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Title: The Voice of the City: Further Stories of the Four Million


Author: O. Henry

Release date: September 1, 1998 [eBook #1444]
                Most recently updated: October 21, 2021

Language: English



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THE VOICE OF THE CITY

Further Stories of the Four Million

by

O. HENRY

Author of "The Four Million," "The Trimmed Lamp," "Strictly
Business," "Whirligigs," "Sixes and Sevens," Etc.

1919







CONTENTS

       I. THE VOICE OF THE CITY
      II. THE COMPLETE LIFE OF JOHN HOPKINS
     III. A LICKPENNY LOVER
      IV. DOUGHERTY'S EYE-OPENER
       V. "LITTLE SPECK IN GARNERED FRUIT"
      VI. THE HARBINGER
     VII. WHILE THE AUTO WAITS
    VIII. A COMEDY IN RUBBER
      IX. ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS
       X. THE DEFEAT OF THE CITY
      XI. THE SHOCKS OF DOOM
     XII. THE PLUTONIAN FIRE
    XIII. NEMESIS AND THE CANDY MAN
     XIV. SQUARING THE CIRCLE
      XV. ROSES, RUSES AND ROMANCE
     XVI. THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT
    XVII. THE EASTER OF THE SOUL
   XVIII. THE FOOL-KILLER
     XIX. TRANSIENTS IN ARCADIA
      XX. THE RATHSKELLER AND THE ROSE
     XXI. THE CLARION CALL
    XXII. EXTRADITED FROM BOHEMIA
   XXIII. A PHILISTINE IN BOHEMIA
    XXIV. FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS ABILITY
     XXV. THE MEMENTO





I

THE VOICE OF THE CITY


Twenty-five years ago the school children used to chant their
lessons. The manner of their delivery was a singsong recitative
between the utterance of an Episcopal minister and the drone of a
tired sawmill. I mean no disrespect. We must have lumber and sawdust.

I remember one beautiful and instructive little lyric that emanated
from the physiology class. The most striking line of it was this:

"The shin-bone is the long-est bone in the hu-man bod-y."

What an inestimable boon it would have been if all the corporeal
and spiritual facts pertaining to man had thus been tunefully and
logically inculcated in our youthful minds! But what we gained in
anatomy, music and philosophy was meagre.

The other day I became confused. I needed a ray of light. I turned
back to those school days for aid. But in all the nasal harmonies
we whined forth from those hard benches I could not recall one that
treated of the voice of agglomerated mankind.

In other words, of the composite vocal message of massed humanity.

In other words, of the Voice of a Big City.

Now, the individual voice is not lacking. We can understand the
song of the poet, the ripple of the brook, the meaning of the man
who wants $5 until next Monday, the inscriptions on the tombs of
the Pharaohs, the language of flowers, the "step lively" of the
conductor, and the prelude of the milk cans at 4 A. M. Certain
large-eared ones even assert that they are wise to the vibrations of
the tympanum produced by concussion of the air emanating from Mr. H.
James. But who can comprehend the meaning of the voice of the city?

I went out for to see.

First, I asked Aurelia. She wore white Swiss and a hat with flowers
on it, and ribbons and ends of things fluttered here and there.

"Tell me," I said, stammeringly, for I have no voice of my own, "what
does this big--er--enormous--er--whopping city say? It must have a
voice of some kind. Does it ever speak to you? How do you interpret
its meaning? It is a tremendous mass, but it must have a key."

"Like a Saratoga trunk?" asked Aurelia.

"No," said I. "Please do not refer to the lid. I have a fancy that
every city has a voice. Each one has something to say to the one who
can hear it. What does the big one say to you?"

"All cities," said Aurelia, judicially, "say the same thing. When
they get through saying it there is an echo from Philadelphia. So,
they are unanimous."

"Here are 4,000,000 people," said I, scholastically, "compressed upon
an island, which is mostly lamb surrounded by Wall Street water. The
conjunction of so many units into so small a space must result in an
identity--or, or rather a homogeneity that finds its oral expression
through a common channel. It is, as you might say, a consensus of
translation, concentrating in a crystallized, general idea which
reveals itself in what may be termed the Voice of the City. Can you
tell me what it is?"

Aurelia smiled wonderfully. She sat on the high stoop. A spray
of insolent ivy bobbed against her right ear. A ray of impudent
moonlight flickered upon her nose. But I was adamant, nickel-plated.

"I must go and find out," I said, "what is the Voice of this City.
Other cities have voices. It is an assignment. I must have it. New
York," I continued, in a rising tone, "had better not hand me a cigar
and say: 'Old man, I can't talk for publication.' No other city acts
in that way. Chicago says, unhesitatingly, 'I will;' I Philadelphia
says, 'I should;' New Orleans says, 'I used to;' Louisville says,
'Don't care if I do;' St. Louis says, 'Excuse me;' Pittsburg says,
'Smoke up.' Now, New York--"

Aurelia smiled.

"Very well," said I, "I must go elsewhere and find out."

I went into a palace, tile-floored, cherub-ceilinged and square with
the cop. I put my foot on the brass rail and said to Billy Magnus,
the best bartender in the diocese:

"Billy, you've lived in New York a long time--what kind of a
song-and-dance does this old town give you? What I mean is, doesn't
the gab of it seem to kind of bunch up and slide over the bar to you
in a sort of amalgamated tip that hits off the burg in a kind of an
epigram with a dash of bitters and a slice of--"

"Excuse me a minute," said Billy, "somebody's punching the button at
the side door."

He went away; came back with an empty tin bucket; again vanished with
it full; returned and said to me:

"That was Mame. She rings twice. She likes a glass of beer for
supper. Her and the kid. If you ever saw that little skeesicks
of mine brace up in his high chair and take his beer and-- But,
say, what was yours? I get kind of excited when I hear them two
rings--was it the baseball score or gin fizz you asked for?"

"Ginger ale," I answered.

I walked up to Broadway. I saw a cop on the corner. The cops take
kids up, women across, and men in. I went up to him.

"If I'm not exceeding the spiel limit," I said, "let me ask you. You
see New York during its vocative hours. It is the function of you and
your brother cops to preserve the acoustics of the city. There must
be a civic voice that is intelligible to you. At night during your
lonely rounds you must have heard it. What is the epitome of its
turmoil and shouting? What does the city say to you?"

"Friend," said the policeman, spinning his club, "it don't say
nothing. I get my orders from the man higher up. Say, I guess you're
all right. Stand here for a few minutes and keep an eye open for the
roundsman."

The cop melted into the darkness of the side street. In ten minutes
he had returned.

"Married last Tuesday," he said, half gruffly. "You know how they
are. She comes to that corner at nine every night for a--comes to say
'hello!' I generally manage to be there. Say, what was it you asked
me a bit ago--what's doing in the city? Oh, there's a roof-garden or
two just opened, twelve blocks up."

I crossed a crow's-foot of street-car tracks, and skirted the edge
of an umbrageous park. An artificial Diana, gilded, heroic, poised,
wind-ruled, on the tower, shimmered in the clear light of her
namesake in the sky. Along came my poet, hurrying, hatted, haired,
emitting dactyls, spondees and dactylis. I seized him.

"Bill," said I (in the magazine he is Cleon), "give me a lift. I am
on an assignment to find out the Voice of the city. You see, it's a
special order. Ordinarily a symposium comprising the views of Henry
Clews, John L. Sullivan, Edwin Markham, May Irwin and Charles Schwab
would be about all. But this is a different matter. We want a broad,
poetic, mystic vocalization of the city's soul and meaning. You are
the very chap to give me a hint. Some years ago a man got at the
Niagara Falls and gave us its pitch. The note was about two feet
below the lowest G on the piano. Now, you can't put New York into a
note unless it's better indorsed than that. But give me an idea of
what it would say if it should speak. It is bound to be a mighty and
far-reaching utterance. To arrive at it we must take the tremendous
crash of the chords of the day's traffic, the laughter and music
of the night, the solemn tones of Dr. Parkhurst, the rag-time, the
weeping, the stealthy hum of cab-wheels, the shout of the press
agent, the tinkle of fountains on the roof gardens, the hullabaloo
of the strawberry vender and the covers of _Everybody's Magazine_,
the whispers of the lovers in the parks--all these sounds must go
into your Voice--not combined, but mixed, and of the mixture an
essence made; and of the essence an extract--an audible extract, of
which one drop shall form the thing we seek."

"Do you remember," asked the poet, with a chuckle, "that California
girl we met at Stiver's studio last week? Well, I'm on my way to see
her. She repeated that poem of mine, 'The Tribute of Spring,' word
for word. She's the smartest proposition in this town just at
present. Say, how does this confounded tie look? I spoiled four
before I got one to set right."

"And the Voice that I asked you about?" I inquired.

"Oh, she doesn't sing," said Cleon. "But you ought to hear her recite
my 'Angel of the Inshore Wind.'"

I passed on. I cornered a newsboy and he flashed at me prophetic pink
papers that outstripped the news by two revolutions of the clock's
longest hand.

"Son," I said, while I pretended to chase coins in my penny pocket,
"doesn't it sometimes seem to you as if the city ought to be able to
talk? All these ups and downs and funny business and queer things
happening every day--what would it say, do you think, if it could
speak?"

"Quit yer kiddin'," said the boy. "Wot paper yer want? I got no time
to waste. It's Mag's birthday, and I want thirty cents to git her a
present."

Here was no interpreter of the city's mouthpiece. I bought a paper,
and consigned its undeclared treaties, its premeditated murders and
unfought battles to an ash can.

Again I repaired to the park and sat in the moon shade. I thought and
thought, and wondered why none could tell me what I asked for.

And then, as swift as light from a fixed star, the answer came to me.
I arose and hurried--hurried as so many reasoners must, back around
my circle. I knew the answer and I hugged it in my breast as I flew,
fearing lest some one would stop me and demand my secret.

Aurelia was still on the stoop. The moon was higher and the ivy
shadows were deeper. I sat at her side and we watched a little cloud
tilt at the drifting moon and go asunder quite pale and discomfited.

And then, wonder of wonders and delight of delights! our hands
somehow touched, and our fingers closed together and did not part.

After half an hour Aurelia said, with that smile of hers:

"Do you know, you haven't spoken a word since you came back!"

"That," said I, nodding wisely, "is the Voice of the City."




II

THE COMPLETE LIFE OF JOHN HOPKINS


There is a saying that no man has tasted the full flavour of life
until he has known poverty, love and war. The justness of this
reflection commends it to the lover of condensed philosophy. The
three conditions embrace about all there is in life worth knowing. A
surface thinker might deem that wealth should be added to the list.
Not so. When a poor man finds a long-hidden quarter-dollar that has
slipped through a rip into his vest lining, he sounds the pleasure of
life with a deeper plummet than any millionaire can hope to cast.

It seems that the wise executive power that rules life has thought
best to drill man in these three conditions; and none may escape all
three. In rural places the terms do not mean so much. Poverty is less
pinching; love is temperate; war shrinks to contests about boundary
lines and the neighbors' hens. It is in the cities that our epigram
gains in truth and vigor; and it has remained for one John Hopkins to
crowd the experience into a rather small space of time.

The Hopkins flat was like a thousand others. There was a rubber plant
in one window; a flea-bitten terrier sat in the other, wondering when
he was to have his day.

John Hopkins was like a thousand others. He worked at $20 per week
in a nine-story, red-brick building at either Insurance, Buckle's
Hoisting Engines, Chiropody, Loans, Pulleys, Boas Renovated, Waltz
Guaranteed in Five Lessons, or Artificial Limbs. It is not for us to
wring Mr. Hopkins's avocation from these outward signs that be.

Mrs. Hopkins was like a thousand others. The auriferous tooth, the
sedentary disposition, the Sunday afternoon wanderlust, the draught
upon the delicatessen store for home-made comforts, the furor for
department store marked-down sales, the feeling of superiority to
the lady in the third-floor front who wore genuine ostrich tips and
had two names over her bell, the mucilaginous hours during which
she remained glued to the window sill, the vigilant avoidance of
the instalment man, the tireless patronage of the acoustics of the
dumb-waiter shaft--all the attributes of the Gotham flat-dweller were
hers.

One moment yet of sententiousness and the story moves.

In the Big City large and sudden things happen. You round a corner
and thrust the rib of your umbrella into the eye of your old friend
from Kootenai Falls. You stroll out to pluck a Sweet William in
the park--and lo! bandits attack you--you are ambulanced to the
hospital--you marry your nurse; are divorced--get squeezed while
short on U. P. S. and D. O. W. N. S.--stand in the bread line--marry
an heiress, take out your laundry and pay your club dues--seemingly
all in the wink of an eye. You travel the streets, and a finger
beckons to you, a handkerchief is dropped for you, a brick is dropped
upon you, the elevator cable or your bank breaks, a table d'hôte or
your wife disagrees with you, and Fate tosses you about like cork
crumbs in wine opened by an un-feed waiter. The City is a sprightly
youngster, and you are red paint upon its toy, and you get licked
off.

John Hopkins sat, after a compressed dinner, in his glove-fitting
straight-front flat. He sat upon a hornblende couch and gazed, with
satiated eyes, at Art Brought Home to the People in the shape of "The
Storm" tacked against the wall. Mrs. Hopkins discoursed droningly
of the dinner smells from the flat across the hall. The flea-bitten
terrier gave Hopkins a look of disgust, and showed a man-hating
tooth.

Here was neither poverty, love, nor war; but upon such barren stems
may be grafted those essentials of a complete life.

John Hopkins sought to inject a few raisins of conversation into
the tasteless dough of existence. "Putting a new elevator in at the
office," he said, discarding the nominative noun, "and the boss has
turned out his whiskers."

"You don't mean it!" commented Mrs. Hopkins.

"Mr. Whipples," continued John, "wore his new spring suit down
to-day. I liked it fine It's a gray with--" He stopped, suddenly
stricken by a need that made itself known to him. "I believe I'll
walk down to the corner and get a five-cent cigar," he concluded.

John Hopkins took his hat and picked his way down the musty halls and
stairs of the flat-house.

The evening air was mild, and the streets shrill with the careless
cries of children playing games controlled by mysterious rhythms and
phrases. Their elders held the doorways and steps with leisurely
pipe and gossip. Paradoxically, the fire-escapes supported lovers in
couples who made no attempt to fly the mounting conflagration they
were there to fan.

The corner cigar store aimed at by John Hopkins was kept by a man
named Freshmayer, who looked upon the earth as a sterile promontory.

Hopkins, unknown in the store, entered and called genially for his
"bunch of spinach, car-fare grade." This imputation deepened the
pessimism of Freshmayer; but he set out a brand that came perilously
near to filling the order. Hopkins bit off the roots of his purchase,
and lighted up at the swinging gas jet. Feeling in his pockets to
make payment, he found not a penny there.

"Say, my friend," he explained, frankly, "I've come out without any
change. Hand you that nickel first time I pass."

Joy surged in Freshmayer's heart. Here was corroboration of his
belief that the world was rotten and man a peripatetic evil. Without
a word he rounded the end of his counter and made earnest onslaught
upon his customer. Hopkins was no man to serve as a punching-bag for
a pessimistic tobacconist. He quickly bestowed upon Freshmayer a
colorado-maduro eye in return for the ardent kick that he received
from that dealer in goods for cash only.

The impetus of the enemy's attack forced the Hopkins line back to
the sidewalk. There the conflict raged; the pacific wooden Indian,
with his carven smile, was overturned, and those of the street who
delighted in carnage pressed round to view the zealous joust.

But then came the inevitable cop and imminent inconvenience for both
the attacker and attacked. John Hopkins was a peaceful citizen, who
worked at rebuses of nights in a flat, but he was not without the
fundamental spirit of resistance that comes with the battle-rage.
He knocked the policeman into a grocer's sidewalk display of goods
and gave Freshmayer a punch that caused him temporarily to regret
that he had not made it a rule to extend a five-cent line of credit
to certain customers. Then Hopkins took spiritedly to his heels down
the sidewalk, closely followed by the cigar-dealer and the policeman,
whose uniform testified to the reason in the grocer's sign that read:
"Eggs cheaper than anywhere else in the city."

As Hopkins ran he became aware of a big, low, red, racing automobile
that kept abreast of him in the street. This auto steered in to the
side of the sidewalk, and the man guiding it motioned to Hopkins
to jump into it. He did so without slackening his speed, and fell
into the turkey-red upholstered seat beside the chauffeur. The big
machine, with a diminuendo cough, flew away like an albatross down
the avenue into which the street emptied.

The driver of the auto sped his machine without a word. He was masked
beyond guess in the goggles and diabolic garb of the chauffeur.

"Much obliged, old man," called Hopkins, gratefully. "I guess you've
got sporting blood in you, all right, and don't admire the sight of
two men trying to soak one. Little more and I'd have been pinched."

The chauffeur made no sign that he had heard. Hopkins shrugged a
shoulder and chewed at his cigar, to which his teeth had clung grimly
throughout the mêlée.

Ten minutes and the auto turned into the open carriage entrance of a
noble mansion of brown stone, and stood still. The chauffeur leaped
out, and said:

"Come quick. The lady, she will explain. It is the great honor you
will have, monsieur. Ah, that milady could call upon Armand to do
this thing! But, no, I am only one chauffeur."

With vehement gestures the chauffeur conducted Hopkins into the
house. He was ushered into a small but luxurious reception chamber. A
lady, young, and possessing the beauty of visions, rose from a chair.
In her eyes smouldered a becoming anger. Her high-arched, threadlike
brows were ruffled into a delicious frown.

"Milady," said the chauffeur, bowing low, "I have the honor to
relate to you that I went to the house of Monsieur Long and found
him to be not at home. As I came back I see this gentleman in
combat against--how you say--greatest odds. He is fighting with
five--ten--thirty men--gendarmes, _aussi_. Yes, milady, he what you
call 'swat' one--three--eight policemans. If that Monsieur Long is
out I say to myself this gentleman he will serve milady so well, and
I bring him here."

"Very well, Armand," said the lady, "you may go." She turned to
Hopkins.

"I sent my chauffeur," she said, "to bring my cousin, Walter Long.
There is a man in this house who has treated me with insult and
abuse. I have complained to my aunt, and she laughs at me. Armand
says you are brave. In these prosaic days men who are both brave and
chivalrous are few. May I count upon your assistance?"

John Hopkins thrust the remains of his cigar into his coat pocket.
He looked upon this winning creature and felt his first thrill of
romance. It was a knightly love, and contained no disloyalty to the
flat with the flea-bitten terrier and the lady of his choice. He had
married her after a picnic of the Lady Label Stickers' Union, Lodge
No. 2, on a dare and a bet of new hats and chowder all around with
his friend, Billy McManus. This angel who was begging him to come
to her rescue was something too heavenly for chowder, and as for
hats--golden, jewelled crowns for her!

"Say," said John Hopkins, "just show me the guy that you've got the
grouch at. I've neglected my talents as a scrapper heretofore, but
this is my busy night."

"He is in there," said the lady, pointing to a closed door. "Come.
Are you sure that you do not falter or fear?"

"Me?" said John Hopkins. "Just give me one of those roses in the
bunch you are wearing, will you?"

The lady gave him a red, red rose. John Hopkins kissed it, stuffed it
into his vest pocket, opened the door and walked into the room. It
was a handsome library, softly but brightly lighted. A young man was
there, reading.

"Books on etiquette is what you want to study," said John Hopkins,
abruptly. "Get up here, and I'll give you some lessors. Be rude to a
lady, will you?"

The young man looked mildly surprised. Then he arose languidly,
dextrously caught the arms of John Hopkins and conducted him
irresistibly to the front door of the house.

"Beware, Ralph Branscombe," cried the lady, who had followed, "what
you do to the gallant man who has tried to protect me."

The young man shoved John Hopkins gently out the door and then closed
it.

"Bess," he said calmly, "I wish you would quit reading historical
novels. How in the world did that fellow get in here?"

"Armand brought him," said the young lady. "I think you are awfully
mean not to let me have that St. Bernard. I sent Armand for Walter. I
was so angry with you."

"Be sensible, Bess," said the young man, taking her arm. "That dog
isn't safe. He has bitten two or three people around the kennels.
Come now, let's go tell auntie we are in good humor again."

Arm in arm, they moved away.

John Hopkins walked to his flat. The janitor's five-year-old daughter
was playing on the steps. Hopkins gave her a nice, red rose and
walked upstairs.

Mrs. Hopkins was philandering with curl-papers.

"Get your cigar?" she asked, disinterestedly.

"Sure," said Hopkins, "and I knocked around a while outside. It's a
nice night."

He sat upon the hornblende sofa, took out the stump of his cigar,
lighted it, and gazed at the graceful figures in "The Storm" on the
opposite wall.

"I was telling you," said he, "about Mr. Whipple's suit. It's a gray,
with an invisible check, and it looks fine."




III

A LICKPENNY LOVER


There, were 3,000 girls in the Biggest Store. Masie was one of them.
She was eighteen and a saleslady in the gents' gloves. Here she
became versed in two varieties of human beings--the kind of gents who
buy their gloves in department stores and the kind of women who buy
gloves for unfortunate gents. Besides this wide knowledge of the
human species, Masie had acquired other information. She had listened
to the promulgated wisdom of the 2,999 other girls and had stored it
in a brain that was as secretive and wary as that of a Maltese cat.
Perhaps nature, foreseeing that she would lack wise counsellors, had
mingled the saving ingredient of shrewdness along with her beauty, as
she has endowed the silver fox of the priceless fur above the other
animals with cunning.

For Masie was beautiful. She was a deep-tinted blonde, with the calm
poise of a lady who cooks butter cakes in a window. She stood behind
her counter in the Biggest Store; and as you closed your hand over
the tape-line for your glove measure you thought of Hebe; and as you
looked again you wondered how she had come by Minerva's eyes.

When the floorwalker was not looking Masie chewed tutti frutti; when
he was looking she gazed up as if at the clouds and smiled wistfully.

That is the shopgirl smile, and I enjoin you to shun it unless you
are well fortified with callosity of the heart, caramels and a
congeniality for the capers of Cupid. This smile belonged to Masie's
recreation hours and not to the store; but the floorwalker must have
his own. He is the Shylock of the stores. When he comes nosing around
the bridge of his nose is a toll-bridge. It is goo-goo eyes or "git"
when he looks toward a pretty girl. Of course not all floorwalkers
are thus. Only a few days ago the papers printed news of one over
eighty years of age.

One day Irving Carter, painter, millionaire, traveller, poet,
automobilist, happened to enter the Biggest Store. It is due to him
to add that his visit was not voluntary. Filial duty took him by the
collar and dragged him inside, while his mother philandered among the
bronze and terra-cotta statuettes.

Carter strolled across to the glove counter in order to shoot a
few minutes on the wing. His need for gloves was genuine; he had
forgotten to bring a pair with him. But his action hardly calls for
apology, because he had never heard of glove-counter flirtations.

As he neared the vicinity of his fate he hesitated, suddenly
conscious of this unknown phase of Cupid's less worthy profession.

Three or four cheap fellows, sonorously garbed, were leaning over
the counters, wrestling with the mediatorial hand-coverings, while
giggling girls played vivacious seconds to their lead upon the
strident string of coquetry. Carter would have retreated, but he
had gone too far. Masie confronted him behind her counter with a
questioning look in eyes as coldly, beautifully, warmly blue as the
glint of summer sunshine on an iceberg drifting in Southern seas.

And then Irving Carter, painter, millionaire, etc., felt a warm flush
rise to his aristocratically pale face. But not from diffidence. The
blush was intellectual in origin. He knew in a moment that he stood
in the ranks of the ready-made youths who wooed the giggling girls at
other counters. Himself leaned against the oaken trysting place of
a cockney Cupid with a desire in his heart for the favor of a glove
salesgirl. He was no more than Bill and Jack and Mickey. And then he
felt a sudden tolerance for them, and an elating, courageous contempt
for the conventions upon which he had fed, and an unhesitating
determination to have this perfect creature for his own.

When the gloves were paid for and wrapped Carter lingered for a
moment. The dimples at the corners of Masie's damask mouth deepened.
All gentlemen who bought gloves lingered in just that way. She curved
an arm, showing like Psyche's through her shirt-waist sleeve, and
rested an elbow upon the show-case edge.

Carter had never before encountered a situation of which he had not
been perfect master. But now he stood far more awkward than Bill
or Jack or Mickey. He had no chance of meeting this beautiful girl
socially. His mind struggled to recall the nature and habits of
shopgirls as he had read or heard of them. Somehow he had received
the idea that they sometimes did not insist too strictly upon the
regular channels of introduction. His heart beat loudly at the
thought of proposing an unconventional meeting with this lovely and
virginal being. But the tumult in his heart gave him courage.

After a few friendly and well-received remarks on general subjects,
he laid his card by her hand on the counter.

"Will you please pardon me," he said, "if I seem too bold; but I
earnestly hope you will allow me the pleasure of seeing you again.
There is my name; I assure you that it is with the greatest respect
that I ask the favor of becoming one of your fr--acquaintances. May
I not hope for the privilege?"

Masie knew men--especially men who buy gloves. Without hesitation she
looked him frankly and smilingly in the eyes, and said:

"Sure. I guess you're all right. I don't usually go out with strange
gentlemen, though. It ain't quite ladylike. When should you want to
see me again?"

"As soon as I may," said Carter. "If you would allow me to call at
your home, I--"

Masie laughed musically. "Oh, gee, no!" she said, emphatically. "If
you could see our flat once! There's five of us in three rooms. I'd
just like to see ma's face if I was to bring a gentleman friend
there!"

"Anywhere, then," said the enamored Carter, "that will be convenient
to you."

"Say," suggested Masie, with a bright-idea look in her peach-blow
face; "I guess Thursday night will about suit me. Suppose you come to
the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street at 7:30. I live
right near the corner. But I've got to be back home by eleven. Ma
never lets me stay out after eleven."

Carter promised gratefully to keep the tryst, and then hastened to
his mother, who was looking about for him to ratify her purchase of
a bronze Diana.

A salesgirl, with small eyes and an obtuse nose, strolled near Masie,
with a friendly leer.

"Did you make a hit with his nobs, Mase?" she asked, familiarly.

"The gentleman asked permission to call," answered Masie, with the
grand air, as she slipped Carter's card into the bosom of her waist.

"Permission to call!" echoed small eyes, with a snigger. "Did he say
anything about dinner in the Waldorf and a spin in his auto
afterward?"

"Oh, cheese it!" said Masie, wearily. "You've been used to swell
things, I don't think. You've had a swelled head ever since that
hose-cart driver took you out to a chop suey joint. No, he never
mentioned the Waldorf; but there's a Fifth Avenue address on his
card, and if he buys the supper you can bet your life there won't be
no pigtail on the waiter what takes the order."

As Carter glided away from the Biggest Store with his mother in his
electric runabout, he bit his lip with a dull pain at his heart.
He knew that love had come to him for the first time in all the
twenty-nine years of his life. And that the object of it should make
so readily an appointment with him at a street corner, though it was
a step toward his desires, tortured him with misgivings.

Carter did not know the shopgirl. He did not know that her home is
often either a scarcely habitable tiny room or a domicile filled to
overflowing with kith and kin. The street-corner is her parlor, the
park is her drawing-room; the avenue is her garden walk; yet for the
most part she is as inviolate mistress of herself in them as is my
lady inside her tapestried chamber.

One evening at dusk, two weeks after their first meeting, Carter and
Masie strolled arm-in-arm into a little, dimly-lit park. They found a
bench, tree-shadowed and secluded, and sat there.

For the first time his arm stole gently around her. Her golden-bronze
head slid restfully against his shoulder.

"Gee!" sighed Masie, thankfully. "Why didn't you ever think of that
before?"

"Masie," said Carter, earnestly, "you surely know that I love you. I
ask you sincerely to marry me. You know me well enough by this time
to have no doubts of me. I want you, and I must have you. I care
nothing for the difference in our stations."

"What is the difference?" asked Masie, curiously.

"Well, there isn't any," said Carter, quickly, "except in the minds
of foolish people. It is in my power to give you a life of luxury. My
social position is beyond dispute, and my means are ample."

"They all say that," remarked Masie. "It's the kid they all give you.
I suppose you really work in a delicatessen or follow the races. I
ain't as green as I look."

"I can furnish you all the proofs you want," said Carter, gently.
"And I want you, Masie. I loved you the first day I saw you."

"They all do," said Masie, with an amused laugh, "to hear 'em talk.
If I could meet a man that got stuck on me the third time he'd seen
me I think I'd get mashed on him."

"Please don't say such things," pleaded Carter. "Listen to me, dear.
Ever since I first looked into your eyes you have been the only woman
in the world for me."

"Oh, ain't you the kidder!" smiled Masie. "How many other girls did
you ever tell that?"

But Carter persisted. And at length he reached the flimsy, fluttering
little soul of the shopgirl that existed somewhere deep down in her
lovely bosom. His words penetrated the heart whose very lightness was
its safest armor. She looked up at him with eyes that saw. And a warm
glow visited her cool cheeks. Tremblingly, awfully, her moth wings
closed, and she seemed about to settle upon the flower of love. Some
faint glimmer of life and its possibilities on the other side of her
glove counter dawned upon her. Carter felt the change and crowded the
opportunity.

"Marry me, Masie," he whispered softly, "and we will go away from
this ugly city to beautiful ones. We will forget work and business,
and life will be one long holiday. I know where I should take you--I
have been there often. Just think of a shore where summer is eternal,
where the waves are always rippling on the lovely beach and the
people are happy and free as children. We will sail to those shores
and remain there as long as you please. In one of those far-away
cities there are grand and lovely palaces and towers full of
beautiful pictures and statues. The streets of the city are water,
and one travels about in--"

"I know," said Masie, sitting up suddenly. "Gondolas."

"Yes," smiled Carter.

"I thought so," said Masie.

"And then," continued Carter, "we will travel on and see whatever we
wish in the world. After the European cities we will visit India and
the ancient cities there, and ride on elephants and see the wonderful
temples of the Hindoos and Brahmins and the Japanese gardens and the
camel trains and chariot races in Persia, and all the queer sights of
foreign countries. Don't you think you would like it, Masie?"

Masie rose to her feet.

"I think we had better be going home," she said, coolly. "It's
getting late."

Carter humored her. He had come to know her varying, thistle-down
moods, and that it was useless to combat them. But he felt a certain
happy triumph. He had held for a moment, though but by a silken
thread, the soul of his wild Psyche, and hope was stronger within
him. Once she had folded her wings and her cool hand had closed about
his own.

At the Biggest Store the next day Masie's chum, Lulu, waylaid her in
an angle of the counter.

"How are you and your swell friend making it? she asked.

"Oh, him?" said Masie, patting her side curls. "He ain't in it any
more. Say, Lu, what do you think that fellow wanted me to do?"

"Go on the stage?" guessed Lulu, breathlessly.

"Nit; he's too cheap a guy for that. He wanted me to marry him and go
down to Coney Island for a wedding tour!"




IV

DOUGHERTY'S EYE-OPENER


Big Jim Dougherty was a sport. He belonged to that race of men.
In Manhattan it is a distinct race. They are the Caribs of the
North--strong, artful, self-sufficient, clannish, honorable within
the laws of their race, holding in lenient contempt neighboring
tribes who bow to the measure of Society's tapeline. I refer, of
course, to the titled nobility of sportdom. There is a class which
bears as a qualifying adjective the substantive belonging to a wind
instrument made of a cheap and base metal. But the tin mines of
Cornwall never produced the material for manufacturing descriptive
nomenclature for "Big Jim" Dougherty.

The habitat of the sport is the lobby or the outside corner of
certain hotels and combination restaurants and cafés. They are mostly
men of different sizes, running from small to large; but they are
unanimous in the possession of a recently shaven, blue-black cheek
and chin and dark overcoats (in season) with black velvet collars.

Of the domestic life of the sport little is known. It has been said
that Cupid and Hymen sometimes take a hand in the game and copper the
queen of hearts to lose. Daring theorists have averred--not content
with simply saying--that a sport often contracts a spouse, and even
incurs descendants. Sometimes he sits in the game of politics; and
then at chowder picnics there is a revelation of a Mrs. Sport and
little Sports in glazed hats with tin pails.

But mostly the sport is Oriental. He believes his women-folk should
not be too patent. Somewhere behind grilles or flower-ornamented fire
escapes they await him. There, no doubt, they tread on rugs from
Teheran and are diverted by the bulbul and play upon the dulcimer and
feed upon sweetmeats. But away from his home the sport is an integer.
He does not, as men of other races in Manhattan do, become the convoy
in his unoccupied hours of fluttering laces and high heels that tick
off delectably the happy seconds of the evening parade. He herds with
his own race at corners, and delivers a commentary in his Carib lingo
upon the passing show.

"Big Jim" Dougherty had a wife, but he did not wear a button portrait
of her upon his lapel. He had a home in one of those brown-stone,
iron-railed streets on the west side that look like a recently
excavated bowling alley of Pompeii.

To this home of his Mr. Dougherty repaired each night when the hour
was so late as to promise no further diversion in the arch domains
of sport. By that time the occupant of the monogamistic harem would
be in dreamland, the bulbul silenced and the hour propitious for
slumber.

"Big Jim" always arose at twelve, meridian, for breakfast, and soon
afterward he would return to the rendezvous of his "crowd."

He was always vaguely conscious that there was a Mrs. Dougherty. He
would have received without denial the charge that the quiet, neat,
comfortable little woman across the table at home was his wife. In
fact, he remembered pretty well that they had been married for nearly
four years. She would often tell him about the cute tricks of Spot,
the canary, and the light-haired lady that lived in the window of the
flat across the street.

"Big Jim" Dougherty even listened to this conversation of hers
sometimes. He knew that she would have a nice dinner ready for him
every evening at seven when he came for it. She sometimes went to
matinées, and she had a talking machine with six dozen records. Once
when her Uncle Amos blew in on a wind from up-state, she went with
him to the Eden Musée. Surely these things were diversions enough for
any woman.

One afternoon Mr. Dougherty finished his breakfast, put on his hat
and got away fairly for the door. When his hand was on the knob be
heard his wife's voice.

"Jim," she said, firmly, "I wish you would take me out to dinner this
evening. It has been three years since you have been outside the door
with me."

"Big Jim" was astounded. She had never asked anything like this
before. It had the flavour of a totally new proposition. But he was a
game sport.

"All right," he said. "You be ready when I come at seven. None of
this 'wait two minutes till I primp an hour or two' kind of business,
now, Dele."

"I'll be ready," said his wife, calmly.

At seven she descended the stone steps in the Pompeian bowling alley
at the side of "Big Jim" Dougherty. She wore a dinner gown made of
a stuff that the spiders must have woven, and of a color that a
twilight sky must have contributed. A light coat with many admirably
unnecessary capes and adorably inutile ribbons floated downward
from her shoulders. Fine feathers do make fine birds; and the only
reproach in the saying is for the man who refuses to give up his
earnings to the ostrich-tip industry.

"Big Jim" Dougherty was troubled. There was a being at his side whom
he did not know. He thought of the sober-hued plumage that this bird
of paradise was accustomed to wear in her cage, and this winged
revelation puzzled him. In some way she reminded him of the Delia
Cullen that he had married four years before. Shyly and rather
awkwardly he stalked at her right hand.

"After dinner I'll take you back home, Dele," said Mr. Dougherty,
"and then I'll drop back up to Seltzer's with the boys. You can have
swell chuck to-night if you want it. I made a winning on Anaconda
yesterday; so you can go as far as you like."

Mr. Dougherty had intended to make the outing with his unwonted wife
an inconspicuous one. Uxoriousness was a weakness that the precepts
of the Caribs did not countenance. If any of his friends of the
track, the billiard cloth or the square circle had wives they had
never complained of the fact in public. There were a number of table
d'hôte places on the cross streets near the broad and shining way;
and to one of these he had purposed to escort her, so that the bushel
might not be removed from the light of his domesticity.

But while on the way Mr. Dougherty altered those intentions. He had
been casting stealthy glances at his attractive companion and he
was seized with the conviction that she was no selling plater. He
resolved to parade with his wife past Seltzer's café, where at this
time a number of his tribe would be gathered to view the daily
evening procession. Yes; and he would take her to dine at Hoogley's,
the swellest slow-lunch warehouse on the line, he said to himself.

The congregation of smooth-faced tribal gentlemen were on watch at
Seltzer's. As Mr. Dougherty and his reorganized Delia passed they
stared, momentarily petrified, and then removed their hats--a
performance as unusual to them as was the astonishing innovation
presented to their gaze by "Big Jim". On the latter gentleman's
impassive face there appeared a slight flicker of triumph--a faint
flicker, no more to be observed than the expression called there by
the draft of little casino to a four-card spade flush.

Hoogley's was animated. Electric lights shone as, indeed, they were
expected to do. And the napery, the glassware and the flowers also
meritoriously performed the spectacular duties required of them. The
guests were numerous, well-dressed and gay.

A waiter--not necessarily obsequious--conducted "Big Jim" Dougherty
and his wife to a table.

"Play that menu straight across for what you like, Dele," said "Big
Jim." "It's you for a trough of the gilded oats to-night. It strikes
me that maybe we've been sticking too fast to home fodder."

"Big Jim's" wife gave her order. He looked at her with respect. She
had mentioned truffles; and he had not known that she knew what
truffles were. From the wine list she designated an appropriate and
desirable brand. He looked at her with some admiration.

She was beaming with the innocent excitement that woman derives from
the exercise of her gregariousness. She was talking to him about a
hundred things with animation and delight. And as the meal progressed
her cheeks, colorless from a life indoors, took on a delicate flush.
"Big Jim" looked around the room and saw that none of the women
there had her charm. And then he thought of the three years she had
suffered immurement, uncomplaining, and a flush of shame warmed him,
for he carried fair play as an item in his creed.

But when the Honorable Patrick Corrigan, leader in Dougherty's
district and a friend of his, saw them and came over to the table,
matters got to the three-quarter stretch. The Honorable Patrick was a
gallant man, both in deeds and words. As for the Blarney stone, his
previous actions toward it must have been pronounced. Heavy damages
for breach of promise could surely have been obtained had the Blarney
stone seen fit to sue the Honorable Patrick.

"Jimmy, old man!" he called; he clapped Dougherty on the back; he
shone like a midday sun upon Delia.

"Honorable Mr. Corrigan--Mrs. Dougherty," said "Big Jim."

The Honorable Patrick became a fountain of entertainment and
admiration. The waiter had to fetch a third chair for him; he made
another at the table, and the wineglasses were refilled.

"You selfish old rascal!" he exclaimed, shaking an arch finger at
"Big Jim," "to have kept Mrs. Dougherty a secret from us."

And then "Big Jim" Dougherty, who was no talker, sat dumb, and saw
the wife who had dined every evening for three years at home, blossom
like a fairy flower. Quick, witty, charming, full of light and ready
talk, she received the experienced attack of the Honorable Patrick on
the field of repartee and surprised, vanquished, delighted him. She
unfolded her long-closed petals and around her the room became a
garden. They tried to include "Big Jim" in the conversation, but he
was without a vocabulary.

And then a stray bunch of politicians and good fellows who lived for
sport came into the room. They saw "Big Jim" and the leader, and over
they came and were made acquainted with Mrs. Dougherty. And in a few
minutes she was holding a salon. Half a dozen men surrounded her,
courtiers all, and six found her capable of charming. "Big Jim" sat,
grim, and kept saying to himself: "Three years, three years!"

The dinner came to an end. The Honorable Patrick reached for Mrs.
Dougherty's cloak; but that was a matter of action instead of words,
and Dougherty's big hand got it first by two seconds.

While the farewells were being said at the door the Honorable Patrick
smote Dougherty mightily between the shoulders.

"Jimmy, me boy," he declared, in a giant whisper, "the madam is a
jewel of the first water. Ye're a lucky dog."

"Big Jim" walked homeward with his wife. She seemed quite as
pleased with the lights and show windows in the streets as with the
admiration of the men in Hoogley's. As they passed Seltzer's they
heard the sound of many voices in the café. The boys would be
starting the drinks around now and discussing past performances.

At the door of their home Delia paused. The pleasure of the outing
radiated softly from her countenance. She could not hope for Jim of
evenings, but the glory of this one would lighten her lonely hours
for a long time.

"Thank you for taking me out, Jim," she said, gratefully. "You'll be
going back up to Seltzer's now, of course."

"To ---- with Seltzer's," said "Big Jim," emphatically. "And d----
Pat Corrigan! Does he think I haven't got any eyes?"

And the door closed behind both of them.




V

"LITTLE SPECK IN GARNERED FRUIT"


The honeymoon was at its full. There was a flat with the reddest of
new carpets, tasselled portières and six steins with pewter lids
arranged on a ledge above the wainscoting of the dining-room. The
wonder of it was yet upon them. Neither of them had ever seen a
yellow primrose by the river's brim; but if such a sight had met
their eyes at that time it would have seemed like--well, whatever
the poet expected the right kind of people to see in it besides a
primrose.

The bride sat in the rocker with her feet resting upon the world. She
was wrapt in rosy dreams and a kimono of the same hue. She wondered
what the people in Greenland and Tasmania and Beloochistan were
saying one to another about her marriage to Kid McGarry. Not that it
made any difference. There was no welter-weight from London to the
Southern Cross that could stand up four hours--no; four rounds--with
her bridegroom. And he had been hers for three weeks; and the crook
of her little finger could sway him more than the fist of any
142-pounder in the world.

Love, when it is ours, is the other name for self-abnegation and
sacrifice. When it belongs to people across the airshaft it means
arrogance and self-conceit.

The bride crossed her oxfords and looked thoughtfully at the
distemper Cupids on the ceiling.

"Precious," said she, with the air of Cleopatra asking Antony for
Rome done up in tissue paper and delivered at residence, "I think
I would like a peach."

Kid McGarry arose and put on his coat and hat. He was serious,
shaven, sentimental, and spry.

"All right," said he, as coolly as though he were only agreeing to
sign articles to fight the champion of England. "I'll step down and
cop one out for you--see?"

"Don't be long," said the bride. "I'll be lonesome without my naughty
boy. Get a nice, ripe one."

After a series of farewells that would have befitted an imminent
voyage to foreign parts, the Kid went down to the street.

Here he not unreasonably hesitated, for the season was yet early
spring, and there seemed small chance of wresting anywhere from those
chill streets and stores the coveted luscious guerdon of summer's
golden prime.

At the Italian's fruit-stand on the corner he stopped and cast a
contemptuous eye over the display of papered oranges, highly polished
apples and wan, sun-hungry bananas.

"Gotta da peach?" asked the Kid in the tongue of Dante, the lover of
lovers.

"Ah, no,--" sighed the vender. "Not for one mont com-a da peach. Too
soon. Gotta da nice-a orange. Like-a da orange?"

Scornful, the Kid pursued his quest. He entered the all-night
chop-house, café, and bowling-alley of his friend and admirer, Justus
O'Callahan. The O'Callahan was about in his institution, looking for
leaks.

"I want it straight," said the Kid to him. "The old woman has got a
hunch that she wants a peach. Now, if you've got a peach, Cal, get it
out quick. I want it and others like it if you've got 'em in plural
quantities."

"The house is yours," said O'Callahan. "But there's no peach in it.
It's too soon. I don't suppose you could even find 'em at one of the
Broadway joints. That's too bad. When a lady fixes her mouth for a
certain kind of fruit nothing else won't do. It's too late now to
find any of the first-class fruiterers open. But if you think the
missis would like some nice oranges I've just got a box of fine ones
in that she might--"

"Much obliged, Cal. It's a peach proposition right from the ring of
the gong. I'll try further."

The time was nearly midnight as the Kid walked down the West-Side
avenue. Few stores were open, and such as were practically hooted at
the idea of a peach.

But in her moated flat the bride confidently awaited her Persian
fruit. A champion welter-weight not find a peach?--not stride
triumphantly over the seasons and the zodiac and the almanac to
fetch an Amsden's June or a Georgia cling to his owny-own?

The Kid's eye caught sight of a window that was lighted and gorgeous
with nature's most entrancing colors. The light suddenly went out.
The Kid sprinted and caught the fruiterer locking his door.

"Peaches?" said he, with extreme deliberation.

"Well, no, Sir. Not for three or four weeks yet. I haven't any idea
where you might find some. There may be a few in town from under
the glass, but they'd be hard to locate. Maybe at one of the more
expensive hotels--some place where there's plenty of money to waste.
I've got some very fine oranges, though--from a shipload that came in
to-day."

The Kid lingered on the corner for a moment, and then set out briskly
toward a pair of green lights that flanked the steps of a building
down a dark side street.

"Captain around anywhere?" he asked of the desk sergeant of the
police station.

At that moment the captain came briskly forward from the rear. He was
in plain clothes and had a busy air.

"Hello, Kid," he said to the pugilist. "Thought you were
bridal-touring?

"Got back yesterday. I'm a solid citizen now. Think I'll take an
interest in municipal doings. How would it suit you to get into
Denver Dick's place to-night, Cap?

"Past performances," said the captain, twisting his moustache.
"Denver was closed up two months ago."

"Correct," said the Kid. "Rafferty chased him out of the Forty-third.
He's running in your precinct now, and his game's bigger than ever.
I'm down on this gambling business. I can put you against his game."

"In my precinct?" growled the captain. "Are you sure, Kid? I'll take
it as a favor. Have you got the entrée? How is it to be done?"

"Hammers," said the Kid. "They haven't got any steel on the doors
yet. You'll need ten men. No, they won't let me in the place. Denver
has been trying to do me. He thought I tipped him off for the other
raid. I didn't, though. You want to hurry. I've got to get back home.
The house is only three blocks from here."

Before ten minutes had sped the captain with a dozen men stole with
their guide into the hallway of a dark and virtuous-looking building
in which many businesses were conducted by day.

"Third floor, rear," said the Kid, softly. "I'll lead the way."

Two axemen faced the door that he pointed out to them.

"It seems all quiet," said the captain, doubtfully. "Are you sure
your tip is straight?"

"Cut away!" said the Kid. "It's on me if it ain't."

The axes crashed through the as yet unprotected door. A blaze of
light from within poured through the smashed panels. The door fell,
and the raiders sprang into the room with their guns handy.

The big room was furnished with the gaudy magnificence dear to Denver
Dick's western ideas. Various well-patronized games were in progress.
About fifty men who were in the room rushed upon the police in a
grand break for personal liberty. The plain-clothes men had to do a
little club-swinging. More than half the patrons escaped.

Denver Dick had graced his game with his own presence that night.
He led the rush that was intended to sweep away the smaller body of
raiders, But when he saw the Kid his manner became personal. Being
in the heavyweight class he cast himself joyfully upon his slighter
enemy, and they rolled down a flight of stairs in each other's arms.
On the landing they separated and arose, and then the Kid was able to
use some of his professional tactics, which had been useless to him
while in the excited clutch of a 200-pound sporting gentleman who was
about to lose $20,000 worth of paraphernalia.

After vanquishing his adversary the Kid hurried upstairs and through
the gambling-room into a smaller apartment connecting by an arched
doorway.

Here was a long table set with choicest chinaware and silver, and
lavishly furnished with food of that expensive and spectacular sort
of which the devotees of sport are supposed to be fond. Here again
was to be perceived the liberal and florid taste of the gentleman
with the urban cognomenal prefix.

A No. 10 patent leather shoe protruded a few of its inches outside
the tablecloth along the floor. The Kid seized this and plucked forth
a black man in a white tie and the garb of a servitor.

"Get up!" commanded the Kid. "Are you in charge of this free lunch?"

"Yes, sah, I was. Has they done pinched us ag'in, boss?"

"Looks that way. Listen to me. Are there any peaches in this layout?
If there ain't I'll have to throw up the sponge."

"There was three dozen, sah, when the game opened this evenin'; but
I reckon the gentlemen done eat 'em all up. If you'd like to eat a
fust-rate orange, sah, I kin find you some."

"Get busy," ordered the Kid, sternly, "and move whatever peach crop
you've got quick or there'll be trouble. If anybody oranges me again
to-night, I'll knock his face off."

The raid on Denver Dick's high-priced and prodigal luncheon revealed
one lone, last peach that had escaped the epicurean jaws of the
followers of chance. Into the Kid's pocket it went, and that
indefatigable forager departed immediately with his prize. With
scarcely a glance at the scene on the sidewalk below, where the
officers were loading their prisoners into the patrol wagons, he
moved homeward with long, swift strides.

His heart was light as he went. So rode the knights back to Camelot
after perils and high deeds done for their ladies fair. The Kid's
lady had commanded him and he had obeyed. True, it was but a peach
that she had craved; but it had been no small deed to glean a peach
at midnight from that wintry city where yet the February snows lay
like iron. She had asked for a peach; she was his bride; in his
pocket the peach was warming in his hand that held it for fear that
it might fall out and be lost.

On the way the Kid turned in at an all-night drug store and said to
the spectacled clerk:

"Say, sport, I wish you'd size up this rib of mine and see if it's
broke. I was in a little scrap and bumped down a flight or two of
stairs."

The druggist made an examination. "It isn't broken," was his
diagnosis, "but you have a bruise there that looks like you'd fallen
off the Flatiron twice."

"That's all right," said the Kid. "Let's have your clothesbrush,
please."

The bride waited in the rosy glow of the pink lamp shade. The
miracles were not all passed away. By breathing a desire for some
slight thing--a flower, a pomegranate, a--oh, yes, a peach--she could
send forth her man into the night, into the world which could not
withstand him, and he would do her bidding.

And now he stood by her chair and laid the peach in her hand.

"Naughty boy!" she said, fondly. "Did I say a peach? I think I would
much rather have had an orange."

Blest be the bride.




VI

THE HARBINGER


Long before the springtide is felt in the dull bosom of the yokel
does the city man know that the grass-green goddess is upon her
throne. He sits at his breakfast eggs and toast, begirt by stone
walls, opens his morning paper and sees journalism leave vernalism
at the post.

For, whereas, spring's couriers were once the evidence of our finer
senses, now the Associated Press does the trick.

The warble of the first robin in Hackensack, the stirring of the
maple sap in Bennington, the budding of the pussy willows along Main
Street in Syracuse, the first chirp of the bluebird, the swan song of
the Blue Point, the annual tornado in St. Louis, the plaint of the
peach pessimist from Pompton, N. J., the regular visit of the tame
wild goose with a broken leg to the pond near Bilgewater Junction,
the base attempt of the Drug Trust to boost the price of quinine
foiled in the House by Congressman Jinks, the first tall poplar
struck by lightning and the usual stunned picknickers who had taken
refuge, the first crack of the ice jam in the Allegheny River, the
finding of a violet in its mossy bed by the correspondent at Round
Corners--these are the advance signs of the burgeoning season that
are wired into the wise city, while the farmer sees nothing but
winter upon his dreary fields.

But these be mere externals. The true harbinger is the heart. When
Strephon seeks his Chloe and Mike his Maggie, then only is spring
arrived and the newspaper report of the five-foot rattler killed in
Squire Pettigrew's pasture confirmed.

Ere the first violet blew, Mr. Peters, Mr. Ragsdale and Mr. Kidd sat
together on a bench in Union Square and conspired. Mr. Peters was the
D'Artagnan of the loafers there. He was the dingiest, the laziest,
the sorriest brown blot against the green background of any bench in
the park. But just then he was the most important of the trio.

Mr. Peters had a wife. This had not heretofore affected his standing
with Ragsy and Kidd. But to-day it invested him with a peculiar
interest. His friends, having escaped matrimony, had shown a
disposition to deride Mr. Peters for his venture on that troubled
sea. But at last they had been forced to acknowledge that either
he had been gifted with a large foresight or that he was one of
Fortune's lucky sons.

For, Mrs. Peters had a dollar. A whole dollar bill, good and
receivable by the Government for customs, taxes and all public
dues. How to get possession of that dollar was the question up for
discussion by the three musty musketeers.

"How do you know it was a dollar?" asked Ragsy, the immensity of the
sum inclining him to scepticism.

"The coalman seen her have it," said Mr. Peters. "She went out
and done some washing yesterday. And look what she give me for
breakfast--the heel of a loaf and a cup of coffee, and her with a
dollar!"

"It's fierce," said Ragsy.

"Say we go up and punch 'er and stick a towel in 'er mouth and cop
the coin" suggested Kidd, viciously. "Y' ain't afraid of a woman, are
you?"

"She might holler and have us pinched," demurred Ragsy. "I don't
believe in slugging no woman in a houseful of people."

"Gent'men," said Mr. Peters, severely, through his russet stubble,
"remember that you are speaking of my wife. A man who would lift his
hand to a lady except in the way of--"

"Maguire," said Ragsy, pointedly, "has got his bock beer sign out. If
we had a dollar we could--"

"Hush up!" said Mr. Peters, licking his lips. "We got to get that
case note somehow, boys. Ain't what's a man's wife's his? Leave it to
me. I'll go over to the house and get it. Wait here for me."

"I've seen 'em give up quick, and tell you where it's hid if you kick
'em in the ribs," said Kidd.

"No man would kick a woman," said Peters, virtuously. "A little
choking--just a touch on the windpipe--that gets away with 'em--and
no marks left. Wait for me. I'll bring back that dollar, boys."

High up in a tenement-house between Second Avenue and the river lived
the Peterses in a back room so gloomy that the landlord blushed to
take the rent for it. Mrs. Peters worked at sundry times, doing odd
jobs of scrubbing and washing. Mr. Peters had a pure, unbroken record
of five years without having earned a penny. And yet they clung
together, sharing each other's hatred and misery, being creatures
of habit. Of habit, the power that keeps the earth from flying to
pieces; though there is some silly theory of gravitation.

Mrs. Peters reposed her 200 pounds on the safer of the two chairs and
gazed stolidly out the one window at the brick wall opposite. Her
eyes were red and damp. The furniture could have been carried away on
a pushcart, but no pushcart man would have removed it as a gift.

The door opened to admit Mr. Peters. His fox-terrier eyes expressed
a wish. His wife's diagnosis located correctly the seat of it, but
misread it hunger instead of thirst.

"You'll get nothing more to eat till night," she said, looking out of
the window again. "Take your hound-dog's face out of the room."

Mr. Peters's eye calculated the distance between them. By taking her
by surprise it might be possible to spring upon her, overthrow her,
and apply the throttling tactics of which he had boasted to his
waiting comrades. True, it had been only a boast; never yet had he
dared to lay violent hands upon her; but with the thoughts of the
delicious, cool bock or Culmbacher bracing his nerves, he was near
to upsetting his own theories of the treatment due by a gentleman
to a lady. But, with his loafer's love for the more artistic and
less strenuous way, he chose diplomacy first, the high card in the
game--the assumed attitude of success already attained.

"You have a dollar," he said, loftily, but significantly in the tone
that goes with the lighting of a cigar--when the properties are at
hand.

"I have," said Mrs. Peters, producing the bill from her bosom and
crackling it, teasingly.

"I am offered a position in a--in a tea store," said Mr. Peters. "I
am to begin work to-morrow. But it will be necessary for me to buy a
pair of--"

"You are a liar," said Mrs. Peters, reinterring the note. "No tea
store, nor no A B C store, nor no junk shop would have you. I rubbed
the skin off both me hands washin' jumpers and overalls to make that
dollar. Do you think it come out of them suds to buy the kind you put
into you? Skiddoo! Get your mind off of money."

Evidently the poses of Talleyrand were not worth one hundred cents on
that dollar. But diplomacy is dexterous. The artistic temperament of
Mr. Peters lifted him by the straps of his congress gaiters and set
him on new ground. He called up a look of desperate melancholy to his
eyes.

"Clara," he said, hollowly, "to struggle further is useless. You have
always misunderstood me. Heaven knows I have striven with all my
might to keep my head above the waves of misfortune, but--"

"Cut out the rainbow of hope and that stuff about walkin' one by one
through the narrow isles of Spain," said Mrs. Peters, with a sigh.
"I've heard it so often. There's an ounce bottle of carbolic on the
shelf behind the empty coffee can. Drink hearty."

Mr. Peters reflected. What next! The old expedients had failed.
The two musty musketeers were awaiting him hard by the ruined
château--that is to say, on a park bench with rickety cast-iron
legs. His honor was at stake. He had engaged to storm the castle
single-handed and bring back the treasure that was to furnish them
wassail and solace. And all that stood between him and the coveted
dollar was his wife, once a little girl whom he could--aha!--why not
again? Once with soft words he could, as they say, twist her around
his little finger. Why not again? Not for years had he tried it. Grim
poverty and mutual hatred had killed all that. But Ragsy and Kidd
were waiting for him to bring the dollar!

Mr. Peters took a surreptitiously keen look at his wife. Her formless
bulk overflowed the chair. She kept her eyes fixed out the window in
a strange kind of trance. Her eyes showed that she had been recently
weeping.

"I wonder," said Mr. Peters to himself, "if there'd be anything in
it."

The window was open upon its outlook of brick walls and drab, barren
back yards. Except for the mildness of the air that entered it might
have been midwinter yet in the city that turns such a frowning face
to besieging spring. But spring doesn't come with the thunder of
cannon. She is a sapper and a miner, and you must capitulate.

"I'll try it," said Mr. Peters to himself, making a wry face.

He went up to his wife and put his arm across her shoulders.

"Clara, darling," he said in tones that shouldn't have fooled a
baby seal, "why should we have hard words? Ain't you my own tootsum
wootsum?"

A black mark against you, Mr. Peters, in the sacred ledger of Cupid.
Charges of attempted graft are filed against you, and of forgery and
utterance of two of Love's holiest of appellations.

But the miracle of spring was wrought. Into the back room over the
back alley between the black walls had crept the Harbinger. It was
ridiculous, and yet-- Well, it is a rat trap, and you, madam and sir
and all of us, are in it.

Red and fat and crying like Niobe or Niagara, Mrs. Peters threw her
arms around her lord and dissolved upon him. Mr. Peters would have
striven to extricate the dollar bill from its deposit vault, but his
arms were bound to his sides.

"Do you love me, James?" asked Mrs. Peters.

"Madly," said James, "but--"

"You are ill!" exclaimed Mrs. Peters. "Why are you so pale and tired
looking?"

"I feel weak," said Mr. Peters. "I--"

"Oh, wait; I know what it is. Wait, James. I'll be back in a minute."

With a parting hug that revived in Mr. Peters recollections of the
Terrible Turk, his wife hurried out of the room and down the stairs.

Mr. Peters hitched his thumbs under his suspenders.

"All right," he confided to the ceiling. "I've got her going. I
hadn't any idea the old girl was soft any more under the foolish rib.
Well, sir; ain't I the Claude Melnotte of the lower East Side? What?
It's a 100 to 1 shot that I get the dollar. I wonder what she went
out for. I guess she's gone to tell Mrs. Muldoon on the second floor,
that we're reconciled. I'll remember this. Soft soap! And Ragsy was
talking about slugging her!"

Mrs. Peters came back with a bottle of sarsaparilla.

"I'm glad I happened to have that dollar," she said. "You're all run
down, honey."

Mr. Peters had a tablespoonful of the stuff inserted into him. Then
Mrs. Peters sat on his lap and murmured:

"Call me tootsum wootsums again, James."

He sat still, held there by his materialized goddess of spring.

Spring had come.

On the bench in Union Square Mr. Ragsdale and Mr. Kidd squirmed,
tongue-parched, awaiting D'Artagnan and his dollar.

"I wish I had choked her at first," said Mr. Peters to himself.




VII

WHILE THE AUTO WAITS


Promptly at the beginning of twilight, came again to that quiet
corner of that quiet, small park the girl in gray. She sat upon a
bench and read a book, for there was yet to come a half hour in which
print could be accomplished.

To repeat: Her dress was gray, and plain enough to mask its
impeccancy of style and fit. A large-meshed veil imprisoned her
turban hat and a face that shone through it with a calm and
unconscious beauty. She had come there at the same hour on the day
previous, and on the day before that; and there was one who knew it.

The young man who knew it hovered near, relying upon burnt sacrifices
to the great joss, Luck. His piety was rewarded, for, in turning a
page, her book slipped from her fingers and bounded from the bench a
full yard away.

The young man pounced upon it with instant avidity, returning it to
its owner with that air that seems to flourish in parks and public
places--a compound of gallantry and hope, tempered with respect
for the policeman on the beat. In a pleasant voice, he risked an
inconsequent remark upon the weather--that introductory topic
responsible for so much of the world's unhappiness--and stood poised
for a moment, awaiting his fate.

The girl looked him over leisurely; at his ordinary, neat dress
and his features distinguished by nothing particular in the way of
expression.

"You may sit down, if you like," she said, in a full, deliberate
contralto. "Really, I would like to have you do so. The light is too
bad for reading. I would prefer to talk."

The vassal of Luck slid upon the seat by her side with complaisance.

"Do you know," he said, speaking the formula with which park chairmen
open their meetings, "that you are quite the stunningest girl I have
seen in a long time? I had my eye on you yesterday. Didn't know
somebody was bowled over by those pretty lamps of yours, did you,
honeysuckle?"

"Whoever you are," said the girl, in icy tones, "you must remember
that I am a lady. I will excuse the remark you have just made because
the mistake was, doubtless, not an unnatural one--in your circle. I
asked you to sit down; if the invitation must constitute me your
honeysuckle, consider it withdrawn."

"I earnestly beg your pardon," pleaded the young ran. His expression
of satisfaction had changed to one of penitence and humility. "It was
my fault, you know--I mean, there are girls in parks, you know--that
is, of course, you don't know, but--"

"Abandon the subject, if you please. Of course I know. Now, tell me
about these people passing and crowding, each way, along these paths.
Where are they going? Why do they hurry so? Are they happy?"

The young man had promptly abandoned his air of coquetry. His cue
was now for a waiting part; he could not guess the rôle he would be
expected to play.

"It IS interesting to watch them," he replied, postulating her mood.
"It is the wonderful drama of life. Some are going to supper and some
to--er--other places. One wonders what their histories are."

"I do not," said the girl; "I am not so inquisitive. I come here to
sit because here, only, can I be near the great, common, throbbing
heart of humanity. My part in life is cast where its beats are never
felt. Can you surmise why I spoke to you, Mr.--?"

"Parkenstacker," supplied the young man. Then he looked eager and
hopeful.

"No," said the girl, holding up a slender finger, and smiling
slightly. "You would recognize it immediately. It is impossible to
keep one's name out of print. Or even one's portrait. This veil and
this hat of my maid furnish me with an _incog_. You should have seen
the chauffeur stare at it when he thought I did not see. Candidly,
there are five or six names that belong in the holy of holies, and
mine, by the accident of birth, is one of them. I spoke to you, Mr.
Stackenpot--"

"Parkenstacker," corrected the young man, modestly.

"--Mr. Parkenstacker, because I wanted to talk, for once, with a
natural man--one unspoiled by the despicable gloss of wealth and
supposed social superiority. Oh! you do not know how weary I am of
it--money, money, money! And of the men who surround me, dancing
like little marionettes all cut by the same pattern. I am sick of
pleasure, of jewels, of travel, of society, of luxuries of all
kinds."

"I always had an idea," ventured the young man, hesitatingly, "that
money must be a pretty good thing."

"A competence is to be desired. But when you have so many millions
that--!" She concluded the sentence with a gesture of despair. "It
is the monotony of it," she continued, "that palls. Drives, dinners,
theatres, balls, suppers, with the gilding of superfluous wealth over
it all. Sometimes the very tinkle of the ice in my champagne glass
nearly drives me mad."

Mr. Parkenstacker looked ingenuously interested.

"I have always liked," he said, "to read and hear about the ways of
wealthy and fashionable folks. I suppose I am a bit of a snob. But I
like to have my information accurate. Now, I had formed the opinion
that champagn is cooled in the bottle and not by placing ice in the
glass."

The girl gave a musical laugh of genuine amusement.

"You should know," she explained, in an indulgent tone, "that we of
the non-useful class depend for our amusement upon departure from
precedent. Just now it is a fad to put ice in champagne. The idea
was originated by a visiting Prince of Tartary while dining at the
Waldorf. It will soon give way to some other whim. Just as at a
dinner party this week on Madison Avenue a green kid glove was
laid by the plate of each guest to be put on and used while eating
olives."

"I see," admitted the young man, humbly.

"These special diversions of the inner circle do not become familiar
to the common public."

"Sometimes," continued the girl, acknowledging his confession of
error by a slight bow, "I have thought that if I ever should love a
man it would be one of lowly station. One who is a worker and not
a drone. But, doubtless, the claims of caste and wealth will prove
stronger than my inclination. Just now I am besieged by two. One is
a Grand Duke of a German principality. I think he has, or has had,
a wife, somewhere, driven mad by his intemperance and cruelty. The
other is an English Marquis, so cold and mercenary that I even prefer
the diabolism of the Duke. What is it that impels me to tell you
these things, Mr. Packenstacker?

"Parkenstacker," breathed the young man. "Indeed, you cannot know how
much I appreciate your confidences."

The girl contemplated him with the calm, impersonal regard that
befitted the difference in their stations.

"What is your line of business, Mr. Parkenstacker?" she asked.

"A very humble one. But I hope to rise in the world. Were you
really in earnest when you said that you could love a man of lowly
position?"

"Indeed I was. But I said 'might.' There is the Grand Duke and the
Marquis, you know. Yes; no calling could be too humble were the man
what I would wish him to be."

"I work," declared Mr. Parkenstacker, "in a restaurant."

The girl shrank slightly.

"Not as a waiter?" she said, a little imploringly. "Labor is noble,
but personal attendance, you know--valets and--"

"I am not a waiter. I am cashier in"--on the street they faced that
bounded the opposite side of the park was the brilliant electric sign
"RESTAURANT"--"I am cashier in that restaurant you see there."

The girl consulted a tiny watch set in a bracelet of rich design
upon her left wrist, and rose, hurriedly. She thrust her book into a
glittering reticule suspended from her waist, for which, however, the
book was too large.

"Why are you not at work?" she asked.

"I am on the night turn," said the young man; "it is yet an hour
before my period begins. May I not hope to see you again?"

"I do not know. Perhaps--but the whim may not seize me again. I must
go quickly now. There is a dinner, and a box at the play--and, oh!
the same old round. Perhaps you noticed an automobile at the upper
corner of the park as you came. One with a white body."

"And red running gear?" asked the young man, knitting his brows
reflectively.

"Yes. I always come in that. Pierre waits for me there. He supposes
me to be shopping in the department store across the square.
Conceive of the bondage of the life wherein we must deceive even our
chauffeurs. Good-night."

"But it is dark now," said Mr. Parkenstacker, "and the park is full
of rude men. May I not walk--"

"If you have the slightest regard for my wishes," said the girl,
firmly, "you will remain at this bench for ten minutes after I have
left. I do not mean to accuse you, but you are probably aware that
autos generally bear the monogram of their owner. Again, good-night."

Swift and stately she moved away through the dusk. The young man
watched her graceful form as she reached the pavement at the park's
edge, and turned up along it toward the corner where stood the
automobile. Then he treacherously and unhesitatingly began to dodge
and skim among the park trees and shrubbery in a course parallel to
her route, keeping her well in sight.

When she reached the corner she turned her head to glance at the
motor car, and then passed it, continuing on across the street.
Sheltered behind a convenient standing cab, the young man followed
her movements closely with his eyes. Passing down the sidewalk of the
street opposite the park, she entered the restaurant with the blazing
sign. The place was one of those frankly glaring establishments, all
white paint and glass, where one may dine cheaply and conspicuously.
The girl penetrated the restaurant to some retreat at its rear,
whence she quickly emerged without her hat and veil.

The cashier's desk was well to the front. A red-haired girl on the
stool climbed down, glancing pointedly at the clock as she did so.
The girl in gray mounted in her place.

The young man thrust his hands into his pockets and walked slowly
back along the sidewalk. At the corner his foot struck a small,
paper-covered volume lying there, sending it sliding to the edge of
the turf. By its picturesque cover he recognized it as the book the
girl had been reading. He picked it up carelessly, and saw that
its title was "New Arabian Nights," the author being of the name
of Stevenson. He dropped it again upon the grass, and lounged,
irresolute, for a minute. Then he stepped into the automobile,
reclined upon the cushions, and said two words to the chauffeur:

"Club, Henri."




VIII

A COMEDY IN RUBBER


One may hope, in spite of the metaphorists, to avoid the breath of
the deadly upas tree; one may, by great good fortune, succeed in
blacking the eye of the basilisk; one might even dodge the attentions
of Cerberus and Argus, but no man, alive or dead, can escape the gaze
of the Rubberer.

New York is the Caoutchouc City. There are many, of course, who go
their ways, making money, without turning to the right or the left,
but there is a tribe abroad wonderfully composed, like the Martians,
solely of eyes and means of locomotion.

These devotees of curiosity swarm, like flies, in a moment in
a struggling, breathless circle about the scene of an unusual
occurrence. If a workman opens a manhole, if a street car runs over
a man from North Tarrytown, if a little boy drops an egg on his
way home from the grocery, if a casual house or two drops into the
subway, if a lady loses a nickel through a hole in the lisle thread,
if the police drag a telephone and a racing chart forth from an Ibsen
Society reading-room, if Senator Depew or Mr. Chuck Connors walks out
to take the air--if any of these incidents or accidents takes place,
you will see the mad, irresistible rush of the "rubber" tribe to the
spot.

The importance of the event does not count. They gaze with equal
interest and absorption at a chorus girl or at a man painting a
liver pill sign. They will form as deep a cordon around a man with
a club-foot as they will around a balked automobile. They have the
furor rubberendi. They are optical gluttons, feasting and fattening
on the misfortunes of their fellow beings. They gloat and pore and
glare and squint and stare with their fishy eyes like goggle-eyed
perch at the book baited with calamity.

It would seem that Cupid would find these ocular vampires too cold
game for his calorific shafts, but have we not yet to discover an
immune even among the Protozoa? Yes, beautiful Romance descended upon
two of this tribe, and love came into their hearts as they crowded
about the prostrate form of a man who had been run over by a brewery
wagon.

William Pry was the first on the spot. He was an expert at such
gatherings. With an expression of intense happiness on his features,
he stood over the victim of the accident, listening to his groans as
if to the sweetest music. When the crowd of spectators had swelled to
a closely packed circle William saw a violent commotion in the crowd
opposite him. Men were hurled aside like ninepins by the impact of
some moving body that clove them like the rush of a tornado. With
elbows, umbrella, hat-pin, tongue, and fingernails doing their duty,
Violet Seymour forced her way through the mob of onlookers to the
first row. Strong men who even had been able to secure a seat on
the 5.30 Harlem express staggered back like children as she bucked
centre. Two large lady spectators who had seen the Duke of Roxburgh
married and had often blocked traffic on Twenty-third Street fell
back into the second row with ripped shirtwaists when Violet had
finished with them. William Pry loved her at first sight.

The ambulance removed the unconscious agent of Cupid. William and
Violet remained after the crowd had dispersed. They were true
Rubberers. People who leave the scene of an accident with the
ambulance have not genuine caoutchouc in the cosmogony of their
necks. The delicate, fine flavour of the affair is to be had only
in the after-taste--in gloating over the spot, in gazing fixedly at
the houses opposite, in hovering there in a dream more exquisite
than the opium-eater's ecstasy. William Pry and Violet Seymour were
connoisseurs in casualties. They knew how to extract full enjoyment
from every incident.

Presently they looked at each other. Violet had a brown birthmark on
her neck as large as a silver half-dollar. William fixed his eyes
upon it. William Pry had inordinately bowed legs. Violet allowed her
gaze to linger unswervingly upon them. Face to face they stood thus
for moments, each staring at the other. Etiquette would not allow
them to speak; but in the Caoutchouc City it is permitted to gaze
without stint at the trees in the parks and at the physical blemishes
of a fellow creature.

At length with a sigh they parted. But Cupid had been the driver of
the brewery wagon, and the wheel that broke a leg united two fond
hearts.

The next meeting of the hero and heroine was in front of a board
fence near Broadway. The day had been a disappointing one. There had
been no fights on the street, children had kept from under the wheels
of the street cars, cripples and fat men in negligée shirts were
scarce; nobody seemed to be inclined to slip on banana peels or fall
down with heart disease. Even the sport from Kokomo, Ind., who claims
to be a cousin of ex-Mayor Low and scatters nickels from a cab
window, had not put in his appearance. There was nothing to stare at,
and William Pry had premonitions of ennui.

But he saw a large crowd scrambling and pushing excitedly in front
of a billboard. Sprinting for it, he knocked down an old woman and a
child carrying a bottle of milk, and fought his way like a demon
into the mass of spectators. Already in the inner line stood Violet
Seymour with one sleeve and two gold fillings gone, a corset steel
puncture and a sprained wrist, but happy. She was looking at what
there was to see. A man was painting upon the fence: "Eat Bricklets
--They Fill Your Face."

Violet blushed when she saw William Pry. William jabbed a lady in a
black silk raglan in the ribs, kicked a boy in the shin, bit an old
gentleman on the left ear and managed to crowd nearer to Violet.
They stood for an hour looking at the man paint the letters. Then
William's love could be repressed no longer. He touched her on the
arm.

"Come with me," he said. "I know where there is a bootblack without
an Adam's apple."

She looked up at him shyly, yet with unmistakable love transfiguring
her countenance.

"And you have saved it for me?" she asked, trembling with the first
dim ecstasy of a woman beloved.

Together they hurried to the bootblack's stand. An hour they spent
there gazing at the malformed youth.

A window-cleaner fell from the fifth story to the sidewalk beside
them. As the ambulance came clanging up William pressed her hand
joyously. "Four ribs at least and a compound fracture," he whispered,
swiftly. "You are not sorry that you met me, are you, dearest?

"Me?" said Violet, returning the pressure. "Sure not. I could stand
all day rubbering with you."

The climax of the romance occurred a few days later. Perhaps the
reader will remember the intense excitement into which the city was
thrown when Eliza Jane, a colored woman, was served with a subpoena.
The Rubber Tribe encamped on the spot. With his own hands William Pry
placed a board upon two beer kegs in the street opposite Eliza Jane's
residence. He and Violet sat there for three days and nights. Then it
occurred to a detective to open the door and serve the subpoena. He
sent for a kinetoscope and did so.

Two souls with such congenial tastes could not long remain apart. As
a policeman drove them away with his night stick that evening they
plighted their troth. The seeds of love had been well sown, and had
grown up, hardy and vigorous, into a--let us call it a rubber plant.

The wedding of William Pry and Violet Seymour was set for June 10.
The Big Church in the Middle of the Block was banked high with
flowers. The populous tribe of Rubberers the world over is rampant
over weddings. They are the pessimists of the pews. They are the
guyers of the groom and the banterers of the bride. They come to
laugh at your marriage, and should you escape from Hymen's tower on
the back of death's pale steed they will come to the funeral and sit
in the same pew and cry over your luck. Rubber will stretch.

The church was lighted. A grosgrain carpet lay over the asphalt to
the edge of the sidewalk. Bridesmaids were patting one another's
sashes awry and speaking of the Bride's freckles. Coachmen tied white
ribbons on their whips and bewailed the space of time between drinks.
The minister was musing over his possible fee, essaying conjecture
whether it would suffice to purchase a new broadcloth suit for
himself and a photograph of Laura Jane Libbey for his wife. Yea,
Cupid was in the air.

And outside the church, oh, my brothers, surged and heaved the rank
and file of the tribe of Rubberers. In two bodies they were, with
the grosgrain carpet and cops with clubs between. They crowded like
cattle, they fought, they pressed and surged and swayed and trampled
one another to see a bit of a girl in a white veil acquire license to
go through a man's pockets while he sleeps.

But the hour for the wedding came and went, and the bride and
bridegroom came not. And impatience gave way to alarm and alarm
brought about search, and they were not found. And then two big
policemen took a hand and dragged out of the furious mob of onlookers
a crushed and trampled thing, with a wedding ring in its vest pocket
and a shredded and hysterical woman beating her way to the carpet's
edge, ragged, bruised and obstreperous.

William Pry and Violet Seymour, creatures of habit, had joined in the
seething game of the spectators, unable to resist the overwhelming
desire to gaze upon themselves entering, as bride and bridegroom, the
rose-decked church.

Rubber will out.




IX

ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS


"One thousand dollars," repeated Lawyer Tolman, solemnly and
severely, "and here is the money."

Young Gillian gave a decidedly amused laugh as he fingered the thin
package of new fifty-dollar notes.

"It's such a confoundedly awkward amount," he explained, genially, to
the lawyer. "If it had been ten thousand a fellow might wind up with
a lot of fireworks and do himself credit. Even fifty dollars would
have been less trouble."

"You heard the reading of your uncle's will," continued Lawyer
Tolman, professionally dry in his tones. "I do not know if you paid
much attention to its details. I must remind you of one. You are
required to render to us an account of the manner of expenditure of
this $1,000 as soon as you have disposed of it. The will stipulates
that. I trust that you will so far comply with the late Mr. Gillian's
wishes."

"You may depend upon it," said the young man. politely, "in spite of
the extra expense it will entail. I may have to engage a secretary. I
was never good at accounts."

Gillian went to his club. There he hunted out one whom he called Old
Bryson.

Old Bryson was calm and forty and sequestered. He was in a corner
reading a book, and when he saw Gillian approaching he sighed, laid
down his book and took off his glasses.

"Old Bryson, wake up," said Gillian. "I've a funny story to tell
you."

"I wish you would tell it to some one in the billiard room," said Old
Bryson. "You know how I hate your stories."

"This is a better one than usual," said Gillian, rolling a cigarette;
"and I'm glad to tell it to you. It's too sad and funny to go with
the rattling of billiard balls. I've just come from my late uncle's
firm of legal corsairs. He leaves me an even thousand dollars. Now,
what can a man possibly do with a thousand dollars?"

"I thought," said Old Bryson, showing as much interest as a bee
shows in a vinegar cruet, "that the late Septimus Gillian was worth
something like half a million."

"He was," assented Gillian, joyously, "and that's where the joke
comes in. He's left his whole cargo of doubloons to a microbe. That
is, part of it goes to the man who invents a new bacillus and the
rest to establish a hospital for doing away with it again. There
are one or two trifling bequests on the side. The butler and the
housekeeper get a seal ring and $10 each. His nephew gets $1,000."

"You've always had plenty of money to spend," observed Old Bryson.

"Tons," said Gillian. "Uncle was the fairy godmother as far as an
allowance was concerned."

"Any other heirs?" asked Old Bryson.

"None." Gillian frowned at his cigarette and kicked the upholstered
leather of a divan uneasily. "There is a Miss Hayden, a ward of my
uncle, who lived in his house. She's a quiet thing--musical--the
daughter of somebody who was unlucky enough to be his friend. I
forgot to say that she was in on the seal ring and $10 joke, too. I
wish I had been. Then I could have had two bottles of brut, tipped
the waiter with the ring and had the whole business off my hands.
Don't be superior and insulting, Old Bryson--tell me what a fellow
can do with a thousand dollars."

Old Bryson rubbed his glasses and smiled. And when Old Bryson smiled,
Gillian knew that he intended to be more offensive than ever.

"A thousand dollars," he said, "means much or little. One man may buy
a happy home with it and laugh at Rockefeller. Another could send
his wife South with it and save her life. A thousand dollars would
buy pure milk for one hundred babies during June, July, and August
and save fifty of their lives. You could count upon a half hour's
diversion with it at faro in one of the fortified art galleries.
It would furnish an education to an ambitious boy. I am told
that a genuine Corot was secured for that amount in an auction
room yesterday. You could move to a New Hampshire town and live
respectably two years on it. You could rent Madison Square Garden for
one evening with it, and lecture your audience, if you should have
one, on the precariousness of the profession of heir presumptive."

"People might like you, Old Bryson," said Gillian, always unruffled,
"if you wouldn't moralize. I asked you to tell me what I could do
with a thousand dollars."

"You?" said Bryson, with a gentle laugh. "Why, Bobby Gillian, there's
only one logical thing you could do. You can go buy Miss Lotta
Lauriere a diamond pendant with the money, and then take yourself off
to Idaho and inflict your presence upon a ranch. I advise a sheep
ranch, as I have a particular dislike for sheep."

"Thanks," said Gillian, rising, "I thought I could depend upon you,
Old Bryson. You've hit on the very scheme. I wanted to chuck the
money in a lump, for I've got to turn in an account for it, and I
hate itemizing."

Gillian phoned for a cab and said to the driver:

"The stage entrance of the Columbine Theatre."

Miss Lotta Lauriere was assisting nature with a powder puff, almost
ready for her call at a crowded matinée, when her dresser mentioned
the name of Mr. Gillian.

"Let it in," said Miss Lauriere. "Now, what is it, Bobby? I'm going
on in two minutes."

"Rabbit-foot your right ear a little," suggested Gillian, critically.
"That's better. It won't take two minutes for me. What do you say to
a little thing in the pendant line? I can stand three ciphers with a
figure one in front of 'em."

"Oh, just as you say," carolled Miss Lauriere. "My right glove,
Adams. Say, Bobby, did you see that necklace Della Stacey had on the
other night? Twenty-two hundred dollars it cost at Tiffany's. But, of
course--pull my sash a little to the left, Adams."

"Miss Lauriere for the opening chorus!" cried the call boy without.

Gillian strolled out to where his cab was waiting.

"What would you do with a thousand dollars if you had it?" he asked
the driver.

"Open a s'loon," said the cabby, promptly and huskily. "I know a
place I could take money in with both hands. It's a four-story
brick on a corner. I've got it figured out. Second story--Chinks
and chop suey; third floor--manicures and foreign missions; fourth
floor--poolroom. If you was thinking of putting up the cap--"

"Oh, no," said Gillian, "I merely asked from curiosity. I take you
by the hour. Drive 'til I tell you to stop."

Eight blocks down Broadway Gillian poked up the trap with his cane
and got out. A blind man sat upon a stool on the sidewalk selling
pencils. Gillian went out and stood before him.

"Excuse me," he said, "but would you mind telling me what you would
do if you had a thousand dollars?"

"You got out of that cab that just drove up, didn't you?" asked the
blind man.

"I did," said Gillian.

"I guess you are all right," said the pencil dealer, "to ride in a
cab by daylight. Take a look at that, if you like."

He drew a small book from his coat pocket and held it out. Gillian
opened it and saw that it was a bank deposit book. It showed a
balance of $1,785 to the blind man's credit.

Gillian returned the book and got into the cab.

"I forgot something," he said. "You may drive to the law offices of
Tolman & Sharp, at ---- Broadway."

Lawyer Tolman looked at him hostilely and inquiringly through his
gold-rimmed glasses.

"I beg your pardon," said Gillian, cheerfully, "but may I ask you a
question? It is not an impertinent one, I hope. Was Miss Hayden left
anything by my uncle's will besides the ring and the $10?"

"Nothing," said Mr. Tolman.

"I thank you very much, sir," said Gillian, and on he went to his
cab. He gave the driver the address of his late uncle's home.

Miss Hayden was writing letters in the library. She was small and
slender and clothed in black. But you would have noticed her eyes.
Gillian drifted in with his air of regarding the world as
inconsequent.

"I've just come from old Tolman's," he explained. "They've been
going over the papers down there. They found a--Gillian searched his
memory for a legal term--they found an amendment or a post-script
or something to the will. It seemed that the old boy loosened up a
little on second thoughts and willed you a thousand dollars. I was
driving up this way and Tolman asked me to bring you the money. Here
it is. You'd better count it to see if it's right." Gillian laid the
money beside her hand on the desk.

Miss Hayden turned white. "Oh!" she said, and again "Oh!"

Gillian half turned and looked out the window.

"I suppose, of course," he said, in a low voice, "that you know I
love you."

"I am sorry," said Miss Hayden, taking up her money.

"There is no use?" asked Gillian, almost light-heartedly.

"I am sorry," she said again.

"May I write a note?" asked Gillian, with a smile, He seated himself
at the big library table. She supplied him with paper and pen, and
then went back to her secrétaire.

Gillian made out his account of his expenditure of the thousand
dollars in these words:

"Paid by the black sheep, Robert Gillian, $1,000 on account of the
eternal happiness, owed by Heaven to the best and dearest woman on
earth."

Gillian slipped his writing into an envelope, bowed and went his way.

His cab stopped again at the offices of Tolman & Sharp.

"I have expended the thousand dollars," he said cheerily, to Tolman
of the gold glasses, "and I have come to render account of it, as I
agreed. There is quite a feeling of summer in the air--do you not
think so, Mr. Tolman?" He tossed a white envelope on the lawyer's
table. "You will find there a memorandum, sir, of the _modus
operandi_ of the vanishing of the dollars."

Without touching the envelope, Mr. Tolman went to a door and called
his partner, Sharp. Together they explored the caverns of an immense
safe. Forth they dragged, as trophy of their search a big envelope
sealed with wax. This they forcibly invaded, and wagged their
venerable heads together over its contents. Then Tolman became
spokesman.

"Mr. Gillian," he said, formally, "there was a codicil to your
uncle's will. It was intrusted to us privately, with instructions
that it be not opened until you had furnished us with a full account
of your handling of the $1,000 bequest in the will. As you have
fulfilled the conditions, my partner and I have read the codicil.
I do not wish to encumber your understanding with its legal
phraseology, but I will acquaint you with the spirit of its contents.

"In the event that your disposition of the $1,000 demonstrates that
you possess any of the qualifications that deserve reward, much
benefit will accrue to you. Mr. Sharp and I are named as the judges,
and I assure you that we will do our duty strictly according to
justice--with liberality. We are not at all unfavorably disposed
toward you, Mr. Gillian. But let us return to the letter of the
codicil. If your disposal of the money in question has been prudent,
wise, or unselfish, it is in our power to hand you over bonds to
the value of $50,000, which have been placed in our hands for that
purpose. But if--as our client, the late Mr. Gillian, explicitly
provides--you have used this money as you have money in the past,
I quote the late Mr. Gillian--in reprehensible dissipation among
disreputable associates--the $50,000 is to be paid to Miriam
Hayden, ward of the late Mr. Gillian, without delay. Now, Mr.
Gillian, Mr. Sharp and I will examine your account in regard to the
$1,000. You submit it in writing, I believe. I hope you will repose
confidence in our decision."

Mr. Tolman reached for the envelope. Gillian was a little the quicker
in taking it up. He tore the account and its cover leisurely into
strips and dropped them into his pocket.

"It's all right," he said, smilingly. "There isn't a bit of need to
bother you with this. I don't suppose you'd understand these itemized
bets, anyway. I lost the thousand dollars on the races. Good-day to
you, gentlemen."

Tolman & Sharp shook their heads mournfully at each other when
Gillian left, for they heard him whistling gayly in the hallway as he
waited for the elevator.




X

THE DEFEAT OF THE CITY


Robert Walmsley's descent upon the city resulted in a Kilkenny
struggle. He came out of the fight victor by a fortune and a
reputation. On the other hand, he was swallowed up by the city. The
city gave him what he demanded and then branded him with its brand.
It remodelled, cut, trimmed and stamped him to the pattern it
approves. It opened its social gates to him and shut him in on a
close-cropped, formal lawn with the select herd of ruminants. In
dress, habits, manners, provincialism, routine and narrowness he
acquired that charming insolence, that irritating completeness, that
sophisticated crassness, that overbalanced poise that makes the
Manhattan gentleman so delightfully small in his greatness.

One of the up-state rural counties pointed with pride to the
successful young metropolitan lawyer as a product of its soil. Six
years earlier this county had removed the wheat straw from between
its huckleberry-stained teeth and emitted a derisive and bucolic
laugh as old man Walmsley's freckle-faced "Bob" abandoned the certain
three-per-diem meals of the one-horse farm for the discontinuous
quick lunch counters of the three-ringed metropolis. At the end of
the six years no murder trial, coaching party, automobile accident or
cotillion was complete in which the name of Robert Walmsley did not
figure. Tailors waylaid him in the street to get a new wrinkle from
the cut of his unwrinkled trousers. Hyphenated fellows in the clubs
and members of the oldest subpoenaed families were glad to clap him
on the back and allow him three letters of his name.

But the Matterhorn of Robert Walmsley's success was not scaled until
he married Alicia Van Der Pool. I cite the Matterhorn, for just so
high and cool and white and inaccessible was this daughter of the
old burghers. The social Alps that ranged about her over whose bleak
passes a thousand climbers struggled--reached only to her knees. She
towered in her own atmosphere, serene, chaste, prideful, wading in no
fountains, dining no monkeys, breeding no dogs for bench shows. She
was a Van Der Pool. Fountains were made to play for her; monkeys were
made for other people's ancestors; dogs, she understood, were created
to be companions of blind persons and objectionable characters who
smoked pipes.

This was the Matterhorn that Robert Walmsley accomplished. If he
found, with the good poet with the game foot and artificially curled
hair, that he who ascends to mountain tops will find the loftiest
peaks most wrapped in clouds and snow, he concealed his chilblains
beneath a brave and smiling exterior. He was a lucky man and knew
it, even though he were imitating the Spartan boy with an ice-cream
freezer beneath his doublet frappéeing the region of his heart.

After a brief wedding tour abroad, the couple returned to create a
decided ripple in the calm cistern (so placid and cool and sunless
it is) of the best society. They entertained at their red brick
mausoleum of ancient greatness in an old square that is a cemetery of
crumbled glory. And Robert Walmsley was proud of his wife; although
while one of his hands shook his guests' the other held tightly to
his alpenstock and thermometer.

One day Alicia found a letter written to Robert by his mother. It was
an unerudite letter, full of crops and motherly love and farm notes.
It chronicled the health of the pig and the recent red calf, and
asked concerning Robert's in return. It was a letter direct from
the soil, straight from home, full of biographies of bees, tales of
turnips, pæans of new-laid eggs, neglected parents and the slump in
dried apples.

"Why have I not been shown your mother's letters?" asked Alicia.
There was always something in her voice that made you think of
lorgnettes, of accounts at Tiffany's, of sledges smoothly gliding
on the trail from Dawson to Forty Mile, of the tinkling of pendant
prisms on your grandmothers' chandeliers, of snow lying on a convent
roof; of a police sergeant refusing bail. "Your mother," continued
Alicia, "invites us to make a visit to the farm. I have never seen a
farm. We will go there for a week or two, Robert."

"We will," said Robert, with the grand air of an associate Supreme
Justice concurring in an opinion. "I did not lay the invitation
before you because I thought you would not care to go. I am much
pleased at your decision."

"I will write to her myself," answered Alicia, with a faint
foreshadowing of enthusiasm. "Félice shall pack my trunks at once.
Seven, I think, will be enough. I do not suppose that your mother
entertains a great deal. Does she give many house parties?"

Robert arose, and as attorney for rural places filed a demurrer
against six of the seven trunks. He endeavored to define, picture,
elucidate, set forth and describe a farm. His own words sounded
strange in his ears. He had not realized how thoroughly urbsidized
he had become.

A week passed and found them landed at the little country station
five hours out from the city. A grinning, stentorian, sarcastic youth
driving a mule to a spring wagon hailed Robert savagely.

"Hallo, Mr. Walmsley. Found your way back at last, have you? Sorry
I couldn't bring in the automobile for you, but dad's bull-tonguing
the ten-acre clover patch with it to-day. Guess you'll excuse my not
wearing a dress suit over to meet you--it ain't six o'clock yet, you
know."

"I'm glad to see you, Tom," said Robert, grasping his brother's hand.
"Yes, I've found my way at last. You've a right to say 'at last.'
It's been over two years since the last time. But it will be oftener
after this, my boy."

Alicia, cool in the summer heat as an Arctic wraith, white as a
Norse snow maiden in her flimsy muslin and fluttering lace parasol,
came round the corner of the station; and Tom was stripped of his
assurance. He became chiefly eyesight clothed in blue jeans, and on
the homeward drive to the mule alone did he confide in language the
inwardness of his thoughts.

They drove homeward. The low sun dropped a spendthrift flood of gold
upon the fortunate fields of wheat. The cities were far away. The
road lay curling around wood and dale and hill like a ribbon lost
from the robe of careless summer. The wind followed like a whinnying
colt in the track of Phoebus's steeds.

By and by the farmhouse peeped gray out of its faithful grove; they
saw the long lane with its convoy of walnut trees running from the
road to the house; they smelled the wild rose and the breath of cool,
damp willows in the creek's bed. And then in unison all the voices of
the soil began a chant addressed to the soul of Robert Walmsley. Out
of the tilted aisles of the dim wood they came hollowly; they chirped
and buzzed from the parched grass; they trilled from the ripples
of the creek ford; they floated up in clear Pan's pipe notes from
the dimming meadows; the whippoorwills joined in as they pursued
midges in the upper air; slow-going cow-bells struck out a homely
accompaniment--and this was what each one said: "You've found your
way back at last, have you?"

The old voices of the soil spoke to him. Leaf and bud and blossom
conversed with him in the old vocabulary of his careless youth--the
inanimate things, the familiar stones and rails, the gates and
furrows and roofs and turns of the road had an eloquence, too, and a
power in the transformation. The country had smiled and he had felt
the breath of it, and his heart was drawn as if in a moment back to
his old love. The city was far away.

This rural atavism, then, seized Robert Walmsley and possessed him. A
queer thing he noticed in connection with it was that Alicia, sitting
at his side, suddenly seemed to him a stranger. She did not belong
to this recurrent phase. Never before had she seemed so remote, so
colorless and high--so intangible and unreal. And yet he had never
admired her more than when she sat there by him in the rickety spring
wagon, chiming no more with his mood and with her environment than
the Matterhorn chimes with a peasant's cabbage garden.

That night when the greetings and the supper were over, the entire
family, including Buff, the yellow dog, bestrewed itself upon the
front porch. Alicia, not haughty but silent, sat in the shadow
dressed in an exquisite pale-gray tea gown. Robert's mother
discoursed to her happily concerning marmalade and lumbago. Tom sat
on the top step; Sisters Millie and Pam on the lowest step to catch
the lightning bugs. Mother had the willow rocker. Father sat in the
big armchair with one of its arms gone. Buff sprawled in the middle
of the porch in everybody's way. The twilight pixies and pucks stole
forth unseen and plunged other poignant shafts of memory into the
heart of Robert. A rural madness entered his soul. The city was far
away.

Father sat without his pipe, writhing in his heavy boots, a sacrifice
to rigid courtesy. Robert shouted: "No, you don't!" He fetched the
pipe and lit it; he seized the old gentleman's boots and tore them
off. The last one slipped suddenly, and Mr. Robert Walmsley, of
Washington Square, tumbled off the porch backward with Buff on top of
him, howling fearfully. Tom laughed sarcastically.

Robert tore off his coat and vest and hurled them into a lilac bush.

"Come out here, you landlubber," he cried to Tom, "and I'll put grass
seed on your back. I think you called me a 'dude' a while ago. Come
along and cut your capers."

Tom understood the invitation and accepted it with delight. Three
times they wrestled on the grass, "side holds," even as the giants of
the mat. And twice was Tom forced to bite grass at the hands of the
distinguished lawyer. Dishevelled, panting, each still boasting of
his own prowess, they stumbled back to the porch. Millie cast a pert
reflection upon the qualities of a city brother. In an instant Robert
had secured a horrid katydid in his fingers and bore down upon her.
Screaming wildly, she fled up the lane, pursued by the avenging glass
of form. A quarter of a mile and they returned, she full of apology
to the victorious "dude." The rustic mania possessed him unabatedly.

"I can do up a cowpenful of you slow hayseeds," he proclaimed,
vaingloriously. "Bring on your bulldogs, your hired men and your
log-rollers."

He turned handsprings on the grass that prodded Tom to envious
sarcasm. And then, with a whoop, he clattered to the rear and brought
back Uncle Ike, a battered colored retainer of the family, with his
banjo, and strewed sand on the porch and danced "Chicken in the
Bread Tray" and did buck-and-wing wonders for half an hour longer.
Incredibly, wild and boisterous things he did. He sang, he told
stories that set all but one shrieking, he played the yokel, the
humorous clodhopper; he was mad, mad with the revival of the old life
in his blood.

He became so extravagant that once his mother sought gently to
reprove him. Then Alicia moved as though she were about to speak, but
she did not. Through it all she sat immovable, a slim, white spirit
in the dusk that no man might question or read.

By and by she asked permission to ascend to her room, saying that she
was tired. On her way she passed Robert. He was standing in the door,
the figure of vulgar comedy, with ruffled hair, reddened face and
unpardonable confusion of attire--no trace there of the immaculate
Robert Walmsley, the courted clubman and ornament of select circles.
He was doing a conjuring trick with some household utensils, and the
family, now won over to him without exception, was beholding him with
worshipful admiration.

As Alicia passed in Robert started suddenly. He had forgotten for
the moment that she was present. Without a glance at him she went on
upstairs.

After that the fun grew quiet. An hour passed in talk, and then
Robert went up himself.

She was standing by the window when he entered their room. She was
still clothed as when they were on the porch. Outside and crowding
against the window was a giant apple tree, full blossomed.

Robert sighed and went near the window. He was ready to meet his
fate. A confessed vulgarian, he foresaw the verdict of justice in
the shape of that whiteclad form. He knew the rigid lines that a Van
Der Pool would draw. He was a peasant gambolling indecorously in the
valley, and the pure, cold, white, unthawed summit of the Matterhorn
could not but frown on him. He had been unmasked by his own actions.
All the polish, the poise, the form that the city had given him had
fallen from him like an ill-fitting mantle at the first breath of a
country breeze. Dully he awaited the approaching condemnation.

"Robert," said the calm, cool voice of his judge, "I thought I
married a gentleman."

Yes, it was coming. And yet, in the face of it, Robert Walmsley was
eagerly regarding a certain branch of the apple tree upon which
he used to climb out of that very window. He believed he could do
it now. He wondered how many blossoms there were on the tree--ten
millions? But here was some one speaking again:

"I thought I married a gentleman," the voice went on, "but--"

Why had she come and was standing so close by his side?

"But I find that I have married"--was this Alicia
talking?--"something better--a man--Bob, dear, kiss me, won't you?"

The city was far away.




XI

THE SHOCKS OF DOOM


There is an aristocracy of the public parks and even of the vagabonds
who use them for their private apartments. Vallance felt rather than
knew this, but when he stepped down out of his world into chaos his
feet brought him directly to Madison Square.

Raw and astringent as a schoolgirl--of the old order--young May
breathed austerely among the budding trees. Vallance buttoned his
coat, lighted his last cigarette and took his seat upon a bench.
For three minutes he mildly regretted the last hundred of his last
thousand that it had cost him when the bicycle cop put an end to
his last automobile ride. Then he felt in every pocket and found
not a single penny. He had given up his apartment that morning. His
furniture had gone toward certain debts. His clothes, save what were
upon him, had descended to his man-servant for back wages. As he sat
there was not in the whole city for him a bed or a broiled lobster
or a street-car fare or a carnation for buttonhole unless he should
obtain them by sponging on his friends or by false pretenses.
Therefore he had chosen the park.

And all this was because an uncle had disinherited him, and cut down
his allowance from liberality to nothing. And all that was because
his nephew had disobeyed him concerning a certain girl, who comes not
into this story--therefore, all readers who brush their hair toward
its roots may be warned to read no further. There was another nephew,
of a different branch, who had once been the prospective heir and
favorite. Being without grace or hope, he had long ago disappeared in
the mire. Now dragnets were out for him; he was to be rehabilitated
and restored. And so Vallance fell grandly as Lucifer to the lowest
pit, joining the tattered ghosts in the little park.

Sitting there, he leaned far back on the hard bench and laughed a
jet of cigarette smoke up to the lowest tree branches. The sudden
severing of all his life's ties had brought him a free, thrilling,
almost joyous elation. He felt precisely the sensation of the
aeronaut when he cuts loose his parachute and lets his balloon drift
away.

The hour was nearly ten. Not many loungers were on the benches. The
park-dweller, though a stubborn fighter against autumnal coolness, is
slow to attack the advance line of spring's chilly cohorts.

Then arose one from a seat near the leaping fountain, and came and
sat himself at Vallance's side. He was either young or old; cheap
lodging-houses had flavoured him mustily; razors and combs had passed
him by; in him drink had been bottled and sealed in the devil's bond.
He begged a match, which is the form of introduction among park
benchers, and then he began to talk.

"You're not one of the regulars," he said to Vallance. "I know
tailored clothes when I see 'em. You just stopped for a moment on
your way through the park. Don't mind my talking to you for a while?
I've got to be with somebody. I'm afraid--I'm afraid. I've told
two or three of those bummers over about it. They think I'm crazy.
Say--let me tell you--all I've had to eat to-day was a couple
pretzels and an apple. To-morrow I'll stand in line to inherit three
millions; and that restaurant you see over there with the autos
around it will be too cheap for me to eat in. Don't believe it, do
you?

"Without the slightest trouble," said Vallance, with a laugh. "I
lunched there yesterday. To-night I couldn't buy a five-cent cup of
coffee."

"You don't look like one of us. Well, I guess those things happen. I
used to be a high-flyer myself--some years ago. What knocked you out
of the game?"

"I--oh, I lost my job," said Vallance.

"It's undiluted Hades, this city," went on the other. "One day you're
eating from china; the next you are eating in China--a chop-suey
joint. I've had more than my share of hard luck. For five years
I've been little better than a panhandler. I was raised up to live
expensively and do nothing. Say--I don't mind telling you--I've
got to talk to somebody, you see, because I'm afraid--I'm afraid.
My name's Ide. You wouldn't think that old Paulding, one of the
millionaires on Riverside Drive, was my uncle, would you? Well, he
is. I lived in his house once, and had all the money I wanted. Say,
haven't you got the price of a couple of drinks about you--er--what's
your name--"

"Dawson," said Vallance. "No; I'm sorry to say that I'm all in,
financially."

"I've been living for a week in a coal cellar on Division Street,"
went on Ide, "with a crook they called 'Blinky' Morris. I didn't have
anywhere else to go. While I was out to-day a chap with some papers
in his pocket was there, asking for me. I didn't know but what he was
a fly cop, so I didn't go around again till after dark. There was
a letter there he had left for me. Say--Dawson, it was from a big
downtown lawyer, Mead. I've seen his sign on Ann Street. Paulding
wants me to play the prodigal nephew--wants me to come back and be
his heir again and blow in his money. I'm to call at the lawyer's
office at ten to-morrow and step into my old shoes again--heir to
three million, Dawson, and $10,000 a year pocket money. And--I'm
afraid--I'm afraid."

The vagrant leaped to his feet and raised both trembling arms above
his head. He caught his breath and moaned hysterically.

Vallance seized his arm and forced him back to the bench.

"Be quiet!" he commanded, with something like disgust in his tones.
"One would think you had lost a fortune, instead of being about to
acquire one. Of what are you afraid?"

Ide cowered and shivered on the bench. He clung to Vallance's
sleeve, and even in the dim glow of the Broadway lights the latest
disinherited one could see drops on the other's brow wrung out by
some strange terror.

"Why, I'm afraid something will happen to me before morning. I don't
know what--something to keep me from coming into that money. I'm
afraid a tree will fall on me--I'm afraid a cab will run over me, or
a stone drop on me from a housetop, or something. I never was afraid
before. I've sat in this park a hundred nights as calm as a graven
image without knowing where my breakfast was to come from. But now
it's different. I love money, Dawson--I'm happy as a god when it's
trickling through my fingers, and people are bowing to me, with the
music and the flowers and fine clothes all around. As long as I knew
I was out of the game I didn't mind. I was even happy sitting here
ragged and hungry, listening to the fountain jump and watching the
carriages go up the avenue. But it's in reach of my hand again
now--almost--and I can't stand it to wait twelve hours, Dawson--I
can't stand it. There are fifty things that could happen to me--I
could go blind--I might be attacked with heart disease--the world
might come to an end before I could--"

Ide sprang to his feet again, with a shriek. People stirred on the
benches and began to look. Vallance took his arm.

"Come and walk," he said, soothingly. "And try to calm yourself.
There is no need to become excited or alarmed. Nothing is going to
happen to you. One night is like another."

"That's right," said Ide. "Stay with me, Dawson--that's a good
fellow. Walk around with me awhile. I never went to pieces like this
before, and I've had a good many hard knocks. Do you think you could
hustle something in the way of a little lunch, old man? I'm afraid my
nerve's too far gone to try any panhandling."

Vallance led his companion up almost deserted Fifth Avenue, and
then westward along the Thirties toward Broadway. "Wait here a few
minutes," he said, leaving Ide in a quiet and shadowed spot. He
entered a familiar hotel, and strolled toward the bar quite in his
old assured way.

"There's a poor devil outside, Jimmy," he said to the bartender, "who
says he's hungry and looks it. You know what they do when you give
them money. Fix up a sandwich or two for him; and I'll see that he
doesn't throw it away."

"Certainly, Mr. Vallance," said the bartender. "They ain't all fakes.
Don't like to see anybody go hungry."

He folded a liberal supply of the free lunch into a napkin. Vallance
went with it and joined his companion. Ide pounced upon the food
ravenously. "I haven't had any free lunch as good as this in a year,"
he said. "Aren't you going to eat any, Dawson?

"I'm not hungry--thanks," said Vallance.

"We'll go back to the Square," said Ide. "The cops won't bother us
there. I'll roll up the rest of this ham and stuff for our breakfast.
I won't eat any more; I'm afraid I'll get sick. Suppose I'd die of
cramps or something to-night, and never get to touch that money
again! It's eleven hours yet till time to see that lawyer. You won't
leave me, will you, Dawson? I'm afraid something might happen. You
haven't any place to go, have you?"

"No," said Vallance, "nowhere to-night. I'll have a bench with you."

"You take it cool," said Ide, "if you've told it to me straight. I
should think a man put on the bum from a good job just in one day
would be tearing his hair."

"I believe I've already remarked," said Vallance, laughing, "that
I would have thought that a man who was expecting to come into a
fortune on the next day would be feeling pretty easy and quiet."

"It's funny business," philosophized Ide, "about the way people take
things, anyhow. Here's your bench, Dawson, right next to mine. The
light don't shine in your eyes here. Say, Dawson, I'll get the old
man to give you a letter to somebody about a job when I get back
home. You've helped me a lot to-night. I don't believe I could have
gone through the night if I hadn't struck you."

"Thank you," said Vallance. "Do you lie down or sit up on these when
you sleep?"

For hours Vallance gazed almost without winking at the stars through
the branches of the trees and listened to the sharp slapping of
horses' hoofs on the sea of asphalt to the south. His mind was
active, but his feelings were dormant. Every emotion seemed to
have been eradicated. He felt no regrets, no fears, no pain or
discomfort. Even when he thought of the girl, it was as of an
inhabitant of one of those remote stars at which he gazed. He
remembered the absurd antics of his companion and laughed softly, yet
without a feeling of mirth. Soon the daily army of milk wagons made
of the city a roaring drum to which they marched. Vallance fell
asleep on his comfortless bench.

At ten o'clock on the next day the two stood at the door of Lawyer
Mead's office in Ann Street.

Ide's nerves fluttered worse than ever when the hour approached; and
Vallance could not decide to leave him a possible prey to the dangers
he dreaded.

When they entered the office, Lawyer Mead looked at them wonderingly.
He and Vallance were old friends. After his greeting, he turned
to Ide, who stood with white face and trembling limbs before the
expected crisis.

"I sent a second letter to your address last night, Mr. Ide," he
said. "I learned this morning that you were not there to receive it.
It will inform you that Mr. Paulding has reconsidered his offer to
take you back into favor. He has decided not to do so, and desires
you to understand that no change will be made in the relations
existing between you and him."

Ide's trembling suddenly ceased. The color came back to his face,
and he straightened his back. His jaw went forward half an inch,
and a gleam came into his eye. He pushed back his battered hat with
one hand, and extended the other, with levelled fingers, toward the
lawyer. He took a long breath and then laughed sardonically.

"Tell old Paulding he may go to the devil," he said, loudly and
clearly, and turned and walked out of the office with a firm and
lively step.

Lawyer Mead turned on his heel to Vallance and smiled.

"I am glad you came in," he said, genially. "Your uncle wants you to
return home at once. He is reconciled to the situation that led to
his hasty action, and desires to say that all will be as--"

"Hey, Adams!" cried Lawyer Mead, breaking his sentence, and calling
to his clerk. "Bring a glass of water--Mr. Vallance has fainted."




XII

THE PLUTONIAN FIRE


There are a few editor men with whom I am privileged to come in
contact. It has not been long since it was their habit to come in
contact with me. There is a difference.

They tell me that with a large number of the manuscripts that are
submitted to them come advices (in the way of a boost) from the
author asseverating that the incidents in the story are true. The
destination of such contributions depends wholly upon the question of
the enclosure of stamps. Some are returned, the rest are thrown on
the floor in a corner on top of a pair of gum shoes, an overturned
statuette of the Winged Victory, and a pile of old magazines
containing a picture of the editor in the act of reading the latest
copy of _Le Petit Journal_, right side up--you can tell by the
illustrations. It is only a legend that there are waste baskets in
editors' offices.

Thus is truth held in disrepute. But in time truth and science and
nature will adapt themselves to art. Things will happen logically,
and the villain be discomfited instead of being elected to the board
of directors. But in the meantime fiction must not only be divorced
from fact, but must pay alimony and be awarded custody of the press
despatches.

This preamble is to warn you off the grade crossing of a true story.
Being that, it shall be told simply, with conjunctions substituted
for adjectives wherever possible, and whatever evidences of style may
appear in it shall be due to the linotype man. It is a story of the
literary life in a great city, and it should be of interest to every
author within a 20-mile radius of Gosport, Ind., whose desk holds a
MS. story beginning thus: "While the cheers following his nomination
were still ringing through the old court-house, Harwood broke away
from the congratulating handclasps of his henchmen and hurried to
Judge Creswell's house to find Ida."

Pettit came up out of Alabama to write fiction. The Southern
papers had printed eight of his stories under an editorial caption
identifying the author as the son of "the gallant Major Pettingill
Pettit, our former County Attorney and hero of the battle of Lookout
Mountain."

Pettit was a rugged fellow, with a kind of shame-faced culture,
and my good friend. His father kept a general store in a little
town called Hosea. Pettit had been raised in the pine-woods and
broom-sedge fields adjacent thereto. He had in his gripsack two
manuscript novels of the adventures in Picardy of one Gaston
Laboulaye, Vicompte de Montrepos, in the year 1329. That's nothing.
We all do that. And some day when we make a hit with the little
sketch about a newsy and his lame dog, the editor prints the other
one for us--or "on us," as the saying is--and then--and then we have
to get a big valise and peddle those patent air-draft gas burners.
At $1.25 everybody should have 'em.

I took Pettit to the red-brick house which was to appear in an
article entitled "Literary Landmarks of Old New York," some day when
we got through with it. He engaged a room there, drawing on the
general store for his expenses. I showed New York to him, and he did
not mention how much narrower Broadway is than Lee Avenue in Hosea.
This seemed a good sign, so I put the final test.

"Suppose you try your hand at a descriptive article," I suggested,
"giving your impressions of New York as seen from the Brooklyn
Bridge. The fresh point of view, the--"

"Don't be a fool," said Pettit. "Let's go have some beer. On the
whole I rather like the city."

We discovered and enjoyed the only true Bohemia. Every day and night
we repaired to one of those palaces of marble and glass and tilework,
where goes on a tremendous and sounding epic of life. Valhalla itself
could not be more glorious and sonorous. The classic marble on which
we ate, the great, light-flooded, vitreous front, adorned with
snow-white scrolls; the grand Wagnerian din of clanking cups and
bowls, the flashing staccato of brandishing cutlery, the piercing
recitative of the white-aproned grub-maidens at the morgue-like
banquet tables; the recurrent lied-motif of the cash-register--it
was a gigantic, triumphant welding of art and sound, a deafening,
soul-uplifting pageant of heroic and emblematic life. And the beans
were only ten cents. We wondered why our fellow-artists cared to dine
at sad little tables in their so-called Bohemian restaurants; and
we shuddered lest they should seek out our resorts and make them
conspicuous with their presence.

Pettit wrote many stories, which the editors returned to him. He
wrote love stories, a thing I have always kept free from, holding the
belief that the well-known and popular sentiment is not properly a
matter for publication, but something to be privately handled by the
alienists and florists. But the editors had told him that they wanted
love stories, because they said the women read them.

Now, the editors are wrong about that, of course. Women do not read
the love stories in the magazines. They read the poker-game stories
and the recipes for cucumber lotion. The love stories are read by fat
cigar drummers and little ten-year-old girls. I am not criticising
the judgment of editors. They are mostly very fine men, but a man
can be but one man, with individual opinions and tastes. I knew two
associate editors of a magazine who were wonderfully alike in almost
everything. And yet one of them was very fond of Flaubert, while the
other preferred gin.

Pettit brought me his returned manuscripts, and we looked them over
together to find out why they were not accepted. They seemed to me
pretty fair stories, written in a good style, and ended, as they
should, at the bottom of the last page.

They were well constructed and the events were marshalled in orderly
and logical sequence. But I thought I detected a lack of living
substance--it was much as if I gazed at a symmetrical array of
presentable clamshells from which the succulent and vital inhabitants
had been removed. I intimated that the author might do well to get
better acquainted with his theme.

"You sold a story last week," said Pettit, "about a gun fight in an
Arizona mining town in which the hero drew his Colt's .45 and shot
seven bandits as fast as they came in the door. Now, if a six-shooter
could--"

"Oh, well," said I, "that's different. Arizona is a long way from New
York. I could have a man stabbed with a lariat or chased by a pair
of chaparreras if I wanted to, and it wouldn't be noticed until the
usual error-sharp from around McAdams Junction isolates the erratum
and writes in to the papers about it. But you are up against another
proposition. This thing they call love is as common around New York
as it is in Sheboygan during the young onion season. It may be mixed
here with a little commercialism--they read Byron, but they look
up Bradstreet's, too, while they're among the B's, and Brigham
also if they have time--but it's pretty much the same old internal
disturbance everywhere. You can fool an editor with a fake picture of
a cowboy mounting a pony with his left hand on the saddle horn, but
you can't put him up a tree with a love story. So, you've got to fall
in love and then write the real thing."

Pettit did. I never knew whether he was taking my advice or whether
he fell an accidental victim.

There was a girl he had met at one of these studio contrivances--a
glorious, impudent, lucid, open-minded girl with hair the color of
Culmbacher, and a good-natured way of despising you. She was a New
York girl.

Well (as the narrative style permits us to say infrequently),
Pettit went to pieces. All those pains, those lover's doubts, those
heart-burnings and tremors of which he had written so unconvincingly
were his. Talk about Shylock's pound of flesh! Twenty-five pounds
Cupid got from Pettit. Which is the usurer?

One night Pettit came to my room exalted. Pale and haggard but
exalted. She had given him a jonquil.

"Old Hoss," said he, with a new smile flickering around his mouth, "I
believe I could write that story to-night--the one, you know, that is
to win out. I can feel it. I don't know whether it will come out or
not, but I can feel it."

I pushed him out of my door. "Go to your room and write it," I
ordered. "Else I can see your finish. I told you this must come
first. Write it to-night and put it under my door when it is done.
Put it under my door to-night when it is finished--don't keep it
until to-morrow."

I was reading my bully old pal Montaigne at two o'clock when I heard
the sheets rustle under my door. I gathered them up and read the
story.

The hissing of geese, the languishing cooing of doves, the braying
of donkeys, the chatter of irresponsible sparrows--these were in my
mind's ear as I read. "Suffering Sappho!" I exclaimed to myself. "Is
this the divine fire that is supposed to ignite genius and make it
practical and wage-earning?"

The story was sentimental drivel, full of whimpering soft-heartedness
and gushing egoism. All the art that Pettit had acquired was gone. A
perusal of its buttery phrases would have made a cynic of a sighing
chambermaid.

In the morning Pettit came to my room. I read him his doom
mercilessly. He laughed idiotically.

"All right, Old Hoss," he said, cheerily, "make cigar-lighters of it.
What's the difference? I'm going to take her to lunch at Claremont
to-day."

There was about a month of it. And then Pettit came to me bearing an
invisible mitten, with the fortitude of a dish-rag. He talked of the
grave and South America and prussic acid; and I lost an afternoon
getting him straight. I took him out and saw that large and curative
doses of whiskey were administered to him. I warned you this was a
true story--'ware your white ribbons if only follow this tale. For
two weeks I fed him whiskey and Omar, and read to him regularly every
evening the column in the evening paper that reveals the secrets of
female beauty. I recommend the treatment.

After Pettit was cured he wrote more stories. He recovered his
old-time facility and did work just short of good enough. Then the
curtain rose on the third act.

A little, dark-eyed, silent girl from New Hampshire, who was studying
applied design, fell deeply in love with him. She was the intense
sort, but externally _glacé_, such as New England sometimes fools us
with. Pettit liked her mildly, and took her about a good deal. She
worshipped him, and now and then bored him.

There came a climax when she tried to jump out of a window, and he
had to save her by some perfunctary, unmeant wooing. Even I was
shaken by the depths of the absorbing affection she showed. Home,
friends, traditions, creeds went up like thistle-down in the scale
against her love. It was really discomposing.

One night again Pettit sauntered in, yawning. As he had told me
before, he said he felt that he could do a great story, and as before
I hunted him to his room and saw him open his inkstand. At one
o'clock the sheets of paper slid under my door.

I read that story, and I jumped up, late as it was, with a whoop of
joy. Old Pettit had done it. Just as though it lay there, red and
bleeding, a woman's heart was written into the lines. You couldn't
see the joining, but art, exquisite art, and pulsing nature had been
combined into a love story that took you by the throat like the
quinsy. I broke into Pettit's room and beat him on the back and
called him names--names high up in the galaxy of the immortals that
we admired. And Pettit yawned and begged to be allowed to sleep.

On the morrow, I dragged him to an editor. The great man read, and,
rising, gave Pettit his hand. That was a decoration, a wreath of bay,
and a guarantee of rent.

And then old Pettit smiled slowly. I call him Gentleman Pettit now
to myself. It's a miserable name to give a man, but it sounds better
than it looks in print.

"I see," said old Pettit, as he took up his story and began tearing
it into small strips. "I see the game now. You can't write with ink,
and you can't write with your own heart's blood, but you can write
with the heart's blood of some one else. You have to be a cad before
you can be an artist. Well, I am for old Alabam and the Major's
store. Have you got a light, Old Hoss?"

I went with Pettit to the depot and died hard.

"Shakespeare's sonnets?" I blurted, making a last stand. "How about
him?"

"A cad," said Pettit. "They give it to you, and you sell it--love,
you know. I'd rather sell ploughs for father."

"But," I protested, "you are reversing the decision of the world's
greatest--"

"Good-by, Old Hoss," said Pettit.

"Critics," I continued. "But--say--if the Major can use a fairly good
salesman and book-keeper down there in the store, let me know, will
you?"




XIII

NEMESIS AND THE CANDY MAN


"We sail at eight in the morning on the _Celtic_," said Honoria,
plucking a loose thread from her lace sleeve.

"I heard so," said young Ives, dropping his hat, and muffing it as he
tried to catch it, "and I came around to wish you a pleasant voyage."

"Of course you heard it," said Honoria, coldly sweet, "since we have
had no opportunity of informing you ourselves."

Ives looked at her pleadingly, but with little hope.

Outside in the street a high-pitched voice chanted, not
unmusically, a commercial gamut of "Cand-ee-ee-ee-s! Nice, fresh
cand-ee-ee-ee-ees!"

"It's our old candy man," said Honoria, leaning out the window and
beckoning. "I want some of his motto kisses. There's nothing in the
Broadway shops half so good."

The candy man stopped his pushcart in front of the old Madison Avenue
home. He had a holiday and festival air unusual to street peddlers.
His tie was new and bright red, and a horseshoe pin, almost
life-size, glittered speciously from its folds. His brown, thin face
was crinkled into a semi-foolish smile. Striped cuffs with dog-head
buttons covered the tan on his wrists.

"I do believe he's going to get married," said Honoria, pityingly. "I
never saw him taken that way before. And to-day is the first time in
months that he has cried his wares, I am sure."

Ives threw a coin to the sidewalk. The candy man knows his customers.
He filled a paper bag, climbed the old-fashioned stoop and handed it
in. "I remember--" said Ives.

"Wait," said Honoria.

She took a small portfolio from the drawer of a writing desk and from
the portfolio a slip of flimsy paper one-quarter of an inch by two
inches in size.

"This," said Honoria, inflexibly, "was wrapped about the first one we
opened."

"It was a year ago," apologized Ives, as he held out his hand for
it,


   "As long as skies above are blue
    To you, my love, I will be true."


This he read from the slip of flimsy paper.

"We were to have sailed a fortnight ago," said Honoria, gossipingly.
"It has been such a warm summer. The town is quite deserted. There is
nowhere to go. Yet I am told that one or two of the roof gardens are
amusing. The singing--and the dancing--on one or two seem to have met
with approval."

Ives did not wince. When you are in the ring you are not surprised
when your adversary taps you on the ribs.

"I followed the candy man that time," said Ives, irrelevantly, "and
gave him five dollars at the corner of Broadway."

He reached for the paper bag in Honoria's lap, took out one of the
square, wrapped confections and slowly unrolled it.

"Sara Chillingworth's father," said Honoria, "has given her an
automobile."

"Read that," said Ives, handing over the slip that had been wrapped
around the square of candy.


   "Life teaches us--how to live,
    Love teaches us--to forgive."


Honoria's checks turned pink.

"Honoria!" cried Ives, starting up from his chair.

"Miss Clinton," corrected Honoria, rising like Venus from the bead
on the surf. "I warned you not to speak that name again."'

"Honoria," repeated Ives, "you must hear me. I know I do not
deserve your forgiveness, but I must have it. There is a madness
that possesses one sometimes for which his better nature is not
responsible. I throw everything else but you to the winds. I strike
off the chains that have bound me. I renounce the siren that lured me
from you. Let the bought verse of that street peddler plead for me.
It is you only whom I can love. Let your love forgive, and I swear to
you that mine will be true 'as long as skies above are blue.'"



On the west side, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, an alley cuts
the block in the middle. It perishes in a little court in the centre
of the block. The district is theatrical; the inhabitants, the
bubbling froth of half a dozen nations. The atmosphere is Bohemian,
the language polyglot, the locality precarious.

In the court at the rear of the alley lived the candy man. At seven
o'clock he pushed his cart into the narrow entrance, rested it upon
the irregular stone slats and sat upon one of the handles to cool
himself. There was a great draught of cool wind through the alley.

There was a window above the spot where he always stopped his
pushcart. In the cool of the afternoon, Mlle. Adèle, drawing card of
the Aërial Roof Garden, sat at the window and took the air. Generally
her ponderous mass of dark auburn hair was down, that the breeze
might have the felicity of aiding Sidonie, the maid, in drying
and airing it. About her shoulders--the point of her that the
photographers always made the most of--was loosely draped a
heliotrope scarf. Her arms to the elbow were bare--there were no
sculptors there to rave over them--but even the stolid bricks in
the walls of the alley should not have been so insensate as to
disapprove. While she sat thus Félice, another maid, anointed and
bathed the small feet that twinkled and so charmed the nightly Aërial
audiences.

Gradually Mademoiselle began to notice the candy man stopping to mop
his brow and cool himself beneath her window. In the hands of her
maids she was deprived for the time of her vocation--the charming
and binding to her chariot of man. To lose time was displeasing to
Mademoiselle. Here was the candy man--no fit game for her darts,
truly--but of the sex upon which she had been born to make war.

After casting upon him looks of unseeing coldness for a dozen times,
one afternoon she suddenly thawed and poured down upon him a smile
that put to shame the sweets upon his cart.

"Candy man," she said, cooingly, while Sidonie followed her impulsive
dive, brushing the heavy auburn hair, "don't you think I am
beautiful?"

The candy man laughed harshly, and looked up, with his thin jaw set,
while he wiped his forehead with a red-and-blue handkerchief.

"Yer'd make a dandy magazine cover," he said, grudgingly. "Beautiful
or not is for them that cares. It's not my line. If yer lookin' for
bouquets apply elsewhere between nine and twelve. I think we'll have
rain."

Truly, fascinating a candy man is like killing rabbits in a deep
snow; but the hunter's blood is widely diffused. Mademoiselle tugged
a great coil of hair from Sidonie's hands and let it fall out the
window.

"Candy man, have you a sweetheart anywhere with hair as long and soft
as that? And with an arm so round?" She flexed an arm like Galatea's
after the miracle across the window-sill.

The candy man cackled shrilly as he arranged a stock of butter-scotch
that had tumbled down.

"Smoke up!" said he, vulgarly. "Nothin' doin' in the complimentary
line. I'm too wise to be bamboozled by a switch of hair and a newly
massaged arm. Oh, I guess you'll make good in the calcium, all right,
with plenty of powder and paint on and the orchestra playing 'Under
the Old Apple Tree.' But don't put on your hat and chase downstairs
to fly to the Little Church Around the Corner with me. I've been
up against peroxide and make-up boxes before. Say, all joking
aside--don't you think we'll have rain?"

"Candy man," said Mademoiselle softly, with her lips curving and her
chin dimpling, "don't you think I'm pretty?"

The candy man grinned.

"Savin' money, ain't yer?" said he, "by bein' yer own press agent.
I smoke, but I haven't seen yer mug on any of the five-cent cigar
boxes. It'd take a new brand of woman to get me goin', anyway. I
know 'em from sidecombs to shoelaces. Gimme a good day's sales and
steak-and-onions at seven and a pipe and an evenin' paper back there
in the court, and I'll not trouble Lillian Russell herself to wink
at me, if you please."

Mademoiselle pouted.

"Candy man," she said, softly and deeply, "yet you shall say that I
am beautiful. All men say so and so shall you."

The candy man laughed and pulled out his pipe.

"Well," said he, "I must be goin' in. There is a story in the evenin'
paper that I am readin'. Men are divin' in the seas for a treasure,
and pirates are watchin' them from behind a reef. And there ain't a
woman on land or water or in the air. Good-evenin'." And he trundled
his pushcart down the alley and back to the musty court where he
lived.

Incredibly to him who has not learned woman, Mademoiselle sat at the
window each day and spread her nets for the ignominious game. Once
she kept a grand cavalier waiting in her reception chamber for half
an hour while she battered in vain the candy man's tough philosophy.
His rough laugh chafed her vanity to its core. Daily he sat on his
cart in the breeze of the alley while her hair was being ministered
to, and daily the shafts of her beauty rebounded from his dull bosom
pointless and ineffectual. Unworthy pique brightened her eyes.
Pride-hurt she glowed upon him in a way that would have sent her
higher adorers into an egoistic paradise. The candy man's hard eyes
looked upon her with a half-concealed derision that urged her to the
use of the sharpest arrow in her beauty's quiver.

One afternoon she leaned far over the sill, and she did not challenge
and torment him as usual.

"Candy man," said she, "stand up and look into my eyes."

He stood up and looked into her eyes, with his harsh laugh like the
sawing of wood. He took out his pipe, fumbled with it, and put it
back into big pocket with a trembling hand.

"That will do," said Mademoiselle, with a slow smile. "I must go now
to my masseuse. Good-evening."

The next evening at seven the candy man came and rested his cart
under the window. But was it the candy man? His clothes were a bright
new check. His necktie was a flaming red, adorned by a glittering
horseshoe pin, almost life-size. His shoes were polished; the tan
of his cheeks had paled--his hands had been washed. The window was
empty, and he waited under it with his nose upward, like a hound
hoping for a bone.

Mademoiselle came, with Sidonie carrying her load of hair. She looked
at the candy man and smiled a slow smile that faded away into ennui.
Instantly she knew that the game was bagged; and so quickly she
wearied of the chase. She began to talk to Sidonie.

"Been a fine day," said the candy man, hollowly. "First time in a
month I've felt first-class. Hit it up down old Madison, hollering
out like I useter. Think it'll rain to-morrow?"

Mademoiselle laid two round arms on the cushion on the window-sill,
and a dimpled chin upon them.

"Candy man," said she, softly, "do you not love me?"

The candy man stood up and leaned against the brick wall.

"Lady," said he, chokingly, "I've got $800 saved up. Did I say you
wasn't beautiful? Take it every bit of it and buy a collar for your
dog with it."

A sound as of a hundred silvery bells tinkled in the room of
Mademoiselle. The laughter filled the alley and trickled back into
the court, as strange a thing to enter there as sunlight itself.
Mademoiselle was amused. Sidonie, a wise echo, added a sepulchral
but faithful contralto. The laughter of the two seemed at last to
penetrate the candy man. He fumbled with his horseshoe pin. At length
Mademoiselle, exhausted, turned her flushed, beautiful face to the
window.

"Candy man," said she, "go away. When I laugh Sidonie pulls my hair.
I can but laugh while you remain there."

"Here is a note for Mademoiselle," said Félice, coming to the window
in the room.

"There is no justice," said the candy man, lifting the handle of his
cart and moving away.

Three yards he moved, and stopped. Loud shriek after shriek came from
the window of Mademoiselle. Quickly he ran back. He heard a body
thumping upon the floor and a sound as though heels beat alternately
upon it.

"What is it?" he called.

Sidonie's severe head came into the window.

"Mademoiselle is overcome by bad news," she said. "One whom she loved
with all her soul has gone--you may have heard of him--he is Monsieur
Ives. He sails across the ocean to-morrow. Oh, you men!"




XIV

SQUARING THE CIRCLE


At the hazard of wearying you this tale of vehement emotions must be
prefaced by a discourse on geometry.

Nature moves in circles; Art in straight lines. The natural is
rounded; the artificial is made up of angles. A man lost in the snow
wanders, in spite of himself, in perfect circles; the city man's
feet, denaturalized by rectangular streets and floors, carry him ever
away from himself.

The round eyes of childhood typify innocence; the narrowed line of
the flirt's optic proves the invasion of art. The horizontal mouth
is the mark of determined cunning; who has not read Nature's most
spontaneous lyric in lips rounded for the candid kiss?

Beauty is Nature in perfection; circularity is its chief attribute.
Behold the full moon, the enchanting golf ball, the domes of splendid
temples, the huckleberry pie, the wedding ring, the circus ring, the
ring for the waiter, and the "round" of drinks.

On the other hand, straight lines show that Nature has been
deflected. Imagine Venus's girdle transformed into a "straight
front"!

When we begin to move in straight lines and turn sharp corners our
natures begin to change. The consequence is that Nature, being more
adaptive than Art, tries to conform to its sterner regulations. The
result is often a rather curious product--for instance: A prize
chrysanthemum, wood alcohol whiskey, a Republican Missouri,
cauliflower _au gratin_, and a New Yorker.

Nature is lost quickest in a big city. The cause is geometrical,
not moral. The straight lines of its streets and architecture, the
rectangularity of its laws and social customs, the undeviating
pavements, the hard, severe, depressing, uncompromising rules of
all its ways--even of its recreation and sports--coldly exhibit a
sneering defiance of the curved line of Nature.

Wherefore, it may be said that the big city has demonstrated the
problem of squaring the circle. And it may be added that this
mathematical introduction precedes an account of the fate of a
Kentucky feud that was imported to the city that has a habit of
making its importations conform to its angles.

The feud began in the Cumberland Mountains between the Folwell and
the Harkness families. The first victim of the homespun vendetta was
a 'possum dog belonging to Bill Harkness. The Harkness family evened
up this dire loss by laying out the chief of the Folwell clan. The
Folwells were prompt at repartee. They oiled up their squirrel rifles
and made it feasible for Bill Harkness to follow his dog to a land
where the 'possums come down when treed without the stroke of an ax.

The feud flourished for forty years. Harknesses were shot at
the plough, through their lamp-lit cabin windows, coming from
camp-meeting, asleep, in duello, sober and otherwise, singly and in
family groups, prepared and unprepared. Folwells had the branches of
their family tree lopped off in similar ways, as the traditions of
their country prescribed and authorized.

By and by the pruning left but a single member of each family. And
then Cal Harkness, probably reasoning that further pursuance of the
controversy would give a too decided personal flavour to the feud,
suddenly disappeared from the relieved Cumberlands, baulking the
avenging hand of Sam, the ultimate opposing Folwell.

A year afterward Sam Folwell learned that his hereditary,
unsuppressed enemy was living in New York City. Sam turned over the
big iron wash-pot in the yard, scraped off some of the soot, which he
mixed with lard and shined his boots with the compound. He put on his
store clothes of butternut dyed black, a white shirt and collar, and
packed a carpet-sack with Spartan _lingerie_. He took his squirrel
rifle from its hooks, but put it back again with a sigh. However
ethical and plausible the habit might be in the Cumberlands, perhaps
New York would not swallow his pose of hunting squirrels among the
skyscrapers along Broadway. An ancient but reliable Colt's revolver
that he resurrected from a bureau drawer seemed to proclaim itself
the pink of weapons for metropolitan adventure and vengeance.
This and a hunting-knife in a leather sheath, Sam packed in the
carpet-sack. As he started, muleback, for the lowland railroad
station the last Folwell turned in his saddle and looked grimly at
the little cluster of white-pine slabs in the clump of cedars that
marked the Folwell burying-ground.

Sam Folwell arrived in New York in the night. Still moving and living
in the free circles of nature, he did not perceive the formidable,
pitiless, restless, fierce angles of the great city waiting in the
dark to close about the rotundity of his heart and brain and mould
him to the form of its millions of re-shaped victims. A cabby picked
him out of the whirl, as Sam himself had often picked a nut from a
bed of wind-tossed autumn leaves, and whisked him away to a hotel
commensurate to his boots and carpet-sack.

On the next morning the last of the Folwells made his sortie into the
city that sheltered the last Harkness. The Colt was thrust beneath
his coat and secured by a narrow leather belt; the hunting-knife hung
between his shoulder-blades, with the haft an inch below his coat
collar. He knew this much--that Cal Harkness drove an express wagon
somewhere in that town, and that he, Sam Folwell, had come to kill
him. And as he stepped upon the sidewalk the red came into his eye
and the feud-hate into his heart.

The clamor of the central avenues drew him thitherward. He had half
expected to see Cal coming down the street in his shirt-sleeves,
with a jug and a whip in his hand, just as he would have seen him in
Frankfort or Laurel City. But an hour went by and Cal did not appear.
Perhaps he was waiting in ambush, to shoot him from a door or a
window. Sam kept a sharp eye on doors and windows for a while.

About noon the city tired of playing with its mouse and suddenly
squeezed him with its straight lines.

Sam Folwell stood where two great, rectangular arteries of the city
cross. He looked four ways, and saw the world hurled from its orbit
and reduced by spirit level and tape to an edged and cornered plane.
All life moved on tracks, in grooves, according to system, within
boundaries, by rote. The root of life was the cube root; the measure
of existence was square measure. People streamed by in straight rows;
the horrible din and crash stupefied him.

Sam leaned against the sharp corner of a stone building. Those faces
passed him by thousands, and none of them were turned toward him.
A sudden foolish fear that he had died and was a spirit, and that
they could not see him, seized him. And then the city smote him with
loneliness.

A fat man dropped out of the stream and stood a few feet distant,
waiting for his car. Sam crept to his side and shouted above the
tumult into his ear:

"The Rankinses' hogs weighed more'n ourn a whole passel, but the mast
in thar neighborhood was a fine chance better than what it was
down--"

The fat man moved away unostentatiously, and bought roasted chestnuts
to cover his alarm.

Sam felt the need of a drop of mountain dew. Across the street men
passed in and out through swinging doors. Brief glimpses could be
had of a glistening bar and its bedeckings. The feudist crossed and
essayed to enter. Again had Art eliminated the familiar circle. Sam's
hand found no door-knob--it slid, in vain, over a rectangular brass
plate and polished oak with nothing even so large as a pin's head
upon which his fingers might close.

Abashed, reddened, heartbroken, he walked away from the bootless door
and sat upon a step. A locust club tickled him in the ribs.

"Take a walk for yourself," said the policeman. "You've been loafing
around here long enough."

At the next corner a shrill whistle sounded in Sam's ear. He wheeled
around and saw a black-browed villain scowling at him over peanuts
heaped on a steaming machine. He started across the street. An
immense engine, running without mules, with the voice of a bull
and the smell of a smoky lamp, whizzed past, grazing his knee. A
cab-driver bumped him with a hub and explained to him that kind words
were invented to be used on other occasions. A motorman clanged his
bell wildly and, for once in his life, corroborated a cab-driver. A
large lady in a changeable silk waist dug an elbow into his back, and
a newsy pensively pelted him with banana rinds, murmuring, "I hates
to do it--but if anybody seen me let it pass!"

Cal Harkness, his day's work over and his express wagon stabled,
turned the sharp edge of the building that, by the cheek of
architects, is modelled upon a safety razor. Out of the mass of
hurrying people his eye picked up, three yards away, the surviving
bloody and implacable foe of his kith and kin.

He stopped short and wavered for a moment, being unarmed and sharply
surprised. But the keen mountaineer's eye of Sam Folwell had picked
him out.

There was a sudden spring, a ripple in the stream of passers-by and
the sound of Sam's voice crying:

"Howdy, Cal! I'm durned glad to see ye."

And in the angles of Broadway, Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street
the Cumberland feudists shook hands.




XV

ROSES, RUSES AND ROMANCE


Ravenel--Ravenel, the traveller, artist and poet, threw his magazine
to the floor. Sammy Brown, broker's clerk, who sat by the window,
jumped.

"What is it, Ravvy?" he asked. "The critics been hammering your stock
down?"

"Romance is dead," said Ravenel, lightly. When Ravenel spoke lightly
he was generally serious. He picked up the magazine and fluttered its
leaves.

"Even a Philistine, like you, Sammy," said Ravenel, seriously (a tone
that insured him to be speaking lightly), "ought to understand. Now,
here is a magazine that once printed Poe and Lowell and Whitman and
Bret Harte and Du Maurier and Lanier and--well, that gives you the
idea. The current number has this literary feast to set before you:
an article on the stokers and coal bunkers of battleships, an exposé
of the methods employed in making liverwurst, a continued story of a
Standard Preferred International Baking Powder deal in Wall Street,
a 'poem' on the bear that the President missed, another 'story' by
a young woman who spent a week as a spy making overalls on the East
Side, another 'fiction' story that reeks of the 'garage' and a
certain make of automobile. Of course, the title contains the words
'Cupid' and 'Chauffeur'--an article on naval strategy, illustrated
with cuts of the Spanish Armada, and the new Staten Island
ferry-boats; another story of a political boss who won the love of
a Fifth Avenue belle by blackening her eye and refusing to vote
for an iniquitous ordinance (it doesn't say whether it was in the
Street-Cleaning Department or Congress), and nineteen pages by the
editors bragging about the circulation. The whole thing, Sammy, is an
obituary on Romance."

Sammy Brown sat comfortably in the leather armchair by the open
window. His suit was a vehement brown with visible checks,
beautifully matched in shade by the ends of four cigars that his vest
pocket poorly concealed. Light tan were his shoes, gray his socks,
sky-blue his apparent linen, snowy and high and adamantine his
collar, against which a black butterfly had alighted and spread his
wings. Sammy's face--least important--was round and pleasant and
pinkish, and in his eyes you saw no haven for fleeing Romance.

That window of Ravenel's apartment opened upon an old garden full of
ancient trees and shrubbery. The apartment-house towered above one
side of it; a high brick wall fended it from the street; opposite
Ravenel's window an old, old mansion stood, half-hidden in the shade
of the summer foliage. The house was a castle besieged. The city
howled and roared and shrieked and beat upon its double doors, and
shook white, fluttering checks above the wall, offering terms of
surrender. The gray dust settled upon the trees; the siege was
pressed hotter, but the drawbridge was not lowered. No further will
the language of chivalry serve. Inside lived an old gentleman who
loved his home and did not wish to sell it. That is all the romance
of the besieged castle.

Three or four times every week came Sammy Brown to Ravenel's
apartment. He belonged to the poet's club, for the former Browns had
been conspicuous, though Sammy had been vulgarized by Business. He
had no tears for departed Romance. The song of the ticker was the
one that reached his heart, and when it came to matters equine and
batting scores he was something of a pink edition. He loved to sit
in the leather armchair by Ravenel's window. And Ravenel didn't mind
particularly. Sammy seemed to enjoy his talk; and then the broker's
clerk was such a perfect embodiment of modernity and the day's sordid
practicality that Ravenel rather liked to use him as a scapegoat.

"I'll tell you what's the matter with you," said Sammy, with the
shrewdness that business had taught him. "The magazine has turned
down some of your poetry stunts. That's why you are sore at it."

"That would be a good guess in Wall Street or in a campaign for the
presidency of a woman's club," said Ravenel, quietly. "Now, there
is a poem--if you will allow me to call it that--of my own in this
number of the magazine."

"Read it to me," said Sammy, watching a cloud of pipe-smoke he had
just blown out the window.

Ravenel was no greater than Achilles. No one is. There is bound to be
a spot. The Somebody-or-Other must take hold of us somewhere when she
dips us in the Something-or-Other that makes us invulnerable. He read
aloud this verse in the magazine:


   THE FOUR ROSES

   "One rose I twined within your hair--
       (White rose, that spake of worth);
    And one you placed upon your breast--
       (Red rose, love's seal of birth).
    You plucked another from its stem--
       (Tea rose, that means for aye);
    And one you gave--that bore for me
       The thorns of memory."


"That's a crackerjack," said Sammy, admiringly.

"There are five more verses," said Ravenel, patiently sardonic. "One
naturally pauses at the end of each. Of course--"

"Oh, let's have the rest, old man," shouted Sammy, contritely, "I
didn't mean to cut you off. I'm not much of a poetry expert, you
know. I never saw a poem that didn't look like it ought to have
terminal facilities at the end of every verse. Reel off the rest of
it."

Ravenel sighed, and laid the magazine down. "All right," said Sammy,
cheerfully, "we'll have it next time. I'll be off now. Got a date at
five o'clock."

He took a last look at the shaded green garden and left, whistling in
an off key an untuneful air from a roofless farce comedy.

The next afternoon Ravenel, while polishing a ragged line of a new
sonnet, reclined by the window overlooking the besieged garden of
the unmercenary baron. Suddenly he sat up, spilling two rhymes and a
syllable or two.

Through the trees one window of the old mansion could be seen
clearly. In its window, draped in flowing white, leaned the angel of
all his dreams of romance and poesy. Young, fresh as a drop of dew,
graceful as a spray of clematis, conferring upon the garden hemmed
in by the roaring traffic the air of a princess's bower, beautiful
as any flower sung by poet--thus Ravenel saw her for the first time.
She lingered for a while, and then disappeared within, leaving a
few notes of a birdlike ripple of song to reach his entranced ears
through the rattle of cabs and the snarling of the electric cars.

Thus, as if to challenge the poet's flaunt at romance and to punish
him for his recreancy to the undying spirit of youth and beauty, this
vision had dawned upon him with a thrilling and accusive power. And
so metabolic was the power that in an instant the atoms of Ravenel's
entire world were redistributed. The laden drays that passed the
house in which she lived rumbled a deep double-bass to the tune of
love. The newsboys' shouts were the notes of singing birds; that
garden was the pleasance of the Capulets; the janitor was an ogre;
himself a knight, ready with sword, lance or lute.

Thus does romance show herself amid forests of brick and stone when
she gets lost in the city, and there has to be sent out a general
alarm to find her again.

At four in the afternoon Ravenel looked out across the garden. In
the window of his hopes were set four small vases, each containing a
great, full-blown rose--red and white. And, as he gazed, she leaned
above them, shaming them with her loveliness and seeming to direct
her eyes pensively toward his own window. And then, as though she had
caught his respectful but ardent regard, she melted away, leaving the
fragrant emblems on the window-sill.

Yes, emblems!--he would be unworthy if he had not understood. She had
read his poem, "The Four Roses"; it had reached her heart; and this
was its romantic answer. Of course she must know that Ravenel, the
poet, lived there across her garden. His picture, too, she must have
seen in the magazines. The delicate, tender, modest, flattering
message could not be ignored.

Ravenel noticed beside the roses a small flowering-pot containing a
plant. Without shame he brought his opera-glasses and employed them
from the cover of his window-curtain. A nutmeg geranium!

With the true poetic instinct he dragged a book of useless
information from his shelves, and tore open the leaves at "The
Language of Flowers."

"Geranium, Nutmeg--I expect a meeting."

So! Romance never does things by halves. If she comes back to you she
brings gifts and her knitting, and will sit in your chimney-corner if
you will let her.

And now Ravenel smiled. The lover smiles when he thinks he has won.
The woman who loves ceases to smile with victory. He ends a battle;
she begins hers. What a pretty idea to set the four roses in her
window for him to see! She must have a sweet, poetic soul. And now to
contrive the meeting.

A whistling and slamming of doors preluded the coming of Sammy Brown.

Ravenel smiled again. Even Sammy Brown was shone upon by the
far-flung rays of the renaissance. Sammy, with his ultra clothes, his
horseshoe pin, his plump face, his trite slang, his uncomprehending
admiration of Ravenel--the broker's clerk made an excellent foil to
the new, bright unseen visitor to the poet's sombre apartment.

Sammy went to his old seat by the window, and looked out over the
dusty green foliage in the garden. Then he looked at his watch, and
rose hastily.

"By grabs!" he exclaimed. "Twenty after four! I can't stay, old man;
I've got a date at 4:30."

"Why did you come, then?" asked Ravenel, with sarcastic jocularity,
"if you had an engagement at that time. I thought you business men
kept better account of your minutes and seconds than that."

Sammy hesitated in the doorway and turned pinker.

"Fact is, Ravvy," he explained, as to a customer whose margin is
exhausted, "I didn't know I had it till I came. I'll tell you, old
man--there's a dandy girl in that old house next door that I'm dead
gone on. I put it straight--we're engaged. The old man says 'nit' but
that don't go. He keeps her pretty close. I can see Edith's window
from yours here. She gives me a tip when she's going shopping, and I
meet her. It's 4:30 to-day. Maybe I ought to have explained sooner,
but I know it's all right with you--so long."

"How do you get your 'tip,' as you call it?" asked Ravenel, losing a
little spontaneity from his smile.

"Roses," said Sammy, briefly. "Four of 'em to-day. Means four o'clock
at the corner of Broadway and Twenty-third."

"But the geranium?" persisted Ravenel, clutching at the end of flying
Romance's trailing robe.

"Means half-past," shouted Sammy from the hall. "See you
to-morrow."




XVI

THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT


"During the recent warmed-over spell," said my friend Carney, driver
of express wagon No. 8,606, "a good many opportunities was had of
observing human nature through peekaboo waists.

"The Park Commissioner and the Commissioner of Polis and the Forestry
Commission gets together and agrees to let the people sleep in the
parks until the Weather Bureau gets the thermometer down again to
a living basis. So they draws up open-air resolutions and has them
O.K.'d by the Secretary of Agriculture, Mr. Comstock and the Village
Improvement Mosquito Exterminating Society of South Orange, N. J.

"When the proclamation was made opening up to the people by special
grant the public parks that belong to 'em, there was a general exodus
into Central Park by the communities existing along its borders.
In ten minutes after sundown you'd have thought that there was an
undress rehearsal of a potato famine in Ireland and a Kishineff
massacre. They come by families, gangs, clambake societies, clans,
clubs and tribes from all sides to enjoy a cool sleep on the grass.
Them that didn't have oil stoves brought along plenty of blankets,
so as not to be upset with the cold and discomforts of sleeping
outdoors. By building fires of the shade trees and huddling together
in the bridle paths, and burrowing under the grass where the ground
was soft enough, the likes of 5,000 head of people successfully
battled against the night air in Central Park alone.

"Ye know I live in the elegant furnished apartment house called the
Beersheba Flats, over against the elevated portion of the New York
Central Railroad.

"When the order come to the flats that all hands must turn out and
sleep in the park, according to the instructions of the consulting
committee of the City Club and the Murphy Draying, Returfing and
Sodding Company, there was a look of a couple of fires and an
eviction all over the place.

"The tenants began to pack up feather beds, rubber boots, strings of
garlic, hot-water bags, portable canoes and scuttles of coal to take
along for the sake of comfort. The sidewalk looked like a Russian
camp in Oyama's line of march. There was wailing and lamenting up
and down stairs from Danny Geoghegan's flat on the top floor to the
apartments of Missis Goldsteinupski on the first.

"'For why,' says Danny, coming down and raging in his blue yarn socks
to the janitor, 'should I be turned out of me comfortable apartments
to lay in the dirty grass like a rabbit? 'Tis like Jerome to stir up
trouble wid small matters like this instead of--'

"'Whist!' says Officer Reagan on the sidewalk, rapping with his club.
''Tis not Jerome. 'Tis by order of the Polis Commissioner. Turn out
every one of yez and hike yerselves to the park.'

"Now, 'twas a peaceful and happy home that all of us had in them same
Beersheba Flats. The O'Dowds and the Steinowitzes and the Callahans
and the Cohens and the Spizzinellis and the McManuses and the
Spiegelmayers and the Joneses--all nations of us, we lived like one
big family together. And when the hot nights come along we kept a
line of children reaching from the front door to Kelly's on the
corner passing along the cans of beer from one to another without the
trouble of running after it. And with no more clothing on than is
provided for in the statutes, sitting in all the windies, with a
cool growler in every one, and your feet out in the air, and the
Rosenstein girls singing on the fire-escape of the sixth floor, and
Patsy Rourke's flute going in the eighth, and the ladies calling each
other synonyms out the windie, and now and then a breeze sailing in
over Mister Depew's Central--I tell you the Beersheba Flats was a
summer resort that made the Catskills look like a hole in the ground.
With his person full of beer and his feet out the windy and his old
woman frying pork chops over a charcoal furnace and the childher
dancing in cotton slips on the sidewalk around the organ-grinder and
the rent paid for a week--what does a man want better on a hot night
than that? And then comes this ruling of the polis driving people out
o' their comfortable homes to sleep in parks--'twas for all the world
like a ukase of them Russians--'twill be heard from again at next
election time.

"Well, then, Officer Reagan drives the whole lot of us to the park
and turns us in by the nearest gate. 'Tis dark under the trees, and
all the children sets up to howling that they want to go home.

"'Ye'll pass the night in this stretch of woods and scenery,' says
Officer Reagan. ''Twill be fine and imprisonment for insoolting the
Park Commissioner and the Chief of the Weather Bureau if ye refuse.
I'm in charge of thirty acres between here and the Agyptian Monument,
and I advise ye to give no trouble. 'Tis sleeping on the grass yez
all have been condemned to by the authorities. Yez'll be permitted
to leave in the morning, but ye must retoorn be night. Me orders was
silent on the subject of bail, but I'll find out if 'tis required and
there'll be bondsmen at the gate.'

"There being no lights except along the automobile drives, us 179
tenants of the Beersheba Flats prepared to spend the night as best we
could in the raging forest. Them that brought blankets and kindling
wood was best off. They got fires started and wrapped the blankets
round their heads and laid down, cursing, in the grass. There was
nothing to see, nothing to drink, nothing to do. In the dark we had
no way of telling friend or foe except by feeling the noses of 'em. I
brought along me last winter overcoat, me tooth-brush, some quinine
pills and the red quilt off the bed in me flat. Three times during
the night somebody rolled on me quilt and stuck his knees against the
Adam's apple of me. And three times I judged his character by running
me hand over his face, and three times I rose up and kicked the
intruder down the hill to the gravelly walk below. And then some one
with a flavour of Kelly's whiskey snuggled up to me, and I found
his nose turned up the right way, and I says: 'Is that you, then,
Patsey?' and he says, 'It is, Carney. How long do you think it'll
last?'

"'I'm no weather-prophet,' says I, 'but if they bring out a strong
anti-Tammany ticket next fall it ought to get us home in time to
sleep on a bed once or twice before they line us up at the polls.'

"'A-playing of my flute into the airshaft, says Patsey Rourke, 'and
a-perspiring in me own windy to the joyful noise of the passing
trains and the smell of liver and onions and a-reading of the latest
murder in the smoke of the cooking is well enough for me,' says he.
'What is this herding us in grass for, not to mention the crawling
things with legs that walk up the trousers of us, and the Jersey
snipes that peck at us, masquerading under the name and denomination
of mosquitoes. What is it all for Carney, and the rint going on just
the same over at the flats?'

"''Tis the great annual Municipal Free Night Outing Lawn Party,' says
I, 'given by the polis, Hetty Green and the Drug Trust. During the
heated season they hold a week of it in the principal parks. 'Tis a
scheme to reach that portion of the people that's not worth taking up
to North Beach for a fish fry.'

"'I can't sleep on the ground,' says Patsey, 'wid any benefit. I
have the hay fever and the rheumatism, and me car is full of ants.'

"Well, the night goes on, and the ex-tenants of the Flats groans and
stumbles around in the dark, trying to find rest and recreation in
the forest. The children is screaming with the coldness, and the
janitor makes hot tea for 'em and keeps the fires going with the
signboards that point to the Tavern and the Casino. The tenants try
to lay down on the grass by families in the dark, but you're lucky if
you can sleep next to a man from the same floor or believing in the
same religion. Now and then a Murpby, accidental, rolls over on the
grass of a Rosenstein, or a Cohen tries to crawl under the O'Grady
bush, and then there's a feeling of noses and somebody is rolled down
the hill to the driveway and stays there. There is some hair-pulling
among the women folks, and everybody spanks the nearest howling kid
to him by the sense of feeling only, regardless of its parentage and
ownership. 'Tis hard to keep up the social distinctions in the dark
that flourish by daylight in the Beersheba Flats. Mrs. Rafferty, that
despises the asphalt that a Dago treads on, wakes up in the morning
with her feet in the bosom of Antonio Spizzinelli. And Mike O'Dowd,
that always threw peddlers downstairs as fast as he came upon 'em,
has to unwind old Isaacstein's whiskers from around his neck, and
wake up the whole gang at daylight. But here and there some few got
acquainted and overlooked the discomforts of the elements. There
was five engagements to be married announced at the flats the next
morning.

"About midnight I gets up and wrings the dew out of my hair, and goes
to the side of the driveway and sits down. At one side of the park I
could see the lights in the streets and houses; and I was thinking
how happy them folks was who could chase the duck and smoke their
pipes at their windows, and keep cool and pleasant like nature
intended for 'em to.

"Just then an automobile stops by me, and a fine-looking,
well-dressed man steps out.

"'Me man,' says he, 'can you tell me why all these people are lying
around on the grass in the park? I thought it was against the rules.'

"''Twas an ordinance,' says I, 'just passed by the Polis Department
and ratified by the Turf Cutters' Association, providing that all
persons not carrying a license number on their rear axles shall keep
in the public parks until further notice. Fortunately, the orders
comes this year during a spell of fine weather, and the mortality,
except on the borders of the lake and along the automobile drives,
will not be any greater than usual.'

"'Who are these people on the side of the hill?' asks the man.

"'Sure,' says I, 'none others than the tenants of the Beersheba
Flats--a fine home for any man, especially on hot nights. May
daylight come soon!'

"'They come here be night,' says he, 'and breathe in the pure air
and the fragrance of the flowers and trees. They do that,' says he,
'coming every night from the burning heat of dwellings of brick and
stone.'

"'And wood,' says I. 'And marble and plaster and iron.'

"'The matter will be attended to at once,' says the man, putting up
his book.

"'Are ye the Park Commissioner?' I asks.

"'I own the Beersheba Flats,' says he. 'God bless the grass and the
trees that give extra benefits to a man's tenants. The rents shall be
raised fifteen per cent. to-morrow. Good-night,' says he."




XVII

THE EASTER OF THE SOUL


It is hardly likely that a goddess may die. Then Eastre, the old
Saxon goddess of spring, must be laughing in her muslin sleeve at
people who believe that Easter, her namesake, exists only along
certain strips of Fifth Avenue pavement after church service.

Aye! It belongs to the world. The ptarmigan in Chilkoot Pass discards
his winter white feathers for brown; the Patagonian Beau Brummell
oils his chignon and clubs him another sweetheart to drag to his
skull-strewn flat. And down in Chrystie Street--

Mr. "Tiger" McQuirk arose with a feeling of disquiet that he did not
understand. With a practised foot he rolled three of his younger
brothers like logs out of his way as they lay sleeping on the floor.
Before a foot-square looking glass hung by the window he stood and
shaved himself. If that may seem to you a task too slight to be
thus impressively chronicled, I bear with you; you do not know of
the areas to be accomplished in traversing the cheek and chin of Mr.
McQuirk.

McQuirk, senior, had gone to work long before. The big son of the
house was idle. He was a marble-cutter, and the marble-cutters were
out on a strike.

"What ails ye?" asked his mother, looking at him curiously; "are ye
not feeling well the morning, maybe now?"

"He's thinking along of Annie Maria Doyle," impudently explained
younger brother Tim, ten years old.

"Tiger" reached over the hand of a champion and swept the small
McQuirk from his chair.

"I feel fine," said he, "beyond a touch of the
I-don't-know-what-you-call-its. I feel like there was going to be
earthquakes or music or a trifle of chills and fever or maybe a
picnic. I don't know how I feel. I feel like knocking the face off a
policeman, or else maybe like playing Coney Island straight across
the board from pop-corn to the elephant houdahs."

"It's the spring in yer bones," said Mrs. McQuirk. "It's the sap
risin'. Time was when I couldn't keep me feet still nor me head cool
when the earthworms began to crawl out in the dew of the mornin'.
'Tis a bit of tea will do ye good, made from pipsissewa and gentian
bark at the druggist's."

"Back up!" said Mr. McQuirk, impatiently. "There's no spring in
sight. There's snow yet on the shed in Donovan's backyard. And
yesterday they puts open cars on the Sixth Avenue lines, and the
janitors have quit ordering coal. And that means six weeks more of
winter, by all the signs that be."

After breakfast Mr. McQuirk spent fifteen minutes before the
corrugated mirror, subjugating his hair and arranging his
green-and-purple ascot with its amethyst tombstone pin--eloquent of
his chosen calling.

Since the strike had been called it was this particular striker's
habit to hie himself each morning to the corner saloon of Flaherty
Brothers, and there establish himself upon the sidewalk, with one
foot resting on the bootblack's stand, observing the panorama of the
street until the pace of time brought twelve o'clock and the dinner
hour. And Mr. "Tiger" McQuirk, with his athletic seventy inches,
well trained in sport and battle; his smooth, pale, solid, amiable
face--blue where the razor had travelled; his carefully considered
clothes and air of capability, was himself a spectacle not
displeasing to the eye.

But on this morning Mr. McQuirk did not hasten immediately to his
post of leisure and observation. Something unusual that he could
not quite grasp was in the air. Something disturbed his thoughts,
ruffled his senses, made him at once languid, irritable, elated,
dissastisfied and sportive. He was no diagnostician, and he did not
know that Lent was breaking up physiologically in his system.

Mrs. McQuirk had spoken of spring. Sceptically Tiger looked about him
for signs. Few they were. The organ-grinders were at work; but they
were always precocious harbingers. It was near enough spring for them
to go penny-hunting when the skating ball dropped at the park. In the
milliners' windows Easter hats, grave, gay and jubilant, blossomed.
There were green patches among the sidewalk debris of the grocers. On
a third-story window-sill the first elbow cushion of the season--old
gold stripes on a crimson ground--supported the kimonoed arms of a
pensive brunette. The wind blew cold from the East River, but the
sparrows were flying to the eaves with straws. A second-hand store,
combining foresight with faith, had set out an ice-chest and baseball
goods.

And then "Tiger's" eye, discrediting these signs, fell upon one that
bore a bud of promise. From a bright, new lithograph the head of
Capricornus confronted him, betokening the forward and heady brew.

Mr. McQuirk entered the saloon and called for his glass of bock. He
threw his nickel on the bar, raised the glass, set it down without
tasting it and strolled toward the door.

"Wot's the matter, Lord Bolinbroke?" inquired the sarcastic
bartender; "want a chiny vase or a gold-lined épergne to drink it out
of--hey?"

"Say," said Mr. McQuirk, wheeling and shooting out a horizontal hand
and a forty-five-degree chin, "you know your place only when it comes
for givin' titles. I've changed me mind about drinkin--see? You got
your money, ain't you? Wait till you get stung before you get the
droop to your lip, will you?"

Thus Mr. Quirk added mutability of desires to the strange humors that
had taken possession of him.

Leaving the saloon, he walked away twenty steps and leaned in the
open doorway of Lutz, the barber. He and Lutz were friends, masking
their sentiments behind abuse and bludgeons of repartee.

"Irish loafer," roared Lutz, "how do you do? So, not yet haf der
bolicemans or der catcher of dogs done deir duty!"

"Hello, Dutch," said Mr. McQuirk. "Can't get your mind off of
frankfurters, can you?"

"Bah!" exclaimed the German, coming and leaning in the door. "I haf
a soul above frankfurters to-day. Dere is springtime in der air. I
can feel it coming in ofer der mud of der streets and das ice in der
river. Soon will dere be bicnics in der islands, mit kegs of beer
under der trees."

"Say," said Mr. McQuirk, setting his hat on one side, "is everybody
kiddin' me about gentle Spring? There ain't any more spring in the
air than there is in a horsehair sofa in a Second Avenue furnished
room. For me the winter underwear yet and the buckwheat cakes."

"You haf no boetry," said Lutz. "True, it is yedt cold, und in der
city we haf not many of der signs; but dere are dree kinds of beoble
dot should always feel der approach of spring first--dey are boets,
lovers and poor vidows."

Mr. McQuirk went on his way, still possessed by the strange
perturbation that he did not understand. Something was lacking to his
comfort, and it made him half angry because he did not know what it
was.

Two blocks away he came upon a foe, one Conover, whom he was bound in
honor to engage in combat.

Mr. McQuirk made the attack with the characteristic suddenness
and fierceness that had gained for him the endearing sobriquet of
"Tiger." The defence of Mr. Conover was so prompt and admirable that
the conflict was protracted until the onlookers unselfishly gave the
warning cry of "Cheese it--the cop!" The principals escaped easily
by running through the nearest open doors into the communicating
backyards at the rear of the houses.

Mr. McQuirk emerged into another street. He stood by a lamp-post
for a few minutes engaged in thought and then he turned and plunged
into a small notion and news shop. A red-haired young woman, eating
gum-drops, came and looked freezingly at him across the ice-bound
steppes of the counter.

"Say, lady," he said, "have you got a song book with this in it.
Let's see how it leads off--


   "'When the springtime comes we'll wander in the dale, love,
     And whisper of those days of yore--'


"I'm having a friend," explained Mr. McQuirk, "laid up with a broken
leg, and he sent me after it. He's a devil for songs and poetry when
he can't get out to drink."

"We have not," replied the young woman, with unconcealed contempt.
"But there is a new song out that begins this way:


   "'Let us sit together in the old arm-chair;
     And while the firelight flickers we'll be comfortable there.'"


There will be no profit in following Mr. "Tiger" McQuirk through his
further vagaries of that day until he comes to stand knocking at the
door of Annie Maria Doyle. The goddess Eastre, it seems, had guided
his footsteps aright at last.

"Is that you now, Jimmy McQuirk?" she cried, smiling through the
opened door (Annie Maria had never accepted the "Tiger"). "Well,
whatever!"

"Come out in the hall," said Mr. McQuirk. "I want to ask yer opinion
of the weather--on the level."

"Are you crazy, sure?" said Annie Maria.

"I am," said the "Tiger." "They've been telling me all day there was
spring in the air. Were they liars? Or am I?"

"Dear me!" said Annie Maria--"haven't you noticed it? I can almost
smell the violets. And the green grass. Of course, there ain't any
yet--it's just a kind of feeling, you know."

"That's what I'm getting at," said Mr. McQuirk. "I've had it.
I didn't recognize it at first. I thought maybe it was en-wee,
contracted the other day when I stepped above Fourteenth Street. But
the katzenjammer I've got don't spell violets. It spells yer own
name, Annie Maria, and it's you I want. I go to work next Monday, and
I make four dollars a day. Spiel up, old girl--do we make a team?"

"Jimmy," sighed Annie Maria, suddenly disappearing in his overcoat,
"don't you see that spring is all over the world right this minute?"

But you yourself remember how that day ended. Beginning with so fine
a promise of vernal things, late in the afternoon the air chilled
and an inch of snow fell--even so late in March. On Fifth Avenue the
ladies drew their winter furs close about them. Only in the florists'
windows could be perceived any signs of the morning smile of the
coming goddess Eastre.

At six o'clock Herr Lutz began to close his shop. He heard a
well-known shout: "Hello, Dutch!"

"Tiger" McQuirk, in his shirt-sleeves, with his hat on the back of
his head, stood outside in the whirling snow, puffing at a black
cigar.

"Donnerwetter!" shouted Lutz, "der vinter, he has gome back again
yet!"

"Yer a liar, Dutch," called back Mr. McQuirk, with friendly
geniality, "it's springtime, by the watch."




XVIII

THE FOOL-KILLER


Down South whenever any one perpetrates some particularly monumental
piece of foolishness everybody says: "Send for Jesse Holmes."

Jesse Holmes is the Fool-Killer. Of course he is a myth, like Santa
Claus and Jack Frost and General Prosperity and all those concrete
conceptions that are supposed to represent an idea that Nature has
failed to embody. The wisest of the Southrons cannot tell you whence
comes the Fool-Killer's name; but few and happy are the households
from the Roanoke to the Rio Grande in which the name of Jesse Holmes
has not been pronounced or invoked. Always with a smile, and often
with a tear, is he summoned to his official duty. A busy man is Jesse
Holmes.

I remember the clear picture of him that hung on the walls of my
fancy during my barefoot days when I was dodging his oft-threatened
devoirs. To me he was a terrible old man, in gray clothes, with a
long, ragged, gray beard, and reddish, fierce eyes. I looked to see
him come stumping up the road in a cloud of dust, with a white oak
staff in his hand and his shoes tied with leather thongs. I may yet--

But this is a story, not a sequel.

I have taken notice with regret, that few stories worth reading
have been written that did not contain drink of some sort. Down go
the fluids, from Arizona Dick's three fingers of red pizen to the
inefficacious Oolong that nerves Lionel Montressor to repartee in
the "Dotty Dialogues." So, in such good company I may introduce an
absinthe drip--one absinthe drip, dripped through a silver dripper,
orderly, opalescent, cool, green-eyed--deceptive.

Kerner was a fool. Besides that, he was an artist and my good friend.
Now, if there is one thing on earth utterly despicable to another, it
is an artist in the eyes of an author whose story he has illustrated.
Just try it once. Write a story about a mining camp in Idaho. Sell
it. Spend the money, and then, six months later, borrow a quarter (or
a dime), and buy the magazine containing it. You find a full-page
wash drawing of your hero, Black Bill, the cowboy. Somewhere in your
story you employed the word "horse." Aha! the artist has grasped the
idea. Black Bill has on the regulation trousers of the M. F. H. of
the Westchester County Hunt. He carries a parlor rifle, and wears a
monocle. In the distance is a section of Forty-second Street during a
search for a lost gas-pipe, and the Taj Mahal, the famous mausoleum
in India.

Enough! I hated Kerner, and one day I met him and we became friends.
He was young and gloriously melancholy because his spirits were
so high and life had so much in store for him. Yes, he was almost
riotously sad. That was his youth. When a man begins to be hilarious
in a sorrowful way you can bet a million that he is dyeing his hair.
Kerner's hair was plentiful and carefully matted as an artist's
thatch should be. He was a cigaretteur, and he audited his dinners
with red wine. But, most of all, he was a fool. And, wisely, I
envied him, and listened patiently while he knocked Velasquez and
Tintoretto. Once he told me that he liked a story of mine that he had
come across in an anthology. He described it to me, and I was sorry
that Mr. Fitz-James O'Brien was dead and could not learn of the
eulogy of his work. But mostly Kerner made few breaks and was a
consistent fool.

I'd better explain what I mean by that. There was a girl. Now, a
girl, as far as I am concerned, is a thing that belongs in a seminary
or an album; but I conceded the existence of the animal in order to
retain Kerner's friendship. He showed me her picture in a locket--she
was a blonde or a brunette--I have forgotten which. She worked in a
factory for eight dollars a week. Lest factories quote this wage by
way of vindication, I will add that the girl had worked for five
years to reach that supreme elevation of remuneration, beginning at
$1.50 per week.

Kerner's father was worth a couple of millions He was willing to
stand for art, but he drew the line at the factory girl. So Kerner
disinherited his father and walked out to a cheap studio and lived
on sausages for breakfast and on Farroni for dinner. Farroni had the
artistic soul and a line of credit for painters and poets, nicely
adjusted. Sometimes Kerner sold a picture and bought some new
tapestry, a ring and a dozen silk cravats, and paid Farroni two
dollars on account.

One evening Kerner had me to dinner with himself and the factory
girl. They were to be married as soon as Kerner could slosh paint
profitably. As for the ex-father's two millions--pouf!

She was a wonder. Small and half-way pretty, and as much at her ease
in that cheap café as though she were only in the Palmer House,
Chicago, with a souvenir spoon already safely hidden in her shirt
waist. She was natural. Two things I noticed about her especially.
Her belt buckle was exactly in the middle of her back, and she didn't
tell us that a large man with a ruby stick-pin had followed her
up all the way from Fourteenth Street. Was Kerner such a fool? I
wondered. And then I thought of the quantity of striped cuffs and
blue glass beads that $2,000,000 can buy for the heathen, and I said
to myself that he was. And then Elise--certainly that was her name--
told us, merrily, that the brown spot on her waist was caused by
her landlady knocking at the door while she (the girl--confound the
English language) was heating an iron over the gas jet, and she hid
the iron under the bedclothes until the coast was clear, and there
was the piece of chewing gum stuck to it when she began to iron the
waist, and--well, I wondered how in the world the chewing gum came to
be there--don't they ever stop chewing it?

A while after that--don't be impatient, the absinthe drip is coming
now--Kerner and I were dining at Farroni's. A mandolin and a guitar
were being attacked; the room was full of smoke in nice, long crinkly
layers just like the artists draw the steam from a plum pudding on
Christmas posters, and a lady in a blue silk and gasolined gauntlets
was beginning to hum an air from the Catskills.

"Kerner," said I, "you are a fool."

"Of course," said Kerner, "I wouldn't let her go on working. Not my
wife. What's the use to wait? She's willing. I sold that water color
of the Palisades yesterday. We could cook on a two-burner gas stove.
You know the ragouts I can throw together? Yes, I think we will marry
next week."

"Kerner," said I, "you are a fool."

"Have an absinthe drip?" said Kerner, grandly. "To-night you are the
guest of Art in paying quantities. I think we will get a flat with a
bath."

"I never tried one--I mean an absinthe drip," said I.

The waiter brought it and poured the water slowly over the ice in the
dripper.

"It looks exactly like the Mississippi River water in the big bend
below Natchez," said I, fascinated, gazing at the be-muddled drip.

"There are such flats for eight dollars a week," said Kerner.

"You are a fool," said I, and began to sip the filtration. "What you
need," I continued, "is the official attention of one Jesse Holmes."

Kerner, not being a Southerner, did not comprehend, so he sat,
sentimental, figuring on his flat in his sordid, artistic way, while
I gazed into the green eyes of the sophisticated Spirit of Wormwood.

Presently I noticed casually that a procession of bacchantes limned
on the wall immediately below the ceiling had begun to move,
traversing the room from right to left in a gay and spectacular
pilgrimage. I did not confide my discovery to Kerner. The artistic
temperament is too high-strung to view such deviations from the
natural laws of the art of kalsomining. I sipped my absinthe drip and
sawed wormwood.

One absinthe drip is not much--but I said again to Kerner, kindly:

"You are a fool." And then, in the vernacular: "Jesse Holmes for
yours."

And then I looked around and saw the Fool-Killer, as he had always
appeared to my imagination, sitting at a nearby table, and regarding
us with his reddish, fatal, relentless eyes. He was Jesse Holmes from
top to toe; he had the long, gray, ragged beard, the gray clothes of
ancient cut, the executioner's look, and the dusty shoes of one who
had been called from afar. His eyes were turned fixedly upon Kerner.
I shuddered to think that I had invoked him from his assiduous
southern duties. I thought of flying, and then I kept my seat,
reflecting that many men had escaped his ministrations when it seemed
that nothing short of an appointment as Ambassador to Spain could
save them from him. I had called my brother Kerner a fool and was in
danger of hell fire. That was nothing; but I would try to save him
from Jesse Holmes.

The Fool-Killer got up from his table and came over to ours. He
rested his hands upon it, and turned his burning, vindictive eyes
upon Kerner, ignoring me.

"You are a hopeless fool," he said to the artist. "Haven't you had
enough of starvation yet? I offer you one more opportunity. Give up
this girl and come back to your home. Refuse, and you must take the
consequences."

The Fool-Killer's threatening face was within a foot of his victim's;
but to my horror, Kerner made not the slightest sign of being aware
of his presence.

"We will be married next week," he muttered absent-mindedly. "With my
studio furniture and some second-hand stuff we can make out."

"You have decided your own fate," said the Fool-Killer, in a low but
terrible voice. "You may consider yourself as one dead. You have had
your last chance."

"In the moonlight," went on Kerner, softly, "we will sit under the
skylight with our guitar and sing away the false delights of pride
and money."

"On your own head be it," hissed the Fool-Killer, and my scalp
prickled when I perceived that neither Kerner's eyes nor his ears
took the slightest cognizance of Jesse Holmes. And then I knew that
for some reason the veil had been lifted for me alone, and that I had
been elected to save my friend from destruction at the Fool-Killer's
hands. Something of the fear and wonder of it must have showed itself
in my face.

"Excuse me," said Kerner, with his wan, amiable smile; "was I talking
to myself? I think it is getting to be a habit with me."

The Fool-Killer turned and walked out of Farroni's.

"Wait here for me," said I, rising; "I must speak to that man. Had
you no answer for him? Because you are a fool must you die like a
mouse under his foot? Could you not utter one squeak in your own
defence?

"You are drunk," said Kerner, heartlessly. "No one addressed me."

"The destroyer of your mind," said I, "stood above you just now and
marked you for his victim. You are not blind or deaf."

"I recognized no such person," said Kerner. "I have seen no one
but you at this table. Sit down. Hereafter you shall have no more
absinthe drips."

"Wait here," said I, furious; "if you don't care for your own life, I
will save it for you."

I hurried out and overtook the man in gray half-way down the block.
He looked as I had seen him in my fancy a thousand times--truculent,
gray and awful. He walked with the white oak staff, and but for the
street-sprinkler the dust would have been flying under his tread.

I caught him by the sleeve and steered him to a dark angle of a
building. I knew he was a myth, and I did not want a cop to see me
conversing with vacancy, for I might land in Bellevue minus my silver
matchbox and diamond ring.

"Jesse Holmes," said I, facing him with apparent bravery, "I know
you. I have heard of you all my life. I know now what a scourge
you have been to your country. Instead of killing fools you have
been murdering the youth and genius that are necessary to make a
people live and grow great. You are a fool yourself, Holmes; you
began killing off the brightest and best of our countrymen three
generations ago, when the old and obsolete standards of society and
honor and orthodoxy were narrow and bigoted. You proved that when you
put your murderous mark upon my friend Kerner--the wisest chap I ever
knew in my life."

The Fool-Killer looked at me grimly and closely.

"You've a queer jag," said he, curiously. "Oh, yes; I see who you
are now. You were sitting with him at the table. Well, if I'm not
mistaken, I heard you call him a fool, too."

"I did," said I. "I delight in doing so. It is from envy. By all the
standards that you know he is the most egregious and grandiloquent
and gorgeous fool in all the world. That's why you want to kill him."

"Would you mind telling me who or what you think I am?" asked the old
man.

I laughed boisterously and then stopped suddenly, for I remembered
that it would not do to be seen so hilarious in the company of
nothing but a brick wall.

"You are Jesse Holmes, the Fool-Killer," I said, solemnly, "and you
are going to kill my friend Kerner. I don't know who rang you up, but
if you do kill him I'll see that you get pinched for it. That is," I
added, despairingly, "if I can get a cop to see you. They have a poor
eye for mortals, and I think it would take the whole force to round
up a myth murderer."

"Well," said the Fool-Killer, briskly, "I must be going. You had
better go home and sleep it off. Good-night."

At this I was moved by a sudden fear for Kerner to a softer and more
pleading mood. I leaned against the gray man's sleeve and besought
him:

"Good Mr. Fool-Killer, please don't kill little Kerner. Why can't you
go back South and kill Congressmen and clay-eaters and let us alone?
Why don't you go up on Fifth Avenue and kill millionaires that keep
their money locked up and won't let young fools marry because one of
'em lives on the wrong street? Come and have a drink, Jesse. Will you
never get on to your job?"

"Do you know this girl that your friend has made himself a fool
about?" asked the Fool-Killer.

"I have the honor," said I, "and that's why I called Kerner a fool.
He is a fool because he has waited so long before marrying her. He
is a fool because he has been waiting in the hopes of getting the
consent of some absurd two-million-dollar-fool parent or something of
the sort."

"Maybe," said the Fool-Killer--"maybe I--I might have looked at it
differently. Would you mind going back to the restaurant and bringing
your friend Kerner here?"

"Oh, what's the use, Jesse," I yawned. "He can't see you. He didn't
know you were talking to him at the table, You are a fictitious
character, you know."

"Maybe he can this time. Will you go fetch him?"

"All right," said I, "but I've a suspicion that you're not strictly
sober, Jesse. You seem to be wavering and losing your outlines. Don't
vanish before I get back."

I went back to Kerner and said:

"There's a man with an invisible homicidal mania waiting to see you
outside. I believe he wants to murder you. Come along. You won't see
him, so there's nothing to be frightened about."

Kerner looked anxious.

"Why," said he, "I had no idea one absinthe would do that. You'd
better stick to Würzburger. I'll walk home with you."

I led him to Jesse Holmes's.

"Rudolf," said the Fool-Killer, "I'll give in. Bring her up to the
house. Give me your hand, boy."

"Good for you, dad," said Kerner, shaking hands with the old man.
"You'll never regret it after you know her."

"So, you did see him when he was talking to you at the table?" I
asked Kerner.

"We hadn't spoken to each other in a year," said Kerner. "It's all
right now."

I walked away.

"Where are you going?" called Kerner.

"I am going to look for Jesse Holmes," I answered, with dignity and
reserve.




XIX

TRANSIENTS IN ARCADIA


There is a hotel on Broadway that has escaped discovery by the
summer-resort promoters. It is deep and wide and cool. Its rooms are
finished in dark oak of a low temperature. Home-made breezes and
deep-green shrubbery give it the delights without the inconveniences
of the Adirondacks. One can mount its broad staircases or glide
dreamily upward in its aërial elevators, attended by guides in brass
buttons, with a serene joy that Alpine climbers have never attained.
There is a chef in its kitchen who will prepare for you brook trout
better than the White Mountains ever served, sea food that would turn
Old Point Comfort--"by Gad, sah!"--green with envy, and Maine venison
that would melt the official heart of a game warden.

A few have found out this oasis in the July desert of Manhattan.
During that month you will see the hotel's reduced array of guests
scattered luxuriously about in the cool twilight of its lofty
dining-room, gazing at one another across the snowy waste of
unoccupied tables, silently congratulatory.

Superfluous, watchful, pneumatically moving waiters hover near,
supplying every want before it is expressed. The temperature
is perpetual April. The ceiling is painted in water colors to
counterfeit a summer sky across which delicate clouds drift and do
not vanish as those of nature do to our regret.

The pleasing, distant roar of Broadway is transformed in the
imagination of the happy guests to the noise of a waterfall filling
the woods with its restful sound. At every strange footstep the
guests turn an anxious ear, fearful lest their retreat be discovered
and invaded by the restless pleasure-seekers who are forever hounding
nature to her deepest lairs.

Thus in the depopulated caravansary the little band of connoisseurs
jealously hide themselves during the heated season, enjoying to the
uttermost the delights of mountain and seashore that art and skill
have gathered and served to them.

In this July came to the hotel one whose card that she sent to
the clerk for her name to be registered read "Mme. Héloise D'Arcy
Beaumont."

Madame Beaumont was a guest such as the Hotel Lotus loved. She
possessed the fine air of the élite, tempered and sweetened by a
cordial graciousness that made the hotel employees her slaves.
Bell-boys fought for the honor of answering her ring; the clerks, but
for the question of ownership, would have deeded to her the hotel
and its contents; the other guests regarded her as the final touch
of feminine exclusiveness and beauty that rendered the entourage
perfect.

This super-excellent guest rarely left the hotel. Her habits were
consonant with the customs of the discriminating patrons of the Hotel
Lotus. To enjoy that delectable hostelry one must forego the city as
though it were leagues away. By night a brief excursion to the nearby
roofs is in order; but during the torrid day one remains in the
umbrageous fastnesses of the Lotus as a trout hangs poised in the
pellucid sanctuaries of his favorite pool.

Though alone in the Hotel Lotus, Madame Beaumont preserved the state
of a queen whose loneliness was of position only. She breakfasted at
ten, a cool, sweet, leisurely, delicate being who glowed softly in
the dimness like a jasmine flower in the dusk.

But at dinner was Madame's glory at its height. She wore a gown as
beautiful and immaterial as the mist from an unseen cataract in a
mountain gorge. The nomenclature of this gown is beyond the guess of
the scribe. Always pale-red roses reposed against its lace-garnished
front. It was a gown that the head-waiter viewed with respect and
met at the door. You thought of Paris when you saw it, and maybe of
mysterious countesses, and certainly of Versailles and rapiers and
Mrs. Fiske and rouge-et-noir. There was an untraceable rumor in the
Hotel Lotus that Madame was a cosmopolite, and that she was pulling
with her slender white hands certain strings between the nations in
the favor of Russia. Being a citizeness of the world's smoothest
roads it was small wonder that she was quick to recognize in the
refined purlieus of the Hotel Lotus the most desirable spot in
America for a restful sojourn during the heat of mid-summer.

On the third day of Madame Beaumont's residence in the hotel a young
man entered and registered himself as a guest. His clothing--to
speak of his points in approved order--was quietly in the mode;
his features good and regular; his expression that of a poised and
sophisticated man of the world. He informed the clerk that he would
remain three or four days, inquired concerning the sailing of
European steamships, and sank into the blissful inanition of the
nonpareil hotel with the contented air of a traveller in his favorite
inn.

The young man--not to question the veracity of the register--was
Harold Farrington. He drifted into the exclusive and calm current of
life in the Lotus so tactfully and silently that not a ripple alarmed
his fellow-seekers after rest. He ate in the Lotus and of its
patronym, and was lulled into blissful peace with the other fortunate
mariners. In one day he acquired his table and his waiter and the
fear lest the panting chasers after repose that kept Broadway warm
should pounce upon and destroy this contiguous but covert haven.

After dinner on the next day after the arrival of Harold Farrington
Madame Beaumont dropped her handkerchief in passing out. Mr.
Farrington recovered and returned it without the effusiveness of a
seeker after acquaintance.

Perhaps there was a mystic freemasonry between the discriminating
guests of the Lotus. Perhaps they were drawn one to another by the
fact of their common good fortune in discovering the acme of summer
resorts in a Broadway hotel. Words delicate in courtesy and tentative
in departure from formality passed between the two. And, as if in the
expedient atmosphere of a real summer resort, an acquaintance grew,
flowered and fructified on the spot as does the mystic plant of the
conjuror. For a few moments they stood on a balcony upon which the
corridor ended, and tossed the feathery ball of conversation.

"One tires of the old resorts," said Madame Beaumont, with a faint
but sweet smile. "What is the use to fly to the mountains or the
seashore to escape noise and dust when the very people that make both
follow us there?"

"Even on the ocean," remarked Farrington, sadly, "the Philistines be
upon you. The most exclusive steamers are getting to be scarcely more
than ferry boats. Heaven help us when the summer resorter discovers
that the Lotus is further away from Broadway than Thousand Islands or
Mackinac."

"I hope our secret will be safe for a week, anyhow," said Madame,
with a sigh and a smile. "I do not know where I would go if they
should descend upon the dear Lotus. I know of but one place so
delightful in summer, and that is the castle of Count Polinski, in
the Ural Mountains."

"I hear that Baden-Baden and Cannes are almost deserted this season,"
said Farrington. "Year by year the old resorts fall in disrepute.
Perhaps many others, like ourselves, are seeking out the quiet nooks
that are overlooked by the majority."

"I promise myself three days more of this delicious rest," said
Madame Beaumont. "On Monday the _Cedric_ sails."

Harold Farrington's eyes proclaimed his regret. "I too must leave on
Monday," he said, "but I do not go abroad."

Madame Beaumont shrugged one round shoulder in a foreign gesture.

"One cannot hide here forever, charming though it may be. The château
has been in preparation for me longer than a month. Those house
parties that one must give--what a nuisance! But I shall never forget
my week in the Hotel Lotus."

"Nor shall I," said Farrington in a low voice, "and I shall never
FORGIVE the _Cedric_."

On Sunday evening, three days afterward, the two sat at a little
table on the same balcony. A discreet waiter brought ices and small
glasses of claret cup.

Madame Beaumont wore the same beautiful evening gown that she had
worn each day at dinner. She seemed thoughtful. Near her hand on the
table lay a small chatelaine purse. After she had eaten her ice she
opened the purse and took out a one-dollar bill.

"Mr. Farrington," she said, with the smile that had won the Hotel
Lotus, "I want to tell you something. I'm going to leave before
breakfast in the morning, because I've got to go back to my work.
I'm behind the hosiery counter at Casey's Mammoth Store, and my
vacation's up at eight o'clock to-morrow. That paper-dollar is the
last cent I'll see till I draw my eight dollars salary next Saturday
night. You're a real gentleman, and you've been good to me, and I
wanted to tell you before I went.

"I've been saving up out of my wages for a year just for this
vacation. I wanted to spend one week like a lady if I never do
another one. I wanted to get up when I please instead of having to
crawl out at seven every morning; and I wanted to live on the best
and be waited on and ring bells for things just like rich folks
do. Now I've done it, and I've had the happiest time I ever expect
to have in my life. I'm going back to my work and my little hall
bedroom satisfied for another year. I wanted to tell you about it,
Mr. Farrington, because I--I thought you kind of liked me, and I--I
liked you. But, oh, I couldn't help deceiving you up till now, for it
was all just like a fairy tale to me. So I talked about Europe and
the things I've read about in other countries, and made you think I
was a great lady.

"This dress I've got on--it's the only one I have that's fit to
wear--I bought from O'Dowd & Levinsky on the instalment plan.

"Seventy-five dollars is the price, and it was made to measure. I
paid $10 down, and they're to collect $1 a week till it's paid for.
That'll be about all I have to say, Mr. Farrington, except that my
name is Mamie Siviter instead of Madame Beaumont, and I thank you for
your attentions. This dollar will pay the instalment due on the dress
to-morrow. I guess I'll go up to my room now."

Harold Farrington listened to the recital of the Lotus's loveliest
guest with an impassive countenance. When she had concluded he drew
a small book like a checkbook from his coat pocket. He wrote upon a
blank form in this with a stub of pencil, tore out the leaf, tossed
it over to his companion and took up the paper dollar.

"I've got to go to work, too, in the morning," he said, "and I might
as well begin now. There's a receipt for the dollar instalment.
I've been a collector for O'Dowd & Levinsky for three years. Funny,
ain't it, that you and me both had the same idea about spending our
vacation? I've always wanted to put up at a swell hotel, and I saved
up out of my twenty per, and did it. Say, Mame, how about a trip to
Coney Saturday night on the boat--what?"

The face of the pseudo Madame Héloise D'Arcy Beaumont beamed.

"Oh, you bet I'll go, Mr. Farrington. The store closes at twelve on
Saturdays. I guess Coney'll be all right even if we did spend a week
with the swells."

Below the balcony the sweltering city growled and buzzed in the July
night. Inside the Hotel Lotus the tempered, cool shadows reigned, and
the solicitous waiter single-footed near the low windows, ready at a
nod to serve Madame and her escort.

At the door of the elevator Farrington took his leave, and Madame
Beaumont made her last ascent. But before they reached the noiseless
cage he said: "Just forget that 'Harold Farrington,' will you?--
McManus is the name--James McManus. Some call me Jimmy."

"Good-night, Jimmy," said Madame.




XX

THE RATHSKELLER AND THE ROSE


Miss Posie Carrington had earned her success. She began life
handicapped by the family name of "Boggs," in the small town known
as Cranberry Corners. At the age of eighteen she had acquired the
name of "Carrington" and a position in the chorus of a metropolitan
burlesque company. Thence upward she had ascended by the legitimate
and delectable steps of "broiler," member of the famous "Dickey-bird"
octette, in the successful musical comedy, "Fudge and Fellows,"
leader of the potato-bug dance in "Fol-de-Rol," and at length to
the part of the maid "'Toinette" in "The King's Bath-Robe," which
captured the critics and gave her her chance. And when we come to
consider Miss Carrington she is in the heydey of flattery, fame
and fizz; and that astute manager, Herr Timothy Goldstein, has her
signature to iron-clad papers that she will star the coming season in
Dyde Rich's new play, "Paresis by Gaslight."

Promptly there came to Herr Timothy a capable twentieth-century young
character actor by the name of Highsmith, who besought engagement as
"Sol Haytosser," the comic and chief male character part in "Paresis
by Gaslight."

"My boy," said Goldstein, "take the part if you can get it. Miss
Carrington won't listen to any of my suggestions. She has turned down
half a dozen of the best imitators of the rural dub in the city. She
declares she won't set a foot on the stage unless 'Haytosser' is the
best that can be raked up. She was raised in a village, you know, and
when a Broadway orchid sticks a straw in his hair and tries to call
himself a clover blossom she's on, all right. I asked her, in a
sarcastic vein, if she thought Denman Thompson would make any kind
of a show in the part. 'Oh, no,' says she. 'I don't want him or John
Drew or Jim Corbett or any of these swell actors that don't know a
turnip from a turnstile. I want the real article.' So, my boy, if
you want to play 'Sol Haytosser' you will have to convince Miss
Carrington. Luck be with you."

Highsmith took the train the next day for Cranberry Corners. He
remained in that forsaken and inanimate village three days. He found
the Boggs family and corkscrewed their history unto the third and
fourth generation. He amassed the facts and the local color of
Cranberry Corners. The village had not grown as rapidly as had Miss
Carrington. The actor estimated that it had suffered as few actual
changes since the departure of its solitary follower of Thespis as
had a stage upon which "four years is supposed to have elapsed." He
absorbed Cranberry Corners and returned to the city of chameleon
changes.

It was in the rathskeller that Highsmith made the hit of his
histrionic career. There is no need to name the place; there is but
one rathskeller where you could hope to find Miss Posie Carrington
after a performance of "The King's Bath-Robe."

There was a jolly small party at one of the tables that drew many
eyes. Miss Carrington, petite, marvellous, bubbling, electric,
fame-drunken, shall be named first. Herr Goldstein follows, sonorous,
curly-haired, heavy, a trifle anxious, as some bear that had caught,
somehow, a butterfly in his claws. Next, a man condemned to a
newspaper, sad, courted, armed, analyzing for press agent's dross
every sentence that was poured over him, eating his à la Newburg in
the silence of greatness. To conclude, a youth with parted hair, a
name that is ochre to red journals and gold on the back of a supper
check. These sat at a table while the musicians played, while waiters
moved in the mazy performance of their duties with their backs toward
all who desired their service, and all was bizarre and merry because
it was nine feet below the level of the sidewalk.

At 11.45 a being entered the rathskeller. The first violin
perceptibly flatted a C that should have been natural; the
clarionet blew a bubble instead of a grace note; Miss Carrington
giggled and the youth with parted hair swallowed an olive seed.

Exquisitely and irreproachably rural was the new entry. A lank,
disconcerted, hesitating young man it was, flaxen-haired, gaping of
mouth, awkward, stricken to misery by the lights and company. His
clothing was butternut, with bright blue tie, showing four inches of
bony wrist and white-socked ankle. He upset a chair, sat in another
one, curled a foot around a table leg and cringed at the approach of
a waiter.

"You may fetch me a glass of lager beer," he said, in response to the
discreet questioning of the servitor.

The eyes of the rathskeller were upon him. He was as fresh as a
collard and as ingenuous as a hay rake. He let his eye rove about
the place as one who regards, big-eyed, hogs in the potato patch.
His gaze rested at length upon Miss Carrington. He rose and went
to her table with a lateral, shining smile and a blush of pleased
trepidation.

"How're ye, Miss Posie?" he said in accents not to be doubted. "Don't
ye remember me--Bill Summers--the Summerses that lived back of the
blacksmith shop? I reckon I've growed up some since ye left Cranberry
Corners.

"'Liza Perry 'lowed I might see ye in the city while I was here. You
know 'Liza married Benny Stanfield, and she says--"

"Ah, say!" interrupted Miss Carrington, brightly, "Lize Perry is
never married--what! Oh, the freckles of her!"

"Married in June," grinned the gossip, "and livin' in the old Tatum
Place. Ham Riley perfessed religion; old Mrs. Blithers sold her place
to Cap'n Spooner; the youngest Waters girl run away with a music
teacher; the court-house burned up last March; your uncle Wiley was
elected constable; Matilda Hoskins died from runnin' a needle in her
hand, and Tom Beedle is courtin' Sallie Lathrop--they say he don't
miss a night but what he's settin' on their porch."

"The wall-eyed thing!" exclaimed Miss Carrington, with asperity.
"Why, Tom Beedle once--say, you folks, excuse me a while--this is
an old friend of mine--Mr.--what was it? Yes, Mr. Summers--Mr.
Goldstein, Mr. Ricketts, Mr.-- Oh, what's yours? 'Johnny''ll do--come
on over here and tell me some more."

She swept him to an isolated table in a corner. Herr Goldstein
shrugged his fat shoulders and beckoned to the waiter. The newspaper
man brightened a little and mentioned absinthe. The youth with parted
hair was plunged into melancholy. The guests of the rathskeller
laughed, clinked glasses and enjoyed the comedy that Posie Carrington
was treating them to after her regular performance. A few cynical
ones whispered "press agent"' and smiled wisely.

Posie Carrington laid her dimpled and desirable chin upon her hands,
and forgot her audience--a faculty that had won her laurels for her.

"I don't seem to recollect any Bill Summers," she said, thoughtfully
gazing straight into the innocent blue eyes of the rustic young
man. "But I know the Summerses, all right. I guess there ain't many
changes in the old town. You see any of my folks lately?"

And then Highsmith played his trump. The part of "Sol Haytosser"
called for pathos as well as comedy. Miss Carrington should see that
he could do that as well.

"Miss Posie," said "Bill Summers," "I was up to your folkeses house
jist two or three days ago. No, there ain't many changes to speak of.
The lilac bush by the kitchen window is over a foot higher, and the
elm in the front yard died and had to be cut down. And yet it don't
seem the same place that it used to be."

"How's ma?" asked Miss Carrington.

"She was settin' by the front door, crocheting a lamp-mat when I
saw her last," said "Bill." "She's older'n she was, Miss Posie. But
everything in the house looked jest the same. Your ma asked me to set
down. 'Don't touch that willow rocker, William,' says she. 'It ain't
been moved since Posie left; and that's the apron she was hemmin',
layin' over the arm of it, jist as she flung it. I'm in hopes,' she
goes on, 'that Posie'll finish runnin' out that hem some day.'"

Miss Carrington beckoned peremptorily to a waiter.

"A pint of extra dry," she ordered, briefly; "and give the check to
Goldstein."

"The sun was shinin' in the door," went on the chronicler from
Cranberry, "and your ma was settin' right in it. I asked her if she
hadn't better move back a little. 'William,' says she, 'when I get
sot down and lookin' down the road, I can't bear to move. Never a
day,' says she, 'but what I set here every minute that I can spare
and watch over them palin's for Posie. She went away down that road
in the night, for we seen her little shoe tracks in the dust, and
somethin' tells me she'll come back that way ag'in when she's weary
of the world and begins to think about her old mother.'

"When I was comin' away," concluded "Bill," "I pulled this off'n the
bush by the front steps. I thought maybe I might see you in the city,
and I knowed you'd like somethin' from the old home."

He took from his coat pocket a rose--a drooping, yellow, velvet,
odorous rose, that hung its head in the foul atmosphere of that
tainted rathskeller like a virgin bowing before the hot breath of the
lions in a Roman arena.

Miss Carrington's penetrating but musical laugh rose above the
orchestra's rendering of "Bluebells."

"Oh, say!" she cried, with glee, "ain't those poky places the limit?
I just know that two hours at Cranberry Corners would give me the
horrors now. Well, I'm awful glad to have seen you, Mr. Summers.
Guess I'll bustle around to the hotel now and get my beauty sleep."

She thrust the yellow rose into the bosom of her wonderful, dainty,
silken garments, stood up and nodded imperiously at Herr Goldstein.

Her three companions and "Bill Summers" attended her to her cab. When
her flounces and streamers were all safely tucked inside she dazzled
them with au revoirs from her shining eyes and teeth.

"Come around to the hotel and see me, Bill, before you leave the
city," she called as the glittering cab rolled away.

Highsmith, still in his make-up, went with Herr Goldstein to a café
booth.

"Bright idea, eh?" asked the smiling actor. "Ought to land 'Sol
Haytosser' for me, don't you think? The little lady never once
tumbled."

"I didn't hear your conversation," said Goldstein, "but your make-up
and acting was O. K. Here's to your success. You'd better call on
Miss Carrington early to-morrow and strike her for the part. I don't
see how she can keep from being satisfied with your exhibition of
ability."

At 11.45 A. M. on the next day Highsmith, handsome, dressed in the
latest mode, confident, with a fuchsia in his button-hole, sent up
his card to Miss Carrington in her select apartment hotel.

He was shown up and received by the actress's French maid.

"I am sorree," said Mlle. Hortense, "but I am to say this to all. It
is with great regret. Mees Carrington have cancelled all engagements
on the stage and have returned to live in that--how you call that
town? Cranberry Cornaire!"




XXI

THE CLARION CALL


Half of this story can be found in the records of the Police
Department; the other half belongs behind the business counter of a
newspaper office.

One afternoon two weeks after Millionaire Norcross was found in
his apartment murdered by a burglar, the murderer, while strolling
serenely down Broadway ran plump against Detective Barney Woods.

"Is that you, Johnny Kernan?" asked Woods, who had been near-sighted
in public for five years.

"No less," cried Kernan, heartily. "If it isn't Barney Woods, late
and early of old Saint Jo! You'll have to show me! What are you doing
East? Do the green-goods circulars get out that far?"

"I've been in New York some years," said Woods. "I'm on the city
detective force."

"Well, well!" said Kernan, breathing smiling joy and patting the
detective's arm.

"Come into Muller's," said Woods, "and let's hunt a quiet table. I'd
like to talk to you awhile."

It lacked a few minutes to the hour of four. The tides of trade were
not yet loosed, and they found a quiet corner of the café. Kernan,
well dressed, slightly swaggering, self-confident, seated himself
opposite the little detective, with his pale, sandy mustache,
squinting eyes and ready-made cheviot suit.

"What business are you in now?" asked Woods. "You know you left Saint
Jo a year before I did."

"I'm selling shares in a copper mine," said Kernan. "I may establish
an office here. Well, well! and so old Barney is a New York
detective. You always had a turn that way. You were on the police in
Saint Jo after I left there, weren't you?"

"Six months," said Woods. "And now there's one more question, Johnny.
I've followed your record pretty close ever since you did that hotel
job in Saratoga, and I never knew you to use your gun before. Why did
you kill Norcross?"

Kernan stared for a few moments with concentrated attention at the
slice of lemon in his high-ball; and then he looked at the detective
with a sudden, crooked, brilliant smile.

"How did you guess it, Barney?" he asked, admiringly. "I swear I
thought the job was as clean and as smooth as a peeled onion. Did I
leave a string hanging out anywhere?"

Woods laid upon the table a small gold pencil intended for a
watch-charm.

"It's the one I gave you the last Christmas we were in Saint Jo. I've
got your shaving mug yet. I found this under a corner of the rug in
Norcross's room. I warn you to be careful what you say. I've got it
put on to you, Johnny. We were old friends once, but I must do my
duty. You'll have to go to the chair for Norcross."

Kernan laughed.

"My luck stays with me," said he. "Who'd have thought old Barney was
on my trail!" He slipped one hand inside his coat. In an instant
Woods had a revolver against his side.

"Put it away," said Kernan, wrinkling his nose. "I'm only
investigating. Aha! It takes nine tailors to make a man, but one can
do a man up. There's a hole in that vest pocket. I took that pencil
off my chain and slipped it in there in case of a scrap. Put up your
gun, Barney, and I'll tell you why I had to shoot Norcross. The old
fool started down the hall after me, popping at the buttons on the
back of my coat with a peevish little .22 and I had to stop him.
The old lady was a darling. She just lay in bed and saw her $12,000
diamond necklace go without a chirp, while she begged like a
panhandler to have back a little thin gold ring with a garnet worth
about $3. I guess she married old Norcross for his money, all right.
Don't they hang on to the little trinkets from the Man Who Lost Out,
though? There were six rings, two brooches and a chatelaine watch.
Fifteen thousand would cover the lot."

"I warned you not to talk," said Woods.

"Oh, that's all right," said Kernan. "The stuff is in my suit case at
the hotel. And now I'll tell you why I'm talking. Because it's safe.
I'm talking to a man I know. You owe me a thousand dollars, Barney
Woods, and even if you wanted to arrest me your hand wouldn't make
the move."

"I haven't forgotten," said Woods. "You counted out twenty fifties
without a word. I'll pay it back some day. That thousand saved me
and--well, they were piling my furniture out on the sidewalk when I
got back to the house."

"And so," continued Kernan, "you being Barney Woods, born as true as
steel, and bound to play a white man's game, can't lift a finger to
arrest the man you're indebted to. Oh, I have to study men as well
as Yale locks and window fastenings in my business. Now, keep quiet
while I ring for the waiter. I've had a thirst for a year or two that
worries me a little. If I'm ever caught the lucky sleuth will have to
divide honors with old boy Booze. But I never drink during business
hours. After a job I can crook elbows with my old friend Barney with
a clear conscience. What are you taking?"

The waiter came with the little decanters and the siphon and left
them alone again.

"You've called the turn," said Woods, as he rolled the little gold
pencil about with a thoughtful fore-finger. "I've got to pass you
up. I can't lay a hand on you. If I'd a-paid that money back--but I
didn't, and that settles it. It's a bad break I'm making, Johnny, but
I can't dodge it. You helped me once, and it calls for the same."

"I knew it," said Kernan, raising his glass, with a flushed smile of
self-appreciation. "I can judge men. Here's to Barney, for--'he's a
jolly good fellow.'"

"I don't believe," went on Woods quietly, as if he were thinking
aloud, "that if accounts had been square between you and me, all the
money in all the banks in New York could have bought you out of my
hands to-night."

"I know it couldn't," said Kernan. "That's why I knew I was safe with
you."

"Most people," continued the detective, "look sideways at my
business. They don't class it among the fine arts and the
professions. But I've always taken a kind of fool pride in it. And
here is where I go 'busted.' I guess I'm a man first and a detective
afterward. I've got to let you go, and then I've got to resign from
the force. I guess I can drive an express wagon. Your thousand
dollars is further off than ever, Johnny."

"Oh, you're welcome to it," said Kernan, with a lordly air. "I'd be
willing to call the debt off, but I know you wouldn't have it. It
was a lucky day for me when you borrowed it. And now, let's drop the
subject. I'm off to the West on a morning train. I know a place out
there where I can negotiate the Norcross sparks. Drink up, Barney,
and forget your troubles. We'll have a jolly time while the police
are knocking their heads together over the case. I've got one of my
Sahara thirsts on to-night. But I'm in the hands--the unofficial
hands--of my old friend Barney, and I won't even dream of a cop."

And then, as Kernan's ready finger kept the button and the waiter
working, his weak point--a tremendous vanity and arrogant egotism,
began to show itself. He recounted story after story of his
successful plunderings, ingenious plots and infamous transgressions
until Woods, with all his familiarity with evil-doers, felt growing
within him a cold abhorrence toward the utterly vicious man who had
once been his benefactor.

"I'm disposed of, of course," said Woods, at length. "But I advise
you to keep under cover for a spell. The newspapers may take up this
Norcross affair. There has been an epidemic of burglaries and
manslaughter in town this summer."

The word sent Kernan into a high glow of sullen and vindictive rage.

"To h----l with the newspapers," he growled. "What do they spell but
brag and blow and boodle in box-car letters? Suppose they do take up
a case--what does it amount to? The police are easy enough to fool;
but what do the newspapers do? They send a lot of pin-head reporters
around to the scene; and they make for the nearest saloon and have
beer while they take photos of the bartender's oldest daughter in
evening dress, to print as the fiancée of the young man in the tenth
story, who thought he heard a noise below on the night of the murder.
That's about as near as the newspapers ever come to running down Mr.
Burglar."

"Well, I don't know," said Woods, reflecting. "Some of the papers
have done good work in that line. There's the _Morning Mars_, for
instance. It warmed up two or three trails, and got the man after the
police had let 'em get cold."

"I'll show you," said Kernan, rising, and expanding his chest. "I'll
show you what I think of newspapers in general, and your _Morning
Mars_ in particular."

Three feet from their table was the telephone booth. Kernan went
inside and sat at the instrument, leaving the door open. He found a
number in the book, took down the receiver and made his demand upon
Central. Woods sat still, looking at the sneering, cold, vigilant
face waiting close to the transmitter, and listened to the words that
came from the thin, truculent lips curved into a contemptuous smile.

"That the _Morning Mars_? . . . I want to speak to the managing
editor. . . Why, tell him it's some one who wants to talk to him
about the Norcross murder.

"You the editor? . . . All right. . . I am the man who killed old
Norcross . . . Wait! Hold the wire; I'm not the usual crank . . . Oh,
there isn't the slightest danger. I've just been discussing it with
a detective friend of mine. I killed the old man at 2:30 A. M. two
weeks ago to-morrow. . . . Have a drink with you? Now, hadn't you
better leave that kind of talk to your funny man? Can't you tell
whether a man's guying you or whether you're being offered the
biggest scoop your dull dishrag of a paper ever had? . . . Well,
that's so; it's a bobtail scoop--but you can hardly expect me to
'phone in my name and address . . . Why? Oh, because I heard you make
a specialty of solving mysterious crimes that stump the police. . .
No, that's not all. I want to tell you that your rotten, lying,
penny sheet is of no more use in tracking an intelligent murderer or
highwayman than a blind poodle would be. . . What? . . . Oh, no, this
isn't a rival newspaper office; you're getting it straight. I did the
Norcross job, and I've got the jewels in my suit case at--'the name
of the hotel could not be learned'--you recognize that phrase, don't
you? I thought so. You've used it often enough. Kind of rattles you,
doesn't it, to have the mysterious villain call up your great, big,
all-powerful organ of right and justice and good government and tell
you what a helpless old gas-bag you are? . . . Cut that out; you're
not that big a fool--no, you don't think I'm a fraud. I can tell it
by your voice. . . . Now, listen, and I'll give you a pointer that
will prove it to you. Of course you've had this murder case worked
over by your staff of bright young blockheads. Half of the second
button on old Mrs. Norcross's nightgown is broken off. I saw it when
I took the garnet ring off her finger. I thought it was a ruby. . .
Stop that! it won't work."

Kernan turned to Woods with a diabolic smile.

"I've got him going. He believes me now. He didn't quite cover the
transmitter with his hand when he told somebody to call up Central on
another 'phone and get our number. I'll give him just one more dig,
and then we'll make a 'get-away.'

"Hello! . . . Yes. I'm here yet. You didn't think I'd run from such
a little subsidized, turncoat rag of a newspaper, did you? . . . Have
me inside of forty-eight hours? Say, will you quit being funny? Now,
you let grown men alone and attend to your business of hunting up
divorce cases and street-car accidents and printing the filth and
scandal that you make your living by. Good-by, old boy--sorry I
haven't time to call on you. I'd feel perfectly safe in your sanctum
asinorum. Tra-la!"

"He's as mad as a cat that's lost a mouse," said Kernan, hanging up
the receiver and coming out. "And now, Barney, my boy, we'll go to
a show and enjoy ourselves until a reasonable bedtime. Four hours'
sleep for me, and then the west-bound."

The two dined in a Broadway restaurant. Kernan was pleased with
himself. He spent money like a prince of fiction. And then a weird
and gorgeous musical comedy engaged their attention. Afterward there
was a late supper in a grillroom, with champagne, and Kernan at the
height of his complacency.

Half-past three in the morning found them in a corner of an all-night
café, Kernan still boasting in a vapid and rambling way, Woods
thinking moodily over the end that had come to his usefulness as an
upholder of the law.

But, as he pondered, his eye brightened with a speculative light.

"I wonder if it's possible," he said to himself, "I won-der if it's
pos-si-ble!"

And then outside the café the comparative stillness of the early
morning was punctured by faint, uncertain cries that seemed mere
fireflies of sound, some growing louder, some fainter, waxing and
waning amid the rumble of milk wagons and infrequent cars. Shrill
cries they were when near--well-known cries that conveyed many
meanings to the ears of those of the slumbering millions of the great
city who waked to hear them. Cries that bore upon their significant,
small volume the weight of a world's woe and laughter and delight
and stress. To some, cowering beneath the protection of a night's
ephemeral cover, they brought news of the hideous, bright day; to
others, wrapped in happy sleep, they announced a morning that would
dawn blacker than sable night. To many of the rich they brought a
besom to sweep away what had been theirs while the stars shone; to
the poor they brought--another day.

All over the city the cries were starting up, keen and sonorous,
heralding the chances that the slipping of one cogwheel in the
machinery of time had made; apportioning to the sleepers while they
lay at the mercy of fate, the vengeance, profit, grief, reward and
doom that the new figure in the calendar had brought them. Shrill and
yet plaintive were the cries, as if the young voices grieved that so
much evil and so little good was in their irresponsible hands. Thus
echoed in the streets of the helpless city the transmission of the
latest decrees of the gods, the cries of the newsboys--the Clarion
Call of the Press.

Woods flipped a dime to the waiter, and said: "Get me a _Morning
Mars_."

When the paper came he glanced at its first page, and then tore a
leaf out of his memorandum book and began to write on it with the
little gold pencil.

"What's the news?" yawned Kernan.

Woods flipped over to him the piece of writing:


   "The New York _Morning Mars_:

   "Please pay to the order of John Kernan the one thousand
   dollars reward coming to me for his arrest and conviction.

   "BARNARD WOODS."


"I kind of thought they would do that," said Woods, "when you were
jollying them so hard. Now, Johnny, you'll come to the police station
with me."




XXII

EXTRADITED FROM BOHEMIA


From near the village of Harmony, at the foot of the Green Mountains,
came Miss Medora Martin to New York with her color-box and easel.

Miss Medora resembled the rose which the autumnal frosts had spared
the longest of all her sister blossoms. In Harmony, when she started
alone to the wicked city to study art, they said she was a mad,
reckless, headstrong girl. In New York, when she first took her seat
at a West Side boardinghouse table, the boarders asked: "Who is the
nice-looking old maid?"

Medora took heart, a cheap hall bedroom and two art lessons a week
from Professor Angelini, a retired barber who had studied his
profession in a Harlem dancing academy. There was no one to set her
right, for here in the big city they do it unto all of us. How many
of us are badly shaved daily and taught the two-step imperfectly by
ex-pupils of Bastien Le Page and Gérôme? The most pathetic sight in
New York--except the manners of the rush-hour crowds--is the dreary
march of the hopeless army of Mediocrity. Here Art is no benignant
goddess, but a Circe who turns her wooers into mewing Toms and
Tabbies who linger about the doorsteps of her abode, unmindful of
the flying brickbats and boot-jacks of the critics. Some of us creep
back to our native villages to the skim-milk of "I told you so"; but
most of us prefer to remain in the cold courtyard of our mistress's
temple, snatching the scraps that fall from her divine table d'hôte.
But some of us grow weary at last of the fruitless service. And then
there are two fates open to us. We can get a job driving a grocer's
wagon, or we can get swallowed up in the Vortex of Bohemia. The
latter sounds good; but the former really pans out better. For, when
the grocer pays us off we can rent a dress suit and--the capitalized
system of humor describes it best--Get Bohemia On the Run.

Miss Medora chose the Vortex and thereby furnishes us with our little
story.

Professor Angelini praised her sketches excessively. Once when
she had made a neat study of a horse-chestnut tree in the park he
declared she would become a second Rosa Bonheur. Again--a great
artist has his moods--he would say cruel and cutting things. For
example, Medora had spent an afternoon patiently sketching the statue
and the architecture at Columbus Circle. Tossing it aside with a
sneer, the professor informed her that Giotto had once drawn a
perfect circle with one sweep of his hand.

One day it rained, the weekly remittance from Harmony was overdue,
Medora had a headache, the professor had tried to borrow two dollars
from her, her art dealer had sent back all her water-colors unsold,
and--Mr. Binkley asked her out to dinner.

Mr. Binkley was the gay boy of the boarding-house. He was forty-nine,
and owned a fishstall in a downtown market. But after six o'clock he
wore an evening suit and whooped things up connected with the beaux
arts. The young men said he was an "Indian." He was supposed to be
an accomplished habitué of the inner circles of Bohemia. It was no
secret that he had once loaned $10 to a young man who had had a
drawing printed in _Puck_. Often has one thus obtained his entrée
into the charmed circle, while the other obtained both his entrée and
roast.

The other boarders enviously regarded Medora as she left at Mr.
Binkley's side at nine o'clock. She was as sweet as a cluster of
dried autumn grasses in her pale blue--oh--er--that very thin
stuff--in her pale blue Comstockized silk waist and box-pleated voile
skirt, with a soft pink glow on her thin cheeks and the tiniest bit
of rouge powder on her face, with her handkerchief and room key in
her brown walrus, pebble-grain hand-bag.

And Mr. Binkley looked imposing and dashing with his red face and
gray mustache, and his tight dress coat, that made the back of his
neck roll up just like a successful novelist's.

They drove in a cab to the Café Terence, just off the most glittering
part of Broadway, which, as every one knows, is one of the most
popular and widely patronized, jealously exclusive Bohemian resorts
in the city.

Down between the rows of little tables tripped Medora, of the Green
Mountains, after her escort. Thrice in a lifetime may woman walk upon
clouds--once when she trippeth to the altar, once when she first
enters Bohemian halls, the last when she marches back across her
first garden with the dead hen of her neighbor in her hand.

There was a table set, with three or four about it. A waiter buzzed
around it like a bee, and silver and glass shone upon it. And,
preliminary to the meal, as the prehistoric granite strata heralded
the protozoa, the bread of Gaul, compounded after the formula of
the recipe for the eternal hills, was there set forth to the hand
and tooth of a long-suffering city, while the gods lay beside their
nectar and home-made biscuits and smiled, and the dentists leaped for
joy in their gold-leafy dens.

The eye of Binkley fixed a young man at his table with the Bohemian
gleam, which is a compound of the look of the Basilisk, the shine of
a bubble of Würzburger, the inspiration of genius and the pleading of
a panhandler.

The young man sprang to his feet. "Hello, Bink, old boy!" he shouted.
"Don't tell me you were going to pass our table. Join us--unless
you've another crowd on hand."

"Don't mind, old chap," said Binkley, of the fish-stall. "You know
how I like to butt up against the fine arts. Mr. Vandyke--Mr.
Madder--er--Miss Martin, one of the elect also in art--er--"

The introduction went around. There were also Miss Elise and Miss
'Toinette. Perhaps they were models, for they chattered of the St.
Regis decorations and Henry James--and they did it not badly.

Medora sat in transport. Music--wild, intoxicating music made by
troubadours direct from a rear basement room in Elysium--set her
thoughts to dancing. Here was a world never before penetrated by her
warmest imagination or any of the lines controlled by Harriman. With
the Green Mountains' external calm upon her she sat, her soul flaming
in her with the fire of Andalusia. The tables were filled with
Bohemia. The room was full of the fragrance of flowers--both mille
and cauli. Questions and corks popped; laughter and silver rang;
champagne flashed in the pail, wit flashed in the pan.

Vandyke ruffled his long, black locks, disarranged his careless tie
and leaned over to Madder.

"Say, Maddy," he whispered, feelingly, "sometimes I'm tempted to pay
this Philistine his ten dollars and get rid of him."

Madder ruffled his long, sandy locks and disarranged his careless
tie.

"Don't think of it, Vandy," he replied. "We are short, and Art is
long."

Medora ate strange viands and drank elderberry wine that they poured
in her glass. It was just the color of that in the Vermont home. The
waiter poured something in another glass that seemed to be boiling,
but when she tasted it it was not hot. She had never felt so
light-hearted before. She thought lovingly of the Green Mountain farm
and its fauna. She leaned, smiling, to Miss Elise.

"If I were at home," she said, beamingly, "I could show you the
cutest little calf!"

"Nothing for you in the White Lane," said Miss Elise. "Why don't you
pad?"

The orchestra played a wailing waltz that Medora had learned from
the hand-organs. She followed the air with nodding head in a sweet
soprano hum. Madder looked across the table at her, and wondered in
what strange waters Binkley had caught her in his seine. She smiled
at him, and they raised glasses and drank of the wine that boiled
when it was cold. Binkley had abandoned art and was prating
of the unusual spring catch of shad. Miss Elise arranged the
palette-and-maul-stick tie pin of Mr. Vandyke. A Philistine at some
distant table was maundering volubly either about Jerome or Gérôme.
A famous actress was discoursing excitably about monogrammed hosiery.
A hose clerk from a department store was loudly proclaiming his
opinions of the drama. A writer was abusing Dickens. A magazine
editor and a photographer were drinking a dry brand at a reserved
table. A 36-25-42 young lady was saying to an eminent sculptor:
"Fudge for your Prax Italys! Bring one of your Venus Anno Dominis
down to Cohen's and see how quick she'd be turned down for a cloak
model. Back to the quarries with your Greeks and Dagos!"

Thus went Bohemia.

At eleven Mr. Binkley took Medora to the boarding-house and left her,
with a society bow, at the foot of the hall stairs. She went up to
her room and lit the gas.

And then, as suddenly as the dreadful genie arose in vapor from the
copper vase of the fisherman, arose in that room the formidable shape
of the New England Conscience. The terrible thing that Medora had
done was revealed to her in its full enormity. She had sat in the
presence of the ungodly and looked upon the wine both when it was red
and effervescent.

At midnight she wrote this letter:


   "MR. BERIAH HOSKINS, Harmony, Vermont.

   "Dear Sir: Henceforth, consider me as dead to you forever.
   I have loved you too well to blight your career by bringing
   into it my guilty and sin-stained life. I have succumbed
   to the insidious wiles of this wicked world and have been
   drawn into the vortex of Bohemia. There is scarcely any
   depth of glittering iniquity that I have not sounded. It is
   hopeless to combat my decision. There is no rising from the
   depths to which I have sunk. Endeavor to forget me. I am
   lost forever in the fair but brutal maze of awful Bohemia.
   Farewell.

   "ONCE YOUR MEDORA."


On the next day Medora formed her resolutions. Beelzebub, flung from
heaven, was no more cast down. Between her and the apple blossoms of
Harmony there was a fixed gulf. Flaming cherubim warded her from the
gates of her lost paradise. In one evening, by the aid of Binkley and
Mumm, Bohemia had gathered her into its awful midst.

There remained to her but one thing--a life of brilliant, but
irremediable error. Vermont was a shrine that she never would dare
to approach again. But she would not sink--there were great and
compelling ones in history upon whom she would model her meteoric
career--Camille, Lola Montez, Royal Mary, Zaza--such a name as one
of these would that of Medora Martin be to future generations.

For two days Medora kept her room. On the third she opened a magazine
at the portrait of the King of Belgium, and laughed sardonically. If
that far-famed breaker of women's hearts should cross her path, he
would have to bow before her cold and imperious beauty. She would not
spare the old or the young. All America--all Europe should do homage
to her sinister, but compelling charm.

As yet she could not bear to think of the life she had once
desired--a peaceful one in the shadow of the Green Mountains with
Beriah at her side, and orders for expensive oil paintings coming in
by each mail from New York. Her one fatal misstep had shattered that
dream.

On the fourth day Medora powdered her face and rouged her lips. Once
she had seen Carter in "Zaza." She stood before the mirror in a
reckless attitude and cried: "_Zut! zut!_" She rhymed it with "nut,"
but with the lawless word Harmony seemed to pass away forever. The
Vortex had her. She belonged to Bohemia for evermore. And never would
Beriah--

The door opened and Beriah walked in.

"'Dory," said he, "what's all that chalk and pink stuff on your face,
honey?"

Medora extended an arm.

"Too late," she said, solemnly. "The die is cast. I belong in another
world. Curse me if you will--it is your right. Go, and leave me in
the path I have chosen. Bid them all at home never to mention my name
again. And sometimes, Beriah, pray for me when I am revelling in the
gaudy, but hollow, pleasures of Bohemia."

"Get a towel, 'Dory," said Beriah, "and wipe that paint off your
face. I came as soon as I got your letter. Them pictures of yours
ain't amounting to anything. I've got tickets for both of us back on
the evening train. Hurry and get your things in your trunk."

"Fate was too strong for me, Beriah. Go while I am strong to bear
it."

"How do you fold this easel, 'Dory?--now begin to pack, so we have
time to eat before train time. The maples is all out in full-grown
leaves, 'Dory--you just ought to see 'em!

"Not this early, Beriah?

"You ought to see 'em, 'Dory; they're like an ocean of green in the
morning sunlight."

"Oh, Beriah!"

On the train she said to him suddenly:

"I wonder why you came when you got my letter."

"Oh, shucks!" said Beriah. "Did you think you could fool me? How
could you be run away to that Bohemia country like you said when
your letter was postmarked New York as plain as day?"




XXIII

A PHILISTINE IN BOHEMIA


George Washington, with his right arm upraised, sits his iron horse
at the lower corner of Union Square, forever signaling the Broadway
cars to stop as they round the curve into Fourteenth Street. But the
cars buzz on, heedless, as they do at the beck of a private citizen,
and the great General must feel, unless his nerves are iron, that
rapid transit gloria mundi.

Should the General raise his left hand as he has raised his right
it would point to a quarter of the city that forms a haven for the
oppressed and suppressed of foreign lands. In the cause of national
or personal freedom they have found a refuge here, and the patriot
who made it for them sits his steed, overlooking their district,
while he listens through his left ear to vaudeville that caricatures
the posterity of his protégés. Italy, Poland, the former Spanish
possessions and the polyglot tribes of Austria-Hungary have spilled
here a thick lather of their effervescent sons. In the eccentric
cafés and lodging-houses of the vicinity they hover over their native
wines and political secrets. The colony changes with much frequency.
Faces disappear from the haunts to be replaced by others. Whither do
these uneasy birds flit? For half of the answer observe carefully the
suave foreign air and foreign courtesy of the next waiter who serves
your table d'hôte. For the other half, perhaps if the barber shops
had tongues (and who will dispute it?) they could tell their share.

Titles are as plentiful as finger rings among these transitory
exiles. For lack of proper exploitation a stock of title goods large
enough to supply the trade of upper Fifth Avenue is here condemned
to a mere pushcart traffic. The new-world landlords who entertain
these offshoots of nobility are not dazzled by coronets and crests.
They have doughnuts to sell instead of daughters. With them it is a
serious matter of trading in flour and sugar instead of pearl powder
and bonbons.

These assertions are deemed fitting as an introduction to the tale,
which is of plebeians and contains no one with even the ghost of a
title.

Katy Dempsey's mother kept a furnished-room house in this oasis of
the aliens. The business was not profitable. If the two scraped
together enough to meet the landlord's agent on rent day and
negotiate for the ingredients of a daily Irish stew they called it
success. Often the stew lacked both meat and potatoes. Sometimes it
became as bad as consommé with music.

In this mouldy old house Katy waxed plump and pert and wholesome and
as beautiful and freckled as a tiger lily. She was the good fairy who
was guilty of placing the damp clean towels and cracked pitchers of
freshly laundered Croton in the lodgers' rooms.

You are informed (by virtue of the privileges of astronomical
discovery) that the star lodger's name was Mr. Brunelli. His wearing
a yellow tie and paying his rent promptly distinguished him from the
other lodgers. His raiment was splendid, his complexion olive, his
mustache fierce, his manners a prince's, his rings and pins as
magnificent as those of a traveling dentist.

He had breakfast served in his room, and he ate it in a red dressing
gown with green tassels. He left the house at noon and returned
at midnight. Those were mysterious hours, but there was nothing
mysterious about Mrs. Dempsey's lodgers except the things that were
not mysterious. One of Mr. Kipling's poems is addressed to "Ye who
hold the unwritten clue to all save all unwritten things." The same
"readers" are invited to tackle the foregoing assertion.

Mr. Brunelli, being impressionable and a Latin, fell to conjugating
the verb "amare," with Katy in the objective case, though not because
of antipathy. She talked it over with her mother.

"Sure, I like him," said Katy. "He's more politeness than twinty
candidates for Alderman, and lie makes me feel like a queen whin he
walks at me side. But what is he, I dinno? I've me suspicions. The
marnin'll coom whin he'll throt out the picture av his baronial halls
and ax to have the week's rint hung up in the ice chist along wid all
the rist of 'em."

"'Tis thrue," admitted Mrs. Dempsey, "that he seems to be a sort iv a
Dago, and too coolchured in his spache for a rale gentleman. But ye
may be misjudgin' him. Ye should niver suspect any wan of bein' of
noble descint that pays cash and pathronizes the laundry rig'lar."

"He's the same thricks of spakin' and blarneyin' wid his hands,"
sighed Katy, "as the Frinch nobleman at Mrs. Toole's that ran away
wid Mr. Toole's Sunday pants and left the photograph of the Bastile,
his grandfather's chat-taw, as security for tin weeks' rint."

Mr. Brunelli continued his calorific wooing. Katy continued to
hesitate. One day he asked her out to dine and she felt that a
dénouement was in the air. While they are on their way, with Katy in
her best muslin, you must take as an entr'acte a brief peep at New
York's Bohemia.

'Tonio's restaurant is in Bohemia. The very location of it is secret.
If you wish to know where it is ask the first person you meet. He
will tell you in a whisper. 'Tonio discountenances custom; he keeps
his house-front black and forbidding; he gives you a pretty bad
dinner; he locks his door at the dining hour; but he knows spaghetti
as the boarding-house knows cold veal; and--he has deposited many
dollars in a certain Banco di-- something with many gold vowels in
the name on its windows.

To this restaurant Mr. Brunelli conducted Katy. The house was dark
and the shades were lowered; but Mr. Brunelli touched an electric
button by the basement door, and they were admitted.

Along a long, dark, narrow hallway they went and then through a
shining and spotless kitchen that opened directly upon a back yard.

The walls of houses hemmed three sides of the yard; a high, board
fence, surrounded by cats, the other. A wash of clothes was suspended
high upon a line stretched from diagonal corners. Those were property
clothes, and were never taken in by 'Tonio. They were there that wits
with defective pronunciation might make puns in connection with the
ragout.

A dozen and a half little tables set upon the bare ground were
crowded with Bohemia-hunters, who flocked there because 'Tonio
pretended not to want them and pretended to give them a good dinner.
There was a sprinkling of real Bohemians present who came for a
change because they were tired of the real Bohemia, and a smart
shower of the men who originate the bright sayings of Congressmen
and the little nephew of the well-known general passenger agent of
the Evansville and Terre Haute Railroad Company.

Here is a bon mot that was manufactured at 'Tonio's:

"A dinner at 'Tonio's," said a Bohemian, "always amounts to twice the
price that is asked for it."

Let us assume that an accommodating voice inquires:

"How so?"

"The dinner costs you 40 cents; you give 10 cents to the waiter, and
it makes you feel like 30 cents."

Most of the diners were confirmed table d'hôters--gastronomic
adventurers, forever seeking the El Dorado of a good claret, and
consistently coming to grief in California.

Mr. Brunelli escorted Katy to a little table embowered with shrubbery
in tubs, and asked her to excuse him for a while.

Katy sat, enchanted by a scene so brilliant to her. The grand
ladies, in splendid dresses and plumes and sparkling rings; the fine
gentlemen who laughed so loudly, the cries of "Garsong!" and "We,
monseer," and "Hello, Mame!" that distinguish Bohemia; the lively
chatter, the cigarette smoke, the interchange of bright smiles and
eye-glances--all this display and magnificence overpowered the
daughter of Mrs. Dempsey and held her motionless.

Mr. Brunelli stepped into the yard and seemed to spread his smile
and bow over the entire company. And everywhere there was a great
clapping of hands and a few cries of "Bravo!" and "'Tonio! 'Tonio!"
whatever those words might mean. Ladies waved their napkins at him,
gentlemen almost twisted their necks off, trying to catch his nod.

When the ovation was concluded Mr. Brunelli, with a final bow,
stepped nimbly into the kitchen and flung off his coat and waistcoat.

Flaherty, the nimblest "garsong" among the waiters, had been assigned
to the special service of Katy. She was a little faint from hunger,
for the Irish stew on the Dempsey table had been particularly weak
that day. Delicious odors from unknown dishes tantalized her. And
Flaherty began to bring to her table course after course of ambrosial
food that the gods might have pronounced excellent.

But even in the midst of her Lucullian repast Katy laid down her
knife and fork. Her heart sank as lead, and a tear fell upon her
filet mignon. Her haunting suspicions of the star lodger arose
again, fourfold. Thus courted and admired and smiled upon by that
fashionable and gracious assembly, what else could Mr. Brunelli be
but one of those dazzling titled patricians, glorious of name but shy
of rent money, concerning whom experience had made her wise? With a
sense of his ineligibility growing within her there was mingled a
torturing conviction that his personality was becoming more pleasing
to her day by day. And why had he left her to dine alone?

But here he was coming again, now coatless, his snowy shirt-sleeves
rolled high above his Jeffriesonian elbows, a white yachting cap
perched upon his jetty curls.

"'Tonio! 'Tonio!" shouted many, and "The spaghetti! The spaghetti!"
shouted the rest.

Never at 'Tonio's did a waiter dare to serve a dish of spaghetti
until 'Tonio came to test it, to prove the sauce and add the needful
dash of seasoning that gave it perfection.

From table to table moved 'Tonio, like a prince in his palace,
greeting his guests. White, jewelled hands signalled him from every
side.

A glass of wine with this one and that, smiles for all, a jest and
repartee for any that might challenge--truly few princes could be so
agreeable a host! And what artist could ask for further appreciation
of his handiwork? Katy did not know that the proudest consummation of
a New Yorker's ambition is to shake hands with a spaghetti chef or to
receive a nod from a Broadway head-waiter.

At last the company thinned, leaving but a few couples and quartettes
lingering over new wine and old stories. And then came Mr. Brunelli
to Katy's secluded table, and drew a chair close to hers.

Katy smiled at him dreamily. She was eating the last spoonful of a
raspberry roll with Burgundy sauce.

"You have seen!" said Mr. Brunelli, laying one hand upon his collar
bone. "I am Antonio Brunelli! Yes; I am the great 'Tonio! You have
not suspect that! I loave you, Katy, and you shall marry with me. Is
it not so? Call me 'Antonio,' and say that you will be mine."

Katy's head drooped to the shoulder that was now freed from all
suspicion of having received the knightly accolade.

"Oh, Andy," she sighed, "this is great! Sure, I'll marry wid ye. But
why didn't ye tell me ye was the cook? I was near turnin' ye down for
bein' one of thim foreign counts!"




XXIV

FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS ABILITY


Vuyning left his club, cursing it softly, without any particular
anger. From ten in the morning until eleven it had bored him
immeasurably. Kirk with his fish story, Brooks with his Porto Rico
cigars, old Morrison with his anecdote about the widow, Hepburn with
his invariable luck at billiards--all these afflictions had been
repeated without change of bill or scenery. Besides these morning
evils Miss Allison had refused him again on the night before. But
that was a chronic trouble. Five times she had laughed at his offer
to make her Mrs. Vuyning. He intended to ask her again the next
Wednesday evening.

Vuyning walked along Forty-fourth Street to Broadway, and then
drifted down the great sluice that washes out the dust of the
gold-mines of Gotham. He wore a morning suit of light gray, low, dull
kid shoes, a plain, finely woven straw hat, and his visible linen was
the most delicate possible shade of heliotrope. His necktie was the
blue-gray of a November sky, and its knot was plainly the outcome of
a lordly carelessness combined with an accurate conception of the
most recent dictum of fashion.

Now, to write of a man's haberdashery is a worse thing than to write
a historical novel "around" Paul Jones, or to pen a testimonial to a
hay-fever cure.

Therefore, let it be known that the description of Vuyning's apparel
is germane to the movements of the story, and not to make room for
the new fall stock of goods.

Even Broadway that morning was a discord in Vuyning's ears; and in
his eyes it paralleled for a few dreamy, dreary minutes a certain
howling, scorching, seething, malodorous slice of street that he
remembered in Morocco. He saw the struggling mass of dogs, beggars,
fakirs, slave-drivers and veiled women in carts without horses, the
sun blazing brightly among the bazaars, the piles of rubbish from
ruined temples in the street--and then a lady, passing, jabbed the
ferrule of a parasol in his side and brought him back to Broadway.

Five minutes of his stroll brought him to a certain corner, where a
number of silent, pale-faced men are accustomed to stand, immovably,
for hours, busy with the file blades of their penknives, with their
hat brims on a level with their eyelids. Wall Street speculators,
driving home in their carriages, love to point out these men to their
visiting friends and tell them of this rather famous lounging-place
of the "crooks." On Wall Street the speculators never use the file
blades of their knives.

Vuyning was delighted when one of this company stepped forth and
addressed him as he was passing. He was hungry for something out of
the ordinary, and to be accosted by this smooth-faced, keen-eyed,
low-voiced, athletic member of the under world, with his grim,
yet pleasant smile, had all the taste of an adventure to the
convention-weary Vuyning.

"Excuse me, friend," said he. "Could I have a few minutes' talk with
you--on the level?"

"Certainly," said Vuyning, with a smile. "But, suppose we step aside
to a quieter place. There is a divan--a café over here that will do.
Schrumm will give us a private corner."

Schrumm established them under a growing palm, with two seidls
between them. Vuyning made a pleasant reference to meteorological
conditions, thus forming a hinge upon which might be swung the door
leading from the thought repository of the other.

"In the first place," said his companion, with the air of one who
presents his credentials, "I want you to understand that I am a
crook. Out West I am known as Rowdy the Dude. Pickpocket, supper
man, second-story man, yeggman, boxman, all-round burglar, cardsharp
and slickest con man west of the Twenty-third Street ferry
landing--that's my history. That's to show I'm on the square--with
you. My name's Emerson."

"Confound old Kirk with his fish stories," said Vuyning to himself,
with silent glee as he went through his pockets for a card. "It's
pronounced 'Vining,'" he said, as he tossed it over to the other.
"And I'll be as frank with you. I'm just a kind of a loafer,
I guess, living on my daddy's money. At the club they call me
'Left-at-the-Post.' I never did a day's work in my life; and I
haven't the heart to run over a chicken when I'm motoring. It's a
pretty shabby record, altogether."

"There's one thing you can do," said Emerson, admiringly; "you can
carry duds. I've watched you several times pass on Broadway. You look
the best dressed man I've seen. And I'll bet you a gold mine I've got
$50 worth more gent's furnishings on my frame than you have. That's
what I wanted to see you about. I can't do the trick. Take a look at
me. What's wrong?"

"Stand up," said Vuyning.

Emerson arose, and slowly revolved.

"You've been 'outfitted,'" declared the clubman. "Some Broadway
window-dresser has misused you. That's an expensive suit, though,
Emerson."

"A hundred dollars," said Emerson.

"Twenty too much," said Vuyning. "Six months old in cut, one inch too
long, and half an inch too much lapel. Your hat is plainly dated one
year ago, although there's only a sixteenth of an inch lacking in
the brim to tell the story. That English poke in your collar is too
short by the distance between Troy and London. A plain gold link
cuff-button would take all the shine out of those pearl ones with
diamond settings. Those tan shoes would be exactly the articles to
work into the heart of a Brooklyn school-ma'am on a two weeks' visit
to Lake Ronkonkoma. I think I caught a glimpse of a blue silk sock
embroidered with russet lilies of the valley when you--improperly--
drew up your trousers as you sat down. There are always plain ones to
be had in the stores. Have I hurt your feelings, Emerson?"

"Double the ante!" cried the criticised one, greedily. "Give me more
of it. There's a way to tote the haberdashery, and I want to get wise
to it. Say, you're the right kind of a swell. Anything else to the
queer about me?"

"Your tie," said Vuyning, "is tied with absolute precision and
correctness."

"Thanks," gratefully--"I spent over half an hour at it before I--"

"Thereby," interrupted Vuyning, "completing your resemblance to a
dummy in a Broadway store window."

"Yours truly," said Emerson, sitting down again. "It's bully of you
to put me wise. I knew there was something wrong, but I couldn't
just put my finger on it. I guess it comes by nature to know how to
wear clothes."

"Oh, I suppose," said Vuyning, with a laugh, "that my ancestors
picked up the knack while they were peddling clothes from house to
house a couple of hundred years ago. I'm told they did that."

"And mine," said Emerson, cheerfully, "were making their visits at
night, I guess, and didn't have a chance to catch on to the correct
styles."

"I tell you what," said Vuyning, whose ennui had taken wings, "I'll
take you to my tailor. He'll eliminate the mark of the beast from
your exterior. That is, if you care to go any further in the way of
expense."

"Play 'em to the ceiling," said Emerson, with a boyish smile of joy.
"I've got a roll as big around as a barrel of black-eyed peas and as
loose as the wrapper of a two-for-fiver. I don't mind telling you
that I was not touring among the Antipodes when the burglar-proof
safe of the Farmers' National Bank of Butterville, Ia., flew open
some moonless nights ago to the tune of $16,000."

"Aren't you afraid," asked Vuyning, "that I'll call a cop and hand
you over?"

"You tell me," said Emerson, coolly, "why I didn't keep them."

He laid Vuyning's pocketbook and watch--the Vuyning 100-year-old
family watch--on the table.

"Man," said Vuyning, revelling, "did you ever hear the tale Kirk
tells about the six-pound trout and the old fisherman?"

"Seems not," said Emerson, politely. "I'd like to."

"But you won't," said Vuyning. "I've heard it scores of times. That's
why I won't tell you. I was just thinking how much better this is
than a club. Now, shall we go to my tailor?"



"Boys, and elderly gents," said Vuyning, five days later at his club,
standing up against the window where his coterie was gathered, and
keeping out the breeze, "a friend of mine from the West will dine at
our table this evening."

"Will he ask if we have heard the latest from Denver?" said a member,
squirming in his chair.

"Will he mention the new twenty-three-story Masonic Temple, in
Quincy, Ill.?" inquired another, dropping his nose-glasses.

"Will he spring one of those Western Mississippi River catfish
stories, in which they use yearling calves for bait?" demanded Kirk,
fiercely.

"Be comforted," said Vuyning. "He has none of the little vices. He is
a burglar and safe-blower, and a pal of mine."

"Oh, Mary Ann!" said they. "Must you always adorn every statement
with your alleged humor?"

It came to pass that at eight in the evening a calm, smooth,
brilliant, affable man sat at Vuyning's right hand during dinner.
And when the ones who pass their lives in city streets spoke of
skyscrapers or of the little Czar on his far, frozen throne, or
of insignificant fish from inconsequential streams, this big,
deep-chested man, faultlessly clothed, and eyed like an Emperor,
disposed of their Lilliputian chatter with a wink of his eyelash.

And then he painted for them with hard, broad strokes a marvellous
lingual panorama of the West. He stacked snow-topped mountains on the
table, freezing the hot dishes of the waiting diners. With a wave of
his hand he swept the clubhouse into a pine-crowned gorge, turning
the waiters into a grim posse, and each listener into a blood-stained
fugitive, climbing with torn fingers upon the ensanguined rocks. He
touched the table and spake, and the five panted as they gazed on
barren lava beds, and each man took his tongue between his teeth and
felt his mouth bake at the tale of a land empty of water and food. As
simply as Homer sang, while he dug a tine of his fork leisurely into
the tablecloth, he opened a new world to their view, as does one who
tells a child of the Looking-Glass Country.

As one of his listeners might have spoken of tea too strong at a
Madison Square "afternoon," so he depicted the ravages of "redeye"
in a border town when the caballeros of the lariat and "forty-five"
reduced ennui to a minimum.

And then, with a sweep of his white, unringed hands, he dismissed
Melpomene, and forthwith Diana and Amaryllis footed it before the
mind's eyes of the clubmen.

The savannas of the continent spread before them. The wind, humming
through a hundred leagues of sage brush and mesquite, closed their
ears to the city's staccato noises. He told them of camps, of ranches
marooned in a sea of fragrant prairie blossoms, of gallops in the
stilly night that Apollo would have forsaken his daytime steeds to
enjoy; he read them the great, rough epic of the cattle and the
hills that have not been spoiled by the hand of man, the mason. His
words were a telescope to the city men, whose eyes had looked upon
Youngstown, O., and whose tongues had called it "West."

In fact, Emerson had them "going."



The next morning at ten he met Vuyning, by appointment, at a
Forty-second Street café.

Emerson was to leave for the West that day. He wore a suit of dark
cheviot that looked to have been draped upon him by an ancient
Grecian tailor who was a few thousand years ahead of the styles.

"Mr. Vuyning," said he, with the clear, ingenuous smile of the
successful "crook," "it's up to me to go the limit for you any time I
can do so. You're the real thing; and if I can ever return the favor,
you bet your life I'll do it."

"What was that cow-puncher's name?" asked Vuyning, "who used to catch
a mustang by the nose and mane, and throw him till he put the bridle
on?"

"Bates," said Emerson.

"Thanks," said Vuyning. "I thought it was Yates. Oh, about that
toggery business--I'd forgotten that."

"I've been looking for some guy to put me on the right track for
years," said Emerson. "You're the goods, duty free, and half-way to
the warehouse in a red wagon."

"Bacon, toasted on a green willow switch over red coals, ought to put
broiled lobsters out of business," said Vuyning. "And you say a horse
at the end of a thirty-foot rope can't pull a ten-inch stake out of
wet prairie? Well, good-bye, old man, if you must be off."

At one o'clock Vuyning had luncheon with Miss Allison by previous
arrangement.

For thirty minutes he babbled to her, unaccountably, of ranches,
horses, cañons, cyclones, round-ups, Rocky Mountains and beans and
bacon. She looked at him with wondering and half-terrified eyes.

"I was going to propose again to-day," said Vuyning, cheerily, "but
I won't. I've worried you often enough. You know dad has a ranch in
Colorado. What's the good of staying here? Jumping jonquils! but it's
great out there. I'm going to start next Tuesday."

"No, you won't," said Miss Allison.

"What?" said Vuyning.

"Not alone," said Miss Allison, dropping a tear upon her salad. "What
do you think?"

"Betty!" exclaimed Vuyning, "what do you mean?

"I'll go too," said Miss Allison, forcibly. Vuyning filled her glass
with Apollinaris.

"Here's to Rowdy the Dude!" he gave--a toast mysterious.

"Don't know him," said Miss Allison; "but if he's your friend,
Jimmy--here goes!"




XXV

THE MEMENTO


Miss Lynnette D'Armande turned her back on Broadway. This was but tit
for tat, because Broadway had often done the same thing to Miss
D'Armande. Still, the "tats" seemed to have it, for the ex-leading
lady of the "Reaping the Whirlwind" company had everything to ask of
Broadway, while there was no vice-versâ.

So Miss Lynnette D'Armande turned the back of her chair to her window
that overlooked Broadway, and sat down to stitch in time the
lisle-thread heel of a black silk stocking. The tumult and glitter of
the roaring Broadway beneath her window had no charm for her; what
she greatly desired was the stifling air of a dressing-room on that
fairyland street and the roar of an audience gathered in that
capricious quarter. In the meantime, those stockings must not be
neglected. Silk does wear out so, but--after all, isn't it just the
only goods there is?

The Hotel Thalia looks on Broadway as Marathon looks on the sea. It
stands like a gloomy cliff above the whirlpool where the tides of two
great thoroughfares clash. Here the player-bands gather at the end of
their wanderings, to loosen the buskin and dust the sock. Thick in
the streets around it are booking-offices, theatres, agents, schools,
and the lobster-palaces to which those thorny paths lead.

Wandering through the eccentric halls of the dim and fusty Thalia,
you seem to have found yourself in some great ark or caravan about to
sail, or fly, or roll away on wheels. About the house lingers a sense
of unrest, of expectation, of transientness, even of anxiety and
apprehension. The halls are a labyrinth. Without a guide, you wander
like a lost soul in a Sam Loyd puzzle.

Turning any corner, a dressing-sack or a _cul-de-sac_ may bring you
up short. You meet alarming tragedians stalking in bath-robes in
search of rumored bathrooms. From hundreds of rooms come the buzz
of talk, scraps of new and old songs, and the ready laughter of the
convened players.

Summer has come; their companies have disbanded, and they take their
rest in their favorite caravansary, while they besiege the managers
for engagements for the coming season.

At this hour of the afternoon the day's work of tramping the rounds
of the agents' offices is over. Past you, as you ramble distractedly
through the mossy halls, flit audible visions of houris, with veiled,
starry eyes, flying tag-ends of things and a swish of silk,
bequeathing to the dull hallways an odor of gaiety and a memory of
_frangipanni_. Serious young comedians, with versatile Adam's apples,
gather in doorways and talk of Booth. Far-reaching from somewhere
comes the smell of ham and red cabbage, and the crash of dishes on
the American plan.

The indeterminate hum of life in the Thalia is enlivened by the
discreet popping--at reasonable and salubrious intervals--of
beer-bottle corks. Thus punctuated, life in the genial hostel scans
easily--the comma being the favorite mark, semicolons frowned upon,
and periods barred.

Miss D'Armande's room was a small one. There was room for her rocker
between the dresser and the wash-stand if it were placed
longitudinally. On the dresser were its usual accoutrements, plus the
ex-leading lady's collected souvenirs of road engagements and
photographs of her dearest and best professional friends.

At one of these photographs she looked twice or thrice as she darned,
and smiled friendlily.

"I'd like to know where Lee is just this minute," she said,
half-aloud.

If you had been privileged to view the photograph thus flattered, you
would have thought at the first glance that you saw the picture of a
many-petalled white flower, blown through the air by a storm. But the
floral kingdom was not responsible for that swirl of petalous
whiteness.

You saw the filmy, brief skirt of Miss Rosalie Ray as she made a
complete heels-over-head turn in her wistaria-entwined swing, far out
from the stage, high above the heads of the audience. You saw the
camera's inadequate representation of the graceful, strong kick, with
which she, at this exciting moment, sent flying, high and far, the
yellow silk garter that each evening spun from her agile limb and
descended upon the delighted audience below.

You saw, too, amid the black-clothed, mainly masculine patrons of
select vaudeville a hundred hands raised with the hope of staying the
flight of the brilliant aërial token.

Forty weeks of the best circuits this act had brought Miss Rosalie
Ray, for each of two years. She did other things during her twelve
minutes--a song and dance, imitations of two or three actors who are
but imitations of themselves, and a balancing feat with a step-ladder
and feather-duster; but when the blossom-decked swing was let down
from the flies, and Miss Rosalie sprang smiling into the seat, with
the golden circlet conspicuous in the place whence it was soon to
slide and become a soaring and coveted guerdon--then it was that the
audience rose in its seat as a single man--or presumably so--and
indorsed the specialty that made Miss Ray's name a favorite in the
booking-offices.

At the end of the two years Miss Ray suddenly announced to her dear
friend, Miss D'Armande, that she was going to spend the summer at an
antediluvian village on the north shore of Long Island, and that the
stage would see her no more.

Seventeen minutes after Miss Lynnette D'Armande had expressed her
wish to know the whereabouts of her old chum, there were sharp raps
at her door.

Doubt not that it was Rosalie Ray. At the shrill command to enter she
did so, with something of a tired flutter, and dropped a heavy
hand-bag on the floor. Upon my word, it was Rosalie, in a loose,
travel-stained automobileless coat, closely tied brown veil with
yard-long, flying ends, gray walking-suit and tan oxfords with
lavender overgaiters.

When she threw off her veil and hat, you saw a pretty enough face,
now flushed and disturbed by some unusual emotion, and restless,
large eyes with discontent marring their brightness. A heavy pile of
dull auburn hair, hastily put up, was escaping in crinkly, waving
strands and curling, small locks from the confining combs and pins.

The meeting of the two was not marked by the effusion vocal,
gymnastical, osculatory and catechetical that distinguishes the
greetings of their unprofessional sisters in society. There was a
brief clinch, two simultaneous labial dabs and they stood on the same
footing of the old days. Very much like the short salutations of
soldiers or of travellers in foreign wilds are the welcomes between
the strollers at the corners of their criss-cross roads.

"I've got the hall-room two flights up above yours," said Rosalie,
"but I came straight to see you before going up. I didn't know you
were here till they told me."

"I've been in since the last of April," said Lynnette. "And I'm going
on the road with a 'Fatal Inheritance' company. We open next week in
Elizabeth. I thought you'd quit the stage, Lee. Tell me about
yourself."

Rosalie settled herself with a skilful wriggle on the top of Miss
D'Armande's wardrobe trunk, and leaned her head against the papered
wall. From long habit, thus can peripatetic leading ladies and
their sisters make themselves as comfortable as though the deepest
armchairs embraced them.

"I'm going to tell you, Lynn," she said, with a strangely sardonic
and yet carelessly resigned look on her youthful face. "And then
to-morrow I'll strike the old Broadway trail again, and wear some
more paint off the chairs in the agents' offices. If anybody had told
me any time in the last three months up to four o'clock this
afternoon that I'd ever listen to that 'Leave-your-name-and-address'
rot of the booking bunch again, I'd have given 'em the real Mrs.
Fiske laugh. Loan me a handkerchief, Lynn. Gee! but those Long Island
trains are fierce. I've got enough soft-coal cinders on my face to go
on and play _Topsy_ without using the cork. And, speaking of corks--
got anything to drink, Lynn?"

Miss D'Armande opened a door of the wash-stand and took out a bottle.

"There's nearly a pint of Manhattan. There's a cluster of carnations
in the drinking glass, but--"

"Oh, pass the bottle. Save the glass for company. Thanks! That hits
the spot. The same to you. My first drink in three months!

"Yes, Lynn, I quit the stage at the end of last season. I quit it
because I was sick of the life. And especially because my heart and
soul were sick of men--of the kind of men we stage people have to be
up against. You know what the game is to us--it's a fight against 'em
all the way down the line from the manager who wants us to try his
new motor-car to the bill-posters who want to call us by our front
names.

"And the men we have to meet after the show are the worst of all. The
stage-door kind, and the manager's friends who take us to supper and
show their diamonds and talk about seeing 'Dan' and 'Dave' and
'Charlie' for us. They're beasts, and I hate 'em.

"I tell you, Lynn, it's the girls like us on the stage that ought to
be pitied. It's girls from good homes that are honestly ambitious and
work hard to rise in the profession, but never do get there. You hear
a lot of sympathy sloshed around on chorus girls and their fifteen
dollars a week. Piffle! There ain't a sorrow in the chorus that a
lobster cannot heal.

"If there's any tears to shed, let 'em fall for the actress that gets
a salary of from thirty to forty-five dollars a week for taking a
leading part in a bum show. She knows she'll never do any better; but
she hangs on for years, hoping for the 'chance' I that never comes.

"And the fool plays we have to work in! Having another girl roll you
around the stage by the hind legs in a 'Wheelbarrow Chorus' in a
musical comedy is dignified drama compared with the idiotic things
I've had to do in the thirty-centers.

"But what I hated most was the men--the men leering and blathering at
you across tables, trying to buy you with Würzburger or Extra Dry,
according to their estimate of your price. And the men in the
audiences, clapping, yelling, snarling, crowding, writhing,
gloating--like a lot of wild beasts, with their eyes fixed on you,
ready to eat you up if you come in reach of their claws. Oh, how I
hate 'em!

"Well, I'm not telling you much about myself, am I, Lynn?

"I had two hundred dollars saved up, and I cut the stage the first of
the summer. I went over on Long Island and found the sweetest little
village that ever was, called Soundport, right on the water. I was
going to spend the summer there, and study up on elocution, and try
to get a class in the fall. There was an old widow lady with a
cottage near the beach who sometimes rented a room or two just for
company, and she took me in. She had another boarder, too--the
Reverend Arthur Lyle.

"Yes, he was the head-liner. You're on, Lynn. I'll tell you all of it
in a minute. It's only a one-act play.

"The first time he walked on, Lynn, I felt myself going; the first
lines he spoke, he had me. He was different from the men in
audiences. He was tall and slim, and you never heard him come in the
room, but you felt him. He had a face like a picture of a
knight--like one of that Round Table bunch--and a voice like a 'cello
solo. And his manners!

"Lynn, if you'd take John Drew in his best drawing-room scene and
compare the two, you'd have John arrested for disturbing the peace.

"I'll spare you the particulars; but in less than a month Arthur and
I were engaged. He preached at a little one-night stand of a
Methodist church. There was to be a parsonage the size of a
lunch-wagon, and hens and honeysuckles when we were married. Arthur
used to preach to me a good deal about Heaven, but he never could get
my mind quite off those honeysuckles and hens.

"No; I didn't tell him I'd been on the stage. I hated the business
and all that went with it; I'd cut it out forever, and I didn't see
any use of stirring things up. I was a good girl, and I didn't have
anything to confess, except being an elocutionist, and that was about
all the strain my conscience would stand.

"Oh, I tell you, Lynn, I was happy. I sang in the choir and attended
the sewing society, and recited that 'Annie Laurie' thing with the
whistling stunt in it, 'in a manner bordering upon the professional,'
as the weekly village paper reported it. And Arthur and I went
rowing, and walking in the woods, and clamming, and that poky little
village seemed to me the best place in the world. I'd have been happy
to live there always, too, if--

"But one morning old Mrs. Gurley, the widow lady, got gossipy while I
was helping her string beans on the back porch, and began to gush
information, as folks who rent out their rooms usually do. Mr. Lyle
was her idea of a saint on earth--as he was mine, too. She went over
all his virtues and graces, and wound up by telling me that Arthur
had had an extremely romantic love-affair, not long before, that had
ended unhappily. She didn't seem to be on to the details, but she
knew that he had been hit pretty hard. He was paler and thinner, she
said, and he had some kind of a remembrance or keepsake of the lady
in a little rosewood box that he kept locked in his desk drawer in
his study.

"'Several times,' says she, 'I've seen him gloomerin' over that box
of evenings, and he always locks it up right away if anybody comes
into the room.'

"Well, you can imagine how long it was before I got Arthur by the
wrist and led him down stage and hissed in his ear.

"That same afternoon we were lazying around in a boat among the
water-lilies at the edge of the bay.

"'Arthur,' says I, 'you never told me you'd had another love-affair.
But Mrs. Gurley did,' I went on, to let him know I knew. I hate to
hear a man lie.

"'Before you came,' says he, looking me frankly in the eye, 'there
was a previous affection--a strong one. Since you know of it, I will
be perfectly candid with you.'

"'I am waiting,' says I.

"'My dear Ida,' says Arthur--of course I went by my real name, while
I was in Soundport--'this former affection was a spiritual one, in
fact. Although the lady aroused my deepest sentiments, and was, as I
thought, my ideal woman, I never met her, and never spoke to her. It
was an ideal love. My love for you, while no less ideal, is
different. You wouldn't let that come between us.'

"'Was she pretty?' I asked.

"'She was very beautiful,' said Arthur.

"'Did you see her often?' I asked.

"'Something like a dozen times,' says he.

"'Always from a distance?' says I.

"'Always from quite a distance,' says he.

"'And you loved her?' I asked.

"'She seemed my ideal of beauty and grace--and soul,' says Arthur.

"'And this keepsake that you keep under lock and key, and moon over
at times, is that a remembrance from her?'

"'A memento,' says Arthur, 'that I have treasured.'

"'Did she send it to you?'

"'It came to me from her,' says he.

"'In a roundabout way?' I asked.

"'Somewhat roundabout,' says he, 'and yet rather direct.'

"'Why didn't you ever meet her?' I asked. 'Were your positions in
life so different?'

"'She was far above me,' says Arthur. 'Now, Ida,' he goes on, 'this
is all of the past. You're not going to be jealous, are you?'

"'Jealous!' says I. 'Why, man, what are you talking about? It makes
me think ten times as much of you as I did before I knew about it.'

"And it did, Lynn--if you can understand it. That ideal love was a
new one on me, but it struck me as being the most beautiful and
glorious thing I'd ever heard of. Think of a man loving a woman he'd
never even spoken to, and being faithful just to what his mind and
heart pictured her! Oh, it sounded great to me. The men I'd always
known come at you with either diamonds, knock-out-drops or a raise of
salary,--and their ideals!--well, we'll say no more.

"Yes, it made me think more of Arthur than I did before. I couldn't
be jealous of that far-away divinity that he used to worship, for I
was going to have him myself. And I began to look upon him as a saint
on earth, just as old lady Gurley did.

"About four o'clock this afternoon a man came to the house for Arthur
to go and see somebody that was sick among his church bunch. Old lady
Gurley was taking her afternoon snore on a couch, so that left me
pretty much alone.

"In passing by Arthur's study I looked in, and saw his bunch of keys
hanging in the drawer of his desk, where he'd forgotten 'em. Well, I
guess we're all to the Mrs. Bluebeard now and then, ain't we, Lynn? I
made up my mind I'd have a look at that memento he kept so secret.
Not that I cared what it was--it was just curiosity.

"While I was opening the drawer I imagined one or two things it might
be. I thought it might be a dried rosebud she'd dropped down to him
from a balcony, or maybe a picture of her he'd cut out of a magazine,
she being so high up in the world.

"I opened the drawer, and there was the rosewood casket about the
size of a gent's collar box. I found the little key in the bunch that
fitted it, and unlocked it and raised the lid.

"I took one look at that memento, and then I went to my room and
packed my trunk. I threw a few things into my grip, gave my hair a
flirt or two with a side-comb, put on my hat, and went in and gave
the old lady's foot a kick. I'd tried awfully hard to use proper and
correct language while I was there for Arthur's sake, and I had the
habit down pat, but it left me then.

"'Stop sawing gourds,' says I, 'and sit up and take notice. The
ghost's about to walk. I'm going away from here, and I owe you eight
dollars. The expressman will call for my trunk.'

"I handed her the money.

"'Dear me, Miss Crosby!' says she. 'Is anything wrong? I thought you
were pleased here. Dear me, young women are so hard to understand,
and so different from what you expect 'em to be.'

"'You're damn right,' says I. 'Some of 'em are. But you can't say
that about men. WHEN YOU KNOW ONE MAN YOU KNOW 'EM ALL! That settles
the human-race question.'

"And then I caught the four-thirty-eight, soft-coal unlimited; and
here I am."

"You didn't tell me what was in the box, Lee," said Miss D'armande,
anxiously.

"One of those yellow silk garters that I used to kick off my leg into
the audience during that old vaudeville swing act of mine. Is there
any of the cocktail left, Lynn?"




        
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