets provided in theatres and roof-gardens, that transported one into strange and delightful lands full of frolicsome music, pretty girls and grotesque drolly extravagant parodies upon human kind. I went here and there at my own dear will, bound by no limits of space, time or comportment. I dined in weird cabarets, at weirder tables d’hôte to the sound of Hungarian music and the wild shouts of mercurial artists and sculptors. Or, again, where the night life quivers in the electric glare like a kinetoscopic picture, and the millinery of the world, and its jewels, and the ones whom they adorn, and the men who make all three possible are met for good cheer and the spectacular effect. And among all these scenes that I have mentioned I learned one thing that I never knew before. And that is that the key to liberty is not in the hands of License, but Convention holds it. Comity has a toll-gate at which you must pay, or you may not enter the land of Freedom. In all the glitter, the seeming disorder, the parade, the abandon, I saw this law, unobtrusive, yet like iron, prevail. Therefore, in Manhattan you must obey these unwritten laws, and then you will be freest of the free. If you decline to be bound by them, you put on shackles.</p>
|
||||
<p>Sometimes, as my mood urged me, I would seek the stately, softly murmuring palm rooms, redolent with high-born life and delicate restraint, in which to dine. Again I would go down to the waterways in steamers packed with vociferous, bedecked, unchecked love-making clerks and shop-girls to their crude pleasures on the island shores. And there was always Broadway—glistening, opulent, wily, varying, desirable Broadway—growing upon one like an opium habit.</p>
|
||||
<p>One afternoon as I entered my hotel a stout man with a big nose and a black mustache blocked my way in the corridor. When I would have passed around him, he greet me with offensive familiarity.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hello, Bellford!” he cried, loudly. “What the deuce are you doing in New York? Didn’t know anything could drag you away from that old book den of yours. Is Mrs. B. along or is this a little business run alone, eh?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hello, Bellford!” he cried, loudly. “What the deuce are you doing in New York? Didn’t know anything could drag you away from that old book den of yours. Is <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> B. along or is this a little business run alone, eh?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You have made a mistake, sir,” I said, coldly, releasing my hand from his grasp. “My name is Pinkhammer. You will excuse me.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The man dropped to one side, apparently astonished. As I walked to the clerk’s desk I heard him call to a bell boy and say something about telegraph blanks.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You will give me my bill,” I said to the clerk, “and have my baggage brought down in half an hour. I do not care to remain where I am annoyed by confidence men.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I moved that afternoon to another hotel, a sedate, old-fashioned one on lower Fifth Avenue.</p>
|
||||
<p>There was a restaurant a little way off Broadway where one could be served almost <i>al fresco</i> in a tropic array of screening flora. Quiet and luxury and a perfect service made it an ideal place in which to take luncheon or refreshment. One afternoon I was there picking my way to a table among the ferns when I felt my sleeve caught.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mr. Bellford!” exclaimed an amazingly sweet voice.</p>
|
||||
<p>There was a restaurant a little way off Broadway where one could be served almost al fresco in a tropic array of screening flora. Quiet and luxury and a perfect service made it an ideal place in which to take luncheon or refreshment. One afternoon I was there picking my way to a table among the ferns when I felt my sleeve caught.</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bellford!” exclaimed an amazingly sweet voice.</p>
|
||||
<p>I turned quickly to see a lady seated alone—a lady of about thirty, with exceedingly handsome eyes, who looked at me as though I had been her very dear friend.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You were about to pass me,” she said, accusingly. “Don’t tell me you do not know me. Why should we not shake hands—at least once in fifteen years?”</p>
|
||||
<p>I shook hands with her at once. I took a chair opposite her at the table. I summoned with my eyebrows a hovering waiter. The lady was philandering with an orange ice. I ordered a <i>crème de menthe</i>. Her hair was reddish bronze. You could not look at it, because you could not look away from her eyes. But you were conscious of it as you are conscious of sunset while you look into the profundities of a wood at twilight.</p>
|
||||
<p>I shook hands with her at once. I took a chair opposite her at the table. I summoned with my eyebrows a hovering waiter. The lady was philandering with an orange ice. I ordered a crème de menthe. Her hair was reddish bronze. You could not look at it, because you could not look away from her eyes. But you were conscious of it as you are conscious of sunset while you look into the profundities of a wood at twilight.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Are you sure you know me?” I asked.</p>
|
||||
<p>“No,” she said, smiling. “I was never sure of that.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“What would you think,” I said, a little anxiously, “if I were to tell you that my name is Edward Pinkhammer, from Cornopolis, Kansas?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“What would I think?” she repeated, with a merry glance. “Why, that you had not brought Mrs. Bellford to New York with you, of course. I do wish you had. I would have liked to see Marian.” Her voice lowered slightly—“You haven’t changed much, Elwyn.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“What would I think?” she repeated, with a merry glance. “Why, that you had not brought <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Bellford to New York with you, of course. I do wish you had. I would have liked to see Marian.” Her voice lowered slightly—“You haven’t changed much, Elwyn.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I felt her wonderful eyes searching mine and my face more closely.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes, you have,” she amended, and there was a soft, exultant note in her latest tones; “I see it now. You haven’t forgotten. You haven’t forgotten for a year or a day or an hour. I told you you never could.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I poked my straw anxiously in the <i>crème de menthe</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>I poked my straw anxiously in the crème de menthe.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m sure I beg your pardon,” I said, a little uneasy at her gaze. “But that is just the trouble. I have forgotten. I’ve forgotten everything.”</p>
|
||||
<p>She flouted my denial. She laughed deliciously at something she seemed to see in my face.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve heard of you at times,” she went on. “You’re quite a big lawyer out West—Denver, isn’t it, or Los Angeles? Marian must be very proud of you. You knew, I suppose, that I married six months after you did. You may have seen it in the papers. The flowers alone cost two thousand dollars.”</p>
|
||||
@ -79,7 +79,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Would it be too late,” I asked, somewhat timorously, “to offer you congratulations?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Not if you dare do it,” she answered, with such fine intrepidity that I was silent, and began to crease patterns on the cloth with my thumb nail.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Tell me one thing,” she said, leaning toward me rather eagerly—“a thing I have wanted to know for many years—just from a woman’s curiosity, of course—have you ever dared since that night to touch, smell or look at white roses—at white roses wet with rain and dew?”</p>
|
||||
<p>I took a sip of <i>crème de menthe</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>I took a sip of crème de menthe.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It would be useless, I suppose,” I said, with a sigh, “for me to repeat that I have no recollection at all about these things. My memory is completely at fault. I need not say how much I regret it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The lady rested her arms upon the table, and again her eyes disdained my words and went traveling by their own route direct to my soul. She laughed softly, with a strange quality in the sound—it was a laugh of happiness—yes, and of content—and of misery. I tried to look away from her.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You lie, Elwyn Bellford,” she breathed, blissfully. “Oh, I know you lie!”</p>
|
||||
@ -87,9 +87,9 @@
|
||||
<p>“My name is Edward Pinkhammer,” I said. “I came with the delegates to the Druggists’ National Convention. There is a movement on foot for arranging a new position for the bottles of tartrate of antimony and tartrate of potash, in which, very likely, you would take little interest.”</p>
|
||||
<p>A shining landau stopped before the entrance. The lady rose. I took her hand, and bowed.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am deeply sorry,” I said to her, “that I cannot remember. I could explain, but fear you would not understand. You will not concede Pinkhammer; and I really cannot at all conceive of the—the roses and other things.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Good-by, Mr. Bellford,” she said, with her happy, sorrowful smile, as she stepped into her carriage.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Good-by, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bellford,” she said, with her happy, sorrowful smile, as she stepped into her carriage.</p>
|
||||
<p>I attended the theatre that night. When I returned to my hotel, a quiet man in dark clothes, who seemed interested in rubbing his finger nails with a silk handkerchief, appeared, magically, at my side.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mr. Pinkhammer,” he said, giving the bulk of his attention to his forefinger, “may I request you to step aside with me for a little conversation? There is a room here.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Pinkhammer,” he said, giving the bulk of his attention to his forefinger, “may I request you to step aside with me for a little conversation? There is a room here.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Certainly,” I answered.</p>
|
||||
<p>He conducted me into a small, private parlor. A lady and a gentleman were there. The lady, I surmised, would have been unusually good-looking had her features not been clouded by an expression of keen worry and fatigue. She was of a style of figure and possessed coloring and features that were agreeable to my fancy. She was in a traveling dress; she fixed upon me an earnest look of extreme anxiety, and pressed an unsteady hand to her bosom. I think she would have started forward, but the gentleman arrested her movement with an authoritative motion of his hand. He then came, himself, to meet me. He was a man of forty, a little gray about the temples, and with a strong, thoughtful face.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Bellford, old man,” he said, cordially, “I’m glad to see you again. Of course we know everything is all right. I warned you, you know, that you were overdoing it. Now, you’ll go back with us, and be yourself again in no time.”</p>
|
||||
@ -103,7 +103,7 @@
|
||||
<p>He led her to the door.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Go to your room for a while,” I heard him say. “I will remain and talk with him. His mind? No, I think not—only a portion of the brain. Yes, I am sure he will recover. Go to your room and leave me with him.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The lady disappeared. The man in dark clothes also went outside, still manicuring himself in a thoughtful way. I think he waited in the hall.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I would like to talk with you a while, Mr. Pinkhammer, if I may,” said the gentleman who remained.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I would like to talk with you a while, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Pinkhammer, if I may,” said the gentleman who remained.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Very well, if you care to,” I replied, “and will excuse me if I take it comfortably; I am rather tired.” I stretched myself upon a couch by a window and lit a cigar. He drew a chair nearby.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Let us speak to the point,” he said, soothingly. “Your name is not Pinkhammer.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I know that as well as you do,” I said, coolly. “But a man must have a name of some sort. I can assure you that I do not extravagantly admire the name of Pinkhammer. But when one christens one’s self suddenly, the fine names do not seem to suggest themselves. But, suppose it had been Scheringhausen or Scroggins! I think I did very well with Pinkhammer.”</p>
|
||||
@ -111,7 +111,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“She is what I would call a fine-looking woman,” I said, after a judicial pause. “I particularly admire the shade of brown in her hair.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“She is a wife to be proud of. Since your disappearance, nearly two weeks ago, she has scarcely closed her eyes. We learned that you were in New York through a telegram sent by Isidore Newman, a traveling man from Denver. He said that he had met you in a hotel here, and that you did not recognize him.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I think I remember the occasion,” I said. “The fellow called me ‘Bellford,’ if I am not mistaken. But don’t you think it about time, now, for you to introduce yourself?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am Robert Volney—Doctor Volney. I have been your close friend for twenty years, and your physician for fifteen. I came with Mrs. Bellford to trace you as soon as we got the telegram. Try, Elwyn, old man—try to remember!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am Robert Volney—Doctor Volney. I have been your close friend for twenty years, and your physician for fifteen. I came with <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Bellford to trace you as soon as we got the telegram. Try, Elwyn, old man—try to remember!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“What’s the use to try?” I asked, with a little frown. “You say you are a physician. Is aphasia curable? When a man loses his memory does it return slowly, or suddenly?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sometimes gradually and imperfectly; sometimes as suddenly as it went.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Will you undertake the treatment of my case, Doctor Volney?” I asked.</p>
|
||||
@ -1,20 +1,20 @@
|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
<title>Chapter 3</title>
|
||||
<title>Babes in the Jungle</title>
|
||||
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||||
<h2>BABES IN THE JUNGLE</h2>
|
||||
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|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Babes in the Jungle</h2>
|
||||
<p>Montague Silver, the finest street man and art grafter in the West, says to me once in Little Rock: “If you ever lose your mind, Billy, and get too old to do honest swindling among grown men, go to New York. In the West a sucker is born every minute; but in New York they appear in chunks of roe—you can’t count ’em!”</p>
|
||||
<p>Two years afterward I found that I couldn’t remember the names of the Russian admirals, and I noticed some gray hairs over my left ear; so I knew the time had arrived for me to take Silver’s advice.</p>
|
||||
<p>I struck New York about noon one day, and took a walk up Broadway. And I run against Silver himself, all encompassed up in a spacious kind of haberdashery, leaning against a hotel and rubbing the half-moons on his nails with a silk handkerchief.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Paresis or superannuated?” I asks him.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hello, Billy,” says Silver; “I’m glad to see you. Yes, it seemed to me that the West was accumulating a little too much wiseness. I’ve been saving New York for dessert. I know it’s a low-down trick to take things from these people. They only know this and that and pass to and fro and think ever and anon. I’d hate for my mother to know I was skinning these weak-minded ones. She raised me better.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Is there a crush already in the waiting rooms of the old doctor that does skin grafting?” I asks.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, no,” says Silver; “you needn’t back Epidermis to win to-day. I’ve only been here a month. But I’m ready to begin; and the members of Willie Manhattan’s Sunday School class, each of whom has volunteered to contribute a portion of cuticle toward this rehabilitation, may as well send their photos to the <i>Evening Daily</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, no,” says Silver; “you needn’t back Epidermis to win to-day. I’ve only been here a month. But I’m ready to begin; and the members of Willie Manhattan’s Sunday School class, each of whom has volunteered to contribute a portion of cuticle toward this rehabilitation, may as well send their photos to the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Evening Daily</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve been studying the town,” says Silver, “and reading the papers every day, and I know it as well as the cat in the City Hall knows an O’Sullivan. People here lie down on the floor and scream and kick when you are the least bit slow about taking money from them. Come up in my room and I’ll tell you. We’ll work the town together, Billy, for the sake of old times.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Silver takes me up in a hotel. He has a quantity of irrelevant objects lying about.</p>
|
||||
<p>“There’s more ways of getting money from these metropolitan hayseeds,” says Silver, “than there is of cooking rice in Charleston, S. C. They’ll bite at anything. The brains of most of ’em commute. The wiser they are in intelligence the less perception of cognizance they have. Why, didn’t a man the other day sell J. P. Morgan an oil portrait of Rockefeller, Jr., for Andrea del Sarto’s celebrated painting of the young Saint John!</p>
|
||||
@ -30,32 +30,32 @@
|
||||
<p>“I’ve got $1,200,” says he. “We’ll pool and do a big piece of business. There’s so many ways we can make a million that I don’t know how to begin.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The next morning Silver meets me at the hotel and he is all sonorous and stirred with a kind of silent joy.</p>
|
||||
<p>“We’re to meet J. P. Morgan this afternoon,” says he. “A man I know in the hotel wants to introduce us. He’s a friend of his. He says he likes to meet people from the West.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“That sounds nice and plausible,” says I. “I’d like to know Mr. Morgan.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“That sounds nice and plausible,” says I. “I’d like to know <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morgan.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It won’t hurt us a bit,” says Silver, “to get acquainted with a few finance kings. I kind of like the social way New York has with strangers.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The man Silver knew was named Klein. At three o’clock Klein brought his Wall Street friend to see us in Silver’s room. “Mr. Morgan” looked some like his pictures, and he had a Turkish towel wrapped around his left foot, and he walked with a cane.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mr. Silver and Mr. Pescud,” says Klein. “It sounds superfluous,” says he, “to mention the name of the greatest financial—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Cut it out, Klein,” says Mr. Morgan. “I’m glad to know you gents; I take great interest in the West. Klein tells me you’re from Little Rock. I think I’ve a railroad or two out there somewhere. If either of you guys would like to deal a hand or two of stud poker I—”</p>
|
||||
<p>The man Silver knew was named Klein. At three o’clock Klein brought his Wall Street friend to see us in Silver’s room. “<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morgan” looked some like his pictures, and he had a Turkish towel wrapped around his left foot, and he walked with a cane.</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Silver and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Pescud,” says Klein. “It sounds superfluous,” says he, “to mention the name of the greatest financial—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Cut it out, Klein,” says <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morgan. “I’m glad to know you gents; I take great interest in the West. Klein tells me you’re from Little Rock. I think I’ve a railroad or two out there somewhere. If either of you guys would like to deal a hand or two of stud poker I—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Now, Pierpont,” cuts in Klein, “you forget!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Excuse me, gents!” says Morgan; “since I’ve had the gout so bad I sometimes play a social game of cards at my house. Neither of you never knew One-eyed Peters, did you, while you was around Little Rock? He lived in Seattle, New Mexico.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Before we could answer, Mr. Morgan hammers on the floor with his cane and begins to walk up and down, swearing in a loud tone of voice.</p>
|
||||
<p>Before we could answer, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morgan hammers on the floor with his cane and begins to walk up and down, swearing in a loud tone of voice.</p>
|
||||
<p>“They have been pounding your stocks to-day on the Street, Pierpont?” asks Klein, smiling.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Stocks! No!” roars Mr. Morgan. “It’s that picture I sent an agent to Europe to buy. I just thought about it. He cabled me to-day that it ain’t to be found in all Italy. I’d pay $50,000 to-morrow for that picture—yes, $75,000. I give the agent a la carte in purchasing it. I cannot understand why the art galleries will allow a De Vinchy to—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, Mr. Morgan,” says klein; “I thought you owned all of the De Vinchy paintings.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“What is the picture like, Mr. Morgan?” asks Silver. “It must be as big as the side of the Flatiron Building.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m afraid your art education is on the bum, Mr. Silver,” says Morgan. “The picture is 27 inches by 42; and it is called ‘Love’s Idle Hour.’ It represents a number of cloak models doing the two-step on the bank of a purple river. The cablegram said it might have been brought to this country. My collection will never be complete without that picture. Well, so long, gents; us financiers must keep early hours.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Morgan and Klein went away together in a cab. Me and Silver talked about how simple and unsuspecting great people was; and Silver said what a shame it would be to try to rob a man like Mr. Morgan; and I said I thought it would be rather imprudent, myself. Klein proposes a stroll after dinner; and me and him and Silver walks down toward Seventh Avenue to see the sights. Klein sees a pair of cuff links that instigate his admiration in a pawnshop window, and we all go in while he buys ’em.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Stocks! No!” roars <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morgan. “It’s that picture I sent an agent to Europe to buy. I just thought about it. He cabled me to-day that it ain’t to be found in all Italy. I’d pay $50,000 to-morrow for that picture—yes, $75,000. I give the agent a la carte in purchasing it. I cannot understand why the art galleries will allow a De Vinchy to—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morgan,” says klein; “I thought you owned all of the De Vinchy paintings.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“What is the picture like, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morgan?” asks Silver. “It must be as big as the side of the Flatiron Building.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m afraid your art education is on the bum, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Silver,” says Morgan. “The picture is 27 inches by 42; and it is called ‘Love’s Idle Hour.’ It represents a number of cloak models doing the two-step on the bank of a purple river. The cablegram said it might have been brought to this country. My collection will never be complete without that picture. Well, so long, gents; us financiers must keep early hours.”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morgan and Klein went away together in a cab. Me and Silver talked about how simple and unsuspecting great people was; and Silver said what a shame it would be to try to rob a man like <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morgan; and I said I thought it would be rather imprudent, myself. Klein proposes a stroll after dinner; and me and him and Silver walks down toward Seventh Avenue to see the sights. Klein sees a pair of cuff links that instigate his admiration in a pawnshop window, and we all go in while he buys ’em.</p>
|
||||
<p>After we got back to the hotel and Klein had gone, Silver jumps at me and waves his hands.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Did you see it?” says he. “Did you see it, Billy?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“What?” I asks.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, that picture that Morgan wants. It’s hanging in that pawnshop, behind the desk. I didn’t say anything because Klein was there. It’s the article sure as you live. The girls are as natural as paint can make them, all measuring 36 and 25 and 42 skirts, if they had any skirts, and they’re doing a buck-and-wing on the bank of a river with the blues. What did Mr. Morgan say he’d give for it? Oh, don’t make me tell you. They can’t know what it is in that pawnshop.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, that picture that Morgan wants. It’s hanging in that pawnshop, behind the desk. I didn’t say anything because Klein was there. It’s the article sure as you live. The girls are as natural as paint can make them, all measuring 36 and 25 and 42 skirts, if they had any skirts, and they’re doing a buck-and-wing on the bank of a river with the blues. What did <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morgan say he’d give for it? Oh, don’t make me tell you. They can’t know what it is in that pawnshop.”</p>
|
||||
<p>When the pawnshop opened the next morning me and Silver was standing there as anxious as if we wanted to soak our Sunday suit to buy a drink. We sauntered inside, and began to look at watch-chains.</p>
|
||||
<p>“That’s a violent specimen of a chromo you’ve got up there,” remarked Silver, casual, to the pawnbroker. “But I kind of enthuse over the girl with the shoulder-blades and red bunting. Would an offer of $2.25 for it cause you to knock over any fragile articles of your stock in hurrying it off the nail?”</p>
|
||||
<p>The pawnbroker smiles and goes on showing us plate watch-chains.</p>
|
||||
<p>“That picture,” says he, “was pledged a year ago by an Italian gentleman. I loaned him $500 on it. It is called ‘Love’s Idle Hour,’ and it is by Leonardo de Vinchy. Two days ago the legal time expired, and it became an unredeemed pledge. Here is a style of chain that is worn a great deal now.”</p>
|
||||
<p>At the end of half an hour me and Silver paid the pawnbroker $2,000 and walked out with the picture. Silver got into a cab with it and started for Morgan’s office. I goes to the hotel and waits for him. In two hours Silver comes back.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Did you see Mr. Morgan?” I asks. “How much did he pay you for it?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Did you see <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morgan?” I asks. “How much did he pay you for it?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Silver sits down and fools with a tassel on the table cover.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I never exactly saw Mr. Morgan,” he says, “because Mr. Morgan’s been in Europe for a month. But what’s worrying me, Billy, is this: The department stores have all got that same picture on sale, framed, for $3.48. And they charge $3.50 for the frame alone—that’s what I can’t understand.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I never exactly saw <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morgan,” he says, “because <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morgan’s been in Europe for a month. But what’s worrying me, Billy, is this: The department stores have all got that same picture on sale, framed, for $3.48. And they charge $3.50 for the frame alone—that’s what I can’t understand.”</p>
|
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<head>
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<title>Chapter 10</title>
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<section id="chapter-10" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY</h2>
|
||||
<p>The poet Longfellow—or was it Confucius, the inventor of wisdom?—remarked:</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p>“Life is real, life is earnest;<br/>And things are not what they seem.”</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>As mathematics are—or is: thanks, old subscriber!—the only just rule by which questions of life can be measured, let us, by all means, adjust our theme to the straight edge and the balanced column of the great goddess Two-and-Two-Makes-Four. Figures—unassailable sums in addition—shall be set over against whatever opposing element there may be.</p>
|
||||
<p>A mathematician, after scanning the above two lines of poetry, would say: “Ahem! young gentlemen, if we assume that X plus—that is, that life is real—then things (all of which life includes) are real. Anything that is real is what it seems. Then if we consider the proposition that ‘things are not what they seem,’ why—”</p>
|
||||
<p>But this is heresy, and not poesy. We woo the sweet nymph Algebra; we would conduct you into the presence of the elusive, seductive, pursued, satisfying, mysterious X.</p>
|
||||
<p>Not long before the beginning of this century, Septimus Kinsolving, an old New Yorker, invented an idea. He originated the discovery that bread is made from flour and not from wheat futures. Perceiving that the flour crop was short, and that the Stock Exchange was having no perceptible effect on the growing wheat, Mr. Kinsolving cornered the flour market.</p>
|
||||
<p>The result was that when you or my landlady (before the war she never had to turn her hand to anything; Southerners accommodated) bought a five-cent loaf of bread you laid down an additional two cents, which went to Mr. Kinsolving as a testimonial to his perspicacity.</p>
|
||||
<p>A second result was that Mr. Kinsolving quit the game with $2,000,000 prof—er—rake-off.</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Kinsolving’s son Dan was at college when the mathematical experiment in breadstuffs was made. Dan came home during vacation, and found the old gentleman in a red dressing-gown reading “Little Dorrit” on the porch of his estimable red brick mansion in Washington Square. He had retired from business with enough extra two-cent pieces from bread buyers to reach, if laid side by side, fifteen times around the earth and lap as far as the public debt of Paraguay.</p>
|
||||
<p>Dan shook hands with his father, and hurried over to Greenwich Village to see his old high-school friend, Kenwitz. Dan had always admired Kenwitz. Kenwitz was pale, curly-haired, intense, serious, mathematical, studious, altruistic, socialistic, and the natural foe of oligarchies. Kenwitz had foregone college, and was learning watch-making in his father’s jewelry store. Dan was smiling, jovial, easy-tempered and tolerant alike of kings and ragpickers. The two foregathered joyously, being opposites. And then Dan went back to college, and Kenwitz to his mainsprings—and to his private library in the rear of the jewelry shop.</p>
|
||||
<p>Four years later Dan came back to Washington Square with the accumulations of B. A. and two years of Europe thick upon him. He took a filial look at Septimus Kinsolving’s elaborate tombstone in Greenwood and a tedious excursion through typewritten documents with the family lawyer; and then, feeling himself a lonely and hopeless millionaire, hurried down to the old jewelry store across Sixth Avenue.</p>
|
||||
<p>Kenwitz unscrewed a magnifying glass from his eye, routed out his parent from a dingy rear room, and abandoned the interior of watches for outdoors. He went with Dan, and they sat on a bench in Washington Square. Dan had not changed much; he was stalwart, and had a dignity that was inclined to relax into a grin. Kenwitz was more serious, more intense, more learned, philosophical and socialistic.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I know about it now,” said Dan, finally. “I pumped it out of the eminent legal lights that turned over to me poor old dad’s collections of bonds and boodle. It amounts to $2,000,000, Ken. And I am told that he squeezed it out of the chaps that pay their pennies for loaves of bread at little bakeries around the corner. You’ve studied economics, Dan, and you know all about monopolies, and the masses, and octopuses, and the rights of laboring people. I never thought about those things before. Football and trying to be white to my fellow-man were about the extent of my college curriculum.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But since I came back and found out how dad made his money I’ve been thinking. I’d like awfully well to pay back those chaps who had to give up too much money for bread. I know it would buck the line of my income for a good many yards; but I’d like to make it square with ’em. Is there any way it can be done, old Ways and Means?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Kenwitz’s big black eyes glowed fierily. His thin, intellectual face took on almost a sardonic cast. He caught Dan’s arm with the grip of a friend and a judge.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You can’t do it!” he said, emphatically. “One of the chief punishments of you men of ill-gotten wealth is that when you do repent you find that you have lost the power to make reparation or restitution. I admire your good intentions, Dan, but you can’t do anything. Those people were robbed of their precious pennies. It’s too late to remedy the evil. You can’t pay them back”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Of course,” said Dan, lighting his pipe, “we couldn’t hunt up every one of the duffers and hand ’em back the right change. There’s an awful lot of ’em buying bread all the time. Funny taste they have—I never cared for bread especially, except for a toasted cracker with the Roquefort. But we might find a few of ’em and chuck some of dad’s cash back where it came from. I’d feel better if I could. It seems tough for people to be held up for a soggy thing like bread. One wouldn’t mind standing a rise in broiled lobsters or deviled crabs. Get to work and think, Ken. I want to pay back all of that money I can.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“There are plenty of charities,” said Kenwitz, mechanically.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Easy enough,” said Dan, in a cloud of smoke. “I suppose I could give the city a park, or endow an asparagus bed in a hospital. But I don’t want Paul to get away with the proceeds of the gold brick we sold Peter. It’s the bread shorts I want to cover, Ken.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The thin fingers of Kenwitz moved rapidly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Do you know how much money it would take to pay back the losses of consumers during that corner in flour?” he asked.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I do not.” said Dan, stoutly. “My lawyer tells me that I have two millions.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“If you had a hundred millions,” said Kenwitz, vehemently, “you couldn’t repair a thousandth part of the damage that has been done. You cannot conceive of the accumulated evils produced by misapplied wealth. Each penny that was wrung from the lean purses of the poor reacted a thousandfold to their harm. You do not understand. You do not see how hopeless is your desire to make restitution. Not in a single instance can it be done.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Back up, philosopher!” said Dan. “The penny has no sorrow that the dollar cannot heal.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Not in one instance,” repeated Kenwitz. “I will give you one, and let us see. Thomas Boyne had a little bakery over there in Varick Street. He sold bread to the poorest people. When the price of flour went up he had to raise the price of bread. His customers were too poor to pay it, Boyne’s business failed and he lost his $1,000 capital—all he had in the world.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Dan Kinsolving struck the park bench a mighty blow with his fist.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I accept the instance,” he cried. “Take me to Boyne. I will repay his thousand dollars and buy him a new bakery.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Write your check,” said Kenwitz, without moving, “and then begin to write checks in payment of the train of consequences. Draw the next one for $50,000. Boyne went insane after his failure and set fire to the building from which he was about to be evicted. The loss amounted to that much. Boyne died in an asylum.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Stick to the instance,” said Dan. “I haven’t noticed any insurance companies on my charity list.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Draw your next check for $100,000,” went on Kenwitz. “Boyne’s son fell into bad ways after the bakery closed, and was accused of murder. He was acquitted last week after a three years’ legal battle, and the state draws upon taxpayers for that much expense.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Back to the bakery!” exclaimed Dan, impatiently. “The Government doesn’t need to stand in the bread line.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The last item of the instance is—come and I will show you,” said Kenwitz, rising.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Socialistic watchmaker was happy. He was a millionaire-baiter by nature and a pessimist by trade. Kenwitz would assure you in one breath that money was but evil and corruption, and that your brand-new watch needed cleaning and a new ratchet-wheel.</p>
|
||||
<p>He conducted Kinsolving southward out of the square and into ragged, poverty-haunted Varick Street. Up the narrow stairway of a squalid brick tenement he led the penitent offspring of the Octopus. He knocked on a door, and a clear voice called to them to enter.</p>
|
||||
<p>In that almost bare room a young woman sat sewing at a machine. She nodded to Kenwitz as to a familiar acquaintance. One little stream of sunlight through the dingy window burnished her heavy hair to the color of an ancient Tuscan’s shield. She flashed a rippling smile at Kenwitz and a look of somewhat flustered inquiry.</p>
|
||||
<p>Kinsolving stood regarding her clear and pathetic beauty in heart-throbbing silence. Thus they came into the presence of the last item of the Instance.</p>
|
||||
<p>“How many this week, Miss Mary?” asked the watchmaker. A mountain of coarse gray shirts lay upon the floor.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Nearly thirty dozen,” said the young woman cheerfully. “I’ve made almost $4. I’m improving, Mr. Kenwitz. I hardly know what to do with so much money.” Her eyes turned, brightly soft, in the direction of Dan. A little pink spot came out on her round, pale cheek.</p>
|
||||
<p>Kenwitz chuckled like a diabolic raven.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Miss Boyne,” he said, “let me present Mr. Kinsolving, the son of the man who put bread up five years ago. He thinks he would like to do something to aid those who where inconvenienced by that act.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The smile left the young woman’s face. She rose and pointed her forefinger toward the door. This time she looked Kinsolving straight in the eye, but it was not a look that gave delight.</p>
|
||||
<p>The two men went down Varick Street. Kenwitz, letting all his pessimism and rancor and hatred of the Octopus come to the surface, gibed at the moneyed side of his friend in an acrid torrent of words. Dan appeared to be listening, and then turned to Kenwitz and shook hands with him warmly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m obliged to you, Ken, old man,” he said, vaguely—“a thousand times obliged.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mein Gott! you are crazy!” cried the watchmaker, dropping his spectacles for the first time in years.</p>
|
||||
<p>Two months afterward Kenwitz went into a large bakery on lower Broadway with a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses that he had mended for the proprietor.</p>
|
||||
<p>A lady was giving an order to a clerk as Kenwitz passed her.</p>
|
||||
<p>“These loaves are ten cents,” said the clerk.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I always get them at eight cents uptown,” said the lady. “You need not fill the order. I will drive by there on my way home.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The voice was familiar. The watchmaker paused.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mr. Kenwitz!” cried the lady, heartily. “How do you do?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Kenwitz was trying to train his socialistic and economic comprehension on her wonderful fur boa and the carriage waiting outside.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, Miss Boyne!” he began.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mrs. Kinsolving,” she corrected. “Dan and I were married a month ago.”</p>
|
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<head>
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||||
<title>Chapter 16</title>
|
||||
<title>Compliments of the Season</title>
|
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|
||||
<h2>COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON</h2>
|
||||
<section id="compliments-of-the-season" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Compliments of the Season</h2>
|
||||
<p>There are no more Christmas stories to write. Fiction is exhausted; and newspaper items, the next best, are manufactured by clever young journalists who have married early and have an engagingly pessimistic view of life. Therefore, for seasonable diversion, we are reduced to very questionable sources—facts and philosophy. We will begin with—whichever you choose to call it.</p>
|
||||
<p>Children are pestilential little animals with which we have to cope under a bewildering variety of conditions. Especially when childish sorrows overwhelm them are we put to our wits’ end. We exhaust our paltry store of consolation; and then beat them, sobbing, to sleep. Then we grovel in the dust of a million years, and ask God why. Thus we call out of the rat-trap. As for the children, no one understands them except old maids, hunchbacks, and shepherd dogs.</p>
|
||||
<p>Now comes the facts in the case of the Rag-Doll, the Tatterdemalion, and the Twenty-fifth of December.</p>
|
||||
<p>On the tenth of that month the Child of the Millionaire lost her rag-doll. There were many servants in the Millionaire’s palace on the Hudson, and these ransacked the house and grounds, but without finding the lost treasure. The child was a girl of five, and one of those perverse little beasts that often wound the sensibilities of wealthy parents by fixing their affections upon some vulgar, inexpensive toy instead of upon diamond-studded automobiles and pony phaetons.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Child grieved sorely and truly, a thing inexplicable to the Millionaire, to whom the rag-doll market was about as interesting as Bay State Gas; and to the Lady, the Child’s mother, who was all form—that is, nearly all, as you shall see.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Child cried inconsolably, and grew hollow-eyed, knock-kneed, spindling, and corykilverty in many other respects. The Millionaire smiled and tapped his coffers confidently. The pick of the output of the French and German toymakers was rushed by special delivery to the mansion; but Rachel refused to be comforted. She was weeping for her rag child, and was for a high protective tariff against all foreign foolishness. Then doctors with the finest bedside manners and stop-watches were called in. One by one they chattered futilely about peptomanganate of iron and sea voyages and hypophosphites until their stop-watches showed that Bill Rendered was under the wire for show or place. Then, as men, they advised that the rag-doll be found as soon as possible and restored to its mourning parent. The Child sniffed at therapeutics, chewed a thumb, and wailed for her Betsy. And all this time cablegrams were coming from Santa Claus saying that he would soon be here and enjoining us to show a true Christian spirit and let up on the pool-rooms and tontine policies and platoon systems long enough to give him a welcome. Everywhere the spirit of Christmas was diffusing itself. The banks were refusing loans, the pawn-brokers had doubled their gang of helpers, people bumped your shins on the streets with red sleds, Thomas and Jeremiah bubbled before you on the bars while you waited on one foot, holly-wreaths of hospitality were hung in windows of the stores, they who had ’em were getting their furs. You hardly knew which was the best bet in balls—three, high, moth, or snow. It was no time at which to lose the rag-doll or your heart.</p>
|
||||
<p>If Doctor Watson’s investigating friend had been called in to solve this mysterious disappearance he might have observed on the Millionaire’s wall a copy of “The Vampire.” That would have quickly suggested, by induction, “A rag and a bone and a hank of hair.” “Flip,” a Scotch terrier, next to the rag-doll in the Child’s heart, frisked through the halls. The hank of hair! Aha! X, the unfound quantity, represented the rag-doll. But, the bone? Well, when dogs find bones they—Done! It were an easy and a fruitful task to examine Flip’s forefeet. Look, Watson! Earth—dried earth between the toes. Of course, the dog—but Sherlock was not there. Therefore it devolves. But topography and architecture must intervene.</p>
|
||||
<p>If Doctor Watson’s investigating friend had been called in to solve this mysterious disappearance he might have observed on the Millionaire’s wall a copy of “The Vampire.” That would have quickly suggested, by induction, “A rag and a bone and a hank of hair.” “Flip,” a Scotch terrier, next to the rag-doll in the Child’s heart, frisked through the halls. The hank of hair! Aha! <span epub:type="z3998:roman">X</span>, the unfound quantity, represented the rag-doll. But, the bone? Well, when dogs find bones they—Done! It were an easy and a fruitful task to examine Flip’s forefeet. Look, Watson! Earth—dried earth between the toes. Of course, the dog—but Sherlock was not there. Therefore it devolves. But topography and architecture must intervene.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Millionaire’s palace occupied a lordly space. In front of it was a lawn close-mowed as a South Ireland man’s face two days after a shave. At one side of it, and fronting on another street was a pleasaunce trimmed to a leaf, and the garage and stables. The Scotch pup had ravished the rag-doll from the nursery, dragged it to a corner of the lawn, dug a hole, and buried it after the manner of careless undertakers. There you have the mystery solved, and no checks to write for the hypodermical wizard or fi’-pun notes to toss to the sergeant. Then let’s get down to the heart of the thing, tiresome readers—the Christmas heart of the thing.</p>
|
||||
<p>Fuzzy was drunk—not riotously or helplessly or loquaciously, as you or I might get, but decently, appropriately, and inoffensively, as becomes a gentleman down on his luck.</p>
|
||||
<p>Fuzzy was a soldier of misfortune. The road, the haystack, the park bench, the kitchen door, the bitter round of eleemosynary beds-with-shower-bath-attachment, the petty pickings and ignobly garnered largesse of great cities—these formed the chapters of his history.</p>
|
||||
@ -63,7 +63,7 @@
|
||||
<p>He paused there as the flunky drew open the great mahogany portal for him to pass into the vestibule.</p>
|
||||
<p>Beyond the wrought-iron gates in the dark highway Black Riley and his two pals casually strolled, fingering under their coats the inevitably fatal weapons that were to make the reward of the rag-doll theirs.</p>
|
||||
<p>Fuzzy stopped at the Millionaire’s door and bethought himself. Like little sprigs of mistletoe on a dead tree, certain living green thoughts and memories began to decorate his confused mind. He was quite drunk, mind you, and the present was beginning to fade. Those wreaths and festoons of holly with their scarlet berries making the great hall gay—where had he seen such things before? Somewhere he had known polished floors and odors of fresh flowers in winter, and—and some one was singing a song in the house that he thought he had heard before. Some one singing and playing a harp. Of course, it was Christmas—Fuzzy though he must have been pretty drunk to have overlooked that.</p>
|
||||
<p>And then he went out of the present, and there came back to him out of some impossible, vanished, and irrevocable past a little, pure-white, transient, forgotten ghost—the spirit of <i>noblesse oblige</i>. Upon a gentleman certain things devolve.</p>
|
||||
<p>And then he went out of the present, and there came back to him out of some impossible, vanished, and irrevocable past a little, pure-white, transient, forgotten ghost—the spirit of noblesse oblige. Upon a gentleman certain things devolve.</p>
|
||||
<p>James opened the outer door. A stream of light went down the graveled walk to the iron gate. Black Riley, McCarthy, and “One-ear” Mike saw, and carelessly drew their sinister cordon closer about the gate.</p>
|
||||
<p>With a more imperious gesture than James’s master had ever used or could ever use, Fuzzy compelled the menial to close the door. Upon a gentleman certain things devolve. Especially at the Christmas season.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It is cust—customary,” he said to James, the flustered, “when a gentleman calls on Christmas Eve to pass the compliments of the season with the lady of the house. You und’stand? I shall not move shtep till I pass compl’ments season with lady the house. Und’stand?”</p>
|
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<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 20</title>
|
||||
<title>Past One at Rooney’s</title>
|
||||
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<section id="chapter-20" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>PAST ONE AT ROONEY’S</h2>
|
||||
<section id="past-one-at-rooneys" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Past One at Rooney’s</h2>
|
||||
<p>Only on the lower East Side of New York do the houses of Capulet and Montagu survive. There they do not fight by the book of arithmetic. If you but bite your thumb at an upholder of your opposing house you have work cut out for your steel. On Broadway you may drag your man along a dozen blocks by his nose, and he will only bawl for the watch; but in the domain of the East Side Tybalts and Mercutios you must observe the niceties of deportment to the wink of any eyelash and to an inch of elbow room at the bar when its patrons include foes of your house and kin.</p>
|
||||
<p>So, when Eddie McManus, known to the Capulets as Cork McManus, drifted into Dutch Mike’s for a stein of beer, and came upon a bunch of Montagus making merry with the suds, he began to observe the strictest parliamentary rules. Courtesy forbade his leaving the saloon with his thirst unslaked; caution steered him to a place at the bar where the mirror supplied the cognizance of the enemy’s movements that his indifferent gaze seemed to disdain; experience whispered to him that the finger of trouble would be busy among the chattering steins at Dutch Mike’s that night. Close by his side drew Brick Cleary, his Mercutio, companion of his perambulations. Thus they stood, four of the Mulberry Hill Gang and two of the Dry Dock Gang, minding their P’s and Q’s so solicitously that Dutch Mike kept one eye on his customers and the other on an open space beneath his bar in which it was his custom to seek safety whenever the ominous politeness of the rival associations congealed into the shapes of bullets and cold steel.</p>
|
||||
<p>But we have not to do with the wars of the Mulberry Hills and the Dry Docks. We must to Rooney’s, where, on the most blighted dead branch of the tree of life, a little pale orchid shall bloom.</p>
|
||||
<p>Overstrained etiquette at last gave way. It is not known who first overstepped the bounds of punctilio; but the consequences were immediate. Buck Malone, of the Mulberry Hills, with a Dewey-like swiftness, got an eight-inch gun swung round from his hurricane deck. But McManus’s simile must be the torpedo. He glided in under the guns and slipped a scant three inches of knife blade between the ribs of the Mulberry Hill cruiser. Meanwhile Brick Cleary, a devotee to strategy, had skimmed across the lunch counter and thrown the switch of the electrics, leaving the combat to be waged by the light of gunfire alone. Dutch Mike crawled from his haven and ran into the street crying for the watch instead of for a Shakespeare to immortalize the Cimmerian shindy.</p>
|
||||
<p>The cop came, and found a prostrate, bleeding Montagu supported by three distrait and reticent followers of the House. Faithful to the ethics of the gangs, no one knew whence the hurt came. There was no Capulet to be seen.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Raus mit der interrogatories,” said Buck Malone to the officer. “Sure I know who done it. I always manages to get a bird’s eye view of any guy that comes up an’ makes a show case for a hardware store out of me. No. I’m not telling you his name. I’ll settle with um meself. Wow—ouch! Easy, boys! Yes, I’ll attend to his case meself. I’m not making any complaint.”</p>
|
||||
<p>At midnight McManus strolled around a pile of lumber near an East Side dock, and lingered in the vicinity of a certain water plug. Brick Cleary drifted casually to the trysting place ten minutes later. “He’ll maybe not croak,” said Brick; “and he won’t tell, of course. But Dutch Mike did. He told the police he was tired of having his place shot up. It’s unhandy just now, because Tim Corrigan’s in Europe for a week’s end with Kings. He’ll be back on the <i>Kaiser Williams</i> next Friday. You’ll have to duck out of sight till then. Tim’ll fix it up all right for us when he comes back.”</p>
|
||||
<p>At midnight McManus strolled around a pile of lumber near an East Side dock, and lingered in the vicinity of a certain water plug. Brick Cleary drifted casually to the trysting place ten minutes later. “He’ll maybe not croak,” said Brick; “and he won’t tell, of course. But Dutch Mike did. He told the police he was tired of having his place shot up. It’s unhandy just now, because Tim Corrigan’s in Europe for a week’s end with Kings. He’ll be back on the <i epub:type="se:vessel.ship">Kaiser Williams</i> next Friday. You’ll have to duck out of sight till then. Tim’ll fix it up all right for us when he comes back.”</p>
|
||||
<p>This goes to explain why Cork McManus went into Rooney’s one night and there looked upon the bright, stranger face of Romance for the first time in his precarious career.</p>
|
||||
<p>Until Tim Corrigan should return from his jaunt among Kings and Princes and hold up his big white finger in private offices, it was unsafe for Cork in any of the old haunts of his gang. So he lay, perdu, in the high rear room of a Capulet, reading pink sporting sheets and cursing the slow paddle wheels of the <i>Kaiser Wilhelm</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>Until Tim Corrigan should return from his jaunt among Kings and Princes and hold up his big white finger in private offices, it was unsafe for Cork in any of the old haunts of his gang. So he lay, perdu, in the high rear room of a Capulet, reading pink sporting sheets and cursing the slow paddle wheels of the <i epub:type="se:vessel.ship">Kaiser Wilhelm</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>It was on Thursday evening that Cork’s seclusion became intolerable to him. Never a hart panted for water fountain as he did for the cool touch of a drifting stein, for the firm security of a foot-rail in the hollow of his shoe and the quiet, hearty challenges of friendship and repartee along and across the shining bars. But he must avoid the district where he was known. The cops were looking for him everywhere, for news was scarce, and the newspapers were harping again on the failure of the police to suppress the gangs. If they got him before Corrigan came back, the big white finger could not be uplifted; it would be too late then. But Corrigan would be home the next day, so he felt sure there would be small danger in a little excursion that night among the crass pleasures that represented life to him.</p>
|
||||
<p>At half-past twelve McManus stood in a darkish cross-town street looking up at the name “Rooney’s,” picked out by incandescent lights against a signboard over a second-story window. He had heard of the place as a tough “hang-out”; with its frequenters and its locality he was unfamiliar. Guided by certain unerring indications common to all such resorts, he ascended the stairs and entered the large room over the café.</p>
|
||||
<p>Here were some twenty or thirty tables, at this time about half-filled with Rooney’s guests. Waiters served drinks. At one end a human pianola with drugged eyes hammered the keys with automatic and furious unprecision. At merciful intervals a waiter would roar or squeak a song—songs full of “Mr. Johnsons” and “babes” and “coons”—historical word guaranties of the genuineness of African melodies composed by red waistcoated young gentlemen, natives of the cotton fields and rice swamps of West Twenty-eighth Street.</p>
|
||||
<p>Here were some twenty or thirty tables, at this time about half-filled with Rooney’s guests. Waiters served drinks. At one end a human pianola with drugged eyes hammered the keys with automatic and furious unprecision. At merciful intervals a waiter would roar or squeak a song—songs full of “<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Johnsons” and “babes” and “coons”—historical word guaranties of the genuineness of African melodies composed by red waistcoated young gentlemen, natives of the cotton fields and rice swamps of West Twenty-eighth Street.</p>
|
||||
<p>For one brief moment you must admire Rooney with me as he receives, seats, manipulates, and chaffs his guests. He is twenty-nine. He has Wellington’s nose, Dante’s chin, the cheek-bones of an Iroquois, the smile of Talleyrand, Corbett’s foot work, and the poise of an eleven-year-old East Side Central Park Queen of the May. He is assisted by a lieutenant known as Frank, a pudgy, easy chap, swell-dressed, who goes among the tables seeing that dull care does not intrude. Now, what is there about Rooney’s to inspire all this pother? It is more respectable by daylight; stout ladies with children and mittens and bundles and unpedigreed dogs drop up of afternoons for a stein and a chat. Even by gaslight the diversions are melancholy i’ the mouth—drink and rag-time, and an occasional surprise when the waiter swabs the suds from under your sticky glass. There is an answer. Transmigration! The soul of Sir Walter Raleigh has traveled from beneath his slashed doublet to a kindred home under Rooney’s visible plaid waistcoat. Rooney’s is twenty years ahead of the times. Rooney has removed the embargo. Rooney has spread his cloak upon the soggy crossing of public opinion, and any Elizabeth who treads upon it is as much a queen as another. Attend to the revelation of the secret. In Rooney’s ladies may smoke!</p>
|
||||
<p>McManus sat down at a vacant table. He paid for the glass of beer that he ordered, tilted his narrow-brimmed derby to the back of his brick-dust head, twined his feet among the rungs of his chair, and heaved a sigh of contentment from the breathing spaces of his innermost soul; for this mud honey was clarified sweetness to his taste. The sham gaiety, the hectic glow of counterfeit hospitality, the self-conscious, joyless laughter, the wine-born warmth, the loud music retrieving the hour from frequent whiles of awful and corroding silence, the presence of well-clothed and frank-eyed beneficiaries of Rooney’s removal of the restrictions laid upon the weed, the familiar blended odors of soaked lemon peel, flat beer, and <i>peau d’Espagne</i>—all these were manna to Cork McManus, hungry for his week in the desert of the Capulet’s high rear room.</p>
|
||||
<p>McManus sat down at a vacant table. He paid for the glass of beer that he ordered, tilted his narrow-brimmed derby to the back of his brick-dust head, twined his feet among the rungs of his chair, and heaved a sigh of contentment from the breathing spaces of his innermost soul; for this mud honey was clarified sweetness to his taste. The sham gaiety, the hectic glow of counterfeit hospitality, the self-conscious, joyless laughter, the wine-born warmth, the loud music retrieving the hour from frequent whiles of awful and corroding silence, the presence of well-clothed and frank-eyed beneficiaries of Rooney’s removal of the restrictions laid upon the weed, the familiar blended odors of soaked lemon peel, flat beer, and <i xml:lang="fr">peau d’Espagne</i>—all these were manna to Cork McManus, hungry for his week in the desert of the Capulet’s high rear room.</p>
|
||||
<p>A girl, alone, entered Rooney’s, glanced around with leisurely swiftness, and sat opposite McManus at his table. Her eyes rested upon him for two seconds in the look with which woman reconnoitres all men whom she for the first time confronts. In that space of time she will decide upon one of two things—either to scream for the police, or that she may marry him later on.</p>
|
||||
<p>Her brief inspection concluded, the girl laid on the table a worn red morocco shopping bag with the inevitable top-gallant sail of frayed lace handkerchief flying from a corner of it. After she had ordered a small beer from the immediate waiter she took from her bag a box of cigarettes and lighted one with slightly exaggerated ease of manner. Then she looked again in the eyes of Cork McManus and smiled.</p>
|
||||
<p>Instantly the doom of each was sealed.</p>
|
||||
@ -70,7 +70,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“All keep still!” was his caution. “Don’t talk or make any noise! Everything will be all right. Now, don’t feel the slightest alarm. We’ll take care of you all.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Ruby felt across the table until Cork’s firm hand closed upon hers. “Are you afraid, Eddie?” she whispered. “Are you afraid you’ll get a free ride?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Nothin’ doin’ in the teeth-chatterin’ line,” said Cork. “I guess Rooney’s been slow with his envelope. Don’t you worry, girly; I’ll look out for you all right.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Yet Mr. McManus’s ease was only skin- and muscle-deep. With the police looking everywhere for Buck Malone’s assailant, and with Corrigan still on the ocean wave, he felt that to be caught in a police raid would mean an ended career for him. He wished he had remained in the high rear room of the true Capulet reading the pink extras.</p>
|
||||
<p>Yet <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McManus’s ease was only skin- and muscle-deep. With the police looking everywhere for Buck Malone’s assailant, and with Corrigan still on the ocean wave, he felt that to be caught in a police raid would mean an ended career for him. He wished he had remained in the high rear room of the true Capulet reading the pink extras.</p>
|
||||
<p>Rooney seemed to have opened the front door below and engaged the police in conference in the dark hall. The wordless low growl of their voices came up the stairway. Frank made a wireless news station of himself at the upper door. Suddenly he closed the door, hurried to the extreme rear of the room and lighted a dim gas jet.</p>
|
||||
<p>“This way, everybody!” he called sharply. “In a hurry; but no noise, please!”</p>
|
||||
<p>The guests crowded in confusion to the rear. Rooney’s lieutenant swung open a panel in the wall, overlooking the back yard, revealing a ladder already placed for the escape.</p>
|
||||
@ -105,9 +105,9 @@
|
||||
<p>“Clear out, quick, both of you, or I’ll—”</p>
|
||||
<p>The cop’s bluster trailed away into inconsequentiality.</p>
|
||||
<p>At the corner of the street the two halted. Cork handed back the money without a word. The girl took it and slipped it slowly into her hand-bag. Her expression was the same she had worn when she entered Rooney’s that night—she looked upon the world with defiance, suspicion and sullen wonder.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I guess I might as well say good-bye here,” she said dully. “You won’t want to see me again, of course. Will you—shake hands—Mr. McManus.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I guess I might as well say good-bye here,” she said dully. “You won’t want to see me again, of course. Will you—shake hands—<abbr>Mr.</abbr> McManus.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I mightn’t have got wise if you hadn’t give the snap away,” said Cork. “Why did you do it?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’d have been pinched if I hadn’t. That’s why. Ain’t that reason enough?” Then she began to cry. “Honest, Eddie, I was goin’ to be the best girl in the world. I hated to be what I am; I hated men; I was ready almost to die when I saw you. And you seemed different from everybody else. And when I found you liked me, too, why, I thought I’d make you believe I was good, and I was goin’ to be good. When you asked to come to my house and see me, why, I’d have died rather than do anything wrong after that. But what’s the use of talking about it? I’ll say good-by, if you will, Mr. McManus.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’d have been pinched if I hadn’t. That’s why. Ain’t that reason enough?” Then she began to cry. “Honest, Eddie, I was goin’ to be the best girl in the world. I hated to be what I am; I hated men; I was ready almost to die when I saw you. And you seemed different from everybody else. And when I found you liked me, too, why, I thought I’d make you believe I was good, and I was goin’ to be good. When you asked to come to my house and see me, why, I’d have died rather than do anything wrong after that. But what’s the use of talking about it? I’ll say good-by, if you will, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McManus.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Cork was pulling at his ear. “I knifed Malone,” said he. “I was the one the cop wanted.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, that’s all right,” said the girl listlessly. “It didn’t make any difference about that.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“That was all hot air about Wall Street. I don’t do nothin’ but hang out with a tough gang on the East Side.”</p>
|
||||
@ -1,13 +1,13 @@
|
||||
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<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 19</title>
|
||||
<title>Proof of the Pudding</title>
|
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<section id="chapter-19" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>PROOF OF THE PUDDING</h2>
|
||||
<section id="proof-of-the-pudding" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Proof of the Pudding</h2>
|
||||
<p>Spring winked a vitreous optic at Editor Westbrook of the <i>Minerva Magazine</i>, and deflected him from his course. He had lunched in his favorite corner of a Broadway hotel, and was returning to his office when his feet became entangled in the lure of the vernal coquette. Which is by way of saying that he turned eastward in Twenty-sixth Street, safely forded the spring freshet of vehicles in Fifth Avenue, and meandered along the walks of budding Madison Square.</p>
|
||||
<p>The lenient air and the settings of the little park almost formed a pastoral; the color motif was green—the presiding shade at the creation of man and vegetation.</p>
|
||||
<p>The callow grass between the walks was the color of verdigris, a poisonous green, reminiscent of the horde of derelict humans that had breathed upon the soil during the summer and autumn. The bursting tree buds looked strangely familiar to those who had botanized among the garnishings of the fish course of a forty-cent dinner. The sky above was of that pale aquamarine tint that ballroom poets rhyme with “true” and “Sue” and “coo.” The one natural and frank color visible was the ostensible green of the newly painted benches—a shade between the color of a pickled cucumber and that of a last year’s fast-black cravenette raincoat. But, to the city-bred eye of Editor Westbrook, the landscape appeared a masterpiece.</p>
|
||||
@ -15,8 +15,8 @@
|
||||
<p>Editor Westbrook’s spirit was contented and serene. The April number of the <i>Minerva</i> had sold its entire edition before the tenth day of the month—a newsdealer in Keokuk had written that he could have sold fifty copies more if he had ’em. The owners of the magazine had raised his (the editor’s) salary; he had just installed in his home a jewel of a recently imported cook who was afraid of policemen; and the morning papers had published in full a speech he had made at a publishers’ banquet. Also there were echoing in his mind the jubilant notes of a splendid song that his charming young wife had sung to him before he left his up-town apartment that morning. She was taking enthusiastic interest in her music of late, practising early and diligently. When he had complimented her on the improvement in her voice she had fairly hugged him for joy at his praise. He felt, too, the benign, tonic medicament of the trained nurse, Spring, tripping softly adown the wards of the convalescent city.</p>
|
||||
<p>While Editor Westbrook was sauntering between the rows of park benches (already filling with vagrants and the guardians of lawless childhood) he felt his sleeve grasped and held. Suspecting that he was about to be panhandled, he turned a cold and unprofitable face, and saw that his captor was—Dawe—Shackleford Dawe, dingy, almost ragged, the genteel scarcely visible in him through the deeper lines of the shabby.</p>
|
||||
<p>While the editor is pulling himself out of his surprise, a flashlight biography of Dawe is offered.</p>
|
||||
<p>He was a fiction writer, and one of Westbrook’s old acquaintances. At one time they might have called each other old friends. Dawe had some money in those days, and lived in a decent apartment house near Westbrook’s. The two families often went to theatres and dinners together. Mrs. Dawe and Mrs. Westbrook became “dearest” friends. Then one day a little tentacle of the octopus, just to amuse itself, ingurgitated Dawe’s capital, and he moved to the Gramercy Park neighborhood where one, for a few groats per week, may sit upon one’s trunk under eight-branched chandeliers and opposite Carrara marble mantels and watch the mice play upon the floor. Dawe thought to live by writing fiction. Now and then he sold a story. He submitted many to Westbrook. The <i>Minerva</i> printed one or two of them; the rest were returned. Westbrook sent a careful and conscientious personal letter with each rejected manuscript, pointing out in detail his reasons for considering it unavailable. Editor Westbrook had his own clear conception of what constituted good fiction. So had Dawe. Mrs. Dawe was mainly concerned about the constituents of the scanty dishes of food that she managed to scrape together. One day Dawe had been spouting to her about the excellencies of certain French writers. At dinner they sat down to a dish that a hungry schoolboy could have encompassed at a gulp. Dawe commented.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s Maupassant hash,” said Mrs. Dawe. “It may not be art, but I do wish you would do a five-course Marion Crawford serial with an Ella Wheeler Wilcox sonnet for dessert. I’m hungry.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He was a fiction writer, and one of Westbrook’s old acquaintances. At one time they might have called each other old friends. Dawe had some money in those days, and lived in a decent apartment house near Westbrook’s. The two families often went to theatres and dinners together. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Dawe and <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Westbrook became “dearest” friends. Then one day a little tentacle of the octopus, just to amuse itself, ingurgitated Dawe’s capital, and he moved to the Gramercy Park neighborhood where one, for a few groats per week, may sit upon one’s trunk under eight-branched chandeliers and opposite Carrara marble mantels and watch the mice play upon the floor. Dawe thought to live by writing fiction. Now and then he sold a story. He submitted many to Westbrook. The <i>Minerva</i> printed one or two of them; the rest were returned. Westbrook sent a careful and conscientious personal letter with each rejected manuscript, pointing out in detail his reasons for considering it unavailable. Editor Westbrook had his own clear conception of what constituted good fiction. So had Dawe. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Dawe was mainly concerned about the constituents of the scanty dishes of food that she managed to scrape together. One day Dawe had been spouting to her about the excellencies of certain French writers. At dinner they sat down to a dish that a hungry schoolboy could have encompassed at a gulp. Dawe commented.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s Maupassant hash,” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Dawe. “It may not be art, but I do wish you would do a five-course Marion Crawford serial with an Ella Wheeler Wilcox sonnet for dessert. I’m hungry.”</p>
|
||||
<p>As far as this from success was Shackleford Dawe when he plucked Editor Westbrook’s sleeve in Madison Square. That was the first time the editor had seen Dawe in several months.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, Shack, is this you?” said Westbrook, somewhat awkwardly, for the form of his phrase seemed to touch upon the other’s changed appearance.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sit down for a minute,” said Dawe, tugging at his sleeve. “This is my office. I can’t come to yours, looking as I do. Oh, sit down—you won’t be disgraced. Those half-plucked birds on the other benches will take you for a swell porch-climber. They won’t know you are only an editor.”</p>
|
||||
@ -73,12 +73,12 @@
|
||||
<p>“I will. If you’ll give me about half an hour of your time I’ll prove to you that I am right. I’ll prove it by Louise.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Your wife!” exclaimed Westbrook. “How?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, not exactly by her, but <i>with</i> her,” said Dawe. “Now, you know how devoted and loving Louise has always been. She thinks I’m the only genuine preparation on the market that bears the old doctor’s signature. She’s been fonder and more faithful than ever, since I’ve been cast for the neglected genius part.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Indeed, she is a charming and admirable life companion,” agreed the editor. “I remember what inseparable friends she and Mrs. Westbrook once were. We are both lucky chaps, Shack, to have such wives. You must bring Mrs. Dawe up some evening soon, and we’ll have one of those informal chafing-dish suppers that we used to enjoy so much.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Indeed, she is a charming and admirable life companion,” agreed the editor. “I remember what inseparable friends she and <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Westbrook once were. We are both lucky chaps, Shack, to have such wives. You must bring <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Dawe up some evening soon, and we’ll have one of those informal chafing-dish suppers that we used to enjoy so much.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Later,” said Dawe. “When I get another shirt. And now I’ll tell you my scheme. When I was about to leave home after breakfast—if you can call tea and oatmeal breakfast—Louise told me she was going to visit her aunt in Eighty-ninth Street. She said she would return at three o’clock. She is always on time to a minute. It is now—”</p>
|
||||
<p>Dawe glanced toward the editor’s watch pocket.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Twenty-seven minutes to three,” said Westbrook, scanning his time-piece.</p>
|
||||
<p>“We have just enough time,” said Dawe. “We will go to my flat at once. I will write a note, address it to her and leave it on the table where she will see it as she enters the door. You and I will be in the dining-room concealed by the portières. In that note I’ll say that I have fled from her forever with an affinity who understands the needs of my artistic soul as she never did. When she reads it we will observe her actions and hear her words. Then we will know which theory is the correct one—yours or mine.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, never!” exclaimed the editor, shaking his head. “That would be inexcusably cruel. I could not consent to have Mrs. Dawe’s feelings played upon in such a manner.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, never!” exclaimed the editor, shaking his head. “That would be inexcusably cruel. I could not consent to have <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Dawe’s feelings played upon in such a manner.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Brace up,” said the writer. “I guess I think as much of her as you do. It’s for her benefit as well as mine. I’ve got to get a market for my stories in some way. It won’t hurt Louise. She’s healthy and sound. Her heart goes as strong as a ninety-eight-cent watch. It’ll last for only a minute, and then I’ll step out and explain to her. You really owe it to me to give me the chance, Westbrook.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Editor Westbrook at length yielded, though but half willingly. And in the half of him that consented lurked the vivisectionist that is in all of us. Let him who has not used the scalpel rise and stand in his place. Pity ’tis that there are not enough rabbits and guinea-pigs to go around.</p>
|
||||
<p>The two experimenters in Art left the Square and hurried eastward and then to the south until they arrived in the Gramercy neighborhood. Within its high iron railings the little park had put on its smart coat of vernal green, and was admiring itself in its fountain mirror. Outside the railings the hollow square of crumbling houses, shells of a bygone gentry, leaned as if in ghostly gossip over the forgotten doings of the vanished quality. <i>Sic transit gloria urbis</i>.</p>
|
||||
@ -86,18 +86,18 @@
|
||||
<p>When the door opened Editor Westbrook saw, with feelings of pity, how meanly and meagerly the rooms were furnished.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Get a chair, if you can find one,” said Dawe, “while I hunt up pen and ink. Hello, what’s this? Here’s a note from Louise. She must have left it there when she went out this morning.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He picked up an envelope that lay on the centre-table and tore it open. He began to read the letter that he drew out of it; and once having begun it aloud he so read it through to the end. These are the words that Editor Westbrook heard:</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p>“<span class="smallcaps">Dear Shackleford</span>: “By the time you get this I will be about a hundred miles away and still a-going. I’ve got a place in the chorus of the Occidental Opera Co., and we start on the road to-day at twelve o’clock. I didn’t want to starve to death, and so I decided to make my own living. I’m not coming back. Mrs. Westbrook is going with me. She said she was tired of living with a combination phonograph, iceberg and dictionary, and she’s not coming back, either. We’ve been practising the songs and dances for two months on the quiet. I hope you will be successful, and get along all right! Good-bye.</p>
|
||||
<p>“<span class="smallcaps">Louise</span>.”</p>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:letter">
|
||||
<p>“<span epub:type="salutation">Dear Shackleford</span>: By the time you get this I will be about a hundred miles away and still a-going. I’ve got a place in the chorus of the Occidental Opera <abbr>Co.</abbr>, and we start on the road to-day at twelve o’clock. I didn’t want to starve to death, and so I decided to make my own living. I’m not coming back. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Westbrook is going with me. She said she was tired of living with a combination phonograph, iceberg and dictionary, and she’s not coming back, either. We’ve been practising the songs and dances for two months on the quiet. I hope you will be successful, and get along all right! Good-bye.</p>
|
||||
<p epub:type="z3998:sender">“<span class="signature">Louise</span>.”</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>Dawe dropped the letter, covered his face with his trembling hands, and cried out in a deep, vibrating voice:</p>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<i>“My God, why hast thou given me this cup to drink? Since she is false, then let Thy Heaven’s fairest gifts, faith and love, become the jesting by-words of traitors and fiends!”</i>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
<em>“My God, why hast thou given me this cup to drink? Since she is false, then let Thy Heaven’s fairest gifts, faith and love, become the jesting by-words of traitors and fiends!”</em>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
<p>Editor Westbrook’s glasses fell to the floor. The fingers of one hand fumbled with a button on his coat as he blurted between his pale lips:</p>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<i>“Say, Shack, ain’t that a hell of a note? Wouldn’t that knock you off your perch, Shack? Ain’t it hell, now, Shack—ain’t it?”</i>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
<em>“Say, Shack, ain’t that a hell of a note? Wouldn’t that knock you off your perch, Shack? Ain’t it hell, now, Shack—ain’t it?”</em>
|
||||
</p>
|
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|
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|
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<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 14</title>
|
||||
<title>Psyche and the Pskyscraper</title>
|
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<section id="chapter-14" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>PSYCHE AND THE PSKYSCRAPER</h2>
|
||||
<section id="psyche-and-the-pskyscraper" epub:type="chapter">
|
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<h2 epub:type="title">Psyche and the Pskyscraper</h2>
|
||||
<p>If you are a philosopher you can do this thing: you can go to the top of a high building, look down upon your fellow-men 300 feet below, and despise them as insects. Like the irresponsible black waterbugs on summer ponds, they crawl and circle and hustle about idiotically without aim or purpose. They do not even move with the admirable intelligence of ants, for ants always know when they are going home. The ant is of a lowly station, but he will often reach home and get his slippers on while you are left at your elevated station.</p>
|
||||
<p>Man, then, to the housetopped philosopher, appears to be but a creeping, contemptible beetle. Brokers, poets, millionaires, bootblacks, beauties, hod-carriers and politicians become little black specks dodging bigger black specks in streets no wider than your thumb.</p>
|
||||
<p>From this high view the city itself becomes degraded to an unintelligible mass of distorted buildings and impossible perspectives; the revered ocean is a duck pond; the earth itself a lost golf ball. All the minutiae of life are gone. The philosopher gazes into the infinite heavens above him, and allows his soul to expand to the influence of his new view. He feels that he is the heir to Eternity and the child of Time. Space, too, should be his by the right of his immortal heritage, and he thrills at the thought that some day his kind shall traverse those mysterious aerial roads between planet and planet. The tiny world beneath his feet upon which this towering structure of steel rests as a speck of dust upon a Himalayan mountain—it is but one of a countless number of such whirling atoms. What are the ambitions, the achievements, the paltry conquests and loves of those restless black insects below compared with the serene and awful immensity of the universe that lies above and around their insignificant city?</p>
|
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@ -23,19 +23,19 @@
|
||||
<p>“Store!”—a fine scorn was expressed by Daisy’s uptilted nose—“sardine box! Waitin’ for me, you say? Gee! you’d have to throw out about a hundred pounds of candy before I could get inside of it, Joe.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I wouldn’t mind an even swap like that,” said Joe, complimentary.</p>
|
||||
<p>Daisy’s existence was limited in every way. She had to walk sideways between the counter and the shelves in the candy store. In her own hall bedroom coziness had been carried close to cohesiveness. The walls were so near to one another that the paper on them made a perfect Babel of noise. She could light the gas with one hand and close the door with the other without taking her eyes off the reflection of her brown pompadour in the mirror. She had Joe’s picture in a gilt frame on the dresser, and sometimes—but her next thought would always be of Joe’s funny little store tacked like a soap box to the corner of that great building, and away would go her sentiment in a breeze of laughter.</p>
|
||||
<p>Daisy’s other suitor followed Joe by several months. He came to board in the house where she lived. His name was Dabster, and he was a philosopher. Though young, attainments stood out upon him like continental labels on a Passaic (N. J.) suit-case. Knowledge he had kidnapped from cyclopedias and handbooks of useful information; but as for wisdom, when she passed he was left sniffling in the road without so much as the number of her motor car. He could and would tell you the proportion of water and muscle-making properties of peas and veal, the shortest verse in the Bible, the number of pounds of shingle nails required to fasten 256 shingles laid four inches to the weather, the population of Kankakee, Ill., the theories of Spinoza, the name of Mr. H. McKay Twombly’s second hall footman, the length of the Hoosac Tunnel, the best time to set a hen, the salary of the railway post-office messenger between Driftwood and Red Bank Furnace, Pa., and the number of bones in the foreleg of a cat.</p>
|
||||
<p>Daisy’s other suitor followed Joe by several months. He came to board in the house where she lived. His name was Dabster, and he was a philosopher. Though young, attainments stood out upon him like continental labels on a Passaic (N. J.) suit-case. Knowledge he had kidnapped from cyclopedias and handbooks of useful information; but as for wisdom, when she passed he was left sniffling in the road without so much as the number of her motor car. He could and would tell you the proportion of water and muscle-making properties of peas and veal, the shortest verse in the Bible, the number of pounds of shingle nails required to fasten 256 shingles laid four inches to the weather, the population of Kankakee, Ill., the theories of Spinoza, the name of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> H. McKay Twombly’s second hall footman, the length of the Hoosac Tunnel, the best time to set a hen, the salary of the railway post-office messenger between Driftwood and Red Bank Furnace, Pa., and the number of bones in the foreleg of a cat.</p>
|
||||
<p>The weight of learning was no handicap to Dabster. His statistics were the sprigs of parsley with which he garnished the feast of small talk that he would set before you if he conceived that to be your taste. And again he used them as breastworks in foraging at the boardinghouse. Firing at you a volley of figures concerning the weight of a lineal foot of bar-iron 5 × 2¾ inches, and the average annual rainfall at Fort Snelling, Minn., he would transfix with his fork the best piece of chicken on the dish while you were trying to rally sufficiently to ask him weakly why does a hen cross the road.</p>
|
||||
<p>Thus, brightly armed, and further equipped with a measure of good looks, of a hair-oily, shopping-district-at-three-in-the-afternoon kind, it seems that Joe, of the Lilliputian emporium, had a rival worthy of his steel. But Joe carried no steel. There wouldn’t have been room in his store to draw it if he had.</p>
|
||||
<p>One Saturday afternoon, about four o’clock, Daisy and Mr. Dabster stopped before Joe’s booth. Dabster wore a silk hat, and—well, Daisy was a woman, and that hat had no chance to get back in its box until Joe had seen it. A stick of pineapple chewing gum was the ostensible object of the call. Joe supplied it through the open side of his store. He did not pale or falter at sight of the hat.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mr. Dabster’s going to take me on top of the building to observe the view,” said Daisy, after she had introduced her admirers. “I never was on a skyscraper. I guess it must be awfully nice and funny up there.”</p>
|
||||
<p>One Saturday afternoon, about four o’clock, Daisy and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Dabster stopped before Joe’s booth. Dabster wore a silk hat, and—well, Daisy was a woman, and that hat had no chance to get back in its box until Joe had seen it. A stick of pineapple chewing gum was the ostensible object of the call. Joe supplied it through the open side of his store. He did not pale or falter at sight of the hat.</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Dabster’s going to take me on top of the building to observe the view,” said Daisy, after she had introduced her admirers. “I never was on a skyscraper. I guess it must be awfully nice and funny up there.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“H’m!” said Joe.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The panorama,” said Mr. Dabster, “exposed to the gaze from the top of a lofty building is not only sublime, but instructive. Miss Daisy has a decided pleasure in store for her.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The panorama,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Dabster, “exposed to the gaze from the top of a lofty building is not only sublime, but instructive. Miss Daisy has a decided pleasure in store for her.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s windy up there, too, as well as here,” said Joe. “Are you dressed warm enough, Daise?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sure thing! I’m all lined,” said Daisy, smiling slyly at his clouded brow. “You look just like a mummy in a case, Joe. Ain’t you just put in an invoice of a pint of peanuts or another apple? Your stock looks awful over-stocked.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Daisy giggled at her favorite joke; and Joe had to smile with her.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Your quarters are somewhat limited, Mr.—er—er,” remarked Dabster, “in comparison with the size of this building. I understand the area of its side to be about 340 by 100 feet. That would make you occupy a proportionate space as if half of Beloochistan were placed upon a territory as large as the United States east of the Rocky Mountains, with the Province of Ontario and Belgium added.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Your quarters are somewhat limited, <abbr>Mr.</abbr>—er—er,” remarked Dabster, “in comparison with the size of this building. I understand the area of its side to be about 340 by 100 feet. That would make you occupy a proportionate space as if half of Beloochistan were placed upon a territory as large as the United States east of the Rocky Mountains, with the Province of Ontario and Belgium added.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Is that so, sport?” said Joe, genially. “You are Weisenheimer on figures, all right. How many square pounds of baled hay do you think a jackass could eat if he stopped brayin’ long enough to keep still a minute and five eighths?”</p>
|
||||
<p>A few minutes later Daisy and Mr. Dabster stepped from an elevator to the top floor of the skyscraper. Then up a short, steep stairway and out upon the roof. Dabster led her to the parapet so she could look down at the black dots moving in the street below.</p>
|
||||
<p>A few minutes later Daisy and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Dabster stepped from an elevator to the top floor of the skyscraper. Then up a short, steep stairway and out upon the roof. Dabster led her to the parapet so she could look down at the black dots moving in the street below.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What are they?” she asked, trembling. She had never been on a height like this before.</p>
|
||||
<p>And then Dabster must needs play the philosopher on the tower, and conduct her soul forth to meet the immensity of space.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Bipeds,” he said, solemnly. “See what they become even at the small elevation of 340 feet—mere crawling insects going to and fro at random.”</p>
|
||||
@ -1,45 +1,45 @@
|
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|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 1</title>
|
||||
<title>Strictly Business</title>
|
||||
<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
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<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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|
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-1" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>STRICTLY BUSINESS</h2>
|
||||
<section id="strictly-business" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Strictly Business</h2>
|
||||
<p>I suppose you know all about the stage and stage people. You’ve been touched with and by actors, and you read the newspaper criticisms and the jokes in the weeklies about the Rialto and the chorus girls and the long-haired tragedians. And I suppose that a condensed list of your ideas about the mysterious stageland would boil down to something like this:</p>
|
||||
<p>Leading ladies have five husbands, paste diamonds, and figures no better than your own (madam) if they weren’t padded. Chorus girls are inseparable from peroxide, Panhards and Pittsburg. All shows walk back to New York on tan oxford and railroad ties. Irreproachable actresses reserve the comic-landlady part for their mothers on Broadway and their step-aunts on the road. Kyrle Bellew’s real name is Boyle O’Kelley. The ravings of John McCullough in the phonograph were stolen from the first sale of the Ellen Terry memoirs. Joe Weber is funnier than E. H. Sothern; but Henry Miller is getting older than he was.</p>
|
||||
<p>All theatrical people on leaving the theatre at night drink champagne and eat lobsters until noon the next day. After all, the moving pictures have got the whole bunch pounded to a pulp.</p>
|
||||
<p>Now, few of us know the real life of the stage people. If we did, the profession might be more overcrowded than it is. We look askance at the players with an eye full of patronizing superiority—and we go home and practise all sorts of elocution and gestures in front of our looking glasses.</p>
|
||||
<p>Latterly there has been much talk of the actor people in a new light. It seems to have been divulged that instead of being motoring bacchanalians and diamond-hungry <i>loreleis</i> they are businesslike folk, students and ascetics with childer and homes and libraries, owning real estate, and conducting their private affairs in as orderly and unsensational a manner as any of us good citizens who are bound to the chariot wheels of the gas, rent, coal, ice, and wardmen.</p>
|
||||
<p>Latterly there has been much talk of the actor people in a new light. It seems to have been divulged that instead of being motoring bacchanalians and diamond-hungry <i xml:lang="fr">loreleis</i> they are businesslike folk, students and ascetics with childer and homes and libraries, owning real estate, and conducting their private affairs in as orderly and unsensational a manner as any of us good citizens who are bound to the chariot wheels of the gas, rent, coal, ice, and wardmen.</p>
|
||||
<p>Whether the old or the new report of the sock-and-buskiners be the true one is a surmise that has no place here. I offer you merely this little story of two strollers; and for proof of its truth I can show you only the dark patch above the cast-iron of the stage-entrance door of Keetor’s old vaudeville theatre made there by the petulant push of gloved hands too impatient to finger the clumsy thumb-latch—and where I last saw Cherry whisking through like a swallow into her nest, on time to the minute, as usual, to dress for her act.</p>
|
||||
<p>The vaudeville team of Hart & Cherry was an inspiration. Bob Hart had been roaming through the Eastern and Western circuits for four years with a mixed-up act comprising a monologue, three lightning changes with songs, a couple of imitations of celebrated imitators, and a buck-and-wing dance that had drawn a glance of approval from the bass-viol player in more than one house—than which no performer ever received more satisfactory evidence of good work.</p>
|
||||
<p>The greatest treat an actor can have is to witness the pitiful performance with which all other actors desecrate the stage. In order to give himself this pleasure he will often forsake the sunniest Broadway corner between Thirty-fourth and Forty-fourth to attend a matinée offering by his less gifted brothers. Once during the lifetime of a minstrel joke one comes to scoff and remains to go through with that most difficult exercise of Thespian muscles—the audible contact of the palm of one hand against the palm of the other.</p>
|
||||
<p>One afternoon Bob Hart presented his solvent, serious, well-known vaudevillian face at the box-office window of a rival attraction and got his d. h. coupon for an orchestra seat.</p>
|
||||
<p>A, B, C, and D glowed successively on the announcement spaces and passed into oblivion, each plunging Mr. Hart deeper into gloom. Others of the audience shrieked, squirmed, whistled, and applauded; but Bob Hart, “All the Mustard and a Whole Show in Himself,” sat with his face as long and his hands as far apart as a boy holding a hank of yarn for his grandmother to wind into a ball.</p>
|
||||
<p>A, B, C, and D glowed successively on the announcement spaces and passed into oblivion, each plunging <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Hart deeper into gloom. Others of the audience shrieked, squirmed, whistled, and applauded; but Bob Hart, “All the Mustard and a Whole Show in Himself,” sat with his face as long and his hands as far apart as a boy holding a hank of yarn for his grandmother to wind into a ball.</p>
|
||||
<p>But when H came on, “The Mustard” suddenly sat up straight. H was the happy alphabetical prognosticator of Winona Cherry, in Character Songs and Impersonations. There were scarcely more than two bites to Cherry; but she delivered the merchandise tied with a pink cord and charged to the old man’s account. She first showed you a deliciously dewy and ginghamy country girl with a basket of property daisies who informed you ingenuously that there were other things to be learned at the old log school-house besides cipherin’ and nouns, especially “When the Teach-er Kept Me in.” Vanishing, with a quick flirt of gingham apron-strings, she reappeared in considerably less than a “trice” as a fluffy “Parisienne”—so near does Art bring the old red mill to the Moulin Rouge. And then—</p>
|
||||
<p>But you know the rest. And so did Bob Hart; but he saw somebody else. He thought he saw that Cherry was the only professional on the short order stage that he had seen who seemed exactly to fit the part of “Helen Grimes” in the sketch he had written and kept tucked away in the tray of his trunk. Of course Bob Hart, as well as every other normal actor, grocer, newspaper man, professor, curb broker, and farmer, has a play tucked away somewhere. They tuck ’em in trays of trunks, trunks of trees, desks, haymows, pigeonholes, inside pockets, safe-deposit vaults, handboxes, and coal cellars, waiting for Mr. Frohman to call. They belong among the fifty-seven different kinds.</p>
|
||||
<p>But you know the rest. And so did Bob Hart; but he saw somebody else. He thought he saw that Cherry was the only professional on the short order stage that he had seen who seemed exactly to fit the part of “Helen Grimes” in the sketch he had written and kept tucked away in the tray of his trunk. Of course Bob Hart, as well as every other normal actor, grocer, newspaper man, professor, curb broker, and farmer, has a play tucked away somewhere. They tuck ’em in trays of trunks, trunks of trees, desks, haymows, pigeonholes, inside pockets, safe-deposit vaults, handboxes, and coal cellars, waiting for <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Frohman to call. They belong among the fifty-seven different kinds.</p>
|
||||
<p>But Bob Hart’s sketch was not destined to end in a pickle jar. He called it “Mice Will Play.” He had kept it quiet and hidden away ever since he wrote it, waiting to find a partner who fitted his conception of “Helen Grimes.” And here was “Helen” herself, with all the innocent abandon, the youth, the sprightliness, and the flawless stage art that his critical taste demanded.</p>
|
||||
<p>After the act was over Hart found the manager in the box office, and got Cherry’s address. At five the next afternoon he called at the musty old house in the West Forties and sent up his professional card.</p>
|
||||
<p>By daylight, in a secular shirtwaist and plain <i>voile</i> skirt, with her hair curbed and her Sister of Charity eyes, Winona Cherry might have been playing the part of Prudence Wise, the deacon’s daughter, in the great (unwritten) New England drama not yet entitled anything.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I know your act, Mr. Hart,” she said after she had looked over his card carefully. “What did you wish to see me about?”</p>
|
||||
<p>By daylight, in a secular shirtwaist and plain voile skirt, with her hair curbed and her Sister of Charity eyes, Winona Cherry might have been playing the part of Prudence Wise, the deacon’s daughter, in the great (unwritten) New England drama not yet entitled anything.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I know your act, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Hart,” she said after she had looked over his card carefully. “What did you wish to see me about?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I saw you work last night,” said Hart. “I’ve written a sketch that I’ve been saving up. It’s for two; and I think you can do the other part. I thought I’d see you about it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Come in the parlor,” said Miss Cherry. “I’ve been wishing for something of the sort. I think I’d like to act instead of doing turns.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Bob Hart drew his cherished “Mice Will Play” from his pocket, and read it to her.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Read it again, please,” said Miss Cherry.</p>
|
||||
<p>And then she pointed out to him clearly how it could be improved by introducing a messenger instead of a telephone call, and cutting the dialogue just before the climax while they were struggling with the pistol, and by completely changing the lines and business of Helen Grimes at the point where her jealousy overcomes her. Hart yielded to all her strictures without argument. She had at once put her finger on the sketch’s weaker points. That was her woman’s intuition that he had lacked. At the end of their talk Hart was willing to stake the judgment, experience, and savings of his four years of vaudeville that “Mice Will Play” would blossom into a perennial flower in the garden of the circuits. Miss Cherry was slower to decide. After many puckerings of her smooth young brow and tappings on her small, white teeth with the end of a lead pencil she gave out her dictum.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mr. Hart,” said she, “I believe your sketch is going to win out. That Grimes part fits me like a shrinkable flannel after its first trip to a handless hand laundry. I can make it stand out like the colonel of the Forty-fourth Regiment at a Little Mothers’ Bazaar. And I’ve seen you work. I know what you can do with the other part. But business is business. How much do you get a week for the stunt you do now?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Hart,” said she, “I believe your sketch is going to win out. That Grimes part fits me like a shrinkable flannel after its first trip to a handless hand laundry. I can make it stand out like the colonel of the Forty-fourth Regiment at a Little Mothers’ Bazaar. And I’ve seen you work. I know what you can do with the other part. But business is business. How much do you get a week for the stunt you do now?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Two hundred,” answered Hart.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I get one hundred for mine,” said Cherry. “That’s about the natural discount for a woman. But I live on it and put a few simoleons every week under the loose brick in the old kitchen hearth. The stage is all right. I love it; but there’s something else I love better—that’s a little country home, some day, with Plymouth Rock chickens and six ducks wandering around the yard.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Now, let me tell you, Mr. Hart, I am STRICTLY BUSINESS. If you want me to play the opposite part in your sketch, I’ll do it. And I believe we can make it go. And there’s something else I want to say: There’s no nonsense in my make-up; I’m <i>on the level</i>, and I’m on the stage for what it pays me, just as other girls work in stores and offices. I’m going to save my money to keep me when I’m past doing my stunts. No Old Ladies’ Home or Retreat for Imprudent Actresses for me.</p>
|
||||
<p>“If you want to make this a business partnership, Mr. Hart, with all nonsense cut out of it, I’m in on it. I know something about vaudeville teams in general; but this would have to be one in particular. I want you to know that I’m on the stage for what I can cart away from it every pay-day in a little manila envelope with nicotine stains on it, where the cashier has licked the flap. It’s kind of a hobby of mine to want to cravenette myself for plenty of rainy days in the future. I want you to know just how I am. I don’t know what an all-night restaurant looks like; I drink only weak tea; I never spoke to a man at a stage entrance in my life, and I’ve got money in five savings banks.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Now, let me tell you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Hart, I am STRICTLY BUSINESS. If you want me to play the opposite part in your sketch, I’ll do it. And I believe we can make it go. And there’s something else I want to say: There’s no nonsense in my make-up; I’m <em>on the level</em>, and I’m on the stage for what it pays me, just as other girls work in stores and offices. I’m going to save my money to keep me when I’m past doing my stunts. No Old Ladies’ Home or Retreat for Imprudent Actresses for me.</p>
|
||||
<p>“If you want to make this a business partnership, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Hart, with all nonsense cut out of it, I’m in on it. I know something about vaudeville teams in general; but this would have to be one in particular. I want you to know that I’m on the stage for what I can cart away from it every pay-day in a little manila envelope with nicotine stains on it, where the cashier has licked the flap. It’s kind of a hobby of mine to want to cravenette myself for plenty of rainy days in the future. I want you to know just how I am. I don’t know what an all-night restaurant looks like; I drink only weak tea; I never spoke to a man at a stage entrance in my life, and I’ve got money in five savings banks.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Miss Cherry,” said Bob Hart in his smooth, serious tones, “you’re in on your own terms. I’ve got ‘strictly business’ pasted in my hat and stenciled on my make-up box. When I dream of nights I always see a five-room bungalow on the north shore of Long Island, with a Jap cooking clam broth and duckling in the kitchen, and me with the title deeds to the place in my pongee coat pocket, swinging in a hammock on the side porch, reading Stanley’s ‘Explorations into Africa.’ And nobody else around. You never was interested in Africa, was you, Miss Cherry?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Not any,” said Cherry. “What I’m going to do with my money is to bank it. You can get four per cent. on deposits. Even at the salary I’ve been earning, I’ve figured out that in ten years I’d have an income of about $50 a month just from the interest alone. Well, I might invest some of the principal in a little business—say, trimming hats or a beauty parlor, and make more.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well,” said Hart, “You’ve got the proper idea all right, all right, anyhow. There are mighty few actors that amount to anything at all who couldn’t fix themselves for the wet days to come if they’d save their money instead of blowing it. I’m glad you’ve got the correct business idea of it, Miss Cherry. I think the same way; and I believe this sketch will more than double what both of us earn now when we get it shaped up.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The subsequent history of “Mice Will Play” is the history of all successful writings for the stage. Hart & Cherry cut it, pieced it, remodeled it, performed surgical operations on the dialogue and business, changed the lines, restored ’em, added more, cut ’em out, renamed it, gave it back the old name, rewrote it, substituted a dagger for the pistol, restored the pistol—put the sketch through all the known processes of condensation and improvement.</p>
|
||||
<p>They rehearsed it by the old-fashioned boardinghouse clock in the rarely used parlor until its warning click at five minutes to the hour would occur every time exactly half a second before the click of the unloaded revolver that Helen Grimes used in rehearsing the thrilling climax of the sketch.</p>
|
||||
<p>Yes, that was a thriller and a piece of excellent work. In the act a real 32-caliber revolver was used loaded with a real cartridge. Helen Grimes, who is a Western girl of decidedly Buffalo Billish skill and daring, is tempestuously in love with Frank Desmond, the private secretary and confidential prospective son-in-law of her father, “Arapahoe” Grimes, quarter-million-dollar cattle king, owning a ranch that, judging by the scenery, is in either the Bad Lands or Amagansett, L. I. Desmond (in private life Mr. Bob Hart) wears puttees and Meadow Brook Hunt riding trousers, and gives his address as New York, leaving you to wonder why he comes to the Bad Lands or Amagansett (as the case may be) and at the same time to conjecture mildly why a cattleman should want puttees about his ranch with a secretary in ’em.</p>
|
||||
<p>Yes, that was a thriller and a piece of excellent work. In the act a real 32-caliber revolver was used loaded with a real cartridge. Helen Grimes, who is a Western girl of decidedly Buffalo Billish skill and daring, is tempestuously in love with Frank Desmond, the private secretary and confidential prospective son-in-law of her father, “Arapahoe” Grimes, quarter-million-dollar cattle king, owning a ranch that, judging by the scenery, is in either the Bad Lands or Amagansett, L. I. Desmond (in private life <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bob Hart) wears puttees and Meadow Brook Hunt riding trousers, and gives his address as New York, leaving you to wonder why he comes to the Bad Lands or Amagansett (as the case may be) and at the same time to conjecture mildly why a cattleman should want puttees about his ranch with a secretary in ’em.</p>
|
||||
<p>Well, anyhow, you know as well as I do that we all like that kind of play, whether we admit it or not—something along in between “Bluebeard, Jr.,” and “Cymbeline” played in the Russian.</p>
|
||||
<p>There were only two parts and a half in “Mice Will Play.” Hart and Cherry were the two, of course; and the half was a minor part always played by a stage hand, who merely came in once in a Tuxedo coat and a panic to announce that the house was surrounded by Indians, and to turn down the gas fire in the grate by the manager’s orders.</p>
|
||||
<p>There was another girl in the sketch—a Fifth Avenue society swelless—who was visiting the ranch and who had sirened Jack Valentine when he was a wealthy club-man on lower Third Avenue before he lost his money. This girl appeared on the stage only in the photographic state—Jack had her Sarony stuck up on the mantel of the Amagan—of the Bad Lands droring room. Helen was jealous, of course.</p>
|
||||
@ -50,13 +50,13 @@
|
||||
<p>Helen thinks Jack has taken the money. Who else was there to take it? The box-office manager was at the front on his job; the orchestra hadn’t left their seats; and no man could get past “Old Jimmy,” the stage door-man, unless he could show a Skye terrier or an automobile as a guarantee of eligibility.</p>
|
||||
<p>Goaded beyond imprudence (as before said), Helen says to Jack Valentine: “Robber and thief—and worse yet, stealer of trusting hearts, this should be your fate!”</p>
|
||||
<p>With that out she whips, of course, the trusty 32-caliber.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But I will be merciful,” goes on Helen. “You shall live—that will be your punishment. I will show you how easily I could have sent you to the death that you deserve. There is <i>her</i> picture on the mantel. I will send through her more beautiful face the bullet that should have pierced your craven heart.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“But I will be merciful,” goes on Helen. “You shall live—that will be your punishment. I will show you how easily I could have sent you to the death that you deserve. There is <em>her</em> picture on the mantel. I will send through her more beautiful face the bullet that should have pierced your craven heart.”</p>
|
||||
<p>And she does it. And there’s no fake blank cartridges or assistants pulling strings. Helen fires. The bullet—the actual bullet—goes through the face of the photograph—and then strikes the hidden spring of the sliding panel in the wall—and lo! the panel slides, and there is the missing $647,000 in convincing stacks of currency and bags of gold. It’s great. You know how it is. Cherry practised for two months at a target on the roof of her boarding house. It took good shooting. In the sketch she had to hit a brass disk only three inches in diameter, covered by wall paper in the panel; and she had to stand in exactly the same spot every night, and the photo had to be in exactly the same spot, and she had to shoot steady and true every time.</p>
|
||||
<p>Of course old “Arapahoe” had tucked the funds away there in the secret place; and, of course, Jack hadn’t taken anything except his salary (which really might have come under the head of “obtaining money under”; but that is neither here nor there); and, of course, the New York girl was really engaged to a concrete house contractor in the Bronx; and, necessarily, Jack and Helen ended in a half-Nelson—and there you are.</p>
|
||||
<p>After Hart and Cherry had gotten “Mice Will Play” flawless, they had a try-out at a vaudeville house that accommodates. The sketch was a house wrecker. It was one of those rare strokes of talent that inundates a theatre from the roof down. The gallery wept; and the orchestra seats, being dressed for it, swam in tears.</p>
|
||||
<p>After the show the booking agents signed blank checks and pressed fountain pens upon Hart and Cherry. Five hundred dollars a week was what it panned out.</p>
|
||||
<p>That night at 11:30 Bob Hart took off his hat and bade Cherry good night at her boarding-house door.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mr. Hart,” said she thoughtfully, “come inside just a few minutes. We’ve got our chance now to make good and make money. What we want to do is to cut expenses every cent we can, and save all we can.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Hart,” said she thoughtfully, “come inside just a few minutes. We’ve got our chance now to make good and make money. What we want to do is to cut expenses every cent we can, and save all we can.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Right,” said Bob. “It’s business with me. You’ve got your scheme for banking yours; and I dream every night of that bungalow with the Jap cook and nobody around to raise trouble. Anything to enlarge the net receipts will engage my attention.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Come inside just a few minutes,” repeated Cherry, deeply thoughtful. “I’ve got a proposition to make to you that will reduce our expenses a lot and help you work out your own future and help me work out mine—and all on business principles.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mice Will Play” had a tremendously successful run in New York for ten weeks—rather neat for a vaudeville sketch—and then it started on the circuits. Without following it, it may be said that it was a solid drawing card for two years without a sign of abated popularity.</p>
|
||||
@ -77,14 +77,14 @@
|
||||
<p>“It was an accident, of course,” said Hart. “Cherry’s all right. She wasn’t feeling in good trim or she couldn’t have done it. There’s no hard feelings. She’s strictly business. The doctor says I’ll be on the job again in three days. Don’t let her worry.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Man,” said Sam Griggs severely, puckering his old, smooth, lined face, “are you a chess automaton or a human pincushion? Cherry’s crying her heart out for you—calling ‘Bob, Bob,’ every second, with them holding her hands and keeping her from coming to you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“What’s the matter with her?” asked Hart, with wide-open eyes. “The sketch’ll go on again in three days. I’m not hurt bad, the doctor says. She won’t lose out half a week’s salary. I know it was an accident. What’s the matter with her?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You seem to be blind, or a sort of a fool,” said Vincente. “The girl loves you and is almost mad about your hurt. What’s the matter with <i>you</i>? Is she nothing to you? I wish you could hear her call you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You seem to be blind, or a sort of a fool,” said Vincente. “The girl loves you and is almost mad about your hurt. What’s the matter with <em>you</em>? Is she nothing to you? I wish you could hear her call you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Loves me?” asked Bob Hart, rising from the stack of scenery on which he lay. “Cherry loves me? Why, it’s impossible.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I wish you could see her and hear her,” said Griggs.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But, man,” said Bob Hart, sitting up, “it’s impossible. It’s impossible, I tell you. I never dreamed of such a thing.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“No human being,” said the Tramp Juggler, “could mistake it. She’s wild for love of you. How have you been so blind?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“But, my God,” said Bob Hart, rising to his feet, “it’s <i>too late</i>. It’s too late, I tell you, Sam; <i>it’s too late</i>. It can’t be. You must be wrong. It’s <i>impossible</i>. There’s some mistake.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But, my God,” said Bob Hart, rising to his feet, “it’s <em>too late</em>. It’s too late, I tell you, Sam; <em>it’s too late</em>. It can’t be. You must be wrong. It’s <em>impossible</em>. There’s some mistake.</p>
|
||||
<p>“She’s crying for you,” said the Tramp Juggler. “For love of you she’s fighting three, and calling your name so loud they don’t dare to raise the curtain. Wake up, man.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“For love of me?” said Bob Hart with staring eyes. “Don’t I tell you it’s too late? It’s too late, man. Why, <i>Cherry and I have been married two years!</i>”</p>
|
||||
<p>“For love of me?” said Bob Hart with staring eyes. “Don’t I tell you it’s too late? It’s too late, man. Why, <em>Cherry and I have been married two years!</em>”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
@ -1,13 +1,13 @@
|
||||
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
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||||
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|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 9</title>
|
||||
<title>The Call of the Tame</title>
|
||||
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|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-9" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE CALL OF THE TAME</h2>
|
||||
<section id="the-call-of-the-tame" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Call of the Tame</h2>
|
||||
<p>When the inauguration was accomplished—the proceedings were made smooth by the presence of the Rough Riders—it is well known that a herd of those competent and loyal ex-warriors paid a visit to the big city. The newspaper reporters dug out of their trunks the old broad-brimmed hats and leather belts that they wear to North Beach fish fries, and mixed with the visitors. No damage was done beyond the employment of the wonderful plural “tenderfeet” in each of the scribe’s stories. The Westerners mildly contemplated the skyscrapers as high as the third story, yawned at Broadway, hunched down in the big chairs in hotel corridors, and altogether looked as bored and dejected as a member of Ye Ancient and Honorable Artillery separated during a sham battle from his valet.</p>
|
||||
<p>Out of this sightseeing delegations of good King Teddy’s Gentlemen of the Royal Bear-hounds dropped one Greenbrier Nye, of Pin Feather, Ariz.</p>
|
||||
<p>The daily cyclone of Sixth Avenue’s rush hour swept him away from the company of his pardners true. The dust from a thousand rustling skirts filled his eyes. The mighty roar of trains rushing across the sky deafened him. The lightning-flash of twice ten hundred beaming eyes confused his vision.</p>
|
||||
@ -33,7 +33,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Merritt slipped the wine card under his glass.</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right. I suppose you think I’m spoiled by the city. I’m as good a Westerner as you are, Greenbrier; but, somehow, I can’t make up my mind to go back out there. New York is comfortable—comfortable. I make a good living, and I live it. No more wet blankets and riding herd in snowstorms, and bacon and cold coffee, and blowouts once in six months for me. I reckon I’ll hang out here in the future. We’ll take in the theatre to-night, Greenbrier, and after that we’ll dine at—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ll tell you what you are, Merritt,” said Greenbrier, laying one elbow in his salad and the other in his butter. “You are a concentrated, effete, unconditional, short-sleeved, gotch-eared Miss Sally Walker. God made you perpendicular and suitable to ride straddle and use cuss words in the original. Wherefore you have suffered his handiwork to elapse by removing yourself to New York and putting on little shoes tied with strings, and making faces when you talk. I’ve seen you rope and tie a steer in 42½. If you was to see one now you’d write to the Police Commissioner about it. And these flapdoodle drinks that you inoculate your system with—these little essences of cowslip with acorns in ’em, and paregoric flip—they ain’t anyways in assent with the cordiality of manhood. I hate to see you this way.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, Mr. Greenbrier,” said Merritt, with apology in his tone, “in a way you are right. Sometimes I do feel like I was being raised on the bottle. But, I tell you, New York is comfortable—comfortable. There’s something about it—the sights and the crowds, and the way it changes every day, and the very air of it that seems to tie a one-mile-long stake rope around a man’s neck, with the other end fastened somewhere about Thirty-fourth Street. I don’t know what it is.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Greenbrier,” said Merritt, with apology in his tone, “in a way you are right. Sometimes I do feel like I was being raised on the bottle. But, I tell you, New York is comfortable—comfortable. There’s something about it—the sights and the crowds, and the way it changes every day, and the very air of it that seems to tie a one-mile-long stake rope around a man’s neck, with the other end fastened somewhere about Thirty-fourth Street. I don’t know what it is.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“God knows,” said Greenbrier sadly, “and I know. The East has gobbled you up. You was venison, and now you’re veal. You put me in mind of a japonica in a window. You’ve been signed, sealed and diskivered. Requiescat in hoc signo. You make me thirsty.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“A green chartreuse here,” said Merritt to the waiter.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Whiskey straight,” sighed Greenbrier, “and they’re on you, you renegade of the round-ups.”</p>
|
||||
@ -1,30 +1,30 @@
|
||||
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|
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<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 4</title>
|
||||
<title>The Day Resurgent</title>
|
||||
<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-4" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE DAY RESURGENT</h2>
|
||||
<section id="the-day-resurgent" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Day Resurgent</h2>
|
||||
<p>I can see the artist bite the end of his pencil and frown when it comes to drawing his Easter picture; for his legitimate pictorial conceptions of figures pertinent to the festival are but four in number.</p>
|
||||
<p>First comes Easter, pagan goddess of spring. Here his fancy may have free play. A beautiful maiden with decorative hair and the proper number of toes will fill the bill. Miss Clarice St. Vavasour, the well-known model, will pose for it in the “Lethergogallagher,” or whatever it was that Trilby called it.</p>
|
||||
<p>First comes Easter, pagan goddess of spring. Here his fancy may have free play. A beautiful maiden with decorative hair and the proper number of toes will fill the bill. Miss Clarice <abbr>St.</abbr> Vavasour, the well-known model, will pose for it in the “Lethergogallagher,” or whatever it was that Trilby called it.</p>
|
||||
<p>Second—the melancholy lady with upturned eyes in a framework of lilies. This is magazine-covery, but reliable.</p>
|
||||
<p>Third—Miss Manhattan in the Fifth Avenue Easter Sunday parade.</p>
|
||||
<p>Fourth—Maggie Murphy with a new red feather in her old straw hat, happy and self-conscious, in the Grand Street turnout.</p>
|
||||
<p>Of course, the rabbits do not count. Nor the Easter eggs, since the higher criticism has hard-boiled them.</p>
|
||||
<p>The limited field of its pictorial possibilities proves that Easter, of all our festival days, is the most vague and shifting in our conception. It belongs to all religions, although the pagans invented it. Going back still further to the first spring, we can see Eve choosing with pride a new green leaf from the tree <i>ficus carica</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>The limited field of its pictorial possibilities proves that Easter, of all our festival days, is the most vague and shifting in our conception. It belongs to all religions, although the pagans invented it. Going back still further to the first spring, we can see Eve choosing with pride a new green leaf from the tree <i xml:lang="la">ficus carica</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>Now, the object of this critical and learned preamble is to set forth the theorem that Easter is neither a date, a season, a festival, a holiday nor an occasion. What it is you shall find out if you follow in the footsteps of Danny McCree.</p>
|
||||
<p>Easter Sunday dawned as it should, bright and early, in its place on the calendar between Saturday and Monday. At 5.24 the sun rose, and at 10.30 Danny followed its example. He went into the kitchen and washed his face at the sink. His mother was frying bacon. She looked at his hard, smooth, knowing countenance as he juggled with the round cake of soap, and thought of his father when she first saw him stopping a hot grounder between second and third twenty-two years before on a vacant lot in Harlem, where the La Paloma apartment house now stands. In the front room of the flat Danny’s father sat by an open window smoking his pipe, with his dishevelled gray hair tossed about by the breeze. He still clung to his pipe, although his sight had been taken from him two years before by a precocious blast of giant powder that went off without permission. Very few blind men care for smoking, for the reason that they cannot see the smoke. Now, could you enjoy having the news read to you from an evening newspaper unless you could see the colors of the headlines?</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ’Tis Easter Day,” said Mrs. McCree.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ’Tis Easter Day,” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCree.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Scramble mine,” said Danny.</p>
|
||||
<p>After breakfast he dressed himself in the Sabbath morning costume of the Canal Street importing house dray chauffeur—frock coat, striped trousers, patent leathers, gilded trace chain across front of vest, and wing collar, rolled-brim derby and butterfly bow from Schonstein’s (between Fourteenth Street and Tony’s fruit stand) Saturday night sale.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’ll be goin’ out this day, of course, Danny,” said old man McCree, a little wistfully. “ ’Tis a kind of holiday, they say. Well, it’s fine spring weather. I can feel it in the air.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why should I not be going out?” demanded Danny in his grumpiest chest tones. “Should I stay in? Am I as good as a horse? One day of rest my team has a week. Who earns the money for the rent and the breakfast you’ve just eat, I’d like to know? Answer me that!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right, lad,” said the old man. “I’m not complainin’. While me two eyes was good there was nothin’ better to my mind than a Sunday out. There’s a smell of turf and burnin’ brush comin’ in the windy. I have me tobaccy. A good fine day and rist to ye, lad. Times I wish your mother had larned to read, so I might hear the rest about the hippopotamus—but let that be.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Now, what is this foolishness he talks of hippopotamuses?” asked Danny of his mother, as he passed through the kitchen. “Have you been taking him to the Zoo? And for what?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have not,” said Mrs. McCree. “He sets by the windy all day. ’Tis little recreation a blind man among the poor gets at all. I’m thinkin’ they wander in their minds at times. One day he talks of grease without stoppin’ for the most of an hour. I looks to see if there’s lard burnin’ in the fryin’ pan. There is not. He says I do not understand. ’Tis weary days, Sundays, and holidays and all, for a blind man, Danny. There was no better nor stronger than him when he had his two eyes. ’Tis a fine day, son. Injoy yeself ag’inst the morning. There will be cold supper at six.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have not,” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCree. “He sets by the windy all day. ’Tis little recreation a blind man among the poor gets at all. I’m thinkin’ they wander in their minds at times. One day he talks of grease without stoppin’ for the most of an hour. I looks to see if there’s lard burnin’ in the fryin’ pan. There is not. He says I do not understand. ’Tis weary days, Sundays, and holidays and all, for a blind man, Danny. There was no better nor stronger than him when he had his two eyes. ’Tis a fine day, son. Injoy yeself ag’inst the morning. There will be cold supper at six.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Have you heard any talk of a hippopotamus?” asked Danny of Mike, the janitor, as he went out the door downstairs.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have not,” said Mike, pulling his shirtsleeves higher. “But ’tis the only subject in the animal, natural and illegal lists of outrages that I’ve not been complained to about these two days. See the landlord. Or else move out if ye like. Have ye hippopotamuses in the lease? No, then?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It was the old man who spoke of it,” said Danny. “Likely there’s nothing in it.”</p>
|
||||
@ -50,12 +50,12 @@
|
||||
<p>“I will,” said Danny. “If this Easter is pulled off there, they ought to be able to give some excuse for it. Not that the hat ain’t a beauty. The green roses are great.”</p>
|
||||
<p>At church the preacher did some expounding with no pounding. He spoke rapidly, for he was in a hurry to get home to his early Sabbath dinner; but he knew his business. There was one word that controlled his theme—resurrection. Not a new creation; but a new life arising out of the old. The congregation had heard it often before. But there was a wonderful hat, a combination of sweet peas and lavender, in the sixth pew from the pulpit. It attracted much attention.</p>
|
||||
<p>After church Danny lingered on a corner while Katy waited, with pique in her sky-blue eyes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Are you coming along to the house?” she asked. “But don’t mind me. I’ll get there all right. You seem to be studyin’ a lot about something. All right. Will I see you at any time specially, Mr. McCree?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Are you coming along to the house?” she asked. “But don’t mind me. I’ll get there all right. You seem to be studyin’ a lot about something. All right. Will I see you at any time specially, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McCree?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ll be around Wednesday night as usual,” said Danny, turning and crossing the street.</p>
|
||||
<p>Katy walked away with the green roses dangling indignantly. Danny stopped two blocks away. He stood still with his hands in his pockets, at the curb on the corner. His face was that of a graven image. Deep in his soul something stirred so small, so fine, so keen and leavening that his hard fibres did not recognize it. It was something more tender than the April day, more subtle than the call of the senses, purer and deeper-rooted than the love of woman—for had he not turned away from green roses and eyes that had kept him chained for a year? And Danny did not know what it was. The preacher, who was in a hurry to go to his dinner, had told him, but Danny had had no libretto with which to follow the drowsy intonation. But the preacher spoke the truth.</p>
|
||||
<p>Suddenly Danny slapped his leg and gave forth a hoarse yell of delight.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hippopotamus!” he shouted to an elevated road pillar. “Well, how is that for a bum guess? Why, blast my skylights! I know what he was driving at now.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hippopotamus! Wouldn’t that send you to the Bronx! It’s been a year since he heard it; and he didn’t miss it so very far. We quit at 469 BC, and this comes next. Well, a wooden man wouldn’t have guessed what he was trying to get out of him.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hippopotamus! Wouldn’t that send you to the Bronx! It’s been a year since he heard it; and he didn’t miss it so very far. We quit at 469 <abbr class="era">BC</abbr>, and this comes next. Well, a wooden man wouldn’t have guessed what he was trying to get out of him.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Danny caught a crosstown car and went up to the rear flat that his labor supported.</p>
|
||||
<p>Old man McCree was still sitting by the window. His extinct pipe lay on the sill.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Will that be you, lad?” he asked.</p>
|
||||
@ -65,12 +65,12 @@
|
||||
<p>Danny reached up on a shelf and took down a thick book labeled in gilt letters, “The History of Greece.” Dust was on it half an inch thick. He laid it on the table and found a place in it marked by a strip of paper. And then he gave a short roar at the top of his voice, and said:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Was it the hippopotamus you wanted to be read to about then?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Did I hear ye open the book?” said old man McCree. “Many and weary be the months since my lad has read it to me. I dinno; but I took a great likings to them Greeks. Ye left off at a place. ’Tis a fine day outside, lad. Be out and take rest from your work. I have gotten used to me chair by the windy and me pipe.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Pel-Peloponnesus was the place where we left off, and not hippopotamus,” said Danny. “The war began there. It kept something doing for thirty years. The headlines says that a guy named Philip of Macedon, in 338 BC, got to be boss of Greece by getting the decision at the battle of Cher-Cheronoea. I’ll read it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Pel-Peloponnesus was the place where we left off, and not hippopotamus,” said Danny. “The war began there. It kept something doing for thirty years. The headlines says that a guy named Philip of Macedon, in 338 <abbr class="era">BC</abbr>, got to be boss of Greece by getting the decision at the battle of Cher-Cheronoea. I’ll read it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>With his hand to his ear, rapt in the Peloponnesian War, old man McCree sat for an hour, listening.</p>
|
||||
<p>Then he got up and felt his way to the door of the kitchen. Mrs. McCree was slicing cold meat. She looked up. Tears were running from old man McCree’s eyes.</p>
|
||||
<p>Then he got up and felt his way to the door of the kitchen. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCree was slicing cold meat. She looked up. Tears were running from old man McCree’s eyes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Do you hear our lad readin’ to me?” he said. “There is none finer in the land. My two eyes have come back to me again.”</p>
|
||||
<p>After supper he said to Danny: “ ’Tis a happy day, this Easter. And now ye will be off to see Katy in the evening. Well enough.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Who pays the rent and buys the food that is eaten in this house?” said Danny, angrily. “Have I no right to stay in it? After supper there is yet to come the reading of the battle of Corinth, 146 BC, when the kingdom, as they say, became an in-integral portion of the Roman Empire. Am I nothing in this house?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Who pays the rent and buys the food that is eaten in this house?” said Danny, angrily. “Have I no right to stay in it? After supper there is yet to come the reading of the battle of Corinth, 146 <abbr class="era">BC</abbr>, when the kingdom, as they say, became an in-integral portion of the Roman Empire. Am I nothing in this house?”</p>
|
||||
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|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 22</title>
|
||||
<title>The Duel</title>
|
||||
<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
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<section id="chapter-22" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE DUEL</h2>
|
||||
<section id="the-duel" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Duel</h2>
|
||||
<p>The gods, lying beside their nectar on ‘Lympus and peeping over the edge of the cliff, perceive a difference in cities. Although it would seem that to their vision towns must appear as large or small ant-hills without special characteristics, yet it is not so. Studying the habits of ants from so great a height should be but a mild diversion when coupled with the soft drink that mythology tells us is their only solace. But doubtless they have amused themselves by the comparison of villages and towns; and it will be no news to them (nor, perhaps, to many mortals), that in one particularity New York stands unique among the cities of the world. This shall be the theme of a little story addressed to the man who sits smoking with his Sabbath-slippered feet on another chair, and to the woman who snatches the paper for a moment while boiling greens or a narcotized baby leaves her free. With these I love to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of Kings.</p>
|
||||
<p>New York City is inhabited by 4,000,000 mysterious strangers; thus beating Bird Centre by three millions and half a dozen nine’s. They came here in various ways and for many reasons—Hendrik Hudson, the art schools, green goods, the stork, the annual dressmakers’ convention, the Pennsylvania Railroad, love of money, the stage, cheap excursion rates, brains, personal column ads., heavy walking shoes, ambition, freight trains—all these have had a hand in making up the population.</p>
|
||||
<p>But every man Jack when he first sets foot on the stones of Manhattan has got to fight. He has got to fight at once until either he or his adversary wins. There is no resting between rounds, for there are no rounds. It is slugging from the first. It is a fight to a finish.</p>
|
||||
@ -23,15 +23,17 @@
|
||||
<p>“Poor Billy,” said the artist, delicately fingering a cigarette. “You remember, when we were on our way to the East how we talked about this great, wonderful city, and how we meant to conquer it and never let it get the best of us? We were going to be just the same fellows we had always been, and never let it master us. It has downed you, old man. You have changed from a maverick into a butterick.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Don’t see exactly what you are driving at,” said William. “I don’t wear an alpaca coat with blue trousers and a seersucker vest on dress occasions, like I used to do at home. You talk about being cut to a pattern—well, ain’t the pattern all right? When you’re in Rome you’ve got to do as the Dagoes do. This town seems to me to have other alleged metropolises skinned to flag stations. According to the railroad schedule I’ve got in mind, Chicago and Saint Jo and Paris, France, are asterisk stops—which means you wave a red flag and get on every other Tuesday. I like this little suburb of Tarrytown-on-the-Hudson. There’s something or somebody doing all the time. I’m clearing $8,000 a year selling automatic pumps, and I’m living like kings-up. Why, yesterday, I was introduced to John W. Gates. I took an auto ride with a wine agent’s sister. I saw two men run over by a street car, and I seen Edna May play in the evening. Talk about the West, why, the other night I woke everybody up in the hotel hollering. I dreamed I was walking on a board sidewalk in Oshkosh. What have you got against this town, Jack? There’s only one thing in it that I don’t care for, and that’s a ferryboat.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The artist gazed dreamily at the cartridge paper on the wall. “This town,” said he, “is a leech. It drains the blood of the country. Whoever comes to it accepts a challenge to a duel. Abandoning the figure of the leech, it is a juggernaut, a Moloch, a monster to which the innocence, the genius, and the beauty of the land must pay tribute. Hand to hand every newcomer must struggle with the leviathan. You’ve lost, Billy. It shall never conquer me. I hate it as one hates sin or pestilence or—the color work in a ten-cent magazine. I despise its very vastness and power. It has the poorest millionaires, the littlest great men, the lowest skyscrapers, the dolefulest pleasures of any town I ever saw. It has caught you, old man, but I will never run beside its chariot wheels. It glosses itself as the Chinaman glosses his collars. Give me the domestic finish. I could stand a town ruled by wealth or one ruled by an aristocracy; but this is one controlled by its lowest ingredients. Claiming culture, it is the crudest; asseverating its pre-eminence, it is the basest; denying all outside values and virtue, it is the narrowest. Give me the pure and the open heart of the West country. I would go back there to-morrow if I could.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Don’t you like this <i>filet mignon</i>?” said William. “Shucks, now, what’s the use to knock the town! It’s the greatest ever. I couldn’t sell one automatic pump between Harrisburg and Tommy O’Keefe’s saloon, in Sacramento, where I sell twenty here. And have you seen Sara Bernhardt in ‘Andrew Mack’ yet?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Don’t you like this filet mignon?” said William. “Shucks, now, what’s the use to knock the town! It’s the greatest ever. I couldn’t sell one automatic pump between Harrisburg and Tommy O’Keefe’s saloon, in Sacramento, where I sell twenty here. And have you seen Sara Bernhardt in ‘Andrew Mack’ yet?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The town’s got you, Billy,” said Jack.</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right,” said William. “I’m going to buy a cottage on Lake Ronkonkoma next summer.”</p>
|
||||
<p>At midnight Jack raised his window and sat close to it. He caught his breath at what he saw, though he had seen and felt it a hundred times.</p>
|
||||
<p>Far below and around lay the city like a ragged purple dream. The irregular houses were like the broken exteriors of cliffs lining deep gulches and winding streams. Some were mountainous; some lay in long, desert cañons. Such was the background of the wonderful, cruel, enchanting, bewildering, fatal, great city. But into this background were cut myriads of brilliant parallelograms and circles and squares through which glowed many colored lights. And out of the violet and purple depths ascended like the city’s soul sounds and odors and thrills that make up the civic body. There arose the breath of gaiety unrestrained, of love, of hate, of all the passions that man can know. There below him lay all things, good or bad, that can be brought from the four corners of the earth to instruct, please, thrill, enrich, despoil, elevate, cast down, nurture or kill. Thus the flavor of it came up to him and went into his blood.</p>
|
||||
<p>There was a knock on his door. A telegram had come for him. It came from the West, and these were its words:</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p>“Come back and the answer will be yes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“<span class="smallcaps">Dolly</span>.”</p>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<b>“Come back and the answer will be yes.</b>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
<p class="signature">“Dolly.”</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>He kept the boy waiting ten minutes, and then wrote the reply: “Impossible to leave here at present.” Then he sat at the window again and let the city put its cup of mandragora to his lips again.</p>
|
||||
<p>After all it isn’t a story; but I wanted to know which one of the heroes won the battle against the city. So I went to a very learned friend and laid the case before him. What he said was: “Please don’t bother me; I have Christmas presents to buy.”</p>
|
||||
@ -1,20 +1,20 @@
|
||||
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
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|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 5</title>
|
||||
<title>The Fifth Wheel</title>
|
||||
<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
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<section id="chapter-5" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE FIFTH WHEEL</h2>
|
||||
<section id="the-fifth-wheel" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Fifth Wheel</h2>
|
||||
<p>The ranks of the Bed Line moved closer together; for it was cold. They were alluvial deposit of the stream of life lodged in the delta of Fifth Avenue and Broadway. The Bed Liners stamped their freezing feet, looked at the empty benches in Madison Square whence Jack Frost had evicted them, and muttered to one another in a confusion of tongues. The Flatiron Building, with its impious, cloud-piercing architecture looming mistily above them on the opposite delta, might well have stood for the tower of Babel, whence these polyglot idlers had been called by the winged walking delegate of the Lord.</p>
|
||||
<p>Standing on a pine box a head higher than his flock of goats, the Preacher exhorted whatever transient and shifting audience the north wind doled out to him. It was a slave market. Fifteen cents bought you a man. You deeded him to Morpheus; and the recording angel gave you credit.</p>
|
||||
<p>The preacher was incredibly earnest and unwearied. He had looked over the list of things one may do for one’s fellow man, and had assumed for himself the task of putting to bed all who might apply at his soap box on the nights of Wednesday and Sunday. That left but five nights for other philanthropists to handle; and had they done their part as well, this wicked city might have become a vast Arcadian dormitory where all might snooze and snore the happy hours away, letting problem plays and the rent man and business go to the deuce.</p>
|
||||
<p>The hour of eight was but a little while past; sightseers in a small, dark mass of pay ore were gathered in the shadow of General Worth’s monument. Now and then, shyly, ostentatiously, carelessly, or with conscientious exactness one would step forward and bestow upon the Preacher small bills or silver. Then a lieutenant of Scandinavian coloring and enthusiasm would march away to a lodging house with a squad of the redeemed. All the while the Preacher exhorted the crowd in terms beautifully devoid of eloquence—splendid with the deadly, accusative monotony of truth. Before the picture of the Bed Liners fades you must hear one phrase of the Preacher’s—the one that formed his theme that night. It is worthy of being stenciled on all the white ribbons in the world.</p>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<i>“No man ever learned to be a drunkard on five-cent whisky.”</i>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p>“No man ever learned to be a drunkard on five-cent whisky.”</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>Think of it, tippler. It covers the ground from the sprouting rye to the Potter’s Field.</p>
|
||||
<p>A clean-profiled, erect young man in the rear rank of the bedless emulated the terrapin, drawing his head far down into the shell of his coat collar. It was a well-cut tweed coat; and the trousers still showed signs of having flattened themselves beneath the compelling goose. But, conscientiously, I must warn the milliner’s apprentice who reads this, expecting a Reginald Montressor in straits, to peruse no further. The young man was no other than Thomas McQuade, ex-coachman, discharged for drunkenness one month before, and now reduced to the grimy ranks of the one-night bed seekers.</p>
|
||||
<p>If you live in smaller New York you must know the Van Smuythe family carriage, drawn by the two 1,500-pound, 100 to 1-shot bays. The carriage is shaped like a bath-tub. In each end of it reclines an old lady Van Smuythe holding a black sunshade the size of a New Year’s Eve feather tickler. Before his downfall Thomas McQuade drove the Van Smuythe bays and was himself driven by Annie, the Van Smuythe lady’s maid. But it is one of the saddest things about romance that a tight shoe or an empty commissary or an aching tooth will make a temporary heretic of any Cupid-worshiper. And Thomas’s physical troubles were not few. Therefore, his soul was less vexed with thoughts of his lost lady’s maid than it was by the fancied presence of certain non-existent things that his racked nerves almost convinced him were flying, dancing, crawling, and wriggling on the asphalt and in the air above and around the dismal campus of the Bed Line army. Nearly four weeks of straight whisky and a diet limited to crackers, bologna, and pickles often guarantees a psycho-zoological sequel. Thus desperate, freezing, angry, beset by phantoms as he was, he felt the need of human sympathy and intercourse.</p>
|
||||
@ -46,7 +46,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Thomas McQuade took in the splendors of this palatial apartment with one eye. With the other he looked for his imposing conductor—to find that he had disappeared.</p>
|
||||
<p>“B’gee!” muttered Thomas, “this listens like a spook shop. Shouldn’t wonder if it ain’t one of these Moravian Nights’ adventures that you read about. Wonder what became of the furry guy.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Suddenly a stuffed owl that stood on an ebony perch near the illuminated globe slowly raised his wings and emitted from his eyes a brilliant electric glow.</p>
|
||||
<p>With a fright-born imprecation, Thomas seized a bronze statuette of Hebe from a cabinet near by and hurled it with all his might at the terrifying and impossible fowl. The owl and his perch went over with a crash. With the sound there was a click, and the room was flooded with light from a dozen frosted globes along the walls and ceiling. The gold portières parted and closed, and the mysterious automobilist entered the room. He was tall and wore evening dress of perfect cut and accurate taste. A Vandyke beard of glossy, golden brown, rather long and wavy hair, smoothly parted, and large, magnetic, orientally occult eyes gave him a most impressive and striking appearance. If you can conceive a Russian Grand Duke in a Rajah’s throne-room advancing to greet a visiting Emperor, you will gather something of the majesty of his manner. But Thomas McQuade was too near his <i>d t’s</i> to be mindful of his <i>p’s</i> and <i>q’s</i>. When he viewed this silken, polished, and somewhat terrifying host he thought vaguely of dentists.</p>
|
||||
<p>With a fright-born imprecation, Thomas seized a bronze statuette of Hebe from a cabinet near by and hurled it with all his might at the terrifying and impossible fowl. The owl and his perch went over with a crash. With the sound there was a click, and the room was flooded with light from a dozen frosted globes along the walls and ceiling. The gold portières parted and closed, and the mysterious automobilist entered the room. He was tall and wore evening dress of perfect cut and accurate taste. A Vandyke beard of glossy, golden brown, rather long and wavy hair, smoothly parted, and large, magnetic, orientally occult eyes gave him a most impressive and striking appearance. If you can conceive a Russian Grand Duke in a Rajah’s throne-room advancing to greet a visiting Emperor, you will gather something of the majesty of his manner. But Thomas McQuade was too near his <abbr>d.t.’s</abbr> to be mindful of his <i epub:type="z3998:grapheme">p’s</i> and <i epub:type="z3998:grapheme">q’s</i>. When he viewed this silken, polished, and somewhat terrifying host he thought vaguely of dentists.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say, doc,” said he resentfully, “that’s a hot bird you keep on tap. I hope I didn’t break anything. But I’ve nearly got the williwalloos, and when he threw them 32-candle-power lamps of his on me, I took a snap-shot at him with that little brass Flatiron Girl that stood on the sideboard.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“That is merely a mechanical toy,” said the gentleman with a wave of his hand. “May I ask you to be seated while I explain why I brought you to my house. Perhaps you would not understand nor be in sympathy with the psychological prompting that caused me to do so. So I will come to the point at once by venturing to refer to your admission that you know the Van Smuythe family, of Washington Square North.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Any silver missing?” asked Thomas tartly. “Any joolry displaced? Of course I know ’em. Any of the old ladies’ sunshades disappeared? Well, I know ’em. And then what?”</p>
|
||||
@ -60,7 +60,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Madam,” said the professor, with his princeliest smile, “the true Art cannot fail. To find the true psychic and potential branch sometimes requires time. We have not succeeded, I admit, with the cards, the crystal, the stars, the magic formulae of Zarazin, nor the Oracle of Po. But we have at last discovered the true psychic route. The Chaldean Chiroscope has been successful in our search.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The professor’s voice had a ring that seemed to proclaim his belief in his own words. The elderly lady looked at him with a little more interest.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, there was no sense in those words that it wrote with my hands on it,” she said. “What do you mean?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The words were these,” said Professor Cherubusco, rising to his full magnificent height: “<i>‘By the fifth wheel of the chariot he shall come.’</i>”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The words were these,” said Professor Cherubusco, rising to his full magnificent height: “<em>‘By the fifth wheel of the chariot he shall come.’</em>”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I haven’t seen many chariots,” said the lady, “but I never saw one with five wheels.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Progress,” said the professor—“progress in science and mechanics has accomplished it—though, to be exact, we may speak of it only as an extra tire. Progress in occult art has advanced in proportion. Madam, I repeat that the Chaldean Chiroscope has succeeded. I can not only answer the question that you have propounded, but I can produce before your eyes the proof thereof.”</p>
|
||||
<p>And now the lady was disturbed both in her disbelief and in her poise.</p>
|
||||
@ -105,11 +105,11 @@
|
||||
<p>Annie’s fingers began to wiggle in her purse.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sure, I’ve got money,” said she. “Lots of it. Twelve dollars.” And then she added, with woman’s ineradicable suspicion of vicarious benevolence: “Bring him here and let me see him first.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Thomas went on his mission. The wan Bed Liner came readily enough. As the two drew near, Annie looked up from her purse and screamed:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mr. Walter—Oh—Mr. Walter!</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Walter—Oh—<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Walter!</p>
|
||||
<p>“Is that you, Annie?” said the young man meekly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, Mr. Walter!—and the Missis hunting high and low for you!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Walter!—and the Missis hunting high and low for you!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Does mother want to see me?” he asked, with a flush coming out on his pale cheek.</p>
|
||||
<p>“She’s been hunting for you high and low. Sure, she wants to see you. She wants you to come home. She’s tried police and morgues and lawyers and advertising and detectives and rewards and everything. And then she took up clearvoyants. You’ll go right home, won’t you, Mr. Walter?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“She’s been hunting for you high and low. Sure, she wants to see you. She wants you to come home. She’s tried police and morgues and lawyers and advertising and detectives and rewards and everything. And then she took up clearvoyants. You’ll go right home, won’t you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Walter?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Gladly, if she wants me,” said the young man. “Three years is a long time. I suppose I’ll have to walk up, though, unless the street cars are giving free rides. I used to walk and beat that old plug team of bays we used to drive to the carriage. Have they got them yet?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“They have,” said Thomas, feelingly. “And they’ll have ’em ten years from now. The life of the royal elephantibus truckhorseibus is one hundred and forty-nine years. I’m the coachman. Just got my reappointment five minutes ago. Let’s all ride up in a surface car—that is—er—if Annie will pay the fares.”</p>
|
||||
<p>On the Broadway car Annie handed each one of the prodigals a nickel to pay the conductor.</p>
|
||||
@ -117,7 +117,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“In that purse,” said Annie decidedly, “is exactly $11.85. I shall take every cent of it to-morrow and give it to professor Cherubusco, the greatest man in the world.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well,” said Thomas, “I guess he must be a pretty fly guy to pipe off things the way he does. I’m glad his spooks told him where you could find me. If you’ll give me his address, some day I’ll go up there, myself, and shake his hand.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Presently Thomas moved tentatively in his seat, and thoughtfully felt an abrasion or two on his knees and his elbows.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say, Annie,” said he confidentially, maybe it’s one of the last dreams of booze, but I’ve a kind of a recollection of riding in an automobile with a swell guy that took me to a house full of eagles and arc lights. He fed me on biscuits and hot air, and then kicked me down the front steps. If it was the <i>d t’s</i>, why am I so sore?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say, Annie,” said he confidentially, maybe it’s one of the last dreams of booze, but I’ve a kind of a recollection of riding in an automobile with a swell guy that took me to a house full of eagles and arc lights. He fed me on biscuits and hot air, and then kicked me down the front steps. If it was the <abbr>d.t.’s</abbr>, why am I so sore?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Shut up, you fool,” said Annie.</p>
|
||||
<p>“If I could find that funny guy’s house,” said Thomas, in conclusion, “I’d go up there some day and punch his nose for him.”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
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|
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|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 8</title>
|
||||
<title>The Girl and the Graft</title>
|
||||
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-8" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE GIRL AND THE GRAFT</h2>
|
||||
<section id="the-girl-and-the-graft" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Girl and the Graft</h2>
|
||||
<p>The other day I ran across my old friend Ferguson Pogue. Pogue is a conscientious grafter of the highest type. His headquarters is the Western Hemisphere, and his line of business is anything from speculating in town lots on the Great Staked Plains to selling wooden toys in Connecticut, made by hydraulic pressure from nutmegs ground to a pulp.</p>
|
||||
<p>Now and then when Pogue has made a good haul he comes to New York for a rest. He says the jug of wine and loaf of bread and Thou in the wilderness business is about as much rest and pleasure to him as sliding down the bumps at Coney would be to President Taft. “Give me,” says Pogue, “a big city for my vacation. Especially New York. I’m not much fond of New Yorkers, and Manhattan is about the only place on the globe where I don’t find any.”</p>
|
||||
<p>While in the metropolis Pogue can always be found at one of two places. One is a little second-hand book-shop on Fourth Avenue, where he reads books about his hobbies, Mahometanism and taxidermy. I found him at the other—his hall bedroom in Eighteenth Street—where he sat in his stocking feet trying to pluck “The Banks of the Wabash” out of a small zither. Four years he has practised this tune without arriving near enough to cast the longest trout line to the water’s edge. On the dresser lay a blued-steel Colt’s forty-five and a tight roll of tens and twenties large enough around to belong to the spring rattlesnake-story class. A chambermaid with a room-cleaning air fluttered nearby in the hall, unable to enter or to flee, scandalized by the stocking feet, aghast at the Colt’s, yet powerless, with her metropolitan instincts, to remove herself beyond the magic influence of the yellow-hued roll.</p>
|
||||
@ -21,11 +21,11 @@
|
||||
<p>“I kind of took to him. For this reason, I met him on Broadway one night when I was out of heart, luck, tobacco and place. He was all silk hat, diamonds and front. He was all front. If you had gone behind him you would have only looked yourself in the face. I looked like a cross between Count Tolstoy and a June lobster. I was out of luck. I had—but let me lay my eyes on that dealer again.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Vaucross stopped and talked to me a few minutes and then he took me to a high-toned restaurant to eat dinner. There was music, and then some Beethoven, and Bordelaise sauce, and cussing in French, and frangipangi, and some hauteur and cigarettes. When I am flush I know them places.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I declare, I must have looked as bad as a magazine artist sitting there without any money and my hair all rumpled like I was booked to read a chapter from ‘Elsie’s School Days’ at a Brooklyn Bohemian smoker. But Vaucross treated me like a bear hunter’s guide. He wasn’t afraid of hurting the waiter’s feelings.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Mr. Pogue,’ he explains to me, ‘I am using you.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Pogue,’ he explains to me, ‘I am using you.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Go on,’ says I; ‘I hope you don’t wake up.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“And then he tells me, you know, the kind of man he was. He was a New Yorker. His whole ambition was to be noticed. He wanted to be conspicuous. He wanted people to point him out and bow to him, and tell others who he was. He said it had been the desire of his life always. He didn’t have but a million, so he couldn’t attract attention by spending money. He said he tried to get into public notice one time by planting a little public square on the east side with garlic for free use of the poor; but Carnegie heard of it, and covered it over at once with a library in the Gaelic language. Three times he had jumped in the way of automobiles; but the only result was five broken ribs and a notice in the papers that an unknown man, five feet ten, with four amalgam-filled teeth, supposed to be the last of the famous Red Leary gang had been run over.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Ever try the reporters,’ I asked him.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Last month,’ says Mr. Vaucross, ‘my expenditure for lunches to reporters was $124.80.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Last month,’ says <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Vaucross, ‘my expenditure for lunches to reporters was $124.80.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Get anything out of that?’ I asks.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘That reminds me,’ says he; ‘add $8.50 for pepsin. Yes, I got indigestion.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘How am I supposed to push along your scramble for prominence?’ I inquires. ‘Contrast?’</p>
|
||||
@ -42,12 +42,12 @@
|
||||
<p>“Miss Artemisia was to get $10,000. If she won the suit that was all; and if she lost she was to get it anyhow. There was a signed contract to that effect.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sometimes they had me out with ’em, but not often. I couldn’t keep up to their style. She used to pull out his notes and criticize them like bills of lading.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Say, you!’ she’d say. ‘What do you call this—letter to a Hardware Merchant from His Nephew on Learning that His Aunt Has Nettlerash? You Eastern duffers know as much about writing love letters as a Kansas grasshopper does about tugboats. “My dear Miss Blye!”—wouldn’t that put pink icing and a little red sugar bird on your bridal cake? How long do you expect to hold an audience in a court-room with that kind of stuff? You want to get down to business, and call me “Tweedlums Babe” and “Honeysuckle,” and sign yourself “Mama’s Own Big Bad Puggy Wuggy Boy” if you want any limelight to concentrate upon your sparse gray hairs. Get sappy.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“After that Vaucross dipped his pen in the indelible tabasco. His notes read like something or other in the original. I could see a jury sitting up, and women tearing one another’s hats to hear ’em read. And I could see piling up for Mr. Vaucross as much notoriousness as Archbishop Cranmer or the Brooklyn Bridge or cheese-on-salad ever enjoyed. He seemed mighty pleased at the prospects.</p>
|
||||
<p>“After that Vaucross dipped his pen in the indelible tabasco. His notes read like something or other in the original. I could see a jury sitting up, and women tearing one another’s hats to hear ’em read. And I could see piling up for <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Vaucross as much notoriousness as Archbishop Cranmer or the Brooklyn Bridge or cheese-on-salad ever enjoyed. He seemed mighty pleased at the prospects.</p>
|
||||
<p>“They agreed on a night; and I stood on Fifth Avenue outside a solemn restaurant and watched ’em. A process-server walked in and handed Vaucross the papers at his table. Everybody looked at ’em; and he looked as proud as Cicero. I went back to my room and lit a five-cent cigar, for I knew the $10,000 was as good as ours.</p>
|
||||
<p>“About two hours later somebody knocked at my door. There stood Vaucross and Miss Artemisia, and she was clinging—yes, sir, clinging—to his arm. And they tells me they’d been out and got married. And they articulated some trivial cadences about love and such. And they laid down a bundle on the table and said ‘Good night’ and left.</p>
|
||||
<p>“And that’s why I say,” concluded Ferguson Pogue, “that a woman is too busy occupied with her natural vocation and instinct of graft such as is given her for self-preservation and amusement to make any great success in special lines.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“What was in the bundle that they left?” I asked, with my usual curiosity.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why,” said Ferguson, “there was a scalper’s railroad ticket as far as Kansas City and two pairs of Mr. Vaucross’s old pants.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why,” said Ferguson, “there was a scalper’s railroad ticket as far as Kansas City and two pairs of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Vaucross’s old pants.”</p>
|
||||
</section>
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|
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|
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<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 18</title>
|
||||
<title>The Girl and the Habit</title>
|
||||
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<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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<section id="chapter-18" epub:type="chapter">
|
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<h2>THE GIRL AND THE HABIT</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Habit</span>—a tendency or aptitude acquired by custom or frequent repetition.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<section id="the-girl-and-the-habit" epub:type="chapter">
|
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<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Girl and the Habit</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p><b>Habit</b>—a tendency or aptitude acquired by custom or frequent repetition.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>The critics have assailed every source of inspiration save one. To that one we are driven for our moral theme. When we levied upon the masters of old they gleefully dug up the parallels to our columns. When we strove to set forth real life they reproached us for trying to imitate Henry George, George Washington, Washington Irving, and Irving Bacheller. We wrote of the West and the East, and they accused us of both Jesse and Henry James. We wrote from our heart—and they said something about a disordered liver. We took a text from Matthew or—er—yes, Deuteronomy, but the preachers were hammering away at the inspiration idea before we could get into type. So, driven to the wall, we go for our subject-matter to the reliable, old, moral, unassailable vade mecum—the unabridged dictionary.</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss Merriam was cashier at Hinkle’s. Hinkle’s is one of the big downtown restaurants. It is in what the papers call the “financial district.” Each day from 12 o’clock to 2 Hinkle’s was full of hungry customers—messenger boys, stenographers, brokers, owners of mining stock, promoters, inventors with patents pending—and also people with money.</p>
|
||||
<p>The cashiership at Hinkle’s was no sinecure. Hinkle egged and toasted and griddle-caked and coffeed a good many customers; and he lunched (as good a word as “dined”) many more. It might be said that Hinkle’s breakfast crowd was a contingent, but his luncheon patronage amounted to a horde.</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss Merriam sat on a stool at a desk inclosed on three sides by a strong, high fencing of woven brass wire. Through an arched opening at the bottom you thrust your waiter’s check and the money, while your heart went pit-a-pat.</p>
|
||||
<p>For Miss Merriam was lovely and capable. She could take 45 cents out of a $2 bill and refuse an offer of marriage before you could—Next!—lost your chance—please don’t shove. She could keep cool and collected while she collected your check, give you the correct change, win your heart, indicate the toothpick stand, and rate you to a quarter of a cent better than Bradstreet could to a thousand in less time than it takes to pepper an egg with one of Hinkle’s casters.</p>
|
||||
<p>There is an old and dignified allusion to the “fierce light that beats upon a throne.” The light that beats upon the young lady cashier’s cage is also something fierce. The other fellow is responsible for the slang.</p>
|
||||
<p>Every male patron of Hinkle’s, from the AD T. boys up to the curbstone brokers, adored Miss Merriam. When they paid their checks they wooed her with every wile known to Cupid’s art. Between the meshes of the brass railing went smiles, winks, compliments, tender vows, invitations to dinner, sighs, languishing looks and merry banter that was wafted pointedly back by the gifted Miss Merriam.</p>
|
||||
<p>Every male patron of Hinkle’s, from the <abbr>A.D.T.</abbr> boys up to the curbstone brokers, adored Miss Merriam. When they paid their checks they wooed her with every wile known to Cupid’s art. Between the meshes of the brass railing went smiles, winks, compliments, tender vows, invitations to dinner, sighs, languishing looks and merry banter that was wafted pointedly back by the gifted Miss Merriam.</p>
|
||||
<p>There is no coign of vantage more effective than the position of young lady cashier. She sits there, easily queen of the court of commerce; she is duchess of dollars and devoirs, countess of compliments and coin, leading lady of love and luncheon. You take from her a smile and a Canadian dime, and you go your way uncomplaining. You count the cheery word or two that she tosses you as misers count their treasures; and you pocket the change for a five uncomputed. Perhaps the brass-bound inaccessibility multiplies her charms—anyhow, she is a shirt-waisted angel, immaculate, trim, manicured, seductive, bright-eyed, ready, alert—Psyche, Circe, and Ate in one, separating you from your circulating medium after your sirloin medium.</p>
|
||||
<p>The young men who broke bread at Hinkle’s never settled with the cashier without an exchange of badinage and open compliment. Many of them went to greater lengths and dropped promissory hints of theatre tickets and chocolates. The older men spoke plainly of orange blossoms, generally withering the tentative petals by after-allusions to Harlem flats. One broker, who had been squeezed by copper proposed to Miss Merriam more regularly than he ate.</p>
|
||||
<p>During a brisk luncheon hour Miss Merriam’s conversation, while she took money for checks, would run something like this:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Good morning, Mr. Haskins—sir?—it’s natural, thank you—don’t be quite so fresh … Hello, Johnny—ten, fifteen, twenty—chase along now or they’ll take the letters off your cap … Beg pardon—count it again, please—Oh, don’t mention it … Vaudeville?—thanks; not on your moving picture—I was to see Carter in Hedda Gabler on Wednesday night with Mr. Simmons … ‘Scuse me, I thought that was a quarter … Twenty-five and seventy-five’s a dollar—got that ham-and-cabbage habit yet. I see, Billy … Who are you addressing?—say—you’ll get all that’s coming to you in a minute … Oh, fudge! Mr. Bassett—you’re always fooling—no—? Well, maybe I’ll marry you some day—three, four and sixty-five is five … Kindly keep them remarks to yourself, if you please … Ten cents?—‘scuse me; the check calls for seventy—well, maybe it is a one instead of a seven … Oh, do you like it that way, Mr. Saunders?—some prefer a pomp; but they say this Cleo de Merody does suit refined features … and ten is fifty … Hike along there, buddy; don’t take this for a Coney Island ticket booth … Huh?—why, Macy’s—don’t it fit nice? Oh, no, it isn’t too cool—these light-weight fabrics is all the go this season … Come again, please—that’s the third time you’ve tried to—what?—forget it—that lead quarter is an old friend of mine … Sixty-five?—must have had your salary raised, Mr. Wilson … I seen you on Sixth Avenue Tuesday afternoon, Mr. De Forest—swell?—oh, my!—who is she? … What’s the matter with it?—why, it ain’t money—what?—Columbian half?—well, this ain’t South America … Yes, I like the mixed best—Friday?—awfully sorry, but I take my jiu-jitsu lesson on Friday—Thursday, then … Thanks—that’s sixteen times I’ve been told that this morning—I guess I must be beautiful … Cut that out, please—who do you think I am? … Why, Mr. Westbrook—do you really think so?—the idea!—one—eighty and twenty’s a dollar—thank you ever so much, but I don’t ever go automobile riding with gentlemen—your aunt?—well, that’s different—perhaps … Please don’t get fresh—your check was fifteen cents, I believe—kindly step aside and let … Hello, Ben—coming around Thursday evening?—there’s a gentleman going to send around a box of chocolates, and … forty and sixty is a dollar, and one is two …”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Good morning, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Haskins—sir?—it’s natural, thank you—don’t be quite so fresh … Hello, Johnny—ten, fifteen, twenty—chase along now or they’ll take the letters off your cap … Beg pardon—count it again, please—Oh, don’t mention it … Vaudeville?—thanks; not on your moving picture—I was to see Carter in Hedda Gabler on Wednesday night with <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Simmons … ‘Scuse me, I thought that was a quarter … Twenty-five and seventy-five’s a dollar—got that ham-and-cabbage habit yet. I see, Billy … Who are you addressing?—say—you’ll get all that’s coming to you in a minute … Oh, fudge! <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bassett—you’re always fooling—no—? Well, maybe I’ll marry you some day—three, four and sixty-five is five … Kindly keep them remarks to yourself, if you please … Ten cents?—‘scuse me; the check calls for seventy—well, maybe it is a one instead of a seven … Oh, do you like it that way, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Saunders?—some prefer a pomp; but they say this Cleo de Merody does suit refined features … and ten is fifty … Hike along there, buddy; don’t take this for a Coney Island ticket booth … Huh?—why, Macy’s—don’t it fit nice? Oh, no, it isn’t too cool—these light-weight fabrics is all the go this season … Come again, please—that’s the third time you’ve tried to—what?—forget it—that lead quarter is an old friend of mine … Sixty-five?—must have had your salary raised, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Wilson … I seen you on Sixth Avenue Tuesday afternoon, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> De Forest—swell?—oh, my!—who is she? … What’s the matter with it?—why, it ain’t money—what?—Columbian half?—well, this ain’t South America … Yes, I like the mixed best—Friday?—awfully sorry, but I take my jiu-jitsu lesson on Friday—Thursday, then … Thanks—that’s sixteen times I’ve been told that this morning—I guess I must be beautiful … Cut that out, please—who do you think I am? … Why, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Westbrook—do you really think so?—the idea!—one—eighty and twenty’s a dollar—thank you ever so much, but I don’t ever go automobile riding with gentlemen—your aunt?—well, that’s different—perhaps … Please don’t get fresh—your check was fifteen cents, I believe—kindly step aside and let … Hello, Ben—coming around Thursday evening?—there’s a gentleman going to send around a box of chocolates, and … forty and sixty is a dollar, and one is two …”</p>
|
||||
<p>About the middle of one afternoon the dizzy goddess Vertigo—whose other name is Fortune—suddenly smote an old, wealthy and eccentric banker while he was walking past Hinkle’s, on his way to a street car. A wealthy and eccentric banker who rides in street cars is—move up, please; there are others.</p>
|
||||
<p>A Samaritan, a Pharisee, a man and a policeman who were first on the spot lifted Banker McRamsey and carried him into Hinkle’s restaurant. When the aged but indestructible banker opened his eyes he saw a beautiful vision bending over him with a pitiful, tender smile, bathing his forehead with beef tea and chafing his hands with something frappé out of a chafing-dish. Mr. McRamsey sighed, lost a vest button, gazed with deep gratitude upon his fair preserveress, and then recovered consciousness.</p>
|
||||
<p>To the Seaside Library all who are anticipating a romance! Banker McRamsey had an aged and respected wife, and his sentiments toward Miss Merriam were fatherly. He talked to her for half an hour with interest—not the kind that went with his talks during business hours. The next day he brought Mrs. McRamsey down to see her. The old couple were childless—they had only a married daughter living in Brooklyn.</p>
|
||||
<p>A Samaritan, a Pharisee, a man and a policeman who were first on the spot lifted Banker McRamsey and carried him into Hinkle’s restaurant. When the aged but indestructible banker opened his eyes he saw a beautiful vision bending over him with a pitiful, tender smile, bathing his forehead with beef tea and chafing his hands with something frappé out of a chafing-dish. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McRamsey sighed, lost a vest button, gazed with deep gratitude upon his fair preserveress, and then recovered consciousness.</p>
|
||||
<p>To the Seaside Library all who are anticipating a romance! Banker McRamsey had an aged and respected wife, and his sentiments toward Miss Merriam were fatherly. He talked to her for half an hour with interest—not the kind that went with his talks during business hours. The next day he brought <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McRamsey down to see her. The old couple were childless—they had only a married daughter living in Brooklyn.</p>
|
||||
<p>To make a short story shorter, the beautiful cashier won the hearts of the good old couple. They came to Hinkle’s again and again; they invited her to their old-fashioned but splendid home in one of the East Seventies. Miss Merriam’s winning loveliness, her sweet frankness and impulsive heart took them by storm. They said a hundred times that Miss Merriam reminded them so much of their lost daughter. The Brooklyn matron, née Ramsey, had the figure of Buddha and a face like the ideal of an art photographer. Miss Merriam was a combination of curves, smiles, rose leaves, pearls, satin and hair-tonic posters. Enough of the fatuity of parents.</p>
|
||||
<p>A month after the worthy couple became acquainted with Miss Merriam, she stood before Hinkle one afternoon and resigned her cashiership.</p>
|
||||
<p>“They’re going to adopt me,” she told the bereft restaurateur. “They’re funny old people, but regular dears. And the swell home they have got! Say, Hinkle, there isn’t any use of talking—I’m on the à la carte to wear brown duds and goggles in a whiz wagon, or marry a duke at least. Still, I somehow hate to break out of the old cage. I’ve been cashiering so long I feel funny doing anything else. I’ll miss joshing the fellows awfully when they line up to pay for the buckwheats and. But I can’t let this chance slide. And they’re awfully good, Hinkle; I know I’ll have a swell time. You owe me nine-sixty-two and a half for the week. Cut out the half if it hurts you, Hinkle.”</p>
|
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<head>
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<title>Chapter 2</title>
|
||||
<title>The Gold That Glittered</title>
|
||||
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<section id="chapter-2" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>THE GOLD THAT GLITTERED</h2>
|
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<section id="the-gold-that-glittered" epub:type="chapter">
|
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<h2 epub:type="title">The Gold That Glittered</h2>
|
||||
<p>A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience. Therefore let us have the moral first and be done with it. All is not gold that glitters, but it is a wise child that keeps the stopper in his bottle of testing acid.</p>
|
||||
<p>Where Broadway skirts the corner of the square presided over by George the Veracious is the Little Rialto. Here stand the actors of that quarter, and this is their shibboleth: “ ‘Nit,’ says I to Frohman, ‘you can’t touch me for a kopeck less than two-fifty per,’ and out I walks.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Westward and southward from the Thespian glare are one or two streets where a Spanish-American colony has huddled for a little tropical warmth in the nipping North. The centre of life in this precinct is “El Refugio,” a café and restaurant that caters to the volatile exiles from the South. Up from Chili, Bolivia, Colombia, the rolling republics of Central America and the ireful islands of the Western Indies flit the cloaked and sombreroed señores, who are scattered like burning lava by the political eruptions of their several countries. Hither they come to lay counterplots, to bide their time, to solicit funds, to enlist filibusterers, to smuggle out arms and ammunitions, to play the game at long taw. In El Refugio, they find the atmosphere in which they thrive.</p>
|
||||
<p>In the restaurant of El Refugio are served compounds delightful to the palate of the man from Capricorn or Cancer. Altruism must halt the story thus long. On, diner, weary of the culinary subterfuges of the Gallic chef, hie thee to El Refugio! There only will you find a fish—bluefish, shad or pompano from the Gulf—baked after the Spanish method. Tomatoes give it color, individuality and soul; chili colorado bestows upon it zest, originality and fervor; unknown herbs furnish piquancy and mystery, and—but its crowning glory deserves a new sentence. Around it, above it, beneath it, in its vicinity—but never in it—hovers an ethereal aura, an effluvium so rarefied and delicate that only the Society for Psychical Research could note its origin. Do not say that garlic is in the fish at El Refugio. It is not otherwise than as if the spirit of Garlic, flitting past, has wafted one kiss that lingers in the parsley-crowned dish as haunting as those kisses in life, “by hopeless fancy feigned on lips that are for others.” And then, when Conchito, the waiter, brings you a plate of brown frijoles and a carafe of wine that has never stood still between Oporto and El Refugio—ah, Dios!</p>
|
||||
<p>One day a Hamburg-American liner deposited upon Pier No. 55 Gen. Perrico Ximenes Villablanca Falcon, a passenger from Cartagena. The General was between a claybank and a bay in complexion, had a 42-inch waist and stood 5 feet 4 with his Du Barry heels. He had the mustache of a shooting-gallery proprietor, he wore the full dress of a Texas congressman and had the important aspect of an uninstructed delegate.</p>
|
||||
<p>One day a Hamburg-American liner deposited upon Pier <abbr>No.</abbr> 55 Gen. Perrico Ximenes Villablanca Falcon, a passenger from Cartagena. The General was between a claybank and a bay in complexion, had a 42-inch waist and stood 5 feet 4 with his Du Barry heels. He had the mustache of a shooting-gallery proprietor, he wore the full dress of a Texas congressman and had the important aspect of an uninstructed delegate.</p>
|
||||
<p>Gen. Falcon had enough English under his hat to enable him to inquire his way to the street in which El Refugio stood. When he reached that neighborhood he saw a sign before a respectable red-brick house that read, “Hotel Español.” In the window was a card in Spanish, “Aqui se habla Español.” The General entered, sure of a congenial port.</p>
|
||||
<p>In the cozy office was Mrs. O’Brien, the proprietress. She had blond—oh, unimpeachably blond hair. For the rest she was amiability, and ran largely to inches around. Gen. Falcon brushed the floor with his broad-brimmed hat, and emitted a quantity of Spanish, the syllables sounding like firecrackers gently popping their way down the string of a bunch.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Spanish or Dago?” asked Mrs. O’Brien, pleasantly.</p>
|
||||
<p>In the cozy office was <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> O’Brien, the proprietress. She had blond—oh, unimpeachably blond hair. For the rest she was amiability, and ran largely to inches around. Gen. Falcon brushed the floor with his broad-brimmed hat, and emitted a quantity of Spanish, the syllables sounding like firecrackers gently popping their way down the string of a bunch.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Spanish or Dago?” asked <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> O’Brien, pleasantly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am a Colombian, madam,” said the General, proudly. “I speak the Spanish. The advisement in your window say the Spanish he is spoken here. How is that?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, you’ve been speaking it, ain’t you?” said the madam. “I’m sure I can’t.”</p>
|
||||
<p>At the Hotel Español General Falcon engaged rooms and established himself. At dusk he sauntered out upon the streets to view the wonders of this roaring city of the North. As he walked he thought of the wonderful golden hair of Mme. O’Brien. “It is here,” said the General to himself, no doubt in his own language, “that one shall find the most beautiful señoras in the world. I have not in my Colombia viewed among our beauties one so fair. But no! It is not for the General Falcon to think of beauty. It is my country that claims my devotion.”</p>
|
||||
<p>At the Hotel Español General Falcon engaged rooms and established himself. At dusk he sauntered out upon the streets to view the wonders of this roaring city of the North. As he walked he thought of the wonderful golden hair of <abbr>Mme.</abbr> O’Brien. “It is here,” said the General to himself, no doubt in his own language, “that one shall find the most beautiful señoras in the world. I have not in my Colombia viewed among our beauties one so fair. But no! It is not for the General Falcon to think of beauty. It is my country that claims my devotion.”</p>
|
||||
<p>At the corner of Broadway and the Little Rialto the General became involved. The street cars bewildered him, and the fender of one upset him against a pushcart laden with oranges. A cab driver missed him an inch with a hub, and poured barbarous execrations upon his head. He scrambled to the sidewalk and skipped again in terror when the whistle of a peanut-roaster puffed a hot scream in his ear. “Válgame Dios! What devil’s city is this?”</p>
|
||||
<p>As the General fluttered out of the streamers of passers like a wounded snipe he was marked simultaneously as game by two hunters. One was “Bully” McGuire, whose system of sport required the use of a strong arm and the misuse of an eight-inch piece of lead pipe. The other Nimrod of the asphalt was “Spider” Kelley, a sportsman with more refined methods.</p>
|
||||
<p>In pouncing upon their self-evident prey, Mr. Kelley was a shade the quicker. His elbow fended accurately the onslaught of Mr. McGuire.</p>
|
||||
<p>In pouncing upon their self-evident prey, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley was a shade the quicker. His elbow fended accurately the onslaught of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McGuire.</p>
|
||||
<p>“G’wan!” he commanded harshly. “I saw it first.” McGuire slunk away, awed by superior intelligence.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Pardon me,” said Mr. Kelley, to the General, “but you got balled up in the shuffle, didn’t you? Let me assist you.” He picked up the General’s hat and brushed the dust from it.</p>
|
||||
<p>The ways of Mr. Kelley could not but succeed. The General, bewildered and dismayed by the resounding streets, welcomed his deliverer as a caballero with a most disinterested heart.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Pardon me,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley, to the General, “but you got balled up in the shuffle, didn’t you? Let me assist you.” He picked up the General’s hat and brushed the dust from it.</p>
|
||||
<p>The ways of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley could not but succeed. The General, bewildered and dismayed by the resounding streets, welcomed his deliverer as a caballero with a most disinterested heart.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have a desire,” said the General, “to return to the hotel of O’Brien, in which I am stop. Caramba! señor, there is a loudness and rapidness of going and coming in the city of this Nueva York.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Kelley’s politeness would not suffer the distinguished Colombian to brave the dangers of the return unaccompanied. At the door of the Hotel Español they paused. A little lower down on the opposite side of the street shone the modest illuminated sign of El Refugio. Mr. Kelley, to whom few streets were unfamiliar, knew the place exteriorly as a “Dago joint.” All foreigners Mr. Kelley classed under the two heads of “Dagoes” and Frenchmen. He proposed to the General that they repair thither and substantiate their acquaintance with a liquid foundation.</p>
|
||||
<p>An hour later found General Falcon and Mr. Kelley seated at a table in the conspirator’s corner of El Refugio. Bottles and glasses were between them. For the tenth time the General confided the secret of his mission to the Estados Unidos. He was here, he declared, to purchase arms—2,000 stands of Winchester rifles—for the Colombian revolutionists. He had drafts in his pocket drawn by the Cartagena Bank on its New York correspondent for $25,000. At other tables other revolutionists were shouting their political secrets to their fellow-plotters; but none was as loud as the General. He pounded the table; he hallooed for some wine; he roared to his friend that his errand was a secret one, and not to be hinted at to a living soul. Mr. Kelley himself was stirred to sympathetic enthusiasm. He grasped the General’s hand across the table.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Monseer,” he said, earnestly, “I don’t know where this country of yours is, but I’m for it. I guess it must be a branch of the United States, though, for the poetry guys and the schoolmarms call us Columbia, too, sometimes. It’s a lucky thing for you that you butted into me to-night. I’m the only man in New York that can get this gun deal through for you. The Secretary of War of the United States is me best friend. He’s in the city now, and I’ll see him for you to-morrow. In the meantime, monseer, you keep them drafts tight in your inside pocket. I’ll call for you to-morrow, and take you to see him. Say! that ain’t the District of Columbia you’re talking about, is it?” concluded Mr. Kelley, with a sudden qualm. “You can’t capture that with no 2,000 guns—it’s been tried with more.”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley’s politeness would not suffer the distinguished Colombian to brave the dangers of the return unaccompanied. At the door of the Hotel Español they paused. A little lower down on the opposite side of the street shone the modest illuminated sign of El Refugio. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley, to whom few streets were unfamiliar, knew the place exteriorly as a “Dago joint.” All foreigners <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley classed under the two heads of “Dagoes” and Frenchmen. He proposed to the General that they repair thither and substantiate their acquaintance with a liquid foundation.</p>
|
||||
<p>An hour later found General Falcon and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley seated at a table in the conspirator’s corner of El Refugio. Bottles and glasses were between them. For the tenth time the General confided the secret of his mission to the Estados Unidos. He was here, he declared, to purchase arms—2,000 stands of Winchester rifles—for the Colombian revolutionists. He had drafts in his pocket drawn by the Cartagena Bank on its New York correspondent for $25,000. At other tables other revolutionists were shouting their political secrets to their fellow-plotters; but none was as loud as the General. He pounded the table; he hallooed for some wine; he roared to his friend that his errand was a secret one, and not to be hinted at to a living soul. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley himself was stirred to sympathetic enthusiasm. He grasped the General’s hand across the table.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Monseer,” he said, earnestly, “I don’t know where this country of yours is, but I’m for it. I guess it must be a branch of the United States, though, for the poetry guys and the schoolmarms call us Columbia, too, sometimes. It’s a lucky thing for you that you butted into me to-night. I’m the only man in New York that can get this gun deal through for you. The Secretary of War of the United States is me best friend. He’s in the city now, and I’ll see him for you to-morrow. In the meantime, monseer, you keep them drafts tight in your inside pocket. I’ll call for you to-morrow, and take you to see him. Say! that ain’t the District of Columbia you’re talking about, is it?” concluded <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley, with a sudden qualm. “You can’t capture that with no 2,000 guns—it’s been tried with more.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“No, no, no!” exclaimed the General. “It is the Republic of Colombia—it is a g-r-reat republic on the top side of America of the South. Yes. Yes.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right,” said Mr. Kelley, reassured. “Now suppose we trek along home and go by-by. I’ll write to the Secretary to-night and make a date with him. It’s a ticklish job to get guns out of New York. McClusky himself can’t do it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley, reassured. “Now suppose we trek along home and go by-by. I’ll write to the Secretary to-night and make a date with him. It’s a ticklish job to get guns out of New York. McClusky himself can’t do it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>They parted at the door of the Hotel Español. The General rolled his eyes at the moon and sighed.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It is a great country, your Nueva York,” he said. “Truly the cars in the streets devastate one, and the engine that cooks the nuts terribly makes a squeak in the ear. But, ah, Señor Kelley—the señoras with hair of much goldness, and admirable fatness—they are magnificas! Muy magnificas!”</p>
|
||||
<p>Kelley went to the nearest telephone booth and called up McCrary’s café, far up on Broadway. He asked for Jimmy Dunn.</p>
|
||||
@ -41,36 +41,36 @@
|
||||
<p>These two gentlemen held a conference that night at McCrary’s. Kelley explained.</p>
|
||||
<p>“He’s as easy as a gumshoe. He’s from the Island of Colombia, where there’s a strike, or a feud, or something going on, and they’ve sent him up here to buy 2,000 Winchesters to arbitrate the thing with. He showed me two drafts for $10,000 each, and one for $5,000 on a bank here. ‘S truth, Jimmy, I felt real mad with him because he didn’t have it in thousand-dollar bills, and hand it to me on a silver waiter. Now, we’ve got to wait till he goes to the bank and gets the money for us.”</p>
|
||||
<p>They talked it over for two hours, and then Dunn said; “Bring him to No. ⸻ Broadway, at four o’clock to-morrow afternoon.”</p>
|
||||
<p>In due time Kelley called at the Hotel Español for the General. He found the wily warrior engaged in delectable conversation with Mrs. O’Brien.</p>
|
||||
<p>In due time Kelley called at the Hotel Español for the General. He found the wily warrior engaged in delectable conversation with <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> O’Brien.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The Secretary of War is waitin’ for us,” said Kelley.</p>
|
||||
<p>The General tore himself away with an effort.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ay, señor,” he said, with a sigh, “duty makes a call. But, señor, the señoras of your Estados Unidos—how beauties! For exemplification, take you la Madame O’Brien—que magnifica! She is one goddess—one Juno—what you call one ox-eyed Juno.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Now Mr. Kelley was a wit; and better men have been shriveled by the fire of their own imagination.</p>
|
||||
<p>Now <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley was a wit; and better men have been shriveled by the fire of their own imagination.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sure!” he said with a grin; “but you mean a peroxide Juno, don’t you?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Mrs. O’Brien heard, and lifted an auriferous head. Her businesslike eye rested for an instant upon the disappearing form of Mr. Kelley. Except in street cars one should never be unnecessarily rude to a lady.</p>
|
||||
<p>When the gallant Colombian and his escort arrived at the Broadway address, they were held in an anteroom for half an hour, and then admitted into a well-equipped office where a distinguished looking man, with a smooth face, wrote at a desk. General Falcon was presented to the Secretary of War of the United States, and his mission made known by his old friend, Mr. Kelley.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ah—Colombia!” said the Secretary, significantly, when he was made to understand; “I’m afraid there will be a little difficulty in that case. The President and I differ in our sympathies there. He prefers the established government, while I—” the secretary gave the General a mysterious but encouraging smile. “You, of course, know, General Falcon, that since the Tammany war, an act of Congress has been passed requiring all manufactured arms and ammunition exported from this country to pass through the War Department. Now, if I can do anything for you I will be glad to do so to oblige my old friend, Mr. Kelley. But it must be in absolute secrecy, as the President, as I have said, does not regard favorably the efforts of your revolutionary party in Colombia. I will have my orderly bring a list of the available arms now in the warehouse.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The Secretary struck a bell, and an orderly with the letters AD T. on his cap stepped promptly into the room.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> O’Brien heard, and lifted an auriferous head. Her businesslike eye rested for an instant upon the disappearing form of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley. Except in street cars one should never be unnecessarily rude to a lady.</p>
|
||||
<p>When the gallant Colombian and his escort arrived at the Broadway address, they were held in an anteroom for half an hour, and then admitted into a well-equipped office where a distinguished looking man, with a smooth face, wrote at a desk. General Falcon was presented to the Secretary of War of the United States, and his mission made known by his old friend, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ah—Colombia!” said the Secretary, significantly, when he was made to understand; “I’m afraid there will be a little difficulty in that case. The President and I differ in our sympathies there. He prefers the established government, while I—” the secretary gave the General a mysterious but encouraging smile. “You, of course, know, General Falcon, that since the Tammany war, an act of Congress has been passed requiring all manufactured arms and ammunition exported from this country to pass through the War Department. Now, if I can do anything for you I will be glad to do so to oblige my old friend, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley. But it must be in absolute secrecy, as the President, as I have said, does not regard favorably the efforts of your revolutionary party in Colombia. I will have my orderly bring a list of the available arms now in the warehouse.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The Secretary struck a bell, and an orderly with the letters <abbr>A.D.T.</abbr> on his cap stepped promptly into the room.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Bring me Schedule B of the small arms inventory,” said the Secretary.</p>
|
||||
<p>The orderly quickly returned with a printed paper. The Secretary studied it closely.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I find,” he said, “that in Warehouse 9, of Government stores, there is shipment of 2,000 stands of Winchester rifles that were ordered by the Sultan of Morocco, who forgot to send the cash with his order. Our rule is that legal-tender money must be paid down at the time of purchase. My dear Kelley, your friend, General Falcon, shall have this lot of arms, if he desires it, at the manufacturer’s price. And you will forgive me, I am sure, if I curtail our interview. I am expecting the Japanese Minister and Charles Murphy every moment!”</p>
|
||||
<p>As one result of this interview, the General was deeply grateful to his esteemed friend, Mr. Kelley. As another, the nimble Secretary of War was extremely busy during the next two days buying empty rifle cases and filling them with bricks, which were then stored in a warehouse rented for that purpose. As still another, when the General returned to the Hotel Español, Mrs. O’Brien went up to him, plucked a thread from his lapel, and said:</p>
|
||||
<p>As one result of this interview, the General was deeply grateful to his esteemed friend, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley. As another, the nimble Secretary of War was extremely busy during the next two days buying empty rifle cases and filling them with bricks, which were then stored in a warehouse rented for that purpose. As still another, when the General returned to the Hotel Español, <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> O’Brien went up to him, plucked a thread from his lapel, and said:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say, señor, I don’t want to ‘butt in,’ but what does that monkey-faced, cat-eyed, rubber-necked tin horn tough want with you?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sangre de mi vida!” exclaimed the General. “Impossible it is that you speak of my good friend, Señor Kelley.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Come into the summer garden,” said Mrs. O’Brien. “I want to have a talk with you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“<i xml:lang="es">Sangre de mi vida!</i>” exclaimed the General. “Impossible it is that you speak of my good friend, Señor Kelley.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Come into the summer garden,” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> O’Brien. “I want to have a talk with you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Let us suppose that an hour has elapsed.</p>
|
||||
<p>“And you say,” said the General, “that for the sum of $18,000 can be purchased the furnishment of the house and the lease of one year with this garden so lovely—so resembling unto the patios of my cara Colombia?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“And dirt cheap at that,” sighed the lady.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ah, Dios!” breathed General Falcon. “What to me is war and politics? This spot is one paradise. My country it have other brave heroes to continue the fighting. What to me should be glory and the shooting of mans? Ah! no. It is here I have found one angel. Let us buy the Hotel Español and you shall be mine, and the money shall not be waste on guns.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Mrs. O’Brien rested her blond pompadour against the shoulder of the Colombian patriot.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> O’Brien rested her blond pompadour against the shoulder of the Colombian patriot.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, señor,” she sighed, happily, “ain’t you terrible!”</p>
|
||||
<p>Two days later was the time appointed for the delivery of the arms to the General. The boxes of supposed rifles were stacked in the rented warehouse, and the Secretary of War sat upon them, waiting for his friend Kelley to fetch the victim.</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Kelley hurried, at the hour, to the Hotel Español. He found the General behind the desk adding up accounts.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley hurried, at the hour, to the Hotel Español. He found the General behind the desk adding up accounts.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have decide,” said the General, “to buy not guns. I have to-day buy the insides of this hotel, and there shall be marrying of the General Perrico Ximenes Villablanca Falcon with la Madame O’Brien.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Kelley almost strangled.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley almost strangled.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say, you old bald-headed bottle of shoe polish,” he spluttered, “you’re a swindler—that’s what you are! You’ve bought a boarding house with money belonging to your infernal country, wherever it is.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ah,” said the General, footing up a column, “that is what you call politics. War and revolution they are not nice. Yes. It is not best that one shall always follow Minerva. No. It is of quite desirable to keep hotels and be with that Juno—that ox-eyed Juno. Ah! what hair of the gold it is that she have!”</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Kelley choked again.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley choked again.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ah, Senor Kelley!” said the General, feelingly and finally, “is it that you have never eaten of the corned beef hash that Madame O’Brien she make?”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
@ -1,13 +1,13 @@
|
||||
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|
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<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 6</title>
|
||||
<title>The Poet and the Peasant</title>
|
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<section id="chapter-6" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE POET AND THE PEASANT</h2>
|
||||
<section id="the-poet-and-the-peasant" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Poet and the Peasant</h2>
|
||||
<p>The other day a poet friend of mine, who has lived in close communion with nature all his life, wrote a poem and took it to an editor.</p>
|
||||
<p>It was a living pastoral, full of the genuine breath of the fields, the song of birds, and the pleasant chatter of trickling streams.</p>
|
||||
<p>When the poet called again to see about it, with hopes of a beefsteak dinner in his heart, it was handed back to him with the comment:</p>
|
||||
@ -17,7 +17,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Conant wrote a poem and called it “The Doe and the Brook.” It was a fine specimen of the kind of work you would expect from a poet who had strayed with Amaryllis only as far as the florist’s windows, and whose sole ornithological discussion had been carried on with a waiter. Conant signed this poem, and we sent it to the same editor.</p>
|
||||
<p>But this has very little to do with the story.</p>
|
||||
<p>Just as the editor was reading the first line of the poem, on the next morning, a being stumbled off the West Shore ferryboat, and loped slowly up Forty-second Street.</p>
|
||||
<p>The invader was a young man with light blue eyes, a hanging lip and hair the exact color of the little orphan’s (afterward discovered to be the earl’s daughter) in one of Mr. Blaney’s plays. His trousers were corduroy, his coat short-sleeved, with buttons in the middle of his back. One bootleg was outside the corduroys. You looked expectantly, though in vain, at his straw hat for ear holes, its shape inaugurating the suspicion that it had been ravaged from a former equine possessor. In his hand was a valise—description of it is an impossible task; a Boston man would not have carried his lunch and law books to his office in it. And above one ear, in his hair, was a wisp of hay—the rustic’s letter of credit, his badge of innocence, the last clinging touch of the Garden of Eden lingering to shame the gold-brick men.</p>
|
||||
<p>The invader was a young man with light blue eyes, a hanging lip and hair the exact color of the little orphan’s (afterward discovered to be the earl’s daughter) in one of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Blaney’s plays. His trousers were corduroy, his coat short-sleeved, with buttons in the middle of his back. One bootleg was outside the corduroys. You looked expectantly, though in vain, at his straw hat for ear holes, its shape inaugurating the suspicion that it had been ravaged from a former equine possessor. In his hand was a valise—description of it is an impossible task; a Boston man would not have carried his lunch and law books to his office in it. And above one ear, in his hair, was a wisp of hay—the rustic’s letter of credit, his badge of innocence, the last clinging touch of the Garden of Eden lingering to shame the gold-brick men.</p>
|
||||
<p>Knowingly, smilingly, the city crowds passed him by. They saw the raw stranger stand in the gutter and stretch his neck at the tall buildings. At this they ceased to smile, and even to look at him. It had been done so often. A few glanced at the antique valise to see what Coney “attraction” or brand of chewing gum he might be thus dinning into his memory. But for the most part he was ignored. Even the newsboys looked bored when he scampered like a circus clown out of the way of cabs and street cars.</p>
|
||||
<p>At Eighth Avenue stood “Bunco Harry,” with his dyed mustache and shiny, good-natured eyes. Harry was too good an artist not to be pained at the sight of an actor overdoing his part. He edged up to the countryman, who had stopped to open his mouth at a jewelry store window, and shook his head.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Too thick, pal,” he said, critically—“too thick by a couple of inches. I don’t know what your lay is; but you’ve got the properties too thick. That hay, now—why, they don’t even allow that on Proctor’s circuit any more.”</p>
|
||||
@ -41,7 +41,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Somewhere outside a phonograph struck up a band piece, and Haylocks was off for it, his coat-tail buttons flopping in the middle of his back.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Divvy, Mike,” said the men hanging upon the bar, winking openly at one another.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Honest, now,” said the bartender, kicking the valise to one side. “You don’t think I’d fall to that, do you? Anybody can see he ain’t no jay. One of McAdoo’s come-on squad, I guess. He’s a shine if he made himself up. There ain’t no parts of the country now where they dress like that since they run rural free delivery to Providence, Rhode Island. If he’s got nine-fifty in that valise it’s a ninety-eight cent Waterbury that’s stopped at ten minutes to ten.”</p>
|
||||
<p>When Haylocks had exhausted the resources of Mr. Edison to amuse he returned for his valise. And then down Broadway he gallivanted, culling the sights with his eager blue eyes. But still and evermore Broadway rejected him with curt glances and sardonic smiles. He was the oldest of the “gags” that the city must endure. He was so flagrantly impossible, so ultra rustic, so exaggerated beyond the most freakish products of the barnyard, the hayfield and the vaudeville stage, that he excited only weariness and suspicion. And the wisp of hay in his hair was so genuine, so fresh and redolent of the meadows, so clamorously rural that even a shell-game man would have put up his peas and folded his table at the sight of it.</p>
|
||||
<p>When Haylocks had exhausted the resources of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Edison to amuse he returned for his valise. And then down Broadway he gallivanted, culling the sights with his eager blue eyes. But still and evermore Broadway rejected him with curt glances and sardonic smiles. He was the oldest of the “gags” that the city must endure. He was so flagrantly impossible, so ultra rustic, so exaggerated beyond the most freakish products of the barnyard, the hayfield and the vaudeville stage, that he excited only weariness and suspicion. And the wisp of hay in his hair was so genuine, so fresh and redolent of the meadows, so clamorously rural that even a shell-game man would have put up his peas and folded his table at the sight of it.</p>
|
||||
<p>Haylocks seated himself upon a flight of stone steps and once more exhumed his roll of yellow-backs from the valise. The outer one, a twenty, he shucked off and beckoned to a newsboy.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Son,” said he, “run somewhere and get this changed for me. I’m mighty nigh out of chicken feed. I guess you’ll get a nickel if you’ll hurry up.”</p>
|
||||
<p>A hurt look appeared through the dirt on the newsy’s face.</p>
|
||||
@ -49,7 +49,7 @@
|
||||
<p>On a corner lounged a keen-eyed steerer for a gambling-house. He saw Haylocks, and his expression suddenly grew cold and virtuous.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mister,” said the rural one. “I’ve heard of places in this here town where a fellow could have a good game of old sledge or peg a card at keno. I got $950 in this valise, and I come down from old Ulster to see the sights. Know where a fellow could get action on about $9 or $10? I’m goin’ to have some sport, and then maybe I’ll buy out a business of some kind.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The steerer looked pained, and investigated a white speck on his left forefinger nail.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Cheese it, old man,” he murmured, reproachfully. “The Central Office must be bughouse to send you out looking like such a gillie. You couldn’t get within two blocks of a sidewalk crap game in them Tony Pastor props. The recent Mr. Scotty from Death Valley has got you beat a crosstown block in the way of Elizabethan scenery and mechanical accessories. Let it be skiddoo for yours. Nay, I know of no gilded halls where one may bet a patrol wagon on the ace.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Cheese it, old man,” he murmured, reproachfully. “The Central Office must be bughouse to send you out looking like such a gillie. You couldn’t get within two blocks of a sidewalk crap game in them Tony Pastor props. The recent <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Scotty from Death Valley has got you beat a crosstown block in the way of Elizabethan scenery and mechanical accessories. Let it be skiddoo for yours. Nay, I know of no gilded halls where one may bet a patrol wagon on the ace.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Rebuffed once again by the great city that is so swift to detect artificialities, Haylocks sat upon the curb and presented his thoughts to hold a conference.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s my clothes,” said he; “durned if it ain’t. They think I’m a hayseed and won’t have nothin’ to do with me. Nobody never made fun of this hat in Ulster County. I guess if you want folks to notice you in New York you must dress up like they do.”</p>
|
||||
<p>So Haylocks went shopping in the bazaars where men spake through their noses and rubbed their hands and ran the tape line ecstatically over the bulge in his inside pocket where reposed a red nubbin of corn with an even number of rows. And messengers bearing parcels and boxes streamed to his hotel on Broadway within the lights of Long Acre.</p>
|
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|
||||
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|
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<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 7</title>
|
||||
<title>The Robe of Peace</title>
|
||||
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-7" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE ROBE OF PEACE</h2>
|
||||
<section id="the-robe-of-peace" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Robe of Peace</h2>
|
||||
<p>Mysteries follow one another so closely in a great city that the reading public and the friends of Johnny Bellchambers have ceased to marvel at his sudden and unexplained disappearance nearly a year ago. This particular mystery has now been cleared up, but the solution is so strange and incredible to the mind of the average man that only a select few who were in close touch with Bellchambers will give it full credence.</p>
|
||||
<p>Johnny Bellchambers, as is well known, belonged to the intrinsically inner circle of the <i>élite</i>. Without any of the ostentation of the fashionable ones who endeavor to attract notice by eccentric display of wealth and show he still was <i>au fait</i> in everything that gave deserved lustre to his high position in the ranks of society.</p>
|
||||
<p>Johnny Bellchambers, as is well known, belonged to the intrinsically inner circle of the élite. Without any of the ostentation of the fashionable ones who endeavor to attract notice by eccentric display of wealth and show he still was au fait in everything that gave deserved lustre to his high position in the ranks of society.</p>
|
||||
<p>Especially did he shine in the matter of dress. In this he was the despair of imitators. Always correct, exquisitely groomed, and possessed of an unlimited wardrobe, he was conceded to be the best-dressed man in New York, and, therefore, in America. There was not a tailor in Gotham who would not have deemed it a precious boon to have been granted the privilege of making Bellchambers’ clothes without a cent of pay. As he wore them, they would have been a priceless advertisement. Trousers were his especial passion. Here nothing but perfection would he notice. He would have worn a patch as quickly as he would have overlooked a wrinkle. He kept a man in his apartments always busy pressing his ample supply. His friends said that three hours was the limit of time that he would wear these garments without exchanging.</p>
|
||||
<p>Bellchambers disappeared very suddenly. For three days his absence brought no alarm to his friends, and then they began to operate the usual methods of inquiry. All of them failed. He had left absolutely no trace behind. Then the search for a motive was instituted, but none was found. He had no enemies, he had no debts, there was no woman. There were several thousand dollars in his bank to his credit. He had never showed any tendency toward mental eccentricity; in fact, he was of a particularly calm and well-balanced temperament. Every means of tracing the vanished man was made use of, but without avail. It was one of those cases—more numerous in late years—where men seem to have gone out like the flame of a candle, leaving not even a trail of smoke as a witness.</p>
|
||||
<p>In May, Tom Eyres and Lancelot Gilliam, two of Bellchambers’ old friends, went for a little run on the other side. While pottering around in Italy and Switzerland, they happened, one day, to hear of a monastery in the Swiss Alps that promised something outside of the ordinary tourist-beguiling attractions. The monastery was almost inaccessible to the average sightseer, being on an extremely rugged and precipitous spur of the mountains. The attractions it possessed but did not advertise were, first, an exclusive and divine cordial made by the monks that was said to far surpass benedictine and chartreuse. Next a huge brass bell so purely and accurately cast that it had not ceased sounding since it was first rung three hundred years ago. Finally, it was asserted that no Englishman had ever set foot within its walls. Eyres and Gilliam decided that these three reports called for investigation.</p>
|
||||
<p>It took them two days with the aid of two guides to reach the monastery of St. Gondrau. It stood upon a frozen, wind-swept crag with the snow piled about it in treacherous, drifting masses. They were hospitably received by the brothers whose duty it was to entertain the infrequent guest. They drank of the precious cordial, finding it rarely potent and reviving. They listened to the great, ever-echoing bell, and learned that they were pioneer travelers, in those gray stone walls, over the Englishman whose restless feet have trodden nearly every corner of the earth.</p>
|
||||
<p>It took them two days with the aid of two guides to reach the monastery of <abbr>St.</abbr> Gondrau. It stood upon a frozen, wind-swept crag with the snow piled about it in treacherous, drifting masses. They were hospitably received by the brothers whose duty it was to entertain the infrequent guest. They drank of the precious cordial, finding it rarely potent and reviving. They listened to the great, ever-echoing bell, and learned that they were pioneer travelers, in those gray stone walls, over the Englishman whose restless feet have trodden nearly every corner of the earth.</p>
|
||||
<p>At three o’clock on the afternoon they arrived, the two young Gothamites stood with good Brother Cristofer in the great, cold hallway of the monastery to watch the monks march past on their way to the refectory. They came slowly, pacing by twos, with their heads bowed, treading noiselessly with sandaled feet upon the rough stone flags. As the procession slowly filed past, Eyres suddenly gripped Gilliam by the arm. “Look,” he whispered, eagerly, “at the one just opposite you now—the one on this side, with his hand at his waist—if that isn’t Johnny Bellchambers then I never saw him!”</p>
|
||||
<p>Gilliam saw and recognized the lost glass of fashion.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What the deuce,” said he, wonderingly, “is old Bell doing here? Tommy, it surely can’t be he! Never heard of Bell having a turn for the religious. Fact is, I’ve heard him say things when a four-in-hand didn’t seem to tie up just right that would bring him up for court-martial before any church.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s Bell, without a doubt,” said Eyres, firmly, “or I’m pretty badly in need of an oculist. But think of Johnny Bellchambers, the Royal High Chancellor of swell togs and the Mahatma of pink teas, up here in cold storage doing penance in a snuff-colored bathrobe! I can’t get it straight in my mind. Let’s ask the jolly old boy that’s doing the honors.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Brother Cristofer was appealed to for information. By that time the monks had passed into the refectory. He could not tell to which one they referred. Bellchambers? Ah, the brothers of St. Gondrau abandoned their worldly names when they took the vows. Did the gentlemen wish to speak with one of the brothers? If they would come to the refectory and indicate the one they wished to see, the reverend abbot in authority would, doubtless, permit it.</p>
|
||||
<p>Brother Cristofer was appealed to for information. By that time the monks had passed into the refectory. He could not tell to which one they referred. Bellchambers? Ah, the brothers of <abbr>St.</abbr> Gondrau abandoned their worldly names when they took the vows. Did the gentlemen wish to speak with one of the brothers? If they would come to the refectory and indicate the one they wished to see, the reverend abbot in authority would, doubtless, permit it.</p>
|
||||
<p>Eyres and Gilliam went into the dining hall and pointed out to Brother Cristofer the man they had seen. Yes, it was Johnny Bellchambers. They saw his face plainly now, as he sat among the dingy brothers, never looking up, eating broth from a coarse, brown bowl.</p>
|
||||
<p>Permission to speak to one of the brothers was granted to the two travelers by the abbot, and they waited in a reception room for him to come. When he did come, treading softly in his sandals, both Eyres and Gilliam looked at him in perplexity and astonishment. It was Johnny Bellchambers, but he had a different look. Upon his smooth-shaven face was an expression of ineffable peace, of rapturous attainment, of perfect and complete happiness. His form was proudly erect, his eyes shone with a serene and gracious light. He was as neat and well-groomed as in the old New York days, but how differently was he clad! Now he seemed clothed in but a single garment—a long robe of rough brown cloth, gathered by a cord at the waist, and falling in straight, loose folds nearly to his feet. He shook hands with his visitors with his old ease and grace of manner. If there was any embarrassment in that meeting it was not manifested by Johnny Bellchambers. The room had no seats; they stood to converse.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Glad to see you, old man,” said Eyres, somewhat awkwardly. “Wasn’t expecting to find you up here. Not a bad idea though, after all. Society’s an awful sham. Must be a relief to shake the giddy whirl and retire to—er—contemplation and—er—prayer and hymns, and those things.</p>
|
||||
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|
||||
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|
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<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 11</title>
|
||||
<title>The Thing’s the Play</title>
|
||||
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-11" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE THING’S THE PLAY</h2>
|
||||
<section id="the-things-the-play" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Thing’s the Play</h2>
|
||||
<p>Being acquainted with a newspaper reporter who had a couple of free passes, I got to see the performance a few nights ago at one of the popular vaudeville houses.</p>
|
||||
<p>One of the numbers was a violin solo by a striking-looking man not much past forty, but with very gray thick hair. Not being afflicted with a taste for music, I let the system of noises drift past my ears while I regarded the man.</p>
|
||||
<p>“There was a story about that chap a month or two ago,” said the reporter. “They gave me the assignment. It was to run a column and was to be on the extremely light and joking order. The old man seems to like the funny touch I give to local happenings. Oh, yes, I’m working on a farce comedy now. Well, I went down to the house and got all the details; but I certainly fell down on that job. I went back and turned in a comic write-up of an east side funeral instead. Why? Oh, I couldn’t seem to get hold of it with my funny hooks, somehow. Maybe you could make a one-act tragedy out of it for a curtain-raiser. I’ll give you the details.”</p>
|
||||
<p>After the performance my friend, the reporter, recited to me the facts over the Würzburger.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I see no reason,” said I, when he had concluded, “why that shouldn’t make a rattling good funny story. Those three people couldn’t have acted in a more absurd and preposterous manner if they had been real actors in a real theatre. I’m really afraid that all the stage is a world, anyhow, and all the players men and women. ‘The thing’s the play,’ is the way I quote Mr. Shakespeare.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I see no reason,” said I, when he had concluded, “why that shouldn’t make a rattling good funny story. Those three people couldn’t have acted in a more absurd and preposterous manner if they had been real actors in a real theatre. I’m really afraid that all the stage is a world, anyhow, and all the players men and women. ‘The thing’s the play,’ is the way I quote <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Shakespeare.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Try it,” said the reporter.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I will,” said I; and I did, to show him how he could have made a humorous column of it for his paper.</p>
|
||||
<p>There stands a house near Abingdon Square. On the ground floor there has been for twenty-five years a little store where toys and notions and stationery are sold.</p>
|
||||
<p>One night twenty years ago there was a wedding in the rooms above the store. The Widow Mayo owned the house and store. Her daughter Helen was married to Frank Barry. John Delaney was best man. Helen was eighteen, and her picture had been printed in a morning paper next to the headlines of a “Wholesale Female Murderess” story from Butte, Mont. But after your eye and intelligence had rejected the connection, you seized your magnifying glass and read beneath the portrait her description as one of a series of Prominent Beauties and Belles of the lower west side.</p>
|
||||
<p>Frank Barry and John Delaney were “prominent” young beaux of the same side, and bosom friends, whom you expected to turn upon each other every time the curtain went up. One who pays his money for orchestra seats and fiction expects this. That is the first funny idea that has turned up in the story yet. Both had made a great race for Helen’s hand. When Frank won, John shook his hand and congratulated him—honestly, he did.</p>
|
||||
<p>After the ceremony Helen ran upstairs to put on her hat. She was getting married in a traveling dress. She and Frank were going to Old Point Comfort for a week. Downstairs the usual horde of gibbering cave-dwellers were waiting with their hands full of old Congress gaiters and paper bags of hominy.</p>
|
||||
<p>Then there was a rattle of the fire-escape, and into her room jumps the mad and infatuated John Delaney, with a damp curl drooping upon his forehead, and made violent and reprehensible love to his lost one, entreating her to flee or fly with him to the Riviera, or the Bronx, or any old place where there are Italian skies and <i>dolce far niente</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>Then there was a rattle of the fire-escape, and into her room jumps the mad and infatuated John Delaney, with a damp curl drooping upon his forehead, and made violent and reprehensible love to his lost one, entreating her to flee or fly with him to the Riviera, or the Bronx, or any old place where there are Italian skies and dolce far niente.</p>
|
||||
<p>It would have carried Blaney off his feet to see Helen repulse him. With blazing and scornful eyes she fairly withered him by demanding whatever he meant by speaking to respectable people that way.</p>
|
||||
<p>In a few moments she had him going. The manliness that had possessed him departed. He bowed low, and said something about “irresistible impulse” and “forever carry in his heart the memory of”—and she suggested that he catch the first fire-escape going down.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I will away,” said John Delaney, “to the furthermost parts of the earth. I cannot remain near you and know that you are another’s. I will to Africa, and there amid other scenes strive to for—”</p>
|
||||
@ -30,22 +30,22 @@
|
||||
<p>The farewell kiss was imprinted upon Helen’s hand, and out of the window and down the fire-escape sprang John Delaney, Africa bound.</p>
|
||||
<p>A little slow music, if you please—faint violin, just a breath in the clarinet and a touch of the ‘cello. Imagine the scene. Frank, white-hot, with the cry of a man wounded to death bursting from him. Helen, rushing and clinging to him, trying to explain. He catches her wrists and tears them from his shoulders—once, twice, thrice he sways her this way and that—the stage manager will show you how—and throws her from him to the floor a huddled, crushed, moaning thing. Never, he cries, will he look upon her face again, and rushes from the house through the staring groups of astonished guests.</p>
|
||||
<p>And, now because it is the Thing instead of the Play, the audience must stroll out into the real lobby of the world and marry, die, grow gray, rich, poor, happy or sad during the intermission of twenty years which must precede the rising of the curtain again.</p>
|
||||
<p>Mrs. Barry inherited the shop and the house. At thirty-eight she could have bested many an eighteen-year-old at a beauty show on points and general results. Only a few people remembered her wedding comedy, but she made of it no secret. She did not pack it in lavender or moth balls, nor did she sell it to a magazine.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Barry inherited the shop and the house. At thirty-eight she could have bested many an eighteen-year-old at a beauty show on points and general results. Only a few people remembered her wedding comedy, but she made of it no secret. She did not pack it in lavender or moth balls, nor did she sell it to a magazine.</p>
|
||||
<p>One day a middle-aged money-making lawyer, who bought his legal cap and ink of her, asked her across the counter to marry him.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m really much obliged to you,” said Helen, cheerfully, “but I married another man twenty years ago. He was more a goose than a man, but I think I love him yet. I have never seen him since about half an hour after the ceremony. Was it copying ink that you wanted or just writing fluid?”</p>
|
||||
<p>The lawyer bowed over the counter with old-time grace and left a respectful kiss on the back of her hand. Helen sighed. Parting salutes, however romantic, may be overdone. Here she was at thirty-eight, beautiful and admired; and all that she seemed to have got from her lovers were approaches and adieus. Worse still, in the last one she had lost a customer, too.</p>
|
||||
<p>Business languished, and she hung out a Room to Let card. Two large rooms on the third floor were prepared for desirable tenants. Roomers came, and went regretfully, for the house of Mrs. Barry was the abode of neatness, comfort and taste.</p>
|
||||
<p>Business languished, and she hung out a Room to Let card. Two large rooms on the third floor were prepared for desirable tenants. Roomers came, and went regretfully, for the house of <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Barry was the abode of neatness, comfort and taste.</p>
|
||||
<p>One day came Ramonti, the violinist, and engaged the front room above. The discord and clatter uptown offended his nice ear; so a friend had sent him to this oasis in the desert of noise.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ramonti, with his still youthful face, his dark eyebrows, his short, pointed, foreign, brown beard, his distinguished head of gray hair, and his artist’s temperament—revealed in his light, gay and sympathetic manner—was a welcome tenant in the old house near Abingdon Square.</p>
|
||||
<p>Helen lived on the floor above the store. The architecture of it was singular and quaint. The hall was large and almost square. Up one side of it, and then across the end of it ascended an open stairway to the floor above. This hall space she had furnished as a sitting room and office combined. There she kept her desk and wrote her business letters; and there she sat of evenings by a warm fire and a bright red light and sewed or read. Ramonti found the atmosphere so agreeable that he spent much time there, describing to Mrs. Barry the wonders of Paris, where he had studied with a particularly notorious and noisy fiddler.</p>
|
||||
<p>Next comes lodger No. 2, a handsome, melancholy man in the early 40’s, with a brown, mysterious beard, and strangely pleading, haunting eyes. He, too, found the society of Helen a desirable thing. With the eyes of Romeo and Othello’s tongue, he charmed her with tales of distant climes and wooed her by respectful innuendo.</p>
|
||||
<p>From the first Helen felt a marvelous and compelling thrill in the presence of this man. His voice somehow took her swiftly back to the days of her youth’s romance. This feeling grew, and she gave way to it, and it led her to an instinctive belief that he had been a factor in that romance. And then with a woman’s reasoning (oh, yes, they do, sometimes) she leaped over common syllogisms and theory, and logic, and was sure that her husband had come back to her. For she saw in his eyes love, which no woman can mistake, and a thousand tons of regret and remorse, which aroused pity, which is perilously near to love requited, which is the <i>sine qua non</i> in the house that Jack built.</p>
|
||||
<p>Helen lived on the floor above the store. The architecture of it was singular and quaint. The hall was large and almost square. Up one side of it, and then across the end of it ascended an open stairway to the floor above. This hall space she had furnished as a sitting room and office combined. There she kept her desk and wrote her business letters; and there she sat of evenings by a warm fire and a bright red light and sewed or read. Ramonti found the atmosphere so agreeable that he spent much time there, describing to <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Barry the wonders of Paris, where he had studied with a particularly notorious and noisy fiddler.</p>
|
||||
<p>Next comes lodger <abbr>No.</abbr> 2, a handsome, melancholy man in the early 40’s, with a brown, mysterious beard, and strangely pleading, haunting eyes. He, too, found the society of Helen a desirable thing. With the eyes of Romeo and Othello’s tongue, he charmed her with tales of distant climes and wooed her by respectful innuendo.</p>
|
||||
<p>From the first Helen felt a marvelous and compelling thrill in the presence of this man. His voice somehow took her swiftly back to the days of her youth’s romance. This feeling grew, and she gave way to it, and it led her to an instinctive belief that he had been a factor in that romance. And then with a woman’s reasoning (oh, yes, they do, sometimes) she leaped over common syllogisms and theory, and logic, and was sure that her husband had come back to her. For she saw in his eyes love, which no woman can mistake, and a thousand tons of regret and remorse, which aroused pity, which is perilously near to love requited, which is the sine qua non in the house that Jack built.</p>
|
||||
<p>But she made no sign. A husband who steps around the corner for twenty years and then drops in again should not expect to find his slippers laid out too conveniently near nor a match ready lighted for his cigar. There must be expiation, explanation, and possibly execration. A little purgatory, and then, maybe, if he were properly humble, he might be trusted with a harp and crown. And so she made no sign that she knew or suspected.</p>
|
||||
<p>And my friend, the reporter, could see nothing funny in this! Sent out on an assignment to write up a roaring, hilarious, brilliant joshing story of—but I will not knock a brother—let us go on with the story.</p>
|
||||
<p>One evening Ramonti stopped in Helen’s hall-office-reception-room and told his love with the tenderness and ardor of the enraptured artist. His words were a bright flame of the divine fire that glows in the heart of a man who is a dreamer and doer combined.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But before you give me an answer,” he went on, before she could accuse him of suddenness, “I must tell you that ‘Ramonti’ is the only name I have to offer you. My manager gave me that. I do not know who I am or where I came from. My first recollection is of opening my eyes in a hospital. I was a young man, and I had been there for weeks. My life before that is a blank to me. They told me that I was found lying in the street with a wound on my head and was brought there in an ambulance. They thought I must have fallen and struck my head upon the stones. There was nothing to show who I was. I have never been able to remember. After I was discharged from the hospital, I took up the violin. I have had success. Mrs. Barry—I do not know your name except that—I love you; the first time I saw you I realized that you were the one woman in the world for me—and”—oh, a lot of stuff like that.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But before you give me an answer,” he went on, before she could accuse him of suddenness, “I must tell you that ‘Ramonti’ is the only name I have to offer you. My manager gave me that. I do not know who I am or where I came from. My first recollection is of opening my eyes in a hospital. I was a young man, and I had been there for weeks. My life before that is a blank to me. They told me that I was found lying in the street with a wound on my head and was brought there in an ambulance. They thought I must have fallen and struck my head upon the stones. There was nothing to show who I was. I have never been able to remember. After I was discharged from the hospital, I took up the violin. I have had success. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Barry—I do not know your name except that—I love you; the first time I saw you I realized that you were the one woman in the world for me—and”—oh, a lot of stuff like that.</p>
|
||||
<p>Helen felt young again. First a wave of pride and a sweet little thrill of vanity went all over her; and then she looked Ramonti in the eyes, and a tremendous throb went through her heart. She hadn’t expected that throb. It took her by surprise. The musician had become a big factor in her life, and she hadn’t been aware of it.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mr. Ramonti,” she said sorrowfully (this was not on the stage, remember; it was in the old home near Abingdon Square), “I’m awfully sorry, but I’m a married woman.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ramonti,” she said sorrowfully (this was not on the stage, remember; it was in the old home near Abingdon Square), “I’m awfully sorry, but I’m a married woman.”</p>
|
||||
<p>And then she told him the sad story of her life, as a heroine must do, sooner or later, either to a theatrical manager or to a reporter.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ramonti took her hand, bowed low and kissed it, and went up to his room.</p>
|
||||
<p>Helen sat down and looked mournfully at her hand. Well she might. Three suitors had kissed it, mounted their red roan steeds and ridden away.</p>
|
||||
@ -58,7 +58,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Forgive me,” he pleaded.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Twenty years is a long time to remain away from the one you say you love,” she declared, with a purgatorial touch.</p>
|
||||
<p>“How could I tell?” he begged. “I will conceal nothing from you. That night when he left I followed him. I was mad with jealousy. On a dark street I struck him down. He did not rise. I examined him. His head had struck a stone. I did not intend to kill him. I was mad with love and jealousy. I hid near by and saw an ambulance take him away. Although you married him, Helen—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“<i>Who Are You?</i>” cried the woman, with wide-open eyes, snatching her hand away.</p>
|
||||
<p>“<em>Who are you?</em>” cried the woman, with wide-open eyes, snatching her hand away.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Don’t you remember me, Helen—the one who has always loved you best? I am John Delaney. If you can forgive—”</p>
|
||||
<p>But she was gone, leaping, stumbling, hurrying, flying up the stairs toward the music and him who had forgotten, but who had known her for his in each of his two existences, and as she climbed up she sobbed, cried and sang: “Frank! Frank! Frank!”</p>
|
||||
<p>Three mortals thus juggling with years as though they were billiard balls, and my friend, the reporter, couldn’t see anything funny in it!</p>
|
||||
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<head>
|
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<title>The Unknown Quantity</title>
|
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|
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<section id="the-unknown-quantity" epub:type="chapter">
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<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Unknown Quantity</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>The poet Longfellow—or was it Confucius, the inventor of wisdom?—remarked:</p>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:poem">
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<span>“Life is real, life is earnest;</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>And things are not what they seem.”</span>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>As mathematics are—or is: thanks, old subscriber!—the only just rule by which questions of life can be measured, let us, by all means, adjust our theme to the straight edge and the balanced column of the great goddess Two-and-Two-Makes-Four. Figures—unassailable sums in addition—shall be set over against whatever opposing element there may be.</p>
|
||||
<p>A mathematician, after scanning the above two lines of poetry, would say: “Ahem! young gentlemen, if we assume that <i epub:type="z3998:grapheme">X</i> plus—that is, that life is real—then things (all of which life includes) are real. Anything that is real is what it seems. Then if we consider the proposition that ‘things are not what they seem,’ why—”</p>
|
||||
<p>But this is heresy, and not poesy. We woo the sweet nymph Algebra; we would conduct you into the presence of the elusive, seductive, pursued, satisfying, mysterious <i epub:type="z3998:grapheme">X</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>Not long before the beginning of this century, Septimus Kinsolving, an old New Yorker, invented an idea. He originated the discovery that bread is made from flour and not from wheat futures. Perceiving that the flour crop was short, and that the Stock Exchange was having no perceptible effect on the growing wheat, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kinsolving cornered the flour market.</p>
|
||||
<p>The result was that when you or my landlady (before the war she never had to turn her hand to anything; Southerners accommodated) bought a five-cent loaf of bread you laid down an additional two cents, which went to <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kinsolving as a testimonial to his perspicacity.</p>
|
||||
<p>A second result was that <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kinsolving quit the game with $2,000,000 prof—er—rake-off.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kinsolving’s son Dan was at college when the mathematical experiment in breadstuffs was made. Dan came home during vacation, and found the old gentleman in a red dressing-gown reading “Little Dorrit” on the porch of his estimable red brick mansion in Washington Square. He had retired from business with enough extra two-cent pieces from bread buyers to reach, if laid side by side, fifteen times around the earth and lap as far as the public debt of Paraguay.</p>
|
||||
<p>Dan shook hands with his father, and hurried over to Greenwich Village to see his old high-school friend, Kenwitz. Dan had always admired Kenwitz. Kenwitz was pale, curly-haired, intense, serious, mathematical, studious, altruistic, socialistic, and the natural foe of oligarchies. Kenwitz had foregone college, and was learning watch-making in his father’s jewelry store. Dan was smiling, jovial, easy-tempered and tolerant alike of kings and ragpickers. The two foregathered joyously, being opposites. And then Dan went back to college, and Kenwitz to his mainsprings—and to his private library in the rear of the jewelry shop.</p>
|
||||
<p>Four years later Dan came back to Washington Square with the accumulations of B. A. and two years of Europe thick upon him. He took a filial look at Septimus Kinsolving’s elaborate tombstone in Greenwood and a tedious excursion through typewritten documents with the family lawyer; and then, feeling himself a lonely and hopeless millionaire, hurried down to the old jewelry store across Sixth Avenue.</p>
|
||||
<p>Kenwitz unscrewed a magnifying glass from his eye, routed out his parent from a dingy rear room, and abandoned the interior of watches for outdoors. He went with Dan, and they sat on a bench in Washington Square. Dan had not changed much; he was stalwart, and had a dignity that was inclined to relax into a grin. Kenwitz was more serious, more intense, more learned, philosophical and socialistic.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I know about it now,” said Dan, finally. “I pumped it out of the eminent legal lights that turned over to me poor old dad’s collections of bonds and boodle. It amounts to $2,000,000, Ken. And I am told that he squeezed it out of the chaps that pay their pennies for loaves of bread at little bakeries around the corner. You’ve studied economics, Dan, and you know all about monopolies, and the masses, and octopuses, and the rights of laboring people. I never thought about those things before. Football and trying to be white to my fellow-man were about the extent of my college curriculum.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But since I came back and found out how dad made his money I’ve been thinking. I’d like awfully well to pay back those chaps who had to give up too much money for bread. I know it would buck the line of my income for a good many yards; but I’d like to make it square with ’em. Is there any way it can be done, old Ways and Means?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Kenwitz’s big black eyes glowed fierily. His thin, intellectual face took on almost a sardonic cast. He caught Dan’s arm with the grip of a friend and a judge.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You can’t do it!” he said, emphatically. “One of the chief punishments of you men of ill-gotten wealth is that when you do repent you find that you have lost the power to make reparation or restitution. I admire your good intentions, Dan, but you can’t do anything. Those people were robbed of their precious pennies. It’s too late to remedy the evil. You can’t pay them back”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Of course,” said Dan, lighting his pipe, “we couldn’t hunt up every one of the duffers and hand ’em back the right change. There’s an awful lot of ’em buying bread all the time. Funny taste they have—I never cared for bread especially, except for a toasted cracker with the Roquefort. But we might find a few of ’em and chuck some of dad’s cash back where it came from. I’d feel better if I could. It seems tough for people to be held up for a soggy thing like bread. One wouldn’t mind standing a rise in broiled lobsters or deviled crabs. Get to work and think, Ken. I want to pay back all of that money I can.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“There are plenty of charities,” said Kenwitz, mechanically.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Easy enough,” said Dan, in a cloud of smoke. “I suppose I could give the city a park, or endow an asparagus bed in a hospital. But I don’t want Paul to get away with the proceeds of the gold brick we sold Peter. It’s the bread shorts I want to cover, Ken.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The thin fingers of Kenwitz moved rapidly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Do you know how much money it would take to pay back the losses of consumers during that corner in flour?” he asked.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I do not.” said Dan, stoutly. “My lawyer tells me that I have two millions.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“If you had a hundred millions,” said Kenwitz, vehemently, “you couldn’t repair a thousandth part of the damage that has been done. You cannot conceive of the accumulated evils produced by misapplied wealth. Each penny that was wrung from the lean purses of the poor reacted a thousandfold to their harm. You do not understand. You do not see how hopeless is your desire to make restitution. Not in a single instance can it be done.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Back up, philosopher!” said Dan. “The penny has no sorrow that the dollar cannot heal.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Not in one instance,” repeated Kenwitz. “I will give you one, and let us see. Thomas Boyne had a little bakery over there in Varick Street. He sold bread to the poorest people. When the price of flour went up he had to raise the price of bread. His customers were too poor to pay it, Boyne’s business failed and he lost his $1,000 capital—all he had in the world.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Dan Kinsolving struck the park bench a mighty blow with his fist.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I accept the instance,” he cried. “Take me to Boyne. I will repay his thousand dollars and buy him a new bakery.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Write your check,” said Kenwitz, without moving, “and then begin to write checks in payment of the train of consequences. Draw the next one for $50,000. Boyne went insane after his failure and set fire to the building from which he was about to be evicted. The loss amounted to that much. Boyne died in an asylum.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Stick to the instance,” said Dan. “I haven’t noticed any insurance companies on my charity list.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Draw your next check for $100,000,” went on Kenwitz. “Boyne’s son fell into bad ways after the bakery closed, and was accused of murder. He was acquitted last week after a three years’ legal battle, and the state draws upon taxpayers for that much expense.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Back to the bakery!” exclaimed Dan, impatiently. “The Government doesn’t need to stand in the bread line.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The last item of the instance is—come and I will show you,” said Kenwitz, rising.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Socialistic watchmaker was happy. He was a millionaire-baiter by nature and a pessimist by trade. Kenwitz would assure you in one breath that money was but evil and corruption, and that your brand-new watch needed cleaning and a new ratchet-wheel.</p>
|
||||
<p>He conducted Kinsolving southward out of the square and into ragged, poverty-haunted Varick Street. Up the narrow stairway of a squalid brick tenement he led the penitent offspring of the Octopus. He knocked on a door, and a clear voice called to them to enter.</p>
|
||||
<p>In that almost bare room a young woman sat sewing at a machine. She nodded to Kenwitz as to a familiar acquaintance. One little stream of sunlight through the dingy window burnished her heavy hair to the color of an ancient Tuscan’s shield. She flashed a rippling smile at Kenwitz and a look of somewhat flustered inquiry.</p>
|
||||
<p>Kinsolving stood regarding her clear and pathetic beauty in heart-throbbing silence. Thus they came into the presence of the last item of the Instance.</p>
|
||||
<p>“How many this week, Miss Mary?” asked the watchmaker. A mountain of coarse gray shirts lay upon the floor.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Nearly thirty dozen,” said the young woman cheerfully. “I’ve made almost $4. I’m improving, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kenwitz. I hardly know what to do with so much money.” Her eyes turned, brightly soft, in the direction of Dan. A little pink spot came out on her round, pale cheek.</p>
|
||||
<p>Kenwitz chuckled like a diabolic raven.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Miss Boyne,” he said, “let me present <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kinsolving, the son of the man who put bread up five years ago. He thinks he would like to do something to aid those who where inconvenienced by that act.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The smile left the young woman’s face. She rose and pointed her forefinger toward the door. This time she looked Kinsolving straight in the eye, but it was not a look that gave delight.</p>
|
||||
<p>The two men went down Varick Street. Kenwitz, letting all his pessimism and rancor and hatred of the Octopus come to the surface, gibed at the moneyed side of his friend in an acrid torrent of words. Dan appeared to be listening, and then turned to Kenwitz and shook hands with him warmly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m obliged to you, Ken, old man,” he said, vaguely—“a thousand times obliged.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mein Gott! you are crazy!” cried the watchmaker, dropping his spectacles for the first time in years.</p>
|
||||
<p>Two months afterward Kenwitz went into a large bakery on lower Broadway with a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses that he had mended for the proprietor.</p>
|
||||
<p>A lady was giving an order to a clerk as Kenwitz passed her.</p>
|
||||
<p>“These loaves are ten cents,” said the clerk.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I always get them at eight cents uptown,” said the lady. “You need not fill the order. I will drive by there on my way home.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The voice was familiar. The watchmaker paused.</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kenwitz!” cried the lady, heartily. “How do you do?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Kenwitz was trying to train his socialistic and economic comprehension on her wonderful fur boa and the carriage waiting outside.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, Miss Boyne!” he began.</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Kinsolving,” she corrected. “Dan and I were married a month ago.”</p>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
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|
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|
||||
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|
||||
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
|
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|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 21</title>
|
||||
<title>The Venturers</title>
|
||||
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|
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<section id="chapter-21" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE VENTURERS</h2>
|
||||
<p>Let the story wreck itself on the spreading rails of the <i>Non Sequitur</i> Limited, if it will; first you must take your seat in the observation car “<i>Raison d’être</i>” for one moment. It is for no longer than to consider a brief essay on the subject—let us call it: “What’s Around the Corner.”</p>
|
||||
<p><i>Omne mundus in duas partes divisum est</i>—men who wear rubbers and pay poll-taxes, and men who discover new continents. There are no more continents to discover; but by the time overshoes are out of date and the poll has developed into an income tax, the other half will be paralleling the canals of Mars with radium railways.</p>
|
||||
<section id="the-venturers" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Venturers</h2>
|
||||
<p>Let the story wreck itself on the spreading rails of the <i epub:type="se:name.vehicle.train">Non Sequitur</i> Limited, if it will; first you must take your seat in the observation car “<i xml:lang="fr">Raison d’être</i>” for one moment. It is for no longer than to consider a brief essay on the subject—let us call it: “What’s Around the Corner.”</p>
|
||||
<p><i xml:lang="la">Omne mundus in duas partes divisum est</i>—men who wear rubbers and pay poll-taxes, and men who discover new continents. There are no more continents to discover; but by the time overshoes are out of date and the poll has developed into an income tax, the other half will be paralleling the canals of Mars with radium railways.</p>
|
||||
<p>Fortune, Chance, and Adventure are given as synonymous in the dictionaries. To the knowing each has a different meaning. Fortune is a prize to be won. Adventure is the road to it. Chance is what may lurk in the shadows at the roadside. The face of Fortune is radiant and alluring; that of Adventure is flushed and heroic. The face of Chance is the beautiful countenance—perfect because vague and dream-born—that we see in our tea-cups at breakfast while we growl over our chops and toast.</p>
|
||||
<p>The <span class="smallcaps">Venturer</span> is one who keeps his eye on the hedgerows and wayside groves and meadows while he travels the road to Fortune. That is the difference between him and the Adventurer. Eating the forbidden fruit was the best record ever made by a Venturer. Trying to prove that it happened is the highest work of the Adventuresome. To be either is disturbing to the cosmogony of creation. So, as bracket-sawed and city-directoried citizens, let us light our pipes, chide the children and the cat, arrange ourselves in the willow rocker under the flickering gas jet at the coolest window and scan this little tale of two modern followers of Chance.</p>
|
||||
<p>The “Venturer” is one who keeps his eye on the hedgerows and wayside groves and meadows while he travels the road to Fortune. That is the difference between him and the Adventurer. Eating the forbidden fruit was the best record ever made by a Venturer. Trying to prove that it happened is the highest work of the Adventuresome. To be either is disturbing to the cosmogony of creation. So, as bracket-sawed and city-directoried citizens, let us light our pipes, chide the children and the cat, arrange ourselves in the willow rocker under the flickering gas jet at the coolest window and scan this little tale of two modern followers of Chance.</p>
|
||||
<hr/>
|
||||
<p>“Did you ever hear that story about the man from the West?” asked Billinger, in the little dark-oak room to your left as you penetrate the interior of the Powhatan Club.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Doubtless,” said John Reginald Forster, rising and leaving the room.</p>
|
||||
<p>Forster got his straw hat (straws will be in and maybe out again long before this is printed) from the checkroom boy, and walked out of the air (as Hamlet says). Billinger was used to having his stories insulted and would not mind. Forster was in his favorite mood and wanted to go away from anywhere. A man, in order to get on good terms with himself, must have his opinions corroborated and his moods matched by some one else. (I had written that “somebody”; but an AD T. boy who once took a telegram for me pointed out that I could save money by using the compound word. This is a vice versa case.)</p>
|
||||
<p>Forster got his straw hat (straws will be in and maybe out again long before this is printed) from the checkroom boy, and walked out of the air (as Hamlet says). Billinger was used to having his stories insulted and would not mind. Forster was in his favorite mood and wanted to go away from anywhere. A man, in order to get on good terms with himself, must have his opinions corroborated and his moods matched by some one else. (I had written that “somebody”; but an <abbr>A.D.T.</abbr> boy who once took a telegram for me pointed out that I could save money by using the compound word. This is a vice versa case.)</p>
|
||||
<p>Forster’s favorite mood was that of greatly desiring to be a follower of Chance. He was a Venturer by nature, but convention, birth, tradition and the narrowing influences of the tribe of Manhattan had denied him full privilege. He had trodden all the main-traveled thoroughfares and many of the side roads that are supposed to relieve the tedium of life. But none had sufficed. The reason was that he knew what was to be found at the end of every street. He knew from experience and logic almost precisely to what end each digression from routine must lead. He found a depressing monotony in all the variations that the music of his sphere had grafted upon the tune of life. He had not learned that, although the world was made round, the circle has been squared, and that it’s true interest is to be in “What’s Around the Corner.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Forster walked abroad aimlessly from the Powhatan, trying not to tax either his judgment or his desire as to what streets he traveled. He would have been glad to lose his way if it were possible; but he had no hope of that. Adventure and Fortune move at your beck and call in the Greater City; but Chance is oriental. She is a veiled lady in a sedan chair, protected by a special traffic squad of dragonians. Crosstown, uptown, and downtown you may move without seeing her.</p>
|
||||
<p>At the end of an hour’s stroll, Forster stood on a corner of a broad, smooth avenue, looking disconsolately across it at a picturesque old hotel softly but brilliantly lit. Disconsolately, because he knew that he must dine; and dining in that hotel was no venture. It was one of his favorite caravansaries, and so silent and swift would be the service and so delicately choice the food, that he regretted the hunger that must be appeased by the “dead perfection” of the place’s cuisine. Even the music there seemed to be always playing <i>da capo</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>At the end of an hour’s stroll, Forster stood on a corner of a broad, smooth avenue, looking disconsolately across it at a picturesque old hotel softly but brilliantly lit. Disconsolately, because he knew that he must dine; and dining in that hotel was no venture. It was one of his favorite caravansaries, and so silent and swift would be the service and so delicately choice the food, that he regretted the hunger that must be appeased by the “dead perfection” of the place’s cuisine. Even the music there seemed to be always playing da capo.</p>
|
||||
<p>Fancy came to him that he would dine at some cheap, even dubious, restaurant lower down in the city, where the erratic chefs from all countries of the world spread their national cookery for the omnivorous American. Something might happen there out of the routine—he might come upon a subject without a predicate, a road without an end, a question without an answer, a cause without an effect, a gulf stream in life’s salt ocean. He had not dressed for evening; he wore a dark business suit that would not be questioned even where the waiters served the spaghetti in their shirt sleeves.</p>
|
||||
<p>So John Reginald Forster began to search his clothes for money; because the more cheaply you dine, the more surely must you pay. All of the thirteen pockets, large and small, of his business suit he explored carefully and found not a penny. His bank book showed a balance of five figures to his credit in the Old Ironsides Trust Company, but—</p>
|
||||
<p>Forster became aware of a man nearby at his left hand who was really regarding him with some amusement. He looked like any business man of thirty or so, neatly dressed and standing in the attitude of one waiting for a street car. But there was no car line on that avenue. So his proximity and unconcealed curiosity seemed to Forster to partake of the nature of a personal intrusion. But, as he was a consistent seeker after “What’s Around the Corner,” instead of manifesting resentment he only turned a half-embarrassed smile upon the other’s grin of amusement.</p>
|
||||
@ -33,7 +33,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Match for which of us gives the order,” he said.</p>
|
||||
<p>Forster lost.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ives laughed and began to name liquids and viands to the waiter with the absorbed but calm deliberation of one who was to the menu born. Forster, listening, gave his admiring approval of the order.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am a man,” said Ives, during the oysters, “Who has made a lifetime search after the to-be-continued-in-our-next. I am not like the ordinary adventurer who strikes for a coveted prize. Nor yet am I like a gambler who knows he is either to win or lose a certain set stake. What I want is to encounter an adventure to which I can predict no conclusion. It is the breath of existence to me to dare Fate in its blindest manifestations. The world has come to run so much by rote and gravitation that you can enter upon hardly any footpath of chance in which you do not find signboards informing you of what you may expect at its end. I am like the clerk in the Circumlocution Office who always complained bitterly when any one came in to ask information. ‘He wanted to <i>know</i>, you know!’ was the kick he made to his fellow-clerks. Well, I don’t want to know, I don’t want to reason, I don’t want to guess—I want to bet my hand without seeing it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am a man,” said Ives, during the oysters, “Who has made a lifetime search after the to-be-continued-in-our-next. I am not like the ordinary adventurer who strikes for a coveted prize. Nor yet am I like a gambler who knows he is either to win or lose a certain set stake. What I want is to encounter an adventure to which I can predict no conclusion. It is the breath of existence to me to dare Fate in its blindest manifestations. The world has come to run so much by rote and gravitation that you can enter upon hardly any footpath of chance in which you do not find signboards informing you of what you may expect at its end. I am like the clerk in the Circumlocution Office who always complained bitterly when any one came in to ask information. ‘He wanted to <em>know</em>, you know!’ was the kick he made to his fellow-clerks. Well, I don’t want to know, I don’t want to reason, I don’t want to guess—I want to bet my hand without seeing it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I understand,” said Forster delightedly. “I’ve often wanted the way I feel put into words. You’ve done it. I want to take chances on what’s coming. Suppose we have a bottle of Moselle with the next course.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Agreed,” said Ives. “I’m glad you catch my idea. It will increase the animosity of the house toward the loser. If it does not weary you, we will pursue the theme. Only a few times have I met a true venturer—one who does not ask a schedule and map from Fate when he begins a journey. But, as the world becomes more civilized and wiser, the more difficult it is to come upon an adventure the end of which you cannot foresee. In the Elizabethan days you could assault the watch, wring knockers from doors and have a jolly set-to with the blades in any convenient angle of a wall and ‘get away with it.’ Nowadays, if you speak disrespectfully to a policeman, all that is left to the most romantic fancy is to conjecture in what particular police station he will land you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I know—I know,” said Forster, nodding approval.</p>
|
||||
@ -41,7 +41,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“I know—I know,” said Forster.</p>
|
||||
<p>“There might be something in aeroplanes,” went on Ives, reflectively. “I’ve tried ballooning; but it seems to be merely a cut-and-dried affair of wind and ballast.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Women,” suggested Forster, with a smile.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Three months ago,” said Ives. “I was pottering around in one of the bazaars in Constantinople. I noticed a lady, veiled, of course, but with a pair of especially fine eyes visible, who was examining some amber and pearl ornaments at one of the booths. With her was an attendant—a big Nubian, as black as coal. After a while the attendant drew nearer to me by degrees and slipped a scrap of paper into my hand. I looked at it when I got a chance. On it was scrawled hastily in pencil: ‘The arched gate of the Nightingale Garden at nine to-night.’ Does that appear to you to be an interesting premise, Mr. Forster?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Three months ago,” said Ives. “I was pottering around in one of the bazaars in Constantinople. I noticed a lady, veiled, of course, but with a pair of especially fine eyes visible, who was examining some amber and pearl ornaments at one of the booths. With her was an attendant—a big Nubian, as black as coal. After a while the attendant drew nearer to me by degrees and slipped a scrap of paper into my hand. I looked at it when I got a chance. On it was scrawled hastily in pencil: ‘The arched gate of the Nightingale Garden at nine to-night.’ Does that appear to you to be an interesting premise, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Forster?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I made inquiries and learned that the Nightingale Garden was the property of an old Turk—a grand vizier, or something of the sort. Of course I prospected for the arched gate and was there at nine. The same Nubian attendant opened the gate promptly on time, and I went inside and sat on a bench by a perfumed fountain with the veiled lady. We had quite an extended chat. She was Myrtle Thompson, a lady journalist, who was writing up the Turkish harems for a Chicago newspaper. She said she noticed the New York cut of my clothes in the bazaar and wondered if I couldn’t work something into the metropolitan papers about it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I see,” said Forster. “I see.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve canoed through Canada,” said Ives, “down many rapids and over many falls. But I didn’t seem to get what I wanted out of it because I knew there were only two possible outcomes—I would either go to the bottom or arrive at the sea level. I’ve played all games at cards; but the mathematicians have spoiled that sport by computing the percentages. I’ve made acquaintances on trains, I’ve answered advertisements, I’ve rung strange door-bells, I’ve taken every chance that presented itself; but there has always been the conventional ending—the logical conclusion to the premise.”</p>
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@ -49,19 +49,19 @@
|
||||
<p>“The sun has risen,” said Ives, “on the Arabian nights. There are no more caliphs. The fisherman’s vase is turned to a vacuum bottle, warranted to keep any genie boiling or frozen for forty-eight hours. Life moves by rote. Science has killed adventure. There are no more opportunities such as Columbus and the man who ate the first oyster had. The only certain thing is that there is nothing uncertain.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well,” said Forster, “my experience has been the limited one of a city man. I haven’t seen the world as you have; but it seems that we view it with the same opinion. But, I tell you I am grateful for even this little venture of ours into the borders of the haphazard. There may be at least one breathless moment when the bill for the dinner is presented. Perhaps, after all, the pilgrims who traveled without scrip or purse found a keener taste to life than did the knights of the Round Table who rode abroad with a retinue and King Arthur’s certified checks in the lining of their helmets. And now, if you’ve finished your coffee, suppose we match one of your insufficient coins for the impending blow of Fate. What have I up?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Heads,” called Ives.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Heads it is,” said Forster, lifting his hand. “I lose. We forgot to agree upon a plan for the winner to escape. I suggest that when the waiter comes you make a remark about telephoning to a friend. I will hold the fort and the dinner check long enough for you to get your hat and be off. I thank you for an evening out of the ordinary, Mr. Ives, and wish we might have others.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Heads it is,” said Forster, lifting his hand. “I lose. We forgot to agree upon a plan for the winner to escape. I suggest that when the waiter comes you make a remark about telephoning to a friend. I will hold the fort and the dinner check long enough for you to get your hat and be off. I thank you for an evening out of the ordinary, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ives, and wish we might have others.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“If my memory is not at fault,” said Ives, laughing, “the nearest police station is in MacDougal Street. I have enjoyed the dinner, too, let me assure you.”</p>
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||||
<p>Forster crooked his finger for the waiter. Victor, with a locomotive effort that seemed to owe more to pneumatics than to pedestrianism, glided to the table and laid the card, face downward, by the loser’s cup. Forster took it up and added the figures with deliberate care. Ives leaned back comfortably in his chair.</p>
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<p>“Excuse me,” said Forster; “but I thought you were going to ring Grimes about that theatre party for Thursday night. Had you forgotten about it?”</p>
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||||
<p>“Oh,” said Ives, settling himself more comfortably, “I can do that later on. Get me a glass of water, waiter.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Want to be in at the death, do you?” asked Forster.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I hope you don’t object,” said Ives, pleadingly. “Never in my life have I seen a gentleman arrested in a public restaurant for swindling it out of a dinner.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right,” said Forster, calmly. “You are entitled to see a Christian die in the arena as your <i>pousse-café</i>.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right,” said Forster, calmly. “You are entitled to see a Christian die in the arena as your pousse-café.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Victor came with the glass of water and remained, with the disengaged air of an inexorable collector.</p>
|
||||
<p>Forster hesitated for fifteen seconds, and then took a pencil from his pocket and scribbled his name on the dinner check. The waiter bowed and took it away.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The fact is,” said Forster, with a little embarrassed laugh, “I doubt whether I’m what they call a ‘game sport,’ which means the same as a ‘soldier of Fortune.’ I’ll have to make a confession. I’ve been dining at this hotel two or three times a week for more than a year. I always sign my checks.” And then, with a note of appreciation in his voice: “It was first-rate of you to stay to see me through with it when you knew I had no money, and that you might be scooped in, too.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I guess I’ll confess, too,” said Ives, with a grin. “I own the hotel. I don’t run it, of course, but I always keep a suite on the third floor for my use when I happen to stray into town.”</p>
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<p>He called a waiter and said: “Is Mr. Gilmore still behind the desk? All right. Tell him that Mr. Ives is here, and ask him to have my rooms made ready and aired.”</p>
|
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<p>He called a waiter and said: “Is <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Gilmore still behind the desk? All right. Tell him that <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ives is here, and ask him to have my rooms made ready and aired.”</p>
|
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<p>“Another venture cut short by the inevitable,” said Forster. “Is there a conundrum without an answer in the next number? But let’s hold to our subject just for a minute or two, if you will. It isn’t often that I meet a man who understands the flaws I pick in existence. I am engaged to be married a month from to-day.”</p>
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<p>“I reserve comment,” said Ives.</p>
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<p>“Right; I am going to add to the assertion. I am devotedly fond of the lady; but I can’t decide whether to show up at the church or make a sneak for Alaska. It’s the same idea, you know, that we were discussing—it does for a fellow as far as possibilities are concerned. Everybody knows the routine—you get a kiss flavored with Ceylon tea after breakfast; you go to the office; you come back home and dress for dinner—theatre twice a week—bills—moping around most evenings trying to make conversation—a little quarrel occasionally—maybe sometimes a big one, and a separation—or else a settling down into a middle-aged contentment, which is worst of all.”</p>
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@ -69,7 +69,7 @@
|
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<p>“It’s the dead certainty of the thing,” went on Forster, “that keeps me in doubt. There’ll nevermore be anything around the corner.”</p>
|
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<p>“Nothing after the ‘Little Church,’ ” said Ives. “I know.”</p>
|
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<p>“Understand,” said Forster, “that I am in no doubt as to my feelings toward the lady. I may say that I love her truly and deeply. But there is something in the current that runs through my veins that cries out against any form of the calculable. I do not know what I want; but I know that I want it. I’m talking like an idiot, I suppose, but I’m sure of what I mean.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I understand you,” said Ives, with a slow smile. “Well, I think I will be going up to my rooms now. If you would dine with me here one evening soon, Mr. Forster, I’d be glad.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I understand you,” said Ives, with a slow smile. “Well, I think I will be going up to my rooms now. If you would dine with me here one evening soon, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Forster, I’d be glad.”</p>
|
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<p>“Thursday?” suggested Forster.</p>
|
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<p>“At seven, if it’s convenient,” answered Ives.</p>
|
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<p>“Seven goes,” assented Forster.</p>
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@ -80,7 +80,7 @@
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<p>“And did you find what you wanted while you were abroad?”</p>
|
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<p>“What I wanted?” said Ives.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes. You know you were always queer. Even as a boy you wouldn’t play marbles or baseball or any game with rules. You wanted to dive in water where you didn’t know whether it was ten inches or ten feet deep. And when you grew up you were just the same. We’ve often talked about your peculiar ways.”</p>
|
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<p>“I suppose I am an incorrigible,” said Ives. “I am opposed to the doctrine of predestination, to the rule of three, gravitation, taxation, and everything of the kind. Life has always seemed to me something like a serial story would be if they printed above each instalment a synopsis of <i>succeeding</i> chapters.”</p>
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<p>“I suppose I am an incorrigible,” said Ives. “I am opposed to the doctrine of predestination, to the rule of three, gravitation, taxation, and everything of the kind. Life has always seemed to me something like a serial story would be if they printed above each instalment a synopsis of <em>succeeding</em> chapters.”</p>
|
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<p>Mary laughed merrily.</p>
|
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<p>“Bob Ames told us once,” she said, “of a funny thing you did. It was when you and he were on a train in the South, and you got off at a town where you hadn’t intended to stop just because the brakeman hung up a sign in the end of the car with the name of the next station on it.”</p>
|
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<p>“I remember,” said Ives. “That ‘next station’ has been the thing I’ve always tried to get away from.”</p>
|
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@ -93,7 +93,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“I am going to be married soon,” said Mary.</p>
|
||||
<p>On the next Thursday afternoon Forster came hurriedly to Ive’s hotel.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Old man,” said he, “we’ll have to put that dinner off for a year or so; I’m going abroad. The steamer sails at four. That was a great talk we had the other night, and it decided me. I’m going to knock around the world and get rid of that incubus that has been weighing on both you and me—the terrible dread of knowing what’s going to happen. I’ve done one thing that hurts my conscience a little; but I know it’s best for both of us. I’ve written to the lady to whom I was engaged and explained everything—told her plainly why I was leaving—that the monotony of matrimony would never do for me. Don’t you think I was right?”</p>
|
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<p>“It is not for me to say,” answered Ives. “Go ahead and shoot elephants if you think it will bring the element of chance into your life. We’ve got to decide these things for ourselves. But I tell you one thing, Forster, I’ve found the way. I’ve found out the biggest hazard in the world—a game of chance that never is concluded, a venture that may end in the highest heaven or the blackest pit. It will keep a man on edge until the clods fall on his coffin, because he will never know—not until his last day, and not then will he know. It is a voyage without a rudder or compass, and you must be captain and crew and keep watch, every day and night, yourself, with no one to relieve you. I have found the <span class="smallcaps">Venture</span>. Don’t bother yourself about leaving Mary Marsden, Forster. I married her yesterday at noon.”</p>
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<p>“It is not for me to say,” answered Ives. “Go ahead and shoot elephants if you think it will bring the element of chance into your life. We’ve got to decide these things for ourselves. But I tell you one thing, Forster, I’ve found the way. I’ve found out the biggest hazard in the world—a game of chance that never is concluded, a venture that may end in the highest heaven or the blackest pit. It will keep a man on edge until the clods fall on his coffin, because he will never know—not until his last day, and not then will he know. It is a voyage without a rudder or compass, and you must be captain and crew and keep watch, every day and night, yourself, with no one to relieve you. I have found the <em>Venture</em>. Don’t bother yourself about leaving Mary Marsden, Forster. I married her yesterday at noon.”</p>
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<h2 epub:type="title">“What You Want”</h2>
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<p>Night had fallen on that great and beautiful city known as Bagdad-on-the-Subway. And with the night came the enchanted glamour that belongs not to Arabia alone. In different masquerade the streets, bazaars and walled houses of the occidental city of romance were filled with the same kind of folk that so much interested our interesting old friend, the late <abbr>Mr.</abbr> H. A. Rashid. They wore clothes eleven hundred years nearer to the latest styles than H. A. saw in old Bagdad; but they were about the same people underneath. With the eye of faith, you could have seen the Little Hunchback, Sinbad the Sailor, Fitbad the Tailor, the Beautiful Persian, the one-eyed Calenders, Ali Baba and Forty Robbers on every block, and the Barber and his Six Brothers, and all the old Arabian gang easily.</p>
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<p>But let us revenue to our lamb chops.</p>
|
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<p>Old Tom Crowley was a caliph. He had $42,000,000 in preferred stocks and bonds with solid gold edges. In these times, to be called a caliph you must have money. The old-style caliph business as conducted by <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Rashid is not safe. If you hold up a person nowadays in a bazaar or a Turkish bath or a side street, and inquire into his private and personal affairs, the police court’ll get you.</p>
|
||||
<p>Old Tom was tired of clubs, theatres, dinners, friends, music, money and everything. That’s what makes a caliph—you must get to despise everything that money can buy, and then go out and try to want something that you can’t pay for.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ll take a little trot around town all by myself,” thought old Tom, “and try if I can stir up anything new. Let’s see—it seems I’ve read about a king or a Cardiff giant or something in old times who used to go about with false whiskers on, making Persian dates with folks he hadn’t been introduced to. That don’t listen like a bad idea. I certainly have got a case of humdrumness and fatigue on for the ones I do know. That old Cardiff used to pick up cases of trouble as he ran upon ’em and give ’em gold—sequins, I think it was—and make ’em marry or got ’em good Government jobs. Now, I’d like something of that sort. My money is as good as his was even if the magazines do ask me every month where I got it. Yes, I guess I’ll do a little Cardiff business to-night, and see how it goes.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Plainly dressed, old Tom Crowley left his Madison Avenue palace, and walked westward and then south. As he stepped to the sidewalk, Fate, who holds the ends of the strings in the central offices of all the enchanted cities pulled a thread, and a young man twenty blocks away looked at a wall clock, and then put on his coat.</p>
|
||||
<p>James Turner worked in one of those little hat-cleaning establishments on Sixth Avenue in which a fire alarm rings when you push the door open, and where they clean your hat while you wait—two days. James stood all day at an electric machine that turned hats around faster than the best brands of champagne ever could have done. Overlooking your mild impertinence in feeling a curiosity about the personal appearance of a stranger, I will give you a modified description of him. Weight, 118; complexion, hair and brain, light; height, five feet six; age, about twenty-three; dressed in a $10 suit of greenish-blue serge; pockets containing two keys and sixty-three cents in change.</p>
|
||||
<p>But do not misconjecture because this description sounds like a General Alarm that James was either lost or a dead one.</p>
|
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<p>
|
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<i xml:lang="fr">Allons!</i>
|
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|
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<p>James stood all day at his work. His feet were tender and extremely susceptible to impositions being put upon or below them. All day long they burned and smarted, causing him much suffering and inconvenience. But he was earning twelve dollars per week, which he needed to support his feet whether his feet would support him or not.</p>
|
||||
<p>James Turner had his own conception of what happiness was, just as you and I have ours. Your delight is to gad about the world in yachts and motor-cars and to hurl ducats at wild fowl. Mine is to smoke a pipe at evenfall and watch a badger, a rattlesnake, and an owl go into their common prairie home one by one.</p>
|
||||
<p>James Turner’s idea of bliss was different; but it was his. He would go directly to his boarding-house when his day’s work was done. After his supper of small steak, Bessemer potatoes, stooed (not stewed) apples and infusion of chicory, he would ascend to his fifth-floor-back hall room. Then he would take off his shoes and socks, place the soles of his burning feet against the cold bars of his iron bed, and read Clark Russell’s sea yarns. The delicious relief of the cool metal applied to his smarting soles was his nightly joy. His favorite novels never palled upon him; the sea and the adventures of its navigators were his sole intellectual passion. No millionaire was ever happier than James Turner taking his ease.</p>
|
||||
<p>When James left the hat-cleaning shop he walked three blocks out of his way home to look over the goods of a second-hand bookstall. On the sidewalk stands he had more than once picked up a paper-covered volume of Clark Russell at half price.</p>
|
||||
<p>While he was bending with a scholarly stoop over the marked-down miscellany of cast-off literature, old Tom the caliph sauntered by. His discerning eye, made keen by twenty years’ experience in the manufacture of laundry soap (save the wrappers!) recognized instantly the poor and discerning scholar, a worthy object of his caliphanous mood. He descended the two shallow stone steps that led from the sidewalk, and addressed without hesitation the object of his designed munificence. His first words were no worse than salutatory and tentative.</p>
|
||||
<p>James Turner looked up coldly, with “Sartor Resartus” in one hand and “A Mad Marriage” in the other.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Beat it,” said he. “I don’t want to buy any coat hangers or town lots in Hankipoo, New Jersey. Run along, now, and play with your Teddy bear.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Young man,” said the caliph, ignoring the flippancy of the hat cleaner, “I observe that you are of a studious disposition. Learning is one of the finest things in the world. I never had any of it worth mentioning, but I admire to see it in others. I come from the West, where we imagine nothing but facts. Maybe I couldn’t understand the poetry and allusions in them books you are picking over, but I like to see somebody else seem to know what they mean. I’m worth about $40,000,000, and I’m getting richer every day. I made the height of it manufacturing Aunt Patty’s Silver Soap. I invented the art of making it. I experimented for three years before I got just the right quantity of chloride of sodium solution and caustic potash mixture to curdle properly. And after I had taken some $9,000,000 out of the soap business I made the rest in corn and wheat futures. Now, you seem to have the literary and scholarly turn of character; and I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll pay for your education at the finest college in the world. I’ll pay the expense of your rummaging over Europe and the art galleries, and finally set you up in a good business. You needn’t make it soap if you have any objections. I see by your clothes and frazzled necktie that you are mighty poor; and you can’t afford to turn down the offer. Well, when do you want to begin?”</p>
|
||||
<p>The hat cleaner turned upon old Tom the eye of the Big City, which is an eye expressive of cold and justifiable suspicion, of judgment suspended as high as Haman was hung, of self-preservation, of challenge, curiosity, defiance, cynicism, and, strange as you may think it, of a childlike yearning for friendliness and fellowship that must be hidden when one walks among the “stranger bands.” For in New Bagdad one, in order to survive, must suspect whosoever sits, dwells, drinks, rides, walks or sleeps in the adjacent chair, house, booth, seat, path or room.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say, Mike,” said James Turner, “what’s your line, anyway—shoe laces? I’m not buying anything. You better put an egg in your shoe and beat it before incidents occur to you. You can’t work off any fountain pens, gold spectacles you found on the street, or trust company certificate house clearings on me. Say, do I look like I’d climbed down one of them missing fire-escapes at Helicon Hall? What’s vitiating you, anyhow?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Son,” said the caliph, in his most Harunish tones, “as I said, I’m worth $40,000,000. I don’t want to have it all put in my coffin when I die. I want to do some good with it. I seen you handling over these here volumes of literature, and I thought I’d keep you. I’ve give the missionary societies $2,000,000, but what did I get out of it? Nothing but a receipt from the secretary. Now, you are just the kind of young man I’d like to take up and see what money could make of him.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Volumes of Clark Russell were hard to find that evening at the Old Book Shop. And James Turner’s smarting and aching feet did not tend to improve his temper. Humble hat cleaner though he was, he had a spirit equal to any caliph’s.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say, you old faker,” he said, angrily, “be on your way. I don’t know what your game is, unless you want change for a bogus $40,000,000 bill. Well, I don’t carry that much around with me. But I do carry a pretty fair left-handed punch that you’ll get if you don’t move on.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You are a blamed impudent little gutter pup,” said the caliph.</p>
|
||||
<p>Then James delivered his self-praised punch; old Tom seized him by the collar and kicked him thrice; the hat cleaner rallied and clinched; two bookstands were overturned, and the books sent flying. A copy came up, took an arm of each, and marched them to the nearest station house. “Fighting and disorderly conduct,” said the cop to the sergeant.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Three hundred dollars bail,” said the sergeant at once, asseveratingly and inquiringly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sixty-three cents,” said James Turner with a harsh laugh.</p>
|
||||
<p>The caliph searched his pockets and collected small bills and change amounting to four dollars.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am worth,” he said, “forty million dollars, but—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Lock ’em up,” ordered the sergeant.</p>
|
||||
<p>In his cell, James Turner laid himself on his cot, ruminating. “Maybe he’s got the money, and maybe he ain’t. But if he has or he ain’t, what does he want to go ’round butting into other folks’s business for? When a man knows what he wants, and can get it, it’s the same as $40,000,000 to him.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Then an idea came to him that brought a pleased look to his face.</p>
|
||||
<p>He removed his socks, drew his cot close to the door, stretched himself out luxuriously, and placed his tortured feet against the cold bars of the cell door. Something hard and bulky under the blankets of his cot gave one shoulder discomfort. He reached under, and drew out a paper-covered volume by Clark Russell called “A Sailor’s Sweetheart.” He gave a great sigh of contentment.</p>
|
||||
<p>Presently, to his cell came the doorman and said:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say, kid, that old gazabo that was pinched with you for scrapping seems to have been the goods after all. He ‘phoned to his friends, and he’s out at the desk now with a roll of yellowbacks as big as a Pullman car pillow. He wants to bail you, and for you to come out and see him.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Tell him I ain’t in,” said James Turner.</p>
|
||||
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