TheLadder/tools/story-to-pack/probe/corpus/pg2776.txt

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Title: The Four Million

Author: O. Henry


        
Release date: August 1, 2001 [eBook #2776]
                Most recently updated: October 21, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2776

Credits: Project Gutenberg volunteers and revised by Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FOUR MILLION ***

[Illustration]




The Four Million

by O. Henry


Contents

 TOBIN’S PALM
 THE GIFT OF THE MAGI
 A COSMOPOLITE IN A CAFÉ
 BETWEEN ROUNDS
 THE SKYLIGHT ROOM
 A SERVICE OF LOVE
 THE COMING-OUT OF MAGGIE
 MAN ABOUT TOWN
 THE COP AND THE ANTHEM
 AN ADJUSTMENT OF NATURE
 MEMOIRS OF A YELLOW DOG
 THE LOVE-PHILTRE OF IKEY SCHOENSTEIN
 MAMMON AND THE ARCHER
 SPRINGTIME À LA CARTE
 THE GREEN DOOR
 FROM THE CABBY’S SEAT
 AN UNFINISHED STORY
 THE CALIPH, CUPID AND THE CLOCK
 SISTERS OF THE GOLDEN CIRCLE
 THE ROMANCE OF A BUSY BROKER
 AFTER TWENTY YEARS
 LOST ON DRESS PARADE
 BY COURIER
 THE FURNISHED ROOM
 THE BRIEF DÉBUT OF TILDY




TOBIN’S PALM


Tobin and me, the two of us, went down to Coney one day, for there was
four dollars between us, and Tobin had need of distractions. For there
was Katie Mahorner, his sweetheart, of County Sligo, lost since she
started for America three months before with two hundred dollars, her
own savings, and one hundred dollars from the sale of Tobin’s inherited
estate, a fine cottage and pig on the Bog Shannaugh. And since the
letter that Tobin got saying that she had started to come to him not a
bit of news had he heard or seen of Katie Mahorner. Tobin advertised in
the papers, but nothing could be found of the colleen.

So, to Coney me and Tobin went, thinking that a turn at the chutes and
the smell of the popcorn might raise the heart in his bosom. But Tobin
was a hardheaded man, and the sadness stuck in his skin. He ground his
teeth at the crying balloons; he cursed the moving pictures; and,
though he would drink whenever asked, he scorned Punch and Judy, and
was for licking the tintype men as they came.

So I gets him down a side way on a board walk where the attractions
were some less violent. At a little six by eight stall Tobin halts,
with a more human look in his eye.

“’Tis here,” says he, “I will be diverted. I’ll have the palm of me
hand investigated by the wonderful palmist of the Nile, and see if what
is to be will be.”

Tobin was a believer in signs and the unnatural in nature. He possessed
illegal convictions in his mind along the subjects of black cats, lucky
numbers, and the weather predictions in the papers.

We went into the enchanted chicken coop, which was fixed mysterious
with red cloth and pictures of hands with lines crossing ’em like a
railroad centre. The sign over the door says it is Madame Zozo the
Egyptian Palmist. There was a fat woman inside in a red jumper with
pothooks and beasties embroidered upon it. Tobin gives her ten cents
and extends one of his hands. She lifts Tobin’s hand, which is own
brother to the hoof of a drayhorse, and examines it to see whether ’tis
a stone in the frog or a cast shoe he has come for.

“Man,” says this Madame Zozo, “the line of your fate shows—”

“’Tis not me foot at all,” says Tobin, interrupting. “Sure, ’tis no
beauty, but ye hold the palm of me hand.”

“The line shows,” says the Madame, “that ye’ve not arrived at your time
of life without bad luck. And there’s more to come. The mount of
Venus—or is that a stone bruise?—shows that ye’ve been in love. There’s
been trouble in your life on account of your sweetheart.”

“’Tis Katie Mahorner she has references with,” whispers Tobin to me in
a loud voice to one side.

“I see,” says the palmist, “a great deal of sorrow and tribulation with
one whom ye cannot forget. I see the lines of designation point to the
letter K and the letter M in her name.”

“Whist!” says Tobin to me, “do ye hear that?”

“Look out,” goes on the palmist, “for a dark man and a light woman; for
they’ll both bring ye trouble. Ye’ll make a voyage upon the water very
soon, and have a financial loss. I see one line that brings good luck.
There’s a man coming into your life who will fetch ye good fortune.
Ye’ll know him when ye see him by his crooked nose.”

“Is his name set down?” asks Tobin. “’Twill be convenient in the way of
greeting when he backs up to dump off the good luck.”

“His name,” says the palmist, thoughtful looking, “is not spelled out
by the lines, but they indicate ’tis a long one, and the letter ‘o’
should be in it. There’s no more to tell. Good-evening. Don’t block up
the door.”

“’Tis wonderful how she knows,” says Tobin as we walk to the pier.

As we squeezed through the gates a nigger man sticks his lighted segar
against Tobin’s ear, and there is trouble. Tobin hammers his neck, and
the women squeal, and by presence of mind I drag the little man out of
the way before the police comes. Tobin is always in an ugly mood when
enjoying himself.

On the boat going back, when the man calls “Who wants the good-looking
waiter?” Tobin tried to plead guilty, feeling the desire to blow the
foam off a crock of suds, but when he felt in his pocket he found
himself discharged for lack of evidence. Somebody had disturbed his
change during the commotion. So we sat, dry, upon the stools, listening
to the Dagoes fiddling on deck. If anything, Tobin was lower in spirits
and less congenial with his misfortunes than when we started.

On a seat against the railing was a young woman dressed suitable for
red automobiles, with hair the colour of an unsmoked meerschaum. In
passing by, Tobin kicks her foot without intentions, and, being polite
to ladies when in drink, he tries to give his hat a twist while
apologising. But he knocks it off, and the wind carries it overboard.

Tobin came back and sat down, and I began to look out for him, for the
man’s adversities were becoming frequent. He was apt, when pushed so
close by hard luck, to kick the best dressed man he could see, and try
to take command of the boat.

Presently Tobin grabs my arm and says, excited: “Jawn,” says he, “do ye
know what we’re doing? We’re taking a voyage upon the water.”

“There now,” says I; “subdue yeself. The boat’ll land in ten minutes
more.”

“Look,” says he, “at the light lady upon the bench. And have ye
forgotten the nigger man that burned me ear? And isn’t the money I had
gone—a dollar sixty-five it was?”

I thought he was no more than summing up his catastrophes so as to get
violent with good excuse, as men will do, and I tried to make him
understand such things was trifles.

“Listen,” says Tobin. “Ye’ve no ear for the gift of prophecy or the
miracles of the inspired. What did the palmist lady tell ye out of me
hand? ’Tis coming true before your eyes. ‘Look out,’ says she, ‘for a
dark man and a light woman; they’ll bring ye trouble.’ Have ye forgot
the nigger man, though he got some of it back from me fist? Can ye show
me a lighter woman than the blonde lady that was the cause of me hat
falling in the water? And where’s the dollar sixty-five I had in me
vest when we left the shooting gallery?”

The way Tobin put it, it did seem to corroborate the art of prediction,
though it looked to me that these accidents could happen to any one at
Coney without the implication of palmistry.

Tobin got up and walked around on deck, looking close at the passengers
out of his little red eyes. I asked him the interpretation of his
movements. Ye never know what Tobin has in his mind until he begins to
carry it out.

“Ye should know,” says he, “I’m working out the salvation promised by
the lines in me palm. I’m looking for the crooked-nose man that’s to
bring the good luck. ’Tis all that will save us. Jawn, did ye ever see
a straighter-nosed gang of hellions in the days of your life?”

’Twas the nine-thirty boat, and we landed and walked up-town through
Twenty-second Street, Tobin being without his hat.

On a street corner, standing under a gas-light and looking over the
elevated road at the moon, was a man. A long man he was, dressed
decent, with a segar between his teeth, and I saw that his nose made
two twists from bridge to end, like the wriggle of a snake. Tobin saw
it at the same time, and I heard him breathe hard like a horse when you
take the saddle off. He went straight up to the man, and I went with
him.

“Good-night to ye,” Tobin says to the man. The man takes out his segar
and passes the compliments, sociable.

“Would ye hand us your name,” asks Tobin, “and let us look at the size
of it? It may be our duty to become acquainted with ye.”

“My name” says the man, polite, “is Friedenhausman—Maximus G.
Friedenhausman.”

“’Tis the right length,” says Tobin. “Do you spell it with an ‘o’
anywhere down the stretch of it?”

“I do not,” says the man.

“_Can_ ye spell it with an ‘o’?” inquires Tobin, turning anxious.

“If your conscience,” says the man with the nose, “is indisposed toward
foreign idioms ye might, to please yourself, smuggle the letter into
the penultimate syllable.”

“’Tis well,” says Tobin. “Ye’re in the presence of Jawn Malone and
Daniel Tobin.”

“Tis highly appreciated,” says the man, with a bow. “And now since I
cannot conceive that ye would hold a spelling bee upon the street
corner, will ye name some reasonable excuse for being at large?”

“By the two signs,” answers Tobin, trying to explain, “which ye display
according to the reading of the Egyptian palmist from the sole of me
hand, ye’ve been nominated to offset with good luck the lines of
trouble leading to the nigger man and the blonde lady with her feet
crossed in the boat, besides the financial loss of a dollar sixty-five,
all so far fulfilled according to Hoyle.”

The man stopped smoking and looked at me.

“Have ye any amendments,” he asks, “to offer to that statement, or are
ye one too? I thought by the looks of ye ye might have him in charge.”

“None,” says I to him, “except that as one horseshoe resembles another
so are ye the picture of good luck as predicted by the hand of me
friend. If not, then the lines of Danny’s hand may have been crossed, I
don’t know.”

“There’s two of ye,” says the man with the nose, looking up and down
for the sight of a policeman. “I’ve enjoyed your company immense.
Good-night.”

With that he shoves his segar in his mouth and moves across the street,
stepping fast. But Tobin sticks close to one side of him and me at the
other.

“What!” says he, stopping on the opposite sidewalk and pushing back his
hat; “do ye follow me? I tell ye,” he says, very loud, “I’m proud to
have met ye. But it is my desire to be rid of ye. I am off to me home.”

“Do,” says Tobin, leaning against his sleeve. “Do be off to your home.
And I will sit at the door of it till ye come out in the morning. For
the dependence is upon ye to obviate the curse of the nigger man and
the blonde lady and the financial loss of the one-sixty-five.”

“’Tis a strange hallucination,” says the man, turning to me as a more
reasonable lunatic. “Hadn’t ye better get him home?”

“Listen, man,” says I to him. “Daniel Tobin is as sensible as he ever
was. Maybe he is a bit deranged on account of having drink enough to
disturb but not enough to settle his wits, but he is no more than
following out the legitimate path of his superstitions and
predicaments, which I will explain to you.” With that I relates the
facts about the palmist lady and how the finger of suspicion points to
him as an instrument of good fortune. “Now, understand,” I concludes,
“my position in this riot. I am the friend of me friend Tobin,
according to me interpretations. ’Tis easy to be a friend to the
prosperous, for it pays; ’tis not hard to be a friend to the poor, for
ye get puffed up by gratitude and have your picture printed standing in
front of a tenement with a scuttle of coal and an orphan in each hand.
But it strains the art of friendship to be true friend to a born fool.
And that’s what I’m doing,” says I, “for, in my opinion, there’s no
fortune to be read from the palm of me hand that wasn’t printed there
with the handle of a pick. And, though ye’ve got the crookedest nose in
New York City, I misdoubt that all the fortune-tellers doing business
could milk good luck from ye. But the lines of Danny’s hand pointed to
ye fair, and I’ll assist him to experiment with ye until he’s convinced
ye’re dry.”

After that the man turns, sudden, to laughing. He leans against a
corner and laughs considerable. Then he claps me and Tobin on the backs
of us and takes us by an arm apiece.

“’Tis my mistake,” says he. “How could I be expecting anything so fine
and wonderful to be turning the corner upon me? I came near being found
unworthy. Hard by,” says he, “is a café, snug and suitable for the
entertainment of idiosyncrasies. Let us go there and have drink while
we discuss the unavailability of the categorical.”

So saying, he marched me and Tobin to the back room of a saloon, and
ordered the drinks, and laid the money on the table. He looks at me and
Tobin like brothers of his, and we have the segars.

“Ye must know,” says the man of destiny, “that me walk in life is one
that is called the literary. I wander abroad be night seeking
idiosyncrasies in the masses and truth in the heavens above. When ye
came upon me I was in contemplation of the elevated road in conjunction
with the chief luminary of night. The rapid transit is poetry and art:
the moon but a tedious, dry body, moving by rote. But these are private
opinions, for, in the business of literature, the conditions are
reversed. ’Tis me hope to be writing a book to explain the strange
things I have discovered in life.”

“Ye will put me in a book,” says Tobin, disgusted; “will ye put me in a
book?”

“I will not,” says the man, “for the covers will not hold ye. Not yet.
The best I can do is to enjoy ye meself, for the time is not ripe for
destroying the limitations of print. Ye would look fantastic in type.
All alone by meself must I drink this cup of joy. But, I thank ye,
boys; I am truly grateful.”

“The talk of ye,” says Tobin, blowing through his moustache and
pounding the table with his fist, “is an eyesore to me patience. There
was good luck promised out of the crook of your nose, but ye bear fruit
like the bang of a drum. Ye resemble, with your noise of books, the
wind blowing through a crack. Sure, now, I would be thinking the palm
of me hand lied but for the coming true of the nigger man and the
blonde lady and—”

“Whist!” says the long man; “would ye be led astray by physiognomy? Me
nose will do what it can within bounds. Let us have these glasses
filled again, for ’tis good to keep idiosyncrasies well moistened, they
being subject to deterioration in a dry moral atmosphere.”

So, the man of literature makes good, to my notion, for he pays,
cheerful, for everything, the capital of me and Tobin being exhausted
by prediction. But Tobin is sore, and drinks quiet, with the red
showing in his eye.

By and by we moved out, for ’twas eleven o’clock, and stands a bit upon
the sidewalk. And then the man says he must be going home, and invites
me and Tobin to walk that way. We arrives on a side street two blocks
away where there is a stretch of brick houses with high stoops and iron
fences. The man stops at one of them and looks up at the top windows
which he finds dark.

“’Tis me humble dwelling,” says he, “and I begin to perceive by the
signs that me wife has retired to slumber. Therefore I will venture a
bit in the way of hospitality. ’Tis me wish that ye enter the basement
room, where we dine, and partake of a reasonable refreshment. There
will be some fine cold fowl and cheese and a bottle or two of ale. Ye
will be welcome to enter and eat, for I am indebted to ye for
diversions.”

The appetite and conscience of me and Tobin was congenial to the
proposition, though ’twas sticking hard in Danny’s superstitions to
think that a few drinks and a cold lunch should represent the good
fortune promised by the palm of his hand.

“Step down the steps,” says the man with the crooked nose, “and I will
enter by the door above and let ye in. I will ask the new girl we have
in the kitchen,” says he, “to make ye a pot of coffee to drink before
ye go. ’Tis fine coffee Katie Mahorner makes for a green girl just
landed three months. Step in,” says the man, “and I’ll send her down to
ye.”




THE GIFT OF THE MAGI


One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it
was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the
grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned
with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing
implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven
cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little
couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection
that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles
predominating.

While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first
stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8
per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had
that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.

In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go,
and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring.
Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name “Mr. James
Dillingham Young.” The “Dillingham” had been flung to the breeze during
a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per
week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, the letters of
“Dillingham” looked blurred, as though they were thinking seriously of
contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James
Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called
“Jim” and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already

introduced to you as Della. Which is all very good.

Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag.
She stood by the window and looked out dully at a grey cat walking a
grey fence in a grey backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she
had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving
every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a
week doesn’t go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated.
They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a
happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something
fine and rare and sterling—something just a little bit near to being
worthy of the honour of being owned by Jim.

There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you
have seen a pier-glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person
may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal
strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being
slender, had mastered the art.

Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. Her
eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its colour within
twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its
full length.

Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which
they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim’s gold watch that had been
his father’s and his grandfather’s. The other was Della’s hair. Had the
Queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have
let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her
Majesty’s jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all
his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his
watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from
envy.

So now Della’s beautiful hair fell about her, rippling and shining like
a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself
almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and
quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or
two splashed on the worn red carpet.

On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl
of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she
fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street.

Where she stopped the sign read: “Mme. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All
Kinds.” One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting.
Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the “Sofronie.”

“Will you buy my hair?” asked Della.

“I buy hair,” said Madame. “Take yer hat off and let’s have a sight at
the looks of it.”

Down rippled the brown cascade. “Twenty dollars,” said Madame, lifting
the mass with a practised hand.

“Give it to me quick,” said Della.

Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed
metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim’s present.

She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else.
There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all
of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in
design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by
meretricious ornamentation—as all good things should do. It was even
worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be
Jim’s. It was like him. Quietness and value—the description applied to
both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried
home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be
properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was,
he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather
strap that he used in place of a chain.

When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence
and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went
to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which
is always a tremendous task, dear friends—a mammoth task.

Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls
that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at
her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.

“If Jim doesn’t kill me,” she said to herself, “before he takes a
second look at me, he’ll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl.
But what could I do—oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty-seven
cents?”

At 7 o’clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of
the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.

Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on
the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she
heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she
turned white for just a moment. She had a habit for saying little
silent prayers about the simplest everyday things, and now she
whispered: “Please God, make him think I am still pretty.”

The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and
very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two—and to be burdened
with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.

Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of
quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in
them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger,
nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments
that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with
that peculiar expression on his face.

Della wriggled off the table and went for him.

“Jim, darling,” she cried, “don’t look at me that way. I had my hair
cut off and sold because I couldn’t have lived through Christmas
without giving you a present. It’ll grow out again—you won’t mind, will
you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say ‘Merry
Christmas!’ Jim, and let’s be happy. You don’t know what a nice—what a
beautiful, nice gift I’ve got for you.”

“You’ve cut off your hair?” asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not
arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.

“Cut it off and sold it,” said Della. “Don’t you like me just as well,
anyhow? I’m me without my hair, ain’t I?”

Jim looked about the room curiously.

“You say your hair is gone?” he said, with an air almost of idiocy.

“You needn’t look for it,” said Della. “It’s sold, I tell you—sold and
gone, too. It’s Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you.
Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered,” she went on with sudden
serious sweetness, “but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall
I put the chops on, Jim?”

Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della.
For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some
inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or
a million a year—what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would
give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that
was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.

Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the
table.

“Don’t make any mistake, Dell,” he said, “about me. I don’t think
there’s anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that
could make me like my girl any less. But if you’ll unwrap that package
you may see why you had me going a while at first.”

White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an
ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to
hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of
all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.

For there lay The Combs—the set of combs, side and back, that Della had
worshipped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise
shell, with jewelled rims—just the shade to wear in the beautiful
vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had
simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of
possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have
adorned the coveted adornments were gone.

But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up
with dim eyes and a smile and say: “My hair grows so fast, Jim!”

And then Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, “Oh, oh!”

Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him
eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash
with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.

“Isn’t it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You’ll have
to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I
want to see how it looks on it.”

Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands
under the back of his head and smiled.

“Dell,” said he, “let’s put our Christmas presents away and keep ’em a
while. They’re too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get
the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on.”

The magi, as you know, were wise men—wonderfully wise men—who brought
gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving
Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones,
possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And
here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two
foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other
the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise
of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were
the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest.
Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.




A COSMOPOLITE IN A CAFÉ


At midnight the café was crowded. By some chance the little table at
which I sat had escaped the eye of incomers, and two vacant chairs at
it extended their arms with venal hospitality to the influx of patrons.

And then a cosmopolite sat in one of them, and I was glad, for I held a
theory that since Adam no true citizen of the world has existed. We
hear of them, and we see foreign labels on much luggage, but we find
travellers instead of cosmopolites.

I invoke your consideration of the scene—the marble-topped tables, the
range of leather-upholstered wall seats, the gay company, the ladies
dressed in demi-state toilets, speaking in an exquisite visible chorus
of taste, economy, opulence or art; the sedulous and largess-loving
_garçons_, the music wisely catering to all with its raids upon the
composers; the _mélange_ of talk and laughter—and, if you will, the
Würzburger in the tall glass cones that bend to your lips as a ripe
cherry sways on its branch to the beak of a robber jay. I was told by a
sculptor from Mauch Chunk that the scene was truly Parisian.

My cosmopolite was named E. Rushmore Coglan, and he will be heard from
next summer at Coney Island. He is to establish a new “attraction”
there, he informed me, offering kingly diversion. And then his
conversation rang along parallels of latitude and longitude. He took
the great, round world in his hand, so to speak, familiarly,
contemptuously, and it seemed no larger than the seed of a Maraschino
cherry in a _table d’hôte_ grape fruit. He spoke disrespectfully of the
equator, he skipped from continent to continent, he derided the zones,
he mopped up the high seas with his napkin. With a wave of his hand he
would speak of a certain bazaar in Hyderabad. Whiff! He would have you
on skis in Lapland. Zip! Now you rode the breakers with the Kanakas at
Kealaikahiki. Presto! He dragged you through an Arkansas post-oak
swamp, let you dry for a moment on the alkali plains of his Idaho
ranch, then whirled you into the society of Viennese archdukes. Anon he
would be telling you of a cold he acquired in a Chicago lake breeze and
how old Escamila cured it in Buenos Ayres with a hot infusion of the
_chuchula_ weed. You would have addressed a letter to “E. Rushmore
Coglan, Esq., the Earth, Solar System, the Universe,” and have mailed
it, feeling confident that it would be delivered to him.

I was sure that I had found at last the one true cosmopolite since
Adam, and I listened to his worldwide discourse fearful lest I should
discover in it the local note of the mere globe-trotter. But his
opinions never fluttered or drooped; he was as impartial to cities,
countries and continents as the winds or gravitation.

And as E. Rushmore Coglan prattled of this little planet I thought with
glee of a great almost-cosmopolite who wrote for the whole world and
dedicated himself to Bombay. In a poem he has to say that there is
pride and rivalry between the cities of the earth, and that “the men
that breed from them, they traffic up and down, but cling to their
cities’ hem as a child to the mother’s gown.” And whenever they walk
“by roaring streets unknown” they remember their native city “most
faithful, foolish, fond; making her mere-breathed name their bond upon
their bond.” And my glee was roused because I had caught Mr. Kipling
napping. Here I had found a man not made from dust; one who had no
narrow boasts of birthplace or country, one who, if he bragged at all,
would brag of his whole round globe against the Martians and the
inhabitants of the Moon.

Expression on these subjects was precipitated from E. Rushmore Coglan
by the third corner to our table. While Coglan was describing to me the
topography along the Siberian Railway the orchestra glided into a
medley. The concluding air was “Dixie,” and as the exhilarating notes
tumbled forth they were almost overpowered by a great clapping of hands
from almost every table.

It is worth a paragraph to say that this remarkable scene can be
witnessed every evening in numerous cafés in the City of New York. Tons
of brew have been consumed over theories to account for it. Some have
conjectured hastily that all Southerners in town hie themselves to
cafés at nightfall. This applause of the “rebel” air in a Northern city
does puzzle a little; but it is not insolvable. The war with Spain,
many years’ generous mint and watermelon crops, a few long-shot winners
at the New Orleans race-track, and the brilliant banquets given by the
Indiana and Kansas citizens who compose the North Carolina Society have
made the South rather a “fad” in Manhattan. Your manicure will lisp
softly that your left forefinger reminds her so much of a gentleman’s
in Richmond, Va. Oh, certainly; but many a lady has to work now—the
war, you know.

When “Dixie” was being played a dark-haired young man sprang up from
somewhere with a Mosby guerrilla yell and waved frantically his
soft-brimmed hat. Then he strayed through the smoke, dropped into the
vacant chair at our table and pulled out cigarettes.

The evening was at the period when reserve is thawed. One of us
mentioned three Würzburgers to the waiter; the dark-haired young man
acknowledged his inclusion in the order by a smile and a nod. I
hastened to ask him a question because I wanted to try out a theory I
had.

“Would you mind telling me,” I began, “whether you are from—”

The fist of E. Rushmore Coglan banged the table and I was jarred into
silence.

“Excuse me,” said he, “but that’s a question I never like to hear
asked. What does it matter where a man is from? Is it fair to judge a
man by his post-office address? Why, I’ve seen Kentuckians who hated
whiskey, Virginians who weren’t descended from Pocahontas, Indianians
who hadn’t written a novel, Mexicans who didn’t wear velvet trousers
with silver dollars sewed along the seams, funny Englishmen,
spendthrift Yankees, cold-blooded Southerners, narrow-minded
Westerners, and New Yorkers who were too busy to stop for an hour on
the street to watch a one-armed grocer’s clerk do up cranberries in
paper bags. Let a man be a man and don’t handicap him with the label of
any section.”

“Pardon me,” I said, “but my curiosity was not altogether an idle one.
I know the South, and when the band plays ‘Dixie’ I like to observe. I
have formed the belief that the man who applauds that air with special
violence and ostensible sectional loyalty is invariably a native of
either Secaucus, N.J., or the district between Murray Hill Lyceum and
the Harlem River, this city. I was about to put my opinion to the test
by inquiring of this gentleman when you interrupted with your
own—larger theory, I must confess.”

And now the dark-haired young man spoke to me, and it became evident
that his mind also moved along its own set of grooves.

“I should like to be a periwinkle,” said he, mysteriously, “on the top
of a valley, and sing tooralloo-ralloo.”

This was clearly too obscure, so I turned again to Coglan.

“I’ve been around the world twelve times,” said he. “I know an Esquimau
in Upernavik who sends to Cincinnati for his neckties, and I saw a
goat-herder in Uruguay who won a prize in a Battle Creek breakfast food
puzzle competition. I pay rent on a room in Cairo, Egypt, and another
in Yokohama all the year around. I’ve got slippers waiting for me in a
tea-house in Shanghai, and I don’t have to tell ’em how to cook my eggs
in Rio de Janeiro or Seattle. It’s a mighty little old world. What’s
the use of bragging about being from the North, or the South, or the
old manor house in the dale, or Euclid avenue, Cleveland, or Pike’s
Peak, or Fairfax County, Va., or Hooligan’s Flats or any place? It’ll
be a better world when we quit being fools about some mildewed town or
ten acres of swampland just because we happened to be born there.”

“You seem to be a genuine cosmopolite,” I said admiringly. “But it also
seems that you would decry patriotism.”

“A relic of the stone age,” declared Coglan, warmly. “We are all
brothers—Chinamen, Englishmen, Zulus, Patagonians and the people in the
bend of the Kaw River. Some day all this petty pride in one’s city or
State or section or country will be wiped out, and we’ll all be
citizens of the world, as we ought to be.”

“But while you are wandering in foreign lands,” I persisted, “do not
your thoughts revert to some spot—some dear and—”

“Nary a spot,” interrupted E. R. Coglan, flippantly. “The terrestrial,
globular, planetary hunk of matter, slightly flattened at the poles,
and known as the Earth, is my abode. I’ve met a good many object-bound
citizens of this country abroad. I’ve seen men from Chicago sit in a
gondola in Venice on a moonlight night and brag about their drainage
canal. I’ve seen a Southerner on being introduced to the King of
England hand that monarch, without batting his eyes, the information
that his grand-aunt on his mother’s side was related by marriage to the
Perkinses, of Charleston. I knew a New Yorker who was kidnapped for
ransom by some Afghanistan bandits. His people sent over the money and
he came back to Kabul with the agent. ‘Afghanistan?’ the natives said
to him through an interpreter. ‘Well, not so slow, do you think?’ ‘Oh,
I don’t know,’ says he, and he begins to tell them about a cab driver
at Sixth avenue and Broadway. Those ideas don’t suit me. I’m not tied
down to anything that isn’t 8,000 miles in diameter. Just put me down
as E. Rushmore Coglan, citizen of the terrestrial sphere.”

My cosmopolite made a large adieu and left me, for he thought he saw
some one through the chatter and smoke whom he knew. So I was left with
the would-be periwinkle, who was reduced to Würzburger without further
ability to voice his aspirations to perch, melodious, upon the summit
of a valley.

I sat reflecting upon my evident cosmopolite and wondering how the poet
had managed to miss him. He was my discovery and I believed in him. How
was it? “The men that breed from them they traffic up and down, but
cling to their cities’ hem as a child to the mother’s gown.”

Not so E. Rushmore Coglan. With the whole world for his—

My meditations were interrupted by a tremendous noise and conflict in
another part of the café. I saw above the heads of the seated patrons
E. Rushmore Coglan and a stranger to me engaged in terrific battle.
They fought between the tables like Titans, and glasses crashed, and
men caught their hats up and were knocked down, and a brunette
screamed, and a blonde began to sing “Teasing.”

My cosmopolite was sustaining the pride and reputation of the Earth
when the waiters closed in on both combatants with their famous flying
wedge formation and bore them outside, still resisting.

I called McCarthy, one of the French _garçons_, and asked him the cause
of the conflict.

“The man with the red tie” (that was my cosmopolite), said he, “got hot
on account of things said about the bum sidewalks and water supply of
the place he come from by the other guy.”

“Why,” said I, bewildered, “that man is a citizen of the world—a
cosmopolite. He—”

“Originally from Mattawamkeag, Maine, he said,” continued McCarthy,
“and he wouldn’t stand for no knockin’ the place.”




BETWEEN ROUNDS


The May moon shone bright upon the private boarding-house of Mrs.
Murphy. By reference to the almanac a large amount of territory will be
discovered upon which its rays also fell. Spring was in its heydey,
with hay fever soon to follow. The parks were green with new leaves and
buyers for the Western and Southern trade. Flowers and summer-resort
agents were blowing; the air and answers to Lawson were growing milder;
hand-organs, fountains and pinochle were playing everywhere.

The windows of Mrs. Murphy’s boarding-house were open. A group of
boarders were seated on the high stoop upon round, flat mats like
German pancakes.

In one of the second-floor front windows Mrs. McCaskey awaited her
husband. Supper was cooling on the table. Its heat went into Mrs.
McCaskey.

At nine Mr. McCaskey came. He carried his coat on his arm and his pipe
in his teeth; and he apologised for disturbing the boarders on the
steps as he selected spots of stone between them on which to set his
size 9, width Ds.

As he opened the door of his room he received a surprise. Instead of
the usual stove-lid or potato-masher for him to dodge, came only words.

Mr. McCaskey reckoned that the benign May moon had softened the breast
of his spouse.

“I heard ye,” came the oral substitutes for kitchenware. “Ye can
apollygise to riff-raff of the streets for settin’ yer unhandy feet on
the tails of their frocks, but ye’d walk on the neck of yer wife the
length of a clothes-line without so much as a ‘Kiss me fut,’ and I’m
sure it’s that long from rubberin’ out the windy for ye and the
victuals cold such as there’s money to buy after drinkin’ up yer wages
at Gallegher’s every Saturday evenin’, and the gas man here twice
to-day for his.”

“Woman!” said Mr. McCaskey, dashing his coat and hat upon a chair, “the
noise of ye is an insult to me appetite. When ye run down politeness ye
take the mortar from between the bricks of the foundations of society.
’Tis no more than exercisin’ the acrimony of a gentleman when ye ask
the dissent of ladies blockin’ the way for steppin’ between them. Will
ye bring the pig’s face of ye out of the windy and see to the food?”

Mrs. McCaskey arose heavily and went to the stove. There was something
in her manner that warned Mr. McCaskey. When the corners of her mouth
went down suddenly like a barometer it usually foretold a fall of
crockery and tinware.

“Pig’s face, is it?” said Mrs. McCaskey, and hurled a stewpan full of
bacon and turnips at her lord.

Mr. McCaskey was no novice at repartee. He knew what should follow the
entrée. On the table was a roast sirloin of pork, garnished with
shamrocks. He retorted with this, and drew the appropriate return of a
bread pudding in an earthen dish. A hunk of Swiss cheese accurately
thrown by her husband struck Mrs. McCaskey below one eye. When she
replied with a well-aimed coffee-pot full of a hot, black,
semi-fragrant liquid the battle, according to courses, should have
ended.

But Mr. McCaskey was no 50-cent _table d’hôter_. Let cheap Bohemians
consider coffee the end, if they would. Let them make that _faux pas_.
He was foxier still. Finger-bowls were not beyond the compass of his
experience. They were not to be had in the Pension Murphy; but their
equivalent was at hand. Triumphantly he sent the granite-ware wash
basin at the head of his matrimonial adversary. Mrs. McCaskey dodged in
time. She reached for a flatiron, with which, as a sort of cordial, she
hoped to bring the gastronomical duel to a close. But a loud, wailing
scream downstairs caused both her and Mr. McCaskey to pause in a sort
of involuntary armistice.

On the sidewalk at the corner of the house Policeman Cleary was
standing with one ear upturned, listening to the crash of household
utensils.

“’Tis Jawn McCaskey and his missis at it again,” meditated the
policeman. “I wonder shall I go up and stop the row. I will not.
Married folks they are; and few pleasures they have. ’Twill not last
long. Sure, they’ll have to borrow more dishes to keep it up with.”

And just then came the loud scream below-stairs, betokening fear or
dire extremity. “’Tis probably the cat,” said Policeman Cleary, and
walked hastily in the other direction.

The boarders on the steps were fluttered. Mr. Toomey, an insurance
solicitor by birth and an investigator by profession, went inside to
analyse the scream. He returned with the news that Mrs. Murphy’s little
boy, Mike, was lost. Following the messenger, out bounced Mrs.
Murphy—two hundred pounds in tears and hysterics, clutching the air and
howling to the sky for the loss of thirty pounds of freckles and
mischief. Bathos, truly; but Mr. Toomey sat down at the side of Miss
Purdy, millinery, and their hands came together in sympathy. The two
old maids, Misses Walsh, who complained every day about the noise in
the halls, inquired immediately if anybody had looked behind the clock.

Major Grigg, who sat by his fat wife on the top step, arose and
buttoned his coat. “The little one lost?” he exclaimed. “I will scour
the city.” His wife never allowed him out after dark. But now she said:
“Go, Ludovic!” in a baritone voice. “Whoever can look upon that
mother’s grief without springing to her relief has a heart of stone.”
“Give me some thirty or—sixty cents, my love,” said the Major. “Lost
children sometimes stray far. I may need carfares.”

Old man Denny, hall room, fourth floor back, who sat on the lowest
step, trying to read a paper by the street lamp, turned over a page to
follow up the article about the carpenters’ strike. Mrs. Murphy
shrieked to the moon: “Oh, ar-r-Mike, f’r Gawd’s sake, where is me
little bit av a boy?”

“When’d ye see him last?” asked old man Denny, with one eye on the
report of the Building Trades League.

“Oh,” wailed Mrs. Murphy, “’twas yisterday, or maybe four hours ago! I
dunno. But it’s lost he is, me little boy Mike. He was playin’ on the
sidewalk only this mornin’—or was it Wednesday? I’m that busy with
work, ’tis hard to keep up with dates. But I’ve looked the house over
from top to cellar, and it’s gone he is. Oh, for the love av Hiven—”

Silent, grim, colossal, the big city has ever stood against its
revilers. They call it hard as iron; they say that no pulse of pity
beats in its bosom; they compare its streets with lonely forests and
deserts of lava. But beneath the hard crust of the lobster is found a
delectable and luscious food. Perhaps a different simile would have
been wiser. Still, nobody should take offence. We would call no one a
lobster without good and sufficient claws.

No calamity so touches the common heart of humanity as does the
straying of a little child. Their feet are so uncertain and feeble; the
ways are so steep and strange.

Major Griggs hurried down to the corner, and up the avenue into Billy’s
place. “Gimme a rye-high,” he said to the servitor. “Haven’t seen a
bow-legged, dirty-faced little devil of a six-year-old lost kid around
here anywhere, have you?”

Mr. Toomey retained Miss Purdy’s hand on the steps. “Think of that dear
little babe,” said Miss Purdy, “lost from his mother’s side—perhaps
already fallen beneath the iron hoofs of galloping steeds—oh, isn’t it
dreadful?”

“Ain’t that right?” agreed Mr. Toomey, squeezing her hand. “Say I start
out and help look for um!”

“Perhaps,” said Miss Purdy, “you should. But, oh, Mr. Toomey, you are
so dashing—so reckless—suppose in your enthusiasm some accident should
befall you, then what—”

Old man Denny read on about the arbitration agreement, with one finger
on the lines.

In the second floor front Mr. and Mrs. McCaskey came to the window to
recover their second wind. Mr. McCaskey was scooping turnips out of his
vest with a crooked forefinger, and his lady was wiping an eye that the
salt of the roast pork had not benefited. They heard the outcry below,
and thrust their heads out of the window.

“’Tis little Mike is lost,” said Mrs. McCaskey, in a hushed voice, “the
beautiful, little, trouble-making angel of a gossoon!”

“The bit of a boy mislaid?” said Mr. McCaskey, leaning out of the
window. “Why, now, that’s bad enough, entirely. The childer, they be
different. If ’twas a woman I’d be willin’, for they leave peace behind
’em when they go.”

Disregarding the thrust, Mrs. McCaskey caught her husband’s arm.

“Jawn,” she said, sentimentally, “Missis Murphy’s little bye is lost.
’Tis a great city for losing little boys. Six years old he was. Jawn,
’tis the same age our little bye would have been if we had had one six
years ago.”

“We never did,” said Mr. McCaskey, lingering with the fact.

“But if we had, Jawn, think what sorrow would be in our hearts this
night, with our little Phelan run away and stolen in the city nowheres
at all.”

“Ye talk foolishness,” said Mr. McCaskey. “’Tis Pat he would be named,
after me old father in Cantrim.”

“Ye lie!” said Mrs. McCaskey, without anger. “Me brother was worth tin
dozen bog-trotting McCaskeys. After him would the bye be named.” She
leaned over the window-sill and looked down at the hurrying and bustle
below.

“Jawn,” said Mrs. McCaskey, softly, “I’m sorry I was hasty wid ye.”

“’Twas hasty puddin’, as ye say,” said her husband, “and hurry-up
turnips and get-a-move-on-ye coffee. ’Twas what ye could call a quick
lunch, all right, and tell no lie.”

Mrs. McCaskey slipped her arm inside her husband’s and took his rough
hand in hers.

“Listen at the cryin’ of poor Mrs. Murphy,” she said. “’Tis an awful
thing for a bit of a bye to be lost in this great big city. If ’twas
our little Phelan, Jawn, I’d be breakin’ me heart.”

Awkwardly Mr. McCaskey withdrew his hand. But he laid it around the
nearing shoulder of his wife.

“’Tis foolishness, of course,” said he, roughly, “but I’d be cut up
some meself if our little Pat was kidnapped or anything. But there
never was any childer for us. Sometimes I’ve been ugly and hard with
ye, Judy. Forget it.”

They leaned together, and looked down at the heart-drama being acted
below.

Long they sat thus. People surged along the sidewalk, crowding,
questioning, filling the air with rumours, and inconsequent surmises.
Mrs. Murphy ploughed back and forth in their midst, like a soft
mountain down which plunged an audible cataract of tears. Couriers came
and went.

Loud voices and a renewed uproar were raised in front of the
boarding-house.

“What’s up now, Judy?” asked Mr. McCaskey.

“’Tis Missis Murphy’s voice,” said Mrs. McCaskey, harking. “She says
she’s after finding little Mike asleep behind the roll of old linoleum
under the bed in her room.”

Mr. McCaskey laughed loudly.

“That’s yer Phelan,” he shouted, sardonically. “Divil a bit would a Pat
have done that trick. If the bye we never had is strayed and stole, by
the powers, call him Phelan, and see him hide out under the bed like a
mangy pup.”

Mrs. McCaskey arose heavily, and went toward the dish closet, with the
corners of her mouth drawn down.

Policeman Cleary came back around the corner as the crowd dispersed.
Surprised, he upturned an ear toward the McCaskey apartment, where the
crash of irons and chinaware and the ring of hurled kitchen utensils
seemed as loud as before. Policeman Cleary took out his timepiece.

“By the deported snakes!” he exclaimed, “Jawn McCaskey and his lady
have been fightin’ for an hour and a quarter by the watch. The missis
could give him forty pounds weight. Strength to his arm.”

Policeman Cleary strolled back around the corner.

Old man Denny folded his paper and hurried up the steps just as Mrs.
Murphy was about to lock the door for the night.




THE SKYLIGHT ROOM


First Mrs. Parker would show you the double parlours. You would not
dare to interrupt her description of their advantages and of the merits
of the gentleman who had occupied them for eight years. Then you would
manage to stammer forth the confession that you were neither a doctor
nor a dentist. Mrs. Parker’s manner of receiving the admission was such
that you could never afterward entertain the same feeling toward your
parents, who had neglected to train you up in one of the professions
that fitted Mrs. Parker’s parlours.

Next you ascended one flight of stairs and looked at the
second-floor-back at $8. Convinced by her second-floor manner that it
was worth the $12 that Mr. Toosenberry always paid for it until he left
to take charge of his brother’s orange plantation in Florida near Palm
Beach, where Mrs. McIntyre always spent the winters that had the double
front room with private bath, you managed to babble that you wanted
something still cheaper.

If you survived Mrs. Parker’s scorn, you were taken to look at Mr.
Skidder’s large hall room on the third floor. Mr. Skidder’s room was
not vacant. He wrote plays and smoked cigarettes in it all day long.
But every room-hunter was made to visit his room to admire the
lambrequins. After each visit, Mr. Skidder, from the fright caused by
possible eviction, would pay something on his rent.

Then—oh, then—if you still stood on one foot, with your hot hand
clutching the three moist dollars in your pocket, and hoarsely
proclaimed your hideous and culpable poverty, nevermore would Mrs.
Parker be cicerone of yours. She would honk loudly the word “Clara,”
she would show you her back, and march downstairs. Then Clara, the
coloured maid, would escort you up the carpeted ladder that served for
the fourth flight, and show you the Skylight Room. It occupied 7×8 feet
of floor space at the middle of the hall. On each side of it was a dark
lumber closet or storeroom.

In it was an iron cot, a washstand and a chair. A shelf was the
dresser. Its four bare walls seemed to close in upon you like the sides
of a coffin. Your hand crept to your throat, you gasped, you looked up
as from a well—and breathed once more. Through the glass of the little
skylight you saw a square of blue infinity.

“Two dollars, suh,” Clara would say in her half-contemptuous,
half-Tuskegeenial tones.

One day Miss Leeson came hunting for a room. She carried a typewriter
made to be lugged around by a much larger lady. She was a very little
girl, with eyes and hair that had kept on growing after she had stopped
and that always looked as if they were saying: “Goodness me! Why didn’t
you keep up with us?”

Mrs. Parker showed her the double parlours. “In this closet,” she said,
“one could keep a skeleton or anaesthetic or coal—”

“But I am neither a doctor nor a dentist,” said Miss Leeson, with a
shiver.

Mrs. Parker gave her the incredulous, pitying, sneering, icy stare that
she kept for those who failed to qualify as doctors or dentists, and
led the way to the second floor back.

“Eight dollars?” said Miss Leeson. “Dear me! I’m not Hetty if I do look
green. I’m just a poor little working girl. Show me something higher
and lower.”

Mr. Skidder jumped and strewed the floor with cigarette stubs at the
rap on his door.

“Excuse me, Mr. Skidder,” said Mrs. Parker, with her demon’s smile at
his pale looks. “I didn’t know you were in. I asked the lady to have a
look at your lambrequins.”

“They’re too lovely for anything,” said Miss Leeson, smiling in exactly
the way the angels do.

After they had gone Mr. Skidder got very busy erasing the tall,
black-haired heroine from his latest (unproduced) play and inserting a
small, roguish one with heavy, bright hair and vivacious features.

“Anna Held’ll jump at it,” said Mr. Skidder to himself, putting his
feet up against the lambrequins and disappearing in a cloud of smoke
like an aerial cuttlefish.

Presently the tocsin call of “Clara!” sounded to the world the state of
Miss Leeson’s purse. A dark goblin seized her, mounted a Stygian
stairway, thrust her into a vault with a glimmer of light in its top
and muttered the menacing and cabalistic words “Two dollars!”

“I’ll take it!” sighed Miss Leeson, sinking down upon the squeaky iron
bed.

Every day Miss Leeson went out to work. At night she brought home
papers with handwriting on them and made copies with her typewriter.
Sometimes she had no work at night, and then she would sit on the steps
of the high stoop with the other roomers. Miss Leeson was not intended
for a sky-light room when the plans were drawn for her creation. She
was gay-hearted and full of tender, whimsical fancies. Once she let Mr.
Skidder read to her three acts of his great (unpublished) comedy, “It’s
No Kid; or, The Heir of the Subway.”

There was rejoicing among the gentlemen roomers whenever Miss Leeson
had time to sit on the steps for an hour or two. But Miss Longnecker,
the tall blonde who taught in a public school and said, “Well, really!”
to everything you said, sat on the top step and sniffed. And Miss Dorn,
who shot at the moving ducks at Coney every Sunday and worked in a
department store, sat on the bottom step and sniffed. Miss Leeson sat
on the middle step and the men would quickly group around her.

Especially Mr. Skidder, who had cast her in his mind for the star part
in a private, romantic (unspoken) drama in real life. And especially
Mr. Hoover, who was forty-five, fat, flush and foolish. And especially
very young Mr. Evans, who set up a hollow cough to induce her to ask
him to leave off cigarettes. The men voted her “the funniest and
jolliest ever,” but the sniffs on the top step and the lower step were
implacable.


I pray you let the drama halt while Chorus stalks to the footlights and
drops an epicedian tear upon the fatness of Mr. Hoover. Tune the pipes
to the tragedy of tallow, the bane of bulk, the calamity of corpulence.
Tried out, Falstaff might have rendered more romance to the ton than
would have Romeo’s rickety ribs to the ounce. A lover may sigh, but he
must not puff. To the train of Momus are the fat men remanded. In vain
beats the faithfullest heart above a 52-inch belt. Avaunt, Hoover!
Hoover, forty-five, flush and foolish, might carry off Helen herself;
Hoover, forty-five, flush, foolish and fat is meat for perdition. There
was never a chance for you, Hoover.

As Mrs. Parker’s roomers sat thus one summer’s evening, Miss Leeson
looked up into the firmament and cried with her little gay laugh:

“Why, there’s Billy Jackson! I can see him from down here, too.”

All looked up—some at the windows of skyscrapers, some casting about
for an airship, Jackson-guided.

“It’s that star,” explained Miss Leeson, pointing with a tiny finger.
“Not the big one that twinkles—the steady blue one near it. I can see
it every night through my skylight. I named it Billy Jackson.”

“Well, really!” said Miss Longnecker. “I didn’t know you were an
astronomer, Miss Leeson.”

“Oh, yes,” said the small star gazer, “I know as much as any of them
about the style of sleeves they’re going to wear next fall in Mars.”

“Well, really!” said Miss Longnecker. “The star you refer to is Gamma,
of the constellation Cassiopeia. It is nearly of the second magnitude,
and its meridian passage is—”

“Oh,” said the very young Mr. Evans, “I think Billy Jackson is a much
better name for it.”

“Same here,” said Mr. Hoover, loudly breathing defiance to Miss
Longnecker. “I think Miss Leeson has just as much right to name stars
as any of those old astrologers had.”

“Well, really!” said Miss Longnecker.

“I wonder whether it’s a shooting star,” remarked Miss Dorn. “I hit
nine ducks and a rabbit out of ten in the gallery at Coney Sunday.”

“He doesn’t show up very well from down here,” said Miss Leeson. “You
ought to see him from my room. You know you can see stars even in the
daytime from the bottom of a well. At night my room is like the shaft
of a coal mine, and it makes Billy Jackson look like the big diamond
pin that Night fastens her kimono with.”

There came a time after that when Miss Leeson brought no formidable
papers home to copy. And when she went out in the morning, instead of
working, she went from office to office and let her heart melt away in
the drip of cold refusals transmitted through insolent office boys.
This went on.

There came an evening when she wearily climbed Mrs. Parker’s stoop at
the hour when she always returned from her dinner at the restaurant.
But she had had no dinner.

As she stepped into the hall Mr. Hoover met her and seized his chance.
He asked her to marry him, and his fatness hovered above her like an
avalanche. She dodged, and caught the balustrade. He tried for her
hand, and she raised it and smote him weakly in the face. Step by step
she went up, dragging herself by the railing. She passed Mr. Skidder’s
door as he was red-inking a stage direction for Myrtle Delorme (Miss
Leeson) in his (unaccepted) comedy, to “pirouette across stage from L
to the side of the Count.” Up the carpeted ladder she crawled at last
and opened the door of the skylight room.

She was too weak to light the lamp or to undress. She fell upon the
iron cot, her fragile body scarcely hollowing the worn springs. And in
that Erebus of the skylight room, she slowly raised her heavy eyelids,
and smiled.

For Billy Jackson was shining down on her, calm and bright and constant
through the skylight. There was no world about her. She was sunk in a
pit of blackness, with but that small square of pallid light framing
the star that she had so whimsically and oh, so ineffectually named.
Miss Longnecker must be right; it was Gamma, of the constellation
Cassiopeia, and not Billy Jackson. And yet she could not let it be
Gamma.

As she lay on her back she tried twice to raise her arm. The third time
she got two thin fingers to her lips and blew a kiss out of the black
pit to Billy Jackson. Her arm fell back limply.

“Good-bye, Billy,” she murmured faintly. “You’re millions of miles away
and you won’t even twinkle once. But you kept where I could see you
most of the time up there when there wasn’t anything else but darkness
to look at, didn’t you? . . . Millions of miles . . . Good-bye, Billy
Jackson.”

Clara, the coloured maid, found the door locked at 10 the next day, and
they forced it open. Vinegar, and the slapping of wrists and burnt
feathers proving of no avail, some one ran to ‘phone for an ambulance.

In due time it backed up to the door with much gong-clanging, and the
capable young medico, in his white linen coat, ready, active,
confident, with his smooth face half debonair, half grim, danced up the
steps.

“Ambulance call to 49,” he said briefly. “What’s the trouble?”

“Oh, yes, doctor,” sniffed Mrs. Parker, as though her trouble that
there should be trouble in the house was the greater. “I can’t think
what can be the matter with her. Nothing we could do would bring her
to. It’s a young woman, a Miss Elsie—yes, a Miss Elsie Leeson. Never
before in my house—”

“What room?” cried the doctor in a terrible voice, to which Mrs. Parker
was a stranger.

“The skylight room. It—”

Evidently the ambulance doctor was familiar with the location of
skylight rooms. He was gone up the stairs, four at a time. Mrs. Parker
followed slowly, as her dignity demanded.

On the first landing she met him coming back bearing the astronomer in
his arms. He stopped and let loose the practised scalpel of his tongue,
not loudly. Gradually Mrs. Parker crumpled as a stiff garment that
slips down from a nail. Ever afterward there remained crumples in her
mind and body. Sometimes her curious roomers would ask her what the
doctor said to her.

“Let that be,” she would answer. “If I can get forgiveness for having
heard it I will be satisfied.”

The ambulance physician strode with his burden through the pack of
hounds that follow the curiosity chase, and even they fell back along
the sidewalk abashed, for his face was that of one who bears his own
dead.

They noticed that he did not lay down upon the bed prepared for it in
the ambulance the form that he carried, and all that he said was:
“Drive like h––––l, Wilson,” to the driver.

That is all. Is it a story? In the next morning’s paper I saw a little
news item, and the last sentence of it may help you (as it helped me)
to weld the incidents together.

It recounted the reception into Bellevue Hospital of a young woman who
had been removed from No. 49 East –––– street, suffering from debility
induced by starvation. It concluded with these words:

“Dr. William Jackson, the ambulance physician who attended the case,
says the patient will recover.”




A SERVICE OF LOVE


When one loves one’s Art no service seems too hard.

That is our premise. This story shall draw a conclusion from it, and
show at the same time that the premise is incorrect. That will be a new
thing in logic, and a feat in story-telling somewhat older than the
great wall of China.

Joe Larrabee came out of the post-oak flats of the Middle West pulsing
with a genius for pictorial art. At six he drew a picture of the town
pump with a prominent citizen passing it hastily. This effort was
framed and hung in the drug store window by the side of the ear of corn
with an uneven number of rows. At twenty he left for New York with a
flowing necktie and a capital tied up somewhat closer.

Delia Caruthers did things in six octaves so promisingly in a pine-tree
village in the South that her relatives chipped in enough in her chip
hat for her to go “North” and “finish.” They could not see her f—, but
that is our story.

Joe and Delia met in an atelier where a number of art and music
students had gathered to discuss chiaroscuro, Wagner, music,
Rembrandt’s works, pictures, Waldteufel, wall paper, Chopin and Oolong.

Joe and Delia became enamoured one of the other, or each of the other,
as you please, and in a short time were married—for (see above), when
one loves one’s Art no service seems too hard.

Mr. and Mrs. Larrabee began housekeeping in a flat. It was a lonesome
flat—something like the A sharp way down at the left-hand end of the
keyboard. And they were happy; for they had their Art, and they had
each other. And my advice to the rich young man would be—sell all thou
hast, and give it to the poor—janitor for the privilege of living in a
flat with your Art and your Delia.

Flat-dwellers shall indorse my dictum that theirs is the only true
happiness. If a home is happy it cannot fit too close—let the dresser
collapse and become a billiard table; let the mantel turn to a rowing
machine, the escritoire to a spare bedchamber, the washstand to an
upright piano; let the four walls come together, if they will, so you
and your Delia are between. But if home be the other kind, let it be
wide and long—enter you at the Golden Gate, hang your hat on Hatteras,
your cape on Cape Horn and go out by the Labrador.

Joe was painting in the class of the great Magister—you know his fame.
His fees are high; his lessons are light—his high-lights have brought
him renown. Delia was studying under Rosenstock—you know his repute as
a disturber of the piano keys.

They were mighty happy as long as their money lasted. So is every—but I
will not be cynical. Their aims were very clear and defined. Joe was to
become capable very soon of turning out pictures that old gentlemen
with thin side-whiskers and thick pocketbooks would sandbag one another
in his studio for the privilege of buying. Delia was to become familiar
and then contemptuous with Music, so that when she saw the orchestra
seats and boxes unsold she could have sore throat and lobster in a
private dining-room and refuse to go on the stage.

But the best, in my opinion, was the home life in the little flat—the
ardent, voluble chats after the day’s study; the cozy dinners and
fresh, light breakfasts; the interchange of ambitions—ambitions
interwoven each with the other’s or else inconsiderable—the mutual help
and inspiration; and—overlook my artlessness—stuffed olives and cheese
sandwiches at 11 p.m.

But after a while Art flagged. It sometimes does, even if some
switchman doesn’t flag it. Everything going out and nothing coming in,
as the vulgarians say. Money was lacking to pay Mr. Magister and Herr
Rosenstock their prices. When one loves one’s Art no service seems too
hard. So, Delia said she must give music lessons to keep the chafing
dish bubbling.

For two or three days she went out canvassing for pupils. One evening
she came home elated.

“Joe, dear,” she said, gleefully, “I’ve a pupil. And, oh, the loveliest
people! General—General A. B. Pinkney’s daughter—on Seventy-first
street. Such a splendid house, Joe—you ought to see the front door!
Byzantine I think you would call it. And inside! Oh, Joe, I never saw
anything like it before.

“My pupil is his daughter Clementina. I dearly love her already. She’s
a delicate thing—dresses always in white; and the sweetest, simplest
manners! Only eighteen years old. I’m to give three lessons a week;
and, just think, Joe! $5 a lesson. I don’t mind it a bit; for when I
get two or three more pupils I can resume my lessons with Herr
Rosenstock. Now, smooth out that wrinkle between your brows, dear, and
let’s have a nice supper.”

“That’s all right for you, Dele,” said Joe, attacking a can of peas
with a carving knife and a hatchet, “but how about me? Do you think I’m
going to let you hustle for wages while I philander in the regions of
high art? Not by the bones of Benvenuto Cellini! I guess I can sell
papers or lay cobblestones, and bring in a dollar or two.”

Delia came and hung about his neck.

“Joe, dear, you are silly. You must keep on at your studies. It is not
as if I had quit my music and gone to work at something else. While I
teach I learn. I am always with my music. And we can live as happily as
millionaires on $15 a week. You mustn’t think of leaving Mr. Magister.”

“All right,” said Joe, reaching for the blue scalloped vegetable dish.
“But I hate for you to be giving lessons. It isn’t Art. But you’re a
trump and a dear to do it.”

“When one loves one’s Art no service seems too hard,” said Delia.

“Magister praised the sky in that sketch I made in the park,” said Joe.
“And Tinkle gave me permission to hang two of them in his window. I may
sell one if the right kind of a moneyed idiot sees them.”

“I’m sure you will,” said Delia, sweetly. “And now let’s be thankful
for Gen. Pinkney and this veal roast.”

During all of the next week the Larrabees had an early breakfast. Joe
was enthusiastic about some morning-effect sketches he was doing in
Central Park, and Delia packed him off breakfasted, coddled, praised
and kissed at 7 o’clock. Art is an engaging mistress. It was most times
7 o’clock when he returned in the evening.

At the end of the week Delia, sweetly proud but languid, triumphantly
tossed three five-dollar bills on the 8×10 (inches) centre table of the
8×10 (feet) flat parlour.

“Sometimes,” she said, a little wearily, “Clementina tries me. I’m
afraid she doesn’t practise enough, and I have to tell her the same
things so often. And then she always dresses entirely in white, and
that does get monotonous. But Gen. Pinkney is the dearest old man! I
wish you could know him, Joe. He comes in sometimes when I am with
Clementina at the piano—he is a widower, you know—and stands there
pulling his white goatee. ‘And how are the semiquavers and the
demisemiquavers progressing?’ he always asks.

“I wish you could see the wainscoting in that drawing-room, Joe! And
those Astrakhan rug portières. And Clementina has such a funny little
cough. I hope she is stronger than she looks. Oh, I really am getting
attached to her, she is so gentle and high bred. Gen. Pinkney’s brother
was once Minister to Bolivia.”

And then Joe, with the air of a Monte Cristo, drew forth a ten, a five,
a two and a one—all legal tender notes—and laid them beside Delia’s
earnings.

“Sold that watercolour of the obelisk to a man from Peoria,” he
announced overwhelmingly.

“Don’t joke with me,” said Delia, “not from Peoria!”

“All the way. I wish you could see him, Dele. Fat man with a woollen
muffler and a quill toothpick. He saw the sketch in Tinkle’s window and
thought it was a windmill at first. He was game, though, and bought it
anyhow. He ordered another—an oil sketch of the Lackawanna freight
depot—to take back with him. Music lessons! Oh, I guess Art is still in
it.”

“I’m so glad you’ve kept on,” said Delia, heartily. “You’re bound to
win, dear. Thirty-three dollars! We never had so much to spend before.
We’ll have oysters to-night.”

“And filet mignon with champignons,” said Joe. “Where is the olive
fork?”

On the next Saturday evening Joe reached home first. He spread his $18
on the parlour table and washed what seemed to be a great deal of dark
paint from his hands.

Half an hour later Delia arrived, her right hand tied up in a shapeless
bundle of wraps and bandages.

“How is this?” asked Joe after the usual greetings. Delia laughed, but
not very joyously.

“Clementina,” she explained, “insisted upon a Welsh rabbit after her
lesson. She is such a queer girl. Welsh rabbits at 5 in the afternoon.
The General was there. You should have seen him run for the chafing
dish, Joe, just as if there wasn’t a servant in the house. I know
Clementina isn’t in good health; she is so nervous. In serving the
rabbit she spilled a great lot of it, boiling hot, over my hand and
wrist. It hurt awfully, Joe. And the dear girl was so sorry! But Gen.
Pinkney!—Joe, that old man nearly went distracted. He rushed downstairs
and sent somebody—they said the furnace man or somebody in the
basement—out to a drug store for some oil and things to bind it up
with. It doesn’t hurt so much now.”

“What’s this?” asked Joe, taking the hand tenderly and pulling at some
white strands beneath the bandages.

“It’s something soft,” said Delia, “that had oil on it. Oh, Joe, did
you sell another sketch?” She had seen the money on the table.

“Did I?” said Joe; “just ask the man from Peoria. He got his depot
to-day, and he isn’t sure but he thinks he wants another parkscape and
a view on the Hudson. What time this afternoon did you burn your hand,
Dele?”

“Five o’clock, I think,” said Dele, plaintively. “The iron—I mean the
rabbit came off the fire about that time. You ought to have seen Gen.
Pinkney, Joe, when—”

“Sit down here a moment, Dele,” said Joe. He drew her to the couch, sat
beside her and put his arm across her shoulders.

“What have you been doing for the last two weeks, Dele?” he asked.

She braved it for a moment or two with an eye full of love and
stubbornness, and murmured a phrase or two vaguely of Gen. Pinkney; but
at length down went her head and out came the truth and tears.

“I couldn’t get any pupils,” she confessed. “And I couldn’t bear to
have you give up your lessons; and I got a place ironing shirts in that
big Twenty-fourth street laundry. And I think I did very well to make
up both General Pinkney and Clementina, don’t you, Joe? And when a girl
in the laundry set down a hot iron on my hand this afternoon I was all
the way home making up that story about the Welsh rabbit. You’re not
angry, are you, Joe? And if I hadn’t got the work you mightn’t have
sold your sketches to that man from Peoria.”

“He wasn’t from Peoria,” said Joe, slowly.

“Well, it doesn’t matter where he was from. How clever you are,
Joe—and—kiss me, Joe—and what made you ever suspect that I wasn’t
giving music lessons to Clementina?”

“I didn’t,” said Joe, “until to-night. And I wouldn’t have then, only I
sent up this cotton waste and oil from the engine-room this afternoon
for a girl upstairs who had her hand burned with a smoothing-iron. I’ve
been firing the engine in that laundry for the last two weeks.”

“And then you didn’t—”

“My purchaser from Peoria,” said Joe, “and Gen. Pinkney are both
creations of the same art—but you wouldn’t call it either painting or
music.”

And then they both laughed, and Joe began:

“When one loves one’s Art no service seems—”

But Delia stopped him with her hand on his lips. “No,” she said—“just
‘When one loves.’”




THE COMING-OUT OF MAGGIE


Every Saturday night the Clover Leaf Social Club gave a hop in the hall
of the Give and Take Athletic Association on the East Side. In order to
attend one of these dances you must be a member of the Give and
Take—or, if you belong to the division that starts off with the right
foot in waltzing, you must work in Rhinegold’s paper-box factory.
Still, any Clover Leaf was privileged to escort or be escorted by an
outsider to a single dance. But mostly each Give and Take brought the
paper-box girl that he affected; and few strangers could boast of
having shaken a foot at the regular hops.

Maggie Toole, on account of her dull eyes, broad mouth and left-handed
style of footwork in the two-step, went to the dances with Anna McCarty
and her “fellow.” Anna and Maggie worked side by side in the factory,
and were the greatest chums ever. So Anna always made Jimmy Burns take
her by Maggie’s house every Saturday night so that her friend could go
to the dance with them.

The Give and Take Athletic Association lived up to its name. The hall
of the association in Orchard street was fitted out with muscle-making
inventions. With the fibres thus builded up the members were wont to
engage the police and rival social and athletic organisations in joyous
combat. Between these more serious occupations the Saturday night hop
with the paper-box factory girls came as a refining influence and as an
efficient screen. For sometimes the tip went ’round, and if you were
among the elect that tiptoed up the dark back stairway you might see as
neat and satisfying a little welter-weight affair to a finish as ever
happened inside the ropes.

On Saturdays Rhinegold’s paper-box factory closed at 3 P. M. On one
such afternoon Anna and Maggie walked homeward together. At Maggie’s
door Anna said, as usual: “Be ready at seven, sharp, Mag; and Jimmy and
me’ll come by for you.”

But what was this? Instead of the customary humble and grateful thanks
from the non-escorted one there was to be perceived a high-poised head,
a prideful dimpling at the corners of a broad mouth, and almost a
sparkle in a dull brown eye.

“Thanks, Anna,” said Maggie; “but you and Jimmy needn’t bother
to-night. I’ve a gentleman friend that’s coming ’round to escort me to
the hop.”

The comely Anna pounced upon her friend, shook her, chided and
beseeched her. Maggie Toole catch a fellow! Plain, dear, loyal,
unattractive Maggie, so sweet as a chum, so unsought for a two-step or
a moonlit bench in the little park. How was it? When did it happen? Who
was it?

“You’ll see to-night,” said Maggie, flushed with the wine of the first
grapes she had gathered in Cupid’s vineyard. “He’s swell all right.
He’s two inches taller than Jimmy, and an up-to-date dresser. I’ll
introduce him, Anna, just as soon as we get to the hall.”

Anna and Jimmy were among the first Clover Leafs to arrive that
evening. Anna’s eyes were brightly fixed upon the door of the hall to
catch the first glimpse of her friend’s “catch.”

At 8:30 Miss Toole swept into the hall with her escort. Quickly her
triumphant eye discovered her chum under the wing of her faithful
Jimmy.

“Oh, gee!” cried Anna, “Mag ain’t made a hit—oh, no! Swell fellow?
well, I guess! Style? Look at ’um.”

“Go as far as you like,” said Jimmy, with sandpaper in his voice. “Cop
him out if you want him. These new guys always win out with the push.
Don’t mind me. He don’t squeeze all the limes, I guess. Huh!”

“Shut up, Jimmy. You know what I mean. I’m glad for Mag. First fellow
she ever had. Oh, here they come.”

Across the floor Maggie sailed like a coquettish yacht convoyed by a
stately cruiser. And truly, her companion justified the encomiums of
the faithful chum. He stood two inches taller than the average Give and
Take athlete; his dark hair curled; his eyes and his teeth flashed
whenever he bestowed his frequent smiles. The young men of the Clover
Leaf Club pinned not their faith to the graces of person as much as
they did to its prowess, its achievements in hand-to-hand conflicts,
and its preservation from the legal duress that constantly menaced it.
The member of the association who would bind a paper-box maiden to his
conquering chariot scorned to employ Beau Brummel airs. They were not
considered honourable methods of warfare. The swelling biceps, the coat
straining at its buttons over the chest, the air of conscious
conviction of the supereminence of the male in the cosmogony of
creation, even a calm display of bow legs as subduing and enchanting
agents in the gentle tourneys of Cupid—these were the approved arms and
ammunition of the Clover Leaf gallants. They viewed, then, genuflexions
and alluring poses of this visitor with their chins at a new angle.

“A friend of mine, Mr. Terry O’Sullivan,” was Maggie’s formula of
introduction. She led him around the room, presenting him to each
new-arriving Clover Leaf. Almost was she pretty now, with the unique
luminosity in her eyes that comes to a girl with her first suitor and a
kitten with its first mouse.

“Maggie Toole’s got a fellow at last,” was the word that went round
among the paper-box girls. “Pipe Mag’s floor-walker”—thus the Give and
Takes expressed their indifferent contempt.

Usually at the weekly hops Maggie kept a spot on the wall warm with her
back. She felt and showed so much gratitude whenever a self-sacrificing
partner invited her to dance that his pleasure was cheapened and
diminished. She had even grown used to noticing Anna joggle the
reluctant Jimmy with her elbow as a signal for him to invite her chum
to walk over his feet through a two-step.

But to-night the pumpkin had turned to a coach and six. Terry
O’Sullivan was a victorious Prince Charming, and Maggie Toole winged
her first butterfly flight. And though our tropes of fairyland be mixed
with those of entomology they shall not spill one drop of ambrosia from
the rose-crowned melody of Maggie’s one perfect night.

The girls besieged her for introductions to her “fellow.” The Clover
Leaf young men, after two years of blindness, suddenly perceived charms
in Miss Toole. They flexed their compelling muscles before her and
bespoke her for the dance.

Thus she scored; but to Terry O’Sullivan the honours of the evening
fell thick and fast. He shook his curls; he smiled and went easily
through the seven motions for acquiring grace in your own room before
an open window ten minutes each day. He danced like a faun; he
introduced manner and style and atmosphere; his words came trippingly
upon his tongue, and—he waltzed twice in succession with the paper-box
girl that Dempsey Donovan brought.

Dempsey was the leader of the association. He wore a dress suit, and
could chin the bar twice with one hand. He was one of “Big Mike”
O’Sullivan’s lieutenants, and was never troubled by trouble. No cop
dared to arrest him. Whenever he broke a pushcart man’s head or shot a
member of the Heinrick B. Sweeney Outing and Literary Association in
the kneecap, an officer would drop around and say:

“The Cap’n ’d like to see ye a few minutes round to the office whin ye
have time, Dempsey, me boy.”

But there would be sundry gentlemen there with large gold fob chains
and black cigars; and somebody would tell a funny story, and then
Dempsey would go back and work half an hour with the six-pound
dumbbells. So, doing a tight-rope act on a wire stretched across
Niagara was a safe terpsichorean performance compared with waltzing
twice with Dempsey Donovan’s paper-box girl. At 10 o’clock the jolly
round face of “Big Mike” O’Sullivan shone at the door for five minutes
upon the scene. He always looked in for five minutes, smiled at the
girls and handed out real perfectos to the delighted boys.

Dempsey Donovan was at his elbow instantly, talking rapidly. “Big Mike”
looked carefully at the dancers, smiled, shook his head and departed.

The music stopped. The dancers scattered to the chairs along the walls.
Terry O’Sullivan, with his entrancing bow, relinquished a pretty girl
in blue to her partner and started back to find Maggie. Dempsey
intercepted him in the middle of the floor.

Some fine instinct that Rome must have bequeathed to us caused nearly
every one to turn and look at them—there was a subtle feeling that two
gladiators had met in the arena. Two or three Give and Takes with tight
coat sleeves drew nearer.

“One moment, Mr. O’Sullivan,” said Dempsey. “I hope you’re enjoying
yourself. Where did you say you live?”

The two gladiators were well matched. Dempsey had, perhaps, ten pounds
of weight to give away. The O’Sullivan had breadth with quickness.
Dempsey had a glacial eye, a dominating slit of a mouth, an
indestructible jaw, a complexion like a belle’s and the coolness of a
champion. The visitor showed more fire in his contempt and less control
over his conspicuous sneer. They were enemies by the law written when
the rocks were molten. They were each too splendid, too mighty, too
incomparable to divide pre-eminence. One only must survive.

“I live on Grand,” said O’Sullivan, insolently; “and no trouble to find
me at home. Where do you live?”

Dempsey ignored the question.

“You say your name’s O’Sullivan,” he went on. “Well, ‘Big Mike’ says he
never saw you before.”

“Lots of things he never saw,” said the favourite of the hop.

“As a rule,” went on Dempsey, huskily sweet, “O’Sullivans in this
district know one another. You escorted one of our lady members here,
and we want a chance to make good. If you’ve got a family tree let’s
see a few historical O’Sullivan buds come out on it. Or do you want us
to dig it out of you by the roots?”

“Suppose you mind your own business,” suggested O’Sullivan, blandly.

Dempsey’s eye brightened. He held up an inspired forefinger as though a
brilliant idea had struck him.

“I’ve got it now,” he said cordially. “It was just a little mistake.
You ain’t no O’Sullivan. You are a ring-tailed monkey. Excuse us for
not recognising you at first.”

O’Sullivan’s eye flashed. He made a quick movement, but Andy Geoghan
was ready and caught his arm.

Dempsey nodded at Andy and William McMahan, the secretary of the club,
and walked rapidly toward a door at the rear of the hall. Two other
members of the Give and Take Association swiftly joined the little
group. Terry O’Sullivan was now in the hands of the Board of Rules and
Social Referees. They spoke to him briefly and softly, and conducted
him out through the same door at the rear.

This movement on the part of the Clover Leaf members requires a word of
elucidation. Back of the association hall was a smaller room rented by
the club. In this room personal difficulties that arose on the ballroom
floor were settled, man to man, with the weapons of nature, under the
supervision of the board. No lady could say that she had witnessed a
fight at a Clover Leaf hop in several years. Its gentlemen members
guaranteed that.

So easily and smoothly had Dempsey and the board done their preliminary
work that many in the hall had not noticed the checking of the
fascinating O’Sullivan’s social triumph. Among these was Maggie. She
looked about for her escort.

“Smoke up!” said Rose Cassidy. “Wasn’t you on? Demps Donovan picked a
scrap with your Lizzie-boy, and they’ve waltzed out to the slaughter
room with him. How’s my hair look done up this way, Mag?”

Maggie laid a hand on the bosom of her cheesecloth waist.

“Gone to fight with Dempsey!” she said, breathlessly. “They’ve got to
be stopped. Dempsey Donovan can’t fight him. Why, he’ll—he’ll kill
him!”

“Ah, what do you care?” said Rosa. “Don’t some of ’em fight every hop?”

But Maggie was off, darting her zig-zag way through the maze of
dancers. She burst through the rear door into the dark hall and then
threw her solid shoulder against the door of the room of single combat.
It gave way, and in the instant that she entered her eye caught the
scene—the Board standing about with open watches; Dempsey Donovan in
his shirt sleeves dancing, light-footed, with the wary grace of the
modern pugilist, within easy reach of his adversary; Terry O’Sullivan
standing with arms folded and a murderous look in his dark eyes. And
without slacking the speed of her entrance she leaped forward with a
scream—leaped in time to catch and hang upon the arm of O’Sullivan that
was suddenly uplifted, and to whisk from it the long, bright stiletto
that he had drawn from his bosom.

The knife fell and rang upon the floor. Cold steel drawn in the rooms
of the Give and Take Association! Such a thing had never happened
before. Every one stood motionless for a minute. Andy Geoghan kicked
the stiletto with the toe of his shoe curiously, like an antiquarian
who has come upon some ancient weapon unknown to his learning.

And then O’Sullivan hissed something unintelligible between his teeth.
Dempsey and the board exchanged looks. And then Dempsey looked at
O’Sullivan without anger, as one looks at a stray dog, and nodded his
head in the direction of the door.

“The back stairs, Giuseppi,” he said, briefly. “Somebody’ll pitch your
hat down after you.”

Maggie walked up to Dempsey Donovan. There was a brilliant spot of red
in her cheeks, down which slow tears were running. But she looked him
bravely in the eye.

“I knew it, Dempsey,” she said, as her eyes grew dull even in their
tears. “I knew he was a Guinea. His name’s Tony Spinelli. I hurried in
when they told me you and him was scrappin’. Them Guineas always
carries knives. But you don’t understand, Dempsey. I never had a fellow
in my life. I got tired of comin’ with Anna and Jimmy every night, so I
fixed it with him to call himself O’Sullivan, and brought him along. I
knew there’d be nothin’ doin’ for him if he came as a Dago. I guess
I’ll resign from the club now.”

Dempsey turned to Andy Geoghan.

“Chuck that cheese slicer out of the window,” he said, “and tell ’em
inside that Mr. O’Sullivan has had a telephone message to go down to
Tammany Hall.”

And then he turned back to Maggie.

“Say, Mag,” he said, “I’ll see you home. And how about next Saturday
night? Will you come to the hop with me if I call around for you?”

It was remarkable how quickly Maggie’s eyes could change from dull to a
shining brown.

“With you, Dempsey?” she stammered. “Say—will a duck swim?”




MAN ABOUT TOWN


There were two or three things that I wanted to know. I do not care
about a mystery. So I began to inquire.

It took me two weeks to find out what women carry in dress suit cases.
And then I began to ask why a mattress is made in two pieces. This
serious query was at first received with suspicion because it sounded
like a conundrum. I was at last assured that its double form of
construction was designed to make lighter the burden of woman, who
makes up beds. I was so foolish as to persist, begging to know why,
then, they were not made in two equal pieces; whereupon I was shunned.

The third draught that I craved from the fount of knowledge was
enlightenment concerning the character known as A Man About Town. He
was more vague in my mind than a type should be. We must have a
concrete idea of anything, even if it be an imaginary idea, before we
can comprehend it. Now, I have a mental picture of John Doe that is as
clear as a steel engraving. His eyes are weak blue; he wears a brown
vest and a shiny black serge coat. He stands always in the sunshine
chewing something; and he keeps half-shutting his pocket knife and
opening it again with his thumb. And, if the Man Higher Up is ever
found, take my assurance for it, he will be a large, pale man with blue
wristlets showing under his cuffs, and he will be sitting to have his
shoes polished within sound of a bowling alley, and there will be
somewhere about him turquoises.

But the canvas of my imagination, when it came to limning the Man About
Town, was blank. I fancied that he had a detachable sneer (like the
smile of the Cheshire cat) and attached cuffs; and that was all.
Whereupon I asked a newspaper reporter about him.

“Why,” said he, “a ‘Man About Town’ is something between a ‘rounder’ and a
‘clubman.’ He isn’t exactly—well, he fits in between Mrs. Fish’s
receptions and private boxing bouts. He doesn’t—well, he doesn’t belong
either to the Lotos Club or to the Jerry McGeogheghan Galvanised Iron
Workers’ Apprentices’ Left Hook Chowder Association. I don’t exactly
know how to describe him to you. You’ll see him everywhere there’s
anything doing. Yes, I suppose he’s a type. Dress clothes every
evening; knows the ropes; calls every policeman and waiter in town by
their first names. No; he never travels with the hydrogen derivatives.
You generally see him alone or with another man.”

My friend the reporter left me, and I wandered further afield. By this
time the 3126 electric lights on the Rialto were alight. People passed,
but they held me not. Paphian eyes rayed upon me, and left me
unscathed. Diners, heimgangers, shop-girls, confidence men,
panhandlers, actors, highwaymen, millionaires and outlanders hurried,
skipped, strolled, sneaked, swaggered and scurried by me; but I took no
note of them. I knew them all; I had read their hearts; they had
served. I wanted my Man About Town. He was a type, and to drop him
would be an error—a typograph—but no! let us continue.

Let us continue with a moral digression. To see a family reading the
Sunday paper gratifies. The sections have been separated. Papa is
earnestly scanning the page that pictures the young lady exercising
before an open window, and bending—but there, there! Mamma is
interested in trying to guess the missing letters in the word N_w Yo_k.
The oldest girls are eagerly perusing the financial reports, for a
certain young man remarked last Sunday night that he had taken a flyer
in Q., X. & Z. Willie, the eighteen-year-old son, who attends the New
York public school, is absorbed in the weekly article describing how to
make over an old skirt, for he hopes to take a prize in sewing on
graduation day.

Grandma is holding to the comic supplement with a two-hours’ grip; and
little Tottie, the baby, is rocking along the best she can with the
real estate transfers. This view is intended to be reassuring, for it
is desirable that a few lines of this story be skipped. For it
introduces strong drink.

I went into a café to—and while it was being mixed I asked the man who
grabs up your hot Scotch spoon as soon as you lay it down what he
understood by the term, epithet, description, designation,
characterisation or appellation, viz.: a “Man About Town.”

“Why,” said he, carefully, “it means a fly guy that’s wise to the
all-night push—see? It’s a hot sport that you can’t bump to the rail
anywhere between the Flatirons—see? I guess that’s about what it
means.”

I thanked him and departed.

On the sidewalk a Salvation lassie shook her contribution receptacle
gently against my waistcoat pocket.

“Would you mind telling me,” I asked her, “if you ever meet with the
character commonly denominated as ‘A Man About Town’ during your daily
wanderings?”

“I think I know whom you mean,” she answered, with a gentle smile. “We
see them in the same places night after night. They are the devil’s
body guard, and if the soldiers of any army are as faithful as they
are, their commanders are well served. We go among them, diverting a
few pennies from their wickedness to the Lord’s service.”

She shook the box again and I dropped a dime into it.

In front of a glittering hotel a friend of mine, a critic, was climbing
from a cab. He seemed at leisure; and I put my question to him. He
answered me conscientiously, as I was sure he would.

“There is a type of ‘Man About Town’ in New York,” he answered. “The
term is quite familiar to me, but I don’t think I was ever called upon
to define the character before. It would be difficult to point you out
an exact specimen. I would say, offhand, that it is a man who had a
hopeless case of the peculiar New York disease of wanting to see and
know. At 6 o’clock each day life begins with him. He follows rigidly
the conventions of dress and manners; but in the business of poking his
nose into places where he does not belong he could give pointers to a
civet cat or a jackdaw. He is the man who has chased Bohemia about the
town from rathskeller to roof garden and from Hester street to Harlem
until you can’t find a place in the city where they don’t cut their
spaghetti with a knife. Your ‘Man About Town’ has done that. He is
always on the scent of something new. He is curiosity, impudence and
omnipresence. Hansoms were made for him, and gold-banded cigars; and
the curse of music at dinner. There are not so many of him; but his
minority report is adopted everywhere.

“I’m glad you brought up the subject; I’ve felt the influence of this
nocturnal blight upon our city, but I never thought to analyse it
before. I can see now that your ‘Man About Town’ should have been
classified long ago. In his wake spring up wine agents and cloak
models; and the orchestra plays ‘Let’s All Go Up to Maud’s’ for him, by
request, instead of Händel. He makes his rounds every evening; while
you and I see the elephant once a week. When the cigar store is raided,
he winks at the officer, familiar with his ground, and walks away
immune, while you and I search among the Presidents for names, and
among the stars for addresses to give the desk sergeant.”

My friend, the critic, paused to acquire breath for fresh eloquence. I
seized my advantage.

“You have classified him,” I cried with joy. “You have painted his
portrait in the gallery of city types. But I must meet one face to
face. I must study the Man About Town at first hand. Where shall I find
him? How shall I know him?”

Without seeming to hear me, the critic went on. And his cab-driver was
waiting for his fare, too.

“He is the sublimated essence of Butt-in; the refined, intrinsic
extract of Rubber; the concentrated, purified, irrefutable, unavoidable
spirit of Curiosity and Inquisitiveness. A new sensation is the breath
in his nostrils; when his experience is exhausted he explores new
fields with the indefatigability of a—”

“Excuse me,” I interrupted, “but can you produce one of this type? It
is a new thing to me. I must study it. I will search the town over
until I find one. Its habitat must be here on Broadway.”

“I am about to dine here,” said my friend. “Come inside, and if there
is a Man About Town present I will point him out to you. I know most of
the regular patrons here.”

“I am not dining yet,” I said to him. “You will excuse me. I am going
to find my Man About Town this night if I have to rake New York from
the Battery to Little Coney Island.”

I left the hotel and walked down Broadway. The pursuit of my type gave
a pleasant savour of life and interest to the air I breathed. I was
glad to be in a city so great, so complex and diversified. Leisurely
and with something of an air I strolled along with my heart expanding
at the thought that I was a citizen of great Gotham, a sharer in its
magnificence and pleasures, a partaker in its glory and prestige.

I turned to cross the street. I heard something buzz like a bee, and
then I took a long, pleasant ride with Santos-Dumont.

When I opened my eyes I remembered a smell of gasoline, and I said
aloud: “Hasn’t it passed yet?”

A hospital nurse laid a hand that was not particularly soft upon my
brow that was not at all fevered. A young doctor came along, grinned,
and handed me a morning newspaper.

“Want to see how it happened?” he asked cheerily. I read the article.
Its headlines began where I heard the buzzing leave off the night
before. It closed with these lines:

“—Bellevue Hospital, where it was said that his injuries were not
serious. He appeared to be a typical Man About Town.”




THE COP AND THE ANTHEM


On his bench in Madison Square Soapy moved uneasily. When wild geese
honk high of nights, and when women without sealskin coats grow kind to
their husbands, and when Soapy moves uneasily on his bench in the park,
you may know that winter is near at hand.

A dead leaf fell in Soapy’s lap. That was Jack Frost’s card. Jack is
kind to the regular denizens of Madison Square, and gives fair warning
of his annual call. At the corners of four streets he hands his
pasteboard to the North Wind, footman of the mansion of All Outdoors,
so that the inhabitants thereof may make ready.

Soapy’s mind became cognisant of the fact that the time had come for
him to resolve himself into a singular Committee of Ways and Means to
provide against the coming rigour. And therefore he moved uneasily on
his bench.

The hibernatorial ambitions of Soapy were not of the highest. In them
there were no considerations of Mediterranean cruises, of soporific
Southern skies drifting in the Vesuvian Bay. Three months on the Island
was what his soul craved. Three months of assured board and bed and
congenial company, safe from Boreas and bluecoats, seemed to Soapy the
essence of things desirable.

For years the hospitable Blackwell’s had been his winter quarters. Just
as his more fortunate fellow New Yorkers had bought their tickets to
Palm Beach and the Riviera each winter, so Soapy had made his humble
arrangements for his annual hegira to the Island. And now the time was
come. On the previous night three Sabbath newspapers, distributed
beneath his coat, about his ankles and over his lap, had failed to
repulse the cold as he slept on his bench near the spurting fountain in
the ancient square. So the Island loomed big and timely in Soapy’s
mind. He scorned the provisions made in the name of charity for the
city’s dependents. In Soapy’s opinion the Law was more benign than
Philanthropy. There was an endless round of institutions, municipal and
eleemosynary, on which he might set out and receive lodging and food
accordant with the simple life. But to one of Soapy’s proud spirit the
gifts of charity are encumbered. If not in coin you must pay in
humiliation of spirit for every benefit received at the hands of
philanthropy. As Caesar had his Brutus, every bed of charity must have
its toll of a bath, every loaf of bread its compensation of a private
and personal inquisition. Wherefore it is better to be a guest of the
law, which though conducted by rules, does not meddle unduly with a
gentleman’s private affairs.

Soapy, having decided to go to the Island, at once set about
accomplishing his desire. There were many easy ways of doing this. The
pleasantest was to dine luxuriously at some expensive restaurant; and
then, after declaring insolvency, be handed over quietly and without
uproar to a policeman. An accommodating magistrate would do the rest.

Soapy left his bench and strolled out of the square and across the
level sea of asphalt, where Broadway and Fifth Avenue flow together. Up
Broadway he turned, and halted at a glittering café, where are gathered
together nightly the choicest products of the grape, the silkworm and
the protoplasm.

Soapy had confidence in himself from the lowest button of his vest
upward. He was shaven, and his coat was decent and his neat black,
ready-tied four-in-hand had been presented to him by a lady missionary
on Thanksgiving Day. If he could reach a table in the restaurant
unsuspected success would be his. The portion of him that would show
above the table would raise no doubt in the waiter’s mind. A roasted
mallard duck, thought Soapy, would be about the thing—with a bottle of
Chablis, and then Camembert, a demi-tasse and a cigar. One dollar for
the cigar would be enough. The total would not be so high as to call
forth any supreme manifestation of revenge from the café management;
and yet the meat would leave him filled and happy for the journey to
his winter refuge.

But as Soapy set foot inside the restaurant door the head waiter’s eye
fell upon his frayed trousers and decadent shoes. Strong and ready
hands turned him about and conveyed him in silence and haste to the
sidewalk and averted the ignoble fate of the menaced mallard.

Soapy turned off Broadway. It seemed that his route to the coveted
island was not to be an epicurean one. Some other way of entering limbo
must be thought of.

At a corner of Sixth Avenue electric lights and cunningly displayed
wares behind plate-glass made a shop window conspicuous. Soapy took a
cobblestone and dashed it through the glass. People came running around
the corner, a policeman in the lead. Soapy stood still, with his hands
in his pockets, and smiled at the sight of brass buttons.

“Where’s the man that done that?” inquired the officer excitedly.

“Don’t you figure out that I might have had something to do with it?”
said Soapy, not without sarcasm, but friendly, as one greets good
fortune.

The policeman’s mind refused to accept Soapy even as a clue. Men who
smash windows do not remain to parley with the law’s minions. They take
to their heels. The policeman saw a man half way down the block running
to catch a car. With drawn club he joined in the pursuit. Soapy, with
disgust in his heart, loafed along, twice unsuccessful.

On the opposite side of the street was a restaurant of no great
pretensions. It catered to large appetites and modest purses. Its
crockery and atmosphere were thick; its soup and napery thin. Into this
place Soapy took his accusive shoes and telltale trousers without
challenge. At a table he sat and consumed beefsteak, flapjacks,
doughnuts and pie. And then to the waiter be betrayed the fact that the
minutest coin and himself were strangers.

“Now, get busy and call a cop,” said Soapy. “And don’t keep a gentleman
waiting.”

“No cop for youse,” said the waiter, with a voice like butter cakes and
an eye like the cherry in a Manhattan cocktail. “Hey, Con!”

Neatly upon his left ear on the callous pavement two waiters pitched
Soapy. He arose, joint by joint, as a carpenter’s rule opens, and beat
the dust from his clothes. Arrest seemed but a rosy dream. The Island
seemed very far away. A policeman who stood before a drug store two
doors away laughed and walked down the street.

Five blocks Soapy travelled before his courage permitted him to woo
capture again. This time the opportunity presented what he fatuously
termed to himself a “cinch.” A young woman of a modest and pleasing
guise was standing before a show window gazing with sprightly interest
at its display of shaving mugs and inkstands, and two yards from the
window a large policeman of severe demeanour leaned against a water
plug.

It was Soapy’s design to assume the role of the despicable and
execrated “masher.” The refined and elegant appearance of his victim
and the contiguity of the conscientious cop encouraged him to believe
that he would soon feel the pleasant official clutch upon his arm that
would insure his winter quarters on the right little, tight little
isle.

Soapy straightened the lady missionary’s ready-made tie, dragged his
shrinking cuffs into the open, set his hat at a killing cant and sidled
toward the young woman. He made eyes at her, was taken with sudden
coughs and “hems,” smiled, smirked and went brazenly through the
impudent and contemptible litany of the “masher.” With half an eye
Soapy saw that the policeman was watching him fixedly. The young woman
moved away a few steps, and again bestowed her absorbed attention upon
the shaving mugs. Soapy followed, boldly stepping to her side, raised
his hat and said:

“Ah there, Bedelia! Don’t you want to come and play in my yard?”

The policeman was still looking. The persecuted young woman had but to
beckon a finger and Soapy would be practically en route for his insular
haven. Already he imagined he could feel the cozy warmth of the
station-house. The young woman faced him and, stretching out a hand,
caught Soapy’s coat sleeve.

“Sure, Mike,” she said joyfully, “if you’ll blow me to a pail of suds.
I’d have spoke to you sooner, but the cop was watching.”

With the young woman playing the clinging ivy to his oak Soapy walked
past the policeman overcome with gloom. He seemed doomed to liberty.

At the next corner he shook off his companion and ran. He halted in the
district where by night are found the lightest streets, hearts, vows
and librettos. Women in furs and men in greatcoats moved gaily in the
wintry air. A sudden fear seized Soapy that some dreadful enchantment
had rendered him immune to arrest. The thought brought a little of
panic upon it, and when he came upon another policeman lounging grandly
in front of a transplendent theatre he caught at the immediate straw of
“disorderly conduct.”

On the sidewalk Soapy began to yell drunken gibberish at the top of his
harsh voice. He danced, howled, raved and otherwise disturbed the
welkin.

The policeman twirled his club, turned his back to Soapy and remarked
to a citizen.

“’Tis one of them Yale lads celebratin’ the goose egg they give to the
Hartford College. Noisy; but no harm. We’ve instructions to lave them
be.”

Disconsolate, Soapy ceased his unavailing racket. Would never a
policeman lay hands on him? In his fancy the Island seemed an
unattainable Arcadia. He buttoned his thin coat against the chilling
wind.

In a cigar store he saw a well-dressed man lighting a cigar at a
swinging light. His silk umbrella he had set by the door on entering.
Soapy stepped inside, secured the umbrella and sauntered off with it
slowly. The man at the cigar light followed hastily.

“My umbrella,” he said, sternly.

“Oh, is it?” sneered Soapy, adding insult to petit larceny. “Well, why
don’t you call a policeman? I took it. Your umbrella! Why don’t you
call a cop? There stands one on the corner.”

The umbrella owner slowed his steps. Soapy did likewise, with a
presentiment that luck would again run against him. The policeman
looked at the two curiously.

“Of course,” said the umbrella man—“that is—well, you know how these
mistakes occur—I—if it’s your umbrella I hope you’ll excuse me—I picked
it up this morning in a restaurant—If you recognise it as yours, why—I
hope you’ll—”

“Of course it’s mine,” said Soapy, viciously.

The ex-umbrella man retreated. The policeman hurried to assist a tall
blonde in an opera cloak across the street in front of a street car
that was approaching two blocks away.

Soapy walked eastward through a street damaged by improvements. He
hurled the umbrella wrathfully into an excavation. He muttered against
the men who wear helmets and carry clubs. Because he wanted to fall
into their clutches, they seemed to regard him as a king who could do
no wrong.

At length Soapy reached one of the avenues to the east where the
glitter and turmoil was but faint. He set his face down this toward
Madison Square, for the homing instinct survives even when the home is
a park bench.

But on an unusually quiet corner Soapy came to a standstill. Here was
an old church, quaint and rambling and gabled. Through one
violet-stained window a soft light glowed, where, no doubt, the
organist loitered over the keys, making sure of his mastery of the
coming Sabbath anthem. For there drifted out to Soapy’s ears sweet
music that caught and held him transfixed against the convolutions of
the iron fence.

The moon was above, lustrous and serene; vehicles and pedestrians were
few; sparrows twittered sleepily in the eaves—for a little while the
scene might have been a country churchyard. And the anthem that the
organist played cemented Soapy to the iron fence, for he had known it
well in the days when his life contained such things as mothers and
roses and ambitions and friends and immaculate thoughts and collars.

The conjunction of Soapy’s receptive state of mind and the influences
about the old church wrought a sudden and wonderful change in his soul.
He viewed with swift horror the pit into which he had tumbled, the
degraded days, unworthy desires, dead hopes, wrecked faculties and base
motives that made up his existence.

And also in a moment his heart responded thrillingly to this novel
mood. An instantaneous and strong impulse moved him to battle with his
desperate fate. He would pull himself out of the mire; he would make a
man of himself again; he would conquer the evil that had taken
possession of him. There was time; he was comparatively young yet; he
would resurrect his old eager ambitions and pursue them without
faltering. Those solemn but sweet organ notes had set up a revolution
in him. To-morrow he would go into the roaring downtown district and
find work. A fur importer had once offered him a place as driver. He
would find him to-morrow and ask for the position. He would be somebody
in the world. He would—

Soapy felt a hand laid on his arm. He looked quickly around into the
broad face of a policeman.

“What are you doin’ here?” asked the officer.

“Nothin’,” said Soapy.

“Then come along,” said the policeman.

“Three months on the Island,” said the Magistrate in the Police Court
the next morning.




AN ADJUSTMENT OF NATURE


In an art exhibition the other day I saw a painting that had been sold
for $5,000. The painter was a young scrub out of the West named Kraft,
who had a favourite food and a pet theory. His pabulum was an
unquenchable belief in the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature. His
theory was fixed around corned-beef hash with poached egg. There was a
story behind the picture, so I went home and let it drip out of a
fountain-pen. The idea of Kraft—but that is not the beginning of the
story.

Three years ago Kraft, Bill Judkins (a poet), and I took our meals at
Cypher’s, on Eighth Avenue. I say “took.” When we had money, Cypher got
it “off of” us, as he expressed it. We had no credit; we went in,
called for food and ate it. We paid or we did not pay. We had
confidence in Cypher’s sullenness and smouldering ferocity. Deep down
in his sunless soul he was either a prince, a fool or an artist. He sat
at a worm-eaten desk, covered with files of waiters’ checks so old that
I was sure the bottomest one was for clams that Hendrik Hudson had
eaten and paid for. Cypher had the power, in common with Napoleon III.
and the goggle-eyed perch, of throwing a film over his eyes, rendering
opaque the windows of his soul. Once when we left him unpaid, with
egregious excuses, I looked back and saw him shaking with inaudible
laughter behind his film. Now and then we paid up back scores.

But the chief thing at Cypher’s was Milly. Milly was a waitress. She
was a grand example of Kraft’s theory of the artistic adjustment of
nature. She belonged, largely, to waiting, as Minerva did to the art of
scrapping, or Venus to the science of serious flirtation. Pedestalled
and in bronze she might have stood with the noblest of her heroic
sisters as “Liver-and-Bacon Enlivening the World.” She belonged to
Cypher’s. You expected to see her colossal figure loom through that
reeking blue cloud of smoke from frying fat just as you expect the
Palisades to appear through a drifting Hudson River fog. There amid the
steam of vegetables and the vapours of acres of “ham and,” the crash of
crockery, the clatter of steel, the screaming of “short orders,” the
cries of the hungering and all the horrid tumult of feeding man,
surrounded by swarms of the buzzing winged beasts bequeathed us by
Pharaoh, Milly steered her magnificent way like some great liner
cleaving among the canoes of howling savages.

Our Goddess of Grub was built on lines so majestic that they could be
followed only with awe. Her sleeves were always rolled above her
elbows. She could have taken us three musketeers in her two hands and
dropped us out of the window. She had seen fewer years than any of us,
but she was of such superb Evehood and simplicity that she mothered us
from the beginning. Cypher’s store of eatables she poured out upon us
with royal indifference to price and quantity, as from a cornucopia
that knew no exhaustion. Her voice rang like a great silver bell; her
smile was many-toothed and frequent; she seemed like a yellow sunrise
on mountain tops. I never saw her but I thought of the Yosemite. And
yet, somehow, I could never think of her as existing outside of
Cypher’s. There nature had placed her, and she had taken root and grown
mightily. She seemed happy, and took her few poor dollars on Saturday
nights with the flushed pleasure of a child that receives an unexpected
donation.

It was Kraft who first voiced the fear that each of us must have held
latently. It came up apropos, of course, of certain questions of art at
which we were hammering. One of us compared the harmony existing
between a Haydn symphony and pistache ice cream to the exquisite
congruity between Milly and Cypher’s.

“There is a certain fate hanging over Milly,” said Kraft, “and if it
overtakes her she is lost to Cypher’s and to us.”

“She will grow fat?” asked Judkins, fearsomely.

“She will go to night school and become refined?” I ventured anxiously.

“It is this,” said Kraft, punctuating in a puddle of spilled coffee
with a stiff forefinger. “Caesar had his Brutus—the cotton has its
bollworm, the chorus girl has her Pittsburger, the summer boarder has
his poison ivy, the hero has his Carnegie medal, art has its Morgan,
the rose has its—”

“Speak,” I interrupted, much perturbed. “You do not think that Milly
will begin to lace?”

“One day,” concluded Kraft, solemnly, “there will come to Cypher’s for
a plate of beans a millionaire lumberman from Wisconsin, and he will
marry Milly.”

“Never!” exclaimed Judkins and I, in horror.

“A lumberman,” repeated Kraft, hoarsely.

“And a millionaire lumberman!” I sighed, despairingly.

“From Wisconsin!” groaned Judkins.

We agreed that the awful fate seemed to menace her. Few things were
less improbable. Milly, like some vast virgin stretch of pine woods,
was made to catch the lumberman’s eye. And well we knew the habits of
the Badgers, once fortune smiled upon them. Straight to New York they
hie, and lay their goods at the feet of the girl who serves them beans
in a beanery. Why, the alphabet itself connives. The Sunday newspaper’s
headliner’s work is cut for him.

“Winsome Waitress Wins Wealthy Wisconsin Woodsman.”

For a while we felt that Milly was on the verge of being lost to us.

It was our love of the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature that
inspired us. We could not give her over to a lumberman, doubly accursed
by wealth and provincialism. We shuddered to think of Milly, with her
voice modulated and her elbows covered, pouring tea in the marble
teepee of a tree murderer. No! In Cypher’s she belonged—in the bacon
smoke, the cabbage perfume, the grand, Wagnerian chorus of hurled
ironstone china and rattling casters.

Our fears must have been prophetic, for on that same evening the
wildwood discharged upon us Milly’s preordained confiscator—our fee to
adjustment and order. But Alaska and not Wisconsin bore the burden of
the visitation.

We were at our supper of beef stew and dried apples when he trotted in
as if on the heels of a dog team, and made one of the mess at our
table. With the freedom of the camps he assaulted our ears and claimed
the fellowship of men lost in the wilds of a hash house. We embraced
him as a specimen, and in three minutes we had all but died for one
another as friends.

He was rugged and bearded and wind-dried. He had just come off the
“trail,” he said, at one of the North River ferries. I fancied I could
see the snow dust of Chilcoot yet powdering his shoulders. And then he
strewed the table with the nuggets, stuffed ptarmigans, bead work and
seal pelts of the returned Klondiker, and began to prate to us of his
millions.

“Bank drafts for two millions,” was his summing up, “and a thousand a
day piling up from my claims. And now I want some beef stew and canned
peaches. I never got off the train since I mushed out of Seattle, and
I’m hungry. The stuff the niggers feed you on Pullmans don’t count. You
gentlemen order what you want.”

And then Milly loomed up with a thousand dishes on her bare arm—loomed
up big and white and pink and awful as Mount Saint Elias—with a smile
like day breaking in a gulch. And the Klondiker threw down his pelts
and nuggets as dross, and let his jaw fall half-way, and stared at her.
You could almost see the diamond tiaras on Milly’s brow and the
hand-embroidered silk Paris gowns that he meant to buy for her.

At last the bollworm had attacked the cotton—the poison ivy was
reaching out its tendrils to entwine the summer boarder—the millionaire
lumberman, thinly disguised as the Alaskan miner, was about to engulf
our Milly and upset Nature’s adjustment.

Kraft was the first to act. He leaped up and pounded the Klondiker’s
back. “Come out and drink,” he shouted. “Drink first and eat
afterward.” Judkins seized one arm and I the other. Gaily, roaringly,
irresistibly, in jolly-good-fellow style, we dragged him from the
restaurant to a café, stuffing his pockets with his embalmed birds and
indigestible nuggets.

There he rumbled a roughly good-humoured protest. “That’s the girl for
my money,” he declared. “She can eat out of my skillet the rest of her
life. Why, I never see such a fine girl. I’m going back there and ask
her to marry me. I guess she won’t want to sling hash any more when she
sees the pile of dust I’ve got.”

“You’ll take another whiskey and milk now,” Kraft persuaded, with
Satan’s smile. “I thought you up-country fellows were better sports.”

Kraft spent his puny store of coin at the bar and then gave Judkins and
me such an appealing look that we went down to the last dime we had in
toasting our guest.

Then, when our ammunition was gone and the Klondiker, still somewhat
sober, began to babble again of Milly, Kraft whispered into his ear
such a polite, barbed insult relating to people who were miserly with
their funds, that the miner crashed down handful after handful of
silver and notes, calling for all the fluids in the world to drown the
imputation.

Thus the work was accomplished. With his own guns we drove him from the
field. And then we had him carted to a distant small hotel and put to
bed with his nuggets and baby seal-skins stuffed around him.

“He will never find Cypher’s again,” said Kraft. “He will propose to
the first white apron he sees in a dairy restaurant to-morrow. And
Milly—I mean the Natural Adjustment—is saved!”

And back to Cypher’s went we three, and, finding customers scarce, we
joined hands and did an Indian dance with Milly in the centre.

This, I say, happened three years ago. And about that time a little
luck descended upon us three, and we were enabled to buy costlier and
less wholesome food than Cypher’s. Our paths separated, and I saw Kraft
no more and Judkins seldom.

But, as I said, I saw a painting the other day that was sold for
$5,000. The title was “Boadicea,” and the figure seemed to fill all
out-of-doors. But of all the picture’s admirers who stood before it, I
believe I was the only one who longed for Boadicea to stalk from her
frame, bringing me corned-beef hash with poached egg.

I hurried away to see Kraft. His satanic eyes were the same, his hair
was worse tangled, but his clothes had been made by a tailor.

“I didn’t know,” I said to him.

“We’ve bought a cottage in the Bronx with the money,” said he. “Any
evening at 7.”

“Then,” said I, “when you led us against the lumberman—the—Klondiker—it
wasn’t altogether on account of the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of
Nature?”

“Well, not altogether,” said Kraft, with a grin.




MEMOIRS OF A YELLOW DOG


I don’t suppose it will knock any of you people off your perch to read
a contribution from an animal. Mr. Kipling and a good many others have
demonstrated the fact that animals can express themselves in
remunerative English, and no magazine goes to press nowadays without an
animal story in it, except the old-style monthlies that are still
running pictures of Bryan and the Mont Pélee horror.

But you needn’t look for any stuck-up literature in my piece, such as
Bearoo, the bear, and Snakoo, the snake, and Tammanoo, the tiger, talk
in the jungle books. A yellow dog that’s spent most of his life in a
cheap New York flat, sleeping in a corner on an old sateen underskirt
(the one she spilled port wine on at the Lady Longshoremen’s banquet),
mustn’t be expected to perform any tricks with the art of speech.

I was born a yellow pup; date, locality, pedigree and weight unknown.
The first thing I can recollect, an old woman had me in a basket at
Broadway and Twenty-third trying to sell me to a fat lady. Old Mother
Hubbard was boosting me to beat the band as a genuine
Pomeranian-Hambletonian-Red-Irish-Cochin-China-Stoke-Pogis fox terrier.
The fat lady chased a V around among the samples of gros grain
flannelette in her shopping bag till she cornered it, and gave up. From
that moment I was a pet—a mamma’s own wootsey squidlums. Say, gentle
reader, did you ever have a 200-pound woman breathing a flavour of
Camembert cheese and Peau d’Espagne pick you up and wallop her nose all
over you, remarking all the time in an Emma Eames tone of voice: “Oh,
oo’s um oodlum, doodlum, woodlum, toodlum, bitsy-witsy skoodlums?”

From a pedigreed yellow pup I grew up to be an anonymous yellow cur
looking like a cross between an Angora cat and a box of lemons. But my
mistress never tumbled. She thought that the two primeval pups that
Noah chased into the ark were but a collateral branch of my ancestors.
It took two policemen to keep her from entering me at the Madison
Square Garden for the Siberian bloodhound prize.

I’ll tell you about that flat. The house was the ordinary thing in New
York, paved with Parian marble in the entrance hall and cobblestones
above the first floor. Our flat was three—well, not flights—climbs up.
My mistress rented it unfurnished, and put in the regular things—1903
antique unholstered parlour set, oil chromo of geishas in a Harlem tea
house, rubber plant and husband.

By Sirius! there was a biped I felt sorry for. He was a little man with
sandy hair and whiskers a good deal like mine. Henpecked?—well, toucans
and flamingoes and pelicans all had their bills in him. He wiped the
dishes and listened to my mistress tell about the cheap, ragged things
the lady with the squirrel-skin coat on the second floor hung out on
her line to dry. And every evening while she was getting supper she
made him take me out on the end of a string for a walk.

If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone they’d never
marry. Laura Lean Jibbey, peanut brittle, a little almond cream on the
neck muscles, dishes unwashed, half an hour’s talk with the iceman,
reading a package of old letters, a couple of pickles and two bottles
of malt extract, one hour peeking through a hole in the window shade
into the flat across the air-shaft—that’s about all there is to it.
Twenty minutes before time for him to come home from work she
straightens up the house, fixes her rat so it won’t show, and gets out
a lot of sewing for a ten-minute bluff.

I led a dog’s life in that flat. ‘Most all day I lay there in my corner
watching that fat woman kill time. I slept sometimes and had pipe
dreams about being out chasing cats into basements and growling at old
ladies with black mittens, as a dog was intended to do. Then she would
pounce upon me with a lot of that drivelling poodle palaver and kiss me
on the nose—but what could I do? A dog can’t chew cloves.

I began to feel sorry for Hubby, dog my cats if I didn’t. We looked so
much alike that people noticed it when we went out; so we shook the
streets that Morgan’s cab drives down, and took to climbing the piles
of last December’s snow on the streets where cheap people live.

One evening when we were thus promenading, and I was trying to look
like a prize St. Bernard, and the old man was trying to look like he
wouldn’t have murdered the first organ-grinder he heard play
Mendelssohn’s wedding-march, I looked up at him and said, in my way:

“What are you looking so sour about, you oakum trimmed lobster? She
don’t kiss you. You don’t have to sit on her lap and listen to talk
that would make the book of a musical comedy sound like the maxims of
Epictetus. You ought to be thankful you’re not a dog. Brace up,
Benedick, and bid the blues begone.”

The matrimonial mishap looked down at me with almost canine
intelligence in his face.

“Why, doggie,” says he, “good doggie. You almost look like you could
speak. What is it, doggie—Cats?”

Cats! Could speak!

But, of course, he couldn’t understand. Humans were denied the speech
of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and
men can get together is in fiction.

In the flat across the hall from us lived a lady with a black-and-tan
terrier. Her husband strung it and took it out every evening, but he
always came home cheerful and whistling. One day I touched noses with
the black-and-tan in the hall, and I struck him for an elucidation.

“See, here, Wiggle-and-Skip,” I says, “you know that it ain’t the
nature of a real man to play dry nurse to a dog in public. I never saw
one leashed to a bow-wow yet that didn’t look like he’d like to lick
every other man that looked at him. But your boss comes in every day as
perky and set up as an amateur prestidigitator doing the egg trick. How
does he do it? Don’t tell me he likes it.”

“Him?” says the black-and-tan. “Why, he uses Nature’s Own Remedy. He
gets spifflicated. At first when we go out he’s as shy as the man on
the steamer who would rather play pedro when they make ’em all
jackpots. By the time we’ve been in eight saloons he don’t care whether
the thing on the end of his line is a dog or a catfish. I’ve lost two
inches of my tail trying to sidestep those swinging doors.”

The pointer I got from that terrier—vaudeville please copy—set me to
thinking.

One evening about 6 o’clock my mistress ordered him to get busy and do
the ozone act for Lovey. I have concealed it until now, but that is
what she called me. The black-and-tan was called “Tweetness.” I
consider that I have the bulge on him as far as you could chase a
rabbit. Still “Lovey” is something of a nomenclatural tin can on the
tail of one’s self respect.

At a quiet place on a safe street I tightened the line of my custodian
in front of an attractive, refined saloon. I made a dead-ahead scramble
for the doors, whining like a dog in the press despatches that lets the
family know that little Alice is bogged while gathering lilies in the
brook.

“Why, darn my eyes,” says the old man, with a grin; “darn my eyes if
the saffron-coloured son of a seltzer lemonade ain’t asking me in to
take a drink. Lemme see—how long’s it been since I saved shoe leather
by keeping one foot on the foot-rest? I believe I’ll—”

I knew I had him. Hot Scotches he took, sitting at a table. For an hour
he kept the Campbells coming. I sat by his side rapping for the waiter
with my tail, and eating free lunch such as mamma in her flat never
equalled with her homemade truck bought at a delicatessen store eight
minutes before papa comes home.

When the products of Scotland were all exhausted except the rye bread
the old man unwound me from the table leg and played me outside like a
fisherman plays a salmon. Out there he took off my collar and threw it
into the street.

“Poor doggie,” says he; “good doggie. She shan’t kiss you any more. ’S
a darned shame. Good doggie, go away and get run over by a street car
and be happy.”

I refused to leave. I leaped and frisked around the old man’s legs
happy as a pug on a rug.

“You old flea-headed woodchuck-chaser,” I said to him—“you moon-baying,
rabbit-pointing, egg-stealing old beagle, can’t you see that I don’t
want to leave you? Can’t you see that we’re both Pups in the Wood and
the missis is the cruel uncle after you with the dish towel and me with
the flea liniment and a pink bow to tie on my tail. Why not cut that
all out and be pards forever more?”

Maybe you’ll say he didn’t understand—maybe he didn’t. But he kind of
got a grip on the Hot Scotches, and stood still for a minute, thinking.

“Doggie,” says he, finally, “we don’t live more than a dozen lives on
this earth, and very few of us live to be more than 300. If I ever see
that flat any more I’m a flat, and if you do you’re flatter; and that’s
no flattery. I’m offering 60 to 1 that Westward Ho wins out by the
length of a dachshund.”

There was no string, but I frolicked along with my master to the
Twenty-third street ferry. And the cats on the route saw reason to give
thanks that prehensile claws had been given them.

On the Jersey side my master said to a stranger who stood eating a
currant bun:

“Me and my doggie, we are bound for the Rocky Mountains.”

But what pleased me most was when my old man pulled both of my ears
until I howled, and said:
“You common, monkey-headed, rat-tailed, sulphur-coloured son of a door
mat, do you know what I’m going to call you?”

I thought of “Lovey,” and I whined dolefully.

“I’m going to call you ‘Pete,’” says my master; and if I’d had five
tails I couldn’t have done enough wagging to do justice to the
occasion.




THE LOVE-PHILTRE OF IKEY SCHOENSTEIN


The Blue Light Drug Store is downtown, between the Bowery and First
Avenue, where the distance between the two streets is the shortest. The
Blue Light does not consider that pharmacy is a thing of bric-a-brac,
scent and ice-cream soda. If you ask it for pain-killer it will not
give you a bonbon.

The Blue Light scorns the labour-saving arts of modern pharmacy. It
macerates its opium and percolates its own laudanum and paregoric. To
this day pills are made behind its tall prescription desk—pills rolled
out on its own pill-tile, divided with a spatula, rolled with the
finger and thumb, dusted with calcined magnesia and delivered in little
round pasteboard pill-boxes. The store is on a corner about which
coveys of ragged-plumed, hilarious children play and become candidates
for the cough drops and soothing syrups that wait for them inside.

Ikey Schoenstein was the night clerk of the Blue Light and the friend
of his customers. Thus it is on the East Side, where the heart of
pharmacy is not glacé. There, as it should be, the druggist is a
counsellor, a confessor, an adviser, an able and willing missionary and
mentor whose learning is respected, whose occult wisdom is venerated
and whose medicine is often poured, untasted, into the gutter.
Therefore Ikey’s corniform, be-spectacled nose and narrow,
knowledge-bowed figure was well known in the vicinity of the Blue
Light, and his advice and notice were much desired.

Ikey roomed and breakfasted at Mrs. Riddle’s two squares away. Mrs.
Riddle had a daughter named Rosy. The circumlocution has been in
vain—you must have guessed it—Ikey adored Rosy. She tinctured all his
thoughts; she was the compound extract of all that was chemically pure
and officinal—the dispensatory contained nothing equal to her. But Ikey
was timid, and his hopes remained insoluble in the menstruum of his
backwardness and fears. Behind his counter he was a superior being,
calmly conscious of special knowledge and worth; outside he was a
weak-kneed, purblind, motorman-cursed rambler, with ill-fitting clothes
stained with chemicals and smelling of socotrine aloes and valerianate
of ammonia.

The fly in Ikey’s ointment (thrice welcome, pat trope!) was Chunk
McGowan.

Mr. McGowan was also striving to catch the bright smiles tossed about
by Rosy. But he was no outfielder as Ikey was; he picked them off the
bat. At the same time he was Ikey’s friend and customer, and often
dropped in at the Blue Light Drug Store to have a bruise painted with
iodine or get a cut rubber-plastered after a pleasant evening spent
along the Bowery.

One afternoon McGowan drifted in in his silent, easy way, and sat,
comely, smooth-faced, hard, indomitable, good-natured, upon a stool.

“Ikey,” said he, when his friend had fetched his mortar and sat
opposite, grinding gum benzoin to a powder, “get busy with your ear.
It’s drugs for me if you’ve got the line I need.”

Ikey scanned the countenance of Mr. McGowan for the usual evidences of
conflict, but found none.

“Take your coat off,” he ordered. “I guess already that you have been
stuck in the ribs with a knife. I have many times told you those Dagoes
would do you up.”

Mr. McGowan smiled. “Not them,” he said. “Not any Dagoes. But you’ve
located the diagnosis all right enough—it’s under my coat, near the
ribs. Say! Ikey—Rosy and me are goin’ to run away and get married
to-night.”

Ikey’s left forefinger was doubled over the edge of the mortar, holding
it steady. He gave it a wild rap with the pestle, but felt it not.
Meanwhile Mr. McGowan’s smile faded to a look of perplexed gloom.

“That is,” he continued, “if she keeps in the notion until the time
comes. We’ve been layin’ pipes for the getaway for two weeks. One day
she says she will; the same evenin’ she says nixy. We’ve agreed on
to-night, and Rosy’s stuck to the affirmative this time for two whole
days. But it’s five hours yet till the time, and I’m afraid she’ll
stand me up when it comes to the scratch.”

“You said you wanted drugs,” remarked Ikey.

Mr. McGowan looked ill at ease and harassed—a condition opposed to his
usual line of demeanour. He made a patent-medicine almanac into a roll
and fitted it with unprofitable carefulness about his finger.

“I wouldn’t have this double handicap make a false start to-night for a
million,” he said. “I’ve got a little flat up in Harlem all ready, with
chrysanthemums on the table and a kettle ready to boil. And I’ve
engaged a pulpit pounder to be ready at his house for us at 9.30. It’s
got to come off. And if Rosy don’t change her mind again!”—Mr. McGowan
ceased, a prey to his doubts.

“I don’t see then yet,” said Ikey, shortly, “what makes it that you
talk of drugs, or what I can be doing about it.”

“Old man Riddle don’t like me a little bit,” went on the uneasy suitor,
bent upon marshalling his arguments. “For a week he hasn’t let Rosy
step outside the door with me. If it wasn’t for losin’ a boarder they’d
have bounced me long ago. I’m makin’ $20 a week and she’ll never regret
flyin’ the coop with Chunk McGowan.”

“You will excuse me, Chunk,” said Ikey. “I must make a prescription
that is to be called for soon.”

“Say,” said McGowan, looking up suddenly, “say, Ikey, ain’t there a
drug of some kind—some kind of powders that’ll make a girl like you
better if you give ’em to her?”

Ikey’s lip beneath his nose curled with the scorn of superior
enlightenment; but before he could answer, McGowan continued:

“Tim Lacy told me he got some once from a croaker uptown and fed ’em to
his girl in soda water. From the very first dose he was ace-high and
everybody else looked like thirty cents to her. They was married in
less than two weeks.”

Strong and simple was Chunk McGowan. A better reader of men than Ikey
was could have seen that his tough frame was strung upon fine wires.
Like a good general who was about to invade the enemy’s territory he
was seeking to guard every point against possible failure.

“I thought,” went on Chunk hopefully, “that if I had one of them
powders to give Rosy when I see her at supper to-night it might brace
her up and keep her from reneging on the proposition to skip. I guess
she don’t need a mule team to drag her away, but women are better at
coaching than they are at running bases. If the stuff’ll work just for
a couple of hours it’ll do the trick.”

“When is this foolishness of running away to be happening?” asked Ikey.

“Nine o’clock,” said Mr. McGowan. “Supper’s at seven. At eight Rosy
goes to bed with a headache. At nine old Parvenzano lets me through to
his back yard, where there’s a board off Riddle’s fence, next door. I
go under her window and help her down the fire-escape. We’ve got to
make it early on the preacher’s account. It’s all dead easy if Rosy
don’t balk when the flag drops. Can you fix me one of them powders,
Ikey?”

Ikey Schoenstein rubbed his nose slowly.

“Chunk,” said he, “it is of drugs of that nature that pharmaceutists
must have much carefulness. To you alone of my acquaintance would I
intrust a powder like that. But for you I shall make it, and you shall
see how it makes Rosy to think of you.”

Ikey went behind the prescription desk. There he crushed to a powder
two soluble tablets, each containing a quarter of a grain of morphia.
To them he added a little sugar of milk to increase the bulk, and
folded the mixture neatly in a white paper. Taken by an adult this
powder would insure several hours of heavy slumber without danger to
the sleeper. This he handed to Chunk McGowan, telling him to administer
it in a liquid if possible, and received the hearty thanks of the
backyard Lochinvar.

The subtlety of Ikey’s action becomes apparent upon recital of his
subsequent move. He sent a messenger for Mr. Riddle and disclosed the
plans of Mr. McGowan for eloping with Rosy. Mr. Riddle was a stout man,
brick-dusty of complexion and sudden in action.

“Much obliged,” he said, briefly, to Ikey. “The lazy Irish loafer! My
own room’s just above Rosy’s. I’ll just go up there myself after supper
and load the shot-gun and wait. If he comes in my back yard he’ll go
away in a ambulance instead of a bridal chaise.”

With Rosy held in the clutches of Morpheus for a many-hours deep
slumber, and the bloodthirsty parent waiting, armed and forewarned,
Ikey felt that his rival was close, indeed, upon discomfiture.

All night in the Blue Light Drug Store he waited at his duties for
chance news of the tragedy, but none came.

At eight o’clock in the morning the day clerk arrived and Ikey started
hurriedly for Mrs. Riddle’s to learn the outcome. And, lo! as he
stepped out of the store who but Chunk McGowan sprang from a passing
street car and grasped his hand—Chunk McGowan with a victor’s smile and
flushed with joy.

“Pulled it off,” said Chunk with Elysium in his grin. “Rosy hit the
fire-escape on time to a second, and we was under the wire at the
Reverend’s at 9.30¼. She’s up at the flat—she cooked eggs this mornin’
in a blue kimono—Lord! how lucky I am! You must pace up some day, Ikey,
and feed with us. I’ve got a job down near the bridge, and that’s where
I’m heading for now.”

“The—the—powder?” stammered Ikey.

“Oh, that stuff you gave me!” said Chunk, broadening his grin; “well,
it was this way. I sat down at the supper table last night at Riddle’s,
and I looked at Rosy, and I says to myself, ‘Chunk, if you get the girl
get her on the square—don’t try any hocus-pocus with a thoroughbred
like her.’ And I keeps the paper you give me in my pocket. And then my
lamps fall on another party present, who, I says to myself, is failin’
in a proper affection toward his comin’ son-in-law, so I watches my
chance and dumps that powder in old man Riddle’s coffee—see?”




MAMMON AND THE ARCHER


Old Anthony Rockwall, retired manufacturer and proprietor of Rockwall’s
Eureka Soap, looked out the library window of his Fifth Avenue mansion
and grinned. His neighbour to the right—the aristocratic clubman, G.
Van Schuylight Suffolk-Jones—came out to his waiting motor-car,
wrinkling a contumelious nostril, as usual, at the Italian renaissance
sculpture of the soap palace’s front elevation.

“Stuck-up old statuette of nothing doing!” commented the ex-Soap King.
“The Eden Musee’ll get that old frozen Nesselrode yet if he don’t watch
out. I’ll have this house painted red, white, and blue next summer and
see if that’ll make his Dutch nose turn up any higher.”

And then Anthony Rockwall, who never cared for bells, went to the door
of his library and shouted “Mike!” in the same voice that had once
chipped off pieces of the welkin on the Kansas prairies.

“Tell my son,” said Anthony to the answering menial, “to come in here
before he leaves the house.”

When young Rockwall entered the library the old man laid aside his
newspaper, looked at him with a kindly grimness on his big, smooth,
ruddy countenance, rumpled his mop of white hair with one hand and
rattled the keys in his pocket with the other.

“Richard,” said Anthony Rockwall, “what do you pay for the soap that
you use?”

Richard, only six months home from college, was startled a little. He
had not yet taken the measure of this sire of his, who was as full of
unexpectednesses as a girl at her first party.

“Six dollars a dozen, I think, dad.”

“And your clothes?”

“I suppose about sixty dollars, as a rule.”

“You’re a gentleman,” said Anthony, decidedly. “I’ve heard of these
young bloods spending $24 a dozen for soap, and going over the hundred
mark for clothes. You’ve got as much money to waste as any of ’em, and
yet you stick to what’s decent and moderate. Now I use the old
Eureka—not only for sentiment, but it’s the purest soap made. Whenever
you pay more than 10 cents a cake for soap you buy bad perfumes and
labels. But 50 cents is doing very well for a young man in your
generation, position and condition. As I said, you’re a gentleman. They
say it takes three generations to make one. They’re off. Money’ll do it
as slick as soap grease. It’s made you one. By hokey! it’s almost made
one of me. I’m nearly as impolite and disagreeable and ill-mannered as
these two old Knickerbocker gents on each side of me that can’t sleep
of nights because I bought in between ’em.”

“There are some things that money can’t accomplish,” remarked young
Rockwall, rather gloomily.

“Now, don’t say that,” said old Anthony, shocked. “I bet my money on
money every time. I’ve been through the encyclopaedia down to Y looking
for something you can’t buy with it; and I expect to have to take up
the appendix next week. I’m for money against the field. Tell me
something money won’t buy.”

“For one thing,” answered Richard, rankling a little, “it won’t buy one
into the exclusive circles of society.”

“Oho! won’t it?” thundered the champion of the root of evil. “You tell
me where your exclusive circles would be if the first Astor hadn’t had
the money to pay for his steerage passage over?”

Richard sighed.

“And that’s what I was coming to,” said the old man, less boisterously.
“That’s why I asked you to come in. There’s something going wrong with
you, boy. I’ve been noticing it for two weeks. Out with it. I guess I
could lay my hands on eleven millions within twenty-four hours, besides
the real estate. If it’s your liver, there’s the _Rambler_ down in the
bay, coaled, and ready to steam down to the Bahamas in two days.”

“Not a bad guess, dad; you haven’t missed it far.”

“Ah,” said Anthony, keenly; “what’s her name?”

Richard began to walk up and down the library floor. There was enough
comradeship and sympathy in this crude old father of his to draw his
confidence.

“Why don’t you ask her?” demanded old Anthony. “She’ll jump at you.
You’ve got the money and the looks, and you’re a decent boy. Your hands
are clean. You’ve got no Eureka soap on ’em. You’ve been to college,
but she’ll overlook that.”

“I haven’t had a chance,” said Richard.

“Make one,” said Anthony. “Take her for a walk in the park, or a straw
ride, or walk home with her from church. Chance! Pshaw!”

“You don’t know the social mill, dad. She’s part of the stream that
turns it. Every hour and minute of her time is arranged for days in
advance. I must have that girl, dad, or this town is a blackjack swamp
forevermore. And I can’t write it—I can’t do that.”

“Tut!” said the old man. “Do you mean to tell me that with all the
money I’ve got you can’t get an hour or two of a girl’s time for
yourself?”

“I’ve put it off too late. She’s going to sail for Europe at noon day
after to-morrow for a two years’ stay. I’m to see her alone to-morrow
evening for a few minutes. She’s at Larchmont now at her aunt’s. I
can’t go there. But I’m allowed to meet her with a cab at the Grand
Central Station to-morrow evening at the 8.30 train. We drive down
Broadway to Wallack’s at a gallop, where her mother and a box party
will be waiting for us in the lobby. Do you think she would listen to a
declaration from me during that six or eight minutes under those
circumstances? No. And what chance would I have in the theatre or
afterward? None. No, dad, this is one tangle that your money can’t
unravel. We can’t buy one minute of time with cash; if we could, rich
people would live longer. There’s no hope of getting a talk with Miss
Lantry before she sails.”

“All right, Richard, my boy,” said old Anthony, cheerfully. “You may
run along down to your club now. I’m glad it ain’t your liver. But
don’t forget to burn a few punk sticks in the joss house to the great
god Mazuma from time to time. You say money won’t buy time? Well, of
course, you can’t order eternity wrapped up and delivered at your
residence for a price, but I’ve seen Father Time get pretty bad stone
bruises on his heels when he walked through the gold diggings.”

That night came Aunt Ellen, gentle, sentimental, wrinkled, sighing,
oppressed by wealth, in to Brother Anthony at his evening paper, and
began discourse on the subject of lovers’ woes.

“He told me all about it,” said brother Anthony, yawning. “I told him
my bank account was at his service. And then he began to knock money.
Said money couldn’t help. Said the rules of society couldn’t be bucked
for a yard by a team of ten-millionaires.”

“Oh, Anthony,” sighed Aunt Ellen, “I wish you would not think so much
of money. Wealth is nothing where a true affection is concerned. Love
is all-powerful. If he only had spoken earlier! She could not have
refused our Richard. But now I fear it is too late. He will have no
opportunity to address her. All your gold cannot bring happiness to
your son.”

At eight o’clock the next evening Aunt Ellen took a quaint old gold
ring from a moth-eaten case and gave it to Richard.

“Wear it to-night, nephew,” she begged. “Your mother gave it to me.
Good luck in love she said it brought. She asked me to give it to you
when you had found the one you loved.”

Young Rockwall took the ring reverently and tried it on his smallest
finger. It slipped as far as the second joint and stopped. He took it
off and stuffed it into his vest pocket, after the manner of man. And
then he ’phoned for his cab.

At the station he captured Miss Lantry out of the gadding mob at eight
thirty-two.

“We mustn’t keep mamma and the others waiting,” said she.

“To Wallack’s Theatre as fast as you can drive!” said Richard loyally.

They whirled up Forty-second to Broadway, and then down the
white-starred lane that leads from the soft meadows of sunset to the
rocky hills of morning.

At Thirty-fourth Street young Richard quickly thrust up the trap and
ordered the cabman to stop.

“I’ve dropped a ring,” he apologised, as he climbed out. “It was my
mother’s, and I’d hate to lose it. I won’t detain you a minute—I saw
where it fell.”

In less than a minute he was back in the cab with the ring.

But within that minute a crosstown car had stopped directly in front of
the cab. The cabman tried to pass to the left, but a heavy express
wagon cut him off. He tried the right, and had to back away from a
furniture van that had no business to be there. He tried to back out,
but dropped his reins and swore dutifully. He was blockaded in a
tangled mess of vehicles and horses.

One of those street blockades had occurred that sometimes tie up
commerce and movement quite suddenly in the big city.

“Why don’t you drive on?” said Miss Lantry, impatiently. “We’ll be
late.”

Richard stood up in the cab and looked around. He saw a congested flood
of wagons, trucks, cabs, vans and street cars filling the vast space
where Broadway, Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth street cross one another
as a twenty-six inch maiden fills her twenty-two inch girdle. And still
from all the cross streets they were hurrying and rattling toward the
converging point at full speed, and hurling themselves into the
struggling mass, locking wheels and adding their drivers’ imprecations
to the clamour. The entire traffic of Manhattan seemed to have jammed
itself around them. The oldest New Yorker among the thousands of
spectators that lined the sidewalks had not witnessed a street blockade
of the proportions of this one.

“I’m very sorry,” said Richard, as he resumed his seat, “but it looks
as if we are stuck. They won’t get this jumble loosened up in an hour.
It was my fault. If I hadn’t dropped the ring we—”

“Let me see the ring,” said Miss Lantry. “Now that it can’t be helped,
I don’t care. I think theatres are stupid, anyway.”

At 11 o’clock that night somebody tapped lightly on Anthony Rockwall’s
door.

“Come in,” shouted Anthony, who was in a red dressing-gown, reading a
book of piratical adventures.

Somebody was Aunt Ellen, looking like a grey-haired angel that had been
left on earth by mistake.

“They’re engaged, Anthony,” she said, softly. “She has promised to
marry our Richard. On their way to the theatre there was a street
blockade, and it was two hours before their cab could get out of it.

“And oh, brother Anthony, don’t ever boast of the power of money again.
A little emblem of true love—a little ring that symbolised unending and
unmercenary affection—was the cause of our Richard finding his
happiness. He dropped it in the street, and got out to recover it. And
before they could continue the blockade occurred. He spoke to his love
and won her there while the cab was hemmed in. Money is dross compared
with true love, Anthony.”

“All right,” said old Anthony. “I’m glad the boy has got what he
wanted. I told him I wouldn’t spare any expense in the matter if—”

“But, brother Anthony, what good could your money have done?”

“Sister,” said Anthony Rockwall. “I’ve got my pirate in a devil of a
scrape. His ship has just been scuttled, and he’s too good a judge of
the value of money to let drown. I wish you would let me go on with
this chapter.”

The story should end here. I wish it would as heartily as you who read
it wish it did. But we must go to the bottom of the well for truth.

The next day a person with red hands and a blue polka-dot necktie, who
called himself Kelly, called at Anthony Rockwall’s house, and was at
once received in the library.

“Well,” said Anthony, reaching for his chequebook, “it was a good
bilin’ of soap. Let’s see—you had $5,000 in cash.”

“I paid out $300 more of my own,” said Kelly. “I had to go a little
above the estimate. I got the express wagons and cabs mostly for $5;
but the trucks and two-horse teams mostly raised me to $10. The
motormen wanted $10, and some of the loaded teams $20. The cops struck
me hardest—$50 I paid two, and the rest $20 and $25. But didn’t it work
beautiful, Mr. Rockwall? I’m glad William A. Brady wasn’t onto that
little outdoor vehicle mob scene. I wouldn’t want William to break his
heart with jealousy. And never a rehearsal, either! The boys was on
time to the fraction of a second. It was two hours before a snake could
get below Greeley’s statue.”

“Thirteen hundred—there you are, Kelly,” said Anthony, tearing off a
check. “Your thousand, and the $300 you were out. You don’t despise
money, do you, Kelly?”

“Me?” said Kelly. “I can lick the man that invented poverty.”

Anthony called Kelly when he was at the door.

“You didn’t notice,” said he, “anywhere in the tie-up, a kind of a fat
boy without any clothes on shooting arrows around with a bow, did you?”

“Why, no,” said Kelly, mystified. “I didn’t. If he was like you say,
maybe the cops pinched him before I got there.”

“I thought the little rascal wouldn’t be on hand,” chuckled Anthony.
“Good-by, Kelly.”




SPRINGTIME À LA CARTE


It was a day in March.

Never, never begin a story this way when you write one. No opening
could possibly be worse. It is unimaginative, flat, dry and likely to
consist of mere wind. But in this instance it is allowable. For the
following paragraph, which should have inaugurated the narrative, is
too wildly extravagant and preposterous to be flaunted in the face of
the reader without preparation.

Sarah was crying over her bill of fare.

Think of a New York girl shedding tears on the menu card!

To account for this you will be allowed to guess that the lobsters were
all out, or that she had sworn ice-cream off during Lent, or that she
had ordered onions, or that she had just come from a Hackett matinee.
And then, all these theories being wrong, you will please let the story
proceed.

The gentleman who announced that the world was an oyster which he with
his sword would open made a larger hit than he deserved. It is not
difficult to open an oyster with a sword. But did you ever notice any
one try to open the terrestrial bivalve with a typewriter? Like to wait
for a dozen raw opened that way?

Sarah had managed to pry apart the shells with her unhandy weapon far
enough to nibble a wee bit at the cold and clammy world within. She
knew no more shorthand than if she had been a graduate in stenography
just let slip upon the world by a business college. So, not being able
to stenog, she could not enter that bright galaxy of office talent. She
was a free-lance typewriter and canvassed for odd jobs of copying.

The most brilliant and crowning feat of Sarah’s battle with the world
was the deal she made with Schulenberg’s Home Restaurant. The
restaurant was next door to the old red brick in which she hall-roomed.
One evening after dining at Schulenberg’s 40-cent, five-course _table
d’hôte_ (served as fast as you throw the five baseballs at the coloured
gentleman’s head) Sarah took away with her the bill of fare. It was
written in an almost unreadable script neither English nor German, and
so arranged that if you were not careful you began with a toothpick and
rice pudding and ended with soup and the day of the week.

The next day Sarah showed Schulenberg a neat card on which the menu was
beautifully typewritten with the viands temptingly marshalled under
their right and proper heads from “hors d’oeuvre” to “not responsible
for overcoats and umbrellas.”

Schulenberg became a naturalised citizen on the spot. Before Sarah left
him she had him willingly committed to an agreement. She was to furnish
typewritten bills of fare for the twenty-one tables in the restaurant—a
new bill for each day’s dinner, and new ones for breakfast and lunch as
often as changes occurred in the food or as neatness required.

In return for this Schulenberg was to send three meals per diem to
Sarah’s hall room by a waiter—an obsequious one if possible—and furnish
her each afternoon with a pencil draft of what Fate had in store for
Schulenberg’s customers on the morrow.

Mutual satisfaction resulted from the agreement. Schulenberg’s patrons
now knew what the food they ate was called even if its nature sometimes
puzzled them. And Sarah had food during a cold, dull winter, which was
the main thing with her.

And then the almanac lied, and said that spring had come. Spring comes
when it comes. The frozen snows of January still lay like adamant in
the crosstown streets. The hand-organs still played “In the Good Old
Summertime,” with their December vivacity and expression. Men began to
make thirty-day notes to buy Easter dresses. Janitors shut off steam.
And when these things happen one may know that the city is still in the
clutches of winter.

One afternoon Sarah shivered in her elegant hall bedroom; “house
heated; scrupulously clean; conveniences; seen to be appreciated.” She
had no work to do except Schulenberg’s menu cards. Sarah sat in her
squeaky willow rocker, and looked out the window. The calendar on the
wall kept crying to her: “Springtime is here, Sarah—springtime is here,
I tell you. Look at me, Sarah, my figures show it. You’ve got a neat
figure yourself, Sarah—a—nice springtime figure—why do you look out the
window so sadly?”

Sarah’s room was at the back of the house. Looking out the window she
could see the windowless rear brick wall of the box factory on the next
street. But the wall was clearest crystal; and Sarah was looking down a
grassy lane shaded with cherry trees and elms and bordered with
raspberry bushes and Cherokee roses.

Spring’s real harbingers are too subtle for the eye and ear. Some must
have the flowering crocus, the wood-starring dogwood, the voice of
bluebird—even so gross a reminder as the farewell handshake of the
retiring buckwheat and oyster before they can welcome the Lady in Green
to their dull bosoms. But to old earth’s choicest kin there come
straight, sweet messages from his newest bride, telling them they shall
be no stepchildren unless they choose to be.

On the previous summer Sarah had gone into the country and loved a
farmer.

(In writing your story never hark back thus. It is bad art, and
cripples interest. Let it march, march.)

Sarah stayed two weeks at Sunnybrook Farm. There she learned to love
old Farmer Franklin’s son Walter. Farmers have been loved and wedded
and turned out to grass in less time. But young Walter Franklin was a
modern agriculturist. He had a telephone in his cow house, and he could
figure up exactly what effect next year’s Canada wheat crop would have
on potatoes planted in the dark of the moon.

It was in this shaded and raspberried lane that Walter had wooed and
won her. And together they had sat and woven a crown of dandelions for
her hair. He had immoderately praised the effect of the yellow blossoms
against her brown tresses; and she had left the chaplet there, and
walked back to the house swinging her straw sailor in her hands.

They were to marry in the spring—at the very first signs of spring,
Walter said. And Sarah came back to the city to pound her typewriter.

A knock at the door dispelled Sarah’s visions of that happy day. A
waiter had brought the rough pencil draft of the Home Restaurant’s next
day fare in old Schulenberg’s angular hand.

Sarah sat down to her typewriter and slipped a card between the
rollers. She was a nimble worker. Generally in an hour and a half the
twenty-one menu cards were written and ready.

To-day there were more changes on the bill of fare than usual. The
soups were lighter; pork was eliminated from the entrées, figuring only
with Russian turnips among the roasts. The gracious spirit of spring
pervaded the entire menu. Lamb, that lately capered on the greening
hillsides, was becoming exploited with the sauce that commemorated its
gambols. The song of the oyster, though not silenced, was _dimuendo con
amore_. The frying-pan seemed to be held, inactive, behind the
beneficent bars of the broiler. The pie list swelled; the richer
puddings had vanished; the sausage, with his drapery wrapped about him,
barely lingered in a pleasant thanatopsis with the buckwheats and the
sweet but doomed maple.

Sarah’s fingers danced like midges above a summer stream. Down through
the courses she worked, giving each item its position according to its
length with an accurate eye. Just above the desserts came the list of
vegetables. Carrots and peas, asparagus on toast, the perennial
tomatoes and corn and succotash, lima beans, cabbage—and then—

Sarah was crying over her bill of fare. Tears from the depths of some
divine despair rose in her heart and gathered to her eyes. Down went
her head on the little typewriter stand; and the keyboard rattled a dry
accompaniment to her moist sobs.

For she had received no letter from Walter in two weeks, and the next
item on the bill of fare was dandelions—dandelions with some kind of
egg—but bother the egg!—dandelions, with whose golden blooms Walter had
crowned her his queen of love and future bride—dandelions, the
harbingers of spring, her sorrow’s crown of sorrow—reminder of her
happiest days.

Madam, I dare you to smile until you suffer this test: Let the Marechal
Niel roses that Percy brought you on the night you gave him your heart
be served as a salad with French dressing before your eyes at a
Schulenberg _table d’hôte_. Had Juliet so seen her love tokens
dishonoured the sooner would she have sought the lethean herbs of the
good apothecary.

But what a witch is Spring! Into the great cold city of stone and iron
a message had to be sent. There was none to convey it but the little
hardy courier of the fields with his rough green coat and modest air.
He is a true soldier of fortune, this _dent-de-lion_—this lion’s tooth,
as the French chefs call him. Flowered, he will assist at love-making,
wreathed in my lady’s nut-brown hair; young and callow and unblossomed,
he goes into the boiling pot and delivers the word of his sovereign
mistress.

By and by Sarah forced back her tears. The cards must be written. But,
still in a faint, golden glow from her dandeleonine dream, she fingered
the typewriter keys absently for a little while, with her mind and
heart in the meadow lane with her young farmer. But soon she came
swiftly back to the rock-bound lanes of Manhattan, and the typewriter
began to rattle and jump like a strike-breaker’s motor car.

At 6 o’clock the waiter brought her dinner and carried away the
typewritten bill of fare. When Sarah ate she set aside, with a sigh,
the dish of dandelions with its crowning ovarious accompaniment. As
this dark mass had been transformed from a bright and love-indorsed
flower to be an ignominious vegetable, so had her summer hopes wilted
and perished. Love may, as Shakespeare said, feed on itself: but Sarah
could not bring herself to eat the dandelions that had graced, as
ornaments, the first spiritual banquet of her heart’s true affection.

At 7:30 the couple in the next room began to quarrel: the man in the
room above sought for A on his flute; the gas went a little lower;
three coal wagons started to unload—the only sound of which the
phonograph is jealous; cats on the back fences slowly retreated toward
Mukden. By these signs Sarah knew that it was time for her to read. She
got out “The Cloister and the Hearth,” the best non-selling book of the
month, settled her feet on her trunk, and began to wander with Gerard.

The front door bell rang. The landlady answered it. Sarah left Gerard
and Denys treed by a bear and listened. Oh, yes; you would, just as she
did!

And then a strong voice was heard in the hall below, and Sarah jumped
for her door, leaving the book on the floor and the first round easily
the bear’s. You have guessed it. She reached the top of the stairs just
as her farmer came up, three at a jump, and reaped and garnered her,
with nothing left for the gleaners.

“Why haven’t you written—oh, why?” cried Sarah.

“New York is a pretty large town,” said Walter Franklin. “I came in a
week ago to your old address. I found that you went away on a Thursday.
That consoled some; it eliminated the possible Friday bad luck. But it
didn’t prevent my hunting for you with police and otherwise ever since!

“I wrote!” said Sarah, vehemently.

“Never got it!”

“Then how did you find me?”

The young farmer smiled a springtime smile.

“I dropped into that Home Restaurant next door this evening,” said he.
“I don’t care who knows it; I like a dish of some kind of greens at
this time of the year. I ran my eye down that nice typewritten bill of
fare looking for something in that line. When I got below cabbage I
turned my chair over and hollered for the proprietor. He told me where
you lived.”

“I remember,” sighed Sarah, happily. “That was dandelions below
cabbage.”

“I’d know that cranky capital W way above the line that your typewriter
makes anywhere in the world,” said Franklin.

“Why, there’s no W in dandelions,” said Sarah, in surprise.

The young man drew the bill of fare from his pocket, and pointed to a
line.

Sarah recognised the first card she had typewritten that afternoon.
There was still the rayed splotch in the upper right-hand corner where
a tear had fallen. But over the spot where one should have read the
name of the meadow plant, the clinging memory of their golden blossoms
had allowed her fingers to strike strange keys.

Between the red cabbage and the stuffed green peppers was the item:

“DEAREST WALTER, WITH HARD-BOILED EGG.”




THE GREEN DOOR


Suppose you should be walking down Broadway after dinner, with ten
minutes allotted to the consummation of your cigar while you are
choosing between a diverting tragedy and something serious in the way
of vaudeville. Suddenly a hand is laid upon your arm. You turn to look
into the thrilling eyes of a beautiful woman, wonderful in diamonds and
Russian sables. She thrusts hurriedly into your hand an extremely hot
buttered roll, flashes out a tiny pair of scissors, snips off the
second button of your overcoat, meaningly ejaculates the one word,
“parallelogram!” and swiftly flies down a cross street, looking back
fearfully over her shoulder.

That would be pure adventure. Would you accept it? Not you. You would
flush with embarrassment; you would sheepishly drop the roll and
continue down Broadway, fumbling feebly for the missing button. This
you would do unless you are one of the blessed few in whom the pure
spirit of adventure is not dead.

True adventurers have never been plentiful. They who are set down in
print as such have been mostly business men with newly invented
methods. They have been out after the things they wanted—golden
fleeces, holy grails, lady loves, treasure, crowns and fame. The true
adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet
unknown fate. A fine example was the Prodigal Son—when he started back
home.

Half-adventurers—brave and splendid figures—have been numerous. From
the Crusades to the Palisades they have enriched the arts of history
and fiction and the trade of historical fiction. But each of them had a
prize to win, a goal to kick, an axe to grind, a race to run, a new
thrust in tierce to deliver, a name to carve, a crow to pick—so they
were not followers of true adventure.

In the big city the twin spirits Romance and Adventure are always
abroad seeking worthy wooers. As we roam the streets they slyly peep at
us and challenge us in twenty different guises. Without knowing why, we
look up suddenly to see in a window a face that seems to belong to our
gallery of intimate portraits; in a sleeping thoroughfare we hear a cry
of agony and fear coming from an empty and shuttered house; instead of
at our familiar curb, a cab-driver deposits us before a strange door,
which one, with a smile, opens for us and bids us enter; a slip of
paper, written upon, flutters down to our feet from the high lattices
of Chance; we exchange glances of instantaneous hate, affection and
fear with hurrying strangers in the passing crowds; a sudden douse of
rain—and our umbrella may be sheltering the daughter of the Full Moon
and first cousin of the Sidereal System; at every corner handkerchiefs
drop, fingers beckon, eyes besiege, and the lost, the lonely, the
rapturous, the mysterious, the perilous, changing clues of adventure
are slipped into our fingers. But few of us are willing to hold and
follow them. We are grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down our
backs. We pass on; and some day we come, at the end of a very dull
life, to reflect that our romance has been a pallid thing of a marriage
or two, a satin rosette kept in a safe-deposit drawer, and a lifelong
feud with a steam radiator.

Rudolf Steiner was a true adventurer. Few were the evenings on which he
did not go forth from his hall bedchamber in search of the unexpected
and the egregious. The most interesting thing in life seemed to him to
be what might lie just around the next corner. Sometimes his
willingness to tempt fate led him into strange paths. Twice he had
spent the night in a station-house; again and again he had found
himself the dupe of ingenious and mercenary tricksters; his watch and
money had been the price of one flattering allurement. But with
undiminished ardour he picked up every glove cast before him into the
merry lists of adventure.

One evening Rudolf was strolling along a crosstown street in the older
central part of the city. Two streams of people filled the
sidewalks—the home-hurrying, and that restless contingent that abandons
home for the specious welcome of the thousand-candle-power _table
d’hôte_.

The young adventurer was of pleasing presence, and moved serenely and
watchfully. By daylight he was a salesman in a piano store. He wore his
tie drawn through a topaz ring instead of fastened with a stick pin;
and once he had written to the editor of a magazine that “Junie’s Love
Test” by Miss Libbey, had been the book that had most influenced his
life.

During his walk a violent chattering of teeth in a glass case on the
sidewalk seemed at first to draw his attention (with a qualm), to a
restaurant before which it was set; but a second glance revealed the
electric letters of a dentist’s sign high above the next door. A giant
negro, fantastically dressed in a red embroidered coat, yellow trousers
and a military cap, discreetly distributed cards to those of the
passing crowd who consented to take them.

This mode of dentistic advertising was a common sight to Rudolf.
Usually he passed the dispenser of the dentist’s cards without reducing
his store; but tonight the African slipped one into his hand so deftly
that he retained it there smiling a little at the successful feat.

When he had travelled a few yards further he glanced at the card
indifferently. Surprised, he turned it over and looked again with
interest. One side of the card was blank; on the other was written in
ink three words, “The Green Door.” And then Rudolf saw, three steps in
front of him, a man throw down the card the negro had given him as he
passed. Rudolf picked it up. It was printed with the dentist’s name and
address and the usual schedule of “plate work” and “bridge work” and
“crowns,” and specious promises of “painless” operations.

The adventurous piano salesman halted at the corner and considered.
Then he crossed the street, walked down a block, recrossed and joined
the upward current of people again. Without seeming to notice the negro
as he passed the second time, he carelessly took the card that was
handed him. Ten steps away he inspected it. In the same handwriting
that appeared on the first card “The Green Door” was inscribed upon it.
Three or four cards were tossed to the pavement by pedestrians both
following and leading him. These fell blank side up. Rudolf turned them
over. Every one bore the printed legend of the dental “parlours.”

Rarely did the arch sprite Adventure need to beckon twice to Rudolf
Steiner, his true follower. But twice it had been done, and the quest
was on.

Rudolf walked slowly back to where the giant negro stood by the case of
rattling teeth. This time as he passed he received no card. In spite of
his gaudy and ridiculous garb, the Ethiopian displayed a natural
barbaric dignity as he stood, offering the cards suavely to some,
allowing others to pass unmolested. Every half minute he chanted a
harsh, unintelligible phrase akin to the jabber of car conductors and
grand opera. And not only did he withhold a card this time, but it
seemed to Rudolf that he received from the shining and massive black
countenance a look of cold, almost contemptuous disdain.

The look stung the adventurer. He read in it a silent accusation that
he had been found wanting. Whatever the mysterious written words on the
cards might mean, the black had selected him twice from the throng for
their recipient; and now seemed to have condemned him as deficient in
the wit and spirit to engage the enigma.

Standing aside from the rush, the young man made a rapid estimate of
the building in which he conceived that his adventure must lie. Five
stories high it rose. A small restaurant occupied the basement.

The first floor, now closed, seemed to house millinery or furs. The
second floor, by the winking electric letters, was the dentist’s. Above
this a polyglot babel of signs struggled to indicate the abodes of
palmists, dressmakers, musicians and doctors. Still higher up draped
curtains and milk bottles white on the window sills proclaimed the
regions of domesticity.

After concluding his survey Rudolf walked briskly up the high flight of
stone steps into the house. Up two flights of the carpeted stairway he
continued; and at its top paused. The hallway there was dimly lighted
by two pale jets of gas—one far to his right, the other nearer, to his
left. He looked toward the nearer light and saw, within its wan halo, a
green door. For one moment he hesitated; then he seemed to see the
contumelious sneer of the African juggler of cards; and then he walked
straight to the green door and knocked against it.

Moments like those that passed before his knock was answered measure
the quick breath of true adventure. What might not be behind those
green panels! Gamesters at play; cunning rogues baiting their traps
with subtle skill; beauty in love with courage, and thus planning to be
sought by it; danger, death, love, disappointment, ridicule—any of
these might respond to that temerarious rap.

A faint rustle was heard inside, and the door slowly opened. A girl not
yet twenty stood there, white-faced and tottering. She loosed the knob
and swayed weakly, groping with one hand. Rudolf caught her and laid
her on a faded couch that stood against the wall. He closed the door
and took a swift glance around the room by the light of a flickering
gas jet. Neat, but extreme poverty was the story that he read.

The girl lay still, as if in a faint. Rudolf looked around the room
excitedly for a barrel. People must be rolled upon a barrel who—no, no;
that was for drowned persons. He began to fan her with his hat. That
was successful, for he struck her nose with the brim of his derby and
she opened her eyes. And then the young man saw that hers, indeed, was
the one missing face from his heart’s gallery of intimate portraits.
The frank, grey eyes, the little nose, turning pertly outward; the
chestnut hair, curling like the tendrils of a pea vine, seemed the
right end and reward of all his wonderful adventures. But the face was
wofully thin and pale.

The girl looked at him calmly, and then smiled.

“Fainted, didn’t I?” she asked, weakly. “Well, who wouldn’t? You try
going without anything to eat for three days and see!”

“Himmel!” exclaimed Rudolf, jumping up. “Wait till I come back.”

He dashed out the green door and down the stairs. In twenty minutes he
was back again, kicking at the door with his toe for her to open it.
With both arms he hugged an array of wares from the grocery and the
restaurant. On the table he laid them—bread and butter, cold meats,
cakes, pies, pickles, oysters, a roasted chicken, a bottle of milk and
one of red-hot tea.

“This is ridiculous,” said Rudolf, blusteringly, “to go without eating.
You must quit making election bets of this kind. Supper is ready.” He
helped her to a chair at the table and asked: “Is there a cup for the
tea?” “On the shelf by the window,” she answered. When he turned again
with the cup he saw her, with eyes shining rapturously, beginning upon
a huge Dill pickle that she had rooted out from the paper bags with a
woman’s unerring instinct. He took it from her, laughingly, and poured
the cup full of milk. “Drink that first” he ordered, “and then you
shall have some tea, and then a chicken wing. If you are very good you
shall have a pickle to-morrow. And now, if you’ll allow me to be your
guest we’ll have supper.”

He drew up the other chair. The tea brightened the girl’s eyes and
brought back some of her colour. She began to eat with a sort of dainty
ferocity like some starved wild animal. She seemed to regard the young
man’s presence and the aid he had rendered her as a natural thing—not
as though she undervalued the conventions; but as one whose great
stress gave her the right to put aside the artificial for the human.
But gradually, with the return of strength and comfort, came also a
sense of the little conventions that belong; and she began to tell him
her little story. It was one of a thousand such as the city yawns at
every day—the shop girl’s story of insufficient wages, further reduced
by “fines” that go to swell the store’s profits; of time lost through
illness; and then of lost positions, lost hope, and—the knock of the
adventurer upon the green door.

But to Rudolf the history sounded as big as the Iliad or the crisis in
“Junie’s Love Test.”

“To think of you going through all that,” he exclaimed.

“It was something fierce,” said the girl, solemnly.

“And you have no relatives or friends in the city?”

“None whatever.”

“I am all alone in the world, too,” said Rudolf, after a pause.

“I am glad of that,” said the girl, promptly; and somehow it pleased
the young man to hear that she approved of his bereft condition.

Very suddenly her eyelids dropped and she sighed deeply.

“I’m awfully sleepy,” she said, “and I feel so good.”

Then Rudolf rose and took his hat. “I’ll say good-night. A long night’s
sleep will be fine for you.”

He held out his hand, and she took it and said “good-night.” But her
eyes asked a question so eloquently, so frankly and pathetically that
he answered it with words.

“Oh, I’m coming back to-morrow to see how you are getting along. You
can’t get rid of me so easily.”

Then, at the door, as though the way of his coming had been so much
less important than the fact that he had come, she asked: “How did you
come to knock at my door?”

He looked at her for a moment, remembering the cards, and felt a sudden
jealous pain. What if they had fallen into other hands as adventurous
as his? Quickly he decided that she must never know the truth. He would
never let her know that he was aware of the strange expedient to which
she had been driven by her great distress.

“One of our piano tuners lives in this house,” he said. “I knocked at
your door by mistake.”

The last thing he saw in the room before the green door closed was her
smile.

At the head of the stairway he paused and looked curiously about him.
And then he went along the hallway to its other end; and, coming back,
ascended to the floor above and continued his puzzled explorations.
Every door that he found in the house was painted green.

Wondering, he descended to the sidewalk. The fantastic African was
still there. Rudolf confronted him with his two cards in his hand.

“Will you tell me why you gave me these cards and what they mean?” he
asked.

In a broad, good-natured grin the negro exhibited a splendid
advertisement of his master’s profession.

“Dar it is, boss,” he said, pointing down the street. “But I ’spect you
is a little late for de fust act.”

Looking the way he pointed Rudolf saw above the entrance to a theatre
the blazing electric sign of its new play, “The Green Door.”

“I’m informed dat it’s a fust-rate show, sah,” said the negro. “De
agent what represents it pussented me with a dollar, sah, to distribute
a few of his cards along with de doctah’s. May I offer you one of de
doctah’s cards, sah?”

At the corner of the block in which he lived Rudolf stopped for a glass
of beer and a cigar. When he had come out with his lighted weed he
buttoned his coat, pushed back his hat and said, stoutly, to the lamp
post on the corner:

“All the same, I believe it was the hand of Fate that doped out the way
for me to find her.”

Which conclusion, under the circumstances, certainly admits Rudolf
Steiner to the ranks of the true followers of Romance and Adventure.




FROM THE CABBY’S SEAT


The cabby has his point of view. It is more single-minded, perhaps,
than that of a follower of any other calling. From the high, swaying
seat of his hansom he looks upon his fellow-men as nomadic particles,
of no account except when possessed of migratory desires. He is Jehu,
and you are goods in transit. Be you President or vagabond, to cabby
you are only a Fare, he takes you up, cracks his whip, joggles your
vertebrae and sets you down.

When time for payment arrives, if you exhibit a familiarity with legal
rates you come to know what contempt is; if you find that you have left
your pocketbook behind you are made to realise the mildness of Dante’s
imagination.

It is not an extravagant theory that the cabby’s singleness of purpose
and concentrated view of life are the results of the hansom’s peculiar
construction. The cock-of-the-roost sits aloft like Jupiter on an
unsharable seat, holding your fate between two thongs of inconstant
leather. Helpless, ridiculous, confined, bobbing like a toy mandarin,
you sit like a rat in a trap—you, before whom butlers cringe on solid
land—and must squeak upward through a slit in your peripatetic
sarcophagus to make your feeble wishes known.

Then, in a cab, you are not even an occupant; you are contents. You are
a cargo at sea, and the “cherub that sits up aloft” has Davy Jones’s
street and number by heart.

One night there were sounds of revelry in the big brick tenement-house
next door but one to McGary’s Family Café. The sounds seemed to emanate
from the apartments of the Walsh family. The sidewalk was obstructed by
an assortment of interested neighbours, who opened a lane from time to
time for a hurrying messenger bearing from McGary’s goods pertinent to
festivity and diversion. The sidewalk contingent was engaged in comment
and discussion from which it made no effort to eliminate the news that
Norah Walsh was being married.

In the fulness of time there was an eruption of the merry-makers to the
sidewalk. The uninvited guests enveloped and permeated them, and upon
the night air rose joyous cries, congratulations, laughter and
unclassified noises born of McGary’s oblations to the hymeneal scene.

Close to the curb stood Jerry O’Donovan’s cab. Night-hawk was Jerry
called; but no more lustrous or cleaner hansom than his ever closed its
doors upon point lace and November violets. And Jerry’s horse! I am
within bounds when I tell you that he was stuffed with oats until one
of those old ladies who leave their dishes unwashed at home and go
about having expressmen arrested, would have smiled—yes, smiled—to have
seen him.

Among the shifting, sonorous, pulsing crowd glimpses could be had of
Jerry’s high hat, battered by the winds and rains of many years; of his
nose like a carrot, battered by the frolicsome, athletic progeny of
millionaires and by contumacious fares; of his brass-buttoned green
coat, admired in the vicinity of McGary’s. It was plain that Jerry had
usurped the functions of his cab, and was carrying a “load.” Indeed,
the figure may be extended and he be likened to a bread-waggon if we
admit the testimony of a youthful spectator, who was heard to remark
“Jerry has got a bun.”

From somewhere among the throng in the street or else out of the thin
stream of pedestrians a young woman tripped and stood by the cab. The
professional hawk’s eye of Jerry caught the movement. He made a lurch
for the cab, overturning three or four onlookers and himself—no! he
caught the cap of a water-plug and kept his feet. Like a sailor
shinning up the ratlins during a squall Jerry mounted to his
professional seat. Once he was there McGary’s liquids were baffled. He
seesawed on the mizzenmast of his craft as safe as a Steeple Jack
rigged to the flagpole of a skyscraper.

“Step in, lady,” said Jerry, gathering his lines. The young woman
stepped into the cab; the doors shut with a bang; Jerry’s whip cracked
in the air; the crowd in the gutter scattered, and the fine hansom
dashed away ’crosstown.

When the oat-spry horse had hedged a little his first spurt of speed
Jerry broke the lid of his cab and called down through the aperture in
the voice of a cracked megaphone, trying to please:

“Where, now, will ye be drivin’ to?”

“Anywhere you please,” came up the answer, musical and contented.

“’Tis drivin’ for pleasure she is,” thought Jerry. And then he
suggested as a matter of course:

“Take a thrip around in the park, lady. ’Twill be ilegant cool and
fine.”

“Just as you like,” answered the fare, pleasantly.

The cab headed for Fifth avenue and sped up that perfect street. Jerry
bounced and swayed in his seat. The potent fluids of McGary were
disquieted and they sent new fumes to his head. He sang an ancient song
of Killisnook and brandished his whip like a baton.

Inside the cab the fare sat up straight on the cushions, looking to
right and left at the lights and houses. Even in the shadowed hansom
her eyes shone like stars at twilight.

When they reached Fifty-ninth street Jerry’s head was bobbing and his
reins were slack. But his horse turned in through the park gate and
began the old familiar nocturnal round. And then the fare leaned back,
entranced, and breathed deep the clean, wholesome odours of grass and
leaf and bloom. And the wise beast in the shafts, knowing his ground,
struck into his by-the-hour gait and kept to the right of the road.

Habit also struggled successfully against Jerry’s increasing torpor. He
raised the hatch of his storm-tossed vessel and made the inquiry that
cabbies do make in the park.

“Like shtop at the Cas-sino, lady? Gezzer r’freshm’s, ’n lish’n the
music. Ev’body shtops.”

“I think that would be nice,” said the fare.

They reined up with a plunge at the Casino entrance. The cab doors flew
open. The fare stepped directly upon the floor. At once she was caught
in a web of ravishing music and dazzled by a panorama of lights and
colours. Some one slipped a little square card into her hand on which
was printed a number—34. She looked around and saw her cab twenty yards
away already lining up in its place among the waiting mass of
carriages, cabs and motor cars. And then a man who seemed to be all
shirt-front danced backward before her; and next she was seated at a
little table by a railing over which climbed a jessamine vine.

There seemed to be a wordless invitation to purchase; she consulted a
collection of small coins in a thin purse, and received from them
license to order a glass of beer. There she sat, inhaling and absorbing
it all—the new-coloured, new-shaped life in a fairy palace in an
enchanted wood.

At fifty tables sat princes and queens clad in all the silks and gems
of the world. And now and then one of them would look curiously at
Jerry’s fare. They saw a plain figure dressed in a pink silk of the
kind that is tempered by the word “foulard,” and a plain face that wore
a look of love of life that the queens envied.

Twice the long hands of the clocks went round, Royalties thinned from
their _al fresco_ thrones, and buzzed or clattered away in their
vehicles of state. The music retired into cases of wood and bags of
leather and baize. Waiters removed cloths pointedly near the plain
figure sitting almost alone.

Jerry’s fare rose, and held out her numbered card simply:

“Is there anything coming on the ticket?” she asked.

A waiter told her it was her cab check, and that she should give it to
the man at the entrance. This man took it, and called the number. Only
three hansoms stood in line. The driver of one of them went and routed
out Jerry asleep in his cab. He swore deeply, climbed to the captain’s
bridge and steered his craft to the pier. His fare entered, and the cab
whirled into the cool fastnesses of the park along the shortest
homeward cuts.

At the gate a glimmer of reason in the form of sudden suspicion seized
upon Jerry’s beclouded mind. One or two things occurred to him. He
stopped his horse, raised the trap and dropped his phonographic voice,
like a lead plummet, through the aperture:

“I want to see four dollars before goin’ any further on th’ thrip. Have
ye got th’ dough?”

“Four dollars!” laughed the fare, softly, “dear me, no. I’ve only got a
few pennies and a dime or two.”

Jerry shut down the trap and slashed his oat-fed horse. The clatter of
hoofs strangled but could not drown the sound of his profanity. He
shouted choking and gurgling curses at the starry heavens; he cut
viciously with his whip at passing vehicles; he scattered fierce and
ever-changing oaths and imprecations along the streets, so that a late
truck driver, crawling homeward, heard and was abashed. But he knew his
recourse, and made for it at a gallop.

At the house with the green lights beside the steps he pulled up. He
flung wide the cab doors and tumbled heavily to the ground.

“Come on, you,” he said, roughly.

His fare came forth with the Casino dreamy smile still on her plain
face. Jerry took her by the arm and led her into the police station. A
gray-moustached sergeant looked keenly across the desk. He and the
cabby were no strangers.

“Sargeant,” began Jerry in his old raucous, martyred, thunderous tones
of complaint. “I’ve got a fare here that—”

Jerry paused. He drew a knotted, red hand across his brow. The fog set
up by McGary was beginning to clear away.

“A fare, sargeant,” he continued, with a grin, “that I want to
inthroduce to ye. It’s me wife that I married at ould man Walsh’s this
avening. And a divil of a time we had, ’tis thrue. Shake hands wid th’
sargeant, Norah, and we’ll be off to home.”

Before stepping into the cab Norah sighed profoundly.

“I’ve had such a nice time, Jerry,” said she.




AN UNFINISHED STORY


We no longer groan and heap ashes upon our heads when the flames of
Tophet are mentioned. For, even the preachers have begun to tell us
that God is radium, or ether or some scientific compound, and that the
worst we wicked ones may expect is a chemical reaction. This is a
pleasing hypothesis; but there lingers yet some of the old, goodly
terror of orthodoxy.

There are but two subjects upon which one may discourse with a free
imagination, and without the possibility of being controverted. You may
talk of your dreams; and you may tell what you heard a parrot say. Both
Morpheus and the bird are incompetent witnesses; and your listener dare
not attack your recital. The baseless fabric of a vision, then, shall
furnish my theme—chosen with apologies and regrets instead of the more
limited field of pretty Polly’s small talk.

I had a dream that was so far removed from the higher criticism that it
had to do with the ancient, respectable, and lamented bar-of-judgment
theory.

Gabriel had played his trump; and those of us who could not follow suit
were arraigned for examination. I noticed at one side a gathering of
professional bondsmen in solemn black and collars that buttoned behind;
but it seemed there was some trouble about their real estate titles;
and they did not appear to be getting any of us out.

A fly cop—an angel policeman—flew over to me and took me by the left
wing. Near at hand was a group of very prosperous-looking spirits
arraigned for judgment.

“Do you belong with that bunch?” the policeman asked.

“Who are they?” was my answer.

“Why,” said he, “they are—”

But this irrelevant stuff is taking up space that the story should
occupy.

Dulcie worked in a department store. She sold Hamburg edging, or
stuffed peppers, or automobiles, or other little trinkets such as they
keep in department stores. Of what she earned, Dulcie received six
dollars per week. The remainder was credited to her and debited to
somebody else’s account in the ledger kept by G–––– Oh, primal energy,
you say, Reverend Doctor—Well then, in the Ledger of Primal Energy.

During her first year in the store, Dulcie was paid five dollars per
week. It would be instructive to know how she lived on that amount.
Don’t care? Very well; probably you are interested in larger amounts.
Six dollars is a larger amount. I will tell you how she lived on six
dollars per week.

One afternoon at six, when Dulcie was sticking her hat-pin within an
eighth of an inch of her _medulla oblongata_, she said to her chum,
Sadie—the girl that waits on you with her left side:

“Say, Sade, I made a date for dinner this evening with Piggy.”

“You never did!” exclaimed Sadie admiringly. “Well, ain’t you the lucky
one? Piggy’s an awful swell; and he always takes a girl to swell
places. He took Blanche up to the Hoffman House one evening, where they
have swell music, and you see a lot of swells. You’ll have a swell
time, Dulce.”

Dulcie hurried homeward. Her eyes were shining, and her cheeks showed
the delicate pink of life’s—real life’s—approaching dawn. It was
Friday; and she had fifty cents left of her last week’s wages.

The streets were filled with the rush-hour floods of people. The
electric lights of Broadway were glowing—calling moths from miles, from
leagues, from hundreds of leagues out of darkness around to come in and
attend the singeing school. Men in accurate clothes, with faces like
those carved on cherry stones by the old salts in sailors’ homes,
turned and stared at Dulcie as she sped, unheeding, past them.
Manhattan, the night-blooming cereus, was beginning to unfold its
dead-white, heavy-odoured petals.

Dulcie stopped in a store where goods were cheap and bought an
imitation lace collar with her fifty cents. That money was to have been
spent otherwise—fifteen cents for supper, ten cents for breakfast, ten
cents for lunch. Another dime was to be added to her small store of
savings; and five cents was to be squandered for licorice drops—the
kind that made your cheek look like the toothache, and last as long.
The licorice was an extravagance—almost a carouse—but what is life
without pleasures?

Dulcie lived in a furnished room. There is this difference between a
furnished room and a boarding-house. In a furnished room, other people
do not know it when you go hungry.

Dulcie went up to her room—the third floor back in a West Side
brownstone-front. She lit the gas. Scientists tell us that the diamond
is the hardest substance known. Their mistake. Landladies know of a
compound beside which the diamond is as putty. They pack it in the tips
of gas-burners; and one may stand on a chair and dig at it in vain
until one’s fingers are pink and bruised. A hairpin will not remove it;
therefore let us call it immovable.

So Dulcie lit the gas. In its one-fourth-candlepower glow we will
observe the room.

Couch-bed, dresser, table, washstand, chair—of this much the landlady
was guilty. The rest was Dulcie’s. On the dresser were her treasures—a
gilt china vase presented to her by Sadie, a calendar issued by a
pickle works, a book on the divination of dreams, some rice powder in a
glass dish, and a cluster of artificial cherries tied with a pink
ribbon.

Against the wrinkly mirror stood pictures of General Kitchener, William
Muldoon, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Benvenuto Cellini. Against one
wall was a plaster of Paris plaque of an O’Callahan in a Roman helmet.
Near it was a violent oleograph of a lemon-coloured child assaulting an
inflammatory butterfly. This was Dulcie’s final judgment in art; but it
had never been upset. Her rest had never been disturbed by whispers of
stolen copes; no critic had elevated his eyebrows at her infantile
entomologist.

Piggy was to call for her at seven. While she swiftly makes ready, let
us discreetly face the other way and gossip.

For the room, Dulcie paid two dollars per week. On week-days her
breakfast cost ten cents; she made coffee and cooked an egg over the
gaslight while she was dressing. On Sunday mornings she feasted royally
on veal chops and pineapple fritters at “Billy’s” restaurant, at a cost
of twenty-five cents—and tipped the waitress ten cents. New York
presents so many temptations for one to run into extravagance. She had
her lunches in the department-store restaurant at a cost of sixty cents
for the week; dinners were $1.05. The evening papers—show me a New
Yorker going without his daily paper!—came to six cents; and two Sunday
papers—one for the personal column and the other to read—were ten
cents. The total amounts to $4.76. Now, one has to buy clothes, and—

I give it up. I hear of wonderful bargains in fabrics, and of miracles
performed with needle and thread; but I am in doubt. I hold my pen
poised in vain when I would add to Dulcie’s life some of those joys
that belong to woman by virtue of all the unwritten, sacred, natural,
inactive ordinances of the equity of heaven. Twice she had been to
Coney Island and had ridden the hobby-horses. ’Tis a weary thing to
count your pleasures by summers instead of by hours.

Piggy needs but a word. When the girls named him, an undeserving stigma
was cast upon the noble family of swine. The words-of-three-letters
lesson in the old blue spelling book begins with Piggy’s biography. He
was fat; he had the soul of a rat, the habits of a bat, and the
magnanimity of a cat . . . He wore expensive clothes; and was a
connoisseur in starvation. He could look at a shop-girl and tell you to
an hour how long it had been since she had eaten anything more
nourishing than marshmallows and tea. He hung about the shopping
districts, and prowled around in department stores with his invitations
to dinner. Men who escort dogs upon the streets at the end of a string
look down upon him. He is a type; I can dwell upon him no longer; my
pen is not the kind intended for him; I am no carpenter.

At ten minutes to seven Dulcie was ready. She looked at herself in the
wrinkly mirror. The reflection was satisfactory. The dark blue dress,
fitting without a wrinkle, the hat with its jaunty black feather, the
but-slightly-soiled gloves—all representing self-denial, even of food
itself—were vastly becoming.

Dulcie forgot everything else for a moment except that she was
beautiful, and that life was about to lift a corner of its mysterious
veil for her to observe its wonders. No gentleman had ever asked her
out before. Now she was going for a brief moment into the glitter and
exalted show.

The girls said that Piggy was a “spender.” There would be a grand
dinner, and music, and splendidly dressed ladies to look at, and things
to eat that strangely twisted the girls’ jaws when they tried to tell
about them. No doubt she would be asked out again. There was a blue
pongee suit in a window that she knew—by saving twenty cents a week
instead of ten, in—let’s see—Oh, it would run into years! But there was
a second-hand store in Seventh Avenue where—

Somebody knocked at the door. Dulcie opened it. The landlady stood
there with a spurious smile, sniffing for cooking by stolen gas.

“A gentleman’s downstairs to see you,” she said. “Name is Mr. Wiggins.”

By such epithet was Piggy known to unfortunate ones who had to take him
seriously.

Dulcie turned to the dresser to get her handkerchief; and then she
stopped still, and bit her underlip hard. While looking in her mirror
she had seen fairyland and herself, a princess, just awakening from a
long slumber. She had forgotten one that was watching her with sad,
beautiful, stern eyes—the only one there was to approve or condemn what
she did. Straight and slender and tall, with a look of sorrowful
reproach on his handsome, melancholy face, General Kitchener fixed his
wonderful eyes on her out of his gilt photograph frame on the dresser.

Dulcie turned like an automatic doll to the landlady.

“Tell him I can’t go,” she said dully. “Tell him I’m sick, or
something. Tell him I’m not going out.”

After the door was closed and locked, Dulcie fell upon her bed,
crushing her black tip, and cried for ten minutes. General Kitchener
was her only friend. He was Dulcie’s ideal of a gallant knight. He
looked as if he might have a secret sorrow, and his wonderful moustache
was a dream, and she was a little afraid of that stern yet tender look
in his eyes. She used to have little fancies that he would call at the
house sometime, and ask for her, with his sword clanking against his
high boots. Once, when a boy was rattling a piece of chain against a
lamp-post she had opened the window and looked out. But there was no
use. She knew that General Kitchener was away over in Japan, leading
his army against the savage Turks; and he would never step out of his
gilt frame for her. Yet one look from him had vanquished Piggy that
night. Yes, for that night.

When her cry was over Dulcie got up and took off her best dress, and
put on her old blue kimono. She wanted no dinner. She sang two verses
of “Sammy.” Then she became intensely interested in a little red speck
on the side of her nose. And after that was attended to, she drew up a
chair to the rickety table, and told her fortune with an old deck of
cards.

“The horrid, impudent thing!” she said aloud. “And I never gave him a
word or a look to make him think it!”

At nine o’clock Dulcie took a tin box of crackers and a little pot of
raspberry jam out of her trunk, and had a feast. She offered General
Kitchener some jam on a cracker; but he only looked at her as the
sphinx would have looked at a butterfly—if there are butterflies in the
desert.

“Don’t eat it if you don’t want to,” said Dulcie. “And don’t put on so
many airs and scold so with your eyes. I wonder if you’d be so superior
and snippy if you had to live on six dollars a week.”

It was not a good sign for Dulcie to be rude to General Kitchener. And
then she turned Benvenuto Cellini face downward with a severe gesture.
But that was not inexcusable; for she had always thought he was Henry
VIII, and she did not approve of him.

At half-past nine Dulcie took a last look at the pictures on the
dresser, turned out the light, and skipped into bed. It’s an awful
thing to go to bed with a good-night look at General Kitchener, William
Muldoon, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Benvenuto Cellini. This story
really doesn’t get anywhere at all. The rest of it comes later—sometime
when Piggy asks Dulcie again to dine with him, and she is feeling
lonelier than usual, and General Kitchener happens to be looking the
other way; and then—

As I said before, I dreamed that I was standing near a crowd of
prosperous-looking angels, and a policeman took me by the wing and
asked if I belonged with them.

“Who are they?” I asked.

“Why,” said he, “they are the men who hired working-girls, and paid ’em
five or six dollars a week to live on. Are you one of the bunch?”

“Not on your immortality,” said I. “I’m only the fellow that set fire
to an orphan asylum, and murdered a blind man for his pennies.”




THE CALIPH, CUPID AND THE CLOCK


Prince Michael, of the Electorate of Valleluna, sat on his favourite
bench in the park. The coolness of the September night quickened the
life in him like a rare, tonic wine. The benches were not filled; for
park loungers, with their stagnant blood, are prompt to detect and fly
home from the crispness of early autumn. The moon was just clearing the
roofs of the range of dwellings that bounded the quadrangle on the
east. Children laughed and played about the fine-sprayed fountain. In
the shadowed spots fauns and hamadryads wooed, unconscious of the gaze
of mortal eyes. A hand organ—Philomel by the grace of our stage
carpenter, Fancy—fluted and droned in a side street. Around the
enchanted boundaries of the little park street cars spat and mewed and
the stilted trains roared like tigers and lions prowling for a place to
enter. And above the trees shone the great, round, shining face of an
illuminated clock in the tower of an antique public building.

Prince Michael’s shoes were wrecked far beyond the skill of the
carefullest cobbler. The ragman would have declined any negotiations
concerning his clothes. The two weeks’ stubble on his face was grey and
brown and red and greenish yellow—as if it had been made up from
individual contributions from the chorus of a musical comedy. No man
existed who had money enough to wear so bad a hat as his.

Prince Michael sat on his favourite bench and smiled. It was a
diverting thought to him that he was wealthy enough to buy every one of
those close-ranged, bulky, window-lit mansions that faced him, if he
chose. He could have matched gold, equipages, jewels, art treasures,
estates and acres with any Croesus in this proud city of Manhattan, and
scarcely have entered upon the bulk of his holdings. He could have sat
at table with reigning sovereigns. The social world, the world of art,
the fellowship of the elect, adulation, imitation, the homage of the
fairest, honours from the highest, praise from the wisest, flattery,
esteem, credit, pleasure, fame—all the honey of life was waiting in the
comb in the hive of the world for Prince Michael, of the Electorate of
Valleluna, whenever he might choose to take it. But his choice was to
sit in rags and dinginess on a bench in a park. For he had tasted of
the fruit of the tree of life, and, finding it bitter in his mouth, had
stepped out of Eden for a time to seek distraction close to the
unarmoured, beating heart of the world.

These thoughts strayed dreamily through the mind of Prince Michael, as
he smiled under the stubble of his polychromatic beard. Lounging thus,
clad as the poorest of mendicants in the parks, he loved to study
humanity. He found in altruism more pleasure than his riches, his
station and all the grosser sweets of life had given him. It was his
chief solace and satisfaction to alleviate individual distress, to
confer favours upon worthy ones who had need of succour, to dazzle
unfortunates by unexpected and bewildering gifts of truly royal
magnificence, bestowed, however, with wisdom and judiciousness.

And as Prince Michael’s eye rested upon the glowing face of the great
clock in the tower, his smile, altruistic as it was, became slightly
tinged with contempt. Big thoughts were the Prince’s; and it was always
with a shake of his head that he considered the subjugation of the
world to the arbitrary measures of Time. The comings and goings of
people in hurry and dread, controlled by the little metal moving hands
of a clock, always made him sad.

By and by came a young man in evening clothes and sat upon the third
bench from the Prince. For half an hour he smoked cigars with nervous
haste, and then he fell to watching the face of the illuminated clock
above the trees. His perturbation was evident, and the Prince noted, in
sorrow, that its cause was connected, in some manner, with the slowly
moving hands of the timepiece.

His Highness arose and went to the young man’s bench.

“I beg your pardon for addressing you,” he said, “but I perceive that
you are disturbed in mind. If it may serve to mitigate the liberty I
have taken I will add that I am Prince Michael, heir to the throne of
the Electorate of Valleluna. I appear incognito, of course, as you may
gather from my appearance. It is a fancy of mine to render aid to
others whom I think worthy of it. Perhaps the matter that seems to
distress you is one that would more readily yield to our mutual
efforts.”

The young man looked up brightly at the Prince. Brightly, but the
perpendicular line of perplexity between his brows was not smoothed
away. He laughed, and even then it did not. But he accepted the
momentary diversion.

“Glad to meet you, Prince,” he said, good humouredly. “Yes, I’d say you
were incog. all right. Thanks for your offer of assistance—but I don’t
see where your butting-in would help things any. It’s a kind of private
affair, you know—but thanks all the same.”

Prince Michael sat at the young man’s side. He was often rebuffed but
never offensively. His courteous manner and words forbade that.

“Clocks,” said the Prince, “are shackles on the feet of mankind. I have
observed you looking persistently at that clock. Its face is that of a
tyrant, its numbers are false as those on a lottery ticket; its hands
are those of a bunco steerer, who makes an appointment with you to your
ruin. Let me entreat you to throw off its humiliating bonds and to
cease to order your affairs by that insensate monitor of brass and
steel.”

“I don’t usually,” said the young man. “I carry a watch except when
I’ve got my radiant rags on.”

“I know human nature as I do the trees and grass,” said the Prince,
with earnest dignity. “I am a master of philosophy, a graduate in art,
and I hold the purse of a Fortunatus. There are few mortal misfortunes
that I cannot alleviate or overcome. I have read your countenance, and
found in it honesty and nobility as well as distress. I beg of you to
accept my advice or aid. Do not belie the intelligence I see in your
face by judging from my appearance of my ability to defeat your
troubles.”

The young man glanced at the clock again and frowned darkly. When his
gaze strayed from the glowing horologue of time it rested intently upon
a four-story red brick house in the row of dwellings opposite to where
he sat. The shades were drawn, and the lights in many rooms shone dimly
through them.

“Ten minutes to nine!” exclaimed the young man, with an impatient
gesture of despair. He turned his back upon the house and took a rapid
step or two in a contrary direction.

“Remain!” commanded Prince Michael, in so potent a voice that the
disturbed one wheeled around with a somewhat chagrined laugh.

“I’ll give her the ten minutes and then I’m off,” he muttered, and then
aloud to the Prince: “I’ll join you in confounding all clocks, my
friend, and throw in women, too.”

“Sit down,” said the Prince calmly. “I do not accept your addition.
Women are the natural enemies of clocks, and, therefore, the allies of
those who would seek liberation from these monsters that measure our
follies and limit our pleasures. If you will so far confide in me I
would ask you to relate to me your story.”

The young man threw himself upon the bench with a reckless laugh.

“Your Royal Highness, I will,” he said, in tones of mock deference. “Do
you see yonder house—the one with three upper windows lighted? Well, at
6 o’clock I stood in that house with the young lady I am—that is, I
was—engaged to. I had been doing wrong, my dear Prince—I had been a
naughty boy, and she had heard of it. I wanted to be forgiven, of
course—we are always wanting women to forgive us, aren’t we, Prince?”

“‘I want time to think it over,’ said she. ‘There is one thing certain;
I will either fully forgive you, or I will never see your face again.
There will be no half-way business. At half-past eight,’ she said, ‘at
exactly half-past eight you may be watching the middle upper window of
the top floor. If I decide to forgive I will hang out of that window a
white silk scarf. You will know by that that all is as was before, and
you may come to me. If you see no scarf you may consider that
everything between us is ended forever.’ That,” concluded the young man
bitterly, “is why I have been watching that clock. The time for the
signal to appear has passed twenty-three minutes ago. Do you wonder
that I am a little disturbed, my Prince of Rags and Whiskers?”

“Let me repeat to you,” said Prince Michael, in his even,
well-modulated tones, “that women are the natural enemies of clocks.
Clocks are an evil, women a blessing. The signal may yet appear.”

“Never, on your principality!” exclaimed the young man, hopelessly.
“You don’t know Marian—of course. She’s always on time, to the minute.
That was the first thing about her that attracted me. I’ve got the
mitten instead of the scarf. I ought to have known at 8.31 that my
goose was cooked. I’ll go West on the 11.45 to-night with Jack Milburn.
The jig’s up. I’ll try Jack’s ranch awhile and top off with the
Klondike and whiskey. Good-night—er—er—Prince.”

Prince Michael smiled his enigmatic, gentle, comprehending smile and
caught the coat sleeve of the other. The brilliant light in the
Prince’s eyes was softening to a dreamier, cloudy translucence.

“Wait,” he said solemnly, “till the clock strikes. I have wealth and
power and knowledge above most men, but when the clock strikes I am
afraid. Stay by me until then. This woman shall be yours. You have the
word of the hereditary Prince of Valleluna. On the day of your marriage
I will give you $100,000 and a palace on the Hudson. But there must be
no clocks in that palace—they measure our follies and limit our
pleasures. Do you agree to that?”

“Of course,” said the young man, cheerfully, “they’re a nuisance,
anyway—always ticking and striking and getting you late for dinner.”

He glanced again at the clock in the tower. The hands stood at three
minutes to nine.

“I think,” said Prince Michael, “that I will sleep a little. The day
has been fatiguing.”

He stretched himself upon a bench with the manner of one who had slept
thus before.

“You will find me in this park on any evening when the weather is
suitable,” said the Prince, sleepily. “Come to me when your marriage
day is set and I will give you a cheque for the money.”

“Thanks, Your Highness,” said the young man, seriously. “It doesn’t
look as if I would need that palace on the Hudson, but I appreciate
your offer, just the same.”

Prince Michael sank into deep slumber. His battered hat rolled from the
bench to the ground. The young man lifted it, placed it over the frowsy
face and moved one of the grotesquely relaxed limbs into a more
comfortable position. “Poor devil!” he said, as he drew the tattered
clothes closer about the Prince’s breast.

Sonorous and startling came the stroke of 9 from the clock tower. The
young man sighed again, turned his face for one last look at the house
of his relinquished hopes—and cried aloud profane words of holy
rapture.

From the middle upper window blossomed in the dusk a waving, snowy,
fluttering, wonderful, divine emblem of forgiveness and promised joy.

By came a citizen, rotund, comfortable, home-hurrying, unknowing of the
delights of waving silken scarfs on the borders of dimly-lit parks.

“Will you oblige me with the time, sir?” asked the young man; and the
citizen, shrewdly conjecturing his watch to be safe, dragged it out and
announced:

“Twenty-nine and a half minutes past eight, sir.”

And then, from habit, he glanced at the clock in the tower, and made
further oration.

“By George! that clock’s half an hour fast! First time in ten years
I’ve known it to be off. This watch of mine never varies a—”

But the citizen was talking to vacancy. He turned and saw his hearer, a
fast receding black shadow, flying in the direction of a house with
three lighted upper windows.

And in the morning came along two policemen on their way to the beats
they owned. The park was deserted save for one dilapidated figure that
sprawled, asleep, on a bench. They stopped and gazed upon it.

“It’s Dopy Mike,” said one. “He hits the pipe every night. Park bum for
twenty years. On his last legs, I guess.”

The other policeman stooped and looked at something crumpled and crisp
in the hand of the sleeper.

“Gee!” he remarked. “He’s doped out a fifty-dollar bill, anyway. Wish I
knew the brand of hop that he smokes.”

And then “Rap, rap, rap!” went the club of realism against the shoe
soles of Prince Michael, of the Electorate of Valleluna.




SISTERS OF THE GOLDEN CIRCLE


The Rubberneck Auto was about ready to start. The merry top-riders had
been assigned to their seats by the gentlemanly conductor. The sidewalk
was blockaded with sightseers who had gathered to stare at sightseers,
justifying the natural law that every creature on earth is preyed upon
by some other creature.

The megaphone man raised his instrument of torture; the inside of the
great automobile began to thump and throb like the heart of a coffee
drinker. The top-riders nervously clung to the seats; the old lady from
Valparaiso, Indiana, shrieked to be put ashore. But, before a wheel
turns, listen to a brief preamble through the cardiaphone, which shall
point out to you an object of interest on life’s sightseeing tour.

Swift and comprehensive is the recognition of white man for white man
in African wilds; instant and sure is the spiritual greeting between
mother and babe; unhesitatingly do master and dog commune across the
slight gulf between animal and man; immeasurably quick and sapient are
the brief messages between one and one’s beloved. But all these
instances set forth only slow and groping interchange of sympathy and
thought beside one other instance which the Rubberneck coach shall
disclose. You shall learn (if you have not learned already) what two
beings of all earth’s living inhabitants most quickly look into each
other’s hearts and souls when they meet face to face.

The gong whirred, and the Glaring-at-Gotham car moved majestically upon
its instructive tour.

On the highest, rear seat was James Williams, of Cloverdale, Missouri,
and his Bride.

Capitalise it, friend typo—that last word—word of words in the epiphany
of life and love. The scent of the flowers, the booty of the bee, the
primal drip of spring waters, the overture of the lark, the twist of
lemon peel on the cocktail of creation—such is the bride. Holy is the
wife; revered the mother; galliptious is the summer girl—but the bride
is the certified check among the wedding presents that the gods send in
when man is married to mortality.

The car glided up the Golden Way. On the bridge of the great cruiser
the captain stood, trumpeting the sights of the big city to his
passengers. Wide-mouthed and open-eared, they heard the sights of the
metropolis thundered forth to their eyes. Confused, delirious with
excitement and provincial longings, they tried to make ocular responses
to the megaphonic ritual. In the solemn spires of spreading cathedrals
they saw the home of the Vanderbilts; in the busy bulk of the Grand
Central depot they viewed, wonderingly, the frugal cot of Russell Sage.
Bidden to observe the highlands of the Hudson, they gaped,
unsuspecting, at the upturned mountains of a new-laid sewer. To many
the elevated railroad was the Rialto, on the stations of which
uniformed men sat and made chop suey of your tickets. And to this day
in the outlying districts many have it that Chuck Connors, with his
hand on his heart, leads reform; and that but for the noble municipal
efforts of one Parkhurst, a district attorney, the notorious “Bishop”
Potter gang would have destroyed law and order from the Bowery to the
Harlem River.

But I beg you to observe Mrs. James Williams—Hattie Chalmers that
was—once the belle of Cloverdale. Pale-blue is the bride’s, if she
will; and this colour she had honoured. Willingly had the moss rosebud
loaned to her cheeks of its pink—and as for the violet!—her eyes will
do very well as they are, thank you. A useless strip of white chaf—oh,
no, he was guiding the auto car—of white chiffon—or perhaps it was
grenadine or tulle—was tied beneath her chin, pretending to hold her
bonnet in place. But you know as well as I do that the hatpins did the
work.

And on Mrs. James Williams’s face was recorded a little library of the
world’s best thoughts in three volumes. Volume No. 1 contained the
belief that James Williams was about the right sort of thing. Volume
No. 2 was an essay on the world, declaring it to be a very excellent
place. Volume No. 3 disclosed the belief that in occupying the highest
seat in a Rubberneck auto they were travelling the pace that passes all
understanding.

James Williams, you would have guessed, was about twenty-four. It will
gratify you to know that your estimate was so accurate. He was exactly
twenty-three years, eleven months and twenty-nine days old. He was well
built, active, strong-jawed, good-natured and rising. He was on his
wedding trip.

Dear kind fairy, please cut out those orders for money and 40 H. P.
touring cars and fame and a new growth of hair and the presidency of
the boat club. Instead of any of them turn backward—oh, turn backward
and give us just a teeny-weeny bit of our wedding trip over again. Just
an hour, dear fairy, so we can remember how the grass and poplar trees
looked, and the bow of those bonnet strings tied beneath her chin—even
if it was the hatpins that did the work. Can’t do it? Very well; hurry
up with that touring car and the oil stock, then.

Just in front of Mrs. James Williams sat a girl in a loose tan jacket
and a straw hat adorned with grapes and roses. Only in dreams and
milliners’ shops do we, alas! gather grapes and roses at one swipe.
This girl gazed with large blue eyes, credulous, when the megaphone man
roared his doctrine that millionaires were things about which we should
be concerned. Between blasts she resorted to Epictetian philosophy in
the form of pepsin chewing gum.

At this girl’s right hand sat a young man about twenty-four. He was
well-built, active, strong-jawed and good-natured. But if his
description seems to follow that of James Williams, divest it of
anything Cloverdalian. This man belonged to hard streets and sharp
corners. He looked keenly about him, seeming to begrudge the asphalt
under the feet of those upon whom he looked down from his perch.

While the megaphone barks at a famous hostelry, let me whisper you
through the low-tuned cardiaphone to sit tight; for now things are
about to happen, and the great city will close over them again as over
a scrap of ticker tape floating down from the den of a Broad street
bear.

The girl in the tan jacket twisted around to view the pilgrims on the
last seat. The other passengers she had absorbed; the seat behind her
was her Bluebeard’s chamber.

Her eyes met those of Mrs. James Williams. Between two ticks of a watch
they exchanged their life’s experiences, histories, hopes and fancies.
And all, mind you, with the eye, before two men could have decided
whether to draw steel or borrow a match.

The bride leaned forward low. She and the girl spoke rapidly together,
their tongues moving quickly like those of two serpents—a comparison
that is not meant to go further. Two smiles and a dozen nods closed the
conference.

And now in the broad, quiet avenue in front of the Rubberneck car a man
in dark clothes stood with uplifted hand. From the sidewalk another
hurried to join him.

The girl in the fruitful hat quickly seized her companion by the arm
and whispered in his ear. That young man exhibited proof of ability to
act promptly. Crouching low, he slid over the edge of the car, hung
lightly for an instant, and then disappeared. Half a dozen of the
top-riders observed his feat, wonderingly, but made no comment, deeming
it prudent not to express surprise at what might be the conventional
manner of alighting in this bewildering city. The truant passenger
dodged a hansom and then floated past, like a leaf on a stream between
a furniture van and a florist’s delivery wagon.

The girl in the tan jacket turned again, and looked in the eyes of Mrs.
James Williams. Then she faced about and sat still while the Rubberneck
auto stopped at the flash of the badge under the coat of the
plainclothes man.

“What’s eatin’ you?” demanded the megaphonist, abandoning his
professional discourse for pure English.

“Keep her at anchor for a minute,” ordered the officer. “There’s a man
on board we want—a Philadelphia burglar called ‘Pinky’ McGuire. There
he is on the back seat. Look out for the side, Donovan.”

Donovan went to the hind wheel and looked up at James Williams.

“Come down, old sport,” he said, pleasantly. “We’ve got you. Back to
Sleepytown for yours. It ain’t a bad idea, hidin’ on a Rubberneck,
though. I’ll remember that.”

Softly through the megaphone came the advice of the conductor:

“Better step off, sir, and explain. The car must proceed on its tour.”

James Williams belonged among the level heads. With necessary slowness
he picked his way through the passengers down to the steps at the front
of the car. His wife followed, but she first turned her eyes and saw
the escaped tourist glide from behind the furniture van and slip behind
a tree on the edge of the little park, not fifty feet away.

Descended to the ground, James Williams faced his captors with a smile.
He was thinking what a good story he would have to tell in Cloverdale
about having been mistaken for a burglar. The Rubberneck coach
lingered, out of respect for its patrons. What could be a more
interesting sight than this?

“My name is James Williams, of Cloverdale, Missouri,” he said kindly,
so that they would not be too greatly mortified. “I have letters here
that will show—”

“You’ll come with us, please,” announced the plainclothes man. “‘Pinky’
McGuire’s description fits you like flannel washed in hot suds. A
detective saw you on the Rubberneck up at Central Park and ’phoned down
to take you in. Do your explaining at the station-house.”

James Williams’s wife—his bride of two weeks—looked him in the face
with a strange, soft radiance in her eyes and a flush on her cheeks,
looked him in the face and said:

“Go with ’em quietly, ‘Pinky,’ and maybe it’ll be in your favour.”

And then as the Glaring-at-Gotham car rolled away she turned and threw
a kiss—his wife threw a kiss—at some one high up on the seats of the
Rubberneck.

“Your girl gives you good advice, McGuire,” said Donovan. “Come on,
now.”

And then madness descended upon and occupied James Williams. He pushed
his hat far upon the back of his head.

“My wife seems to think I am a burglar,” he said, recklessly. “I never
heard of her being crazy; therefore I must be. And if I’m crazy, they
can’t do anything to me for killing you two fools in my madness.”

Whereupon he resisted arrest so cheerfully and industriously that cops
had to be whistled for, and afterwards the reserves, to disperse a few
thousand delighted spectators.

At the station-house the desk sergeant asked for his name.

“McDoodle, the Pink, or Pinky the Brute, I forget which,” was James
Williams’s answer. “But you can bet I’m a burglar; don’t leave that
out. And you might add that it took five of ’em to pluck the Pink. I’d
especially like to have that in the records.”

In an hour came Mrs. James Williams, with Uncle Thomas, of Madison
Avenue, in a respect-compelling motor car and proofs of the hero’s
innocence—for all the world like the third act of a drama backed by an
automobile mfg. co.

After the police had sternly reprimanded James Williams for imitating a
copyrighted burglar and given him as honourable a discharge as the
department was capable of, Mrs. Williams rearrested him and swept him
into an angle of the station-house. James Williams regarded her with
one eye. He always said that Donovan closed the other while somebody
was holding his good right hand. Never before had he given her a word
of reproach or of reproof.

“If you can explain,” he began rather stiffly, “why you—”

“Dear,” she interrupted, “listen. It was an hour’s pain and trial to
you. I did it for her—I mean the girl who spoke to me on the coach. I
was so happy, Jim—so happy with you that I didn’t dare to refuse that
happiness to another. Jim, they were married only this morning—those
two; and I wanted him to get away. While they were struggling with you
I saw him slip from behind his tree and hurry across the park. That’s
all of it, dear—I had to do it.”

Thus does one sister of the plain gold band know another who stands in
the enchanted light that shines but once and briefly for each one. By
rice and satin bows does mere man become aware of weddings. But bride
knoweth bride at the glance of an eye. And between them swiftly passes
comfort and meaning in a language that man and widows wot not of.




THE ROMANCE OF A BUSY BROKER


Pitcher, confidential clerk in the office of Harvey Maxwell, broker,
allowed a look of mild interest and surprise to visit his usually
expressionless countenance when his employer briskly entered at half
past nine in company with his young lady stenographer. With a snappy
“Good-morning, Pitcher,” Maxwell dashed at his desk as though he were
intending to leap over it, and then plunged into the great heap of
letters and telegrams waiting there for him.

The young lady had been Maxwell’s stenographer for a year. She was
beautiful in a way that was decidedly unstenographic. She forewent the
pomp of the alluring pompadour. She wore no chains, bracelets or
lockets. She had not the air of being about to accept an invitation to
luncheon. Her dress was grey and plain, but it fitted her figure with
fidelity and discretion. In her neat black turban hat was the
gold-green wing of a macaw. On this morning she was softly and shyly
radiant. Her eyes were dreamily bright, her cheeks genuine peachblow,
her expression a happy one, tinged with reminiscence.

Pitcher, still mildly curious, noticed a difference in her ways this
morning. Instead of going straight into the adjoining room, where her
desk was, she lingered, slightly irresolute, in the outer office. Once
she moved over by Maxwell’s desk, near enough for him to be aware of
her presence.

The machine sitting at that desk was no longer a man; it was a busy New
York broker, moved by buzzing wheels and uncoiling springs.

“Well—what is it? Anything?” asked Maxwell sharply. His opened mail lay
like a bank of stage snow on his crowded desk. His keen grey eye,
impersonal and brusque, flashed upon her half impatiently.

“Nothing,” answered the stenographer, moving away with a little smile.

“Mr. Pitcher,” she said to the confidential clerk, “did Mr. Maxwell say
anything yesterday about engaging another stenographer?”

“He did,” answered Pitcher. “He told me to get another one. I notified
the agency yesterday afternoon to send over a few samples this morning.
It’s 9.45 o’clock, and not a single picture hat or piece of pineapple
chewing gum has showed up yet.”

“I will do the work as usual, then,” said the young lady, “until some
one comes to fill the place.” And she went to her desk at once and hung
the black turban hat with the gold-green macaw wing in its accustomed
place.

He who has been denied the spectacle of a busy Manhattan broker during
a rush of business is handicapped for the profession of anthropology.
The poet sings of the “crowded hour of glorious life.” The broker’s
hour is not only crowded, but the minutes and seconds are hanging to
all the straps and packing both front and rear platforms.

And this day was Harvey Maxwell’s busy day. The ticker began to reel
out jerkily its fitful coils of tape, the desk telephone had a chronic
attack of buzzing. Men began to throng into the office and call at him
over the railing, jovially, sharply, viciously, excitedly. Messenger
boys ran in and out with messages and telegrams. The clerks in the
office jumped about like sailors during a storm. Even Pitcher’s face
relaxed into something resembling animation.

On the Exchange there were hurricanes and landslides and snowstorms and
glaciers and volcanoes, and those elemental disturbances were
reproduced in miniature in the broker’s offices. Maxwell shoved his
chair against the wall and transacted business after the manner of a
toe dancer. He jumped from ticker to ’phone, from desk to door with the
trained agility of a harlequin.

In the midst of this growing and important stress the broker became
suddenly aware of a high-rolled fringe of golden hair under a nodding
canopy of velvet and ostrich tips, an imitation sealskin sacque and a
string of beads as large as hickory nuts, ending near the floor with a
silver heart. There was a self-possessed young lady connected with
these accessories; and Pitcher was there to construe her.

“Lady from the Stenographer’s Agency to see about the position,” said
Pitcher.

Maxwell turned half around, with his hands full of papers and ticker
tape.

“What position?” he asked, with a frown.

“Position of stenographer,” said Pitcher. “You told me yesterday to
call them up and have one sent over this morning.”

“You are losing your mind, Pitcher,” said Maxwell. “Why should I have
given you any such instructions? Miss Leslie has given perfect
satisfaction during the year she has been here. The place is hers as
long as she chooses to retain it. There’s no place open here, madam.
Countermand that order with the agency, Pitcher, and don’t bring any
more of ’em in here.”

The silver heart left the office, swinging and banging itself
independently against the office furniture as it indignantly departed.
Pitcher seized a moment to remark to the bookkeeper that the “old man”
seemed to get more absent-minded and forgetful every day of the world.

The rush and pace of business grew fiercer and faster. On the floor
they were pounding half a dozen stocks in which Maxwell’s customers
were heavy investors. Orders to buy and sell were coming and going as
swift as the flight of swallows. Some of his own holdings were
imperilled, and the man was working like some high-geared, delicate,
strong machine—strung to full tension, going at full speed, accurate,
never hesitating, with the proper word and decision and act ready and
prompt as clockwork. Stocks and bonds, loans and mortgages, margins and
securities—here was a world of finance, and there was no room in it for
the human world or the world of nature.

When the luncheon hour drew near there came a slight lull in the
uproar.

Maxwell stood by his desk with his hands full of telegrams and
memoranda, with a fountain pen over his right ear and his hair hanging
in disorderly strings over his forehead. His window was open, for the
beloved janitress Spring had turned on a little warmth through the
waking registers of the earth.

And through the window came a wandering—perhaps a lost—odour—a
delicate, sweet odour of lilac that fixed the broker for a moment
immovable. For this odour belonged to Miss Leslie; it was her own, and
hers only.

The odour brought her vividly, almost tangibly before him. The world of
finance dwindled suddenly to a speck. And she was in the next
room—twenty steps away.

“By George, I’ll do it now,” said Maxwell, half aloud. “I’ll ask her
now. I wonder I didn’t do it long ago.”

He dashed into the inner office with the haste of a short trying to
cover. He charged upon the desk of the stenographer.

She looked up at him with a smile. A soft pink crept over her cheek,
and her eyes were kind and frank. Maxwell leaned one elbow on her desk.
He still clutched fluttering papers with both hands and the pen was
above his ear.

“Miss Leslie,” he began hurriedly, “I have but a moment to spare. I
want to say something in that moment. Will you be my wife? I haven’t
had time to make love to you in the ordinary way, but I really do love
you. Talk quick, please—those fellows are clubbing the stuffing out of
Union Pacific.”

“Oh, what are you talking about?” exclaimed the young lady. She rose to
her feet and gazed upon him, round-eyed.

“Don’t you understand?” said Maxwell, restively. “I want you to marry
me. I love you, Miss Leslie. I wanted to tell you, and I snatched a
minute when things had slackened up a bit. They’re calling me for the
’phone now. Tell ’em to wait a minute, Pitcher. Won’t you, Miss
Leslie?”

The stenographer acted very queerly. At first she seemed overcome with
amazement; then tears flowed from her wondering eyes; and then she
smiled sunnily through them, and one of her arms slid tenderly about
the broker’s neck.

“I know now,” she said, softly. “It’s this old business that has driven
everything else out of your head for the time. I was frightened at
first. Don’t you remember, Harvey? We were married last evening at 8
o’clock in the Little Church Around the Corner.”




AFTER TWENTY YEARS


The policeman on the beat moved up the avenue impressively. The
impressiveness was habitual and not for show, for spectators were few.
The time was barely 10 o’clock at night, but chilly gusts of wind with
a taste of rain in them had well nigh de-peopled the streets.

Trying doors as he went, twirling his club with many intricate and
artful movements, turning now and then to cast his watchful eye adown
the pacific thoroughfare, the officer, with his stalwart form and
slight swagger, made a fine picture of a guardian of the peace. The
vicinity was one that kept early hours. Now and then you might see the
lights of a cigar store or of an all-night lunch counter; but the
majority of the doors belonged to business places that had long since
been closed.

When about midway of a certain block the policeman suddenly slowed his
walk. In the doorway of a darkened hardware store a man leaned, with an
unlighted cigar in his mouth. As the policeman walked up to him the man
spoke up quickly.

“It’s all right, officer,” he said, reassuringly. “I’m just waiting for
a friend. It’s an appointment made twenty years ago. Sounds a little
funny to you, doesn’t it? Well, I’ll explain if you’d like to make
certain it’s all straight. About that long ago there used to be a
restaurant where this store stands—‘Big Joe’ Brady’s restaurant.”

“Until five years ago,” said the policeman. “It was torn down then.”

The man in the doorway struck a match and lit his cigar. The light
showed a pale, square-jawed face with keen eyes, and a little white
scar near his right eyebrow. His scarfpin was a large diamond, oddly
set.

“Twenty years ago to-night,” said the man, “I dined here at ‘Big Joe’
Brady’s with Jimmy Wells, my best chum, and the finest chap in the
world. He and I were raised here in New York, just like two brothers,
together. I was eighteen and Jimmy was twenty. The next morning I was
to start for the West to make my fortune. You couldn’t have dragged
Jimmy out of New York; he thought it was the only place on earth. Well,
we agreed that night that we would meet here again exactly twenty years
from that date and time, no matter what our conditions might be or from
what distance we might have to come. We figured that in twenty years
each of us ought to have our destiny worked out and our fortunes made,
whatever they were going to be.”

“It sounds pretty interesting,” said the policeman. “Rather a long time
between meets, though, it seems to me. Haven’t you heard from your
friend since you left?”

“Well, yes, for a time we corresponded,” said the other. “But after a
year or two we lost track of each other. You see, the West is a pretty
big proposition, and I kept hustling around over it pretty lively. But
I know Jimmy will meet me here if he’s alive, for he always was the
truest, stanchest old chap in the world. He’ll never forget. I came a
thousand miles to stand in this door to-night, and it’s worth it if my
old partner turns up.”

The waiting man pulled out a handsome watch, the lids of it set with
small diamonds.

“Three minutes to ten,” he announced. “It was exactly ten o’clock when
we parted here at the restaurant door.”

“Did pretty well out West, didn’t you?” asked the policeman.

“You bet! I hope Jimmy has done half as well. He was a kind of plodder,
though, good fellow as he was. I’ve had to compete with some of the
sharpest wits going to get my pile. A man gets in a groove in New York.
It takes the West to put a razor-edge on him.”

The policeman twirled his club and took a step or two.

“I’ll be on my way. Hope your friend comes around all right. Going to
call time on him sharp?”

“I should say not!” said the other. “I’ll give him half an hour at
least. If Jimmy is alive on earth he’ll be here by that time. So long,
officer.”

“Good-night, sir,” said the policeman, passing on along his beat,
trying doors as he went.

There was now a fine, cold drizzle falling, and the wind had risen from
its uncertain puffs into a steady blow. The few foot passengers astir
in that quarter hurried dismally and silently along with coat collars
turned high and pocketed hands. And in the door of the hardware store
the man who had come a thousand miles to fill an appointment, uncertain
almost to absurdity, with the friend of his youth, smoked his cigar and
waited.

About twenty minutes he waited, and then a tall man in a long overcoat,
with collar turned up to his ears, hurried across from the opposite
side of the street. He went directly to the waiting man.

“Is that you, Bob?” he asked, doubtfully.

“Is that you, Jimmy Wells?” cried the man in the door.

“Bless my heart!” exclaimed the new arrival, grasping both the other’s
hands with his own. “It’s Bob, sure as fate. I was certain I’d find you
here if you were still in existence. Well, well, well!—twenty years is
a long time. The old restaurant’s gone, Bob; I wish it had lasted, so
we could have had another dinner there. How has the West treated you,
old man?”

“Bully; it has given me everything I asked it for. You’ve changed lots,
Jimmy. I never thought you were so tall by two or three inches.”

“Oh, I grew a bit after I was twenty.”

“Doing well in New York, Jimmy?”

“Moderately. I have a position in one of the city departments. Come on,
Bob; we’ll go around to a place I know of, and have a good long talk
about old times.”

The two men started up the street, arm in arm. The man from the West,
his egotism enlarged by success, was beginning to outline the history
of his career. The other, submerged in his overcoat, listened with
interest.

At the corner stood a drug store, brilliant with electric lights. When
they came into this glare each of them turned simultaneously to gaze
upon the other’s face.

The man from the West stopped suddenly and released his arm.

“You’re not Jimmy Wells,” he snapped. “Twenty years is a long time, but
not long enough to change a man’s nose from a Roman to a pug.”

“It sometimes changes a good man into a bad one,” said the tall man.
“You’ve been under arrest for ten minutes, ‘Silky’ Bob. Chicago thinks
you may have dropped over our way and wires us she wants to have a chat
with you. Going quietly, are you? That’s sensible. Now, before we go on
to the station here’s a note I was asked to hand you. You may read it
here at the window. It’s from Patrolman Wells.”

The man from the West unfolded the little piece of paper handed him.
His hand was steady when he began to read, but it trembled a little by
the time he had finished. The note was rather short.


_Bob: I was at the appointed place on time. When you struck the match
to light your cigar I saw it was the face of the man wanted in Chicago.
Somehow I couldn’t do it myself, so I went around and got a plain
clothes man to do the job.

JIMMY._




LOST ON DRESS PARADE


Mr. Towers Chandler was pressing his evening suit in his hall bedroom.
One iron was heating on a small gas stove; the other was being pushed
vigorously back and forth to make the desirable crease that would be
seen later on extending in straight lines from Mr. Chandler’s patent
leather shoes to the edge of his low-cut vest. So much of the hero’s
toilet may be intrusted to our confidence. The remainder may be guessed
by those whom genteel poverty has driven to ignoble expedient. Our next
view of him shall be as he descends the steps of his lodging-house
immaculately and correctly clothed; calm, assured, handsome—in
appearance the typical New York young clubman setting out, slightly
bored, to inaugurate the pleasures of the evening.

Chandler’s honorarium was $18 per week. He was employed in the office
of an architect. He was twenty-two years old; he considered
architecture to be truly an art; and he honestly believed—though he
would not have dared to admit it in New York—that the Flatiron Building
was inferior in design to the great cathedral in Milan.

Out of each week’s earnings Chandler set aside $1. At the end of each
ten weeks with the extra capital thus accumulated, he purchased one
gentleman’s evening from the bargain counter of stingy old Father Time.
He arrayed himself in the regalia of millionaires and presidents; he
took himself to the quarter where life is brightest and showiest, and
there dined with taste and luxury. With ten dollars a man may, for a
few hours, play the wealthy idler to perfection. The sum is ample for a
well-considered meal, a bottle bearing a respectable label,
commensurate tips, a smoke, cab fare and the ordinary etceteras.

This one delectable evening culled from each dull seventy was to
Chandler a source of renascent bliss. To the society bud comes but one
début; it stands alone sweet in her memory when her hair has whitened;
but to Chandler each ten weeks brought a joy as keen, as thrilling, as
new as the first had been. To sit among _bon vivants_ under palms in
the swirl of concealed music, to look upon the _habitués_ of such a
paradise and to be looked upon by them—what is a girl’s first dance and
short-sleeved tulle compared with this?

Up Broadway Chandler moved with the vespertine dress parade. For this
evening he was an exhibit as well as a gazer. For the next sixty-nine
evenings he would be dining in cheviot and worsted at dubious _table
d’hôtes_, at whirlwind lunch counters, on sandwiches and beer in his
hall-bedroom. He was willing to do that, for he was a true son of the
great city of razzle-dazzle, and to him one evening in the limelight
made up for many dark ones.

Chandler protracted his walk until the Forties began to intersect the
great and glittering primrose way, for the evening was yet young, and
when one is of the _beau monde_ only one day in seventy, one loves to
protract the pleasure. Eyes bright, sinister, curious, admiring,
provocative, alluring were bent upon him, for his garb and air
proclaimed him a devotee to the hour of solace and pleasure.

At a certain corner he came to a standstill, proposing to himself the
question of turning back toward the showy and fashionable restaurant in
which he usually dined on the evenings of his especial luxury. Just
then a girl scuddled lightly around the corner, slipped on a patch of
icy snow and fell plump upon the sidewalk.

Chandler assisted her to her feet with instant and solicitous courtesy.
The girl hobbled to the wall of the building, leaned against it, and
thanked him demurely.

“I think my ankle is strained,” she said. “It twisted when I fell.”

“Does it pain you much?” inquired Chandler.

“Only when I rest my weight upon it. I think I will be able to walk in
a minute or two.”

“If I can be of any further service,” suggested the young man, “I will
call a cab, or—”

“Thank you,” said the girl, softly but heartily. “I am sure you need
not trouble yourself any further. It was so awkward of me. And my shoe
heels are horridly common-sense; I can’t blame them at all.”

Chandler looked at the girl and found her swiftly drawing his interest.
She was pretty in a refined way; and her eye was both merry and kind.
She was inexpensively clothed in a plain black dress that suggested a
sort of uniform such as shop girls wear. Her glossy dark-brown hair
showed its coils beneath a cheap hat of black straw whose only ornament
was a velvet ribbon and bow. She could have posed as a model for the
self-respecting working girl of the best type.

A sudden idea came into the head of the young architect. He would ask
this girl to dine with him. Here was the element that his splendid but
solitary periodic feasts had lacked. His brief season of elegant luxury
would be doubly enjoyable if he could add to it a lady’s society. This
girl was a lady, he was sure—her manner and speech settled that. And in
spite of her extremely plain attire he felt that he would be pleased to
sit at table with her.

These thoughts passed swiftly through his mind, and he decided to ask
her. It was a breach of etiquette, of course, but oftentimes
wage-earning girls waived formalities in matters of this kind. They
were generally shrewd judges of men; and thought better of their own
judgment than they did of useless conventions. His ten dollars,
discreetly expended, would enable the two to dine very well indeed. The
dinner would no doubt be a wonderful experience thrown into the dull
routine of the girl’s life; and her lively appreciation of it would add
to his own triumph and pleasure.

“I think,” he said to her, with frank gravity, “that your foot needs a
longer rest than you suppose. Now, I am going to suggest a way in which
you can give it that and at the same time do me a favour. I was on my
way to dine all by my lonely self when you came tumbling around the
corner. You come with me and we’ll have a cozy dinner and a pleasant
talk together, and by that time your game ankle will carry you home
very nicely, I am sure.”

The girl looked quickly up into Chandler’s clear, pleasant countenance.
Her eyes twinkled once very brightly, and then she smiled ingenuously.

“But we don’t know each other—it wouldn’t be right, would it?” she
said, doubtfully.

“There is nothing wrong about it,” said the young man, candidly. “I’ll
introduce myself—permit me—Mr. Towers Chandler. After our dinner, which
I will try to make as pleasant as possible, I will bid you
good-evening, or attend you safely to your door, whichever you prefer.”

“But, dear me!” said the girl, with a glance at Chandler’s faultless
attire. “In this old dress and hat!”

“Never mind that,” said Chandler, cheerfully. “I’m sure you look more
charming in them than any one we shall see in the most elaborate dinner
toilette.”

“My ankle does hurt yet,” admitted the girl, attempting a limping step.
“I think I will accept your invitation, Mr. Chandler. You may call
me—Miss Marian.”

“Come then, Miss Marian,” said the young architect, gaily, but with
perfect courtesy; “you will not have far to walk. There is a very
respectable and good restaurant in the next block. You will have to
lean on my arm—so—and walk slowly. It is lonely dining all by one’s
self. I’m just a little bit glad that you slipped on the ice.”

When the two were established at a well-appointed table, with a
promising waiter hovering in attendance, Chandler began to experience
the real joy that his regular outing always brought to him.

The restaurant was not so showy or pretentious as the one further down
Broadway, which he always preferred, but it was nearly so. The tables
were well filled with prosperous-looking diners, there was a good
orchestra, playing softly enough to make conversation a possible
pleasure, and the cuisine and service were beyond criticism. His
companion, even in her cheap hat and dress, held herself with an air
that added distinction to the natural beauty of her face and figure.
And it is certain that she looked at Chandler, with his animated but
self-possessed manner and his kindling and frank blue eyes, with
something not far from admiration in her own charming face.

Then it was that the Madness of Manhattan, the frenzy of Fuss and
Feathers, the Bacillus of Brag, the Provincial Plague of Pose seized
upon Towers Chandler. He was on Broadway, surrounded by pomp and style,
and there were eyes to look at him. On the stage of that comedy he had
assumed to play the one-night part of a butterfly of fashion and an
idler of means and taste. He was dressed for the part, and all his good
angels had not the power to prevent him from acting it.

So he began to prate to Miss Marian of clubs, of teas, of golf and
riding and kennels and cotillions and tours abroad and threw out hints
of a yacht lying at Larchmont. He could see that she was vastly
impressed by this vague talk, so he endorsed his pose by random
insinuations concerning great wealth, and mentioned familiarly a few
names that are handled reverently by the proletariat. It was Chandler’s
short little day, and he was wringing from it the best that could be
had, as he saw it. And yet once or twice he saw the pure gold of this
girl shine through the mist that his egotism had raised between him and
all objects.

“This way of living that you speak of,” she said, “sounds so futile and
purposeless. Haven’t you any work to do in the world that might
interest you more?”

“My dear Miss Marian,” he exclaimed—“work! Think of dressing every day
for dinner, of making half a dozen calls in an afternoon—with a
policeman at every corner ready to jump into your auto and take you to
the station, if you get up any greater speed than a donkey cart’s gait.
We do-nothings are the hardest workers in the land.”

The dinner was concluded, the waiter generously fed, and the two walked
out to the corner where they had met. Miss Marian walked very well now;
her limp was scarcely noticeable.

“Thank you for a nice time,” she said, frankly. “I must run home now. I
liked the dinner very much, Mr. Chandler.”

He shook hands with her, smiling cordially, and said something about a
game of bridge at his club. He watched her for a moment, walking rather
rapidly eastward, and then he found a cab to drive him slowly homeward.

In his chilly bedroom Chandler laid away his evening clothes for a
sixty-nine days’ rest. He went about it thoughtfully.

“That was a stunning girl,” he said to himself. “She’s all right, too,
I’d be sworn, even if she does have to work. Perhaps if I’d told her
the truth instead of all that razzle-dazzle we might—but, confound it!
I had to play up to my clothes.”

Thus spoke the brave who was born and reared in the wigwams of the
tribe of the Manhattans.

The girl, after leaving her entertainer, sped swiftly cross-town until
she arrived at a handsome and sedate mansion two squares to the east,
facing on that avenue which is the highway of Mammon and the auxiliary
gods. Here she entered hurriedly and ascended to a room where a
handsome young lady in an elaborate house dress was looking anxiously
out the window.

“Oh, you madcap!” exclaimed the elder girl, when the other entered.
“When will you quit frightening us this way? It is two hours since you
ran out in that rag of an old dress and Marie’s hat. Mamma has been so
alarmed. She sent Louis in the auto to try to find you. You are a bad,
thoughtless Puss.”

The elder girl touched a button, and a maid came in a moment.

“Marie, tell mamma that Miss Marian has returned.”

“Don’t scold, sister. I only ran down to Mme. Theo’s to tell her to use
mauve insertion instead of pink. My costume and Marie’s hat were just
what I needed. Every one thought I was a shopgirl, I am sure.”

“Dinner is over, dear; you stayed so late.”

“I know. I slipped on the sidewalk and turned my ankle. I could not
walk, so I hobbled into a restaurant and sat there until I was better.
That is why I was so long.”

The two girls sat in the window seat, looking out at the lights and the
stream of hurrying vehicles in the avenue. The younger one cuddled down
with her head in her sister’s lap.

“We will have to marry some day,” she said dreamily—“both of us. We
have so much money that we will not be allowed to disappoint the
public. Do you want me to tell you the kind of a man I could love,
Sis?”

“Go on, you scatterbrain,” smiled the other.

“I could love a man with dark and kind blue eyes, who is gentle and
respectful to poor girls, who is handsome and good and does not try to
flirt. But I could love him only if he had an ambition, an object, some
work to do in the world. I would not care how poor he was if I could
help him build his way up. But, sister dear, the kind of man we always
meet—the man who lives an idle life between society and his clubs—I
could not love a man like that, even if his eyes were blue and he were
ever so kind to poor girls whom he met in the street.”




BY COURIER


It was neither the season nor the hour when the Park had frequenters;
and it is likely that the young lady, who was seated on one of the
benches at the side of the walk, had merely obeyed a sudden impulse to
sit for a while and enjoy a foretaste of coming Spring.

She rested there, pensive and still. A certain melancholy that touched
her countenance must have been of recent birth, for it had not yet
altered the fine and youthful contours of her cheek, nor subdued the
arch though resolute curve of her lips.

A tall young man came striding through the park along the path near
which she sat. Behind him tagged a boy carrying a suit-case. At sight
of the young lady, the man’s face changed to red and back to pale
again. He watched her countenance as he drew nearer, with hope and
anxiety mingled on his own. He passed within a few yards of her, but he
saw no evidence that she was aware of his presence or existence.

Some fifty yards further on he suddenly stopped and sat on a bench at
one side. The boy dropped the suit-case and stared at him with
wondering, shrewd eyes. The young man took out his handkerchief and
wiped his brow. It was a good handkerchief, a good brow, and the young
man was good to look at. He said to the boy:

“I want you to take a message to that young lady on that bench. Tell
her I am on my way to the station, to leave for San Francisco, where I
shall join that Alaska moose-hunting expedition. Tell her that, since
she has commanded me neither to speak nor to write to her, I take this
means of making one last appeal to her sense of justice, for the sake
of what has been. Tell her that to condemn and discard one who has not
deserved such treatment, without giving him her reasons or a chance to
explain is contrary to her nature as I believe it to be. Tell her that
I have thus, to a certain degree, disobeyed her injunctions, in the
hope that she may yet be inclined to see justice done. Go, and tell her
that.”

The young man dropped a half-dollar into the boy’s hand. The boy looked
at him for a moment with bright, canny eyes out of a dirty, intelligent
face, and then set off at a run. He approached the lady on the bench a
little doubtfully, but unembarrassed. He touched the brim of the old
plaid bicycle cap perched on the back of his head. The lady looked at
him coolly, without prejudice or favour.

“Lady,” he said, “dat gent on de oder bench sent yer a song and dance
by me. If yer don’t know de guy, and he’s tryin’ to do de Johnny act,
say de word, and I’ll call a cop in t’ree minutes. If yer does know
him, and he’s on de square, w’y I’ll spiel yer de bunch of hot air he
sent yer.”

The young lady betrayed a faint interest.

“A song and dance!” she said, in a deliberate sweet voice that seemed
to clothe her words in a diaphanous garment of impalpable irony. “A new
idea—in the troubadour line, I suppose. I—used to know the gentleman
who sent you, so I think it will hardly be necessary to call the
police. You may execute your song and dance, but do not sing too
loudly. It is a little early yet for open-air vaudeville, and we might
attract attention.”

“Awe,” said the boy, with a shrug down the length of him, “yer know
what I mean, lady. ’Tain’t a turn, it’s wind. He told me to tell yer
he’s got his collars and cuffs in dat grip for a scoot clean out to
’Frisco. Den he’s goin’ to shoot snow-birds in de Klondike. He says yer
told him not to send ’round no more pink notes nor come hangin’ over de
garden gate, and he takes dis means of puttin’ yer wise. He says yer
refereed him out like a has-been, and never give him no chance to kick
at de decision. He says yer swiped him, and never said why.”

The slightly awakened interest in the young lady’s eyes did not abate.
Perhaps it was caused by either the originality or the audacity of the
snow-bird hunter, in thus circumventing her express commands against
the ordinary modes of communication. She fixed her eye on a statue
standing disconsolate in the dishevelled park, and spoke into the
transmitter:

“Tell the gentleman that I need not repeat to him a description of my
ideals. He knows what they have been and what they still are. So far as
they touch on this case, absolute loyalty and truth are the ones
paramount. Tell him that I have studied my own heart as well as one
can, and I know its weakness as well as I do its needs. That is why I
decline to hear his pleas, whatever they may be. I did not condemn him
through hearsay or doubtful evidence, and that is why I made no charge.
But, since he persists in hearing what he already well knows, you may
convey the matter.

“Tell him that I entered the conservatory that evening from the rear,
to cut a rose for my mother. Tell him I saw him and Miss Ashburton
beneath the pink oleander. The tableau was pretty, but the pose and
juxtaposition were too eloquent and evident to require explanation. I
left the conservatory, and, at the same time, the rose and my ideal.
You may carry that song and dance to your impresario.”

“I’m shy on one word, lady. Jux—jux—put me wise on dat, will yer?”

“Juxtaposition—or you may call it propinquity—or, if you like, being
rather too near for one maintaining the position of an ideal.”

The gravel spun from beneath the boy’s feet. He stood by the other
bench. The man’s eyes interrogated him, hungrily. The boy’s were
shining with the impersonal zeal of the translator.

“De lady says dat she’s on to de fact dat gals is dead easy when a
feller comes spielin’ ghost stories and tryin’ to make up, and dat’s
why she won’t listen to no soft-soap. She says she caught yer dead to
rights, huggin’ a bunch o’ calico in de hot-house. She side-stepped in
to pull some posies and yer was squeezin’ de oder gal to beat de band.
She says it looked cute, all right all right, but it made her sick. She
says yer better git busy, and make a sneak for de train.”

The young man gave a low whistle and his eyes flashed with a sudden
thought. His hand flew to the inside pocket of his coat, and drew out a
handful of letters. Selecting one, he handed it to the boy, following
it with a silver dollar from his vest-pocket.

“Give that letter to the lady,” he said, “and ask her to read it. Tell
her that it should explain the situation. Tell her that, if she had
mingled a little trust with her conception of the ideal, much heartache
might have been avoided. Tell her that the loyalty she prizes so much
has never wavered. Tell her I am waiting for an answer.”

The messenger stood before the lady.

“De gent says he’s had de ski-bunk put on him widout no cause. He says
he’s no bum guy; and, lady, yer read dat letter, and I’ll bet yer he’s
a white sport, all right.”

The young lady unfolded the letter; somewhat doubtfully, and read it.


Dear Dr. Arnold:   I want to thank you for your most kind and opportune
aid to my daughter last Friday evening, when she was overcome by an
attack of her old heart-trouble in the conservatory at Mrs. Waldron’s
reception. Had you not been near to catch her as she fell and to render
proper attention, we might have lost her. I would be glad if you would
call and undertake the treatment of her case.

  Gratefully yours,

Robert Ashburton.


The young lady refolded the letter, and handed it to the boy.

“De gent wants an answer,” said the messenger. “Wot’s de word?”

The lady’s eyes suddenly flashed on him, bright, smiling and wet.

“Tell that guy on the other bench,” she said, with a happy, tremulous
laugh, “that his girl wants him.”




THE FURNISHED ROOM


Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a certain vast bulk of
the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side.
Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to
furnished room, transients forever—transients in abode, transients in
heart and mind. They sing “Home, Sweet Home” in ragtime; they carry
their _lares et penates_ in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a
picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree.

Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers,
should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but
it would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the
wake of all these vagrant guests.

One evening after dark a young man prowled among these crumbling red
mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth he rested his lean
hand-baggage upon the step and wiped the dust from his hatband and
forehead. The bell sounded faint and far away in some remote, hollow
depths.

To the door of this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung, came a
housekeeper who made him think of an unwholesome, surfeited worm that
had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy
with edible lodgers.

He asked if there was a room to let.

“Come in,” said the housekeeper. Her voice came from her throat; her
throat seemed lined with fur. “I have the third floor back, vacant
since a week back. Should you wish to look at it?”

The young man followed her up the stairs. A faint light from no
particular source mitigated the shadows of the halls. They trod
noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn.
It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank,
sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to
the staircase and was viscid under the foot like organic matter. At
each turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the wall. Perhaps plants
had once been set within them. If so they had died in that foul and
tainted air. It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but
it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them
forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished
pit below.

“This is the room,” said the housekeeper, from her furry throat. “It’s
a nice room. It ain’t often vacant. I had some most elegant people in
it last summer—no trouble at all, and paid in advance to the minute.
The water’s at the end of the hall. Sprowls and Mooney kept it three
months. They done a vaudeville sketch. Miss B’retta Sprowls—you may
have heard of her—Oh, that was just the stage names—right there over
the dresser is where the marriage certificate hung, framed. The gas is
here, and you see there is plenty of closet room. It’s a room everybody
likes. It never stays idle long.”

“Do you have many theatrical people rooming here?” asked the young man.

“They comes and goes. A good proportion of my lodgers is connected with
the theatres. Yes, sir, this is the theatrical district. Actor people
never stays long anywhere. I get my share. Yes, they comes and they
goes.”

He engaged the room, paying for a week in advance. He was tired, he
said, and would take possession at once. He counted out the money. The
room had been made ready, she said, even to towels and water. As the
housekeeper moved away he put, for the thousandth time, the question
that he carried at the end of his tongue.

“A young girl—Miss Vashner—Miss Eloise Vashner—do you remember such a
one among your lodgers? She would be singing on the stage, most likely.
A fair girl, of medium height and slender, with reddish, gold hair and
a dark mole near her left eyebrow.”

“No, I don’t remember the name. Them stage people has names they change
as often as their rooms. They comes and they goes. No, I don’t call
that one to mind.”

No. Always no. Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the
inevitable negative. So much time spent by day in questioning managers,
agents, schools and choruses; by night among the audiences of theatres
from all-star casts down to music halls so low that he dreaded to find
what he most hoped for. He who had loved her best had tried to find
her. He was sure that since her disappearance from home this great,
water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous
quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its
upper granules of to-day buried to-morrow in ooze and slime.

The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of
pseudo-hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the
specious smile of a demirep. The sophistical comfort came in reflected
gleams from the decayed furniture, the ragged brocade upholstery of a
couch and two chairs, a foot-wide cheap pier glass between the two
windows, from one or two gilt picture frames and a brass bedstead in a
corner.

The guest reclined, inert, upon a chair, while the room, confused in
speech as though it were an apartment in Babel, tried to discourse to
him of its divers tenantry.

A polychromatic rug like some brilliant-flowered rectangular, tropical
islet lay surrounded by a billowy sea of soiled matting. Upon the
gay-papered wall were those pictures that pursue the homeless one from
house to house—The Huguenot Lovers, The First Quarrel, The Wedding
Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel’s chastely severe outline
was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew
like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it was some desolate
flotsam cast aside by the room’s marooned when a lucky sail had borne
them to a fresh port—a trifling vase or two, pictures of actresses, a
medicine bottle, some stray cards out of a deck.

One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the
little signs left by the furnished room’s procession of guests
developed a significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of
the dresser told that lovely woman had marched in the throng. Tiny
finger prints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel
their way to sun and air. A splattered stain, raying like the shadow of
a bursting bomb, witnessed where a hurled glass or bottle had
splintered with its contents against the wall. Across the pier glass
had been scrawled with a diamond in staggering letters the name
“Marie.” It seemed that the succession of dwellers in the furnished
room had turned in fury—perhaps tempted beyond forbearance by its
garish coldness—and wreaked upon it their passions. The furniture was
chipped and bruised; the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed a
horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of some
grotesque convulsion. Some more potent upheaval had cloven a great
slice from the marble mantel. Each plank in the floor owned its
particular cant and shriek as from a separate and individual agony. It
seemed incredible that all this malice and injury had been wrought upon
the room by those who had called it for a time their home; and yet it
may have been the cheated home instinct surviving blindly, the
resentful rage at false household gods that had kindled their wrath. A
hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.

The young tenant in the chair allowed these thoughts to file,
soft-shod, through his mind, while there drifted into the room
furnished sounds and furnished scents. He heard in one room a tittering
and incontinent, slack laughter; in others the monologue of a scold,
the rattling of dice, a lullaby, and one crying dully; above him a
banjo tinkled with spirit. Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains
roared intermittently; a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence. And he
breathed the breath of the house—a dank savour rather than a smell—a
cold, musty effluvium as from underground vaults mingled with the
reeking exhalations of linoleum and mildewed and rotten woodwork.

Then, suddenly, as he rested there, the room was filled with the
strong, sweet odour of mignonette. It came as upon a single buffet of
wind with such sureness and fragrance and emphasis that it almost
seemed a living visitant. And the man cried aloud: “What, dear?” as if
he had been called, and sprang up and faced about. The rich odour clung
to him and wrapped him around. He reached out his arms for it, all his
senses for the time confused and commingled. How could one be
peremptorily called by an odour? Surely it must have been a sound. But,
was it not the sound that had touched, that had caressed him?

“She has been in this room,” he cried, and he sprang to wrest from it a
token, for he knew he would recognize the smallest thing that had
belonged to her or that she had touched. This enveloping scent of
mignonette, the odour that she had loved and made her own—whence came
it?

The room had been but carelessly set in order. Scattered upon the
flimsy dresser scarf were half a dozen hairpins—those discreet,
indistinguishable friends of womankind, feminine of gender, infinite of
mood and uncommunicative of tense. These he ignored, conscious of their
triumphant lack of identity. Ransacking the drawers of the dresser he
came upon a discarded, tiny, ragged handkerchief. He pressed it to his
face. It was racy and insolent with heliotrope; he hurled it to the
floor. In another drawer he found odd buttons, a theatre programme, a
pawnbroker’s card, two lost marshmallows, a book on the divination of
dreams. In the last was a woman’s black satin hair bow, which halted
him, poised between ice and fire. But the black satin hair-bow also is
femininity’s demure, impersonal, common ornament, and tells no tales.

And then he traversed the room like a hound on the scent, skimming the
walls, considering the corners of the bulging matting on his hands and
knees, rummaging mantel and tables, the curtains and hangings, the
drunken cabinet in the corner, for a visible sign, unable to perceive
that she was there beside, around, against, within, above him, clinging
to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly through the finer senses
that even his grosser ones became cognisant of the call. Once again he
answered loudly: “Yes, dear!” and turned, wild-eyed, to gaze on
vacancy, for he could not yet discern form and colour and love and
outstretched arms in the odour of mignonette. Oh, God! whence that
odour, and since when have odours had a voice to call? Thus he groped.

He burrowed in crevices and corners, and found corks and cigarettes.
These he passed in passive contempt. But once he found in a fold of the
matting a half-smoked cigar, and this he ground beneath his heel with a
green and trenchant oath. He sifted the room from end to end. He found
dreary and ignoble small records of many a peripatetic tenant; but of
her whom he sought, and who may have lodged there, and whose spirit
seemed to hover there, he found no trace.

And then he thought of the housekeeper.

He ran from the haunted room downstairs and to a door that showed a
crack of light. She came out to his knock. He smothered his excitement
as best he could.

“Will you tell me, madam,” he besought her, “who occupied the room I
have before I came?”

“Yes, sir. I can tell you again. ’Twas Sprowls and Mooney, as I said.
Miss B’retta Sprowls it was in the theatres, but Missis Mooney she was.
My house is well known for respectability. The marriage certificate
hung, framed, on a nail over—”

“What kind of a lady was Miss Sprowls—in looks, I mean?”

“Why, black-haired, sir, short, and stout, with a comical face. They
left a week ago Tuesday.”

“And before they occupied it?”

“Why, there was a single gentleman connected with the draying business.
He left owing me a week. Before him was Missis Crowder and her two
children, that stayed four months; and back of them was old Mr. Doyle,
whose sons paid for him. He kept the room six months. That goes back a
year, sir, and further I do not remember.”

He thanked her and crept back to his room. The room was dead. The
essence that had vivified it was gone. The perfume of mignonette had
departed. In its place was the old, stale odour of mouldy house
furniture, of atmosphere in storage.

The ebbing of his hope drained his faith. He sat staring at the yellow,
singing gaslight. Soon he walked to the bed and began to tear the
sheets into strips. With the blade of his knife he drove them tightly
into every crevice around windows and door. When all was snug and taut
he turned out the light, turned the gas full on again and laid himself
gratefully upon the bed.


It was Mrs. McCool’s night to go with the can for beer. So she fetched
it and sat with Mrs. Purdy in one of those subterranean retreats where
house-keepers foregather and the worm dieth seldom.

“I rented out my third floor, back, this evening,” said Mrs. Purdy,
across a fine circle of foam. “A young man took it. He went up to bed
two hours ago.”

“Now, did ye, Mrs. Purdy, ma’am?” said Mrs. McCool, with intense
admiration. “You do be a wonder for rentin’ rooms of that kind. And did
ye tell him, then?” she concluded in a husky whisper, laden with
mystery.

“Rooms,” said Mrs. Purdy, in her furriest tones, “are furnished for to
rent. I did not tell him, Mrs. McCool.”

“’Tis right ye are, ma’am; ’tis by renting rooms we kape alive. Ye have
the rale sense for business, ma’am. There be many people will rayjict
the rentin’ of a room if they be tould a suicide has been after dyin’
in the bed of it.”

“As you say, we has our living to be making,” remarked Mrs. Purdy.

“Yis, ma’am; ’tis true. ’Tis just one wake ago this day I helped ye lay
out the third floor, back. A pretty slip of a colleen she was to be
killin’ herself wid the gas—a swate little face she had, Mrs. Purdy,
ma’am.”

“She’d a-been called handsome, as you say,” said Mrs. Purdy, assenting
but critical, “but for that mole she had a-growin’ by her left eyebrow.
Do fill up your glass again, Mrs. McCool.”




THE BRIEF DÉBUT OF TILDY


If you do not know Bogle’s Chop House and Family Restaurant it is your
loss. For if you are one of the fortunate ones who dine expensively you
should be interested to know how the other half consumes provisions.
And if you belong to the half to whom waiters’ checks are things of
moment, you should know Bogle’s, for there you get your money’s
worth—in quantity, at least.

Bogle’s is situated in that highway of _bourgeoisie_, that boulevard of
Brown-Jones-and-Robinson, Eighth Avenue. There are two rows of tables
in the room, six in each row. On each table is a caster-stand,
containing cruets of condiments and seasons. From the pepper cruet you
may shake a cloud of something tasteless and melancholy, like volcanic
dust. From the salt cruet you may expect nothing. Though a man should
extract a sanguinary stream from the pallid turnip, yet will his
prowess be balked when he comes to wrest salt from Bogle’s cruets. Also
upon each table stands the counterfeit of that benign sauce made “from
the recipe of a nobleman in India.”

At the cashier’s desk sits Bogle, cold, sordid, slow, smouldering, and
takes your money. Behind a mountain of toothpicks he makes your change,
files your check, and ejects at you, like a toad, a word about the
weather. Beyond a corroboration of his meteorological statement you
would better not venture. You are not Bogle’s friend; you are a fed,
transient customer, and you and he may not meet again until the blowing
of Gabriel’s dinner horn. So take your change and go—to the devil if
you like. There you have Bogle’s sentiments.

The needs of Bogle’s customers were supplied by two waitresses and a
Voice. One of the waitresses was named Aileen. She was tall, beautiful,
lively, gracious and learned in persiflage. Her other name? There was
no more necessity for another name at Bogle’s than there was for
finger-bowls.

The name of the other waitress was Tildy. Why do you suggest Matilda?
Please listen this time—Tildy—Tildy. Tildy was dumpy, plain-faced, and
too anxious to please to please. Repeat the last clause to yourself
once or twice, and make the acquaintance of the duplicate infinite.

The Voice at Bogle’s was invisible. It came from the kitchen, and did
not shine in the way of originality. It was a heathen Voice, and
contented itself with vain repetitions of exclamations emitted by the
waitresses concerning food.

Will it tire you to be told again that Aileen was beautiful? Had she
donned a few hundred dollars’ worth of clothes and joined the Easter
parade, and had you seen her, you would have hastened to say so
yourself.

The customers at Bogle’s were her slaves. Six tables full she could
wait upon at once. They who were in a hurry restrained their impatience
for the joy of merely gazing upon her swiftly moving, graceful figure.
They who had finished eating ate more that they might continue in the
light of her smiles. Every man there—and they were mostly men—tried to
make his impression upon her.

Aileen could successfully exchange repartee against a dozen at once.
And every smile that she sent forth lodged, like pellets from a
scatter-gun, in as many hearts. And all this while she would be
performing astounding feats with orders of pork and beans, pot roasts,
ham-and, sausage-and-the-wheats, and any quantity of things on the iron
and in the pan and straight up and on the side. With all this feasting
and flirting and merry exchange of wit Bogle’s came mighty near being a
salon, with Aileen for its Madame Récamier.

If the transients were entranced by the fascinating Aileen, the
regulars were her adorers. There was much rivalry among many of the
steady customers. Aileen could have had an engagement every evening. At
least twice a week some one took her to a theatre or to a dance. One
stout gentleman whom she and Tildy had privately christened “The Hog”
presented her with a turquoise ring. Another one known as “Freshy,” who
rode on the Traction Company’s repair wagon, was going to give her a
poodle as soon as his brother got the hauling contract in the Ninth.
And the man who always ate spareribs and spinach and said he was a
stock broker asked her to go to “Parsifal” with him.

“I don’t know where this place is,” said Aileen while talking it over
with Tildy, “but the wedding-ring’s got to be on before I put a stitch
into a travelling dress—ain’t that right? Well, I guess!”

But, Tildy!

In steaming, chattering, cabbage-scented Bogle’s there was almost a
heart tragedy. Tildy with the blunt nose, the hay-coloured hair, the
freckled skin, the bag-o’-meal figure, had never had an admirer. Not a
man followed her with his eyes when she went to and fro in the
restaurant save now and then when they glared with the beast-hunger for
food. None of them bantered her gaily to coquettish interchanges of
wit. None of them loudly “jollied” her of mornings as they did Aileen,
accusing her, when the eggs were slow in coming, of late hours in the
company of envied swains. No one had ever given her a turquoise ring or
invited her upon a voyage to mysterious, distant “Parsifal.”

Tildy was a good waitress, and the men tolerated her. They who sat at
her tables spoke to her briefly with quotations from the bill of fare;
and then raised their voices in honeyed and otherwise-flavoured
accents, eloquently addressed to the fair Aileen. They writhed in their
chairs to gaze around and over the impending form of Tildy, that
Aileen’s pulchritude might season and make ambrosia of their bacon and
eggs.

And Tildy was content to be the unwooed drudge if Aileen could receive
the flattery and the homage. The blunt nose was loyal to the short
Grecian. She was Aileen’s friend; and she was glad to see her rule
hearts and wean the attention of men from smoking pot-pie and lemon
meringue. But deep below our freckles and hay-coloured hair the
unhandsomest of us dream of a prince or a princess, not vicarious, but
coming to us alone.

There was a morning when Aileen tripped in to work with a slightly
bruised eye; and Tildy’s solicitude was almost enough to heal any
optic.

“Fresh guy,” explained Aileen, “last night as I was going home at
Twenty-third and Sixth. Sashayed up, so he did, and made a break. I
turned him down, cold, and he made a sneak; but followed me down to
Eighteenth, and tried his hot air again. Gee! but I slapped him a good
one, side of the face. Then he give me that eye. Does it look real
awful, Til? I should hate that Mr. Nicholson should see it when he
comes in for his tea and toast at ten.”

Tildy listened to the adventure with breathless admiration. No man had
ever tried to follow her. She was safe abroad at any hour of the
twenty-four. What bliss it must have been to have had a man follow one
and black one’s eye for love!

Among the customers at Bogle’s was a young man named Seeders, who
worked in a laundry office. Mr. Seeders was thin and had light hair,
and appeared to have been recently rough-dried and starched. He was too
diffident to aspire to Aileen’s notice; so he usually sat at one of
Tildy’s tables, where he devoted himself to silence and boiled
weakfish.

One day when Mr. Seeders came in to dinner he had been drinking beer.
There were only two or three customers in the restaurant. When Mr.
Seeders had finished his weakfish he got up, put his arm around Tildy’s
waist, kissed her loudly and impudently, walked out upon the street,
snapped his fingers in the direction of the laundry, and hied himself
to play pennies in the slot machines at the Amusement Arcade.

For a few moments Tildy stood petrified. Then she was aware of Aileen
shaking at her an arch forefinger, and saying:

“Why, Til, you naughty girl! Ain’t you getting to be awful, Miss
Slyboots! First thing I know you’ll be stealing some of my fellows. I
must keep an eye on you, my lady.”

Another thing dawned upon Tildy’s recovering wits. In a moment she had
advanced from a hopeless, lowly admirer to be an Eve-sister of the
potent Aileen. She herself was now a man-charmer, a mark for Cupid, a
Sabine who must be coy when the Romans were at their banquet boards.
Man had found her waist achievable and her lips desirable. The sudden
and amatory Seeders had, as it were, performed for her a miraculous
piece of one-day laundry work. He had taken the sackcloth of her
uncomeliness, had washed, dried, starched and ironed it, and returned
it to her sheer embroidered lawn—the robe of Venus herself.

The freckles on Tildy’s cheeks merged into a rosy flush. Now both Circe
and Psyche peeped from her brightened eyes. Not even Aileen herself had
been publicly embraced and kissed in the restaurant.

Tildy could not keep the delightful secret. When trade was slack she
went and stood at Bogle’s desk. Her eyes were shining; she tried not to
let her words sound proud and boastful.

“A gentleman insulted me to-day,” she said. “He hugged me around the
waist and kissed me.”

“That so?” said Bogle, cracking open his business armour. “After this
week you get a dollar a week more.”

At the next regular meal when Tildy set food before customers with whom
she had acquaintance she said to each of them modestly, as one whose
merit needed no bolstering:

“A gentleman insulted me to-day in the restaurant. He put his arm
around my waist and kissed me.”

The diners accepted the revelation in various ways—some incredulously,
some with congratulations; others turned upon her the stream of
badinage that had hitherto been directed at Aileen alone. And Tildy’s
heart swelled in her bosom, for she saw at last the towers of Romance
rise above the horizon of the grey plain in which she had for so long
travelled.

For two days Mr. Seeders came not again. During that time Tildy
established herself firmly as a woman to be wooed. She bought ribbons,
and arranged her hair like Aileen’s, and tightened her waist two
inches. She had a thrilling but delightful fear that Mr. Seeders would
rush in suddenly and shoot her with a pistol. He must have loved her
desperately; and impulsive lovers are always blindly jealous.

Even Aileen had not been shot at with a pistol. And then Tildy rather
hoped that he would not shoot at her, for she was always loyal to
Aileen; and she did not want to overshadow her friend.

At 4 o’clock on the afternoon of the third day Mr. Seeders came in.
There were no customers at the tables. At the back end of the
restaurant Tildy was refilling the mustard pots and Aileen was
quartering pies. Mr. Seeders walked back to where they stood.

Tildy looked up and saw him, gasped, and pressed the mustard spoon
against her heart. A red hair-bow was in her hair; she wore Venus’s
Eighth Avenue badge, the blue bead necklace with the swinging silver
symbolic heart.

Mr. Seeders was flushed and embarrassed. He plunged one hand into his
hip pocket and the other into a fresh pumpkin pie.

“Miss Tildy,” said he, “I want to apologise for what I done the other
evenin’. Tell you the truth, I was pretty well tanked up or I wouldn’t
of done it. I wouldn’t do no lady that a-way when I was sober. So I
hope, Miss Tildy, you’ll accept my ’pology, and believe that I wouldn’t
of done it if I’d known what I was doin’ and hadn’t of been drunk.”

With this handsome plea Mr. Seeders backed away, and departed, feeling
that reparation had been made.

But behind the convenient screen Tildy had thrown herself flat upon a
table among the butter chips and the coffee cups, and was sobbing her
heart out—out and back again to the grey plain wherein travel they with
blunt noses and hay-coloured hair. From her knot she had torn the red
hair-bow and cast it upon the floor. Seeders she despised utterly; she
had but taken his kiss as that of a pioneer and prophetic prince who
might have set the clocks going and the pages to running in fairyland.
But the kiss had been maudlin and unmeant; the court had not stirred at
the false alarm; she must forevermore remain the Sleeping Beauty.

Yet not all was lost. Aileen’s arm was around her; and Tildy’s red hand
groped among the butter chips till it found the warm clasp of her
friend’s.

“Don’t you fret, Til,” said Aileen, who did not understand entirely.
“That turnip-faced little clothespin of a Seeders ain’t worth it. He
ain’t anything of a gentleman or he wouldn’t ever of apologised.”






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