[4M] [Editorial] Modernize hyphenation and spelling
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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="a-cosmopolite-in-a-cafe" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
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<section id="a-cosmopolite-in-a-café" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
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<h2 epub:type="title">A Cosmopolite in a Café</h2>
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<p>At midnight the café was crowded. By some chance the little table at which I sat had escaped the eye of incomers, and two vacant chairs at it extended their arms with venal hospitality to the influx of patrons.</p>
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<p>And then a cosmopolite sat in one of them, and I was glad, for I held a theory that since Adam no true citizen of the world has existed. We hear of them, and we see foreign labels on much luggage, but we find travellers instead of cosmopolites.</p>
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<p>I invoke your consideration of the scene—the marble-topped tables, the range of leather-upholstered wall seats, the gay company, the ladies dressed in demi-state toilets, speaking in an exquisite visible chorus of taste, economy, opulence or art; the sedulous and largess-loving garçons, the music wisely catering to all with its raids upon the composers; the mélange of talk and laughter—and, if you will, the Würzburger in the tall glass cones that bend to your lips as a ripe cherry sways on its branch to the beak of a robber jay. I was told by a sculptor from Mauch Chunk that the scene was truly Parisian.</p>
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<p>My cosmopolite was named E. Rushmore Coglan, and he will be heard from next summer at Coney Island. He is to establish a new “attraction” there, he informed me, offering kingly diversion. And then his conversation rang along parallels of latitude and longitude. He took the great, round world in his hand, so to speak, familiarly, contemptuously, and it seemed no larger than the seed of a Maraschino cherry in a table d’hôte grape fruit. He spoke disrespectfully of the equator, he skipped from continent to continent, he derided the zones, he mopped up the high seas with his napkin. With a wave of his hand he would speak of a certain bazaar in Hyderabad. Whiff! He would have you on skis in Lapland. Zip! Now you rode the breakers with the Kanakas at Kealaikahiki. Presto! He dragged you through an Arkansas post-oak swamp, let you dry for a moment on the alkali plains of his Idaho ranch, then whirled you into the society of Viennese archdukes. Anon he would be telling you of a cold he acquired in a Chicago lake breeze and how old Escamila cured it in Buenos Ayres with a hot infusion of the <i xml:lang="es">chuchula</i> weed. You would have addressed a letter to “E. Rushmore Coglan, <abbr>Esq.</abbr>, the Earth, Solar System, the Universe,” and have mailed it, feeling confident that it would be delivered to him.</p>
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<p>I was sure that I had found at last the one true cosmopolite since Adam, and I listened to his worldwide discourse fearful lest I should discover in it the local note of the mere globe-trotter. But his opinions never fluttered or drooped; he was as impartial to cities, countries and continents as the winds or gravitation.</p>
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<p>My cosmopolite was named E. Rushmore Coglan, and he will be heard from next summer at Coney Island. He is to establish a new “attraction” there, he informed me, offering kingly diversion. And then his conversation rang along parallels of latitude and longitude. He took the great, round world in his hand, so to speak, familiarly, contemptuously, and it seemed no larger than the seed of a Maraschino cherry in a table d’hôte grape fruit. He spoke disrespectfully of the equator, he skipped from continent to continent, he derided the zones, he mopped up the high seas with his napkin. With a wave of his hand he would speak of a certain bazaar in Hyderabad. Whiff! He would have you on skis in Lapland. Zip! Now you rode the breakers with the Kanakas at Kealaikahiki. Presto! He dragged you through an Arkansas post-oak swamp, let you dry for a moment on the alkali plains of his Idaho ranch, then whirled you into the society of Viennese archdukes. Anon he would be telling you of a cold he acquired in a Chicago lake breeze and how old Escamila cured it in Buenos Aires with a hot infusion of the <i xml:lang="es">chuchula</i> weed. You would have addressed a letter to “E. Rushmore Coglan, <abbr>Esq.</abbr>, the Earth, Solar System, the Universe,” and have mailed it, feeling confident that it would be delivered to him.</p>
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<p>I was sure that I had found at last the one true cosmopolite since Adam, and I listened to his worldwide discourse fearful lest I should discover in it the local note of the mere globetrotter. But his opinions never fluttered or drooped; he was as impartial to cities, countries and continents as the winds or gravitation.</p>
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<p>And as E. Rushmore Coglan prattled of this little planet I thought with glee of a great almost-cosmopolite who wrote for the whole world and dedicated himself to Bombay. In a poem he has to say that there is pride and rivalry between the cities of the earth, and that “the men that breed from them, they traffic up and down, but cling to their cities’ hem as a child to the mother’s gown.” And whenever they walk “by roaring streets unknown” they remember their native city “most faithful, foolish, fond; making her mere-breathed name their bond upon their bond.” And my glee was roused because I had caught <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kipling napping. Here I had found a man not made from dust; one who had no narrow boasts of birthplace or country, one who, if he bragged at all, would brag of his whole round globe against the Martians and the inhabitants of the Moon.</p>
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<p>Expression on these subjects was precipitated from E. Rushmore Coglan by the third corner to our table. While Coglan was describing to me the topography along the Siberian Railway the orchestra glided into a medley. The concluding air was “Dixie,” and as the exhilarating notes tumbled forth they were almost overpowered by a great clapping of hands from almost every table.</p>
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<p>It is worth a paragraph to say that this remarkable scene can be witnessed every evening in numerous cafés in the City of New York. Tons of brew have been consumed over theories to account for it. Some have conjectured hastily that all Southerners in town hie themselves to cafés at nightfall. This applause of the “rebel” air in a Northern city does puzzle a little; but it is not insolvable. The war with Spain, many years’ generous mint and watermelon crops, a few long-shot winners at the New Orleans race-track, and the brilliant banquets given by the Indiana and Kansas citizens who compose the North Carolina Society have made the South rather a “fad” in Manhattan. Your manicure will lisp softly that your left forefinger reminds her so much of a gentleman’s in Richmond, Va. Oh, certainly; but many a lady has to work now—the war, you know.</p>
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<p>It is worth a paragraph to say that this remarkable scene can be witnessed every evening in numerous cafés in the City of New York. Tons of brew have been consumed over theories to account for it. Some have conjectured hastily that all Southerners in town hie themselves to cafés at nightfall. This applause of the “rebel” air in a Northern city does puzzle a little; but it is not insolvable. The war with Spain, many years’ generous mint and watermelon crops, a few long-shot winners at the New Orleans racetrack, and the brilliant banquets given by the Indiana and Kansas citizens who compose the North Carolina Society have made the South rather a “fad” in Manhattan. Your manicure will lisp softly that your left forefinger reminds her so much of a gentleman’s in Richmond, Va. Oh, certainly; but many a lady has to work now—the war, you know.</p>
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<p>When “Dixie” was being played a dark-haired young man sprang up from somewhere with a Mosby guerrilla yell and waved frantically his soft-brimmed hat. Then he strayed through the smoke, dropped into the vacant chair at our table and pulled out cigarettes.</p>
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<p>The evening was at the period when reserve is thawed. One of us mentioned three Würzburgers to the waiter; the dark-haired young man acknowledged his inclusion in the order by a smile and a nod. I hastened to ask him a question because I wanted to try out a theory I had.</p>
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<p>“Would you mind telling me,” I began, “whether you are from—”</p>
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@ -25,11 +25,11 @@
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<p>And now the dark-haired young man spoke to me, and it became evident that his mind also moved along its own set of grooves.</p>
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<p>“I should like to be a periwinkle,” said he, mysteriously, “on the top of a valley, and sing tooralloo-ralloo.”</p>
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<p>This was clearly too obscure, so I turned again to Coglan.</p>
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<p>“I’ve been around the world twelve times,” said he. “I know an Esquimau in Upernavik who sends to Cincinnati for his neckties, and I saw a goat-herder in Uruguay who won a prize in a Battle Creek breakfast food puzzle competition. I pay rent on a room in Cairo, Egypt, and another in Yokohama all the year around. I’ve got slippers waiting for me in a tea-house in Shanghai, and I don’t have to tell ’em how to cook my eggs in Rio de Janeiro or Seattle. It’s a mighty little old world. What’s the use of bragging about being from the North, or the South, or the old manor house in the dale, or Euclid avenue, Cleveland, or Pike’s Peak, or Fairfax County, Va., or Hooligan’s Flats or any place? It’ll be a better world when we quit being fools about some mildewed town or ten acres of swampland just because we happened to be born there.”</p>
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<p>“I’ve been around the world twelve times,” said he. “I know an Esquimau in Upernavik who sends to Cincinnati for his neckties, and I saw a goat-herder in Uruguay who won a prize in a Battle Creek breakfast food puzzle competition. I pay rent on a room in Cairo, Egypt, and another in Yokohama all the year around. I’ve got slippers waiting for me in a teahouse in Shanghai, and I don’t have to tell ’em how to cook my eggs in Rio de Janeiro or Seattle. It’s a mighty little old world. What’s the use of bragging about being from the North, or the South, or the old manor house in the dale, or Euclid avenue, Cleveland, or Pike’s Peak, or Fairfax County, Va., or Hooligan’s Flats or any place? It’ll be a better world when we quit being fools about some mildewed town or ten acres of swampland just because we happened to be born there.”</p>
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<p>“You seem to be a genuine cosmopolite,” I said admiringly. “But it also seems that you would decry patriotism.”</p>
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<p>“A relic of the stone age,” declared Coglan, warmly. “We are all brothers—Chinamen, Englishmen, Zulus, Patagonians and the people in the bend of the Kaw River. Some day all this petty pride in one’s city or State or section or country will be wiped out, and we’ll all be citizens of the world, as we ought to be.”</p>
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<p>“But while you are wandering in foreign lands,” I persisted, “do not your thoughts revert to some spot—some dear and—”</p>
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<p>“Nary a spot,” interrupted E. R. Coglan, flippantly. “The terrestrial, globular, planetary hunk of matter, slightly flattened at the poles, and known as the Earth, is my abode. I’ve met a good many object-bound citizens of this country abroad. I’ve seen men from Chicago sit in a gondola in Venice on a moonlight night and brag about their drainage canal. I’ve seen a Southerner on being introduced to the King of England hand that monarch, without batting his eyes, the information that his grand-aunt on his mother’s side was related by marriage to the Perkinses, of Charleston. I knew a New Yorker who was kidnapped for ransom by some Afghanistan bandits. His people sent over the money and he came back to Kabul with the agent. ‘Afghanistan?’ the natives said to him through an interpreter. ‘Well, not so slow, do you think?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says he, and he begins to tell them about a cab driver at Sixth avenue and Broadway. Those ideas don’t suit me. I’m not tied down to anything that isn’t 8,000 miles in diameter. Just put me down as E. Rushmore Coglan, citizen of the terrestrial sphere.”</p>
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<p>“Nary a spot,” interrupted E. R. Coglan, flippantly. “The terrestrial, globular, planetary hunk of matter, slightly flattened at the poles, and known as the Earth, is my abode. I’ve met a good many object-bound citizens of this country abroad. I’ve seen men from Chicago sit in a gondola in Venice on a moonlight night and brag about their drainage canal. I’ve seen a Southerner on being introduced to the King of England hand that monarch, without batting his eyes, the information that his grandaunt on his mother’s side was related by marriage to the Perkinses, of Charleston. I knew a New Yorker who was kidnapped for ransom by some Afghanistan bandits. His people sent over the money and he came back to Kabul with the agent. ‘Afghanistan?’ the natives said to him through an interpreter. ‘Well, not so slow, do you think?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says he, and he begins to tell them about a cab driver at Sixth avenue and Broadway. Those ideas don’t suit me. I’m not tied down to anything that isn’t 8,000 miles in diameter. Just put me down as E. Rushmore Coglan, citizen of the terrestrial sphere.”</p>
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<p>My cosmopolite made a large adieu and left me, for he thought he saw some one through the chatter and smoke whom he knew. So I was left with the would-be periwinkle, who was reduced to Würzburger without further ability to voice his aspirations to perch, melodious, upon the summit of a valley.</p>
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<p>I sat reflecting upon my evident cosmopolite and wondering how the poet had managed to miss him. He was my discovery and I believed in him. How was it? “The men that breed from them they traffic up and down, but cling to their cities’ hem as a child to the mother’s gown.”</p>
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<p>Not so E. Rushmore Coglan. With the whole world for his—</p>
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<p>Joe and Delia met in an atelier where a number of art and music students had gathered to discuss chiaroscuro, Wagner, music, Rembrandt’s works, pictures, Waldteufel, wall paper, Chopin and Oolong.</p>
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<p>Joe and Delia became enamoured one of the other, or each of the other, as you please, and in a short time were married—for (see above), when one loves one’s Art no service seems too hard.</p>
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<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> and <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Larrabee began housekeeping in a flat. It was a lonesome flat—something like the A sharp way down at the left-hand end of the keyboard. And they were happy; for they had their Art, and they had each other. And my advice to the rich young man would be—sell all thou hast, and give it to the poor—janitor for the privilege of living in a flat with your Art and your Delia.</p>
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<p>Flat-dwellers shall indorse my dictum that theirs is the only true happiness. If a home is happy it cannot fit too close—let the dresser collapse and become a billiard table; let the mantel turn to a rowing machine, the escritoire to a spare bedchamber, the washstand to an upright piano; let the four walls come together, if they will, so you and your Delia are between. But if home be the other kind, let it be wide and long—enter you at the Golden Gate, hang your hat on Hatteras, your cape on Cape Horn and go out by the Labrador.</p>
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<p>Joe was painting in the class of the great Magister—you know his fame. His fees are high; his lessons are light—his high-lights have brought him renown. Delia was studying under Rosenstock—you know his repute as a disturber of the piano keys.</p>
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<p>Flat-dwellers shall endorse my dictum that theirs is the only true happiness. If a home is happy it cannot fit too close—let the dresser collapse and become a billiard table; let the mantel turn to a rowing machine, the escritoire to a spare bedchamber, the washstand to an upright piano; let the four walls come together, if they will, so you and your Delia are between. But if home be the other kind, let it be wide and long—enter you at the Golden Gate, hang your hat on Hatteras, your cape on Cape Horn and go out by the Labrador.</p>
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<p>Joe was painting in the class of the great Magister—you know his fame. His fees are high; his lessons are light—his highlights have brought him renown. Delia was studying under Rosenstock—you know his repute as a disturber of the piano keys.</p>
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<p>They were mighty happy as long as their money lasted. So is every—but I will not be cynical. Their aims were very clear and defined. Joe was to become capable very soon of turning out pictures that old gentlemen with thin side-whiskers and thick pocketbooks would sandbag one another in his studio for the privilege of buying. Delia was to become familiar and then contemptuous with Music, so that when she saw the orchestra seats and boxes unsold she could have sore throat and lobster in a private dining-room and refuse to go on the stage.</p>
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<p>But the best, in my opinion, was the home life in the little flat—the ardent, voluble chats after the day’s study; the cozy dinners and fresh, light breakfasts; the interchange of ambitions—ambitions interwoven each with the other’s or else inconsiderable—the mutual help and inspiration; and—overlook my artlessness—stuffed olives and cheese sandwiches at 11 <abbr class="time">p.m.</abbr></p>
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<p>But after a while Art flagged. It sometimes does, even if some switchman doesn’t flag it. Everything going out and nothing coming in, as the vulgarians say. Money was lacking to pay <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Magister and Herr Rosenstock their prices. When one loves one’s Art no service seems too hard. So, Delia said she must give music lessons to keep the chafing dish bubbling.</p>
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<p>“Sold that watercolour of the obelisk to a man from Peoria,” he announced overwhelmingly.</p>
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<p>“Don’t joke with me,” said Delia, “not from Peoria!”</p>
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<p>“All the way. I wish you could see him, Dele. Fat man with a woollen muffler and a quill toothpick. He saw the sketch in Tinkle’s window and thought it was a windmill at first. He was game, though, and bought it anyhow. He ordered another—an oil sketch of the Lackawanna freight depot—to take back with him. Music lessons! Oh, I guess Art is still in it.”</p>
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<p>“I’m so glad you’ve kept on,” said Delia, heartily. “You’re bound to win, dear. Thirty-three dollars! We never had so much to spend before. We’ll have oysters to-night.”</p>
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<p>“I’m so glad you’ve kept on,” said Delia, heartily. “You’re bound to win, dear. Thirty-three dollars! We never had so much to spend before. We’ll have oysters tonight.”</p>
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<p>“And filet mignon with champignons,” said Joe. “Where is the olive fork?”</p>
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<p>On the next Saturday evening Joe reached home first. He spread his $18 on the parlour table and washed what seemed to be a great deal of dark paint from his hands.</p>
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<p>Half an hour later Delia arrived, her right hand tied up in a shapeless bundle of wraps and bandages.</p>
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<p>“Clementina,” she explained, “insisted upon a Welsh rabbit after her lesson. She is such a queer girl. Welsh rabbits at 5 in the afternoon. The General was there. You should have seen him run for the chafing dish, Joe, just as if there wasn’t a servant in the house. I know Clementina isn’t in good health; she is so nervous. In serving the rabbit she spilled a great lot of it, boiling hot, over my hand and wrist. It hurt awfully, Joe. And the dear girl was so sorry! But Gen. Pinkney!—Joe, that old man nearly went distracted. He rushed downstairs and sent somebody—they said the furnace man or somebody in the basement—out to a drug store for some oil and things to bind it up with. It doesn’t hurt so much now.”</p>
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<p>“What’s this?” asked Joe, taking the hand tenderly and pulling at some white strands beneath the bandages.</p>
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<p>“It’s something soft,” said Delia, “that had oil on it. Oh, Joe, did you sell another sketch?” She had seen the money on the table.</p>
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<p>“Did I?” said Joe; “just ask the man from Peoria. He got his depot to-day, and he isn’t sure but he thinks he wants another parkscape and a view on the Hudson. What time this afternoon did you burn your hand, Dele?”</p>
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<p>“Did I?” said Joe; “just ask the man from Peoria. He got his depot today, and he isn’t sure but he thinks he wants another parkscape and a view on the Hudson. What time this afternoon did you burn your hand, Dele?”</p>
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<p>“Five o’clock, I think,” said Dele, plaintively. “The iron—I mean the rabbit came off the fire about that time. You ought to have seen Gen. Pinkney, Joe, when—”</p>
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<p>“Sit down here a moment, Dele,” said Joe. He drew her to the couch, sat beside her and put his arm across her shoulders.</p>
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<p>“What have you been doing for the last two weeks, Dele?” he asked.</p>
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<p>“I couldn’t get any pupils,” she confessed. “And I couldn’t bear to have you give up your lessons; and I got a place ironing shirts in that big Twenty-fourth street laundry. And I think I did very well to make up both General Pinkney and Clementina, don’t you, Joe? And when a girl in the laundry set down a hot iron on my hand this afternoon I was all the way home making up that story about the Welsh rabbit. You’re not angry, are you, Joe? And if I hadn’t got the work you mightn’t have sold your sketches to that man from Peoria.”</p>
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<p>“He wasn’t from Peoria,” said Joe, slowly.</p>
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<p>“Well, it doesn’t matter where he was from. How clever you are, Joe—and—kiss me, Joe—and what made you ever suspect that I wasn’t giving music lessons to Clementina?”</p>
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<p>“I didn’t,” said Joe, “until to-night. And I wouldn’t have then, only I sent up this cotton waste and oil from the engine-room this afternoon for a girl upstairs who had her hand burned with a smoothing-iron. I’ve been firing the engine in that laundry for the last two weeks.”</p>
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<p>“I didn’t,” said Joe, “until tonight. And I wouldn’t have then, only I sent up this cotton waste and oil from the engine-room this afternoon for a girl upstairs who had her hand burned with a smoothing-iron. I’ve been firing the engine in that laundry for the last two weeks.”</p>
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<p>“And then you didn’t—”</p>
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<p>“My purchaser from Peoria,” said Joe, “and Gen. Pinkney are both creations of the same art—but you wouldn’t call it either painting or music.”</p>
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<p>And then they both laughed, and Joe began:</p>
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<p>“It’s all right, officer,” he said, reassuringly. “I’m just waiting for a friend. It’s an appointment made twenty years ago. Sounds a little funny to you, doesn’t it? Well, I’ll explain if you’d like to make certain it’s all straight. About that long ago there used to be a restaurant where this store stands—‘Big Joe’ Brady’s restaurant.”</p>
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<p>“Until five years ago,” said the policeman. “It was torn down then.”</p>
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<p>The man in the doorway struck a match and lit his cigar. The light showed a pale, square-jawed face with keen eyes, and a little white scar near his right eyebrow. His scarfpin was a large diamond, oddly set.</p>
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<p>“Twenty years ago to-night,” said the man, “I dined here at ‘Big Joe’ Brady’s with Jimmy Wells, my best chum, and the finest chap in the world. He and I were raised here in New York, just like two brothers, together. I was eighteen and Jimmy was twenty. The next morning I was to start for the West to make my fortune. You couldn’t have dragged Jimmy out of New York; he thought it was the only place on earth. Well, we agreed that night that we would meet here again exactly twenty years from that date and time, no matter what our conditions might be or from what distance we might have to come. We figured that in twenty years each of us ought to have our destiny worked out and our fortunes made, whatever they were going to be.”</p>
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<p>“Twenty years ago tonight,” said the man, “I dined here at ‘Big Joe’ Brady’s with Jimmy Wells, my best chum, and the finest chap in the world. He and I were raised here in New York, just like two brothers, together. I was eighteen and Jimmy was twenty. The next morning I was to start for the West to make my fortune. You couldn’t have dragged Jimmy out of New York; he thought it was the only place on earth. Well, we agreed that night that we would meet here again exactly twenty years from that date and time, no matter what our conditions might be or from what distance we might have to come. We figured that in twenty years each of us ought to have our destiny worked out and our fortunes made, whatever they were going to be.”</p>
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<p>“It sounds pretty interesting,” said the policeman. “Rather a long time between meets, though, it seems to me. Haven’t you heard from your friend since you left?”</p>
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<p>“Well, yes, for a time we corresponded,” said the other. “But after a year or two we lost track of each other. You see, the West is a pretty big proposition, and I kept hustling around over it pretty lively. But I know Jimmy will meet me here if he’s alive, for he always was the truest, stanchest old chap in the world. He’ll never forget. I came a thousand miles to stand in this door to-night, and it’s worth it if my old partner turns up.”</p>
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<p>“Well, yes, for a time we corresponded,” said the other. “But after a year or two we lost track of each other. You see, the West is a pretty big proposition, and I kept hustling around over it pretty lively. But I know Jimmy will meet me here if he’s alive, for he always was the truest, stanchest old chap in the world. He’ll never forget. I came a thousand miles to stand in this door tonight, and it’s worth it if my old partner turns up.”</p>
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<p>The waiting man pulled out a handsome watch, the lids of it set with small diamonds.</p>
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<p>“Three minutes to ten,” he announced. “It was exactly ten o’clock when we parted here at the restaurant door.”</p>
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<p>“Did pretty well out West, didn’t you?” asked the policeman.</p>
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<p>The policeman twirled his club and took a step or two.</p>
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<p>“I’ll be on my way. Hope your friend comes around all right. Going to call time on him sharp?”</p>
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<p>“I should say not!” said the other. “I’ll give him half an hour at least. If Jimmy is alive on earth he’ll be here by that time. So long, officer.”</p>
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<p>“Good-night, sir,” said the policeman, passing on along his beat, trying doors as he went.</p>
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<p>“Good night, sir,” said the policeman, passing on along his beat, trying doors as he went.</p>
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<p>There was now a fine, cold drizzle falling, and the wind had risen from its uncertain puffs into a steady blow. The few foot passengers astir in that quarter hurried dismally and silently along with coat collars turned high and pocketed hands. And in the door of the hardware store the man who had come a thousand miles to fill an appointment, uncertain almost to absurdity, with the friend of his youth, smoked his cigar and waited.</p>
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<p>About twenty minutes he waited, and then a tall man in a long overcoat, with collar turned up to his ears, hurried across from the opposite side of the street. He went directly to the waiting man.</p>
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<p>“Is that you, Bob?” he asked, doubtfully.</p>
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<p>We were at our supper of beef stew and dried apples when he trotted in as if on the heels of a dog team, and made one of the mess at our table. With the freedom of the camps he assaulted our ears and claimed the fellowship of men lost in the wilds of a hash house. We embraced him as a specimen, and in three minutes we had all but died for one another as friends.</p>
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<p>He was rugged and bearded and wind-dried. He had just come off the “trail,” he said, at one of the North River ferries. I fancied I could see the snow dust of Chilcoot yet powdering his shoulders. And then he strewed the table with the nuggets, stuffed ptarmigans, bead work and seal pelts of the returned Klondiker, and began to prate to us of his millions.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Bank drafts for two millions,” was his summing up, “and a thousand a day piling up from my claims. And now I want some beef stew and canned peaches. I never got off the train since I mushed out of Seattle, and I’m hungry. The stuff the niggers feed you on Pullmans don’t count. You gentlemen order what you want.”</p>
|
||||
<p>And then Milly loomed up with a thousand dishes on her bare arm—loomed up big and white and pink and awful as Mount Saint Elias—with a smile like day breaking in a gulch. And the Klondiker threw down his pelts and nuggets as dross, and let his jaw fall half-way, and stared at her. You could almost see the diamond tiaras on Milly’s brow and the hand-embroidered silk Paris gowns that he meant to buy for her.</p>
|
||||
<p>And then Milly loomed up with a thousand dishes on her bare arm—loomed up big and white and pink and awful as Mount Saint Elias—with a smile like day breaking in a gulch. And the Klondiker threw down his pelts and nuggets as dross, and let his jaw fall halfway, and stared at her. You could almost see the diamond tiaras on Milly’s brow and the hand-embroidered silk Paris gowns that he meant to buy for her.</p>
|
||||
<p>At last the bollworm had attacked the cotton—the poison ivy was reaching out its tendrils to entwine the summer boarder—the millionaire lumberman, thinly disguised as the Alaskan miner, was about to engulf our Milly and upset Nature’s adjustment.</p>
|
||||
<p>Kraft was the first to act. He leaped up and pounded the Klondiker’s back. “Come out and drink,” he shouted. “Drink first and eat afterward.” Judkins seized one arm and I the other. Gaily, roaringly, irresistibly, in jolly-good-fellow style, we dragged him from the restaurant to a café, stuffing his pockets with his embalmed birds and indigestible nuggets.</p>
|
||||
<p>There he rumbled a roughly good-humoured protest. “That’s the girl for my money,” he declared. “She can eat out of my skillet the rest of her life. Why, I never see such a fine girl. I’m going back there and ask her to marry me. I guess she won’t want to sling hash any more when she sees the pile of dust I’ve got.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’ll take another whiskey and milk now,” Kraft persuaded, with Satan’s smile. “I thought you up-country fellows were better sports.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’ll take another whiskey and milk now,” Kraft persuaded, with Satan’s smile. “I thought you upcountry fellows were better sports.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Kraft spent his puny store of coin at the bar and then gave Judkins and me such an appealing look that we went down to the last dime we had in toasting our guest.</p>
|
||||
<p>Then, when our ammunition was gone and the Klondiker, still somewhat sober, began to babble again of Milly, Kraft whispered into his ear such a polite, barbed insult relating to people who were miserly with their funds, that the miner crashed down handful after handful of silver and notes, calling for all the fluids in the world to drown the imputation.</p>
|
||||
<p>Thus the work was accomplished. With his own guns we drove him from the field. And then we had him carted to a distant small hotel and put to bed with his nuggets and baby seal-skins stuffed around him.</p>
|
||||
<p>“He will never find Cypher’s again,” said Kraft. “He will propose to the first white apron he sees in a dairy restaurant to-morrow. And Milly—I mean the Natural Adjustment—is saved!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“He will never find Cypher’s again,” said Kraft. “He will propose to the first white apron he sees in a dairy restaurant tomorrow. And Milly—I mean the Natural Adjustment—is saved!”</p>
|
||||
<p>And back to Cypher’s went we three, and, finding customers scarce, we joined hands and did an Indian dance with Milly in the centre.</p>
|
||||
<p>This, I say, happened three years ago. And about that time a little luck descended upon us three, and we were enabled to buy costlier and less wholesome food than Cypher’s. Our paths separated, and I saw Kraft no more and Judkins seldom.</p>
|
||||
<p>But, as I said, I saw a painting the other day that was sold for $5,000. The title was “Boadicea,” and the figure seemed to fill all out-of-doors. But of all the picture’s admirers who stood before it, I believe I was the only one who longed for Boadicea to stalk from her frame, bringing me corned-beef hash with poached egg.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -19,37 +19,37 @@
|
||||
<p>But this irrelevant stuff is taking up space that the story should occupy.</p>
|
||||
<p>Dulcie worked in a department store. She sold Hamburg edging, or stuffed peppers, or automobiles, or other little trinkets such as they keep in department stores. Of what she earned, Dulcie received six dollars per week. The remainder was credited to her and debited to somebody else’s account in the ledger kept by G⸺ Oh, primal energy, you say, Reverend Doctor—Well then, in the Ledger of Primal Energy.</p>
|
||||
<p>During her first year in the store, Dulcie was paid five dollars per week. It would be instructive to know how she lived on that amount. Don’t care? Very well; probably you are interested in larger amounts. Six dollars is a larger amount. I will tell you how she lived on six dollars per week.</p>
|
||||
<p>One afternoon at six, when Dulcie was sticking her hat-pin within an eighth of an inch of her <i xml:lang="la">medulla oblongata</i>, she said to her chum, Sadie—the girl that waits on you with her left side:</p>
|
||||
<p>One afternoon at six, when Dulcie was sticking her hatpin within an eighth of an inch of her <i xml:lang="la">medulla oblongata</i>, she said to her chum, Sadie—the girl that waits on you with her left side:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Say, Sade, I made a date for dinner this evening with Piggy.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You never did!” exclaimed Sadie admiringly. “Well, ain’t you the lucky one? Piggy’s an awful swell; and he always takes a girl to swell places. He took Blanche up to the Hoffman House one evening, where they have swell music, and you see a lot of swells. You’ll have a swell time, Dulce.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Dulcie hurried homeward. Her eyes were shining, and her cheeks showed the delicate pink of life’s—real life’s—approaching dawn. It was Friday; and she had fifty cents left of her last week’s wages.</p>
|
||||
<p>The streets were filled with the rush-hour floods of people. The electric lights of Broadway were glowing—calling moths from miles, from leagues, from hundreds of leagues out of darkness around to come in and attend the singeing school. Men in accurate clothes, with faces like those carved on cherry stones by the old salts in sailors’ homes, turned and stared at Dulcie as she sped, unheeding, past them. Manhattan, the night-blooming cereus, was beginning to unfold its dead-white, heavy-odoured petals.</p>
|
||||
<p>Dulcie stopped in a store where goods were cheap and bought an imitation lace collar with her fifty cents. That money was to have been spent otherwise—fifteen cents for supper, ten cents for breakfast, ten cents for lunch. Another dime was to be added to her small store of savings; and five cents was to be squandered for licorice drops—the kind that made your cheek look like the toothache, and last as long. The licorice was an extravagance—almost a carouse—but what is life without pleasures?</p>
|
||||
<p>Dulcie lived in a furnished room. There is this difference between a furnished room and a boarding-house. In a furnished room, other people do not know it when you go hungry.</p>
|
||||
<p>Dulcie lived in a furnished room. There is this difference between a furnished room and a boardinghouse. In a furnished room, other people do not know it when you go hungry.</p>
|
||||
<p>Dulcie went up to her room—the third floor back in a West Side brownstone-front. She lit the gas. Scientists tell us that the diamond is the hardest substance known. Their mistake. Landladies know of a compound beside which the diamond is as putty. They pack it in the tips of gas-burners; and one may stand on a chair and dig at it in vain until one’s fingers are pink and bruised. A hairpin will not remove it; therefore let us call it immovable.</p>
|
||||
<p>So Dulcie lit the gas. In its one-fourth-candlepower glow we will observe the room.</p>
|
||||
<p>Couch-bed, dresser, table, washstand, chair—of this much the landlady was guilty. The rest was Dulcie’s. On the dresser were her treasures—a gilt china vase presented to her by Sadie, a calendar issued by a pickle works, a book on the divination of dreams, some rice powder in a glass dish, and a cluster of artificial cherries tied with a pink ribbon.</p>
|
||||
<p>Against the wrinkly mirror stood pictures of General Kitchener, William Muldoon, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Benvenuto Cellini. Against one wall was a plaster of Paris plaque of an O’Callahan in a Roman helmet. Near it was a violent oleograph of a lemon-coloured child assaulting an inflammatory butterfly. This was Dulcie’s final judgment in art; but it had never been upset. Her rest had never been disturbed by whispers of stolen copes; no critic had elevated his eyebrows at her infantile entomologist.</p>
|
||||
<p>Piggy was to call for her at seven. While she swiftly makes ready, let us discreetly face the other way and gossip.</p>
|
||||
<p>For the room, Dulcie paid two dollars per week. On week-days her breakfast cost ten cents; she made coffee and cooked an egg over the gaslight while she was dressing. On Sunday mornings she feasted royally on veal chops and pineapple fritters at “Billy’s” restaurant, at a cost of twenty-five cents—and tipped the waitress ten cents. New York presents so many temptations for one to run into extravagance. She had her lunches in the department-store restaurant at a cost of sixty cents for the week; dinners were $1.05. The evening papers—show me a New Yorker going without his daily paper!—came to six cents; and two Sunday papers—one for the personal column and the other to read—were ten cents. The total amounts to $4.76. Now, one has to buy clothes, and—</p>
|
||||
<p>I give it up. I hear of wonderful bargains in fabrics, and of miracles performed with needle and thread; but I am in doubt. I hold my pen poised in vain when I would add to Dulcie’s life some of those joys that belong to woman by virtue of all the unwritten, sacred, natural, inactive ordinances of the equity of heaven. Twice she had been to Coney Island and had ridden the hobby-horses. ’Tis a weary thing to count your pleasures by summers instead of by hours.</p>
|
||||
<p>For the room, Dulcie paid two dollars per week. On weekdays her breakfast cost ten cents; she made coffee and cooked an egg over the gaslight while she was dressing. On Sunday mornings she feasted royally on veal chops and pineapple fritters at “Billy’s” restaurant, at a cost of twenty-five cents—and tipped the waitress ten cents. New York presents so many temptations for one to run into extravagance. She had her lunches in the department-store restaurant at a cost of sixty cents for the week; dinners were $1.05. The evening papers—show me a New Yorker going without his daily paper!—came to six cents; and two Sunday papers—one for the personal column and the other to read—were ten cents. The total amounts to $4.76. Now, one has to buy clothes, and—</p>
|
||||
<p>I give it up. I hear of wonderful bargains in fabrics, and of miracles performed with needle and thread; but I am in doubt. I hold my pen poised in vain when I would add to Dulcie’s life some of those joys that belong to woman by virtue of all the unwritten, sacred, natural, inactive ordinances of the equity of heaven. Twice she had been to Coney Island and had ridden the hobbyhorses. ’Tis a weary thing to count your pleasures by summers instead of by hours.</p>
|
||||
<p>Piggy needs but a word. When the girls named him, an undeserving stigma was cast upon the noble family of swine. The words-of-three-letters lesson in the old blue spelling book begins with Piggy’s biography. He was fat; he had the soul of a rat, the habits of a bat, and the magnanimity of a cat … He wore expensive clothes; and was a connoisseur in starvation. He could look at a shop-girl and tell you to an hour how long it had been since she had eaten anything more nourishing than marshmallows and tea. He hung about the shopping districts, and prowled around in department stores with his invitations to dinner. Men who escort dogs upon the streets at the end of a string look down upon him. He is a type; I can dwell upon him no longer; my pen is not the kind intended for him; I am no carpenter.</p>
|
||||
<p>At ten minutes to seven Dulcie was ready. She looked at herself in the wrinkly mirror. The reflection was satisfactory. The dark blue dress, fitting without a wrinkle, the hat with its jaunty black feather, the but-slightly-soiled gloves—all representing self-denial, even of food itself—were vastly becoming.</p>
|
||||
<p>Dulcie forgot everything else for a moment except that she was beautiful, and that life was about to lift a corner of its mysterious veil for her to observe its wonders. No gentleman had ever asked her out before. Now she was going for a brief moment into the glitter and exalted show.</p>
|
||||
<p>The girls said that Piggy was a “spender.” There would be a grand dinner, and music, and splendidly dressed ladies to look at, and things to eat that strangely twisted the girls’ jaws when they tried to tell about them. No doubt she would be asked out again. There was a blue pongee suit in a window that she knew—by saving twenty cents a week instead of ten, in—let’s see—Oh, it would run into years! But there was a second-hand store in Seventh Avenue where—</p>
|
||||
<p>The girls said that Piggy was a “spender.” There would be a grand dinner, and music, and splendidly dressed ladies to look at, and things to eat that strangely twisted the girls’ jaws when they tried to tell about them. No doubt she would be asked out again. There was a blue pongee suit in a window that she knew—by saving twenty cents a week instead of ten, in—let’s see—Oh, it would run into years! But there was a secondhand store in Seventh Avenue where—</p>
|
||||
<p>Somebody knocked at the door. Dulcie opened it. The landlady stood there with a spurious smile, sniffing for cooking by stolen gas.</p>
|
||||
<p>“A gentleman’s downstairs to see you,” she said. “Name is <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Wiggins.”</p>
|
||||
<p>By such epithet was Piggy known to unfortunate ones who had to take him seriously.</p>
|
||||
<p>Dulcie turned to the dresser to get her handkerchief; and then she stopped still, and bit her underlip hard. While looking in her mirror she had seen fairyland and herself, a princess, just awakening from a long slumber. She had forgotten one that was watching her with sad, beautiful, stern eyes—the only one there was to approve or condemn what she did. Straight and slender and tall, with a look of sorrowful reproach on his handsome, melancholy face, General Kitchener fixed his wonderful eyes on her out of his gilt photograph frame on the dresser.</p>
|
||||
<p>Dulcie turned like an automatic doll to the landlady.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Tell him I can’t go,” she said dully. “Tell him I’m sick, or something. Tell him I’m not going out.”</p>
|
||||
<p>After the door was closed and locked, Dulcie fell upon her bed, crushing her black tip, and cried for ten minutes. General Kitchener was her only friend. He was Dulcie’s ideal of a gallant knight. He looked as if he might have a secret sorrow, and his wonderful moustache was a dream, and she was a little afraid of that stern yet tender look in his eyes. She used to have little fancies that he would call at the house sometime, and ask for her, with his sword clanking against his high boots. Once, when a boy was rattling a piece of chain against a lamp-post she had opened the window and looked out. But there was no use. She knew that General Kitchener was away over in Japan, leading his army against the savage Turks; and he would never step out of his gilt frame for her. Yet one look from him had vanquished Piggy that night. Yes, for that night.</p>
|
||||
<p>After the door was closed and locked, Dulcie fell upon her bed, crushing her black tip, and cried for ten minutes. General Kitchener was her only friend. He was Dulcie’s ideal of a gallant knight. He looked as if he might have a secret sorrow, and his wonderful moustache was a dream, and she was a little afraid of that stern yet tender look in his eyes. She used to have little fancies that he would call at the house sometime, and ask for her, with his sword clanking against his high boots. Once, when a boy was rattling a piece of chain against a lamppost she had opened the window and looked out. But there was no use. She knew that General Kitchener was away over in Japan, leading his army against the savage Turks; and he would never step out of his gilt frame for her. Yet one look from him had vanquished Piggy that night. Yes, for that night.</p>
|
||||
<p>When her cry was over Dulcie got up and took off her best dress, and put on her old blue kimono. She wanted no dinner. She sang two verses of “Sammy.” Then she became intensely interested in a little red speck on the side of her nose. And after that was attended to, she drew up a chair to the rickety table, and told her fortune with an old deck of cards.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The horrid, impudent thing!” she said aloud. “And I never gave him a word or a look to make him think it!”</p>
|
||||
<p>At nine o’clock Dulcie took a tin box of crackers and a little pot of raspberry jam out of her trunk, and had a feast. She offered General Kitchener some jam on a cracker; but he only looked at her as the sphinx would have looked at a butterfly—if there are butterflies in the desert.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Don’t eat it if you don’t want to,” said Dulcie. “And don’t put on so many airs and scold so with your eyes. I wonder if you’d be so superior and snippy if you had to live on six dollars a week.”</p>
|
||||
<p>It was not a good sign for Dulcie to be rude to General Kitchener. And then she turned Benvenuto Cellini face downward with a severe gesture. But that was not inexcusable; for she had always thought he was Henry <span epub:type="z3998:roman">VIII</span>, and she did not approve of him.</p>
|
||||
<p>At half-past nine Dulcie took a last look at the pictures on the dresser, turned out the light, and skipped into bed. It’s an awful thing to go to bed with a good-night look at General Kitchener, William Muldoon, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Benvenuto Cellini. This story really doesn’t get anywhere at all. The rest of it comes later—sometime when Piggy asks Dulcie again to dine with him, and she is feeling lonelier than usual, and General Kitchener happens to be looking the other way; and then—</p>
|
||||
<p>At half-past nine Dulcie took a last look at the pictures on the dresser, turned out the light, and skipped into bed. It’s an awful thing to go to bed with a good night look at General Kitchener, William Muldoon, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Benvenuto Cellini. This story really doesn’t get anywhere at all. The rest of it comes later—sometime when Piggy asks Dulcie again to dine with him, and she is feeling lonelier than usual, and General Kitchener happens to be looking the other way; and then—</p>
|
||||
<p>As I said before, I dreamed that I was standing near a crowd of prosperous-looking angels, and a policeman took me by the wing and asked if I belonged with them.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Who are they?” I asked.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why,” said he, “they are the men who hired working-girls, and paid ’em five or six dollars a week to live on. Are you one of the bunch?”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -8,18 +8,18 @@
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="between-rounds" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Between Rounds</h2>
|
||||
<p>The May moon shone bright upon the private boarding-house of <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Murphy. By reference to the almanac a large amount of territory will be discovered upon which its rays also fell. Spring was in its heydey, with hay fever soon to follow. The parks were green with new leaves and buyers for the Western and Southern trade. Flowers and summer-resort agents were blowing; the air and answers to Lawson were growing milder; hand-organs, fountains and pinochle were playing everywhere.</p>
|
||||
<p>The windows of <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Murphy’s boarding-house were open. A group of boarders were seated on the high stoop upon round, flat mats like German pancakes.</p>
|
||||
<p>The May moon shone bright upon the private boardinghouse of <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Murphy. By reference to the almanac a large amount of territory will be discovered upon which its rays also fell. Spring was in its heydey, with hay fever soon to follow. The parks were green with new leaves and buyers for the Western and Southern trade. Flowers and summer-resort agents were blowing; the air and answers to Lawson were growing milder; hand-organs, fountains and pinochle were playing everywhere.</p>
|
||||
<p>The windows of <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Murphy’s boardinghouse were open. A group of boarders were seated on the high stoop upon round, flat mats like German pancakes.</p>
|
||||
<p>In one of the second-floor front windows <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCaskey awaited her husband. Supper was cooling on the table. Its heat went into <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCaskey.</p>
|
||||
<p>At nine <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McCaskey came. He carried his coat on his arm and his pipe in his teeth; and he apologised for disturbing the boarders on the steps as he selected spots of stone between them on which to set his size 9, width Ds.</p>
|
||||
<p>As he opened the door of his room he received a surprise. Instead of the usual stove-lid or potato-masher for him to dodge, came only words.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> McCaskey reckoned that the benign May moon had softened the breast of his spouse.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I heard ye,” came the oral substitutes for kitchenware. “Ye can apollygise to riff-raff of the streets for settin’ yer unhandy feet on the tails of their frocks, but ye’d walk on the neck of yer wife the length of a clothes-line without so much as a ‘Kiss me fut,’ and I’m sure it’s that long from rubberin’ out the windy for ye and the victuals cold such as there’s money to buy after drinkin’ up yer wages at Gallegher’s every Saturday evenin’, and the gas man here twice to-day for his.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I heard ye,” came the oral substitutes for kitchenware. “Ye can apollygise to riffraff of the streets for settin’ yer unhandy feet on the tails of their frocks, but ye’d walk on the neck of yer wife the length of a clothesline without so much as a ‘Kiss me fut,’ and I’m sure it’s that long from rubberin’ out the windy for ye and the victuals cold such as there’s money to buy after drinkin’ up yer wages at Gallegher’s every Saturday evenin’, and the gas man here twice today for his.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Woman!” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McCaskey, dashing his coat and hat upon a chair, “the noise of ye is an insult to me appetite. When ye run down politeness ye take the mortar from between the bricks of the foundations of society. ’Tis no more than exercisin’ the acrimony of a gentleman when ye ask the dissent of ladies blockin’ the way for steppin’ between them. Will ye bring the pig’s face of ye out of the windy and see to the food?”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCaskey arose heavily and went to the stove. There was something in her manner that warned <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McCaskey. When the corners of her mouth went down suddenly like a barometer it usually foretold a fall of crockery and tinware.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Pig’s face, is it?” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCaskey, and hurled a stewpan full of bacon and turnips at her lord.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> McCaskey was no novice at repartee. He knew what should follow the entrée. On the table was a roast sirloin of pork, garnished with shamrocks. He retorted with this, and drew the appropriate return of a bread pudding in an earthen dish. A hunk of Swiss cheese accurately thrown by her husband struck <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCaskey below one eye. When she replied with a well-aimed coffee-pot full of a hot, black, semi-fragrant liquid the battle, according to courses, should have ended.</p>
|
||||
<p>But <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McCaskey was no 50-cent table d’hôter. Let cheap Bohemians consider coffee the end, if they would. Let them make that faux pas. He was foxier still. Finger-bowls were not beyond the compass of his experience. They were not to be had in the Pension Murphy; but their equivalent was at hand. Triumphantly he sent the granite-ware wash basin at the head of his matrimonial adversary. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCaskey dodged in time. She reached for a flatiron, with which, as a sort of cordial, she hoped to bring the gastronomical duel to a close. But a loud, wailing scream downstairs caused both her and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McCaskey to pause in a sort of involuntary armistice.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> McCaskey was no novice at repartee. He knew what should follow the entrée. On the table was a roast sirloin of pork, garnished with shamrocks. He retorted with this, and drew the appropriate return of a bread pudding in an earthen dish. A hunk of Swiss cheese accurately thrown by her husband struck <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCaskey below one eye. When she replied with a well-aimed coffeepot full of a hot, black, semi-fragrant liquid the battle, according to courses, should have ended.</p>
|
||||
<p>But <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McCaskey was no 50-cent table d’hôter. Let cheap Bohemians consider coffee the end, if they would. Let them make that faux pas. He was foxier still. Finger-bowls were not beyond the compass of his experience. They were not to be had in the Pension Murphy; but their equivalent was at hand. Triumphantly he sent the graniteware wash basin at the head of his matrimonial adversary. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCaskey dodged in time. She reached for a flatiron, with which, as a sort of cordial, she hoped to bring the gastronomical duel to a close. But a loud, wailing scream downstairs caused both her and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McCaskey to pause in a sort of involuntary armistice.</p>
|
||||
<p>On the sidewalk at the corner of the house Policeman Cleary was standing with one ear upturned, listening to the crash of household utensils.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ’Tis Jawn McCaskey and his missis at it again,” meditated the policeman. “I wonder shall I go up and stop the row. I will not. Married folks they are; and few pleasures they have. ’Twill not last long. Sure, they’ll have to borrow more dishes to keep it up with.”</p>
|
||||
<p>And just then came the loud scream below-stairs, betokening fear or dire extremity. “ ’Tis probably the cat,” said Policeman Cleary, and walked hastily in the other direction.</p>
|
||||
@ -30,7 +30,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Oh,” wailed <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Murphy, “ ’twas yisterday, or maybe four hours ago! I dunno. But it’s lost he is, me little boy Mike. He was playin’ on the sidewalk only this mornin’—or was it Wednesday? I’m that busy with work, ’tis hard to keep up with dates. But I’ve looked the house over from top to cellar, and it’s gone he is. Oh, for the love av Hiven—”</p>
|
||||
<p>Silent, grim, colossal, the big city has ever stood against its revilers. They call it hard as iron; they say that no pulse of pity beats in its bosom; they compare its streets with lonely forests and deserts of lava. But beneath the hard crust of the lobster is found a delectable and luscious food. Perhaps a different simile would have been wiser. Still, nobody should take offence. We would call no one a lobster without good and sufficient claws.</p>
|
||||
<p>No calamity so touches the common heart of humanity as does the straying of a little child. Their feet are so uncertain and feeble; the ways are so steep and strange.</p>
|
||||
<p>Major Griggs hurried down to the corner, and up the avenue into Billy’s place. “Gimme a rye-high,” he said to the servitor. “Haven’t seen a bow-legged, dirty-faced little devil of a six-year-old lost kid around here anywhere, have you?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Major Griggs hurried down to the corner, and up the avenue into Billy’s place. “Gimme a rye-high,” he said to the servitor. “Haven’t seen a bowlegged, dirty-faced little devil of a six-year-old lost kid around here anywhere, have you?”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Toomey retained Miss Purdy’s hand on the steps. “Think of that dear little babe,” said Miss Purdy, “lost from his mother’s side—perhaps already fallen beneath the iron hoofs of galloping steeds—oh, isn’t it dreadful?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ain’t that right?” agreed <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Toomey, squeezing her hand. “Say I start out and help look for um!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Perhaps,” said Miss Purdy, “you should. But, oh, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Toomey, you are so dashing—so reckless—suppose in your enthusiasm some accident should befall you, then what—”</p>
|
||||
@ -43,7 +43,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“We never did,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McCaskey, lingering with the fact.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But if we had, Jawn, think what sorrow would be in our hearts this night, with our little Phelan run away and stolen in the city nowheres at all.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ye talk foolishness,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McCaskey. “ ’Tis Pat he would be named, after me old father in Cantrim.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ye lie!” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCaskey, without anger. “Me brother was worth tin dozen bog-trotting McCaskeys. After him would the bye be named.” She leaned over the window-sill and looked down at the hurrying and bustle below.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ye lie!” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCaskey, without anger. “Me brother was worth tin dozen bog-trotting McCaskeys. After him would the bye be named.” She leaned over the windowsill and looked down at the hurrying and bustle below.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Jawn,” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCaskey, softly, “I’m sorry I was hasty wid ye.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ’Twas hasty puddin’, as ye say,” said her husband, “and hurry-up turnips and get-a-move-on-ye coffee. ’Twas what ye could call a quick lunch, all right, and tell no lie.”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCaskey slipped her arm inside her husband’s and took his rough hand in hers.</p>
|
||||
@ -52,7 +52,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ’Tis foolishness, of course,” said he, roughly, “but I’d be cut up some meself if our little Pat was kidnapped or anything. But there never was any childer for us. Sometimes I’ve been ugly and hard with ye, Judy. Forget it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>They leaned together, and looked down at the heart-drama being acted below.</p>
|
||||
<p>Long they sat thus. People surged along the sidewalk, crowding, questioning, filling the air with rumours, and inconsequent surmises. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Murphy ploughed back and forth in their midst, like a soft mountain down which plunged an audible cataract of tears. Couriers came and went.</p>
|
||||
<p>Loud voices and a renewed uproar were raised in front of the boarding-house.</p>
|
||||
<p>Loud voices and a renewed uproar were raised in front of the boardinghouse.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What’s up now, Judy?” asked <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McCaskey.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ’Tis Missis Murphy’s voice,” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCaskey, harking. “She says she’s after finding little Mike asleep behind the roll of old linoleum under the bed in her room.”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> McCaskey laughed loudly.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -10,21 +10,21 @@
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">By Courier</h2>
|
||||
<p>It was neither the season nor the hour when the Park had frequenters; and it is likely that the young lady, who was seated on one of the benches at the side of the walk, had merely obeyed a sudden impulse to sit for a while and enjoy a foretaste of coming Spring.</p>
|
||||
<p>She rested there, pensive and still. A certain melancholy that touched her countenance must have been of recent birth, for it had not yet altered the fine and youthful contours of her cheek, nor subdued the arch though resolute curve of her lips.</p>
|
||||
<p>A tall young man came striding through the park along the path near which she sat. Behind him tagged a boy carrying a suit-case. At sight of the young lady, the man’s face changed to red and back to pale again. He watched her countenance as he drew nearer, with hope and anxiety mingled on his own. He passed within a few yards of her, but he saw no evidence that she was aware of his presence or existence.</p>
|
||||
<p>Some fifty yards further on he suddenly stopped and sat on a bench at one side. The boy dropped the suit-case and stared at him with wondering, shrewd eyes. The young man took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow. It was a good handkerchief, a good brow, and the young man was good to look at. He said to the boy:</p>
|
||||
<p>A tall young man came striding through the park along the path near which she sat. Behind him tagged a boy carrying a suitcase. At sight of the young lady, the man’s face changed to red and back to pale again. He watched her countenance as he drew nearer, with hope and anxiety mingled on his own. He passed within a few yards of her, but he saw no evidence that she was aware of his presence or existence.</p>
|
||||
<p>Some fifty yards further on he suddenly stopped and sat on a bench at one side. The boy dropped the suitcase and stared at him with wondering, shrewd eyes. The young man took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow. It was a good handkerchief, a good brow, and the young man was good to look at. He said to the boy:</p>
|
||||
<p>“I want you to take a message to that young lady on that bench. Tell her I am on my way to the station, to leave for San Francisco, where I shall join that Alaska moose-hunting expedition. Tell her that, since she has commanded me neither to speak nor to write to her, I take this means of making one last appeal to her sense of justice, for the sake of what has been. Tell her that to condemn and discard one who has not deserved such treatment, without giving him her reasons or a chance to explain is contrary to her nature as I believe it to be. Tell her that I have thus, to a certain degree, disobeyed her injunctions, in the hope that she may yet be inclined to see justice done. Go, and tell her that.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The young man dropped a half-dollar into the boy’s hand. The boy looked at him for a moment with bright, canny eyes out of a dirty, intelligent face, and then set off at a run. He approached the lady on the bench a little doubtfully, but unembarrassed. He touched the brim of the old plaid bicycle cap perched on the back of his head. The lady looked at him coolly, without prejudice or favour.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Lady,” he said, “dat gent on de oder bench sent yer a song and dance by me. If yer don’t know de guy, and he’s tryin’ to do de Johnny act, say de word, and I’ll call a cop in t’ree minutes. If yer does know him, and he’s on de square, w’y I’ll spiel yer de bunch of hot air he sent yer.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The young lady betrayed a faint interest.</p>
|
||||
<p>“A song and dance!” she said, in a deliberate sweet voice that seemed to clothe her words in a diaphanous garment of impalpable irony. “A new idea—in the troubadour line, I suppose. I—used to know the gentleman who sent you, so I think it will hardly be necessary to call the police. You may execute your song and dance, but do not sing too loudly. It is a little early yet for open-air vaudeville, and we might attract attention.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Awe,” said the boy, with a shrug down the length of him, “yer know what I mean, lady. ‘Tain’t a turn, it’s wind. He told me to tell yer he’s got his collars and cuffs in dat grip for a scoot clean out to ‘Frisco. Den he’s goin’ to shoot snow-birds in de Klondike. He says yer told him not to send ’round no more pink notes nor come hangin’ over de garden gate, and he takes dis means of puttin’ yer wise. He says yer refereed him out like a has-been, and never give him no chance to kick at de decision. He says yer swiped him, and never said why.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The slightly awakened interest in the young lady’s eyes did not abate. Perhaps it was caused by either the originality or the audacity of the snow-bird hunter, in thus circumventing her express commands against the ordinary modes of communication. She fixed her eye on a statue standing disconsolate in the dishevelled park, and spoke into the transmitter:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Awe,” said the boy, with a shrug down the length of him, “yer know what I mean, lady. ‘Tain’t a turn, it’s wind. He told me to tell yer he’s got his collars and cuffs in dat grip for a scoot clean out to ‘Frisco. Den he’s goin’ to shoot snowbirds in de Klondike. He says yer told him not to send ’round no more pink notes nor come hangin’ over de garden gate, and he takes dis means of puttin’ yer wise. He says yer refereed him out like a has-been, and never give him no chance to kick at de decision. He says yer swiped him, and never said why.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The slightly awakened interest in the young lady’s eyes did not abate. Perhaps it was caused by either the originality or the audacity of the snowbird hunter, in thus circumventing her express commands against the ordinary modes of communication. She fixed her eye on a statue standing disconsolate in the dishevelled park, and spoke into the transmitter:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Tell the gentleman that I need not repeat to him a description of my ideals. He knows what they have been and what they still are. So far as they touch on this case, absolute loyalty and truth are the ones paramount. Tell him that I have studied my own heart as well as one can, and I know its weakness as well as I do its needs. That is why I decline to hear his pleas, whatever they may be. I did not condemn him through hearsay or doubtful evidence, and that is why I made no charge. But, since he persists in hearing what he already well knows, you may convey the matter.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Tell him that I entered the conservatory that evening from the rear, to cut a rose for my mother. Tell him I saw him and Miss Ashburton beneath the pink oleander. The tableau was pretty, but the pose and juxtaposition were too eloquent and evident to require explanation. I left the conservatory, and, at the same time, the rose and my ideal. You may carry that song and dance to your impresario.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m shy on one word, lady. Jux—jux—put me wise on dat, will yer?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Juxtaposition—or you may call it propinquity—or, if you like, being rather too near for one maintaining the position of an ideal.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The gravel spun from beneath the boy’s feet. He stood by the other bench. The man’s eyes interrogated him, hungrily. The boy’s were shining with the impersonal zeal of the translator.</p>
|
||||
<p>“De lady says dat she’s on to de fact dat gals is dead easy when a feller comes spielin’ ghost stories and tryin’ to make up, and dat’s why she won’t listen to no soft-soap. She says she caught yer dead to rights, huggin’ a bunch o’ calico in de hot-house. She side-stepped in to pull some posies and yer was squeezin’ de oder gal to beat de band. She says it looked cute, all right all right, but it made her sick. She says yer better git busy, and make a sneak for de train.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“De lady says dat she’s on to de fact dat gals is dead easy when a feller comes spielin’ ghost stories and tryin’ to make up, and dat’s why she won’t listen to no soft-soap. She says she caught yer dead to rights, huggin’ a bunch o’ calico in de hothouse. She sidestepped in to pull some posies and yer was squeezin’ de oder gal to beat de band. She says it looked cute, all right all right, but it made her sick. She says yer better git busy, and make a sneak for de train.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The young man gave a low whistle and his eyes flashed with a sudden thought. His hand flew to the inside pocket of his coat, and drew out a handful of letters. Selecting one, he handed it to the boy, following it with a silver dollar from his vest-pocket.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Give that letter to the lady,” he said, “and ask her to read it. Tell her that it should explain the situation. Tell her that, if she had mingled a little trust with her conception of the ideal, much heartache might have been avoided. Tell her that the loyalty she prizes so much has never wavered. Tell her I am waiting for an answer.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The messenger stood before the lady.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -13,9 +13,9 @@
|
||||
<p>It is not an extravagant theory that the cabby’s singleness of purpose and concentrated view of life are the results of the hansom’s peculiar construction. The cock-of-the-roost sits aloft like Jupiter on an unsharable seat, holding your fate between two thongs of inconstant leather. Helpless, ridiculous, confined, bobbing like a toy mandarin, you sit like a rat in a trap—you, before whom butlers cringe on solid land—and must squeak upward through a slit in your peripatetic sarcophagus to make your feeble wishes known.</p>
|
||||
<p>Then, in a cab, you are not even an occupant; you are contents. You are a cargo at sea, and the “cherub that sits up aloft” has Davy Jones’s street and number by heart.</p>
|
||||
<p>One night there were sounds of revelry in the big brick tenement-house next door but one to McGary’s Family Café. The sounds seemed to emanate from the apartments of the Walsh family. The sidewalk was obstructed by an assortment of interested neighbours, who opened a lane from time to time for a hurrying messenger bearing from McGary’s goods pertinent to festivity and diversion. The sidewalk contingent was engaged in comment and discussion from which it made no effort to eliminate the news that Norah Walsh was being married.</p>
|
||||
<p>In the fulness of time there was an eruption of the merry-makers to the sidewalk. The uninvited guests enveloped and permeated them, and upon the night air rose joyous cries, congratulations, laughter and unclassified noises born of McGary’s oblations to the hymeneal scene.</p>
|
||||
<p>Close to the curb stood Jerry O’Donovan’s cab. Night-hawk was Jerry called; but no more lustrous or cleaner hansom than his ever closed its doors upon point lace and November violets. And Jerry’s horse! I am within bounds when I tell you that he was stuffed with oats until one of those old ladies who leave their dishes unwashed at home and go about having expressmen arrested, would have smiled—yes, smiled—to have seen him.</p>
|
||||
<p>Among the shifting, sonorous, pulsing crowd glimpses could be had of Jerry’s high hat, battered by the winds and rains of many years; of his nose like a carrot, battered by the frolicsome, athletic progeny of millionaires and by contumacious fares; of his brass-buttoned green coat, admired in the vicinity of McGary’s. It was plain that Jerry had usurped the functions of his cab, and was carrying a “load.” Indeed, the figure may be extended and he be likened to a bread-waggon if we admit the testimony of a youthful spectator, who was heard to remark “Jerry has got a bun.”</p>
|
||||
<p>In the fullness of time there was an eruption of the merrymakers to the sidewalk. The uninvited guests enveloped and permeated them, and upon the night air rose joyous cries, congratulations, laughter and unclassified noises born of McGary’s oblations to the hymeneal scene.</p>
|
||||
<p>Close to the curb stood Jerry O’Donovan’s cab. Nighthawk was Jerry called; but no more lustrous or cleaner hansom than his ever closed its doors upon point lace and November violets. And Jerry’s horse! I am within bounds when I tell you that he was stuffed with oats until one of those old ladies who leave their dishes unwashed at home and go about having expressmen arrested, would have smiled—yes, smiled—to have seen him.</p>
|
||||
<p>Among the shifting, sonorous, pulsing crowd glimpses could be had of Jerry’s high hat, battered by the winds and rains of many years; of his nose like a carrot, battered by the frolicsome, athletic progeny of millionaires and by contumacious fares; of his brass-buttoned green coat, admired in the vicinity of McGary’s. It was plain that Jerry had usurped the functions of his cab, and was carrying a “load.” Indeed, the figure may be extended and he be likened to a bread-wagon if we admit the testimony of a youthful spectator, who was heard to remark “Jerry has got a bun.”</p>
|
||||
<p>From somewhere among the throng in the street or else out of the thin stream of pedestrians a young woman tripped and stood by the cab. The professional hawk’s eye of Jerry caught the movement. He made a lurch for the cab, overturning three or four onlookers and himself—no! he caught the cap of a water-plug and kept his feet. Like a sailor shinning up the ratlins during a squall Jerry mounted to his professional seat. Once he was there McGary’s liquids were baffled. He seesawed on the mizzenmast of his craft as safe as a Steeple Jack rigged to the flagpole of a skyscraper.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Step in, lady,” said Jerry, gathering his lines. The young woman stepped into the cab; the doors shut with a bang; Jerry’s whip cracked in the air; the crowd in the gutter scattered, and the fine hansom dashed away ‘crosstown.</p>
|
||||
<p>When the oat-spry horse had hedged a little his first spurt of speed Jerry broke the lid of his cab and called down through the aperture in the voice of a cracked megaphone, trying to please:</p>
|
||||
@ -28,9 +28,9 @@
|
||||
<p>Inside the cab the fare sat up straight on the cushions, looking to right and left at the lights and houses. Even in the shadowed hansom her eyes shone like stars at twilight.</p>
|
||||
<p>When they reached Fifty-ninth street Jerry’s head was bobbing and his reins were slack. But his horse turned in through the park gate and began the old familiar nocturnal round. And then the fare leaned back, entranced, and breathed deep the clean, wholesome odours of grass and leaf and bloom. And the wise beast in the shafts, knowing his ground, struck into his by-the-hour gait and kept to the right of the road.</p>
|
||||
<p>Habit also struggled successfully against Jerry’s increasing torpor. He raised the hatch of his storm-tossed vessel and made the inquiry that cabbies do make in the park.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Like shtop at the Cas-sino, lady? Gezzer r’freshm’s, ‘n lish’n the music. Ev’body shtops.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Like shtop at the Cassino, lady? Gezzer r’freshm’s, ‘n lish’n the music. Ev’body shtops.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I think that would be nice,” said the fare.</p>
|
||||
<p>They reined up with a plunge at the Casino entrance. The cab doors flew open. The fare stepped directly upon the floor. At once she was caught in a web of ravishing music and dazzled by a panorama of lights and colours. Some one slipped a little square card into her hand on which was printed a number—34. She looked around and saw her cab twenty yards away already lining up in its place among the waiting mass of carriages, cabs and motor cars. And then a man who seemed to be all shirt-front danced backward before her; and next she was seated at a little table by a railing over which climbed a jessamine vine.</p>
|
||||
<p>They reined up with a plunge at the Casino entrance. The cab doors flew open. The fare stepped directly upon the floor. At once she was caught in a web of ravishing music and dazzled by a panorama of lights and colours. Some one slipped a little square card into her hand on which was printed a number—34. She looked around and saw her cab twenty yards away already lining up in its place among the waiting mass of carriages, cabs and motor cars. And then a man who seemed to be all shirtfront danced backward before her; and next she was seated at a little table by a railing over which climbed a jessamine vine.</p>
|
||||
<p>There seemed to be a wordless invitation to purchase; she consulted a collection of small coins in a thin purse, and received from them license to order a glass of beer. There she sat, inhaling and absorbing it all—the new-coloured, new-shaped life in a fairy palace in an enchanted wood.</p>
|
||||
<p>At fifty tables sat princes and queens clad in all the silks and gems of the world. And now and then one of them would look curiously at Jerry’s fare. They saw a plain figure dressed in a pink silk of the kind that is tempered by the word “foulard,” and a plain face that wore a look of love of life that the queens envied.</p>
|
||||
<p>Twice the long hands of the clocks went round, Royalties thinned from their al fresco thrones, and buzzed or clattered away in their vehicles of state. The music retired into cases of wood and bags of leather and baize. Waiters removed cloths pointedly near the plain figure sitting almost alone.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -8,7 +8,7 @@
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="lost-on-dress-parade" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Lost on Dress Parade</h2>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Towers Chandler was pressing his evening suit in his hall bedroom. One iron was heating on a small gas stove; the other was being pushed vigorously back and forth to make the desirable crease that would be seen later on extending in straight lines from <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Chandler’s patent leather shoes to the edge of his low-cut vest. So much of the hero’s toilet may be intrusted to our confidence. The remainder may be guessed by those whom genteel poverty has driven to ignoble expedient. Our next view of him shall be as he descends the steps of his lodging-house immaculately and correctly clothed; calm, assured, handsome—in appearance the typical New York young clubman setting out, slightly bored, to inaugurate the pleasures of the evening.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Towers Chandler was pressing his evening suit in his hall bedroom. One iron was heating on a small gas stove; the other was being pushed vigorously back and forth to make the desirable crease that would be seen later on extending in straight lines from <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Chandler’s patent leather shoes to the edge of his low-cut vest. So much of the hero’s toilet may be entrusted to our confidence. The remainder may be guessed by those whom genteel poverty has driven to ignoble expedient. Our next view of him shall be as he descends the steps of his lodging-house immaculately and correctly clothed; calm, assured, handsome—in appearance the typical New York young clubman setting out, slightly bored, to inaugurate the pleasures of the evening.</p>
|
||||
<p>Chandler’s honorarium was $18 per week. He was employed in the office of an architect. He was twenty-two years old; he considered architecture to be truly an art; and he honestly believed—though he would not have dared to admit it in New York—that the Flatiron Building was inferior in design to the great cathedral in Milan.</p>
|
||||
<p>Out of each week’s earnings Chandler set aside $1. At the end of each ten weeks with the extra capital thus accumulated, he purchased one gentleman’s evening from the bargain counter of stingy old Father Time. He arrayed himself in the regalia of millionaires and presidents; he took himself to the quarter where life is brightest and showiest, and there dined with taste and luxury. With ten dollars a man may, for a few hours, play the wealthy idler to perfection. The sum is ample for a well-considered meal, a bottle bearing a respectable label, commensurate tips, a smoke, cab fare and the ordinary etceteras.</p>
|
||||
<p>This one delectable evening culled from each dull seventy was to Chandler a source of renascent bliss. To the society bud comes but one début; it stands alone sweet in her memory when her hair has whitened; but to Chandler each ten weeks brought a joy as keen, as thrilling, as new as the first had been. To sit among bon vivants under palms in the swirl of concealed music, to look upon the habitués of such a paradise and to be looked upon by them—what is a girl’s first dance and short-sleeved tulle compared with this?</p>
|
||||
@ -20,14 +20,14 @@
|
||||
<p>“Does it pain you much?” inquired Chandler.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Only when I rest my weight upon it. I think I will be able to walk in a minute or two.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“If I can be of any further service,” suggested the young man, “I will call a cab, or—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Thank you,” said the girl, softly but heartily. “I am sure you need not trouble yourself any further. It was so awkward of me. And my shoe heels are horridly common-sense; I can’t blame them at all.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Thank you,” said the girl, softly but heartily. “I am sure you need not trouble yourself any further. It was so awkward of me. And my shoe heels are horridly commonsense; I can’t blame them at all.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Chandler looked at the girl and found her swiftly drawing his interest. She was pretty in a refined way; and her eye was both merry and kind. She was inexpensively clothed in a plain black dress that suggested a sort of uniform such as shop girls wear. Her glossy dark-brown hair showed its coils beneath a cheap hat of black straw whose only ornament was a velvet ribbon and bow. She could have posed as a model for the self-respecting working girl of the best type.</p>
|
||||
<p>A sudden idea came into the head of the young architect. He would ask this girl to dine with him. Here was the element that his splendid but solitary periodic feasts had lacked. His brief season of elegant luxury would be doubly enjoyable if he could add to it a lady’s society. This girl was a lady, he was sure—her manner and speech settled that. And in spite of her extremely plain attire he felt that he would be pleased to sit at table with her.</p>
|
||||
<p>These thoughts passed swiftly through his mind, and he decided to ask her. It was a breach of etiquette, of course, but oftentimes wage-earning girls waived formalities in matters of this kind. They were generally shrewd judges of men; and thought better of their own judgment than they did of useless conventions. His ten dollars, discreetly expended, would enable the two to dine very well indeed. The dinner would no doubt be a wonderful experience thrown into the dull routine of the girl’s life; and her lively appreciation of it would add to his own triumph and pleasure.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I think,” he said to her, with frank gravity, “that your foot needs a longer rest than you suppose. Now, I am going to suggest a way in which you can give it that and at the same time do me a favour. I was on my way to dine all by my lonely self when you came tumbling around the corner. You come with me and we’ll have a cozy dinner and a pleasant talk together, and by that time your game ankle will carry you home very nicely, I am sure.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The girl looked quickly up into Chandler’s clear, pleasant countenance. Her eyes twinkled once very brightly, and then she smiled ingenuously.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But we don’t know each other—it wouldn’t be right, would it?” she said, doubtfully.</p>
|
||||
<p>“There is nothing wrong about it,” said the young man, candidly. “I’ll introduce myself—permit me—<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Towers Chandler. After our dinner, which I will try to make as pleasant as possible, I will bid you good-evening, or attend you safely to your door, whichever you prefer.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“There is nothing wrong about it,” said the young man, candidly. “I’ll introduce myself—permit me—<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Towers Chandler. After our dinner, which I will try to make as pleasant as possible, I will bid you good evening, or attend you safely to your door, whichever you prefer.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“But, dear me!” said the girl, with a glance at Chandler’s faultless attire. “In this old dress and hat!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Never mind that,” said Chandler, cheerfully. “I’m sure you look more charming in them than any one we shall see in the most elaborate dinner toilette.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“My ankle does hurt yet,” admitted the girl, attempting a limping step. “I think I will accept your invitation, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Chandler. You may call me—Miss Marian.”</p>
|
||||
@ -44,7 +44,7 @@
|
||||
<p>In his chilly bedroom Chandler laid away his evening clothes for a sixty-nine days’ rest. He went about it thoughtfully.</p>
|
||||
<p>“That was a stunning girl,” he said to himself. “She’s all right, too, I’d be sworn, even if she does have to work. Perhaps if I’d told her the truth instead of all that razzle-dazzle we might—but, confound it! I had to play up to my clothes.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Thus spoke the brave who was born and reared in the wigwams of the tribe of the Manhattans.</p>
|
||||
<p>The girl, after leaving her entertainer, sped swiftly cross-town until she arrived at a handsome and sedate mansion two squares to the east, facing on that avenue which is the highway of Mammon and the auxiliary gods. Here she entered hurriedly and ascended to a room where a handsome young lady in an elaborate house dress was looking anxiously out the window.</p>
|
||||
<p>The girl, after leaving her entertainer, sped swiftly crosstown until she arrived at a handsome and sedate mansion two squares to the east, facing on that avenue which is the highway of Mammon and the auxiliary gods. Here she entered hurriedly and ascended to a room where a handsome young lady in an elaborate house dress was looking anxiously out the window.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, you madcap!” exclaimed the elder girl, when the other entered. “When will you quit frightening us this way? It is two hours since you ran out in that rag of an old dress and Marie’s hat. Mamma has been so alarmed. She sent Louis in the auto to try to find you. You are a bad, thoughtless Puss.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The elder girl touched a button, and a maid came in a moment.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Marie, tell mamma that Miss Marian has returned.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -8,7 +8,7 @@
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="mammon-and-the-archer" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Mammon and the Archer</h2>
|
||||
<p>Old Anthony Rockwall, retired manufacturer and proprietor of Rockwall’s Eureka Soap, looked out the library window of his Fifth Avenue mansion and grinned. His neighbour to the right—the aristocratic clubman, G. Van Schuylight Suffolk-Jones—came out to his waiting motor-car, wrinkling a contumelious nostril, as usual, at the Italian renaissance sculpture of the soap palace’s front elevation.</p>
|
||||
<p>Old Anthony Rockwall, retired manufacturer and proprietor of Rockwall’s Eureka Soap, looked out the library window of his Fifth Avenue mansion and grinned. His neighbour to the right—the aristocratic clubman, G. Van Schuylight Suffolk-Jones—came out to his waiting motorcar, wrinkling a contumelious nostril, as usual, at the Italian renaissance sculpture of the soap palace’s front elevation.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Stuck-up old statuette of nothing doing!” commented the ex-Soap King. “The Eden Musee’ll get that old frozen Nesselrode yet if he don’t watch out. I’ll have this house painted red, white, and blue next summer and see if that’ll make his Dutch nose turn up any higher.”</p>
|
||||
<p>And then Anthony Rockwall, who never cared for bells, went to the door of his library and shouted “Mike!” in the same voice that had once chipped off pieces of the welkin on the Kansas prairies.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Tell my son,” said Anthony to the answering menial, “to come in here before he leaves the house.”</p>
|
||||
@ -33,13 +33,13 @@
|
||||
<p>“Make one,” said Anthony. “Take her for a walk in the park, or a straw ride, or walk home with her from church. Chance! Pshaw!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You don’t know the social mill, dad. She’s part of the stream that turns it. Every hour and minute of her time is arranged for days in advance. I must have that girl, dad, or this town is a blackjack swamp forevermore. And I can’t write it—I can’t do that.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Tut!” said the old man. “Do you mean to tell me that with all the money I’ve got you can’t get an hour or two of a girl’s time for yourself?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve put it off too late. She’s going to sail for Europe at noon day after to-morrow for a two years’ stay. I’m to see her alone to-morrow evening for a few minutes. She’s at Larchmont now at her aunt’s. I can’t go there. But I’m allowed to meet her with a cab at the Grand Central Station to-morrow evening at the 8.30 train. We drive down Broadway to Wallack’s at a gallop, where her mother and a box party will be waiting for us in the lobby. Do you think she would listen to a declaration from me during that six or eight minutes under those circumstances? No. And what chance would I have in the theatre or afterward? None. No, dad, this is one tangle that your money can’t unravel. We can’t buy one minute of time with cash; if we could, rich people would live longer. There’s no hope of getting a talk with Miss Lantry before she sails.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve put it off too late. She’s going to sail for Europe at noon day after tomorrow for a two years’ stay. I’m to see her alone tomorrow evening for a few minutes. She’s at Larchmont now at her aunt’s. I can’t go there. But I’m allowed to meet her with a cab at the Grand Central Station tomorrow evening at the 8.30 train. We drive down Broadway to Wallack’s at a gallop, where her mother and a box party will be waiting for us in the lobby. Do you think she would listen to a declaration from me during that six or eight minutes under those circumstances? No. And what chance would I have in the theatre or afterward? None. No, dad, this is one tangle that your money can’t unravel. We can’t buy one minute of time with cash; if we could, rich people would live longer. There’s no hope of getting a talk with Miss Lantry before she sails.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right, Richard, my boy,” said old Anthony, cheerfully. “You may run along down to your club now. I’m glad it ain’t your liver. But don’t forget to burn a few punk sticks in the joss house to the great god Mazuma from time to time. You say money won’t buy time? Well, of course, you can’t order eternity wrapped up and delivered at your residence for a price, but I’ve seen Father Time get pretty bad stone bruises on his heels when he walked through the gold diggings.”</p>
|
||||
<p>That night came Aunt Ellen, gentle, sentimental, wrinkled, sighing, oppressed by wealth, in to Brother Anthony at his evening paper, and began discourse on the subject of lovers’ woes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“He told me all about it,” said brother Anthony, yawning. “I told him my bank account was at his service. And then he began to knock money. Said money couldn’t help. Said the rules of society couldn’t be bucked for a yard by a team of ten-millionaires.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, Anthony,” sighed Aunt Ellen, “I wish you would not think so much of money. Wealth is nothing where a true affection is concerned. Love is all-powerful. If he only had spoken earlier! She could not have refused our Richard. But now I fear it is too late. He will have no opportunity to address her. All your gold cannot bring happiness to your son.”</p>
|
||||
<p>At eight o’clock the next evening Aunt Ellen took a quaint old gold ring from a moth-eaten case and gave it to Richard.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Wear it to-night, nephew,” she begged. “Your mother gave it to me. Good luck in love she said it brought. She asked me to give it to you when you had found the one you loved.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Wear it tonight, nephew,” she begged. “Your mother gave it to me. Good luck in love she said it brought. She asked me to give it to you when you had found the one you loved.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Young Rockwall took the ring reverently and tried it on his smallest finger. It slipped as far as the second joint and stopped. He took it off and stuffed it into his vest pocket, after the manner of man. And then he ‘phoned for his cab.</p>
|
||||
<p>At the station he captured Miss Lantry out of the gadding mob at eight thirty-two.</p>
|
||||
<p>“We mustn’t keep mamma and the others waiting,” said she.</p>
|
||||
@ -71,7 +71,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Anthony called Kelly when he was at the door.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You didn’t notice,” said he, “anywhere in the tie-up, a kind of a fat boy without any clothes on shooting arrows around with a bow, did you?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, no,” said Kelly, mystified. “I didn’t. If he was like you say, maybe the cops pinched him before I got there.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I thought the little rascal wouldn’t be on hand,” chuckled Anthony. “Good-by, Kelly.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I thought the little rascal wouldn’t be on hand,” chuckled Anthony. “Goodbye, Kelly.”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -12,7 +12,7 @@
|
||||
<p>It took me two weeks to find out what women carry in dress suit cases. And then I began to ask why a mattress is made in two pieces. This serious query was at first received with suspicion because it sounded like a conundrum. I was at last assured that its double form of construction was designed to make lighter the burden of woman, who makes up beds. I was so foolish as to persist, begging to know why, then, they were not made in two equal pieces; whereupon I was shunned.</p>
|
||||
<p>The third draught that I craved from the fount of knowledge was enlightenment concerning the character known as A Man About Town. He was more vague in my mind than a type should be. We must have a concrete idea of anything, even if it be an imaginary idea, before we can comprehend it. Now, I have a mental picture of John Doe that is as clear as a steel engraving. His eyes are weak blue; he wears a brown vest and a shiny black serge coat. He stands always in the sunshine chewing something; and he keeps half-shutting his pocket knife and opening it again with his thumb. And, if the Man Higher Up is ever found, take my assurance for it, he will be a large, pale man with blue wristlets showing under his cuffs, and he will be sitting to have his shoes polished within sound of a bowling alley, and there will be somewhere about him turquoises.</p>
|
||||
<p>But the canvas of my imagination, when it came to limning the Man About Town, was blank. I fancied that he had a detachable sneer (like the smile of the Cheshire cat) and attached cuffs; and that was all. Whereupon I asked a newspaper reporter about him.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why,” said he, “a ‘Man About Town’ something between a ‘rounder’ and a ‘clubman.’ He isn’t exactly—well, he fits in between <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Fish’s receptions and private boxing bouts. He doesn’t—well, he doesn’t belong either to the Lotos Club or to the Jerry McGeogheghan Galvanised Iron Workers’ Apprentices’ Left Hook Chowder Association. I don’t exactly know how to describe him to you. You’ll see him everywhere there’s anything doing. Yes, I suppose he’s a type. Dress clothes every evening; knows the ropes; calls every policeman and waiter in town by their first names. No; he never travels with the hydrogen derivatives. You generally see him alone or with another man.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why,” said he, “a ‘Man About Town’ something between a ‘rounder’ and a ‘clubman.’ He isn’t exactly—well, he fits in between <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Fish’s receptions and private boxing bouts. He doesn’t—well, he doesn’t belong either to the Lotus Club or to the Jerry McGeogheghan Galvanised Iron Workers’ Apprentices’ Left Hook Chowder Association. I don’t exactly know how to describe him to you. You’ll see him everywhere there’s anything doing. Yes, I suppose he’s a type. Dress clothes every evening; knows the ropes; calls every policeman and waiter in town by their first names. No; he never travels with the hydrogen derivatives. You generally see him alone or with another man.”</p>
|
||||
<p>My friend the reporter left me, and I wandered further afield. By this time the 3126 electric lights on the Rialto were alight. People passed, but they held me not. Paphian eyes rayed upon me, and left me unscathed. Diners, heimgangers, shop-girls, confidence men, panhandlers, actors, highwaymen, millionaires and outlanders hurried, skipped, strolled, sneaked, swaggered and scurried by me; but I took no note of them. I knew them all; I had read their hearts; they had served. I wanted my Man About Town. He was a type, and to drop him would be an error—a typograph—but no! let us continue.</p>
|
||||
<p>Let us continue with a moral digression. To see a family reading the Sunday paper gratifies. The sections have been separated. Papa is earnestly scanning the page that pictures the young lady exercising before an open window, and bending—but there, there! Mamma is interested in trying to guess the missing letters in the word N_w Yo_k. The oldest girls are eagerly perusing the financial reports, for a certain young man remarked last Sunday night that he had taken a flyer in Q., <span epub:type="z3998:roman">X</span>. & Z. Willie, the eighteen-year-old son, who attends the New York public school, is absorbed in the weekly article describing how to make over an old skirt, for he hopes to take a prize in sewing on graduation day.</p>
|
||||
<p>Grandma is holding to the comic supplement with a two-hours’ grip; and little Tottie, the baby, is rocking along the best she can with the real estate transfers. This view is intended to be reassuring, for it is desirable that a few lines of this story be skipped. For it introduces strong drink.</p>
|
||||
@ -28,7 +28,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“I’m glad you brought up the subject; I’ve felt the influence of this nocturnal blight upon our city, but I never thought to analyse it before. I can see now that your ‘Man About Town’ should have been classified long ago. In his wake spring up wine agents and cloak models; and the orchestra plays ‘Let’s All Go Up to Maud’s’ for him, by request, instead of Händel. He makes his rounds every evening; while you and I see the elephant once a week. When the cigar store is raided, he winks at the officer, familiar with his ground, and walks away immune, while you and I search among the Presidents for names, and among the stars for addresses to give the desk sergeant.”</p>
|
||||
<p>My friend, the critic, paused to acquire breath for fresh eloquence. I seized my advantage.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You have classified him,” I cried with joy. “You have painted his portrait in the gallery of city types. But I must meet one face to face. I must study the Man About Town at first hand. Where shall I find him? How shall I know him?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Without seeming to hear me, the critic went on. And his cab-driver was waiting for his fare, too.</p>
|
||||
<p>Without seeming to hear me, the critic went on. And his cabdriver was waiting for his fare, too.</p>
|
||||
<p>“He is the sublimated essence of Butt-in; the refined, intrinsic extract of Rubber; the concentrated, purified, irrefutable, unavoidable spirit of Curiosity and Inquisitiveness. A new sensation is the breath in his nostrils; when his experience is exhausted he explores new fields with the indefatigability of a—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Excuse me,” I interrupted, “but can you produce one of this type? It is a new thing to me. I must study it. I will search the town over until I find one. Its habitat must be here on Broadway.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am about to dine here,” said my friend. “Come inside, and if there is a Man About Town present I will point him out to you. I know most of the regular patrons here.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -29,7 +29,7 @@
|
||||
<p>The pointer I got from that terrier—vaudeville please copy—set me to thinking.</p>
|
||||
<p>One evening about 6 o’clock my mistress ordered him to get busy and do the ozone act for Lovey. I have concealed it until now, but that is what she called me. The black-and-tan was called “Tweetness.” I consider that I have the bulge on him as far as you could chase a rabbit. Still “Lovey” is something of a nomenclatural tin can on the tail of one’s self respect.</p>
|
||||
<p>At a quiet place on a safe street I tightened the line of my custodian in front of an attractive, refined saloon. I made a dead-ahead scramble for the doors, whining like a dog in the press despatches that lets the family know that little Alice is bogged while gathering lilies in the brook.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, darn my eyes,” says the old man, with a grin; “darn my eyes if the saffron-coloured son of a seltzer lemonade ain’t asking me in to take a drink. Lemme see—how long’s it been since I saved shoe leather by keeping one foot on the foot-rest? I believe I’ll—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, darn my eyes,” says the old man, with a grin; “darn my eyes if the saffron-coloured son of a seltzer lemonade ain’t asking me in to take a drink. Lemme see—how long’s it been since I saved shoe leather by keeping one foot on the footrest? I believe I’ll—”</p>
|
||||
<p>I knew I had him. Hot Scotches he took, sitting at a table. For an hour he kept the Campbells coming. I sat by his side rapping for the waiter with my tail, and eating free lunch such as mamma in her flat never equalled with her homemade truck bought at a delicatessen store eight minutes before papa comes home.</p>
|
||||
<p>When the products of Scotland were all exhausted except the rye bread the old man unwound me from the table leg and played me outside like a fisherman plays a salmon. Out there he took off my collar and threw it into the street.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Poor doggie,” says he; “good doggie. She shan’t kiss you any more. ‘S a darned shame. Good doggie, go away and get run over by a street car and be happy.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -14,7 +14,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Think of a New York girl shedding tears on the menu card!</p>
|
||||
<p>To account for this you will be allowed to guess that the lobsters were all out, or that she had sworn ice-cream off during Lent, or that she had ordered onions, or that she had just come from a Hackett matinee. And then, all these theories being wrong, you will please let the story proceed.</p>
|
||||
<p>The gentleman who announced that the world was an oyster which he with his sword would open made a larger hit than he deserved. It is not difficult to open an oyster with a sword. But did you ever notice any one try to open the terrestrial bivalve with a typewriter? Like to wait for a dozen raw opened that way?</p>
|
||||
<p>Sarah had managed to pry apart the shells with her unhandy weapon far enough to nibble a wee bit at the cold and clammy world within. She knew no more shorthand than if she had been a graduate in stenography just let slip upon the world by a business college. So, not being able to stenog, she could not enter that bright galaxy of office talent. She was a free-lance typewriter and canvassed for odd jobs of copying.</p>
|
||||
<p>Sarah had managed to pry apart the shells with her unhandy weapon far enough to nibble a wee bit at the cold and clammy world within. She knew no more shorthand than if she had been a graduate in stenography just let slip upon the world by a business college. So, not being able to stenog, she could not enter that bright galaxy of office talent. She was a freelance typewriter and canvassed for odd jobs of copying.</p>
|
||||
<p>The most brilliant and crowning feat of Sarah’s battle with the world was the deal she made with Schulenberg’s Home Restaurant. The restaurant was next door to the old red brick in which she hall-roomed. One evening after dining at Schulenberg’s 40-cent, five-course table d’hôte (served as fast as you throw the five baseballs at the coloured gentleman’s head) Sarah took away with her the bill of fare. It was written in an almost unreadable script neither English nor German, and so arranged that if you were not careful you began with a toothpick and rice pudding and ended with soup and the day of the week.</p>
|
||||
<p>The next day Sarah showed Schulenberg a neat card on which the menu was beautifully typewritten with the viands temptingly marshalled under their right and proper heads from “hors d’oeuvre” to “not responsible for overcoats and umbrellas.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Schulenberg became a naturalised citizen on the spot. Before Sarah left him she had him willingly committed to an agreement. She was to furnish typewritten bills of fare for the twenty-one tables in the restaurant—a new bill for each day’s dinner, and new ones for breakfast and lunch as often as changes occurred in the food or as neatness required.</p>
|
||||
@ -31,14 +31,14 @@
|
||||
<p>They were to marry in the spring—at the very first signs of spring, Walter said. And Sarah came back to the city to pound her typewriter.</p>
|
||||
<p>A knock at the door dispelled Sarah’s visions of that happy day. A waiter had brought the rough pencil draft of the Home Restaurant’s next day fare in old Schulenberg’s angular hand.</p>
|
||||
<p>Sarah sat down to her typewriter and slipped a card between the rollers. She was a nimble worker. Generally in an hour and a half the twenty-one menu cards were written and ready.</p>
|
||||
<p>To-day there were more changes on the bill of fare than usual. The soups were lighter; pork was eliminated from the entrées, figuring only with Russian turnips among the roasts. The gracious spirit of spring pervaded the entire menu. Lamb, that lately capered on the greening hillsides, was becoming exploited with the sauce that commemorated its gambols. The song of the oyster, though not silenced, was <i xml:lang="es">dimuendo con amore</i>. The frying-pan seemed to be held, inactive, behind the beneficent bars of the broiler. The pie list swelled; the richer puddings had vanished; the sausage, with his drapery wrapped about him, barely lingered in a pleasant thanatopsis with the buckwheats and the sweet but doomed maple.</p>
|
||||
<p>Today there were more changes on the bill of fare than usual. The soups were lighter; pork was eliminated from the entrées, figuring only with Russian turnips among the roasts. The gracious spirit of spring pervaded the entire menu. Lamb, that lately capered on the greening hillsides, was becoming exploited with the sauce that commemorated its gambols. The song of the oyster, though not silenced, was <i xml:lang="es">dimuendo con amore</i>. The frying-pan seemed to be held, inactive, behind the beneficent bars of the broiler. The pie list swelled; the richer puddings had vanished; the sausage, with his drapery wrapped about him, barely lingered in a pleasant thanatopsis with the buckwheats and the sweet but doomed maple.</p>
|
||||
<p>Sarah’s fingers danced like midgets above a summer stream. Down through the courses she worked, giving each item its position according to its length with an accurate eye. Just above the desserts came the list of vegetables. Carrots and peas, asparagus on toast, the perennial tomatoes and corn and succotash, lima beans, cabbage—and then—</p>
|
||||
<p>Sarah was crying over her bill of fare. Tears from the depths of some divine despair rose in her heart and gathered to her eyes. Down went her head on the little typewriter stand; and the keyboard rattled a dry accompaniment to her moist sobs.</p>
|
||||
<p>For she had received no letter from Walter in two weeks, and the next item on the bill of fare was dandelions—dandelions with some kind of egg—but bother the egg!—dandelions, with whose golden blooms Walter had crowned her his queen of love and future bride—dandelions, the harbingers of spring, her sorrow’s crown of sorrow—reminder of her happiest days.</p>
|
||||
<p>Madam, I dare you to smile until you suffer this test: Let the Marechal Niel roses that Percy brought you on the night you gave him your heart be served as a salad with French dressing before your eyes at a Schulenberg table d’hôte. Had Juliet so seen her love tokens dishonoured the sooner would she have sought the lethean herbs of the good apothecary.</p>
|
||||
<p>But what a witch is Spring! Into the great cold city of stone and iron a message had to be sent. There was none to convey it but the little hardy courier of the fields with his rough green coat and modest air. He is a true soldier of fortune, this <i xml:lang="fr">dent-de-lion</i>—this lion’s tooth, as the French chefs call him. Flowered, he will assist at love-making, wreathed in my lady’s nut-brown hair; young and callow and unblossomed, he goes into the boiling pot and delivers the word of his sovereign mistress.</p>
|
||||
<p>By and by Sarah forced back her tears. The cards must be written. But, still in a faint, golden glow from her dandeleonine dream, she fingered the typewriter keys absently for a little while, with her mind and heart in the meadow lane with her young farmer. But soon she came swiftly back to the rock-bound lanes of Manhattan, and the typewriter began to rattle and jump like a strike-breaker’s motor car.</p>
|
||||
<p>At 6 o’clock the waiter brought her dinner and carried away the typewritten bill of fare. When Sarah ate she set aside, with a sigh, the dish of dandelions with its crowning ovarious accompaniment. As this dark mass had been transformed from a bright and love-indorsed flower to be an ignominious vegetable, so had her summer hopes wilted and perished. Love may, as Shakespeare said, feed on itself: but Sarah could not bring herself to eat the dandelions that had graced, as ornaments, the first spiritual banquet of her heart’s true affection.</p>
|
||||
<p>But what a witch is Spring! Into the great cold city of stone and iron a message had to be sent. There was none to convey it but the little hardy courier of the fields with his rough green coat and modest air. He is a true soldier of fortune, this <i xml:lang="fr">dent-de-lion</i>—this lion’s tooth, as the French chefs call him. Flowered, he will assist at lovemaking, wreathed in my lady’s nut-brown hair; young and callow and unblossomed, he goes into the boiling pot and delivers the word of his sovereign mistress.</p>
|
||||
<p>By and by Sarah forced back her tears. The cards must be written. But, still in a faint, golden glow from her dandeleonine dream, she fingered the typewriter keys absently for a little while, with her mind and heart in the meadow lane with her young farmer. But soon she came swiftly back to the rockbound lanes of Manhattan, and the typewriter began to rattle and jump like a strikebreaker’s motor car.</p>
|
||||
<p>At 6 o’clock the waiter brought her dinner and carried away the typewritten bill of fare. When Sarah ate she set aside, with a sigh, the dish of dandelions with its crowning ovarious accompaniment. As this dark mass had been transformed from a bright and love-endorsed flower to be an ignominious vegetable, so had her summer hopes wilted and perished. Love may, as Shakespeare said, feed on itself: but Sarah could not bring herself to eat the dandelions that had graced, as ornaments, the first spiritual banquet of her heart’s true affection.</p>
|
||||
<p>At 7:30 the couple in the next room began to quarrel: the man in the room above sought for A on his flute; the gas went a little lower; three coal wagons started to unload—the only sound of which the phonograph is jealous; cats on the back fences slowly retreated toward Mukden. By these signs Sarah knew that it was time for her to read. She got out “The Cloister and the Hearth,” the best non-selling book of the month, settled her feet on her trunk, and began to wander with Gerard.</p>
|
||||
<p>The front door bell rang. The landlady answered it. Sarah left Gerard and Denys treed by a bear and listened. Oh, yes; you would, just as she did!</p>
|
||||
<p>And then a strong voice was heard in the hall below, and Sarah jumped for her door, leaving the book on the floor and the first round easily the bear’s. You have guessed it. She reached the top of the stairs just as her farmer came up, three at a jump, and reaped and garnered her, with nothing left for the gleaners.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -22,7 +22,7 @@
|
||||
<p>But, Tildy!</p>
|
||||
<p>In steaming, chattering, cabbage-scented Bogle’s there was almost a heart tragedy. Tildy with the blunt nose, the hay-coloured hair, the freckled skin, the bag-o’-meal figure, had never had an admirer. Not a man followed her with his eyes when she went to and fro in the restaurant save now and then when they glared with the beast-hunger for food. None of them bantered her gaily to coquettish interchanges of wit. None of them loudly “jollied” her of mornings as they did Aileen, accusing her, when the eggs were slow in coming, of late hours in the company of envied swains. No one had ever given her a turquoise ring or invited her upon a voyage to mysterious, distant “Parsifal.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Tildy was a good waitress, and the men tolerated her. They who sat at her tables spoke to her briefly with quotations from the bill of fare; and then raised their voices in honeyed and otherwise-flavoured accents, eloquently addressed to the fair Aileen. They writhed in their chairs to gaze around and over the impending form of Tildy, that Aileen’s pulchritude might season and make ambrosia of their bacon and eggs.</p>
|
||||
<p>And Tildy was content to be the unwooed drudge if Aileen could receive the flattery and the homage. The blunt nose was loyal to the short Grecian. She was Aileen’s friend; and she was glad to see her rule hearts and wean the attention of men from smoking pot-pie and lemon meringue. But deep below our freckles and hay-coloured hair the unhandsomest of us dream of a prince or a princess, not vicarious, but coming to us alone.</p>
|
||||
<p>And Tildy was content to be the unwooed drudge if Aileen could receive the flattery and the homage. The blunt nose was loyal to the short Grecian. She was Aileen’s friend; and she was glad to see her rule hearts and wean the attention of men from smoking potpie and lemon meringue. But deep below our freckles and hay-coloured hair the unhandsomest of us dream of a prince or a princess, not vicarious, but coming to us alone.</p>
|
||||
<p>There was a morning when Aileen tripped in to work with a slightly bruised eye; and Tildy’s solicitude was almost enough to heal any optic.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Fresh guy,” explained Aileen, “last night as I was going home at Twenty-third and Sixth. Sashayed up, so he did, and made a break. I turned him down, cold, and he made a sneak; but followed me down to Eighteenth, and tried his hot air again. Gee! but I slapped him a good one, side of the face. Then he give me that eye. Does it look real awful, Til? I should hate that <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Nicholson should see it when he comes in for his tea and toast at ten.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Tildy listened to the adventure with breathless admiration. No man had ever tried to follow her. She was safe abroad at any hour of the twenty-four. What bliss it must have been to have had a man follow one and black one’s eye for love!</p>
|
||||
@ -33,17 +33,17 @@
|
||||
<p>Another thing dawned upon Tildy’s recovering wits. In a moment she had advanced from a hopeless, lowly admirer to be an Eve-sister of the potent Aileen. She herself was now a man-charmer, a mark for Cupid, a Sabine who must be coy when the Romans were at their banquet boards. Man had found her waist achievable and her lips desirable. The sudden and amatory Seeders had, as it were, performed for her a miraculous piece of one-day laundry work. He had taken the sackcloth of her uncomeliness, had washed, dried, starched and ironed it, and returned it to her sheer embroidered lawn—the robe of Venus herself.</p>
|
||||
<p>The freckles on Tildy’s cheeks merged into a rosy flush. Now both Circe and Psyche peeped from her brightened eyes. Not even Aileen herself had been publicly embraced and kissed in the restaurant.</p>
|
||||
<p>Tildy could not keep the delightful secret. When trade was slack she went and stood at Bogle’s desk. Her eyes were shining; she tried not to let her words sound proud and boastful.</p>
|
||||
<p>“A gentleman insulted me to-day,” she said. “He hugged me around the waist and kissed me.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“A gentleman insulted me today,” she said. “He hugged me around the waist and kissed me.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“That so?” said Bogle, cracking open his business armour. “After this week you get a dollar a week more.”</p>
|
||||
<p>At the next regular meal when Tildy set food before customers with whom she had acquaintance she said to each of them modestly, as one whose merit needed no bolstering:</p>
|
||||
<p>“A gentleman insulted me to-day in the restaurant. He put his arm around my waist and kissed me.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“A gentleman insulted me today in the restaurant. He put his arm around my waist and kissed me.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The diners accepted the revelation in various ways—some incredulously, some with congratulations; others turned upon her the stream of badinage that had hitherto been directed at Aileen alone. And Tildy’s heart swelled in her bosom, for she saw at last the towers of Romance rise above the horizon of the grey plain in which she had for so long travelled.</p>
|
||||
<p>For two days <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Seeders came not again. During that time Tildy established herself firmly as a woman to be wooed. She bought ribbons, and arranged her hair like Aileen’s, and tightened her waist two inches. She had a thrilling but delightful fear that <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Seeders would rush in suddenly and shoot her with a pistol. He must have loved her desperately; and impulsive lovers are always blindly jealous.</p>
|
||||
<p>Even Aileen had not been shot at with a pistol. And then Tildy rather hoped that he would not shoot at her, for she was always loyal to Aileen; and she did not want to overshadow her friend.</p>
|
||||
<p>At 4 o’clock on the afternoon of the third day <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Seeders came in. There were no customers at the tables. At the back end of the restaurant Tildy was refilling the mustard pots and Aileen was quartering pies. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Seeders walked back to where they stood.</p>
|
||||
<p>Tildy looked up and saw him, gasped, and pressed the mustard spoon against her heart. A red hair-bow was in her hair; she wore Venus’s Eighth Avenue badge, the blue bead necklace with the swinging silver symbolic heart.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Seeders was flushed and embarrassed. He plunged one hand into his hip pocket and the other into a fresh pumpkin pie.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Miss Tildy,” said he, “I want to apologise for what I done the other evenin’. Tell you the truth, I was pretty well tanked up or I wouldn’t of done it. I wouldn’t do no lady that a-way when I was sober. So I hope, Miss Tildy, you’ll accept my ‘pology, and believe that I wouldn’t of done it if I’d known what I was doin’ and hadn’t of been drunk.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Miss Tildy,” said he, “I want to apologise for what I done the other evenin’. Tell you the truth, I was pretty well tanked up or I wouldn’t of done it. I wouldn’t do no lady that away when I was sober. So I hope, Miss Tildy, you’ll accept my ‘pology, and believe that I wouldn’t of done it if I’d known what I was doin’ and hadn’t of been drunk.”</p>
|
||||
<p>With this handsome plea <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Seeders backed away, and departed, feeling that reparation had been made.</p>
|
||||
<p>But behind the convenient screen Tildy had thrown herself flat upon a table among the butter chips and the coffee cups, and was sobbing her heart out—out and back again to the grey plain wherein travel they with blunt noses and hay-coloured hair. From her knot she had torn the red hair-bow and cast it upon the floor. Seeders she despised utterly; she had but taken his kiss as that of a pioneer and prophetic prince who might have set the clocks going and the pages to running in fairyland. But the kiss had been maudlin and unmeant; the court had not stirred at the false alarm; she must forevermore remain the Sleeping Beauty.</p>
|
||||
<p>Yet not all was lost. Aileen’s arm was around her; and Tildy’s red hand groped among the butter chips till it found the warm clasp of her friend’s.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -29,9 +29,9 @@
|
||||
<p>“Sit down,” said the Prince calmly. “I do not accept your addition. Women are the natural enemies of clocks, and, therefore, the allies of those who would seek liberation from these monsters that measure our follies and limit our pleasures. If you will so far confide in me I would ask you to relate to me your story.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The young man threw himself upon the bench with a reckless laugh.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Your Royal Highness, I will,” he said, in tones of mock deference. “Do you see yonder house—the one with three upper windows lighted? Well, at 6 o’clock I stood in that house with the young lady I am—that is, I was—engaged to. I had been doing wrong, my dear Prince—I had been a naughty boy, and she had heard of it. I wanted to be forgiven, of course—we are always wanting women to forgive us, aren’t we, Prince?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I want time to think it over,’ said she. ‘There is one thing certain; I will either fully forgive you, or I will never see your face again. There will be no half-way business. At half-past eight,’ she said, ‘at exactly half-past eight you may be watching the middle upper window of the top floor. If I decide to forgive I will hang out of that window a white silk scarf. You will know by that that all is as was before, and you may come to me. If you see no scarf you may consider that everything between us is ended forever.’ That,” concluded the young man bitterly, “is why I have been watching that clock. The time for the signal to appear has passed twenty-three minutes ago. Do you wonder that I am a little disturbed, my Prince of Rags and Whiskers?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I want time to think it over,’ said she. ‘There is one thing certain; I will either fully forgive you, or I will never see your face again. There will be no halfway business. At half-past eight,’ she said, ‘at exactly half-past eight you may be watching the middle upper window of the top floor. If I decide to forgive I will hang out of that window a white silk scarf. You will know by that that all is as was before, and you may come to me. If you see no scarf you may consider that everything between us is ended forever.’ That,” concluded the young man bitterly, “is why I have been watching that clock. The time for the signal to appear has passed twenty-three minutes ago. Do you wonder that I am a little disturbed, my Prince of Rags and Whiskers?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Let me repeat to you,” said Prince Michael, in his even, well-modulated tones, “that women are the natural enemies of clocks. Clocks are an evil, women a blessing. The signal may yet appear.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Never, on your principality!” exclaimed the young man, hopelessly. “You don’t know Marian—of course. She’s always on time, to the minute. That was the first thing about her that attracted me. I’ve got the mitten instead of the scarf. I ought to have known at 8:31 that my goose was cooked. I’ll go West on the 11:45 to-night with Jack Milburn. The jig’s up. I’ll try Jack’s ranch awhile and top off with the Klondike and whiskey. Good-night—er—er—Prince.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Never, on your principality!” exclaimed the young man, hopelessly. “You don’t know Marian—of course. She’s always on time, to the minute. That was the first thing about her that attracted me. I’ve got the mitten instead of the scarf. I ought to have known at 8:31 that my goose was cooked. I’ll go West on the 11:45 tonight with Jack Milburn. The jig’s up. I’ll try Jack’s ranch awhile and top off with the Klondike and whiskey. Good night—er—er—Prince.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Prince Michael smiled his enigmatic, gentle, comprehending smile and caught the coat sleeve of the other. The brilliant light in the Prince’s eyes was softening to a dreamier, cloudy translucence.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Wait,” he said solemnly, “till the clock strikes. I have wealth and power and knowledge above most men, but when the clock strikes I am afraid. Stay by me until then. This woman shall be yours. You have the word of the hereditary Prince of Valleluna. On the day of your marriage I will give you $100,000 and a palace on the Hudson. But there must be no clocks in that palace—they measure our follies and limit our pleasures. Do you agree to that?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Of course,” said the young man, cheerfully, “they’re a nuisance, anyway—always ticking and striking and getting you late for dinner.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -10,32 +10,32 @@
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Coming-Out of Maggie</h2>
|
||||
<p>Every Saturday night the Clover Leaf Social Club gave a hop in the hall of the Give and Take Athletic Association on the East Side. In order to attend one of these dances you must be a member of the Give and Take—or, if you belong to the division that starts off with the right foot in waltzing, you must work in Rhinegold’s paper-box factory. Still, any Clover Leaf was privileged to escort or be escorted by an outsider to a single dance. But mostly each Give and Take brought the paper-box girl that he affected; and few strangers could boast of having shaken a foot at the regular hops.</p>
|
||||
<p>Maggie Toole, on account of her dull eyes, broad mouth and left-handed style of footwork in the two-step, went to the dances with Anna McCarty and her “fellow.” Anna and Maggie worked side by side in the factory, and were the greatest chums ever. So Anna always made Jimmy Burns take her by Maggie’s house every Saturday night so that her friend could go to the dance with them.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Give and Take Athletic Association lived up to its name. The hall of the association in Orchard street was fitted out with muscle-making inventions. With the fibres thus builded up the members were wont to engage the police and rival social and athletic organisations in joyous combat. Between these more serious occupations the Saturday night hop with the paper-box factory girls came as a refining influence and as an efficient screen. For sometimes the tip went ’round, and if you were among the elect that tiptoed up the dark back stairway you might see as neat and satisfying a little welter-weight affair to a finish as ever happened inside the ropes.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Give and Take Athletic Association lived up to its name. The hall of the association in Orchard street was fitted out with muscle-making inventions. With the fibres thus builded up the members were wont to engage the police and rival social and athletic organisations in joyous combat. Between these more serious occupations the Saturday night hop with the paper-box factory girls came as a refining influence and as an efficient screen. For sometimes the tip went ’round, and if you were among the elect that tiptoed up the dark back stairway you might see as neat and satisfying a little welterweight affair to a finish as ever happened inside the ropes.</p>
|
||||
<p>On Saturdays Rhinegold’s paper-box factory closed at 3 P. M. On one such afternoon Anna and Maggie walked homeward together. At Maggie’s door Anna said, as usual: “Be ready at seven, sharp, Mag; and Jimmy and me’ll come by for you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>But what was this? Instead of the customary humble and grateful thanks from the non-escorted one there was to be perceived a high-poised head, a prideful dimpling at the corners of a broad mouth, and almost a sparkle in a dull brown eye.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Thanks, Anna,” said Maggie; “but you and Jimmy needn’t bother to-night. I’ve a gentleman friend that’s coming ’round to escort me to the hop.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Thanks, Anna,” said Maggie; “but you and Jimmy needn’t bother tonight. I’ve a gentleman friend that’s coming ’round to escort me to the hop.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The comely Anna pounced upon her friend, shook her, chided and beseeched her. Maggie Toole catch a fellow! Plain, dear, loyal, unattractive Maggie, so sweet as a chum, so unsought for a two-step or a moonlit bench in the little park. How was it? When did it happen? Who was it?</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’ll see to-night,” said Maggie, flushed with the wine of the first grapes she had gathered in Cupid’s vineyard. “He’s swell all right. He’s two inches taller than Jimmy, and an up-to-date dresser. I’ll introduce him, Anna, just as soon as we get to the hall.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’ll see tonight,” said Maggie, flushed with the wine of the first grapes she had gathered in Cupid’s vineyard. “He’s swell all right. He’s two inches taller than Jimmy, and an up-to-date dresser. I’ll introduce him, Anna, just as soon as we get to the hall.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Anna and Jimmy were among the first Clover Leafs to arrive that evening. Anna’s eyes were brightly fixed upon the door of the hall to catch the first glimpse of her friend’s “catch.”</p>
|
||||
<p>At 8:30 Miss Toole swept into the hall with her escort. Quickly her triumphant eye discovered her chum under the wing of her faithful Jimmy.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, gee!” cried Anna, “Mag ain’t made a hit—oh, no! Swell fellow? well, I guess! Style? Look at ‘um.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Go as far as you like,” said Jimmy, with sandpaper in his voice. “Cop him out if you want him. These new guys always win out with the push. Don’t mind me. He don’t squeeze all the limes, I guess. Huh!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Shut up, Jimmy. You know what I mean. I’m glad for Mag. First fellow she ever had. Oh, here they come.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Across the floor Maggie sailed like a coquettish yacht convoyed by a stately cruiser. And truly, her companion justified the encomiums of the faithful chum. He stood two inches taller than the average Give and Take athlete; his dark hair curled; his eyes and his teeth flashed whenever he bestowed his frequent smiles. The young men of the Clover Leaf Club pinned not their faith to the graces of person as much as they did to its prowess, its achievements in hand-to-hand conflicts, and its preservation from the legal duress that constantly menaced it. The member of the association who would bind a paper-box maiden to his conquering chariot scorned to employ Beau Brummel airs. They were not considered honourable methods of warfare. The swelling biceps, the coat straining at its buttons over the chest, the air of conscious conviction of the supereminence of the male in the cosmogony of creation, even a calm display of bow legs as subduing and enchanting agents in the gentle tourneys of Cupid—these were the approved arms and ammunition of the Clover Leaf gallants. They viewed, then, genuflexions and alluring poses of this visitor with their chins at a new angle.</p>
|
||||
<p>Across the floor Maggie sailed like a coquettish yacht convoyed by a stately cruiser. And truly, her companion justified the encomiums of the faithful chum. He stood two inches taller than the average Give and Take athlete; his dark hair curled; his eyes and his teeth flashed whenever he bestowed his frequent smiles. The young men of the Clover Leaf Club pinned not their faith to the graces of person as much as they did to its prowess, its achievements in hand-to-hand conflicts, and its preservation from the legal duress that constantly menaced it. The member of the association who would bind a paper-box maiden to his conquering chariot scorned to employ Beau Brummel airs. They were not considered honourable methods of warfare. The swelling biceps, the coat straining at its buttons over the chest, the air of conscious conviction of the supereminence of the male in the cosmogony of creation, even a calm display of bow legs as subduing and enchanting agents in the gentle tourneys of Cupid—these were the approved arms and ammunition of the Clover Leaf gallants. They viewed, then, genuflections and alluring poses of this visitor with their chins at a new angle.</p>
|
||||
<p>“A friend of mine, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Terry O’Sullivan,” was Maggie’s formula of introduction. She led him around the room, presenting him to each new-arriving Clover Leaf. Almost was she pretty now, with the unique luminosity in her eyes that comes to a girl with her first suitor and a kitten with its first mouse.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Maggie Toole’s got a fellow at last,” was the word that went round among the paper-box girls. “Pipe Mag’s floor-walker”—thus the Give and Takes expressed their indifferent contempt.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Maggie Toole’s got a fellow at last,” was the word that went round among the paper-box girls. “Pipe Mag’s floorwalker”—thus the Give and Takes expressed their indifferent contempt.</p>
|
||||
<p>Usually at the weekly hops Maggie kept a spot on the wall warm with her back. She felt and showed so much gratitude whenever a self-sacrificing partner invited her to dance that his pleasure was cheapened and diminished. She had even grown used to noticing Anna joggle the reluctant Jimmy with her elbow as a signal for him to invite her chum to walk over his feet through a two-step.</p>
|
||||
<p>But to-night the pumpkin had turned to a coach and six. Terry O’Sullivan was a victorious Prince Charming, and Maggie Toole winged her first butterfly flight. And though our tropes of fairyland be mixed with those of entomology they shall not spill one drop of ambrosia from the rose-crowned melody of Maggie’s one perfect night.</p>
|
||||
<p>But tonight the pumpkin had turned to a coach and six. Terry O’Sullivan was a victorious Prince Charming, and Maggie Toole winged her first butterfly flight. And though our tropes of fairyland be mixed with those of entomology they shall not spill one drop of ambrosia from the rose-crowned melody of Maggie’s one perfect night.</p>
|
||||
<p>The girls besieged her for introductions to her “fellow.” The Clover Leaf young men, after two years of blindness, suddenly perceived charms in Miss Toole. They flexed their compelling muscles before her and bespoke her for the dance.</p>
|
||||
<p>Thus she scored; but to Terry O’Sullivan the honours of the evening fell thick and fast. He shook his curls; he smiled and went easily through the seven motions for acquiring grace in your own room before an open window ten minutes each day. He danced like a faun; he introduced manner and style and atmosphere; his words came trippingly upon his tongue, and—he waltzed twice in succession with the paper-box girl that Dempsey Donovan brought.</p>
|
||||
<p>Dempsey was the leader of the association. He wore a dress suit, and could chin the bar twice with one hand. He was one of “Big Mike” O’Sullivan’s lieutenants, and was never troubled by trouble. No cop dared to arrest him. Whenever he broke a pushcart man’s head or shot a member of the Heinrick B. Sweeney Outing and Literary Association in the kneecap, an officer would drop around and say:</p>
|
||||
<p>“The Cap’n ‘d like to see ye a few minutes round to the office whin ye have time, Dempsey, me boy.”</p>
|
||||
<p>But there would be sundry gentlemen there with large gold fob chains and black cigars; and somebody would tell a funny story, and then Dempsey would go back and work half an hour with the six-pound dumbbells. So, doing a tight-rope act on a wire stretched across Niagara was a safe terpsichorean performance compared with waltzing twice with Dempsey Donovan’s paper-box girl. At 10 o’clock the jolly round face of “Big Mike” O’Sullivan shone at the door for five minutes upon the scene. He always looked in for five minutes, smiled at the girls and handed out real perfectos to the delighted boys.</p>
|
||||
<p>But there would be sundry gentlemen there with large gold fob chains and black cigars; and somebody would tell a funny story, and then Dempsey would go back and work half an hour with the six-pound dumbbells. So, doing a tightrope act on a wire stretched across Niagara was a safe terpsichorean performance compared with waltzing twice with Dempsey Donovan’s paper-box girl. At 10 o’clock the jolly round face of “Big Mike” O’Sullivan shone at the door for five minutes upon the scene. He always looked in for five minutes, smiled at the girls and handed out real perfectos to the delighted boys.</p>
|
||||
<p>Dempsey Donovan was at his elbow instantly, talking rapidly. “Big Mike” looked carefully at the dancers, smiled, shook his head and departed.</p>
|
||||
<p>The music stopped. The dancers scattered to the chairs along the walls. Terry O’Sullivan, with his entrancing bow, relinquished a pretty girl in blue to her partner and started back to find Maggie. Dempsey intercepted him in the middle of the floor.</p>
|
||||
<p>Some fine instinct that Rome must have bequeathed to us caused nearly every one to turn and look at them—there was a subtle feeling that two gladiators had met in the arena. Two or three Give and Takes with tight coat sleeves drew nearer.</p>
|
||||
<p>“One moment, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> O’Sullivan,” said Dempsey. “I hope you’re enjoying yourself. Where did you say you live?”</p>
|
||||
<p>The two gladiators were well matched. Dempsey had, perhaps, ten pounds of weight to give away. The O’Sullivan had breadth with quickness. Dempsey had a glacial eye, a dominating slit of a mouth, an indestructible jaw, a complexion like a belle’s and the coolness of a champion. The visitor showed more fire in his contempt and less control over his conspicuous sneer. They were enemies by the law written when the rocks were molten. They were each too splendid, too mighty, too incomparable to divide pre-eminence. One only must survive.</p>
|
||||
<p>The two gladiators were well matched. Dempsey had, perhaps, ten pounds of weight to give away. The O’Sullivan had breadth with quickness. Dempsey had a glacial eye, a dominating slit of a mouth, an indestructible jaw, a complexion like a belle’s and the coolness of a champion. The visitor showed more fire in his contempt and less control over his conspicuous sneer. They were enemies by the law written when the rocks were molten. They were each too splendid, too mighty, too incomparable to divide preeminence. One only must survive.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I live on Grand,” said O’Sullivan, insolently; “and no trouble to find me at home. Where do you live?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Dempsey ignored the question.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You say your name’s O’Sullivan,” he went on. “Well, ‘Big Mike’ says he never saw you before.”</p>
|
||||
@ -52,7 +52,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Maggie laid a hand on the bosom of her cheesecloth waist.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Gone to fight with Dempsey!” she said, breathlessly. “They’ve got to be stopped. Dempsey Donovan can’t fight him. Why, he’ll—he’ll kill him!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ah, what do you care?” said Rosa. “Don’t some of ’em fight every hop?”</p>
|
||||
<p>But Maggie was off, darting her zig-zag way through the maze of dancers. She burst through the rear door into the dark hall and then threw her solid shoulder against the door of the room of single combat. It gave way, and in the instant that she entered her eye caught the scene—the Board standing about with open watches; Dempsey Donovan in his shirt sleeves dancing, light-footed, with the wary grace of the modern pugilist, within easy reach of his adversary; Terry O’Sullivan standing with arms folded and a murderous look in his dark eyes. And without slacking the speed of her entrance she leaped forward with a scream—leaped in time to catch and hang upon the arm of O’Sullivan that was suddenly uplifted, and to whisk from it the long, bright stiletto that he had drawn from his bosom.</p>
|
||||
<p>But Maggie was off, darting her zigzag way through the maze of dancers. She burst through the rear door into the dark hall and then threw her solid shoulder against the door of the room of single combat. It gave way, and in the instant that she entered her eye caught the scene—the Board standing about with open watches; Dempsey Donovan in his shirt sleeves dancing, light-footed, with the wary grace of the modern pugilist, within easy reach of his adversary; Terry O’Sullivan standing with arms folded and a murderous look in his dark eyes. And without slacking the speed of her entrance she leaped forward with a scream—leaped in time to catch and hang upon the arm of O’Sullivan that was suddenly uplifted, and to whisk from it the long, bright stiletto that he had drawn from his bosom.</p>
|
||||
<p>The knife fell and rang upon the floor. Cold steel drawn in the rooms of the Give and Take Association! Such a thing had never happened before. Every one stood motionless for a minute. Andy Geoghan kicked the stiletto with the toe of his shoe curiously, like an antiquarian who has come upon some ancient weapon unknown to his learning.</p>
|
||||
<p>And then O’Sullivan hissed something unintelligible between his teeth. Dempsey and the board exchanged looks. And then Dempsey looked at O’Sullivan without anger, as one looks at a stray dog, and nodded his head in the direction of the door.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The back stairs, Giuseppi,” he said, briefly. “Somebody’ll pitch your hat down after you.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -15,7 +15,7 @@
|
||||
<p>For years the hospitable Blackwell’s had been his winter quarters. Just as his more fortunate fellow New Yorkers had bought their tickets to Palm Beach and the Riviera each winter, so Soapy had made his humble arrangements for his annual hegira to the Island. And now the time was come. On the previous night three Sabbath newspapers, distributed beneath his coat, about his ankles and over his lap, had failed to repulse the cold as he slept on his bench near the spurting fountain in the ancient square. So the Island loomed big and timely in Soapy’s mind. He scorned the provisions made in the name of charity for the city’s dependents. In Soapy’s opinion the Law was more benign than Philanthropy. There was an endless round of institutions, municipal and eleemosynary, on which he might set out and receive lodging and food accordant with the simple life. But to one of Soapy’s proud spirit the gifts of charity are encumbered. If not in coin you must pay in humiliation of spirit for every benefit received at the hands of philanthropy. As Caesar had his Brutus, every bed of charity must have its toll of a bath, every loaf of bread its compensation of a private and personal inquisition. Wherefore it is better to be a guest of the law, which though conducted by rules, does not meddle unduly with a gentleman’s private affairs.</p>
|
||||
<p>Soapy, having decided to go to the Island, at once set about accomplishing his desire. There were many easy ways of doing this. The pleasantest was to dine luxuriously at some expensive restaurant; and then, after declaring insolvency, be handed over quietly and without uproar to a policeman. An accommodating magistrate would do the rest.</p>
|
||||
<p>Soapy left his bench and strolled out of the square and across the level sea of asphalt, where Broadway and Fifth Avenue flow together. Up Broadway he turned, and halted at a glittering café, where are gathered together nightly the choicest products of the grape, the silkworm and the protoplasm.</p>
|
||||
<p>Soapy had confidence in himself from the lowest button of his vest upward. He was shaven, and his coat was decent and his neat black, ready-tied four-in-hand had been presented to him by a lady missionary on Thanksgiving Day. If he could reach a table in the restaurant unsuspected success would be his. The portion of him that would show above the table would raise no doubt in the waiter’s mind. A roasted mallard duck, thought Soapy, would be about the thing—with a bottle of Chablis, and then Camembert, a demi-tasse and a cigar. One dollar for the cigar would be enough. The total would not be so high as to call forth any supreme manifestation of revenge from the café management; and yet the meat would leave him filled and happy for the journey to his winter refuge.</p>
|
||||
<p>Soapy had confidence in himself from the lowest button of his vest upward. He was shaven, and his coat was decent and his neat black, ready-tied four-in-hand had been presented to him by a lady missionary on Thanksgiving Day. If he could reach a table in the restaurant unsuspected success would be his. The portion of him that would show above the table would raise no doubt in the waiter’s mind. A roasted mallard duck, thought Soapy, would be about the thing—with a bottle of Chablis, and then Camembert, a demitasse and a cigar. One dollar for the cigar would be enough. The total would not be so high as to call forth any supreme manifestation of revenge from the café management; and yet the meat would leave him filled and happy for the journey to his winter refuge.</p>
|
||||
<p>But as Soapy set foot inside the restaurant door the head waiter’s eye fell upon his frayed trousers and decadent shoes. Strong and ready hands turned him about and conveyed him in silence and haste to the sidewalk and averted the ignoble fate of the menaced mallard.</p>
|
||||
<p>Soapy turned off Broadway. It seemed that his route to the coveted island was not to be an epicurean one. Some other way of entering limbo must be thought of.</p>
|
||||
<p>At a corner of Sixth Avenue electric lights and cunningly displayed wares behind plate-glass made a shop window conspicuous. Soapy took a cobblestone and dashed it through the glass. People came running around the corner, a policeman in the lead. Soapy stood still, with his hands in his pockets, and smiled at the sight of brass buttons.</p>
|
||||
@ -50,7 +50,7 @@
|
||||
<p>But on an unusually quiet corner Soapy came to a standstill. Here was an old church, quaint and rambling and gabled. Through one violet-stained window a soft light glowed, where, no doubt, the organist loitered over the keys, making sure of his mastery of the coming Sabbath anthem. For there drifted out to Soapy’s ears sweet music that caught and held him transfixed against the convolutions of the iron fence.</p>
|
||||
<p>The moon was above, lustrous and serene; vehicles and pedestrians were few; sparrows twittered sleepily in the eaves—for a little while the scene might have been a country churchyard. And the anthem that the organist played cemented Soapy to the iron fence, for he had known it well in the days when his life contained such things as mothers and roses and ambitions and friends and immaculate thoughts and collars.</p>
|
||||
<p>The conjunction of Soapy’s receptive state of mind and the influences about the old church wrought a sudden and wonderful change in his soul. He viewed with swift horror the pit into which he had tumbled, the degraded days, unworthy desires, dead hopes, wrecked faculties and base motives that made up his existence.</p>
|
||||
<p>And also in a moment his heart responded thrillingly to this novel mood. An instantaneous and strong impulse moved him to battle with his desperate fate. He would pull himself out of the mire; he would make a man of himself again; he would conquer the evil that had taken possession of him. There was time; he was comparatively young yet; he would resurrect his old eager ambitions and pursue them without faltering. Those solemn but sweet organ notes had set up a revolution in him. To-morrow he would go into the roaring downtown district and find work. A fur importer had once offered him a place as driver. He would find him to-morrow and ask for the position. He would be somebody in the world. He would—</p>
|
||||
<p>And also in a moment his heart responded thrillingly to this novel mood. An instantaneous and strong impulse moved him to battle with his desperate fate. He would pull himself out of the mire; he would make a man of himself again; he would conquer the evil that had taken possession of him. There was time; he was comparatively young yet; he would resurrect his old eager ambitions and pursue them without faltering. Those solemn but sweet organ notes had set up a revolution in him. Tomorrow he would go into the roaring downtown district and find work. A fur importer had once offered him a place as driver. He would find him tomorrow and ask for the position. He would be somebody in the world. He would—</p>
|
||||
<p>Soapy felt a hand laid on his arm. He looked quickly around into the broad face of a policeman.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What are you doin’ here?” asked the officer.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Nothin’,” said Soapy.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -21,7 +21,7 @@
|
||||
<p>He engaged the room, paying for a week in advance. He was tired, he said, and would take possession at once. He counted out the money. The room had been made ready, she said, even to towels and water. As the housekeeper moved away he put, for the thousandth time, the question that he carried at the end of his tongue.</p>
|
||||
<p>“A young girl—Miss Vashner—Miss Eloise Vashner—do you remember such a one among your lodgers? She would be singing on the stage, most likely. A fair girl, of medium height and slender, with reddish, gold hair and a dark mole near her left eyebrow.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“No, I don’t remember the name. Them stage people has names they change as often as their rooms. They comes and they goes. No, I don’t call that one to mind.”</p>
|
||||
<p>No. Always no. Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the inevitable negative. So much time spent by day in questioning managers, agents, schools and choruses; by night among the audiences of theatres from all-star casts down to music halls so low that he dreaded to find what he most hoped for. He who had loved her best had tried to find her. He was sure that since her disappearance from home this great, water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its upper granules of to-day buried to-morrow in ooze and slime.</p>
|
||||
<p>No. Always no. Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the inevitable negative. So much time spent by day in questioning managers, agents, schools and choruses; by night among the audiences of theatres from all-star casts down to music halls so low that he dreaded to find what he most hoped for. He who had loved her best had tried to find her. He was sure that since her disappearance from home this great, water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its upper granules of today buried tomorrow in ooze and slime.</p>
|
||||
<p>The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of pseudo-hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the specious smile of a demirep. The sophistical comfort came in reflected gleams from the decayed furniture, the ragged brocade upholstery of a couch and two chairs, a foot-wide cheap pier glass between the two windows, from one or two gilt picture frames and a brass bedstead in a corner.</p>
|
||||
<p>The guest reclined, inert, upon a chair, while the room, confused in speech as though it were an apartment in Babel, tried to discourse to him of its divers tenantry.</p>
|
||||
<p>A polychromatic rug like some brilliant-flowered rectangular, tropical islet lay surrounded by a billowy sea of soiled matting. Upon the gay-papered wall were those pictures that pursue the homeless one from house to house—The Huguenot Lovers, The First Quarrel, The Wedding Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel’s chastely severe outline was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it was some desolate flotsam cast aside by the room’s marooned when a lucky sail had borne them to a fresh port—a trifling vase or two, pictures of actresses, a medicine bottle, some stray cards out of a deck.</p>
|
||||
@ -42,7 +42,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Why, there was a single gentleman connected with the draying business. He left owing me a week. Before him was Missis Crowder and her two children, that stayed four months; and back of them was old <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Doyle, whose sons paid for him. He kept the room six months. That goes back a year, sir, and further I do not remember.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He thanked her and crept back to his room. The room was dead. The essence that had vivified it was gone. The perfume of mignonette had departed. In its place was the old, stale odour of mouldy house furniture, of atmosphere in storage.</p>
|
||||
<p>The ebbing of his hope drained his faith. He sat staring at the yellow, singing gaslight. Soon he walked to the bed and began to tear the sheets into strips. With the blade of his knife he drove them tightly into every crevice around windows and door. When all was snug and taut he turned out the light, turned the gas full on again and laid himself gratefully upon the bed.</p>
|
||||
<p>It was <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCool’s night to go with the can for beer. So she fetched it and sat with <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Purdy in one of those subterranean retreats where house-keepers foregather and the worm dieth seldom.</p>
|
||||
<p>It was <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCool’s night to go with the can for beer. So she fetched it and sat with <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Purdy in one of those subterranean retreats where housekeepers foregather and the worm dieth seldom.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I rented out my third floor, back, this evening,” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Purdy, across a fine circle of foam. “A young man took it. He went up to bed two hours ago.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Now, did ye, <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Purdy, ma’am?” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCool, with intense admiration. “You do be a wonder for rentin’ rooms of that kind. And did ye tell him, then?” she concluded in a husky whisper, laden with mystery.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Rooms,” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Purdy, in her furriest tones, “are furnished for to rent. I did not tell him, <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCool.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -12,7 +12,7 @@
|
||||
<p>That would be pure adventure. Would you accept it? Not you. You would flush with embarrassment; you would sheepishly drop the roll and continue down Broadway, fumbling feebly for the missing button. This you would do unless you are one of the blessed few in whom the pure spirit of adventure is not dead.</p>
|
||||
<p>True adventurers have never been plentiful. They who are set down in print as such have been mostly business men with newly invented methods. They have been out after the things they wanted—golden fleeces, holy grails, lady loves, treasure, crowns and fame. The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate. A fine example was the Prodigal Son—when he started back home.</p>
|
||||
<p>Half-adventurers—brave and splendid figures—have been numerous. From the Crusades to the Palisades they have enriched the arts of history and fiction and the trade of historical fiction. But each of them had a prize to win, a goal to kick, an axe to grind, a race to run, a new thrust in tierce to deliver, a name to carve, a crow to pick—so they were not followers of true adventure.</p>
|
||||
<p>In the big city the twin spirits Romance and Adventure are always abroad seeking worthy wooers. As we roam the streets they slyly peep at us and challenge us in twenty different guises. Without knowing why, we look up suddenly to see in a window a face that seems to belong to our gallery of intimate portraits; in a sleeping thoroughfare we hear a cry of agony and fear coming from an empty and shuttered house; instead of at our familiar curb, a cab-driver deposits us before a strange door, which one, with a smile, opens for us and bids us enter; a slip of paper, written upon, flutters down to our feet from the high lattices of Chance; we exchange glances of instantaneous hate, affection and fear with hurrying strangers in the passing crowds; a sudden douse of rain—and our umbrella may be sheltering the daughter of the Full Moon and first cousin of the Sidereal System; at every corner handkerchiefs drop, fingers beckon, eyes besiege, and the lost, the lonely, the rapturous, the mysterious, the perilous, changing clues of adventure are slipped into our fingers. But few of us are willing to hold and follow them. We are grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down our backs. We pass on; and some day we come, at the end of a very dull life, to reflect that our romance has been a pallid thing of a marriage or two, a satin rosette kept in a safe-deposit drawer, and a lifelong feud with a steam radiator.</p>
|
||||
<p>In the big city the twin spirits Romance and Adventure are always abroad seeking worthy wooers. As we roam the streets they slyly peep at us and challenge us in twenty different guises. Without knowing why, we look up suddenly to see in a window a face that seems to belong to our gallery of intimate portraits; in a sleeping thoroughfare we hear a cry of agony and fear coming from an empty and shuttered house; instead of at our familiar curb, a cabdriver deposits us before a strange door, which one, with a smile, opens for us and bids us enter; a slip of paper, written upon, flutters down to our feet from the high lattices of Chance; we exchange glances of instantaneous hate, affection and fear with hurrying strangers in the passing crowds; a sudden douse of rain—and our umbrella may be sheltering the daughter of the Full Moon and first cousin of the Sidereal System; at every corner handkerchiefs drop, fingers beckon, eyes besiege, and the lost, the lonely, the rapturous, the mysterious, the perilous, changing clues of adventure are slipped into our fingers. But few of us are willing to hold and follow them. We are grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down our backs. We pass on; and some day we come, at the end of a very dull life, to reflect that our romance has been a pallid thing of a marriage or two, a satin rosette kept in a safe-deposit drawer, and a lifelong feud with a steam radiator.</p>
|
||||
<p>Rudolf Steiner was a true adventurer. Few were the evenings on which he did not go forth from his hall bedchamber in search of the unexpected and the egregious. The most interesting thing in life seemed to him to be what might lie just around the next corner. Sometimes his willingness to tempt fate led him into strange paths. Twice he had spent the night in a station-house; again and again he had found himself the dupe of ingenious and mercenary tricksters; his watch and money had been the price of one flattering allurement. But with undiminished ardour he picked up every glove cast before him into the merry lists of adventure.</p>
|
||||
<p>One evening Rudolf was strolling along a crosstown street in the older central part of the city. Two streams of people filled the sidewalks—the home-hurrying, and that restless contingent that abandons home for the specious welcome of the thousand-candle-power table d’hôte.</p>
|
||||
<p>The young adventurer was of pleasing presence, and moved serenely and watchfully. By daylight he was a salesman in a piano store. He wore his tie drawn through a topaz ring instead of fastened with a stick pin; and once he had written to the editor of a magazine that “Junie’s Love Test” by Miss Libbey, had been the book that had most influenced his life.</p>
|
||||
@ -33,7 +33,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Fainted, didn’t I?” she asked, weakly. “Well, who wouldn’t? You try going without anything to eat for three days and see!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Himmel!” exclaimed Rudolf, jumping up. “Wait till I come back.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He dashed out the green door and down the stairs. In twenty minutes he was back again, kicking at the door with his toe for her to open it. With both arms he hugged an array of wares from the grocery and the restaurant. On the table he laid them—bread and butter, cold meats, cakes, pies, pickles, oysters, a roasted chicken, a bottle of milk and one of red-hot tea.</p>
|
||||
<p>“This is ridiculous,” said Rudolf, blusteringly, “to go without eating. You must quit making election bets of this kind. Supper is ready.” He helped her to a chair at the table and asked: “Is there a cup for the tea?” “On the shelf by the window,” she answered. When he turned again with the cup he saw her, with eyes shining rapturously, beginning upon a huge Dill pickle that she had rooted out from the paper bags with a woman’s unerring instinct. He took it from her, laughingly, and poured the cup full of milk. “Drink that first” he ordered, “and then you shall have some tea, and then a chicken wing. If you are very good you shall have a pickle to-morrow. And now, if you’ll allow me to be your guest we’ll have supper.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“This is ridiculous,” said Rudolf, blusteringly, “to go without eating. You must quit making election bets of this kind. Supper is ready.” He helped her to a chair at the table and asked: “Is there a cup for the tea?” “On the shelf by the window,” she answered. When he turned again with the cup he saw her, with eyes shining rapturously, beginning upon a huge Dill pickle that she had rooted out from the paper bags with a woman’s unerring instinct. He took it from her, laughingly, and poured the cup full of milk. “Drink that first” he ordered, “and then you shall have some tea, and then a chicken wing. If you are very good you shall have a pickle tomorrow. And now, if you’ll allow me to be your guest we’ll have supper.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He drew up the other chair. The tea brightened the girl’s eyes and brought back some of her colour. She began to eat with a sort of dainty ferocity like some starved wild animal. She seemed to regard the young man’s presence and the aid he had rendered her as a natural thing—not as though she undervalued the conventions; but as one whose great stress gave her the right to put aside the artificial for the human. But gradually, with the return of strength and comfort, came also a sense of the little conventions that belong; and she began to tell him her little story. It was one of a thousand such as the city yawns at every day—the shop girl’s story of insufficient wages, further reduced by “fines” that go to swell the store’s profits; of time lost through illness; and then of lost positions, lost hope, and—the knock of the adventurer upon the green door.</p>
|
||||
<p>But to Rudolf the history sounded as big as the Iliad or the crisis in “Junie’s Love Test.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“To think of you going through all that,” he exclaimed.</p>
|
||||
@ -44,9 +44,9 @@
|
||||
<p>“I am glad of that,” said the girl, promptly; and somehow it pleased the young man to hear that she approved of his bereft condition.</p>
|
||||
<p>Very suddenly her eyelids dropped and she sighed deeply.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m awfully sleepy,” she said, “and I feel so good.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Then Rudolf rose and took his hat. “I’ll say good-night. A long night’s sleep will be fine for you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He held out his hand, and she took it and said “good-night.” But her eyes asked a question so eloquently, so frankly and pathetically that he answered it with words.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, I’m coming back to-morrow to see how you are getting along. You can’t get rid of me so easily.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Then Rudolf rose and took his hat. “I’ll say good night. A long night’s sleep will be fine for you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He held out his hand, and she took it and said “good night.” But her eyes asked a question so eloquently, so frankly and pathetically that he answered it with words.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, I’m coming back tomorrow to see how you are getting along. You can’t get rid of me so easily.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Then, at the door, as though the way of his coming had been so much less important than the fact that he had come, she asked: “How did you come to knock at my door?”</p>
|
||||
<p>He looked at her for a moment, remembering the cards, and felt a sudden jealous pain. What if they had fallen into other hands as adventurous as his? Quickly he decided that she must never know the truth. He would never let her know that he was aware of the strange expedient to which she had been driven by her great distress.</p>
|
||||
<p>“One of our piano tuners lives in this house,” he said. “I knocked at your door by mistake.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -8,9 +8,9 @@
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-love-philtre-of-ikey-schoenstein" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein</h2>
|
||||
<p>The Blue Light Drug Store is downtown, between the Bowery and First Avenue, where the distance between the two streets is the shortest. The Blue Light does not consider that pharmacy is a thing of bric-a-brac, scent and ice-cream soda. If you ask it for pain-killer it will not give you a bonbon.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Blue Light scorns the labour-saving arts of modern pharmacy. It macerates its opium and percolates its own laudanum and paregoric. To this day pills are made behind its tall prescription desk—pills rolled out on its own pill-tile, divided with a spatula, rolled with the finger and thumb, dusted with calcined magnesia and delivered in little round pasteboard pill-boxes. The store is on a corner about which coveys of ragged-plumed, hilarious children play and become candidates for the cough drops and soothing syrups that wait for them inside.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ikey Schoenstein was the night clerk of the Blue Light and the friend of his customers. Thus it is on the East Side, where the heart of pharmacy is not glacé. There, as it should be, the druggist is a counsellor, a confessor, an adviser, an able and willing missionary and mentor whose learning is respected, whose occult wisdom is venerated and whose medicine is often poured, untasted, into the gutter. Therefore Ikey’s corniform, be-spectacled nose and narrow, knowledge-bowed figure was well known in the vicinity of the Blue Light, and his advice and notice were much desired.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Blue Light Drug Store is downtown, between the Bowery and First Avenue, where the distance between the two streets is the shortest. The Blue Light does not consider that pharmacy is a thing of bric-a-brac, scent and ice-cream soda. If you ask it for painkiller it will not give you a bonbon.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Blue Light scorns the laboursaving arts of modern pharmacy. It macerates its opium and percolates its own laudanum and paregoric. To this day pills are made behind its tall prescription desk—pills rolled out on its own pill-tile, divided with a spatula, rolled with the finger and thumb, dusted with calcined magnesia and delivered in little round pasteboard pillboxes. The store is on a corner about which coveys of ragged-plumed, hilarious children play and become candidates for the cough drops and soothing syrups that wait for them inside.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ikey Schoenstein was the night clerk of the Blue Light and the friend of his customers. Thus it is on the East Side, where the heart of pharmacy is not glacé. There, as it should be, the druggist is a counsellor, a confessor, an adviser, an able and willing missionary and mentor whose learning is respected, whose occult wisdom is venerated and whose medicine is often poured, untasted, into the gutter. Therefore Ikey’s corniform, bespectacled nose and narrow, knowledge-bowed figure was well known in the vicinity of the Blue Light, and his advice and notice were much desired.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ikey roomed and breakfasted at <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Riddle’s two squares away. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Riddle had a daughter named Rosy. The circumlocution has been in vain—you must have guessed it—Ikey adored Rosy. She tinctured all his thoughts; she was the compound extract of all that was chemically pure and officinal—the dispensatory contained nothing equal to her. But Ikey was timid, and his hopes remained insoluble in the menstruum of his backwardness and fears. Behind his counter he was a superior being, calmly conscious of special knowledge and worth; outside he was a weak-kneed, purblind, motorman-cursed rambler, with ill-fitting clothes stained with chemicals and smelling of socotrine aloes and valerianate of ammonia.</p>
|
||||
<p>The fly in Ikey’s ointment (thrice welcome, pat trope!) was Chunk McGowan.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> McGowan was also striving to catch the bright smiles tossed about by Rosy. But he was no outfielder as Ikey was; he picked them off the bat. At the same time he was Ikey’s friend and customer, and often dropped in at the Blue Light Drug Store to have a bruise painted with iodine or get a cut rubber-plastered after a pleasant evening spent along the Bowery.</p>
|
||||
@ -18,12 +18,12 @@
|
||||
<p>“Ikey,” said he, when his friend had fetched his mortar and sat opposite, grinding gum benzoin to a powder, “get busy with your ear. It’s drugs for me if you’ve got the line I need.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Ikey scanned the countenance of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McGowan for the usual evidences of conflict, but found none.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Take your coat off,” he ordered. “I guess already that you have been stuck in the ribs with a knife. I have many times told you those Dagoes would do you up.”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> McGowan smiled. “Not them,” he said. “Not any Dagoes. But you’ve located the diagnosis all right enough—it’s under my coat, near the ribs. Say! Ikey—Rosy and me are goin’ to run away and get married to-night.”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> McGowan smiled. “Not them,” he said. “Not any Dagoes. But you’ve located the diagnosis all right enough—it’s under my coat, near the ribs. Say! Ikey—Rosy and me are goin’ to run away and get married tonight.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Ikey’s left forefinger was doubled over the edge of the mortar, holding it steady. He gave it a wild rap with the pestle, but felt it not. Meanwhile <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McGowan’s smile faded to a look of perplexed gloom.</p>
|
||||
<p>“That is,” he continued, “if she keeps in the notion until the time comes. We’ve been layin’ pipes for the getaway for two weeks. One day she says she will; the same evenin’ she says nixy. We’ve agreed on to-night, and Rosy’s stuck to the affirmative this time for two whole days. But it’s five hours yet till the time, and I’m afraid she’ll stand me up when it comes to the scratch.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“That is,” he continued, “if she keeps in the notion until the time comes. We’ve been layin’ pipes for the getaway for two weeks. One day she says she will; the same evenin’ she says nixy. We’ve agreed on tonight, and Rosy’s stuck to the affirmative this time for two whole days. But it’s five hours yet till the time, and I’m afraid she’ll stand me up when it comes to the scratch.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You said you wanted drugs,” remarked Ikey.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> McGowan looked ill at ease and harassed—a condition opposed to his usual line of demeanour. He made a patent-medicine almanac into a roll and fitted it with unprofitable carefulness about his finger.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I wouldn’t have this double handicap make a false start to-night for a million,” he said. “I’ve got a little flat up in Harlem all ready, with chrysanthemums on the table and a kettle ready to boil. And I’ve engaged a pulpit pounder to be ready at his house for us at 9:30. It’s got to come off. And if Rosy don’t change her mind again!”—<abbr>Mr.</abbr> McGowan ceased, a prey to his doubts.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I wouldn’t have this double handicap make a false start tonight for a million,” he said. “I’ve got a little flat up in Harlem all ready, with chrysanthemums on the table and a kettle ready to boil. And I’ve engaged a pulpit pounder to be ready at his house for us at 9:30. It’s got to come off. And if Rosy don’t change her mind again!”—<abbr>Mr.</abbr> McGowan ceased, a prey to his doubts.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I don’t see then yet,” said Ikey, shortly, “what makes it that you talk of drugs, or what I can be doing about it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Old man Riddle don’t like me a little bit,” went on the uneasy suitor, bent upon marshalling his arguments. “For a week he hasn’t let Rosy step outside the door with me. If it wasn’t for losin’ a boarder they’d have bounced me long ago. I’m makin’ $20 a week and she’ll never regret flyin’ the coop with Chunk McGowan.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You will excuse me, Chunk,” said Ikey. “I must make a prescription that is to be called for soon.”</p>
|
||||
@ -31,14 +31,14 @@
|
||||
<p>Ikey’s lip beneath his nose curled with the scorn of superior enlightenment; but before he could answer, McGowan continued:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Tim Lacy told me he got some once from a croaker uptown and fed ’em to his girl in soda water. From the very first dose he was ace-high and everybody else looked like thirty cents to her. They was married in less than two weeks.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Strong and simple was Chunk McGowan. A better reader of men than Ikey was could have seen that his tough frame was strung upon fine wires. Like a good general who was about to invade the enemy’s territory he was seeking to guard every point against possible failure.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I thought,” went on Chunk hopefully, “that if I had one of them powders to give Rosy when I see her at supper to-night it might brace her up and keep her from reneging on the proposition to skip. I guess she don’t need a mule team to drag her away, but women are better at coaching than they are at running bases. If the stuff’ll work just for a couple of hours it’ll do the trick.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I thought,” went on Chunk hopefully, “that if I had one of them powders to give Rosy when I see her at supper tonight it might brace her up and keep her from reneging on the proposition to skip. I guess she don’t need a mule team to drag her away, but women are better at coaching than they are at running bases. If the stuff’ll work just for a couple of hours it’ll do the trick.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“When is this foolishness of running away to be happening?” asked Ikey.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Nine o’clock,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McGowan. “Supper’s at seven. At eight Rosy goes to bed with a headache. At nine old Parvenzano lets me through to his back yard, where there’s a board off Riddle’s fence, next door. I go under her window and help her down the fire-escape. We’ve got to make it early on the preacher’s account. It’s all dead easy if Rosy don’t balk when the flag drops. Can you fix me one of them powders, Ikey?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Ikey Schoenstein rubbed his nose slowly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Chunk,” said he, “it is of drugs of that nature that pharmaceutists must have much carefulness. To you alone of my acquaintance would I intrust a powder like that. But for you I shall make it, and you shall see how it makes Rosy to think of you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Chunk,” said he, “it is of drugs of that nature that pharmaceutists must have much carefulness. To you alone of my acquaintance would I entrust a powder like that. But for you I shall make it, and you shall see how it makes Rosy to think of you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Ikey went behind the prescription desk. There he crushed to a powder two soluble tablets, each containing a quarter of a grain of morphia. To them he added a little sugar of milk to increase the bulk, and folded the mixture neatly in a white paper. Taken by an adult this powder would insure several hours of heavy slumber without danger to the sleeper. This he handed to Chunk McGowan, telling him to administer it in a liquid if possible, and received the hearty thanks of the backyard Lochinvar.</p>
|
||||
<p>The subtlety of Ikey’s action becomes apparent upon recital of his subsequent move. He sent a messenger for <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Riddle and disclosed the plans of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McGowan for eloping with Rosy. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Riddle was a stout man, brick-dusty of complexion and sudden in action.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Much obliged,” he said, briefly, to Ikey. “The lazy Irish loafer! My own room’s just above Rosy’s. I’ll just go up there myself after supper and load the shot-gun and wait. If he comes in my back yard he’ll go away in a ambulance instead of a bridal chaise.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Much obliged,” he said, briefly, to Ikey. “The lazy Irish loafer! My own room’s just above Rosy’s. I’ll just go up there myself after supper and load the shotgun and wait. If he comes in my back yard he’ll go away in a ambulance instead of a bridal chaise.”</p>
|
||||
<p>With Rosy held in the clutches of Morpheus for a many-hours deep slumber, and the bloodthirsty parent waiting, armed and forewarned, Ikey felt that his rival was close, indeed, upon discomfiture.</p>
|
||||
<p>All night in the Blue Light Drug Store he waited at his duties for chance news of the tragedy, but none came.</p>
|
||||
<p>At eight o’clock in the morning the day clerk arrived and Ikey started hurriedly for <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Riddle’s to learn the outcome. And, lo! as he stepped out of the store who but Chunk McGowan sprang from a passing street car and grasped his hand—Chunk McGowan with a victor’s smile and flushed with joy.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -8,7 +8,7 @@
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-romance-of-a-busy-broker" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Romance of a Busy Broker</h2>
|
||||
<p>Pitcher, confidential clerk in the office of Harvey Maxwell, broker, allowed a look of mild interest and surprise to visit his usually expressionless countenance when his employer briskly entered at half past nine in company with his young lady stenographer. With a snappy “Good-morning, Pitcher,” Maxwell dashed at his desk as though he were intending to leap over it, and then plunged into the great heap of letters and telegrams waiting there for him.</p>
|
||||
<p>Pitcher, confidential clerk in the office of Harvey Maxwell, broker, allowed a look of mild interest and surprise to visit his usually expressionless countenance when his employer briskly entered at half past nine in company with his young lady stenographer. With a snappy “Good morning, Pitcher,” Maxwell dashed at his desk as though he were intending to leap over it, and then plunged into the great heap of letters and telegrams waiting there for him.</p>
|
||||
<p>The young lady had been Maxwell’s stenographer for a year. She was beautiful in a way that was decidedly unstenographic. She forewent the pomp of the alluring pompadour. She wore no chains, bracelets or lockets. She had not the air of being about to accept an invitation to luncheon. Her dress was grey and plain, but it fitted her figure with fidelity and discretion. In her neat black turban hat was the gold-green wing of a macaw. On this morning she was softly and shyly radiant. Her eyes were dreamily bright, her cheeks genuine peachblow, her expression a happy one, tinged with reminiscence.</p>
|
||||
<p>Pitcher, still mildly curious, noticed a difference in her ways this morning. Instead of going straight into the adjoining room, where her desk was, she lingered, slightly irresolute, in the outer office. Once she moved over by Maxwell’s desk, near enough for him to be aware of her presence.</p>
|
||||
<p>The machine sitting at that desk was no longer a man; it was a busy New York broker, moved by buzzing wheels and uncoiling springs.</p>
|
||||
@ -26,7 +26,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“What position?” he asked, with a frown.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Position of stenographer,” said Pitcher. “You told me yesterday to call them up and have one sent over this morning.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You are losing your mind, Pitcher,” said Maxwell. “Why should I have given you any such instructions? Miss Leslie has given perfect satisfaction during the year she has been here. The place is hers as long as she chooses to retain it. There’s no place open here, madam. Countermand that order with the agency, Pitcher, and don’t bring any more of ’em in here.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The silver heart left the office, swinging and banging itself independently against the office furniture as it indignantly departed. Pitcher seized a moment to remark to the bookkeeper that the “old man” seemed to get more absent-minded and forgetful every day of the world.</p>
|
||||
<p>The silver heart left the office, swinging and banging itself independently against the office furniture as it indignantly departed. Pitcher seized a moment to remark to the bookkeeper that the “old man” seemed to get more absentminded and forgetful every day of the world.</p>
|
||||
<p>The rush and pace of business grew fiercer and faster. On the floor they were pounding half a dozen stocks in which Maxwell’s customers were heavy investors. Orders to buy and sell were coming and going as swift as the flight of swallows. Some of his own holdings were imperilled, and the man was working like some high-geared, delicate, strong machine—strung to full tension, going at full speed, accurate, never hesitating, with the proper word and decision and act ready and prompt as clockwork. Stocks and bonds, loans and mortgages, margins and securities—here was a world of finance, and there was no room in it for the human world or the world of nature.</p>
|
||||
<p>When the luncheon hour drew near there came a slight lull in the uproar.</p>
|
||||
<p>Maxwell stood by his desk with his hands full of telegrams and memoranda, with a fountain pen over his right ear and his hair hanging in disorderly strings over his forehead. His window was open, for the beloved janitress Spring had turned on a little warmth through the waking registers of the earth.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -26,7 +26,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Anna Held’ll jump at it,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Skidder to himself, putting his feet up against the lambrequins and disappearing in a cloud of smoke like an aerial cuttlefish.</p>
|
||||
<p>Presently the tocsin call of “Clara!” sounded to the world the state of Miss Leeson’s purse. A dark goblin seized her, mounted a Stygian stairway, thrust her into a vault with a glimmer of light in its top and muttered the menacing and cabalistic words “Two dollars!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ll take it!” sighed Miss Leeson, sinking down upon the squeaky iron bed.</p>
|
||||
<p>Every day Miss Leeson went out to work. At night she brought home papers with handwriting on them and made copies with her typewriter. Sometimes she had no work at night, and then she would sit on the steps of the high stoop with the other roomers. Miss Leeson was not intended for a sky-light room when the plans were drawn for her creation. She was gay-hearted and full of tender, whimsical fancies. Once she let <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Skidder read to her three acts of his great (unpublished) comedy, “It’s No Kid; or, The Heir of the Subway.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Every day Miss Leeson went out to work. At night she brought home papers with handwriting on them and made copies with her typewriter. Sometimes she had no work at night, and then she would sit on the steps of the high stoop with the other roomers. Miss Leeson was not intended for a skylight room when the plans were drawn for her creation. She was gay-hearted and full of tender, whimsical fancies. Once she let <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Skidder read to her three acts of his great (unpublished) comedy, “It’s No Kid; or, The Heir of the Subway.”</p>
|
||||
<p>There was rejoicing among the gentlemen roomers whenever Miss Leeson had time to sit on the steps for an hour or two. But Miss Longnecker, the tall blonde who taught in a public school and said, “Well, really!” to everything you said, sat on the top step and sniffed. And Miss Dorn, who shot at the moving ducks at Coney every Sunday and worked in a department store, sat on the bottom step and sniffed. Miss Leeson sat on the middle step and the men would quickly group around her.</p>
|
||||
<p>Especially <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Skidder, who had cast her in his mind for the star part in a private, romantic (unspoken) drama in real life. And especially <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Hoover, who was forty-five, fat, flush and foolish. And especially very young <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Evans, who set up a hollow cough to induce her to ask him to leave off cigarettes. The men voted her “the funniest and jolliest ever,” but the sniffs on the top step and the lower step were implacable.</p>
|
||||
<p>I pray you let the drama halt while Chorus stalks to the footlights and drops an epicedian tear upon the fatness of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Hoover. Tune the pipes to the tragedy of tallow, the bane of bulk, the calamity of corpulence. Tried out, Falstaff might have rendered more romance to the ton than would have Romeo’s rickety ribs to the ounce. A lover may sigh, but he must not puff. To the train of Momus are the fat men remanded. In vain beats the faithfullest heart above a 52-inch belt. Avaunt, Hoover! Hoover, forty-five, flush and foolish, might carry off Helen herself; Hoover, forty-five, flush, foolish and fat is meat for perdition. There was never a chance for you, Hoover.</p>
|
||||
@ -48,7 +48,7 @@
|
||||
<p>She was too weak to light the lamp or to undress. She fell upon the iron cot, her fragile body scarcely hollowing the worn springs. And in that Erebus of the skylight room, she slowly raised her heavy eyelids, and smiled.</p>
|
||||
<p>For Billy Jackson was shining down on her, calm and bright and constant through the skylight. There was no world about her. She was sunk in a pit of blackness, with but that small square of pallid light framing the star that she had so whimsically and oh, so ineffectually named. Miss Longnecker must be right; it was Gamma, of the constellation Cassiopeia, and not Billy Jackson. And yet she could not let it be Gamma.</p>
|
||||
<p>As she lay on her back she tried twice to raise her arm. The third time she got two thin fingers to her lips and blew a kiss out of the black pit to Billy Jackson. Her arm fell back limply.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Good-bye, Billy,” she murmured faintly. “You’re millions of miles away and you won’t even twinkle once. But you kept where I could see you most of the time up there when there wasn’t anything else but darkness to look at, didn’t you? … Millions of miles … Good-bye, Billy Jackson.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Goodbye, Billy,” she murmured faintly. “You’re millions of miles away and you won’t even twinkle once. But you kept where I could see you most of the time up there when there wasn’t anything else but darkness to look at, didn’t you? … Millions of miles … Goodbye, Billy Jackson.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Clara, the coloured maid, found the door locked at 10 the next day, and they forced it open. Vinegar, and the slapping of wrists and burnt feathers proving of no avail, some one ran to ‘phone for an ambulance.</p>
|
||||
<p>In due time it backed up to the door with much gong-clanging, and the capable young medico, in his white linen coat, ready, active, confident, with his smooth face half debonair, half grim, danced up the steps.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ambulance call to 49,” he said briefly. “What’s the trouble?”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -22,7 +22,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Whist!” says Tobin to me, “do ye hear that?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Look out,” goes on the palmist, “for a dark man and a light woman; for they’ll both bring ye trouble. Ye’ll make a voyage upon the water very soon, and have a financial loss. I see one line that brings good luck. There’s a man coming into your life who will fetch ye good fortune. Ye’ll know him when ye see him by his crooked nose.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Is his name set down?” asks Tobin. “ ’Twill be convenient in the way of greeting when he backs up to dump off the good luck.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“His name,” says the palmist, thoughtful looking, “is not spelled out by the lines, but they indicate ’tis a long one, and the letter ‘o’ should be in it. There’s no more to tell. Good-evening. Don’t block up the door.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“His name,” says the palmist, thoughtful looking, “is not spelled out by the lines, but they indicate ’tis a long one, and the letter ‘o’ should be in it. There’s no more to tell. Good evening. Don’t block up the door.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ’Tis wonderful how she knows,” says Tobin as we walk to the pier.</p>
|
||||
<p>As we squeezed through the gates a nigger man sticks his lighted segar against Tobin’s ear, and there is trouble. Tobin hammers his neck, and the women squeal, and by presence of mind I drag the little man out of the way before the police comes. Tobin is always in an ugly mood when enjoying himself.</p>
|
||||
<p>On the boat going back, when the man calls “Who wants the good-looking waiter?” Tobin tried to plead guilty, feeling the desire to blow the foam off a crock of suds, but when he felt in his pocket he found himself discharged for lack of evidence. Somebody had disturbed his change during the commotion. So we sat, dry, upon the stools, listening to the Dagoes fiddling on deck. If anything, Tobin was lower in spirits and less congenial with his misfortunes than when we started.</p>
|
||||
@ -36,9 +36,9 @@
|
||||
<p>The way Tobin put it, it did seem to corroborate the art of prediction, though it looked to me that these accidents could happen to any one at Coney without the implication of palmistry.</p>
|
||||
<p>Tobin got up and walked around on deck, looking close at the passengers out of his little red eyes. I asked him the interpretation of his movements. Ye never know what Tobin has in his mind until he begins to carry it out.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ye should know,” says he, “I’m working out the salvation promised by the lines in me palm. I’m looking for the crooked-nose man that’s to bring the good luck. ’Tis all that will save us. Jawn, did ye ever see a straighter-nosed gang of hellions in the days of your life?”</p>
|
||||
<p>’Twas the nine-thirty boat, and we landed and walked up-town through Twenty-second Street, Tobin being without his hat.</p>
|
||||
<p>On a street corner, standing under a gas-light and looking over the elevated road at the moon, was a man. A long man he was, dressed decent, with a segar between his teeth, and I saw that his nose made two twists from bridge to end, like the wriggle of a snake. Tobin saw it at the same time, and I heard him breathe hard like a horse when you take the saddle off. He went straight up to the man, and I went with him.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Good-night to ye,” Tobin says to the man. The man takes out his segar and passes the compliments, sociable.</p>
|
||||
<p>’Twas the nine-thirty boat, and we landed and walked uptown through Twenty-second Street, Tobin being without his hat.</p>
|
||||
<p>On a street corner, standing under a gaslight and looking over the elevated road at the moon, was a man. A long man he was, dressed decent, with a segar between his teeth, and I saw that his nose made two twists from bridge to end, like the wriggle of a snake. Tobin saw it at the same time, and I heard him breathe hard like a horse when you take the saddle off. He went straight up to the man, and I went with him.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Good night to ye,” Tobin says to the man. The man takes out his segar and passes the compliments, sociable.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Would ye hand us your name,” asks Tobin, “and let us look at the size of it? It may be our duty to become acquainted with ye.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“My name” says the man, polite, “is Friedenhausman—Maximus G. Friedenhausman.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ’Tis the right length,” says Tobin. “Do you spell it with an ‘o’ anywhere down the stretch of it?”</p>
|
||||
@ -51,7 +51,7 @@
|
||||
<p>The man stopped smoking and looked at me.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Have ye any amendments,” he asks, “to offer to that statement, or are ye one too? I thought by the looks of ye ye might have him in charge.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“None,” says I to him, “except that as one horseshoe resembles another so are ye the picture of good luck as predicted by the hand of me friend. If not, then the lines of Danny’s hand may have been crossed, I don’t know.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“There’s two of ye,” says the man with the nose, looking up and down for the sight of a policeman. “I’ve enjoyed your company immense. Good-night.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“There’s two of ye,” says the man with the nose, looking up and down for the sight of a policeman. “I’ve enjoyed your company immense. Good night.”</p>
|
||||
<p>With that he shoves his segar in his mouth and moves across the street, stepping fast. But Tobin sticks close to one side of him and me at the other.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What!” says he, stopping on the opposite sidewalk and pushing back his hat; “do ye follow me? I tell ye,” he says, very loud, “I’m proud to have met ye. But it is my desire to be rid of ye. I am off to me home.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Do,” says Tobin, leaning against his sleeve. “Do be off to your home. And I will sit at the door of it till ye come out in the morning. For the dependence is upon ye to obviate the curse of the nigger man and the blonde lady and the financial loss of the one-sixty-five.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
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